Tag Archives: st austell

Tasting Language in the Real World

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Beer is a grand drink.

CUSTOMER
What’s that 1913 Stout? I keep seeing it around on the posters and meaning to try it.

TEENAGE BARPERSON
It’s, er, got chocolate and coffee, er, flavours, and it’s, er, smooth. [Suddenly remembering] Vanilla!

CUSTOMER
It’s actually got coffee and chocolate in? Wow. That sounds interesting.

TEENAGE BARPERSON
It’s an old recipe. They found this old recipe, or something, and, like, brewed it up again, to the old recipe, and that.

CUSTOMER
And they were using chocolate and coffee in beer back then, where they?

TEENAGE BARPERSON
[Totally baffled, backing away] They were, were they? I didn’t know that.

 

THE CUSTOMER TAKES THE BOTTLE BACK TO THE TABLE.

CUSTOMER’S PARTNER
What’s this? Stout? I don’t like stout. Too bitter.

CUSTOMER
No, this is chocolate flavoured, apparently. [Tastes] Ooh, ah, blimey, yeah… Coffee and chocolate and, er, um, vanilla.

CUSTOMER’S PARTNER
[Reading] There’s nothing about chocolate on the ingredients list.

CUSTOMER
Oh. Weird. [Sheepish] Actually, to be honest, it just tastes like sweet Guinness to me.

Pub Crawling in Padstow

Sign outside The Harbour Inn pub.

Padstow in North Cornwall is best known for its connection with TV chef Rick Stein and for its ‘Obby ‘Oss, of which more later. Its attractive and compact town centre, however, also supports six pubs, which struck us as the perfect number for a Saturday night crawl.

Having been deprived of St Austell’s Proper Job for a couple of months, we headed straight to the London Inn, outside which a sign promised a very nearly full range of the local brewing giant’s cask ales. Inside, we found a pleasing lack of head-office-approved corporate slickness, and genuine clutter on the walls, rather than the stuff that comes by the kilo from pub decor companies. Nothing special, but comfortable, and the PJ was very good. We considered staying, but, no, the crawl must go on.

The Golden Lion Inn, Padstow.The interior of the Golden Lion, just across the road, looked strangely familiar, and then it dawned on us: we’d seen it in the documentary Oss Oss Wee Oss (Alan Lomax, 1953) on the BFI DVD Here’s a Health to the Barley Mow. As the stable of one of the Padstow ‘Obby ‘Osses, the Golden Lion is a culturally and historically significant pub, and its low beams and dark corners are very appealing. It was uncomfortably quiet, however, and the Tintagel Castle Gold was lacking zing.

We soon found out why the other pubs were quiet: everyone was at The Old Ship, where it was standing room only, because a Johnny Cash tribute act was set to perform. It made much of offering Brain’s S.A. — a rarity in Cornwall, it’s true, but hardly anything to shout about. Sharp’s Own, sweetish at the best of times, was also as flat as a pancake. What’s the opposite of cosy? That’s what the Ship was. As the faux-Man in Black launched into ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, we slipped away, leaving our drinks unfinished.

We then commenced a run of three St Austell pubs.

The Shipwrights felt a bit like a pub-themed fast food restaurant, with that particularly lurid orange wood finish that too often characterises modern pub refits, and we didn’t like being cleaned up around (at 9:30!), though the barmaid who served us was very chatty and pleasant. There were more fruit machines than customers. Tribute and Proper Job were in decent enough nick, too.

The Old Custom House was also quiet, with flickering TV screens on every spare surface. The highlight here was the new bottled version of 1913 Stout, tasting excellent despite its clear bottle, and served in an appropriately vintage-feeling straight-sided pint glass.

We hit the Harbour Inn in the run up to closing time. It is the stable for the rival ‘Oss, the Blue Ribbon or Peace ‘Oss, and had a pleasant, lived-in feel. Even though it’s huge, and we had the place almost to ourselves, the landlord and landlady made us feel very welcome, hitting the perfect balance between attentiveness and giving us space. When they wanted us to leave, it was hinted at with a very gentle: ‘Ahem… will you be wanting any more drinks at all?’

