Beer. Birra. Bier. - A blog about beer and brewing.

Brewdog Blitz!

2012-01-26T09:10:00.000Z

If you want to learn about beer, you’d do much worse than to start homebrewing. What better way to understand the ingredients and processes integral to beer, than to get hands-on with them? I’m always reminded of this when I drink beers like Brewdog’s Blitz!. Beers of super-low strength that aim to deliver the same flavour hit as their heavyweight rivals.

Attempting to brew one of my own made me appreciate just how difficult it is. 5 IBUs either side of target and you’ve missed by 25 percent, a final gravity that’s 5 points too low and you’ve screwed up your ABV and dried out your beer. It’s a balancing act where everything sits on a knife edge, the slightest mistake will stand out like a sore thumb and there’s nowhere to hide.

Step up Brewdog Blitz!, a modest 2.8 percenter that’s clearly inspired by recent legislative change to halve duty on beer brewed between 1.2 and 2.8 percent ABV. Described as a West Coast hop bomb, it’s brewed with a grist of only caramalt and is probably best described as a US amber ale.

There’s lots of caramelly, malty, sticky toffee aroma that follows through into the taste. I’m thinking sweets with too much sugar in them, Flumps and candy floss. Sitting atop that is a load of American hops. Not in a traditional citrus and pine West Coast IPA sort of a way though; more a reserved, jammy, tutti frutti ice cream, candied peel sort of a way. The body is thin and watery, but whatever, what were you expecting for 2.8 percent!?

5am Saint Junior.

Consider me a fan. This is the beer that Nanny State should’ve been. Beers of this strength might not deliver the depth of flavour and character of those that are stronger, but what they do offer is a decent alternative for those that want something weak but worthwhile.

I tried Blitz! when the Camden bar opened and I loved it. Here, in the bottle, it’s great too. This should be on at all times in Brewdog bars, I would drink a lot of it and I can see other people doing the same. Top marks.

A Letter From An Old Friend

2012-01-19T10:21:00.001Z

I recieved a letter from an old friend. It felt like something I should post:

Dear Mark,

I’m hoping you can help me. I’m worried my parents don’t love me anymore.

It started when they sent me away to boarding school at Meantime. Lost in a foreign land of cockney accents and jellied eels, they promised I’d be made here for the export market only, but people are drinking me in the UK and they’re asking questions. They say I’m slowly losing my punk spirit, becoming more Meantime by the day! My noble hop character and biscuity malt base seem to be vanishing, replaced by indifferent aromatics and a cut-green-apple flavour so similar to London Lager that it’s difficult to defend myself.

Things move so quickly at home and Christmas was as busy as ever. The new bar was opened in Camden and everything went to plan. Everything, except my invite to the party. They were all there, the parents, my brothers - Punk IPA and Hardcore, the cousins - Paradox and Tokyo*, even friends of the family - the foreign imports. Not me though, no space for me on the draught lineup. Overlooked again.

I feel like they just want me out of the way. They hide me in an Equity for Punks blanket, my bottle label says nothing about me anymore, nothing about the way I taste or the ingredients that make me, just generic blurb about shares and international importers. Why me!?

So what do you think? Am I overreacting?

I’m just worried. I used to be their pride and joy. I used to be a statement. You could compare me to mass-produced lager and I’d stand head and shoulders above, encapsulating the Brewdog ethic and mission statement in every mouthful. Now I just feel neglected, like I’m no longer part of the family; I don’t feel like I’m the type of beer that Brewdog should be associated with.

Yours,
77 Lager.

Thornbridge Kipling - Speachless

2012-01-12T13:01:00.000Z

Thornbridge Kipling.

Images from here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

The Golden Pints 2011

2012-01-05T22:01:00.014Z

Well I knew I was indecisive, but this took ages! Here are my Golden Pint winners for 2011.

Best UK Draught Beer
To pack so much flavour into a beer so small; Redemption Trinity really is a triumph. Camden Town managed to change my mind on a whole style with their Gentleman’s Wit. Brewdog took a beer that’d become one dimensional and too bitter, and they turned it into an IPA that rivals anything from the US. The winner however, is a beer that had me coming back time and again, a beer that takes the Nelson Sauvin hop and makes it dance on a pedestal. Thornbridge Kipling.

Best UK Bottled or Canned Beer
I had some cracking bottles of Oakham Citra last year. There’s one brewery synonymous with bottled beer though, and that’s The Kernel. Their Imperial Brown Stout was fantastic, but even better was batch 2 of the Coffee IPA.

Best Overseas Draught Beer
Unfiltered, unpasteurised Pilsner Urquell was there at one of the best beer-related nights of 2011 - the European Beer Bloggers Conference. It was there when I finished a magical trip around the brewery cellars in Pilsen, and it was there when I drank one of the most ridiculous-but-delicious pints of the year. Inimitable, beautiful, delicious.

Best Overseas Bottled or Canned Beer
A runner up and a winner linked by age. I drank Great Divide Wood Aged Double IPA on Christmas day and it forced me to think about the ageing and storage of beer in a completely new way. I drank Cantillon Rose de Gambrinus at the brewery recently and the bottling was so fresh that it felt like I was drinking framboise for the first time all over again. The Cantillon takes it.

Best Overall Beer
Unfiltered, unpasteurised Pilsner Urquell. Simply put, if you love beer and you’ve only tried the standard version, you owe yourself a trip to Pilsen.

Best Pumpclip or Label
Whenever Johanna Basford works with Brewdog, the result rocks. The bottle label for Sunk Punk (above, from here) was a true work of art. I also think Badger are worth a mention for the overhaul they gave their bottles, and for the way they consistently display flavour profile and food matching information on their labelling.

Best UK Brewery
For picking up where they left off in 2010, The Kernel. For seizing 2011 and making it their own, Magic Rock. For most exciting me about 2012, Camden Town.

Best Overseas Brewery
Mikkeller rarely put a foot wrong, and when you consider the number of variables brought about by brewing in so many borrowed breweries, the opportunity for a cock-up is huge. Testament indeed to the sheer brewing skill and expertise of Mr Mikkel Borg Bjergsø. In truth, however, this is the easiest category to pick a winner for. The Cantillon brewery is one-of-a-kind. I could happily spend every Saturday morning there, watching American tourists recoil at their first taste of lambic and drinking some of the best beer in the entire world.

Pub/Bar of the Year
Moeder Lambic Fontainas has an awesome draft beer lineup and the kind of service that every barman should aspire to. Barcade in Brooklyn is the best beer bar I’ve ever been to. Ever.

Beer Festival of the Year
For its location, beer list, and for the amount of Gadds’ beer involved ... Planet Thanet. The London Brewers Alliance Showcase was great again too.

Independent Retailer of the Year
The Bottle Shop in Canterbury. Customer service to rival Moeder Lambic.

Online Retailer of the Year
For quality of service and product range, it has to be My Brewery Tap.

Best Beer Blog or Website
MrDrinkNeat. Video beer reviews the way (I think) they should be done – informative, well edited and succinct. Pencil & Spoon goes without saying.

Food and Beer Pairing of the Year
Brooklyn East India Pale Ale and pulled pork at Fette Sau. (To be completely honest though, the bourbon we had was even better).

In 2012 I’d Most Like To ...
Write more outside of the blog, visit the US again, see Paula Radcliffe win the Olympic marathon.

British Guild of Beer Writers

2011-12-05T09:57:00.005Z

The British Guild of Beer Writers held their annual awards last week, and at that ceremony I was honoured to be awarded the silver prize in the 'Best Use of Online Media' category. If you write or communicate about beer in Britain, the guild awards are as big as it gets, to walk away with an award is just a huge honour.

I write this blog because I love beer. Beer and brewing fill my head with enthusiasm and ideas, they provoke me to be creative and this blog is my outlet for that creativity. Whether it's a homebrew recipe, comparing hop varieties to Star Wars, bursting to tell people how good the beer I just drank is or an experiment I've been making a mess of the kitchen with, BeerBirraBier is my outlet and my means by which to create.

The fact that people read what I write and engage with each other over it - that's the icing on the cake. To be given an award? That's like the cherry and the delicate little dusting of sugar ...

Congratulations to all the other winners on the night. It's fantastic to spend an evening with so many talented people, and it really inspires me to continue improving.

London and South East Craft Brewing Competition 2011

2011-11-17T16:28:00.007Z

This weekend past, the London Amateur Brewers hosted the first ever ‘London and South East Craft Brewing Festival’ in Wimbledon, London. Borrowing heavily from the now defunct Sutton competition that’s taken place in previous years, the emphasis was on a structured judging segment before an informal festival-style drinking session later in the day.

With entries totalling in excess of one hundred, across styles as varied as best bitters, saisons, new world hopped weisse beers, lagers and smoked ales, the standard was generally very high. The knowledge and enthusiasm in the room was obvious, but it’s good to see that backed up by some quality output too.

Judging came courtesy of the country’s newly qualified BJCP judges and members of the National Guild of Wine and Beer Judges. The award for best in show on this occasion going to Tom Greasley for his ‘Sarcastro Stout’, whilst Fergus McIver picked up the people’s choice gong.

Bigger things planned for next year. Here are some photos:

The Kernel - Double Black IPA

2011-11-14T16:22:00.007Z

There’s a scene in Cloverfield where the mutilated, dismembered head of lady liberty is seen crashing down a Manhattan street. Apparently unfazed by a glimpse of the colossal monster responsible for this over-sized jeu de Boules, the nearby New Yorker reaches for his phone to record the moment. The scene sticks in my mind because every now and then I feel the same compulsion. Yeah it’s rare that London‘s under the attack of an unknown, possibly extraterrestrial entity at the time, but that basic urge to capture and record is the same.

The Kernel Brewery needs no introduction. If you’re a fan of good beer or you spend even the smallest of your free time visiting the pubs and restaurants of the capital, you’ll have heard of them. Their double black IPA - cannily named ‘Double Black’ - is an insanely-mental drink. Clearly it bears significant resemblance to French neoclassical sculptures of Roman goddesses because, upon taking a sip, I was sent immediately scurrying for pen and paper.

In this awesome age of ‘OMG!’, ‘legend!’ and ‘Best.Blah.Ever.’, you’d be excused for dismissing the use of a compound adjective like ‘insanely-mental’ as typical blogger hyperbole. Not this time though. This time I mean it.

The dark brown colour - rather than an ominous opaque black - and fresh hop notes in the aroma give rise to a false sense of security. There’s so much sweetness in this beer; it combines with the fudgey, toffee and darker roasted character of the malt to appear deep and rich and tar-like. It coats your mouth like a spoonful of black treacle before a bulldozer of bitterness powers in, stunning the back of your throat like a slap round the face on a freezing cold day. And if that bitterness makes the cut, then the burn of alcohol rubs salt deep into the wound; the one-two combination working to devastating, stinging effect.

Halfway down the glass, my tongue curling, my head spinning; I wasn’t ready for this assault, this is an unfair fight! Part of me says leave the rest and move on, but part won’t let me. That part that orders vindaloo, that throws hot sauce in the shopping trolley; it’s poking me with a stick and it’s egging me on.

The Kernel Double Black is an abusive challenge of a beer. It will mess you up. It’ll knock you out and then help you to your feet, leaving you with a parting kiss, knowing that you’ll forgive it and come back for more.

The Kernel Double Black is a beer that you experience as much as taste. You need that experience in your life. Look out for the beer at beermerchants.com or direct from the brewery.

London Brewers Alliance 2011 Showcase

2011-11-10T14:40:00.006Z

At the end of last month the London Brewers Alliance held the second of their annual showcase events. Here's a few photos from the day:

Sick Lambic

2011-11-04T13:06:00.005Z

My rhubarb lambic is acting up.

If you missed the first two posts, here’s a catch up. With some surplus homebrew, some sour beer dregs, a homemade lactic starter and a couple of sticks of rhubarb, I fashioned something close to a sour beer. Maybe. Things were going well, the first bottle tasted great, samples from the fermenter grew tarter and I thought I had a bit of a winner on my hands.

Five months later, I have this:

Now wait, don’t panic yet. In his book 'Wild Brews', Jeff Sparrow tells us that “the fermentation of lambic occurs in a specific sequence, each microbial species growing at different rates before reading a high enough cell count to act, in turn, on the wort”. The fermentation of sour beer is far from straight forward, could this just be the next stage in a normal wild fermentation? The pellicle that formed after I pitched the lactic starter started to break up and drop away, then in came the monster you see above, slowly but steadily it grew over the top of the beer. Could this new pellicle be the work of a microbe that had sat dormant, waiting for its chance to take control?

Frank Boon, head man at lambic brewery Brouwerij Boon, tells us that “after four or five months, it [lambic beer] can be very unpleasant. The bitterness disappears, the first taste of acidity appears, and it has less esters than the end. At certain moments it is very pleasant, and others it is not”." A condition that Jean Van Roy of Brouwerij Cantillon attributes to fermentation cycle in combination with ambient temperature and season: “Before September, the beer will be sick”. Sparrow explains “During the first warm day, certain strains of pediococcus cerevisiae – sometimes known as Bacillus viscosus bruxellensis – give the beer viscosity. This condition is described in some texts as 'ropiness' for the long strands of slime produced on the top of the wort. All lambic goes through this sickness and comes out the other side ready to blend of serve”.

So what’s the diagnosis for my beer? Is it sick? Will it get better? Will it come back stronger, smelling of roses and ethyl lactacte? Or is this a terminal case of mould that’ll slowly spell the end?

Cross your fingers.

Quotes taken from Jeff Sparrow's excellent book Wild Brews: Beer Beyond the Influence of Brewer's Yeast.

Pulled Pork, Fette Sau Style

2011-10-22T12:54:00.013+01:00

Consecutive blogs on a single topic? Must be love.*

“I think I know just what we need”

Holiday, New York city, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, brewery tour, beer, hungry, Fette Sau, BBQ, the most delicious pulled pork, incredible burnt end beans, wonderfully fresh Brooklyn IPA, fantastic bourbon.

Booo! Early mornings, early nights, three hour commutes, eight hours in front of a computer screen, instant coffee, UHT milk, the office canteen, overcooked porridge and dried-out baked potatoes.

We hit the weekend, I’m missing New York and I’ve got a craving for BBQ like you wouldn’t imagine. I’ve been punching the words “Fette Sau” into YouTube and Google at random intervals throughout the week, a compulsion that’s proven more fruitful than I’d assumed it would. It turns out that the dry rub Matt Lang uses on his meat isn’t the closely guarded secret that it has every right to be. There are in fact numerous sources online that claim to know it. Sweet.

Sense** prevails following a morning investigating the feasibility of a meat smoker made from a terracotta plant pot and a whole load of lighter fluid. So I can’t recreate the smoke element of that delicious pulled pork, but I can get top quality meat, and I’ve got something that claims to be the dry rub. Close enough.

1/3 cup garlic powder
1 1/2 Tbsp ground cumin
2 1/3 cup dark brown sugar
1 Tbsp cayenne pepper
1/4 cup ground cinnamon
2 cup ground coffee (espresso grind)
2 cup kosher salt
1/2 cup ground black pepper

This is the perfect thing to cook when you’ve got people coming round for beer. Wake up, mix a load of dry ingredients together, rub the mix all over a piece of fatty pork shoulder, stick it in the oven at gas mark 2.5 and forget about it. Somewhere between 6 and 8 hours later when the beers are flowing, all you need to do is take the meat out and pull it apart with your hands. What could be simpler?

If you wanna get all expert about it, I think it makes sense to take the rind off the meat first. I got the butcher to do this, leaving some of the fat behind but not too much. Pulled pork isn’t about the crackling and you might have some grief getting the skin to crisp up with the oven so low, easier to get rid. Put the shoulder on a rack, in a baking tray. You don’t want it to stew in the liquid that escapes through cooking, so getting it up and off the bottom of the tray is the way to go.

It’s close to Fette Sau. The smoke is missing for sure. I tried using some smoked paprika in place of the cayenne pepper but it wasn’t nearly enough to work. Close or not, it’s most definitely delicious. I was cooking 2 pounds of meat for 2 hungry people and, even having halved the dry rub recipe, I easily had twice as much rub as I needed. It’s also worth pointing out the difference between kosher salt and standard salt. The much larger grains of kosher salt mean that less of them fit into a measuring cup, you can’t just substitute for the same amount of table salt.

When I had this at the restaurant, the Brooklyn IPA worked pretty well with it. Every beer pairing pales in comparison to a glass of bourbon though. The woody, oaky quality gives an interesting depth to the charred meat, the sweetness tempering that aggressive rub. Delicious.

* Listen carefully, that’s the sound of my girlfriend simultaneously tutting and rolling her eyes ...

** The girlfriend tells me it would be a stupid idea in our shared garden. She’s right, when I do things like this it usually ends in disaster or personal injury. Sometimes both.

Fette Sau, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

2011-10-19T16:31:00.001+01:00

Fette Sau is easier found by moonlight than by sunlight. In the evening, follow your ears; the gaggle of the forty-five-minute-queue will lead you to the darkened alley of an entrance. By day, it’s your nose that’ll show you the way. If you’re looking for the entrance, you’ll walk straight past it, twice, but the aroma of smoke and roast is a constant signpost that hangs thick in the air from a block away. You can’t miss it.

There’s a twinge of embarrassment as the big, bright sign reading “Fette Sau” clips you round the ear for being stupid. Embossed on the black night sky in electric-neon pink, it’s now more obvious than your overwhelming sense of excitement. Shuffling down that darkened, average looking alleyway, you wait for the big reveal. A right turn, a left turn, and then the restaurant shows its hand, full house, literally.

Inside, a single expansive room with an awkwardness about its shape is filled with beaten up wooden tables and benches. Every seat is taken. Ahead the serving counter stretches away from you to the back wall and then out to the left in a sort of drunken 'L' shape. It’s dark, there’s a fog of wood smoke in the air, the walls are stripped back to brick and the ceiling doesn’t really exist. It feels like an underground school canteen. The first in a series of stations is a blackboard that displays today’s menu, cuts of meat against prices per pound, a handful of sides and extra bread if you want it. Next a glass-fronted counter that keeps the food warm whilst you order, piles of blackened meat stacked on top of each other inside, enjoying a quick rest on their journey from the smoker in the background to your stomach. The man in control carves the last ribs from a rack and leans over to scrub out the option with the heel of his hand. A steel tray is placed in front of us before being lined with brown paper, our order is taken, the tray filled, and we’re ushered along the line for payment.

The bar is our final stop. Twenty microbrews on draught, dispensed through taps with handles fashioned from old butchery utensils. The bourbon list is vast, the biggest I’ve seen. The barman props himself up against the back bar, he’s wearing a proud look on his face, a look that says he knows I’ll enjoy what I eat and drink before I even order from him.

Stepping back outside to find some space, greedily scoffing down the first mouthful, my suspicions are confirmed. Fette Sau is perfect. The food is delicious, the beer and bourbon are fantastic enhancements, the environment is one you experience rather than use.

I’d go back and tell the staff, but they already know.

Picture from here. Fette Sau is a BBQ restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. If you ever find yourself in the area, drop everything and go.

Englishman Drinking In New York

2011-10-13T11:52:00.000+01:00

If you're on Manhattan, head towards The Ginger Man, Rattle 'n' Hum, Blind Tiger or The Pony Bar. Brooklyn: Barcade, Spuyten Duyvil (above) or the brewery.

New Yorkers will happily drink pint measures of a beer that's too strong to be drunk in pint measures. If you ask though, most places will sell you a half pour for half price.

Very strong beer will often come in a short measure. 10oz, 8oz, something like that. Ask for one by name and you'll be given the smaller serving automatically.

Always take ID with you. I might be lucky(?) enough to avoid age checks in England, but I was asked 3 or 4 times in NY for ID. Easier just to have it with you at all times.

New Yorkers don't know where the date of birth section is on a UK driving licence.

Look out for the option of a flight on the bar menu. Often a selection of around 5 taster pours of your choosing, it's a good way to try a few beers without getting hammered too quickly.

Drinkers in New York tip very well. The result of this is that barmen will expect you to tip well also. If you're paying by cash, the standard is to leave a dollar per drink on the bar after you've paid for your round. The first time you do this you'll wonder if you've made a mistake, they will eventually pick the notes up though. Honest. If you start a tab or ask to pay by card, there's a handy space on the receipt slip for adding a tip amount.

