OnTap Magazine

FEATURE A TRANS ATLANTIC RECIPE For the next two months we bounced ideas around and nally agreed on only using South African hops in this IPA. I was pushing for a little help from those hoppy gems from the Yakima region as Riot’s many previous experiments with African Queen and Southern Passion proved they were not as explosive, nor as stable as their US comrades. But the team at Stone pointed out that collaborations are a time to let those shackles drop and blow normality out the water. is was right up Riot’s street, so we pushed forward knowing that this IPA was going to be unique – not a West Coast tropical bomb that I think most were expecting, but another layer in the potential avour spectrum of IPA. We were certainly ready to try. Many emails and phone calls later, the recipe was set. It was July, which gave us a little under three months to tackle the complicated and costly mission of getting the hops across the Atlantic ready for brew day in September. Travel plans were next and luckily I managed to coincide it with other work in Europe which helped to reduce the costs (it’s a long way to San Diego and of course costly travelling on the ZAR). ere was also still the overhead of getting the beer back to Cape Town. ere is simply no way of getting around it – this type of collab is a lavish a air, so if you’re thinking this is a pro t-maker for the brewery, dismiss that view immediately. It certainly can be on local collabs, but not when you have to move the brewer and raw materials – and later the beer itself – across oceans to make it happen. Brew day was an absolute pleasure. e brewing standard was higher than I had experienced anywhere else before, including my time brewing in London. I volunteered to do all the shitty work like cleaning, holding random stu , monitoring time and removing the spent grain whilst the brilliant brewer at Stone’s Liberty Station facility, David Wilson, led the show on their 2000L two-vessel system. Single infusion mash at 66.5C, solid lauter, followed by a 60-minute boil which took us to lunch (and a few IPAs of course – unbelievably they had about 15 di erent IPAs on at their Liberty Station restaurant that day). Huge SA hop additions into the whirlpool took us to a perfect transfer into the fermenter. ey used their own house ale yeast (live culture pitch; dry yeast is not even a consideration in the California brewing scene as far as I could tell). What a day! We experienced Stone Brewing Co. We gained California brewing exposure. In doing so we happily shared our South African hop knowledge with our new friends and most importantly hung out with some of the coolest, hardest working brewers on the planet doing that thing that we love above all else: making IPA. Now all we need is the next instalment…surely “Cali to Cape IPA” makes the most sense… StoneBrewingopened in Escondido, California in 1996. They’re famed for their well hopped IPAs, high-ABV ales and perhaps most of all for their flagship strong ale, Arrogant Bastard. Now one of the largest craft breweries in the USA, Stone opened a second brewing location, Liberty Station, in the San Diego neighbourhood of Point Loma in 2013. In 2014 they opened a third brewery in Berlin, Germany, and a fourth in Richmond, Virginia (USA). BREWING LEGENDS