Uiltje x Clayton Hops: Should I Just Keep Chasing Penguins

John Hi there. I'm John Weich, creative director at Uiltje Brewing Company, and today I'm sitting down with head brewer Mattia Mantovani to talk about our latest beer from our small-batch IPA series: Should I Just Keep Chasing Penguins? I asked Mattia to talk for a few reasons. First is that he's been raving about Chasing Penguins for a few weeks now. It features New Zealand Rhapsody hop, and it's a 100% collaboration with Kiwi producer Clayton Hops. Second, it's actually been a while since I've sat down with Mattia, and since then he's been to New Zealand and back, and I kind of wanted to hear his thoughts about the whole New Zealand hop industry and how it compares to the US industry. So let's just dive in and see where the conversation takes us. Enjoy.

Mattia I’m Mattia Mantovani, head brewer of Uiltje Brewery and started in 2020. 

John We've been talking about New Zealand hops for about a year because you went there last year. 

Mattia Yeah 2525.

John So yeah okay. We had had a chance to talk about it, but now we have an opportunity because we have a new beer coming out. It's called Should I Just Keep Chasing Penguins?  And of course, it's based on a parody of an Adele song, West Coast, collaboration with Clayton Hops. Where we use only Clayton Hops. So who's Clayton hops? 

Mattia In a way, it's a producer that I didn't know too well. And they're not the biggest, I would say top two maybe, top three for sure. In, like, volume may like they're not the most famous, I would say, so that they are big, but not that famous yet.

John That's actually a positive for you, right? You like to discover things other people don't know.

Mattia Yeah, yeah. 

John So we have a new beer coming out soon, and I think this is just a good opportunity to not only talk about the beer itself, but maybe even dive a little bit deeper into the New Zealand hop scene. What's the story behind the beer?

Mattia Okay. So basically, as you mentioned, I was in New Zealand for crop 25, so March 25th for hops selection. And I was there with James, our package manager. So we went there, as I said, to select hops, visiting growers we already work with, like Freestyle Hops. And because we were there, it just made sense to check the other companies and see how they work. And we end up visiting Clayton and during the walk around of the production facility we realized that their processing plant was brand new. We were quite amazed because brand-new processing equipment is not the norm for the other New Zealand companies we visited.

John You're being quite political right now, I think.

Mattia Yeah. Yeah, I know, because there is something unsaid in the beer industry, but I will share it anyway. Most of the old equipment from the US goes to New Zealand. So, a lot of the processing facilities there use old US facilities. That means that if it was old in the US, it's even older in New Zealand at this moment. So it was just a nice to find a company that actually invests a lot to in machinery, because new equipment gives you more control over more factors.

John Yeah because that's what you as a brewer are looking for, right? Control and consistency and professionalism. Okay, so you ran into these guys. They must have given you something you liked to get you excited.

Mattia I was already excited by the new machinery, but then we did a walk around and I was really impressed with the small brew system they have. And they had a brewer who was really knowledgeable. They were using a lot of different hops. And I know, everyone goes all out during harvest, but it was just nice to see the setup, how clean everything was. I'm OCD, and their brewer was kind of as OCD as me. I feel like that I'm trying to sell everyone on Clayton Hops, which I’m not. Their hops are just part of the conversation. 

John I get it. Spoiler alert: Mattia is not trying to sell you Clayton Hops.

Mattia So first everything there is brand-new, and then we spend a couple of hours driving around and walking their fields. We were pretty late to the harvest, but there was one hop that really stuck with us. It was a private variety, called CIP 014. And they gave us the sample and both James and I were really amazed about how strong the peach flavor was.

John You said it was like drinking peach juice out of your hand?

Mattia Yeah, that's correct. Exactly that, it was just insane. Especially because in New Zealand all the varieties have some kind of dank, some white grapes. Of course, that changes with earlier and later hops. The earlier harvests have less dank, less white grape. And even though it was late in the season this hop was more like the early harvest stuff. It was really, really juicy, really peachy, really melony. It reminded me of a really good batch of El Dorado from the US, which has that peachy, lemony smell. We asked them for a few kilograms. Remember, we didn’t have a relationship ship with them at the time. To them, we were just another potential customer. So we left it at that. But four or five months later we received a sample of the hops we loved. Naturally, we wanted to showcase the hops and the brand. At the time it was still known under its experimental name CIP 014, it wasn’t yet named NZ Rhapsody. That’s always the case with experimental varieties; they need to go through years of procedures. And then the marketing teams get involved and gives it a name. We thought this would make a great collab. It’s a nice story – though not as nice as the hop itself. And now we’re brewing it. By the way, they only named it NZ Rhapsody when were in the process of making the recipe.  

