TRADITIONAL AND MODERN BREWING COLLIDE
If you were to ask a die-hard UnBarred fan what kind of beers we brew, they’d probably point to the more modern, experimental brews that we’ve released over the years. Such as our Pastry Sours, Bueno Shake, Dank Juice and Stoutzilla. And these are just a few of them! We do brew some more conventional styles of course, such as Joosy, our award-winning, best-selling hazy pale; but even that has a modern twist. More recently though, you’ll have seen that we’ve been exploring more traditional styles. Our Best Bitter has been one of the success stories of 2023, and at the back-end of last year we brewed using the parti-gyle method for the very first time. Everyone at the brewery loves traditional beer, with Head Brewer Jordan Mower cutting his teeth in this industry under the wing of a brewer who only brewed these styles of beer. That was our inspiration for this spate of traditional styles, but our most recent release has brought both traditional and a very modern technique clashing together for yet another thirst* for us.
Liquid Haze is a cask-only Pale Ale that has been brewed with tradition in mind, but with a very modern twist - we haven’t used any hops. OK, so the beer historians will point out here that hops themselves could be considered a modern addition to beer, having only existed for a few hundred years. Before then, we brewed with something called ‘gruit’ which is essentially a mixture of herbs that bittered and gave beer its flavour. But that’s not what we’ve done here, either. We’ve used hop extract.
A collaboration with Totally Natural Solutions, or TNS for short, we’ve got our hands on some new and experimental extracts that are designed to replace hops in the different stages of the brewing process, be it bittering or dry-hopping. Darryl and the TNS team visited us a few weeks back for the brew day, suitcase of the goods in hand, and joined us in brewing what has been a very first for both of us. ‘For this brew, we focused on our HopGain® FLOE as the main attraction as it is our new hot-side addition. We also used a small amount of HopBurst® Citrulicious and HopBurst® Nelson Sauvin which is our dry hop replacement.’ Darryl Mills from TNS explains. ‘HopGain® FLOE is a totally flowable, 100% hop extract designed for use in the late stages of the boil or in the whirlpool. With the absence of alpha acids, it does not add any bitterness, so it gives brewers the freedom to pack in as much flavour on the hot-side as possible. HopGain® FLOE can be used to replace or reduce existing late hopping/whirlpooling additions allowing for better wort quality, higher yield gains and less clean-up after the brew day!’
Liquid Haze uses a combination of Citra and Nelson Sauvin for a melange of citrus, white grape, gooseberry and tropical fruit notes. At 4.8% it has a soft, creamy body that carries the huge aroma from the heavy ‘dry-hop’ but is incredibly refreshing and easy drinking, making it a great pint of cask for these warm Summer evenings. We’re incredibly excited for you to try this very experimental and innovative take on a traditional cask Pale and we hope you love it as much as we do.
As it’s a cask only release, you’ll need to visit our Taproom to try it, or your favourite cask boozer. Keep an eye out on our socials for where Liquid Haze ends up
*pun intended.