Practice your signature, chip and pin doesn't appear to have arrived in New York yet.

For some unknown reason, when you pay for a round by cash, you always seem to get dollar notes in the change ...

The plus side to all this tipping business is that the barmen of New York are some of the friendliest, most knowledgeable people you'll ever encounter.

In Opposite Land (also known as the USA), cask is the new keg. Whilst everything I personally tried was great, I was warned over and over that cellarmanship is still some way behind the enthusiasm for cask beer. Take caution.

In Opposite Land, people eat with their feet and walk on their hands.*

Don't fall for the IPA fries at Rattle 'n' Hum. They're just fries. Good fries, granted, but just fries all the same.

If you've ever wished you could buy a shirt or glass emblazoned with the logo of your favourite bar, you're in luck. NYC is merch-crazy.

If you are planning a trip to The Big Apple soon, keep it yourself, I'll just get jealous.

* Note: This might be a lie.

Tap East, Westfield Stratford City

2011-09-29T16:44:00.005+01:00

I saw Scotland play Argentina this weekend. Tit-for-tat going in at the halftime interval, Scotland came out to score twice, putting real space between the two teams for the first time. Then it happened, guard down, caught on the back foot, Lucas Amorosino punishes the Scots with a moment of individual brilliance, dancing round four defenders, crashing over the line to score the decisive try. Eighty minutes played, insignificant in comparison to that thirty second period, one single moment that defined the match and encapsulated its story.

On 13th September 2011, Tap East opened in Westfield Stratford City. A single moment in time, an important chapter in the story of London beer. As drinkers, brewers, landlords and proponents of quality beer, we’ve been working towards this for some time.

It would be easy to write about the chalkboard walls, the rare bottles on shelving and the glass panels that’ll provide customers with a view of the brew-kit. It would be even easier to write about the service, the draft beer selection and the bottle fridges. Tap East is important for another reason. Tap East is a specialist beer bar and microbrewery in a major shopping centre. A shopping centre, with a Topshop, a John Lewis and a ... a microbrewery and specialist beer bar. Yeah, exactly!

Slumped on a comfy sofa, paddling in a sea of plastic carrier bags, the average shopper now sits. Sipping an ale that was brewed ten feet away, slurping a lager that was aged in the cellar of a craftsman on a different continent. He finishes his conversation about yesterday’s game, picks up the trainers he just bought at Sports Direct and heads off to the food court for something to eat. He does this because he’s an average Londoner, and because beer is now something more than fizzy-yellow lager and old-man-flat-brown.

Drinking New York City

2011-09-23T11:46:00.008+01:00

I’m off to New York City soon and my heart is set on two things: beer and beef. The missus keeps talking about shops and sightseeing, but I’ve chosen to put this down to her odd sense of humour*. I’ve got a rough list of destinations sketched out but, if a job in IT has taught me anything, it’s that the Internet always knows best. So, The Internet, let’s have it. Where does an Englishman in New York go when he wants good food and good beer?

Food
Katz’s Deli
Fette Sau
Shake Shack
Burger Joint
5 Napkin
Nathan’s (if we can get out that far)
Dinosaur BBQ

Beer
Brooklyn Brewery
Barcade
Rattle ‘n’ Hum
Blind Tiger
Gingerman

Shops
Bierkraft
Wholefoods Bowery
New Beer Distributors

Crowdsourcing GO!

*Of course, I’m joking. Shops for the day, food and beer for the evening.

Picture from here.

Dream Beer Festival Lineup

2011-09-20T12:18:00.024+01:00

A post inspired by this and this.

I kinda go to beer festivals to drink new beer, not the ones I know and love. That being said, if I were asked to pick a dream lineup of old favourites, it might look something like this:

Cask
Marble Pint (Is there a better, more flavour-filled session ale?).
Thornbridge Kipling (I love Nelson Sauvin hops).
Oakham Citra (Best application of the Citra hop that I've tasted).
Gadds' No 3 (Hometown classic).
Darkstar Hophead (If there is a better session ale than Pint, it's Hophead).

Keg
Bear Republic Racer 5 (The best American IPA I've tasted).
Victory Prima Pils (An awesome US Pilsner).
Pilsner Urquell (THE Pilsner. Unfiltered and unpasteurised or not at all).
Ayinger Celebrator (Doppel-licious).
Brewdog Punk IPA (Brewdog's crowning glory).
Brewdog Hardcore IPA (Brewdog's other crowning glory).
Augustiner Helles (Simple. Delicious. Simply delicious. Reminds me of Munich).

Bottle
Mikkeller Beer Geek Brunch Weasel (The knockout punch).
Cantillion Rosé De Gambrinus (One for the missus. I'll take a sampler).
Cantillon Gueuze (Halftime refresher).
Kernel SCCANS (Hometown modern-classic).
Orval (Everybody's best mate).
Fuller's Vintage Ale (Different every time you drink it, but constantly great).

Now, tell me that's a festival you wouldn't enjoy!

Image from here.

Revised BJCP Guidelines for IPA

2011-09-16T09:06:00.008+01:00

The Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) serves to "promote beer literacy and the appreciation of real beer, and to recognize beer tasting and evaluation skills". Their style guidelines for India Pale Ale (IPA) were written in 2008 and span English IPA, American IPA and Imperial IPA. To my mind, that doesn't sufficiently cover the variety that exists within the IPA catergory in 2011.

Here's an attempt at a (summarised) update to the guidelines; intended to provoke thought and debate around the IPA style, rather than critque on the BJCP as an organisation:

American IPA

Origin: US interpretation of classic English style.

Aroma: Prominent aroma of citrusy, floral, resinous, piney, American hops. Possible malty sweetness in the background. No fermentation character.

Appearance: Golden through amber to medium reddish copper. Often clear, often hazy through dry hopping. White to off-white persistent head.

Flavour: Prominent citrusy, floral, resinous, piney, American hops. Moderate malt sweetness, some toasty and caramel flavours. Medium-dry to dry finish. No fermentation character. Prominent hop bitterness.

Alcohol: 5.5% to 8.0%

Commercial Examples: Odell IPA, Russian River Blind Pig, Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA.

Imperial IPA

Origin: Up-scaled version of American IPA style.

Aroma and Flavour: As for American IPA, with everything increased. Significantly sweeter, balanced by an equal increase in hop bitterness. Alcohol warmth sometimes evident but fermentation profile still clean.

Appearance: As for American IPA, with a tendency to be slightly darker.

Alcohol: 8.0% to 10.0%

Commercial Examples: Russian River Pliny The Elder, Stone Ruination IPA, Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA.

Triple IPA

Origin: Up-scaled version of the Imperial IPA style.

Aroma and Flavour: As for Imperial IPA, with everything increased. Huge sweetness balanced by massive bitterness. Huge hop aroma and flavour with strong malty, toffee and caramel backbone. Obvious alcohol warmth but clean fermentation profile.

Appearance: As for Imperial IPA.

Alcohol: 10.0% and above.

Commercial Examples: Russian River Pliny The Younger, Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA.

Black IPA

Origin: Modification to American IPA style through the inclusion of darker malts. De-husked black malt often used to provide colour without flavour.

Aroma: Prominent aroma of citrusy, floral, resinous, piney, American hops. Possible malty sweetness in the background. Possible dark malt character, giving notes of roastiness, liquorice, bitter chocolate and coffee. No fermentation character.

Appearance: Opaque black. White to off-white persistent head.

Flavour: Prominent citrusy, floral, resinous, piney, American hops. Moderate malt sweetness, some toasty and caramel flavours. Medium-dry to dry finish. No fermentation character. Prominent hop bitterness. Possible dark malt flavour giving notes of roastiness, liquorice, bitter chocolate and coffee.

Alcohol: 5.5% to 8.0%

Commercial Examples: The Kernel Black IPA, 21st Amendment Back in Black, Windsor & Eton Conqueror.

Traditional English IPA

Origin: A stronger, hoppier pale ale exported to the British living in India around the turn of the 18th century. Often falsely purported to have been brewed stronger to survive the sea voyage, often falsely purported to have been exported for consumption by British troops.*

Aroma: Moderate/high hop aroma of floral, earthy, spicy, grassy English hops. A moderate caramel-like or toasty malt presence is common. Low to moderate fruitiness, either from yeast esters or hops, can be present.

Appearance: Golden through amber to medium reddish copper. Often clear, can be hazy through dry hopping. White to off-white persistent head.

Flavour: Moderate/high hop flavour of floral, earthy, spicy, grassy English hops. Moderate malt sweetness to support hop bitterness; toasty, biscuity, caramel flavours. Medium-dry to dry finish. Prominent hop bitterness. Some fruity ester character from fermentation.

Alcohol: 5.0% to 8.0%

Commercial Examples: Meantime IPA, Worthington White Shield.

Modern English IPA

Origin: A modern beer style that bears no resemblance to traditional English IPA. A lowest common denominator ale, brewed to appeal to as wide a range of people as possible. Linked to the IPA banner in name only.

Aroma: Muted. Perhaps some caramel and toffee notes from crystal malt. Low to moderate fruity esters from the use of an English ale yeast.

Appearance: Golden through amber to medium reddish copper. Always clear. White to off-white thin head. Perhaps a hint of grassy, spicy English hops.

Flavour: Caramel and toffee notes from the use of crystal malt. Fruity esters. Medium-dry to dry finish. Watery, thin mouthfeel. Moderate hop bitterness. Perhaps a hint of grassy, spicy English hops.

Alcohol: 3.0% to 5.0%

Commercial Examples: Greene King IPA.

British Brewed American IPA

Origin: British interpretation of the American IPA style.

Aroma, Appearance and Flavour: As for American IPA.

Alcohol: 5.5% to 8.0%

Commercial Examples: The Kernel SCCANS, Marble Dobber, Magic Rock Cannonball, Brewdog Punk IPA.

Mid Atlantic Pale Ale

Origin: The product of British “session” drinking culture and the influence of American Craft Brewing. Beers heavily inspired by America and the generous use of American hops, scaled down to meet the session drinking habits of British drinkers.

Aroma: Prominent aroma of citrusy, floral, resinous, piney, American hops. Possible malty sweetness in the background. No fermentation character.

Appearance: Golden through to light amber to medium reddish copper. Often clear, often hazy through dry hopping. White to off-white persistent head.

Flavour: Prominent citrusy, floral, resinous, piney, American hops balanced by an English pale malt backbone of biscuity sweetness. Moderate toasty, caramel flavours acceptable. Medium-dry to dry finish. No fermentation character. Balanced hop bitterness.

Note: Use of hops from New Zealand, and therefore the associated flavour/aroma of NZ hops, is also acceptable (but fairly uncommon).

Alcohol: 3.0% to 5.5%

Commercial Examples: Marble Pint, Darkstar Hophead, Oakham Citra, Oakham JHB, Redemption Trinity.

New Zealand IPA

Origin: Kiwi interpretation of classic English style.

Aroma: Prominent aroma of tropical fruits, gooseberry, white grape, lychee and citrus fruits from New Zealand hop varieties. Possible malty sweetness in the background. No fermentation character.

Appearance: Golden through amber to medium reddish copper. Often clear, often hazy through dry hopping. White to off-white persistent head.

Flavour: Prominent flavour of tropical fruits, gooseberry, white grape, lychee and citrus fruits from New Zealand hop varieties. Medium-dry to dry finish. No fermentation character. Prominent hop bitterness.

Alcohol: 5.5% to 8.0%

Commercial Examples: Brewdog Chaos Theory, The Kernel Nelson Sauvin IPA, Mikkeller Single Hop IPA Nelson Sauvin.

* Martyn Cornell, August 4th 2011. See here.

For Pilsner Urquell

2011-09-09T08:00:00.010+01:00

It’s like waking up to discover snow fell through the night. The pristine beauty of that white blanket, indiscriminate in its veiling of path and road and flower bed. Opening the front door, hoping you’re the first, that no foul footprint mars the beauty. Pause, take it in, step. Refusing to turn, you enjoy the crunch and squeak of powder underfoot, all the while knowing the damage that lays in your wake. And you’re happy and you’re sad; if damage is to be done, at least it be done by you. The moment ends as you leave your road, greeted by the dirty slush of those before you; accept the inevitable and look skyward, fresh snowfall again becomes your desire.

This is how I feel as that mug of Pilsner Urquell is chaperoned across the bar. When it comes to beer, nothing is more beautiful. A golden, hazy body; hiding behind a gossamer-film of condensation. That head; foam that defines foam, thick and dense like double cream with a bitter sting. Its peak arriving as the tap is closed. Pause, take it in, sip. It’s immediately perfect.

You don’t feel it yet, but it’s in the post. That’s for sure. Enveloped by that perfect moment, until the jarring sound of glass against table – like the rattle of a letterbox – forces you back into reality, forces you to accept the inevitable. Shamefully you survey the damage, seeking console in the delicate lace that lays behind. It’s not enough, spoiled goods the beauty lost, for nothing compares to that first perfect sip.

Visiting Pilsner Urquell a few weeks ago inspired this post. I was just in awe of how beautiful the first sip of a PU is, how nothing compares and how you immediately want a fresh pour afterwards. The post is a bit different to normal, but I think it's good to challenge yourself from time to time, to write something completely different, in a way that you don't feel completely comfortable with.

Supermarkets & Beer & Food

2011-09-02T08:13:00.010+01:00

Are supermarkets missing a trick? Is there an opportunity to promote beer as a dinner table extra; something to put in the shopping basket along with the Maris Pipers and the topside of beef? If you listen to the beer writer and the brewer, the answer is a resounding yes. Yet, despite this, there isn’t a single major supermarket in the country that’s trying to ‘add-on-sale’ beer in this way.

When it comes to wine it’s a done deal, in-store marketing, point of sale advertising, food matches printed on bottles; we’re conditioned to treat ourselves to a bottle of something grape-based when we’re cooking that Sunday lunch or special occasion meal. Beer on the other hand, is only pushed at us when there’s a major sporting event going on and our plates are full of crisps and nuts.

Flick through the in-store magazine and you might see the occasional tasting note for a pale ale next to the new BBQ range. Or, if you’re lucky, there might be an advert for something strong and dark next to the mince pies and the Christmas cake. I’m not talking about stuff like that though, I’m talking about making an obvious and persistent connection between food products and beer. Here’s something I saw in France recently that works really well:

Without obscuring pricing or shelf edge labelling, new information - specific to that product - is made available to the shopper. He or she now knows that that wine works with fish and poultry, subconsciously it becomes a near-sensory experience that can be mentally tasted and imagined alongside that evening’s meal. How many more people will now pick up that bottle, how many will run back through the shop to grab an extra ingredient that they wouldn’t have otherwise bought? Wouldn’t the same work for beer?

For the supermarket, it’s a unique idea that increases the chance of an add-on-sale. For the beer lover, it’s a step towards changing the public perception of beer, putting beer on a par with wine and championing its consumption in a way that many drinkers won't have considered.

What do you think? Great idea or waste of time? Would something like this persuade you to pick up a beer or pair a beer with your dinner?

Magic Rock Bottles

2011-08-18T08:46:00.009+01:00

Magic Rock Brewing might not have been around long, but they’re already making an impact with the beers they brew. Cask and keg offerings at the awesome new Craft Beer Co and Southampton Arms in London, a funky launch at North Bar in Leeds and a generally positive buzz around the beer world – they’re out the blocks well.

I’ve enjoyed their stuff on draught, but it’s bottles I want to talk to you about today. Bottles that have some of the best branding on them that I’ve ever seen. Bottles full of delicious beer?

First up is High Wire, a 5.5% beer that calls itself a West Coast Pale Ale. The aroma is dominated by high alpha acid American hops, floral and perfumed rather than heavy and dank, they bring notes of lychee, some sappy pine and some mango. This follows through into the flavour, where it’s met with a firm malt-driven backbone of caramel and toffee. It’s generously hopped for a beer in the American pale ale style and, whilst I do think you need a decent malt body to stand up to that, I’d go so far as to say that perhaps there is too much malt character here. The body feels slightly thin – something which could be down to filtering – but the bitterness is about spot on.

High Wire’s big brother is Cannonball, a full-fledged IPA in the American style with 7.4% of its 330ml handed over to alcohol. Its aroma is juicy, juicy like you just stamped on a bowlful of very ripe satsumas and tangerines, juicy with a slight hint of sticky pine sap in the background. Flavour honours aroma with the addition of more of that malt, that caramelly, toffee malt that’s in the High Wire. There might be a bit too much of it for my personal taste here too, there’s almost the slight suggestion of a weak golden barley wine going on - just because that malt character is quite big. Bitterness is bang on again, there’s a tiny bit of alcohol burn and then a slick, oily texture that definitely doesn’t come from a fault like diacetyl, but might come from hop oils. This is good beer, very good beer. The hop profile is a little on the muddy side and, I think, lacking the clarity of hop flavour that you get in the very best American IPA’s but, nonetheless, this is good beer.

And finally Rapture, which immediately makes me think of Brewdog 5am Saint, a “Red Hop Ale” at 4.6% alcohol. The aroma is more floral in this one, cut flowers, flower petals and then dank, leafy, well ... leaves. The flavour profile is dominated by those hops; they’re painted over a canvas of crystal malt that brings a load of burnt sugar, dark toffee and even feint coffee and bitter chocolate. There’s some sweetness there but it finishes dry and, with that dryness, the crystal malt is allowed to take over, leaving some astringency. I love 5am Saint because the hop and malt is in perfectly balance, Rapture almost gets there but the crystal just becomes a bit too much for me.

You know what; there aren’t many breweries out there that make three bottled beers of this quality. To have done so within the first few months of operation, well, that’s no mean feat.

Are You Positive?

2011-08-09T15:18:00.007+01:00

A bit of back-and-forth between HardknottDave and Tandleman has again got me thinking about blogging about bad beer and bad drinking experiences.

On one hand you can argue that the blogger should use their writing to reflect the state of the beer landscape in which they drink; it’s not all good beer out there and it’s misleading to suggest otherwise. Putting questions about the influence that bloggers even have to one side, you could argue that pubs and beer won’t improve unless the landlord or brewer is told where they’re going wrong. If you mislead a new drinker into a bad pub and they walk out thinking that that’s as good as it gets, how many come back for a second pint?

The converse argument is that you catch more flies with honey than you do vinegar. If you spend your time telling people about all the bad beer you drink then your message becomes wrapped in negativity. Tweet about the three bad beers you drank whilst enjoying the three great ones silently and give the new drinker no reason to ask for beer.

For me it’s important to remember that judgement shouldn’t be cast quickly. One bad pint doesn’t make a bad pub; one bad batch doesn’t make a bad brewer. The things I tweet and the things I blog are almost always opinion based; opinion does not equal fact. Humility is important, especially when your opinion isn’t a positive one, and when you’re opinion is potentially damaging to a brewer or publican’s brand it’s important to consider how you share it.

It’s a balancing act for sure, a balancing act that I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t mastered. I want to champion beer as a great drink because I know how great it is. I want to focus on the good stuff and get other people interested in beer by sharing that with them, but I also think it’s important to be honest and for a drinker to know when something isn’t as it should be.

Personally I think it’s more effective to focus on the positive. I’m more likely to persuade people to drink beer that I describe as good than beer I complain about being bad. Generally people are pretty smart; a set of posts about great beer doesn’t necessarily mean a leap to the conclusion that bad beer is nonexistent.

What do you think?

I wrestled with whether or not to post this entry. It feels, to a certain extent, like I'm crashing someone elses argument and I'm not really keen on blogging about blogging. This is something that came up at the European Beer Bloggers Conference though, and it's something that I think is important. If the influence of the beer blogger continues to grow, so will the relevance on this issue.

Image from here.

Columbus-Brined Onion Sourdough

2011-07-28T20:35:00.001+01:00

I've talked of my love for the Columbus hop here. Well, some time has passed since then but I still bloody love them. They've just got this sinister, dark, dank, vegetal thing going on when used in large quantities; I'm convinced that they're the perfect partner for onions and garlic. Onions are bright and acidic and sometimes bitter, they've got that flavour that just hangs around for hours, on your finger tips, on your breath. Onion and columbus should just work together, Kevin Nash and Scott Hall.

I've been playing around trying to bring these two flavours together and here's something that worked quite well.

