On Friday 27 April, a bunch of us from the brewery and the Horseshoe are driving down to a hop farm in Kent to pick hop shoots.

Hops grow perennially. After harvest in September the plant dies, but then when the sunshine of spring comes it begins to grow again, shooting from the ground and able to grow up to six inches a day.

These fresh shoots can be picked when they poke through the ground and cooked as a vegetable. When fully grown into hop cones, they are incredibly bitter and inedible, but as hop shoots they are similar to asparagus or samphire.

When the team returns from picking, they’ll take their harvest straight to the Horseshoe kitchen and start cooking. The shoots will be served up as soon as possible and on the bar will be all the Camden Town beers and a few others from around London.

The hop shoot picking has been arranged by the London Brewers Alliance and a large group will be going to Kent before sending the shoots to pubs around London (there’s a list here) for them to start cooking – with the race on to be the first to serve them up.

On the menu at the Horseshoe will be: Whole plaice with hop shoots; Blythburgh pork chop and hop shoots; and a Saturday brunch of Kent hop shoots, poached egg, English muffin, hollandaise sauce. There might also be some other things…

Tables at the Horseshoe can be booked on 0207 7431 7206. There should be hop shoots on the menu on Friday and Saturday. And if anyone wants to jump in our van and come down to Kent with us, then just email joey@camdentownbrewery.com – we’re leaving London at 8am and there’s four places.

Since late last year, we’ve been working on updating our branding. We thought this was going to be simple but it turned out to be really challenging. We didn’t want it too busy but not to sparse; we didn’t want too American or English or European but we’re inspired by all of those; we wanted something with impact but also something that gave you more if you wanted to find it…

We felt the old bottles (below) we had didn’t reflect or represent where we were or where we want to be going, but we found it hard to put our personality into the artwork and working on the beers took over our thoughts.

We’ve worked with loads of great people since we started, both here and abroad, but when we were finally ready to really go for the labels we found The Tenfold Collective, based in Loveland, Colorado. We discovered them through Oh Beautiful Beer, a website we’d spend hours on looking at great beer branding around the world. From their work with Uinta and Grimm Brothers, we knew we’d found our guys.

The brief was simple: rebrand Hells Lager, Camden Wheat and Camden Pale, plus to create an identity for Camden Ink and make it all look awesome and a reflection of our personality. After that would come a lot more stuff – new beers, a website, posters, stationery, things like that, all of which is coming soon (here’s the upcoming designs for Ink t-shirts).

The great news is that this week the labels for Hells, Pale and Wheat were printed, as were Black Friday and more USA Hells (which means we’re brewing more of it!). Jasper and Mark went up to see them coming off the print run. We think they look awesome and we’re so excited to finally see them – and you have to see them on the bottle to know how cool they really are.

The labels are now on the bottles and you can buy them from the Brewery Bar on Friday nights.

These, along with new keg badges (at the top of this post), will now be going out into pubs, bars, bottle shops and restaurants, so look out for them!

What do you think?

Camden Pale – Current. Inspired by the classics like Sierra Nevada and Little Creatures, it’s the beer we’ve made since day one. Citrusy with American hops, lime, lemon, tropical fruit and a floral hint. It’s dry and clean with a balanced flavour profile.

Camden Pale – New. It’s Pale ale wearing an IPA jacket. Pale ale with bigger balls. It’s got loads of US hops and heavy on the new varieties that hit like tropical fruit boxing gloves punching a bowl of citrus fruit in the face.

We love Camden Pale but it’s the beer which keeps us awake at night trying to make it the best it can be while we wrestle with different inspirations. We’ve tried tweaking things, changing hop additions and hop varieties but never quite felt it was exactly what we wanted it to be…

So we started again. What we wanted with the new Pale was something bigger, more in your face with fruity aroma, more mouthfeel and body for the hop flavour to grab hold of and a little more ABV to keep things in place. It’s all-American-hopped, there’s loads of late hop additions, whirlpool additions and it’s dry-hopped. It also contains a new American hop variety called Calypso, which we now all keep in our pockets as hop snuff because it smells so incredible.

The Vital Statistics (aka: Top/Hop Trumps)

Camden Pale Current
ABV: 4.5%
IBU: 30-40 (it’s evolved)
Hops: Perle, Cascade, Centennial, Simcoe, Citra, Amarillo

Camden Pale New
ABV: 4.9%
IBU: 40
Hops: Columbus, Cascade, Simcoe, Citra and Calypso

We love them both and we have artwork made up for both, now we need you to help us out. On Friday we’ll have both Pale versions on the bar: we’re doing a deal on third-pints of each for you to try and then vote on your favourite – we want you to help us choose which way Camden Pale goes.

