Extract from The Evening Standard 16th September 1999

A ROOSTER BOOSTER by Andrew Jefford

Great talent rewrites the rule book. In sport, art, business or science, the principle is always the same: when an exceptionally gifted practitioner happens along a world is altered. Everything which comes afterwards must take their work into account.
The particular field I have in mind in the field of brewing. If you like good beer, scented and full of complex flavour you'll probably have tried many ales produced by regional brewers and microbrewers. There are hundreds to choose from.
Then one day someone offers you a pint of something you haven't heard of before. It has twice as much aroma as anything you've previously encountered and it lifts your experience of the refreshing, leafy beauty of hops to new heights. In drinking, too, those same leaf-and-flower characters are ringingly, hauntingly evident, memorably painted onto a canvas of unusually clean restrained malt. Whoever brewed this you realise is a virtuoso. The more you drink, the more you realise that ale brewing in Britain will never be the same. This is one brewer who has, truly, rewritten the rules.
The pumpclip names to watch out for, if you don't already know them, are Rooster's and Outlaw; the brewers name is Sean Franklin. His background is unusual, one reason why his beers are the most instantly recognisable in Britain. He began in the wine trade. Not only that but he worked for Louis Latour in Burgundy at Corton Grancey, on and off, for three years, and studied Oenology, too, under Professor Emile Peynaud in Bordeaux. Yet despite this background Franklin could not get a suitable wine job when he returned to England. He was reduced to cab-driving in Harrogate.
His experiences had taught him that the wine trade was full of chicanery. He once worked as a bottler in Wapping and had seen the same wine come into the cellar in bulk and leave with three different labels and four different vintages on it. "All my confidence is in my taste." And one morning he found himself in the Goose Eye Inn at Laycock just outside Keighley, Yorkshire, tasting the locally brewed Goose Eye Bitter. "It was a spring morning, very crisp, still with a nip in the air. The pub was beginning to fill up. I tasted the beer, and I thought, 'if they can do this, I can do this.' Eighteen months later I had my own brewery.
It has been a long hard road, though: that brewery, Franklin's , was eventually someone else and there was another unsuccessful sortie into the wine trade and more cab driving before Rooster finally strutted out into the daylight. All the while, though, Sean was experimenting with hops. "My theory was that hops could have as much flavour and aroma diversity as grapes. I've discovered that weight for weight they actually have more.
Having watched Sean in action in his Harrogate brewery and compared his work with others, I would say there are two "secrets" as to why Sean beers are different from most ales. The first is his hops: he uses hops from only the finest sources, always vacuum packed and stored at low temperatures. No less importantly he uses American hop varieties like Chinook and old varieties such as Bramling Cross and new varieties like First Gold more intelligently and more creatively than any other brewer I have come across.
And the second secret? He actually claimed to me that he admired the American Bud - because, he said, he knew how difficult it was to make a clean beer with as little flavour as Bud has and because it would make a great base onto which to overlay symphonic hop aromas and tastes. The second secret, in other words, is that he deliberately excludes non-hop flavour input to give his hops maximum impact.
He works with very soft water, which he treats with a minimum of calcium chloride and calcium sulphate to ensure effective fermentations. His malts, a mixture of Maris Otter and Pipkin, are pale in general and he handles them (more wine background) scrupulously to protect them from oxidation.
The yeast does its job, but it doesn't leave a lot of bite and tang in the beer. Fermentations are coolish. His hop additions - though this is surmise, since I wasn't allowed to witness them - are certainly careful and probably very late in the boil to maximise fragrance in the beer rather than having it evaporate and also to minimise raw bitterness.
Sean has created more than a hundred recipes for beers and he's far from finished. There are still plenty of hops he hasn't begun to work on and I don't doubt that that when he does there will be plenty more extraordinary aromas and flavours to come.
The chief problem is that his team of three is working flat out yet only making 40 barrels per week - barley enough to register on the national scale - and there is no bottled Rooster yet. Can microbreweries expand and preserve their soul - and their flavours?
The American model suggests that, with care, this is possible, and no British micro deserves more sympathetic investment more than Rooster.

