Discover how brewer and scientist Nathan Vadeboncoeur, founder of Project Hop and Brasserie du Bon Temps, is reviving historical beer styles by researching and recreating IPAs from different eras. His journey from hop quality assurance to historical brewing has equipped Vadeboncoeur with the knowledge to meticulously recreate these beers using period-appropriate ingredients, water chemistry, and brewing techniques to provide modern drinkers with an authentic taste of beer history.
Many beer lovers have heard the folklore surrounding the origins of the India Pale Ale – that English brewers added massive quantities of hops to their barrels of pale ale in order to prevent the beer from spoiling on its long journey to India, where it would slake the thirst of British soldiers. The hoppy bite of the IPA was thus born.
The story isn’t quite as simple as that, though. In recent years, beer historians and writers such as Martyn Cornell and Joshua Bernstein have provided more nuanced explanations of IPA history. However, the core ideas remain: beginning in the 18th century, pale ales were increasingly hopped to survive the journey to southern climes, including India, and the style became ever more popular over the next couple of centuries.
Intellectual understanding of the IPA is one thing, but what did these early versions actually taste like? While there are relatively few 18th and 19th-century brewing-related records, a few survive that sketch out the shape of these older beers. Brewer and scientist Nathan Vadeboncoeur, founder of Project Hop and Brasserie du Bon Temps, has dug into the beer archives to find out how to brew these original versions of the IPA. And now you can buy some to try at home!
The Beginnings: Hop Science and the Roots of Beer
Vadeboncoeur’s Project Hop was initially not a brewing project at all, but a company rooted in his training as an environmental scientist. Launched in 2017, the original Project Hop offered quality assurance services for BC’s hop growers. As he worked on assessing hop quality across the province, he became increasingly interested in hop terroir. Wine has terroir, so why not beer?
He noted that terroir – the soil, the microbes, the surrounding vegetation – affects hop flavours, even among hops of the same variety. He realized that if brewers knew they could count on the quality and flavour of a particular hop, they would be more likely to purchase – and thus he could help boost the business of small hop farmers and encourage more experimentation in hop production.
The Covid Pivot and Founding the Brasserie du Bon Temps
However, the COVID-19 pandemic ground everything to a halt. At that time, he pivoted from hop terroir to hop history. His company Project Hop became the current Project Hop, which is his line of historical IPAs, and from Project Hop grew his brewery label: Brasserie du Bon Temps.
Vadeboncoeur was a homebrewer, but in 2020, after he was invited to brew some single-hop beers at R&B Brewing, he learned to scale up and refine his techniques. He began looking into old recipes, experimenting with test batches, and serving some historical styles to R&B’s taproom customers. Brasserie du Bon Temps and Project Hop were born.
“I was able to talk to customers about how it was a recipe from 200 years ago and tell them the story,” says Vadeboncoeur. “The story really makes the beer, and to go back in time offers a different dimension to that experience. People seem to really like that.” And customers at R&B enjoyed Vadeboncoeur’s adventurous beers, which included an Old IPA, a grisette, an Abbey-style ale, and a Scandinavian beer called Råøl, or “Raw Ale.” This beer, according to Project Hop’s description, is made without boiling the wort: “This raw (unboiled) beer is flavoured by infusing hot water with juniper branches […] then pouring this over grain to extract sugars, then straight into fermentation with a heritage Norwegian yeast.” Not something you’d easily find on a craft brewery’s tap list!
Bringing the Past to Life
Brasserie du Bon Temps brews out of other breweries, such as [the now closed] Flashback and Tinhouse Brewing, and has that same spirit of collaboration in its name. The brewery is named after the Order of Good Cheer, founded by Samuel de Champlain in 1606 to help boost morale for the settlers of New France. It became, essentially, the first gastronomic drinking club; after its founding, deaths dropped dramatically. The brewery honours beer’s history of bringing people together through flavour and experience. According to the website, “Brasserie du Bon Temps re-creates historical recipes to bring you the story of beer from accidental discovery to the world’s favourite tipple. Our beers are faithful recreations of old styles or research-based best guesses when the historical trail runs cold.”
The goal of Brasserie du Bon Temps is to recreate historical beers, including the line of hop-focused IPAs under Project Hop. But how did Vadeboncoeur find the historical information that allowed him to do this? He’s a scientist by trade rather than a historian, but he certainly has the research skills required to unearth such treasures. One open-access resource he used was Project Gutenberg, which provides digitized scans of thousands of old books. He was looking for needles in haystacks, but he found enough information about breweries and brewing practices to allow him to brew his historical IPA mix pack: the 1754, the 1823, the 1870, and the 1914.
