Tag: Brew Dog

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Man V #BrewBurger

Burger condiments

The idea, apparently, was “to get as much beer in a burger as we possibly could.”


“Ah, well, I like to chuck a bottle of beer into my burger mix,” I smile.
Tom from Honest Burger looks at me oddly. “No, we don’t actually put it in the burger itself. The beef is the main ingredient. It has to shine. We don’t want to smother it.”
Oh. This is more complicated than I thought.

Fair enough though: the meat for the burger is 35-day dry-aged beef sourced from The Ginger Pig, possibly the most adored meat supplier to the self-conscious London foodie. The only thing added to the meat itself is a light seasoning. My own preferred way of making burgers – buy whatever mince they have in Sainsburys round the corner, squidge it all up with salt, pepper, onion, beer, grain mustard and a bit of coriander or parlsey before chucking it on the barbie – suddenly seems crude and naive. 
This branch of Honest Burger, yet another new burger chain, is in King’s Cross, and has been open about six weeks. “Oh, you’re the beer blogger,” says the person on the door when I give my name. I’m shown downstairs where a few people from BrewDog welcome me and get me a beer, and I slide into a booth constructed from bare wooden planks. 
London has been deluged by new burger ‘concepts’ over the last couple of years, and my ‘hipster twat’ alarm is on a hair trigger, ready to go off. 
The theory is sound: southern US cuisine is a perfect foil for craft beer, two complementary flavour suites just waiting to be fit together.
But Britain has a habit of appropriating brilliant concepts and executing them in a humdrum way. Last autumn I went to a ‘street food festival’ in Dalston. We paid eight quid to get in (which included a free pint of Meantime beer, but not the Meantime beer I wanted, according to the incredibly bad-tempered servers) then queued for 25 minutes to spend another £9 on a deeply average burger which we ate from wobbly paper plates on creaky benches in a disused factory warmed by open braziers. I fancied that two years previously, tramps had sat in this same spot eating very similar food in identical circumstances. All evening, this was my earworm:

A couple of months earlier, I’d joined Evan Rail, an American beer writer now living in Prague, who had been dispatched to London by the New York Times to review another trendy London burger joint. He’s much kinder in the article he wrote than he was on the night, when he said, “Well… it’s a burger isn’t it?”
So tonight, I’m wary, ready for another ‘concept’ that promises everything and delivers only salt, fat and deflated guilt. I’m here for the #BrewBurger, a collaboration with BrewDog that allegedly contains so much beer you need to be ID’d as over 18 before you’re allowed to eat it. I’m sceptical about this, as most of the alcohol surely burns off. I’m doubly sceptical when introduced to Tom and his business partner. They barely look old enough to get served in a pub themselves, let alone run one of London’s most talked about new burger chains. Exactly half an hour after the appointed start time, the room fills instantly with fresh-faced hipsters and the burgers start coming out.
So if there’s no beer in the burger itself, where does all the booze go? Well, the beef dripping in which the onions are cooked has been slathered with Punk IPA. The bacon has been marinated in 5AM Saint and brown sugar. And the barbecue sauce has been infused with the mighty Arran whisky barrel aged Paradox.  
With a billing like that, I decide to take a little more care with my burger than I normally would. 
Firstly, the appearance: the style of presentation could be summed up as ‘Fuck you, Masterchef.’ This is dirty and, yes, honest food. 
Detox buster.

It smells wonderful, complete in a way I’ve never thought about in relation to a burger before. It’s all about balance, with sweet and sour, umame and caramel, strong yet surprisingly graceful.

The bacon on its own is so phenomenal you could be forgiven for forgetting the burger and asking for a bacon buttie instead. If it were possible for a flavour to transport you to a high ridge at a flaming Montana sunset to watch cowboys herd steers across the prairie, only you’re sitting on the balcony of a Parisian Michelin starred restaurant at the top of that ridge, then this bacon would do it.

Onto the main event, and the burger is simply the best one I can remember tasting. You can taste the beef, and I realise how rarely beef tastes of beef, and that good beef tastes of a happy life.

When I get to the middle of the burger, all these elements finally come together – the onions and the bacon and the barbecue sauce – and suddenly the hype doesn’t sound like hype any more. There’s definitely booze here, spiritous and risky. Am I just imagining I can taste the barrel ageing of the Paradox through all those layers of barbecue sauce in the middle of everything else that’s going on? I’m not sure.

