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beer reviews bottled beer

QUICK POST: Alphabet Brewing Co Flat White Breakfast Stout

Flat White Breakfast Stout.

This beer was part of a batch ordered from Beer Ritz and paid for by Patreon subscribers like Simon Branscombe and Jared Kiraly — thanks, chaps!

We chose this particular beer because it came up as a suggestion in last year’s Golden Pints. A 330ml can at 7.4% ABV cost £3.19.

The can is rather cool looking and the name is appealing: breakfast is a lovely word for starters, and flat white (a small amount of smooth steamed milk over espresso) is just about hanging in there as the hip coffee preparation of the day even though you can now get them in Greggs.  We can imagine this cropping up in cafes and delis, appealing to people who might not otherwise be that into beer.

We don’t know much about Alphabet other than that a friend of a friend who was in the process of setting up a brewery in Manchester tells us they’re nice people, and that cans of their Hoi Polloi pilsner we tried earlier this year were decent enough.

The name hints at the stylistic gimmick at the heart of this beer: it is a stout but not black as we’ve come to expect. This is idea with some historical basis previously mined most notably by Durham Brewery. One immediate problem, though, is that, though pale for a stout, it is by no means white. In fact, it is reddish brown — the least remarkable colour for beer other than yellow. So an exciting proposition — Wonder At the Freakish White Stout! — is anything but in execution. ‘Pale’ might better have set our expectations but even that would be pushing it. Still, it did look appetising enough on its own terms, clear and gleaming.

The second problem, unfortunately, was a big stale aroma that caused us to recoil rather than to smack our lips in anticipation. Where there ought to have been perhaps a touch of smoke or fruit there was a sort of damp, dirty basement stink — the wrong kind of dank altogether.

Once we’d got past that (aromas recede after the initial encounter) the taste was interesting, definitely dark-tasting (because dark is a flavour in beer), slightly spicy, with some suggestion of cherry, and a lot of burnt cream. The resemblance to coffee, in other words, was specifically to those sweetened, flavoured, very milky dessert coffees that abound at this time of year. We didn’t particularly like it, just as we don’t particularly like that kind of coffee, but we can see how it might appeal to palates other than ours.

Unfortunately that staleness was a deal-breaker. This can was theoretically good for another few weeks, until 17 December, and has been stored in the cool and dark since we bought it, but we’d say it actually expired some time ago. And, once again, like a stuck record, we have to point the finger at dodgy packaging, or packaging processes. We’re getting more and more wary of cans from smaller breweries, especially when they cost as much as a pint of ale at our local. In this case, we feel a bit swizzed.

Categories
News pubs

News, Nuggets & Longreads 24 June 2017: Markets, Marketing, Manchester

Here’s all the beer- and pub-related reading that’s entertained, educated or amused us in the last seven days, from football lagers to Mancunian tap-rooms.

Every now and then the Guardian does a really great piece on pubs and this week it’s Jessica Furseth on the endangered sub-species of market pubs — long a staple of Quirky London writing with their perverse opening hours and lingering earthiness in an ever glossier city.

Walk into a pub at 7am and you’ll meet construction workers, police, nurses and paramedics, people from the media industry and other office workers. Giulia Barbos, who tends bar at the Fox and Anchor [in London], says the rising price of a stout and full English has meant the crowds have moved from market workers towards office workers, who might have a bit more money to spend. ‘Now, people sometimes come in just to have breakfast,’ she says.


Red Devil Lager
SOURCE: Latas Futebol Clube

For Vice Sports Ryan Herman has unearthed the story of how several English football clubs attempted to launch their own lagers in the 1980s only to face a tabloid backlash:

On 1 December 1987, Manchester United held a launch party for Red Devil Lager at Old Trafford. Members of a team famed for its drinking culture, including Kevin Moran, Norman Whiteside and Paul McGrath, turned up alongside a collection of celebrities ‘du jour’… Indeed no party at that time and in that venue would have been complete without Coronation Street stars Michael Le Vell (aka Kevin Webster), Kevin Kennedy (Curly Watts) and Nigel Pivarro (Terry Duckworth)… What could possibly go wrong?

(Via @JimbaudTurner)

If you found this interesting then note that the site from which we took the picture, Latas Futebol Clubeis run by a collector of football-club-branded beer packaging. It’s in Portugese but easy enough to navigate.


The Black Jack tap room.

