Tag Archives: beer

October 20, 2020 · 6:36 pm

The Beak Brewery and taproom, Lewes

It’s been a tough year in many respects thanks to Covid-19, and the brewing and pub trade has taken some serious knocks. Lockdown closures and subsequent restrictions and curfews have resulted in substantial job losses and falling sales. For the big chains – Wetherspoons*, Greene King, Marstons, Fullers etc – sales are down about a third on the same period last year. As for already struggling independent pubs it’s not looking good for that particular cornerstone of British conviviality.

All of which makes it all the more impressive that brewer and food writer Danny Tapper successfully open a brewery and taproom in the midst of lockdown.

The Beak, based just outside the East Sussex county town of Lewes, opened its taproom just after the long lockdown eased in August 2020. We hiked over the Downs with the kids (it’s child- and dog-friendly) on Saturday 15 August and enjoyed a sunny afternoon sitting on benches in the carpark of an industrial estate, drinking Danny and brewer Robin Head-Fourman’s beers and eating food from a pop-up by Kitgum of Brighton.

Danny Tapper

“We signed a ten year lease two weeks before lockdown”, says Danny with understandable bemusement. They were setting up the brewery in March 2020, just as the country shifted into the new reality of lockdown. “It was a big leap of faith.” Not only given the pandemic, but also the fact that, after a fruitless search for a rural location for his brewery, Danny had visited “this not very inspiring industrial unit” in Cliffe Industrial Estate. Although it’s only a 10-15 minute walk from the centre of Lewes, they had no idea if people would come, walking via a busy road (in desperate need of a toucan crossing) to an industrial unit.

The site, however, is actually rather special. On a sunny evening, the magnificent chalk cliffs behind the brewery radiate light, while gulls, corvids and even peregrine falcons wheel around. On a more practical level, as the other businesses in the estate are generally closed over the weekend, there’s room for Beak visitors to spread out, with socially distanced tables on the shop floor and in the carpark, under shelters as necessary. “A space like this has been a blessing during lockdown,” says Danny.

New brews

For anyone who knows British beer, particularly in the south of England, Lewes is renowned for its strong brewing heritage. For years the town has been synonymous with Harvey’s. The Beak offers a very different experience – a young microbrewery compared to a heritage brewery (which dates itself back to 1790); kegs and cans versus casks and bottles; a craft beer outfit versus a real ale one (though that’s painfully reductive, and personally I prefer to say “real beer” for anything not brewed by the industrial giants). But their relationship seems cordial, you can’t argue with choice and variety and historically Lewes had a dozen or so breweries.

Most of all, Danny’s business had an agility that’s enabled it to prevail against the Covid odds.

Although the taproom offers a great social experience and enables visitors to develop a bond you don’t get when simply buying a beer from the supermarket or even a pub, 85 per cent The Beak’s business is in direct sales, mostly in the form of cans.

Danny and Robin’s output is currently from three fermenters, each able to produce 15 barrels or 2,000 litres. So a total of 6,000 litres (or 60 hectolitres), which equates to around 10,000 cans. Danny started homebrewing in his early twenties, before switching to nomad brewing so he could produce commercially. He created The Beak brand in 2016, and says previously he’d “probably do in a year what we do in a week here.”

Of the beer they brew, kegs are mostly used at the taproom and a few other local venues, like The Patch and Depot, where Danny first met Robin, who was working at nearby Burning Sky. Danny says the taproom sells about 700 pints on a Saturday. Most of the rest of the beer is shipped around the country – to London and Leeds (where Danny used to be based), Brighton, Manchester, Bristol, Newcastle. During his nomad brewing days, Danny not only worked with various renowned breweries, like North Brew Co, Partizan, Beavertown, Burning Sky and Northern Monk, he also personally drove around doing his sales and deliveries, creating a network. As a business model, it was a “great way to build a brand, but a crap way to make money.”

Planning ahead

Danny says they’re also talking to exporters. He’s got plans. When they set up, they planned to be able to double capacity. They’ve already ordered a fourth fermenting vessel. “It is a big step for us,” says Danny “We didn’t expect it to happen so quickly.” They’re now also opening the taproom on Fridays, with the plans for “plant-based Indian street food” on offer. On Saturdays, meanwhile, the pop-up food options will keep on changing. Danny says, “we’re mixing it up all the time”.

So while the brewery will have a core range – Lulla 3.5% session table pale, Parade 6% IPA, Strangers 5% IPA – Danny and Robin like to keep experimenting. As an agile microbrewery, they enjoy what Robin calls the “scope to be creative”. They “want the beers to be quite playful”. So while Danny has stepped back from the brewing, they work together on recipes. “Like any good relationship, we talk a lot,” he says. For Halloween 2020, for example, they’re using some refurbished casks from the 40s or 50s to age and inflect some Pencil, Beaks’ 6% India porter.

Further ahead things get even more exciting, with Danny having ordered a concrete fermenter from Italy. Traditionally these vessels are used for natural wine making. Danny and Robin will be using them for mixed fermentation beers, an equivalent to natural wines. As they’re surrounded by the South Downs National Park, with Southerham Farm Nature Reserve on the hills above those cliffs, they plan to harvest wild yeasts and create a “mother beer” – not unlike a sourdough madre (mother) or kombucha scoby** – for blending using the Solera method.

The mother beer will be something that’s unique to The Beak, and, alongside their use of London Fog yeast, will further define the character of The Beak’s output. Realistically Danny hopes those beers will be arriving in Spring 2021. Watch this space for my coverage of The Beak’s “These Hills Sing” project. And – geographical and pandemic factors willing – try and visit The Beak taproom for a dynamic real beer and fun food experience. And if you can’t make it, order some from the site. “People always want beer,” says Danny “It’s just figuring out how to get it to them.”

The Beak Brewery
beakbrewery.com
@thebeakbrewery
Unit 14 Cliffe Industrial Estate, BN8 6JL

Footnotes

* I don’t think I’ve visited a Wetherspoons since I worked in London’s Leicester Square circa 1997. It remains a place I’ve no interest in visiting a) given the alternatives and b) given the founder’s frequent obnoxiousness, but in particular his encouragement of Britain’s absurd departure from the EU.

** Scoby means “symbiotic combination of bacteria and yeasts”. For those who still haven’t encountered kombucha, it’s a drink made by fermenting sweet tea that may have originated in Manchuria. I first had at Old Man Mountain, my New Zealand home in the mid-90s. It’s been popular in certain, shall we say, more hippy-healthfood circles for decades.

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Filed under Ale, beer, Breweries, British beer

Tagged as ale, beer, craft beer, Lewes, real beer, taproom

September 27, 2018 · 8:41 am

Holler Brewery Taproom, Brighton

Life’s too short for bad beer. I don’t drink that much these days and when I do I want it to be something notable, preferably local. Luckily, here in Sussex we’re blessed with some great breweries. These days I favour anything that’s been brewed at Missing Link in the Weald – Unbarred, Kiln, Lost Pier and of course the excellent Beak – and Holler. I visited Holler (then Holler Boys) just as they were starting out in Sussex in early 2017. Now Steve Keegan (pictured, below) and the team have made a move to the big city, opening a new taproom just off London Road in Brighton in a fabulously converted shed. Or “two sheds with storage and squatters”.

According to Steve, they’ve more than doubled their brewing capacity with the new site, producing 150 casks a week now where in their rural site at Blackboys they were doing about 80 casks.¹ He’s also joined by Gary Brandon, former head brewer of another Sussex outfit, Long Man.

