Tag Archives: bitter

Ale, Lager and Macho Fantasy

Carlsberg Special Brew Advert 1976.In 1983, a piece of fluff research sponsored by the International Lager Festival, and written up in The Daily Mirror by none other than Alastair Campbell, found that lager drinkers were ‘better in bed… suaver, slimmer, more sophisticated and better educated than bitter drinkers’. They tended to fancy ‘women like Raquel Welch, TV presenter Sue Lawley and actress Pamela Stephenson’. They were men as cool as Sting or Barry Sheene. Bitter drinkers, on the other hand, as represented by Bernard Manning and Jocky Wilson, were ‘big and fat, dull and drab with hairy chests and spend so much time playing darts with the lads that when they go to bed, it’s usually to sleep’.

A CAMRA spokesman disagreed with these findings: ‘better in bed my boot’.

Oddly, when a survey was conducted by real ale brewers Hall and Woodhouse (aka ‘Badger’) in 1989, the results were quite different. As reported in The Times on 30 December that year:

Ale fellows, it seems, like to think of themselves as country types who work the land, wear rough-textured clothes and are “physically stronger than men of today”. “It is here that the real attraction of this fantasy lies,” says Thornton Mustard, the marketing psychologist behind the project.

Mr Mustard, who, amazingly, is a real person, went on to say that, in the ale drinker’s fantasy:

…the work pace is seen to be leisurely, and it is nearly always summer. The only variation is the harvest; a lovely autumnal mood. A man works hard and is brought tankards of ale by his wife. He has earned this ale: it is strong, yet refreshing.

‘Bitter’, on the other hand, ‘has a rough, uncultured and very masculine tonality which reassures today’s man that underneath his civility he is little-changed’. It’s was a word of the industrial north, he reckoned. (Oh, really?).

His conclusion? Brewers should market to men using one macho fantasy or another and leave women alone to make up their own minds: ‘The whole idea of marketing to women has been a disaster because it always comes across as incredibly condescending.’

A Lightplater while waiting for a train

Young's Light Ale

With our train due in an hour,we wandered out of the station in a small inland Cornish town in search of a pub. The first we came across was busy and smart enough; on entering, a cheery-looking landlady greeted us and engaged in a little light banter. She then served us two pints and a half of the warmest, dullest bitter we’ve had in a while.

This seemed a perfect time for a little experiment. “Is that Young’s Light Ale in the fridge?” we asked, spotting the label from several metres away. It was, so we bought some, and used it to (a) reduce the temperature of our pints from lukewarm to cool; (b) put some fizz in them; and (c) lift the bitterness. They weren’t great pints thereafter, but were at least pleasant enough to finish.

All of this reminded us of (sorry) yet another passage from Richard Boston’s Beer and Skittles (1976) in which he lists various ‘traditional’ beer mixes:

  • Lightplater – bitter and light ale.
  • Mother-in-law — old and bitter. (Oh dear. Bernard Manning much?)
  • Granny — old and mild.
  • Boilermaker — brown and mild.
  • Blacksmith –stout and barley wine.
  • Half-and-half – bitter and stout, or bitter and mild.

If you’re compelled to mix beers in an emergency as we were, or just fancy a change, these all sound like they might create something drinkable.

Bailey’s dad, of course, never complains about bad beer. If it can’t be rendered passable with the addition of a bottle of Mann’s Brown Ale, then it’s time to move on.

The John Smith’s Experiment: Conclusion

The head on a glass of water with 60ml of John Smith's.

We couldn’t find much to love in John Smith’s Extra Smooth, and we really did try. Given the uncontroversial recipe, we have to assume the cause of the problem is that widget — that little ping-pong ball which injects nitrogren into the beer on opening to create the weird, everlasting ‘creamy’ head.

Does it add flavour? We don’t think it should, but it probably does change our perception of the flavours, emphasising some and dampening others — an extreme version of the effect we notice when drinking a given beer both with and without sparkler.

But what to do with the remaining cans? Well, the everlasting creamy head has its uses. See that picture above? That’s a pint glass of water topped off with 60ml of JSES. It will put a head on anything, with only a small hit to the flavour.

When we opened a bottle of homebrewed stout and found it completely flat (it needed a few more weeks) we added the tiniest amount of JSES and, as if by magic, found ourselves with a far more appealing glass of beer.

