Categories
Beer styles

Explaining lager vs. ale

This week, a colleague asked me in the pub whether London Pride is better than Carlsberg and what the difference is between them. I wasn’t quite sure what the most helpful answer would be.

I’ve seen a perfect demonstration of the wrong approach, in a well-known beer geek pub in London. A young woman at the bar asked her boyfriend what ale was, exactly, and how it differed from beer. She was overheard by a huge, bearded man with bona fide piss stains on his trousers. He ran the length of the bar, pint in hand, to crowingly deliver a complex explanation about different yeasts and top and bottom fermentation. He also threw in a bit about exceptions to the basic rule like koelsch, alt, dark lager and so on. As well as making him look like a total tosser, it wasn’t a terribly helpful answer for someone with a very limited understanding of beer and a passing interest in finding out more.

I’ve been asked this question by Spanish friends in the UK, and my answer is usually something like: “Lager’s what you usually drink in Spain. It’s generally light in colour and fizzy. In Spain (and usually in Britain), it doesn’t have a strong flavour, although you can get lagers that are more bitter or aromatic. Ale is a traditional British drink, and is less fizzy, fruitier and usually more bitter. It is often brown, but can be lighter or darker. Personally, I think the flavour of ale is much more interesting and varied than the lagers you usually get in pubs in Spain or the UK.”

But that also looks quite patronising when I write it down.

So what is the best answer, particularly if you want to encourage people to try the ale and give the Carlsberg a miss?

Boak

Categories
beer reviews Beer styles

Pumpkin ales

Post Road Pumpkin Ale
Post Road Pumpkin Ale

From reading US beer blogs, I get the impression that pumpkin beers are quite big over there. Apparently, the early Colonists turned to pumpkins to bulk out the barley, or something like that. At any rate, they’re a novelty over here.

We picked up Post Road Pumpkin Ale at Beer Exposed. It’s in the Brooklyn Brewery’s line of historic ales, so it’s branded a little differently. The overwhelming smell was spices (cinnamon and nutmeg at a guess). Unfortunately, what was a lovely smell translated into a rather unbalanced beer — really quite acrid from all the spice, with a thin body.

So we weren’t expecting a lot from Hall & Woodhouse’s seasonal Pumpkin Ale. We’re not massive fans of the Badger brewery products, particularly their “flavoured” beers, and particularly when they’re not fresh. This one had been sitting in our stash for around nine months, so the omens weren’t good. Well, that just goes to show how wrong you can be, as this is a lovely beer. Interestingly, it smelled of bananas, and the flavour was a bit like a less sickly, slightly spicier weissbier but with an ale-like mouthfeel and condition. And it was in excellent condition too, despite filtering, pasteurisation and our idiosyncratic cellaring methods. At 4.6%, it’s a bit weaker than the Brooklyn effort, but had a great rocky, long-lasting head. Excellent stuff, highly recommended.

Boak

Categories
Beer styles Belgium

Alternative Belgian beer styles

A ludicrously strong pale and a ludicrously strong dark Belgian beer, taken in Ghent.

Style guidelines. Doncha just love them? As homebrewers, we can see that they have their uses sometimes, if you’re trying to recreate a specific beer, or describe what you’ve created in terms that everyone will understand.

But the categories that exist for Belgian beers are pretty daft. Objectively speaking, is there actually much difference between a “Belgian Golden Strong Ale”, and a “triple”, at least as defined here? Or even a Belgian Blond Ale? “Dubbels” and “tripels” are surely only relative terms, depending on which brewery makes them.

At least the idea of separate styles for “Trappist” beer and an “Abbey” beer seem to have fallen by the wayside, although you still get sweeping generalisations such as:

“Finish is variable depending on interpretation (authentic Trappist versions are moderately dry to dry, Abbey versions can be medium-dry to sweet)”

Personally, I think we should start again with Belgian beer styles. My simpler categorisation would go as follows:

(1) witbiers

(2) sour ones

(3) fruity ones

(4) boring pilsners

(5) Belgian pale ales (you know, the ones that aren’t ludicrously strong)

(6) ludicrously strong pale beers

(7) ludicrously strong dark ones

Have I missed anything?

Obviously, within these, there are some huge ranges of flavours, but that’s the case with the guidelines as they currently stand. My classification is also easier for the layman to understand.

