Tag: st austell

Categories
News opinion

What the ‘Craft Can’ Means

St Austell Korev in cans.

St Austell have announced that they are putting their lager, Korev, into 330ml cans.

In their press release, they explicitly present this as an embrace of ‘craft beer’:

The craft beer revolution continuing to sweep America has now resulted in the unexpected return of the humble beer can as the container of choice for over 400 US breweries – and now this trend is crossing the pond.

Canned beer certainly isn’t new and you can go into any supermarket in Britain and find shelves filled with tins of London Pride, Bass and other somewhat interesting beers. But those are 440ml or 500ml containers, and have long been the budget option in a market where the upmarket choice is a ‘premium bottled ale’ (PBA).

The new generation of ‘craft cans’ are materially identical but look like soft drinks — cute little R2-D2s which sit neatly in the hand, and slip easily into rucksacks and handbags for train journeys and trips to the beach. And for stronger beers, or those that are more strongly flavoured, 330ml is plenty. Some people even report that beers taste fresher from cans, perhaps because they are better protected from the light.

Their real significance, though, in our view, is cultural.

If the Campaign for Real Ale liked traditional pubs, ‘craft beer’** likes chrome’n’neon bars; ‘craft beer’ rejects cask-conditioned ale in favour of keg; it chooses IPA over best bitter; and now it is embracing cans over the 500ml bottles which seemed so exciting when they appeared in supermarkets from the late 1980s onward.

In the post-BrewDog era, cans are yet another way to underline the changing of the guard. But they are also a way for the old guard to take a slice of the cake. After all, they do own most of the canning lines in the country.

** We’ve updated our page explaining what we mean by ‘craft beer’. In this case, we’re using 2: “…used to describe a ‘movement’ arising from c.1997 onwards which rejected not only ‘mass-produced’ beer but also the trappings of established ‘real ale’ culture”.

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture News opinion

The Black Hole of Craft Beer

Black holes in space have yet to be directly observed, and their presence can only be inferred through their interaction with other matter and light.

Recent events in the world of beer suggest that ‘craft beer’ might operate in the same way. There’s no agreed definition in the UK, and yet we can all tell when the actions of breweries are being distorted by its mysterious presence.

First, locally, we’ve observed the recent roll-out of a rebranded St Austell ‘Proper Cool’ keg IPA. Does this design and copy remind you of anyone?

St Austell Proper Cool beer mat.

Though St Austell don’t use the C-word themselves, here’s how we heard a barman explain this beer to a customer: “You know Proper Job? Well it’s a craft version of that.”

St Austell can claim to have been doing ‘craft’ (US-hopped IPA, beers with spices) since before ‘craft’ was really a thing, so it’s weird to see them aping BrewDog so openly, especially as it’s a bit ‘Dad in a baseball cap’. (They have literally declared themselves cool.)

Then, further north, this fascinating blog post emerged from Thornbridge’s head brewer, Rob Lovatt, announcing the arrival of a Parma Violet porter, and explaining its place in their new ‘Left Field Beer Project’. It seems to us that his teeth are gritted:

All of my brewing team will tell you that I’m very style-oriented and I take some persuading to even put the slightest twist on a classic beer style. 

When we visited Thornbridge last year, we detected a (good natured and probably healthy) tension between a conservative lobby focused on tradition, and those who wanted to be more playful and experimental. Parma Violet is, we think, is driven by the latter, and an attempt to do something a bit more ‘craft’, whatever exactly that means. Others made the same suggestion on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/MagicRockRich/status/466603231603617792

Disclosure: we have had various dealings with both St Austell and Thornbridge, and are speaking at a Thornbridge pub next week, on 21 May. We’re not scientists — sorry if we got black holes wrong in our attempt at a rhetorical flourish.

Categories
beer reviews Beer styles Belgium

St Austell Tamar Creek

St Austell Tamar Creek.

St Austell have continued their exploration of ‘world beer’ styles with a Belgian-style sour cherry beer.

We’ve met Roger Ryman, head brewer at St Austell, a few times, and he has always struck us as rather sensible — the kind of bloke who keeps a very tidy glove box. Get him on to the subject of Belgian beer, however, and he becomes positively giddy.

Last time we bumped into him, in a pub in Penzance, he’d just come back from a trip to Poperinge accompanied by the latest edition of Stange and Webb’s Good Beer Guide to Belgium, and was excited to have re-stocked his cellar with multiple cases of De Ranke XX Bitter.

So when he brews Belgian-style beers at St Austell, it isn’t a text-book exercise or a mere marketing gimmick — there is a certain amount of passion (sorry) behind it.

The base beer for Tamar Creek was brewed on a tiny experimental brew kit, inoculated with wild yeast and brettanomyces, and then aged in wooden barrels on a bed of cherries from the Tamar Valley for six months. It comes in 750ml corked bottles wrapped in printed paper, in a tribute to Liefman’s — a better marketing manoeuvre than this rather gory PR photo:

Cherries being squashed by feet at St Austell.

We bought our bottle at the brewery shop for £9, but the online price is £14 including delivery. Is it worth the money?

Tasting

On opening, we got hit by an immediate nostril-curling sting of ‘funk’ which reminded us specifically of apples rotting in an orchard. (Brace yourselves — this review is all about ‘the erotics of disgust’.)

Poured into squeaky clean glasses, a soapy rose-tinted head rose up and over the lip of the glass before prickling away to nothing after 30 seconds or so, leaving what looked like a glass of well-aged red wine.

