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.