Hopster’s Beer Club – Bracket Brewing
This is the May 2023 instalment of Hopster’s Beer Club, where a guest brewery appears at the Hopster’s taproom in Enmore to tell us about a selection of four of their beers. This month the guest brewery is Bracket Brewing.
The beers on offer were:
- Eleventh Hour (NEIPA 6.2%)
- This is the Way (WCIPA 6.2%)
- Retroshift (Red IPA 7.7%)
- Express Yourself (Imperial IPA 8.5%)
Presentation
The session started off well. Both Mike and Mark, the father and son team behind Bracket Brewing, were presenting. I thought the presenters worked well as a pair, with the younger guy giving us most of the information, with a follow-up from the father who was keen for feedback on what the audience felt about the beers.
Bracket have been in operation now for 2 years, having taken the risk to begin business during the COVID lock-downs, and have managed to succeed where some established breweries have closed down.
Bracket uses four different yeast strains for their beers, giving their beers a much greater range of flavours than you get from many breweries.
‘Eleventh Hour’
This beer is based on a New England IPA, i.e. a Hazy IPA. Bracket uses 12 grams of hops per litre for this beer, including Sabro, Freestyle, and Citra. Once the yeast is harvested for reuse, they use a simple dry hopping technique, but using twice the hops you would use in a typical pale ale.
The grain bill is predominantly extra pale malt, with smaller additions of various types of oats, including malted and flaked oats.
This beer was definitely ‘juicy’, and full of hop aroma. It was typical of a ‘Hazy’. It looked like lemon barley water, with that typical cloudiness. The citrus flavour was there, perhaps more of lime than lemon, and the aroma was grassy/herbal, or hemp as one guy in the audience suggested. Quite refreshing, and the favourite beer of the night for one guy at my table (thanks Steve).
‘This is the Way’
There is a trend in the US right now for brewers to make crisper, cleaner tasting IPAs, going to any lengths to avoid esters in their beers, considering any ester as an off flavour, rather like you do in a lager.
This makes the beer hard to label, and as the presenters point out, labelling your beer pigeon-holes it, opening you up to criticism if you dare to vary slightly off the established style track.
While basted on a West Coast IPA, this beer uses a lager yeast, giving it a much cleaner flavour profile. This beer is Bracket’s first attempt to follow this trend, and they like their results, and probably won’t be going back to using American ale yeast in the future for this style of beer. The difference between these beers and Cold IPAs is that Cold IPAs usually have corn added.
It did indeed taste crisp, despite a final gravity of 1.013. This gave the beer enough body not to be thin, and the very clean flavour profile helped with the crispness. It was quite hoppy, but not as resinous as many WCIPAs tend to be.
This was my favourite beer of the two presented so far.
Unfortunately, this is where things started to go pear-shaped. There is often a break in the middle of the four beers being presented, where the presenters answer questions and mingle with the audience. So, the guys started chatting, and they kept on chatting. The next two beers came out, and we sipped on those, waiting for them to recommence.
After over an hour, it became pretty clear they weren’t going to continue. I asked Mitch if they were going to carry on, and he thought they were. But, eventually the audience got sick of waiting and started to leave. I asked the presenters what was going on. They said they would have been happy to continue, but no one was asking them to. That was someone else’s responsibility, not theirs.
And to be fair, he’s right. What we need is an organiser, a dedicated host to make sure everything stays on-track. A lot of Hopster’s events seem to fizzle out half-way through. Perhaps there is a Hopster’s member who would like to volunteer?
It’s a shame, because this could have been a good Beer Club!
All four beers are available on tap at the moment at the Hopster’s taproom on Enmore Rd, Enmore. A full list of beers currently on tap is always available here.
Update 04/06/2023
Hopsters have the ‘Express Yourself’ hazy double IPA on tap at the moment. I’ve had the opportunity to taste it. It is slightly sweet, with a hoppy nose. ABV of 8.5% but tastes weaker. It reminds me of the German wine Riesling, a medium dry wine that was popular in the 1980s.
