{"id":59277,"date":"2025-02-25T13:06:14","date_gmt":"2025-02-25T21:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bcaletrail.ca\/?p=59277"},"modified":"2025-02-25T13:06:14","modified_gmt":"2025-02-25T21:06:14","slug":"raising-a-glass-to-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bcaletrail.ca\/raising-a-glass-to-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Raising a Glass to the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Discover how brewer and scientist Nathan Vadeboncoeur, founder of Project Hop and Brasserie du Bon Temps, is reviving historical beer styles by researching and recreating IPAs from different eras. His journey from hop quality assurance to historical brewing has equipped Vadeboncoeur with the knowledge to meticulously recreate these beers using period-appropriate ingredients, water chemistry, and brewing techniques to provide modern drinkers with an authentic taste of beer history.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Meet the BC brewer who is bringing old beer styles back to life<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Many beer lovers have heard the folklore surrounding the origins of the India Pale Ale \u2013 that English brewers added massive quantities of hops to their barrels of pale ale in order to prevent the beer from spoiling on its long journey to India, where it would slake the thirst of British soldiers. The hoppy bite of the IPA was thus born.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The story isn\u2019t quite as simple as that, though. In recent years, beer historians and writers such as Martyn Cornell<\/a> and Joshua Bernstein<\/a> have provided more nuanced explanations of IPA history. However, the core ideas remain: beginning in the 18<\/span>th<\/span> century, pale ales were increasingly hopped to survive the journey to southern climes, including India, and the style became ever more popular over the next couple of centuries.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Intellectual understanding of the IPA is one thing, but what did these early versions actually taste like? While there are relatively few 18<\/span>th<\/span> and 19th-century<\/span>\u00a0brewing-related records, a few survive that sketch out the shape of these older beers. Brewer and scientist Nathan Vadeboncoeur, founder of Project Hop<\/a> and Brasserie du Bon Temps, has dug into the beer archives to find out how to brew these original versions of the IPA. And now you can buy some to try at home!<\/span><\/p>\n

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A flight of historical IPAs by Project Hop and Brasseries du Bon Temps (photo: No\u00eblle Phillips)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Beginnings: Hop Science and the Roots of Beer<\/b><\/h4>\n

Vadeboncoeur\u2019s Project Hop was initially not a brewing project at all, but a company rooted in his training as an environmental scientist. Launched in 2017, the original Project Hop offered quality assurance services for BC\u2019s hop growers. As he worked on assessing hop quality across the province, he became increasingly interested in hop terroir<\/em>. Wine has terroir, so why not beer?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He noted that terroir \u2013 the soil, the microbes, the surrounding vegetation \u2013 affects hop flavours, even among hops of the same variety. He realized that if brewers knew they could count on the quality and flavour of a particular hop, they would be more likely to purchase \u2013 and thus he could help boost the business of small hop farmers and encourage more experimentation in hop production.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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The Covid Pivot and Founding the Brasserie du Bon Temps<\/b><\/h4>\n

However, the COVID-19 pandemic ground everything to a halt. At that time, he pivoted from hop terroir to hop history. His company Project Hop became the current Project Hop,<\/a> which is his line of historical IPAs, and from Project Hop grew his brewery label: Brasserie du Bon Temps<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Vadeboncoeur was a homebrewer, but in 2020, after he was invited to brew some single-hop beers at R&B Brewing<\/a>, he learned to scale up and refine his techniques. He began looking into old recipes, experimenting with test batches, and serving some historical styles to R&B\u2019s taproom customers. Brasserie du Bon Temps and Project Hop were born.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI was able to talk to customers about how it was a recipe from 200 years ago and tell them the story,\u201d says Vadeboncoeur. \u201cThe story really makes the beer, and to go back in time offers a different dimension to that experience. People seem to really like that.\u201d And customers at R&B enjoyed Vadeboncoeur\u2019s adventurous beers, which included an Old IPA, a grisette, an Abbey-style ale, and a Scandinavian beer called R\u00e5\u00f8l<\/em>, or \u201cRaw Ale.\u201d This beer, according to Project Hop\u2019s description, is made without boiling the wort: \u201cThis raw (unboiled) beer is flavoured by infusing hot water with juniper branches [\u2026] then pouring this over grain to extract sugars, then straight into fermentation with a heritage Norwegian yeast.\u201d Not something you\u2019d easily find on a craft brewery\u2019s tap list!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Vadeboncoeur adds hops from a small Manitoba farm to a brew shortly after finding a home for his label at Tinhouse Brewing in Port Coquitlam, BC (photo: Project Hop \/ Instagram)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bringing the Past to Life<\/b><\/h4>\n

