Tag: Beer

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The best of British beer

Can I have your thoughts?
For reasons I’ll be able to reveal in a week or so, I need to choose one beer (bottled) to act as an ambassador for all that is great about the British brewing.
If we’re honest, that’s an impossible task, but nevertheless I need to do it – and make my decision in the next 24 hours. There’s so much diversity, so much quality. There are enduring classics, and exciting new tyros on the scene. But which one, above all others, symbolises why British beer is the best in the world? (This is not the place to argue whether or not British beer is the best on the world – for the purposes of this thing we have to assume that it is – for reasons I’ll explain later).
I already have a couple of ideas of my own, so I’m not just being lazy, but thought it would make an interesting debate!

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Beer, Politics and World Peace

Headline in today’s paper:

The story: a cop arrested a black professor and has been accused of acting in a racist manner. Obama was critical, saying the cop had “acted stupidly”, and this has led to a cranking up of racial tension.  Obama, recognising that this is turning into a bigger row and that his own comments have helped inflame the situation, now wants to defuse that tension.  And how does he do that?  He invites the cop in question, and the guy he arrested, for a beer at the White House.
Not a cup of tea.  Not a coffee.  Not a glass of wine.  A BEER.
This seems kind of an obvious post for me to make, given that I’ve written books on the subject, but in an age where beer in headlines usually only means binge drinking, violence and alcoholism, this is a story that needs to be screamed from the rooftops till every hysteric in the media finally gets it.
Why would Obama invite both men for “a beer here in the White House” rather than simply invite them to get round a table and discuss it without stipulating what refreshments were on offer?  We all know why.  But I’ll spell it out anyway.
Because beer is the most sociable drink in the world.
Because in every single culture where beer is drunk, to invite someone to share a beer with you is not just politeness; it symbolises an offer of friendship.  It’s a clear statement that when you meet, this will not be a formal negotiation or dressing down, but a more relaxed meeting of equals.  By inviting them for a beer, rather than a meeting, Obama is saying that he will not be their president when they meet – he will be one of three guys who need to clear the air.  He’s acknowledging that if they accept this particular invitation, these guys will be attending in a spirit of reconciliation.  Because only the biggest dick in the world would accept a beer from someone and then behave in an antagonistic manner as they sit drinking together.
The social codes around beer are universal, and as old as civilisation itself.  They remain largely unspoken, even though they are commonly understood.  But for years we’ve allowed beer’s unique magic to be eroded on all sides – it’s been demonised by neo-prohibitionists and health freaks, commoditised by retailers and by global brewers who describe themselves ‘not as brewers, but as FMCG marketing companies that just happen to sell beer’*, moronised by a small minority of boors, scorned by snobs who think you have to drink wine to be admired in shallow, materialistic, brand-obsessed society, and made impenetrable by another minority of deluded snobs who believe the best way to revive beer is to steal wine’s most pretentious clothes and mannerisms.
Now the most powerful man in the world has reminded us what it’s really all about.
I hope the guys accept Obama’s invitation.  I don’t give a damn whether he serves them Bud Light or Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA, Corona or Samuel Smith’s Oatmeal Stout.  In one sentence, he’s said everything I tried to say in Three Sheets to the Wind, and said it with a gazillion times more impact.
So raise a glass to Barack Obama – president, heir to Mr Miyagi, and now Global Beer Drinker of the Year 2009.
ps – Our old friends at the BBC – more enthusiastic than most about linking beer to anything negative – have managed to report the story without even mentioning Obama’s offer of beer – thereby missing the entire point of his invitation.
*Here I’m paraphrasing comments made by the president of AB-Inbev UK last year – a guy I actually used to work with.  I’d been meaning to invite him out to responsibly consume some FMCG units with me in a business-to-consumer interface location till I read this.

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Good beer ad

The Aussies seem to have the kind of fun with beer ads that we Brits used to have twenty years ago. VB have a heritage of 
making big budget commercials. I know they don’t always get 
people to drink more beer, but this one has some beautifully 
observed moments in it, is full of beery irreverence and makes 
the important point that beer unites us all in an entertaining 
way.

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Hurrah for David Mitchell!

Fans of Peep Show or, slightly less likely, of That Mitchell & Webb Look, will be delighted to know that David Mitchell (yeah, the nerdy one) is a real ale fan, and not afraid to admit it (even though he simply calls it bitter, he goes to some lengths to distinguish it from ‘creamy’ bitters).