Is Padstow worth a visit for beer geeks? No. Is there enough to keep a pub-lover entertained if they’re visiting for other reasons? Definitely. Bear in mind, though, that in season, none of these pubs will be as quiet as we found them on a chilly night in March.

Top Ten Cornish Beers 2013

Chocolate vanilla stouts.

Chocolate vanilla stouts from Harbour and Rebel. (Honourable mentions, below.)

Last year, as the season approached, we put together lists of our favourite Cornish beers and pubs. Those lists were fine then, but things are changing fast on the beer scene in Cornwall, and we though we ought to revisit our ‘top tens’ before the new season. (Though floods, hail and gales suggest it’s not here quite yet.)

So, for 2013, here are the cask-conditioned beers we’ve particularly enjoyed in pubs in Cornwall in the last year. We could easily have named five beers from Penzance Brewing Co., and another five from St Austell, but have tried to ‘spread the love’.

  1. Driftwood Spars – Dêk Hop (3.8%). Pale amber, flinty and tannic; hoppy without being flowery. (What we said last year.)
  2. NEW ENTRY Harbour Brewing – Light Ale (3.2% when we tried it). Super-pale, with lemon peel zinginess, tonic bitterness and a restrained aroma.
  3. Penzance Brewing Company — Potion 9 (4%). A ‘pale and hoppy’ which continues to blow our minds every time we drink it: sessionable but complex, with the same fresh bread maltiness we find in the best Czech lagers.
  4. Penzance Brewing Company — Trink (5.2%). Potion’s big brother, edging towards Thornbridge Jaipur territory. Deeper in colour, stronger, and more honeyed than Potion, but with a distinct Eden Project exotic floweriness — Citra?
  5. NEW ENTRY Rebel Brewing — Eighty Shilling (5%). Somewhere between a stout and a mild in character; plummy, with a touch of roastiness, and a little coffee cream.
  6. Skinner’s — Porthleven (4.8%). You wouldn’t know this gently-perfumed golden ale was from the same brewery as Betty Stogs. Not outrageously flamboyant in its aroma, each pint leaves the throat just dry enough to demand another.
  7. NEW ENTRY Spingo — Ben’s Stout (4.8%). As served at the Blue Anchor, one of the few decent dark Cornish beers, even if it is a little variable. We find ourselves craving it. Like black tea with brown sugar, in a good way.
  8. Spingo — Middle  (5%) A classic, and an illustration of a typical sweetish West Country beer. Keeps improving, too, and now has a little more dryness and a good malty snap.
  9. St Austell — Proper Job (4.5%) The best of St Austell’s regular beers, but not found in all of their pubs. It was modeled on a US IPA and, though lighter-bodied than many of those, does provide a satisfying whack of citrus hop character.
  10. St Austell — Tribute (4.2%) With Sharp’s Doom Bar and Skinner’s Betty Stogs, part of the bog standard line up on a Cornish free house bar, but by far the best of the three. Actually an interesting beer (custom Vienna-type malt, US hops) and, on good form, a delight. (We said the same last year.)

Honourable mentions

  • Few of Sharp’s regular beers really float our boat but their specials (e.g. Hayle Bay Honey IPA) can be very characterful, and we loved their Connoisseur’s Choice bottled beers.
  • Harbour and Rebel are both making some very interesting bottled beers, e.g. chocolate vanilla stouts.
  • St Austell’s Korev Lager, which we hated at first, continues to rise in our estimation. Not a ‘challenging’ beer, it is certainly very satisfying, especially on a hot summer’s day. Their spring and summer seasonals tend to be variations on Proper Job but lower in alcohol and were stunning last year. And need we mention 1913 Stout again?

As before, breweries who aren’t mentioned and think they ought to be should drop us an email, or comment below, and we’ll tell them why.

