Over the past few months, we’ve been thinking of ways to create affordable beers for our customers to be able to have craft beer options whilst still watching the pennies. Firstly, we realise that affordable is a bit of a sliding scale for people so we settled on trying to create a beer that could be sold for Under £5 and still get the bar 60% GP. So, this concept was the starting point for us to try and create recipes that have our signature complexity and full flavour but focus on ingredients that are more affordable. The first place to start was the malt bill.

Focussing on Malt

For our first affordable beer, we decided to make British malt the showcase. We are lucky enough to work with Simpsons malt. They have been a leading maltster since 1863 and create some incredible heritage malt. They work directly with farmers to support them and make sure their barley is the best from seed to malting. Their approach to barley and malting is driven by a passing of generational culture throughout the Simpsons family and the quality of their malt is something we take great pride in when forming the backbone of all our beers at Exale. For this recipe we used Vienna malt as the base malt, it provides a lovely light biscuit base and a little hint of toasted, nutty flavour. We then layered the caramelised malts with brown malt, dark crystal malt and chocolate malt. These provide all the burnt sugar and molasses; brown malt adds a little dried fruit and coffee. To finish off we add the roasted barley and black malt which give the nice dryness and a hint of burnt toast. We created this beautifully complex dry stout. It’s a beer that all the brew team go back to time and again for an after-brew beer. So much flavour but still light and dry and makes you go back for more.

For our second beer we looked at the biggest costs in our core range of beers and by far the biggest expense for us is Hops. We love hops and the job they do in beer, but it got us thinking about what alternatives there are. The main compounds that give us the fruit and tropical notes in hops are a tiny amount of oils which normally make up less than 10% of the matter that goes into the fermenter. Of those oils, an even smaller amount is the aromatic ones that we really want to extract such as Geraniol, Myrcene, and Farnasene. So that got us thinking about where else are these oils and compounds are abundant. Turns out a lot of British hops also contain these essential oils and compounds so we decided to build a recipe that could display some of the desirable flavours and aromas of a hoppy pale but without the expensive hops.

Herbal alternative to hop aroma

For this beer (Half wit) we brewed a beer with another friend of ours and someone who knows unusual ingredients, Phil from simple things fermentations. We decided that we should use a style and yeast strain that would help boost the aromatics and showcase the herbal notes in a way that tied it all together and made a balanced beer. We looked for herbs that had high oil content and ones with different oils that would complement each other. The Heather has a lot of phenolic compounds which highlights the spicy earthy yeast character of wit. Lemon Verbena has high Citral content (30%) and also a lot of geraniol which is a key compound in the hop Citra. The result was a beautifully balanced beer, crisp and sharp with subtly yeast character and aromatic and citrus notes from the herbs. It’s incredibly drinkable yet complex and I think it’s a great showcase for alternative flavourings to Hops.

Hopefully, we’ll be producing more along these lines over the next few months and hopefully, you guys out there get to try them and enjoy them as much as we’ve enjoyed making them.

It’s long been an ambition of ours to create something new to the beer world, In the UK
beer scene so many of our ideas come from other people’s beers and more often than not
from the US market. Of course no Idea is original but why not take inspiration and try and come up with something innovative and new. 
We wanted to create something that celebrates more European nuanced brewing styles and also crucially look at something much more sustainable by cutting out the reliance on hops from the other side of the planet.

The inspiration for this was looking back at styles of beer previously brewed in the UK and
Europe and using that as a starting point. The Uk had a great tradition of brewing Gruits before hops were discovered, Many contained a heady mix of hedgerow botanicals largely
forgotten today, We are surrounded by many great flavours with Angelica, hogweed,
meadowsweet and bog myrtle all having great aromatic compounds. Things like lemon
verbena and pineapple weed contain many of the desirable essential oils that give hope
there citrus and tropical fruit character.

Another source of inspiration was the Belgian workers ales, such as wits and Grissets- light ales with plenty of wheat and spicy estery yeasts that make them dry refreshing and full
flavoured. These ales were perfect for enjoying after a hard days graft and often incorporated fruit peel or spices.

