Categories
pubs

Don't be scared off by cutlery

As the death of the gastropub is announced, we found ourselves pondering how people react to the ‘food led’ pub and why we’ve never really had a problem with it.

Admittedly, if a place is sending clear signals that, despite being in a pub building, the establishment is really a restaurant, we don’t go in unless we want dinner. (Those signals, by the way, might include a name with the word ‘restaurant’ in it, or simply not stocking any beer at all.) Generally, however, we don’t let a bit of cutlery and the odd bit of French on a menu stop us going inside.

We have never been turned away and have always had great success with a bit of human interaction: “Is it OK if we just have a couple of pints?”

On a couple of very rare occasions, we have had to drink our pints with a snooty looking owner sulking nearby, but, as far as we’re concerned, that’s their problem. Is it us or are hardened, experienced drinkers sometimes rather sensitive flowers when it comes to this kind of thing?

The Falmouth Packet is a Cornish pub which really gets it right. It is food-led — the landlord is a chef — and it has almost no seating for people who just want to drink. Nonetheless, they have not only always made us feel welcome whether we’re eating or not, but actually take the time to make conversation with us as we sit at the bar. They have an excellent beer, Jolly Farmer, brewed exclusively for them by the Penzance Brewing Company, as well as two other cask ales. It’s cosy, too, and the locals who gather around the bar are always up for a chat. So, food-led or not, we have no hesitation in recommending this as a great place to go for a pint.

Categories
Beer history Beer styles Belgium

Saison cracked?

Saison dupont beer in the glass with bottle

After our recent pondering on the nature of saison, several people, including Alan at A Good Beer Blog, suggested we read Farmhouse Ales by Phil Markowski. Thanks for the tip, chaps. It’s a great book and has, indeed, helped us ‘get it’.

It’s in the same series as Stan Hieronymus’s marvellous Brew Like a Monk and is designed to help home brewers understand the recipes and practices used by breweries currently producing biere de garde and saison. Even if you never intend to brew anything, if you love Belgian beer, these books are must-reads.

The centrepiece of Farmhouse Ales is an essay by brewer Yvan De Baets which attempts to summarise the history of saison and, crucially, explain what the heck it is. A key phrase occurs therein: saison, says De Baets, “has a small ‘wild side'”. He also cites a (primary) source suggesting that, in the late 1940s, saisons were very like what we would now call geuze.

At this point, something clicked for us. The idea of a spectrum with a point at which wild yeasts in the mix become evident makes a lot of sense, and also helps to explain why so many beers are described as “almost saison” or “saison like”. We slightly repurposed his phrase “wild side” and came up with this.

Diagram showing the relative wildness of various Belgian beers.

Ultimately, of course, it’s up to a brewery if they wish to call their beer a saison, hence some of the lucozade-like sugary beers flying that flag, and the idea of precise categories in this territory is a bit silly, but a beer just on the wild side — that is, with at a hint of wild yeast or ‘roughness’ without being downright sour — is probably what we would now understand to be a saison.

Now to drink some more of them and test this new understanding.

Categories
bottled beer marketing

Clear bottles: argh!

We’ll let others do the talking on this.

First, John Keeling, Head Brewer at Fuller’s, on Twitter.

"We have never used clear glass because of light struck flavours."

And then this video review from the Real Ale Guide.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP1MvGJUKh4]

Brewers (and packacing designers): pack it in!

Categories
design Franconia Germany marketing The Session

The Big Session Comeback Tour

Beer mat from the Hausbrauerei Altstadthof, Nuremberg.

We haven’t taken part in the session for a couple of years, mostly because we found ourselves struggling to fit in an opportunity to, e.g., drink a particular type of beer before it rolled around.

Anyway, it’s time to get back in the saddle so here we are again to talk about the art of beer labels, caps and coasters, for this month’s session hosted by HopHeadSaid.

We have a particular interest in commercial design and illustration and when it relates to beer, all the better. We’ve posted about it on more than one occasion and have been really enjoying this excellent blog about beer branding recently.

The image above is one of our favourite bits of beer-related design and, perhaps not so coincidentally, comes from one of our favourite breweries.

What’s not to like? There’s sans serif typography (we have some sympathy with the Helvetica nerds), a simple colour scheme reflecting the flag of Franconia and an equally simple graphic. All of this reminds us vividly of their pub in Nuremberg and their beers, all of which are also simple, unpretentious and clean.

You’ll note that the image above is a bit rough. It needed some restoration because this beermat, along with a stack of others from Germany, the Czech Republic and Belgium, lives in our kitchen and gets used every day. It’s a little bit of Nuremberg we can enjoy every day. As a result, it is covered in beer stains.

Mind you, that Satan cap art isn’t bad either, and nor are the twin labels for the Brooklyn/Schneider collaborations.

Categories
pubs real ale

Weird bar staff quirks

Here are a couple of oddities we’ve come across lately.

1. The barman who warned us not to mix the sediment from our St Austell clouded yellow into the glass with the beer or we’d “end up very poorly”. That’s clouded yellow. It’s a British take on a Bavarian wheat beer, and the bottle advises that it can be served with or without the yeast sediment mixed in. Yet more evidence of the British fear of suspended yeast and its supposedly poisonous qualities.

2. The barmaid who thought we weren’t looking when she held a sparkler near the pump in the last few seconds as she pulled the pint to lively up the head. She didn’t attach it, she just held it in place while she put the finishing touches to our pints. Without this bit of weird jiggery-pokery, we suspect they would have been completely flat.

UPDATE 27/07/2012: we spotted another barmaid in a St Austell pub doing more-or-less the same thing with the sparkler only, this case, she stopped when she had the glass two-thirds full, fixed the sparkler properly, and then finished the pint. We asked why and she said: “Because Proper Job is a bit lively. If you leave the sparkler on the whole time, it gets too much head. This is the best of both worlds.” So, there you go, we got it wrong first time round.