Beer Culture with Des de Moor

Proef/Craig Allan Agent Provocateur and Cuvée d’Oscar

Des — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:37:04 +0000

Top Tastings 2011 (bottled Cuvée d’Oscar)

ABV: 6.5% and 7.5%
Origin: Lochristi, Oost-Vlaanderen, Vlaanderen
Website: craigallan.fr, www.proefbrouwerij.com

Craig Allan Cuvée d'Oscar (brewed at Proef)

These beers are produced in Belgian Flanders by a Scottish brewer based in Picardy, northern France, and are decidedly international at heart. Craig Allan trained in Edinburgh but found the British brewing scene hidebound by tradition. He now lives in Méry-la-Bataille, in the Oise département, and is working with the owners of Lille’s Abbaye des Saveurs beer shop and specialist pub La Capsule to create a new range of beers. The aspiration is to open a brewery somewhere in the area but in the meantime brewing takes place at the ever reliable Proef in Lochristi, over the Belgian border, proving ground for so many interesting new beers.

Having shaken off the weight of one deep rooted brewing tradition, Craig isn’t likely to succumb to another one, and his beers are a long way from the bières de garde typical of French Flanders and Picardy, leaning instead towards US-influenced craft beer styles and a spirit of artisanal experimentation. The former tendency is most evident in Agent Provocateur, a self described hybrid of a Belgian golden ale and an IPA.

Tasted from a keykeg at La Capsule, this was a cloudy golden beer with a foamy white head and a very rich fruity aroma with notes of kiwi fruit, pineapple, resinous Cascade hops and some farmyard scents. There was less hoppy bitterness than I expected on the rich full palate, though tasty apricot jam flavours came through, and a solid maltiness coupled with the characteristic esters of Belgian yeast established the golden ale side of the hybrid. A lightly sweet, lightly drying finish had some vegetal hop character.

Much as the Agent provoked me to appreciation, Cuvée d’Oscar (‘Oscar’s brew’, named after Craig’s baby son) turned out to be something else entirely. My personal tastes veer more towards dark beer anyway, but this one was so original and unusual. It’s based on a wheat Bock of the Schneider Aventinus variety, with a “high proportion” of wheat malt joining Munich, crystal and chocolate barley malts in the grist, fermented with Bavarian wheat beer yeast and given a twist with a good dose of hops, including dry hopping with New Zealand Nelson Sauvin.

A keykeg sample was thick and chestnut brown, with a thick bubbly off-tan head, looking very much like a strong Belgian brown, but certainly not smelling like one. The aroma was very fruity, with grape and apricot notes, followed by an unusual and very complex toffee palate with apricot, pineapple, chocolate, malt loaf and a spicy, yeasty quality. A pleasant finish was packed with vivid and unusual flavours, blending chocolate and toffee notes with satsumas, grapes and a touch of roast, with spicy hops nicely balancing an overall biscuity sweetness.

The bottle conditioned version I bought in the shop left even more of an impression. This looked very similar, again with a foamy head, and again I noted grapes and apricots in a creamy aroma. These fruits showed up too in the complex, sweetish palate alongside chocolate, breakfast cereal, exotic spice and a developing hoppy bitterness, with a luscious bubbly texture adding to the sensual delight. Chocolate turned quite dark and stern in the finish with raisins, toffee and an emerging powdery dryness with roasted malt flavours rounded off by apricot nectar, with a touch of herbal, lettucey bitterness.

Another brewer to watch, without a doubt.

Redwillow Ageless Double IPA

Des — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:23:24 +0000

Top Tastings 2011

ABV: 7.2%
Origin: Macclesfield, Cheshire East, England
Website: redwillowbrewery.com

Redwillow Ageless Double IPA

Recent years have seen the emergence of a number of new, small British breweries that place themselves firmly in the international craft beer movement rather than the native real ale tradition. I hesitate to use the label “craft beer” as in my view even the most dyed-in-the-wool cask ale producers should be counted as craft breweries, but there’s certainly an emerging and influential group of young brewers who are determined to do things differently, often looking across the Atlantic for inspiration.

The most recent example I’ve encountered is Redwillow, founded in 2010 by Toby McKenzie in Macclesfield. I happened across a selection of Toby’s cask and bottle conditioned beers at one of Manchester’s burgeoning number of interesting beer venues, the Font Bar, in early December, and with limited time to spare opted to try a bottle of this US-inspired double IPA. It turned out to be a good choice.

The beer poured amber, with a very big puffy yellowish head. Grapefruit and tropical fruit notes quickly seized control of a toffeeish malt aroma. More tropical fruit exploded on a resinous palate with notes of spice, burnt toast, lavender, sesame oil and a slight washing up liquid hint – an impressive intensity of flavour but nowhere near as overbearing as some beers in this style. Pineapple, coconut and a building peppery note danced in a long finish, with a minerally, chewy quality and some spicy, seedy notes.

