Old Dug, New Tricks
One of the challenges of brewing is choosing when to allow a recipe to be reviewed, tweaked or even overhauled. Since beer is made from natural ingredients that are cultivated year upon year, there will always be a degree of variance in the crops themselves, and thus a degree of jiggerypokery and alchemy is always going on behind the scenes to keep our beer as delicious and consistent as possible.
Sometimes, though, it’s worth taking a critical eye to an existing beer. The market is forever evolving, tastes change and styles have to adapt to keep up.
Brewery Dug has been our flagship IPA since 2012 (a simpler time, when “social distancing” was a polite way of saying “Would you mind sitting somewhere else on this bus?”). It’s emblematic of the style at the time: a brash, generously hopped IPA that blends earthy pine flavours with grapefruit aromas.
In 2012, the logic for making aromatic IPAs was simple – import American grown hops, use them heavily in the last 15 minutes of the boil, and enjoy. In this cursed year of 2021, there’s no such rule for the style anymore – IPAs can be anywhere from tooth rippingly bitter, to smoothie-like desserts in a glass. Furthermore, the work of hop development programmes around the world has yielded some truly remarkable new varieties of hop that give a broader spectrum of flavours and aromas. In particular, within the UK, hops such as Olicana, Jester and Harlequin have been developed to provide the same kind of aromatic clout that only imported hops could provide a decade ago.
Which leads me to why we’re overhauling Brewery Dug IPA.
It strikes me as absurd to rely on importing vast quantities of a crop from overseas (and contributing to the environmental damage that goes along with it), whilst ignoring the incredible potential available to us domestically. We should be showcasing the incredible skill of the Hop Development Programme at Charles Faram here in the UK, and making incredible beers with the new varieties that have come from it.
Which is why Brewery Dug IPA will be brewed with 100% UK grown materials, as of yesterday. We’ve embraced the original spirit of the beer – a bitter, US style IPA, but with the modern twist of modern UK hops. The result is a beer packed with juicy orange marmalade flavours, resinous pine aromas and a refreshing citrus finish.
Just like our very own Office Manager, Helga, this Dug still has some new tricks up her sleeve.
Brewery Dug IPA will be back in stock by mid-July – I hope you enjoy it as much as we do!