Kirin Ichiban is apparently made (in Bedford…) with uncompromising standards, using only the single first pressing of the finest ingredients, giving us the sweetest, most flavoursome beer every time.
Is anyone else slightly confused by this label?
Posts Tagged ‘lager’
Extra virgin lager
Friday, July 2nd, 2010Where’s me pilsner to, my luvver?
Sunday, November 8th, 2009
It may seem odd to go all the way to Bristol and then make Zero Degrees our first stop, given we have a branch of the same brewpub in London. The shameful truth is, though, that we’ve never been to the one in Blackheath, despite hearing great things about the beer from bloggers and friends.
On this occasion, the decision was made for us when we’d dragged ourselves up the charming, Dickensian Christmas Steps and spotted that the place was opposite, just as we started to feel peckish and thirsty.
Despite the late-90s trendy warehouse look and aspirational dance-jazz soundtrack, the first thing that struck us was how many families were in, contributing to a German brauhaus atmosphere. The staff were extremely friendly, too, although that seems to be true of Bristolians more generally. We got a smile on approaching the bar; a “be with you in a minute”; a bit of banter during service; and some apparent expertise when it came to the flavour and manufacture of the beer. Impressive stuff.
We started out with the pilsner and one of the specials, continental blonde. The pilsner was bang on, if mainstream — something like tankova Urquell.
The continental blonde was fascinating and delicious. Despite the colour, we think it was actually a clone of a Belgian pale ale, but much fresher tasting than any example of the real thing we’ve had. It was spicy with hints of banana — an absolute treat.
The wheat ale was Belgian style and utterly delicious. Again, the freshness and condition was outstanding. The dark lager was also of a superior quality, as good as the wonderful Bernard Dark, with a besutiful balance of treacle and bitterness. It might almost be as good as U Fleku.
The prices, as Jeff has noted of the London branch, were very competitive for such an apparently swanky place, with regulars at £2.60 specials at £2.90.
A minor quibble, though: does the name refer to the temperature of the bar? Brrrrrr….
Un-skunked bottled lager
Thursday, August 27th, 2009
In a crap pub, a bottle of Budvar is often the last refuge for the beer geek. Sadly, those little green bottles are almost always past their best — stale and flavourless.
It was nice this week to be reminded that it doesn’t always have to be that way with bottled lager, though, when Augustiner Lagerbier Hell (our beer of the week) transported us to Bavaria with one sip.
There were veritable hops, sweet malt and — hooray! — no off flavours.
It also helped that it was served in a nicely shaped and properly branded glass. That shouldn’t matter, but it does.
Hot weather no good for beer geekery
Monday, June 29th, 2009
These days, it never seems to be the right time to tackle a strong or quirky beer. Maybe it’s the weather — we’re craving cold lager or, like Knut, wheat beer. Ron’s of the view that there’s nothing better in the heat than a chilled Guinness Foreign Export, but we’re not convinced.
So, the Brew Dogs, the Belgians and the bocks sit gathering dust in the ‘cellar’ while our recycling bin fills up with empty bottles from beers like Svyturys (contains rice) and Franziskaner (contains no real hops). We’re also slowly working our way through our oh-so-small stash of homebrewed lager.
Maybe this weekend, we’ll tackle our recently acquired Lou Pepes. They ought to be refreshing and worth taking notes on.
Scotland – natural home of tasty lager?
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008We picked up three great Scottish lagers last week from Utobeer. We were with friends, so we were pretending not to be sad and didn’t take any notes, which means we can’t give you much in the way of detailed descriptions. Nonetheless, they’re all recommended.
First we tried Latitude Pilsner, from the Atlas Brewery. We thought this was fruity and sherbety, and packed a good amount of flavour in for 3.9%. We wonder what the cask verson is like?
Next up was Hop Rocker from BrewDog. This is the first time we’ve had anything from BrewDog, but it certainly won’t be the last. This reminded us quite a lot of Brooklyn lager, although maybe not as intense — a good mixture of sweetness and bitter, nice balanced carbonation. The Beer Nut has recently reviewed it, here.
Finally, an old favourite – Harviestoun’s Schiehallion. We’ve always liked this one for its full flavour and wonderfully dry, perfumy finish.
