Not feeling bitter: brewing a beer for women who are not mad about hops

After ten years of working in beer at CAMRA , drinking it, talking about it and encouraging other people to drink it, I finally got to brew my own real ale one Saturday in May 2012. I arrived at 9am at Brewster’s Brewery in Grantham with Jane Peyton following an uncomfortably early start from my home in Hertfordshire.

The opportunity to brew was the result of winning a competition run by Sara Barton from Brewster’s Brewery and Jane Peyton from the School of Booze. Sara has gone on to be awarded Brewer of the Year by the British Guild of Beer Writers and Jane to become one of the first female beer sommeliers, so I was in fine company! The challenge was to come up with a beer which lots of women would want to try and which would also make a great accompaniment to that most favoured of foods, the chocolate bar. Not just any chocolate bar but one created by Divine Chocolate; Dark Chocolate and Raspberry would be my inspiration.

I therefore invented a wheat beer with raspberry which I named Wheat Watchers. When I say invented, I came up with the idea, it was Sara who had to make this work and source the wheat and the yeast, consider how to add the raspberry and put together the recipe for this new brew.  The name is obviously a play on words: many women are turned off beer because they think it is fattening when it fact it’s less calorific than wine, and this beer would be brewed with wheat in addition to barley.

When I first started working for CAMRA, I remember being told, on a pub crawl around snowy Perthshire with a large number of CAMRA volunteers, that some women prefer the taste of wheat beer to more traditional hoppy beers. It’s not true of all women of course, but I reasoned that a wheat beer which is light on bitterness might be a good first step for female drinkers who might otherwise not try it.

Jane and I assisted Sara in brewing this new beer, helping to weigh the ingredients, tasting the wort, which is the liquid extracted from the early stages of the brewing process, adding the hops, and the yeast (which is called pitching the wort) and standing on ladders.  It was reasonably strenuous as we lugged our ingredients around the brewery, although luckily we didn’t have to dig out the hops. Sara and family were on hand with cakes and sandwiches as we discussed how to promote our new beer and the different styles of beer that Brewsters was now brewing, including a delicious Porter which we sampled. The experience brought home that running a brewery is extremely hands on with Sara and Sean putting in huge amounts of time, not just in brewing but also running the business and chasing up orders. They also gave up their Saturday to brew Wheat Watchers and then took Jane and I to their pub to try out some more of their beers. What a day!

The beer was finally launched at the renowned Rake Pub near London’s Borough Market in August 2012. It was one of the events of the year in London, well for me anyway... Feedback on the beer was good with lots of friends and fellow beer lovers in attendance. Watch out for Wheat Watchers, available in bottle and cask, a heavenly beer to accompany some Divine chocolate or to drink all on its own.

*Louise Ashworth is CAMRA’s former Marketing Manager. She now runs her own PR agency. louiseashworth1@gmail.com