Monday, 29 March 2010

I'm in the pub drinking a pint of real ale because it's Cask Ale Week

I'm in the pub right now. I ordered a pint of British Bulldog from Westerham Brewery, a micro just up the road from here. It's a gleaming bronze with a thick head of foam. Not much on the nose, a little bread and some dried fruit. It's a real thirst quencher, full-bodied and smooth, a backbone of distant caramel and a finish of dry, peppery hops. It's not complicated, it doesn't need me to write detailed tasting notes, it doesn't challenge me in any way, it's just a great drink, a classic to-the-style best bitter, wonderfully kept and spot-on enjoyable.

There's a certain amount of pride which comes with drinking a pint like this. I look around and I see glasses of wine and pints of lager. I'm sitting here with my British cask ale, raising the glass and taking deep, satisfying mouthfuls. I am proud to be drinking it.

It's Cask Ale Week and that means we have an opportunity to champion this wonderful product. Sure, we can drink cask ale every week of the year, but that's not the point, this is about drinking British beer in the pub and celebrating the glory that is a pint of real ale.

I think I'll have another.

Friday, 26 March 2010

BrewDog Nanny State v0.5

I hated BrewDog’s first version of Nanny State (but then I think everything BrewDog do is either loved or hated - there's no middle ground any more), the 1.1% stupidly-hopped imperial mild. I liked the idea - a low ABV brew that still tastes recogniseable as a beer – it just tasted like over-stewed hop tea. I don’t think many others liked it either and BrewDog tweaked the recipe and brought out a 0.5% version with toned-down hops (though using a list which reads like lupulin erotica: Centennial, Amarillo, Columbus, Cascade and Simcoe and dry-hopped with Centennial and Amarillo). Still liking the idea and wanting it to work, I bought a couple of bottles of the new batch.

It pours a russet, fiery-ember colour with a thick, lacing foam. The nose explodes with brutal hops, charred at the edges, roasted citrus, a subtle berry sweetness. The nose shocks and delights to begin but the more I drink the more I pick out the over-done flavours, the burnt rubber, the singed tropical fruit. It’s more intriguing than inviting, a kind of dig-around-and-see-what-you-find aroma. It’s relatively thin in the mouth, as you’d expect, but for 0.5% it’s very impressive. There’s very little sweetness, a dry astringency and some nuttiness then the hops arrive with less grace than a pissed-off tap-dancing rhino. It blasts in and explodes, rasping, hot, super-dry. You need to drink some more to ease the hop burn but the sweetness isn’t there and those hops just pile-drive back through again, an onslaught of saliva-sapping bitterness. It’s not a great beer yet the whole time it’s strangely intriguing, like looking at a pretty pre-op.

The 0.5% brew is better than the 1.1% version but that bitterness is just a real killer (and I tend to like the hoppy beers, dontcha know). The £1.79 per bottle price tag (plus postage on top) is also just too much when I can buy Punk for £1 a bottle – I like at least a little bang for my buck. I would like more breweries to make good low ABV beers. BrewDog’s Edge is superb at 2.7% beer and Thornbridge have just brewed The Light, a 2.9% beer, so there are a few examples out there, but I think there’s space for more. Anyone else interested in low alcohol beer (so long as it's nice and tastes like actual, real beer)?

As an aside, I was drinking this while cooking a chilli-hot Quorn and vegetable curry, which, when you think about it, is probably the food equivalent of Nanny State.

Thursday, 25 March 2010

A Budget for Beer

I’ve had a couple of whirlwind-busy days with meetings, a full email inbox and different important projects flying around at work, hence I’ve been a bit quiet. While I was dipping in and out of twitter today I kept seeing people talking about their budget. During a long evening meeting I scribbled down some numbers to try and work out mine. Here it is:

Around half my wages goes into the joint account for rent, bills and food. I try to save a few hundred but in reality this just gets eaten up on paying off the credit card, overdraft or the holiday to Greece that’s booked for July. There’s some set aside for phone bill, internet and the monthly payments for the laser eye surgery I had two years ago. Then I allow myself about £100 a week for spending. Anything left after this just goes to make my student overdraft (it’s interest free so of course I still use it – free money!) less harrowing.

