Saltaire Triple Chocoholic might be my favourite chocolate beer. It’s not sweet like some, but definitely smells of chocolate. It’s dark, creamy and extremely full bodied, almost like a Spanish hot chocolate fit for dipping your churros.
It’s like (but better than) the Meantime effort at its best.
And, for all its intense flavour and gooeyness, is a mere 4.8%.
Once again, evidence that Saltaire are masters of flavouring beer.
Boak
What do Wells and Young’s Bombardier and Greene King IPA have in common?
They’re both brands with a reputation for being bland, boring and often badly kept, as the token gesture towards ‘real ale’ in mediocre pubs.
And yet both are listed by Michael Jackson in his 500 Beers book, and other bloggers and beer writers have started to question their knee-jerk dismissal, suggesting that they are not so much bland and boring as straightforward and nonetheless well crafted.
So, we want to give them another shot but, to be fair about it, we want to make sure we drink them in the best possible condition.
So, where can we find absolutely the best pint of each in or near London?
Getting fruit flavour into beer is harder than you might imagine.
Some fruit beers are too sweet, others are too sour. The fruit flavour can be overpowering, or barely perceptible. Worst of all, it can sometimes be just too pink.
Saltaire’s Blackberry Cascade and Raspberry Blonde get it exactly right. They both taste enough of fruit that you can tell it’s there without being told (we tested this theory on unsuspecting friends). They’re a little sweet, hardly at all sour, and un-dyed.
We’re not 100 per cent sure but we suspect the trick might be to get over the purism which says fresh fruit is best: these beers are ‘infused’ with ‘flavours’, which to us suggests extracts or syrups. Who cares, though? It works.
Blackberries are Boak’s favourite fruit, which is why Blackberry Cascade has edged it as our beer of the week.
We made Mighty Oak Maldon Gold (3.8%) our beer of the week once. It’s a regular at our local and we’ve enjoyed it more and more as we’ve got to know it.
In the last week, for one reason and another, we’ve taken different friends to the pub on three occasions and watched their reactions to this quietly impressive beer.
All three said: “Wow.”
One of our friends is a Foster’s/Magners drinker by nature and even he loved it. In fact, he wouldn’t shut up about it. A conversion?
This beer seems to sit right in the sweet spot — interesting enough that we keep going back to it as well appealing to people who aren’t geeky about beer.
So, we’re making it beer of the week again.
Every now and then we have a moment when we realise why everyone else is raving about a particular beer or pub. Recently, that happened with St Peter’s and the Jerusalem Tavern.
From the bottle, we generally find their beers, despite the lovely branding, to be watery and fizzy. On the rare occasion we’ve tried them from a cask in pubs other than the Jerusalem, they’ve been pleasant, but nothing special.
But at the Jerusalem, from a cask, Organic Ale knocked us for six: it was a hundred times more complex and satisfying than the bottled version. We were expecting so little that there were looks of giddy joy on our faces as we drank.
“Blimey,” was our one word review at the time.
Photo by Surprisetruck at Flickr, under a Creative Commons license.
We read in a Tweet from John Keeling, Fuller’s head brewer, that their Hock would be on sale around now.
We have now seen it in the wild, at the Jugged Hare on Vauxhall Bridge Road. It’s a mild and therefore not a mind-blowing drinking experience, but really very pleasant and with a characteristic Fuller’s candied peel tang.
It seems we’re the last to the party on this so-called ‘Black IPA’, having already seen posts by:
We finally tracked it down at Cask in Pimlico last night. We liked it but, at 6.6%, and with an almost harsh bitterness and rich, mouth-coating hops, it was one to enjoy by the half and at a leisurely pace.
The oxymoron in the name is a bit irritating — black and pale..? — although we can see what they’re getting at. We’d probably call it a flowery porter.
The real benefit of Cask Ale Week as we see it is not particularly that it encourages punters to drink more cask ale but that it convinces those selling it to up their game a notch.
In a Fuller’s pub (the Mad Hatter Hotel, near Blackfriars and Waterloo) last week, we were spoilt for choice, with our beloved London Porter (the Cask Ale Week special), a brilliant IPA (Bengal Lancer), London Pride, ESB and Chiswick all on offer.
Now, Fuller’s, let’s have that variety all year round: interesting beers are for life, not just for Cask Ale Week.
We’re big fans of experimental beers made with a single variety of hop and (so far) have yet to have a bad beer from Barnsley’s Acorn Brewery, so we just had to try Motueka IPA at the Pembury Tavern.
The beer was fantastic — quenching, herbal and dry, with perhaps just a hint of banana in the aroma — but, on this showing, we’d be hard pressed to identify Motueka hops if we came across them again without a bloody great big sign telling us they were there. We tend to hop from beer to beer if there are several on offer but went back for more of this, Tandleman-style, which must say something.
For more single hop action check out Geoff’s fascinating homebrewing experiments.
Update 17/03/10 — of course we meant “a single variety of hop” rather than “a single hop”. How crap would that beer be?
On the same day we visited the Dove, we also made it to another legendary west London pub, the Bricklayers in Putney. It’s beautifully done out, being neither trendy nor grotty, although it was bloody cold.
It was the week after their beer festival and the garden was full of spent casks — “Beer Fail!” Nothing was going to waste, though and anything left in the garden was going at a pound a pint.
We were excited to see a huge range of Timothy Taylor’s beers and didn’t even bother trying anything from the guest pumps or the garden. We’ve heard a lot about the legendary Dark Mild, and it is indeed fabulous: chocolate and vanilla and at only 3.5%. Ram Tam is a wonderfully fruity dark beer, also very special, with blackcurrant and clove notes. Why aren’t Tim Taylor’s other beers as well known as Landlord?
We're a pair of beer geeks who live in London in the UK. Bailey is a man, Boak is a lady. We've been writing this beer blog since April 2007 and it's taken us all over Britain and Europe in pursuit of the perfect pint.
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