Drink London Black! Drink London Black! - Carol of the London Black.

Drink London Black! Drink London Black! 

Our beloved London Black gets its own Christmas Carol and Music Video! Captured in the studio and on the night at our famous Christmas Carols evening, this re-imagining of a Christmas classic is as smooth on the ear as London Black is on the palate.     

Huge thanks to Matt The List and his Christmas Choir for lending us their voices, and to Harry Wrigley for capturing the magic. 

Head over to the webshop to stock up, crack open a can and sing along to your new favourite Christmas Carol! Yummy Yummy Yummy Porter!

Credits:

Video Filmed and Produced by Ellie Edmonds and Anspach & Hobday
Original Composer: Mykola Leontovych 
Lyrics: Matthew Hickman, Anspach & Hobday
Producer/Engineer: Harry Wrigley 
Performers: Matt The List’s Christmas Choir, Anspach & Hobday

London Black - (4.4%)

from £3.75

Print: London Black #7: ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas

from £21.50

Hop Pickers’ Harvest (Green Hopped Pale)

Hop Pickers’s Harvest - 4.0%

The Hop Pickers’ Harvest is our first ever Green Hopped beer, brewed exclusively with freshly picked Ernest hops, grown at Hukins Hop farm in Tenterden, Kent. 

The freshness of the hops is right at the fore, with intense, bright tropical and citrus fruit aromas jumping out of the glass, along with subtle notes of anise and a unique, fresh floral character. 

It’s easy to forget that beer is, at its heart, an agricultural product. It's especially easy to forget this if you brew on a South London industrial estate. Raw materials arrive on pallets, in boxes, vacuum packed in mylar, wrapped in plastic, and are available all year around, often at a single day's notice. Whilst convenient, and indeed essential, this belies the true nature of beer and the ecosystem upon which it depends. A recent number of visits to the hop gardens of Kent in preparation for our first Green-Hopped beer have brought this into sharp focus. 

It is curious perhaps, that cities such as London have historically been, and arguably remain, the epicenters of brewing cultures, quite separate from the farms upon which they depend.  There are good reasons for this including transportation and access to ingredients, access to the market and consumers and the heavy dependence on industrial resources and labour. This is in stark contrast to wine, whose production is virtually inseparable from land and settings from which its grapes are produced.

However, the dependence remains. Without the farms, and more importantly the farmers, we brewers are clearly nothing. The generational knowledge and experience, and enduring dedication on display at hop farms such as Hukins is nothing short of inspiring. It serves as an important reminder that a beer is truly made long before the brewer even has their boots on. 

In the case of London at least, a connection to hop growing farms did remain, with families traveling to Kent at the end of summer for ‘Oppin Season. Often setting up fully fledged, yet temporary communities, the Londoners would set to work, deftly cutting the bines from the wires and carefully picking the cones, ensuring each one remained in tacked and in prime condition for its use in the brewhouse. This is the history that both the Hop Pickers’ Pale and the Bermondsey Pale aim to celebrate. 

(On a personal note, my Grandmother was born and raised just a few hundred meters from our Bermondsey Arch, so imagine my disappointment when I learned that she did not spend her summers picking hops, as many of her neighbours likely would have done. No eye on the narrative, ey!)

On to the beer itself.  The Hop Pickers’ Harvest is our first ever Green Hopped beer, brewed exclusively with freshly picked Ernest hops, grown at Hukins Hop farm in Tenterden, Kent. The freshness of the hops is right at the fore, with intense, bright tropical and citrus fruit aromas jumping out of the glass, along with subtle notes of anise and a unique, fresh floral character. The beer is as balanced and drinkable as the year-round release, but the freshly picked green hops offer it its own unique identity, also imparting a touch more bitterness. 

With only a matter of hours between the hops being picked and being loaded into the brew house, this beer is a truly unique expression of the Ernest hop, only achievable for a fleeting moment once a year. 

Our brewhouse isn't designed to accommodate whole cone hops, much less green hops (which require about 6 times the quantity by weight when compared to kilned hops), so we were unsure as to how their presence would translate in the finished beer. Any concerns were well and truly allayed upon taking the first samples from the tank. The beer is as bright and vibrant as any traditionally hopped beer we’ve brewed, which is made all the more surprising by the fact that Hop Pickers’ Harvest is not dry-hopped. In addition to the dominant fruitiness of the beer, there is another dimension to it; a freshness, a floral, spicy and almost leafy character to it that I have not experienced when using kilned and pelletised  hops. It is this character that places the beer right from where it came, the verdant hop gardens of Kent. 