For our new beer we decided to go somewhere down the middle, we’ve used a 30% wheat bill to nod towards the Belgian style and a more ester driven yeast, But we’ve combined that with locally sourced botanics that add the citrus element youd normally get form the hops. The result is a highly aromatic citrus beer with a crisp refreshing backbone and nice bitter finish. Each addition of the beer will change depend on what is in season with the idea always being a balanced sessionable beer full flavoured but low in alcohol. 

We wanted to create a beer that has a flavour profile and price point that will appeal to people across the beer spectrum and show that we don’t need to be looking across the pond for all our inspirations when we have an incredible array of ingredients and history to draw from right on our doorstep. 
Garden party will be available in 330ml cans and kegs and will always be one of the lowest priced beers in our range, we want to encourage people to try this beer and see what’s possible when you think outside the normal brewing parameters.

In these blogs we go into the process of how we make our favourite beers. An in depth discussion for the beer geeks.

When we started out to design a session IPA the main objective was always balance. Like most of the beers we do we want every part of the beer to have its place and contribute something to the overall flavour of the beer.

The first place I always start is the malt bill. For this beer I wanted it to be juicy, that means we need a full mouthfeel, a softness and some residual sugars left over. The first part of constructing this is the make-up of the malt bill. We go with 80% extra pale male 15% wheat and 5% oats. The extra pale makes sure we have all the fermentable and a nice bright straw colour, the wheat makes it nice and full bodied and helps give a nice big fluffy head. It also adds some haze from the proteins in the what. Finally the Oats give a sweetness and silkiness that helps round out the body and makes a perfect base to start building hop profile on. 

Once we’ve established the base malts we next need to use a few simple tricks to get the best out of it. We do this in two ways. First a little water treatment. We go a little heavier on the calcium chloride on this beer as that helps to accentuate the sweetness in the malt bill and give a softer feel to the beer, The next step is to mash at a fairly high temperature of 68 degrees. This means we get more of the unfermentable sugars which results in a thicker mouthfeel and more residual sugars as the yeast cant digest these more complex sugars and leaves them behind in the beer.

The next step once we’ve made the wort just right, is to choose a yeast to start fermenting this, with just the right mix of properties to leave us enough body and also contribute some fruity esters to the beer. The esters help give a platform to lift the fruity aromatic compounds in the hops.

The selection of Hops is carefully considered to give us the right mix of citrus stone fruit and more tropical notes. The citra and Mandarina bavaria add a lot of the citrus peel and more floral notes in skoosh. That's reinforced with a bit of a blueberry and stone fruit note from mosaic and finally the Azzacca gives us a hint of pineapple and Guava. We Dry hop to around 10g/ltr as we find that’s the sweet spot for maximum aroma without verging into the vegetal/onion territory of over-hopped beers at this abv.

The result is a balanced hoppy beer, with just enough mouthfeel to reinforce that juicy feel, but not overly aggressive on the pallet so you come back for it pint after pint. It’s a beer designed to be enjoyable, sessionable and accessible. We’re really proud of this beer, and it’s been our most popular beer for sme time now. Hopefully it will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

In December 2019 we opened the doors to our brewery & Taproom,, however we could never have envisioned the 2 and half years that were waiting round the corner. We became a brewery forged in the toughest times our industry has ever faced, and that has shaped our story.

 

We created closer links with our community who supported us through tough times. We got in touch with our local flora and fauna and honed our processes and knowledge to be better brewers with a smaller footprint on our community and our planet. Undoubtedly we came through that process shaped by the journey and ready to make the most of the time we’ve missed. With that in mind it was time for a new look. Our initial branding feels like it belongs to a bygone era, we now know who we are and our sense of place. We wanted to find an illustrator who could bring that to life across all our branding, to portray our sense of humour that saw us through the dark times. We feel we’ve found that in illustrator Inga Ziemele. Her art is surreal, adventurous and full of beauty, skill and mischief. We feel it’s a partnership that will give us a fresh new sense of identity and will be a better representation of who we are and what we make.