Category Archives: Beer styles

The Moment Guinness Won

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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.

Month of Mild: Origins

Make Mine Real Mild -- CAMRA, c.1980.For the last thirty-six years (with gaps) May has been the Campaign for Real Ale’s ‘Mild Month‘. This sub-campaign began life as an attempt to change CAMRA’s image, as much as to save and celebrate an endangered type of beer.

It began in December 1974 when a letter from Tim Beswick appeared in What’s Brewing making the point that mild wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. This prompted a thoughtful article by David Hall, of CAMRA’s South Manchester branch, in the January 1975 edition, in which he considered why this might be the case and what should be done about it. Members were blinkered, he said, and, in London especially, should stop demanding new and interesting beers while overlooking what was on their doorstep. ‘To those trying an unfamiliar brew,’ he went on, ‘and to those organising future beer exhibitions… the message must be don’t neglect the mild.’

It can’t have helped, he also pointed out, that CAMRA had tended to obsess over the decreasing original gravities (OG) of beer. Celebrating the relative potency of, say, Fuller’s ESB, and using the ever-dwindling alcohol content of keg bitter as a stick with which to beat the Big Six, sent the message that only strong beer was good beer.

Joe Goodwin, who became CAMRA Chairman, and sadly died in 1980 at the age of 31.

Joe Goodwin, who became CAMRA Chairman, and sadly died in 1980 at the age of 31.

Gears ground and the conversation continued until, in January 1977, this announcement appeared in What’s Brewing, echoing the point above.

CAMRA is to launch a determined effort to promote mild ale… Joe Goodwin, the NE [National Executive] member responsible for organising the venture, told What’s Brewing: ‘CAMRA exists to preserve choice. Since mild ales represent a significant portion of the range of real ales available in this country and since several milds are under threat of extinction, this has become a vital national campaign… As a campaign, we’re in danger of becoming too frequently associated with the promotion of over-priced, high-gravity beers. It’s about time we did something positive to change that image.’

That’s interesting for a couple of reasons. First, that ‘over-priced, high-gravity’ accusation is something now applied to ‘craft beer’; and, secondly, because it also represents a sign of CAMRA’s often-criticised drift into the ‘responsible drinking’ camp.

Has Mild Month been effective? Perhaps in preserving mild as a seasonal special, but there are relatively few that are brewed year-round, and those that are can be hard to find. As one veteran brewer said to us: ‘Breweries aren’t museums, but all good products ought to have a place.’

The Stale Language of Beer

Two glasses of beer.

This guest post on Sophie Atherton’s blog is interesting for several reasons. First, because Ms. Woolgar, not being a fully-fledged beer geek, seems to have been able to react honestly to the beers she tasted without the fog of hype clouding her vision. Secondly, because of some of the language she uses to describe flavour and aroma:

  • a hint of Maltesers
  • a fresh, zesty lemon mousse aroma
  • a slight toasted cumin flavour
  • mustard and cress
  • blue cheese.

That refreshingly original vocabulary, apparently based on gut feeling, is a pleasure to read.

A lot of people, us included, write about beer using words and terms largely informed by Michael ‘Beer Hunter’ Jackson, Roger Protz, and others in that lineage. People will describe ‘horse blanket’ when they really mean ‘that thing you get in that other beer that Michael Jackson said had a horse blanket character’. Who, apart from Adrian Tierney-Jones, has actually smelled a horse blanket? Seriously?

The same goes for ‘styles’. The established style framework has its uses, we think, but Alan is right to ask why there aren’t any/many alternatives. New ways of cutting the deck can be revealing, even if they ultimately fail. For example, we’ve been enjoying and pondering upon Tandleman’s distinction between beers for ‘supping’ and those for ‘sipping’. An entire classification system could be worked up from that — one that reflects the question of ‘sessionability’ while recognising that carbonation, bitterness, balance, and intensity of flavour are arguably as important as alcoholic strength.

Epic Saison from Somerset

Detail of the Wild Beer Co logo.

We don’t know much about the Wild Beer Co. other than what we’ve picked up on Twitter, from their website and from other people’s blog posts, but the very idea of a brewery based in Somerset with the following philosophy blows our minds:

By adding a Wild 5th ingredient or process to our beers we are giving you a truly memorable drinking experience… Some of our beers will be aged in oak to allow the soft vanilla and rich tannins to help mature the beer, others fermented with wild yeast strains to add layers of flavour and complexity to the beer.