I made a columbus brine by combining about a dozen ground columbus pellets, a generous pinch of salt and a litre or so of water. I then sliced up two smallish onions and soaked them in the brine for two days. The idea here is that the salty water draws out liquid from the onions and replaces it with the brine, leaving you with water that tastes of onion and onion that tastes of hops. Perfect.

Right, so, one of my other big loves is bread - I've been attempting (and failing) to produce the perfect loaf from my sourdough starter for about three years now. But, my thinking was that a slightly sour, wild tasting onion loaf with a columbus edge might just work. My sourdough recipe takes three days to make from beginning to end and involves a whole load of long-winded steps, you could easily just use any old bread recipe and achieve a decent result.

So go ahead and make some bread dough. Separate the onion from the liquid (may I suggest the use of a sieve?) and then very lightly wash any hop material off the onion with cold water. When the dough has gone through its last proving stage and is ready for the oven, simply scatter the onion over the top of the loaf and bake as normal.

What I got looked a little like this:

The combination works superbly. You get that tart, rustic bread with the smack of onion flavour on top and then the leafy, dank columbus and a subtle bitterness. I had the bread warm with a glass of Kernel Columbus Pale Ale, the beer just freshening up the hop flavour, picking it out of the bread and adding a sweetness that helped balance out any bitterness.

I've had some failures when cooking with hops (see here for instance), but whether it be luck or judgment, on this occasion, it came together beautifully.

Kernel Coffee IPA Batch 2

2011-07-21T10:29:00.000+01:00

Sometimes you take a notepad because you suspect something interesting might happen, sometimes you save a bottle of beer because you know you want to write about it and then other times you’re taken by surprise and you’re forced to pick up that pen and paper because something’s happened that everybody must hear about!

Routine Sunday afternoon, probably won’t be drinking again now until next weekend, might as well have one more beer, golf is on TV – boring, Kernel Coffee IPA Batch 2 is in the fridge, let’s go for that.

“It pours a copper-flame”, blah, blah, blah; the head is a colour that I don’t care about. A swirl, a sniff, a sip, boom! Wake up call, reach for that pen and paper, this is seriously good. Like, put-down-what-you’re-doing, turn-that-shit-golf-off, full-undivided-attention, good.

The aroma is dominated by coffee. Not freshly brewed coffee or ground coffee beans; it’s like the smell you get when you come back to your cold cafetiere to wash it up. When you tip those used grounds out into the bin and the smell hits you, it’s like that. There’s also chocolate, milk chocolate, lots of milk chocolate, then in the back there’s a sweet, ripe, tropical, fruit character coming from the hops. The coffee is doing enough masking to allow those specific fruits to hide but it reminds me of the smell you get when a fruit bowl has started to turn – that really ripe, fruity aroma you get.

When you drink it you’re immediately struck by how thick, velvety and creamy it is. The hops come forward a bit more and seem tropical, lots of mango in particular. The coffee is still the protagonist, bringing roasty, coffee and milk chocolate notes, it’s like a Solero with chocolate-coffee sauce all over it.

When I drank the first batch of this beer I was amazed at how two-faced it was. It was almost like the hops and the coffee had a fight and moved to opposing ends of the mouthful. This time it’s remarkable for the opposite reason, everything is so well integrated, harmonious and balanced. Those hops and that coffee must’ve settled their differences because, in this beer, they’re best mates.

If you’re lucky enough to find any of this around, buy it, buy as much of it as you can and drink it as quickly as you can.

Sensational.

And to finish, a question: Coffee and IPA sounds like a crazy combination, two things that shouldn’t really work together. But, is the coffee working in this beer like a dark malt would? Does this make the seemingly crazy actually quite logical? If you stained an IPA black with something like Carafa III and used a small amount of chocolate malt to add dark malt character, would you be a million miles off a coffee IPA? Would you be a million miles off a hoppy porter?

Use Your Local

2011-07-19T20:31:00.004+01:00

The nice people over at useyourlocal.com asked me to write a few words on a pub topic of my choice. I said yes and wrote about places like Craft Beer Co. You can check it out here.

An Evening of Swedish Beer

2011-07-13T09:00:00.000+01:00

Back at the Beer Bloggers Conference I picked up some rare bottles from Sweden. They’d been sitting in the fridge quite happily, but with the other-half out for the evening and me with nothing much on, I thought I’d grab them out and see what they’re up to.

Thinking it best to start with something subtle and then move onwards, first up I had Sigtuna Brygghus East River Lager. Labelled handsomely in industrial chrome and with a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge, it looks great before you even reach for the bottle opener. It’s a Vienna lager and therefore on the darker side of golden. The aroma is big and bold, shouting American hops at the top of its voice. This follows through to citrusy notes in the flavour, backed by caramel and chewy, sweet malt. There’s a slight metallic element to it that distracts and I’d call this an APA (American Pale Ale) if I didn’t know better; very enjoyable all the same.

Game plan incited, we now hit full-on lager craving. Slottskällans Bryggeri St Eriks Pilsner might do the job.

Maybe not. American hops again. Aroma and flavour packed with overripe oranges, blossom and tinned mandarins. There’s a subtle sulphur in the background - flinty, minerally, like concrete when its just started to rain - enough to make me think pilsner, but not enough to compete with those hops. Closer to the beer I was expecting but still some way off; very tasty though.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Up next is St Eriks IPA, and as soon as I take a sip my brain screams EAST COAST. Lots of crystal malt in the flavour profile, tannic, slightly chewy, loads of caramel and toffee. There are hops there too but they seemed muted, fruity but indiscernibly so. The body is very thin and that results in an astringency when combined with the crystal malt. If you’re into East Coast IPAs (think Dogfish Head) then you’ll like this, it’s a personal thing but I just prefer it from the West.

And to round things out with a lovely symmetry, we say “hello best beer of the night” to Sigtuna Brygghus Summer IPA. More of those tinned mandarins, some peaches and some citrus and maybe a little pine in the background too. How this beer is 7.1% I do not know. It romps home with beautiful balance, sweetness up front and then the softest bitterness in the finish that just sweeps everything away. Very well brewed, a really fantastic beer.

Bravo Sweden.

International #IPADay - August 4th

2011-07-08T07:56:00.001+01:00

The Beer Wench and Ryan Ross have come together to organise the first ever #IPADay. A web based event designed to give beer lovers around the world an opportunity (an excuse?) to celebrate great beer with like-minded people. The wine world is ahead when it comes to this sort of event, organising things like Chardonnay Day and Cabernet Day like it went out of fashion. Well the 4th of August is about IPA, let's raise a toast to a great beer style and to great beer; organise an IPA tasting at your house, write a blog, record a video or send a tweet. Do what you want, but make sure you involve an IPA and make sure you tell everyone about it!

10 different breweries from around the world are involved and in England we're represented by Summer Wine. They've teamed up with some of the UK's top beer outlets - The Port Street Beer House in Manchester, The Free Trade Inn in Newcastle and The Rake and The Southampton Arms in London - to run #IPADay events, mini festivals, live blogging sessions and tastings.

The official event website is here: www.ipaday.eventbrite.com. Tweeting will be done under the #IPADay hash tag and a thread will be running in the Ratebeer forums.

Let's drink some IPA!

My Brewery Tap

2011-07-01T08:13:00.005+01:00

This is a heads up to say that I’ve started writing some content for MyBreweryTap. As I’m sure most readers of this blog will know, one of the guys behind MBT has recently moved into the world of brewing, meaning that time to write blogs and stuff is even more tight. When asked if I’d like to contribute, I jumped at the chance. MBT is a company I really like, they’re all about bringing an ever increasing beer range to people at reasonable prices, the guys behind it are beer lovers like the rest of us and I think I’ve got some cool content ideas to bring to their blog.

By way of disclaimer, I’d like to say from the beginning that I’m in no way part of MBT as a company and I’m not being paid for anything I write for them. I’m doing it for the fun of it and for the chance to write from a different angle; if something they sell is bad then I’ll say so, I’m under no obligation to write specific content and nothing I post will be edited or censored. I’ve written an intro post here and we’re kicking things off with a Drink Along concept that I’ve blogged about here.

beerbirrabier.com is still my main focus and I’ll continue to blog here as much as I ever have. Check out the MBT blog here and (perhaps) add it to your blog lists if you haven’t already. You can add MyBreweryTap on Facebook and on Twitter. It would be great to hear some feedback on what I’m doing over there as well as what’s going on here, so feel free to let me know!

So that’s that; let normal service resume ...

Conchiglie with Roasted Tomato, Garlic and Bock Sauce

2011-06-21T07:50:00.005+01:00

I love Italian food. Maybe its because I spent a lot of time there as a youngster, maybe it’s because I watched too much Jamie Oliver growing up; I just cant help but love the simplicity and the emphasis that’s put on produce and provenance. Is there anything better than slices of ripe tomato, torn mozzarella, basil leaves and olive oil? Toasted ciabatta, Parmesan and pesto. Stone-baked sourdough pizza, hazelnut gelato …

And pasta. I eat loads of pasta during the week because it’s quick, delicious and really versatile. A real favourite is roasted tomato and garlic with spaghetti or linguine. I usually take bread crumbs and combine them with salt, pepper, olive oil, thyme and garlic. Slice some tomatoes in half, pack the crumb mixture down into the fleshy part and roast on a low heat for an hour.

When they’re all nice and roasted, I throw them into a blender with some passata, a squeeze of tomato puree and another big slug of good olive oil. That’ll make you a fantastic sauce to stir through pasta, but something I really like to do is then add about half a bottle of Peroni Gran Riserva. Continue blending until well mixed and then return to the heat to thicken slightly.

I find that the beer adds a honey-like, malt sweetness that you don’t get by adding table sugar. The beer adds depth and richness to the sauce; by drinking the rest of the bottle with the food you’ll be able to pull out spicy, muscovado sugar and ripe fruity flavours in the sauce that wouldn’t be there without the beer.

As a nice variation: at the point where you add the beer, just keep on adding, and you'll end up with a delicious soup. Have that with some toasted bread and you're sorted. Peroni Gran Riserva is sold in lots of supermarkets, but if you have another light (or 'helles') bock instead, I'm sure it would work equally well.

Beer Bloggers Conference Days 2 & 3

2011-06-19T11:00:00.002+01:00

I realised that I hadn't posted my remaining photos from the Beer Bloggers Conference. Days two and three saw a food and beer pairing lesson, a talk from Martin Dickie of Brewdog, hop pickers on stilts, racing snails, a tour of Fuller's brewery, LOTS of great beer at Camden Town Brewery and another fantastic meal with some special bottles from the cellars at Fuller's.

Rhubarb Lambic Update

2011-06-13T20:59:00.017+01:00

About two months ago I wrote this. An experiment with some surplus homebrew, some sour beer dregs and an overactive imagination.

Six weeks after giving birth to that beer I took a sample to see how things were progressing. It was warm and flat, of course, but it was also tart and lacking any signs of obvious oxidation. Even more positive was the BIG Brett flavour that now dominated. Things are going well I thought to myself, but what this beer could really do with is lots (and lots) more sourness.

Enter the lactic starter.

So a friend of mine sees an article in Zymurgy that he thinks might interest me. It describes a process by which you can make a lactic starter without the need for buying a lactic bacteria culture. He's right, it does interest me, and it seems like perfect timing.

Here's what you do. Lactic bacteria live naturally on the outside of malted grain. If you take a wort at 1.038 and you hold it at 38c, you produce the perfect environment for lactic bacteria. Add malted barley to this mixture, wait three days and this is what you get:

That bacteria on the outside of the grain will eat the sugar in the wort and will reproduce, making lactic acid along the way. That lactic acid is (part of) what you're tasting when you drink a sour beer like Lambic or Gueuze.

I used about 50g of dried malt extract in 500ml of water. I boiled this for about 5 minutes and then cooled to 38c. I poured this into a sanitised milk bottle, added 2 heaped dessert spoons of crushed pale malted barley, capped it with some tin foil and sat it in a temperature controlled water bath for the three days.

My lacto-friends now ready for battle, all it took was a sieve to strain out the junk and 300ml of new fresh wort at around 1.040. Both these things pitched into the main batch of Rhubarb Lambic and away we go. This is the pellicile that now sits atop my beer:

This might just be the most geeky post I've written on this blog, but I don't care - this is why I love homebrewing!

Colin Valentine on Beer Bloggers

2011-05-29T21:44:00.041+01:00

The above video was originally uploaded to YouTube by a user called Alcofrolicchap here. It shows CAMRA chairman Colin Valentine sharing some of his views on the growing number of beer bloggers and their apparent views on beer. Generally I don't see the point in posting negative articles on this blog, I'm usually of the mind that if you don't have anything good to say then it's better to say nothing at all. Despite this, there are a few points that Colin makes that I feel an obligation to respond to. An obligation as a beer blogger and a member of, as he calls it, the "bloggerati". Far from attempting to create confrontation, this is an attempt to disprove some of the points Colin makes.

Colin Valentine says "the bloggerati are only interested in new things" and "the best beer they've ever had is the next one".

Well, here and here I talk about how much I like Worthington White Shield, a beer that dates back to 1829 and is often described as the oldest surviving IPA.

Zak Avery speaks here about Greene King Coronation Ale; a beer brewed once, in 1936, 75 years ago.

Mark Dredge writing about Pilsner Urquell, a beer that dates back to 1842, describes his experience whilst drinking it as “the most incredible drinking experience of my life so far”.

And here’s Pete Brown in a video blog about the oldest brewing competition in the world, one that dates back to 1886, a video blog that also focuses upon the brewing traditions of Burton upon Trent.

Colin Valentine argues that unlike "Real Ale", the term "Craft Beer" is worthless because it has no definition.

Is something meaningless until it has a solid definition? I don’t think so. “Craft Beer” is becoming a de facto standard term for beer brewed with skill and passion and with a focus on quality and flavour. It will never have an enforced definition because it isn’t the mission statement of an organisation. “Craft Beer” is a banner under which lovers of great beer operate; be it a professional in a brewery, an amateur brewing at home or a drinker with a glass in hand, an advocate of craft beer is a lover of beer that tastes great. EVERYTHING else about that beer is secondary.

Colin Valentine says "Craft beer changes not a jot between leaving the brewery and getting into the customer's glass and is served using CO2 and/or nitrogen. It is called KEG BEER".

Wrong. Here I talk about a pint of cask Thornbridge Jaipur that was so good it completely blew me away, whilst here I talk about Lovibonds Brewery and their range of fantastic keg beer. Leigh from “The Good Stuff” writes about enjoying Camden Town Pale Ale (Keg) and also Black Sheep Imperial Stout (cask). All of these beers are craft beers. I can only assume that Colin is attempting to describe filtered and pasteurised keg beer. The term "Craft Beer" is not applied based on the method of dispense, show me the blogger that disagrees and I’ll show you the blogger that’s in the minority.

Colin Valentine says "Forty years of achievement means nothing to them" and “all of these people want us to change and adopt their latest idea, not to try and start their own movement".

Relatively speaking, I’m a young beer drinker; I have no first hand experience of the 1970s and the crap keg beer that threatened to kill off cask ale. However, neither am I an idiot. I personally appreciate CAMRA and the work they have done, I’m able to understand the important role they’ve played in shaping the beer that’s available for me to drink today and I am grateful that cask ale is widely available in so many of my local pubs. Similarly, I understand the power and visibility that CAMRA has as an organisation, and for that reason I would like to see CAMRA more open to change. The beer landscape is different today than it was in 1975, not all kegged beer today is bad beer. I think CAMRA are in a unique position, the opportunity exists for the organisation’s tremendous work to be continued, but continued in the campaign for the promotion of great beer regardless of the method of dispense.

Coffee Oatmeal Stout - Tasting

2011-05-28T19:01:00.011+01:00

Broke open a bottle of the coffee version of this today. It's big, there's some alcohol warmth there; it's had three weeks in the bottle and it tastes green. I think I over did the IBUs, underestimated the bitterness that the coffee would add and added too much dark malt. It's bitter, probably too bitter and very dry. It tastes like that flavour you get in your mouth after you've had an espresso.

I'm being harsh on myself though (what home brewer isn't!?) because it's actually pretty damn decent. I think it needs some more age on it and, when I brew it again, I'll address the bitterness issues, but the dryness makes it incredibly drinkable and the coffee to dark malt character is beautifully balanced. There's also a real floral quality in the aroma; I can only assume that's coming from the yeast and the coffee.

Beer Bloggers Conference Day 1

2011-05-24T19:30:00.013+01:00

Day one of the Beer Bloggers Conference started with a killer headache from the night before. A warm up meet and greet with the sponsors, history of beer in London, a fun bloggers panel, an off flavours session, a HUGE dinner and then lots and lots of incredible Pilsner Urquell. Here are some photos:

I've uploaded more to Flickr.

Beer Bloggers Conference Day 0

2011-05-20T10:03:00.004+01:00

A couple of photos from the pre Beer Bloggers Conference pub crawl. Needless to say, most of the night was spent drinking, not taking pictures.

Columbus Hops

2011-05-18T12:41:00.001+01:00

Personal preference for hop variety seems to come and go like preference for beer style. It’s probably a combination of things, the number of single hop beers that brewers are making these days, access to hops in their raw state for home brewing, picking out a flavour in beer that’s easily attributable to a specific hop and developing a taste for it.

Well, I’ve got this thing for Columbus hops at the moment. It started with some pellets I got hold of for home brewing, then I started to pick the same flavour out in big American IPAs and more recently I’ve enjoyed both The Kernel Columbus Pale Ale and Columbus IPA.

The Columbus variety was created by Charles Zimmerman in the USA, it was released for commercial use in the early nineties and, whilst the exact lineage remains unknown, it is believed that the Brewers Gold variety is the main component in its breeding line. Tomahawk is a proprietary hop variety owned by Yakima Chief Inc, widely accepted as being identical to Columbus, it differs in name only. And then there’s Zeus, similar to Columbus or the same thing again? Who knows for sure, it tends to have a slightly higher alpha acid content and better yield, but popular opinion is that the two are similar enough to call the same. Next time you see a hop listed as ‘CTZ’, you’ll understand why.

At percentages in the teens, Columbus hops have a massive alpha acid content, making them an obvious choice for bittering any style of beer. More recently however they are being used as aroma and dry hops in American IPAs and pale ales. They lend a clean, sharp bitterness to beer, a bitterness that fills the back of the mouth and builds after the swallow. When used for flavour and aroma they really stand out from the crowd; if bright, citrusy c-hops are the Rebel Alliance then Columbus hops are the Galactic Empire. Dark, muddy and dank; they add flavours and aromas that could be described as: wet leaves, undergrowth, bark, vegetal, herbal, woody and even Cannabis.

I’m a fan, at least for now. Look out for The Kernel Columbus Pale Ale and IPA if you’re interested in tasting a great showcase for the Columbus hop. Alternatively, Otley Columb-O is very good too.

Take Me To Pilsen

2011-05-17T22:03:00.004+01:00

“People say the hop flavour is like nothing you’ve ever experienced. Like the freshest hops but fresher, wonderfully aromatic and fruity, spicy and dank, subtle but in-your-face all at the same time. It’s a beer that manages to quench your thirst but still makes you want to drink more, an impossible feat made possible. It’s sweet but not too sweet, bitter but not too bitter, it tastes full and thick but it’s light and sessionable. You could easily drink four or five in an evening and wake up hangover free; but at the same time, people happily sip a single glass all night long.

If you ask me, and most people do, it’s the best beer ever made”. He took a long deep breath, slowly exhaled and slumped down in his chair.

“Hold that thought!” I said, dashing off.

I’d only been gone a minute or two. Had broken the seal, you know how it is, but by the time I got back he was gone. He’d been sitting there all night, chatting away to anyone that happened to look interested, but he chose then to leave, right when it was getting interesting! Crazy old bloke, muttering on about this beer he’d once had, best beer in the World apparently. LEGENDARY. Perfect, he said.

Of course, what he didn’t say was who bloody made it! Or what it was called for that matter. How can the perfect beer exist anyway? Impossible.

Looking back on it now he was probably just making it up. But he planted a seed in my mind that refused to stop growing. I’ve drunk a lot of beer since then, probably more than my fair share, but I still haven’t found it.

