Category Archives: Misc

October 24, 2014 · 5:48 pm

Harveys Bonfire Boy Strong Ale 2014

It’s been a busy week here on the building site, so escaping the frenzied activity of plasterers, plumbers, window fitters and carpenters this morning I went into town – and had to visit the Harveys brewery shop, as their famed Bonfire Boy had just appeared. In fact it was bottled just this morning, the batch prepared to accompany the annual Bonfire Night, aka Guy Fawkes Night, celebrations, 5th November. They didn’t even have a button set up on their till, so I reckon I was the first customer to buy it.

Since I was a kid in the 1970s, when we used to run through the embers of the massive fire on the site of Oram’s Arbor in Winchester, Bonfire Night has become a sorry, much diminished thing in many parts of the country, local council regulations banning the actual bonfire in many places. It’s pathetic. What’s Bonfire Night without a bonfire? Luckily, Lewes is the world capital of Bonfire Night. It’s a very, very serious business here, with neighbourhood Bonfire Societies, dressed in colour-coded striped Guernseys, white trousers and various themed costumes, holding their own processions, burning barrel races, fireworks displays and bonfires in a continuation of traditions that date back to the 17th century, or earlier.

The Lewes Bonfire historian – with whom I share a surname – Jim Etherington says “Any account of what form 5th November celebrations in Lewes took in the years immediately following the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 remains conjecture” but writes about solid accounts from the year 1679. “The rolling of blazing tar barrels through the High Street is recorded for the first time” in 1832. Years of tension between the Bonfire Boys and local authorities continued until the Bonfire Societies began to form in the late 1840s, giving the anarchy some organisational tethers. As with many British folk traditions, consolidation and honing took place in the Victorian era, and over the intervening decades the events have become world famous – with a reported 80,000 people sometimes packing the town, which normally has a population of around 15,000.

Harveys first brewed Bonfire Boy in 1996. It was then called Firecracker, and commemorated the work of the fire brigade and their work fighting a blaze at the brewery in July of that year, but it subsequently became the annual Bonfire Night brew.

It’s a delicious beer, a dark amber colour, very little head and an aroma of apples and toffee – appropriately enough, given that toffee apples (aka candy apples in American) are for many Brits a treat closely associated with Halloween and Bonfire Night, both arguably modern incarnations of the Celtic Samhain. The beer also has a taste of apple and toffee, along with a deep maltiness, like well-baked bread or warming porridge with golden syrup, and hints of Prunus genus fruits like cherry and plum. It’s a smooth, full-bodied beer, confident in its 5.8% strength. It’s one of those beers that feels really substantial when you roll it around in your mouth, almost like eating an autumnal stew followed by a hot fruit pudding.

I’m looking forward to having a few more come The Glorious Fifth.

6 Comments

Filed under Ale, beer, Misc

Tagged as Bonfire Night, Guy Fawkes, Harvey's, Lewes

October 14, 2014 · 5:42 pm

From building site to castle. Real, actual castle

As our building works were plodding into their most inconvenient stages we’d arranged to go away. I went down to Devon to see my folks, visiting a strangely dead village on the way down where all the cafes were closed but there was this great carving on an old pub.

Being in Devon was lovely in itself as we got to enjoy the last vestiges of summer while mowing a meadow, but also because staying at my parents’ house meant I had use of an actual kitchen, something I’ve not had for 13 weeks now. So I could get stuck straight in with the baking, using up some something aging ingredients to make a surprisingly good loaf and okay almond and candied peel cookies.

For the weekend, thanks to a generous gift for Fran’s big birthday and my less significant one from my folks, we went and stayed in a castle. An actual castle. Surely all boys – and many girls – fantasise about living in castles when they’re young, and this was about as good a fulfilment of that as I could hope for, aged forty-something in the 21st century.

Kingswear Castle is a small defensive fort built a few meters above the waterline of the mouth of the river Dart. It was constructed at the turn of the 15th century to form a pair with Dartmouth Castle just over the river. Both were fitted with cannons to cover the mouth of the river in case of attack by enemy ships trying to take advantage of the sheltered port of Dartmouth. Improving technology soon made Kingswear Castle obsolete and it fell into disrepair. A Victorian aristocrat owned it in the 19th century, then the local MP in the mid-20th century, but I can imagine it wasn’t the easiest home. The gardener there told us the winter 2013-2014 storms involved waves breaking into not just a small Victorian bedroom in a turret at ground level, but also into an upstairs bedroom. Like Dartmouth opposite, it was also a significant spot in WW2, and there’s a blockhouse in the garden.

As a place to visit though, with some mixed but not extreme weather, it was a wonderful experience. Partly, again, as it had a kitchen so I could do some cooking and baking, but partly because it had a kitchen with a view across the mouth of the River Dart or out to sea.

Among the things I made were the Dan Lepard apple and orange crumble tart I mentioned in my last post. It was delicious, especially with some of that divine dairy nectar clotted cream. (In this case, from Riverford Dairy. So good.)

I also made a loaf, about 80 per cent spelt, given an overnight fermentation. First I put it the dough an embrasure on the spiral stairway to prove.

But I think there was too much warm air coming up, so I moved it to the ground (or rock) floor, where the old gun ports are. The finished loaf looked a bit like a seal, suitably enough as I’d seen one on the evening we arrived.

On our final morning, the weather was a tad wild and windy, and the waves were breaking into these ports. No wonder it wasn’t an easy place to live, especially for the MP, who put his kitchen in here and presumably watched it floating around in the surf on regular occasions.

Before the final wet and windy morning, however, we had some lovely weather. Good enough for a sunny walk along the coast path, via the old WW2 installations and current Coastwatch station at Froward Point, to Coleton Fishacre. This is a National Trust property, built in the 1920s for the D’Oyly Carte family, founders of the Savoy Theatre and patrons of Gilbert and Sullivan. I loved the 1920s styling, but particularly enjoyed the kitchens, replete with their fake loaf of bread.

The sunny weather also gave us a nice backdrop for a patriotic moment and some beer tasting. This included a range from a new brewery near Winchester, my home town, called Mash. To be brutally honest, we found most of their beers insubstantial, not ready for release. But good luck to them. I always enjoy encountering a new brewery.

Then we had some more local beers from Teignworthy Brewery in the Devon village of Newton Abbot (which we’d driven through.) This mild was almost a porter, with charcoally hints and a medium body.

The (sensible) boozing didn’t stop when we’d left either. We tried some more beers from Clearwater Brewery, in the north Devon village of Bideford.

The baking didn’t stop either. I was able to make one more loaf, this time with Wessex Mill‘s Wessex Cobber, a lovely malty flour I’ve tried before. As well as being an amazing holiday, it was just such a relief to have an opportunity to do some baking. For someone who makes bread every week, being without a kitchen for so long has been an interesting trial.

