Last year, a travelling Tasmanian beer blogger who had written a piece for The Crafty Pint before setting off around the world called in to Bodebrown, a small craft brewery in southern Brazil. They'd recently won the Best New Exhibitor title at the 2012 Australian International Beer Awards and made Adam feel at home, so much so he suggested we get in touch with them about this year's Good Beer Week. We did, they came, they had fun, so did everyone that met them, and they've left behind a beer brewed with Hargreaves Hill.
Samuel and Paulo Cavalcanti are legends of the Brazilian brewing scene, known for high ABV and highly hopped beers, who possess the KombIPA - a jet black Kombi van that pours their six different IPAs (including the Cacau one brewed with California's Stone). So it was some surprise when the recipe they sent over to Hargreaves Hill so they could brew a batch before they landed in Melbourne was for a Bock (in other words a strong German style lager). Weren't these the hopheads? Then things became clear when, upon their arrival, they asked if they could visit the brewery to "mess with the beer" before it was kegged off. And mess they did...
Samuel, a chemist by trade, has developed a hopping technique that's caught the eyes of some of the world's most well known brewers: he takes the filter apart and fills every layer with hops, pumps CO2 through for 15 minutes and then circulates the beer through the hopped filter. At Hargreaves they did this with Galaxy and Summer and turned the Bock into the Hop Bock. The result is a beer that's as clean and full bodied as you'd expect a Bock around the 6.5% mark to be but with tonnes of hop aroma and flavour, so much in fact that for the second batch brewed at the brewers' joint GBW event, the Bodebrown guys decided to tone down the filter hop addition. "We forget that the hops are so much fresher here!" The first Hoppy Hop Bock is out now with the second to follow in a few weeks and is, we're pretty sure, the first ever Australian / Brazilian collaboration and the country's first hop-filtered beer.
Published June 3, 2013 2013-06-03 00:00:00
