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beer reviews bottled beer

Sharp’s Connoisseurs’ Choice in the pub

Sharp's Connoisseur's Choice triple

There isn’t much Belgian beer on sale in pubs in Cornwall, which is a shame, because strong, slow beers lend themselves to stormy, candlelit Sunday afternoons, of which we have plenty. Fortunately, Sharp’s head brewer, Stuart Howe, is something of a Belgophile, and has produced two beers which very neatly plug the gap.

Honey Spice Tripel (10%) is entirely convincing and delicious. Honey in beers we can take or leave but, as is usually the case when it’s employed in brewing, it’s not a very pronounced presence here. In fact, what lords it over this beer is a big, unrestrained Belgian yeast pumping out banana aroma and tongue-tingling Asian spiciness. (The Westmalle strain, right?)

The Quadrupel (10%) is apparently fermented with four strains of yeast. The overall impression, though, is that, once again, something very like the Westmalle strain won. Our impression (according to notes on one of the touchscreen devices) was of more bananas — really ripe ones — doused in rum, but it’s another one of those beers that has almost every flavour in it if you wait long enough. (Chocolate, coffee, dark fruits, Werther’s Originals, old army boots, bat’s blood…) In a blind tasting, would we rate St Bernardus Abt 12 higher? Maybe, but the freshness and swagger of this beer might tip the balance.

Final observations: it was great to see these on sale in a relatively normal pub, at a not-outrageous £5.50 a bottle, which is less than imports go for down this way, on the rare occasions they’re seen. It was even better when the barman announced, with evident pride, that they had a full supply of the attractive Belgian-style glasses in which they are supposed to be served. But… Connoisseurs’ Choice? Why not just call them Wankers’ Selection or Dickhead’s Delight? We bloggers don’t need our egos encouraging.

Categories
Beer styles Belgium homebrewing

Brewing Without Reference to Styles

We’ve just brewed a… something.

For once, we didn’t set out to make a tripel, an IPA or a stout — we just looked at the ingredients we had, thought about the beer we wanted to drink, and off we went.

It uses a Belgian saison yeast (because that’s the only one we had in) and borrows some aspects of our tripel recipe (because we liked how it turned out) but it doesn’t fit the parameters for an ‘average’ tripel as set out in Stan Hieronymus’s Brew Like a Monk, or those for a saison or ‘super saison’ given in Farmhouse Ales by Phil Markowski. It uses English pale malt (all we had), Tettnang hops (because… why not?) and a bit of white sugar.

We’re not claiming to have done anything especially innovative (although it does have some unusual secret spices) — all we’ve done is tinker with the variables a bit. It’s going to turn out to be a Belgian-inspired blonde beer of some description, and that won’t set the world alight.

But, still, it felt liberating. We’re going to do this more often.

Lots of commercial breweries defy or even define standard styles: Orval, for example, isn’t anything but Orval, love it or loathe it, and sits awkwardly among the other Trappist beers which have fallen into line with each other.

Many newer breweries, on the other hand, seem to us to trot out one of each from the recipe section in Homebrewing for Dummies and, for a bit of variety, take two standard styles and cross-breed them. The beer might great, but will this approach produce classics? Will it create genuinely new, individualistic, original beers?