An English lager, made by an award-winning English winemaker, has just been declared one of the world’s best lagers.
The International Beer Challenge (IBC) has been judging the world’s best beers for the past 16 years and has now awarded Kent’s Chapel Down vineyard a gold medal for its Curious Brew premium lager.
The IBC represents the beer maker’s ‘Oscars’ and are entered by the world’s largest breweries all the way through to tiny, pioneering microbrewers. This year, judges tasted over 400 beers before declaring the Kent winemaker’s lager to be the best of its class.
It’s one of only 30 beers, from countries including Belgium, Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the USA, to achieve gold medal standard.
Chapel Down believes that its success comes down to using the best quality products and, crucially, bringing wine-making thinking to the beer brewing process. It uses East Anglian malt, saaz and cascade hops, and then re-ferments the lager using the same Champagne yeast that also goes into its award-winning sparkling wines. Finally, the winemaker adds a “dosage” of very rare and fragrant Nelson Sauvin hops, before cold filtering the unpasteurised beer into bottles.
The result: a highly drinkable and refreshing 4.7% abv lager beer that wins a gold medal!
Beer expert and author Pete Brown, says:
“I was intrigued when I first heard from Frazer that he was creating beers and I loved the results when I first tasted them. Brewing with champagne yeast is something you’d expect the Belgians to do and so is brewing a lager for that matter.
“The result is a lovely beer which has a sparkling zing that makes it refreshing, satisfying and a lovely halfway house between beer and a sparkling wine. The flavour is a fuller, more assertive beer that’s fruity and rounded, but still reined in at the end by a crisp dryness.”
Frazer Thompson is CEO of Chapel Down and oversees the brewing process:
“We’ve changed people’s minds about English wine and now we want to do the same when it comes to lager. Mass-produced lagers taste like corporate cardboard and have the aroma of market research rather than hops.
“We’ve worked really hard to craft something that is more fragrant and more refreshing than other beers when served cold. This is a lager for people who love beer.”
Where to find Curious Brew
Curious Brew is currently served on draught at Jamie Oliver’s Union Jack’s and several Jamie’s Italians, The Swan at London’s Globe Theatre, the Royal Opera House, Gordon Ramsay restaurants, ETM’s The Gun, The RAC Club, M&B’s Brown’s Brasseries, as well as many leading independent pubs across the South East.
It can also be ordered by the case (24-bottles) directly from the Chapel Down Vineyard website for £29.99.