Beer Design and Evolution

One of the great advantages of brewing a small range of beers is the opportunity it offers to develop a beer.  Prospect is our best selling beer and went through five small scale pilot brews before the first commercial batch of 1300 litres.  Apart from experimenting with different yeasts and a temporary swap out of an unavailable hop last summer the beer remains exactly the same with a big flavour profile and complexity for a 3.7% beer.  Prospect is made three malts and five hop varieties - whole hops added in three stages.

Scholar is a different story.  The base design for this beer was "Black Cat Bitter" a recipe I used to make as a craft brewer.  We started with all English hop varieties but just couldn't get the flavour profile we were looking for.  The intention was to make a "big" mid strength dark copper coloured bitter reminiscent of the Ruddles County of 30 years ago - a beer to go with roast beef and mustard but not overly strong in alcohol.  And so every time we make Scholar there has been a single adjustment to build its colour, flavour profile and complexity.  The beer is on it's third yeast strain and now has five malts and five hop varieties including one NZ and two NW Pacific USA hops added in multiple stages.  The development of the flavour profile has been quite profound (for me as the brewer anyway - I do wonder if anyone else notices!) I think Scholar would now hold its own in a blind tasting against beers over a percent stronger in alcohol.  It also works well as a craft bottle conditioned ale.  I think that opening one compared to a mass produced beer is like trying crusty french bread fom an artisan baker compared to a white sliced loaf - perhaps it's the slight aroma of yeasty hoppiness.