A hopping education

The relatively recent surge in popularity of boutique beers has meant I have had to pay a bit more attention to what I like and don’t like in that beverage.    Previously, this didn’t seem important, if it was just a matter of choosing between one of the major brands on sale at the local liquor barn.

One brand I have never liked is XXXX Bitter.   At first, you could put this down to the common tendency of a youthful palette towards sweeter drinks.   I hardly drank any beer in my first alcohol drinking days, but if I tried any, I found I particularly disliked XXXX Bitter.

Later, I found some of the Toohey’s range more to my taste.    Speaking of which, it’s hard not to be impressed with the apparent effort put into the Extra Dry commercial:

I see there is a video out about how they made it.  Interesting:

Anyway, back to beers generally.

A bar which I’ve been going to at West End lately has a huge range of boutique beers available, and recently for some reason they have been pushing Indian Pale Ales.  I find these undrinkably bitter, and they reminded me that it was an unusual degree of bitter aftertaste that used to put me off XXXX Bitter.  Although I had a vague idea that it was hops that were used as a bittering agent, I’ve had a look around on the internet to confirm this is indeed true.

Good old wikipedia notes that hops have been used in beer since the 11th century.  Before that:

…..brewers used a wide variety of bitter herbs and flowers, including dandelion, burdock root, marigold, horehound (the German name for horehound means "mountain hops"), ground ivy, and heather.

People in the old days experimented an awful lot with dubious sounding plants and weed, didn’t they?  Interestingly, hops came to be favoured as they helped beer keep better:

Hops are used extensively in brewing for their many purported benefits, including balancing the sweetness of the malt with bitterness, contributing a variety of desirable flavors and aromas, and having an antibiotic effect that favors the activity of brewer's yeast over less desirable microorganisms. Historically, it is believed that traditional herb combinations for ales were abandoned when it was noticed that ales made with hops were less prone to spoilage.

Well, that’s a clever feature.

Anyway, intense hoppiness puts me off beer, and I’ve decided I’m particularly fond of the lightly hopped white ales, especially those with the added spice and orange peel flavours.

White Rabbit White Ale is very good, and is on tap at Archives (the West End bar I referred to above.)    (White Rabbit Dark Ale is also very nice.)   But the ridiculously knowable bar staff  last week ago recommended Holgate White Ale (in the bottle) and it was excellent too.    This week, they had a (very expensive)  white ale from Japan, of all places, and although it wasn’t bad,  it wasn’t worth the price.    I also tried Whale Ale from Port Stephens, a wheat beer but none of the added spice or citrus, so it was nothing to write home about.  Nice label, though, from a brewery that seems to specialise in novelty labels.

The first white or wheat beer I tried (some years ago now) was Hoegarrden at the Belgium Beer Cafe in Brisbane.  It’s delicious, but now these Australian small breweries are doing this in equal quality.  I really the Belgium Beer Cafe, but I am pretty rarely in the city to partake of its pleasures.

Beer with spice and citrus flavours  seems more medieval and interesting than your regular lager or other stuff. 

But amongst your more routine beers, I have taken to Rogers Beer.  A very easy drink.

It’s always good to have a new interest….