Perhaps Scotland is the natural place for producing quality UK lagers? It’s a bit cooler than England (not that we’re roasting here at the moment!) and therefore well suited to lagering, and the water’s probably a bit better for it too.
Boak
PS — we note that Brew Dog are “in trouble” again — after being picked on by the Portman group for aggressive labelling, they’re now being attacked in the press for launching Tokyo, possibly Britain’s strongest beer at 12%. You can read their side of the story on their blog, here. Are they unlucky, or just shrewd at marketing?
We drank them at a bring-your-own Ethiopian restaurant in Shepherd’s Bush. Blimey, that’s some filling food. We’re still stuffed now.
Central European Beer Halls in Hanoi
Friday, July 18th, 2008
The following post comes from Wei Sen, our man in Hanoi. During his last visit to the UK he told us all about the beer scene in Vietnam, and it sounded so interesting that we asked him to blog about it for us.
The walls are panelled in dark wood, the air is heavy with the smell of hops and cigarette smoke, the tables are crowded with dishes of smoked sausage and fried cheese, and everywhere there are tables of customers throwing back tankards of beer brewed in the on-site microbrewery. It’s not a scene typically associated with Vietnam, but Hoa Vien Brauhaus in Hanoi is part of a number of European style beer halls that have opened over the last couple of years.
There is no doubt that beer is the drink of choice in Hanoi. The most popular drinking places are bia hoi, which serve unpasteurised beer and traditional snacks. Most bia hoi are quite modest, and consist of a few plastic tables and stools set out on the pavement. However, as the economy has developed, more upmarket venues have opened up to cater to the new middle classes. The most notable of these are the Czech beer halls –- bia tiep — that have opened up in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
Drinking in Hoa Vien (or the half dozen other such places in Hanoi) two things are immediately obvious. The first is that the décor, food, and beer are all heavily influenced by European styles. The other is that the clientele –- unlike the bars and pubs of Hanoi’s tourist district — are almost exclusively Vietnamese.
Although modern Vietnam is a capitalist-friendly place, during the 1970s and 80s the main foreign influences were from other communist countries. Thousands of Vietnamese worked or studied abroad in the USSR or the Eastern Bloc (including Hoa Vien’s founder, who is now the honorary consul for the Czech Republic in Ho Chi Minh City). One of the more positive aspects of this cooperation is the exposure to a European beer culture that complements Vietnamese drinking habits without seeming uncomfortably foreign.
Hoa Vien mainly serves a pilsner style draft lager; the taste is light but hoppy, and well-suited to provide refreshment in Hanoi’s muggy and humid summers. A bottled version is also available, as well as a stout. There is a varied menu, with a broad range of hearty east European dishes, as well as more traditional Vietnamese food.
Bia hoi are likely to remain popular –- 3,000 dong (10 pence) for a glass of street-corner lager on a hot day is too good an offer for most people to turn down. However, for those with a bit more cash to spare, bia tiep are the perfect places to witness the fusion of Vietnamese and European cultures through a shared love of beer.
Wei Sen
Big brewers love their beer too
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
We recently had an interesting conversation with a former executive level employee of a one of the big booze companies. He likes decent beer himself and was outraged by this.
But he also said that, in his time travelling the world for IndustroBooze, he met a lot of brewers of what most of us would consider crappy beers, and found that, to a man, they loved the beer they produced.
He said that the makers of one of the big bland American lagers drank it themselves and were genuinely convinced of its quality. They couldn’t understand why it was so reviled. After all, making it taste the way it did, consistently, was hard work for them — not just a matter of pressing a button.
Perhaps most revealingly, he described the experience of working for a big international drinks company as like being “brainwashed”. The company’s own products are wheeled out at parties; dished out as Christmas bonuses; and staff are encouraged to drink them when they’re out and about and push them to friends.
Just like mothers who think their own children are the most wonderful in the world, regardless of any evidence to the contrary, the men who slave over industrial size operations to make the bland beers most beer geeks shun think their babies are beautiful too.
Bailey
PS sorry about reusing this image so soon, but we gather Stella Artois are keen to increase their profile in the world of beer blogging. Anything we can do to help!
