Tag Archives: craft beer

Book Review: Craft Beer World

Detail of Mark Dredge's book Craft Beer World.

The market for lists of ‘beers to drink before you die’ is crowded — are there reasons to choose Mark ‘Pencil and Spoon’ Dredge’s offer over any other?

If you’re just starting to take an interest in beer, it’s useful to have a more experienced friend who can point you in the right direction until you start to form your own opinions. If that friend happens to have similar tastes to you then all the better. If you’re a real ale drinker who wants to explore, then Roger Protz has you covered; if you are fundamentally turned off by the very idea of real ale culture, then Dredge is your man.

Some people will find this book annoying. They’ll roll their eyes at suggestions America is the beating heart of craft beer, and that hops ‘only really got exciting in the 1970s’ when American brewers worked out how to get the best from them. They’ll be rubbed the wrong way by food and drink pairing suggestions, and by the focus on big beers over everyday ‘drinkers’. They are not the market for this book and probably shouldn’t read it for the sake of their blood pressure. Dredge has, and has always had, a distinct voice, loved by some, sneered at by others, but certainly not ‘vanilla’. Read his blog before you buy the book and you’ll know what to expect.

Having said that, from our perspective, there is probably not enough Dredge in the book. There are photos of beer labels and bottles, but not many of him and his drinking buddies on their exciting sounding travels. (Jamie Oliver would not miss this trick…) Occasionally, he sets the scene for when and where a particular beer was consumed –  the entry on Crate Brewery Lager, for example — and we’d have liked more.

Even though we’re got our own opinions on beer, and no longer need the ‘beginner’s guide’ asides, we did get something out of this book, as we’ve tried very few of the beers Dredge recommends. We won’t be carrying it round with us everywhere we go, as we did with our first Michael Jackson pocket guide, but we’ve made mental notes of a few brews and will keep an eye out for them on our travels.

We were also interested in his customised style classification system — descriptive rather than prescriptive — which acknowledges the emergence of, for example, ‘pale and hoppy session beer’ and ‘Pacific pale ale’ as recognisable categories. IPA is at the centre of his view of ‘craft beer’ and so almost every variation thereon — e.g. ‘Belgian IPA’ — gets its own sub-style. This is an honest reflection of what’s going on, like it or not, and makes sense to us.

If there is a bouncy twenty-something in your life who is just beginning to take an interest in beer, this might be the perfect birthday or Christmas present.

Disclosure: we were sent a free copy of this book by the publishers, Dog’n'Bone, and this blog gets a mention in the ‘learn more’ section at the back.

Dairylea Wonderloaf Beer

Isinglass Collagen beer treatment advertisement.

Ron Pattinson’s enjoyably snarky post about keg bitter and craft beer used an interesting turn of phrase: ‘Over-priced, trendy, processed beer’.

Arguably, all beer is processed, unless you are drinking the spontaneously fermented liquid which gathers at the bottom of your grain bucket after heavy rain. But people use the phrase ‘processed food’ to mean something quite particular — that which has been treated, often using patented methods, to make it more ‘stable’ and increase its shelf-life. In other words, where the taste of the product is a secondary consideration after efficient production, easy distribution and stability in storage. (Is that what’s being described here?)

Does processing necessarily result in bad-tasting food and drink? Freeze-dried strawberries covered in chocolate are one of the most delicious foodstuffs known to man, and there are certain purposes for which only a fluffy, sweetened, processed bread will serve. On the whole, though, few people would choose a triangle of Dairylea cheese over a nice piece of ripe cheddar.

Is it easy to decide if a beer has been ‘processed’? Bottle-conditioned beer which has been pasteurised and re-seeded with a clean yeast might resemble unprocessed beer, but it’s actually been subjected to additional processing. Meanwhile, there are an increasing number of kegged beers which are barely processed at all, though they might be in sealed containers.

Reading descriptions of the taste of the much-derided Watney’s keg bitters, one of the most offensive aspects seem to be their sweetness. Is arresting fermentation while sugars remain in the beer, or adding sugar after fermentation, processing? As far as we know, they weren’t bunging in saccharine. (Which, by the way, some rustic, ‘real’ farmyard Somerset cider producers do.)

