Categories
opinion

You’re Dead to us Now

Someone who reads the blog and follows us on Twitter wrote to us last week. His email began: “Your definition of Craft Beer/Breweries I feel is the best I’ve seen in an attempt to clarify a confusing situation.”

“Do go on,” we said smugly, sitting in noxious clouds of our own self-satisfaction.

“At what point is a Craft Brewer no longer a Craft Brewer? Can that happen?”

The blood drained from our faces. That is a very awkward question.

It helps if, like us, you don’t think of this as binary, but a question of degrees. And, as the definition of ‘craft beer’ in the UK isn’t (yet) fixed or externally validated, and if you think it’s a worthwhile idea, you need to have your own criteria.

The more boxes they tick, they more likely we are to think they’re a craft brewery. By extension, if those ticks are rubbed out, our thinking goes into reverse.

If Thornbridge start using clear bottles, or ditch cask ale, or start describing Jaipur only as “a premium beer made with the best malt and hops”, we’d begin to have doubts. Brewdog, for all their attempts to monopolise this territory, do lots of things that don’t sound very much like craft brewing to us: a few more steps in that direction, and they’re out, at least in our minds.

Finally, does it matter if a brewery stops being ‘craft’? No. It doesn’t necessarily mean their beer suddenly tastes bad, or that we hate them, just that our relationship changes. ‘Craft’ is not synonymous with ‘worthy’.

 

Categories
American beers

Memorable Beers #1: Goose Island IPA

We first tried Goose Island IPA in the Rake, probably around Christmas of 2006.

We never spend Christmas together but have always compensated with a sort of ‘office Christmas do’ a week or so before. When we lived in London, that usually meant taking a day off work, Christmas shopping for as long as we could bear it, and then chasing beer from midday onwards.

Borough Market is like the set of a Dickens adaptation at Christmas: roasting chestnuts, carols and mulled wine on the air. Expensive apples.

Were we just in a ‘peace on Earth and goodwill to all beers’ kind of mood, or was drinking that IPA really like tasting in Technicolor? We said wow a lot and marvelled at its slight haze. We may even have giggled with excitement. We declared it our favourite beer for some time thereafter.

These days, though we still enjoy it, we find GI IPA muted and too full of crystal malt — not Seville orange marmalade so much as seaside fudge.

If we write another fifty or so posts in the next twenty-five days, we’ll hit 1000 by the time we hit our fifth anniversary of blogging; as that date approaches, we are also feeling nostalgic. Hence this series. Yeah, we like round numbers — sue us.

Categories
Blogging and writing opinion

Do beer blogs matter at all?

Insofar as blogs are at all important, it is for the following reasons:

  • They have a disproportionate effect on ‘the buzz’. Someone who’s just heard of Thornbridge Brewery might Google “Thornbridge beer” term and, in so doing, would find several blogs in the first two pages of results. Not only that but, if they’re anything like us, those results will leap out at them over the boring local newspaper stories and directory listings. Blogs, because they are full of ‘subject relevant content‘ and organic links to one another, storm the Google rankings.
  • Bloggers aren’t freaks — they’re just people whose interest in beer overlaps with an interest in writing (or being the centre of attention, or web design, or whatever else motivates them). What the small number of bloggers say can give an insight into what a slightly larger group of drinkers are thinking but not expressing. There are blogs to represent all types of drinkers, too — not just the cork-and-cage brigade and CAMRA man.
  • They give consumers a voice: where, once, only professional journalists could cause trouble for businesses, now anyone with a Blogger or WordPress account has the potential to do the same thing. That can be a nuisance for businesses but, from our perspective, helps to redress the balance of power.
  • At their best, they (a) act as a proving ground for the next generation of beer writers and (b) motivate professional beer writers to up their game. If bog-standard beer writing can be got for free, the stuff you want us to pony up for had better be good.
  • A handful of blogs aren’t just blogs — they’re epic works of scholarship or insight evolving over time.

We don’t really think any single blog is that important or well read (we’ve seen our stats…) but, as a body, they have a certain gravitational pull. In the UK, it’s probably fair to say that they have more influence with pubgoers and beer geeks than any specialist print publication, except perhaps CAMRA’s.

On the other hand, very few people who regularly drink beer ever read anything about it, just as millions of people enjoy music or films without paying the slightest attention to what critics, amateur or professional, have to say.

Categories
opinion real ale

CAMRA members and keg

We heard the disappointing news today that some very reasonable suggestions by a CAMRA working group were rejected almost completely by the National Executive. This was followed by the rejection at CAMRA‘s annual general meeting of another sensible step towards supporting British breweries. (Though Motion 15 (more here) was carried.)

Neither bit of news was unexpected. Policy doesn’t change overnight and let’s not forget that, as others have pointed out, keg-friendly bloggers are not CAMRA’s core membership. It can’t afford to scare the die-hards away, even if that makes other members sigh and ponder cancelling their direct debits.

Anyway, here’s some thinking about where beer geeks stand in relationship to CAMRA and keg beer. We haven’t numbered the boxes this time, so apologies to those who like to label themselves. (But we’re in the fifth box down.)

UPDATE: changed the diagram. Better?

Attempt to map attitudes to keg beer against CAMRA membership.

We’ll get bored of these graphics soon. Probably. Maybe.

Categories
czech republic homebrewing

Inspired by a memory of a taste

Inside U Fleku, Prague.

As we neared the end of the lager brewing season (the point when our utility room stops being cold) we decided to make something dark, and the beer that came to mind — what we found ourselves craving — was the one at U Fleku in Prague.

We did some research online and found a few recipes, all wildly different, and cross-referenced them to come up with the following.

Malt: 4kgs Weyermann’s Premium Pilsner Malt (EBC 3-5); 0.5kg Munich Malt (EBC 20); 0.5kg Crystal; 0.3kg Chocolate (EBC 500).
Hops: 50g Pioneer 9.4% (90 mins); 50g Liberty 3.6% (20 mins); 50g Liberty 3.6% (5 mins).
Yeast: White Labs WLP800.
Notes: single decoction mash.

Without going into tons of detail, this all worked very nicely but, when we took it out of secondary fermentation ready to bottle, our hearts sank: it in no way resembled U Fleku. It had that homebrew smell and taste; it was too pale; it was like a crappy English bitter.

We put five litres into a polypin and dry-hopped it, hoping to rescue at least a portion. The rest we bottled, just in case a miracle might occur…

The first glimmer of hope came when we tapped the polypin and, despite a lingering ‘homebrewness’, found it kind of moreish. We drank the lot. Surely, though, this was just the dry-hopping at work, making the best of a bad lot?

Then, last night, with low expectations, we opened the first bottle and were delighted to find that a transformation had taken place. In an appropriately Mittel-European handled glass, it looked darker, clear as a bell and healthy red-brown. The head was like  meringue. Tasting it didn’t quite take us back to U Fleku, but it certainly made us feel that, if we were to go outside, a tram might be passing, on its way to a grand square somewhere nearby.

The moral of the story? Er… bottle it anyway and hope for the best?

We asked Velky Al of Fuggled fame for an appropriately Czech name and he suggested “Odštěpek” which he tells us means “a chip off the old block”. Thanks, Al!