American craft is still hard to match

By Phil Mellows

We can thank the Americans for craft beer and the wealth of styles and flavours we’re now able to enjoy over here. Of course, these beers still have their roots in European brewing, but from the 1980s the new breed of ‘boutique breweries’, as they were known, grew those roots in all kinds of weird and wonderful directions.

In recent times, US craft beer has undergone something of a loss of confidence as volumes have fallen. Some say that it’s lost its vim, its spirit of adventure. But none of that was evident at a lunch I attended last month on the eve of the London Craft Beer Festival, hosted by the Brewers Association, which represents American craft beer.

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The event promised to pair US brews with Japanese food, a bold mission, and I was feeling sceptical but at the same time curious as I arrived at the surprisingly spacious underground dining room at Moi in London’s Wardour Street.

And it turned out to be one of the best events of its kind that I’ve been to. It wasn’t just the matching, which was generally sound across the seven courses (including the canapes), with a couple of surprise stand-outs, it was the quality of the beer and the distinctiveness of the various styles showcased. There was a kind of clarity about these beers (and I don’t mean the liquid). They knew what they were about.

I don’t drink US craft beer very often. It’s become harder to find over here, and when you do find it, the price can put you off. But this lunch selection suggested that the Americans are just as bold and inventive as ever, and worth exploring, if that’s what you’re into.

Perhaps it’s because American independent brewers have got to fight their corner these days. Mediocre is not going to cut it. Beers can’t simply call themselves ‘craft’ to be offered a spot on a bar or in a fridge, they’ve got to deliver on those original values that brought such excitement to the market.

To pick a couple or three examples from the lunch, Oregon’s Coldfire Brewing, a new one to me, came up with the latest expression of its series The Sparrow and the Crow. This is based on a blend of beers wild fermented in oak barrels for two years to soften the sourness, then rested on pinot noir grapes grown in the local Willamette Valley to take on a vinous quality, then it undergoes a second fermentation in the bottle.

You’d think there’s enough going on with this without trying to pair it with food, but the king oyster mushroom, grilled eel and watercress was an intriguing companion.

The main course of bone-in sirloin and miso-cured trout, served with baked rice, salad, pickled pear and summer beans, was paired with a West Coast IPA from California, Knee Deep Brewing’s Breaking Bud. It’s a funny name for a serious beer that’s a reminder of what a West Coast IPA ought to be. You don’t know what you’re going to get when you order a ‘westie’ these days, but this was big enough to stand up to the food and the experience was helped along by a dry finish.

At the end we got a raspberry ripple sorbet for dessert. Yep, very simple. But it came with a very complex beer. Virginia Beer Co’s Ideas of Order blends a bourbon barrel-aged milk stout with an English-style barley wine and weighs in at 13% abv. The match divided the crowd and a theory went round that those who got more raspberry than sorbet in their scoop were disappointed while those who got more sorbet than raspberry, like me, were delighted. Discuss.

Anyway, the whole thing revived my interest in food pairing, which can be terribly hit and miss, and also my interest in US craft beers. So where are the best places to find them over here now?

The good news is that Tilray, a company that owns a number of breweries in the States (as well as a medicinal cannabis business), has introduced beers from nine of them into the 11 sites it took on when it acquired Brewdog earlier this year, that is the brewpubs in Birmingham, Canary Wharf, Ellon, Dublin, Edinburgh (two), Manchester, Paddington, Seven Dials, Tower Hill and Waterloo.

Other places where you can choose from a range of US beers and drink them on-site include the Beer Cave & Taproom on Birmingham’s Stirchley Beer Mile, opened by importer Brew Export at the end of last year.

Further north, the Stonegate branch of the House of the Trembling Madness in York is split between an atmospheric pub upstairs and a shop bursting with brews downstairs.

But it’s London that, predictably, has the most drink-in destinations, among them Ghost Whale, with branches in Brixton and Putney, Indiebeer in Islington, and that old reliable the Beer Merchants Tap in Hackney Wick.

It’s not compulsory to pair your American craft beer with fancy food, by the way. A packet of crisps will do the job.

Photo © Nic Crilly Hargrave