Monthly Archives: January 2013

Gut reactions and associations

Beers on a pub table.

Well? If you’re so clever, YOU find a picture to illustrate emotional gut reactions!

If you were sat next to us in a pub and overheard us talking to each other about the beer we’re drinking, you might notice a few of the following statements, before we’ve translated our reactions into la-di-dah blogger speak.

      • We’ve brewed better – a serious criticism: professional brewers ought to make better beer than us (for now, at least).
      • (Face pull) Had worse in Belgium — weird, rough around the edges by British standards, but not necessarily terrible. Interesting.
      • Erm… a bit farty — ‘sulphurous’ in posh beer tasting speak — not necessarily bad!
      • Bad home brew — a harsher criticism than ‘we’ve brewed better’ — it’s reminded us of that first, foul kit we made in a plastic bucket in the garage.
      • It’s got that [Brewery X] thing — with reference to one of two or three breweries whose beers we generally don’t like.
      • Sorry, I can’t drink that — it’s not ‘off’, just so unpleasant it’s no fun to consume. Gets abandoned.
      • By ‘eck, it’s on good form tonight — cask ale, however consistently well made, varies from pub to pub, cask to cask, day to day.
      • Ooh, zingy! – you know — zingy.
      • Mmm, Germany… (sigh) – beer with a certain type of hoppiness that reminds us of drinking very fresh lager in a German beer garden. (Not said only of lager.)
      • Ah, Sheffield… (sigh) – a high accolade bestowed upon the most satisfying very pale, hoppy session ales.
      • Actually, that’s not so bad — getting to like a ‘meh’ pint about halfway down.
      • Actually, I’m not so sure — realising that, once the first pleasant waft of hops have drifted on the wind, the underlying beer is a bit nasty.
      • Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah…. that’s hit the spot (tummy rub) — said of any beer at the end of a long coastal walk, when it is impossible to judge beer quality.
      • (Sulk, harrumph.) Want to swap? – we’re each drinking different beers and one of them is ‘meh’.
      • Better than Guinness/John Smith’s/Peroni — faint praise of a fairly bland ‘real ale’/'craft beer’/Category D Beverage.

We liked the inclusion of ‘emotional’ in these tasting notes by Bee; but we’re less impressed by a persistent tendency of beerier-than-thou types to assume that other people’s reactions to beer are faked, insincere or otherwise ‘stupid’.

An official definition of craft beer?

In his New Beer Guide (1988), Brian Glover recounts the story of Mike Reynolds and the Paradise Brewery, just down the road from us in Hayle:

[The brewery] was installed in 1981 in outbuildings which already had planning permission for craft use. Mike Reynolds considered small-scale brewing a craft and went ahead. Penwith District Council considered brewing an industry and objected. Eventually the case (with a little help from CAMRA) went on appeal to the Department of the Environment — which is where Michael Heseltine leapt in as Secretary of State, ruling in favour of the brewery.

In 1988, that was a nice little story but, twenty five years on, has it take on a new importance? (To beer geeks, at least…) Did the Government, with this intervention, establish a precedent for what does and doesn’t count as ‘craft’ brewing in the UK? They did so for ‘draught beer’ and ‘cask ale’, so it is possible.

We can’t find any contemporary newspaper coverage but, when we get the chance, we’ll do some digging in the Cornwall county archives. We’d also love to read contemporary paperwork from the DoE. In the meantime, if anyone else can point us to more information, or remembers this case, please comment below.

Bonus: Mike Reynolds sounds like an amazing bloke: amongst other achievements,  he also invented the Milky Bar kid!

Beerwolf Books, Falmouth

Beerwolf Books

We’d heard a few mentions of Beerwolf Books, which opened in Falmouth, Cornwall, in the run up to Christmas, and had understood that it was either a bookshop with beer, or a pub with some books for sale. Either way, it sounded like something different, and so we made sure it was on our list of places to visit during a weekend away in the coastal town.