“Nicer than lager, more democratic than wine, and not in the least bit creamy.”  You can’t argue with that, really.
He talks some sense, which makes up for the fact that it’s not exactly laugh-a-minute.  N0-one said he had to be funny all the time, and there’s a meerkat in it if you think there absolutely must be some kind of comedy element.
I found this on i-tunes – it’s an episode of David Mitchell’s soap box, a regular video podcast. This is the first time I’ve attempted to upload some video.  

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Drinking on Jimmy’s Farm


We’ve had quite a few conversations recently about how nice it would be if a few more celebrities threw their hats into the beer ring, so to speak, and we got a bit more championing of beer from people who people take notice of. 

So I was intrigued the other day when Mrs Brown came home from a meeting out in the sticks with three beers from Jimmy’s Farm.  
Jimmy Doherty is a mate of Jamie Oliver’s who rose to fame with a series in 2002 about setting up his specialist pig farm in Suffolk. The series led to an expansion of the farm and this led to a series about the perils of the expansion, which led to more attention and more expansion, and so on in a beautifully postmodern spiral of a farm-cum-media phenomenon-cum-theme park feeding itself and growing to become a big business today.
Whatever your thoughts on this as a business model, it’s great that someone with this kind of profile is weighing in as a small brewer.  So what about the beers?
There are three in the range, all bottle conditioned:
  • The Same Again – a 5.2% golden ale described as a ‘light refreshing hoppy brew’
  • Flying Pig – a 6% premium bitter that’s ‘packed with masses of cascade hops’
  • Large black pig – 6%, stout that has ‘more malt than you can shake a stick at’.

The branding is excellent – it follows the design for all Jimmy’s Farm produce (there’s lots of it) and there’s been some serious money spent here.  And it’s intriguing for a range of three beers all to be above 5%.  This is a very good-looking selection of ales, and I got quite excited about tasting them.  

So imagine my disappointment when they resolutely failed to deliver. The golden ale had the fresh, springy aroma you’d expect, and was then weirdly thin in the mouth – I’ve had bags more flavour in a 3.8% golden ale and was mystified as to how a 5.2% beer could taste of so little. 
I’ve no idea where the cascade hops were in the premium bitter. That’s my favourite hop, the reason for my whole IPA obsession, and it was present neither on the nose nor the palate. This was probably the best of the three but again, at 6% you were left wondering where the flavour was hiding.
The stout, like the golden ale, promised something on the nose that it could not deliver in the mouth – aromas of chocolate and coffee with nothing behind them.
Maybe the packaging and ABV levels raised my expectations of Brew Dog-style flavours.  And maybe the lack of them is deliberate – the provenance and packaging of these beers makes them a perfect vehicle to attract new people to beer, and maybe the thinking is that fuller flavours would scare novices off.  
But I don’t believe that’s true.  Wine drinkers who don’t like beer think of it as gassy lager or flat real ale.  They’re put off by extreme bitterness perhaps, but every time I try a novice on an aromatic golden ale or IPA, or a rich, chocolatey stout, they love it – wine drinkers are used to more concentrated flavours after all.  And anyway, higher ABVs on the label are more likely than flavour to deter people who think beer can only be 3-4%.
The beers are of course not brewed on the farm itself, but at the Red Rat Brewery, founded in 2007 in nearby Bury St Edmunds.
Curiously, while they’re for sale via the brewery’s website, and in Jimmy’s actual farm shop (where Mrs Brown found them) they’re only for sale on Jimmy’s farm website as part of a father’s day gift pack that includes a book and some sausages.
What a waste of a fantastic opportunity.

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The difference the Atlantic makes

Every British beer drinkers knows Foster’s – an ‘Aussie’ lager brewed under licence in the UK, the second-biggest beer brand in the country.  I like lager as much as ale and I try to keep an open mind, but I used some in a beer tasting recently (they wanted to learn about lager) and a can from the supermarket proved utterly undrinkable – not just in my opinion, but in that of the beer-tasting novices who had poured it from a can and really thought about the flavour for the first time in their lives.  Maybe that’s why Foster’s these days trumpets the virtues of ‘extra-cold’ so loudly in their ads.
Not a lot of Brits know that Foster’s lager is also available in the US.  And today, when I was looking at funnies on The Onion, I was held up by a banner ad for their latest product launch:


Yes, Foster’s has launched an ALE.  At least, it claims to be an ale.  It has caramel colouring added, and may be a lager in disguise, but the website makes a great deal of how it tastes different from the lager: caramel and fruit aromas versus ‘light malt aroma’, and a ‘smooth caramel finish’ rather than a ‘light hop finish’.  More interestingly, the beer aficionados at beeradvocate say on the whole that it tastes pretty decent.  I’m sure it will never give the likes of Stone or Dogfish Head sleepless nights, they’ve seemingly launched a perfectly drinkable beer.