2 Comments

Filed under Ale, beer, Baking, Misc, Travelling

Tagged as baking, dartmouth, kingswear castle, landmark trust

October 1, 2014 · 8:04 am

An evening with Dan Lepard at The Hearth, Lewes

Dan Lepard is my baking hero. If you know my blog(s) you’ll know I mention him a fair amount. His book The Handmade Loaf was the encouragment I needed to take my baking to the next level, and I had a great run making his reliable recipes from The Guardian, now collected in Short and Sweet. So I had some fanboy excitment when I heard he was doing a day at The Hearth pizzeria and bakehouse in Lewes, arranged by proprietor Michael Hanson.

Taking place on Tuesday 30 September, this was surely one of the biggest days of Lewes Octoberfeast, and indeed The Hearth has been at the heart of the 2014 festival. Dan had three events over the course of the day: classes Bread Made Simple and The Big (Cake) Bang Theory, then an evening meal, prepared in The Hearth’s wood-fired oven.

As Michael said in his introduction, a hearth is “where people are around a fire, sharing stories, in each other’s company” and you can’t argue with the warmth, literal and metaphorical, that comes from a wood-fired oven. It also gives a remarkable depth and richness to any food cooked in it – both in flavour terms but also in more rarified, almost spiritual terms. This is real cooking: wood, smoke, oven walls with serious mass, ancient technology.

For the meal itself, Dan, aided by Michael, food and travel writer Andy Lynes and The Hearth team, prepared a series of hearty dishes that carried on this theme of warmth, real food, depth of flavour, all eminently suitable for the last day of September, where our Indian summer is finally giving way to a change of seasons and the food cravings that accompany cooler weather.

First up flatbreads with a bagna cauda. I’d not encountered the latter before, but it’s a hot dip originally from Piedmont/Piemonte, northwest Italy. Dan’s version was an intense, thick, oily and salty, as only serious anchovy-based dishes can be, and was served with flatbread. It included oregano brought back by Emilio and Diane, who we shared a table with, from Emilio’s Sicilian hometown of Pachino (of tomato fame).

The main course was shoulder of pork, with sage, lemon and garlic. The woodfired oven is perfect for proper, slow-cooked pork, and Dan said they cooked this for about four hours. It was served with crisped-up polenta slice, roasted celeriac and potato, and mushroom and borlotti bean stew. I hope Fran isn’t reading this as she’ll be really sad she wasn’t able to make it, as these are some of her favourite things, excellently done.

The desert was one an apple and pine nut cake served with Amaretto and raisin gelato. It was a delicious, surprisingly delicate desert. The cake is based on one of Dan’s recipes for the Sydney Morning Herald, and he explained how cooking apple in orange utilises the ascorbic acid to preserve the natural sweetness, resulting in a need for less added refined sugar. And cakes with some form crumble on the top are always a winner in my book (cf toscakaka, streusel cake).

All in all, a great evening, hosted by two men who combine experience with enthusiasm, to paraphrase Dan quoting Forbes. An evening that played to the strengths of a wood-fired oven, which isn’t just for pizza – though The Hearth remains one of the few places I’ve had a decent pizza in England. Let’s hope Dan Lepard comes back to The Hearth more in future, to spread knowledge – and cook great food.

(Oh, and usual apologies about the photography. I’m really not a photographer, despite being the only one wielding a DSLR yesterday evening. Not only was Dan a professional photographer, I also met Susan Bell that evening, which throws these bodges in a very sorry light.)

2 Comments

Filed under Misc, Other food, Restaurants etc

Tagged as dan lepard, Lewes, OctoberFeast, The Hearth

August 19, 2014 · 11:17 am

Microwave chocolate cake experiments

As you may have noticed, this beer-and-baked-goods site isn’t featuring much of the latter at the moment. Due to buildings works, we’ve not had a kitchen for a month, and probably won’t have one for another couple of months at least, so there’s not baking going on here. Instead, we have a pathetic electric hotplate and a basic microwave.

And can you bake in a microwave? No, you can’t. Not literally at least, as the verb to bake apparently has its origins, via the Middle English baken, the Old English bacan, the Old Norse baka, and even the Old High German bahhan, in the Greek phōgein meaning to roast, to parch, to warm. So in essence baking is a process based around heat, specifically dry heat. Microwaving, on the other hand, involves zapping the food item with energy from approximately the middle of the electromagnetic spectrum.

You’re not cooking with thermal energy as you do in a conventional oven, you’re cooking with energy that generates thermal energy. You’re not baking with a dry heat, you’re causing molecules in the food – particularly the liquid component, the water – to dance and get hot.

I didn’t grow up with microwaves, and only acquired one when a relative of Fran’s died about a decade ago. I know they’re an efficient way of preparing food, but if you take pleasure in cooking, it’s quite likely you take pleasure in the tangibility of real heat: from an electric element in an oven, from a gas flame on a hob. The latter particularly has a kind of primal immediacy, like a neat, manageable campfire.

So having said all that, I must report I’m surprised at my first microwave cake. How can you make a cake without baking it? I can’t really reconcile that, yet the mixture I made was a pretty normal cake mix, and it was cooked in the microwave in about five minutes, and the results are most definitely a cake. Not a good cake, but definitely a cake.

It’s not all good news though. What makes it not a good cake is a certain dryness, a weird airy homogeneity, a lack of depth of flavour and a slightly dry, ashy mouthfeel. Though the latter may be partly explained from the relatively high amount of baking powder in this recipe. Some jam and ganache, or even some standard water icing, might mask that, and compensate a bit for the dryness, but it’s definitely not as good as a real, proper, baked-in-an-oven cake. Nuking all the water molecules to cook the batter is no substitute for real heat.

But while I’ve not got an oven, it’ll have to do.

140g plain flour
40g cocoa
3 tsp baking powder
150g caster sugar
100g sunflower oil
100g hot water
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence

1. Grease and base-line a 22cm microwave-safe cake container. This could be a glass dish or a silicon cake pan.*
2. Sieve the flour, cocoa and baking powder together into a mixing bowl.
3. Stir the sugar into the flour mix.
4. Whisk together the sunflower oil, hot water, eggs and vanilla essence in a jug.
5. Pour the liquid mix into the dry mix and combine well to break down any dry lumps.
6. Pour the batter into the prepared pan or dish.
7. Cover with clingfilm (aka plastic wrap). This is the bit that freaks me out. Making a cake? With heat? With plastic?

8. Put the pan or dish in the microwave and hit it at max power. Time will depend on your microwave. Mine is 700W, and it took seven minutes. If yours is 800W max, it may only take 5 or 6 minutes. Peel back the plastic and check with a skewer to see if the cake is cooked fully. If not, nuke it a bit more.
9. Remove from the microwave and allow to sit for about five minutes.

