Hair of the Dog Adam and Moor JJJ IPA: Open It!

The final day of Open It! and two more bottles. The first is a survivor from San Francisco; Adam, a ‘Hearty Old World Ale’ by Hair of the Dog in Portland, which uses Northwest hops, pilsner malt and speciality malt, including some smoked malts. At 10% it pours like black petrol with a red hue. It’s so unexpectedly fruity that it brings a smile – raisins first, then a spritz of mango and passion fruit, then dark, finger-staining, overripe berries. That fruit chimes with the uplifting sweetness which runs through it but it’s shadowed by a deep, dark chocolate and charred wood background which really makes this beer. It’s intense, full on, interesting and different with each mouthful. The smoke adds a really interesting flavour to the whole thing while all that fruit cuts through it.

And the final Open It! beer is one I’ve been saving to see how time changes it. When I first opened a Moor JJJ IPA I described it as “not a pussy-footing, pretend imperial IPA. This beer is balls-out and in your face” with the “kiss-on-the-cheek, slap-on-the-bum of big malt and big hops that makes very bitter beers so drinkable.” Now it’s so very different. The hops have changed, they’ve blended in, they’ve left a little sticky, piney residue and a drying finish and instead of punching you in the face they now tickle your chin. This beer is no longer about the hops and it’s the malt that wins it with berries, jam, vanilla and oh-so smooth and easy drinking for its toe warming 9.5%. I wanted to see what it’d be like with some age to it but I didn’t expect such a large shift; it’s like a new beer. Given a choice I think I’ll go with the fresh one (I love hops), but on a cold Sunday night this one warmed me to the core and I enjoyed every greedy gulp. ‘Drink Moor Beer’ is something I intend to do next year.

That’s Open It! done and I think it was a success. So much of a success that we’ll plan another one in six months! Thanks to everyone who took part, I hope there were some good beers poured over the weekend.

Nectar Ales Black Xantus: Open It!

Some people are just nice and want to give you bottles of beer because they think you will like them. This happened to me when I was in San Francisco. A tweet arrived saying something along the lines of ‘I’ve left some bottles behind the bar for you.’ I never met Bill (I don’t think so, anyway, although I don’t remember much of SF as I was either completely wasted or disgustingly hungover with very little in the middle UPDATE: I did meet Bill! It was in City Beer Store where I was at my drunkest! Sorry Bill and thanks again), the guy who left them, but I’m incredibly grateful. The first was a Russian River Damnation 23 (an oaked tripel) and it was sensational. The second was Black Xantus by Nectar Ales.

It’s an 11% imperial stout with coffee, aged in bourbon barrels and hopped with US Fuggles, which is just my kind of thing. It pours a dark brown with a chucky head that you can’t help but dip your finger into. Immediately it bursts with bourbon and throws out vanilla ice cream, oak, coconut and milk chocolate. One mouthful and I’m in love (and lust): imagine an amazing chocolate milkshake with bourbon and you aren’t far off. It’s a smooth glugger, packed with chocolate, iced coffee, fruity and roasted coffee, lots of barrel and a little liquorice. It’s – here it comes – awesome.

Simple as that. I don’t know much about the brewery or the beer but it doesn’t matter. The beer is excellent and I’ve finally got around to drinking it. The joy of Open It! is that it isn’t necessarily about drinking the superstars or the rarities of the cellar (though this may well be a rare superstar...), it’s about drinking the beers you’ve been meaning to drink.

There’s still time for people to take part in Open It! and lots have already been drinking something good from their selection. Just look at twitter to see what people have been drinking.

Marble Decadence Kriek: Open It!

I’ve decided to make a weekend of Open It! and get through a few of the nice bottles which are in the beer cupboard. Following the action on twitter, it seems I’m not the only one taking full advantage and getting stuck into some of those beers which were gathering dust.

