Monthly Archives: May 2013

Florida Pale Ale, Part #1 – Hop Taste Test

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One of our favorite local IPAs has been in short supply recently (Cigar City’s Jai Alai). This had been my go-to beer ever since it started showing up at our local grocery store in cans (and the fact that it tasted even fresher in cans is a big part of my conversion to can/bottle agnosticism).

Hop Tea #1: Low-Alpha

So of course we decided it was time to complete our transformation to IPA-lovers and brew our own.  We have really grown to like hoppier beers, especially given the almost total lack of hoppy beers in the Netherlands.  And the ones we most like are Florida Pale Ale-style IPAs like Jai Alai and SwampHead’s Big Nose.  These are generally as hoppy as more traditional American IPAs, but with less resiny bitterness and more floral and herbal aroma.  I found a forum post with the Jai Alai hop schedule.  And since there were five different hops involved, I decided to order a bunch of American hops — Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, Mt. Hood, Nugget, Willamette, etc. and taste-test them to decide what we really wanted to use.  Our usual supplier was sold-out of Amarillo, so we wound up with nine 1-ounce packages of American hops.

We made two batches of tea — one pellet of each hop in tiny espresso cups.  The first batch were the low-alpha varieties (Ahtanum, Cascade, Centennial, Mt. Hood and Willamette).  There were some clear losers (Cascade tasted very acrid and resiny, Ahtanum tested very oily), but no clear winners.

The second round had much clearer winners and losers — the high-alpha varieties (Chinook, Columbus, Nugget and Simcoe) had much more pronounced flavors.  We both liked Chinook and Nugget quite a bit, and hated Columbus (engine-fire) and Simcoe (astringent and resiny).

After a quick check of the handy Oxford Companion to Beer told us that Mt. Hood and Nugget were typically used for bittering, we arrived at a hop schedule: Mt. Hood and Nugget for bittering, and Centennial, Chinook and Willamette divided evenly between flavor and aroma.  Going back to the Jai Alai hop schedule showed that we’d basically picked all the hops they weren’t using, and gave us a little pause.  But we decided to plow ahead with what we liked, since we can always go back and copy Jai Alai if it doesn’t turn out.

Hogtown Craft Beer Festival

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We went to the Hogtown Craft Beer Festival — our local beer festival here in Gainesville.  We missed the inaugural event last year, but were glad to make it this year.  It was held in the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens, which are very beautiful this time of year.  Unfortunately, it had been raining most of the day before the fest, so the ground was pretty muddy.  Luckily the rain let up so we didn’t get soaked at the outdoor festival.

The local and regional beer selection was very good.  There were a ton of breweries from Jacksonville (Bold City, Green Room, Intuition Ale Works, Engine 15), Tampa (Cigar City, St. Somewhere), Tallahassee (Momo’s, Pesacola Bay), and St. Augustine (Mile Marker) which I’d heard of but mostly never had any beer from.  There were also several regional and national brewers — it was good to see them represented, but with so much local beer we’d never had, we decided to focus on the new and local.

There was a good variety of styles of beer represented, with lots of IPA, porter, stout, but also saison, rye, wheat, etc.  By far our favorite beer of the event was Engine 15’s Doolittle Rye Saison.  It gets mixed reviews on RateBeer, but we both loved it.  I generally hate rye beers, but this one was a very solid saison, with just a touch of sweetness and not too much rye astringency.

There was quite a crowd, but the lines for beer moved very quickly.  There were around 50 breweries pouring, so it was also easy to shift to a shorter line if anything had a long line.  We only had to wait in two long lines: one for free burgers (which makes sense) and the other was for Swamp Head just after they tapped a special keg of saison.  Other than that, there were at most two or three people ahead of us for any given line.  And many times you could just walk up with no line.

So other than being afraid of getting rained on, I think it was one of the best beer festivals I’ve been to.  There was way more beer than we could drink, and tons of local beer we’d never had before.