10. Run a palette knife around the edge then turn out and allow to cool completely.

11. Decorate with ganache, or apricot jam and melted chocolate and butter like a sachertorte. Plain like this (above) it’s a bit dry.

* I tried to buy the latter, a silicone cake pan from a brand called Zeal. Unfortunately it didn’t say whether it was microwave-safe. I assume it would be, but don’t know enough about microwaving to be certain. So I didn’t buy it. I’ve emailed the Kitchen Innovations, the company behind the Zeal brand, but they’ve not replied. Got to love a brand that communicates with its potential customers.

2 Comments

Filed under Cakes, Misc, Recipes

Tagged as baking, choclate cake, microwave

July 29, 2014 · 9:25 am

Making bread in The Walking Dead

Those who read this blog will know I like bread. You may not know, however, I’m also a lifelong comic book reader. One comic I’m following avidly is zombie apocalypse saga The Walking Dead, which has recently taken an interesting turn. They’re still fighting zombies of course, but they’re also growing more food too.

Although many people started reading The Walking Dead comics when the TV series (2010-) became a hit, I’ve been there since the beginning, 2003. I can’t remember how I started but it was possibly thanks to my friend Dr Jamie Russell, a screenwriter and author of Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema. We’re both pretty into apocalyptic fiction. I grew up with stuff like John Christopher, John Wyndham and JG Ballard. My mother was partly responsible, as she likes it too: novels like these, but also TV like the BBC’s Survivors (1975-1977). My childhood was also the era of cinema classics like Mad Max and The Terminator or repeats of The Omega Man or Logan’s Run on TV.

I’m one of those apocalypse geeks who likes to discuss how things would change, what you’d do when human civilisation collapses. I like to fantasise about fortifying my parents’ place in the country, building up its traditional southwest of England hedge-banks into a proper defensive palisade to keep the zombie hordes at bay. Or whatever.

Reality check
It’s all daft, obviously, as the collapse isn’t coming in one neat cinematic fell swoop, it’s coming slowly, now, as we speak, from our excessive consumerism, our unquenchable thirst for fossil fuels, supported by “greenest government ever” pawns who support fracking when our focus should be on energy efficiency and renewables. Such backwards policy furthers climate change, which destabilises agricultural, which causes famine, which results in population movement and increased tension in an overpopulated world. But slowly. We’re living the slow apocalypse. Which just doesn’t make for such great fiction.

Still, while all this is happening, we lap up the sudden apocalypse fiction, the bombs, the plagues, the zombies: The Walking Dead TV series is huge how, and a new trailer for the long-awaited fourth Mad Max film has just emerged via the ComicCon event in San Diego, etc, etc, etc.

I’d got a bit behind with The Walking Dead comics, but now I’ve caught up again. Thankfully, with issue 126, creator Robert Kirkman ended the protracted ‘All Out War’ storyline, which IMHO revisited too much ground already covered by the Governor storylines. With issue 127, Kirkman and artist Charlie Adlard refresh the series with a neat ellipsis. The issue is called ‘A New Beginning’ and about two years have passed since the war. The community of survivors seems to be flourishing, focussing on their food security by cultivating food, not just relying on scavenging food from before the zombie plague.

Post-apocalyptic practicalities
As much as I love the action element of apocalyptic stories, I much prefer it when they look at the practicalities of living in a changed world. This is why the BBC’s 1975 Survivors is superior to the 2008 remake. The former got stuck into the important business of how to survive after a plague had wiped out most of the population and nature was taking over again. The 2008 version, meanwhile, mostly just had its survivors bickering like soap opera characters. When they did try to do something practical – eg build a chicken coop – it was pathetic and cursory, physically and dramatically. Compare that with the original TV series, where they look at things like medical treatment, how to make candles, and even how to maintain a watermill.

The latter is particularly significant as water and wind provided the (sustainable) energy for milling grain for centuries. And milling grain means bread, the historic staple food.

Today, most people go to a supermarket, buy something sliced and wrapped in plastic and eat that. That’s not bread. That’s a post-industrial filler, a culinary deception and dietary disaster. There’s no way western civilisation could have achieved all that it has achieved (for better or worse) if we’d had white sliced as our staple.

For a community to thrive it needs a decent staple, and real bread is just that. So it’s great to see the survivors in The Walking Dead during that two-year ellipsis are farming, have built a windmill and are baking their own bread in their home, Alexandria, Virginia, not far from Washington DC.

Burning issues
In issue 128, Eugene, the community’s resident dorky genius, says he just read a book about how to do it, but Rick, the increasingly physically maimed but mentally sharp leader, won’t hear it. He realises the importance of the mill and the bakehouse in his vision for rebuilding civilisation.

Although we don’t see the more extensive grain fields you’d need to feed the comic’s community of, I dunno, a hundred-ish, you do see gardens and a glimpse of orchards. Unfortunately, the way Charlie has presented the mill and bakehouse is a bit of a bodge. The artwork is as great as ever, but it’s not a credible layout. The bakehouse seems to be inside the windmill. I have never encountered such an arrangement, and suspect it rarely, if ever, happened historically. If a mill did have an associated bakehouse, it would have been a separate building due to the fire hazard of cranking a wood-fired oven near chaff, wooden structures and valuable grain and flour.

The bread itself is portrayed slightly strangely too. The baker, Olivia, is handling a peel with tin loaves on it – though they’re not in tins. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that she’s taken the loaves out of their tins then put them back in the oven to finish baking. Despite this quibbles, the scenes featuring the mill and bread are great: significant and moving.

Growing food. Grinding grain. Baking real bread. Now, perhaps The Walking Dead’s survivor’s can really thrive*.

* I doubt it though, as Kirkman generally seems to prefer his protagonists to suffer. Mistrust, human weakness and violence are the bread and butter of The Walking Dead. Not bread.

4 Comments

Filed under Breads, Discussion, Misc

Tagged as bread, comic books, comics, The Walking Dead, windmill, zombies

July 11, 2014 · 4:07 pm

A week in Rome: Etruscan necropolis, Etrusca beer

We didn’t spend out entire holiday just eating and drinking. I made a point of doing a few day trips. One was to the Etruscan necropolis – city of the dead – of Banditaccia, a train ride, a bus ride and a surprisingly pleasant walk from Cerveteri, a town near the coast to the nortwest of Rome.

Banditaccia is such an evocative name. It makes me think of bandits and other unsavoury rural types using the old underground chambers (hypogea) to hide away in the middle ages. It’s quite likely they did too, though I can’t report that as fact.