It’s Manchester Beer Week (23/06-02/07) and a couple of posts from Mancunian bloggers caught our eye. First, from Kaleigh, there comes a useful guide to the city’s brewery taprooms which looks worth bookmarking for future reference. ‘If I find myself in Manchester city centre on a Saturday, I generally end up in a brewery’, she says, which we know to be true from following her on Twitter.

Secondly, there’s a bit of PR from the event organisers. We normally shrug at press releases but this has some interesting numbers based on commissioned research:

The Manchester Beer Audit 2017 found 411 different cask ales on sale in venues throughout the Manchester City Council area, beating nearest rival Sheffield, which boasted 385 beers in its last survey, as well as Nottingham (334), York (281), Norwich (254), Derby (213), and Leeds (211)… The survey also confirmed that Manchester is leading other cities in kegged “craft” beers too, with 234 different beers on sale throughout the city, an increase in variety that has been sparked by the recent boom in craft brewing.

This was prompted, we assume, by similar claims made by Sheffield last year and greeted with some consternation by Leodensians, Mancunians, Londoners… In other words, a pissing match has commenced. Instinctively we groan at this — ‘My city’s better than your city’ is a tedious, more or less unwinnable argument — but, actually, a bit of competition probably won’t do any harm, and certainly generates attention.


Charles from Ards Brewing.

We’re always nagging people to write about smaller, less well-known, basically shy breweries, which is why we pounced on this piece by the Dirty Hallion. It profiles the the Ards Brewing Company of Northern Ireland which ‘has no website for… and a very limited social media presence’. We’d certainly never heard of it. There’s not much drama here but the origin story is interestingly typical and refreshingly free from Grand Passions:

Charles… was a successful architect but like many people involved in the construction industry, myself included, the recession forced a career change… A friend actually suggested brewing and despite no real experience in brewing, he was interested. The same friend taught him the basics and that was it, he was hooked. Shortly after he bought the equipment and started homebrewing. From there he expanded and built the brewery he now uses.

(This was actually posted last week but we only spotted it on Sunday.)


BrewDog Beers on a shelf.

Freshness continues to be the hot topic among antipodean commentators. This week Luke Robertson at Ale of a Time asks a fundamental question: is the long shelf-life demanded by the industrial beer distribution model fundamentally at odds with exciting, zingy beer? Well, that’s our reading, but here’s a bit of what he actually says:

The distribution model and marketplace for beer simply isn’t designed for volatile IPAs or unpasteurized lagers. The history of this model is all tied into pasteurization and refrigeration. While refrigeration is still just as important, pasteurization is a dirty word amongst small brewers. When sending your beer out of the brewery you can almost guarantee that your beer is going to end up old, and probably on a warm shelf.


Painting of a bearded Victorian.
William Everard

Only a few weeks after Charles Wells announced that it was selling its brewing operation and most brands to Marston’s comes another jolt: Everard’s of Leicester is handing off production of its beer to Robinson’s and Joule’s. You won’t find many beer geeks — even the traditionalists — with a lot of gushing kind words for Everard’s beer but this is nonetheless another worrying development in the health of Britain’s family brewing tradition. (Via @robsterowski.)


And, finally, here’s a thought-provoking Tweet from Joe Stange which is of course a generalisation and a simplification but…

Categories
Brew Britannia Generalisations about beer culture opinion

Smoke Signals: We’re Not Stuck in the Mud, Honest!

Moor brewery wall sign: 'No fish guts.'

In recent weeks the Campaign for Real Ale has been sending coded signals: it isn’t hidebound or dogmatic, it can change, it is hip to where it’s at, Daddy-O.

First there was this press release referencing an article in the latest edition of the Good Beer Guide:

A growing number of brewers are looking at alternatives to isinglass as a clearing or ‘fining’ agent in their beers, the 2017 Good Beer Guide (GBG), published by the Campaign for Real Ale, CAMRA, reports. Isinglass is made from the swim bladders of fish – and as more and more drinkers today are vegetarians and vegans, brewers are looking at alternative ways to serve crystal clear pints.

The press release, and the article to which it refers, aren’t calling for more unfined beer (though the former does quote Roger Protz seeming to do so) but that’s certainly how the BBC and other outlets reported it. (Later corrected.) The reason, we suspect, that CAMRA’s communications staff got so especially annoyed at this misrepresentation is because they laboured hard behind the scenes to get a message that all the key players were happy with. This is the kind of thing politicians deal with all the time: ‘I think it’s time to consider whether oranges might not deserve a place in the fruit bowl alongside apples, in certain circumstances,’ says the Minister; MINISTER SLAMS OUR GREAT BRITISH APPLE reads the headline. Because carefully composed, nuanced messages are rarely news.

