Haar rolls in as our first release of 2024

The first release of 2024, our first foray into the 440ml "tall boy" can size and the first brand new beer brewed at Rosemains Steading. Haar has been a long time coming, but when we first set out to brew this beer, we had absolutely no idea what we would be producing. 

Good people make good beer

Our hazy, dry hopped New England style IPA, Haar, started its journey with a somewhat unconventional origin - within the help of over 300 of our crowd-fund investors. As part of our crowdfunding investor perks we promised to brew a crowdsourced beer for anyone supporting the building of our brewery with an investment of over £100. We were overwhelmed to not only reach our crowdfunding target but absolutely smash past it, allowing us to be sat here today, writing this blog in Scotland's first dedicated alcohol-free brewery.

And a pledge had been made. While we worked on securing a site, installing a brewery and getting our stock levels back to normal, our investors waited to hear word of their promised beer.

Building a beer

With the usual process of beer development thrown out of the window and all bets called off, we reached out to our investors in February this year to begin the search for our investor beer. We wanted this to be a true representation of what the people who built this brewery wanted, so everything from the colour, bitterness, malt and hop flavour, and acidity were voted on.

As you can probably guess, there wasn't a simple solution that would fit all of the responses we received. While a lot of people opted for pale, hoppy beers, we also received a number of votes for darker beers - something we've definitely taken on board for future recipe development. When it comes to this beer though, here was the brief our brewing minds needed to get to work on:

A reasonably pale beer with hops being the key flavour, backed up by malt, a balanced bitterness with moderate fruitiness and low acidity. 

We also asked all of our investors to give us feedback on flavours they enjoy more generally in beer to help us hone in on the perfect beer. Quite quickly we saw tropical fruit and citrus leap into the lead as the key flavours to pick out, with grainy notes rounding out the top three attributes for us to consider. 

All the puzzle pieces

With all of these components in mind, there was only really one beer style that we thought would do justice to the desires of our crowdfunders. The New England IPA beer style is a pretty new kid on the block with a focus on tropical and citrus fruit flavours from the use of lots of hops in the later stages of the brewing process. These are intentionally hazy beers (due to the volume of hops used in dry hopping) with a balanced bitterness. One of the great things about this style is it really allows for specific hop varieties to shine. With so many people letting us know tropical fruit was high on their favourite flavours in beer, we decided to pack this beer with a hop from North America known for bringing coconut, tangerine and stone fruit flavours. Sabro is a hop developed through the cross-breeding of wild New Mexican hops and has taken the brewing world by storm. We paired this with our favourite hop from down under, Galaxy, and Citra, another popular hop from North America to create the perfect tropical medley for you.

What do you call a ship?

We had our recipe. Now for the name.

This is where things got interesting. There is always a risk when asking a big group to name something new. We've all heard of Boaty McBoatface. So when we opened up naming to our investors, we were ready for anything.

We won't go through the entire list of suggestions here, no one needs to read what I have seen, but there were some absolute stand-outs, including our final name, Haar, which was suggested by a number of people in various forms. This suited the beer perfectly, describing the sea fog that descends over the brewery and much of Scotland on a regular basis at this time of year. 

Hoisting the flags