Hello, shed dwellers!
Sorry not to have updated in so long. It's been a very busy time. Lots to update on!
Most importantly, I can now confirm the schedule for the book. It's going to be published a little later than I had planned, and probably quite a bit later than you were expecting, and I'll come onto the reasons for that in a sec. But we're looking at an official publication date to coincide with Father's Day in Spring 2017. The good news from a subscriber's point of view is that you get your copies quite a bit earlier than that. You should have them in your hands by this time next year.
Now, if you're one of those people who pledged for the book this time last year, when we first launched it, two years probably seems like an awfully long time to wait. Why so long?
Firstly, books do take a surprisingly long time to come to fruition. I'll be handing in the manuscript in July this year, and it takes a good nine months for any book to go through the editing, design, production, publication and sell-in process - if it's being done properly.
Secondly, I've already been working hard on the book for over a year and this is how long a good book takes to write (especially if you're still having to do other work to pay the bills.) I had a great deal of this book mapped out in my head when I first pitched it to you, and a load of notes from previous work that I could use. But once I knew the book was probably going to happen, there was a lot of new research to do. Hop and barley harvests happen around September and that was a key time for me to research them, with other, less time-specific aspects, fitting in where they can. My previous books have each taken two to three years to write, so this is still going to be quicker than I normally manage.
Thirdly, the book has grown thanks to the particular circumstances of crowdfunding on Unbound. As you know, getting the book funded required me to talk quite publicly about what it was going to be about and what it involved. And as well as attracting the attention of good people like yourselves who wanted to fund the book, it also attracted the attention of brewers, hop growers, malsters and barley farmers who got in touch and offered to show me what they do. So if you read the excerpt on this page about me dreaming of a trip to the Yakima Valley, that dream came true in September. I was also invited to visit Weyermann, the makers fo speciality malts in Bamberg, and I just got back from a trip I'm going to tell you about below. In the next few months I'll be going to look at why soft water is so essential for perfect pilsner in the Czech Republic, learning more about wild yeasts from Belgian brewers, and attending celebrations to mark the 500th anniversary of the Rheinheitsgebot, the German beer purity law. None of these trips would have happened under a normal publishing deal, where we keep the book under wraps until publication. Every one of them will be making the book richer, deeper and more multi-faceted than I could have imagined. So thanks for your patience: it will be worth the wait!
So one of these delaying diversions happened when the brewers at Stone & Wood - Australia's most exciting craft brewer - learned about the project and felt it needed to include southern hemisphere hops as well as the northern hemisphere. I'm sure you agree. Their harvest is of course six months either side of the nothern hemisphere, and is happening right now. So I was lucky enough to go to Tasmania and meet the guys at Hop Products Australia, who raised the revered Galaxy hop.
Here's their main hop farm where Galaxy is grown:
Galaxy is loved around the world for the intsense passion fruit aromas it gives off. The hop cones are the longest I've ever seen:
And when you rub these hops in your hands, they're incredibly oily, literally bursting with aromatic essential oils. Six months after I was busy with the northern hemisphere harvest, being in a hop garden and rubbing hops is just as entrancing as it was then. It's not something you ever get tired of.
Normally, hops are dried before use. If they're not, they start to rot pretty quickly. When these hops were harvested, I timed it at about 25 minutes from being on the bine to being in the kiln, drying.
But if you use them straight away, they can be put into a beer as fresh hops, also known as wet hops or green hops. So I wasn't just there on some kind of jolly - I was put to work as a mule to take 25kg of fresh, wet hops from the fields in Tasmania to the Stone & Wood brewery in Byron Bay.
Stone & Wood are one of those craft breweries that seem to have fun with everthing they do. While we were in Tasmania, they did a beach cleaning event, followed by beer, burgers and live bands. This was made possible thanks to Clyde the Defender, whiohas a mobile bar in his back end:
After the party, the following morning I was on a plane, checking in my 25kg of Galaxy as personal luggage:
We took these hops straight to the brewery where they were put into large muslin sacks, like giant teabags, and suspended inside a vessel full of freshly brewed Pacific Ale to steep for a few days. The hop drying process destroys some of the more delicate essential oils, so this is the once a year chance to taste the full spectrum of a given hop in a beer.
After a few days, the beer was racked off into kegs and sent around the country. I tagged along to the one that went to Brisbane, where we launched it at a special event as part of Brewsvegas - a week-long celebration of the thriving craft beer scene down under:
(photo: Matt Kirkegaard)
The whole trip was a whirwhind, and it added yet another dimension to the hop story. I'm writing it up now.
As I do these final few trips to complete the research for the book, I'll update more often, and let you know where we are with the book and how it's coming along.
Cheers.