Even approaching Beerwolf feels like you’ve stumbled upon a secret: it’s up an easy-to-miss alleyway between chain stories, in a beautiful eighteenth century building on Bells Court. Through the red door, there’s a creaking wooden staircase and a view of shelves of books. So it is a bookshop. Then the smell of beer and the sound of chatter drift down. So it is a pub.

With deep red walls, dark wood, furniture neither too neat nor too tatty, and just enough daylight through small-paned windows, the pub part of Beerwolf (the bit we were most interested in) appealed immediately. The book shop, off to one side, and with a place to rest your beer while you browse, sets the mood, positively inviting long reading or writing sessions amid the buzz of conversation.

The beer is good, too. Very good. Among five cask ales, none of them the usual suspects, were 80 Shilling from local brewery Rebel (grainy, dark and silky), Marble Manchester Bitter (the kind of pale and hoppy beer that makes us consider a move up north some time) and our favourite Penzance Brewing Potion 9. In the fridges, a few Belgian standards such as Kwak and Chimay — not the stuff to excite hardened beer geeks, perhaps, but little seen in Cornwall.

We set up camp for the afternoon, watching and listening. What appeared to be a contingent of local CAMRA members staked out the bar and worked their way through the full range, murmuring their appreciation. Students came in pairs or gangs, buying piles of books and lots of lager, tea and coffee. Middle-aged couples came for the books and stayed for a pint. A stag do came for pints and walked away with some books. “Wow!” said more than one person on reaching the top of the staircase.

Struggling book and record shops: we urge you to find a struggling pub and pair up. Supermarkets, with their idea of offering several services on one premises, might just be on to something.

Bad beer or an acquired taste?

Shepherd Neame India Pale Ale

We’ve had an interesting and rather educational experience with Shepherd Neame in the last few weeks which all started with this review of their Christmas Ale. We thought there was something wrong with it — something beyond a matter of house style or ‘characterful’ yeast. SN’s ever-patient in-house marketing man, John Humphreys, was disappointed we hadn’t liked it and asked if he could send us a few more beers to try, which is how we ended up with samples of the new India Pale Ale (6.1%), newly brown-bottled 1698 (6.5%) and Double Stout (5.2%).

Unfortunately, whatever it was that we found ‘wrong’ in the Christmas Ale was also present in both the IPA and 1698: neither of us could stand to drink them and they ended up down the sink after about half a bottle of each. At this point, we contacted John to break the bad news and let him know that we thought there was a production issue.

This troubled him and he decided to investigate. In a very civilised exchange, we shared the batch numbers of the bottles in question, along with more detailed notes on the ‘off’ flavours (‘bad breath’); he initiated the quality assurance (QA) process at their end; and kept us informed of progress. The conclusion, after bottles from those very batches had been retrieved from the QA ‘archive’ and tasted by brewers and QA managers, was that there were no detectable faults, and that the beers in question were excellent.

It’s possible that something went wrong on the long journey down to Penzance, though it seems unlikely. Far more likely, as John has suggested, is that Shepherd Neame beers have an intrinsic character we not only dislike but read as ‘off’.

Beers we do like, such as those from Harvey’s, have flavours that might be considered off — we’ve occasionally referred jokingly to Sussex Best as ‘the English Orval’ — and other bloggers and writers have certainly enjoyed these particular SN beers.

We can’t change our minds — we still found them undrinkable — but maybe we need to think a bit harder before calling ‘wrong’ in future, and perhaps also get our hands on something that can help us understand off-flavours in a more scientific manner.

Is the end of the beer boom nigh?

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” Sherlock Holmes

Yeah, whatevs, pipe boy.

Though we’re still crunching data on brewery openings, closings and goings on between the 1970s and the present day, this optimistic post from Des de Moor, and some pessimistic responses on Twitter, got us thinking about possible signs the current beer boom might be coming to an end. Here’s what we’ve come up with.

1. Fewer breweries open than in the previous year

Er, yes, this one is a bit obvious. Previous UK brewery booms (early 80s, mid 90s) follow the usual ‘Bell curve’, and there’s no reason to think this one will be any different. Here’s 2006-08 from figures given by CAMRA at successive Good Beer Guide launches.