The move has come about through Holler’s success and through Steve’s working relationship with Rupert Davidson and Dav Sahota, founders of Brighton pizza group Fatto a Mano. Steve knew Rupert and Dav previously but wanted to get things up and running in Sussex first. Once Holler reached a certain level in the Blackboys incarnation, they got together and came up with a business plan for the expansion. Thus the Taproom was born. Furthermore, as Fatto a Mano’s London Road branch is mere minutes away around the corner, drinkers at the Taproom can order their quality pizza.

Five vats – “the Jackson Five” – line the back wall; a mural by Billy Mather (who does the distinctive Holler branding) adorns one wall alongside; and there’s both outdoor and indoor seating, the latter at handsome yellow-topped tables, part of the design scheme by Steve’s other half and Holler collaborator Bethany Warren. The all-important bar has space up to 11 drinks. When we visited there were 10 beers, a mix of cask and keg, and one cider. I sampled about six. I already know I love Holler brews such as Fog Cutter Session IPA and Cheat Mode Pale Ale, but my new favourite is the rich, accessible Bevy Beast, a 4.2% Red Rye Ale.

Overall, it’s a great space. The open-plan layout and lack of barriers between bar and brewery are really important for Steve as his mission isn’t just to offer great beers, but to communicate about them. He says, it’s “really important for me to meet customers. To break down barriers between the beer and the customers”. Indeed, they have a motto – “Beer for all”² though he’s also keen they operate as a “local brewery”.

Steve was understandably busy as this was their first night with a crowd, but I’ll try and ask him more about this at some stage. Personally, I prefer local as it just makes more sense. Beer is, after all, mostly water – made exciting through the alchemy of yeast, hops and sprouted grains – so transporting it around the world is madness, another of those pieces of modern human behaviour that’s questionable in an era of increasingly scary climate change.

I’m really excited about this venue. It feels looks great, feels great and offers great beer. Even the loos are a memorable experience. Steve is not just a great brewer but a canny businessman. He doesn’t rush things – a sensible policy in brewing and in business. But he did muse about a next move: perhaps Hastings, Haywards Heath or Lewes. Selfishly, I hope it’s the latter. Much as I respect tradition, we could really do with a dynamic, young, community oriented, accessible beer brand here, especially at the rate our pubs are dying. But in the meantime, I encourage anyone to get to the Holler Taproom in Brighton.

19-23 Elder Place, Brighton BN1 4GF

hollerbrewery.com

1 For those who don’t speak British brewing weights and measures, 150 casks is nearly 11,000 (imperial) pints or 55 hectolitres.
2 All Holler beers are also vegan. The only people excluded by this all are, presumably, teetotallers.

The Patch beer café, Lewes

Anyone who knows Lewes, the county town of East Sussex, will know it’s a good beer town. Historically it’s had a dozen or so breweries, though now there’s just the stately Harvey’s left. It’s also had dozens of pubs, many of which have fallen by the wayside over the years and continue to do so, with the recent closures of The Crown Inn at the top of School Hill and the Trevor, over the hill at Glynde. So I’m pleased to report the opening of a new venue: The Patch, which has taken over the unit formerly occupied by Fillers sandwich bar opposite the Market Tower.

Lewes is a great town if you like more traditional beers, if you’re of a CAMRA bent and favour cask bitters and suchlike. Indeed, you can get some great, well-kept cask beers from several venues around town: notably The John Harvey Tavern (Harvey’s tap room), the Brewers, the Gardeners. But while the Snowdrop and even the Elephant & Castle have long offered a reasonably varied selection, the town hasn’t had a venue dedicated to craft beers.

I don’t like this traditional vs craft distinction but for convenience I’m considering craft beers as those from smaller breweries using more modern blends of hops (from the US West Coast and the Antipodes) and playing around with different yeasts, wild yeasts, fruits and other adjuncts, and aging in wine barrels. Like Burning Sky in the nearby village of Firle. I had a few bottles of theirs over Christmas, and Les Amis du Brassage, a collaboration with Fork Brewing in Wellington, NZ, featured rooibos tea, pink peppercorns, rosehips and not just malted barley but also wheat and oats. Not exactly traditional brewing. (BTW, I enjoyed some other Fork beers when we were in Wellington a few – or five – years ago.)

Patch, owner of The Patch, has a long relationship with Burning Sky, and in his opening line-up on his 10 keg taps, two are Burning Sky. He also has two from another Sussex brewery, Gun, as well as one from Wild Beer Co (Somerset), one Beavertown (London) and two from Wild Weather Ales (Berkshire). “The first line up is crowd-pleasing,” says Patch, and it certainly pleased me, as it’s always fun to try Wild Beer, Burning Sky is a local favourite, and Beavertown’s Gamma Ray is the quintessence of English craft beer from the past half-decade or so, a big, feisty APA replete with fab sci-fi artwork.

Patch says he plans to rotate the beers, and is sticking with kegs. This may horrify some – but it’s not like they don’t have plenty of other options in Lewes. And Patch has good reasons. One is wastage, “Particularly wastage,” he says. “Cask has a very short shelf life.” His second reason is more personal. “To be honest, all my favourite beers are kegs,” he says, adding “I think brewers are putting their most interesting beers out on keg.” Kegging is simply a more viable option for young, smaller breweries, and it’s such outfits who tend to be more experimental.

I started with Wild Beer’s Pogo, which is one of those slightly dangerous brews that tastes like some kind of citrusy soft drink, though thankfully it’s only 4.1%. It’s a pale ale that has added passion-fruit, orange and guava. Adding fruit can make beers a bit sickly; an award-winner at the Great British Beer Festival a few years ago made with apricot juice still makes me feel a bit queasy. Thankfully this is finely done.

Next I had a Vermont Pale from Gun, a 4.4% New England style pale made with malted oats and wheat. It’s neither too sweet nor too bitter, despite a lot of hopping. It was OK, but a bit eclipsed by the boldness of the other beers I tried.

Drinking with my friend Alex Larman, things started to get a bit muddled as he has twice my capacity, but I also had Gamma Ray then a Curse of Threepwood from Wild Weather, a pleasingly sour 5% experience made with rhubarb and hibiscus. Love a bit of hibiscus. Had one on our balcony in Rome. I also sampled Burning Sky’s 7% Pretty Mess, another big, fruity experience.

Patch has taken years to bring this project to fruition, and I met him in his previous guise at the Snowdrop. His taste isn’t exactly in line with mine but I’m happy to report that everything we tried was good, well kept, at a good temperature, and featured some fun fruitiness and sourness. All good cheering beers for post-Christmas, the arse-end of the year in England.

Anyway, Patch says he’s been trying to get a project underway for about two years. He hoped to open at Bonfire, but things only fell into place around Christmas. He continues to use the existing facilities of Fillers, and indeed will operate as a sandwich takeaway and daytime café, as well as offering pintxos – the Basque equivalent of tapas – on Friday and Saturday evenings. We tried some pintxos, snacks where a topping is pinned to a slice of baguette with is cocktail stick, and they were good. I especially enjoyed the deep-fried mackerel balls with a dill dressing. It’s quite ambitious but hopefully the combination of services – snacky lunches for nearby workers and tourists, quality beers for drinkers – will take off. Bit by bit he’ll tweak the venue, starting with a “proper bar” that’ll hopefully go in this month, January 2018. I look forward to my next visit. Though I do need to work out a better rounds system with Mr Larman.

For more information about The Patch beer café, 19-21 Market Street, Lewes BN7 2NB, check out Instagram and Facebook.

