The Hand Specials

At the beginning of every year, the brew team gets together and discusses what specials they’ll make over the next twelve months. It’s an exciting conversation, and I always look forward to hearing what they come up with. 

This year the plan includes: a couple of New England Pales, a Table Beer, a Sticke Bier (I had to look this one up - it’s an Altbier, and Sticke means ‘secret’), a NEIPA, a Helles, a Dark Mild, a Triple IPA, a Sour and a West Coast Red IPA. This is on top of our annual seasonals.

But why do we create all these specials? We have a very strong core range, but we like to create a stimulating calendar of specials for a variety of reasons. 

Most importantly, specials are great for our customers - for our own pubs and for our trade customers. To be able to offer new and interesting styles that differ from our core range just makes things a bit more interesting for everyone through the year. 

There are many drinkers that religiously stick to a single beer style, but there is evidence emerging that habits are changing and more people than ever are trying new styles from breweries they know and trust. I have a go-to beer that I’ll have any time (most of the time) - Shaka - and sometimes I’ll go through an Otto phase, but when the team creates these specials, I’ll almost always switch until it's gone. Especially if it’s a hazy pale.

Making specials is also great for the brew team. Mastering consistency and quality in such huge batches over many years is imperative for the success of any brewery. 

Jack says: “Brewing is a balance of creativity and attention to detail. A large part of brewing at a regional brewery is brewing the same beers day-in, day-out. Although this might sound unappealing, we take a huge amount of pride in our ability to brew a beer that tastes exactly the same every time. 

Beer is a natural product, made using agricultural ingredients that can change from season to season depending on the amount of sun and rainfall etc, and also using a live organism - yeast - that does what it wants, not what we want. Our daily challenges revolve around making our core beers taste the same as the last batch with these varying inputs and is a huge part of the skillset to be a great brewer.”

Specials give the team an opportunity to push their skills and learn new skills. A chance to research new techniques and ingredients; to test new processes and recipes; to push the boundaries and create new flavour, fermentation and carbonation possibilities. In our second special of 2024 (24:02 Table Beer), the team used a ‘liquid dry hop’ for the first time. This was all about testing this new product to see how it differs from regular dry hopping.

A note on this from Jack: “HopBurst® Nectaron is a dry hop replacement and gives bright tropical fruit flavours and aromas of pineapple and stone fruit. It's produced from leaf hops or T90 pellets, by innovative extraction and distillation methods. It's just one of the new, 100% hop derived liquid products from our hop suppliers to enhance aroma in our beer.”

Having a smaller (900l) kit at our Brighton brewpub, The Hand in Hand, means we can test out smaller batches if we want to. It’s far less riskier when experimenting. Saying that, the brews never really go wrong, but they can occasionally turn out slightly different than planned. That’s how we learn. 

The brew team is excellent at thinking quickly and saving a brew if it’s going wayward. I remember a very early Otto brew (when we were still brewing everything at The Hand) that wasn’t exactly how the brewers wanted it, so they added coconut and called it Milky Joe. It was delicious!

Sometimes, a beer that sat proudly in our core range becomes an annual special (or ‘seasonal’). Lobo, for example, is a favourite of the locals and of mine, so there are a few fans disappointed by this relegation. Its slightly higher abv (5.2%) is all that stops it from being my go-to pale. The reason this one dropped out of core is simply to do with the cost of the volume of malt and hops in the recipe. 

Every now and then, it’s the other way around and specials can end up more like pilot brews. The feedback is so good that they turn into a seasonal, like Dayglow Hedgerow, our Elderflower Saison, and Tamper, our Coffee Porter. We now make these every year. They can even make their way into our core range. 

Our ‘Low Mile Lager’, 795, started this way. We asked ourselves if we could create an excellent German pilsner-style lager using ingredients sourced closer to our UK home. This was the beginning of our Planet Healthy Drinking ambitions (I’ll write a blog on that very soon). With 795, natural carbonation further reduced the carbon footprint. We brought the ingredients' mileage that made our first core range lager, Yuba, from 4110 miles to 795 - 80% fewer miles! Farewell Yuba. Hello 795. And 795 has now won multiple awards in can and keg.

We originally created 795 in collaboration with a UK hop grower called Brook House Hops. This is another reason to create specials: to collaborate with other breweries, producers and charities across the country as well as our local community. Sharing the load on brew days, sharing ideas on recipes and processes, sharing a few pints, and of course, opening each other up to new audiences and customers.

We’ve had the pleasure of working on a number of collaborations and made some great friends along the way. To name a few: Cloak and Dagger, Brighton Bier, Fallen Acorn, The Rake, Loughran Brewers Select, Lallemand, The Fudge Patch, Twin Pines, The Coven, Same Sky, Unite Brew and more. 

This year we’ll be collaborating with Three Legs Brewery - helping celebrate their 10 year anniversary. Also with Good Chemistry Brewing, and with Crafty Beer Girls and Women in Beer for our International Women’s Day IWDCB Brew.

Specials - good for customers, good for brewers, good for range, and good for the industry. Lots of very good reasons to make specials. Check out our first two of 2024:

24:01, a 5.2% New England Pale. 
Tasting notes: Richer and thicker than anything we've ever brewed, 24:01 features a grist turbo charged with oats for a full mouthfeel softer than a cloud. Naturally hazy and dripping with a fruitbowl of aromas drawing together a pick-n-mix for the senses of berries, ripe citrus, fizzy sherbet and sticky sweet pineapple, expect big flavours to match that thick body.

24:02, a 2.9% Table Beer.
Tasting notes: 24:02 is a light and refreshing Table Beer, designed to give great pint at a lower Abv. Vibrant grapefruit on the nose gives way to a soft nourishing palate of subtle malt sweetness invigorated by a burst of zappy tropical pineapple and passionfruit. A light body and crisp, balanced finish make 24:02 the perfect pint to welcome in the spring.

A note on the names. Quite a common way of naming test beers or specials is to simply number or code them. Some breweries make this their main naming system, most famously in the UK, Brew By Numbers, but I also loved the “Mr Series” by Danish brewery, To Øl, where they used CMYK numbers for Mr Brown, Mr Pink etc. 

We’ve never used codenames like we are on our new specials before (year:number). We previously threw a few names around that fit with our naming conventions (I’ll write a blog about naming beers at some point), with the idea of them relating in some way to the beer itself, the process, its ingredients or the collaboration. Numbering them like this just makes the whole thing a lot simpler. It creates a sort of ‘line up’ for the year and more of a focus on the style.

For the new specials’ label designs, I’ve used a small feature of one of our Artist in Resident, Hello Marine’s pieces. I’d used these dashes from Fest (our Oktoberfest Märzen) on many of last year's specials. This year, I’ve greatly enlarged the style name and each beer will have a different colourway. With the new uniform codenames and designs, I think these look really smart.

We think all of our beers are special, but I hope you get to try some of our ‘specials’ this year.