Drink it at the Brewery Bar this Friday – 13 April. It’ll be on the bar alongside Black Friday, our new black pilsner. We’ll also have Byron Pale Ale on tap (hopped with Cascade, Centennial, Galaxy and Motueka, if you were wondering). Come and get ‘em from 4pm!

Black Friday, our new limited release beer, is a what-if-Hells-Lager-turned-badass. It’s a black pilsner.

It’s made in a fun way. Pilsners are classically pale, dry and bitter with a delicate hop aroma, often from the Saaz hop. What we did was take a grain bill which was 100% pilsner malt in the mash tun and as we transferred into the lauter tun (where we separate the spent grain from the wort), we added the roasted barley – we wanted the stain of black without much roast flavour.

Then back in the kettle we used two hop varieties which both have Saaz parentage and have been bred and grown to have a bigger, more impactful flavour – Premiant from Czech Republic and Motueka from New Zealand. Together they smell totally incredible – like sticking your head in a bag of lemons, limes, mangoes and sweet herbs like basil and mint. Beautiful.

Fermented with a lager yeast, we gave it four weeks in tank and added a big dose of dry hops to kick out more of that amazing aroma. The finished beer messes with our minds. We kind-of expected a bold brashness but we got beauty and balance. The darkness gives a cocoa-like foam and a nutty, chocolatey aroma which hits the tongue first before it rounds out and the darkness becomes light, finishing like a classic pilsner with a herb-spiked-lemon hop twist. It’s lager but different and we love it.

Here’s the stats:

ABV: 4.8%
IBU: 35
Malt: Pilsner and roast barley
Hops: Premiant and Motueka

Taste Black Friday on Black Friday – 13 April – at the Brewery Bar. It’s limited release so don’t miss it. We’ve also got Byron and Big Apple Hot Dogs cooking at the brewery, plus two other beers that have never been on tap before – Byron Pale Ale and a new version of Camden Pale!

We drink a lot of beer at the brewery – it’s part of the job, of course. With brewmaster Rob ‘three-Mars-bars-a-day’ Gargan’s habit, we also collectively chomp a lot of chocolate. But, for the upcoming weekend of chocolate-eating, what should you have with each Camden Town Brewery beer…

Hells Lager isn’t the obvious choice for a choc but don’t let that stop you. A Snickers gave the ‘packet of peanuts and a pint of lager, mate’ thing but the incredible and really weirdly brilliant match goes to Hells Lager with a Flake. Seriously. You need to try that. All of us just said wow and took another bite from the bar.

Imagine if some crazy kitchen boffin made chocolate with hops in it. That’d rule. Camden Pale is all fruity hops and what they can do is swipe the melting chocolate straight off your tongue. The winner with a Pale was, unexpectedly, a Cream Egg. The thick sweetness of the egg centre hung on the tongue until the hops kicked fruitily through. Who’da thought…

Camden Ink was the one we had the chocolate pennies on being the best but the big bitterness took things in strange directions. White chocolate does a great job though, giving a creaminess to the dark roast like a deconstructed mocha, while any Cream Egg left over from the Pale also tastes really good – sweetness and bitterness hug it out and agree to call it a draw.

Camden Wheat smells and tastes like bananas. Chocolate and banana are good buddies and wheat beer is the winner with all kinds of chocolate – the smooth body and that hint of nutty sweetness works so well. Maltesers and Crunchie bars are brilliant but white chocolate is the best – hide a packet of buttons in your pocket and go to the pub and see what you think.

Camden Town Brewery vs Easter… Everyone wins! Beer and chocolate – how do you drink and eat yours?

The Camden Town Brewery Bar will be open on Friday 13 April: Black Friday.

It’s a one-night opening and it’s the release of our new beer, Black Friday – a beautiful black pilsner, stained dark in the brewing process and made with hops descended from the classic pilsner hop, Saaz. It looks black, hints at roast to begin, then drinks elegant and light with bursts of lemony, tropical hops throughout. It’s lager but different.

We’ll have lots of different Camden Town beers on tap as well as Black Friday, plus we’ve got a new version of Camden Pale, which we’ve brewed to put into battle against the current Pale – we need you to decide which we continue to brew (more on this hop fight soon!).

We’ve also got food and this time it’s from two of our favourite places in London: next to Big Apple Hot Dogs, our resident sausage slingers, will be Byron, who are bringing their Van along for it’s first road trip! And because we’ve got Byron we’ll be serving Byron Pale Ale on tap for the first time.

Friday 13 April. It’s Black Friday. We’ve got hamburgers and hot dogs. Open 4pm-11pm. See you there!

(The bar will open properly soon, we promise. We’re very close now; just getting everything sorted to make it a great place to come and hang out for beers a few days a week – this is the last big party before we fling the doors open.)