Wim & Richie on Seasonal Brews and Sustainability
Speaker 1 (00:15)
So we have our core range, these five beers, but we also do two seasonals every year, one for the summer and one the winter. And we’re well into the winter one at this stage. Now, the winter one, we don’t have the same story as Grunt and Hop on. And the other ones are very much finnable, North Dublin-based stories. Our seasonals Our seasonals, our summer one has a guy in a deck chair, and in the winter, he’s still on the deck chair. It’s just dark and it’s raining. Somebody else, he looks a bit grey. Somebody asked me, Is he dead? He’s not dead. He’s just still on the beach in the winter. But this one does, as it happened, have a really interesting story in terms of the actual. Back at the end of the summer, Jean was contacted by a farmer near Ashburn, not too far from here, to see would we be interested in using emmer wheat. I think Jean said, What’s emmer wheat? And she asked me, and I said, What’s emmer wheat? I thought I heard of it, but I wasn’t sure. And this guy, his name is Dominic, and he has a farm called Cornstown House.
Speaker 1 (01:44)
And And he is really interested in heritage grains, so stuff, oats and barley and wheat and strange things that were grown in antiquity, but also 50, 100 years ago, the things they would have made bread and beer with in the 19th century. He’s into all this. And emmer wheat is one of these things. It’s an ancient form of wheat. It’s back 10,000 years ago when they first domesticated crops in the Middle East, it was one of the first things that was domesticated. And so he’s growing these. He’s also growing spelt and ironcorn, which are both ancient forms of wheat. And so I thought, well, it’d be really cool to use it. And he said, Can you use it? Jean wanted to see, could we do something with it? And I thought, yeah, let’s put it in a beer. It’s going to be probably behave more or less like wheat, but maybe with a bit more flavour. And it was coming towards winter. I couldn’t do any of the classic wheat beer things like grunt as a wheat beer, but it’s something you might not want to drink so much of in the winter. We had already decided we wanted to do this stout this year, so I thought, Well, you can put wheat in a stout.It was not malted, even.It wasn’t malted.
Speaker 1 (02:57)
You can use unmalted grain in beer, but you can’t use that much of it. You can use maybe 20% max, maybe a little bit more, because for technical reasons, malted barley, malded wheat has enzymes in it that help to break down the sugar, the things that the yeast can ferment. They have surplus, so you can use… They have enough to ferment the other unmulted grains, but not too many of them. We were confined to using about… I think we ended up using about 10% or so of this grain is the emmer, a malded emmer wheat. So I went to Cornstown House to meet Dominic, amazing guy.
Speaker 2 (03:36)
That’s a fabulous place. It’s a fabulous place. If you don’t come on a brewery tour here or you have small kids, go to Cornstown House because they have animals that you can…
Speaker 1 (03:44)
The lamas you can pet and all this stuff. But he was in the middle of a field when I went out there. And there was an archaeologist from UCD who explained all about emmer wheat to me because she was out visiting too, because she’s really interested in this stuff. And he was in a 1970s combine harvester which he and his friends had restored as a labour of love. He was trying to harvest oak and wheat at the time and pulling leavers. He asked me, did I want to go on it? I foolishly said, no. I’m kicking myself now because I’ll never get another go to drive a combine harvester. Anyway, long story short, we got the emmer wheat from them and we brewed a number of batches now with it and it’s gone down really well. As you can see, it’s a fairly straightforward stout. Other than the strange ingredient, which to me, I think wheat tends to ferment a little bit more than barley and leave a little less residual flavour. So the effect of that is that it dries out the beer, which makes it more drinkable. So it’s quite a drinkable stout.
Speaker 1 (04:48)
But being emmer wheat, it’s supposed to be… It’s hard to tell in isolation if we didn’t… Unless we have two beers that were brewed the same except for the emmer wheat. But it’s supposed to be a little bit fruitier, a little bit nuttier, and there’s definitely a lot of flavours going on. Now, a lot of that is from the dark motes, like the one that I showed you earlier down in the brewery. But you can see it’s got a bit of a creamy head. It’s not nitrogenated or anything Guinness, but it’s-So we can’t really do the beautiful creamy heads that Guinness do so well.
Speaker 2 (05:22)
And by the way, we love Guinness as well. But from a flavour point of view, if you like the real flavour of stout, oh my God, you get so much more out of the stout from us or from any craft beer company compared to a pint of Guinness or a pint of Island’s Edge.