At times I’ve worried I take it all a bit too seriously, y’know, it is only beer at the end of the day. I’ve noticed a lot of my mates do it too though, they might not’ve been there when I met that bloke but they seem to know about the beer. Somehow they seem to know. I’ll sit there in the pub and watch them do the same things I do, that’s how I know they know. They’ll take that first sip of a pint and then their faces give them away. They’ll put the glass back down and then there it is, written on their faces: slightly too bitter, could do with some more roast flavour, nice, good, great, but never perfect.

Yeah, I’ve come close a few times myself. Course I have. I remember walking off the beach after a day in the Sun, being met by an ice cold lager in a frozen glass, thinking to myself: there’s nothing I’d rather be drinking. I remember once sitting around a campfire with all my mates, we’d just polished off this awesome barbecue and then Dave broke out this smoked beer from Germany, it tasted like the atmosphere around us had been condensed, concentrated and forced into a bottle, it was incredible.

And yeah, before you ask, there was a time, one time, when I though I’d found it. It was this dusty old bottle, years old it was, a mate found it in his loft underneath a load of old crates. He gave it to me and said something about it being a ‘ten ninety five gravity’, not that he had any idea what that meant, he just said that’s what the crate had written on it and that it belonged to his old man. Lager drinker you see, he had no interest in it so he just gave it to me. I remember looking at it for markings or clues, anything to point in the right direction. I feel embarrassed about it now to be honest; I got annoyed and chucked the bottle out when I hit a dead end. Maybe someone else would’ve seen something on that bottle that I missed, the shape of it, the maker of the cap, something. Who knows? All I know is it’s the closest I’ve ever got. Lovely it was, beautiful to look at, perfect condition even after all those years, fantastic fruity hop flavour and bags of chewy malt, wonderfully sweet yet balanced by a punchy bitterness. Like I say, I thought it was perfect at first, at first, but then it built on me and the body just felt a bit thin, a bit thin to carry that flavour for the length of the glass. So close. So close.

People have said I do it on purpose you know? They say I convince myself that even the best beers have something missing, something that would make them slightly better. They accuse me of loving the chase; they say I’d have no reason to go searching if I found my perfect beer, no reason to drink all those great ones along the way. I just laugh and tell them they’re talking rubbish, that they make no sense. Even if they did, I’d never admit it …

Picture taken from here.

Cheese on Toast Two Ways & Brown Ale

2011-05-16T09:54:00.016+01:00

I’ve written a few times about cheese and beer, about pairing the two and about some of my favourite beers to drink with good Cheddars. I’ll tell you what else completely owns though, brown ale and a good melter like Emmental.

You can go straight-up cheese on toast and that’s fine, that works nicely; grate it on there, stick it under the grill, job done, classic. I like to do something a bit extra if time allows though; when I’m making a white sauce for pasta or lasagne I always make slightly too much, stir some grated Emmental into the spare whilst still warm, leave to cool and then keep it in the fridge until you need it. When you take it out it’ll have set into a firm paste; you spread that onto some thick cut toast, grate some more cheese on top, grill it until molten and you’re onto a winner. Sort of like a Welsh rarebit for cheats.

I’d been living under a croque-monsieur shaped rock until a few months ago. I know, I know; how I managed to go so long without ever trying such a classic snack is both beyond me and unforgivable. My first ever went some way to making up for it though, doing it in style I had one at the Le Poechenellekelder, just off the Grand-Place of Brussels, in the (rather small) shadow of the Mannekin Pis. It was fantastic, molten cheese, crisp bread and good ham. I washed it down that day with a Rochefort 6 – another first for me – which worked really well. When I make it at home I use a micro grater to get the cheese really fine, it seems to melt better that way, and I like to dip the outside of each slice quickly into a mixture of beaten egg and milk to give a puffy almost French toast quality.

I love the malty quality of a brown ale with cheeses like Emmental and Cheddar. The nutty quality that you sometimes get from darker malts, umami and marmite, sesame seeds and peanuts, that sort of thing. They work really well to pick out the sweetness in the cheese and can really complement the peppery, piquant notes of a strong Cheddar. A good, firm bitterness and a spritz of carbonation work well to balance out the creaminess too, when the cheese leaves a fatty film across your mouth, these qualities in the beer will help to cut through and wash them away. I opened a bottle of Big Sky Brewing Moose Drool on this occasion, it’s something I picked up at GBBF and had been looking forward to for a while. In reality it was a bit lighter in body and intensity of flavour than the food needed; a great alternative, if you can get hold of it, would be Dogfish Head’s fantastic Indian Brown Ale.

Try it yourself. Cheese on toast two ways with brown ale.

De Dolle Oerbier - Nailing a Flavour

2011-05-10T08:43:00.000+01:00

Let me describe a feeling. A feeling I know you’ve had. That feeling when you eat something or you drink something and straight away you know what it tastes like. You know what it tastes like because it tastes like something you’ve had before, probably something you’ve had loads of times before.

There may be great depth and character to that thing you’re eating or that thing you’re drinking, but because that one flavour jumped out at you, all the others fade into the background, all the others are irrelevant. That one thing that you picked out involuntarily is something you recognise straight away, it’s something you know, something you know until you’re asked: “what does that taste like to you”. And then, at that precise moment, your mind goes blank and the words leave you’re tongue, you know what it is because you’ve had it a hundred times before, but can you name it when asked? Of course you can’t.

And then the feeling I’m describing arrives, right when it all suddenly comes to you. Wet grass! That smells exactly like wet grass. Strawberry jam! That tastes exactly like strawberry jam. And the people around you nod in unison and the air fills with a chorus of “ohhh yeah”, “so it does”, and that all important “you’re dead right, I’d never have guessed that, but now you say it ....”.

What a sweet feeling that is.

Well, the other day I drank De Dolle Oerbier and had exactly one of those moments. Never has a beer tasted more like three specific ingredients to me.

It’s rich and deep, mahogany and cherry wood; complex and complicated, I found it challenging and hard work. It’s sweet and bitter at the same time, sour, acetic, tart, full of raw alcohol and woody, grizzly unripened red fruits.

Whatever. Let that all go in one ear and out the other. Drink this beer and draw a line under: cranberry, port and balsamic vinegar. Try it, you’ll see.

Brewing an Oatmeal Stout

2011-05-05T10:10:00.006+01:00

Mikkeler Beer Geek Brunch Weasel is one of my favourite beers in the World. How could it not be? I had Founders Breakfast Stout recently and that ruled too. I thought I might give brewing an oatmeal stout a go, splitting the batch and adding coffee to one half. So that’s what I’ve done. Half the grist is pale malt, a quarter is oats, I’ve then divided the dark malt content into five percent chunks and gone with a combination of roast barley, pale chocolate and standard chocolate. There’s some special B and Munich malt in there to add complexity to the malt sweetness too.

Pale Malt (Marris Otter) - 50%
Flaked Oats - 22.2%
Chocolate Malt - 5.6%
Pale Chocolate Malt - 5.6%
Munich Malt - 5.6%
Special B - 3.0%

I mashed at 68c and capped with 30g of carafa special III on the final batch sparge, hoping to stain the wort as black as possible without changing up the roasty flavour profile any further. Original gravity was 1071 and I picked dried US05 yeast at 19c to give a clean fermentation with little to no yeast character.

The batch has been split in half, the first half will be fermented out to completion and bottled as an oatmeal stout at around 7% alcohol. The second half will receive a sugar addition worth 7 gravity points when 70% attenuation is reached. When that’s fermented I’ll add a further 7 gravity points worth of sugar dissolved in strong coffee. The aim is to add easily fermentable sugar at a point where the yeast is ready and eager to ferment, without shocking the yeast with a wort that has too high a concentration of sugar. The amount of coffee to add will largely be based on guess work but I might do a few experiments by blending a dark beer with some strong coffee and scaling up the ratio that works best. The coffee half will have a revised original gravity of 1085. Assuming it gets down to around 1015, factoring in the dilution that the coffee will cause, I should get an ABV in the region of 8%.

Yum, breakfast beer!

Pictures, Pictures, Pictures.

2011-05-03T22:36:00.008+01:00

I've uploaded a bunch of pictures to my Flickr account. I always take more than I end up using on a blog post so I'll stick the rest online in future. Think of it as the blogging equivalent of a DVD extra!

Check it out here.

Open It! - Cantillon Saint Lamvinus

2011-05-01T19:26:00.016+01:00

I love Cantillon beer. A month or so ago I visited the brewery and my love deepened and grew, such a magical place. This bottle of Saint Lamvinus was carried back to London by hand on the return leg of that trip and it was so worth it! A blend of lambics aged in red wine barrels with Merlot grapes; it's one of the harder Cantillon beers to find.

Sweeter than expected but still Cantillon-epically sour. Red grapes and cranberries. Warm, sweaty goats. Something distinctly plastic or man-made, flip-flop foam perhaps. Blackcurrants. Under ripe redcurrants, the kind that are grizzly and difficult to chew through. Iron. Deep, rich, red wine. A full enough body to carry everything across your tongue and then a crisp, snappy finish that leaves you wanting the next sip. Utterly delicious.

See here or here for more on the Open It! event.

As Live: Cornish Rattler Cyder

2011-04-30T18:53:00.016+01:00

Not quite in the spirit of Open It!, but something I have been meaning to open for a while is the bottle of Cornish Rattler cider that the people at Healey's sent me.

18:55 I just tried to pour it with a head and stopped near the end for the sediment ... which isn't there. Old (beer) habits die hard I guess.

19:01 Bloody hell, feel a bit out of my depth with this. Makes you realise how much you get used to the flavours in beer. It's mightily refreshing if nothing else.

19:05 Bottle says it's a cloudy cider but it looks pretty bright to me. It's crisp in the finish with a very feint bitterness. Sounds massively obvious but the main taste is crisp, fresh apple.

19:07 Hopzine Rob is drinking AleSmith IPA. As much as this is hitting the spot right now, I'd probably trade.

19:11 The sweetness in this alongside the relatively simple flavour profile makes it incredibly drinkable.

19:14 I'm convinced I can taste something along the lines of sesame seeds or five spice in this. Something like that smell that hits you when you walk into a Chinese supermarket.

19:17 Maybe the bitterness isn't there and I'm just looking for it because I always drink beer? There's an alcoholic flavour in the finish for sure though.

19:21 Well that's the end of that. Opened as the first drink of the night when really thirsty; didn't last long as a result. I'm not a cider drinker but in the hot sun on a summer's day I would happily quaff the hell out of this! Very pleasant.

Hop Growing 2011

2011-04-26T12:35:00.008+01:00

Step one in the production of my 2011 wet hop IPA: plant hop rhizome. Ok, maybe not, but I am giving hop growing a go this year. Just the one Cascade rhizome, starting out in a big pot so that I can control growth and move it to a sunnier spot if necessary. This post is more about the pictures than the words to be honest, but it’ll hopefully be the first in a diary that chronicles growth from planting all the way up to harvest. I’m not expecting many cones in the first year but you never know, might end up with enough for a late hop addition if I’m lucky.

Summer Sessions

2011-04-21T15:09:00.006+01:00

A few beers have really caught my eye recently.

We’re experiencing unusually good weather in the South of England for this time of year. It doesn’t take much for the shorts and sunglasses to come out, nor the ever-eager Londoner that simultaneously sunbathes topless in the park whilst cowering from the chill-wind behind a tree trunk or hedgerow. It’s a funny sight, but a sight that fills you with the optimism of summer, the knowledge that those alfresco evenings and scorched afternoons aren’t far away.

Drinking habits begin to change too; the comforting warmth of a big, dark porter or stout is dethroned and refreshment becomes king. The golden ales and lager beers take over tap handles and fill fridges, offering us thirst slaking super-powers par excellence. We’re looking for beers that offer quaffability not sipability, something we can greedily chug down and draw a line under with a contented sigh and a table-bump of the pint glass.

Drinkability is a word that sparks debate; for me, when used in the context of a golden summer ale, it largely hinges on alcohol content. I don’t want to be drinking something that’ll rock me after a single pint, that’s not what I’m looking for, I want something that I can drink two or three of and still feel fine after. I want something to drink, not something to get me drunk. Extreme session beer*; a maximum of 4 percent ABV.

It’s a difficult style to brew because there’s nothing to hide behind. You get a slight off flavour in an IIPA and there’s a good chance you’ll get away with it, badly ferment an imperial stout and you can just apply a barrel-aged-bandage to cover it up. Easy. But when everything is subtle and turned down to a whisper the brewer isn’t forgiven so quickly, the slightest suggestion of a problem becomes deafening. And if that weren’t difficult enough, the window in which a balanced beer can be landed becomes increasingly narrow the smaller you go. What’s 10 IBUs when your total is around 90? But 10 IBUs when your total is 20, well that’s a different story. 5 gravity points in a 10 percent barley wine, but in a ... yeah, you get the idea.

Camden Town Brewery’s Inner City Green is one of those beers that have caught my eye. It’s one of the best beers I’ve had all year in fact. At only 3.9 percent ABV it manages to punch well above its weight; enough bitterness in the finish to balance out a subtle sweetness up front and sufficient body to carry a raft of exotic fruit flavours from the Nelson Sauvin and Southern Cross hops. Taking things even further is Redemption Trinity; a tiny ABV of only 3 percent is hidden by a massive citrus hop presence and a crisp, snappy bitterness that works to prevent the beer from ever feeling thin or watery. Old favourites in the same vein include Dark Star Hophead, Marble Pint and Thornbridge Wild Swan; but I could only ever finish with a nod towards Gadds’ Low and Behold, a beer that I simply cannot wait to try at Planet Thanet this weekend, a beer brewed in protest of continuing duty increases in the UK and the “generous” new legislation to remove duty on beers brewed at 2.8 percent ABV or below. Should be a good one!

* Yeeesss, I know. That was intentional.

Bite-Size: Malty Beer and Cheddar Cheese

2011-04-19T10:31:00.004+01:00

Back with another bite-sized food and beer combination to blow your socks off.

I’ve written before about my love for simplicity, maybe the fact it’s a recurring theme says something about me, but it’s the inspiration behind today’s combination too. I love bread, a lot, maybe too much in fact; I could eat a good loaf of bread on its own, probably in one sitting if I really tried. But when you take a good, freshly baked loaf and combine it with some strong Cheddar, you move things on to a new level. Two of the simplest things in world, but together they’re like Mr and Mrs Perfection. Less is more they say, and in this instance, I’m inclined to agree.

A self contained plateful of delicious comforting nourishment that wouldn’t benefit from any further addition, beautiful simplicity. Blowing away any sense of occasion, need for meal table rule or even a knife and fork, leaving you with the joyful act of eating in its purest form. The more hungrily you can scoff it down the better, tearing hunks off the loaf with hands is essential and only thickly cut slabs of cheese will do.

And it's that nourishment factor that inspires my beer choice. Something thick and hearty, chewy and filling, bread in liquid form. Something like an old school English IPA, Worthington White Shield, with its substantial body and mouthfeel, its rugged malty backbone, enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with any loaf of bread. Residual sweetness in the beer that will accent the sweet creaminess of the cheese and spicy, peppery, dusty English hop varieties that will compliment the earthy, wild, mustard seed qualities of a traditional, unpasteurised Cheddar.

Those Trappist monks know what they're doing when it comes to nourishing beer. Michael Jackson wrote: "The notion of specialising in strong brews dates from the time when these [Trappist] beers were regarded as 'liquid bread' to sustain the body during lent"¹, and if you fancy going a bit continental with this food pairing, you could do much worse than look to the monasteries of Belgium and Holland. Rochefort 8 for example will toe the same line as Worthington White Shield, substituting hops for a sweetness built around dried fruit, figs and plums. The carbonation lending a hand to cut away the creaminess of the cheese and add a lightness to the meal.

Or hop across the border for a German equivalent, a Bock or a Doppelbock, made with copious amounts of malt to produce a beer with lager roots but considerable substance too. Paulaner Salvator or Ayinger Celebrator are good choices, of the former Zak Avery writes: “Originally brewed as ‘liquid bread’ sustenance during Lent, Salvator (Latin for ‘saviour’) is an orange-brown beer with a luscious, nourishing malt character. Medium-sweet on the palate, with some dried fruit, toffee and a faint hoppy spiciness. For many, the textbook example of a doppelbock”². The same themes of hop-spice, complex malty sweetness, bitterness and carbonation to play off the mustard, cream and sweetness of the cheese.

Malty, sweet, chewy beer and strong Cheddar cheese; a match made in heaven.

¹ Taken from an article originally printed in The Independent, Feb 2nd 1991.
² Tasting notes from 500 Beers by Zak Avery.

Coffee IPA - Mikkeller & Kernel

2011-04-15T07:27:00.017+01:00

You know those people that can’t take anything at face value, the ones that always have to take things too far and go to extremes, have to know everything about something, become completely involved in their latest interest before flitting on to the next thing? Well, I’m probably one of those people. Actually no, I am one of those people. I couldn’t take up jogging without challenging myself to run a marathon, watch a film without seeing the rest of the trilogy or drink a beer without understanding how it’s made.

There! I’ve said it.

And this is why I stop myself before it’s too late. I don’t drink much wine or whisky because I know what would happen if I really got into them. The same goes for tea and coffee; reading the back of that packet is the first step on a slippery slope, before you know it you’re researching grind granularity and optimum brewing temperature. Too much money, too much time, too much liquid to consume!

I've always enjoyed good coffee though; after dinner with some dark chocolate, first thing in the morning with a bacon sandwich or as a flavour characteristic in beer. Whether it comes from beans added to the mash, espresso added to tank or just heavily kilned malt, I can't think of a single beer with coffee flavour that isn't dark in appearance. Well, at least not until I heard about Mikkeller Koppi and Kernel Brewery Coffee IPA; beers deliberately attempting to fuse the striking flavour of American hops with artisan coffee. The former was brewed in collaboration with Swedish roasters Koppi and uses a combination of Tomahawk hops and Ethiopian Guji Natural coffee beans, whereas the latter was made in partnership with Square Mile Coffee Roasters of London and features a coffee from the same region called Suke Quto.

The battle of appearance is an easy win for Kernel, pin-bright with a fluffy white head, dismissing the murky haze of the Mikkeller offering with little effort. Koppi has an aroma that's bursting with coffee notes, like wetted coffee grounds, used and allowed to cool, rather than the smell you'd associate with freshly brewed coffee. In the mouth it has a thick texture, milky and creamy, smooth, something that really works well against the coffee flavour. And then in the background lurks some distant hoppy fruit, locked out by a caffeine hit squad no doubt, forced to play second fiddle to masses of coffee flavour, fresh and zingy and light rather than roasty and burnt, exactly like a mug of coffee would taste.

The Kernel is a different beast entirely. Almost the polar opposite in fact. Its aroma is packed full of fruity hops, citrus and pine; it jumps out at you as a fantastic IPA before a slight hint of coffee appears. The same is true of the flavour, it’s like when Equatorial Guinea decided that Mr Moussambani should definitely enter the Olympic 100m swimming race; by the time the coffee flavour crosses the line, the hops have got out and hit the showers. But I don’t mean to sound negative here, the subtlety of the coffee flavour is great, it means it can work off the hop flavour rather than clash with it. The Kernel beer is thinner and drier than Koppi and the long coffee finish works well with that to add an extra dimension to the bitterness of the beer.

On paper, the idea of a coffee IPA is a stupid one; how could those two flavours ever co-exist? But both these beers are great, completely different, but totally delicious in their own way. I loved the full-on coffee hit of the Mikkeller but the subtlety of the Kernel was fantastic too. It would be great to see a beer that combines both elements and finds the middle ground; in-your-face fruity coffee being balanced out by assertive hopping.

Bite-Size: Stout. Porter. Burger.

2011-04-12T09:00:00.000+01:00

Here’s a favourite of mine. A quick, bite-sized combination that might get you thinking next time you’re in the kitchen. I love a burger, from the hastily grabbed Big Mac that’s eaten on the train home, to the pseudo-sophisticated diner experience at places like Draft House and Byron; I love ‘em. They strip away pretence and deliver meat, veg and sauce all in an edible packaging that you can hold in your hands. What more could you ask for?