Next week: having sorted beer styles, how to end world hunger.

Boak

Categories
Beer styles

Month of Mild — Ron nails it

Just a quick one to say that, if anyone has any confusion whatsoever about what mild is or where it came from, Ron Pattinson has posted a very clear summary which, controversially, he bases on historical evidence…

That post should be what comes at the top of the list when you Google “mild”, so everyone please link to it to make that happen!

Categories
Beer styles The Session

The Session: Christmas beer

session-logo-r-sm.jpgThis month’s session is hosted by the Barley Vine, and bloggers were asked in this post here to pick a seasonal beer or two.

We thought we’d bend the rules slightly and pontificate on Christmas / “winter” beers, and possibly get round to drinking one later. It’s not through lack of choice – London’s pubs are full of various seasonal offerings, and at the Pig’s Ear beer festival in Hackney I counted around 50 beers described as “Christmas Ales” from Britain and a dozen or so foreign offerings. It’s just that it’s an interesting topic in its own right: what, if anything, makes a Christmas beer?

In Britain, Christmas ales tend to be dark (but not as dark as porters) and spicy. This no doubt is related to our Christmas foods, which tend to be dark and spicy. The spices used tend to be cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg — all ingredients that shout “Christmas” at you. Unfortunately, these spices are quite difficult to get right. Too much and you end up with quite astringent flavours and “the wrong kind” of bitterness; too little and you may as well have not bothered — it’s just a gimmick to make the beer sound attractive. It’s quite rare to get a beer where you can taste the spice BUT without it being overpowering — like Dorset’s Advent-ageous which we tried at the Pig’s Ear festival.

Interestingly, Christmas ales in Britain are often not that strong. While some brewers see it as an excuse to whack up the malt and therefore the strength, most seem to stick to around the 5% mark. The evidence for this comes from the programme of the Pig’s Ear Beer festival, where there are plenty on offer at under 5%. Probably a good job given the amount we drink at Christmas in this country…

Belgian brewers are not ones for being constrained by styles or rules, and this applies to Christmas beers as well. Some are light, some are dark, but from the couple we’ve had, they don’t strike us as being more spicy than usual. They do tend to be stronger than usual though — e.g. Dolle Brouwers “Stille Nacht” at 12% (a nice drop, from what we remember, but that was a while back).

How about Christmas wheat beers? We’re not experts on the German brewing scene, but it was interesting to discover last time we were there that several breweries produce winter wheatbeers. We had an excellent beer called “Schneewaltzer” from the Herrnbrau brewery in Ingolstadt, described as a “Winterweisse”. It tasted incredibly Christmassy, even though we were drinking it in April… but then it’s not that surprising, given that one of the dominant flavours of many German wheatbeers is cloves, which we Brits always associate with Christmas.

belenos.jpgBut back to the Session topic! We tried a Christmas beer from Spain: Belenos de Navidá. I spotted it in El Corte Ingles, the legendary department store where you can get everything, including decent beer. It’s 9%, made in the Asturias region by “Exclusivas Tormas”, who seem to mostly be an importer / distributor. It says “we made this beer to celebrate Christmas 2006” in strange Castillian (archaic? regional? I wouldn’t dare say). I wonder whether that means they made it around Christmas 2006, or to sell over Christmas 2006? It’s best before November 2008, at any rate.

There’s no other information on the label. Is it bottle-conditioned, top or bottom fermented? The only source of further information on the internet is a web-forum about Spanish beer, from which I’ve been able to ascertain that:

  1. you can get it on tap in Oviedo (Asturias) but not many other places, though I don’t know if that would be the same as this “Christmas” beer;
  2. there’s rumours that it’s made in Belgium and only bottled in the Asturias, although these rumours are contested; and
  3. it reminds subscribers of this forum of a Belgium triple.

It pours a nice red colour and definitely has yeast suspended in it. It does indeed taste Belgium abbey / trappist through and through — good body, toffee-apple flavour, mild zestiness and spiciness. Extremely drinkable for its 9% and quite possibly the best beer in Spain.

Not that that’s saying much.

In conclusion, possibly the only thing that links Christmas beers is that they are an opportunity for brewers across the world to try something different, to experiment with their recipes and make something special.