I’ve had the Marble Decadence Kriek for ages. It’s just been sitting in the cupboard with no real to-be-opened occasion hanging around its shoulders. It’s an 8.7% imperial stout blended with kriek, a sour cherry beer (I was told what kriek it was but my booze-addled brain has completely forgotten). They also do a straight-up Decadence, which I’ve got but haven’t opened, and one blended with Frambozen, which I had months ago. When I opened the Frambozen the cork nearly blew a hole in my kitchen ceiling, so I proceeded with caution with this, making sure eyes, teeth and lights were at safe distances.

It pours an oily black with a tan head flush with the pink of cherries. The kriek dominates to begin with to the point where eyes-closed this could just be a heavy-bodied sour beer, but if ever there was a case for a beer to be decanted then this is it, as over the space of a couple of hours it evolved and grew into something altogether different.

Starting with sour overkill, at one point I wrote that it tastes like cheap red wine (heavy on the tongue, sharply overpowering berries, tannic) but then it all changed and mellowed and the sour went in and the chocolate underneath came out. By the end of the bottle it’s chocolate, sour cherries and almonds in near-harmony, though still a little cherry-heavy for my taste. It won’t be for everyone, given the sharp tang running through it, but it’s an interesting beer. The true test: would I buy it again? Probably not (give me the kriek and the stout separately). I’d stick to the Special (which really is special) or try the new US IPA, Utility Special, which is currently available. Or the delicious Dobber.

Marble Decadence Kriek: I finally opened it! Now what should I have tomorrow... 

Open It! This Weekend

It’s almost time to Open It! This weekend, 3-5 December, is when we can get those special bottles and open them just for the sake of opening them. Andy and I have also managed to arrange for lots of people to be snowed in to enjoy it even more and to have an even better excuse to drink a beer from the stash...!

It’s simple: just choose a bottle you’ve been saving for ages and open it. Then tell others about it on twitter (use the #openit hashtag), blogs, facebook or even in real life. It’s a chance to drink those beers while they are (hopefully) still good because the last thing we want is to hoard a beer for years and then find out it’s way passed its best!

Open It! this weekend. Who's taking part?

Annoyingly, I am actually snowed in with no hope of reaching my special bottles, which live with my parents in their garage (I’ve called and made sure a few towels have been laid over them to keep them less cold). This means that one or two of my to-be-opened beers now won’t be opened and instead I need to pick a few others. Thankfully I’ve got a couple in the flat that I can finally release into my glass.

Feel free to use the logo in any blog posts you want to post. It was designed by Richard from myBrewerytap. If you are snowed in and need beer then that’s the place to go!

Some Tasty Old Things at Fuller’s

“As you will know, I am a professional drinker… and you are all amateurs,” begins John Keeling, the Fuller’s head brewer, as he invites us to open and drink the bottle in front of us. This is an old beer and by old I mean very old: 2^nd September 1891, to be precise. Yet it was only bottled recently… The beer is the first in a new series for Fuller’s called Past Masters and it involves looking back at old brewing records and recreating them as closely as possible. For all the open-mouthed e-gazing at what’s going on around the world in terms of modern developments of brewing and the boundary-breaking beers being brewed with superhero hops or mind-bending processes, I find it constantly and deeply interesting to think about how a beer would’ve tasted a hundred years ago or more, so the Past Masters project definitely appeals to me.

XX is the first of the Past Masters. Technically it’s a XXK but you can also drink it fresh so XX works (in ye olde brewing days, X denoted a mild beer, XX was a strong beer and XXK was a strong beer made for keeping; the Fuller’s version is a strong beer which can be drunk now but which should also improve if kept, you see). Ron Pattinson had a hand in the recipe and the history side of things and he was also there for the brewing of the beer which is a pale strong ale (an early example of a Burton Ale), 7.5%, made with Plumage Archer malt which was a variety used from 1903 onwards (close enough to 1891...), sugar and heavily hopped (53 IBUs) with Fuggles and Goldings. The recipe is pieced together as closely as possible from the original and it represents a “rediscovery of the past,” as John Keeling put it.

