Frequently Asked Questions about Lovibonds Beer

General

Water

Hops

General

That's correct, we currently only brew experimental beers at our site/shop in Henley.  Jeff brews the rest of the beer at Luxters.  After fermentation and some conditioning, we transfer the beer to Henley where it is further lagered and packaged in kegs or bottles. 

Jeff is also responsible for the brewing operation at Luxters, brewing their own brand as well as beer for their other clients, including the Queen (brews for the Old Windsor farm shop).

We don't filter any of our beer, therefore there is a chance that your pint may have a haze too it.  This can come from some of the ingredients we use, such as our Bavarian yeast strain in our Henley Gold, which doesn't want to drop to the bottom of the tank. 

We also use some old school techniques, such as dry hopping our Henley Amber.  Dry hopping consists of steeping whole hop cones in the fermented beer.  This can lead to what us brewers call a 'hop haze'.  We feel the aroma and flavour benefit outweighs the lack of complete brightness.

If you are used to looking at a crystal clear pint of industrial lager, you must know that this is because the beer has been fined with plastic dust, centrifuged, then most like filtered 3 or 4 times to remove all the processing aids that have been added.  We feel this process strips the beer of its natural goodness and won't go there.

Henley Gold and the rest of Lovibonds beers are not filtered or pasteurised.  Henley Gold was inspired by the best Bavarian wheat beers and it is served as it would be in the Germany. Wheat beer is meant to have medium to high carbonation and served cold, hence our chosen serving method.

Beer is very similar in ingredients to bread, and as we all know, bread needs to be eaten fresh.  You wouldn't dream of getting your bread shipped in from hundreds or thousand miles away.  Most beers are also not up to very long distances and abuses in the modern day supply chain.  This is why, if you want to be enjoying the freshest possible example of a beer, you should try to consume one that is brewed locally.

The minute beer leaves the brewery, unless it is kept at refrigerator temperatures, it begins to spoil.  This has led some brewers to do everything possible to make sure their beer fares well under the market abuse.  Pasteurisation and sterile filtering are practices that help the large brewers cope with shipping beer around the world.

Some large brewers have actually moved production of their 'brands' closer to local markets to overcome these issues.  Take a look at the bottle of beer in your refrigerator.   Where was it produced?  Here are a couple of interesting brewing locations for the common beers in my local supermarket:

Indian Kingfisher - Brewed in Kent

Foster's Australian Lager - Brewed in Reading

Belgian Stella Artois - Brewed in South Wales

French Kronenbourg 1664 - Brewed in Reading

American Budweiser - Brewed in London

American Miller - Brewed in Reading

Obviously, these large brewers also feel that local beer is best...

Water

Beer is 90% water, therefore it is obviously critical to the whole process and end product.  As a general rule, if your water is good to drink it will be fine for brewing. Getting a bit deeper into the subject though, it is the specific water chemistry that plays a huge role in the type of beer that can be produced successfully.

If you live in Henley, you will know what your kettle looks like after a couple weeks of making tea and coffee.  This type of water is not the easiest water to brew with.  The 'temporary' (because it can be turned into white fur) hardness limits the types of beer that can be brewed with it, specifically, golden beers are very difficult to make palatable with this type of water. 

It turns out that most world beer styles have been determined by the water chemistry of the areas where they evolved.  For instance, Henley beers were always on the dark side for a bitter.  Back then, they didn't know it, but by adding dark grains (roasted to differing degrees Lovibond) the brewer was lowering (acidifying) the ph of the mash and of the resulting beer.  By trial and error beers like Guinness evolved in hard water Dublin and the pale beers in the soft water regions of the Czech Republic.

Hops

Hops have been used for centuries as the brewer's favourite spice.  Hops are added at different points of the process to produce bitterness, flavours and aromas.  The brewer has dozens of varieties to play with in controlling the character of the end beer. 

So why has the brewing community settled on hops as the spice of choice?  Prior to hops being used in brewing, brewers made use of many long forgotten herbs and spices, some of them highly psychotropic.  Some believe that it was a conspiracy by the church that these highly inebriating brews were eventually replaced with hop infused brews.  Practically, brewers realised that beers infused with the hop flowers stayed fresher for longer periods of time.

Some of the gruit beers of the past were highly narcotic, aphrodisiacal and psychotropic when consumed in sufficient quantity.  Turns out that hops provide almost the opposite effect, as consuming hopped beer has a mildly sedating and anaphrodesiacal effect...in other words, hopped beer tends to put the drinker to sleep and dull sexual desire (okay, maybe not desire, but perhaps performance)...much different from beers many centuries ago.

Lovibond's uses hops from around the world, including from the south east UK, a couple famous hop growing regions in Europe and the North West, USA.

Hop bines flower in late summer and it is only this cone, or flower that the brewer uses for bittering, flavour and aroma.  The cone has oil glands that must be boiled in solution in order to extract them.  A brewer that says they use whole hops buys them from a producer that picks them, dries them and packages them in and oxygen barrier bags.  This method is the closest to using them fresh from the hop fields.

There are several advantages to using whole hops, but not all breweries choose this method as whole hops are costly, bulky to store and can make a mess out of the brew house.  Some breweries use hop pellets that are made from whole hops being compressed through a pellet making machine.  These hops have better stability than whole hops and do not take up as much room to store.      

Other, most often large brewers, go so far as to get their hops delivered in 25 litre jugs.  Chemists extract the essential oils that the brewer wants, often leaving behind undesirable components.  The brewer then saves space, cleanup time and can accurately add hop bitterness with a syringe.

Lovibonds use only the finest whole hops.  We find that the advantages of using whole hops far outweigh the disadvantages.  One of the biggest advantages in our brew house is that the whole hops are used as an all natural filter for the wort (unfermented beer) prior to fermentation.  This is the only filter used on our beers.

The easiest way is to ask, as most brewers will be more than happy to discuss their ingredients and processes. 

You can also gain some clues by looking at the beer in your hand.  There are a couple disadvantages of using whole and pellet hops, one being that the final beer will be susceptible to a condition known as 'light struck'.  A beer that has been 'light struck' will have a 'skunky' or 'catty' aroma and flavour.  This aroma and flavour is created by a reaction with light (sun or fluorescent light) and a hop compound present in the beer.  This reaction takes only a matter of minutes with a clear pint glass in direct sunlight.  This reaction can also take place over time on the lit supermarket shelf or off licence refrigerator.

If you haven't experienced these aromas, the best thing you could do is go to your local supermarket where you can buy Heineken in both the green bottles and in aluminium tin.  Taste the tin and bottle side by side and you will probably come to two conclusions...the Heineken in the tin will taste like it does in a cafe in Amsterdam, whereas the Heineken in the green bottle will taste like it does every else in the world - typically light struck.

Brown bottles offer the most protection against the light struck condition.  If the beer in your hand is in a clear or green bottle, there is a risk that the beer was made with hop extract because this condition has led some brewers that sell beer in clear or green bottles to seek out workarounds for the 'light struck' reaction. 

One advantage to using hop extracts or concentrated oils (like those above) is that the chemist has been clever enough to remove the compounds responsible for the light struck reaction.  Several famous beer brands rely on this method to ensure that their clear and green bottle products stand the best chance against market abuse.

The hop plant is 'sexed', where there does exist male and female plants.  Hop growers use only the female plants as they produce the flower, or hop cone.  Hop growers propagate them buy taking roots from another female plant, effectively creating a clone of another female.