Archive for the ‘bottled beer’ Category

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Bring your own

Saturday, May 1st, 2010

While it seems there are some divided opinions on whether it’s ever OK to bring your own food into a pub, there are plenty of restaurants which let you provide your own booze, because they don’t want to or can’t get an alcohol licence.

This came to mind when a friend told us about a BYO Thai restaurant in Walworth in south London (Mama Thai, 235 Walworth Road, London SE17 1RL).

The nearest tube is Elephant and Castle. It’s a cheap and cheerful thai place without a licence (so technically BYO) but has struck a deal with the off licence next door to let you order what you want. They have a surprisingly good selection of bottled beers which you can order. Off hand, I remember there were Left Hand beers from the US, but I’m pretty sure they had a lot of Belgian, Czech and other European ones.

Given the appalling state of the beer on offer in most restaurants (“So my choice is Chang or Tsingtao…?”) and how fussy we’ve become about what we will and won’t drink, BYO is the perfect solution.

Here’s a directory of BYO restaurants put together with wine in mind, but we’d be interested to hear your recommendations.

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Posted in beer and food, bottled beer | 3 Comments »

Yebisu and Asahi

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

To accompany some noodles, we went for two mainstream Japanese beers we picked up at Arigato supermarket in Soho — Yebisu lager and Asahi Black.

Yebisu proudly calls itself an ‘all malt beer’ and, yes, there is a real toasted malt flavour. All in all, this pale lager is not an exciting beer, but it is a satisfying, moreish and likeable one. A notch above the central point of bland on the Grim-to-Great™ commercial lager rating scale.

Asahi Dry, which is what we see most often in the UK, is brewed here under license. Asahi Black, however, is imported from Japan. It’s after the manner of a German schwarzbier — smooth, creamy and with soft cocoa flavours, rather than the bitter roastiness of a stout. It reminded us particularly of Bernard Dark, but with less body and a much less intense flavour. A winner, and possibly also a good way to lure non-beery chums into drinking something with a bit more character than Foster’s.

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Posted in Beers and brewing by region and/or country, beer and food, bottled beer | 3 Comments »

The Emperor’s New Beer

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

Tsingtao, so Michael Jackson says in his 500 Beers, is “relatively mild but has notably more hop aroma and bitterness than most other golden lagers from China”. Faint praise but, nonetheless, Tsingtao makes the list. His Eyewitness Companion to Beer from a few years later describes it as a “hoppy, light-bodied pilsner”.

The Beer Book says Tsingtao is “crisp, slightly malty… nutty sweet” and it’s “aroma grainy, with a hint of sweetness”.

There’s no doubting that it’s an interesting beer in historical and cultural terms but, on our scale for rating commercial lager which runs from unpleasant, through bland, to very tasty, we’d place Tsingtao somewhere near the bottom.

Are we missing something?

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Posted in beer reviews, bottled beer | 13 Comments »

Community beers

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Jame and Lizzie Brodie, who run our local brewery, kindly gave us a box of their beers last month, and we’re slowly working our way through the ones we haven’t tried before. The first thing to note is that either free beer tastes better or, across the board, Brodie’s beers have improved since they first launched. We enjoyed their Eat 17 IPA last year, and their Ho Ho Ho at Christmas, and the first of the new lot we’ve tasted were excellent too.

Old Hopper’s Ale is brewed with hops from East London (Cable Street, in fact) picked by residents in Tower Hamlets Community Housing. The beer gets its name from the fact that many of them spent summer holidays as children picking hops in Kent. It’s a nice story and a really impressive beer, with a good solid hop flavour that isn’t astringent or grassy.

Pink Pride is a light beer (3.4%) with a little raspberry in it and an excellent example of a refreshing and balanced fruit beer. The raspberry is there but not overpowering, perhaps adding just a little sourness. Grapefruity hops give it a crisp finish. It tastes and feels a lot like a cask ale, a great achievement for a microbrewed bottled beer.

