Tag Archives: stout

The Moment Guinness Won

Bottled Guinness stout.As long as we’ve been aware of beer, we’ve known that Guinness was the draught stout, utterly dominating the UK pub market. Even the lager market, with its many very similar products, is not ruled by one single company to the same extent.

Their rise to dominance over the stout market happened quickly in the nineteen-fifties and especially in the sixties but, at the end of that period, there was one last serious attempt to challenge it.

Bass Charrington, the biggest group of its kind, and Watney Mann, the Red Barrel concern, will at the month-end launch a test market of Colonel Murphy’s draught stout at 500 pub in the Manchester and Brighton areas. Within a year, they expect to have enough information to give the new product national coverage… If Colonel Murphy’s is a success it will be a blow to Guinness, because between them Bass and Watney control more than 16,500 of Britain’s 60,000 pubs and it is reasonable to assume that the majority of these will be closed to draught Guinness. (The Financial Times, 26 June 1969.)

Unfortunately, the challenge came to late; the summer was hot; and, though they spent plenty on advertising, it wasn’t anywhere near enough to build from nothing a brand to compete with Guinness. Only six months later, the Charrington-Watney alliance conceded defeat. They not only withdrew Colonel Murphy’s from sale in their UK but also signed an agreement to sell draught Guinness in all of their pubs. Guinness had won.

Fittingly, they announced the end of hostilities, and their unconditional surrender, on 11 November. Beer geeks welcomed the conquerors with open arms.

Beer with flavours, but not flavoured

La Soccarada beer.

There’s been plenty of thinking recently about whether adding ‘non-beery’ ingredients to beer is a good idea. (Here’s Jeff Alworth on that subject.) Broadly speaking, we tend to agree that throwing in things like cocoa nibs, doughnuts, maple syrup, wasabi and Tunnock’s Teacakes fails more often than it succeeds. This weekend, however, we were reminded that ‘wacky’ ingredients can work, if they’re used well, and we’re willing to broaden our minds a little.

First, on Friday night, we drank a Spanish beer, La Socarrada, imported by a Welsh delicatessen and restaurant chain, Ultracomida. We have pretty low expectations of Spanish ‘artisanal’ beer (based on past experience), and especially when it’s pitched as being ‘for food’ (maximum pretension, minimum flavour). La Soccarada, in a plain bottle with a glossy card tied around its neck, didn’t look promising, and the talk of rosemary and rosemary honey as key ingredients were immediately off-putting.

Things got worse when, on opening, it almost gushed, disturbing the yeast as it surged into the neck, which left us with a glass of cloudy, rather soupy, dark orange liquid. Our first reactions: “Oh, no! Eugh!” But then we thought about that reaction: were we being like those people who rejected Cascade hops for tasting ‘weird’ back in the seventies? We persevered. We find rosemary rather intense and a little nausea-inducing in great amounts; and, of course, we associate it with savouriness, which made it a challenge. (And being ‘challenged’ is overrated.) But we kept sipping, just like we can’t stop eating Twiglets once we start.

By the end, we’d decided that, actually, it was a pretty decent if rather unusual beer. The flavours certainly weren’t ‘dumbed down’ and were actually rather intriguing. In particular, we were interested to note how strongly the honey came through with that throat-catching, medicinal note that sets it apart from simple syrup. They didn’t sit superficially ‘on top’ of the beer, either, at least not any more than a big dry-hop aroma can be said to do so. It might benefit from more obvious hop bitterness, and a spicier yeast, but, in conclusion, we’d be pleased to drink this instead of Estrella Damm in a Spanish restaurant.

On Saturday, hammering the point home, we tasted Harbour Brewing Chocolate & Vanilla Imperial Stout alongside Rebel Brewing Co’s similarly conceived Mexi-Cocoa, and were impressed at the integration of the ‘flavourings’ into the body of both beers. Both were smooth and clean, with those ‘novelty’ ingredients bedded deep down, overlapping seamlessly with the bitterness of dark malts. Harbour’s milkier, sweeter beer was slightly more to our taste, beating Young’s Double Chocolate Stout and probably also Meantime’s take on the same idea.

We didn’t pay for any of these beers: La Soccarada was sent to us by Ultracomida’s PR firm, and Darren ‘Beer Today’ Norbury supplied samples of the stouts at a ‘sample sharing’ session in the back room of a local pub.

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.

Black IPA: too subtle for us

On Saturday, we drank Cornish brewery Coastal’s black IPA and enjoyed it but found ourselves, once again, scratching our heads in bafflement: it was yet another black IPA that might have been sold to us as porter or stout without controversy. Sure, it had evident citrusy hops which we might have made note of, though we wouldn’t have ‘marked it down’ as not being ‘true to style’.

People keep trying to explain the distinction to us:

  • black IPA should be black but not roasty — it’s a different ‘black’ flavour than stout
  • if you can’t taste any difference from ‘normal’ IPA, then the blackness is superficial.

This is a level of subtlety which, at the moment, is just beyond us, especially as the water is muddied by hoppy porters (complete with roastiness) bearing the black IPA label. (Failed attempts, as we understand it, as measured against an emerging set of rules surrounding the style.)

Maybe we need to try making one ourself to really understand this other ‘black flavour’?