1754: This beer imitates the earliest beers that were brewed at Hodgson’s Bow Brewery in London and shipped to India in the mid-18th century. The original beer used basic floor-malted pale malt and plenty of East Kent Goldings hops. It would have aged into a “stock ale” – a stronger beer, something closer to a barleywine – on its journey to India. The movement of the ship would have agitated the brewers yeast left in the beer, but would also have enlivened the Brettanomyces yeast living in the wood of the barrel. The Brett would eat all the long-chain sugars that regular yeast couldn’t, and would impart that aged ale flavour as well.
To replicate this process, Vadeboncoeur adjusted his water to match London’s water chemistry at the time and estimated the alpha acid levels of older varieties of East Kent Goldings in order to calculate an equivalent amount in the hop’s modern version. He then added a specific strain of Brett to the wort and left it in oak barrels over the hot summer months to reproduce the conditions of the voyage to India.
1823: This beer replicates the Burton Brewery’s imitation of the Bow Brewery’s IPA (Project Hop’s 1754). When Hodgson decided he didn’t want to use the East India Company to ship the Bow’s beer anymore, the EIC looked for another brewer who could make the same product. They found Samuel Allsopp and his brewery at Burton-on-Trent. According to legend, Allsopp brought this beer to his brewer and asked if he could make it. The brewer spat it out in disgust: “Yes, I can make this. But who would want to drink it?” Many people, it turns out. The Burton version of Hodgson’s IPA uses the same recipe, with the exception of the water chemistry, which is unique to Burton-on-Trent. The Burton water is much harder, and there’s 4 times the mineral content in this beer, which helps the yeast eat more sugar and thus makes the beer a bit drier. Meanwhile, the sulfates enhance the hop flavour.
1870: This beer is the same as the 1823, but with no barrel-aging and no Brettanomyces added. It uses East Kent Goldings hops but adds another hop variety to the mix: Strisselspault, a French hop.
1914: This final historical IPA owes its lower ABV and lighter flavour to the popularity of lager combined with anti-German sentiment at the onset of World War I. English drinkers didn’t want a German product, so they adjusted their English beer to align with the current lager trend. This beer includes corn in the mash because there wasn’t enough barley available, and uses only East Kent Goldings hops, nothing from the continent. There’s no barrel-aging or wild yeast. It’s light and very drinkable – the patriotic option for those who didn’t want to drink German lagers.
In addition to the historical IPA mix-pack, Vadeboncoeur also brews and sells other historical styles, such as the King Gambrinus Adambier, a velvety 10% ABV dark beer which replicates a 500-year-old German beer known for its lightly smoky taste and dark fruit character, and Biere St. Bertin, a medieval gruit ale (an unhopped beer flavoured with herbs). He currently brews out of Tinhouse Brewing Co. in Port Coquitlam, where he recently had a beer release. Customers who stopped by Tinhouse that day could taste a flight of historical IPAs while listening to Vadeboncoeur’s explanation of their origins. Phil Smith, brewer and co-owner of Tinhouse, says his brewery has welcomed small contract brewers for several years. “We were alerted to the fact that Nathan was looking for a home to brew some fun and experimental beers. It’s been a long work in progress, but we are so happy to have helped, and excited to have these beers hitting the market now,” says Smith. “It’s been an interesting process working with Nathan and watching him craft these IPAs that are true to the era in which they originated.”
You can sign up for the Brasserie du Bon Temps Beer Club to receive all the information about beer releases from both the Brasserie and Project Hop. The five-dollar monthly membership fee includes perks like member-only articles and videos, a live monthly presentation and Q&A on beer history and brewing, 10% discount on all Brasserie and Project Hop products, and the option to purchase quarterly micro-batch, member-only beers. Vadeboncoeur hopes to have regular production of his core historic beers, with seasonal releases that reflect when they would have been available in their original forms. Customers can also buy these beers directly – no membership required – from the Project Hop website.
If you’re looking for more opportunities to sample Brasserie du Bon Temps and Project Hop’s historical IPAS, you might be in luck if you also picked up tickets to the upcoming (sold out) North Island Craft Beer Festival on March 15, 2025. Vadeboncoeur will be there to pour these unique brews for Island beer lovers!
