We've been so wrapped up in work and holiday travel and god-knows-what-else that we sort of lost sight of what Bone Up is all about: filling out paperwork until we want to claw our eyes out! And, almost as importantly, the thing that allows us to fill out all that paperwork: brewing. And this week's brew is one we've been itching to make for weeks because this time we got to play with the new (well, new to the commercial brewing world, not new new) Neomexicanus hops!
We hadn't heard of them until very recently, but they're quite the interesting find. The short-and-oversimplified version of the story is that most if not all of the hops used in commercial brewing nowadays are predominately or entirely of European origin (hop parentage is kind of wacky, so you'll often get hops that have like 17% American ancestry). But hops grow everywhere! Given the right conditions they'll grow like weeds, not unlike a certain genetic cousin of theirs: Weed (I assume most of you already know this due to the fact that it's the #1 "tee-hee" joke on brewery tours, but I will still caution you not to smoke hops because you will just get a terrible headache if you do). So anyway, some guy out in New Mexico found these crazy weird hops just growing outside and he started cultivating them and now they're grown and sold by a monastery (for further reading, we strongly recommend this Smithsonian article and if you're still interested maybe look at this blog post).
As you may have guessed, we think it's just the bee's knees that we get to brew with these hops (the cones grow in multiheaded bunches! Like a hydra! Or... grapes). We've always been fascinated by the farmhouse brewing tradition - beer used to be just a food product and people made it out of whatever was easy and/or cheap to get (while we love the idea, we try not to use the word "farmhouse" to describe our beers since our brewery is in an industrial park, which is about as far on the other side of the spectrum as you can get given that it's neither farm nor house). And it doesn't stop at the old-timey throwback beers like the Norwegian beers made with spruce branches or colonial-era American beers made out of pumpkins and squash - many of the beer styles you know and love stem from brewers trying to deal with environmental and/or political factors. For instance:
-English beers tend to be low in alcohol because of taxes imposed on brewing ingredients during the World Wars - they used to be hella strong back in the day.
-Belgian beers tend to be dry and cloudy because a tax was placed on the size of the mash tun, which meant brewers had to use thick mashes and lots of sugar (somewhat counterintuitively, sugar leads to a drier beer instead of a sweeter one).
-American Mainstream Beers use corn and rice because domestic barley is very high in protein, which makes a beer that's relatively thick. Adjuncts were used to lighten the body and make it more palatable to people who were accustomed to European beer (that's right! It's not because the Big Brewers are cheap! Maybe next time you shouldn't get all your Historical Beer Facts from a Sam Adams label).
In conclusion, this long rambling story is a great example of why we don't let our head brewer write blog posts more often.
As you may have guessed, we think it's just the bee's knees that we get to brew with these hops (the cones grow in multiheaded bunches! Like a hydra! Or... grapes). We've always been fascinated by the farmhouse brewing tradition - beer used to be just a food product and people made it out of whatever was easy and/or cheap to get (while we love the idea, we try not to use the word "farmhouse" to describe our beers since our brewery is in an industrial park, which is about as far on the other side of the spectrum as you can get given that it's neither farm nor house). And it doesn't stop at the old-timey throwback beers like the Norwegian beers made with spruce branches or colonial-era American beers made out of pumpkins and squash - many of the beer styles you know and love stem from brewers trying to deal with environmental and/or political factors. For instance:
-English beers tend to be low in alcohol because of taxes imposed on brewing ingredients during the World Wars - they used to be hella strong back in the day.
-Belgian beers tend to be dry and cloudy because a tax was placed on the size of the mash tun, which meant brewers had to use thick mashes and lots of sugar (somewhat counterintuitively, sugar leads to a drier beer instead of a sweeter one).
-American Mainstream Beers use corn and rice because domestic barley is very high in protein, which makes a beer that's relatively thick. Adjuncts were used to lighten the body and make it more palatable to people who were accustomed to European beer (that's right! It's not because the Big Brewers are cheap! Maybe next time you shouldn't get all your Historical Beer Facts from a Sam Adams label).
In conclusion, this long rambling story is a great example of why we don't let our head brewer write blog posts more often.
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