Categories
Beer history

Remembering the Early Days of Brewdog

2008 vintage Brewdog bottles.

We’re writing about the emergence of Brewdog for our book project at the moment and would really welcome your help in remembering how beer geeks felt about them in their first five years.

Nowadays, even people who still have a soft-spot for the (wealthy, successful, very businesslike) punks begin any statement about them with the words ‘Whatever you think of Brewdog…’ or ‘I don’t like their marketing but…’

Back in their early days, though, there was no such quibbling: Brewdog were, as far as most people were concerned, a thoroughly good thing. Here’s what we said when we’d barely been blogging a year:

Isn’t BrewDog’s marketing strategy just ace?  Cool-looking bottles that you’d happily give to non-beer-geek mates. Limited edition batches, like 90s indie singles. Lots of publicity in “taking on” the Portman group… you have to be impressed with that ambition.

Melissa Cole liked them enough to do this when the Portman Group were picking on them in 2008; and Zak Avery said this in 2009. Even Tandleman was impressed. Then things like this happened, and the love affair turned a little sour.

Because recent history is all a bit of a blur, we’d love to hear your recollections, or read old blog posts to which you can point us, either by email or in comments below. We’re especially interested if you:

  • ever described yourself as a Brewdog ‘fan’
  • started a blog mostly to write about Brewdog
  • got angry at people for criticising them
  • were on their side over Speedball
  • aimed to buy everything they released, even if it was expensive or hard to find.

What attracted you to Brewdog? And, if you’re now out of love with them, what was the turning point for you?

Categories
beer reviews pubs real ale

Brief Encounter With Beer

The beer list at the Wellington pub, Birmingham.

When the train from Penzance spat us out in Birmingham on Friday, on the way to Warwickshire for a wedding, we found we had time for a pint or two between trains. Is there anything sweeter than an hour in the pub stolen from a day which is otherwise not your own? (Would ‘more bitter’ be appropriate?)

The entrance to the Post Office Vaults pub, Birmingham.The Post Office Vaults is a windowless basement pub a short walk from the back entrance of Birmingham New Street Station. It smells, as cellar bars often do, a little earthy, but those first pints of pale’n’hoppy ale (Salopian Oracle (4%) and Ossett Citra (4.2%)) were just what we needed to revive us. The Hobson’s Mild (3.2%) with which we followed those tasted a bit… mild. Too much crystal malt was in evidence for our taste, but there was no doubt it was in excellent condition. The finisher, a bottle of Stone IPA, was anything but mild, though its taste didn’t quite live up to its in-your-face, marmalade perfume.

On the return leg, we arranged a slightly longer pause between trains, and managed to dash to the Wellington, an old-school ‘beer exhibition’ with fifteen cask ales on offer. Mid-refurbishment, it felt tatty, but not unpleasantly so, and the real-time beer list on a flat-screen was a distinctly modern touch. At one point, we watched the landlord pull a tot of golden ale into a half pint glass and hold it up to the window, turning it on his fingertips and peering with narrowed eyes, like a diamond dealer inspecting a stone for flaws. We were in the hands of professionals.

The star of the show at the Wellington was Oakham Citra (4.2%), though we couldn’t have managed a long session on it, and if we’d have been staying for the afternoon, we’d have stuck with Abbeydale’s Exodus (4.3%) — also very pale, also ‘floral’, but more balanced, and without any tooth-jangling astringency. Abbeydale seem very reliable to us and we wonder why they’re not better known; their understated (homemade-looking) graphic design can’t help.

Finally, we fit in a brief stop at a largely deserted Brewdog Birmingham. Cocoa Psycho (10%), a chocolate stout, had a big hole where some flavours should have been. The same was true of a fairly bland IPA hopped only with Goldings from Kent (6.7%). Neither was ‘fizzy’ or ‘cold’ — just lacking depth. The same IPA with Slovenian Dana hops, however, was a startling, freakish eye-opener that made us laugh. Our immediate thought: roast lamb! On dissecting that, we decided we were tasting something like thyme, mint and ‘onion flowers‘. We’re not sure we liked it, but our taste-buds appreciated the wake-up call. Someone should go all out and use Dana in a Rauchbier, or even a meat stout.