If that’s not enough alcoholic complexity, the burger has been paired with a fourth BrewDog beer, the newly released Bourbon Baby. It’s been aged in Bourbon barrels – something that conventional craft brewing wisdom says only works for strong, dark porters and stouts, not a 5.8%ABV Scotch ale like this.

I tried this beer fresh off the bottling line just yesterday, 500 miles north of here in BrewDog’s new brewery. Those bottles were then couriered down here and crash-chilled. This beer cannot possibly be on its best form.

And initially, the beer is less than the sum of its parts. It’s doing what a beer does, being all cold and refreshing and helping out with a bit of palate cleansing action. Despite the temperature there’s a big hit of chocolate and bourbon, but it becomes less interesting in the face of the onslaught of flavour the #BrewBurger is packing. And then, the retronasal action kicks in. Despite the trauma it’s endured over the last day or so, the beer comes out punching, sneaks around the back of the palate and pulls in that boozy spiritousness, completing a whole chain of flavour elements and making them sing harmonies. Bourbon Baby is a very good beer, even this cold, even this agitated, even up against this burger. And there you are: dirty food and dirty beer together playing magic on your palate like an idiot savant virtuoso pianist made out of chopped beef and malted barley. Yet another BrewDog idea that sounds like it might be trying a bit too hard on paper, but makes perfect, stunning sense when delivered.

Last time I ate at McDonalds – which was more recently than I care to admit – I remember using the last of the fries to scrape up the dregs of salt and sauce. Even as the compacted aggregate of the food slumped heavily in my stomach, my palate was unsatisfied, overstimulated and seeking closure. With #BrewBurger the fries, nice as they are, are superfluous. The burger and beer together a complete meal without anything else, battering your palate into delighted submission.

I always feel guilty about eating burgers. They are not good for you. This meal is not a healthy meal, and doesn’t pretend to be. I resolve that from now on a burger has to be this good for it to be worth the damage.

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Brewers Dominate BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming Awards

I wrote a few years ago that Thornbridge and BrewDog were like the Beatles and the Stones: rivals, both revolutionary, one more user friendly and respectable, the other edgier and more dangerous, but each profoundly changing the medium they work in.

Now, I’ve had to update my analogy by a few decades. Because over the next few weeks I am officiating in a rivalry that more resembles this:
In January, I appealed for drinks producers of all kinds to put themselves forward for the BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming Awards. I am judging the category of Best Drinks Producer for the second time, along with Victoria Moore, the wine writer for the Daily Telegraph.
Clearly our appeal struck a chord. The total number of entries doubled to almost 200. Of that total, 113 were either brewers or cider makers. I especially enjoyed reading some of the nominations for micro-distillers and people making interesting, natural, adult-oriented soft drinks. But as Victoria and I hacked our way down to a long shortlist, almost half the names on it were brewers. Every single brewery that I am excited about in Britain today either put themselves forward or was nominated by a fan.
We had to take our longlist of eight or nine contenders to a meeting with the judges from all the other categories. Each shortlist, including categories like Best Farmer, Best Food Market and Best Takeaway Food, has to be approved by the entire judging panel.
Best Drinks Producer was kept until last, because we had samples from many of our shortlisted entrants to taste. After tasting our top three, people asked to taste some of the other beers too, just to make sure we’d chosen well. Things got quite raucous. A couple of our decisions were overturned, and finally it went to a vote, the result being that among three finalists, we have two breweries and a winemaker:
UK’S BEST DRINKS PRODUCER, FINALISTS
Someone across the table captured my reaction to this:

Shortlist agreed.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted that two of our three finalists are brewers. It reflects the momentum and creativity in brewing today. And I love both brewers, having known each pretty much since they started. But that’s the problem. I might have to choose between them.

Of course the wine maker might impress us more – I’ve been keen to find out more about the revolution that’s happening in British sparkling wine. It’s a three-way fight.

But within that three-way, there’s an epic struggle brewing for the craft beer crown. BrewDog’s Martin Dickie began his brewing career at Thornbridge. Along with Stefano Cossi he created Jaipur, the beer that has won more prizes in British brewing competitions than any other in the last ten years. He began his experiments with wood ageing beer with Thornbridge’s St Petersburg. And two years later he quit to go home and found BrewDog with his childhood friend James Watt.

