Categories
Beer styles Generalisations about beer culture opinion

Small Details Add Up

Small detail from a brewery logo.

We’ve written about the variables in beer before, but this post on beer styles by Jeff ‘Beervana’ Alworth made us think more specifically about the tiny variables. These are the things that, on their own, might not be missed but which, together, add up to a unique fingerprint for a beer.

You can measure a beer’s attributes and replicate them and declare it ‘technically the same’; and you can categorise a beer and brew something which matches the ‘profile for the style’; but it’s the sometimes barely perceptible contributions from people, process, place and ingredients that make it what it is.

Chemists can synthesise strawberry flavour by breaking down its chemical components or make artificial musk for perfume. Technicians can replicate the sound of a violin or human voice with synthesis and samples. But, for now, what they end up with is something that works in the mix, if you don’t pay too much attention, and which will never satisfy someone who really knows their stuff.

Without the small details — flaws or wrinkles? — a beer can end up in the uncanny valley.

Could we honestly spot the difference between food-grade acid added to a beer and that which occurs naturally during fermentation and maturation? Honestly, maybe not, but we have tended to perceive added complexity in the beers made with the most roundabout, time-consuming, arcane processes.

But maybe that’s psychological?

Bonus points to anyone who can identify the brewery from the ‘small detail’ in the picture above...

Categories
Beer styles real ale

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.

Categories
Beer history Beer styles

Session #64: Pale Ales

Beer Mat advertising St Austell Extra c.1960

Phew. The Beer Babe has chosen a Session topic we can address without hunting high and low for exotic imported bottles: she wants us to write about pale ales. In Britain, pale ale, under its other name, bitter, is the staple offering of almost every pub in the land.

Yes, John Smith’s, Bass and all those other ‘brown bitters‘ are pale ales. In the small town where we live, we’ve got a choice of about thirty cask-conditoned pale ales/bitters at any one time, but we’ve written about most of them before, or have made a decision not to do so for diplomatic reasons.

But there are plenty of Cornish pale ales we haven’t tried and never will.

Throughout World War II, St Austell brewed nothing but PA (pale ale), ceasing production of mild, stout and porter altogether. In 1944, their PA used Tucker’s English malt, a little invert sugar (No 2), a big slug of caramel for colour and (we think) English hops — ‘Wickham’ being the producer. (A letter from the hop merchants tucked into the log promises at least a small allowance of best ‘East Kents’ for dry hopping.) All this produced a beer with an original gravity (OG) of 1.030 — about as weak as English beer ever gets, probably equating to less than 3% ABV.

In 1960, they were making beer intended for kegging and called Extra. It used Tucker’s English malt as its base, just like the 1944 brew. It also  included a small proportion of  ‘enzymic’ malt (acid malt?) and glucose alongside invert sugar 3 (darker than 2). In fact, it had three times as much sugar in as the 1944 brew — would it have been drier? Its OG was 1.040, so a bit stronger, but not that much. The name is pure marketing.

We’re still learning to read old brewing records (literally the handwriting is terrible) and interpret them, hence the rather reticent descriptions of the two beers above. We’ll probably come back to them at a later date.

Categories
Beer styles

The Session Curve

Our pints of mild on Saturday got us thinking about the experience of drinking a given beer over the course of a session which helped us understand what the term ‘session beer’ means to us.

So, this chart is an attempt to illustrate the pleasure we gain from a selection of beers over the course of an arbitrarily selected six drink session (about the upper end of what we ever drink — a ‘big one’ by our standards) indicated on the bottom axis.

The session beer curve illustrated in a chart.

It’s a bit of a jumble but:

  1. St Austell Black Prince, after about four pints, seems the finest beer in the world, after an underwhelming start, and we could keep drinking it forever.
  2. Fuller’s London Pride is rarely exciting but maintains its appeal throughout a session — another definition of balanced?
  3. St Austell Proper Job is a great beer — one we’re always delighted to find — but not one we like to drink more than about three pints of. It fails as a session beer because it is too intensely hoppy and just a touch too strong for us — the feeling that we ought to call it a day, the surprisingly wobbly walk to the bar, comes a little too soon.
Categories
Beer styles

What Does IPA Mean?

Advertisement for our book with link to Amazon.

Also available at Blackwell’s, Foyle’s and Waterstones.

In his latest post, Ron Pattinson rails against those who deride Greene King IPA as “not a proper India Pale Ale” while they blindly accept Guinness’s right to call itself a stout. IPA, Ron points out, was not always strong, even in the nineteenth century; and, anyway, British beer styles evolve over time: an 1850 IPA would bear little resemblance to one brewed in, say, 1946.

The fact is, though, that GK do seem out of step with the current usage of the term IPA.

On the one hand, more traditional ale brewers in the UK tend to give the name to the beer in their range which, compared to their standard bitter, is lighter in colour (often orange-hued) and more evidently hoppy.

On the other, “new wave” British brewers tend to make IPAs in the US manner — strong, deep amber, and with heavy, piney, citrusy hopping.

Not many breweries (in fact, only GK?) produce an “IPA” which is deep brown and lightly-hopped.

So, although of course GK aren’t doing anything wrong, it’s easy to see why some people might be puzzled or disappointed if they’re used to other breweries’ IPAs. (Although feeling almost physically angry is a little over-zealous.)

Of course, for all that, there are lots of people who like GK IPA and couldn’t give a flying one whether it’s a “proper IPA” by either historical or beer geek standards. In fact, the only IPA they know is GK’s so perhaps, in twenty years time, IPA will come to mean brown, lightly hopped beer, just as Guinness now defines stout for most drinkers.