Surprisingly good beer, surprisingly good pub

Beer glass with Bays Brewery logo.

Fowey (pronounced ‘Foy’) is one of those ‘Islington-on-Sea’ towns, crawling with celebs and with more bistros than you can drizzle a jus on. We arrived there on Sunday after a long walk along the coast, covered in mud and gasping for a pint, and began the ritual review of the pubs on offer, settling eventually on the Galleon.

Though the signs weren’t good — ugly red brick building, Doom Bar logos, the sounds (shudder) of live sunday afternoon jazz — it was the word ‘freehouse’ that lured us in. Might we find something other than Tribute, Doom Bar or Betty Bloody Stogs? Reader, we did: there were beers from the iconoclastic Cornish publican’s foreign brewery of choice, Bay’s of Devon.

Bay’s are a perfectly OK brewery. They’re good. They’re fine. They’re not at all bad. We wouldn’t go out of our way to find them, but we’re always pleased to see them on offer. Except, on this occasion, one of the beers was better than OK: it was excellent. Devon Dumpling (5.1% ABV), while not in the same league as Thornbridge Jaipur, reminded us of it, with a similarly hefty body and orange glow, and a well-judged balance of sweetness and bitterness. We awarded it a distinction in Leigh Good Stuff’s ‘same again please’ test and drank several.

By the standards of the UK’s hottest pubs and bars, the beer selection at the Galleon was nothing special, but it was well-chosen, including Sharp’s Cornish Coaster, a 3.6% golden charmer which ought to be their flagship beer; St Austell Proper Job, by far that brewery’s most exciting draught product; and Doom Bar, the most popular choice of the old boys at the bar. (The big gang of teenagers who’d just got back from a night out clubbing in their shiny trousers were on Tequila, Stella and white wine.)

What the Galleon shows, we suppose, is that a pub doesn’t have to be ancient to be cosy, and that it’s possible to offer quality and choice, in a quiet way, without scaring the horses.

St Austell Celtic beer festival

image

The now annual Celtic beer festival at St Austell brewery is clearly a major event in the local social calendar. Despite the pouring rain, people were waiting outside in the road river for two or more hours to get in.

Inside were labyrinthine cellars, a music stage and young folk on the pull – a party atmosphere more like a nightclub than a traditional beer festival. We know St Austell can brew, but they can also, most definitely, organise the proverbial P-up in a B.

With 35+ St Austell brews plus around a hundred from other breweries, we could only start to scratch the surface, particularly as we had to traverse the meat market to get to the more interesting ones. We started with our new favourite, 1913 stout. This has already dropped in strength from when we had it last, which is a little disappointing, but was still tasty, and if this change is a precursor to rolling it out to more local pubs as a Guinness-challenger, then we’re in favour.

At the more experimental end, Smoking Barrel was a refreshing Rauchbier; Bad Habit was a superb 8.5% triple; and Hell Up was a very convincing Alt Bier. There were also beers for the sweet-toothed West Country palate – High Maltage was a turbo-charged HSD, whereas 1851 was a sugary, honeyish pale ale.

As you might expect, everything was in perfect condition – probably the best we’ve ever encountered at a beer festival. Korev lager came across really well, even against more exotic competition, which we put down to freshness.

The only way this festival could be improved (for us) would be to have either a quiet room or even better, a quiet day beforehand for beer geeks to taste all the experimental brews. But maybe that would be contrary to the very essence of this celebratory event.

Full disclosure; we received “VIP” access (cringe) to the festival, which got us in for free, and included a few free pints and grub.

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.

South West, not Wild West

St Austell Big Job IPA.

Proper Job IPA (cask at 4.5%; bottled at 5.5%) is the hoppiest of St Austell’s regular range, and its internationally successful brand has been ‘extended’ to give us Proper Black (a bottled black IPA at 6%) and now Big Job, a bottled US-inspired strong IPA at 9%.