Now, many will say that when you’re eating a burger you need to be drinking an American IPA. And, there’s no doubting that that is indeed a great combination. But for me there’s something else that works equally well. You need to sear that burger hard and fast, you need to get it onto a smoking hot griddle and you need to force some black onto the outside. By all means turn the heat down and cook it through afterwards, but that flame-grilling or heavy-searing is what makes all the difference. It’s that colour that can build a bridge to the beer in your glass; the smoky, burnt, near-acrid flavour you impart on the meat can be mirrored by the flavour that heavily kilned special malts bring to beer styles like porter and stout. I’m talking chocolate malt, roast barley, black and brown malt. And once that bridge has been built and crossed, you’re in a land where natives include caramel and toffee, to compliment the natural sweetness of good meat, and spiky bitterness that will freshen and liven your palate.

Go with loads of fresh mayonnaise and try something slightly wild and sour like Harveys Porter, the acidity serving as a foil for the oiliness in the food. Or flip it around and try a flabby but delicious oatmeal stout like Sam Smiths alongside a burger piled high with slices of zingy gherkin*. And if you really can’t get past that IPA, then why not try a hoppy stout like Sierra Nevada or Kernel 1890 with curry-powder-spiked tomato ketchup; the beer beckoning that spice over, one finger raised and a shout of “wot you lookin at!”.

Food and beer pairings will always divide opinion, what’s fun is to take a basic, bite-sized concept and play around with it until you strike gold.

* Ok, so that one's a little more out there.

London Beer at The Rake

2011-04-07T09:28:00.020+01:00

Phil Lowry over at beermerchants.com posted this blog entry yesterday about brewing in the UK and the burgeoning craft beer scene that we’re seeing develop here. He throws out there that “I am starting to wonder if actually we have one of the best beer scenes in the world”, which is not to be taken lightly when you consider his traveling and beer knowledge credentials.

But enough about Mr Lowry and more about London. As a resident of the capital, I’m privileged to be in what feels like the epicentre of this beer scene. Something I attempted to capture in this blog comment:

It’s difficult for someone like myself to put all this in context sometimes. I’m in a fortunate position to have only ever been interested in good beer when its prevalence is on the increase. Something that’s out of my control, but something that I do recognise and understand.

That being said, even as an avid advocate of good beer, the seemingly endless number of craft beer bar openings, beer events and new breweries is bloody exciting stuff. For those close to London, you’re a stone’s throw away from a number of world class bars and breweries. There’s a mix of contemporary (Euston Tap, Cask) and traditional (Wenlock, Old Fountain, Sam Smiths etc) and a new sense of unity and community among the city’s brewers. We might be looking to places like the US for inspiration, but we’re melding it with things that we’ve always done well and the result must surely be a beer “scene” that’s comparable with that of any other city in the world!

A Friday night in The Rake to celebrate a new beer launch with the brewer, surrounded by people that love and enthuse about good beer. Saturday in the Euston Tap drinking world class beer from Denmark, Europe and the US. Sunday in The White Horse for cask Harveys and a roast; then Monday night for an LAB meeting – a homebrewers group that goes from strength to strength. Where else can you do that but in the UK and in London?

Love it!

And there’s no better time to celebrate and sample London beer than next week! Starting on Sunday 10th April, The Rake will be hosting a series of five meet the brewer events. Redemption kick things off followed by The Kernel on Monday, Meantime take control of Tuesday and then Camden Town have their turn on Wednesday. Rounding off the week will be (the slightly less London based) Windsor & Eton. It’s a great chance to meet the people behind the beer and sample their wares at the same time. There’ll also be a focus on London beer if the bar has any spare taps, including a rare cask of the Fuller’s Past Masters XX Strong Ale.

See you there.

---

Update (08/04/11) - some further details

Sunday: starts at 12 noon, 12 beers racked on the decking and 3 on the handpulls inside. 7 keg lines also inside. Meet the Brewers event with Andy Moffatt and Andy Smith of Redemption brewery starting at 2pm. The three handpulls inside will be exclusively Redemption for Sunday.

Monday: Kernel Black IPA on the handpulls inside, meet the brewer event with Evin O'Riordan at 7pm in the evening.

Tuesday: A visit from Steve Schmidt of Meantime and 5 Meantime beers on Keg for the evening! (Time TBC).

Wednesday: Jasper Cuppiadge of Camden Town Brewery, 5 kegged Camden beers and two casks. (Time TBC).

Thursday: London launch of Windsor & Eton's royal wedding beer 'The Windsor Knot'. There will also be three casks available either on the bar or outside on the decking.

There will also be beers available from Zero Degrees, Brew Wharf, Sambrooks and Ha'penny. Fullers are sending down their last cask of Past Masters No.1 and Brodies are sending 4 beers including The Revolution Red IPA that was brewed in collobration with Glyn Roberts.

Awesome! Note - I don't have any connection with The Rake, I'm just happy to shout about this because I love what they do and you should too!

Rhubarb Lambic

2011-04-05T08:20:00.018+01:00

What do you do with ten bottles of homebrew that you aren’t keen on? A beer that isn’t bad, but isn’t great either. Cook with it? Give it away? Stash it in a cupboard and drink it slowly over time? Maybe. I thought I’d try something a bit different.

Early spring means rhubarb; the most eager of the harvest, tart and acidic, yet to be tempered by the full warmth of the sun. It’s a classic, English ingredient that most of us are guilty of overlooking; something about it just feels old fashioned and, even if we did buy it, what would we do with it?

There’s a wildness about the acidic flavour of rhubarb that reminds me of lambic beer. Sure, we might cultivate it and force it to grow all year round, but it’s one of those foods that always feels slightly out of control. With its super-resilient rhizomes and poisonous leaves, it’s like a favourite son that Mother Nature keeps a bit more snugly under her wing. And lambic is a similar affair, the brewer kids himself that he’s the boss, but spontaneous fermentation does what it wants, when it wants. No amount of seasonal brewing or blending batches will give him ultimate control.

So why not bring these two things together? The sharp sourness of a lambic beer, bolstered by the acidic, fruity tang of fresh rhubarb. Makes sense to me.

Being careful to avoid as much oxygenation as possible, I siphoned the beer a bottle at a time back into a demijohn. In went two sticks of rhubarb that I roughly cut into inch long pieces, followed by the sediment and dregs from a bottle of 2005 Boon Mariage Parfait Gueuze.

Airlock on. See you in 4 months.

Yep, I do realise that the dregs from a single bottle is probably nowhere near enough. And yes, six year old yeast sediment is probably not the best way to go. The presence of all the oxygen I knocked into solution will probably result in a load of harsh acetic acid and the base beer had way too many IBU’s for any lactic bacteria to stand a chance. All very good points. But you gotta give these things a go though, right? What’s the point in being a homebrewer if you can’t mess around from time to time!?

Punk Off - Bottle vs Can

2011-03-31T09:31:00.002+01:00

I’ve wanted to do a bottle vs. can blind tasting for a while now. There’s always just too much beer in my fridge to justify buying a four pack of London Pride though, so it hasn’t happened. The benefits of cans over glass are numerous: they’re less permeable to oxygen, they offer better protection against light strike, they’re easier to store and transport and they chill faster. But do they affect the way a beer tastes? And, if so, how?

With the change to their Punk IPA recipe (that I wrote about here), Brewdog also introduced the beer in 330ml cans. I bought a bottle and a can shortly after the new recipe was brewed, so I’ve assumed that the beer is either the same batch or from two batches that were made very closely together. Each had the same storage from the moment it entered my hands; back of the fridge away from any temperature fluctuations or bright light.

I turn my back whilst a lovely assistant* pours the two beers into identical glasses, labelling at random “beer one” and “beer two”.

Beer number one had a fluffier, more persistent head. The aroma felt like it was lacking something over the initial test batches of new Punk though. Those hops were there, sure, bringing citrus aromas and tropical fruits, but they felt dull and tamed. Mickey Rourke as Randy The Ram - they felt like they’d lost their edge. And the same was true for the taste, a more dominant wave of chewy malt sweetness quickly rushing in after a limp initial hop attack. Bummer, not what I was hoping for at all. A delicious beer in its own right, but not what I wanted from new Punk and certainly not what I remember from those early teaser batches.

In contrast, beer number two felt flatter and softer, less carbonation, a much smaller head that quickly disappeared after pouring. But we don’t judge a book, or a beer, by its cover; the aroma of this sample being worlds apart from the first. A plume of citrus-driven hop aroma meeting you from the glass, far more impactful and assertive than the first. That chewy, toffee, caramel malt backbone beaten into submission by the hops; you could pick it from the background but it felt like a canvas for those hops to be painted over, rather than a dominant flavour character.

So then, clearly one beer at the peak of freshness and one on the decline. How much can be put down to those factors outside of the closure method? Age, batch, storage before leaving the brewery and whilst in transit. Who knows? Short of visiting the brewery and drinking straight off the production line, it's difficult to recreate a fairer test than the one I carried out here. Whilst not definitive, hopefully it does give some insight into the can vs bottle debate.

And the big reveal ...... beer one: bottle, beer two: can.

*Girlfriend coaxed into it during a Dancing on Ice advert break.

Maris Otter & Crystal Malted Pancakes

2011-03-29T08:38:00.006+01:00

Back here I wrote about using hops as a seasoning for fried chicken. Well, in combination with some ideas I heard the Homebrew Chef Sean Paxton talking about, it got me thinking about how I could use malt in a recipe. Mark Dredge has since used pale malt in a really cool way, enhancing the texture and flavour of a cookie, but my idea was driven more by the technique that’s used with malt for brewing beer - mashing. When you mash malted barely to make beer, you combine it with water at a very specific temperature in order to produce a thick porridge. Over time, the natural starches within the grains are converted to sugar by enzymes (also found naturally within the grain) and are dissolved into the liquid. The resulting sugary water is known as wort. This wort is usually then seasoned with hops and fermented with brewing yeast to make beer.

So what if you take milk and heat it to a very specific temperature, let’s say 67C, and then combine it with a small amount of pale and crystal malted barley? Leave it for an hour in a warm place and then strain off the grain with a sieve. The milky wort could then be used with egg, butter, baking powder and flour to make pancake batter. No?

Yes.

That’s exactly what I did, and it worked really well. This recipe acts as a good base but you only need it as a guide. I left the sugar out and relied on the malt to provide all the sweetness, I multiplied the ingredients by 1.5 and used 20g pale malt and 10g crystal malt.

The sweetness from the grain replaced the sugar and added biscuity and caramel notes that you wouldn’t ordinarily get. The pancakes felt denser, richer and smoother than when I’ve made this recipe before; served with bacon and maple syrup they were absolutely delicious.

A cool way to get some of the flavours usually associated with beer into your food, using both a brewing ingredient and a brewing process. This is a technique that I plan to use on more recipes in the future, but what beer would you use to pair with these pancakes?

---

Full Recipe (makes 7 large pancakes) 200g plain flour, 1.5 tsp baking powder, 3/4 tsp salt, 200ml milk, 2 medium eggs (beaten), 2 tbsp melted butter, 20g pale malt, 10g crystal malt.

Heat the milk to 67C in a heavy saucepan, stir the malt in really well. Wrap in a few towels or place in an oven that's been set to low for an hour. Remove (lauter) the grain from the milk using a fine sieve. Whisk the egg, butter, baking power, flour and salt into the milk mixture until smooth. Get a heavy-bottomed pan hot and oiled, pour a ladle of the mixture into the pan and leave alone until bubbles appear on the surface, turn the pancake once and leave for a further minute or two. Sorted.

Pairing Good Beer with Good Food: Spring

2011-03-21T08:36:00.009Z

My latest article for Thanet CAMRA's Ale of Thanet publication covers food and beer pairing with a spring theme. You can check it out below or find the original (for a limited period) here.

---

From the golden ales of summer to the brown ales of autumn and then the dark beers of winter; a year has passed and we complete our journey with spring. We’ve looked at the changing seasons and the way they impact what we drink, pairing great beers with great foods along the way. Spring is about anticipation and expectation; we’re done with winter now, no more snow delayed trains and no more icy walks to work. As the days tick by the evening sunlight teases us with its growing perseverance, that barbecue is in the back of our minds and summer isn’t far away.

Springtime is an overlooked season when it comes to beer; not quite summer and not quite winter, it struggles to be defined by an obvious beer style, many breweries choosing just to release their summer blonde ales a month or two early. Good food and good produce on the other hand begin to come into their own at this time of year, the more eager of the crop can be harvested giving us delicious new potatoes, spring onions and broad beans. One of my favourite things in the world is a bowlful of boiled new potatoes, tossed in olive oil, lemon juice and dill; served warm it’s difficult to beat.

May brings us asparagus, that perennial English favourite that just isn’t the same at any other time of year. It’s best served simply, allowing its wonderful natural flavour to take centre stage. Snap off the woody stubs, boil in salted water for four minutes or until tender with a slight bite and serve with a generous knob of butter. The classic beer accompaniment is a Belgian Tripel or strong golden ale; Duvel is a great example of the latter and is widely available in supermarkets. At 8.5 % ABV it’s an intense beer, strong alcohol notes combine with peppery, spicy noble hops and a firm bitter finish. There’s a sweetness up front in the beer that’ll find the natural sweetness of the asparagus, the abundant carbonation balances out the heaviness in the beer and helps to cut through the butter. Noble Saaz hops have a delicate herbal quality to them, almost vegetal when used in large quantities; this is a perfect match for the food and paves the way for the bittersweet bridge between the food and the drink. There’s a complex simplicity about this pairing that I just love, it’s unfussy, it just works, but it offers more every time you come back for a mouthful.

Duvel is available at all good off-licences and bottled beer shops. A 330ml bottle will cost in the region of £2.50.

Quite frankly, I’d feel a complete and utter fraud if I wrote an article about spring food but didn’t include lamb. And, whilst not certain, I’m pretty sure that when eating lamb it’s a legal requirement to have mint sauce and roast potatoes. People have been convicted for far less serious crimes to good food. How do you pair a beer with something like mint sauce though? Something so brash, with its sugary sweetness, tart acidity and menthol tang? It would take a big beer to stand up to that, but with something full-on you risk swamping the food or adding one flavour too many and making the whole meal feel muddled. I think a lighter beer is the best way to go, something that’s clean and simple and refreshing but has enough about it to make itself known. I like Wells and Young’s London Gold for occasions such as this. It’s a top fermented, bottle conditioned beer, but by the time it hits the glass it feels somewhere between an ale and a lager. Sporting notes of hay and bread crust it has a zingy citrus tartness to it and a crisp, snappy bitter finish. It’s full of flavour without being full-on, and it has a palate cleansing quality that I think makes it great with strongly flavoured food.

Wells and Young’s London Gold is widely available. A 500ml bottle will cost around £2.

A final offering, a personal favourite, crab cakes with chili and coriander. Fresh crab meat begins to come into season at this time of year and, whilst it can be difficult to find, it’s worth the effort to track down over tinned. If you don’t like the idea of buying live crab, a good fishmonger will happily sell you a dressed version. I combine this meat with some seasoned mashed potato, thinly sliced spring onion, chili and plenty of fresh coriander. Use an egg yolk to bring the mixture together and form into cakes in your hands. Dust each side of the cakes with some plain flour, gently fry in standard olive oil until golden brown and serve with a generous dollop of mayonnaise and some rocket leaves. I like this with a bottle of Brewdog 5am Saint, an amber ale from the Scottish brewers that’s packed full of new world hops. It has a toffee and caramel malt background that works with the natural sweetness of the crab; then overlaying that sits a wave of jammy-sweet tropical fruits that will find the fruitiness of the chili, before a crisp, bitter finish that will cut through the food like a squeeze of citrus.

Brewdog 5am Saint is available at selected Sainsbury’s shops. A 300ml bottle will cost around £1.90.

I love good beer and I love good food; when the two come together they can make for delicious results. Hopefully this seasonal series has showcased a few great combinations and made you think about the beers you drink with the food you eat. Its versatility, accessibility and variety makes beer the greatest long drink in the world, I think that’s something we’d all agree on. Let’s celebrate and enjoy beer throughout the year, not just when in the pub or at a festival. Set another place at the dinner table, a place for good beer.

As Live FA Cup & To Øl

2011-03-13T13:49:00.028Z

Here goes then. A little blog for fun. I'm settled down with a beer to watch the West Ham game. Some "As Live" thoughts on the beer I drink and the game as it unfolds.

13:59 Kick off after the break. The beer in the picture is a homebrew that's just reached condition. 4% with a load of chinook and cascade. Pretty decent, I think I've got the water treatment about nailed now.

14:01 Resting Demba Ba? Is that dodgy knee finally becoming an issue? Why the hell is Upson still wearing that captain's armband? Two words: Scott Parker.

14:04 Nice save Robert Green! A goal there? That's the last thing we needed.

14:08 This homebrew is pretty decent. The bitterness is huge but it doesn't linger. Hop flavour is almost all coming from the dry hop. In other news, ITV1 in HD rocks.

14:13 Booorrriinnggg! How can anyone be a fan of the way Stoke play? One down.

14:20 West Ham just need to calm down, hold the ball up and look to go forward. It feels like they're panicking a bit.

14:24 Some ridiculous acting from Obinna. Goes down like a lead weight, rolls around like he's been shot in the gut, only to pop up immediately as soon as the ref shows him the yellow card. I hate this side of football, you don't get this in cricket!

14:32 GET IN!! Great finish. Well controlled (with the shoulder ... or possibly arm). 1-1.

14:38 An injury on both sides just as the game starts to break loose and become a bit more exciting. I can hear the away fans singing bubbles. Goal-machine-spector is now on the field.

14:51 Half time and scores level. West Ham's goal was a tad lucky, but I think the score line probably reflects the way it's gone so far.

15:07 Second half has kicked off and Stoke have a penalty for a blatant dive. Scott Parker plays by the rules, simple as that, blatant dive. How much of that decision was down to the hand ball call in the first half?

15:07 Justice is done. Rob Green, beautiful penalty save. Get in there!

15:10 I found a beer during the break. It's something I picked up a couple of weeks back from the awesome Cask Pub and Kitchen in Pimlico. First Frontier IPA from the Danish brewery To Øl.

15:17 So, I don't know anything about this beer. I was told that the brewers behind it were apprentices at Mikkeller. The label says it's and American IPA at 7.1%. The hops are warrior, centennial and simcoe.

15:25 This beer is interesting. The aroma is packed with perfume and floral notes. I'm getting some ripe apricot flesh and some grapefruit in the background. It reminds me a lot of the hoppy Italian craft beers I've had. Birra del Borgo Re Ale Extra, Toccalmatto Zona Cesarini, that sort of thing. They all share a floral, perfume note that I've never had in an American beer.

15:26 And we're back to 2-1. This must be quite a game for the neutral.

15:31 I think it's yeast. This beer has been sitting still in my fridge for a fortnight and I poured it carefully to leave the sediment behind, despite that though it's really hazy. The main flavour I'm getting is very similar to the taste of US05 yeast that's just had beer racked off it after primary fermentation.

15:38 Refresher sweets and maybe some apple (but not in an oxidised way). I just read the last entry again and realised it sounds a bit odd. Yes, as odd as it sounds, I have tasted yeast after I've racked homebrew off it, what can I say ....

15:42 Fearing the result a bit, my mind has started to stray. Found this wonderfully abstract video on the To Øl website.

15:50 West Ham have a blatant penalty turned down and then hit the crossbar shortly afterwards. I think that cancels out any good luck in the first half.

15:53 Getting lots of yeast and apple now. Maybe this beer is slightly oxidised.

16:00 Well, looks like that Wembley day out will have to wait another year. 2-1 Stoke, a disappointing result and a slightly disappointing beer in First Frontier IPA.

Hopcorn Chicken

2011-03-10T08:37:00.008Z

I like the idea of using hops in food. Picking out the flavour characteristics of a particular hop and using them in place of, or alongside, the ingredient they emulate. How about a lemon mousse with the enigmatic sorachi ace, or key lime pie with the vibrant, zesty notes of citra? It’s something that appeals to both the food and beer lover in me, all at the same time.

The difficulty comes in isolating hop flavour without also extracting bitterness. In “How to Brew” John Palmer tells us that: “The main bittering agent is the alpha acid resin which is insoluble in water until isomerised by boiling”. But put a hop cone in your mouth and bite down on it, make a hop tea using water at 60 degrees centigrade or dry hop a beer heavily and you’ll know that boiling is far from fundamental to extracting bitterness. And whilst that bitterness is essential to balancing the malty sweetness of beer, in food it’s almost always unwelcome.