Now both breweries are guiding lights of the UK craft beer movement. Both have achieved huge levels of success, and added chains of pubs or bars to their businesses that set superlative standards for serving beer as well as brewing it. Each brand is so strong it attracts keen, bright beer lovers who want to work with them and be part of the story. Both have taken the US craft beer influence and turned it on its head, exporting their beers back out round the world. Countless people have been inspired by them to set up breweries of their own.

So which is best?

There’s only one way to find out… or maybe not.

We visited BrewDog last Monday, going around the new brewery, tasting the latest beer, Bourbon Baby, straight from the bottling line, going through the core range and finishing with another beer, as yet unnamed, drawn from a red wine barrel where it has another three months to go before bottling. At one point Victoria, who doesn’t really drink beer, whispered “I think I’ve been converted to beer.”

This coming Monday we visit Thornbridge. Every time I go there, there are new surprises, and they’ve promised us plenty more this time.

And then, in a couple of weeks, we head to Kent to visit Gusborne, who have been making sparkling wine since 2006 and are regularly cited as one of the most exciting wine makers in the country.

We have a crew with us capturing the whole thing, ready for it to be turned into at least one, and possibly two, editions of the BBC Radio 4 Food Programme. I’ll post details of when you can catch up on our exploits. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in Bristol on May 1st.

In the meantime, who do you think you should win? Who should be celebrated as not just the best brewer (or winemaker), but the best producer of any drink in Britain? 

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The Pub Trade in 2013

Just before Christmas I was asked by leading pub trade mag The Publican’s Morning Advertiser to give some predictions for what will happen in the UK pub trade in 2013.  They had to edit for space, and killed one or two jokes in the process, so here is the full thing.
Apologies if it’s a bit cliquey for those not working in the UK pub trade – I didn’t have time to do proper predictions here.  Normal blogging will resume just as soon as I’ve finished writing my next book, World’s Best Cider, in about a month’s time.
January 
A beer blogger from Wrexham works out a definition of ‘craft beer’ that nobody has a problem with. She is subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
February 
The rate of pub closures rises.  Everyone in the industry panics.
March 
A saboteur switches George Osborne’s weak Ovaltine for Timothy Taylor Landlord, and the chancellor unexpectedly tastes beer for the very first time.  He uses his budget statement to issue a heartfelt apology to the nation’s brewers and immediately freezes beer duty.
April 
The negativity on the Publican’s Morning Advertiser’s online forums reaches such an intensity that it creates a black hole just outside Crawley.  Professor Brian Cox is called.
May 
Brew Dog releases a 4.1% ABV premium bitter brewed with moderate amounts of Fuggles and Goldings hops. Beer bloggers declare this to be a stroke of subversive genius. The Portman Group slams it as stupid and irresponsible.
June
The royal baby is born.  Various brewers create commemorative ales. The Daily Mail accuses brewing industry of trying to give booze to babies.
July 
The Crawley Black Hole disappears. The nation celebrates. Brian Cox reveals he did it by showing cute pictures of puppies to PMA forum contributors until they cheered up a bit. And points out that this took THREE. FUCKING. MONTHS.
August
Brew Dog’s 4.1% bitter wins Champion Beer of Britain.  Beer bloggers declare this to be a stroke of subversive genius. The Portman Group slams it as stupid and irresponsible.
September
The rate of pub closures falls.  No one says anything about it.
October 
The editor of Observer Food Monthly commissions the first article about beer in the magazine’s thirteen-year history.

Just kidding.

November 
Shortly after releasing his blockbusting autobiography in time for the Christmas rush, Greg Mulholland MP flies to the jungle to appear on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here.  And obviously wins it.  Because he’s AMAZING.
December
Wells & Young’s revives Young’s Christmas Pudding Ale (come on, guys, take a hint).
See you soon.

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Someone (formerly?) at Diageo is probably having trouble sitting down at the moment…

It’s the drinks PR omnishambles that makes George Osborne look like a competent chancellor.

Brew Dog have long been known for their spectacular PR stunts, but the storm that broke on Twitter today seemed breathtaking even by their standards.