John How long has it had a name? Like a couple months. Right. Officially.

Mattia February, yeah.

John Turning to Chasing Penguins. It’s got a lot of other things going on. It's not just a single hop beer. You've toyed with it. The reason we are even having this conversation is your enthusiasm for it. It’s been kind of engineered to your own personal IPA tastes.

Mattia Basically, it's a West Coast IPA, and West Coast IPAs are my favorite style because I'm a hoppy guy, I need to showcase hops, and a West Coast IPA is the perfect style for me to just to showcase hops. We didn't want to do a single hop IPA because, I don't know, I feel like single hop IPAs are nice but sometimes boring. So we decided to blend two hop varieties: New Zealand Rhapsody and Nelson Sauvin. We’ll be using Amplifire™ to add flavor and aroma for a 100% Clayton Hops beer.

John Again, we're not being paid to promo Clayton Hops here, but we’re doing a good job. 

Mattia The Amplifire™ is to make sure all the peachiness and melony come through. We use pilsner malt to make sure the hops have the space to shine but are also adding some rice flakes to make it even drier. West Coast IPAs are already dry, but this is going to be even drier. A juicy, dry, and easy to drink IPA, I would say.

John I'm just curious. I think over the last 12 years I've tasted every single Uiltje beer to come out. How dry is dry?

Mattia We’ve produced some pretty dry beers over the years, so I’m not going to say it’s as dry as Fancy Pants, for example, but it’s close. Chasing Penguins is basically a blend of a brute IPA and a West Coast IPA. It's quite similar to a Cold IPA, and Cold IPAs are really dry. We brewed last year’s Who Let the Dogs Out? with rice flakes as well to make it really dry and dank. 

John Who Let the Dogs Out? was our collab with Brew Dog. It was a really good beer and actually really successful collaboration. 

Mattia Yeah, it was. It would say of our entire brew team, probably 60 or 70% of them would say that that was their favorite beer over the past few years. 

John We brewed it as a one-off collab but it just kept going and going and going. So just to be clear, you see Chasing Penguins as a possible successor to Who Let the Dogs Out? in terms of a fan favorite.

Mattia Yeah. I mean, it depends on the marketing. So it's not really up to me, but recipe wise, it’s very good.

John Who Let the Dogs Out? was a Cold IPA, this is a West Coast IPA. Are these styles the same but with subtle variations?

Mattia There are probably 15 different styles that head towards the same direction, because everything is an IPA. But there are differences. For instance, a Cold IPA is supposed to be brewed with lager yeast, while a West Coast IPA with ale yeast. That’s probably the main difference Who Let the Dogs Out? and Chasing Penguins. But some brewers add pale ale instead of pilsner, it’s just matter of the brewery itself. It gives you options. We consider Chasing Penguins a West Coast IPA because we are using only New Zealand hops, but if we’d have blended it with a US hop it would have been a Pacific Coast IPA. It's just a bit of a mess. As I’ve said, I'm OCD so like to keep things simple and organized. So let's call it a West Coast IPA with New Zealand hops.

John Tell me more about New Zealand, because, again, we haven’t spoken about it and now we have a good excuse to. You were there for a couple of weeks last year. What did you learn? Most people know the West Coast in the US at least a little bit. They know the European varieties and stuff like that, but let's give New Zealand the spotlight for a second. What's the good, the bad and the ugly of New Zealand hops?

Mattia This conversation makes more sense if talk about it within the context of US hops as well. I have a lot of experience with US hops, my daily job but also visiting there a few times. You’ve been there as well, so you know what I’m saying. The US is a big hop producer, with big fields – like really, really big fields. When you go there it is easy to select because you have all these different lots and you can smell the leaves, they can tailor to your flavor palette. The only real challenge is choosing your producer carefully because you are choosing from samples. It’s how the hops are processed that will determine the end quality of your product. So long story short, the US pre-selects for you based on your profile, you select from leaf samples and almost everything is available. 

John For an OCD guy like you this is good. It's all contained and the process is clear. 

Mattia It's easy because you know that you can trust the process. You don’t need to smell the palette because you’ve already smelt the leaves and you trust that the producer can finish it off. You can show up to the fields in time, get to enjoy the hop harvest, they produce it and ship it to you. In New Zealand, I would say it's more similar to Germany. They have a lot of different types of fields. The landscape is sometimes irregular because of course it's not all flat like in the US. Different landscapes can lead to different flavors. Can I name names to make my point?