Graph of new UK brewery openings 2006-08

Number of new breweries opening each year according to CAMRA, e.g. 99 in 12 months preceding September 2011; 158 announced from then until September 2012.

When the new GBG is launched in the autumn of this year, the ‘new breweries’ number will be significant. If it’s more than 158, then the boom is still going; if less… well, it’s not the end of the world, but it means we can start to expect a slump the unfettered growth to slow down in the next few years. (Our guess (that’s a guess): it’ll be 180+, but then back down to 150 in 2014.)

2. The big-small operators start selling up

A final death knell for the 1980s boom was, we think, the moment when David Bruce of the Firkin chain of brewpubs sold his interest to Midsummer Inns for £6.6m in 1987. Clever people invest at the start of the boom and sell before it peaks. So, if, say, Martin Hayes of the Craft Beer Company, for example, decides to cash in his chips and sell his five (?) pubs to a bigger national operator, alarm bells ought to ring.

3. Big breweries get in on the act

We’re not saying big brewers can’t or shouldn’t ‘do craft’, but it might be a bad sign when they do. The 1980s boom was partly down to Whitbread, Allied and others getting in on the action with their own ‘fake Firkin’ brewpubs and the (half-hearted) revival of their own real ale brands. They undercut small operators and contributed to an over-saturation of the market. The equivalent these days might be the ‘pilot plants’ all the bigger breweries are opening; but a far bigger danger sign wil be the first Mitchells & Butlers brewpub or ‘craft beer bar’.

4. Hipsters move on from beer

Hipsters might not consume much beer as a total share of the market, but they own the buzz. They write blogs, reviews, newspaper and magazine articles, and work in TV production. They attract attention. If (when) they decide that Brewdog isn’t cool anymore and move on to, say, sloe gin, or mead, or whatever, it’ll be a rats- from-sinking-ship moment. This usually happens well before the peak of the boom, which suggests there might be a couple more years to go yet. Thirty-odd years ago, c.1980, key indicators were a drop off in CAMRA membership and in sales of the GBG, as those who’d got excited by the ‘real ale craze’ lost interest. What’s a modern equivalent? Sales of the Craft Beer London app? Brewdog shares? Google searches?

Summary

What we’re saying, we guess, is that there’s no reason to be gloomy just yet — there’s another year or more of boom to be enjoyed — but that anyone opening a brewery right now is doing so towards the peak of the curve and had better have a bloody good offer if they expect to be trading in three or four years time.

If you’ve got any guesses or suggested indicators, share them below.

UPDATED 09:30 24/01/2012 a slump is not what you call the end of a boom, apparently! You live and learn…

Beer hunting beyond the pub

Beer from Harbour Brewing at the Old Coastguard, Mousehole.

The temporary exhibition of portraits of chefs meant that we spent the entire meal with Albert Roux and Nathan Outlaw giving us ‘evils’. Quite unnerving.

The Old Coastguard in Mousehole (‘Mowzle’) is the kind of place it’s taken us years to feel comfortable visiting: slightly pretentious, but not obnoxiously so, with a distinct air of ‘Sunday best’ about it. A ‘dining pub’ rather than a boozer, we were drawn there on Saturday for a celebratory meal, but also because we’d heard there might be good beer on offer, contrary to usual practice.

Harbour Brewing, based in North Cornwall, started distributing their beer in spring 2012, and their immediate success demonstrates that there is demand for Cornish ‘craft beer’, even if not so much in Cornwall itself. They’ve got beautiful branding and apparently boundless energy. The difficulty for us has been that, having tried an early test batch of their IPA, we’ve been waiting for the beer itself to catch up. At first, it wasn’t quite right, though far from bad; as the months passed, it improved every time we came across it, but kept failing a crucial test: we simply didn’t prefer it to the beer from the big regional, St Austell.