Homebrew chef Sean Paxton talks about a technique for capturing hop flavour that involves salt. He makes a “hop salt” by layering together alternate bags of hops and sea salt. The bags are made from muslin which allows the aroma of the hop to slowly permeate the salt over time. Although it takes a while for that hop flavour to become strong enough, it eventual provides you with a hop flavour that can be added easily to food without the dreaded bitterness.

Whilst my own hop salt experiment slowly comes to life, I thought I’d have a go at something a bit quicker. We know that hop pellets taste bitter as all hell, but could you use them sparingly enough, combined with other ingredients, to give a hop flavour with manageable bitterness?

I took two columbus hop pellets, just two, ground them in a pestle and mortar and added sea salt flakes. Instantly I got a huge aroma of dank, wet leaves. In the background lurked a piney note and some lemony citrus. Working on the fly I added some coriander seed, thinking that the zingy, citrus freshness that they have would pick out and amplify the similar qualities in the hop. Boom! What an aroma resulted, delicious.

To test this seasoning I needed something quite subtle, a carrier that would provide a canvas for the flavour rather than mask it. I used some popcorn chicken by taking it still hot from the oven, throwing it into a plastic food bag with the seasoning and giving the whole thing a good shake. The coverage this gave was pretty much spot on; light, but evenly spread across each mouthful.

Did it work? Simply put, no. The smell coming off the food was great, the heat forcing those volatile aroma compounds into the air, massively enhancing the fragrance that the seasoning had when first ground. But the bitterness was still there, still there in spades. At first you got a great flavour following through from the notes in the aroma, but then in pounded the most brutal bitterness I’ve ever experienced. Massive, face puckering, ear curling bitterness. Clutching at straws, a light sprinkle of sugar did actually go some way towards tempering it, but ultimately nothing was bringing this one back from the realms of failure.

Interesting stuff. Let’s see how the hop salt goes.

Lovibonds VAT 69 IPA

2011-02-22T22:33:00.005Z

Yeah, so anyway, I’m walking into the shop on the way home from work, it’s Friday and I’m grabbing the essentials for the evening. I can’t be arsed with anything new tonight, I just fancy something to sit back and enjoy, something I’m familiar with, something I don’t need to think about. Bottle of white for the missus and some ice cubes; yeah I know I’m paying for frozen tap water but life’s too short for those little trays, I always end up with more water over the floor than in the freezer anyway!

Something looks wrong with this bottle. Why would they change the label? Whatever, it doesn’t have those three words on it so it must be the same inside. “New and improved”.

Glass out, ice in, feet up, sip. Ahhhh.

Arghhh, what the hell!

Where’s that buttery sweetness, vanilla and woody oak? I’ve got a mouthful of American hops! This doesn’t taste like whisky at all. If anything, it tastes like beer. Wait a minute, now I look a bit closer, it is beer! Lovibonds 69 IPA, I thought I’d bought Sanderson VAT 69 Scotch Whisky.

An easy mistake to make. I mean, if I’m being absolutely honest, the labels do look completely different. One of them is based on a red and white American road sign whilst the other is black and gold with stencil font, but they’re still easily mistaken. The beer was found in the beer aisle – of a specialist beer shop, in a beer shaped bottle, at a typical beer price with a beer ABV; but apart from that it’s identical to the whisky.

Ah well, having made this easy mistake, there’s absolutely no way I’m going back to that shop to get that whisky. Nope, my mind’s made up. I’ll never buy that whisky again! Why would I when the 69 IPA tastes so similar and I can just buy that instead?

---

This post was written in response to the news that global beverage company Diageo have taken exception to micro brewers Lovibonds using the number 69 in their marketing. Apparently the "69 IPA" brand is easy to confuse with their own "VAT 69" whisky. See here.

Punk Off - Punk vs Punk

2011-02-18T08:34:00.008Z

For a lot of us, Brewdog Punk IPA is an important beer. Love them or hate them, in many ways Brewdog spearhead the good (craft?) beer movement in the UK and, as the brewery flagship, Punk is symbolic of the whole ethos behind the brewery. Punk is a statement of intent, and as a lover of good beer it’s something I feel a kinship for. When I put a bottle of Punk in my supermarket basket I feel like I’ve done more than buy beer; I’ve made a point, I’ve left the cheap, tasteless crap behind and I’ve paid a little more for a quality product, crafted by skilled people that care about flavour above all else.

Changing the Punk recipe would therefore be insane, right? A wise man once said: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But that’s exactly what Brewdog have done, determined that they can make it a better beer they’ve lowered the bitterness and alcohol and increased the dry hops in the recipe. They’ve made Punk better than it was, simple as that.

Taking that last bottle of original Punk out of the fridge, prising the cap off and pouring it into a glass, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a slight twang of sadness. The last time I’d ever drink Punk! Ever! Breaking open a bottle of the new version alongside it felt like the right way to see the old girl off; a passing of the baton, a changing of the guard.

Original Punk is filtered so, naturally, it pours a much brighter gold then the new comer. The aroma is actually quite reserved with currant skins, some white grape and elderberries. The malt is really there, bringing a toasty quality to the finish and the faintest hint of nuttiness or smoke. Then in floods that trademark bitterness, brutal and unforgiving. It’s a beer I know and love, perhaps lacking the impact it once had but still great.

New Punk is a completely different beer. The aroma is masses of satsuma, grapefruit and pine that follow through to the taste before giving in to a bitterness that feels perfectly in proportion. It’s dry and it’s light, perhaps a touch thin if being hypercritical, but it’s wonderfully refreshing. It feels like a move towards 5am Saint, it’s less aggressive than the original but it’s packed full of flavour and it’s effortlessly drinkable - exactly the type of beer I want to fill my fridge with.

Variation between batches has been a problem for Brewdog in the past, the Punk I drank here for example was far from the best I’ve had. I hope the same problem doesn’t hit the new recipe because, with it now being available in cans, it’s something I can see myself wanting to drink a lot of. I’ve tried the new version from a bottle, keg and cask; whilst all very different, they’ve all been great. It’s a brave move to change the product you built your company on, but I think it’s the right one.

Brood: Why Craft Beer Means Something

2011-02-11T09:50:00.008Z

Some beer is brewed purely to make money. The flavour of this beer and the processes used to make it are irrelevant; they are necessary cogs in a money making machine, and if the brewer can change them to increase the money he makes then he will, regardless of the impact it has. A production process driven by profit alone, we call this beer “Macro Beer”.

Some beer is brewed for experimentation, for investigation, through interest and enthusiasm, for the love of flavour. When this beer is made no consideration is given to cost or complexity of process; if there’s a way to make that beer better, the brewer will find it and will use it. A production process that’s enabled by skill and knowledge, driven by the quality of the final product. We call this beer “Homebrew”.

And then some beer finds itself sitting between these two groups. It’s made with the passion, skill and love that defines the homebrew, but it’s also sold to make the brewer a living. Profitability is critical, but it isn’t to the detriment of the finished beer. The brewer strives for balance, to achieve both a quality product, and enough money to live. What do we call this beer?

***

It's a tough environment over on that macro side. Massive marketing budgets, corporate sponsorships, endless pounds to spend on research and the economies of scale. The only way that our plucky middle-group-hero can compete is by carving out a niche, identifying himself as something a bit different, something worthy of attention. That niche is quality, and his weapon is the reassurance that it's ok to pay a premium for something of significant quality. His identity, his banner, is "Craft Beer".

Appealing to this niche is critical if a foothold is to be established in that left hand group. The macro cannot be matched for price; the moment quality is brought into question or a beer is viewed as too expensive it fails, and the customer reverts to the cheap slabs piled high in the corner.

So slap the words “Craft Beer” on any old product and the jobs a goodun then? No. Branding, packaging, promotion; all critical in denoting a product as being one of quality. Take supermarkets; you see a black packet in Marks & Spencer or Tesco and you immediately think quality. Whether the banner is “Taste the difference”, “Finest” or “ASDA Extra Special” isn’t important, you’ll judge a beer on the appearance of the pump clip or bottle label way before you get a chance to read the small print. And all these things are only worthy of investment if the product’s right; the skill and expertise of the brewer have to be there in the first place, the proof of the pudding is in the eating they say, there’s no point in polishing a turd.

A banner does allow us to tie things together though, we with our natural human instinct to group, categorise and classify. It’s an enabler for providing us with a way to write and speak and communicate with more accuracy than by just saying “beer”. It’s an identity and a statement of intent.

The specific name we use isn’t the important thing here. “Craft Beer" or "Micro Beer or "Artisan Ale”, each would work equally well, and any preference for one over the other is exactly that - just a preference. A preference which is irrelevant, irrelevant for the reasons discussed and irrelevant because, like it or not, “Craft Beer” has become the de facto standard. “Craft Beer” puts emphasis on the craftsmanship behind the beer, on the skill and expertise of the brewer, on quality; as a banner, “Craft beer” works.

This blog was posted as part of "Brood", see here.

Pretzels and Dips

2011-02-09T08:28:00.006Z

Pretzels in England suck. Those tiny little bronze knots, baked to a crisp, sandpaper-dry; they’re the snack you buy for Christmas and eventually throw away in February, they always disappoint. In the US and in Germany it’s a completely different story. Over there, a pretzel is a snack as big as your face; it’s doughy and leathery, it’s chewy and tangy, it’s aggressively studded with enough salt to make your mouth water, it’s perfect for beer.

For my money, the key process in producing a great pretzel is the boil before the bake. You bring a large pan of water to the boil and add a tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda; this is then used as a bath for each pretzel before baking. Keep the water at a boil and just throw each pretzel in for one minute, making sure that the whole surface of the dough gets contact time with the water. Easy. The science behind this defeats me, but what it does for the finished snack is add that characteristic leathery exterior, whilst leaving the inside soft and doughy.

Next on the critical list is the shaping of your unbaked pretzel. Roll between hands to form a long strand and then twist into that familiar shape - remembering to leave sufficient space for rising. Whilst this is easy enough for those face-sized-monsters we touched on earlier, smaller, dainty, bite-sized versions would need the kind of dexterity and finger girth that only Tinkerbell could boast of. For this reason, I made Pretzel bites by cutting the pre-shaped strands into thumbnail chunks with a sharp knife; maintaining the flavour and texture of the pretzel, just in a mouth sized morsel.

And to partner - a selection of beer themed dips; all starting with a foundation of mayonnaise, based on a recipe by Richard Fox (via Mark Dredge).

Having split the batch, the first version got three teaspoons of Young’s Bitter folded through it; giving a sharp bitterness to the finish and a feint hop-spice upfront. A generous pinch of mustard powder and a drizzle of honey to the second attempt seemed like a good idea at the time, but the mustard combined with the beer to give a two-punch-combo of astringency and heat; quite frankly horrendous. Attempt number three, beautifully fresh garam masala, enough to flavour without leaving a grainy texture, wonderfully fragrant, almost floral, earthy and spicy; tempered by the rich, velvety mayonnaise, a clear winner.

Finally, a dip inspired by the Mexican sauce Mole Poblano - a dark and luscious combination of chocolate, chilli peppers and as many as twenty other ingredients. I very finely grated some onion and garlic, sweated this off in some olive oil and then added a spice mix of smoked paprika, cumin, salt, black pepper, chilli powder, cinnamon and clove. To beer-it-up and add that essential chocolate flavour I deglazed the pan with Young’s Double Chocolate Stout, followed by enough tomato puree to leave a thick, velvety sauce. Intense but delicious.

So, pretzels and a selection of dips. Beer snacks are the way forward my friends.

Saison du BUFF & Focaccia

2011-02-03T10:58:00.008Z

What do you pair with a beer like Saison du BUFF? An American saison that’s flavoured with parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme! The cogs churn through the extraordinary: chocolate, coffee, red fruits; but settle on something a bit more safe.

I’ve always had something of an addiction for baking bread; if not for the early mornings, crap salary and shiny allure of IT, I might even be a baker today. The classic combination of rosemary, sea salt and olive oil pops into my head; combine with that safety net of flour and water and we’re focaccia bound from here on out.

My recipe for bread goes something like this:

How much do I want? Lots! Then I’ll need a lot of flour! One packet of yeast, salt, some olive oil if it suits and then enough water to bring it together. Knead it to the point that you think you’ve kneaded it enough, then knead it some more. Stick it in a bowl, leave it for an hour. Punch it in the face and then knead it some more. Shape, leave to double in size, bake.

When making focaccia, I use the handle of a wooden spoon to push holes into the surface of the bread just before it goes into the oven. Salt, rosemary and good olive oil are pounded together in a pestle and mortar, then rubbed all over the bread.

Saison du BUFF is an interesting beer. Oddly interesting. I’m not really sure I like it. The flavour profile is dominated by the herbs, mainly rosemary in fact, then in comes a Belgian yeast character that feels grubby and dirty, it’s sulphurous and bitter and not very nice. The two elements clash badly and you’re left thinking: nice idea in theory, not so great in practice.

On the other, the bread turned out brilliantly; lovely peppery olive oil, fragrant rosemary and an assertive saltiness. Delicious.

Dot Com

2011-02-01T08:40:00.006Z

You can now access this blog via http://www.beerbirrabier.com

From under the familiar, comfortable wing of Blogspot.com, it's time for this Blog to emerge and take its first steps into the world of adulthood. If you see it cowering in a corner, wearing unwashed clothes, surrounded by Pot Noodle and Rustlers packets - spare it a moment please. Feed it some baked beans and tell it to have a bath.

You can still use the beerbirrabier.blogspot.com URL and old links will automatically redirect to the new domain - no worries there.

Bacon, Chocolate & Stout Muffins

2011-01-27T09:10:00.017Z

Christmas morning. I'm back home, surface area at a premium, every good sitting spot is taken, glasses rest on window ledges and on the arms of chairs. The floor is a battlefield of wrapping paper, dreaming of its former glory it lies there wounded, in the final throws of life; peeled away like a shell, it valiantly clings to the shape it once held, but that black sack of death stands tall in the corner of the room. The background smell of roasting Turkey builds, the mass of bodies cause condensation to cloud the windows ....

"Your turn. Mark! Your turn!"

"What, huh, oh yeah! Sorry, miles away."

I close the cover and put the newly-revealed book down, clearly I got it wrong this time. Straddling that line between interest in the present you just opened and holding everyone else up by forgetting to put it down, it's a difficult one to get right. The book in question is "The Flavour Thesaurus" by Niki Segnit and, even with attention set to flick-through, my head is swamped by ideas and inspiration.

Chocolate with bacon wrestles its way to the front of the list. Like many, I tried bacon and maple syrup for the first time with considerable reservation, only to be blown away by just how incredible a combination it can be. Apply that theory to chocolate and you can understand how the two might work in partnership. A muffin strikes me as the perfect medium on which to bring these two flavours together, and it just so happens that I’ve got a tried and trusted muffin recipe in my arsenal already.

I always cook bacon in the oven, laid on a cooling rack that sits in a walled baking tray. I do this for a few reasons: firstly it means the flat doesn’t smell like the local cafe for the rest of the morning, secondly because I find it allows the fat to drip away from the meat, causing it to dry out slightly and crisp up better. That and because I don’t own a grill!

I cooked two rashers of smoked streaky and then diced them very finely. This was added to the batter right before resting, along with four heaped teaspoons of cocoa powder and two tablespoons of Young’s Double Chocolate Stout. Baked in the normal way, the muffins were then cooled and enjoyed with the rest of the beer.

I like Young’s Double Chocolate Stout. It’s like a big beery chocolate bar forced into a bottle. It’s a great beer for pairing with food and it worked really well here; the thick body and chocolate notes sitting alongside the dense, sweet muffins. A palate cleansing crackle of carbonation and then a tease of bitterness. All happening whilst that salty, meaty bacon added depth to the chocolate, almost seasoning it, enhancing the chocolate flavour but taking it in a new direction at the same time.

A strange combination, but one that really works.

* Flickr photo set for this post.

Stop! Stand Still and Eat Chips!

2011-01-21T09:02:00.012Z

I spotted this article in the Evening Standard last week and it made me laugh.

"Moderate drinking is good for your health and can cut the risk of diabetes and high blood pressure, claim doctors". Fantastic! Any idea who these doctors are, or perhaps what makes them qualified to make such a statement?

"Up to a pint a day, combined with exercise and a Mediterranean diet, can even help people lose weight, said Spanish researchers". CAN help people lose weight, so equally there's a good chance that it WON'T help people lose weight? Surely one cigarette a week, combined with exercise and a diet low in saturated fat could equally serve to act as a weight loss diet? This just in: a diet of marathon training, Ryvita and Vodka (one shot per week), CAN help you to lose weight!

The researchers are from Spain though ... narrows it down a bit further than those doctors at least.

"Beer drinkers here [in Spain] do not resemble Britons, who drink large quantities, almost without moving from one spot, while eating chips". Brilliant! So, if you thought our national pastime was cricket or bowls or football or lawn tennis, you're sadly mistaken.

I'm off down the pub to drink twelve pints, stand in the same spot for four hours and to eat my own body weight in fried potato. See you all there.

Connect!

2011-01-13T11:11:00.004Z

I'm attempting to pull my various social media streams together and to make them the focal point of the blog. To the right-hand side is an icon that will link you to my Twitter, Facebook and Flickr accounts. Extras will be added as they come up. I'm thinking Wikio and possibly something like Upcoming.

Get connected!

Beer Blogging In 2011

2011-01-07T10:34:00.004Z

Hello 2011, where did you come from?!

I'm attempting a bit of a blog redesign at the moment. It's taking up the small amount of free time that I've actually got, so things have slowed down blog entry wise as a result. Rest assured that everything will be back to normal very soon.

My first new beer of 2011 will come in the form of The Kernel Black IPA, brewed in collaboration with Rake manager Glyn and being launched here. Looking forward to it and will hopefully see some of you there.

Did somebody say Twissup?

Pairing Good Beer with Good Food: Christmas

2010-12-23T09:29:00.023Z

My latest article for Thanet CAMRA's Ale of Thanet publication covers food and beer pairing with a Christmas theme. You can check it out below or find the original here. December has been a lean month on the blogging front; work, family, holidays and colds have all got in the way a bit. I'm looking forward to really picking things up in the new year.

---

For many of us, Christmas dinner is the most important meal of the year. It’s the focal point of the holiday season; it’s something we look forward to and plan for weeks. With our friends, family and loved ones around that table, it’s important that the meal is just right; and for some, it’s one of the few occasions where thought is extended beyond the food, to the drink pairing too.

Whilst it might be instinctive to reach for a bottle of white, I see no reason why beer shouldn’t be given a chance on that centre stage. Break open a few good bottles and share them around!

Turkey can be a dry, bland meat if mistreated; what Turkey loves is something a bit showy and assertive to sit aside it, something to perk it up and encourage it along. It’s a meat that carries other flavours well, which is why we often eat it with something like cranberry jelly. Those fruity, sweet, sharp little berries hold the turkey’s hand and help it along.

Batemans XXXB is a premium bitter at 4.8%. It’s a deep amber colour with a distinct berry-fruit sweetness, making it a perfect match for roast chicken and turkey. In the same way as traditional cranberry jelly, it will punctuate each mouthful, lifting the meat to new heights.

Whilst the bird is undoubtedly the main event, it wouldn’t be the same without that vegetable undercard. The roast potatoes and buttered brussels are absolutely essential; from there we can take it in the direction of the parsnip, the carrot and the cabbage. Yorkshire pudding, why not? Bread sauce, go on then. Pigs in blankets, just a couple. Tiring behind the apron and tiring to the palate; but fear not because the XXXB has your back - stiff bitterness, a refreshingly light body and plenty of carbonation. Enough to lift the most tired of palates, leaving you ready for the next mouthful.

Batemans XXXB is available at all good off-licences and bottled beer shops. A 500ml bottle will cost in the region of £2.50.

Plump with that delicious cargo, it’s mission impossible to fight off slumber whilst the Queen makes her speech. Awake and put off those dishes with a mince pie and a bottle of American IIPA!