A terrible, snobbish though has also occured to us: we frequently have visitors who don’t care much about beer — perhaps we can fob it off on them?

That’s the end of our John Smith’s experiment, but it has given us another idea: at some point soon, instead of slagging off JSES, we’ll taste all the readily available canned bitters blind and try to identify the best.

The John Smith’s Experiment: Part 2

Here are our notes from the first of our 18 cans of John Smith’s Extra Smooth:

Surprisingly powerful aroma rising out of the glass. Not of hops but actually quite Guinness-like if we close our eyes – the black malt they use for colour? Very light body (watery) perhaps emphasises by the very thick head. Actually a decent amount of bitterness, but accompanied by something acrid – bile? (Eew.) Definitely more acid burn than we remember. A little hint of grassiness floating over the surface. Much nicer as the weird foamy head disappears.

Verdict: if we weren’t doing this experiment, we would pour this away. Not pleasant.

That first can was fridge cold (as per the serving instructions). Next we tried it at room temperature (better, less acrid); and, over the next few days, from a variety of different glasses, both cold and at room temperature.

It looked amazing served cold in a large brandy glass — like some gleaming amber pale ale ‘van ‘t vat’ in a Belgian bar. The attractive appearance didn’t fool our tastebuds, though, and, if anything, the shape of the glass emphasised that peculiar, burning, stomach-acid sensation.

Did we start to like it more? The honest answer is, no, we really didn’t: we found it less palatable with every can we consumed. Shame — if we had, it could save us a lot of time and money.

The thing that really puzzled us, though: who says this is easy-drinking, bland beer? It isn’t — it is a downright bizarre, odd-tasting product. It could probably be improved by replacing the dark malts used for colour with more-or-less flavourless, frowned-upon caramel for starters. (See the canned bitter Cain’s brew for Co-Op — not especially characterful, but not weird.)

We did not finish the slab.

There’s one more post on this subject to go, in which we discuss widgets, Extra Smoothness, and what we did with the leftover cans. (Though maybe we should have just done one really long epic to confound everyone who has heard rumours we write concisely…?)

 

The John Smith’s Experiment: Part 1

John Smith's packaging close up.

John Smith’s bitter is one of those beers which has become a byword for badness amongst beer geeks — the punchline to jokes, a shortcut to suggest the utter hopelessness of a crappy pub.

It is available cask-conditioned but is more usually seen as a keg beer or in cans in the supermarket. It’s usually heavily discounted — the cheapest ale available in the average Wetherspoons, for example, and always included in ‘two slabs for £X’ offers.

Roger Protz’s Real Ale Almanac suggests that the ingredients are pale malt, black malt for colour and high-alpha English hops for bittering, which intelligence was backed up by a slightly vague email from Heineken’s customer enquiry line.

That recipe doesn’t sound bad, does it? Not inspiring, but not bad. Not unlike many of the twentieth century bitter recipes Ron Pattinson posts on his blog on Let’s Brew Wednesdays. Kind of appetising, in fact, if you appreciate unassuming English bitters.

So we bought fifteen eighteen cans of the Extra Smooth variant, and spent a week drinking them, and nothing else.

What did we expect to find? Either:

1. that we would have our prejudices confirmed, recalibrate our tastebuds, and enjoy the beer we usually drink all the more; or

2. that we’d get used to it and, by persevering, get to know it, and so find its hidden depths with tastebuds more experienced than when we dismissed it several years ago.

This was an interesting experience for us in lots of ways.

More to follow in Part 2.

I, Bitter Drinker

British people are often culturally programmed to choose a certain type of tipple, even before they touch a drop.

Consider the socially-conditioned bitter drinker, a type we know personally and well. These are blokes who don’t really have strong feelings about beer but know what they’re not: lager louts, party animals, pretentious, ‘continental’, fizzy. A pint of bitter (John Smith’s Extra Smooth, London Pride, whatever’s at hand) just fits their identity, and that’s that.

Perhaps it’s that a pint of bitter, though some might call it boring, seems to them vaguely counter-cultural — representative of a kind of quiet contrariness, like indie music and rambling. It signals their place in a minority, where they feel at home, without being at all ostentatious.

None of the blokes we’ve got in mind are CAMRA members. Bitter is bitter is bitter. For them, it’s not something to campaign for or think too much about.

What would ever make the confirmed bitter drinker order something different at the bar? It’s hard to imagine. Our suspicion is that the more you market at him, the more stubborn he’ll get: “Pint of bitter, please.”