It’s accompanying story is slightly more vague than Old Hop Picker’s.  It was apparently made “with the help of London’s gay community”. We can’t work out if this is a brilliant marketing trick  or an act of commercial suicide. However good the beer, a lot of blokes might feel a bit vulnerable shouting to the barman in a crowded pub: “Can I get a bottle of Pink Pride, please? Yes, that’s right, the gay beer. The one with raspberries in.”

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Posted in beer reviews, bottled beer | 13 Comments »

Bottled Beer at St Pancras

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

Just a quick one — if you find yourself passing through Kings Cross St Pancras Station and in need of a decent bottle of beer or two, then Sourced is a wee shop with a pretty impressive selection. Impressive for a train station, anyway.

Posted in bottled beer, buying beer, london | 16 Comments »

Homage to the white bits on the map

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

Announcing the arrival of an Icelandic blogger to the scene the other day, Knut used the catch-all term ‘the white areas on the map‘. As anyone who saw this satellite image in the papers this week will know, Britain has temporarily joined the club, and so it seemed the perfect opportunity to get into the spirit of things.

Here’s what we did yesterday:

  1. Put Johan Johansson on the stereo.
  2. Had a hot bath.
  3. Rolled in the snow.
  4. Got back in the hot bath.
  5. Ate a salad of pickled herring, potatoes, beetroot, apple, onion and sour cream.
  6. Drank the bottle of Nøgne ø God Jul we were given by Knut before Christmas.

We enjoyed the beer a lot. It’s a classy, complex drop which is nonetheless easier going than Harvey’s Imperial Stout. We got something different with every mouthful but the overall picture was of treacle with a hint of wood smoke. We liked the fact that, although very dark, it was deep brown rather than black. The head was so far off white that, for a moment, we wondered if there might be saffron in the beer.

Additional notes: We didn’t roll in the snow for very long because we felt like a right pair of twats. The music eventually proved too pretentious for us and we put ABBA on instead. The table we ate off was bought from IKEA. After this bizarre interlude, we went to the pub for a bottle of Fuller’s 1845.

Update: here are Beer Sagas’ reviews of Nogne ø beers, and here’s the Beer Nut on Nogne ø God Jul Islay Cask edition.

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Posted in beer reviews, bottled beer | 4 Comments »

Sour Stout in a Victorian Pub

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

In search of Fullers London Porter, and following a tip from reader Ant, we found ourselves back at the Royal Oak in Borough, south of London Bridge. The Porter was great, as always, if a little flat. Harvey’s Old Ale (4.3%) had rich fruit cake flavours and reminded us of Adnams Broadside. It was also a little sour, which made us wonder if they really do add some aged beer to new to make it, or just a happy accident.

The highlight, though, was the Imperial Stout (9%). The cheery barman was delighted when we asked if they had any and bounced off to get a bottle. He apologised profusely for the fact that it no longer comes in a corked bottle and presented it with some pride in a big wine glass.  We’ve had before but fairly early on in our beer drinking adventures, when our tastebuds were less mature, and then found it too intensely flavoured to actually finish. This time, it was love at first sight. There is something very sexy about a dark beer with a brown, caramel-coloured head. The smell was pure Cantillon — sour, sweet, and (bear with us) bordering on manure. The flavours exploded with every sip: blackberry, chocolate, tobacco (never thought we’d enjoy that), leather… we could go on. Astounding, in short, and now in our top 10.

As we drank, it began to snow outside. A Victorian pub, snow and black beer: it couldn’t have been more Christmassy.

NB – Fuller’s London Porter is also on at the Mad Bishop and Bear in Paddington Station, in cracking form.

A merry Christmas to all our readers – we’ll be back in a couple of days.

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Posted in Beer styles, beer reviews, bottled beer | 8 Comments »

Beer of the Year

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

This is the kind of thing we usually chicken out of but, in the pub one night this week, we thrashed it out and made a decision.

