The Making of a Classic: Thornbridge Jaipur
In the ten previous installments of this series, none of the beers in question has even been younger than forty years, and certainly none were developed in the 21st century. One of the smell tests for any beer we call a “classic” is longevity. Will it survive and, critically, will it remain a hallmark to which we continually return? Today I’ll highlight an adolescent first brewed just 16 years ago, Thornbridge’s Jaipur IPA.
By today’s tastes, it doesn’t even appear especially unusual. A relatively early example of an American West Coast IPA first brewed in the countryside of Derbyshire, it became one of the tentpole beers of the UK’s embrace of hoppy American ales. Thornbridge became an example of how to translate the American craft brewery model to Britain, and in the years since its founding, that model has exploded. It was an important moment in British brewing, as a new generation of beer drinkers found these breweries exciting in a way traditional ale breweries weren’t. As a result, Jaipur has been the subject of more than one loving treatment, and Jonny Garrett’s recent Good Beer Hunting piece is the best.
The reason to call it a classic, however, has to do with more than just millennial nostalgia. In the decade following Jaipur’s release, breweries were content to merely recreate American IPAs. Then they did something far more interesting, fusing the older English tradition with the new American one. And when we look more closely at Jaipur, with its Maris Otter base and cask ale treatment, we see the blueprint English breweries are now using. It may not have been the first beer to find a way to bridge the two traditions, but it was by far the most prominent and influential.
Background
Thornbridge began life as an echo of an earlier time. A few hundred years ago, large country estates had their own breweries, and they often made more extravagant, expensive beers than commercial companies could. An example of such a manor is Thornbridge Hall, an estate dating to the 12th century in the trees and hills of the Peak District. By the time Jim and Emma Harrison bought Thornbridge Hall in 2002, whatever home-brewing the residents might have conducted in the 17th or 18th century was long gone. Yet like any new homeowners, the Harrisons started hosting social events there. As Jim brought in casks of ale for guests, he had an idea. Why not revive the practice of estate brewing—and, while he was at it, sell the beer as well? Thornbridge Brewery was born of this idea, and was situated in one of the out-buildings on the site.
Harrison found a partner in Simon Webster and they hired two young brewing-school graduates, Italian Stefano Cossi and Scotsman Martin Dickie, giving them wide latitude in the brewhouse. Their first beer was a classic English bitter called Lord Marples, which is still made today. It is perfectly traditional, with local malts and Golding hops, meant to be served on cask like scores of other bitters in the country. The second beer was another traditional ale, which they called a golden. The early efforts were illustrative of the trend up to that point of British “craft” breweries that may have been new and small, but still made traditional styles.
Soon, however, the two brewers had come up with something a bit more daring. They amped up the strength to 5.9%—massive for the time—used a neutral American yeast, and dosed Jaipur with 60 BUs of American hops. Yet they didn’t go the full American. That would have meant a stronger beer, a more bitter one, and certainly not one that would have worked on cask—one of the formats in which Thornbridge packaged Jaipur. And then there was that base malt of Maris Otter, which no Americans were using.
Thornbridge Hall
British beer geeks went crazy. I can offer a bit of oral history here, because I remember the bloggers of the day spilling rapturous praise for Jaipur onto their digital pages. It was in an era before social media, when ratings sites were niche affairs, and buzz spread by word of mouth and via hobbyist websites and blogs. Something was happening in Derbyshire, and the whole country took notice. The beer was like nothing Brits had tasted and while some thought it was too intense (and too American), others thought they saw the future of beer. Martin Dickie certainly did. He only lasted a year at Thornbridge before heading home to found BrewDog, where he promptly made an extremely Jaipur-esque beer you may have heard of: Punk IPA.
Craft Keg and CAMRA’s Folly
Cask ale has been dying for fifty years. Indeed, champions founded the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) in 1971 to defend this antique draft system. As a measure of how long the decline has been, organizers originally called their club The Campaign for the Revitalization of Ale. At the time, the great threat was not lager—cask’s ultimate reaper—but artificially-kegged beer large ale-producers tried to pass off as authentic cask. They were by all accounts dispiriting products and deserved the backlash they got.
The problem was that as the youthful founders of CAMRA aged, the organization began to resemble a religious organization devoted to a very specific dogma of “live” ale. They became so hidebound in their definition that when craft beer arrived, often in the form of American-style kegged beer, they reacted as if it were Watney’s Red Barrel 2.0 (to cite an infamous beer from the 1970s). This was an unfortunate development. As I have argued, cask ale is one of the most impressive forms of beer made in the world today, and arguably the most hand-crafted. Yet by the early aughts, cask had taken on the image of the kind of beer your grandpa drinks in merry olde pubs that were shrines to nostalgia.
Craft beer, by contrast, seemed exciting and new, and people flocked into craft beer bars, free houses, and the occasional taproom (those would become popular a decade later) for vivid, exciting new beers like Jaipur. For the first time in decades, breweries were opening instead of closing, and young people had a reason to go the pub.