The necropolis was established at the beginning of the 7th century BC, at least. I love this – you wander round Rome going “Wow, Colosseum…” but that particular monument only dates from the 1st century AD. Etruscan civilisation, which gave its name to Tuscany, was already remarkably sophisticated when Romulus and Remus were still just dirty wolf-boys shouting at each other, mythically, from huts on the adjacent hilltops of the Palatine and Aventine.

Cerveteri, called Caere by the Etruscans and located a mile from Banditaccia, has a museum in the castle that dominates the centre of town. Even after all the best finds from excavations were filched by the Vatican, it’s still full of amazing finds, mostly ceramics. They show how closely the Etruscans traded through the Med, notably with the Greeks, as the art style is similar, as are the gods and mythological characters featured.

Multimedia hypogea
Visiting the tombs themselves, and imagining how they would have looked decorated with these urns and other funerary furnishings, is an amazing experience. The place was pretty much deserted when we visited, so a staff member was able to turn on multimedia installations for us in three of the hypogea. I have mixed feelings about all the holes in the tuff volcanic rock drilled so they could install projectors and speakers, but the systems work surprisingly well, lighting up the tombs and giving a sense of how these spaces were used.

What struck me, even centuries later, with the tombs mostly denuded of their decorations, is how homely they are. And this is just the point. The Etruscans created the necropolises as mirror images of the cities of the living. Each hypogeum was a home for several generations of family. The dead were initially body wrapped in cloth, then buried, or burned and put in urns. The hypogea consist of rooms with stone beds, and some even feature incredible decorations. The most famous example is Banditaccia’s Tomb of the Reliefs – amazing 3D designs of tools and utensils, for war and domestic work: those two most important activities of the living.

As Fran pointed out, the notion of the tombs being the mirror image of homes is also expressed by the fact that these spaces, firstly large, rounded tumuli, then later in rows much like terraced housing, were carved out of the tuff. It was a process of creating a living space for the dead by hollowing out spaces in the ground. This contrasts with building a home above ground, creating space by erecting walls and roofs.

It’s interesting too that although the Roman Republic eventually subsumed Etruria, the final three kings of the Roman Kingdom were an Etruscan dynasty (in the 7th-6th centuries BC, though this period isn’t well documented). And as they had so much common culture, the guide we spoke to said the Romans respected the Etruscan funerary arrangements enough to leave the necropolises alone, even after they had effectively quashed their civilisation. Indeed, there were still new tombs being carved in the 3rd century AD. It was only later they were semi-forgotten, becoming overgrown. Although some did provide strange cave-like spaces for shepherds – and bandits? – over the centuries, most were lost and the area resembled a series of lumps and small hills in the 19th century, before Raniero Mengarelli started his systematic excavations in 1909.

It’s a wonderful place, right up there with Ostia Antica for my favourite ancient sites in Italy: partly because these two are just undersubscribed compared to the better-known Pompey and Herculaneum, but also partly because Banditaccia has a reminded me of its fellow UNESCO site Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Banditaccia – or at least what’s been excavated – is a lot smaller but both have a similar substantialness and sense of mystery. Angkor Wat is a lot more recent (dating from the 11th-15th centuries AD) but I love these places where ancient stones have trees growing through the weathered old stonework, itself carved with sheer manpower.

Etruscan beer
After visiting Banditaccia we went beer shopping and it seemed only right to get a bottle of Birra del Borgo’s Etrusca “archeo birra”.

Etrusca is actually the name of three beers, first made during a fascinating project in 2012 by Birra del Borgo (in Lazio, east of Rome), Baladin brewery (in Piedmont, NW Italy) and Dogfish Head (in Delaware, US). The brewmasters of all three worked with Dr Patrick McGovern, an archaeology professor and director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Project for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, who had worked on various other ancient ale projects previously with Dogfish Head.

Together they established a list of ingredients that were consumed by the Etruscans. The Baladin site says, “Under Dr Pat’s supervision, ingredients have been selected on the basis of the findings made at several Italian archaeological sites.” According to a post on the Dogfish Head site, meanwhile, “the team clearly found that the Etruscans had a taste for ale.”

I know the ancient Romans drank beer, so it’s not a stretch to imagine the Etruscans did too true. Although grain-based beer is more associated with northern Europe, grain was of course grown in ancient Italy too, and the Dogfish site continues “The backbone of Birra Etrusca comes from two-row malted barley and an heirloom Italian wheat.” This wheat is ‘Senatore Cappelli’, which I saw in several Italian craft beers on this recent visit.

Italian society never underwent the seismic changes experienced in Britain during our comprehensive industrial revolution. Nor did it embrace as fully as Britain or the US the post-war approaches to agriculture based on rejecting ancient practices in favour of plying farmland with tonnes and tonnes and endless tonnes of petrochemical industry derived fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides. Plus, pockets of mountainous Italy remain isolated to this day. Unlike Britain, where we rejected our heritage grains in favour of modern varieties bred by agri-corporations to thrive with said chemicals, Italy still grows some of the same varieties of grain it has grown for centuries. Cappelli, however, arguably isn’t such a grain: it was selectively bred from Tunisian ‘Jenah Rhetifah’ durum wheat at the start of the 20th century. It’s conjecture, but ‘Jenah Rhetifah’ may have ancient heritage, and may indeed have been related to grain traded or cultivated by the Etruscans. I don’t know; I need to consult an expert more. Or find some funding to bloody well do a PhD!

Weird and wonderful
The beer also contains various other weird and wonderful ingredients, based on, according to the Baladin site, “research carried out on Etruscan habits, as they would [have] spiced fermented drinks with hazelnut flour, pomegranate and pomegranate juice, honeys, sultanas, natural resin and gentian root”. The “natural resin” in question is probably what the Dogfish site refers to as “the sarsaparilla-like Ethiopian myrrh resin.” The myrrh and gentian are the bittering agents, though the recipe does also include a “handful of whole-flower hops”.

Recording cultivation of hops in Europe didn’t come until centuries later, though as Humulus lupulus is native to Eurasia and north Africa there’s the chance it was utilised by the Etruscans. Wondering about this, I sent an email to Dr McGovern, the “Indiana Jones of ancient ales, wines, and extreme beverages”. Though busy on a lecture tour in Australia he kindly replied and said, “There is some evidence of hops being found in association with beverages at Etruscan sites, but not much.” I’ve just ordered his most recent book, ‘Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages’ (Berkeley: University of California, 2009) so perhaps that will tell me more. Check out the article ‘The Brewing of Etrusca Beer’ via Dr Pat’s site here (a PDF download) as it gives more detail of the procedure, while a second article on the same page, ‘Ancient Italic Beer The archaeological finds at Pombia (NO), discusses the evidence of hop usage in this era, though it refers to finds from a “proto-Celtic” population in Piedmont/Piemonte, nortern Italy, that is north of ancient Etruria.