In this sensational statement, Brew Dog claimed that at the Scottish BII Awards last weekend, Brew Dog were voted clear winners of the Bar Operator of the Year Award.  They knew this because the judges were sitting at their table and told them so.  So everyone was surprised when another company’s name was read out, with judges saying, ‘That’s not possible.’

The plot thickened when the ‘winners’ took the stage and refused to accept the trophy because it had Brew Dog’s name engraved on it!

Later, according to Brew Dog, the BII phoned and said this had happened because Diageo, the main sponsors of the award, had threatened BII officials, warning them that any future sponsorships would be cancelled if the award was presented to Brew Dog.

Another stunt?

Well… no.  Brew Dog are famous for stunts, but this would be suicide if it were not true.  And this was all about the bars – say what you like about the sensationalism of the head honchos, love or hate the brand, but as I’ve said repeatedly, the bars are about nothing but genuine passion and hard work.  Could this really be spin and exaggeration?

No, it couldn’t.

I asked Diageo for a statement, and here it is:

“There was a serious misjudgement by Diageo staff at the awards dinner on Sunday evening in relation to the Bar Operator of the Year Award, which does not reflect in anyway Diageo’s corporate values and behaviour.

“We would like to apologise unreservedly to BrewDog and to the British Institute of Innkeeping for this error of judgement and we will be contacting both organisations imminently to express our regret for this unfortunate incident.”
I’ve got more to say about the increasingly shameless bullying and anticompetitive tactics employed by some (but not all) big brewers, but this one really takes the biscuit.  Diageo, having been caught red handed, had no option but to blame it on a rogue element, and we must take them at their word.  But does this reveal something deeper about the attitudes of some global brewing corporations?

Brew Dog’s facility with social media means that the hashtag, #andthewinnerisnot, was trending globally by early afternoon.  Would Diageo have rushed out this grovelling apology before the advent of social media?  I’m not sure they would.  We may well look back on this as the start of the tables turning in how different types of brands manage their media.  We live in a very transparent and interconnected world these days – interesting times, as the Chinese would say…

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Brew Dog London opens!

Blimey – a look at my Wikio ranking (if anyone still looks at Wikio rankings) shows what happens when you don’t blog for six weeks…

In case you’ve not been following, the reason I seem to have given up blogging is that I have to focus on my new book.  It’s going well: I’ve written about 45,000 words (about 140 pages) so far, but with a mid-January deadline I won’t be having much of a Christmas, and I won’t be blogging too often before it’s finished.

But I just wanted to do a quick post because I went to the journalist’s launch of Brew Dog’s new London bar last night in Camden, North London.

And it’s really just to reiterate what I said when I visited their Edinburgh bar in the summer, and express my delight that they’ve opened one a bit closer to my house.

No brewer divides opinion and stirs up as much controversy as Brew Dog.  And they do that deliberately.  Sometimes I write to slag off their childish pranks, sometimes to praise them.  About two years ago half the blogosphere was devoted to discussion of their antics (oh, and their beers) and I’ve read some people say they gave up reading blogs because they were sick of reading about Brew Dog.

But the company is four years old now and maturing rather nicely.  And the bars – which are starting to spread to many major UK cities – really are excellent.

Purists will be upset that they don’t do any cask beers at all, but this would be a good experiment: if you’re prepared to be open-minded, it’s worth going along and challenging the keg offering to deliver.  I think there’s something there for everyone.  Last night I was talking to someone who writes for London Drinker, CAMRA London’s magazine, and we were disagreeing about keg beer – he was saying he could still taste the gas in the beers he was drinking and that he didn’t like that and wished they were available on cask.  But later, he tried some of the stronger beers and came back to tell me they were excellent.

So there’s a great range on offer.  And the other thing I love about Brew Dog bars is that when I walk in, and I feel a little bit old and that the bar might be too cool for school, this is dispelled as soon as I actually get to the bar.  Brew Dog bars could so easily be too cool for school, and they’re not.  They’re unpretentious and run by people with a genuine passion for beer, a passion they want to spread.