If a beer is inefficiently manufactured, difficult to distribute, with a short shelf-life, will it taste better? Will it burn twice as bright for half as long? And is ‘processed’ actually the antithesis of ‘craft’?

Sorry for the barrage of questions. This is your classic ‘thinking aloud’ blog post. Answers welcome but not expected.

How far has the idea of craft beer spread?

Beer bottle: Harbour Porter No 6

In this post, we’re using ‘craft beer’ to refer to breweries who define themselves or some of their products using that term.

As people ponder the contrast between beer consumption and brewery numbers, two views are emerging at extremes of the spectrum of opinion:

1. Beer has begun its inevitable and long-awaited ascendancy — soon every pub will stock a vast range of interesting beer, there’s no reason the number of breweries should ever stop rising, and everyone will be drinking it. Just look at London. Soon, everywhere will be London! Endless London! Rejoice!

2. Beer is doomed — craft beer is a pathetic little bubble — an idea with no appeal to anyone but geeks. You can’t judge anything by what’s going on in that London. Look at downward overall beer consumption and pub numbers and repent, crafterati! Repent!

From our vantage point up here on the fence, we’ve seen some evidence that craft beer is an idea that is breaking out, if not, perhaps, ‘sweeping the country’, and has some distance left to run.

Our recent trip to Falmouth left us rather astounded as we realised that, in a town with a population of 20,000, there are at least four pubs/bars selling bottled and kegged craft beer (e.g. Five Degrees West, Beerwolf, The Front, Hand Bar) and apparently doing well at it. Self-consciously ‘craft’ local breweries like Rebel of Penryn and Harbour seem to be gaining a foothold in an increasing number of outlets, and the ‘craftier’ end of Sharp’s output is getting easier to find. There’s even a posh off-licence which stocks Mikkeller — one of the horsemen of the craftpocalypse?

Let’s move the goalposts, though, before someone else does: Falmouth is a university town, and full of middle class yachting types, so it doesn’t paint a true picture. What about the real world, Lord and Lady Fauntleroy?

Dammit. Banged to rights. In ‘working towns’ in Cornwall (definition on demand), we’ve seen less evidence of craft beer in the wild. Oddly, it is Molson-Coors-owned Sharp’s that are perhaps having the most impact: it’s a shock to walk in to a bog standard pub and find beers such as Stuart Howe’s Triple A — a cask ale fermented with Belgian yeast — or Hayle Bay Honey IPA, alongside Doom Bar, the ultimate sweetly bland ‘Cornish ale’. The grizzled fellers propping up the bar might find his experiments a bit ‘weird’, but these beers do seem to sell, perhaps because they’re strong.

Otherwise, though, it’s cafes, restaurants and gourmet burger joints where craft beer pops up most often, but, even then, it’s likely to be alongside bottles of execrable contract brewed but nicely branded ‘gift shop beer’, or skunked Corona-aping ‘Cornish lager’: there’s not much indication that local restaurateurs are really engaged with beer in the same way they are with, say, beef, or bread.

If, in six month’s time, there is a craft beer bar in Truro (not a ‘pop up’), and a pub in Penzance which regularly stocks Harbour or Rebel, then we’ll feel comfortable saying that ‘craft beer’ has gone at least a little bit mainstream. Until then, it remains a noisy niche.

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!

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…

St Austell Experiment With Kegs

Admiral's Ale keg font.

We were interested to see this Tweet from St Austell, the most dominant of our local breweries: “Admirals and Smugglers craft keg ale on sale at St Austell visitor centre”.

For some, that phrase ‘craft keg ale’ will cause consternation but, terminology aside, this is an interesting development. Admiral’s and Smuggler’s are two of St Austell’s stronger bottled beers, the latter having been brewed in one form or another for at least fifty-six years as a strong special. They’re currently seen in shops more often than in pubs, which is a shame, because Admiral’s in particular is a favourite of ours.

If breweries start kegging their bottled beers and thus increase the variety of draught beer on offer to British drinkers, without reducing the number of cask ales, isn’t that something most people could live with?

The St Austell beer that would suit kegging best, though, is surely their Clouded Yellow wheat beer — one which calls for high levels of carbonation and low temperatures.

