Ronbridge

Mr Ronald Pattinson of Amsterdam was in Dublin last month, as he has mentioned on his own blog. The hard taskmasters at the National Homebrew Club forced him to talk at length about brewing history in front of a crowd at UnderDog. The English visitor's presence was marked by the coincidental appearance of two new English beers on the taps, both single hop experiments from Thornbridge.

It felt like there was a bit of a deconstructed Jaipur thing going on, because the first on was Quiet Storm Ahtanum. Ahtanum is a fairly obscure American hop, and one I only really know from Jaipur and its subsequent clone, BrewDog Punk. The beers were that sort of strength too: 5.5% ABV. This one was a very pale yellow with a slight haze and lots of fizz, a carbonic bite disturbing the flavour somewhat. The flavour is very interesting and not at all what I was expecting from it, being a bowl of varied ripe fruits, including peach, apricot, white grape and red apple -- funky and foedtid, in a most pleasurable way. It's very sweet with it, and gets sweeter as it goes, having an element of strawberry too by the end. A tannic finish dries it out enough for the sweetness not to be a problem. I liked it. There's lots of complexity for a single hop beer, and it had a very modern profile: surprising for essentially a legacy hop. I didn't miss the lack of bittering.

When that ran out it was replaced by Quiet Storm Cascade, and I thought I would be on more familiar ground with this. Surprise! There was no earthy bitterness here, and no punchy grapefruit or resin. Instead, it's a rich and nutty dessert, suggesting nougat or almond paste. The fizz problem from the other one has been solved, as it was lovely and smooth. I searched hard for any familiar features, and only towards the end did I notice a very faint metallic rasp, like you get from Cascade's ancestor Fuggle. I'm guessing both of these were made using some class of fruit-enhancing IPA yeast, because I'm pretty sure Cascade wouldn't turn out like this from a neutral strain. Regardless, it was very tasty, if not quite as interesting as the Ahtanum one.

There are loads of Quiet Storms in this series and I'll be looking out for others. Single hop beers are usually about demonstrating the specific characteristics of an individual hop. These ones, conversely, appear to be putting a new twist on them.