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Talking Terpenes
There’s a good chance you’ve heard or read the word terpenes being bandied about the beer world of late. If you haven’t, there’s a very good chance you will at some point.
What we can confirm with certainty is that you have definitely had them in a beer – they’re aromatic compounds found in most plants and herbs, including hops. The reason they’ve become one of the hot terms of 2024 for brewers, suppliers and beer geeks, however, is the way they’re now being provided to and used by brewers in beers.
Without giving too much away – not least because you’ll gain a much better understanding from listening to the experts in this podcast episode – brewers now have access to terpenes in concentrated form which allows them to add specific characters to their beers, whether that’s enhancing a particular fruitiness in a pale ale or giving an IPA an aroma very much like the one emanating from the cupboard of your uni weed dealer.
They’re one of a growing number of new tools at the disposal of brewers – one which senior writer Will Ziebell has written about after witnessing the excitement surrounding them at the 2023 Craft Brewers Conference in Nashville.
To further explore this innovative space within the fascinating world of beer in 2024, we invited one of the brewers who has been among the first to jump on them in Australia, Scott McKinnon of Wolf of the Willows, and former Fixation head brewer Sam Bethune, who handles technical sales for Bintani, onto the show to tell us all about them: what they are, where they come from, how they’re used, and why they like them.
That’s only part of the discussion, however. Before we get to the technical stuff, they share their stories: how they fell in love with craft beer and later ended up making it their livelihood. Scott’s story starts out as a ski bum on the slopes of Colorado, while Sam’s begins while touring the States in another guise – with a mate who’s also now in beer.
With Wolf of the Willows’ tenth anniversary coming up, we chat about their XPA – one of the very first in Australia – and their evolution as a brewing company, while Sam takes us back to his days as Fixation’s first head brewer at the Incubator and to the High Country and the small hop farm he’s nurturing.
You can find the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. Please like and subscribe – and if you are enjoying the show, please rate and review it too so we can reach more people and get them excited about the delights of Aussie craft beer.
Cheers!
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James Smith launched The Crafty Pint in 2010, two years after moving to Australia from the UK. He was taken to Mountain Goat within weeks of landing in Melbourne, joined their indoor cricket team, and is still navigating the rabbit hole that is craft beer to this day.
The beers that turned you on to good beer:
- Watching pints of McEwan's 80 Shilling settle when visiting family in Edinburgh.
- Pints of flat Bass from the jug at the Cap & Stocking in Kegworth.
- A first Paulaner Hefeweizen when working in Munich in 1998: “This smells of bananas!”
- Castle Rock Harvest Pale – how could a 3.8 percent ABV beer be so good? (It turns out it was an early example of the three Cs – Cascade, Centennial and Columbus – in an English bitter).
- Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA poured through hops at the Sunset Grill in Cambridge, MA, in the company of a man who turned out to be the Beer Nut (while we were both covering a double murder case at the time).
- Ordering a Mountain Goat Hightail on my first day as an Aussie resident as it was local and I’d never heard of it; “A dark Australian beer; well I never…”
- Murray’s Icon 2IPA at Beer DeLuxe Fed Square, recommended by a guy I’d not long known who's now the main man at Fixation, served by Mik Halse, now head of sales at Hawkers. How could an Australian beer smell as good as that?!?
You've got three beers to turn someone else on to good beer; what are they and why?
- Any really good, fresh and balanced West Coast style IPA. Punchy hop aromatics are the most obvious way to capture someone's attention and these IPAs, done well, present the key components in beer (if you're sticking to just water, malt, hops and yeast) in harmony yet with the volume turned up.
- Saison Dupont. Arguably a selfish choice here as I bloody love the broad saison style and dearly hope it will finally take hold in Australia one day. Given a choice, I'd probably crack one enlivened with Brettanomyces like Molly Rose Matilde for myself but, when it comes to turning on someone new, you've got to go with the classic.
- Rodenbach Caractère Rouge. Because if you don't enjoy or can't appreciate this beer, I'll never win you over. And because Filip, the fruit and wood specialist at Rodenbach that designed it, is a beautiful human.
The last beer you enjoyed:
Fixation IPA at The Incubator.
Three things that represent you:
- The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Golden Plains
NB All articles written by James in the first eight years of the site appear as By Crafty Pint. Today, that's used for collaborative efforts by the wider team.
