Poperings Hommel Bier has appeared just once on this blog, and that just won't do. For the past three years or so it has been an essential purchase whenever I happened by Bradleys, the only local merchant I know to stock it. Recently the supply seems to have dried up, apparently the importing of the brand - at least latterly - was a temporary arrangement, which is of course devastating news if that's the case. Years ago it seemed to be a fairly regular presence, sometimes only in 750ml bottles, sometimes even popping up on draught, so hopefully its absense is not permanent. Let this overdue reappraisal not be an elegy.
There's an initial tangle of spice on the nose, a powderfine pepper and stalky celery splashing out of the glass. Dig through this and you find some familiar and enticing caramel. This caramel character is prominent on the palate, with that sweet cosy core wrapped in leaves of grassy, herbal hops. Lemongrass turns to orange marmalade and then to freshly shaven lemon zest, but all tempered by the honeyed and ever so slightly boozy malt core. A wonderful interplay, a joy. As the beer warms you get to appreciate that it is laced with as much yeast-derived character as it is hommel character, or maybe it's the dance of the two that makes it so enjoyable.
As the Poperings pipeline has more or less dried up it's necessary to scratch the itch some other way, and the way I've been doing it is with another of my favourite beers, also scandalously absent from this blog,
De Ranke XX Bitter. A pale, hazy orange, it looks more substantial than the Hommel Bier, despite in fact being a comparitively light 6% to the former's 7.5% ABV. Despite a careful pour it's hard to avoid a bit of sediment in suspension, but this doesn't muddy things at all. A beautiful aroma of mixed noble and new-world hop forwardness, although only Brewer's Gold and Hallertau Mittelfrüh are used. It's juicy in a real grapefruit juice sort of way - bitter, waxy and pithy. This bracing rush is softened by a pleasantly grassy and herbal character with another flourish of citrus peel. Superb, moreish. In spite of the well advertised (and dutifully delivered) bitterness, there
is a final little dollop of sugar to keep things fun and fairly balanced, even if that sweetness is manifested as a rather bittersweet and satisfying orange marmalade.
Look, it's a stunner, I'm obviously a fan. While it lacks the rustic quality, dry spicing and yeast forward character of the Hommel Bier, it delivers instead a more robust bitterness with some genuinely juicy hop flavours, and there's still enough herbal estery nonsense to enjoy for the zymurgists among us.