Roger Ryman, head brewer at St Austell, has used the name Big Job for various strong IPAs in recent years, including a ‘south seas’ version, and the c.6% cask beer we tried at Bodmin beer festival earlier this year. This iteration, presented in a crown-capped 750ml bottle, is an unashamed imitation of of the type of American ‘double IPA’ you might see lurking in a fridge at the Craft Beer Company.

On the whole, we felt distinctly warm towards this beer. It has Ryman’s trademark clean, distinct, bright flavours, and would certainly pass as something from across the Atlantic in a blind tasting. Its tagline is ‘massively hopped’ and, from the undoubtedly generous use of Citra and Centennial hops, we got sweet orange fruit rather than puckering grapefruit, with perhaps a little whiff of music-festival drug fug. Massive? No, but plenty, in terms of flavour, at least. It also has some just-caught sugar bitterness, sweet marmalade stickiness and a throat-catching alcoholic burn (nicer than it sounds) for balance.

There is no downside, as such — there’s nothing bad about it — but, compared to the Brewdog Punk IPA we drank afterwards, Big Job seemed a little restrained in its aroma (as if it really had travelled a few thousand miles, in fact), so perhaps a heavier hand with the dry-hopping might help it along. We also thought, at this strength and sweetness, that it could have stood a little more carbonation. It would certainly bear up well if kegged, in the coldest, fizziest way imaginable.

We might well pick up a bottle if we find ourselves near the brewery shop (depending on the price) and, in the unlikely event we ever see it in a pub, will certainly get one to share. It’s the kind of beer we’d like to see more of in Cornwall, alongside the ‘everyday drinkers’.

In fact, on that point, it’s surely about time St Austell got themselves a flagship pub or bar which is all about the beer — somewhere we could go every weekend and find the latest experiment from the pilot plant, rather than schlepping about on public transport trying to hunt them down.

We didn’t schlep anywhere to find this: it was sent to us gratis, without charge, absolutely free, and at no cost to us, by St Austell.

Stout as Spacetime Anomaly

Cask of St Austell 1913 Original Stout

One of the problems with brewing at home is that formulating a recipe stimulates the imagination, and the ingredients smell delicious, so that you want to drink the beer the minute it goes into the fermentor. By the end of Thursday, having brewed to a 1912 St Austell recipe, all we could think about was drinking a pint of black, rummy, treacley stout. Guinness aside, however, Penzance is a stout-free zone. It’s also short on porters, dark mild… in fact, anything beyond brown is hard to find.

But, as luck would have it, we couldn’t have aligned our brewing and drinking agendas any better this week: a Tweet brough to our attention that Roger Ryman’s own recreation of a 1913 recipe (5.2%, £2.75 pint) would be available at Docktoberfest, a festival at the Dock Inn in Penzance. We legged it down and wasted no time reviewing the beer list: “1913 Stout, please!”

In a straight-sided pint glass, with a loose, long-lasting, off-white head, it looks as if it might have been snatched straight from a pre-war sepia photograph. There’s a whiff of balsamic vinegar, red wine and very rich espresso. The taste was multi-layered and complex, mouth-coatingly oily, with rolling waves of intense flavour where Guinness just has a big watery nothing. Sweet and a touch sour; burnt-bitter and prunes-in-syrup fruity; and, finally, like licking treacle from a spoon. It reminded us most of Fuller’s London Porter, which also uses brown malt, and is one of the few beers we’d make multiple changes on public transport to get at.

We liked it.

In conclusion, our thesis, which requires more investigation, is now that brown malt, dark sugars and one hundred years of history add vital extra dimensions to a stout. Our own 1912 stout, which is fermenting furiously, might help us confirm or deny that suspicion.

Picture nicked from the Dock Inn Twitter feed.

Recipe: 1912 St Austell Stout

Roger Ryman, head brewer at St Austell, kindly let us look at their historic brewing logs earlier this year. With help from Ron Pattinson, frequent reference to his blog and to the book he wrote with Kristen England, The 1909 Style Guide, we think we’ve just about managed to make sense of some of the earliest recipes (MS Word file).

