(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Friday Night Beer Blog: Indoor Hops Edition [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-01-06 Definitely not brewed with indoor-grown hops (and the fuzziness is perhaps appropriate, given how the beer got chosen to begin with) Greetings, beer lovers! Happy Friday (even on this date, of all dates), or maybe especially so, given the humiliation meted out to the wannabe not-quite Speaker of the House this week. Once, or perhaps not, again, ‘tis chingchongchinaman as your guest FNBB blogger for this evening, giving esquimaux another well-earned night off from blogging duties. The launch point for tonight’s FNBB was this “Where I Work” article from September 2022 in the science journal Nature, one of the dream journals where every scientist wants to get published. The write-up is sort of an infomercial, as it were, about the first beer to be made using indoor-grown hops. The beer is titled “Respect!”, but has nothing to do with Aretha Franklin, AFAICT. Instead, this beer is the product of a collaboration between a Spain-based agricultural biotechnology outfit, Ekonoke and the Spanish agricultural company Hijos de Rivera. The Nature article centers on Ana Saez García, a co-founder of Ekonoke, who toots her own horn just a little bit (hence my “infomercial” comment) thus: “Our collaboration’s first fruit — ‘Respect!’, a limited edition of a beer produced entirely with our hydroponically grown Humulus — came out in July. It’s the world’s first beer to be made exclusively with indoor hops.” A July 2022 on-line press release from Hijos de Rivera tells a bit more about the two new “Respect!” brews, whereas the Nature article mentioned apparently just one release (or sounded like only one release): ‘Respect! es un doble proyecto colaborativo: con Ekonoke, pioneros en cultivo de lúpulo indoor en España y con Pan da Moa, panadería de referencia en la capital gallega. El resultado son dos “cervezas de la casa” LTR home brewed que se elaboran en Chantada y se pueden consumir en los locales que La Tita Rivera tiene en Madrid, Vigo y A Coruña.’ Google Translation (very lightly paraphrased): (‘Respect! is a double collaborative project: with Ekonoke, pioneers in indoor hop cultivation in Spain, and with Pan da Moa, a reference bakery in the Galician capital. The result is two LTR home brewed "house beers" that are made in Chantada and can be consumed in the premises that La Tita Rivera has in Madrid, Vigo and A Coruña.’) ASG reminds doofuses (doofi?) like me about the role of hops in beer: ‘Liquid bread’, Spanish-style (y una IPA, si?) “Hops, the flower of the plant Humulus lupulus, are what gives beer its distinctive flavour.” She then goes on to the main selling point (or “value proposition”, to use corporate-speak) of the particular hops used to make this new beer: “Growing them hydroponically means using a minimal amount of substrate for the roots. We also use a recirculating irrigation system that recycles most of the water we use to grow the plants.” Obviously this plays the sustainability card. ASG mentions scale-up of the initial idea, where “This year” clearly means 2022: “This year, we will move to a new indoor site of 1,000 square metres in Galicia, in the north of Spain, to start producing at commercial scale. We’re setting up this facility in partnership with Hijos de Rivera, the Spanish company that launched the beer Estrella Galicia more than 100 years ago.” Given agricultural supply disruptions, it will be interesting to see how all this shakes out, as it is very early days for this idea, to be sure. Tonight’s featured beer chez 3CM makes no such grandiose claims about sustainability, or has any sort of Spanish theme or anything else like that. Instead, this is another selection from Well Crafted Beer Company, their “Blonde Americano”, as you can see. This was another of my whimsy purchases, where I was lazy enough not to realize that coffee beans were part of the brewing recipe package. So both stimulants and depressants are present in the same beverage, so to speak :) . It actually is a fine-tasting beer, given that I hadn’t planned on coffee flavor in my beer. It just shows that 3CM the loser needs to check his whims more carefully, it would seem. With that, time to turn it over to you folks. What are you imbibing tonight? Anyone brewing their own? Inquiring minds, etc.. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/6/2145629/-Friday-Night-Beer-Blog-Indoor-Hops-Edition Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/