The Session #15: seeing the light
Friday, May 2nd, 2008
It’s January, not many winters ago. We’re in the Altstadthof, a brewpub in Nuremberg, and we’ve just decided that the “Rothes” beer we’ve just drunk three pints of is the best beer we’ve ever tasted. We look at each other and decide we’ve fallen in love with beer.
We decide we want to learn more about it — how can the “lager” we’ve been told is the root of all evil be so wonderfully varied? How do they make this amazing stuff? And so an obsession is born from a brief winter holiday.
We picked Nuremberg for a destination as (a) the flights were incredibly cheap (b) it seemed like an interesting place, especially if you like history and central European winters. I also booked a few days “surprise” holiday in the lovely Hotel Nepomuk in Bamberg, as a birthday treat for Bailey. I chose Bamberg because I’d heard it was pretty, and had a recommendation for the hotel in question. (It’s a classy joint — fellow beer-blogger Evan Rail celebrated his honeymoon there recently.)
So we planned a trip to the beer mecca that is Franconia, without beer being a motivation, and without really knowing much about beer at all. I’m not saying we’re experts now, but at the time we didn’t know our Dunkel from our Dunkel-Weiss, and nor did we care. In those days we drank real ale, but also “normal” lager. We weren’t sufficiently interested in beer to pick a pub on the basis of it, let alone a holiday destination.
That changed with this holiday.
We noted from the guidebook that Bamberg was famous for its breweries, and that people visited from all over the world to try the products from the nine (or is it ten? or eight?) breweries. That’ll be fun, we thought, gives us something to do. The rest is a bit of a blurry haze — I couldn’t tell you which ones we visited without seeing them again (at least two were shut) or what beers we liked. I remember Rauchbier, but I don’t think I liked it particularly at the time. I remember being surprised and bewildered by the different names and types of beer, and trying to work out what the difference was between a pils and a helles.
By the time we got back to Nuremberg, we were eager to try everything we could get our hands on. Then came the afternoon in the Alstadthof, and we were hooked.
We’re going back to Nuremberg and Bamberg in a couple of months, armed with a bit more knowledge. We’ve already been back to the Alstadthof, and the Rothes is still our favourite beer in the world.
For more on drinking in Nuremberg, see our post from June last year.
For the session announcement, see here. Let us know about your entry by leaving us a comment here or sending us an email – boakandbailey “at” gmail “dot” com
Boak
Cheeky Stella Artois ad campaign
Sunday, April 27th, 2008This new advertising campaign for Stella Artois is designed to emphasise the quality of the product. It implies that Stella contains only the four traditional ingredients of beer:
That’s right — hops, malted barley, maize and water.
Maize!? Rather than trying to hide the fact they they use corn as an adjunct to make the beer cheaper, they’re boasting about it, counting on the fact that most people won’t know any better. Hardly honest, but bloody clever.
And they’ve avoided mentioning all that yucky yeast, too, in case the thought of it puts anyone off.
Tasty British lager
Monday, April 21st, 2008Being big fans of good lager, we were excited to read Stonch’s rave review of “Moravka”, a lager brewed by the Taddington brewery in Derbyshire, in the middle of England. We were even more excited to see we could give it a go in the Jerusalem Tavern.
Unfortunately, Bailey got man-flu, so I went on my own. And it is, indeed, lovely stuff. One thing that marks it out from other micro-brewed lagers we’ve tried is it had the body and carbonation spot on – it wasn’t thin and fizzy, but rather bold and almost creamy in texture. Flavourwise it’s accentuated more towards the malt than the hops, but it’s certainly not sweet or bland. I could drink pint after pint of it.
Micro-brewed lager has got a very tough convincing job to do in the UK. It can’t compete with the mass-marketed rubbish, but can’t count on a “craft beer / artisanal beer” market to make up for it, as too many ale drinkers just dismiss lager. Yes, I know the readers of this blog are more tolerant, but I’m sure you all know people who “won’t touch the stuff”…
So good luck to ‘em. They deserve to do well.
Declaration of pecuniary interest: I got my pint free, from an evangelising Stonch. But I would definitely pay for it in future.
Boak
