Tag Archives: pondering

Brewery Numbers Aren’t Everything

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godson

It seems that, between 1980 and 1983, around a hundred new breweries opened in Britain — about as many again as there were in total ten years earlier. Last year, as you’ll have heard repeated over and over, for the first time in a century, there were more than a thousand breweries operating across the UK. London alone now has almost fifty.

But how excited should we be about those numbers?

On the one hand, many small breweries, each brewing a range of beers, means lots of choice for consumers. There are multiple examples of the most obscure varieties of beer on the market — yes, but which British-brewed Berliner Weisse would madam like?

But, on the other hand, some of these breweries are so small, and their beer has so few outlets, that we’re not even sure they really exist in any meaningful sense.

Looking in more detail at the early eighties brewing boom, which was greeted with breathless excitement by beer enthusiasts desperate to believe, it’s notable how many breweries were literally just a bloke with a bucket in his kitchen, or off-the-shelf ‘brewpubs’ jumping on the Firkin bandwagon. Even some apparently bigger breweries were actually small ones occupying corners of grand buildings. Easy come, easy go.

Are there figures for the total number of different beers in regular production knocking about somewhere? Or the number of people employed in the brewing industry? One really interesting figure, following on from this discussion, would be how many breweries are making any kind of profit.

An Unworked Stream with Just Enough Gold

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Panning for Gold

Believe it or not, we’re not completely stuck in the seventies, Life on Mars style: we’ve also spent a bit of time recently talking to the current generation of British brewers, and have a few more interviews scheduled. In particular, we’ve most recently been considering those parts of the industry which, if it hadn’t become a hated buzzword, we might have called ‘innovative’.

The critics are right, though — innovative isn’t the correct word, because there’s rarely anything new being done, even if it’s being presented differently. Let’s express it another way: we mean brewers who are producing beer for which there is apparently almost no market.

They’re making beer which hardly anyone has asked for; which most people won’t like; which will make some people downright angry; and cause many of their peers to look at them with raised eyebrows.

And yet… these brewers are paying the bills, it seems, and finding money to invest in their businesses too boot. They’re optimistic for the future and worrying less about finding new accounts than fulfilling outstanding orders while they await delivery of shiny new fermenting vessels. There was even tentative talk from one exhausted-looking brewer of taking a holiday abroad this year, for the first time in several years.

Maybe they can be likened to bands with ‘one thousand true fans‘? In his 2008 article of that name, Kevin Kelly suggested that was how many devotees a ‘creator’ needed to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

All breweries making freaky beer need to do is find the handful of freaks who will love it.

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.

The Decent Pint

Ansell's Mild beer mat (detail)

These days, it seems, every wedding has to be a fairy tale; every book a best-selling tour de force; and every glass of beer a ten-out-often life-changing experience.

This is another example of the inflation of expectation that has taken place in the last fifty years: what early beer consumer campaigners wanted was a ‘decent pint’, i.e. one that wasn’t ‘lousy’. That’s a pretty modest demand.

You might say it shows a lack of ambition — why aim for merely ‘decent’? What’s the point, when you could reach for the sky, chase your dreams, be all you can be, and so on?

Without highs and lows, on a diet of constant mind-blowing brilliance, its easy to lose perspective, and for a beer which is truly excellent by any objective standard to elicit from jaded palates only that monosyllabic response which sums up the age: ‘Meh.’

It’s not always about you

Luckily, I avoided having to drink a Hoopy Mary, improvised by a friend in the absence of tomato juice.

Luckily, I avoided having to drink a Hoopy Mary, improvised by a friend in the absence of tomato juice.

By Bailey

I’ve just come back from a stag weekend. It’s fair to say they’re not my natural environment — I’m too introverted and uptight to really let loose — but this one was fun. At the end, traveling back to Penzance with a disgusting hangover, I realised something: I hadn’t thought about beer all weekend.

Of course, I drank plenty. Heineken from a mini-keg; canned Kronenbourg 1664; even a few very welcome pints of real ale in cosy country pubs. But I wasn’t in charge of the beer or where we drank it, and simply went with the flow.