We are painfully aware, however, that many new generation breweries fail to live up to their own hype — though we’re not clever enough to entirely resist their allure, big ideas and nice branding aren’t everything — and so, seeing Wild Beer Co’s beer on offer in Bristol, approached with a little caution.

Thankfully, Epic Saison (5%, keg) was a triumph. First, it had that very distinctive yeast character (orange and lemon peel, exotic spices) we know from Dupont and Van Klomp, perhaps with the ‘pear drop’ channel turned up a notch; followed by a surprising, pleasing level of dry, chalky bitterness. After several days of ‘serious’ beer drinking, it was like a hard reset for the palate (© Simon H Johnson), reaching into every corner to shut down the systems before rebooting them. With steel toe-caps.

Beers like this — clean (but not too much so…), intelligently conceived, and distinctive without being silly — go some way to convincing us that homegrown ‘European-style’ beers might one day displace at least some of those weirdly cheap and usually superior imports.

We rather liked Butcombe’s flagship Bristol ‘craft beer’ pub the Colston Yard, by the way: their own Rare Breed, all but poisonous in bottles, tasted great there, and it was fascinating to watch earnest students working their way through bottles of Cantillon in a sort of inverted-macho drinking game.

The Meaning of Ale

Sign for zum Uerige, Duesseldorf, Germany.

In 1977, beer writer Michael Jackson, choosing his words carefully, said this in his World Guide to Beer:

Although its palate is emphatically German, Altbier is not dissimilar in style from the British and North American ales, and it even more clearly resembles Belgian top-fermented beers like the Antwerp De Koninck brew.

Not dissimilar, resembles… what he doesn’t say is that Alt or Belgian top-fermented beers are ales — only that some top-fermentated beers share certain characteristics. He doesn’t use the word ‘ale’ at all when discussing Kölsch in the same book. It’s a way of helping people who’ve never been to Düsseldorf or tasted Alt to understand what to expect, and also perhaps to make a point about the influence of yeast.

A year later, however, Michael Dunn, in his Penguin Guide to Real Draught Beer, which lists Jackson’s book in its very short bibliography, presented this over-simplification of the same idea:

Even though we do not have real lager in Britain, excellent real draught beer is obtainable on the continent — there are, for example, the alt beers of Düsseldorf, the Belgian trappiste beers, and kölsch [sic] beers from Cologne — but these are top-fermented ales and not lagers.

Dunn, elected to CAMRA’s national executive in 1976, had an axe to grind: if the best beer is ale, in the sense applied by CAMRA after 1971, then foreign beers which could be described as such were more easily accepted into the fold.

But how many others at this time misread and/or misrepresented Jackson in the same way? Are people cribbing from him, but lacking his subtlety, to blame for the irritating tendency to call anything top-fermented, from whatever culture, ‘ale’? As German beer blogger Felix vom Endt put it in a recent discussion on Twitter: ‘Altbier = Altbier and Kölsch = Kölsch .. You don’t translate it’.

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.

A Lightplater while waiting for a train

Young's Light Ale

With our train due in an hour,we wandered out of the station in a small inland Cornish town in search of a pub. The first we came across was busy and smart enough; on entering, a cheery-looking landlady greeted us and engaged in a little light banter. She then served us two pints and a half of the warmest, dullest bitter we’ve had in a while.

This seemed a perfect time for a little experiment. “Is that Young’s Light Ale in the fridge?” we asked, spotting the label from several metres away. It was, so we bought some, and used it to (a) reduce the temperature of our pints from lukewarm to cool; (b) put some fizz in them; and (c) lift the bitterness. They weren’t great pints thereafter, but were at least pleasant enough to finish.

All of this reminded us of (sorry) yet another passage from Richard Boston’s Beer and Skittles (1976) in which he lists various ‘traditional’ beer mixes:

  • Lightplater – bitter and light ale.
  • Mother-in-law — old and bitter. (Oh dear. Bernard Manning much?)
  • Granny — old and mild.
  • Boilermaker — brown and mild.
  • Blacksmith –stout and barley wine.
  • Half-and-half – bitter and stout, or bitter and mild.