Speaker 1 (05:42)
You get a whole lot more roast flavours, chocolate, coffee. And there’s no chocolate or coffee in this beer. It’s just natural flavours from the way that the malts are roast. I’m so delighted with this and we’ve got a lot of really great feedback. There’s a lot of our customers in the shops and the off-licenses and using expletives and asking them, Des, why the F is this not on all the time? And all this stuff. A lot of people have been really fond of this. So that’s really gratifying. Actually, that’s one of the nice things about… Because we’re doing okay, but you don’t go into Craft Brewing for the money. You go into it for the glory. And part of the glory is when you get really good feedback on the beer, and this one’s just a love for a single.
Speaker 2 (06:27)
And it’s nice. With the seasonals, we get an opportunity to brew a different beer every summer or every winter. But with the success of this stout now, we’ll probably keep this stout theme going. In the past, we’ve had a coffee stout where we would have added Espresso coffee, and we had an Espresso machine here in the brewery, and we made, I think it was 750 Espresos that we put into the beer in order to give it that real coffee flavour.
Speaker 1 (06:57)
Delighted to say that was before my time. I didn’t have to make any Espresos.
Speaker 2 (07:02)
Yeah, we also did a flat white stout, which was coffee, and then we added a bit of lactose in it as well. It wasn’t white, it was still black. But you can do wonderful things with stouts, and you can also make them very strong. Like a seven or eight % stout is also really nice. This is just five %. And as Richie said, the flavours out of it are fantastic. And it’s a wonderful after dinner drink or drink in front The note of the fireplace.
Speaker 1 (07:31)
But it’s drinkable as well. I think a lot of people see stout as heavy or thick. I think a lot of that is just a perception because especially the lower strength Stouts, I find them very drinkable as long as there’s not too much sweetness, as long as they’re balanced. And this one, I don’t make any bones about the fact that I don’t particularly like sweet beers. I like them to be bitter. I usually get rolled back by the others in the brewery when I’m trying to make something too bitter, and I realise not everybody likes as much. But this one, I think, has a good balance. It’s not too sweet, so you don’t feel it being too full. You can definitely drink it like a normal beer, which is nice in the winter.
Speaker 2 (08:10)
Just roll back on the grain. I think we took a shot of… Once the grain, we’ve taken all the sugars out of the grain, it becomes spent grain. For a brewery like ours, which is basically in Dublin City Centre, it’s very difficult to get rid of waste-like grain. I’d say 80% of breweries in Ireland, if not 90% of breweries in Ireland, are out in the countryside and near farms and everything. And the best place to get rid of your spent grain is to bring it to a farm because cattle love it. But if you’re based here in the middle of Dublin and you have a container full of grain there every month or every week or every couple of weeks, it can become very expensive to get rid of that. So we found a farmer who actually runs a very large hardware store here in Baldoil, and he has a farm, and he’s only too delighted to pick up our grain every week and feed it to his cattle. And his cattle love it.
Speaker 1 (09:28)
Yes.
Speaker 2 (09:30)
And there’s even, like Paul, our brewer said, if cattle eat brewer’s grain, their methane output is less than when they eat normal feed. So it’s really good for the environment as well.
Speaker 1 (09:46)
Yeah, there’s a lot of really interesting research being done into that thing, into additives, into animal feed that will reduce their… Because obviously the meat industry, the methane thing is a massive of environmental issue. I read another thing about seaweed, a similar thing. But yeah, the brewer’s grain, that was an interesting one. Obviously, they don’t just eat the grain. I think that’s too much for them. There’s probably still a lot of sugar in there. It’s not good for them, but it gets mixed in with the rest of their feed and it has this nice consequences, as well as being sustainable, that we’re getting rid of it in a sustainable way.
Speaker 2 (10:23)
Sustainability is important for us. We were very lucky when we bought the brewery. The brewery has a couple of features in it that make it more sustainable than a lot of older breweries. Most breweries have a heat exchanger when the wort goes to the fermenter and it’s cooled down and we regain hot water. But we also have a heat exchanger on our kettle. So when we boil the beer, the steam is collected, it’s condensed into hot water, it’s run through a heat exchanger, and we collect up to a thousand litres of hot water into our hot water tank. It basically means that we produce all our own hot water, and we use a lot of it. Unfortunately, to make one litre for a beer, you might use seven or eight litres of water. And most of that is used for cleaning, and cleaning, and cleaning again. They say that a head brewer with all his, I He can make beautiful beers, he can do that. Essentially, he’s a really good cleaner. Sorry, Richie. I’m the exception to the roof. But cleaning… In any food plant, cleaning is so important, and we do a lot of it.