It makes me want to cry, really it does.  What does it say about this country and its attitude to beer that this kind of launch would be unthinkable here?  Crucially, Foster’s in the UK is brewed and marketed by S&N Heineken, whereas it’s a Miller brand in the US.  But Miller are here too, doing a very good job of Peroni and Pilsner Urquell, and they show not the slightest intention of going anywhere near ale.
This is not a CAMRA rant; it’s a flavour rant, the latest example of how beer is summarily excluded by drinkers, major corporate brewers and food and drink writers alike from the revolution that’s happening on the British palate.  Every year it feels like we make little bits of progress, then something like this makes you see how far there is to go.  

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Is it alright to like Morrissey Fox?

Saviours of the ale industry?  Or a pair of twats?  As they say on reality TV, YOU decide...

One of the most controversial beer stories this year is the entry of man behaving badly Neil Morrissey into the brewing industry, with his mate Richard Fox.  They took over a pub, Ye Olde Punch Bowl at Marton cum Grafton in Yorkshire, built a microbrewery in the back garden, started turning out a golden ale that was very quickly listed nationwide in Tesco, and got the whole thing made into a TV show, Neil Morrissey’s Risky Business, which ran for three weeks on Channel 4.   
The whole saga sent the beer world into a bit of a tizz, and we can summarise the debate as follows.  On the one hand, the brewing industry is gasping for breath and celebrity involvement is the oxygen of our times.  It can only be a good thing.  They’re brewing real ale rather than lager – nothing wrong with lager of course, but ale needs publicity to help challenge outdated perceptions of it.  And in the TV series, they managed to get beer on the telly for the first time since Michael Jackson’s Beer Hunter, seventeen years ago.
So what’s the problem?  Well, they’re interlopers.  They swan in from nowhere, with no brewing background, and suddenly it’s their beer in Tesco and them on the telly.  That’s just not fair.  Brewers are jealous of the success of the beer, and people like me are jealous because it should be us on the telly because we’ve been trying for years and we’ve all put so much more work in.  They’re famous, we’re jealous and bitter.  
And the telly programme itself – was it a good advertisement for beer?  Reviews were mixed, and many industry grumblers felt it was too laddish.  Too much swearing.  As we know, in some corners of the industry these are terrible crimes.
I must confess I’m ambivalent myself.  I’ve known Richard Fox for a few years and he’s a really nice bloke.  He’s a great ambassador for beer, particularly at live events where he evangelises beer and food matching.  But I’ve had about five or six serious attempts at getting my books turned into TV series and never succeeded.  They have a book tie-in which has an endorsement on the front from Richard Hammond – why can’t I have a quote from Richard Hammond?  And the book shamelessly and without credit rips off an idea from Man Walks into a Pub.  
So I’m a bit resentful and jealous, at the same time as feeling sneery and critical of people in the brewing industry who feel the same way.  To resolve my feelings one way or the other, I went along a few weeks ago to the official trade launch of Morrissey Fox, with the intention of letting the beer itself do the talking.
My quest for objectivity ran into trouble straight away, because the two stars were pouring the beer themselves, working the bar like pros.  Richard greeted me warmly and immediately introduced me TV’s Neil Morrissey.  I was a big fan of Men Behaving Badly in its day, but I wasn’t star-struck because Neil is a genuinely warm and nice bloke who genuinely makes you feel like a mate.  He may have been laying it on a bit thick when he said he was star-struck at meeting me!  Turns out he’s a big fan of Man Walks into a Pub, having read it when Hugo Speer out of The Full Monty gave him a copy and said he had to read it.
Having seen The Full Monty I can, unfortunately, only ever picture Hugo Speer in a red leather thong.  I imagined him wearing this, all oiled-up, while handing over a fake-tan-stained copy of my first book to the man who does the voice of Bob the Builder.  It was a moment I could never have imagined at the start of my writing career.
Anyway, I tried my best to put this out of my head, and moved on to the beers. 
The blonde ale is a blonde ale.  I like blonde ales a lot and I like the way they bring people into the ale category for the first time.  Morrissey Fox blonde ale was not at all bad and it was not the best I’ve tasted.  There’s not much more I can say about it, but that shouldn’t be seen as a criticism.
The best bitter was a different story.  This was a very fine beer indeed: chocolatey brown with a nice tight head, it was nutty and toffeeish and caramelly and very, very smooth, complex but insanely drinkable.  I loved it.
Finally there was a Christmas ale, full of spicy and fruity flavours.  It felt a bit obvious – too much of a collection of elements rather than a blended whole.  But not unpleasant.  
So they may be spawny gets who have more attention than they deserve.  Or they may be very talented brewers who simply have more drive and nous than other brewers and beery media wannabes.  Whatever, they are really, really nice blokes who genuinely love beer, and they’ve made two not-bad beers and one fantastic beer.  If you just take that last sentence and forget the controversy and jealousy over the media circus, that’s good enough for me.