Finally, I went here directly from a new ‘bar and kitchen’ (ugh!) run by a reasonably large pub operator, that’s moving with the times by stocking an interesting range of craft beers that will be familiar to geeks but you really don’t see in many places at all.  That’s to be welcomed.  But £4.25 for a pint of cask Meantime Pale Ale (4.2% ABV), brewed less then ten miles away, was taking the fucking piss.  By contrast, the prices at Brew Dog were perfectly reasonable for what you were getting.

Gotta leave it there – got to go and write about Princess Margaret and the Bishop of Southwark having a lock in.

But if you’re in London, go to Brew Dog Camden.  And of you’re not, don’t worry – a Brew Dog bar will probably be opening a bit closer to you sooner than you think.

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Perfect Pub Service – how to charm and delight your customers in one easy move

While in Edinburgh last month filming the latest video blog, I made time to visit the newly opened Brew Dog Bar in the city.  We didn’t feature it in the Vlog because it doesn’t serve any cask beer, and that particular Vlog is about cask beer.  But as we were filming on my bleedin’ birthday, once we’d finished I hooked up with my old mates Allan and McAlastair and we hit the town.

We ended up here:

I don’t think it’s ever this quiet

after 11pm, on a Tuesday night, and the place was buzzing, mainly with young, studenty people who seemed more passionate and knowledgable about beer than you might expect.

Brew Dog make headlines, and increasingly piss people off (or simply bore them) the way some people pick their nose.  They just can’t help it.  Like Aesop’s scorpion who stung the frog carrying it across the river, it’s in their nature.  And perhaps the greatest shame about this is that it hides some of the true facts of their operation behind a screen of punk attitude.  Because much of what they do is really very good indeed.

The service in Brew Dog Edinburgh was incredible.  In parts, it was the best service I’ve ever seen in a pub or bar.

The main element of this is that if anyone looked hesitant or unsure, or simply paused a beat too long at the bar, the member of staff serving them would pour a small taster into a shot glass and offer it to them.  They might ask what kind of beer people like, or they might say, “This is my favourite beer, it’s amazing, you’ve got to try it.” Then another member of staff would say, “No, try this one, this is my favourite beer ever and they say they’re not going to brew it again. I’m trying to make it sell really quickly so they realise they have to.”

The bar was covered in sample glasses.  As soon as one person swept them up, they’d start dropping on the bar again as the relentless tide of tasters kept coming. And the money flowed over the bar in the opposite direction.

We’ve currently putting together the fifth Cask Report.  This year, we’ll be recommending large programmes of samples and pro-active offering of tasters as the main strategy to overcome various barriers to drinking cask ale.  The thing is, we’ve recommended it every year, and it hasn’t happened yet, even though every time we do research asking people why they don’t drink real ale, they tell us this would make them drink more.  I’ve mentioned it before on here too.  I don’t understand why more pubs don’t do it more often.

Now here’s a bar that does it in spades, does it brilliantly – and is rammed every night of the week with people paying premium prices for interesting beers.

Brew Dog Edinburgh’s bar staff are young, hip and good-looking – as you’d expect from a company so concerned about its image.  I was quite worried they were going to be a bit too cool for school – not the case. They also happen to be friendly, enthusiastic, and visibly knowledgeable and passionate about beer.

Forget the CAMRA spats, the Portman groups spats, the SIBA spats, the stupidly strong beers and the roadkill.  Brew Dog should be getting headlines as a case study in how to hire, train and motivate brilliant bar staff, brilliant ambassadors for beer.

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Brew Dog hires rank amateurs to create its latest beer

Entering the revolutionary spirit

Well, it was an offer we couldn’t refuse.  Especially when, with their trade mark hyperbole, Brew Dog publicly referred to us as ‘the rock stars of the beer blogging world’*.

On 27th January, massively and pathetically hungover after hosting a beer dinner at Musa Aberdeen, Mark Dredge, Zak Avery and me were whisked up to Fraserburgh to brew a beer we had designed.  (When I say ‘we’, I mean mainly Zak and Mark thought about it and designed it and I said ‘yes’.)

We went into the hops store and chose the hops.  We tipped the frankly worrying amount of malt into the mash tun, which we filled almost to the top, and we made Young Dredge stand on top of a ladder and do a continuous addition of hops throughout the boil.  I’ve no idea how long this took him, because I bailed out early and was on my way home by then (to be fair, my flight was booked weeks before and brewing somehow took a lot longer – or started a lot later – than we had thought.)