Speaker 2 (11:45)
At the moment, we’re working on a project to put solar panels on the roof. Unfortunately, with the high energy prices, that’s an easy, commercially justifiable project. Project, but we like the idea as well because it adds to our sustainability. All our grain, all our malted barley, 80% of it is base malt, comes from a field out in Wexford on Hookhead. So again, we like to buy as many of our ingredients locally. But as we said, we can only get the hops in Oregon, which makes makes it very unsustainable. But it’s supposedly a sustainable farm. So we do what we can, and we can’t do everything. And a brewery, by its nature, does use energy, but we try to keep that as low as possible. Anyway, should we move on to one more beer before we wrap this up? So besides our core range, of which we had two beers, we have our seasonals. We also do limited editions, and limited editions really are there to show off. Because we only do one batch of beer, it is commercially a difficult proposition because we have to design a label, we have to make the beer, we have to market the beer, we have to give out samples.
Speaker 2 (13:21)
And all that is extra marketing cost that we normally don’t have. But it’s very important. It’s also important for the brewers because they like to brew something different every now and then. It gives us a chance to try different styles. If one of them does really well, we might decide to make it a core beer or we might decide to make it a seasonal beer. So the last limited edition that we did was a Goza. And Richie is going to tell you exactly what a Goza is.
Speaker 1 (13:56)
Goza is one of these interesting and anomalies in German brewing. You probably hear a lot about the Reinhardt’s Gabot, the German brewing purity law that they’re only allowed to use. It’s not beer unless it only has barley and yeast and malt and Sorry, Eastern Mould and Hops and Water. There are a few exceptions to the rule on historical grounds, and Goza is one of them. It’s a really old style before this law would have come in, and it’s from the town of Lipsick, or near Leipzig, anyway. Now, it almost completely died out before it got… It was one of these things that was resurrected by the craft industry because in craft beer, unfortunately, one of the things that we’re beholden to is the fact that people just want new stuff all the time, new, new, new. If you can discover… I’m still waiting for you to discover some Dutch style that nobody’s heard of. If you can discover some style that nobody’s heard of and then brew it, then it’s great. People realised that 100 years ago, they were brewing this beer in Vibesick that was really old. I think with the Iron Carton and everything, it had completely died out and they resurrected it.
Speaker 1 (15:10)
Essentially, it is a sour beer made with salt. So it’s crazy. It blows your mind if you think that this is a German beer.
Speaker 2 (15:20)
So salt is the ingredient that’s not part of the Rheinheitz Kabot.
Speaker 1 (15:23)
Well, also it’s got this… It traditionally would have been brewed with a lactic bacteria, which a lot of our sour beers, that’s a standard method for now, but it’s not traditional for Germans. A lactic bacteria, which gives you this lactic acid that really makes it sour, and a yoghurt sour in a yoghurt sour, lemon sour a certain way. So it’s naturally soured that way. They add salt to the boil, which is really interesting when you add salt to beer because we think of salt a certain way, but actually it also accentuates sweetness. It’s fascinating. And then a lot of them would also have had coriander added, which is standard for some of the Belgian beers, but it’s a bit far out for the Germans. So it’s really one of these very weird historical anomalies, and it’s gotten quite popular. A lot of brewers now would make it as a base beer and then add fruit purée, which would… I’ve seen lime ones, I’ve seen rasberry ones. I think we did a rasbury one on the small scale. But we decided to do a fairly straight, unadulterated, no fruit, just close to the historical style. And this actually, interestingly, this started life as a small beer that we did for the crack beer community, which is an online beer portal thing.
Speaker 1 (16:49)
And it did very well for them, and we thought, you know what? We should do this again on a big scale for a limited edition. The great thing about sour beers is they’re so unlike normal beers. They’re closer to something between a dry white wine or a dry cider. Some of the northern French ciders are really almost sour as well. Natural wines are sour. It’s more like that. There’s no hops in this. The flavour is all sourness, sour jelly. It’s great.
