Tag: ships

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Off up the Baltic

Writing this from a Helsinki hotel room: endless days, Mediterranean temperatures and six quid pints.

Hope the boat is bigger than this one

I blogged in March about the harebrained scheme that’s been hatched to take casks of Imperial Russian Stout from London to St Petersburg by boat.  I won’t repeat the overall idea here – if you didn’t catch it, check out the link.

In mid-May, pins of each beer were tapped in Woolwich, South London, and I was one of a dozen or so people to take part in a blind tasting of them.  Beer style purists would have disappeared in a twisted spiral of smoke at the extraordinary diversity of beers all supposedly brewed to the same quite distinct style.  There were some awful ones, some OK ones and some fabulous ones.  Some of the latter were from the people you would expect, others were surprising (it was supposed to be blind – I made a note of what they were afterwards).  I’m not going to go into more detail now, because I want to wait until we taste them in St Petersburg and compare the effect of the journey.

So after four weeks the ship, containing more pins of each beer, has travelled from St Petersburg as far as Helsinki.  Thermopylae, her crew and a bunch of ragged beer eccentrics all entered port yesterday, while the Beer Widow and I landed at the airport late last night in the 10pm sunshine.  We all meet up today.

We set sail for St Pete’s early tomorrow morning.  For most of next week I’ll be out of email and phone contact so apologies for any unanswered messages or blog comments that go unpublished (I have to keep comment moderation on because of the immense volume of spam – I’ll check up whenever I have a signal).

I’ll try to blog from St Pete’s about how it all goes- y’all behave now!

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All at sea again: Imperial Russian Stout is coming home.

I am SO going on this.

This is old news now, but I’ve been meaning to promote it for ages and, having just paid my deposit, now seems like the perfect time.

This June – almost four years since I recreated the journey of IPA from Burton-on-Trent to India – a group of brewers corralled by a man almost as mad as I am will be recreating the Baltic Run, from London to St Petersburg.

This is the journey that foreshadowed IPA, and its recreation is taking place on the kind of epic scale, and with the a level of authenticity, that I only wish I could have achieved with my adventure.  Tim O’ Rourke, a longstanding figure in the beer industry, had the idea a few years ago after a chat I had with him about my IPA voyage, and he’s worked tirelessly to make it a reality.

He’s hired Thermopylae – the yacht above – and convinced eleven brewers to create Imperial Russian Stouts that will be loaded on board after a special beer festival in London, running from 12th to 15th May.  The ship will then set sail across the North Sea, and will tour pubs and beer festivals around the Baltic, with the intention of arriving in St Petersburg on 15th June.  The journey will be in stages, and volunteer crew are still needed for various bits of it.  It’s a non-proft making venture and hiring a round-the-world clipper plus professional skipper and watch captains doesn’t come cheap, so it costs £700 per person per week.  But it’s worth it to be part of this once-in-a-lifetime – sod that, once-in-two-centuries -experience.

It’s a common misconception that stout was shipped to Russia by Burton brewers in the days of the Czars.  Well, while some stout may or may not have gone in later days, the beer that made Burton famous was strong, sweet, nut-brown ale.  Years later though, London’s porter brewers got in on the act and started exporting their beers to Imperial courts that fell in love with strong British beer styles.  British ships originally went to the Baltic to source wood for barrels, and figured they needed to take something on the outward journey to make it worthwhile.  So they took beer, and it really took off.  Maybe it was because of Staffordshire glass blowers working on the new palaces of St Petersburg.  Maybe it was inspired by attempts to keep up with Peter the Great, who served it at royal banquets, or Catherine the Great, who was ‘immoderately fond’ of British beer.  But the Baltic was Britain’s first great export market, until a combination of Bonaparte and prohibitive duty rates killed the trade off.  Back in Burton, it was the infrastructure and knowhow developed for the Baltic trade that allowed Burton brewers to crack the Indian market.

On the modern day version, the beers taking the trip come from:

1.     Harveys
2.     Coors Museum Brewery/William Worthington Brewery
3.     Wadworth
4.     Shepherd Neame
5.     St Austell
6.     Elgood’s
7.     Thrornbridge
8.     Meantime
9.     Bartram Brewery
10.  Black Sheep
11.  Fullers

I wish I could go along for the whole voyage, but I’ll be helping The Beer Widow organise Stokey Lit Fest again at the start of June.  Happily, we have just enough time to recover from the Litfest before getting a flight to Helsinki, where we’ll meet the ship and her cargo for the final leg to St Petersburg and what will hopefully be a triumphant arrival.

Middle of June, Baltic, a sun that never sets… I might even take the Beer Widow with me this time.  Go to www.thegreatbalticadventure.com if you’re interested in joining us.