The result is a 7.5% ‘Imperious Pilsner’.  Zak wrote some label copy that goes on about killing your ideals and worshipping your heroes and stuff, which is really good and adorns the bottle label.  But basically it’s doing to lager what new wave brewers such as Brew Dog have done to pale ales, porters and stouts.  (I’m not saying we’re the first – just that that’s what we did.)  It features an insane amount of Saaz hops, and was lagered for a full six weeks before being dry-hopped with yet more Saaz.

If we were music writers being offered the chance to go and make a record with a popular and influential band, the result would be horrible beyond belief.  One of the nice things about the brewing world is that an idea like this can actually work out quite well.

The result of our collaboration is a bitter, hoppy character that’s refreshingly different from the prevailing, ubiquitous Citra-sy trend.  It’s more elegant, more structured, more noble – a classy beer, a very firm, gentlemanly shake of the hand rather than a slap around the face.

We’re giving Avery Brown Dredge a triple-headed launch this Thursday, 31st March, at three separate locations.  Zak will be at the North Bar in Leeds,  I’ll be at the Jolly Butchers, London N16, and Mark will be at the Rake, London SE1, at 7.30pm.  We’ll probably link up with something like a #ABD hash tag on Twitter and try to do some Live Aid style three headed technology shenanigans.

Brew Dog MD James Watt will be joining me at JBs, and various other Brew Dog honchos will be at the other locations.  These will be the only three outlets in the UK with the beer on draught, with just one keg each, so get there fast.  I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other Brew Dog treats turning up as well…

Post launch, the beer will be available only from the Brew Dog online shop.  We hope you enjoy it!

*Being called rock stars, we had to decide which ones we were.  Well, I did.  Mark is obviously one of McFly.  Zak is Flea out of Red Hot Chilli Peppers (I did not see his sock).  And I’ hoping to be Hooky out of New Order, but am probably Gary Barlow.

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The Beatles and the Stones

Maybe it’s because they share the same combination of artistry and sociability, maybe it’s because both have the power to intoxicate, or maybe it’s just that one was my passion and obsession before the other came along. But I can’t help seeing constant parallels between the world of brewing and the world of pop and rock music. When I first realized that I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to write about music, and maybe I’m just venting some of that frustrated desire.
I’m not going to describe brewing as the new rock and roll because that would be unforgivable, but the excitement of discovering a new beer, the sense of an underground, an alternative to the mainstream, the hype and buzz that occasionally surround an ‘important’ new release… they’re very similar. If you took away the music analogy and my other favourite – seeing the brewing industry in terms of Monty Python films – I’d struggle to describe how I feel about beer and brewing.With that in mind, I was struck recently by the strongest parallel to date. And it’s this: Thornbridge and Brew Dog are the Beatles and the Stones.In the early sixties, the Beatles and the Stones tore up the blueprint of popular music and redefined it forever. They took established forms – rock and roll, rhythm and blues – and while they showed immense respect for these traditions, they twisted them into brand new shapes.The influence of both is inarguable and still felt today.But the two bands were quite different in the way they came across, and people talked about which they preferred.
Thornbridge Hall just to of shot to the left.

While both were experimental and incredibly popular, the Beatles were seen as clean-cut, nice, cheeky boys who you could take home to meet your mum if you snagged one of them. They rocked the establishment, but there was something wholesome about them. They proved accessible and likeable as well as pioneering and brave.

You can’t go out in Fraserburgh dressed like that, you dangerous young punks!

The Stones on the other hand were more dangerous, more edgy, with more attitude. “Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?” ran the infamous headline. While both bands indulged in mind-altering substances, it was the Stones who were seen as the druggy, edgy band, the real rock and rollers, the Rolls Royce in the swimming pool and the TV out the hotel window.