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Lovely Pub Hosts Festival of Lovely Beer This Weekend

The White Horse in Parson’s Green has long been famous as THE Mecca for the luvvies of the beer world, if that’s not too bizarre a concept (the idea of there being luvvies of the beer world, rather than them having a Mecca).  

There was a general feeling when landlord Mark Dorber left after 25 years that it wasn’t going to be as good as it used to be.  And while Mark is an irreplaceable character (currently to be found being highly and very entertainingly opinionated at his new gaff in Walberswick), current manager Dan Fox, ably assisted by Ben Lockwood (a man whose unimpeachable and unquestionable passion for Barnsley FC mirrors my own) have ensured a seamless continuation of high standards for which they deserve recognition and acclaim.
A perfect example of this is this weekend, the White Horse’s 26th Old Ales Festival.  From beer o’clock on Friday 28th November to I-should-remember-I-need-to-be-at-work-tomorrow on Sunday 30th, the pub will be showcasing at least fifty examples of historic styles like barley wine, old ale, mild, porter, stout and strong ale.  It’s cold.  It’s raining.  It’s the credit crunch.  You don’t need any more reasons than that.  But there are many more – including exclusive CASK beers from Meantime, and rare beers from North America.
See you there.

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Put a little Berghaus in your soul

It was wet and cold in the middle of July, when the rest of the country seems to have had a lovely weekend, but the Latitude Festival, in a gorgeous, leafy park with oak trees centuries-old and a silvery lake, was the perfect end to two weeks of birthday celebrations. I think the sheep, dyed pink, and the punts on the aforementioned lake, were there just for the weekend, but apparently the rest of it is there all the time.

Since turning forty I’m convinced that my knees are going and I’ve started getting heartburn and my back aches, and I really like sitting down much, much more than I used to, but for four days it was splendid to meet friends I don’t see often enough and behave like a bunch of teenage lads. The ailments, if I’m honest, are probably due to too much beer for too long.

Latitude is the perfect destination for anyone who thinks Glastonbury has lost its spirit. Great bands and brilliant comedy were punctuated by strolls to the literature and poetry tents. You could even go and see Sadlers Wells doing a bit of ballet if the mood took you (it didn’t take me).

One of the nicest surprises was at the drinks tent. Alongside Tuborg lager (hey, it’s better than Glasto’s Budweiser) and Aspall’s cider were two ales I’d never heard of before, and both were mighty fine.

It turns out that Hektor’s Brewery is actually on site, in Henham Park, the location of the festival. They supplied two beers: Pure, a clean 3.8% golden ale with a lovely crisp, citrussy hop finish, and Scarecrow, a darker, richer beer at 5%, full-bodied and maltier but still with a delightful hop edge to it that suggests American hops have been involved somewhere along the line, though their website says it’s just full of English hops.

It was with mixed feelings that I took the news that every one of the festival’s five bars had run out of Scarecrow by Saturday afternoon – only half way through the festival. No more lovely 5% beer for me, but you’ve got a love that kind of emphatic endorsement from the youngest festival crowd I’ve ever seen. Up to that point, each time I was at the bar every single order included at least one pint of it, among the ciders and the lagers. I’ve no idea what the product mix was, but ale must have had a higher share than it enjoys in most of the high street pubs in whihc these guys usually drink.

By Sunday it was getting difficult to find Pure as well – they had some left at two of the bars buy Sunday evening. My mates started off drinking cider. After they tried the Pure, they never went back.
A couple of damn fine beers, enjoyed so much more outside, in front of the best bands currently strutting their stuff.

Thanks Latitude – see you next year.

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