Nanny State

By way of a recap for anyone that missed it, some weeks back Brewdog released a beer called "Nanny State". Think IPA, super hoppy, super bitter and you're not too far off. The only difference being the ABV. Where you might be expecting an alcohol content anywhere up to 6 or 7 percent, this little number only weighs in at 1.1 percent.

Many beer writers, better than I, have written about the reasons behind the production of this beer and the events that lead to its creation. However, what interested me personally, as a home brewer, was a unique chance to a taste a "proper" beer with one of the key components missing. That component, of course, being malt and therefore alcohol. By tasting something like this you can better understand the role each component part plays in a finished beer, meaning you can better adjust that part in future beers you make. Hopefully allowing you to get both a better end result and an end result closer to that which you were aiming for.

Of course, adjusting ingredients from one beer you make to the next will allow you to achieve the same result. The only problems with this being that you aren't brewing to commercial standards, so cant be sure 100% of the impact on taste that your processes are having without you being aware of it. Secondly, beer ingredients aren't cheap, and home brewing a batch of beer from grain to glass takes a significant amount of time. Money for ingredients and six weeks of maturation time is a lot to spend on an experiment, that could end up being poured down the drain.

I was lucky enough to hear that The Rake had a limited amount on hand pull, so I popped in after work to check it out.

As you'd expect, the nose is all hops with no sign of maltiness at all. Despite this, the aroma does go some way to hiding the beer's secret. As soon as you taste however, it's immediately obvious that something's up. It isn't the alcohol void that's the problem, it's the complete lack of body and any sweetness at all. What you get is a thin, insipid, watery drink that finishes with insane levels of hop bitterness. The bitterness of the finish is so much in fact, that you're left not wanting another sip. Imagine putting a tea bag in boiling water and coming back to drink it the next day, that's what this beer is like.

Point proven then, I guess. If you're going to make a super hoppy beer with bucket loads of complex hop flavour, you need the malty sweetness (and consequently the ABV), to balance it all out and make it drinkable.

Whilst I do agree with this and understand the reasoning behind Nanny State, I don't think it's beyond the talents of Brewdog to produce a super hoppy 3.5-4% "IPA", that tastes great and you can easily drink several pints of. Infact, I don't think it's completely beyond my talents as a home brewer, at least to get pretty close.

Watch this space!