Tag: greene king

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beer reviews bottled beer

Beers salvaged from the junk shop shelf

A selection of ancient beers.

On our last trip out, in February, we visited Stroud for the day. That’s where, in a jumbled-up junk shop, we found a collection of grubby old beer bottles, still full, and for sale at £2 each.

We bought a selection based on (a) ignoring royal wedding and jubilee beers and (b) aiming for breweries that seemed more interesting to us.

  • Greene King Audit Barley Wine
  • Charles Wells Old Bedford Ale
  • Banks Old Ale

Then we got home and drank them.

Ever since our experience with Adnams Tally Ho, and having discussed the issue with Patrick Dawson, we’ve been committed to drinking these ancient beers when we come across them.

They rarely improve with age, or ever gain any particular cash value, but every now and then, one is a wonder.

In this set, all of which we reckon date from around 1980, give or take, there were two good ‘uns and, sadly, one total dud – not a bad strike rate.

Greene King Audit Barley Wine was the winner. It reminded us of Harvey’s Prince of Denmark – a mellower, milder take on imperial stout. On opening, there was a very slight hiss. It produced loose bubbles and barely held a head. There was berry, sherry, leather and… cheese? That makes it sound more complex than it was. Overall, it was pleasant, boosted by the sheer timebending thrill of consuming something bottled when we were babies.

Charles Wells Old Bedford Ale was, unfortunately, flat. From its tiny bottle, it produced what looked like two glasses of cheap brown cooking sherry. The first taste confirmed it: this beer didn’t survive the battle. The overwhelming flavour was, well, water, with a background whisper of burnt sugar and cloves.

Finally, the one we were most excited about: Banks Old Ale, with an OG of c.1092. It hissed, gave us brief bubbles, and then left us with two egg-cup’s-worth of flat black oil. It was salty, rich, full of prune syrup and plum. We wanted just a little more.

In conclusion, £6 for the pleasure of drinking two decent old beers that haven’t been produced in decades seems worthwhile. It’s certainly cheaper than a session at Kulminator, with a similar hit rate.

And you know what? The nip bottle needs to make a comeback.

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Uncategorized

News, nuggets and longreads 24 August 2019: Greene King, Kveik, Wellington Boots

The Highbury Vaults.

Here’s everything on beer and pubs from the past seven days that struck us as especially noteworthy, from Suffolk to Thailand.

The big news of the week – or is it? – is the takeover of English regional brewing behemoth Greene King. Roger Protz, who has been writing about brewery takeovers for half a century, offers commentary here:

In every respect, this is a far more worrying sale [then Fuller’s to Asahi]. Asahi will continue to make beer at the Fuller’s site in Chiswick, West London. It’s a company with a long history of brewing. CK Asset on the other hand has no experience of brewing and its main – if not sole – reason for buying Greene King will be the ownership of a massive tied estate of 2,700 pubs, restaurants and hotels. The Hong Kong company, which is registered in the Cayman Islands, is owned by Li Ka-Shing, one of the world’s richest men. He has a war chest of HK$60 billion to buy up properties and companies throughout the world.

This didn’t make quite the splash the Fuller’s sale did for various reasons: it wasn’t a brewery-to-brewery sale, for one thing, so is harder to parse; and Greene King is far less fondly regarded by beer geeks than Fuller’s.

We’re anxious about it not because we especially love Greene King but because it’s potentially yet another supporting post knocked out from under British beer and pub culture. See here for more thoughts on that.

Mystery yeast.

Lars Marius Garshol has been trying to get to grips with a mystery: is the yeast strain White Labs sell as Kveik really Kveik? If not, what is it?

If this yeast was not the ancestral Muri farm yeast, what was it doing in Bjarne Muri’s apartment? It very clearly is not a wild yeast, but a mix of two domesticated yeasts. It doesn’t seem very plausible that the air in Oslo is full of those. On the other hand it doesn’t seem at all plausible that this was the ancestral Muri yeast… Two things seem clear: this is a domesticated fermentation yeast, and it’s probably not the ancestral Muri yeast. The latter simply because it doesn’t seem well suited for that particular brewing environment.

A tea room.
Lyons Corner House, 1942. SOURCE: HM Government/Wikimedia Commons.

Not about pubs, but adjacent: Thomas Harding has written an account of the history of his family’s business, J. Lyons & Co, which is reviewed in the Guardian by Kathryn Hughes. We became fascinated by Lyons while researching 20th Century Pub, because of this kind of thing:

From the 1920s you could pop into a Lyons tea shop to be served by a “nippy”, a light-footed waitress got up like a parlourmaid. If you were a working girl of the newest and nicest variety – a secretary, teacher or shop assistant – you could eat an express lunch on your own in a Lyons without risking your respectability. If you were feeling particularly smart, you could go up to “town” and stay in the art deco-ish Strand Palace or Regent’s Palace hotels, vernacular versions of elite institutions such as Claridge’s or The Savoy. In the evening you might venture out to the “Troc”, or Trocadero, in your best togs, where you could enjoy a fancy dinner and dance to a jazz band.

