boakandbailey.com

We’re having a little break. See you on Sunday for more baltic porter action!

The Duke of Cambridge in Islington is a restaurant/pub which prides itself on its ethical credentials. Ninety-five per cent of its fruit and veg comes from the UK; everything, from the oil in the candles to the washing up liquid, is organic; everything is Fair Trade.

The place itself is all stripped wood, black ceilings and pot plants, but also full of sunlight and fresh air. The staff were friendly (we got a ‘Hello!’ on entering), even if they did make us feel rather lumpy and unglamorous. The clientele is solidly middle class — so much so, in fact, that they’d passed beyond suits and into expensively scruffy designer casuals.

Bailey’s Dad wouldn’t like it, let’s put it that way.

In line with their ethical mission, the pub’s owners get most of their beer from breweries in the south east of England, namely St Peter’s and Pitfield. We’d never seen Pitfield beers on tap, but were very impressed. These beers do not suffer at all from being organic!

The Pitfield SB (the first organic bitter in the UK, apparently) tasted a little sweet on its own, but with fish and chips suddenly gained a new dimension — drier, crisper and with more apparent hop aroma.

We also worked our way through Pitfield East Kent Goldings (Summer Lightning-like), Eco-Warrior (sweet and citrusy); St Peter’s Organic; and Pitfield lager (fruity, malty, very pleasant).

But the real revelation was a bottle of Pitfield’s N1 Wheat Beer. Coriander seed, orange peel and hops gave it a pronounced Belgian flavour, but darker malt made sure this was no mere Hoegaarden clone. Poperings Hommelbier sprang to mind, in fact.

In short, a lovely place to go if you fancy a treat (it’s not cheap) on a summer evening… of if you’re a ticker missing a few of Pitfield’s beers from your collection.

The Duke of Cambridge is at 30 St Peter’s Street, ten minutes walk from Angel tube station. The photo above is from their website.

We were going to return to our quest for a decent Baltic Porter, as we’ve got a few awaiting tasting. However, it was such a lovely day yesterday that we decided to drink fruit beers in the garden instead.

To give some context to our tasting notes; neither of us are massive fruit beer fans, and we certainly both prefer our fruit beer to be identifiably *beer* first and foremost, not an alcopop. I really can’t deal with overly sweet drinks of any form, but I do have a bit of a “sour tooth”, whereas Bailey doesn’t tend to go for sour flavours.

Timmerman’s Kriek, 4%
Looks quite artificial, with deep red colour and pink head. There’s a definite hint of sourness in the aroma though, which is promising. The taste - Bassett’s cherry drops. The aftertaste contains a blast of pure sugar on the end of the tongue which I’m not so keen on, but overall, it’s not as bad as I was expecting, i.e. not as sickly sweet as Fruli.

Boon Kriek 4%

We had high hopes for this one, as it seems to be generally quite rated and is as authentic as you like. However, it was a lot like the Timmerman’s - overly sweet and not very complex at all. It was a bit more buttery than Timmerman’s, and had even less sourness.

Mort Subite Kriek (original) 4.5%
This we liked a lot. It’s a much less lurid pink, and the flavour is a great balance of sweet and sour, with a nice dry refreshing finish. Definitely a lot more going on with this one than Timmerman’s or Boon. The difference is in the aftertaste - whereas with the above two we got sugar, and not a lot else, here you get a crisp fruitiness that lingers on the palate.

Meantime Raspberry Grand Cru 6.5%
Bit of an odd one out in this session (raspberry, not lambic, British) but it’s always been a favourite, not least because it’s beer first and raspberry second, with a good bitterness that you don’t tend to get in fruit beers. That’s what we remembered, anyway (see a review from December 2007 here). It always tastes slightly different from batch to batch in the Union, their brewery tap, and we’ve noted that in the last few years it’s become less pink and less obviously raspberry-flavoured.

However, this incarnation (and it is the stronger “grand cru” version) seems to have forgotten the raspberries altogether. There’s a generic fruity taste, a bit like a nice Koelsch, but unless someone told you it was raspberry, you wouldn’t know. The refreshing tartness makes it a pleasant drink, but I think would be a disappointment to people looking for a fruit beer, and at 6.5%, this is not one you want to quaff much of in the sun.

Disappointing - I know this can be better.

Cantillon Kriek 5%
We bought this when we visited the brewery back in August 2007, so it’s been in storage for around nine months, in addition to the time it’s already spent at the brewery.