You could obviously appreciate both, but you probably had a definite preference for one over the other. Thornbridge and Brew Dog are symbiotically linked in my mind because when I first met Thornbridge, Martin Dickie was joint brewer there with Stefano Cossi. Since they went their separate ways they’ve remained on good terms (when I brewed at Thornbridge, the screensaver on the brewery laptop was a big photo of Martin). They’ve developed very similar beers – Martin first explored the wood aging that would lead him to Paradox and beyond with Thornbridge’s wonderful St Petersburg. And Jaipur and Punk IPA are clearly related. A couple of weeks ago, each brewery sent me some beer to try. Brew Dog sent a bottle of Sink the Bismarck! And Thornbridge delivered a few bottles of Jaipur that’s been centrifuged rather than pasteurized and/or cold filtered. This weekend, I tried them both. Both IPAs, both from new wave rock and roll brewers. Jaipur the latest Beatles remix, Sink! the challenging new release from Their Satantic Majesties. I’m actually going to have to discuss the beers in a separate blog post now because there is so much to say about Sink! in particular, so I’ll let this observation – originally intended as an intro to a blog about beer tastings – stand on its own. Please let’s not get into which one of the Bakewell lot is Ringo, and whether James Watt is more Mick Jagger or Andrew Loog Oldham – I don’t want to get down to the personal level (though I’ll give you Martin Dickie as Keith Richards – there’s even a passing physical resemblance to the young Keef). But if the analogy is true, can we extend it? Who is the brewing world’s Simply Red, its Joy Division or Black Lace?

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Brew Dog creates world’s strongest beer – can we talk about the beer?

Slag ’em or praise ’em, you just can’t stop talking about ’em.

But it’s nice to be able to talk about Brew Dog for the right reasons again. Today, the brewery announces the launch of Tactical Nuclear Penguin – at 32%, the strongest beer on the planet, beating previous record holder Sam Adams Utopias by 7%.
The boys – slightly chastened by the whole Portman farrago a few weeks ago – assure me that this launch is all about the beer. Doubtless there will be headlines about how irresponsible it is to brew a beer at this strength, and the whole presentation of the launch will be edgy and controversial (without explicitly baiting the Portman Group, thankfully)because that’s who they are – that is the Brew Dog brand.
But the press release proves Brew Dog have learned that you can do edgy and at the same time still promote a responsible drinking message. I love this:
Beer has a terrible reputation in Britain, it’s ignorant to assume that a beer can’t be enjoyed responsibly like a nice dram or a glass of fine wine. A beer like Tactical Nuclear Penguin should be enjoyed in spirit sized measures. It pairs fantastically with vanilla bean white chocolate it really brings out the complexity of the beer and complements the powerful, smoky and cocoa flavours.
A warning on the label states: This is an extremely strong beer, it should be enjoyed in small servings and with an air of aristocratic nonchalance. In exactly the same manner that you would enjoy a fine whisky, a Frank Zappa album or a visit from a friendly yet anxious ghost.
So let’s talk about the beer. TNP is an Imperial Stout that has been matured in wooden casks for eighteen months. It has then been frozen to minus twenty degrees at the local ice cream factory in Fraserburgh (not much demand for ice cream up there I’d have thought, but I guess the ambient temperature makes it much easier to produce). By freezing the beer to concentrate it this way, they get the alcoholic strength.
This could make for an incredibly harsh and fiery taste. I’ve yet to taste the beer myself, but Brew Dog claim that because of the 18 months in cask, there’s a very rich, smooth, mellow and complex flavour.
In beer circles the debate will be as to whether you can still really call this a beer at all, given that (apologies if my science isn’t quite right here) the freezing technique is effectively doing the same thing as distillation. Is this cheating?
I once attended a breakfast hosted by Jim Koch, founder of Samuel Adams, father of the awesome Utopias. I asked him a similar question – is this still beer? – and was inspired by his answer. He said something along the lines of beer has been around for thousands of years. Over that time it has evolved continually, and the pace of evolution has picked up considerably in the last couple of centuries. “How arrogant would we have to be to say that in this time, our time, we’ve done everything with beer that can be done? That we’ve perfected beer?” he asked me.
This is why when I love Brew Dog, I really do love them. It’s easy – and not always inaccurate – to accuse them of arrogance. But not when they do something like this. It’s far more arrogant to say ‘we can’t possibly improve on our beer’ than it is to never stop trying to do precisely that. In my marketing role, I often hear brewers talk about something like a slightly different bottle size and refer to it as ‘innovation’. Brew Dog are genuine innovators on a global stage, redefining what beer can actually be.
I hope to taste some soon. If it tastes like fiery alcoholic gut rot, then that’s what I’ll say. But I hope – and suspect – that it’s going to taste sublime.

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