The important bit here is the £400 a month for spending. This is effectively my beer money. It used to pay for clothes and important things like that but now it just gets poured into a pint glass and swallowed. This is quite a lot of money considering I keep my drinking to two or three days a week but in this I have to factor train tickets, magazines and diet Coke for Lauren, snacks and meals, erratic drunk purchases, etc. I also have a list of places to visit, festivals to go to and events in the next few months, all of which need paying for. Plus online orders (maybe one every other month) and it soon adds up. I often wonder what I’d spend the money on if I didn’t like beer and I have fantastical daydreams about my lavish lifestyle, but then I realise that I’m putting my money into the best craft industry there is, enjoying unique and delicious products, loving hand crafted to give pleasure to others, best consumed with friends. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

But the industry has been socked in the stomach again with another tax rise and the promise of it increasing 2% above inflation for the next few years (that's a 5% rise overall). From Sunday that supposedly puts 2p on your pint. In reality it’ll be more like 10p – how many places currently charging £3 a pint will up their prices to £3.02? It’ll be £3.10 (see the end of this press release). The scary figure in all of this is that beer duty has increased 25% since 2008. That’s insane.

The taxes come to help curb binge drinking, apparently, but what they do in the real world is push people out of businesses and jobs. The community pub, already under great threat, will now have an even harder job. Breweries will be put under more financial pressure. The social drinker will be hit in the pocket. If this move is intended to push up the prices of cheap supermarket lager then why not just gun straight for those 24-cans-for-£8 deals and ban them or start using a minimum unit price. The sad fact is that a lager drinker who likes to go to the pub for a few jars will see a bigger rise in the cost of his pint and might even be turned towards buying that cheap multipack instead of going out to drink it, so it’s utterly counter-productive. And real ale and cider drinkers and makers are just being blindly shafted.

The big breweries who can afford to sell their beer that cheap will not feel the impact as much as a small micro-brewery. The big breweries will always have an outlet for their beer but the micros rely on local pubs to stock their beer. Fewer pubs, fewer drinkers and more competition for handpumps isn’t a good equation.

Binge drinking can’t be solved by throwing taxes at it. Binge drinking can only be solved through education. With a government only interested in tangible, year-on-year figures, this is completely reductive and ignoring the real problems in the dark side of our drinking culture. A quick fix this ain’t; a tick in a box it is. Britain is still broken.

I’m happy to pay good money for good beer and I want my money to go back into the breweries and pubs that make and sell it. I don’t want a large wad of it going into a government that is unfairly branding all beer as the same and all beer as bad. A lot has been done in this budget to help out small businesses but it seems the craft beer and cider makers have just been ignored. It’s so frustrating to see something you love suffer because it’s at the control of someone else who just doesn’t care.

There is a facebook group to fight back against the ridiculous rise in cider taxes. I haven't joined it because most of the people in that group are sad that their ‘Bows might get more expensive, but over 11,000 have signed up already. The artisan market could really suffer from this unless, as promised, the increase is specifically targeted towards certain brands. Perhaps more effective is this petition. It will be interesting to see if social media will be able to impact upon politics, although I doubt it will in this case.

I don’t really understand politics or money, but I do understand people and this is going to affect a lot of people.

And I got the picture from Arfur, here.

Tuesday, 23 March 2010

Dark Star Saison

In The Evening Star, Brighton. I‘d gone there wanting Dark Star's Saison, the brewery special for March, and it was on the bar. It’s a golden pint, foggy at the edges, a thin white lace winds down the glass. It’s a noseful of biscuity malt, of distant orange pith, pepper, a summer-day-in-the-country freshness. It’s 4.5%, clean and crisp, a wonderful mouthful of pale malt, smooth, a gentle earthy dryness, a rounded spice, a zesty spike, an uplifting finish of hops. It was so good I had to have another pint. If we didn’t have to leave for the train I probably would’ve had another.

Dark Star have done it again. I thought Six Hop was superb and this one ranks alongside it. The April special is their 6.2% IPA and I’m already thirsty to try it. I’m also looking forward to more Six Hop at Planet Thanet Beer Festival, as well as the APA (that's one of my favourite beer festivals and this year the beer list is looking very tasty - that's my Good Friday sorted).

Sunday, 21 March 2010

The Hop Press: A Fast Cask

For this week’s Hop Press post I’ve written about Marston’s new Fast Cask initiative. I’ve basically taken Pete’s, Roger’s and the Publican's posts and squashed them together, asking the most important question at the end: if this works with yeast, could it work with hops and could we therefore got ‘cask hopped’ beer?!

Friday, 19 March 2010

Announcing: The Next Beer Swap and Twissup!

Beer Swap and Twissup are back!