You have to have the courage of your convictions when you drink this beer. If you gingerly sip it, all you get is SOUR, but if you take a big gulp and let it cover your tongue, there’s a pleasing explosion of apple, cherry, pink grapefruit and strawberry, with red wine / sherry notes in the finish.

I’d be lying if I said I wanted to sip this all day long; even in the sun it’s hard work, although the champagne body and bubbles gives it a pleasing decadent feel.

All in all, Mort Subite was the surprising winner for both of us.

For more tantalising beer on grass action, check out Beer Nut’s post on wheatbeers. He’s got a bigger garden than us though.

For more on fruitbeers, here’s a Session post we did back in August 2007 on the same topic, including notes on our own blackberry beer.

Boak

Here’s a thought that occured to me as I was negotiating the night-bus network home last night.

There are lots of parts of London named after pubs, which helps lend the place a certain exoticism, and perhaps underlines the importance of pubs in our culture.  Angel and Elephant & Castle are a couple of famous ones, but there are loads more, particularly in the suburbs, where they act as landmarks / terminus points for buses.

Some of these have long since been demolished, although that doesn’t necessarily stop them having a review on Beer in the Evening (eg the Crooked Billet in Walthamstow, which despite being knocked down well over twenty years ago still achieves a 6.3 rating).

Anyway, as I got booted off the bus next to the Swan, in Tottenham, which has a certain infamy, I whiled away the time trying to think of any of “landmark” pubs which are both (a) still in existance and (b) any good, i.e. that you might actually choose to go to.

I’m still struggling.

Incidentally, is naming areas after pubs just a British thing?  Can’t say I’ve noticed it in other countries, but I am pretty unobservant.

Boak

Picture of a London night bus courtesy of Alistair Rae on Flickr.

Firstly, apologies for the delay in writing this up, but we wanted to do it justice. We’re very pleased with both the number (43, we make it) and the quality of responses. We’ve gone back to re-read several of them already. Incidentally, if we have left you off - sorry, it’s not intentional, and do let us know!

It’s been absolutely fascinating getting the insight into the people behind these great beer blogs. We’ve all come to “good beer” from very different places. As well as contributions from all over the US, we’ve had posts from the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Argentina, and Lithuania.

However, some themes do emerge…

Sudden epiphanies

One of the reasons for suggesting the topic is that our epiphany seemed so sudden — during a week-long holiday.

Al at Hop Talk writes about the moment at a barbecue when he realised that two beers he’d thought were more-or-less the same actually had distinct characteristics. A lightbulb moment.

Maeib describes something similar. He was interested to discover several different styles on one day, in one pub, which piqued his curiosity. He’s been on a quest for the perfect beer ever since.

Kieran Haslett-Moore from New Zealand had his big moment on a train when he drank his first Emerson’s and realised beer could have character. He is now one of the keenest proponents of cask ale in his hemisphere. So that would be a life changing moment, then.

Wheat beer is a great introduction to decent beer, and it was an American version which brought Jon at the Brew Site on board. He describes Widmer Hefeweizen as “thick, yeasty, bready, crisp, bracing, and the most delicious beer to pass my lips ever” and says it opened his eyes. Yes, that does indeed sound very tasty.

The Beer Nut’s conversion came shortly before he actually drank the fabled beer, when a polemic printed on the back of a menu at the Porterhouse in Dublin roused his passions. Fortunately, the beer was good enough to justify the rhetoric.

Rick Lyke underlines a point that came through in many people’s posts — the beer that turns you on doesn’t have to be that great, just better than what you’ve been drinking before. In his case, he flashed the cash as a 17 year old and spent nearly four times as much as his mates buying a German import which blew his mind. He’s never looked back! The same goes for Chipper Dave (great nickname!) who had his head turned by a humble bottle of Labatt’s Blue and then again, a few years later, by Guinness. And Eric Delia isn’t ashamed to admit that a can of Miller Lite set his heart aflutter. At the age of 10. Crivens.

Stacey at Hodoeporicon (her first Session) tells us that she “got it” when she drank Schooner, a poorly regarded Canadian beer. It’s not that the beer was especially great — just that it was something other than Bud Light. Now she is “the person who brings good beer to the party & orders draft or cask ales when everyone else is pounding Buds“. From little acorns…

Jay Brooks was stationed on Staten Island with an army band (!) when he tried Bass and Guinness and realised that there was more to beer than light American lagers. If you want to read more, see his semi-fictional memoir of a beer drinker, written in 30 days as part of National Novel Writing Month.