The real point was intended to be, we think, that (a) CAMRA knows about this stuff on the outer fringes of ‘craft beer’; (b) it acknowledges that good beer can be made this made way; and (c) it is watching with keen interest and an open attitude.

On a similar note was last week’s announcement that, for the first time, a canned beer has been certified as ‘real ale’ by the Campaign’s technical committee. At the most basic level this is a statement of fact — the TC counted yeast cells in the packaged product and gave it the thumbs up — but of course it’s much more than that. In 2016, cans are a ‘craft’ thing, and certainly seem to dominate the crafty end of our Twitter feed, and this is about CAMRA finding a way to connect with that constituency. We don’t think it’s too much to describe it as a gesture of friendship. (But craft cynics might see it as co-opting or Dad dancing, while real ale hard-liners will see pandering.)

Here’s something we said in our big Brew Britannia follow-up blog post in 2015, in relation to the decision that beer in key-keg could be considered real ale under certain circumstances:

[That’s] how we expect CAMRA to play this in the years to come – slow change without big announcements – merely the occasional sounding of a dog whistle through selected channels. That way, they will hope to avoid scaring away conservative members many of whom (not all) also happen to be older and therefore, for various reasons, make up the bulk of the active membership.

That still holds true but perhaps the whistles are getting more frequent and more audible?

Categories
marketing opinion

Infantile?

Label for Partizan X ale w. crossed dinosaurs.
Art by Alec Doherty. SOURCE: Partizan Brewing Archive.

We’re working on an article about mild in the 21st century, research for which prompted this statement in an email from Andy Smith at Partizan:

The beer was originally simply called mild… We then decided to rebrand as X… This worked OK but not as well as we’d hoped. It was at this stage we put dinosaurs on the label and sales rocketed! I kid you not. It sells as well if not better now as our other dark beers. Dinosaurs! Now we spend our weekends hearing how cute the dinosaurs are (recently changed) and  answering the question what is X?

That’s funny, of course, but also made us think, ‘Huh. So craft beer drinkers are like children?’

We’ve observed before, as has almost everyone else who’s written a tedious think-piece on the subject, that craft beer in cans has been successful partly because they are tactile and colourful, bright and toy-like. Beavertown Brewery’s cartoon-laden designs in particular suggest material for an (admittedly slightly weird) animated series and also make them look like a bit like soft drinks. (Gamma Ray more so than this example we have at hand.)

Beavertown Smog Rocket design.
Art by Nick Dwyer. Source: Beavertown Brewery.

And sometimes, with fruit and residual sweetness and novelty flavourings and higher carbonation, the hippest beers can taste a bit like soft drinks too.

Of course we checked ourselves fairly promptly: one person’s infantile is, of course, another person’s fun, and we understand that you humans enjoy this emotion fun is good.

And even if it is infantile, is that a bad thing? One key reason people drink is to reduce the pressures of adult life and the pub is where grown-ups go to play.

This is a question we’re going to have in mind from now on, though, especially when we find ourselves considering the generation gap between real ale culture and craft beer. (Def 2.)

Categories
Brew Britannia

One Year On, One Month on

There have been a few developments on ‘the scene’ since we wrote our long post updating on Brew Britannia at the start of July.

The Kernel Brewery tap room, which gave birth to the ‘Bermondsey Beer Mile’, will no longer be opening on Saturdays from 5 September. Meanwhile, Manchester has gained its own weekend crawl — ‘The Piccadilly Beer Mile‘.

→ Matthew Curtis has managed to wheedle a little more information about the United Craft Brewers from its founders.

→ Management at Bateman’s of Lincolnshire have gone beyond complaining about Progressive Beer Duty: they’re planning (or at least threatening) to downsize to get under the threshold, as Roger Protz reported.

Harbour Brewing of Cornwall have their canning line up and running; Dark Star launched canned beers at the beginning of July; and Magic Rock have their canning line almost ready to go. Meanwhile, John Keeling of Fuller’s had this to say:

→ And, finally, anxiety over consolidation and predation was kept bubbling by Duvel Moortgat’s merger with (or take over of, or synergising with, or something) US brewery Firestone Walker.

* * *

Tempting as it is to follow this in seven days’ time with ‘One Year On, One Month On, One Week On’, we’ll resist the urge…