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beer reviews

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.

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture opinion

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…

Categories
beer reviews pubs real ale

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.

Categories
Beer history

Beer for the penguins

Penguins on the Falkland Islands.
SOURCE: Yuriy Rzhemovskiy/Unsplash

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.

Categories
Blogging and writing Generalisations about beer culture opinion

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.