Dr Joel tells of his first sip of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in the car park at a gig, which left him dazed and confused and in love with hops. If you decide you love hops, you more-or-less have to give up on bog standard beers, right? And, on the flipside, Thomas at Geistbear Brewing Blog tells us that he had his head turned by a malty dunkelweizen, whilst studying the language in Germany.

Another touching tale of teenage experimentation comes from Heath, whose excellent post sees him admit to something lots of us do — choosing his first batch decent beer based on how cool the labels looked! Not a bad way to go about it, if his list is anything to go by.

Knut Albert discovered an interest in beer whilst travelling around Europe with a gang of friends as a young man. Being a friendly type, he got talking to some British lads in a train station on the continent (he shared a melon with them…) and found himself a few days later drinking Young’s Special with them at a pub in Sutton. Sutton!?

And the last of our batch of people turned on by beers they’re not so keen on these days, Pivni Filosof, who was so used to boring Quilmes in his native Argentina that when a new beer came on the market which was brewed to the Rheinheitsgebot (as opposed to containing “who knew what”) he couldn’t help but be impressed. Then he moved to the Czech republic…

Gradual enlightenment

For Chela, enlightenment was a gradual process, including formative periods in London and Edinburgh. Immersion in a particular beer culture did the job, in other words, which is also true for Stonch, whose six months in Prague rewired his tastebuds and brain.

Dr Fabulous (not his birth name) was similarly seduced over the course of years by beers from abroad, but consumed most of them at home, finding in them a hint of the exotic which was hard to resist.

Alan at A Good Beer Blog is a bit fed up of the navel-gazing of recent Sessions, but nonetheless tells a fascinating tale of drinking beer, getting to like beer, and then, after several years, discovering that there a beer scene was emerging which he wanted to be part of. He read an article in the Atlantic Monthly which gave him a glimpse of “what beer could be” and hasn’t looked back.

David at Musings over a pint was drinking “better beer” along with the bog standard stuff for ages without making a particular distinction and, after time, just stuck with the good stuff. No blinding light there. And Stan at Appellation beer (founder of the Session) narrows it down to five incidents over the course of nearly 40 years. Lew Bryson also lists several occasions when it might have happened, or nearly happened, but decides ultimately that the terminal moment was when he started to take notes and keep a diary. To note: Lew’s loyal fans have started recording their own “turning points” in the comments, making his post a session within a session. Take a look!

Brewmaster Matt had a few steps along the way, but thinks several years of being interested in beer all came together on a wine-tasting tour of Europe which ended up as a beer-tasting tour of Germany! That’s what we like to hear…

Martin, the Electric Landlord, was slowly converted by repeated exposure to one beer (Holt’s Bitter) in one pub (the Crescent, Salford) as a student. Is there such a thing as a monogamous beer geek? And if so, what does that make tickers and scoopers? The swingers of the beer drinking world?

The Beer Philosopher also got into beer gradually at college, but the best part of his post is about the moment when he nearly got turned off beer for life, drinking a very cheap, very generic beer with a friend as a thirsty 14 year old.

Which brings us to one of our favourite posts, from the Black Cat Brewery in Ireland. Thom not only took a while to get into beer, but worked bloody hard at it, too. He didn’t, stricly speaking, like the beers he was tasting, but really wanted to. Eventually, Erdinger Weissbier took him by the hand and showed him the ropes with appropriate care and gentleness…

The time, the place, the people

Martynas from Lithuania tells us that, despite drinking baltic porter/barley wine for breakfast as a student, he didn’t really get into beer until he found himself working as cheap labout in Yorkshire and got into the habit of washing the dust from his throat with pints of real ale. Incidentally, we bought a bottle of the breakfast beer he mentions today — we’ll let you know how that goes!

Yorkshire seems to exert a magical effect on potential beer lovers. Andy over at Beerbuzzing grew up in Tadcaster, home of Sam Smiths, so just couldn’t avoid decent beer. He joined CAMRA to get into festivals on the cheap.

Rob at Sophisticated Brews had a relatively late moment of clarity at the age of 41 when he joined an outing to a ball game which stopped off at the Goose Island brewery on the way. He says that, there and then, he “realized how crappy the stuff I’d been drinking was”. Mmmmm. Goose Island. Gargle.

Jessica, the Thirsty Hopster, drank beer at first because everyone else was doing it and she didn’t want to be a pain in the arse. And if she was going to drink beer, she might as well find one she actually liked — which turned out to be Magic Hat No. 9.