It’s young in the bottle (brewed over summer then aged for three months) but it’s simultaneously intensely flavoured yet subtle, as if there are things in there wanting to be found but still hiding away, not ready to come out yet. The malt is immediately impressive and mouth-filling, then combining with the hops to create an oral IMAX experience which edges towards a savoury taste, not sweet, with some hints of candied orchard fruit and an estery, botanical, dry finish from all those hops and the booze. It’s good but it promises to get better…

The dimension of time is what Fuller’s are looking at with these beers. They are at once about looking back to the past to recreate a recipe not tasted in many generations, but at the same time these are beers which will last for a generation themselves and they will change over that time. As such, the Past Masters work as a new sibling to the Vintages and Brewer's Reserves which are designed in a way to make them ideal to leave for a few years to develop.  

I find the aging process fascinating. I also love the idea of the Past Masters series and look forward to seeing what comes next – it’s a chance to taste a tangible and sensory glimpse at history, recreated as closely as possible for us to drink now. Who knows what will actually happen to the XX but I intend to buy a few and wait a couple of years to find out.

I will also be buying a lot of the Vintage 2010, which we tried on the night along with Vintage 2005 and 1999 and the two Brewer's Reserves - we were there specifically to look at aged beers. The Vintage '10 is absolutely fantastic already (sometimes they need a few months or years to develop but this is already beautiful). I was admiring the cherries and almonds in it and then a sudden burst of mandarin caught me off-guard and got me even more excited. This is the best fresh Vintage I’ve tasted (even if I have only had a few of them) and I hope it will get better and better.

The XX is now on sale at the brewery shop in Chiswick. I think the Vintage is also out now.

Pencil, Spoon and a Shiny New Tankard

It was the British Guild of Beer Writers annual awards dinner and ceremony last night and I’m incredibly proud and excited to write that I won the Online Communicator/New Media category for the second year running!

I entered into five categories (why not, eh?) but it was the Online one that I wanted to win the most. I get up stupidly early to do it and I spend unreasonable amounts of time on it, but I do it because I love it.

Like Zak Avery’s post, I hope to write more but I’m in desperate need of a fry up, so the blog (for once!) will have to wait. I’ll be drinking in London today, say hello if you see me. 

A beer decanter, one for Santa?

Last weekend, while carefully pouring a bottle of beer between five glasses, trying not to disturb the heavy sediment in the bottle, my mate suggested the use of a decanter for the beer. A beer decanter. Why had I never thought of that before? How many times have I opened a big bottle only to have the last glass of it pour out murky and filled with yeasty chunks. You can do it with port, whisky and wine, so what about beer?

In Belgium, they sometimes serve 750ml beers in baskets with the bottle leaning at a 30-degree angle so you can pour without much disturbance of the bits in the bottom, and that works well, but in other places, or at home, the bottle is poured and then returned to upright, sloshing around the stuff left in there. With more breweries using larger bottles (ones which you can’t pour into just one glass), it makes sense to pour them from their container in one go into a decanter and then fill up glasses from there, right?

Beer isn’t the same as whisky or wine in that it’s carbonated, but unless it takes you hours or days to drink your beer then this probably isn’t anything to worry about. It would work best with those bottle conditioned 750ml beers which you either want to share between a few friends or drink yourself over an evening.

Decanting beer – does anyone do this already? Does everyone do this and I’m just way behind? Or is it a stupid idea because those bits never hurt anyone? Either way, I’ve got one on my Christmas list this year (and if I don't put beer in it then I can always put wine in there!).

Open It! Reminder

Dust off those special bottles because Open It! is coming very soon... Friday 3 December to Sunday 5 December, get the good bottles out of the cupboard and get them open. Don’t hold back thinking that a worthy special occasion will come along soon, that you might get a new job next week, a promotion next month, win the lottery, get married, have some kids, whatever. They don’t come very often and the last thing you want is to go to that bottle in a year and find that it’s past its best. This is the chance to make a special occasion just to open that bottle.