First, Beer Swap. The ‘let’s send each other beers we can’t get near us and then use social media to talk about them’ game. The same rules apply as last year and if you blog or use twitter to talk about beer then you can enter (it is probably still GB only until we find cheap ways to ship outside of our little island). Here’s the deal:

• You need to find four local beers (use your discretion on ‘local’ but try and make them small breweries, also, choose good beers).
• No more than two beers from one brewery. Feel free to send homebrew, but only two bottles and then send local beers too. Or you can send homebrew as an extra.
• You will send them to another Beer Swapper and you will be sent four beers from someone else (it won’t be the person you send to).
• You then drink them and tweet and blog about them – send messages to @beerswap and use the #beerswap hashtag.
The dates: The end date will be the 14th May. You have until the 28th March to join in and then Andy and I will sort out the sending. You will need to post out your beers by April 16th.
• To enter, go here and submit your details on the form (we need you to use the form to collect up all the names and details – your information will be kept secure, of course). We will sort them out and get them ready for the next stage.

Last time we had issues with postage and Collect+ didn’t really do it for us (the dreaded #collectplusfail). This time we need to do something different, so if anyone has any ideas then please let us know. We will advise on the best service when we announce the next steps after the 28th.

Who wants to swap some beer?!

And Twissup... Sheffield will be hard to beat but we’ll give it a damn good go! So, get the 15th May in the diary as we’re going to Burton-upon-Trent! (assuming the National Brewery Centre is all open and up and running). All the details will come soon but it will hopefully involve a brewery, a museum, maybe a maltings and definitely lots of pubs and beer! It’ll be a great follow-up to Sheffield! There's also a facebook group for #Twissup.

Now, there’s just two questions:

1) Beer Swap: Are you in? (If yes, remember to fill in this form!)

2) Burton Twissup: Are you in?

Thursday, 18 March 2010

FABPOW! Thai Red Curry with Thornbridge Kipling and Jaipur

If there’s one question I’ve been asking myself for the last god-knows-how-long, it’s what works better with a Thai red curry, Thornbridge’s Kipling or Jaipur...?

Thai red curry: Chicken thigh; onion; garlic, ginger and fresh red chilli; pinch of sugar, some paprika, and turmeric; Waitrose’s red curry paste; coconut milk; fish sauce, a big handful or coriander and some lime juice, in that order, allowing each to have five minutes before putting the next bit in. You can put vegetables in if you want - I just added more chicken (by the way, I’ve stopped writing recipes out in the typical way... this allows for masculine intervention and stubbornness, kind of like putting together a cupboard with the instructions – base, sides, top, door, handles).

I got the beers from myBrewerytap who are selling a mixed box of Kipling and Jaipur. I had a box from them last year and since then they’ve continued to grow impressively, increasingly featuring more interesting breweries. It’s great to see Thornbridge available now (with the hope of more beers coming soon) as well as Crown.

As I was cooking I put a message on twitter asking whether people thought the Kipling or Jaipur would work better. The answer was unanimous (out of four or five...) that it would be Jaipur. The curry was hot, creamy and sweet, salty, fragrant and juiced with lime to lift and lighten all the flavours. Kipling, at 5.2%, is lighter in body than Jaipur and hopped with Nelson Sauvins, which make themselves known immediately with a nose of creamy passion fruit, lime and kiwi. It’s smooth and fruity with a great bite of dry bitterness at the end and a beer I’d happily drink every day. With the curry, the hops hit the chilli first, perking them up just enough, then the lime and coriander come in and play with the fruitiness, then it sweeps to the end with a palate-cleansing bitterness. The joy in this is the passion fruit, citrus and kiwi quality from the hops, which really bring it to life and perfectly balance the spectrum of flavour in the curry, particularly the lime and coriander. Jaipur, at 5.9%, is bigger, slightly sweeter and hopped with American varieties giving a great tangerine and floral aroma. There’s more body and sweetness in the Jaipur and the finish is smooth and quenching rather than dry. With the curry it becomes earthier, there’s a herbal quality to it and then at the end there’s a hidden punch of bitterness from the hops which spikes the chilli heat. It doesn’t quite have the lightness to lift the creamy curry and the oranges and coconut don’t balance as well as the tropical fruit in the Kipling.

Kipling won the fight - the dry finish, the light and lively body, and the unique bridging flavours of the fruit made for a joy of a match. The Kipling also seems to fare slightly better in the bottle than Jaipur which was lacking some of its usual punch. I’m already craving this dinner again; it was one of the most successful FABPOWs I’ve had this year, plus, of course, who can resist beer and curry?

