8 BREWING & BEVERAGE INDUSTRIES BUSINESS Innovation. A word when used in the context of beer and brewing can often cover a multitude of unexciting sins, especially in the febrile atmosphere of the current beer scene where drinkers want brewers to keep chopping and changing when it comes to their beers. You see it in some craft beer bars where the same beer, however delicious, rarely makes a reappearance. On the other hand, I can just about tolerate IPAs having an added fruit infusion that makes them even more of a Carmen Miranda moment, or single- estate coffee beans being blended into an imperial stout (providing I don’t drink it too late at night). However, in my experience innovation has rarely been that innovative. Besides, I would rather a brewery get its brewing practices right and make sure its beers are served in a wholesome state in the pub or bar before they start trumpeting how this or that is innovative. Several years ago I interviewed John Keeling of Fuller’s about innovation in cask and his words still resonate: ‘Sometimes innovation smacks of desperation and in the case of cask it often is. For me, innovation in cask beer would be to improve its shelf life. Stop it going flat whilst on dispense and stop it oxidising.’ However, part of the joy in writing about beer is that sometimes you can come across brewing innovation in the true meaning of the word and it’s not exactly rocket science. I was recently contacted by Paddy Johnson of Windsor & Eton, whose son Kieran has set up a brewery-within-a- brewery with Uprising. The thinking behind this is that Kieran (also head brewer for Windsor & Eton) brews under the Uprising brand in his spare time. These are beers that are slightly more left field than the ones produced during the day, with a white pale ale, an imperial stout and a West Coast IPA in the portfolio. The latter, which is called Treason, has been pretty successful and it is what happened next that made me think about the real meaning of innovation. As Johnson explained to me, the brewing team had been thinking of making Treason available in five different formats: keg (coarse filtered but not sterile filtered or pasteurised) and naturally carbonated; bottle conditioned; main-stream canned, sterile filtered and carbonated but not pasteurised; can conditioned, packaged with yeast and some priming sugar to condition and finally cask conditioned. ‘We were getting demand for Treason in many formats,’ he told me. ‘Whilst it is predominantly kegged, bottle conditioned or canned we also got requests for cask. Meanwhile the reason for trying can conditioned is that we’ve always felt that in highly hopped beers you lose character from sterile filtration so we wanted to try can conditioning to see if there really is a difference.’ To help understand the thinking behind Johnson’s direction, I tried Treason in the five different formats and found it a fascinating experience. There was a definite difference between all five variations on the same theme. The sterile filtered Treason was sweetish and had a pungent hop note before finishing dry; meanwhile the can-conditioned version was not so sweet, seeming fuller-bodied; it still had an attractive dryness though it was more bitter than its fellow canned example. Cask Treason was smooth on the palate with a more pronounced bitterness than the kegged version, with the sweetness more apparent. It also felt more expansive in its mouth feel. The kegged version saw malt taking a more dominant role, alongside the citrusy notes of the hops, with a very dry finish. Finally the bottle- conditioned Treason was boldly hopped and had an over the horizon sweetness that appeared before the dry and bitter finish. These were all the same beers, but different dispenses or processes. It’s not something that Johnson plans to do beyond Treason for the moment, but he did say to me that within the brewery the consensus was that ‘least filtration the better! We feel that the can conditioned is better BUT we are still watching for effects of ageing’. Beer has been around for a long time and at its best it’s a simply made drink, a combination of water, yeast, hops and malt. There are historic brewing techniques, different blends of yeast cultures, different hops and malts that make for innovation and also different modes of dispensation as Treason has shown. Sometimes the simple things in life are the best. Adrian Tierney-Jones Adrian Tierney-Jones Innovation made simple Adrian Tierney-Jones is a freelance journalist whose work also appears in the Daily Telegraph, All About Beer, Beer, Original Gravity, Sunday Times Travel Magazine, and Publican’s Morning Advertiser amongst many others. He’s been writing books since 2002 and they include West Country Ales, Great British Pubs, Britain’s Beer Revolution (co-written with Roger Protz) and his latest The Seven Moods of Craft Beer; general editor of 1001 Beers To Try Before You Die and contributor to The Oxford Companion to Beer, World Beer and 1001 Restaurants You Must Experience Before You Die. Chair of Judges at the World Beer Awards and also on the jury at the Brussels Beer Challenge, Dutch Beer Challenge and the Copa Latinoamericana de Cervezas Artesanales in Peru. 8_Layout 1 13/08/2017 08:10 Page 1