Tag: patreon

Categories
beer reviews bottled beer

Patreon’s Choice: De Molen Not For Sale Ale — Craft Lager

Not for Sale Ale -- Craft Lager

We asked our Patreon subscribers to suggest some beers for us to taste and Chris Gooch chose this one: “I’m dying to know what the De Molen Not for Sale Ale is like. An initiative that deserves a lot of support.”

The initiative he mentions started in Sweden and is dedicated to tackling human trafficking and modern slavery. One hundred per cent of the profits from this beer, brewed in the Netherlands, go to the Not for Sale campaign. We bought our bottles from Honest Brew at a quite reasonable £2.89 per 330ml, plus delivery.

It’s a hazy yellow beer with high carbonation. The aroma is a back-and-forth of straightforward citrus hop and pungent, funky, overripe fruit. There’s perhaps a bit of vegetable or leafy herb in there, too.

It tastes of green apple, orange pith and brown bread, before seguing into the kind of bitterness that hangs around, feeding back on itself until there’s no bandwidth left.

We liked it a lot, with only some very slight nitpicking reservations about those vegetal notes. It’s bright, full of flavour and character, and quite distinctive. If we had to compare it to another beer it would be the single-hop Cascade ale brewed by Castle Rock for M&S a few years ago (and, what do you know, De Molen does use Cascade in this beer) except it’s quirkier and dirtier, in the best possible sense.

Is it a lager? In technical terms, no. It’s even less like lager than our experiments in brewing Helles with Goldings and Maris Otter — more fruity and funky, in fact, than many packaged and pacified British ales. But in terms of how you might use it? Yes, it fits in the lager slot. It tastes great cold, bites at the back of the throat, doesn’t demand your full attention, and tastes primarily of malt and hops. And, at 4.7% ABV, you could probably tackle a few in a row if you had the taste.

We’d definitely buy this again even if 100 per cent of the profits were going into somebody’s pocket. It’s our kind of beer.

Categories
Blogging and writing

The Best of Us in 2017

Illustration: typewriter and "2017"

The idea behind this round-up of the best of our own writing from 2017 is, as much as anything, to remind ourselves of what we’ve pulled off.

We forgot we’d written some of this stuff at all, while other bits we had in mind were were from last year, or maybe the year before.

It’s been a hectic time what with moving from Penzance to Bristol and the publication of a second book but, despite all that, we kept up a fairly steady flow of posts — about 240 in all. Of course that includes plenty of throwaways, weekly links round-ups, and our Month That Was summaries. Still, we reckon it amount to about 160,000 words of original writing — enough for another two books.

This is probably a good point to say that if you appreciate our output and want to encourage us to keep doing it, ad-free, and mostly outside any kind of paywall, please do consider subscribing to our Patreon. It’s dead easy, and for as little as $2 per month you can help pay for all this, and also get some bonus stuff there. (We’ve unlocked a few posts over the course of the year so you can see for yourself.) That people have signed up has been a major source of encouragement but, you know, there’s always room for a bit more.

Now, down to business. We’ve decided to limit ourselves to ten that we especially like but have also included by way of a footnote a second list of the stuff that actually got all the traffic, which is not always the stuff that’s most fun or interesting to write. First up, its…

Continue reading “The Best of Us in 2017”
Categories
beer reviews bottled beer

Patreon’s Choice #3: Odyssey Spottieottiehopaliscious

Odyssey American Pale Ale.

This is the third in a series of posts with notes on beers chosen for us by our Patreon subscribers. (If you want a ton of bonus stuff, and to tell us what to drink, sign up!)

Chris Gooch suggested that we try something, anything, from Herefordshire brewery, Odyssey. What Beer Ritz had in stock was Spottieottiehopaliscious, an American pale ale at 5.4% ABV. One 500ml bottle cost a rather wince-inducing £4.43.

The packaging is interesting, pitched somewhere between old school real ale and modern craft — vaguely folky, acoustic, fibrous.

The beer itself was golden with a loose but steady head, none of which, frankly, we were really able to focus on over the intoxicating, incredible aroma. It filled the air with blossom, with orange, grapefruit and peach. If something can smell sweet, this beer did, as if it was triggering some dormant ability to detect the ripest nearby fruit with a twitch of the nostrils.

It didn’t taste quite as astonishing, sadly. It seemed soft and pillowy on the palate and brought to mind tinned mandarin segments, or maybe some long-forgotten soft drink of the 1980s. Which is not to say it lacks bitterness — that sat there, adding weight, like a granite marble on the back of the tongue. There was, thank goodness, no onion or armpit, the appreciation of which in vogue characteristics is apparently beyond us. Overall it reminded us of Thornbridge’s fun, approachable pale ale Chiron, only looser and a touch funkier.

We found it, in short, thoroughly likeable and enjoyable. Nearly five-quid’s-worth of likeable? Maybe not quite.

Categories
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
beer reviews bottled beer

Patreon’s Choice #2: Bottled Hophead

Hophead label.

This is a quick entry in our series of notes on beers suggested by our Patreon subscribers. This time it’s the bottled version of Dark Star Hophead as suggested by @AleingPaul who has never tried it himself.

We bought this from Beer Ritz at £2.78 per 500ml bottle and, like the cask version, it has an ABV of 3.8%.

A note, first, on that cask beer — a classic we think it’s fair to say, or at least a standard. Here’s a bit on the history of the beer from an article we wrote for All About Beer a couple of years ago:

Another cult favourite is Hophead from Dark Star, a brewery in Brighton, a fashionable coastal resort an hour’s train ride south of London. Mark Tranter… worked at Dark Star from the 1990s until 2013. He recalls that, at some time after 1996, one of the owners of the Evening Star pub where the brewery was then based went to California and came back with Cascade hop pellets. These, along with other U.S. hops available in small quantities via hop merchants Charles Faram, formed the basis of ‘The Hophead Club’, conceived by Dark Star founder Rob Jones. At each meeting of the club members would taste a different single-hopped beer. ‘Cascade was the customers’ and brewers’ favourite, so it was not long until that became the staple,’ recalls Tranter. When he took on more responsibility in the brewery, Tranter tweaked the recipe, reducing its bitterness, and, in 2001, dropping its strength from 4% to 3.8%. Today, with the brewery under new ownership and with a different team in the brew-house, the beer remains single-minded and popular, giving absolute priority to bright aromas of grapefruit and elderflower.

Cask Hophead might have had a wobble a few years ago, or it might just have been that we had a run of bad luck, but on the whole it’s been a beer we cannot help but drink when it’s on offer. Its relatively low strength means we can take a decent amount without getting in a whirl or suffering the next day; its light body makes it swiggable and easygoing; but it is far from bland, even by the hop-saturated standards of 2017.

Perhaps our fondness is partly down to the fact that we’re of the Cascade generation and developed our love of beer when that hop variety was the coolest thing in town. Whatever the reason, fond we are.

So, how is the bottle? Does it capture the magic? Can you get that Hophead buzz in the comfort of your front room, dressed in your jim-jams?

Apparently not.

The bottled beer is utterly dull — a pan-and-scan VHS, K-Tel edit, plastic imitation.

It’s not horrid — there’s enough hop character there to spark a little pleasure — but it feels heavy, tastes as if it’s been microwaved, and has nothing to set it apart from any number of golden ales from less beloved breweries available in every supermarket in the land.

It’s weird to feel so irritated by a mediocre beer, but it must be because it’s a mediocre incarnation of a great beer.

We won’t be going out of our way to buy it again but will perhaps enjoy our next encounter with cask Hophead all the more.