Tribute Tribute

As with a lot of life, we form a personal connection with our surroundings as we go through important events. My wife and I got married in Cornwall, England and through one thing and another we came across a 100 + year old brewery in the tiny town of St Austell. Their flagship beer is called Tribute, and not only did we fall in love with it, so did many of our immediate and extended family who came to help us celebrate.

Tribute itself is an homage by their head brewer (a fellow by the name of Roger Ryman) to a beer which they brewed as a one-off to celebrate the eclipse around the turning of the millennium. Roger drew up his experience and created a beer which took classic English malts and matched them up with American Willamette hops, and Slovenian Styrian Golding hops. The result is sheer beauty, with the bready-crackery character of the malt playing perfectly against the lemon-citrus notes from the Goldings and the earthy-blackberry notes from the Willamettes.

Thus as Tribute itself is a knock-off of his own beer, I figure that I can shamelessly pander and call my knockoff of his knockoff Tribute Tribute. After all, beer is something that is sensitive to its environment, even if I brought Roger to my brewery and let him have at it, even he would come up with something very similar to, but not entirely like Tribute itself.

I'm taking the spirit of Roger's idea, matching up the berry and lemon character of the signature hops, using my own base of locally sourced grain and of course my own locally sourced water, along with my own yeast strain to brew this beer. The result is a balanced beer, with the same interplay between the richness of the malt character and the complementary characters of the signature flavor hops.

Naturally, this beer is right at home in a cask so you'll see it rotate through over time.