Cultivator

Growing our range of experimental beers and pushing the boundaries of what we can create in a whole new way, we’d love to introduce you to our dankest beer yet. Hello, Cultivator!  

We are very used to finding innumerable ways to say the words ‘citrussy’, ‘fruity’ and ‘tropical’, but trying to skirt around the words ‘weed’ or ‘skunky’ is definitely a new one to us.

Cultivator is made with innovative products botanically derived from cultivar specific hops and terpenes. Complex and intensely aromatic, Brewgas Blackberry Kush and Pineapple Express hold aromas of sweet candy alongside propagating a potent dank character and planting flavour notes of sticky resin on the palate. We’ve chosen Simcoe and Galaxy hops as the supporting acts to these remarkable products to further boost the tropical, piney flavour found within this heady, tasty brew.

So just how did this extraordinary beer come about? Over to our brewer Christie, the brains behind this brew:

We were at the annual SIBA BeerX conference in Liverpool this year chatting to our suppliers and peers at the Charles Faram hop stand. Alongside rubbing some of their beautiful hops, there was a new supplier to us who I got chatting with, they were from a company called Abstrax Hops who supply products called Brewgas. These are (get ready for this it’s a lot of words) cultivar specific terpene profile extracts from plants from the cannabaceae family which aren’t humulus lupulus (hops). In less words, we have used weed oil extracts to add flavour to this beer. Cannabis and hops are in the same family and share a large proportion of genetic content so there’s a nice crossover here, and in the same way that we are picky about what hop varieties we use for our beers we’ve been able to do exactly that with these terpenes.

It’s completely CBD and THC free so there’s no funny business, nothing illicit and we can assure you it’s not a gimmick, it’s a revelation. The brewery did have a certain ….distinctive… aroma when we brewed it though….

We originally trialled some Brewgas samples in a number of our beers and we came to the conclusion that they worked best in Heathen – the dank aromas from the terpenes really harmonise nicely with a robust caramelly malt backbone and resonant bitterness. So for the base of Cultivator we have gone old school West Coast style with caramalt and a touch of biscuit malt, then to complement the Brewgas products we chose the relatively high bitterness and piney joy of Simcoe at every stage, including Simcoe Hyperboost, another state of the art hop derived product from our suppliers Yakima Chief Hops.

We’ve been producing our experimental hop range for a while now and I truly think this is a great culmination of all the work we have put in thus far. We genuinely don’t think we’ve ever tasted a beer quite like this one and we’re really proud of it.

I hope you enjoy the beer more than I enjoyed trying to persuade everyone at the brewery that this was a good idea.

Cheers,

Christie

*Cultivator is available now in cask, keg and can (including from our online shop). We’d love to hear what you think to it – and if you’d like to find out more about these groundbreaking products, including the LoudFactor of the variants we’ve used in this beer (yes, really), head to the AbstraxHops website.