As a brewery, we typically spend this time of year focusing on our Oktoberfest offering, which  involves brewing a number of classic German styles beers and putting on some sort of lederhosen-clad event. Whilst we will no doubt continue this adopted tradition, I wonder if from now on we will also focus our attention a little more closely to home.

 The harvest offers us a unique opportunity to brew a truly special beer. It also affords us a moment to reflect upon all that we depend on; the seasons, the land, the farmers, and of course, the Hop Pickers!

Paul Anspach

The full illustration, by Alan Batley.

Shop here

The Pineapple Gose - Collab with Maldon Sea Salt

Aromas of freshly sliced, fleshy pineapple are achieved not only by the addition of 100kg of pineapple juice, but also by the use of the intensely fruity Bru-1 hop. Coriander seeds add gently aromatic notes of sweet spice. A delicate acidity keeps the beer bright and fresh, while a touch of salt on the finish adds balance and drinkability. A humble reimagining of a classic German style.

https://www.anspachandhobday.com/shop/the-pineapple-gose

Hop Picker’s Pale - An ode to hops and the hands that pick them.

An ode to hops and the hands that pick them. The combination of Citra, Nectaron and Hallertau Blanc creates a veritable punch bowl of tropical fruit with aromas of orange, pineapple, white grapes and ripe mango. A light, fresh body and a gentle bitterness results in a beer of unwavering drinkability.

Hops are often celebrated as the hero of a beer, the fundamental ingredient that makes a beer what it is. To some extent, this is true, especially with Pale Ales and IPAs. No job is more important then, than that of the Hop Picker. For generations, families of Londoners would travel out of the city to the hop fields of Kent and beyond, spending their summers aloft on stilts, freeing the vines from the wire work and delicately plucking the cones from the stems. 

This beer takes you on that journey. A beer born in Bermondsey but with its roots firmly in the fields. By putting the bright, bold and fruitforward character of the hop at its fore, this beer is a tribute to the generations of Pickers whose tireless and careful work would ensure that only the finest hops made their way into every pint they produced. 

Beyond the hops, a light malt including a generous helping of wheat keeps the beer fresh and soft, and an expressive strain of English Ale yeast compliments the fruit character of the hops. The beer will be brewed throughout the Summer, with a green-hopped version produced with hops picked fresh from the vines planned for late August/early September.

As ever, our illustrator Alan Batley has perfectly captured the story of the beer with a scene depicting a team of hop pickers hard at work.

Jumbo IPA - A collaboration with Kirkstall Brewery.

Roll up! Roll up! Bare witness and marvel at the wonder of Jumbo, an India Pale Ale of epic proportion! Presented to the world at The Great Exhibition of Prize Ales, Jumbo represents a daring collaboration between two esteemed outfits, Anspach & Hobday and Kirkstall Brewery.  Countless bushels of the finest malted barley and bales of prized English hops are fused together giving rise to notes of pithy marmalade, sweet malt and bitter grapefruit. A true feat of brewing mastery, Jumbo IPA will undoubtedly delight one and all!

How We Made It

We’ve come together with Kirkstall Brewery to make a wonderful beer worthy of their Great Exhibition of Prize Ales. The four-day beer festival, held at Kirkstall in Leeds, challenged participating brewers to create new beers which explore a connection to the past. We brewed a big, bold IPA, with artwork inspired by historic Croydon brewery Nalder & Colly’s beer labels.

Nalder & Collyers was a historic Croydon brewery, not far from where Anspach & Hobday brews today. We were drawn to their illustrations of Jumbo and retro typography, which felt innately tied to the Victoriana aesthetic we've already established through our artwork.

The beer represents a true coming together of the old and the new, an ethos that we feel both breweries embrace. A significant portion of the grist is Chervallier, an English heritage variety that was widely used in the early 19th-century and was the dominant malted barley used for much of the Victorian era. Chervallier gives a wonderful, pronounced sweet malt character with notes of honey and even marmalade. This is paired with a blend of more contemporary, English hops, led by Ernest, offering up aromas of bitter grapefruit, apricot and spice. A clean, American Ale yeast strain allows these characteristics to shine through, resulting in a well balanced yet complex beer.