So what does it taste like?
Evaluating the experience of drinking a beer like this is tricky as the story of its genesis is so fascinating it’s potentially distracting. Not only was the recipe created with Dr Pat’s expert input, but the three breweries used different materials for the ferment. Dogfish used some bronze plates in in the vats, Baladin used wooden barrels, and Borgo used specially made terracotta jars. This is appropriate given the importance of terracotta for storing liquids in ancient Italy. We were staying in Testaccio, and drank our bottle of Etrusca there, a mere 100m or so from Monte Testaccio, which is also known as Monte dei cocci – which could be translated as “Hill of the earthenware shards”. Yes, the hill is a massive mound of broken ancient Roman amphorae.

Suitably enough, given our day trip, Fran said the beer, which is a pale, cloudy golden colour, “smells like an old cave somewhere”, with all that nuttiness, fruit and fermentation giving a certain mustiness.

Fran got more earthy smells from it – mushrooms, humus (leaf litter not chickpea). I got a more sharp, sauerkraut smell, with honey. The taste was sour, honey, balsamic, metallic. Fran thought it tasted like fermented tomato juice: not that she’s ever drunk that, as far as I know, but it did have a certain minerally, Bloody Mary quality.

It’s not a beer to spend a relaxing evening with, perhaps, but it’s unique. I wish I could try the Dogfish Head version, but I’ve never seen any of their ales for sale in Italy or the UK, sadly. The comparison would be interesting, and Dr Pat says that he finds the “pomegranate and myrrh are more pronounced and better integrated” with the Dogfish version.

Either way, I love these historical experiments, like Harveys’ Priory Ale from earlier this year, commemorating a slightly more recent bit of history, the Battle of Lewes 750 years ago. Dogfish Head has produced a series of these experimental brews, with their most recent collaboration with Dr McGovern a prehistoric-style Nordic ale they’re called Kvasir. There’s more about their working process, and why we lost our inclination to make such diverse brews, in an article on The Atlantic’s site here.

So anyway, Etruscan remains, Etrusca archaeological ale recreations: what a great day. And far too long a post. I was planning to mention a few other beers I tried on the trip but that will have to wait.

5 Comments

Filed under Ale, beer, Breweries, Discussion, Italian beer, Misc, Rome

Tagged as ale, ancient ale, archaeology, Banditaccia, beer, Cerveteri, Etruria, Etrusca, Etruscans

May 9, 2014 · 3:20 pm

Real Bread Maker Week, 10-16 May 2014

Earlier this week I had a fantastic bike ride up from Lewes to Wapsbourne Manor (44km there and back along verdant Sussex country lanes; route here), home of the renowned campsite also known as Wowo. There, I met owner Paul Cragg along with Andy Forbes of the Brockwell Bake, who is working to restore British heritage wheats and has a crop at Wapsbourne.

Our conversations were informative and wide-ranging and I’m still trying to work out how to write a blog about it all. This is partly because the Brockwell Bake is involved in a fascinating range of activities, all interconnected around questions of grain and bread, cultivating and baking, but each with its own detail and complexities. Among the activities are educational projects, encouraging a wider understanding of what goes into bread and how it’s made. And when I say bread, I mean real bread, not that wheat-based garbage wrapped in plastic you find on supermarket shelves.

Real Bread Campaign
In this respect, the Brockwell Bake’s work overlaps with that of the Real Bread Campaign. The campaign is part of the charity Sustain – the alliance for better food and farming. Their primary remit involves education about what constitutes real bread – a healthy item that’s been a part of the human diet for millennia but has been tarnished by the grotesque compromises of the mid-20th century industrialisation of food production. And how you can make it. Or where you can buy it. Or indeed, how you can set up your own business making and selling it. You can find out more about what the campaign here.

Anyway, tomorrow, 10 May, marks the start of the campaign’s Real Bread Maker Week: “The annual celebration of Real Bread and its makers: on your high street, in the back of your kitchen cupboard and at the ends of your sleeves.” Furthermore, according to the site, “The main aim of the week is to encourage people to get baking Real Bread or buying it from local, independent bakeries.” Various events are taking place around the country. Find out more here.

Red casserole bread
In the meantime, here’s the latest real bread I’ve made. I’m really loving using an old red casserole dish I acquired from my mother, who inherited it from her mother. It’s a heavy Danish cast-iron piece of kit that lends itself really well to the technique of pre-heating it as hot as your oven will go, then adding the bread, putting the lid on and baking.

This is sourdough made with the sponge-and-dough technique. This involves making a pre-ferment – the sponge – with some of the flour and the liquid, letting that ferment, then adding the rest of the flour and salt and forming your dough.

Sponge:
100g rye leaven/sourdough starter (at 100% hydration)
320g water (filtered)
270g flour (I used 170g local wholegrain wheat, 100g slightly less local strong white)

1. Whisk together the water and leaven.
2. Add the flour and mix well.
3. Cover with a cloth and leave to ferment for 9-16 hours. Say while you’re at work.

Dough:
11g salt
270g flour (again, I used a mixture of wholegrain wheat and strong white).

4. Combine the salt and flour.
5. Add to the sponge and bring together with a spatula or wooden spoon or you can even get your hands in there if you want.
6. Bring to a dough with a quick knead, to make sure everything is well combined.
7. Form a ball and return to the bowl (cleaned and oiled slightly). Cover again and leave for few hours.
8. Take out the ball of dough, stretch it and give it a fold – that is, folding up one then, then the other down to form a kind of enveloped. Return to the bowl, then repeat this process again a few more times every 15 minutes.
9. Cover the bowl with cling film or put it in a plastic bag, then put it in the fridge for about 8-10 hours – I did it overnight.
10. Take out the dough, and allow it to come back to room temperature.
11. Gently form the dough into a ball, then rest it for 15 minutes.
12. Form the ball into a baton – but gently as you don’t want to de-gas it too much. (I really must do a series of photos or some videos of shaping dough.)
13. Give the dough one final prove (or proof) in a basket lined with floured cloth, with the seam of the baton upwards. I did this for about an hour in the airing cupboard, which is 24C.
14. Preheat the oven – I did mine as hot as it’ll get, 250C.
15. Put the casserole in the oven to get to the same temperature – I left mine for 30 minutes.
16. Take the casserole out and quickly and carefully invert the dough into it, so the seam goes to the bottom.
17. Put the lid back on, and bake for 30 minutes.
18. Take the lid off and bake for another 15 minutes, or until the top is nicely coloured – I like nice “high bake”, a dark colour.
19. Take out the loaf and allow to cool completely on a wire rack.