So, here’s the recipe we’ll be using later this week. Brewers and home brewers — what do you think?

SPECIFICATIONS
Dead black
Original gravity (OG): 1059
c.55 international bitterness units (IBUs)

INGREDIENTS
4400g English pale malt
630g brown malt
630g black malt
420g invert sugar No 2
210g caramel (aka E150 colouring, aka ammonia caramel, aka ‘browning’)
88g East Kent Goldings hops at c.5.8% alpha acid
‘Burton’ yeast, e.g. White Labs WLP023

MASH grains at 66c/151F for one hour. Sparge in two batches of equal size, the first at 79c/175F; second 85c/185F.

BOIL for two hours. Add sugar No 2 and caramel at the start (120 mins). When the sugar is fully dissolved, add 65g of the hops (or c.70% of total). Add the remaining hops (18g, c.30% of total) at 90 mins (30 mins remaining).

COOL and FERMENT as per your usual procedure. (For added historical accuracy, though, you could try an open fermentation…)

Notes

1. In 1912, St Austell’s brewers were a bit slap-dash with their book-keeping: whole brew days are dismissed with a ‘ditto’ for the previous; key columns are left blank; and information is written in the wrong places, ignoring the printed boundaries. Like many breweries of the time, St Austell seemed to be terrified of industrial espionage, and so, even where information is provided, it’s in a rather cryptic format.
2. The biggest problem was the lack of information about the volume of liquid used at each stage but, after months of staring at it, we worked out that ’34′ under ‘B’ referred to the number of barrels in the boil.
3. We’ve gone with a Burton yeast because another recipe in the 1912 St Austell log says this:

Burton No 1 yeast note.
4. Post-WWI St Austell recipes call for, e.g., 70lbs of yeast cropped from an active fermentation. We can’t be any more precise than to suggest that a decent-sized starter would therefore be a good idea.
5. We’re guessing about the timing of hop additions based on other contemporary stout recipes. We’re also guessing at the variety, but St Austell used ‘Worcesters’ in many other recipes.
6. No finings: what would be the point in a beer this black?
7. We know it’s meant to have an OG of 1059 because of this helpful key:

Gravities list, 1912.

St Austell Strawberry Blonde

St Austell Cornish Blonde fruit lager.

Christopher Hutt’s The Death of the English Pub (1973) is full of grim prophecies, but he saves this dystopian vision for the very end of the book:

Professor Hough of the British School of Malting in Birmingham University predicted in 1972 that we would soon be drinking raspberry, strawberry and other fruit-flavoured beers. On cue as always, one of the big six was already test-marketing an orange beer, and this is now generally available. A pint of orange today, a pint of strawberry tomorrow.

St Austell, the biggest of our local breweries, has been experimenting with fruit in the last year. The raspberry porter we tried at the brewery bar was excellent and the latest effort, Strawberry Blonde (4%), was… a lot better than we were expecting.

It comes in a clear bottle and looks very much like rosé wine, though the marketeers have admirably avoided the temptation to write FOR GIRLS! on the label. Among the ingredients, as is the fashion, are strawberries from a specific Cornish farm, along with crystal malt, corn and hop extract. So, that’s a clear bottle and dodgy-sounding ingredients: hopes were not high.

Note, however, that no strawberry flavourings are listed. That fact, which we kept checking and rechecking in disbelief, made the bold aroma all the more impressive. This beer smelled like a big pink milkshake, strawberry chews, or a four-year-old’s birthday jelly.

The flavour wasn’t too bad, either — crisp, rather neutral, with just a hint of underripe sourness — but couldn’t possibly live up to the perfume. Perhaps future version of this beer would benefit from a more interesting base beer? Something with more body and more tang? Clouded Yellow, St Austell’s clever faux-Bavarian wheat beer, might work.

We bought our bottle of Strawberry Blonde in the Great Western Hotel in Newquay.