If you’re compelled to mix beers in an emergency as we were, or just fancy a change, these all sound like they might create something drinkable.

Bailey’s dad, of course, never complains about bad beer. If it can’t be rendered passable with the addition of a bottle of Mann’s Brown Ale, then it’s time to move on.

Back in the Beer Loop, Sort Of

Windermere Pale Ale pint and pumpclip.

Apart from the small matter of the Olympics, our trip to London was also an opportunity to gorge on beers we can’t get here in the most westerly town in Britain.

We’ve been taking in the buzz about breweries like Hawkshead, Windsor and Eton and Kernel, and feeling a little left out. In the space of a few days, we put that right, as best we could.

We had a session on Hawkshead’s 3.5% barely-coloured-at-all Windermere Pale Ale at the Eagle which was just perfect — not aggressive or explosive, but certainly fascinating, like one of those actors who is charming for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on. And here’s sessionable: after a long evening concluding with several supposedly final rounds, we were more-or-less sober by the time we got home and hangover free the next day. Also good to note that, as the evening wore on, those we were with abandoned their Grolschs and Guinnesses until we were simply ordering eight Windermeres with each round.

We drank two kegged Kernel single-hop pale ales which went some way to convincing us of the hype: the kinds of beers you can smell from several feet away as they sit on the bar; which attack the senses and cause you to sit up straight, shaking the cobwebs from your head. We wouldn’t want to drink beer like this all the time but they were great as a hop-binge indulgence. (On a side note, one was served as cloudy as German wheat beer, but tasted just as good as t’other.)

We tried a couple of Windsor and Eton cask ales — Kohinoor IPA (4.5%) and Eton Boatman (4.3%) — which, even though they were served a touch warm, were obviously quality beers, and the kind of thing we’d be happy to drink every day of the week, much as we are with St Austell Tribute and Proper Job.

Amongst many other beers (Italian, Belgian, American; keg, cask, bottle… urgh… tired tastebuds) we even managed to fit in an ‘all-Brett’ kegged IPA from Brodies. We couldn’t tell it was made with Brettanomyces, to be honest, which is perhaps why we enjoyed it as much as we did.

But why did we feel the need to catch-up? We can get good beer in Cornwall and (though mild is in short supply) can even find a good variety, from strong stout to pale and hoppy. When you read breathless blog post after breathless blog post, though, it’s hard to maintain a philosophical indifference to the greener grass on the other side.

What Gives a Beer Value?

A chart showing relative values we place on beers.

This is another attempt to ‘graph our relationship with beer‘. This time, it’s about capturing the various qualities that give a particular beer value in our eyes.

  • Sentiment: homesickness, happy memories, family connections.
  • Taste: how nice is it?
  • Complexity: and how deep?
  • Tradition: does it connect us with history and a particular culture? (Cask ale does this.)
  • Value: i.e. value for money.
  • Rarity: how likely are we to find this beer again any time soon?
  • Novelty: Schlenkerla’s smoked maerzen scores highly here.
  • Sessionability: we like beers we can drink a few of.
  • Refreshment: sometimes, we want beer to quench our thirst and cool us down.

For example, we know, objectively speaking, that Butcombe’s cask bitter isn’t the world’s best beer but, nonetheless, we value it more highly than almost as highly as Duvel. That sounds nuts, right? But we’re not saying it’s as great a a better beer, only that, for us, a pint of Butcombe Bitter is tied up with happy times in Somerset pubs with Bailey’s parents (sentiment); and, especially when we lived in London, it had a certain rarity value.

Even we were surprised to see that St Austell’s Black Prince Mild has the highest value of any beer on the chart, but then again, it is remarkably rare; gives us a powerful sense of engaging with brewing tradition; taps into all the sentimental associations we make with mild-loving grandparents; and is a wonderful session beer.

Schlenkerla Maerzen scores highly because, not only does smoked beer have novelty value, and a taste we happen to like, but even the merest whiff of it transports us back to Bamberg.

We could record marks for every beer we drink against this system. It might be interesting to see, after a year or two, which ends up having the most ‘value’, and whether we would also consider it our favourite beer.