The local CAMRA branch seems to be pretty clued-up and active. Their magazine is a slick publication which, in the current issue, includes a nice article on Antwerp, as well as sneer-free news of Brewdog’s opening. Their free ‘real ale map’ of the city is excellent, too. Brewdog’s staff, for their part, were doing an excellent job of educating interested punters without patronising them.

Categories
opinion pubs

It’s us, not you, Brewdog Bristol

Always the last to any party, we finally made it to a Brewdog bar on our trip to Bristol.

Shiny, new, and in the ‘organic corporate’ style pioneered by sandwich-chain Pret a Manger, it certainly isn’t a pub.

The bar staff were, to a fault, helpful and cheerful. The advice they were giving when asked was sound, too, though unfortunately laced with bright-eyed, cult-like statements such as (paraphrased) ‘Brewdog were the first to have the guts to do something different’, etc.. If the decor reminded us of Pret, then the spiel reminded us of a Hare Krishna cafe.

Beer was priced as we expected, with our favourite Punk IPA at (if we remember rightly) £4.20 for two halves, and tasted just as delicious as it does from the bottle. 5AM Saint was… what’s that phrase? ‘Liquid cardboard’?

Around us were students who’d ordered ‘whatever lager you have’, drawn, we guess, by the coolness of the bar rather than the beer; middle-aged men who wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Wenlock Arms; and parties of thirtysomethings not yet especially into beer apparently there for an experience. In case you were wondering, they’re the people who buy the super-strong beers in spirit measures at £6 a pop. From where we were sitting, they got their money’s worth, talking animatedly, swapping glasses, and finding much to marvel at: ‘It tastes just like sherry — I wouldn’t think it was beer if I didn’t know.’

It is certainly an interesting addition to the city’s beer scene and will thrive. We’ll no doubt pop in again if we’re passing (assuming we’re still welcome) but the fact is, there was no chemistry between us and this bar.

Categories
Blogging and writing breweries buying beer

Do Brewdog use CO2?

UPDATED after comments from our readers. Short answer: who knows how the hell Brewdog are carbonating their beers.

Every day, between five and ten unique visitors find our blog with the search term ‘do brewdog use Co2’. No kidding.

Because it pains us to imagine their disappointed little faces when they discover that we don’t actually answer that question anywhere, we decided it was time we did.

We take it that the question is really (a) “Do Brewdog artificially carbonate their beer?” or (b) “Are Brewdog’s beers ‘real ale’?”

To which the answers are (a) yes sort of, maybe and (b) no hardly any.

It seems most of Brewdog’s beers are carbonated in closed fermentors; have most of their yeast filtered out; and are then ‘topped up’ with CO2 to get to the right level of carbonation. All of Brewdog’s beers are carbonated using carbon dioxide injected into the beer.

They made a fuss about ceasing production of cask do not currently produce any ‘real ale’ — that is beer which is conditioned (carbonated) ‘naturally’ in the bottle or cask by yeast remaining in the beer — but do produce a very small number of limited edition beers which are conditioned naturally in the bottle. Those are technically ‘real ales’, we guess, though they wouldn’t like to label them as such…

Does that make their beer better or worse? Does the use of some added CO2 make their beer worse? Can. Of. Worms.

We also get occasional visitors trying to find out if John Smith’s smooth is real ale: it isn’t, but John Smith’s Cask (rarely seen) is.

Categories
marketing opinion

A Household Name

A lot of what The Scottish Brewery does only makes sense when it occurs to you that they have one aim: to become a household name.

They simply don’t care if they’re loved or loathed, as long as they can break out of the beer geek ghetto and become the kind of brand that ‘normals’ have heard of. Their eyes are fixed firmly on the goal.

It explains their partnership with Tesco, which otherwise compromises their ‘punk’ brand, but gets their products and logo seen alongside Carlsberg et al; it explains their attention-at-any-cost approach to PR stunts;  and it explains this needy tweet which emerged at the height of the Diageogate PR triumph yesterday, when their story was trending worldwide:

We have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, what they’re doing to get where they want to be is pretty much constantly irritating; on the other, we’ve yet to see a British ‘craft brewery’ crossover into mainstream consciousness. If they make it, it might be a good thing in lots of ways, as long as they don’t pull the ladder up behind them.