Olde English pubs may be full of charm, but not necessarily bodies.
Despite CAMRA’s position, beer was headed in a new direction. Even reading about it in Oregon, I could see the excitement the new breweries generated. People engaged in real, heated arguments about whether “craft keg” debased ales or elevated them. Fans of cask argued the new craft wasn’t properly British—and they were right, sort of. Craft breweries were definitely looking to the US as they made 7% IPAs with 75 IBUs of Cascade and Chinook hops. Yet craft fans were also right. Bitters had been the standard pub beer for half a century and hadn’t evolved an inch. The fidelity offered by CAMRA had become a straightjacket.
There and Back Again
The cask ale CAMRA reveres is made of characterful local malts, English hops, expressive yeast, and is brewed to a modest strength so that when served on cask it makes for an incredible session beer. Americans like Ken Grossman were inspired by Britain, but immediately deviated from that template. American malts had been engineered for mass market lagers and lacked character. Our hops were different and more assertive. Standard domestic lagers were 5% and, perhaps in an effort to seem more special, breweries tended to brew their pales and porters to about 5.5%—quite a bit stronger than English beer. And of course, Americans didn’t mess with cask-conditioning.
(We may not give the UK enough credit for their regular use of hopbacks and dry-hopping, either. Americans adapted both methods, which have become signature elements of their IPAs. Sometimes it seems like they forgot they didn’t invent them.)
When American craft beer headed back across the Atlantic, it barely resembled the cask bitter that originally inspired it. Craft breweries of Thornbridge’s vintage gingerly experimented in the American mode—big, boozy hop bombs. When I visited the UK in 2011, the hottest brewery in town was The Kernel, which had several pales and IPAs on at the time. The pales were all over 5% and the IPAs began at 6.1% and ranged above 10%. All featured classic Pacific Northwest hop varieties and all were bracingly bitter. Fans of this beer drank it for the rush. They didn’t notice the method of dispense.
The Thornbridge Hall brewery today, with brewers Rachel Green and Alice Murphy
The newer production brewery near Bakewell
But then a curious thing happened. The two currents, the old cask tradition and American-inspired craft beer, started coming back together. Rare is the old Victorian brewery that doesn’t offer something crafty these days, whether it’s Adnams New England IPA, Hook Norton’s Crafty Fox Black IPA, or Timothy Taylor’s Cascade and Chinook-hopped Cook Lane IPA. Craft breweries, likewise, have started to move back toward old-school cask ales, having discovered a decade and a half later that they can be gorgeous examples of the brewer’s art.
As these streams have come together, they’ve created a third approach rooted in British tradition, but which borrows a few tricks from America. Squeezing more from fruity hop varieties (even some from the England), breweries are making a new range of sessionable cask ales. They have a definite quality of juiciness, yet retain the rich flavors of local malts, the character of house yeasts, and the balance critical in pub beers. On cask, these qualities blossom in astonishing ways that Americans have just never been able to grasp or appreciate.
In these newer beers we see the DNA of Jaipur. As keg, cask, bottle, and now canned beer, it seems to shimmer, presenting different versions of itself. In all versions, the nose and initial impressions are purely Pacific Northwest—grapefruit, sweet orange, fir. These impressions are heightened on keg, though. The rocky carbonation stiffens the hops’ spikier elements, which dominate the palate through to the swallow. It is aggressive and a little rough. Cask shuffles the elements a bit, smoothing the hops, accentuating the orange a bit more than the fir. It’s jammier and sweeter. One becomes aware that, yes, there is a bit of malt down there underneath, with the sweetness of scone. I even find some yeast flavors filling in the gaps. It’s a different presentation—softer, sweeter, and yes, juicier.
Thornbridge was certainly not the only brewery doing this. Marble gets a lot of credit, too, sticking largely with the British playbook but adding ever more hop saturation. Folks in Britain following closely will be able to name a dozen or two more. Yet Jaipur was that beer that broke through Britain’s charmingly fragmented beer scene. If you were into beer in the middle aughts and wanted to taste the future, you started with Jaipur. Even we Americans tracked it down to understand what was happening in the UK.
And because BrewDog’s Punk came out roughly contemporaneously and was such a similar beer, we see how important it was to know where that line separating America and Britain lay. It’s interesting to consider the American beer geek response to these two beers. We weren’t impressed with Punk. It was American, but more timid—a knock-off without much punch. If we wanted a real American IPA, we had plenty that did a better job. But Jaipur was intriguing because while it was familiar, it was also unusual. It had flavor notes we just don’t find here. That was especially true on cask.
I don’t know if cask ale will remain the culture touchstone it has been for hundreds of years. Yet if it does survive, it will be because it evolved—finally!—and now features modern flavors younger drinkers crave. If you were going to cite one beer that helped break the dam on what cask beer should taste like, you could do a lot worse than Thornbridge Jaipur.
All photos courtesy Thornbridge Brewery.