Hepworth Brewery has launched The Right Stuff, an organic ale made with locally-sourced barley from Sussex and organically grown American style hops.
Chinook and Cascade hops reflect its American nature, and the result is a naturally carbonated, gluten-free, and vegan friendly ale which is full and fruitily flavoured. It is 5% ABV and bottle conditioned.
While Hepworth & Co has brewed and developed many styles of beers over its 20-year history, this is the first time it has come up with an organic American style ale due to difficulty in ensuring the right hops.
Head brewer and managing director, Andy Hepworth, said: “Over the last 20 years, reliably sourcing quality organic hops has become much easier, and we are lucky enough to have high quality barley on our doorstep in Sussex.
“Hepworth has long wanted to make an APA that truly shows the best example of this style and now, thanks to the improved quality of ingredients available to us, we can for the very first time.
“The name for The Right Stuff came from novelist Tom Wolfe, who coined the phrase when writing of the qualities to make the grade as supersonic test pilots and astronauts. They had to have necessary range of skills but also that extra non-specific quality, ‘the right stuff’, that made the difference. When we developed this beer from American and British style hops, we realised we had made the right stuff ourselves!”
In another first for the company, Hepworth & Co launched its first own-brand low-alcohol beer, Spartan, in January. Spartan is a British style pale ale which uses a complex grist of speciality malts that limit the fermentation to 0.5% ABV, resulting in a rounded body that would normally be expected in a full-strength beer.
Spartan is modelled on Hepworth’s successful Traditional Sussex Bitter, itself a low-strength quaffable beer at 3.5%, which uses not just British hops, but local Sussex grown hops.