Wellies
SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons.

Mark Johnson has written an account of a weekend spent at Thornbridge Brewery’s Peakender festival with a typical dash of acid:

I just can’t understand anybody being disgruntled about a little mud. We have worn our wellies on our last two visits to Peakender and not needed them. We wore them in 2019 because, guess what, it is still a festival and this time we happened to need them. Wading through the showground site for two days was not an issue to us at all. Maybe it is because of where we live, I don’t know, but when I see people muttering to themselves about the state of the ground, whilst trying to make it to the toilet wearing FLIP FLOPS… heaven forbid… I don’t know…

Buffy's Bitter.

Paul Bailey (no relation) has some interesting notes on the demise of Buffy’s Brewery (one we’d never heard of) and the problem with ‘badge brewing’:

The closure was blamed on there being too many breweries in Norfolk, and with over 40 of them all competing for a slice of a diminishing market, something had to give. Like many industry observers, I was more than a little surprised to learn that Buffy’s had gone to the wall, but Roger Abrahams, who founded the brewery, along with Julia Savory, claimed that the micro-brewing sector was close to saturation point, and that competition between brewers “had become very aggressive.”

We don’t know anything whatsoever about brewing in Thailand but it turns out to be a complex business, according to this article from the Bangkok Post:

No one but the ultra rich are allowed to brew beer for sale in Thailand. The law is as unjust and outrageous as that. And no lawmaker has suffered the bitter taste of inequality in the brewing industry quite like Future Forward Party MP Taopiphop Limjittrakorn, who in January 2017 was arrested for brewing and selling his own craft beer… On Wednesday, Mr Taopiphop, 30, took Deputy Finance Minister Santi Prompat to task over his ministry’s regulation that stops brewing start-ups from exploiting the growing thirst for new flavours.

Finally, much to the amusement of British commentators, American pop superstar Taylor Swift has been writing about London, including a passing mention for pubs:

 

There are more links from Stan Hieronymus on Monday most weeks and from Alan McLeod on Thursday.

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beer reviews bottled beer

Yes, Greene King — More of This

Greene King Heritage beers -- bottles and vintage beer glasses.

For some years now we’ve been repeating one message: old family brewers should be focusing on their heritage, not trying to keep up with BrewDog. So we were delighted to hear that Greene King has upped its historic beer game.

Their new limited edition bottled heritage range doesn’t quite approach the full-on authenticity of Fuller’s Past Masters series being, as far as we can tell, only vaguely ‘inspired by’ archive recipes rather than painstakingly recreating them. What is notable is their use of a once near-extinct variety of malting barley, Chevallier, the revival of which you can read about here:

Starting a few years ago with only a handful of seeds, by 2013 half a tonne was available for brewing…. Now the 2015 harvest is nudging 200 tonnes and there’s Chevallier malt aplenty. With another 15 tonnes reserved for seed, the expectation is that similar harvests will be possible in future years…. “People that have tasted it say that it has a very rich, malty flavour. We’ve had comments back from the States such as, ‘It’s the most aromatic malt that I’ve ever brewed with.’ … There’s a perception of a difference, of richer maltiness.”

We bought one bottle of each of Greene King’s heritage beers at our local Tesco supermarket for £2.49 each. That’s a touch pricier than many bog standard supermarket ales but then the bottles are full-pint sized and the beers are both relatively strong.

Suffolk Pale Ale at 5% ABV knocked our socks off. We found it vigorously bitter, almost too much so, with a remarkable freshness that suggests the pop of just ripe gooseberries. (It’s bottle-conditioned which perhaps helps.) It has a beautiful aroma which is hard to pin down — a certain sappiness might be the way to describe it, with some suggestion of fresh-baked bread. There’s nothing of the new world about it though the use of German hops (obvious once you read the label) offer a subtle twist, herbal rather than fruity. If you can’t bothered to brew one of the 19th century pale ale recipes from Ron Pattinson’s book this is a decent substitute. It’s delicious, thought provoking, and perhaps the best Greene King beer we’ve ever tasted. In fact, it’s one of the best beers we’ve come across in recent months.

Vintage Fine Ale at 6.5% less brilliant but it’s still very much a step in the right direction for Greene King. Deep red-brown in colour it has a distinct autumnal feel. On the plus side there were the various facets of richness — golden syrup, Christmas pudding and plums. The only things holding it back were a husky stale note (which we suspect might disappear with a few months ageing) and the fact that Fuller’s already makes similar but better beers in this style. On the whole, though, we liked it and would — indeed probably will — buy it again.

Let’s hope these sell well, that the Pale Ale becomes a regular, and that there are more heritage beers to come. But, seriously, when do we get the funk? Bring out the nip bottles of 5X and let’s get some blending going.