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Filed under Ale, beer, Bars, pubs etc

Tagged as ale, beer, Lewes, pubs

June 18, 2017 · 1:05 pm

Crumbs Brewing and the bread-beer relationship

This blog was founded because of my dual love of bread and beer, two foodstuffs that are linked through their fundamental ingredients of grain and yeast. At some point after humanity settled and began growing crops, we discovered that grain, either whole or ground as flour, underwent a decisive process when mixed with liquid and left – fermentation. The first written record of all this is from ancient Sumeria (modern southern Iraq), the circa 1800BC Hymn to Ninkasi¹ – the goddess of beer, or more broadly, the goddess of fermentation. Her followers may well have been responsible for beer and bread.

For centuries, fermentation remained a sort of quotidian mystery. Such was the significance of bread and ale as staples for the masses in Medieval Europe that the unknown ingredient had an almost spiritual nature and was called “Godisgoode”, “God is good” (possibly²). Early scientists thought the process was chemical not biological. The single cell fungi yeast and lactobacilli that fed on sugars and produced carbon dioxide – leavening bread and lending vigour to beer – wouldn’t be understood until the mid-19th century and the work of microbiologist Louis Pasteur.

Anyway. In Lewes, on the second Sunday of every month, there’s a street food market called Food Rocks. Not many people seem to be aware of it, so it needs a bit more promotion – as there’s some good stuff there. I was helping my friend Alex Marcovitch on his stall Kabak, selling delicious Eastern Meditteranean, North African and Middle Eastern-inspired foods. This time round, diagonally opposite us were Chalk Hills Bakery of Reigate, in the Surrey Hills, where I got myself ready for my shift with a delicious cinnamon bun, and Crumbs Brewing, where I met founder Morgan Arnell and “crumb spreader” Adria Tarrida.

Restoring an ancient connection
These two establishments have a noteworthy relationship. It’s one that reconfirms the ancient connection between baker and brewer. Historically, notably in Gaelic cultures, bakeries and breweries would have operated side-by-side, the barm – the frothy surplus yeast – from the brew being utilised by the baker to make a leaven for bread³.

Apparently, in some parts of Europe, the barm method existed alongside the sourdough method. Baker and food writer John Downes gives one Medieval example here: “In England noblemen’s bread, manchet, was always made with the barm method, whereas the commoners’ bread, maslin, was a sourdough.” He continues “Barm bread survived until World War Two and even later in the North of England largely as barm cakes.”

Anyway, as usual I’m getting distracted⁴. Crumbs Brewing aren’t doing this (yet). Instead,they’re using leftover bread from Chalk Hills Bakery as an ingredient. A few breweries are using the technique, such as Toast Ale, whose website gives the statistic that “44% of bread is wasted”. It’s pretty shocking. Any food waste is a crime. The amount of energy put into growing and transporting food, only for it to be thrown away is bad enough, but in landfills it contributes to the problem of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Hills to Isle
So the work of breweries like Crumbs is very important. Morgan, who founded Crumbs with his wife Elaine, says they collect any leftover bread, crumb it, and freeze it. When they have 150kg they take it to Goddards Brewery on the Isle of Wight. Morgan says Goddards were “one of the few brewers that was willing to test out our recipe and method, helped by the fact that I grew up on the Island so could twist their arm to help us!”

The longer term plan is to set up in the Surrey Hills too. Morgan writes more about the process of making the beer – their first batch was brewed in April – here on the Crumbs blog. The 150kg makes a 30 hectolitre⁵ brew, “c 6000 500ml bottles in our case” explains Morgan.

Breadbeerisgood
Suffice to say, the beer is delicious. I wouldn’t really be writing about it here if I didn’t actually like the stuff. It’s called an Amber Lager, and I can kind of see the logic of this naming to help it appeal to lager drinkers. It’s certainly light and refreshing. It’s bottled at Goddards and isn’t bottle conditioned, but its carbonation level is pleasant. To my mind it is more an ale than a lager, and it is indeed made with top-fermenting (ale) yeasts, not bottom-fermenting (lager) yeast.

There are so many craft ales around at the moment, notably dubbed APA and American IPA, which overuse the Chinook, Cascade, Citra, Mosaic hops etc to the point where they’re reminiscent of cleaning products, pine-scented detergent or whathaveyou. Thankfully the Crumbs Amber is more subtle proposition. Morgan says they use Progress hops, which the British Hops Association says, are “an excellent bittering and late aroma hop.” The overall flavour is more about the malt and bread. It doesn’t taste bready per se, but it has a warm sweetness and decent body, without heaviness. Morgan says “The slightly sweet, malty aftertaste is a result of the bread.” He adds that they plan to try brewing with different types of bread and it “Will be interesting to see how brewing with different loaves changes that character.”

It’s a great addition to the SE of England craft brewing scene so I’m very glad to have come across Crumbs at Food Rocks. Good luck to them, and I’m intrigued to try their next beers made with different breads: “dark rye stout or sourdough IPA anyone?”

Notes
1 The full text of the Hymn of Ninkasi can be found here. In English, not ancient Sumerian.
2 There’s some debate. This thread gives a few sources for the term, but it’s not entirely conclusive.
3 I’ve done a few barm bread experiments: here and here.
4 When one is actually paid to write journalistically, one mustn’t get distracted. There’s usually a tight editorial brief and even tighter wordcount. Not so on one’s own blog! Hah!
5 A hectolitre is 100 litres. 1hl is about 0.61 UK beer barrels, or So 30hl is around 18 UK beer barrels or 660 imperial gallons. For Americans, 30hl is 25.5 US beer barrels or 795 US liquid gallons. Good heavens I wish people would standardise things globally. Some might see it as heritage. I love a bit of history, but all these different weights and measures just make life even more flipping complicated. I sincerely hope “Brexit” doesn’t have us going back to shillings and scruples and chains.

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Filed under Breweries, British beer, Discussion, Flour & grain

Tagged as ale, beer, bread, brewery, fermentation

February 25, 2017 · 1:48 pm

Real beer barm bread mark II

A few years ago, I was given a bottle of barm by my brewer friend Michele Sensidoni, of Mastri Birrai Umbri. For those who don’t know, barm is the yeast, and yeasty foam, formed by vigorously reproducing yeasts during the fermentation process in brewing. I used it to make some bread. Last week, I was lucky enough to visit Holler Boys, a new Sussex brewery, and meet its owner and brewer Steve Keegan.

Steve is a friend of a friend, and former managing director of Late Knights Brewery, which he set up in south London in 2012. It expanded fast and they opened several pubs, but things drew to a close in Autumn 2016. I’ll tell that story in another post soon, in the meantime, here’s another experimental barm bread.

I got up this morning – well, I was woken up by the Raver, 19 months, at the not too uncivilised hour of 6.50 – and found the dough crawling out of its proving basket. So, yes, this is one of those blog posts that talks about a bit of a cock-up, not an expert success story.

When we visited, Steve was busy making new brews and one of his conditioning tanks, named Wayne, was bubbling away. I asked Steve if I could have a scoop of the froth, the barm.

Barmy starter
Back home, I mixed with flour and water over the course of three days, much like you would feed a sourdough starter. It wasn’t that vigorous, but it was alive. The barm I’d got from Michele had involved a lot more liquid and yeasty bits. This scoop of bubbles, however, was a bit of a gamble, as it obviously didn’t contain quite such a density of yeasts.

In the evening of the third day – sounding a tad Biblical – I made up a dough. Here’s the recipe.

350g beer barm starter, at 100% hydration (ie, I fed it on equal quantities of flour and water)
8g fine sea salt
300g water
500g strong white bread flour

Ignoring the small amount of liquid in the initial scoop of barm, the total liquid in the dough was about 475g, the flour 675g, making a dough hydration of 70% (475/675 x 100).