Wednesday, 17 March 2010

St Guinness Day

When I was 17 I worked at Gillingham Football Club. It was a good first job, fairly easy and I got to watch all of the home games. Over the summer I worked on the functions as one of a handful of regular staff who set-up the halls during the day (the hospitality areas at Gillingham are actually very nice). One day I’m talking to John. He was in the year above me at school, one of those kids you don’t mess with, a bit rough and ready, more mature than everyone else, more ‘experienced’, but a guy that opens up and softens when you get to know him. “I drink Guinness,” he tells me. “Can’t stand lager.” We’re making fans out of blue napkins and dressing the tables. “Did you know, if you drink eight pints of Guinness and then swallow some glitter, in the morning your shit will be black and glittery?”

I’ve never really done the St Patrick’s Day thing of going out, drinking lots of Guinness and wearing a novelty hat. It is quite appealing though... I wanted to post something for St Patrick’s Day. I was going to do some cooking right up until the moment, yesterday afternoon (the day before St Patrick’s Day), an email arrived from ‘Publicity Freelancer’ with a red exclamation mark of importance and started ‘Dear Blogger’. It asked, bluntly, if we might be able to post a recipe from a book about Guinness which they are promoting. Any cooking plans were abandoned right then.

Monday, 15 March 2010

Marin Brewing Co. Point Reyes Porter

One of the best beers I had in California. I packed up my case and jumped on the ferry to Larkspur to start the second part of my trip – Petaluma, Santa Rosa, Healdsburg. It’s a short ride across the Bay; a welcome respite to walking. I’m sad to leave the city behind, the sun bathing it and bringing it alive, but I know there are more adventures ahead. On the ferry I read a beer magazine, flicking through pages about the best beers of the year so far. Before I know it, and just as my tired eyes fall shut thanks to the relaxing rocking motion, we pull into the terminal. “Go over the bridge and you’ll see it.” Mario tells me as I’m pulling along my heavy suitcase, loaded with bottles. Eventually my nose pulls me towards the beer, the smell of toffee and citrus in the air. I’d met the brewers three days ago, lovely guys, they said to come and say hi. Inside, on the left, is the brewhouse and Kim is busy brewing, the whole bar smells amazing, so inviting, a powerful inducer of thirst if ever there was one. “Sit down and we’ll sort you out some beers.” I take a flight, a small pour of each of their brews, and sip while ordering lunch – a burger, of course. Mario knows these beers and goes straight for the Point Reyes Porter. Pitch black, an impossibly neat and thick head. He smacks his lips and nods his head. I sip through pale ales and IPAs, a wheat beer, a barley wine and then onto the porter. It’s astounding. It’s 6% but fuller bodied than something double that, it’s all dark chocolate, coffee roast and sweet smoke. Every sip is more impressive than the last, better than the last. Lunch comes, a charred burger covered in cheese, a hugely satisfying mouthful of that is followed by the last sip of beer - the sweetness of the smoke, the depth of flavour in the beer just echoes everything good in the burger and bounces off of it, enhancing it. Kim comes back, he has a couple of bottles for us: “Here’s the Porter, we bottled it this morning.” We leave through necessity more than choice, in truth I could’ve stayed there all afternoon.

Back home and I’m missing San Francisco. It’s the post-holiday blues, thoughts of things I missed or places I should’ve returned to. The memory of that lunch, seemingly innocuous, a short pit-stop on the way to Lagunitas and Russian River, moved me to remember that bottle and open it at just 12 days old. This is a big award winner for Marin and when Kim handed over the bottles there was obvious pride that this was the first time he’d brewed it himself (“I usually do the stout, Arne [the head brewer] does the Porter... this is the batch that’ll be going forward for competition this year”.) It pours a gorgeous, thick black with a creamy sand-coloured head. It’s dark chocolate, nuts, a hint of milkshake, smoked bacon as it warms. It’s smooth, it’s bold, creamy, intensely roasty, a berry sweetness, a lactic edge, smoke, dry at the end, incredibly drinkable, incredibly good. They do a lot of good things at Marin. If you are in San Francisco then go to the ferry port at 12.25pm and you’ll be sitting in the brewpub by 1.10pm. Order a porter and tell them I say hi.

I wrote about brewpubs here. Marin features in a number of the pictures, including Kim, the brewer.

Sunday, 14 March 2010

Hop Press: A London Drinker

I went to the London Drinker Beer and Cider Festival and I drank... This week’s post is about that festival, a mention of the forthcoming Wetherspoon's International Real Ale Festival (the signs are up outside mine already) and a happy endnote about the current and future state of beer and brewing in London.