A mince pie is one of those things that I could happily eat all year round. When they finally make an appearance it’s important to consume as many as possible before they’re scared off by the springtime sun. Supermarket offerings vary massively, some passable, some terrible; the best mince pies are those you make yourself. Sticky round the edges where the bubbling filling has started to leak, still warm from the oven, generously filled and wrapped with the crumbliest sweet pastry. What they lack in elegance they make up for in flavour, and only an equally bold beer is capable of taking on the pairing challenge.

Tesco Finest American Double IPA (IIPA) is a big beer. It’s brewed exclusively for the supermarket chain by Brewdog of Scotland – a brewery that took gold in the IIPA category at this year’s World Beer Cup. It takes the intense bitterness and hop profile of an American IPA and doubles it. A bitterness rating off-the-scale, masses and masses of the freshest hops and 9 % alcohol. If you’re yet to encounter beers like this, you might think them over-the-top and excessive – well, that would be because they are! Treat them with respect, serve them cold, drink them in small quantities and you’ll be repaid with a flavour profile unlike that in any other beer.

The sticky dried-fruit, pith and peel of the mince pie will find a perfect partner in the citrus-laden, resinous, jam-like hops. The buttery, sweet pastry will be amplified by the sweetness of the beer and then the brutally bitter bite will stomp in and wash everything away. Bitterness against sweetness; the two work in stunning harmony, duelling it out to achieve dominance but never quite getting there. A whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

Tesco Finest American Double IPA is available at selected Tesco shops. A 330ml bottle will cost around £2.

***

Boxing Day brings the worst food hangover of the year; eating will be the last thing on your mind. Until lunchtime! Then suddenly that hotchpotch of Tupperware and foil in the fridge becomes a limitless treasure trove of potential. Lightly toast some thick white bread and get building; hunks of cold turkey, slices of stuffing, finely shredded white cabbage or really crisp iceberg lettuce, a cold sausage if any are left and then spoonfuls of spicy, tart, fruity chutney. Pair with a James Bond film and a glass of good pilsner and you’re set.

The lineage of the lager beer can be traced back to a single parent. Pilsner Urquell is characterised by its bright golden colour, its foamy head and the generous use of noble Saaz hops. Brewed in the Czech town of Pilsen since 1842, it’s responsible for spawning the vast majority of beer consumed worldwide. Whilst the modern day SABMiller incarnation might not compare to the unfiltered, unpasteurised original, it manages to stand head and shoulders above the majority of macro lager. Heavier in body than most, Pilsner Urquell balances caramel sweetness with punchy bitterness. The Saaz hops lend a uniquely recognisable herbal quality and there’s soft carbonation throughout. It’s full but light, snappy, crisp and dry, it arrives and then vanishes; this is what defines Pilsner Urquell and this is what makes it perfect for the Boxing Day sandwich.

You need something robust enough to stand up to those rich flavours, but a heavy beer would just be too much. Urquell will happily hold its own, but it’s light enough to stop you feeling weighed down. Delicious!

Pilsner Urquell is widely available in a number of sizes. At Sainsbury’s, a 500ml bottle costs around £1.81.

***

Christmas is a time for friends and family, it’s a time to enjoy good food, good drink and good company. Whilst we’re happy to make beer a part of our everyday lives, we seem to turn to wine for the special occasions. Save an extra place at the Christmas table this year, a place for beer.

Iceland - I Found Beer!

2010-12-03T19:45:00.003Z

The Vinbud was exactly what I was looking for. Walking in there felt like an admission of guilt (another story for another blog), but once inside I found loads of Icelandic beer. Household names brewed under licence, domestic macro brands and a handful of micro beers. Fantastic.

The weather here is cold. Minus 12 degrees cold. We left the hotel last night and returned without sensation in our big toes. The water is heated by geothermal power, it picks up minerals and other nice things on the way to your house, it fills the room with the smell of hard boiled egg whenever you turn the hot tap on. The Sun never makes it above the horizon. It's not until 11am that it gets up at all! That Sun's lazier than I am. When you wake up you feel shattered, regardless of the time, because it's still dark outside and your body tells you to go back to sleep. So very different. The entire population of Iceland is only 300,000 people. Reykjavik has 100,000 of those people. You can fit 90,000 into Wembley Stadium!

They have Taco Bell here but not McDonalds. So very different.

Iceland - Vinbud

2010-12-01T22:14:00.007Z

I've found it readers! Beer central in Iceland. The government shops that sell beer over 2.25% ABV are called Vinbud [Vínbúð] and this is the local one. It's next to an English pub called "The English Pub" (see what they did there?) and it's about five minutes from the hotel. It turns out that 60% of Icelandic people don't want to buy strong alcohol in the supermarket, so it's all relegated to these little shops. No signs overhead, age restrictions on the door, reduced opening hours ... it's like they don't want you to drink or something!

Alcohol obsessed? No. Beer obsessed? Maybe. I'll be there tomorrow.

Iceland - Egils Gull & Burning Bread

2010-11-30T21:26:00.007Z

I'm in Iceland. The country not the supermarket.

I walked into a shop earlier and they were selling beer for the same price as Diet Coke. Everything is so expensive, but the beer is the same price as Coke. I bought some flat breads and they tasted like burning; imagine the smell of a barbecue when you attempt to clean it the morning after use - well it tasted like that. It tasted like someone grabbed it whilst they were fleeing a burning building. Why would you save baked goods from a burning building? If bread is at the top of your "must save" list then you need to get a cat or something.

The beer turned out to be 2.5%, which is probably why it was so cheap. It was called Egils Gull and, as luck would have it, the mini bar in my hotel room happened to have a Gull branded glass. It tasted terrible; like soda water with a drop of beer concentrate in it. Oddly sweet, a carbon dioxide metallic quality and some limp bitterness to finish.

I get the feeling that they don't much care for beer over here.

Canned Beer

2010-11-23T08:32:00.025Z

After much contemplation and discussion, Brewdog have announced that they will, again, lead the way in the UK by canning their craft beer. From March 2011 their flagship product Punk IPA will be available in cans. Rather nifty looking cans at that:

The benefits of canning beer have been covered in the past (see this by Mark Dredge). For me it's important to set cans apart from bottles and that should be done through the way we intend them to be drunk. I want to see breweries putting core product in a can; beers intended for everyday drinking. I want to stack up a six pack in the back of my fridge; six cans of a beer I love and that I know I can get whenever I want. That can will be the one I reach for when I'm thirsty and don't want to think, it'll be the one I reach for when I'm packing a picnic and it'll be the one I reach for when taking a few to a mate's.

Leave the one-off, super-rare, super-special beers to the grandiose bottle, to the cork and cage.

And, most importantly - less is more. If we're ever going to change perceptions of canned beer in this country, 330ml is the only way to go. It instantly draws a line between macro and micro, it’s a sensible volume for higher ABVs and it stands out.

Lovibonds Brewery - 69 IPA Launch

2010-11-19T08:21:00.022Z

Lovibonds is an exciting brewery because they aren’t afraid to do things a bit differently. They make good beer and they like to experiment.

They launched the bottled version of their rebranded IPA (69 IPA) to unanimous acclaim on Monday night at The Rake, Borough. An American IPA at 6.9 % that’s dry hopped with centennial and columbus hops. Dry hopped using Robinson-esque equipment, dreamt up by founding brewer Jeff Rosenmeier. Think Sierra Nevada Torpedo; a vessel packed with fresh hops, purged of oxygen with carbon dioxide, fed by a constant stream of newly fermented beer. Every drop filtered through those hops, forced to make contact with them, over and over again.

It must look like Frankenstein’s laboratory in that brewery; the shinning metallic bodies of the fermenters, the mechanical whir of the pump – like the rhythmic beating of a heart, artery and vein replaced by meters of plastic piping. A circulatory system crafted from a patchwork of odds and ends. Capable of producing beer with massive hop presence; like the smell left on your hands after handling fresh hops.

Bitter, light, cold, refreshing and acutely hoppy. Citrus fruits from the centennial and dank, leafy, resinous, near-vegetal notes from the columbus. That 69 is a fantastic IPA.

Then there was Sour Grapes. Ah, Sour grapes, such a beautiful disaster. An unwanted infection souring, quite literally, a batch of beer and the moods of two brewers. Seven hundred litres down the drain, only to discover that the infection had forced a wonderful transformation. A sample keg at the brewery tap flew out the door and the accidental became the intentional. The beer is now brewed and soured on purpose. It’s labelled as a gueuze but, being unblended, I guess it’s technically a lambic. Whatever. It was the first beer to run dry on the night and that says it all.

Dark Reserve was a seamless blend of bourbon and beer. The beer bringing a roast malt character, dark chocolate and bitterness; the bourbon bringing creamy vanilla, woody oak and velvety alcohol warmth. It’s easy for a beer to be consumed by the barrel it’s aged in, dominated by the bigger flavours and reduced to a cameo role. With Dark Reserve though, one silently sweeps into the next, leaving both parts intact but producing a new whole that’s better than the sum of its parts.

Lovibonds are something of a well-kept secret at the moment. Their beer doesn’t travel far and they don’t put anything in a cask. If you see their stuff around, give it a try!

Forgettable

2010-11-15T08:01:00.047Z

I drank some forgettable beer this weekend. Forgettable beer and forgettable TV. The thing is though, if you ever get to a point where you can't enjoy some trashy TV, with a trashy take away pizza and whatever can-of-crap lager you're given, then chances are you're probably taking yourself too seriously.

So what about that X Factor then, huh? Is it me or are most of them a bit poor this year? Take "It is Varrgner Louis" for example, I thought that joke stopped being funny when Jedward were eliminated a year ago. Apparently not. Mary Byrne manages to belt out a decent tune if they pick the right song for her, but I can't help but feel like someone should phone the police and report the theft of Susan Boyle's act.

Rebecca Ferguson has a great voice and will make the final. Unfortunately though, she's instantly forgettable; look for her to jog your memory by eating kangaroo penis in about a year's time. Stacey Soloman anyone? Same goes for Paije Richardson, minus the bit about the great voice.

Drama came this week in the form of Katie Waissel and her ability to defy the odds and avoid the boot. Now, I don't think old one-trick-pony Aidan should've stayed either, but not since Rachel Adedeji has so much effort been unsuccessfully spent on trying to find someone a niche and an image. It didn't work that time either ... I can't see her lasting much longer.

Being over the age of 16 and male, that leaves the only two people worth watching. ITV champion gurner Cher Lloyd does everything in her power to make people dislike her, even Wayne Rooney could learn a thing or two from her; but she reminds me of Diana Vickers, something different and interesting lies in everything she does. Dare I say she has a certain X factor about her? And then there's Matt Cardle, winner of the 2010 series, runner up to Take That in the battle for Christmas number one. What a good voice he has.

I saw The Social Network yesterday and all of a sudden I have a strange compulsion to start using Facebook. I thinks this means I lose.

My Antonia & The Imperial Pilsner

2010-11-12T08:06:00.013Z

The recent British Guild of Beer Writers seminar provoked a lot of talk about beer styles: what do they mean; are they necessary, could we do without them? Reading a few blogs on the subject, it seemed like a poignant time to open my bottle of Dogfish Head / Birra del Borgo My Antonia; a 7.5 percent imperial pilsner.

With the grain bill of a traditional pilsner, albeit ramped up, and the hopping schedule of an American IPA, an imperial pilsner fuses two existing beer styles to produce something completely new. Rogue kicked things off back in 2003 with their Morimoto Pils, Sam Adams came to the party in 2005 and a small bunch of (mostly American) breweries have made attempts since. Relatively speaking though, this is a new beer style and something that only a handful of breweries have attempted.

My Antonia sits a lager-straw in the glass, with tinges of gold that suggest something more is going on. Immediately you’re struck by how thick and smooth it feels, a luxurious honey-sweetness dominates as it slides across your tongue, filling your whole mouth. It’s floral, fragrant, perfumed; then a herbal quality takes over as it builds up. The finish is punchy and bitter but light and cleansing, it’s a beer that tempts you to chug it all down, but at the same time warns that you mustn’t.

There’s something Champagne about this beer; lots of carbonation, a deft lightness and the suggestion of yeasty white bread and brioche. I can see it working well with something like a bread and butter pudding, allowing the bready flavour in the yeast to come forward whilst taming the richness of the pudding with bitterness and carbonation. At the same time, the savoury edge of those herbal hops would work well against something meaty; I’m thinking a classic Chicago style hot dog with all its salad and condiment sidekicks. Zak Avery says the savoury flavour presents itself as celery salt, he’s right, and therein would lie the bridge between hot dog and beer.

My Antonia is a beer that forces you to throw away the style guide, but it's a beer that’s no less stunning as a result.

Kelly Ryan

2010-11-08T12:00:00.008Z

We’re eight hours in and I’m starting to flag. The Jever in my hand is doing its best to perk me up; the crisp bitterness and spritzy carbonation are uplifting and refreshing, but that identity parade of pumps, on the horizon of the bar, looms large.

The Grove is a pub with a reputation that precedes it. Today it’s full to bursting, every seat taken, all standing room occupied. There’s a constant stream of people at the bar and the busy sound of chatter fills the air.

Then Kelly Ryan stands up. Eyes follow him as he moves across the room. He’s been carrying around a bag all day, a bag full of bottles, bottles of experimental and exclusive Thornbridge beer. Before the first cap is removed, the crowd has gathered and the room belongs to Kelly, I get the feeling that people want to try these bottles almost as much as Kelly wants to share them.

We try the new batch of Bracia and I realise that this is it, in a nutshell, the reason why our loss will be

New Zealand

’s gain. Since 2006, Kelly has been an integral part of building arguably the best brewery in England; but beyond that he’s been a pioneer for social media and bridging the gap between beer maker and beer drinker. A part of the Twissup events, a blogger and a twitter fan; any available channel has been used to involve the drinker and to build a sense of community among lovers of good beer.

My first conversation with Kelly came about through Twitter. I was planning a homebrew black IPA at the time and, as luck would have it, Thornbridge were brewing Raven. One throwaway tweet later and I’m discussing the relative merits of de-husked carafa special 3 with one of the best brewers in the country. Emails back and forth, reviewing of recipes, tips on process; I was genuinely blown away by the time Kelly was happy to dedicate to my little homebrew project.

Kelly Ryan: kick ass brewer, a man with an effervescent enthusiasm for beer that can’t be contained, a bloke that always has time for people that want to pick his brains, and someone who’s driven innovation in both the beer we drink and the way we communicate about it.

Thanks Kelly, all the best in the future.

Food & Beer - Spotted In the Wild

2010-11-05T08:19:00.007Z

All press is good press, right? I found this rare example of a main stream food and beer pairing article (of sorts) in the Sunday Star Take 5 Magazine. Part advert, part recipe, part beer plug and part mental. Words fail me; I feel like I need to go and write two good pieces on food and beer to try and restore balance to the universe.

Beer Muffins with Hop Drizzle, Hop Icing and a Crystal Malt Crumb

2010-11-01T09:43:00.000Z

Social media and the Internet, wonderful things. I love the fusion of communication channels; the multiple ways in which you can talk to people and how those channels come together to form a whole. Dom, of the Marble Brewery, bought cupcakes to a tasting at Cask Pub and Kitchen; Phil, of Beermerchants, tasted them and then tweeted about some of his own; Glyn, of The Rake, saw this and got cupcake curious on his blog and then Mark Dredge picked up the gauntlet in a blog comment. All these different methods of communication coming together to provide a platform on which people around the world can talk; how brilliant!

Before I picked up the whisk, I started to daydream about the combination of beer and cake. I want to make a cake that involves beer, but I don’t want to simply use beer within the cake mix. Mark did this recently with ice cream and I questioned if the same approach could be applied to a cake. How about making a plain muffin mix and then adding a hop tea to it? How about thickening that hop tea with icing sugar and turning it into a hop drizzle? How about some hop icing on top of that, then a sprinkling of crushed crystal malt? With some dried malt extract added to the batter in place of caster sugar, I could give the cake a real malty edge and hopefully end up with the cake equivalent of an IPA!

Ingredients (for 5 muffins): 110g plain flour, 110g butter, 60g caster sugar, 1.5 tsp baking powder, 2 eggs, handful of hops, 100g icing sugar, 1 heaped tablespoon crystal malt.

Start by infusing a handful of hops in 350ml warm water. The best way to do this is using a cafetiere, make sure the water is warm but not hot and add enough just to cover the hops. Set to one side and leave whilst you make the muffin mixture.

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy; add the eggs, baking powder and flour; stir very well. Once the hop tea has had a minimum of 15 minutes stewing time, depress the plunger and pour off the liquid. Add 3 tablespoons of the hop liquid to the batter and mix well. Place in the fridge and leave for a minimum of 1 hour.

Line a muffin tin with individual muffin cases. Take the cake mixture out of the fridge and carefully half fill each case with a spoon; the mixture will have risen slightly and taken on an airy texture, try to preserve as much of this air as possible.

Set your oven to 200c and move a shelf as close to the middle as possible. Allow the oven 10 minutes to heat before placing the muffins inside. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until risen and golden on top. Avoid opening the oven door if you can.

Cool on a wire rack until warm. At this point, spoon over 2-3 teaspoons of the hop tea.

When completely cold, take the icing sugar and add the hop tea drop by drop until you end up with a thick icing. You’ll need surprising little liquid, so don’t be tempted to add too much at once. Crush the crystal malt in a pestle and mortar until almost at the stage of being dust, carefully spoon the icing over each muffin and top with a sprinkle of the crystal malt. Allow the icing to set before eating.

The hop flavour is delicate but definitely comes through in the finished cake. It's a real challenge to extract hop flavour and aroma without bitterness, but against the malty sweetness this is balanced out. For future attempts, I'll experiment with ways to increase the hop presence whilst keeping the bitterness low.

Why Cask Ale Rocks

2010-10-26T12:00:00.001+01:00

Cask ale is important to each of us in very different ways. In this collaborative blogging effort Mark (beer writer), Shea (young female drinker), Glyn (bar manager), Kelly (brewer) and myself say why it's important.

Some people paint pictures and draw sketches, some paint their toe nails green, some sing and dance and play the guitar whilst others knit jumpers and stitch clothes. Creativity is a characteristic we share; there within all of us it lies, for some more eager to show itself than for others, it lies and it waits. From global hit record to origami swan, that creativity must find an outlet; for me it found that outlet in home brewing.

Irrespective of image and perception, the fact is that an immeasurable number of ingredient and process combinations mean a myriad of possible flavours and aromas. Far from being boring, brown and bitter; cask ale is a living, evolving product for the true connoisseur. Hop varieties in their hundreds become the colour palette of the brewer, hewn over a canvas of malt to produce anything from a deeply rich and robust coffee stout to a zingy, light, citrus-packed golden ale.

Good cask ale is carved out of the best raw ingredients through the application of knowledge, skill and creativity. For the drinker it provides a spectrum of flavour more than comparable with wine; there’s a beer for hot summer evenings, cold winter nights, to accompany your favourite food or for a special occasion. It’s a drink that offers new depth and complexity as appreciation grows, it’s a drink that changes with the seasons and that matures with time. Beer is a drink devoid of pomp and arrogance, it knows no sense of material worth, the most expensive world class beer costing a fraction of the equivalent wine. Beer is here for drinking, nothing more, nothing less.

As a home brewer, beer provides me with a platform on which I can unleash my imagination. With access to raw materials of the same quality as the professional, I can conjure up any flavour combination I like, burning up every last joule of that eager creative energy. The enjoyment and pleasure I get from a pint of good beer now extends beyond merely drinking it.

Gillian Orr asserts that “your tipple of choice can say a lot about you”. Well let that be the case. Let cask ale define me as a person that puts flavour on a pedestal, concerned with what’s in the glass, not what’s around it. In Britain we’re experiencing a brewing renaissance; when I go to the pub, I know what’ll be in my glass.

Bacon Sandwiches & Henley Dark

2010-10-22T13:21:00.000+01:00

Let’s talk about something important, let’s talk about bacon sandwiches. Smoked back bacon, fried; hand cut white bread, toasted; generous amounts of cupboard-warm ketchup or brown sauce. Hangover cure of medicinal proportions, breakfast mainstay of national importance.

The perfect beer partner? Lovibonds Henley Dark; a 4.8 percent porter with a difference. Borrowing from the traditional Rauchbier style of Bamberg Germany, malt is hand-smoked over beech wood chips on a barbecue outside the brewery, before being added to the beer in small, precise quantities.