We’ve been quietly naming a beer of the week almost every week since February and so looked over that list first to see if any of the candidates leapt out. The full list is below, after the jump, if you’re interested.

We decided, on reflection, that there were certain beers we not only enjoyed but kept coming back to. We had multiple pints of St Austell Tribute, Thornbridge Jaipur and Fuller’s ESB.  We drank many bottles of Sam Smith’s Taddy Porter, Brew Dog’s Punk IPA, Anchor Liberty Ale, Pilsner Urquell and Flying Dog Old Scratch (our stand-by beer this summer). We would keep going back for Wuerzburger Hofbrau Pils if we lived anywhere near Wuerzburg.

But one beer that we’d never mentioned as beer of the week, and which always delights us, is Dark Star Hophead. Dark Star might be our favourite UK brewery, if we have to choose, and Hophead is one of the best of their beers. It’s not too strong (several pints won’t kill you) but absolutely bursting with freshness and up-front hop flavour. It’s a corker. We love it. We’re going to drink lots more of it in 2010.

(more…)

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Posted in beer reviews, bottled beer, real ale | 7 Comments »

Kerstbiers at the Poechenellekelder

Monday, December 7th, 2009

marzipansantas

We’ve just got back from a week away in Germany. On the way out, we spent a night in Brussels checking into our hotel not long before 10.30 pm on a rainy Tuesday night. That gave us just enough time to dash to our favourite pub, the Poechenellekelder, to try a few items from their very extensive Christmas beer menu.

Tsjeeses by Struise caught our eye because of the mysterious name which became less so once we said it aloud and saw the label, which features a cartoon of a very stoned Jesus with smoke curling from his mouth and ears. Tacky branding aside, it was a perfect Belgian blonde and absurdly drinkable at 10%. Not too sweet, not too bitter, definitely spicy but nothing you could pick out. Everything was in balance. It reminded us what we love about Belgian beer.

Palm Dubbel was  less exciting, but certainly not unpleasant. It reminded us of Leffe Radieuse, with the same kind of fruit flavour which makes you wonder if cherries have been added somewhere along the way.

Zinnebier Xmas (Brasserie de la Senne) reminded us of Fuller’s London Porter but was much easier to swig — less intense and with a lighter body. Roasted grains mixed with sour-fruit aromas. Fabulous.

Forestinne Nordika from Brasserie Caracole was the last we could squeeze in as the bar emptied and bills were paid. Luckily, it was also a hit, with a powerful sweet orange-peel aroma and flavour that we loved.  There was more fruit than spice and we guessed from the colour that it had been made with something like English pale ale malt as the base.

All in all, a successful start to our trip.

Still to come: we find a brewery making stout in Cologne; catch ourselves ticking mulled drinks; and find a surprising amount of decent beer in Northern Germany.

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Posted in Belgium, bottled beer | 5 Comments »

Craft-brewed beer from Toledo

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Domus 'artesanal' beer from Toledo

Spanish version here.

Domus is an ‘artesanal’ beer from Cerveza Regia, Toledo. It’s bottle-conditioned, top fermented and available in various trendy bars in its home city. The marketing and packaging are fabulous, just screaming quality.

Unfortunately, the beer itself is a lot like one of our less successful homebrews: too fizzy, too thin and a little grassy. As it warms up, the toasted flavours come through a bit and it’s nice to have something with veritable hops, but unfortunately they have a way to go before we’d choose this over a glass of bland but pleasant fizzy Spanish lager.

Is it a step forward that something like this even exists in Spain? Our fear is that if someone does stray from a fizzy lager to try this they will simply be  put off craft beers and ales forever.

It doesn’t help that the bar staff have no idea how to handle it, shaking up the yeast and expecting us to drink it from the bottle which is (of course) the cool thing to do with ‘premium’ beers in Spain.

Posted in Spain, beer reviews, bottled beer | 3 Comments »

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