Hop Out of Bed

Hop out of bed. Pull on those sticky trousers, dried with the remnants of humming hopped beer, fasten the crisped laces of your stained boots built for the brewer and hop out of bed.

The sweet smell of bread, boiled grain, it intoxicates the senses as the wort's fumes breeze through your brain. Inhale as you stir, sparge, and mix that delightful sugary goo. You hope this brew works wonders like the last...the next great beer, the next great brewer, your double hopped creation drawing nearer and nearer each time you hop out of bed.

Hop out of bed and hop into the kettle. Not tea, but it helps, but fragrant aromatic citras and amarillos. Bitter magnums and piney centennials. A beer to put hair on the chests of millenials, a beer to drown the drinkers of lager with something to take their taste buds farther when they hop out of bed.

Sticky buds and spent grain, it's time to ferment again. The vessels filled and cooled, how we will drool when the casks are full. We think "the gravity is correct but the flavour will be out of this world," perhaps too precious to be sold. Scrubbing and wiping, the stuff you forget when you wake up tomorrow and hop out of bed.

It's been three weeks, dry-hopped and dumped yeast, unfined is just fine not that we don't have the time but the flavours hang around like an aged wine if you don't strain your liquid gold through fish guts and brine, or so I am told. That's how they do it, you know? The others glug their stale lagers straight from a trout's bladder. "It's cloudy" they crow. It's not off. No doubt, it's better unfined. Worry not for the lagerians when you hop out of bed to find...

Casks and casks and casks from the brew, you don't need to ask, there's a glass waiting for you. ABVs and IBUs, acronyms built to please, but it's the taste and the nose and the sight that gives ease to grins of men like these. That brioche bread, that perfect head, the malty backbone and biscuity undertones are what will make you get up tomorrow and hop out of bed.

The beer will flow and the night will grow towards a close, but when it's time to go there's one thing a brewer knows as you take off your boots inside your abode. Those smells, tastes, notes, that made you wake will be to blame when the head pain breaks the dawn in the morrow. Not hopping out of bed tomorrow.