Speaker 2 (17:18)
We often get people that come on a tour with a group of friends, and one of them will say, I don’t like beer. I don’t like beer. And come to a brewery tour, you don’t beer, but that’s okay. But we always give them a taste. We give them a taste of the grunt, and we give them a taste of this beer. And very often, because this is so unlike normal beer, they’ll taste this and say, That’s actually a…
Speaker 1 (17:48)
It’s nice to have a… We can’t really justify a year-round sour beer, but it’s a beautiful thing to have in your food arsenal. If you have a sour beer, there’s so many great food pairings to go with this.
Speaker 2 (18:01)
Such as?
Speaker 1 (18:02)
Such as. You get this thing in Belgium, there’s a lot of sour beers there. If you pair any sour beer like this with fat, sour, acid, and fat are classic. That’s a classic pair. You want to pair this with charcuterie, pork belly, any fatty terrine, anything like that, any meaty-fatt thing, and it’s perfect. Because the acid really cuts through that… When you eat that charcuterie, If you’re going to go to your mouth a little bit. The acid cuts straight through it. It’s a really great pair. So get yourself some pork belly or get a really good…
Speaker 2 (18:38)
And a couple of cans of gosa.
Speaker 1 (18:40)
A couple of cans of gosa on your set. Get a nice shot of your boy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even some cheese.
Speaker 2 (18:44)
Never mind the Alsace wine.
Speaker 1 (18:47)
Exactly, exactly. No, they’re perfect for that. So yeah, this one’s great for that. It’s lovely to have a sour beer in the brewery.
Speaker 2 (18:54)
Yeah, I agree. And it’s nice to have that range of beer. The four beers we’ve tasted now, they are all completely different and miles apart. And that’s what I craft. People ask, what is craft beer? That independent and all that. But really what we’re doing is we’re brewing beers with lots of flavour and lots of different flavours and interesting flavours and interesting beers. Whereas I’m very sorry, but Heineken is a bland product. It tastes a little bit different in than it does taste here, but it’s a bland product, and there isn’t much flavour to it. Now, that’s also why it appeals to a lot of people. But craft beers have lots of flavour, lots of interesting flavours. And there’s always something different to taste.
Speaker 1 (19:45)
Also, I think one of the nice things about… I mean, it is a difficult one to see what does craft mean. It can’t just be about size, it can’t just be about independence, it can’t be about…
Speaker 2 (19:55)
It’s not all that as well, but sure.
Speaker 1 (19:58)
There’s no easy way to define it. But one, I One thing important thing which you can use to define it is, up to a point, now, Vim will probably kill me for saying this because you can go out on a limb a little bit, not financially, to a certain degree. You can try something that you’re not entirely sure is going to work. Whereas I know if I was running a multi-million euro, massive brewery that was producing thousands and thousands of litres of beer every day, I would want to be damn sure that something was going to work before I put down to paper and signed off on it.
Speaker 2 (20:34)
Of course, because you’re going to sell so much of it. We can do with our limited emissions. We will produce whatever, a couple of pallets of it.
Speaker 1 (20:42)
We won’t do something crazy. And of course, we’ll listen to Dez and Tom and see what they think about, are they going to be able to sell it? We’re not going to be completely oblivious to it, but at the same time we can say, I think this is going to work, or let’s try a start. I can think.
Speaker 2 (20:58)
And still, and having said all that, they won’t brew a Belgian triple for me. And I would love a really nice Belgian triple, and they just keep, I won’t sell in Ireland. I think I would drink most of it myself.
Speaker 1 (21:16)
Unfortunately, we keep going back to whatever IPAs, and Vargas, and-We need to start a campaign.
Speaker 2 (21:23)
Sours, and all that stuff.
Speaker 1 (21:25)
We can start a campaign and get the people to demand it. Then we’ll have to brew it.
Speaker 2 (21:29)
People If we start demanding a triple or a double, that would be great. The only thing about this beer, it’s a German beer. Unfortunately, I love German beers. Germans are very good at making beer. They’re also very good at soccer and at football, and I still hate them for it. But anyway, cheers. Cheers, Sam. Thank you very much.
Want to discover more about Hope Beer? Check out our blogs on their seasonal ales & eco-initiatives and two signature brews.