If you’re anything like me, you’ll have been drinking a generous share of Burnt Mill’s excellent beers lately.
At only nine months old Burnt Mill has already become one of the UK’s most talked about breweries and with good reason – it’s come out of the gate with a selection of well defined, hop forward offerings, as well as a cracking imperial stout and a mouth puckering pineapple gose. It should come as no surprise, then, that it was named as the best new English brewery in the annual RateBeer awards last month.
Burnt Mill’s rapid rise to prominence represents a couple of important shifts in the brewing industry as I see it. First it shows that craft beers early adopters – the enthusiasts – still constantly crave the new. This can be frustrating when all you crave in beer is consistency and familiarity, but finding a balance between this and the hype is the catalyst, creating the energy that keeps beer ticking along. You might say it’s fundamental to the continued development of a maturing industry.
The other shift is that the rapid rise in popularity of breweries like Burnt Mill, along with luminaries including Verdant and DEYA, demonstrates the importance of producing quality beer from day one.
With more than 2,000 breweries in the UK market, there is no longer room for excuses (not that there ever was, brewers). There is no longer time to muddle around for a year or more getting things right. The consumer has moved too far to tolerate the below-average. It’s a market that demands the excellent and the exceptional, all of the time – reasons I think why Burnt Mill has thrived, thus far (hey, no pressure folks.)
This brings me to the Suffolk brewery’s first Double IPA, Ties That Bine, a gratuitously hopped beer produced in collaboration with hop supplier Simply Hops and yeast supplier Lallemand. The deeply golden beer reeks of sticky marmalade and freshly zested orange with plenty of melon, peach and apricot joining these aromas. It’s thick and resinous on the palate, with all those hop oils, residual sugars and plenty of weighty alcohol pressing waves of citrus and stone fruit onto your tongue.
On its surface is a West Coast IPA that could stand toe to toe with some of San Diego’s best. But there’s a little more to it than that, with Lallemand’s New England yeast strain adding stone fruit complexity to the mix. It’s a beer that’s as easy to throw back carelessly as it is to sit and muse over into the small hours. However you choose to enjoy it though, it’s likely your experience will be anything less than an immensely positive one.
You can find more from beer writer Matthew Curtis as UK editor of Good Beer Hunting and on Twitter @totalcurtis. Pick up a can of Burnt Mill Ties That Bine DIPA while you can.