Odin's Tears: an experiment in oats
Odin’s Tears started off as an experiment to see how far we could push the use of oats in one of our beers. Oats are used in many ale styles but perhaps most notably in New England IPAs, to give them more body and impart a soft creaminess whilst adding proteins that give it that characteristic haze.
It’s this glutinous body that can often make it difficult to work with, especially when you add lots to your wort which can become very viscous. So with this in mind we decided to throw caution to the wind and smash a load in to this beer to give it a creamy full body and run the tightrope of Oat jeopardy!
The rest of the malt bill for the beer was very straightforward using a mix of Pale Ale Malt, Wheat for head retention, and Cara Malt to add a little colour and add a bit of biscuit flavour.
As part of this beer Tim also wanted to play around with some new ingredients. We only use English hops at the brewery so it's be a good tie to try a couple he'd been waiting to play with for a while: Challenger and UK Cascade. Challenger is an extremely popular bittering hop in UK circles and has a reputation for being a great hop for a balanced bitterness, and Cascade is much better known as an American hop so he thought it would be cool to see what the English version is like.
For the all important yeast for this beer, Tim went a bit rogue and tried out a lager yeast. After a bit of research he came across a Bavarian Lager yeast that sounded like it had some nicely balanced characteristics that might suit this beer.
The label was designed by the amazing Teigan Komaromi more of her work can be viewed here:
https://www.instagram.com/teigan.kom/