Brasserie du Bon Temps brews out of other breweries, such as [the now closed] Flashback and Tinhouse Brewing<\/a>, and has that same spirit of collaboration in its name. The brewery is named after the Order of Good Cheer, founded by Samuel de Champlain in 1606 to help boost morale for the settlers of New France. It became, essentially, the first gastronomic drinking club; after its founding, deaths dropped dramatically. The brewery honours beer\u2019s history of bringing people together through flavour and experience. According to the website, \u201cBrasserie du Bon Temps re-creates historical recipes to bring you the story of beer from accidental discovery to the world\u2019s favourite tipple. Our beers are faithful recreations of old styles or research-based best guesses when the historical trail runs cold.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The goal of Brasserie du Bon Temps is to recreate historical beers, including the line of hop-focused IPAs under Project Hop. But how did Vadeboncoeur find the historical information that allowed him to do this? He\u2019s a scientist by trade rather than a historian, but he certainly has the research skills required to unearth such treasures. One open-access resource he used was Project Gutenberg, which provides digitized scans of thousands of old books. He was looking for needles in haystacks, but he found enough information about breweries and brewing practices to allow him to brew his historical IPA mix pack: the 1754, the 1823, the 1870, and the 1914.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Vadeboncoeur speaks to a group of beer lovers at Tinhouse Brewing in Port Coquitlam during a tasting of his historical IPA series (photo: No\u00eblle Phillips)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

1754: <\/b>This beer imitates the earliest beers that were brewed at Hodgson\u2019s Bow Brewery in London and shipped to India in the mid-18<\/span>th<\/span> century. The original beer used basic floor-malted pale malt and plenty of East Kent Goldings hops. It would have aged into a \u201cstock ale\u201d \u2013 a stronger beer, something closer to a barleywine \u2013 on its journey to India. The movement of the ship would have agitated the brewers yeast left in the beer, but would also have enlivened the Brettanomyces yeast living in the wood of the barrel. The Brett would eat all the long-chain sugars that regular yeast couldn\u2019t, and would impart that aged ale flavour as well.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To replicate this process, Vadeboncoeur adjusted his water to match London\u2019s water chemistry at the time and estimated the alpha acid levels of older varieties of East Kent Goldings in order to calculate an equivalent amount in the hop\u2019s modern version. He then added a specific strain of Brett to the wort and left it in oak barrels over the hot summer months to reproduce the conditions of the voyage to India.<\/span><\/p>\n

1823:<\/b> This beer replicates the Burton Brewery\u2019s imitation of the Bow Brewery\u2019s IPA (Project Hop\u2019s 1754). When Hodgson decided he didn\u2019t want to use the East India Company to ship the Bow\u2019s beer anymore, the EIC looked for another brewer who could make the same product. They found Samuel Allsopp and his brewery at Burton-on-Trent. According to legend, Allsopp brought this beer to his brewer and asked if he could make it. The brewer spat it out in disgust: \u201cYes, I can make this. But who would want to drink it?\u201d Many people, it turns out. The Burton version of Hodgson\u2019s IPA uses the same recipe, with the exception of the water chemistry, which is unique to Burton-on-Trent. The Burton water is much harder, and there\u2019s 4 times the mineral content in this beer, which helps the yeast eat more sugar and thus makes the beer a bit drier. Meanwhile, the sulfates enhance the hop flavour.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n