At the Old Coastguard, however, we found ourselves ordering a second round of their Light Ale, a 3.2% ABV cask ‘pale and hoppy’, turning our nose up at St Austell Tribute, which tasted flabby by comparison. In fact, Harbour Light even beat the pints of St Austell Proper Job we’d enjoyed the night before, too — no mean feat for a much weaker beer, given our love for PJ at its best. Light Ale isn’t the most intensely flavoured or aromatic beer of this style we’ve tried (that’s probably Brodie’s Citra) but certainly had enough lemon-peel zing to perk us up after our wind-whipped walk from Penzance. The condition couldn’t have been better, either, the head forming, in baking parlance, ‘soft peaks’, and lasting until the end of the pint.

Paler than many UK lagers and very sessionable, we can see Light Ale finding a niche in Cornish pubs… eventually. We’d love to walk into more pubs and see three different colours, at three strengths, from three different breweries, rather than the usual c.4% brown bitter or c.4% brown bitter line-up we find all too often, but it might take a while for conservative punters to come round to the idea. ‘Premium Craft’ labelling, in the meantime, will, we suspect, see Harbour’s beers cropping up in a lot of cafes, restaurants and bars in the coming summer season.

Now, here’s a question: how much do you think a pint of Light Ale was the Old Coastguard? (For context, Proper Job goes at c.£3.45 in pubs in Penzance.) Guesses below, answer tomorrow.

Beer for the penguins

Penguins

Penguins in the Falkland Islands by V1ctor (Flickr Creative Commons).

In the excitement of the post-CAMRA beer revolution, breweries popped up in some very remote places.

First, starting closest to home, there was the Lundy Brewery on the island in the Bristol Channel, which sold its beer through the Marisco Tavern from 1984 until 1995. With a permanent population of fewer than thirty people, the brewery was really installed to capitalise on the summer tourist market.

1983 saw the opening of a brewery at Borve on the Isle of Lewis. Brian Glover, in his marvellous New Beer Guide (1987), describes the owners’ difficulties in getting raw materials — malt picked up with farm supplies; hops and yeast in the post — and, in particular, the locals’ lack of sympathy when the cost was passed on to them. In 1988, the brewery moved to the mainland.

So far, so good, but now it’s time to really push the boat out, so to speak, and head all the way across the Atlantic to the Falkland Islands. It was there, in February 1983 that a brewery was established for the first time. Sir Rex Hunt, Civil Commissioner, opened the brewery, and was shown around by Ron Barclay whose employers, Everard’s of Leicester, were behind the venture. They both enjoyed pints of Penguin Ale. Was it a political statement in the wake of the recently concluded war with Argentina? Or, more likely, an attempt to pacify the several thousand thirsty soldiers stationed there?

Finally, there was a similar effort on St Helena, this time led by veteran brewer Bill Urquhart. Urquhart, an ex-Watney man, is a contender for the title of Britain’s first ‘microbrewer’, and acted as consultant to several new breweries in the late seventies and eighties. In 1980, after he’d sold the Litchborough Brewery, intending to retire, the Foreign Office approached him on behalf of Solomon’s, the island’s biggest company. As his daughter told us: “For the next three years he spent several months a year in the South Atlantic assembling a brewing plant and training the local staff.”

See also: the pub at the edge of the world.

The value of silly beer

Willy Wonka who, sadly, never made beer.

Who’s for Everlasting Beer?

There are some who argue that high-concept beers are, at best, pointless and, at worst, damaging to The Culture of Beer. For our part, though we rarely drink them and certainly don’t make much of an effort to seek them out, we sometimes find the ideas behind them funny, and feel, ultimately, that they have their place.

Within a given brewery’s range, silly beers can play the same role as the concept car, or those catwalk clothes that prompt people to say: “You’d never actually wear it out in a million years, would you?” They make a statement about values; they speak to the skill and imagination of the brewer; and they create buzz. Often, they’re impossible to find in the real world and prohibitively expensive when they do turn up, but that doesn’t really matter — it’s all about the halo effect. “I heard something about this brewery! Their head brewer is a genius!” says the consumer, and then chooses that brand of perfectly nice bitter or lager over another.

For drinkers, the benefit of such beers is negligible, though perhaps ingredients or techniques from the CRAZY!!! beer might help the brewer level up, and thus influence for the better something more mainstream they brew down the line. If you’re the kind of drinker afflicted with the need to ponder your pint, however, then WACKY!!! beers provide much needed input: the opportunity to be outraged; to question what beer is; and to articulate what exactly it is you do want.