It’s as easy as that and everyone can take part: Open a bottle or two (share them if you want – an Open It! Party) over that weekend and then tell others. Write a blog about it, tweet about it (#openit), use the facebook page or just talk to people in real life while you drink that beer you’ve been saving for ages. Do it between 3-5 December and tell us what you are drinking and how it is.

Just Open It!

This is another joint effort between me and Andy from Beer Reviews.

Lovibonds Sour Grapes and 69 IPA

Lovibonds’ Sour Grapes is sensational. There’s no need to build up to it, I’ll just throw it straight out there. It started as a beautiful mistake when a batch of wheat beer caught an ‘infection’ and started to sour. They poured most of it away but, because they liked where the taste was going and knowing that a bit of lactic acidity isn’t the worst thing in the world, they held some back and put it on tap at the brewery in Henley – it sold out in a weekend.

Sour beer is an acquired taste. It’s not like a pint of bitter that’s gone bad and tastes like someone’s spitefully added old milk and lime. These beers have been knowingly inoculated with wild yeasts to turn their beer a particular way. The lambics and gueuze of Belgium are the classics of the style but American brewers are experimenting with wild ales with increasing regularity. They can range from subtle to eye-watering; from a spritz of sherbet to sharp lemon or sour vinegar. Many are aged to allow their flavour to properly develop, this means they often come with unrivalled complexity and flavour, particularly those also aged in wood (which most are). A number of different yeasts can be used, from the naturally airborne ones to specific varieties; the most widely know is called Brettanomyces (or just Brett) and it’s responsible for a lemony, horse blanket, leathery flavour – other yeasts give more or different levels of sourness.

With their beer, Lovibonds bought three Pinot Noir wine barrels which were previously used to hold English sparkling wine. Each barrel was filled with beer and inoculated with a different yeast: barrel one got pure Brettanomyces bruxellensis, the Brett native to the Brussels area and the one used for the classics of the style; the second got the yeast from a bottle of Oud Beersel and the third is from Drie Fonteinen. The aim was originally to blend the beers to make the best combination, a practice used in Belgium which separates lambic from gueuze: lambic is a vintage from one batch of beer; gueuze is a blend of any number of vintages from different barrels. The Sour Grapes that Lovibonds took to The Rake on Monday was an unblended (the tap clip said gueuze but it was lambic) keg of the pure Brett barrel (they will likely blend the others in the future).

The result is a 4.6% beer, crystal clear and evidently Champagne-like in aroma. The sharpness hits the tongue immediately but it mellows almost as fast, leaving lemons and wine. Behind that there’s a biscuity, bready flavour which perfectly counters the sour, then comes the barrel adding a depth of wood, some texture and something which I often get in these beers – wotsits. Not like the finger-staining cheese flavour, more like the after taste, that savoury hit on the swallow. Lambic and gueuze is not generally the sort of thing to drink by the pint but Sour Grapes is something I could happily drink two or three of, where the sharp flavour is refreshing rather than rasping and each mouthful is interesting. It’s a definite British stamp on a Belgian classic and an American vogue style and it works very well - everyone else must’ve liked it too as it sold out halfway through the night. Hopefully what’s left of the other three barrels will come out soon...

The reason we were at The Rake on a Monday night was for the launch of 69 IPA (Lovibonds brought other beers with them, including the Sour Grapes and a keg version of Dark Reserve). It’s a 6.9% American-style IPA hopped with Warrior and Centennial. It also undergoes a unique dry-hopping where an old keg has been converted to include a hop filter and a flo-jet and the beer is pumped and circulated through hops for four days – two days with Centennials and two days with Columbus. The ‘Hopinator’, as it’s known, adds an intense aroma to the beer, picking up all the leafy aromatics from the hops but little extra bitterness (it’s like a Randall the Enamel Animal only more prolonged). It’s another beer which stands apart from the others in its category. The hops are monsterous, the aroma is like a cloud around your face made from bitter oranges and the finish is long, dry and intense, calling you back for another mouthful to get that sweet hit of caramel at the beginning. It’s big and bold and all the better for it – it’s a taste of West Coast America brewed next to the Thames. I also love the tap handle and bottle label (the bottled version, incidentally, is less heavy-hitting on the hops and very easy drinking).