Mario at Brewed for Thought also got into beer because he was trying to make friends in a new town and the local pub just happened to have amazing beer. If he’d gone to university in a different city, it might never have happened. Shudder. And Buttle got into beer because he lived around the corner from an import specialist called Beers of the World and thought he might as well have a nose around. Those are both great stories of how making the most of what’s going on in your town can change your life for the better.

Finally, there’s Steve, who was taking part in a USC tailgate (it’s like a foreign language…) when, under the influence of a tasty Sam Adams, he rashly agreed with a fellow sports fan that they should try to drink as many different beers as they could. He didn’t realise quite what a commitment he was making…

Homebrewing

A number of people have come to good beer via homebrewing. Legendary home-brew guru Charlie Papazian gives his story here. It’s also and important part of the story for Rick at the Brew Blog, Keith at Brainard Brewing, and Wilson at Brewvana, who was also lucky enough to be born with “the beer gene”. Nicolino at Cerveza al sur de Ecuador in a Spanish-language post mentions hombrewing as an important factor, but also credits the Argentinian economic crisis of 2001; apparently this led to overnight cessation in imports of foreign beers, and subsequently a rise in homegrown microbreweries!

Finally, there is the unclassifiable. Troy at Great Canadian Pubs and Beer reports on how his obsession started with fascinating empty bottles he found in garbage trucks (that’s rubbish lorries to us Brits). Rob from Pfiff! tells us that he was bred on the good stuff, and couldn’t get his hands on crappy macro-brew if he tried. Lucky devil. Similarly, Paul Arthur skipped the fizzy lagers, making his way to beer via single malt whiskies and fine wine. The beer that did it for him was Ommegang Abbey Ale, which we’ve always wanted to try but never seen on sale in the UK.

Flying Dog Brewery tell us about their founding here.

Stephen Beaumont wrote a lovely post, but his site is down right now. We’ll update as and when.

Estoy escribiendo este post en español, pero necesito un poco más tiempo…

The next session will be hosted by Thomas at Geist Bear

We’re still digesting all of the fabulous posts we’ve received, but you still have an opportunity to contribute, as we don’t have time to do the round up justice today!

Also, we’ve been having a massive spam attack, so I’m worried we may have deleted some genuine links by accident.  Please check that your comment has appeared where you posted it, if not then please leave another comment or email us.

Boak and Bailey

Versión castellana

It’s January, not many winters ago. We’re in the Altstadthof, a brewpub in Nuremberg, and we’ve just decided that the “Rothes” beer we’ve just drunk three pints of is the best beer we’ve ever tasted. We look at each other and decide we’ve fallen in love with beer.

We decide we want to learn more about it — how can the “lager” we’ve been told is the root of all evil be so wonderfully varied? How do they make this amazing stuff? And so an obsession is born from a brief winter holiday.

We picked Nuremberg for a destination as (a) the flights were incredibly cheap (b) it seemed like an interesting place, especially if you like history and central European winters. I also booked a few days “surprise” holiday in the lovely Hotel Nepomuk in Bamberg, as a birthday treat for Bailey. I chose Bamberg because I’d heard it was pretty, and had a recommendation for the hotel in question. (It’s a classy joint — fellow beer-blogger Evan Rail celebrated his honeymoon there recently.)

So we planned a trip to the beer mecca that is Franconia, without beer being a motivation, and without really knowing much about beer at all. I’m not saying we’re experts now, but at the time we didn’t know our Dunkel from our Dunkel-Weiss, and nor did we care. In those days we drank real ale, but also “normal” lager. We weren’t sufficiently interested in beer to pick a pub on the basis of it, let alone a holiday destination.

That changed with this holiday.

We noted from the guidebook that Bamberg was famous for its breweries, and that people visited from all over the world to try the products from the nine (or is it ten? or eight?) breweries. That’ll be fun, we thought, gives us something to do. The rest is a bit of a blurry haze — I couldn’t tell you which ones we visited without seeing them again (at least two were shut) or what beers we liked. I remember Rauchbier, but I don’t think I liked it particularly at the time. I remember being surprised and bewildered by the different names and types of beer, and trying to work out what the difference was between a pils and a helles.

By the time we got back to Nuremberg, we were eager to try everything we could get our hands on. Then came the afternoon in the Alstadthof, and we were hooked.