BITTER TASTE OF A PERFUMED GARDEN
If you think you don't like real ale, perhaps because you've found it murky and astringent, try any well served Rooster or Outlaw beer and I guarantee you will revise your opinion. Sean Franklin uses the Rooster name for his permanent range, like the 3.9% Special, the 4.3% Yankee and Scorcher, and the 4.7% Rooster's; the Outlaw name is used for a huge series of experimental and one-off beers. What are they like? Unclassical, in a word - which may be one reason why, despite ferocious success at regional beer festivals, Rooster has never succeeded in winning the Champion Beer of Britain tag. Most are very pale and clean in flavour, with recessive malt; the bitterness is always soft and nuanced; and you'll find them full of perfume garden aromas and flavours.
The problem is tracking them down. There are no pubs in the South where they are always on sale, but some where you find them occasionally include the Wheatsheaf at Borough Market, Stoney Street, SE1; The Surrey Oaks, Parkgate Road, Newdigate, Near Dorking; The Lower Red Lion, Fishpool Street,
St Albans; The Dripping Spring, Tower Road, St Leonard near Hastings and the Evening Star, Surrey Street, Brighton. The White Horse on Parson's Green is closed but when it reopens in a month or two it will stock Rooster and Outlaw regularly, as it has done in the past.
Copyright: Evening Standard.

Caught on the Hops
Richard Neill 'Drinksman'

Pints of fragrance, as well as flavour

Sean Franklin has a novel method of illustrating why his beer tastes as good as it does - It involves generous lumps of dry, green, flaky material, some vigorous rolling of the palms and a lot of sniffing.

The green stuff is hops - sorry to disappoint all those applauding the first marijuana-fuelled beer tasting - and, according to the owner of the Rooster Brewery in Harrogate, they can do for beer what an aromatic grape variety does for wine.

Tearing open a silver vacpac, Sean gives me a dollop of dry, compressed flowers. "Rub it between your hands" he says, "tell me what you can smell", sensing this might be just a cunning plan to prevent note taking, I nevertheless follow his instructions and end up with two hop-covered shoes, very sticky hands and a noseful of lavender and lime. "Amarillo hops from the Yakima Valley," says my host, before stuffing a hand into a second bag for the next test.

The clumps come thick and fast and for someone who thought hops just smelt of hops, the sensory education is illuminating. I pick out grapefruit (Chinook); lychee (Cascade), orange (Yugoslav Golding), lemon (Crystal) and a whole bunch of aromas you would never associate with beer. "If we can isolate these different flavours and get these get them into the beers then, we have a story to tell," says the man I can describe only as a ringmaster trapped inside the body of a brewer.

By all rights, Sean Franklin should be fermenting grapes somewhere in France, not playing around with hops in deepest Yorkshire. After an apprenticeship with a wine merchant in Wapping, he went to Bordeaux to study and came into contact with Emile Peynaud one of France's leading wine experts. "Emile taught me how to put everything into a framework at a time when tasting, wine was fairly rudimentary. He split everything up into minute detail," recalls Franklin. Yet despite such excellent training, he ended up switching his interest to beer after an abortive dip into wine retailing.
His first attempt to get to grips with the grist was in the mid-1980's when he opened up Franklin's Brewery in a shed next door to the Gardener's Arms in Harrogate. Because of a conflict of interests with the landlord, he only ever made one beer there, but after a spell of cab-driving around the Dales, he set up the Rooster Brewery with his wife, Alison, in 1993. The awards and plaudits have never stopped coming in.

All his beers are unusually pale in colour, all are beautifully fragrant and full-flavoured and all are surprisingly elegant and light. "I'm looking to try to get the sort of fruity aromas. that are popular in wine," says Franklin, who makes six beers under the Rooster label and a large number of experimental beers under his second label, The Outlaw Brewing Company. "It's a bit like a chateau's second wine - if we cock up, we've got somewhere to put them," he jokes, although you'd be hard pressed to describe any of the 120-odd beers made in the past seven years as a cock-up.

