Arbor Bock Star

This was brewed in early December after a series of conversations I had had with Jon Comer at Arbor; it was also inspired by a review in Beer Advocate of a beer called Hoponious Union. I kinda liked the idea of merging the clean canvas of colour that lagering brings to the bruising, one night stand of pungency that hops can come up with. So this was my idea but Arbor facilitated it and this is the result.

[clears throat, looks at the audience, acknowledges the pianist]

A burnished, well-polished, buffed-up, sleepy-eyed chestnut in colour, the sort of wine-dark sea colour that is suggestive in the northern European mind of chestnuts roasting by the fire in the middle of winter; the nose is as shy as a young child in a family snap, hiding but still wanting to be seen. Nose is almost like what you would imagine an orange pie to smell like; an orange liqueur perhaps; the straitened lace of toasted grain; the licentiousness of alcohol. A moth might want to drink this, but it would be wrong to offer it to a moth, but on the other hand how to bother this moth with a description? Here goes. The soft brushed skin of ripe peach, the sweetness of the malt bill, the luscious, lubricious touch of citrus on the tongue before it all tumbles down a dry, dusty, sweetened ravine of a finish, the sort of gulch, ravine, whatever, you will have seen in a Tarantino movie. It’s a bock in the sense that it’s sweet and alcoholic; it’s been lagered so it’s released from the pain of estery fruitiness so it’s a bock; but on the other hand the hops of which there are many kick the beer into a newer sensory territory. Hey it’s an India Pale Bock. Styles are like tomorrow’s parties at which you never intend to turn up. 

India Pale Bock anyone?

Joy of joys: part of the fun is digging out the mash

Why is collaboration with a brewery important to me? Why do I do it? There’s an element of ego — it’s satisfying to see your name linked with a brewery that you admire, a brewery that makes beers that you (and others) enjoy. It’s good fun to hang around a brewery for a day and find out how beer is brewed, rub loads of gorgeous hops such as Chinook, Bullion and Amarillo between your hands and take a Marianas Trench of a sniff and just for a day leave behind the potentially ruinous world of trying to put words together so that they form some sort of sense. I also love beer, love certain beers more than others and when I find a brewery that is willing to riff on a style that I love then I want to join in. There’s a sense of ‘let’s see what happens’ when certain combinations are tried; there is also a sense of experimentation, a sense of creativity. I can’t brew but I can devise a recipe and someone like Jon at Arbor (which is where I was on Friday) is happy to let me loose. That’s it really. Oh and the beer we have made will be called Bock Star and we’re saying that it’s an India Pale Bock and it will be released sometime late in January. That’s it really.

Rye mild west at Arbor Ales

If the song remains the same then you’re listening to the same song all the time, but if the beer remains the same then the beer remains the same. Sameness and variety both have their uses within the frenetic and febrile world of beer — sometimes I would like more of the same but at other times (and I must admit that this happens more and more) I want something different. This is the something that Arbor Ales (along with many others of its ilk) have cottoned onto. On the day that I arrive at the brewery in Bristol, the sun is shining, as if to bless the day’s endeavours. I’m there to brew a beer, once more into the mash tun in the name of creativity (as well as beery ego let’s be honest — Pete Brown has written elsewhere about how brewing a beer with a friendly brewery is akin to a rock journalist getting on stage with their favourite band, and why not?). 

The idea emerged a couple of months ago when I met Arbor’s Jon Comer for several beers at the brewery’s Three Tuns in the Hotwells area of Bristol. And the beer we were brewing? I had long harboured the desire to produce a rye mild, something that would make use of this most excellent grain (I used to enjoy O’Hanlon’s rye beer as well as Rye (I)PAs from Founder’s, Terrapin and Bear Republic). I envisaged a low-gravity beer with plenty of body and just to make it interesting have it dry hopped with Tettnang hops. 

For the record 50% of the base malt was mild malt, 25% rye malt and the rest Munich malt; then we added some crystal rye, oats and caramalt. Tettnang Hersbrucker was chucked in at several stages and I think we boiled for about an hour. The abv will be about 3.7% and Jon’s initial tastings suggest a big malty presence. I tasted the hopped wort after it had been chilled and I hope that the spiciness of the rye will still make itself felt. I’m looking forward to seeing what the dry-hopping will do. It will be available soon so I’d welcome comments on it.

But then is it a mild? If you want to know what I think here is something I wrote for a Beer magazine debate a couple of years ago, which I suspect started my thought process that would lead to Arbor Ales’ Ryeteous Ale, as we have decided to call it.

Are milds really milds these days?

Sitting at a table judging a selection of milds at SIBA’s National Awards earlier this year, one question kept cropping up — ‘is this to style?’ We had creamy milds, slightly hoppy ones, sweetish ones, grainy dry ones and ones with plain chocolate on the palate and nose. One had a hint of white pepper on the nose. Is this so bad?

A recent What’s Brewing correspondent claimed that the current Champion Beer of Britain was not a mild because it was too hoppy. I would disagree. In the shifting ever-restless world of beer styles nothing remains exactly the same and nor should it. And while we should respect that mild has its perimeters, maybe it’s time to recognise that they are seemingly wider than we thought, thus allowing brewers to make their own mark.

If we didn’t favour such a promiscuous attitude towards beer styles then we wouldn’t have the current crop of IPAs (go back 30 years and apart from White Shield anything with the word IPA would have been as weak as, er, a mild). Furthermore, we wouldn’t have, for better or worse, golden ales, double IPAs, chilli stouts and coffee porters.

A style category for mild is imperative (as for dropping the name from the brand that’s a different mash tun of amber malt), but it shouldn’t be based on what it was like in the ‘good old days’. A beer style is there as a starting point for innovation and experimentation — you have to learn what something is before disassembling it. Even Tracey Emin probably got an O-Level in art before she started rearranging beds.

Beers change, beers develop. All beer styles in their way should be moveable feasts (though maybe not as crazily amorphous as saison). And if this broad new meaning of mild brings new drinkers to the category then all the better — now where’s that glass of triple hopped, double fermented, black pepper spiced mild?