And if Proper Job turns up in kegs… well, then we might start to get worried.

Picture nicked from the St Austell Twitter feed and edited. Hope they don’t mind.

Big breweries confused, middling ones confusing

Watney's Red Barrel

Every day, we come across something from thirty or more years ago which chimes with present-day issues in the world of beer. Here are a couple of related notes.

Observation 1: big breweries in the 1970s struggled to find a satisfactory approach to the ‘real ale craze’ just as the ‘leisure beverage’ companies they became are grappling with how to get in on ‘craft beer’ today.

Watney’s approach to real ale has so far been muted. It has experimentally introduced at a few of its London pubs, at 35p a pint, cask-conditioned beer brewed in Norwich. (It says its real beer travels.) There has been no big promotional fuss, and it is hard to see how there could be for a product whose appeal is that of not being a big-brewery mass-produced beer.

The Economist, 10 July 1976, p99.

‘Real ale’ being more clearly defined than ‘craft beer’ meant big breweries could easily produce products that met the technical criteria, but what they couldn’t do was make beer geeks love them. It was certainly real ‘real ale’, rather than ‘faux craft’, and CAMRA gave wary nods of approval, but Watney certainly weren’t in from the cold. They’d been the baddies for too long, and their interest in real ale just didn’t seem sincere.

Observation 2: regional/family brewers have always muddied the water. How do you make sense of them as part of a vaguely hippyish smaller-is-better, stick-it-to-the-man ideology?

Mr Protz, a former member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, has been attacked by the far Left for his defence of the small independent breweries with their ‘often feudal labour relations.’… ‘The problem is that political people, including the Left in Britain, have not yet realised that politics and the Labour movement does not stop at the shop floor,’ Mr Protz argues. ‘Beer is part of the leisure industry, and the leisure industry, how people enjoy themselves, is about money and power and influence — just as much as a factory. The middleclass consumer and the working man have been getting a bad deal.’

The Guardian, 19 June 1978, p4.

The Big Six all had the DNA of family breweries, but had lost their humanity. Regional brewers, on the other hand, were only ever a step away from becoming bad guys themselves. A little growth spurt; a takeover here and a closure there; a little too heavy a hand with the brewery tie and… well, look at Greene King, who were heroes in the 1970s, but now seem to be villains.

Picture by Martin Deutsch, from Flickr, under a Creative Commons License. It was taken at an exhibition on the work of the Design Research Unit which we saw when it stopped off at the Tate Gallery in St Ives.

Geeky bubble, overpriced beer

Sign advertising real ale in London, 2007.

People sometimes criticise ‘craft beer’ for being a bubble or niche; for being the preserve of a small group of geeks, obsessed with obscure, strong beers; paying outrageous prices for them in trendy, specialist outlets; and not interested in ‘normal’ drinking in their local. Now, why does that sound familiar?

…the Fox in Hermitage… [boasts] a battery of beer pumps that would keep a CAMRA-man boring away for hours… Three brews from Courages, Lowenbrau lager on draught, Worthington, Morlands and even John Smith’s Yorkshire bitter at 36p a pint. That’s just a sample and I’d not even heard of some of the bottled varieties… The pints in the White Horse — a less pretentious and more typical village pub — are from Morlands. Better kept in my opinion than at beerarama down the road, and only 29p for bitter in the public, as against 34p in the saloon in the Fox.

The Daily Express, 6 August 1978.

The Goose and Firkin found a ready market, predominantly young, affluent and mobile with most customers coming from outside the area. The Campaign for Real Ale called the pub ‘too crowded, too noisy and too expensive’. Prices were certainly aimed at the top end of the market, with beers such as Mind Bender and Knee Trembler made at much stronger levels than most national brands.

The Financial Times, 24 February, 1982.

Only 33 per cent of those questioned had heard of CAMRA… and 70 per cent said they would not go out of their way to find a pint of ‘real ale.’

NOP Market Research: The British Pub 1977, as reported in the FT, 29 July 1977.

The Campaign for Real Ale… achieved considerable publicity and was largely responsible for forcing the brewers to re-think their marketing strategies. However, of the 78 per cent of beer sales classified as draught, only about 14 per cent is accounted for by ‘real ale’. This share is likely to be maintained but it is not expected to expand greatly.