Oh, and while you’re baking, what better item to wear than a snazzy Real Bread Campaign apron? You can get a limited edition “I [loaf] Real Bread’ apron from Balcony Shirts here, with £3 from every sale going to the campaign.

1 Comment

Filed under Baking, Breads, Discussion, Flour & grain, Misc

Tagged as Andy Forbes, Brockwell Bake, Real Bread Campaign, Real Bread Maker Week

April 30, 2014 · 3:41 pm

Hundred per cent local spelt loaf

The collection of different flours in my cupboard is getting a bit silly (again). I just can’t resist it when I see a new type I’ve not tried before. In this case, it was some spelt flour, grown and milled by Toos Jeuken, who I buy a lot of my veg from at the weekly Lewes market.

There’s a full profile of the Dutch-born Toos here on The Guardian site, from 2004, and a more recent profile on the market site here. They say she arrived in England on a bike in 1978 and has been farming in Sussex, specifically at Cuckfield, 16 miles from Lewes, since.

I hadn’t really registered that she sold grains as she always has such a wonderful selection of veg at her stall, even now, in the hungry gap. (Spring might be verdant, but traditionally March and April were the time of year when, as Paul Waddington puts it in Seasonal Food, “winter stores ran low and new produce had yet to mature.” Sure, there is still a selection of local produce – last week the farmers’ market had its first asparagus – but it’s a long way from late summer.)

Anyway, at her Laines Organic Farm, alongside all the veg, Toos grows several grains, including oats, barley and spelt. Last week I bought some of her rolled oats (hand-rolled!) and wholegrain spelt flour.

Too many chromasomes
Spelt (Triticum spelta) is an older variety of wheat, less manipulated¹ than modern strains of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum). Though they are closely related, with spelt alternatively classified as a subspecies: Triticum aestivum subsp. Spelta. Both are what is called hexaploid plant species – that is, they have six sets of chromasomes. By comparison, more ancient wheats have few sets of chromasomes: einkorn (Triticum monococcum) is diploid, with two sets. Emmer (Triticum diococcum) is tetrapolid, with four sets, as is Durum wheat (Triciticum durum, or Triticum turgidum subsp. Durum) – the wheat most commonly used for pasta, which was domesticated from emmer.

In the issue 19 of ‘True Loaf’, the magazine of the Real Bread Campaign, Penny Williams of the Artisan Bakery School, highlights the importance of long fermentation of proper bread, but also looks at the issue of wheat varieties and how they may affect digestibility. She quotes a 2011 Indian study² and concern about a potential “impending epidemic” of coeliac and other wheat protein related issues as India transitions from older diploid and tetraploid wheats to hexaploid wheats, notably modern strains of Triticum aestivum. She goes on to quote a 2010 study³ that looks at a broad selection of wheat varieties, with an eye to their “antigenic gliadins” – that is, the gluten proteins that may be responsible for “triggering autoimmune response in people with coeliac disease.”

“The findings suggest,” she writes, “that modern wheat breeding practices may have led to an incresed exposure to these coeliac ‘trigger’ proteins. While they also identified a few modern wheat varieties that had relatively low levels of antigenic proteins… I question whether tinkering with modern wheat is really the right direction to be going in.”

Less tinkered with
I would have to agree with that. Although I can’t really entirely avoid using modern wheat as I like to made cakes and enriched breads that rely on white flours too much, and these are hard⁴ to replace with older wheats.

I do at least try to use older wheat varieties in my wholesome bread experiments. And while spelt may be hexaploid, it’s a lot less tinkered with than modern, industrially cultivated and processed bread wheat. Especially as I’ve been lucky enough to find an experienced organic grower so close to home in the form of Toos. Next time I see her I’ll have to ask if she’s growing any emmer or einkorn.

So anyway. This was my 100% (or 99.5%) spelt loaf.

500g wholegrain spelt flour, nice and branny
340g water
10g fresh yeast
10g salt
50g wheat leaven, 100% hydration

This wasn’t a proper recipe. I just made a sponge, or pre-ferment, with 250g of the spelt flour, the 340g of water and the 10g of yeast in the evening and left it overnight. I wasn’t planning to use any sourdough leaven, but was playing around with it in the morning, so just chucked a bit into the sponge. I then added the rest of the flour and the salt and formed a dough. Did the on-and-off easy knead thing, let it prove up, formed a ball, gave it a final prove, then baked it the hot Le Creuset (like this bread), spraying some water onto the top crust before putting the lid on, resulting in a shiny floury glaze.

It wasn’t my best loaf in terms of the crumb – it’s crumbly and a bit underbaked – but boy did it taste good. The 100% wholegrain spelt flour just had a nuttiness and depth of flavour that’s more pronounced than the breads I’ve been making recently with the Sussex Red wholegrain flour (from Barlow, a modern wheat variety). As I do long fermentations, and avoid foul industrial wheat-based products (white sliced “bread” etc), I don’t suffer from negative reactions to “antigenic gliadians” etc, but I suspect even if I did, this spelt bread would be perfectly digestible.

Footnotes
1. By which I mean selective cultivation, over many centuries, but especially accelerated since the so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s when new strains of various crops with higher yields were developed. Higher yields but, we know now, potentially higher environmental repurcussions, due to their heavy reliance on chemical fertilisers, pesticides etc. So not really very “green” in the modern, sustainability sense.

1. ‘Celiac disease: can we avert the impending epidemic in India?’

2. ‘Presence of celiac disease epitopes in modern and old hexaploid wheat varieties: wheat breeding may have contributed to increased prevalence of celiac disease.’

3. Hard, but not necessarily impossible. It’ll just be a lifelong challenge to revise favourite recipes etc so they work with these more earnest, properly old-school wheat varieties.

6 Comments

Filed under Baking, Breads, Discussion, Misc

Tagged as bread, Celiac, Coeliac, gluten, spelt, Triticum spelta, wheat

March 21, 2014 · 1:00 pm

Our friend yeast

It doesn’t matter how many times I make bread, I always find the rising, the leavening, of dough enormously pleasing. The quiet industry of yeast is nothing short of a wonder, and our relationship with it remarkable.

Yeast is a microscopic type of fungus. Of course, “yeast” in the baking and brewing senses refers to a variety of different species of yeast. Predominantly, however, bakers’ yeast is a strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The main yeast used in brewing is also a strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. It’s also a key player in winemaking.

Some etymology
Myco is the Greek for fungus (with mycology the discipline of studying fungus). Saccharo, like saccharine, is also from the Greek, for sugar. So Saccharomyces means sugar-fungus.

Cerevisiae is generally translated as meaning “of beer”, but to go a little deeper, it’s presumably related to Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain, agriculture, and fertility, and the origin of our word “cereal”. (Ceres is also the name of a yucky strong Danish lager much loved by undiscerning Italians, but we won’t go into that.)