1. Bring the barm starter, salt, water and flour together to form a soft dough in a roomy bowl.
2. Turn out onto a lightly oiled work surface and knead. Knead it briefly, form a ball, then put back into the bowl, lightly oiled. Cover and leave 10 minutes.
3. Knead again, put back in the bowl, cover and leave 10 minutes again.
4. Repeat a few more times then put back in the bowl, cover and put the fridge for 24 hours.

Now, this is where I went wrong. I wanted to give it a final prove in a proving basket, but I misjudged the liveliness of the dough – the barm starter had turned out to be more vigorous than I thought. I thought I could give it a final prove at room temperature (in this case 17-18C), overnight, for about 9 hours. I probably should have done it in the fridge.

The dough spilled over the edges of the proving basket, which was too small for the amount of dough, and stuck. It was overproved and had a bad skin where the dough had dried out. I was forced to prise it out (destroying stucture) and reform the ball, give it a short final prove, then resort to baking in a preheated casserole dish, rather than slid off a peel onto a hot baking stone as I’d planned.

I don’t think there’s any point continuing with a numbered recipe now, as it went wrong. But when I say “wrong”, I mean that I learned a lesson. If I can get hold of some more barm, I’ll know to trust it more for leavening.

The result isn’t what I was aiming for, and its crumb structure is a slight disappointment, but the flavour is good. Fran says she can taste a beeriness, a bitterness. T-Rex, three, enjoyed it too, until he decided he didn’t, and said “Yuck”. I’d like to think this wasn’t an entirely failed experiment: all I had to start with was a few grams of foam, it was fun and the results are tasty. I just got the timings wrong. Hey, I’ve only made real barm bread twice!

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Filed under Baking

Tagged as barm, barm bread, beer, bread

September 25, 2015 · 4:52 pm

Harveys’ Old Ale and the end of the summer

In my last post I mentioned it was the autumn equinox a few days ago. This is the moment when day and night are the same length. And now the nights are, officially, getting longer. We’ve had a fairly poor summer here in southern England. May and June were lovely, but since then it’s been unsettled, frequently cool. After my two and half summers in Rome, where summer generally runs from April to October, I feel somewhat cheated.

That said, there is one bright side to the nights drawing in and the prospect of dark and damp from here through to March: Harveys’¹ Old Ale.

I love Old Ale. It’s quite possibly my favourite of Harveys’ 20-odd beers (I think I’ve tried them all now; nearly at least). It’s dark and sweet and warming. If a beer can be cosy and reassuring, it’s Harveys’ Old Ale. It’s a beer that’s perfect to drink in a warm pub, preferably with an open fire, on a long winter evening. Robin Thorpe of Harveys called it the “classic winter beer”, and added that as September has already turned so cool and wet it’s fine to be drinking it already. Which suits me.

We got to try the first of this year’s Old Ale at a Harveys tasting last night, hosted by Robin and Edmund Jenner. The evening was billed as a Seasonal Beer Tasting, and was a highly informative run-through of the beers – and how and why they fit with certain seasons.

A trend of the past 30 or 40 years may have seen a diminishment of seasonal beers, with many ill-informed drinkers just quaffing the same generic industrial brews all year round, but Harveys is among the heritage breweries that maintains the tradition of varying production through the year.

The evening started, however, with Wild Hop, a 3.7% ABV light ale that’s a perfect light summer drink. I mentioned Wild Hop back after my tour of the brewery in June 2014, but Edmund told us more about the gestation of this beer, which they first produced in 2004 “in response to what we now call blonde ale.”

It’s made with Fuggles and Goldings hops in the boil, then dry-hopped with English grown Cascade, which are more modest in flavour and aroma than their New World counterparts. It also contains Sussex variety hops – which are a recent domestication of a wild variety, first discovered on the Sussex-Kent border. Ed explained how most wild hops simply don’t have the qualities required for brewing, but this hybrid proved perfect.

Fran, in her usual unique way, said the Wild Hop reminded her of Sindy dolls or Tiny Tears. Something in the aroma reminded her of nuzzled dollies as a child. I can’t say I could relate; maybe Action Man smelled very different.

Although Harveys vary their production during the year, their main year-round brew is their Best Bitter. It accounts for about 90% of their production now. Bitter and Best Bitter are quintessential English beers, and it would be easy to imagine we’ve been drinking them here for centuries. But Ed gave us more history. Harveys’ Best wasn’t produced in 1945 (instead they brewed 75% mild, 25% pale), only accounted for 7% of their production in 1955 and 45% in 1965. Today’s Best Bitter, in fact, only “re-evolved” after the Second World War.

Two wars seriously threatened Britain’s grain supplies, with convoys from North America harried by U-boats. When grain did get here, the priority was food, not booze. So barley wasn’t used in brewing so much and what was produced had lower gravity, and alcohol by volume. Brewers were required to keep gravity low, and indeed, the wars even resulted in the introduction of licensing hours to keep the war effort population more sensible in their booze consumption. Trends and tastes in beer change – mild is way out of fashion now – but war and law have also played a significant role too.

At the end of the evening we had a blend² of Best and the Old Ale, and it was a cracker. I may be asking for this again, see if I can help encourage some pubs to start this practice again. Blending was the norm in British beer drinking until fairly recently.

As much as I love the Old Ale, the most pertinent beer we tasted last night was the South Downs Harvest. Like the wheat sheaf in my previous post, this is a celebration of the harvest, of autumn. It’s a light, biscuity golden ale – which is made with green hops, just harvested. As Ed said, it contains “something of this year’s summer.”

Among the other beers we tasted was Armada Ale, which was first brewed in 1988 to commemorate 400 years since the Spanish Armada. Harveys are great at such commemorative brews. Among their recent ones was the fascinating Priory Ale, brewed last year for the 750th anniversary of the Battle of Lewes. I talked about this herby, historical brew here.

Last night Robin raised their Celebration Cocktail – with Priory Ale – and said it was to celebrate numerous things happening in 2015: 800 years since the Magna Carta, the birth of Anne of Cleves (who had a house in Lewes, which you can still visit, and was born 22 September 1515), 75 years since the Battle of Britain, 50 years since the development of the famed Maris Otter malt and even Harveys’ own 225th birthday.

So much history, mediated through the medium of beer. Harveys’ production of such beers encapsulate various elements of local and English history. Furthermore, as Ed reiterated, their beers get their character from their yeast, the same strain since 1957, and the water, taken from a borehole into the chalk aquifer. It’s rainwater filtered through chalk and as such has a unique mineral character. Have a pint of Harveys and that liquid is our history, our heritage and our environment. It’s a wonderful thing. With all this on offer, how anyone can drink characterless industrial beers I don’t know.

Notes
1. They’re called “Harvey’s”, though it’s more generally rendered as “Harveys” these days. Luckily, as a double possessive apostrophe is a bit painful: Harvey’s’.
2. I’ve heard this before, but it bears repeating. Blending beers is also out of fashion, but not at The Jolly Tanners in Staplefield, West Sussex, where Ed says they call the practice “tosspotting”. For those who don’t know this minor English word, a tosspot is an idiot or a drunkard. With “to toss” British slang for “to masturbate”. Apparently tosspot has its origins in the 1560s.

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Filed under Ale, beer, Breweries

Tagged as ale, beer, brewing, Harvey's, history, tasting

July 1, 2015 · 5:06 pm

Sardinian holiday – sun, scrub and craft beer

Last week we went to Sardinia for a holiday. During our two years in Rome we tried to explore Italy, but it’s a disparate, varied and not always easily connected country so we left with a long list of places we’d failed to reach. Sardinia was high on that list.

