East India Pale Ale - London 1897, 5.8%

East India Pale Ale, London 1897, 5.8%

Malt: Golden Promise, Dextrin Malt
Hops: Goldings, Challenger
Yeast: English Ale Yeast

We’ve been brewing dark beers to old London recipes since the breweries inception, so it seems odd to think that this is the first time we have used an archive recipe for a pale beer.  We admit to being completely seduced by hop forward beers in the modern style (or at least how we define this).  It’s a lot of what we do and who we are.  Our house yeast is really clean, allowing other parts of the beer to shine through, like the Maris Otter barley that drives all our beers, and the bright, fruity, aromatically playful hops that we employee in our IPAs and Pale Ales.  We’ve allowed this vision of what we thought pale and hoppy beers should be to guide what we do in a certain way, looking forward, chasing hops.

This East India Pale Ale turns all of that around.  It is based on a Fuller’s recipe from 1897.  While London was the point of origin of the East India Pale Ale, by this time it was no longer the centre of the production of pale beers bound for India (this had moved to Burton).  We chose a London recipe, as that is who we are, and it appeals to us to try to connect once again with London’s brewing history, this time to situate IPAs once again within the cities brewing lineage.

The questions raised by the recipe were answered first of all with Golden Promise barley, and Challenger and Goldings hops.  Golden Promise is one of the few surviving heritage English malting barley varieties, though it dates from the middle of the last century rather than from the one before.  Challenger and Goldings represent the British hop tradition of hedgerow, spice, grass, tea, and it is very likely that hops similar to Goldings would have been used in beers like this at the time of the recipe. 

The colour is burnished gold.  Aroma is an enticing blend of marmalade, toffee, spice and gunpowder/flint.  The flavour starts clean but quickly moves into a marmalade warmth, more of an orange honey character than the way the malt presents in our house IPAs.  This beer then has a dry finish, tea like, the fruit giving way slowly to something a touch herbal, a touch bitter.  The bottle and keg version give sparkle and lightness, an effervescence that accentuates the refreshing character that these beers needed to provide at their destination.  The cask is more rounded, gentle and generous