Cerevisia / cervisia means “beer” in Latin, and is the origin of the Spanish cerveza and even the obscure Italian word cervogia. Indeed, struggling through an Italian etymological dictionary, the vis is the Latin for “force” or “strength”, so the Latin name for beer seems to literally mean “the drink containing the strength of cereal”.

This is one of those many occasions when I wished I’d studied Latin. I went to a flippin’ Catholic school for crying out loud, but we didn’t do Latin!

Anyway, for most of humanity’s long history of bread-making and brewing, we were oblivious not just to the specific strains of yeast, but even to the whole concept of microorganisms. And yet there they were, helping us access the nutritional qualities of grain through the millennia. Yeast was first observed in 1680, but not recognised as a living thing. Louis Pasteur identified yeast as the cause of alcoholic fermentation in 1857 and the cause of dough inflating a few years later.

Even today, there’s plenty of disagreement about certain aspects of the nature of yeast: according to various figures, in a single gram of yeast, for baking or brewing, there are between 8 and 20 billion cells.

Oh, and after all that Latin and Greek, the word yeast itself is from the Old English gist/gyst, with very similar words in other northern European languages and, it seems, a Sanskrit root – yásati, meaning “(to) boil” or “to bubble”

Fungus fun for all the family
So thanks yeast. Or yeasts, as it’s not just S. cerevisiae. Other Saccharomyces are used in the production of food and drink, such as S. pastorianus (the hybrid strain used for bottom-fermenting lagers and pilsners; formerly known as S. carlsbergensis), S. bayanus and S. uvarum.

Then there’s the whole Brettanomyces genus. This name means “British yeast” and was so-named during investigations into English ales at the Danish Carlsberg brewery in the early 20th century. B. bruxellensis is an essential element in the production of Belgian Lambics and related sour beers.

Then there are other genera like Kazachstania, with K. exigua, found in sourdough cultures and olive brine. Heck, even the Candida genus comes into play. Yes, C. humilis, a yeast from the genus responsible for a lot of fungal infection, and even wine spoilage, is considered the “dominant species” for the production of some sourdoughs.

I like dogs, but with their invaluable services in the production of staple food and drink, to leavening bread doughs and fermenting alcohols, perhaps these yeasts have a better claim to being man’s* best friend(s).

* Sorry, inherently sexist language. Can’t really sidestep this by putting mankind’s or humanity’s either.

Types of beer

Are innumerable: even the key styles have sub-varieties, or the names may have changed meaning over time and distance, or the same style may have different names in different languages or dialects, just to add to the muddle.

This list is just an attempt to consolidate my knowledge. I’ll keep adding to it, either as I learn more, or realise I’ve forgotten stuff, or when people correct me. Or to add images.

Abbey
Belgian beers in vein of Trappist beers, but without the official monastic supervision.

Ale
Generic term for beers that are made with top fermenting yeasts at warmer temperatures. Historically, ales were unhopped but not any more. Not for a long while.

Altbier
“Old beer”, a German (specifically Düsseldorf and Westphalia) dark ale.

Amber
Coppery ales that derive their colour from crystal malts.

American IPA
US evolution of the English IPA. Big, aromatic, bitter ales made with the distinctively citrussy, resiny West Coast US hop varieties: Cascade, Amarillo, Chinook, Simcoe, Centennial, Columbus. The quintessential beer of the craft beer movement.

APA
American pale ale. “The first true American craft-beer style, this took inspiration from the pale beers brewed in Europe and then made them American by using the hugely fruity hops grown the West Coast of the United States.” (Mark Dredge). On a spectrum with pale ales and American IPAs.

Barley wine
A fairly generic term, but basically an English style of strong ale, with 8% ABV plus. Indeed, at 12% some have a comparable strength to grape wine.

Bière de Garde
“Beer for keeping”, strong ale from Pas de Calais, equivalent to Belgian saison beers.

Bitter
Synonymous with English pale ale. Ales with wide variation in colour and strength, but most typically around 5% and golden-brown. By modern standards not especially bitter or hoppy, more defined by mellow maltiness.

Bière blanche
See witbier (below).

Blonde
Generic term for light, golden coloured pale ales of varying malt and hop profiles.

Bock
Strong German lager. The name, purportedly, derives from accent and dialect variables in Germany, where the place where the style originated – Einbeck – became ein bock (“a billy goat”). Variables include doppelbock (see below).

Brown ale
Fairly generic term for a sweet, brown generally mild, lower alcohol ale. More specifically an English ale type, originally.

Doppio malto
Italian birra doppio malto (“double malt ale”) can be seen as the equivalent of English strong ales or even some barley wines, or strong Belgian abbey beers, or Trappist dubbels. Italian beers are classified as analcolica (non-alcoholic, though technically low-alchohol), leggera(light) or normale, speciale and doppio malto, with each category defined by its gradi plato – a measurement of density.

Dubbel
“Double”. Medium to strong brown Trappist ale.

Dopplebock
Dark, maltier version of bock (see above).

Dunkel
“Dark” in German, and used to refer to various dark lagers. More typical of Bavaria. Malty, not as strong as dopplebocks.

ESB
Extra special bitter. An English brewer’s highest original gravity bitter, after session/ordinary bitter (lower) and special/best bitter (middling). Synonymous with premium bitter.

Faro
A type of lambic (see below). Made by blending a lambic and a young, sweetened beer.

Frambozen, framboise
Dutch/Belgian raspberry lambic (see below).

Fruit beer
Any beer that uses fruit adjuncts. May be whole fruit, purées or juices. Kriek cherry lambic is a fruit beer, for example, but others may be more convention brews augmented with fruit ingredients.

Geuze, gueuze
A type of well-carbonated Belgian lambic, made with blend of older (2-3 years) and young lambics.

Golden ale
Generic term for light golden ales, sometimes used synonymously with “blonde”. Arguably, golden ales have less body, and are crisper, more like lagers.

Hefeweizen
“Yeast wheat” in German. A type of wheat beer with low hoppiness, high carbonation, phenolic clove aromas. See also kristallweizen.

Helles
“Bright” in German. Distinguishes this lager from dunkel. Munich pale lager inspired by Czech pilsners.

IPA
India Pale Ale. Now a varied style (see American IPA) but original English versions were less punchy, made with older, mellower English hop varieties. The hoppiness originally developed out of necessity – its preservative quality allowed the ale to survive the long journey to British imperial India without going off.

Imperial stout, Russian Imperial stout
Strong (9% ish ABV) dark beer style first brewed in 18th century England for export to Russia. Brewing industry veteran Ian Swanson, teacher at the Beer Academy, said it was a case of the ships needing ballast as they went to Russia and brought back timber.

