‘Unfiltered’ is just the latest thing, like IPA’s were. They could let them clear, but they deliberately don’t just to showcase how unfiltered they are. There’s some economics involved in this too, beers are filtered to speed up brewing times, but afterwards they need to be recharged with CO2. And that’s more expensive now, so it favours unfiltered brews anyway. And economics was behind the shift to IPAs too really, it’s cheaper to add hops than malt, British beers aren’t as malty as they used to be IMO.
But, my recommendation for a British beer (if you can find it) is Theakston’s Old Peculier.
But for the high hopped IPAs you would generally need a heavy malt bill. The two kind of scale with each other. You don’t generally have something with like 80 IBUs and end up at 5% ABV. Most of your hop bombs (like 2IPAs and higher) are like 8%-12% ABV, which requires a lot of malt.
As has been mentioned above, Greene King are worth checking out. Their eponymous IPA is nothing overly special but some of their more limited beers are really good, e.g. Abbot Ale. Adnams is another winner, their Broadside is superb and the bottled version comes in at something like 6.5%. Ok GK and Adnams are both from my home county so I may be a little biased! Over the border in Norfolk there is Woodforde’s which also do some cracking ales like Nelson’s Revenge. I would also second the recommendations for Doom Bar and Old Speckled Hen, oh and Spitfire is another good one.
All components of beer can contribute to haze. Proteins from the grain, the type of yeast used, and the use of dry hopping. A quick google turned up two articles from two of America’s top craft breweries - Allagash and Stone.
Britain imposed an extra tax a few years ago for strong beers, it’s rare to see anything above 7.5% now. Most beers here are session beers and in the range 4-5% but the craze for hops brought a few new beers in that % range with American hops like Cascade as pretend IPAs.
A lot of small breweries don’t filter their beer and create perfectly clear beer. The move to hazy beers recently isn’t because they decided to save money.
There are certainly breweries that are making cloudy beers because they think it’s the thing to do or because they suck at making beer. But good breweries are doing it for a reason, the primary one being that increased proteins from malts capture hop oils and give the beer a more hoppy taste and smoother mouthfeel. See the links in @kferr’s post above for more description.
Also, no one is making IPAs to save money. They are among the most expensive beers to make. IPAs don’t replace malt with hops; it’s more of both. And hops ain’t cheap.
Bah! Hazy beers are a sign of sloth and ineptitude. Some brewer got sloppy and then decided that rather than learn how to brew properly they’d just put it out “as is” and make up a “style” to sell it to the hipsters. Goes hand in hand with gigantically unbalanced beers so loaded with hops that you can’t taste the crap recipe and slipshod procedures used.
In case you missed it, I freaking loathe hazy, juicy, whatever the hipsters are drinking today beers and think everyone involved should be beaten with a large oosik.
If I had to guess, their “unfiltered” also means that they don’t let it settle, don’t use any kind of clarifiers, not even irish moss, and so forth.
And they can get a pretty good amount of cloudiness by putting in a small amount of wheat. And IIRC, there are various mashing techniques that can minimize (and by omission, maximize I suppose) cloudiness.
So I doubt they’re suspending solids or anything sketchy, they’re just doing everything they can within the normal brewing process to make sure their beer is cloudy.
If you don’t like hazies and hoppy IPAs, that’s fine. One of the wonderful things about beer is that there’s a style for everyone.
But don’t propagate incorrect information because you don’t understand a style. There are reasons to make a beer cloudy other than “I want it to look cloudy,” and there are reasons to make hoppy beers other than to hide flaws or a bad recipe.
I love a mellow English bitter, I love a rich smooth stout, and I love a well-made hop-charged IPA. I’m not drinking IPA to be hip.
I liked their first album too. I think it’s still a good beer, but it doesn’t taste quite so special to me as it did (and I don’t think this is my imagination - as I didn’t really know about the change to mass production until someone told me, when I commented that it didn’t seem quite what it was).
Greene King Fireside is one of my favourites - a red ale that has a production run limited to be available in winter only (ie when you would want to sit by a fire)
I keep hearing this word “hops”, but I’m not clear on what it means. If Santa brought me a bag of hops, what would I be looking at? Are hops good for anything besides putting in beer?
They are flowers of the hop plant. They give beer its bitterness to balance with the malt, and have various flavors associated with them from citrusy to piney to spicy, etc. Before hops, beers were often flavored with other botanicals (like, say, spruce needles) to balance out the sweetness of the malt. They also function as a preservative. And when you get a beer that’s skunked (formally called “light struck”), the breakdown of some of their chemicals are what causes that flavor.
They are usually dried before use in beer. (Though you can get wet hopped beers.)
You can also make a tea with them, or flavor sparkling water with them. I don’t know of any culinary uses off-hand, but I bet a quick Google would come up with something. I see no reason why they couldn’t be used for cooking or baking, other than they are a bit bitter.
If you look at beer labels, sometimes you will find a drawing of hops on there. I feel like I see it on German beer labels a lot.
ETA: Like so:
There’s barley grain pictured on the ends, then hops on either side of the leafy-looking thing which is … I don’t know. I’d guess a hop leaf, but that doesn’t look like the right shape.
Back in the '90s, while vacationing in southern Germany and Austria, we saw a lot of fields in which hops were growing. They looked very distinctive, with big frameworks set up for the hop plants to climb.
And they are supposedly extremely easy to gray. I have a friend in Iowa City who decided to put them up in his garden (though he grew his on a little bit of an angle on a wire from the ground to the top of his house) and he had way more hops than he knew what to do with by the end of the season.
The trouble I have with this, is that hazy beer used to be the the sign the beer was off, or at the end of the barrel. About one in ten pints I typically drank in the UK back in the 80s tended to be sent back, because it was off. It was a real problem. I don’t recall doing that in the last 20 odd years, I guess processes may have improved, or much less small breweries producing small barrels. Also having a lot of sediment at the bottom, or drinking such hazy beer tended to lead to gastronomical problems too.
If I ordered a beer like that nowadays, I’d drink it, but then change my choice for the next beer. I guess old habits die hard. But it did used to be a sign of a problem with a beer.
These days a dodgy pint in a pub is a sign of a bad pub, not a bad brewery. Cask ale is a living thing and has to be looked after properly at the pub. At my local (which has been in the CAMRA Good Beer Guide for 40 years) when someone brings a beer back because it smells or tastes off, even if it looks OK, the staff immediately turn that pump clip around and investigate. I’ve been to bad pubs where they will change the pint for another but not take the bad beer off, leaving it for those who don’t know how to recognize a bad beer to finish it off. At the worst pubs they’ll just say “it’s supposed to be like that” and refuse to change it.
It’s true that we do drink with our eyes. Stonehenge brewery produce a beer every spring called “Sign of Spring” which is just a standard session bitter with a bit of green food colouring added. There are people who won’t go near it if they see it, but think it’s fine when they taste it with their eyes closed.
