Breakfast Beer Tasting: Brewdog Challenger

Keeping up the Brewdog theme, I decided to kick off the working week with the third in their series of IPA is Dead single hop beers. Once again the basics are the same as the first beer, so the faces stay the same, but the focus changes to Challenger.

Challenger is very much the quintessential English hop and is a favourite dual-purpose hop for many brewers of traditional Bitters. The beer poured amber with little carbonation and a small off-white head. The aroma was pungent: an earthy hop smell with some pepper and toffee.

The body was light-medium and unmistakably Challenger in taste. There’s a lot of earthy hop bitterness, pepper and tea flavours here. You do get a good blast of bitter aftertaste, but it’s all a bit one-dimensional. It may be a good bittering hop, but let loose like this reveals Challenger’s limitations.

So, they’ve obviously packed a hell of a lot of Challenger into this, but is bigger necessarily better? Not on this evidence; it may handle its isolated exposure better than Galaxy, but it’s no Motueka. And its one-dimensional nature seems overkill at the prescribed strength and would be better suited to something weaker.