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czech republic News

News, Nuggets & Longreads 21 May 2016: Pilsner, Mild and Pubs

Entrance foyer at the Punch Tavern on Fleet Street, London.

These are all the blog posts and articles touching on beer and pubs that have given us pause for thought, or told us something we didn’t know, in the last week, from Pilsner to pubs.

→ We somehow missed this one last week so it gets top billing today: Evan Rail’s blog is back from whatever Internet wormhole it got lost in (this is great news, generally) and his latest post is about the influence of the Czech influence on European lager brewing in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It makes a strong case, with reference to some lovely primary sources, for Czech brewing getting more credit than it has tended to in the past:

For its low-grade Bavière, the brewery used German hops (generally Hallertau, Wolnzach and a less-expensive cultivar, Bavière Montagne), which it bought from J. Tüchmann & Söhne and Bernard Bing in Nuremberg. But for the higher-grade Munich and the Bock that was later renamed Pilsner, the brewery generally used 100% Saaz, purchased from hop vendors like the Kellner brothers and Sonnenschein & Landesmann, both in Žatec (aka Saaz), right here in Bohemia.

Detail from a Whitbread advertisement, 1937, showing beer with food.

→ For Eater Matthew Sedacca ponders how ‘foodie culture’ (which includes craft beer) survived, and even thrived during, the Great Recession. We don’t necessarily agree with all of his conclusions but it’s a great question:

A large driver behind the sustainability of the “foodie” ideology during and post-recession has been linked to the millennial generation’s shift in attitude towards material goods —€” namely, they don’t really want them. Several reports have highlighted the phenomenon that, unlike the baby boomers and several members of Gen X, millennials prefer consumption of ‘experiences.’

→ Alec Latham considers the various ways in which pubs in St Albans, where he lives, have mutated, changed or otherwise been reinvented:

Some pubs come back from the dead, others change the orientation of their ‘swing’… Though Mokoko’s isn’t a beery place, it’s still a great bar. After all, cocktails are people too.

Greene King sign

→ In an interview with Australian Brews News the venerable brewing professor Charles Bamforth has railed against gimmicks in brewing, like a Dogfish Head beer made with chewed-up and spat-out grains: ‘Come on! You’re only going to do it once aren’t you?’ It’s not all grumping, though: he thinks black IPA, for example, is the right kind of boundary pushing.

→ Ed visited Greene King and brings us this interesting nugget, among others:

I also got to try their XX mild at last… Having various milds in the portfolio from the breweries they’ve taken over they rationalised it to just one recipe, and had tasting trials to decide on the best one. Despite the name it’s sold under it was actually the Hardys and Hansons mild that won.

→ Gary Gillman continues to dig up tasting notes and opinions on Belgian beer from the 19th century like this 1836 1847 diary entry mentioning Westmalle. (The makings of a longer article or e-book here, perhaps?)

→ Not reading but listening: on the Robert Elms show on BBC Radio London this week a listener asked if anyone remembered an estate pub in South London called The Apples & Pears. People did (@ 2h 20m):

It was a very modern pub… Myself and my three girlfriends used to drive up on a Saturday night in our Austin A40… We used to go around ’72, ’73… We used to dress to match the era of the car, lots of long beads, headbands, flouncy frocks, sort of 1920s flappers was our style…

→ Carlisle is getting a State Management Scheme museum with Heritage Lottery funding — fantastic new! Let’s generally have more brewing, beer and pub museums and exhibitions, please. (There’s no website that we can find so this Tweet with a screenshot of a Word document will have to do.)

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News pubs

News, Nuggets & Longreads 14/11/2015

Pump handles in a London pub with the date: 14/11/2015.

Here’s the beer news and commentary that most interested or amused us in the last seven days.

→ For Belgian Smaak, Breandán Kearney writes at length about a collaboration between Irish and Belgian brewers:

A hard-nosed Belgian farmer arrives at the historical brew house in the Flemish village of Bokrijk on an old Dexta tractor to pick up the spent grain… Rob Hynes makes a bee line for the tractor. “That’s a thing of beauty,” he says. “I used to own one years ago but I sold it. I regret that.”

→ Des de Moor has been exploring the Midlands and wrote a long piece about Black Country breweries for his website, Beer Culture:

The name dates from this period: contemporary accounts talk of a blasted land of spoil heaps and perpetual twilight, overcast by factory smoke in the daytime and lit by furnaces at night. J R R Tolkein, who grew up in south Birmingham, based his chief villain Sauron’s desolate domain in The Lord of the Rings on this landscape. Its name, Mordor, even translates as ‘black country’ in the author’s invented languages.

→ In the age of ‘crowd-funding fatigue’ Seth Fiegerman’s take for Mashable, under the headline ‘Crowdfunding may not create the ‘next Facebook,’ but it’s great for craft breweries‘, is an interesting one. (Via @BeerAttorney.)

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