Is thinking and talking about beer a good thing? If it helps to prevent a slow sleepwalk into monopoly and across-the-board blandness, then the answer is probably yes.

We were prompted to think about this by Elizabeth David who, in her book Italian Food, mentions the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti and his proto-Heston Blumenthal ‘futurist food’ manifesto.

Surprisingly good beer, surprisingly good pub

Beer glass with Bays Brewery logo.

Fowey (pronounced ‘Foy’) is one of those ‘Islington-on-Sea’ towns, crawling with celebs and with more bistros than you can drizzle a jus on. We arrived there on Sunday after a long walk along the coast, covered in mud and gasping for a pint, and began the ritual review of the pubs on offer, settling eventually on the Galleon.

Though the signs weren’t good — ugly red brick building, Doom Bar logos, the sounds (shudder) of live sunday afternoon jazz — it was the word ‘freehouse’ that lured us in. Might we find something other than Tribute, Doom Bar or Betty Bloody Stogs? Reader, we did: there were beers from the iconoclastic Cornish publican’s foreign brewery of choice, Bay’s of Devon.

Bay’s are a perfectly OK brewery. They’re good. They’re fine. They’re not at all bad. We wouldn’t go out of our way to find them, but we’re always pleased to see them on offer. Except, on this occasion, one of the beers was better than OK: it was excellent. Devon Dumpling (5.1% ABV), while not in the same league as Thornbridge Jaipur, reminded us of it, with a similarly hefty body and orange glow, and a well-judged balance of sweetness and bitterness. We awarded it a distinction in Leigh Good Stuff’s ‘same again please’ test and drank several.

By the standards of the UK’s hottest pubs and bars, the beer selection at the Galleon was nothing special, but it was well-chosen, including Sharp’s Cornish Coaster, a 3.6% golden charmer which ought to be their flagship beer; St Austell Proper Job, by far that brewery’s most exciting draught product; and Doom Bar, the most popular choice of the old boys at the bar. (The big gang of teenagers who’d just got back from a night out clubbing in their shiny trousers were on Tequila, Stella and white wine.)

What the Galleon shows, we suppose, is that a pub doesn’t have to be ancient to be cosy, and that it’s possible to offer quality and choice, in a quiet way, without scaring the horses.

Recipe for a brewing boom

Foaming pint of homebrew.

We’re making good progress on our book and, as we leave the nineteen-seventies behind us, we’ve been reading up about the early 1980s UK brewing boom. In interviews with brewers, one theme crops up time and time again, as in this report from 1983: ‘Raising their glasses to success yesterday were three redundant brewery workers and them man who helped them get back into business… Now THEY are the bosses of Britain’s newest brewery — Aston Manor in Birmingham.‘ (Daily Express, 20 May.)

The theme we’re talking about is, of course, redundancy.

At the very start of 1980, Britain officially entered a fifteen month recession. That year saw a huge bump in the number of redundancies, from 187,000 in 1979 to 494,000. Here’s one of those lovely graphs showing redundancies in thousands during this period.

Graph

Great Britain redundancies (thousands) 1977-1985. Source: figures provided in ‘Britain’s Redundancy payments for displaced workers’, Lawrence S Root, University of Michigan, Monthly Labor Review, June 1987.

And here’s a graph showing new brewery openings in the same period.

Graph

New breweries in the UK 1977 to 1985. Sources: New Beer Guide, Brian Glover, 1988 (1977-1982); Quaffale.org (1983-1985).

The sources for that last chart are flaky, and we’ve got a lot more research to do into the circumstances behind the founding of the 100 or so new breweries that appeared between 1980 and 1983, but it’s probably not going too far to say that the sudden boom in breweries coincides exactly with the highest peak of redundancies, is it?

On a similar note, and also on our to do list, can it be a coincidence that the most recent boom in brewery numbers occured in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis?

(We are, by the way, slowly working our way through editions of the CAMRA Good Beer Guide to compile our database of brewery openings by year, which we’ll make available for others to use once its done.)