Our friend Annely recommended Maddalena archipelago in northeastern Sardinia. We plumped for it without too much agonising as it seemed to fit the bill for us – beach, some wilds, and a fairly easy journey.

The islands have a long historical association with the Italian navy, and even NATO (a US nuclear sub ran aground there in 2003; oops). There is still a navy presence there, but mostly the archipelago is defined by being a national park, and a destination for people who like to play about in boats. We don’t do the latter – instead we stuck with buses and hiking on Caprera, a largely unpopulated island to the east of La Maddalena island itself. Giuseppe Garibaldi, the great unifier, had a house there, and indeed we saw his deathbed on a tour. I was more interested in seeing his windmill and forno (oven), both perched on a rocky hilltop.

Pleasant surprises
After our days wandering the scrubby, aromatic macchia*, with its thickets of wild lavender, helichrysum, juniper, myrtle and cork oak and lying around reading by turquoise seas, we went back to La Maddalena port. There, we were very happy to find that one bar had beers from a couple of Sardinian craft breweries. Funny really, as this place – Bar Fiume di Serra Francesco – looked very ordinary but had the interesting beers, while a hip bar a stone’s throw away just had industrial crap beer.

One of these is Ichnusa – a lager that pertains to be Sardinian, and brewed since 1912. Thing is, these days it’s owned by Heineken, and I’d challenge anyone to really distinguish between the two, or a dozen other best-selling industrial lagers, in a blind tasting.

Real Sardo beer
The real beers we tried were from Marduk Brewery and P3 Brewing Company. All the ones we tried were excellent, and a great reminder of how exciting Italian craft beer is.

I’m enjoying being back in Britain, and having access to our dual cultures of traditional, CAMRA-endorsed, cask-dispensed real ale and lively US-influenced craft beer, but I really miss Italian craft beer. It’s such a dynamic scene, partly influenced by Italy’s food and drink great traditions, partly free of them and able to be experimental.

I love how I can drink something like P3’s 50 Nodi (“50 knots”) and not only get a whiff of the heady juniper macchia we’ve just been walking in but also get a whole long trail of heritage. It’s an Italian beer that’s called an India Pale Ale, but really it’s an IPA in part inspired by US IPAs, which have themselves evolved from the less intense older British IPAs.

The spiel on these beers is such fun too. This one says it has “high notes of caramel and intense floral, citrus and exotic fruit perfumes”. Me and Fran got pineapple and Parma Violets, among other things. Furthermore, “Il suo carattere forte deriva da una miscela di luppoli inglesi, americani e neozelandesi che vi accompagneranno in un viaggio sensoriale ineguagliabile” – “It’s strong character derives from a mix of English, America and New Zealand hops that accompany you on an incomparable sensory voyage”! Love it. (Those hops are Simcoe, Pacific Jade, Citra, Goldings.)

We also enjoyed P3’s Riff, which they call a “Session White IPA” and, along with two (barley) malts also contains wheat malt, wheat flakes and oat flakes, along with four hops of US and English origin: Fuggle, Styrian Golding, Willamette and Citra. And coriander. And orange zest. All of which makes its presence felt, but in a neatly balanced mix.

Grow your own
While P3 is in Sassari, Sardinia’s second-largest city, located in the northwest, Marduk, meanwhile, is in Irgoli, in the east. Their tagline says they’re a Birrificio agricolo – a farm-brewery, or words to that effect. Another blurb in Il Fiume’s menu about Marduk says, “Le nostre birre nascono da un’accurata selezione delle materie prime che produciamo direttamente in azienda” – that is, “Our beers are born from a careful selection of ingredients produced directly within the farm/business.”

They grow their own barley and “diverse varietà di luppolo” (“various types of hop”) to maintain a close control on the process – and food miles. I mean, we were about 60 miles (92km) away but it was the closest craft brewery. We tried their American Pale Ale and American IPA, which were both great, though surely an APA segues into an AIPA? And surely these are uniquely Italian pale ales now anyway?

My local brewery here in Lewes, Harveys, similarly sources its ingredients locally, but this is something fairly new in Italian brewing, as hops weren’t grown there. When we left La Maddalena we had one night in Olbia, and found a bar that claimed online to sell local craft beers. They didn’t, but they did have a bottle of Nazionale from Baladin.

Baladin is the brewery that both started the Italian craft brewing scene, and the owner of the bar in Rome that introduced me to it, so it was nice to have a Nazionale – which Baladin developed to be the “first 100% Italian beer made with Italian ingredients.”

So all in all, very pleasing beer drinking on holiday. Even more so as we were back in the land of the aperitivo snack. Now back in England, we went out for a few drinks for Fran’s birthday yesterday at the Brighton Beer Dispensary and while the beers were great, the table did seem a bit bare without a plate of cheeses, salumi and breads. While Fran loved the cured meat products, I enjoyed the local Sardinian crispbread, pane carasau, sprinkled with Sardinian pecorino and melted. So civilised.

(I’ve written two more posts about this holiday: second and third.)

* In English, we use the related French word maquis for this kind of scrub. Not much point us having a word for it I suppose, as we don’t have any – it’s specifically a Mediterranean environment.

Walking from Lewes to Winchester on the South Downs Way

Winchester, in Hampshire, is my home town but now I’m living in Lewes, in Sussex. Between the two is the ridge of chalk hills known as the South Downs, along which runs a path: the South Downs Way.

When we moved to Lewes in summer 2011, we walked a section of the Way to the southeast of Lewes, but since we moved back here this year, I’ve been wanting to walk to Winchester. We finally found a time in September to escape the building site and do the walk, happily coinciding with my birthday. After a cool, wet August, the summer came back in September and we had great weather. Three of the five mornings had thick mists, but these generally burned off leaving sun and views along the hills and north over the Weald, the lowland area between the South Downs and the next set of hills, the North Downs.

The south of England has been populated and manipulated by humans for millennia. The landscape of the hills was defined by centuries of sheep farming, which resulted in a unique ecology, plagioclimax communities featuring amazing selections of wildflowers and other wildlife. Much of this downland has been lost in England with the mechanisation of farming, but there’s still plenty along the Way. The human influence is also evinced by numerous hill forts , old industrial buildings, castles, tumuli (prehistoric burial mounds) and many, many cross dykes. No, not angry lesbians, but prehistoric earthworks that may have been territorial boundaries

Nature, history – and pubs
The other good thing about a walk in a long-populated part of the world is that you can go to the pub, something that’s not so easy on a backcountry hike. There were some great pubs along the way, and some great beers. A few pints of which, I would say, are well-earned after walking 20 miles (32km). We also stopped in a few nice tea shops, which, along with pubs, are – when done well – one of England’s great pleasures.

England’s B&Bs, on the other hand, can be less of a pleasure. There are some great B&Bs out there, and we stayed in a few lovely places, but they’re not the greatest examples of our hospitality. Aside from small, rubbish showers, my main grievance is the so-called “full English breakfast”. It’s all very well to pile a plate with sausages and beans and toast, but when all of that food is industrially produced, it just turns my stomach. Luckily, we stayed a few places that had their own chickens, ducks and pigs, so the eggs and pork products were good, but among the five places we stayed, only one served real bread, and only one offered homemade granola. The other four provided toast and “cereal” made from industrially used and abused grains. These are not good foods for your health in general and preparing to walk long distances specifically. B&Bs of Britain – make the effort! Serving real bread would be a great start.

In total we walked 88 miles / 141km, linking, the old-fashioned way, my current home and my childhood home. Here are some pics.

Day 1: Lewes to Steyning (21 miles / 34km)
Misty morning. Though this dew pond – one of many along the top of the Downs – with its one solitary tree looked handsome and moody.