We’re going back to Nuremberg and Bamberg in a couple of months, armed with a bit more knowledge. We’ve already been back to the Alstadthof, and the Rothes is still our favourite beer in the world.

For more on drinking in Nuremberg, see our post from June last year.

For the session announcement, see here. Let us know about your entry by leaving us a comment here or sending us an email - boakandbailey “at” gmail “dot” com

Boak

Enero, no hace muchos años. Estamos en el Altstadthof, un brewpub en Nuremberg, y hemos decidido que su “Rothes” es la mejor cerveza que hemos probado en todo el mundo.

Decidimos que queremos aprender más sobre ella - ¿cómo pueden los “lagers” tener tanto sabor y variedad? ¿Cómo se elabora esta cosa maravillosa? Así nació una obsesión, desde unas breves vacaciones de invierno.

Escogimos Nuremberg como un destino porque (a) los vuelos fueron increíblemente baratos (b) parecía un lugar interesante, sobre todo si te gusta la historia y los inviernos de Europa central. Ademas, yo organicé unos días en Bamberg, para un regalo para Bailey. Yo había eligido Bamberg porque había escuchado que era bonito, y porque tenía una recomendación para el hotel “St Nepomuk”. (Por cierto, nuestro compañero de beer-blogging, Evan Rail, celebró su luna de miel allí hace poco.) Este artículo continua…

Read the rest of this entry »

Our amigo Chela has posted an interesting entry on the “Compañía Asturiana de Amigos de la Cerveza” blog about the supposed battle between wine and beer. He suggests that in “wine countries”, wine has always been democratic in its appeal to high and low society alike. In traditional beer-drinking countries, on the other hand, we’ve developed a bit of an inferiority complex towards wine over the ages. And from this has recently emerged the trend for trying to make beer “the new wine”, and leading in some cases to a “Manichean battle” between beer and wine, or at least lots of words being written on why beer is superior to wine.

This can be seen from googling “beer is the new wine”, and is a topic that recurs on American beer blogs in particular. Appellation beer, for example, have a whole series of posts about beer and wine, making “beer is not the new wine” one of their rules. Amen to that. There are enough bloody know-it-alls as it is, without making beer into some rarified “interest”. That said, it would be nice if it had a bit more respect, i.e. articles in the weekend papers, the odd nice beer in a restaurant, that kind of thing.

Back to Chela’s post. There were many interesting comments in response about people’s preferences, whether one really was better, and trends in shopping for wine. But what really interested me were the historical reasons put forward for the cultural superiority of wine. Obviously, in the UK, it’s always been a status symbol, as only the rich could afford it, but why should it be considered a superior drink in countries where it’s common, cheap and easy to produce, like Spain? Galguera suggested it has its roots in the Roman empire — wine being associated with the sophisticated Romans, while the barbaric huns drank beer. Cotoya suggests the religious influence is more important — you don’t get communion beer, after all.

I thought these were interesting points. I’ve had the occasional debate with a wine-lover about how sophisticated beer can be, how it can be just as complex as wine, but I’d never really thought about the origins of our cultural prejudices, or how common they were across Europe, despite the differences in drinking cultures.

Notes

Chela, Cotoya and Galguera all contribute to Compañía Asturiana de Amigos de la Cerveza. If you don’t speak Spanish, Google translate does a pretty good job these days, but don’t trust it to translate English into Spanish.

Boak

This post over at Appellation Beer made us think again about beer’s status in the world.

A lot of people see it as a basic right in life. They get annoyed when it’s taxed and/or the price goes up.

Unfortunately, it’s a heavily processed product. Yes, beer is a processed food. And like all processed food, it is very energy intensive. Think about the energy used in growing barley; malting the barley; mashing the barley; throwing most of it away and boiling the remaining liquid; chilling the remaining liquid; moving, storing and distributing the the finished product, sometimes to the opposite side of the world.

And then, nature takes a funny turn for a year or two, malt and hops go up in price, and we suddenly find that what once we drank as a cheap alternative to clean water has become an expensive luxury.

So, beer really ought to be expensive, and we probably ought to consume it more thoughtfully.

What options do the brewers and distributors have for keeping the price down? Reducing the quality, for one. Or squeezing the people in the supply chain, as in this depressing tale from Tyson.

Personally, we’d rather pay a fiver for our pint than damage the planet, or people’s livelihoods. Is that what it’s going to come to?

For a lot more on related topics, from a more learned writer than us, see Chris O’Brien’s Beer Activist blog.

Bailey