John It’s our podcast, go ahead. 

Mattia Okay. Cool. So back to New Zealand. We were there doing hop selection at Freestyle Hops. For them, it’s kind of useless to select from a cone leaf because you don't know how is going to develop during processing. For them it makes more sense to select from the final product, the pellets. This is feasible for them because they are way smaller, of course, compared to the US. So basically whatever they are going to harvest is going to be pelletized in, like, weeks in. Put simply what you smell and feel is what you get. You're literally feeling the hop you are buying. It’s more comparable to dry hopping where you smell it and can say, Okay, this is a nice batch. This beer is going to be nice. Selecting hops in New Zealand is the same, whereas in the US it is not the case at all. The cone you smell is going to be turned into pellets in months, not weeks. It’s just the system, we have to work with that. You select hops in September, they are processed in December. Faster than that simply isn’t feasible in the US, which is why New Zealand is a great place for hop geeks like me. 

John But does that means you don’t always get exactly what you want from the US? 

Mattia Yes and no. In the US, the processing process is the same. You must choose a producer you can trust on this. You cannot worry about something will go wrong. It can happen, everyone makes mistakes, you can get unlucky, but it’s not the norm. Another thing, and I don't want to be too geeky here, but in the US hop selection often takes place on a long table in a room where the producer showcases samples. They don’t tell you anything about the origin. You give them your preferred profiles, they give you samples, you pick from those samples, that’s it. In New Zealand, it's a lot more fun selecting because it’s more open, less busy, they can play around. They are literally the geeky part of the hop industry, they tell you what you are tasting, whether it’s early harvest or mid harvest or late harvest. For someone with OCD this is just insane because then you can smell the different harvests. 

John They're just very transparent about what you are smelling.

Mattia Yeah, 100%. They love to share, actually. And another thing, for instance, I'm a European. We are in Europe and we are used to Nelson Sauvin late harvest. That dank, those white grape flavors. 

John Why are we used to that? Just because it takes so long to get from New Zealand to Europe.

Mattia No, no, it’s just how Nelson Sauvin is supposed to be here in Europe. I'm not saying anything about Nelson Sauvin, it's a gorgeous hop, I love it. But when I was there, I discovered what Nelson Sauvin early harvest. Nelson Sauvin early harvest is that tropical. It contains a tropical favor us Europeans don’t usually have . When you taste Nelson Sauvin in New Zealand it has some juiciness. To get that juiciness in Europe you have to blend it with a US hop. Nowadays you can do it only with a New Zealand variety because you can play with early and late harvest, you can have the tropical juiciness and still, if you want, add the white grapy dankness… you know what I mean?

John It's like, well, it makes me I'm going to bring it back to Chasing Penguins in the sense that we have a 100% West Coast IPA with 100% hops from New Zealand.

Mattia Who Let the Dogs Out was 100% New Zealand variety. It was Nectaron, Nelson Sauvin and Superdelic.

John Let's swing back to the beginning of discussion and maybe the end of the discussion. Just total verdict on Chasing Penguins again. This expectations high, at least my personal expectations are quite high, for all the reasons you said. But final verdict on New Zealand hops and where it is, where do you think is going and Uiltje’s relationship to New Zealand hops now that you've been here and established good ties.

Mattia I would say we should explore more New Zealand variety. I know that every brewery uses New Zealand variety, but they should spend more time in to understanding the New Zealand variety. Because you can play a lot. You don't necessarily need to use US varieties and you don't necessarily need to, like, private varieties. Now this is a big topic as well, public and the private, but sometimes public pub public variety can are just as nice. Actually, we should end this in a perfect way. If you're a brewer and you're listening, please try to brew a beer with Cascade from US, early Cascade from New Zealand and late Cascade from New Zealand. So then you can see exactly what I mean. It's just a fun play with hops and same variety, different country. And don't be crazy enough to use European Cascade in an IPA if you expect flavor as US cascade because of course European hops are slightly less intense. I'm saying this even though one of my favorite hops is Elixir from France. So read between the lines, I would say. But yeah, yeah, it's just do this little experiment and, let me know your thoughts.

John It sounds like you're inviting them the contact you. You want to give you your email address to them? 

Mattia Mattila at … .

John  You guys just send it to the normal email address and it will find its way to Mattia. 

Mattia Please, and again, let me know what you think about the beer.

John Thanks for the time, man. 

Mattia And thank you. Bye bye.