Already done a few miles. I love topographic features with devil-related names. The Dyke is the grandest of them along the South Downs.

Tea stop at the Hiker’s Rest, Saddlescombe Farm, before climbing up the Devil’s Dyke. A unique arrangement involving a small food truck serving cakes etc parked in a farm yard, with seating both outside and inside old feeding sheds.

Cup of tea at eminently cute Steyning Tea Rooms. Yes, it’s green tea with lemon, not your normal British black tea with milk. Cos that’s how I roll. Sometimes.

First pint of the walk, Long Man Pale Ale from Long Man Brewery, further east in Sussex, near the Long Man of Wilmington. We stayed at the Chequer Inn. Although it was a pretty standard pub, the beer was well kept – they have Cask Marque and SIBA signs – and the 15th century building had a lot of character.

Steyning has a very handsome high street, which remains fairly unspoiled except for that most reliable of taints on the modern human environment, the motor vehicle.

Day 2: Steyning to Bury (13 miles / 21km)
Started the day getting supplies from the Sussex Produce Company, which has this excellent selection of local beers.

These hops were growing semi-wild on the edge of Steyning.

Wild chicory on the ridge above Steyning. If you like chicory and are interested in the various cultivated forms and their relationship with this wild one, I wrote about it here.

Paths in the mist – or possibly fret, as a sea mist is known in Sussex dialect.

An unusual WW2 bunker on Highden Hill, just after crossing the A24 London Road. It was apparently built by Canadian forces 1940-42, and was dubbed the “Tin Castle” by local schoolchildren.

Stopping at The Bridge Inn at Amberley (or more accurately, Amberley station / Houghton Bridge) for a few halves of Hip Hop – a hoppy blonde ale – from West Sussex’s Langham Brewery and some live bluegrass.

There used to be a ferry across the River Arun between Bury and Amberley. Walkers be warned – there isn’t a ferry any more, but there is a fine new foot and cycle bridge.

Nice little village Bury. We had dinner at the Squire and Horse gastro pub where the food was good and the service very hospitable, so much so that I forget to take photos. I was drinking Sussex Gold, from Arundel Brewery, suitably enough, as it’s just down the River Arun. This light, smooth 4.2% ABV ale, which combined subtle lemon and caramel flavours, was just right for a warm evening, sitting outside watching dragonflies flit. (It really has been an amazing year for dragonflies here in southern England.)

Day 3: Bury to South Harting (20 miles / 33km)
Another misty start coming out of Bury, but it cleared very suddenly when we got back up on the ridge.

The Devil’s Jumps, one of the many wonderful prehistoric sites along the route. They’re a series of five bell barrows, a type of tumulus: that is, a grave (or not) created with a stone construction covered with earth. Fran had been having a bad day with blisters but a game pie cheered her up as did the amazing sight of a hare which ran across the path near the Jumps, closely followed by a stoat.

This memorial is just near the Devil’s Jumps, and another fascinating bit of history. The South Downs Way official trail guide shows its weakness when author Paul just says “A German pilot killed during the Second World War perhaps?”. In fact, it’s a memorial to a 25-year-old airman who was on a Ju88 bomber, shot down by a British fighter on 13 August 1940, “Eagle Day”.

We spent a very pleasant couple of hours enjoying beautiful late afternoon/evening weather – and Upham Brewery beers, from Hampshire, though we were still in West Sussex – at the White Hart pub in South Harting.

Day 4: South Harting to Corhampton (18 miles / 29km)

The day started with mist again, beautiful as we headed back up to the ridge through these woods.

I’m assuming this enigmatic bollard with a length of chain attached marks the county boundary between Hampshire and West Sussex. Why the chain?

The English hedgerows in September are things of great beauty. Among the many plants in these tangled, frequently ancient field boundaries is black bryony, Dioscorea communis. This is Britain’s only native member of the yam family, though unlike its African staple food relative, it’s not edible.

After seeing a 20-year-old book about the Way illustrated with aerial photos, I was intrigued about the landlocked naval base known as HMS Mercury. Sadly, by the time we arrived, it’s all a building site for massive houses in a weird pastiche 18th farm cottage architectural style. This is Fran changing the plasters on her blisters just nearby.

This was our lunch that day. Local Sussex cheese and bread, though the latter was disappointing. My water bottle is a growler from Estes Park Brewery, which we visited almost a year ago.

View of Old Winchester Hill from the east. Quite why it’s called Old Winchester, when it’s 18km from Winchester (itelf pretty old, with its own hill fort) is a mystery. One local legend says the Romans tried to build Winchester (Venta Belgarum) there, but every morning they returned to the site and found the stonework they’d laid had been rolled down the hill. So they chose Winchester instead.

Quick break on Old Winchester Hill, most of which is a wild flower meadow at the moment, helping mantain species that need grazed chalk downland and also helping the much-ravaged bee population.

The villages of Corhampton, Meonstoke and Exton all blur together. Two of them have pubs and ancient churches. Corhampton church dates from 1020. This yew tree may be even older.

Exton’s church, St Peter’s and St Paul’s, is slightly younger, 13th century. This is apparently a gravestone (now located in the nave) showing the Angel of Death summoning a scholar from his books.

We arrived about 4.30pm. The pub, appropriately named The Shoe, didn’t open till 6pm, dammit. So we hung about in the churchyard until it did, then I had a pint of Wadworth 6X. Wadworth is in Wiltshire, so relatively local as it’s the next county to the northwest of Hampshire. It was a solid, medium-bodied, malty, caramelly ale. Fran had Swordfish, a similar malt ale given a bit of bite with the addition of rum.

The Shoe is a great food pub. Desserts included that essential British (gastro-) pub classic, sticky toffee pudding. It wasn’t the best sticky toffee I’ve had (it wasn’t warm enough for starters) but the main coarses we had – venison and scallops – were excellent so we were in a forgiving mood.

Day 5: Corhampton to Winchester (15 miles / 25km)
Leaving the lovely Corhampton Lane Farm B&B, where they both grow and clean grain, we scrambled down the back of their property. This vineyard was across the valley. The South Downs are becoming increasingly significant for wine production. I don’t know much about it, but apparently chalk and limestone are particularly good for producing sparkling wines – and that’s what this estate, Exton Park, does.

Not far to go now, getting back in the countryside I explored as a kid on my bike and on family walks.

For those who know me, they’ll know I got a bit obsessed with dead bikes while living in Rome. This was a nice variation on a theme. What it’s doing alongside a path on Gander Down I don’t know.

Some more hedgerow bounty. It really has been an amazing year for sloes and blackberries. If we’d been medieval pilgrims of a lowly caste or abstemious bent, we probably could have walked the whole route feeding ourselves on blackberries and hedgerow apples.

Reaching Winchester, we stopped at my favourite home town pub, The Black Boy free house, for a quick early afternoon drink. I had a Saxon Bronze from Alfred’s Brewery, founded in 2012 and named after our 9th century Saxon king, Alfred the Great. Winchester was his capital and from there he built the foundations of modern England. The Saxon Bronze is one of those new generation English ales that has the maltiness of a traditional bitter, but is informed by the crisp New World hoppiness so associated with the craft beer revolution.

And here is some serious caskery outside the Black Boy.

The end of our walk, on the steps of my folks’ place.

Now, I absolutely loved this walk. So much history and beauty. Fran had a wobble when her blisters were getting to her, but overall she enjoyed it too. My only regret is not doing one extra mile at the end and going to the Hospital of St Cross, a Norman church and almshouses, where you can request the “wayfarer’s dole” at the porter’s lodge. As we were genuine old-school wayfarers, it would have made sense, but as I grew up just near there, it felt weird to go there to blag a piece of bread and mouthful of ale.