Or, actually, maybe ‘black’ alone is enough of a style descriptor to cover everything from dark mild to black IPA, via porter and stout? After all, even beers just dyed black with caramel taste darker to us, because our brains and palates are wired to our eyes and are easily fooled.

This isn’t a moan about black IPA being oxymoronic, by the way, because we’re over that and everyone’s bored of hearing it/refuting it.

Our White Whale was a Black Beer

Pump clip design for Penzance Brewing's Scilly Stout

When we first visited the Star Inn last year, we saw that Penzance Brewing Company’s Scilly Stout, made in the on-site brewery, was listed on the blackboard as coming “dreckly”. We now know that “dreckly” is an elastic concept meaning “at some point in the future”, but it actually took us nearly a year to track it down.

We kept arriving at the pub to find that Scilly Stout had just finished, or was due on in the next few days. We began to suspect it was a cruel joke played on tourists, along the lines of Porthemmet. “Have you tried it yet?” people kept asking. “Bah,” we replied.

Then, as spring approached, we were delighted to finally find it at Bodmin Beer Festival. Since then, as if a spell was broken, we’ve found it on sale at the pub every time we’ve visited.

The Star usually gives us what we’ve always asked for — one of each colour, please! Potion 9 is golden and 4%; the two bitters have brown covered; and Scilly Stout, when it’s there, offers not only darkness, but strength, at 7%. If you liked Fuller’s Past Master’s Double Stout, you’ll probably enjoy Scilly, too: it’s got an acid snap and a body that proves you don’t need nitrogen to make a beer chewable.

If you’re on holiday in this part of Cornwall, do visit the Star. Just don’t count on finding Scilly Stout on sale — it’ll probably be coming dreckly.

Memorable Beers #6: Guinness FES

When we host a party, we’re always delighted to open the door and have a plastic bag thrust at us: “We know you like beer so we brought a few interesting things we picked up.”

We have a very vivid memory of the end of a party some time in around 2005. Everyone had gone and music was playing into an empty front room strewn with empty beer cans and paper plates. We slumped onto the sofa, slightly exhausted and a little tipsy, and decided to split one more beer before tidying up. We reached for a bag of beers a friend had brought, harvested from the corner shops of Walthamstow.

The bottle that came to hand was Dublin-brewed Guinness Foreign Extra Stout. Being snotty about Guinness, we didn’t expect much except a nastier, boozier version of the stout we occasionally drank in an emergency in the pub.

The aroma, like smelling salts, snapped us out of our post-party drowsing: jaded as were our palates, it poked its way through. It tasted, we both agreed, like a delicious pudding. (We were enjoying, not taking notes, so that’s where the insight ended.)

Why do we remember this particular moment so vividly? Perhaps because of the shock of having our prejudices overturned.

Why Camden deserve a medal

Camden Town Brewery launched a nitro-keg stout late last year. Although cask-conditioned stout is a great thing, this is a clever move in commercial terms as well as striking a much more effective blow against the ubiquity of Guinness in London’s pubs than cask stout could ever realistically hope to achieve.

First, in commercial terms, like many of Camden’s beers, it sits only just over the conceptual line from the usual suspects. It looks pretty much like Guinness; it feels a bit like Guinness in the mouth; and, although considerably more flavourful than recent pints of Guinness we’ve had, isn’t “imperialised”, flavoured with chocolate/espresso/whisky/etc., or full of flowery US hops. Many people who normally drink Guinness (not beer geeks) will order this and go on to drink more than one pint, probably without grumbling. It’ll sell.

And, secondly, there’s why they deserve a medal: this beer might start to wean people off their automatic, go-to brands. It starts to send the message that there are stouts other than Guinness and that it is possible to stray from your usual brand without being struck down by lightning.

If we want to see choice in pubs, we just can’t have gigantic, monolithic brands stealing all the oxygen in a given space, as Guinness currently does, and Camden are doing something about it.

Fuller’s cask-conditioned Black Cab Stout is a marvellous development, too, but, we suspect, a step too far for many Guinness drinkers, lacking the familiar creamy head. And let’s not forget that Sam Smith’s nitro-keg stout has been around for years…

Small mercies

The only social situation where you’re less likely to find decent beer than a wedding is a work Christmas do.

In the kinds of hotels, chain restaurants and pubs where these things tend to take place, you thank God for small mercies. For example, when faced with three kegged lagers and smooth flow Marston’s Pedigree, kegged Marston’s Oyster Stout is at least something new. And it wasn’t bad with a big roast dinner, either.

At a Mexican restaurant in Covent Garden, where the waiter was desperate to push a ‘bucket of Corona’, there was Negra Modelo: yes, it’s boring, but there’s a ghost of a malt flavour in there, and it’s not skunked. It’s better than water, and certainly better than cheap tequila.

A lot of stout about

Guinness have set out (pretty successfully) to turn St Patrick’s Day into International Guinness Day but their’s wasn’t the only stout about this week.

For example, Cask in Pimlico had the brilliant, Guinness-baiting Sussex Extra Stout, while Shepherd Neame rolled out their own tastefully branded (ahem) Double Stout.

Could it be that the market is managing to do for stout in March what CAMRA is trying so hard to achieve for mild in May? We’d love to see stouts and porters other than Guinness on sale in pubs during the rest of the year, but this is a start.