DONZOKO X EPOCHAL
PROPER CLASS
A 5% beer brewed with Pilsner malt, spelt and Tardif de Bourgogne hops
We brewed a base of Heidelberg Pils from Bestmalz and spelt from Tags and Co of county Durham. The beer was then hopped heavily with a variety new to us from a producer we both love, Locher Hopfen of Tettnang.
Tardif de Bourgogne (literally 'late Burgundy') is an old, French noble variety grown, in this case, in Tettnang. It's bursting with rich nobility but is also a hop with distinct personality.
The beer has subtle notes of bay, lavender and apricot. On the palate, it has refreshing dryness, deliciously doughy pilsner malt flavour and a crunchy, lingering bitterness.
The name is sort of a mashup of our respective naming procedures. The beer is, we contend, proper class, but the name is also a bit of a logic joke.
When philosophers and logicians talk about infinity, they often use Set Theory to do so rigourously. Set theory is the study of collections of objects, which become interesting mostly when they have an infinite amount of stuff in them.
One of the more mind-bending results in this field is that infinity comes in different sizes and, indeed, that there is a rather large heirachy of increasingly large infinities. Early on, it was found that some of these are so terrifyingly massive that if you include them with the rest of the sets, you'll break the theory. These were hastily hived off and called 'proper classes'.
A proper class, then, is a sort of paradoxically massive infinite totality. For a delightful session beer, it is therefore both an effective name and an ambitious order quantity. May you soon order a Proper Class!