Instead, we paid a visit to this wonderful gravestone in the grounds of Winchester Cathedral. Thomas Thetcher was a soldier who died in 1726, apparently because of his beer choice: “Here sleeps in peace a Hampshire Grenadier, / Who caught his death by drinking cold small Beer, / Soldiers be wise from his untimely fall / And when ye’re hot drink Strong or none at all.”

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Filed under Ale, beer, Bars, pubs etc, Breweries

Tagged as beer, hiking, pubs, south downs way, walking

August 13, 2014 · 8:59 am

A London beer jaunt

Yesterday, I took a day away from the building site that is our home to visit London and sample some beers with my friend Russell, of Hooksmith Press. It being London Beer City, along with the Great British Beer Festival and the London Craft Beer Festival, it seemed almost rude to not go to London and drink beer.

Although I lived in London from 1997 to 2011, I already feel like an outsider, a country mouse, when I visit. All major cities have certain consistent qualities – a winding river, a dominant old building, a hill – but cities that launder channel large amounts of money also change fast. London is no exception. The number of ego monuments going up at the moment is extraordinary. London was never a highrise town, but the money men seem determined to turn it into one. It’s just plain weird – there are only so many empty offices and flats for the mega rich one city needs.

Back down on the ground, however, another way in which London is changing fast is its beer scene. Small independent breweries are popping up right, left and centre. Back when I lived in London, there were very few. Fuller’s had, somehow, survived the culls and takeovers*, and still operated as a fair-sized independent, offering beers like the easy drinking, organic golden Honey Dew that helped me transition to ale appreciation. While Fuller’s was founded in 1845, new breweries were rare. One that led the way was Meantime, which was founded in 2000. Where I lived in south London, meanwhile, The Florence pub in Herne Hill began producing its own beers on-site in 2007.

The new beer scene arguably took off in London, however, with The Kernel, which started brewing in 2009. The growth since then has been incredible. According to beer writer Des de Moor, “By the beginning of 2014, despite a few losses, there were well over 50 [breweries] – a quintupling of brewery numbers over five years.” All this happening after I’d left the city. No wonder I feel like an outsider now, with all these new buildings, and new beers.

The first place we went to was Russell’s local in Leytonstone, the grand Red Lion (640 High Road, Leytonstone, London E11 3AA). Even pubs like this exemplify how our beer culture has changed the past decade. Part of the Antic chain, it has an excellent selection of beers, keg, cask and bottle, including Meantime and The Kernel but also Beavertown (purveyors of my favourite recent beer, Gamma Ray), Camden Brewery and London Fields Brewery. I’d never had anything from the latter, which was founded in 2011, so tried their Love Not War, cask. It’s reddish, with a fairly full, chewy, malty body and a big slap of hops.

Canalside
That second place we went to was Crate on Fish Island, Hackney Wick, east London. This is an area defined by old warehouses, canals, 2012 Olympics facilities seeming to lumber on the horizon like weary daikaiju, grafitti and hipsters. Lots of hipsters.

I suspect fairly quickly me and Russ felt old. We’re not, really – we’re half-way between the twenty-something hipsters and the sixty-something CAMRA crowd. Which isn’t a bad place to be, as I reckon it makes us old enough to have some knowledge, and some memories of when beer was really bad, but young enough to be receptive to extreme hop forwardiness, weird adjuncts, and even beer in kegs and cans.

Indeed, Russ is more inclined to colder, fizzier beers from kegs (at say 6C). Personally, I favour the Great British pint hand-pulled from a cask, carbonated by the live, active state of the yeast, and served at cellar temperatures (say 12C). Luckily, the real beer explosion the past few years, and particularly in well-served places like London, means we can both be satisfied in the same bars and pubs. The old guard might poo-poo all keg beer, but you can’t argue with the craftsmanship of these beers.

We were both broadly after more hoppy brews so the comparisons were interesting. To my mind, 6C is still a bit too cold, neutralising some of the aromas and flavours, but as Americans will always tell you, colder beer is more refreshing. I reckon a keg beer, clasped in body temperature hands (37C ish) will get to just about the right temperature when you’ve drunk half a pint.

Crate, a brewery with a canalside bar and pizzeria, has been open since 2012. We jumped over a fence and sat by the canal, which was remarkably clean and only partially cluttered with dilapidated barges. Russ informed me these were the local hipsters’ accommodation of choice, and that it wasn’t unusual for them to arrive at the bar from round the corner in mini speedboats. This really wasn’t my London at all. The beer was good though. My Pale Ale was rich and almost meaty in its taste, along with hints of coconut, pineapple. Russ had the IPA, which was also good… though a bit cold and fizzy initially. We had to agree to disagree on this one. Being a New Zealander Russ probably can’t help himself.

Re-branding
After Crate we wandered around Fish Island some more, checking out the new Truman’s brewery, with its sign saying “Established 1666 / Closed 1989 / Re-established 2010”. I’ve got mixed feelings about this. Truman’s was a familiar name growing up even if I didn’t drink it, but I do wonder whether it was really necessary to re-cycle an old brand when you’re joining a new era of brewing and asserting your own identity with new brews. We went round the corner to the brewery’s tap room, The Cygnet, on Swan Whaft, another canalside location with a similar hipster presence and cartoony, grafitti-ish wall art. Here, the hipster boy serving couldn’t do the mental arithmetic for the change from a £20 note from two £4 beers, and the beer Russ had was the only duffer we had that day. It was an NZ Pale from Hackney Brewery. It was packed with NZ hops, so we had to try it, but it was badly kept, posisbly spoiled, and far too warm – around room temp, 20C ish, despite the casks being wrapped in thermal skins. I had Truman’s Lazarus, a 42% ABV golden pale ale that was delicious. The site says, “Lazarus is our celebration of the rebirth of Truman’s”, which again seems slightly odd when it’s all about the quintessentially American Cascade and Chinook hops – not exactly characteristics of traditional English beer.

Afterwards, we headed across town to meet Fran at the Cask near Victoria. Thanks for the connections, orange Overland. Public transport as it should be: rationalised, wide-ranging, clean and functional. Why can’t more British trains be like this?

I’ve written about the Cask before, but wanted to visit this evening as their part of London Beer City was a New Brewery Showcase and Meet the Brewers event. Of the six breweries flagged up on the flyer, one was Burning Sky, one of my two most local in Lewes, while Atom is in Hull, with the remaining four – Strawman, Hammerton, Anspach & Hobday and Bullfinch – being in London. Although the first one I had was London Session, from London Beer Factory, an outfit based on West Norwood, southeast London. According to a post on A London Beer and Pub Guide from June 2014, “London brewery count rises to 70 with the addition of London Beer Factory, who have just started brewing.” The beer was good and wholesome, like apple crumble and custard.

Next up I had Strawman’s 3.9% ABV Saison, from a keg. Russ said it tasted of pears and almonds. Along with bubblegum. And “soap – the kind of soap you get in a B&B” and “Parma Violets” according to Fran, who was drinking Bullfinch’s Rascal, a 4.8% ABV session IPA that was massively hoppy. The site says it’s “Currently featuring Kazbek, Simcoe, Ahtanum and Colombus hops”.

Russ was drinking Burning Sky at my recommendation, but as I generally drink either Burning Sky or Harveys when I’m at home I was favouring the London brews. Though I did get to meet Burning Sky’s brewer, Mark Tranter.