Lovibonds are making some fantastic beers and they are different. One thing that can’t be said about the brewery is that they are copying anyone else: they stick to kegs, their range is tight and well built (a wheat beer, an amber, a dark ale made with home-smoked malt and stronger versions of the wheat and dark) and the brews look and taste great. I wish I could get their beers in more places, particularly the two headliners in this post. They have a tap room open at the weekends in Henley which generally serves all their range and I should get over their sometime – so should everyone else (it’s also a lovely town!). Whenever the keg revolution properly begins in the UK (which it will!) they will already be there to wave it in, slap it on the back and say: “It’s about bloody time too. Now here, try this!”

I got the pictures from the Lovibonds facebook page.

Ten Words Beer Bloggers Use Too Often...

...Or use too loosely when describing beer!

Hoppy

It’s too easy to use – ‘Mmm, this beer is so hoppy!’ – but what does it mean? Is it aroma hoppy, bitter hoppy, all-round hoppy? Is it juicy hoppy, earthy hoppy, floral hoppy, fragrant hoppy? Is it good hoppy or bad hoppy?

Malty

See above. ‘Mmm, this beer is very malty’. But is that caramel or chocolate? Bread or coffee? Toast or toffee? Is it full bodied or not? Is it sweet or not?

Citrus

Citrus?! Oranges, lemons, limes and grapefruit count in the citrus bracket. If it’s citrusy then in what way – juicy, bitter, sharp? Does it smell like a grapefruit skin, pith, juice or flesh? Does it smell like lime or taste like it? If it tastes like it then is it a sourness or just a flavour?

Earthy

What does earthy mean? What does it actually taste like? Like mud? Like stones? Like brick? Like leaves? A herby bitterness? Coffee grounds? Vegetal?

Tropical Fruit

Abundant in American hops but which fruit is it specifically? Pineapple, mango (what variety?!), kiwi fruit, passion fruit, papaya, guava, lychee... each have their own specific flavour so what do you actually taste?

Floral

Another generic hoppy term along with citrus, earthy and tropical. What flower does it smell like? Is it elderflower? Roses? Fields of daisies (whatever that smells like)? Spicy floral, orange blossom or even the tack of spruce or pine? This one is harder than the others to nail and get accurate.

Crisp

‘It’s got a lovely crisp finish.’ What the hell does that mean? I write it all the time but now I’m looking at it properly I don’t get it... It’s a quenching finish, maybe a little dry, definitely vague.

Chocolate

But it is like milk or dark? If it’s dark then how dark? Is it creamy or bitter? Subtle or full-on? Does it taste like actual chocolate you’ve eaten before or is it just kind of roasty and chocolatey?

Dried Fruit

The reserve of the winter warmer or hidden in a nice stout, but you can dry almost any fruit, so which is it? Are we talking generic raisins or perhaps the tang of a dried apricot, maybe even the candy depth of a dried pear?

Spice

Ah, now this is a big one. A catch-all for anything a little different. Struggling to pick out what was in that Belgian blonde, the word spice goes in the note book and I’m almost satisfied, but what spices are they? The ting of metallic clove, the pungent heat of ginger, the tonsil tingling crack of pepper, a festive dusting of cinnamon, fruity green chilli or fiery dried seeds, is the coriander orangey and floral or dry and freshly ground. This is the one I chase around the glass trying to work out what that spice is.

There’s 10 to start with but what else is there? I nearly used the words Awesome, Great and Delicious but pulled them out before posting and replaced them. I'm definitely guilty of all of the above and I'm sure I'll continue to use them, just maybe I'll try a little harder to get the right word from now on!

Picture from here.