The pursuit of hoppiness

Say hello to our new friend Cluster.

Eight weeks, two fermentations, hours spent bottling, just to find out that we would have trouble scaling up our tried and tested recipe. In our previous - much smaller - home brews, Progress hops had been a superb addition and helped us create some great IPAs and bitters. However, its 8% alpha acid does not partner well with the large quantities of fresh fruit we used to flavour our larger batches – especially the sourness of raspberries.

The following weekend we held a live Instagram video and met with the team at Redemption Brewery and One Mile End. We had some great advice from all these guys, on how to perfect our beer, make the jump from home brew to a fully fledged brewery and what to look out for along the way. (What we learnt in one weekend alone will fill many a blog post to come!)

After lots of research, paired with the advice from the craft community and several brewing sessions – fueled by a couple of rather good beers (shout out to Beavertown Brewery for their Gamma Ray APA) - we made some alterations to our base recipe and fruit flavouring. We've changed hops and scaled back the amount we used per brew.

With that said, we'd like to introduce you to Cluster hops. Floral in taste and aroma, these babies compliment the flavour from all three of our current beers marvelously. When popping the cap off the new beers you are still hit with the fruit smell – particularly the strawberry - but in addition we’ve found that the Cluster hops provide an earthy aftertaste. This helps bring the intensity of the fruit flavour down a few notches, preventing it from overpowering the beer itself.

We're ramping up production at the moment, so we hope that there will be a few beers going out to some of you to try before you buy!

Cheers for all the support during this trying time.

Keep drinking.

Your pals,

Lost Boys