Despite a rather thin body, it tasted convincingly Belgian, the funky aroma matched by an acidic note not unlike (brace…) bile. It took us a while to pin down exactly which taste memories were being triggered, then it clicked: it had the skull-dissolving tang of pink grapefruit juice.

There was a dry tannic note, too, which wasn’t unlike biting into a grape seed.

On the whole, we’ll call it a grower. Though, at first, it seemed thin and one dimensional, the texture and sweetness built as it coated our mouths, and ‘ho-hum’ eventually turned to ‘yum yum’.

We didn’t regret spending £9 on it — about the same price as an imported Belgian equivalent — but whether you reach the same conclusion will probably depend on your interest in the exercise, the value you place on ‘buying local’, and your knowledge of the style.

We certainly look forward to future iterations of this brew, and to more heartfelt Belgian-inspired experiments from St Austell.

Categories
Beer history

Session #87: Ellis & Son of Hayle

Reuben Gray is hosting this month’s session and has asked everyone to write something about the history of a local brewery. This is a very rough outline of something we’ll hopefully flesh out, with better sources, at some point in the future.

Christopher Ellis portrait.
Christopher Ellis.
When we first visited the brewery offices at St Austell a couple of years ago, we noticed some bottles of beer with vintage-style labels bearing the name ‘Ellis’.

The head brewer, Roger Ryman, explained that Ellis had been absorbed in Walter Hicks & Co to form the present day St Austell Brewery before World War II, and that the bottles we were looking at had been brewed to a historic recipe for members of the Ellis family who were still involved with the brewery.

This naturally intrigued us: St Austell is an hour away from Penzance but Ellis were based much nearer to us in Hayle, just up the coast from St Ives. There’s very little sign of them — no ghost signs or brewery livery that we’ve noticed — which made us all the more curious.

ellis_tonicAs it happened, we didn’t really get much time for serious research before writing this post, but it’s an ongoing project, and here’s what we have gleaned from passing mentions in various places.

Brewing first commenced at Bodriggy  (a village now absorbed into Hayle) some time after 1800 under a man called John Richards. He sold this concern to Christopher Ellis (1790-1867) who formally founded the brewing company in 1815.

Like many other breweries in the 19th century, Ellis seems to have begun life as primarily a malting operation with some brewing on the side. The company also produced mineral waters, and imported wines and spirits.

In the 1870s, the company expanded, and a large ‘steam’ brewery was constructed. Those buildings are still standing on Sea Lane:


View Larger Map

From a handful of labels we’ve seen, it seems that Ellis bottled a lot of Guinness, and we know they also produced their own ‘Sparkling Tonic Dinner Ale’. We understand the brewing logs are in existence, and we’re hoping they might be in the archives at Hayle. When or if we ever see them, it will be interesting to find out if there was anything distinctive about West Cornish beer. (We suspect not.)

In his book West Country Ales, Adrian Tierney-Jones summarised their fate: “Ellis’ main customers were the workers in the mines, foundries and shipyards of West Cornwall, and when the local economy vanished, so did sales of the beer.”

In 1934, Hicks & Co stepped in and took over, turning the Hayle brewery into a distribution centre for St Austell beers. This brought 30 pubs into the fold, including the Dolphin, Fountain and Yacht in Penzance; the Star and Wellington at St Just; and the Fountain at Newbridge where we drank the other week.

Ultimately, Ellis were a small brewery of the sort which abounded in the Victorian era, most of which were taken over to become the ‘&’ components of larger companies such as Truman, Hanbury & Buxton, or Fuller, Smith & Turner Watney, Combe, Reid. (See Ron’s comment below.)

We’ll keep researching Ellis as a side project. In the meantime, we can’t help but think that it would be nice to see some Ellis branded beers on sale down this way.

Sources (Unfortunately, all secondary and mostly lacking references.)

  • West Country Ales by Adrian Tierney-Jones (2002)
  • St Austell Brewery est. 1851 by Clifford Hockin (1981)
  • The Book of Hayle by Cyril Noall (1985)
  • The Brewing Industry: A Guide to Historical Records, ed. Lesley Richmond, Alison Turton (1990)
  • ‘The Hayle Steam Brewery’ (flyer), Hayle Town Council, date unknown (c.2007?)
Categories
opinion

The Problem With Local Giants

St Austell Pub Sign.

If we have to live under the benevolent dictatorship of a big regional brewer, we’re happier with St Austell than we would be with some others.

Across the range, the character of their beer appeals to us, being generally clean, bright and fruity. Tribute, we maintain, is a remarkably interesting beer for a brewery to have as its flagship, with German-style malts and American hops much in evidence.

In Roger Ryman, they have a head brewer who was raving about hoppy American beer before it was cool and who, alongside ‘standards’, has slowly built up a range of interesting specialities.

Their pubs in Cornwall are also, on the whole, well run, and we rarely, if ever, come across a bad pint, suggesting healthy levels of investment in infrastructure and staff training.

But they are not perfect.

With almost 300 pubs, St Austell control a good chunk of the market in the West Country, and the chances are slim of finding anything other than their beers in most small towns or villages in Cornwall.

What we would like to see, though we hold out no great hope, is St Austell’s managed pubs stocking at least the occasional beer from another UK brewery — ideally, something interesting, but we’d take London Pride just for a bit of variety every now and then.

After all, they benefit from exactly these kinds of arrangements elsewhere in the country, with pubs from Plymouth to Plaistow increasingly likely to stock St Austell Tribute as a ‘guest ale’.