One of the surprises he pulls out for me is a Bourbon Stout, made with a touch of vanilla and Jim Bean and stored in old whisky barrels. Imagine a beer that tastes like Irish coffee with dark chocolate stirred in and you are somewhere close to the flavour of this magical brew. Sadly stocks at the White Horse in Parson's Green south-west London (the only pub outside Yorkshire that regularly serves Roosters beers) ran out a few hours into St. Patrick's Day. But they still have the excellent lychee-edged Yankee on tap. Another beer you will occasionally find here at the 'Sloaney Pony' is a pale, tangeriney beer called Hooligan, which by some weird coincidence (according to landlord Mark Dorber) sells particularly well when Chelsea are playing at home.

There is no doubt that Sean Franklin is an extraordinary brewer and there is no question he is swimming against the tide of popular marketing opinion. At a time when most brewers are taking flavour out, he is trying to put more in; and at a time that hops are being used as little more than window-dressing he is putting them at central stage.

"The problem in the English beer industry is that we are afraid to add new tastes to the spectrum that is already there," says Franklin. "In America, the microbrewery movement is far more adventurous. They will try anything."

Asked whether he regrets not becoming a winemaker he says there is no lingering urge to work with grapes. "With beer there is a chance to produce something every day, whereas with wine you have just one opportunity a year. I'm on brew number 1,261 at the moment, which in wine terms is the equivalent of working over a thousand vintages".

But his wine connections haven't weakened and in a strange but appropriate twist, the wine-broking company Farr Vintners is planning to invest in Roosters Brewery. We believe in recognising quality, whatever form it comes in, and his beers are excellent," says director Stephen Browett, who can usually be found with a pint of real ale in his hand when not trading cases of Le Pin and Romanée-Conti. If the deal goes ahead, the Farr Vintner's funds will allow Franklin to relocate to bigger premises, increase his production and move into bottled beers.

For the moment, though, Rooster beers can be found on tap in selected pubs around North Yorkshire and if you still need further persuasion to seek them out, let me leave you with the words of the landlord of The Maltings in York. In a quiet moment between sips of Silver Arrow (one of Franklin's "second label" beers) he turned to me and with a delivery of Boycottian directness, said:
"That man Franklin … E's God and this is God's water."

Top of the Hops

This article apeared in the Daily Telegraph on Sat 8 April 2000Top of the hops

Can humble ales ever be as fine as wine? Yorkshire brewer Sean Franklin thinks so, as he tells Michael Jackson

Saturday, 27 October 2001


The stranger on the phone said he had studied the science of wine-making in Bordeaux, under Emile Peynaud, and now wished to do some research in the American north-west. Did I have any thoughts? "Interesting Pinot Noirs," I replied, "but I am more concerned with north-western hops." To my surprise so was he. Better still, I thought I detected a Yorkshire accent – a man from God's own county.

Sean Franklin may have inherited his Christian name from an Irish forbear, but he was born in Leeds. At the Turkey Inn, in the hamlet of Goose Eye, near the village of Layock, not far from Keighley, he encountered the light on the road to Damascus. It was a shaft of sunlight, refracted through a pint of ale. A moment, a mood; such are the turns in life. "A cool, spring morning. The beer was well served and refreshing. It was made on the premises. From that moment, the idea that I could make beer gripped my imagination. It became an obsession."

Can wine be upstaged by beer? For some of us, it can. Either drink can be merely a means of ingesting alcohol, or it can have flavours that tempt us to the chase. Hunting flavours, in all their complexity, finding their origins is an intense preoccupation for Sean Franklin.

He found a Pinot Noir that especially excited him in the American north-west, but it was in the heartland of hop cultivation in the US, the Yakima Valley of Washington state. Franklin also developed a passion for the valley's best known and famously floral hop variety, the Cascade.