The Financial Times, 21 March 1979.

In the Shires Bar opposite Platform Six at London’s St Pancras Station, yesterday, groups of earnest young men sipped their pints with the assurance of wine tasters… There were nods of approval for the full bodied Sam Smith Old Brewery Bitter, and murmurs of delight at the nutty flavour of the Ruddles County beer… In one corner sat four young men sipping foaming pints. They were members of CAMRA… and prove their dedication by travelling three nights a week from Fulham in South West London — four miles away. One of them, 22-year-old accountant Michael Morris, said: ‘This place beats any of our local pubs.’

The Daily Express, 03 April 1978.

The real ale champs launched a bitter attack on greedy pub landlords yesterday — and ended up over a barrel themselves… The Campaign for Real Ale slammed pubs that cashed in on the craze then admitted that its own London pub charged at least 10p too much for an extra-strong brew.. the beer that caught CAMRA’s experts on the hop was the 70p-a-pint Theakston’s Old Peculier served up at the Nag’s Head in Hampstead… But landlord Steve Ellis was quick to scotch claims that he was profiteering… “We have to buy Old Peculier through an agency and it costs us a lot,” he said… [Roger] Protz said several pubs in Central London had been barred from the guide for cashing in on the real ale revival… One Whitehall pub charged 51p for a pint of Ruddles County and another in the West End sold Fuller’s London Pride for 44p. Both beers cost up to 9p less elsewhere, said Mr Protz.

The Daily Mirror, 18 April 1979.

Craft Fish Guts

Sturgeon by David Torcivia, from Flickr under a Creative Commons License.
There was a bit of a to-do the other week when a UK TV show about food production suggested that isinglass finings represented some kind of ‘dark side’ of the brewing industry. (We didn’t see it — we gathered this from the miniature Twitter storm that ensued.) Isinglass is made from the swim bladders of fish, so we’ll acknowledge that there is a certain ‘ick’ factor, but it’s been used in British brewing for a long time and isn’t something we have any problem with at all.

This 1978 article from CAMRA’s What’s Brewing, however, suggests that not only is isinglass harmless, but that brewers could be going a little further and making it part of their ‘craft’ schtick:

On the first floor of Godson’s Brewery… head brewer Rob Adams takes what looks like a large flat sea shell from a sideboard drawer… It is the dried bladder of a sturgeon fish… Mr Adams makes his own finings from sturgeon bladders, bought at £7 a pound and mixed with water in a large plastic dustbin.

Do any brewers these days make their own isinglass from scratch? And would a really ‘crafty’ brewery perhaps go a step further and have a saltwater pond full of fish in the back yard…?

Ian Mackey, author of this very useful book, has very kindly provided us with a treasure trove of useful clippings from this period, so expect a few more nuggets in weeks to come.

Picture by David Torcivia, from Flickr, under a Creative Commons License.

Try Jumping on This Bandwagon

As bigger British brewers move menacingly into ‘craft beer’ territory with pilot plants and US-inspired IPAs, is the increasing interest by smaller brewers in arcane and time-consuming brewing methods from Belgium and elsewhere an attempt to shore up the defences?

We know that some smaller brewers perceive what the bigger boys are doing as an attempt to ‘crush the rebellion’, scoffing at the idea that they’re being supportive or ‘joining in the fun’.

What the big boys aren’t yet equipped or prepared to do, it seems to us, is use many multiple yeast strains in the same brewery; mess around with wild yeast; indulge in complex Belgian-style brewing processes; or brew niche styles like saison with any serious intent.

That’s where craft brewers, branding and ‘values’ aside, can still make their mark. It’s also an opportunity to steal a slice of the speciality import market by offering an appealingly local alternative.

The risks? That the beer geeks don’t come with. Those Belgian beers are hard to match, let alone beat, and they’re still bizarrely cheap. Orval, admired as it is, is not universally enjoyed (we don’t really get it). Styles like lambic, a long-term investment and difficult to get right, are also a chin-stroking, thought-provoking hard sell, even to those inclined to take an interest.

This is the same process through which professional writers, if they want to keep earning at it, need to push themselves into territory where we amateurs aren’t ready or able to follow.