Jester

Meet Jester. He was born 18th July 2016. He's lived with us since he was 7 weeks old.

I'm sure you will be thinking "Dave, just bugger off to Facebook if you are going to post pictures of your pets, we thought this was a beer blog!"

Well, yes, but we named Jester after the fairly recently developed British hop variety.

 "Dave, you make beers with New World hops... using British hops will just make the beer taste of twigs and moss!"

You lot are so lacking in inspiration and experimentation ain't you? I mean, historically British hops have developed for boring major regional brewers and their twig tasting beers....... but things are changing.

Make no bones about it, there are efforts being made to develop new hop varieties and it is important for us brewers to explore what they can do for beers.

We've started a new series of beers; the neutron series. The first one was Neutron Centennial. We use quite a lot of Centennial hops in our beers so getting the chance to isolate the single hop was handy.

 Jester hop variety has got some English characteristics, but we thought it to be one of the more suitable hops to play with. We're not apologetic for trying and we think we brought out the best in it.

Jester the Azimutt is doing fine...As you can see he's grown up into a fine proud dog...all growed up and that.

Have English hop varieties grown up yet? Well, it's improving, but there is still work to do.. We'll keep trying new varieties until we find the top-notch ones that can replace those properly funky American varieties.