Recently, more than two decades of conversations, arguments, letters and e-mails after our first phone conversation, he recalled his travels around that particular meeting point of grapes and hops. (There are similar rendezvous for eclectic drinkers in Kent, Sussex, and northern France; the south of Germany; Bohemia and Moravia.)

"Grapes can show great individuality, but hops are capable of more," Franklin concludes. He still finds himself matching grape and hop varieties to explain aromas and flavours. Even people who don't aspire to connoisseurship have heard of grape varieties; hardly anyone outside the brewing industry can name a hop. Wine presents itself as being worthy of knowledge, and therefore respect; the lesson should be learned by beer, much more popular, but far less valued.

One of the most obvious lessons is the marketability of varietal wines. Franklin makes a varietal beer, but does not identify it as such (marketing is not his strong point). It is called Yankee, and is hopped entirely with Cascades. Like all of his beers, it is available only on draught, cask-conditioned. Almost all of his beers are brewed exclusively from pale malts with soft flavours, so that the assertive hop can dominate. His use of the hop always emphasises aroma first, then flavour, rather than simple bitterness.

In the Cascade hop, Franklin finds the robust citrus of the Muscat grape and the lychee character of the Gewürztraminer. The Chinook hop reminds him more of the "cat's pee", gooseberry and blackcurrant of the Sauvignon Blanc. And the newly fashionable Liberty hop? A little hesitation here, then he settles for the raspberry aromas and flavours of Cabernet Franc.

All of these are Washington State hops. Franklin has led a trend among small British brewers toward the robust, aromatic, varieties of Washington and Oregon. A side effect has been to encourage fresh thinking on the ways in which the aromas and flavours of any hop variety are orchestrated in brewing.

This is bringing new approaches to the use of the more subtle, complex English varieties, too. You can taste the result in Sean Franklin's newest beer, though you may have to hunt for the product.

Franklin's name lingers on a brewery that he in no longer owns, in Harrogate. He sold that in order to expand, brewing for several years in the same town, under the name Rooster's. He has just expanded again, moving Rooster's to a hangar-like building by the river Nidd, in nearby Knaresborough. With splendid incongruity, he is currently fitting a second-hand kettle that I first saw in the Crooked River Brewery, in Cleveland, Ohio.

The English hops come neither from Kent or from the Worcester-Hereford growing region. They recall a time when transport was more difficult, and hops had to be grown locally, even if the plants fared less well. These are Yorkshire hops, grown by Trevor Nicholson, the head gardener for the Harewood House Trust.

The Lascelles family's Palladian house, with contributions by Robert Adam and Capability Brown, is a tourist attraction. It has a beautiful walled garden, educatively featuring plants traditionally used in clothing, food or drink. When a wall was denuded by the dismantling of a crumbling glasshouse, Nicholson wanted to soften its appearance with a climbing plant that would not damage the brickwork. He fancied hops, but thought the brewers' varieties more handsome than those sold for decoration. The sheltered garden and south-facing wall have proven warm enough to crop this far north.

Nicholson went to enormous trouble to improvise equipment to dry the hop cones and pack them tightly, so that they would not oxidise or shrivel. His version of an oast house involves blow-heaters under a long table, its top replaced by mesh. His counterpart to hopsack "pockets" are sterilised baked-bean cans kept under weights.

Franklin was still pondering the contribution of the Harewood hops when I visited his brewery recently. The varieties include Fuggles, which to my nose has a hint of aniseed; Mathon, which I find cinnamon-ish; and the minty Early Bird.

He was also pondering a name for the new beer, which will be available this weekend. I suggested Noble Hop, the term used in the brewing industry for the most aromatic varieties. Franklin was hoping that he would be permitted to refer to Harewood House in the name. Chateau Lascelles, perhaps?

Under the Rooster's Brewery name, Sean Franklin's beers are featured at The Maltings, York, and 80 pubs in Yorkshire, Lancashire and Merseyside, with southern outposts such as the White Horse, Parson's Green, London