No Marketing Budget in Post-war Devon

Pale "A" Ale -- the Best Bitter in the West of England -- Brewed only by the Plymouth Breweries Ltd.
We found the above on the flyleaf of a The Homeland Guide to Dartmoor (undated but c.1947). It’s hard to imagine a plainer advertisement or, indeed, a plainer name for a flagship product. Post-war austerity and all that, we suppose.

On a related note, we also know from our recent nosing in their brewing records that, for the duration of World War II, St Austell produced nothing but “PA” (pale ale).

It must have been hard to get anything but bitter in the West Country in the 1940s.

 

The Brown Bitter Company

It’s in central London — let’s say Bloomsbury — and based in a renovated Victorian pub. It’s not very big and the fact that it’s entirely panelled in dark wood only makes it look smaller.

Over the door is a slogan: “They only taste the same to uneducated palates”. On the walls, further bits of propaganda: “If you want to drink tangerine-flavoured hop-juice, you’re in the wrong bar”; “Extreme beer? Bloody rude beer, more like”; and “If a pint of bitter was good enough for your granddad, it’s good enough for you.”

On the bar are twenty handpumps serving different cask bitters from around the country. They are all in impeccable condition, cool but cold, served with our without sparkler depending on the customer’s preference, in straight pint glasses. The vast wall of fridges behind the bar are stocked with more than 200 bottled bitters, some bottle-conditioned, others not. The one thing these beers have in common: they are brown.

There are several hefty leatherbound volumes filled with detailed tasting notes by an eminent British beer writer, aimed at helping customers detect the subtle differences between the vast range of ostensibly similar beers.

There is also a very small import section featuring American and European interpretations of bitter. For the handful of lager drinkers, there are a few bottled German dunkels on offer.

Does that sound like a nightmare, a dream or something in between? Is there fun to be had in exploring nuances and learning to appreciate subtlety? Or is variety the only path to enlightenment?

We’re not the first people to imagine a bar by a long chalk, by the way. Here are a few of Leigh’s.

We need to talk about Greene King IPA

The sign outside a Greene King pub in London.

For a beer many people consider bland and over-exposed, Greene King IPA doesn’t half get talked about a lot. To us, it’s the cask ale equivalent of Budweiser — brewed to be nearly flavourless, not too intoxicating and uncontroversial. It was, in fact, for that reason that it was the first cask ale that Bailey got the taste for, many years ago.

Zak Avery, Paul Garrard and others stick up for it, however, arguing that it is subtle rather than bland, and that it suffers because it is often sold in pubs which don’t know how to look after it. The latter is certainly true, and also applies to, e.g., London Pride when not served in a Fuller’s pub.

Zak suggests that we and others who find GK IPA boring need to recalibrate our tastebuds. We know what he means — a pint of our usual after a fortnight in Spain last year tasted like an extreme hop-monster — but can’t agree that GK IPA is an unfairly neglected classic. If faced with a choice between GK IPA and a cold Cruzcampo, we’d take the latter every time, and that’s saying something.

We recently described GK IPA, rather than ‘craft keg’, as the thin end of the wedge in the battle against crap beer: it’s got more in common with John Smith’s smooth keg ales than it has, say, an exciting brown bitter like Harvey’s Sussex Best.

Which is not to say that people who enjoy it are wrong to do so, or that they’re not really enjoying it, just that it would be a shame if that was as far as they got. It’s like upgrading from Dairylea to mild cheddar and thinking you’re eating ‘proper cheese’. (That sounds snobbish but we can’t find any other way to express this — and beer and cheese aren’t things you need to be rich or Eton-educated to enjoy.)

What’s most frustrating, as Zak also points out, is that Greene King make some interesting beers, but their flagship brew just happens to be their worst.

Another beer which we’re beginning to think about the same way is Sharp’s Doom Bar. It’s hugely popular but, in our experience, often disappointing. We had a great pint of it a couple of years back but, since then, have always been let down by its dusty cardboard flavours and believe us, we keep trying. Recently, we had a pint alongside one each of St Austell HSD and Marston’s Pedigree, and Doom Bar lost. (But now we need to do that taste test blind.)

UPDATE (16/12/2011): we had another good pint of Doom Bar last night — bright, fruity and very alive. Still not a great hit rate but we’re not writing it off yet.