Adventures in small batch homebrew.
All beer geeks like to occasionally have something that reminds us of when we were first getting into craft beer, so I enjoyed seeing some proper Beer Discourse triggered by a Matt Curtis article yesterday. The thrust of the article, which I broadly agree with, is that beer is unavoidably a product of essentially industrial processes, and hence that to try to ape (parts of) the wine world in…
I assume by this point that most people subscribe to Vittles? But for those who don't, this week's article was a rumination by Jonathan Nunn on his (and his cockney dad's) complex relationship with traditional Pie and Mash shops. A central point of the piece is that a key problem for modern pie and mash shops is that the food is, fundamentally, just not that nice. Or at least, not that well…
Right, 2020. It goes without saying that a lot of fairly terrible stuff has happened this year. I'm not going to dwell on that more than is necessary. Weirdly, from a personal point of view we've had one of the best things that ever happened to us too, with the birth of our tiny baby Robbie at the beginning of October. COVID turned our lives upside down, and then the new arrival turned it - more…
I'm kind of assuming that everyone's already read Lily Waite 's thing for Good Beer Hunting about the postmodernist reading of craft beer and NEIPA as a simulacrum by now. If you haven't then stop what you're doing and go and do it now. I'm not going to say anything specific about that bit except that it's really good, but if it's Critical Beer Theory week now then I might as well get around to…
Whelp, The Session is running again, and Al at Fuggled has asked a simple question that's perhaps more meaningful now than it would be at a lot of other times - where are we all at right now? Well, we're broadly fine. To steal a line from Brian Aldiss (throwing some very British shade at the works of John Wyndham), we're having a very cosy catastrophe - working from home in a comfortable house,…
So it looks like the "expensive beer" discourse is back. First, a declaration of interest. I quite like fancy, expensive beers, and I know that many of the things that I like in fancy beers - mixed fermentation, barrel aging, high gravity, expensive hops - add to the cost of the beer. A lot of these sorts of beers are also fairly niche, meaning that the brewers have limited opportunities to save…
While it's no secret that mild as a mass-market beer is in a bad way, one place where it actually seems to be doing alright is our local homebrew club. At a group that meets in the back room of a craft beer bar, and where the styles presented range from Brut IPA to Hefeweisen, from experimental sours to Imperial Stouts, Dark Milds still crop up surprisingly regularly. To me, though, the idea of…
The craft beer scene's thirst for novelty can be one of its more ridiculous aspects. I sometimes wonder whether anyone would actually notice if there were only really a couple of dozen different New England DIPAs, being repeatedly repackaged with different combinations of collaborating breweries listed on different snazzy cans with different cryptic names. But this sort of endless variation seems…
Scene: A craft beer bar. One table is occupied by a group of hipsters with flat peak caps on. A man and his wife enter. Man: You sit here, dear. Wife: All right. Man (to Waitress): Evening! Waitress: Evening! Man: Well, what've you got? Waitress: Well, there's IPA with mosaic and simcoe; IPA with mosaic and centennial; IPA with mosaic and citra; IPA with mosaic, simcoe and citra; IPA with mosaic,…
News here that CAMRA are to have an official Keykeg bar at the Great British Beer Festival. It's worth pointing out that several of their regional festivals have been doing this for a couple of years now, but I guess that this is news in that the GBBF is symbolically the Last Great Citadel of Cask. Anyway, on a basic level this is a sensible step in the right direction. Embracing a wider range of…
If there's one thing that Cambridge food-scene boosters are really good at, it's getting breathlessly excited about a Hot New Thing happening here, even though in a national context it's so old hat that your granny is kind of over it. Hence I rolled my eyes a bit when, a full decade after Punk IPA started appearing in supermarkets, the publicity for the Eat Cambridge food festival announced a…
One of the staples of online beer forums is international visitors asking for local recommendations, and I normally try to help where I can. Something that always seems jarring to me, though, is the question a lot of American beer geeks ask: "which breweries should I visit"? As a British punter, it's never really occurred to me that on visiting a new town in the UK or on the continent, my first…