I think we started losing track a bit by this point. Not because we were especially sozzled, but more because we were busy chatting, as we’d not seen Russ for years. And eating. The Cask is the only place I’ve ever been that can make the non-meat burger equivalent that is a mushroom in a roll into something really good, with stacks of halloumi. (I won’t call it “the vegetarian option” as just cos you eat meat doesn’t mean you always have to choose meat; I eat meat, but fancied halloumi more.)

Our last round was all about the hops, with some almost eye-wateringly bitter beers. We had Hammerton’s N7 Pale Ale, which Fran said was reminiscent of “sweaty armpits”; then Anspach & Hobday’s The IPA; and Atom’s This Is IPA. Lots of astringency, sweat and sweeties, specifically pear drops.

Personally, I’d say the latter two were actually APAs, or British APAs, BAPAs, not IPAs. IPAs simply aren’t that aggressive, or at least they weren’t historically. It’s all in flux, and very dynamic. And really, with this half-day wander round London, guided by Russ, I barely even began to scratch the surface of what’s been happening since I moved out of London. I’m not sure how often I can justify going up to London to booze, but each time I do, the prospect of yet more new beers and new breweries is exciting. Sure all these places won’t last, and things will have to bed down to match the market, but what amazing times. It’d almost be possible to forget most of Britain is still dominated by shit industrial lager.

* CAMRA probably played a notable role in this survival. It had been founded in 1971 and within five years was a significant, influential body. In ‘Brew Britannia: The Strange Rebirth of British Beer’ Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey write, of CAMRA’s mid-1970s successes, “The rot had been stopped, and breweries such as Young’s and Fuller’s were no longer simply under threat but were booming.”

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Tagged as ale, beer, Bullfinch, cask, Crate, Hammerton, keg, london

July 17, 2014 · 1:26 pm

Bad memories, skunkiness and the question of beer in cans

For many drinkers of real beer, the implications of cans are almost too terrible to contemplate. They certainly are for me. Cans remind me of buying cheapo industrial lager just to get drunk in the Winchester Cathedral Grounds as a teenager. As well as associating canned beer with vile industrial lagers, I always associated them with a metallic taste. I assumed this was not necessarily the vile industrial lager itself, but the packaging.

But all that’s changing. The challenge now is changing such preconceptions.

It is strange how abiding a prejudice can be, but if you learned to drink by consuming vile industrial lagers (or indeed snakebites), frequently from cans, and have memories of puking and hangovers, the psychology isn’t that complex. It’s just a kind of self-inflicted aversion. It worked too: I didn’t drink from the age of 18 to 24.

Times change
Anyway, the past few years, I’ve been increasingly encountering real beers, in cans. Initially I bridled when I was served Angry Peaches from Garage Project in a can in a restaurant in Wellington, but this New Zealand take on an APA turned out to be delicious, and one of the best beers I had in NZ.

More recently I’ve encountered a couple of other interesting beers in cans. When we were in Rome a few weeks ago, hanging out at Tram Depot in Testaccio, I was drinking Steamer (7.6% ABV). But it wasn’t as good as I remembered: I appreciate its depth of flavour and body, but it’s not well-integrated and always seems to be over-carbonated. Its recipe needs some tweaking. So I wanted to try the other real beer they were offering, something not quite as strong (it had been a long day, a long hot day of boozing and eating). This turned out to be something called Kurt (4.32% ABV), and not Italian but Swiss. I didn’t even know Switzerland had a craft beer scene.

It was nominally from a brewery called Bad Attitude. Aside from any irony inherent in this name, the Bad Attitude set-up is a bit confusing. It also seems to be Ticino Brewing Company (aka Birrificio Ticinese in Italian, as the Ticino is Switzerland’s predominantly Italian-speaking canton). Which also seems to be related to another brand, Birra San Martino. The latter’s site says they were founded in 2002, but have called themselves Birrificio Ticinese since 2010. They’re all at the same address in the town of Stabio, but I can’t work out why they exist as three brands.

As for the straw-coloured beer itself, it was a bit weird. Despite being made with two hops from one of my favourite parts of the world – Riwaka and Motueka, both places in the north of South Island NZ – and some great British Marris Otter malt, most of all I got a coconut flavour. It’s not that I dislike coconut especially, but I just didn’t like it in a pale ale flavour profile. I know some beers have coconut as an adjunct, but Kurt didn’t, so I’d guess it came from an ester, those chemical compounds that give beers so many diverse flavours and aromas.*

Retro-futuristic
The most recent beer I’ve had in a can I drunk in the beautiful evening sun last night. This was Gamma Ray from Beavertown. This was the beer I’ve tried from this brewery, set up in London in 2011, and it was very enjoyable indeed.

I do love British APAs – they tend to have the decisive characteristics of the more aromatic US hops but balanced with our traditional love of beers defined more by their maltiness. In this case the hops were Amarillo, Columbus, Bravo and Magnum (“added in ever increasing amounts at the end of the boil and in the fermenter”), though the bitterness was surprisingly minimal, without any particularly dry mouthfeel. The beer was rounded out and sweetened with not one but three malts, Simpsons Best, Caragold and Caramalt. Excellent.

The experience was enhanced by the can’s awesome wraparound wide-screen design, a kind of retro-SF horror tableau of goldfish bowl-helmeted spacemen being zapped into skullfacedness by flying saucers. Love it. Indeed, on an aesthetic level, one of the great points about cans is how they design can go 360 like this, unlike with the traditional front and back labels of bottles.

Cans versus bottles
The main arguments for using cans, however, are more practical. Mostly made from aluminum, they’re simply a lighter weight material and as such involve much less energy when transported, compared to glass bottles. From both me lugging stuff home from Twenty One Wines in Brighton in a bag to massive trucks carrying it around on roads, or shipments moving internationally (something that’s arguably absurd given that beer is mostly water, but that’s another argument). Furthermore, a bottle, when used once, involves a lot more energy to manufacture and then recycle – assuming people bother to even recycle.

The other big argument for cans is that they protect the beer from light damage. The traditional brown glass bottle protects the beer from light damage to some extent, but for those companies that insist on packaging in green or clear glass, the beer will spoil, will get lightstruck when left in daylight. The UV causes a reaction resulting in what’s called “skunkiness” – that is, a chemical process creates a molecule that’s closely related to those in skunk spray.

As for the issue of the beer getting a metallic taste, so synonymous with cheapo bad lager, most cans used for beer these days have a thin inner lining so there’s no contact between beer and aluminium. Certainly all my recent experiences with “tinnies” have been entirely free of metallic hauntings and the ensuing teenage flashbacks.

So I’ll definitely be happy to drink real beer in cans now. Which is good, as it’s becoming increasingly common. This US NPR article quote says, “five years ago, just a few dozen craft brewers in the US were canning, while today there are more than 500.” So expect to see more here in the UK too.

Having said that though, probably 60 per cent of the beer I drink at home is from my local (800m away) brewery, Harveys. Their (brown) bottled beer is sold with a deposit, so I just take them back and they reuse them. But most people don’t have a local brewery with such an enlightened (nay, sensibly old-fashioned – we always did the same with milk in Britain when things were more localised) approach. So for the abovementioned reasons, there’s probably no reason to poo-poo cans any more. Even if you’re particularly hardcore about your real beer requirements. The Gamma Ray for example was in a can and unpasteurised and unfiltered.

* My friend Michele, a food scientist and brewer, suggests the coconut odour and taste may come from one of two chemicals: from the molecule d-Decalattone (C₁₀H₁₈O₂) or from an ethyl group of chemicals (–C₂H₅), which are derived from ethane (C₂H₆). Srangely, the latter can present with odours of coconut, or pear, or wine.

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Filed under Ale, beer, Breweries, British beer, Discussion

Tagged as ale, beer, bottles, cans, tins

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