Kolsch, Kölsch, Koelsch
A light, lager-like top fermented beer from Cologne (Köln), Germany. Becoming popular as it’s easily accessible to lager drinkers, but is quicker to make, not requiring lagering (cold store conditioning).

Kriek
A type of Belgian lambic made with sour cherries.

Kristallweizen
A type of wheat beer: a hefeweizen that’s been filtered for brightness.

Lager
Generic term for beers that are made with bottom-fermenting yeasts at colder temperatures, and involve a cold “lagering” (literally “storage” in German) conditioning period, originally in caves or tunnels.Where caves or tunnels weren’t an option, winter ice was used to cool the cellars. This was superceded by refridgeration in the 1870s. Lagers were first brewed in Britain in Glasgow and Wrexham in the 1880s, but didn’t really start to take over until the 1960s. Despite German (etc) pride in lagers, it’s the culprit for some of the worst crimes against beer in its long history, and the reason I stopped drinking for years as a teenager in the late 1980s. Shockingly for a country with such an important ale history, the biggest selling beer in Britain since 1985 is a generic industrial lager. Mentioning no names. …. Carling.

Lambic
Distinctive beer style specifically from Pajottenland region of Belgium (southwest of Brussels). Relies on spontaneous fermentation and wild yeasts (like Brettanomyces bruxellensis and Brettanomyces lambicus) and lactobacilli, and as such is very different to other beer styles with their tightly controlled yeast strains. Various sub-varieties, like kriek, geuze, faro. 30% unmalted wheat. Winey and sour flavours. Hops used for preservation not bitterness, so often old and intentionally cheesy. Aged in sherry and wine barrels.

Märzen, Märzenbier, Marzen
A malty lager originally from Bavaria though now more generic.

Mild
Low gravity, malty beer from England. “Mild” originally referred to a young, fresh beer, as opposed to a more flavoursome old, or stale, beer but more recently can mean “mildly hopped.” X to XXXX strengths, historically.

Milk stout
A variable of stout (see below), made with lactose (milk sugar). Lactose is unfermentable so the resulting beers have a thick, creamy body with lower ABVs.

NZ draft, NZ draught
Common New Zealand beer style. A malty, minimally hopped brown lager with ABV around 4-5%.

Oatmeal stout
Stout made with oats alongside the malt, adding a smoothness.

Oktoberfest, Oktoberfestbier
Traditionally Märzen lagers brewed in March and largered to October. Now a registered trademark of six members of the Club of Munich Brewers.

Old ale
Name for dark, malty British ales, generally 5% ABV plus. Originally contrasted with mild ales.

Oud bruin
“Old brown”. From the Flemish region of Belgium, a malty brown ale with sour notes due to an atypically long aging process.

Pale ale
Generic term for ales produced with pale malts. English bitters, IPAs, APAs and Scotch ales are all variations on pale ale.

Pilsener, Pilsner, Pils
Type of pale lager that originated in the Bohemian city of Plzeň (Pilsen), now in the Czech Republic. Now many lagers made outside of Pilsen are considered pilseners.

Porter
Originally a dark, nutritious ale drunk by London porters in the 18th century, made with dark brown malts . A strong porter was a “stout porter”, though now the terms are almost interchangeable.

Pumpkin beer
US style, made with pumpkin flesh and often unveiled ceremoniously in the Autumn. Often spiced with pumpkin pie spices: nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and allspice. A type of vegetable beer.

Rauchbier
“Smoked beer” from Bamberg, Germany. Made with malt dried oven an open flame.

Roggenbier
A Bavarian type of rye beer with light, dry, spicy taste. Brewed with same yeast as hefeweizen (see above).

Rye beer
Beers featuring rye alongside the more typical malt (malted barley). See roggenbier.

Saison
A fairly generic French term (“season” ) for strong-ish pale ales. Saison beer evolved in the farms of Wallonia, French-speaking Belgium, where it was brewed in late winter, and stored for drinking by farm workers slaving away at the harvest and whatnot.

Schwarzbier
“Black beer”. German term for dark lagers made with dark malts.

Scotch ale
Scottish style of pale ale, malty but lightly hopped. Also known as “wee heavy”, apparently. May feature peaty or smoked malts, often fairly strong (6-9% ABV).

Session
Not so much a style as a strength: weak-ish beers (4% ABV or less, generally) than can be drunk fairly copiously in a “session”. Generally more about the (US, citrussy) hops than the malt.

Smoked beer
Beers made with smoked malt – which is dried with open fire. Not a fan.

Stout
Originally a British term to describe strong beer, such as “pale stout” or “stout porter.” Evolved and muddled up with porter, and came to be another name for dark (black-ish) ales. Remained popular in early 20th century when porters all but died out, before its revival in the 1970s.

Trappist
Beer produced by, or under the supervisor of, Trappist monks. As of 2014, there are 10 Trappist beer producers, mostly in Belgium, but also in Netherlands, US and Austria. Chimay most famous. Various top-fermented styles, classified as Enkel (single), Dubbel and Tripel.

Tripel
“Triple”, strongest of the Trappist beers.

Vegetable beer
Any beer that’s made with vegetable ingredients – like the US pumpkin beers. Another popular vegetable beer flavouring ingredient is chili pepper. Even though it’s technically a fruit (see fruit beer).

Vienna
Local equivalent of dunkel or schwarzbier, that is a dark lager.

Weissbier
“White beer” in Bavarian. A category of wheat beers that includes hefeweizens.

Weizen
“White” in German. Wheat beers, same as weissbier basically but a different dialect name.

Wheat beer
Beers (usually ales, see above) made with a high proportion of wheat – at least 50% – along with the malt.

Witbier
“White beer”, aka “bière blanche”. Wheat beer from the Netherlands and Belgium (predominantly). Tends to be hazy when cold, due to yeast and wheat proteins suspended in the liquid. Mostly feature gruit: a Dutch term (grute in German) for blends of herbs, spices and fruit used for flavouring and preserving certain continental beers prior to the popularisation of hops in the middle ages. Today these may well involve coriander and orange zest.

It’s one big happy fermented family! Pop Chart Lab, a Brooklyn-based design team have done some excellent visualisations of it, here and (a newer version) here.

2 Comments

Filed under Ale, beer, Misc

Tagged as ale, beer, names, styles

Category Archives: Misc

Harveys Bonfire Boy Strong Ale 2014

From building site to castle. Real, actual castle

An evening with Dan Lepard at The Hearth, Lewes

Microwave chocolate cake experiments

Making bread in The Walking Dead

A week in Rome: Etruscan necropolis, Etrusca beer

Real Bread Maker Week, 10-16 May 2014

Hundred per cent local spelt loaf

Our friend yeast

Types of beer

Recent Posts

Instagram

Archives

Categories

Get notifications by email

Follow Us