Categories
Beer styles

To those who wait?

Whereas the best lagers have a month, two months or even longer to mature, some big industrial incarnations, we understand, are lucky to get three days.

Given that the purpose of lagering is to allow chemical compounds to dissipate or be consumed by the secondary action of yeast, how is it actually possible to accelerate this process? More chemicals? Sorcery?

Peraps all the important stuff happen in the first three days and the rest is just superstition and marketing, but we can’t help but wonder if is this one of the reasons why, say, Stella Artois tastes so nasty.

Would it improve if given 90 days to ripen?

Categories
pubs

End of the Season

West Cornwall’s summer season ends today.

It’s the last day we’ll be able to get Jelbert’s ice-cream in Newlyn; museums, gardens and some tourist-focused shops are switching to winter hours or closing altogether; and, most importantly from our point of view, many pubs are suddenly empty.

Pubs which are designed for the hot, heaving days of August — huge buildings with multiple rooms, beer gardens, play areas and several bars — are partially closed. As the rain and fog settles, the lights are going out, and people are retreating to the log-fire in the saloon.

We visited a pub yesterday which, when we last went, was so busy every table was reserved, all day. Yesterday, the barman looked startled when we walked in. The clock was ticking, the fire was crackling, and he had been lost in thought, chin in hand.

We sat in the corner of a pub designed to accommodate more than two hundred people and had it to ourselves. The Overlook Hotel came to mind.

Our first winter out west is going to be an interesting one.

Categories
Blogging and writing

Winter edition of CAMRA's BEER magazine

The latest edition of CAMRA’s excellent BEER magazine is available online for members. We’ve got a little piece in it in which we go head to head with The Reluctant Scooper on the subject of smutty pumpclips.

We argue that they’re rubbish.

(There, that’ll save you wading through our whole argument.)

If you’ve read the article and want to argue or agree with us, the comments below are a good place to do it. We’re also on Twitter @boakandbailey.

Categories
Beer history Blogging and writing opinion

Update on the Oxford Companion to Beer

Since we wrote this somewhat positive but reserved review, there’s been plenty going on.

In a stroke of genius, Alan at A Good Beer Blog has set up a wiki so that readers of the Companion can identify and record errors. What’s particularly helpful, we think, is that he’s asked people to focus on just the facts, ma’am, and not to make it personal. This needn’t be narky, sarky nitpicking — it could be something really constructive and useful.

In fact, hippies that we are, we were hoping this whole discussion would turn into a kind of beer commmunity collaborative love-in.

Unfortunately, what he’s read so far has made Martyn Cornell angry (a bit too angry, maybe). Garrett Oliver, who edited the companion, seems to have taken it personally (it wasn’t, but then the book is his baby) and has responded with sarcasm and a point-by-point rebuttal. And Martyn has come back to that in the comments here. Yeesh. This could run and run.

Meanwhile, all this discussion has been met with cries of “pedantry” and “spoil-sports!” on Twitter and forums.

And we continue to find both bloopers and entries which give us hope. Ron Pattinson might not have much time for Horst Dornbusch, but Herr Dornbusch and Mr Oliver’s article on porter in the Companion cites Ron’s mini-book on the subject and (based on a quick read) gets the basics right. Most importantly, it refers to the story of Ralph Harwood inventing porter as a substitute for three threads as a myth, in no uncertain terms.

We still think the book is a good read as long as you read critically and don’t do anything daft like base an academic paper on its contents; and we certainly still think it’s a big step forward in terms of ambition for books about beer.

But our view has hardened a bit: it’s not pedantry, nitpicking or spoil-sport behaviour to expect a book which costs quite a lot of money to get the history right. Yes, maybe some of those pointing out errors could be a bit more gracious and take less obvious glee in finding them but, really, no-one should publish a book with some claim to academic rigour and be surprised when academics and historians challenge it. It’s all in the game.

Categories
beer festivals

CAMRA Kernow Festival, Falmouth

Detail from the logo of CAMRA Kernow

Having moved to Penzance proper from a village a few weeks ago, we suddenly find ourselves much better connected by public transport, and so getting up to Falmouth for the CAMRA Kernow beer festival on Saturday was a doddle.

Even as we approached the venue from the station, we could tell it was going to be good: the streets were crowded much like the approach to a football ground on match day. The venue itself was busy — almost chaotic — but the startled looking volunteers were nonetheless fast and efficient and had us inside, pints in hand, within five minute of hitting the door. Impressive.

Now, there was plenty of Cornish and other West Country beer on offer but, frankly, we can get that any day of the week so we made a beeline for what we’ve been missing the most since the move: proper northern beer.

We knew Steel City Brewing’s Escafeld would be hoppy and weren’t disappointed: it smelled of mown grass, and tasted something like a good, sharp gooseberry jam. Kelham Island’s Now That’s What I Call Bitter was exactly the kind of flinty, crisp, pale and hoppy beer we’d been dreaming of. It took us right back to Sheffield in an instant. And we couldn’t resist an old favourite — Thornbridge Kipling. Can you believe we’ve gone more than six months without a pint of anything from Thornbridge? Weird.

We didn’t just drink beers from up north, though, and also dug into the very decent selection from Oakham, reminding ourselves that this brewery (whose products we don’t see enough of) are up there with Dark Star, Crouch Vale and other favourites of ours. Black Hole Porter was the standout.

Not for the first time, we’ve been very impressed by a regional festival in a way that we aren’t generally by the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF). Why? Perhaps because there’s less overwhelming choice; a different crowd — locals, students, passing hippies; and a cosier venue? We’ll keep pondering this.

Of course, the real  buzz was about the toilets: many of the women in attendance were gleeful at a turning of the tables which saw them walking straight in while the gents queued for a urinal. “I wouldn’t use the sink in the disabled toilet if I were you.” Eeew.