There’s a subtle sweetness that’s quickly kicked out the way. In comes a flood of roast malt. Chasing behind is a feint wisp of smoke, too little to dominate or overpower but just enough to add a savoury edge to the beer, just enough to build a bridge to the smoky, savoury, salty bacon. A prickle of carbonation and a punch of bitterness; the fattiness cut and any heaviness lifted. A delicious combination.

Stuart Howe - 52 Beers

2010-10-19T08:44:00.034+01:00

Beer bloggers and beer blog readers will likely be aware of the 52 beers project that Stuart Howe of Sharp's brewery is running. For everyone else, here’s the summary: on a small (60 litre) scale, Stuart has embarked on a year long project to brew a different beer every week of 2010. Mandatory ingredients include experimentation, creativity and a cheeky sense of humour. Outside that anything can, and probably will, be used. He’s the Willy Wonka of beer and he’s ready to brew*.

All of the beer is being bottled, some will be poured at beer festivals and industry events whilst some will probably never see the light of day. I was lucky enough to get my hands on a few bottles and this is what I thought.

Shellfish Stout

Oysters and stout go way back, they’ve been hanging out for time, at first as two separate entities paired together and then later fused in the brewers kettle to form Oyster Stout. Shellfish Stout takes this combination one step further by including cockles and mussels in the brew. Shell and flesh are committed to the dark depths of the boiling wort for twenty minutes, providing chloride and iodine to boost sweetness as well as body, depth and umami sensation.

The beer is squid-ink-black with an aroma of dark chocolate and coffee. The palate has a subtle sweetness; big, bold roasty flavour; a pronounced graininess in the finish and more of that coffee and dark, bitter chocolate. I was expecting something massive, salty and rich; fearing something tangy with hints of fish; but what you actually get is an incredibly smooth, velvety beer that’s full of body but still feels nimble and light. Very good indeed.

50 Hop IPA

Some people say that less is more, others protest that you can have too much of a good thing. 50 Hop IPA tells these people to shut up, it calls them an idiot and then batters them around the head with seven more hop additions. 50 Hop IPA is a beer featuring 50 different hop varieties. 45 go into the wort whilst it boils and then 5 more are used post fermentation. It’s fermented with the Sharp's house yeast and, at an original gravity of 1065, it’s probably around 7 to 7.5 percent ABV.

Half the batch were packaged as standard whilst the rest were blessed with a Bobek hop cone in the bottle. There’s burnt sugar and caramel sweetness at first but it fades away too quickly, swept aside by an assertive hop flavour that's unlike any I’ve tasted before. I could detect citrus fruit, grapefruit and grassy notes but everything feels muddled, confused, individual hop characteristics are muted by everything else that’s going on around them. Perhaps I’m being controlled by my subconscious but it tastes like each of those 50 hops gave it their best shot and then threw the towel in; you’ve got to pick your battles and when you're slugging it out against 49 others, the odds aren't great. The bitterness is big, the body quite oily, and I can’t help but detect a slight fusel note in the background. The bottle hopped version has a fresher hop aroma that doesn’t move through onto the palate, it’s my preferred of the two but still fails to deliver the bright, fruity hop explosion I’d built myself up to expect.

The 52 beer experiment is still in full swing (you can follow it here). For me it captures all of the reasons why home brewing is such a great hobby; you can be as creative as you like whilst throwing caution to the wind, safe in the knowledge that the worst case scenario is a few wasted hops and some malt. The beauty of Stuart's experiment is that the best case scenario could end up in our glasses!

* Apparently the best of the bunch could become permanent Sharp's beers … if Stuart can get them past management.

MyBreweryTap Rocks!

2010-10-17T14:19:00.008+01:00

Last Wednesday I placed an order with mybrewerytap.com, last Friday I received the order from mybrewerytap.com! Service so good it's worth shouting about, or at least I think so anyway. Beer from the UK, East and West Coast America and Italy; picked from the awesome Pick 'n' Mix offer and delivered super quick. Bottle prices are more than competitive, the range is ever-expanding and the focus genuinely appears to be on giving the customer what he or she wants. Round of applause from me.

The Pick 'n' Mix offer lets you select as many bottles as you want, from an ever changing list, with flat rate fixed postage. I went for Marble Dobber and Vuur & Vlam, Baladin Open, a Mallinsons Single Hop Simcoe, Sierra Nevada Torpedo and Tumbler, a Dogfish Head Indian Brown Ale and DFH/Birra del Borgo My Antonia.

Time to get stuck in!

Crouch Vale Amarillo - Tasting Notes

2010-10-11T07:59:00.017+01:00

Some tasting notes based on the approach I wrote about here; the beer in question is Crouch Vale Amarillo.

Beer: Amarillo, 5.0% ABV

Brewer: Crouch Vale

Hop: Woody, spicy and some citrus fruit. Very moderate, never dominates. Becomes very sightly floral and perfumed as the beer warms.

Sweet: Very slight sweetness to start, quickly lost when hop character moves in.

Malt: Distinct maltiness in the finish, biscuits and cereal both in the taste and on the nose.

Bitter: A moderate bitterness only. Works well to cleanse the palate.

Dry: Citrus hops work nicely against a dry, bitter (almost tart) finish.

Pairing Good Beer with Good Food: Cheese

2010-09-29T12:29:00.002+01:00

Cheese and beer is well-trodden ground for a reason. It works. As a gateway food and beer pairing it’s perfect; grab an armful of different cheeses, throw a few beers in the fridge and an hour or two later you can sit down to your own little pairing experiment. With very little effort, expense or knowledge it’s possible to yield some fantastic results; whilst at the same time there’s sufficient variety and variation to keep the experienced pairer happy too.

It may be far from an original idea, but it’s something I find myself continually returning to.

Beer can compliment cheese by way of either contrast or harmony. Sharp, acidic, tangy cheese demands a beer that will stand up to it; contrasted with anything less than bracing bitterness and punchy hops, the cheese will become too dominant, wrestling the beer to the ground and stealing its lunch money. Equally, adjectives like nutty, sweet, creamy, velvety and buttery can all be used to describe both beer and cheese. Identify characteristics like these in each partner and then bring them together in a harmonious marriage for delicious results.

"Beer can do a lot better [than wine] - it can find such harmony with cheese that you won't know where the beer ends and the cheese begins. Traditional beer and cheese are absolutely perfect together." (Garrett Oliver, The Brewmaster's table)

For some it will be easy to dismiss all this as the product of an overactive imagination. The hyperbolic ramblings of a beer lover gone too far; wrapped up in the romance of beer, its history and accessibility, the gross neglect it’s shown as a gastronomic delight. Easy only if that someone is yet to experience the true treat of a perfect beer and food pairing. As Oliver says, when you absolutely nail it, you lose the ability to distinguish between the two component parts; a new flavour is born where one bleeds seamlessly into the other.

Good pairings are easy to come by, apply a little knowledge, make some careful decisions, and you’re pretty likely to get there. You’ll probably wonder what all the fuss is about, but you’ll get there. It’s the great pairings that’re worth chasing though, the ones that take a bit of teasing out, a bit of perfecting over time and a fair slice of luck. These are the ones that don’t come about very often but make it all worth while when they do, revelatory pairings that instantly secure themselves a spot on the favourites list, these are the pairings that Oliver sings about.

Bell's Hopslam is a beer I’ve only ever had once. I had it with Comté, a hard French cheese made with milk only from the Montbeliard cow. The cheese has a wonderful sweetness which is amplified by the honey used to brew Hopslam; the fruity west coast American hops grab hold of the fruitiness in the cheese and a nutty, nutmeg like quality sits aside the grainy, malty, bitter finish to the beer. The words I write here will never do the combination justice, but hopefully they will inspire others to try the pairing.

Another favourite is to pair an English IPA, like White Shield, with traditional English cheddar like Montgomery's. I’ve written about this before; for me it’s an all time classic because it pairs two fantastic English products to achieve a result that’s simple delicious. Many a time I’ve enjoyed an evening meal of torn bread, slabs of strong cheddar and a glass of foamy White Shield. People say that sometimes less is more, and in this instance I definitely agree. A self contained plateful of delicious, comforting nourishment that wouldn’t benefit from any further addition, beautiful simplicity. The natural creamy sweetness of the cheese will compliment the sweet maltyness of the beer. A traditional truckle of aged cheddar will have an earthy, wild, mustard like quality to it; a perfect match for the spicy, peppery, dusty notes associated with English hop varieties like Goldings.

Applewood smoked cheddar is a bulky, boisterous, bruiser of a cheese. Its texture so densely thick and creamy that it leaves a film on the roof of your mouth and across the width of your tongue; that creaminess moves into woody smoke and then a finish that builds into a lingering tang. Like David to Goliath, Meantime Wheat is a beer of complete contrast. Its spritzy, highly carbonated, light-weight little feet come rushing in, they dance all over your mouth, lifting that heavy film, washing it all away. Choc full of fruity banana and clove esters; the beer will soothe the cheese and bring out its hidden sweetness.

In Beer Companion, Michael Jackson describes Orval as having “an earthy, leathery, oily aroma, in which some tasters detect sage, and an intensely dry acidic palate”. It’s the presence of brettanomyces in the bottle however that provides the point of harmony between Orval and a creamy goat’s cheese. The beer with its dirty, horsy, wild notes and the cheese with mousy, musty ripeness; the pair shake hands over funk whilst the acidic dry nature of Orval cuts the creamy, fattiness of the cheese.

So many fantastic combinations waiting to be enjoyed. The cakey, sticky dried fruits and toffee-sweetness of a barley wine will hold hands and walk off into the sunset with tangy, salty, blue-marbled Stilton. How about a berry-sweet and sharp Kriek with a super-creamy Brie or Camembert; or nutty aged Dry Monterey Jack with a luscious, velvety oatmeal stout; or beechwood smoked cheese from Bavaria with a Bamburg Rauchbier or …

For brewers and cheese makers alike, art lies in being able to create a uniquely delicious flavour experience. When pairing beer and cheese, we are given the chance to become the artist, and that flavour experience becomes ours to create. As Garrett Oliver says: “once you get started, you’ll find it difficult to stop. And why should you?”

Tasting Notes

2010-09-22T09:55:00.015+01:00

I've been thinking a bit about tasting notes lately. When I first started writing this blog I tried to stay away from them; I find they can be dry, repetitive and not really much fun to read. A few of the round up posts I wrote came pretty close, but I tried to keep it observation and opinion based rather than full on tasting note.

Increasingly I find myself searching out tasting notes for the beers I’m drinking. It’s useful to be able to calibrate your palate against other people. Things you might otherwise have missed can be pointed out, flavours you can’t quite define can be defined and technical reasons behind a specific character in the beer can be made obvious. For me it’s a vital part of growing as a beer drinker, it’s a great way to learn more about the beer you’re drinking and it allows you to better appreciate the subsequent beers you drink. Whilst there may be no substitute for sitting around and sharing a beer with fellow beer lovers; tasting notes on the web do provide a good alternative.

The tasting notes I’ve encountered online are a mixed bunch. An element of variation from one to the next is to be expected, taste is subjective after all, but it’s more a question of accuracy and quality that’s the downfall of some. Tasting something in a beer that nobody else has is one thing, a single line on ratebeer.com that describes a beer as being “sweet, sour, dry and bitter” is something else altogether. (What does that even mean?)

Some of the better resources are referenced at the bottom of this blog entry(1). Quality of content is something they all have in common, but the differences in the way that content is delivered are wide and numerous. Zak Avery accompanies all of his tasting notes with a youtube video, allowing him to be more conversational and emotive with his message. Rob at Hopzine.com has great consistency between beers by providing a structured breakdown of appearance, aroma, taste and overall experience. And Mark Dredge brings a sense of real-time to his tasting notes by blogging them in an As-Live format.

That point around consistency is key for me. I’d like to see a standardised platform on which beers can be rated and reviewed, allowing for the standout differences between one review and the next to be solely about the differences in the beer, not about the review style. A platform that provokes the reviewer into thinking about each part of the beer and allows them to be assessed in turn, limiting the opportunity for short, non-descriptive, inaccurate tasting notes.

Mark Dredge writes (here) about the tasting chart that Badger use on the reverse of all their bottles. Breaking down the beer into bitter, sweet, hoppy, malty and fruity; they introduce the concepts of malt and hops as beer ingredients and rate the intensity of each to give the drinker an idea what to expect. Hand in hand with the taste chart is Cyclops; an independent methodology that aims to demystify beer and make it accessible to the average drinker. Cyclops provides single word tasting notes for appearance, aroma and taste and then rates sweetness and bitterness out of five.

Taking inspiration from these I’ve started to put together a tasting note template for myself. Something to use whenever I review a beer, something that will guide me through the tasting of a beer in a structured and consistent way, allowing me to capture my thoughts for future reference and for anyone that happens to read the review.

My approach breaks a beer down into ten categories. Four of these are key ingredients that make beer: yeast, hops, malt and special grains. The remaining six are generic flavours which apply to most beers. Collectively these ten descriptors will allow an overall profile of almost any beer style to be defined. Each category will be given a rating out of 5 with the results being plotted over a radar chart. The categories will then be used as a guide to write more detailed tasting notes, with justification for the score given also being included.

I hope that this will allow me to write succinct, consistent and comparable tasting notes over a long period of time. They will be accessible to the new beer drinker, interesting to the beer geek and useful as reference point all at the same time.

I plan to develop this over time, so it would be interesting to hear thoughts and opinions. I also want to make it ‘open source’ and available to anyone that wants to use it, so I’ve uploaded the template here and included instructions. Feel free to have a look.

(1) beerreviews.co.uk, pencilandspoon, hopzine, realalereviews, zak avery

Ale of Thanet - Autumn

2010-09-17T09:07:00.005+01:00

My latest article for Ale of Thanet is now available here (beginning on page 5).

Ale of Thanet is a free publication produced by the Thanet branch of CAMRA. It's released quarterly around the Thanet area and covers beer and pub news, opinion, local events etc. In this issue I continue the series on seasonal food and beer pairing, this time looking at the best of autumnal food and the beer to drink with it.

What are your favourite autumnal food and beer pairings?

I Hardcore You & Mince Pies

2010-09-14T08:41:00.008+01:00

Christmas seems to get earlier every year. My girlfriend has started buying presents and making lists already, people at work are booking time off and my Mum is asking how many to expect for the big dinner. I was in the supermarket at the weekend and they had mince pies for sale, mince pies for sale in September! Madness you’ll agree, but it did trigger a thought in the back of my mind …

I Hardcore You is a collaborative effort between Scottish brewers Brewdog and Danish cuckoo(1) Mikkeller. It’s a blend of two beers (Hardcore IPA and I Beat yoU) that’s been dry hopped once more for luck and bottled as a one off limited edition. Put simply, it’s a whole that’s better than the sum of its parts, and those parts are pretty damn good to start with.

At 9.5 percent it’s a big beer. Incredible sweetness, incredible bitterness, incredible balance. The sweetness greets you with juicy citrus fruits and bucket loads of pine before a bitterness sweeps in and smothers your whole palate. The two work in stunning harmony; duelling it out to achieve dominance but never quite getting there. Despite a slight warming sensation on the way down, I refuse to believe this beer is 9.5 percent ABV, there must’ve been a mistake when it was bottled. Effortlessly quaffable, it drinks almost as well as an American Pale Ale.

Christmas wouldn’t be right without a mince pie. Those in the picture above might be a stock supermarket offering, but just think of them as a preseason friendly, a precursor to the luscious, deep-filled, indulgent little treats that will be on offer nearer the big day. The sticky dried fruit, pith and peel find a perfect partner in the jammy-citrus hops. The sweet, buttery pastry is amplified by the sweetness of the beer until the brutal bitter bite stomps on in and washes everything away. A whole that’s better than the sum of its parts.

Happy New Year?

I Hardcore You can be difficult to find now, I'm sure this pairing would work equally well with a different Double IPA.

(1)A cuckoo brewer is one that uses free space at other breweries rather than brewing from their own dedicated brewery. Sometimes referred to as nomadic brewing.

Crouch Vale Amarillo - As Live Tasting

2010-09-12T12:35:00.015+01:00

I'm sitting at home trying to put off the mess of a flat I need to tidy up. I've been writing something for Ale of Thanet over the last few days, so haven't had a chance to blog. This is a unique situation for me, time on my hands, at home, nobody else around. How about having a go at a Dredgian as-live tasting I think to myself ...

12:39 Beer meets glass. It's on the copper side of golden. Head is white, small and loose. Is this too early to be drinking? I've just polished off a bacon roll for breakfast and I don't feel ready for beer.

12:40 I've decided the beer is a bit cold, so I'll let it warm up for a bit.

12:44 Does anyone else check for sediment by putting their eye to the bottle mouth and holding it up to the light like a telescope? Makes me feel like a pirate. Avast me hearties, this bottle be sediment free!

12:48 A little about the beer and brewer. Crouch Vale are based in Essex and have been around since the early 80's. This beer is 5 percent and is described as a "golden premium ale", it uses a load of West Coast American amarillo hops late in the boil to showcase their flavour and aroma.

12:53 Enough waiting. The aroma is predominately malt, some biscuit and cereal perhaps. Behind that lurks some juicy fruits, but they really lurk well. I feel a bit let down. I get some citrus hop coming through but it's way off what I was expecting.

12:56 First impression is that it's quite thin in the mouth. Carbonation is moderate. A very light sweetness moves into a woody, spicy hop character. This develops into citrus fruit and then a bitterness comes in as you swallow. There's a slight dryness in the finish and a tartness that plays off against the citrus hops quite nicely.

13:01 I still can't find the camera! Another quick snap with the iPhone it is.

13:03 There's definitely a grainy quality to this beer too, it comes through towards the end as a biscuity flavour. The hops seem more floral and perfumed now; I'd never guess this was amarillo hops.

13:06 Just checked the loaf of bread I've got proving in the kitchen. Bloody thing is still the same size as when it started! That sour dough starter really knows how to take its time.

13:09 That tartness is becoming a bit too much now. There's a strange meaty, Marmite harshness in the background too. I wonder how long this was on the shelf before I bought it? Unfortunately the bottle doesn't have a bottling date on it.

13:13 I'm not enjoying this anymore. I was expecting a bright, hop forward, pale beer. This is reserved, malty and a little a dull. There, I said it!

13:15 I'll leave this sitting in the glass I think. Maybe it will have improved if I come back to it in a bit.

Judging by other views, either the cask version is far superior or I've just got an old (or bad) bottle. I had high hopes, but the beer didn't really deliver. What are your views on Crouch Vale Amarillo?

Consider cheap macro lager

2010-09-07T13:23:00.006+01:00

Inspired by Oliver Thring.

You could argue that people take beer for granted. Saturday afternoons in front of the football, summer BBQ’s or a day at the beach; all occasions on which beer is routinely bought, all too often with little thought, care or consideration. The latest supermarket deal is snapped up, guzzled down and discarded with yesterday’s newspaper. The more I think about macro lager, the harder it becomes to accept it as harmless and innocent.

A hundred shades of yellow, somehow all different but all the same. Fierce, aggressive carbonation, guilt ridden bubbles of gas fighting to escape the liquid and hide their shame. A vacant void where the aroma should be. A flavour noticeable by its absence, instantly recognisable but bereft of any character, depth or distinction. Filtered, pasteurised, killed. A lifeless liquid, the ghost of something once great, it’s haunting of shelf and fridge like a desperate last attempt to be remembered.

How did beer end up like this? How has something, so important to so many, been allowed to degenerate into a shadow of its former self? We’re a nation of beer drinkers and of beer brewers! We’ve a proud history of making some of the best beer in the entire world, but we’re losing sight of that. And for what? To save a few quid at Tesco?

Beer crafted with skill, artistry and consideration is an unbeatable thing. Be it a roasty porter, pithy IPA or zingy summer ale, good beer can deliver a spectrum of flavour as diverse as the wildest imagination. Capable, with ease, of slaking the thirst and hitting the spot that you buy that macro lager for; real beer is a living product that continues to mature, change and develop with time.

Beer is the most important drink in Britain. Whilst it might feel comforting to pick up that familiar brand over and over again, what a shame it would be if nothing else existed. A beer renaissance is happening under our noses, there's never been a better time for you to make that change. Next time time you pick up that slab, think about what you're doing, you're worth more than this.