This interview was sent out in the April 2021 edition of Club Hops Which of your beers are you most proud of?The Hazy IPAs have been a huge success for us, but I would be lying if I said they were in our initial plans when opening the brewery. In fact, I had never brewed a hazy beer before starting Mountain Culture. We’re proud of them and of how they have developed over the time we’ve been opened - especially the Status Quo because it was the beer we put the most amount of work into perfecting. But on a personal note, I’m proud of our Decoction Lagers. A style that is not often made these days and one that meant we...
Last week we touched upon the flurried season that is wine harvest, but another harvest takes place at a similar time in Australia. Let's raise our glasses to hop harvest. Hops are the flowers (or cones) of the plant Humulus Lupulus which, fun fact, is part of the Cannabaceae family – the same family that cannabis belongs to. Humulus Lupulus grows as a bine (hop bine) and farmers string trellises to encourage the plant to grow vertically. It feels quite magical to stroll between the bines, quite nymph-like as if you are surrounded by drapery made of hops and foliage. The hop flowers contain all the essential oils, alpha, and beta acids that benefit the brewing world. A single plant will produce roughly 350g –...
As today is April 1st, we set out writing this Schmoozeletter with full intention to fool you. Our thought was to promote a ridiculous style of craft beer that had yet to come into existence, but our plans were thwarted while browsing the web and discovering many of our wild creations already existed. We came across a world of beery weirdness, some which were on our radar, some which would no longer be considered weird, and some which confused, fascinated, and tempted us.
Welcome back. We hope you had a lovely intermission and got yourself a beer! Now, where were we? Oh yes, hops! A side note about hops: Hops consist of alpha and beta acids and essential oils. The alpha and beta acids lend bittering, while the essential oils lend aroma to the beer. Depending on when hops are added throughout the boil they will impart more or less, bitterness and aromatics to the beer. If hops are in the boil for a longer duration of time those essential oils burn off, while bitterness increases. Therefore, brewers will add hops at a multitude of stages throughout the boil to make the finished product more complex. Once the boil is finished, the hop particles and any...
Bookmark this post! We’re going to be chatting about a multitude of topics throughout these bulletins so we thought we’d re-discover the basics in two parts. (You can find a glossary of terms in part two, linked below). Let's chat all things BREWING. Yes, even though it tastes as though it were sent from heaven, beer is the result of nature, science, and a brewer’s free will. We’re going to nerd out, and it's going to be fun! It all starts with precious barley. Barley is the chosen grain for brewing for a multitude of reasons; 1) the husks act as a natural filter bed through whichto strain the wort (pronounced ‘wert’), 2) Barley contains a large amount of starches which...