In fact, refusing to drink what was shoved into my hand, or insisting on one pub over another, would have been a serious social misstep. The point of a weekend like this is for everyone to bond through shared experiences. If any individual should be the centre of attention, it’s the stag or hen, not the prima donna with the sensitive palate demanding special treatment.

Drinking a few dodgy lagers didn’t kill me and, anyway, just as we’ve always found on holiday, they taste better in the right context.

Aside: at one point, I was asked to recommend a hoppy beer in a pub. I didn’t recognise any of them and asked the landlord for advice. He shrugged. “Don’t ask me, mate.” Crap, right?

What is balance in beer?

A man balancing on a bicycle.

‘Balanced’, like ‘clean‘, is one of those words all beer geeks learn from their first primer (usually a book by Michael Jackson, Roger Protz or someone similar) — but what, exactly, does it mean? A bit of argy-bargy on the subject on Twitter got us thinking.

We’ve promised ourselves not to quote every nugget of wisdom from For the Love of Hops because it wouldn’t fair to Stan, but we can’t resist this new addition to the Tao of Keeling:

To have balance in the beer does not mean simply to go to the middle, bland flavours.

So, ‘balanced’ needn’t mean restrained, as long as its unrestrained in every direction at once? The yellow platform shoes will look better if complemented with a feather boa? That kind of thing?

The reason balance has a bad reputation in some quarters is, as Mr Keeling suggests, because some brewers of bland beer use it as a defence mechanism, implying that their critics have no taste.

And, as for the assumption that balance is best… well, yes, usually, it probably is. Most of the time, even if we want to drink an intensely-flavoured beer, we want it to present a Wall of Taste — a cohesive blend. Every now and then, though, a really sweet, bitter, sour, one note beer can be quite fun.

Is balance prized, at least in part, because unbalanced beers are the equivalent of an air horn, while balance requires virtuoso skill? That’s especially true of extreme balancing.

What is beer innovation?

Tomorrow's World on TV.

Dave ‘Hardknott’ Bailey recently wrote a blog post asking the question ‘What is beer innovation?’ It’s a subject that’s interested us for a while, partly because we find the suggestion that ‘it’s all been done before’ a bit depressing, so we thought we’d indulge in some pondering on the subject.

1. Innovation has to mean more than ‘doing something mad’. As Alan has said before, a beer 23 times more salt than malt would be completely new, but would also (probably) be horrible. Sellotaping a toaster to the bonnet is not innovation in car design. Having said that, in any field, you probably have to produce a lot of stinkers on the road to a modern classic.

2. Innovation doesn’t need to be noisy and obnoxious. Golden ale, which emerged as an identifiable niche in the UK market in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, seems like a no-brainer with hindsight, but, until then, British beers that were anything other than black or brown were rare.

3. Doing something ‘old hat’ in a new time, place or context, can seem innovative. Hoegaarden, first brewed in the sixties, was an attempt to recreate the beer of Pierre Celis’s youth, but, when it hit Britain twenty years later, it blew people’s minds. What’s that phrase you see in secondhand shops? ‘New to you.’ Attempts to recreate Devon White Ale or Grätzer might yield similar results, especially once they’ve been tweaked for a modern palate and production methods.

4. Small mutations make something new. The crime novel has been with us for a long time and yet, somehow, small tweaks to the formula keep it going strong. In beer, a new hop variety or tiny development in technique can create something that’s new enough to keep the drinker (or, at least, the beer geek) interested.

5. True innovation defies categorisation, for a while at least. If you can create a beer which gets itself listed under ‘other’, which breaks the classification system at your local beer retailer, and which is the only one of its type, then you might have done something innovative.

6. Innovation will probably be greeted with anger and/or utter disdain. To some, with a particular idea of classical perfection, what is new will always seem wrong — discordant, ugly or perverse. Or even just silly. But your kids are gonna love it.

7. If we could tell you what the next innovation in brewing would be, we’d be millionaires. Or not, but you take our point.

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.

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.

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.