What did the original East India Pale Ales taste like?

As with trying to recreate any heritage beer, looking at the recipes isn't really enough.

EIPAs were either 100% pale ale malt, or a combination of pale ale malts. Simple?

Not really.

Pale ale malt in the late 1800s wasn't the same as it is today. It was a totally different grain for a start.

So get the right grain!

Again, not so simple.

It's possible to get the same grain as was used back then, but modern kilning patterns are totally different.
So you have to then get the right grain kilned especially to the patterns they used in the late 1800s.

Starting to get a bit more complicated isn't it?

Hops are easier, Goldings is Goldings is Goldings. Even if there are many, many varieties of them. But breweries seemed to be more slapdash about variety and freshness then than we are now. So we can be too.

Then there's also the yeast to consider, find, scale up.

So just going on the recipe just doesn't work.

You'll end up with something pale, very bitter due to the high amounts of hops used, and very sweet due to the low attenuation.

But getting the right ingredients helps.

And then there's the ageing.

East India Pale Ale wasn't drunk straight away. Drink fresh didn't exist back then.

The beer was put into barrels and left in the brewery yard for a year before being shipped out to India, taking 6 months.

You can't just put it into any barrel though, English barrels were riddled with Brettonomycis, so you have to have barrels innocculated with this funky yeast for the beer to mature on.

So as you see, it's not just a case of taking a recipe, grabbing the ingredients, brewing it and drinking it.

There's a lot of time and effort, and a huge amount of help from great folks that's needed to accurately reproduce an original East India Pale Ale.

This beer was two and a half years in the making, and is possibly the most accurate recreation of the original IPAs to date.

And it'll be available on draught in our brewery tap from 7pm tomorrow.