Kmflett's Blog

CAMRA at 50. Hop Back Summer Lightning revisited

One classic beer perhaps well associated with CAMRA is Hop Back Summer Lightning.

It won the Best Strong Bitter category at the Great British Beer Festival in August 1993

I used to drink it(mainly on cask) on a regular basis-often in Wetherspoons pubs where it was frequently available.

Wetherspoons??  some may say. Indeed, this was in the 1990s. There were no craft beer pubs and no craft beer. If you wanted any kind of interesting beer range (cask only) then Spoons was often a good bet.

Summer Lightning was a 5% golden beer, as they were then called. 5% was then at the top of range of beer strength that was regularly available and what marked the beer out was that, for the time, it was hoppy. That is to say that in the balance between malt and hops that makes a decent, drinkable beer, it was tilted a little way towards the hop. That marked it out from many beers of the era where the balance was a good deal more towards the malt. There is nothing wrong with that but Summer Lightning offered a different taste in beer that just hadn’t been around.

I was motivated to revisit it by a social media discussion about which beers had started those who now drink ‘craft’ on a journey in that direction.

I found a couple of bottles in Waitrose (it’s also in Morrisons) and duly tried one. The taste was much as I remembered, although the bottled version is no longer bottle conditioned. Did it still taste hoppy? Up to a point but not as hoppy as many beers now. Rather the malt side of things was a bit more pronounced than might be usual in 2021.

Cloudwater tweeted that Summer Lightning was one of the beers that started the developments in brewing that led to where we are now. I agree, but its still a decent drinkable beer 30 odd years on. In short still a classic.

I wonder if Hop Back have ever considered doing a Double Summer Lightning….