So, The Session is coming to an end, and for the final installment, we've been asked to think about "a beer for the end of a life, an end of a meal, an end of a day, an end of a relationship." Now, there are some obvious truisms about the last beer of the night. It's got to be big. It's probably dark. It's likely to be expensive, too. However much we like to praise beers for their subtlety,…
The small but intense world of traditional lambic is often good for microdrama, and the latest storm in a tasting glass is the news that Drie Fonteinen and Girardin are leaving HORAL, the association of traditional lambic producers. There's no official statement from either brewery that I'm aware of, but it's tempting to speculate that their reasons might be similar to the reason that Cantillon…
Matt Curtis has raised the subject of beer in restaurants again. It's always a popular topic; most beer people would love to have a choice of interesting beers to drink before, during or after a meal, but the fancier restaurants get, the more obstinately they seem to stick to extremely un-fancy beer. One bit of writing where a smart restaurant does sell beer is in Dorothy L Sayers' 1933 novel…
For this months instalment of the Session, I asked the world's beer bloggers to think a bit about Farmhouse Beer - what does it mean, and why do people care? Now the time is up, I've got some great responses, and a fascinating range of perspectives. To Gary Gillman, "farmhouse beer" really just means saison or saison-inflected beers, and it's actually not something he's particularly into. Other…
Before I opened the can of Green Path, the flagship IPA from Suffolk-based brewery Burnt Mill, I had a good idea of what I was going to get, and I had a good idea of how this post was going to go. It's a New England IPA, of course. Burnt Mill describe themselves as a "farm brewery", and the design of the can - field, windmill and sky, all in impressionistic green and blue watercolour - anchors…
The fanfare in craft brewing often seems to be around new hops, exotic malts and experimental adjuncts, but for me yeast is where the real magic lies. Everything else is additive, linear and predictable - add strawberries, get strawberry flavour - but yeast is transformative. I often joke that you can divide homebrewers into cooks and DIY-enthusiasts, but when it comes to yeast-driven styles, they…
The Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday, is an opportunity once a month for beer bloggers from around the world to get together and write from their own unique perspective on a single topic. Each month, a different beer blogger hosts the Session, chooses a topic and creates a round-up listing all of the participants, along with a short pithy critique of each entry. (You can find more information…
There's been a bit more talk recently about the CAMRA Revitalisation Project and the Special Resolutions that have been proposed for this year's AGM off the back of it. Phil at Oh Good Ale gives a really good summary of the changes that the Special Resolutions would make to the Articles of Association, although, as will become apparent, I don't entirely agree with his interpretation of them.…
So yeah, the Fullers buyout of Dark Star. It's hard not to suspect that there will be more of this sort of thing to come, and Boak and Bailey have been pondering what you might want to look out for if you fancy playing "the prediction game." One of their conclusions is that breweries rarely seem to sell up in the heady hype-phase — it’s during the come down that they’re vulnerable. In fact, I'd…
It's good to see some talk about class and price in craft beer coming up again. For all that pricing issues generate endless bickering, it's a subject that shouldn't be ignored. How many people are put off by the cost of craft beer? Is it socially responsible to create a culture that has a financial barrier to entry? Should craft brewers be more concerned with making beer that's more widely…
So, the long-awaited report from the CAMRA Revitalisation Project has finally arrived and is already attracting some attention. From a quick skim through - there's quite a lot in there - a lot of it seems to be sensible, pragmatic stuff. It did make me grind my teeth in places, though. For instance, the proposals include the following: CAMRA should promote the virtues of well-produced, well-kept,…
I guess it's a bit late for a New Year crystal-ball-gazing post, but I've come up with a nice format so I'm going to use it. To whit: two jaded, cynical predictions about how nice things that everyone's looking forward to probably won't happen, and two naively credulous ones about different nice things that I'm hoping will. Cynicism Craft lager won't be massive. At least not in the way that some…
For an emergency session topic, Jay Brooks has asked us three questions for the coming year. Thus: 1) What one word, or phrase, do you think should be used to describe beer that you’d like to drink? Erm, I can't help much on this one. I'd struggle to think of a single defining characteristic of beer that I'd like to drink beyond the fact that I'd like to drink it, so I'm not sure that there's…