Pays Flamand Anosteké Brune Imperial Smout

Des — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:10:08 +0000

Top Tastings 2011

ABV: 8.5%
Origin: Blaringhem, Nord, France
Website: www.bracine.com

Brasserie du Pays Flamand Anosteké Brune Imperial Smout

In November 2011 I was in Lille for a few days, checking out among other things the excellent beer range at the Abbaye des Saveurs shop in Vieux-Lille which will shortly feature in a Beer Sellers piece here. It was an opportunity to remind myself both of the joys of traditional bières de garde from this region of France, and to explore the work of some of the newer breweries now emerging, who take a more eclectic, internationally inspired approach to developing fine local products.

A good example of these is the Brasserie du Pays Flamand (‘Flemish Country brewery’), opened in 2006 by banker Mathieu Lesenne and commercial engineer Olivier Duthoit, both in their 30s and home brewers. For the first two years they contracted at another brewery, Saint-Germain, before opening at their current site in the village of Blaringhem on the edge of the Nord département, in a former distillery that once made spirits out of locally grown beet.

The brewery first made a success of its Bracine brand using substantial quantities of Flemish hops, before developing a new range of specialities, also well hopped but “more anchored in the brewing tradition”. Not long ago much of the area was Dutch speaking, as the place name attests, and the dialect survives – the brand name, Anosteké, is a dialect rendering of ‘tot de volgende keer’, ‘until the next time’.

I tried the Brune, which is subtitled curiously “imperial smout” [sic] – not quite an imperial stout. ratebeer.com has it as a Black IPA but I’m not so sure – there’s a definite stoutishness but also suggestions of an unusually well hopped and roasty dark abbey beer. Whatever, it’s a class act.

The beer is thick and near-black with a subsiding tan head. Fruit cake, tart plums, rum and coffee are evident on a rich aroma with a sweetish black treacle note, heralding a fruity palate that gradually dries, with lots of rich chocolate character, angelica, touches of raspberry and cherry fruit, a hint of brandy and a definite chewy hop note. A smooth, slightly clinging swallow leaves a complex finish with notes of tobacco, wood ash. Dry, roasty, charred and bitterish hoppy flavours linger over moreish sweetness. The next time can’t come too soon.

Ale House Rock at the Snooty Fox!

Des — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 11:42:53 +0000

Mixing it up on the wheels of steel. Or something. Pic: Ian Harris

Next weekend (2-5 February 2012) sees the latest beer and music themed festival at the very welcoming and decent Snooty Fox pub at Canonbury. Yes, you’ll be able to enjoy some great beers, but you’ll also be able to catch a rare DJ set from yours truly.

I don’t usually write about my other activities on this blog but since this one has a beer link here’s a shameless plug. In my shady past I DJ’d for several years at the famous 100 Club in Oxford Street on Saturday nights, playing an eclectic mix mainly based around classic rhythm & blues and soul, with all kinds of other retro stuff thrown in from big band jazz and rock’n'roll through easy listening, ska and Latin to punk and the odd bit of indie. The event at the Fox is billed as a rock’n'roll themed weekend but my contibutions are likely to be a bit more eclectic than that.

Besides a moonlighting beer writer, the event also features 25 new wave craft beerswith a focus on ales with unusual flavours such as a Milk Stout from Dark Star, Plum Porter from Titanic and a special jasmine IPA from Thornbridge. A brand new beer from Revolution Brewing named Unknown Pleasures in honour of Joy Division will also be featured, so I might slip a Manchester miserabilist tune in my set too.

Copies of my book will of course be on sale and I’ll be happy to sign prepurchased ones. See you there on Friday 3 February: my set starts at 2100 and the pub is open till 0100.

For more see www.snootyfoxlondon.co.uk/events.html.

Marble Old Manchester Ale

Des — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:04:02 +0000

Top Tastings 2011

ABV: 7.3%
Origin: Manchester, England
Website: www.marblebeers.co.uk, www.fullers.co.uk

Fuller's head brewer John Keeling with Marble Old Manchester. "Old and from Manchester." Pic: Fuller's

Collaboration beers are especially popular among the new generation of craft brewers, often across national boundaries, and have produced some fascinating results. But here’s one that crosses the generations, bringing together one of Britain’s leading old established independent breweries with one of its most impressive new arrivals, and also connecting two of the country’s greatest cities. It’s a beer that brought John Keeling, who has kept London’s Fuller’s in the first rank of world breweries, back to his native Manchester to create something rather special with James Campbell at the innovative Marble brewery.

Old Manchester Ale – “I like this beer because it’s like me, old and from Manchester!” comments John – is actually partly inspired by a London beer, Fuller’s own ESB, a favourite at Marble for its mix of juicy malt and assertive hops. When it was introduced in 1971, ESB replaced a long established Burton ale, not a light coloured India-style pale but a darker, sweeter beer in a style that originated in Burton but was once commonly brewed across England. It seems possible that ESB inherited some of its predecessor’s characteristics with its deep colour and rich maltiness.

Old Manchester turns the ESB volume control up a little and brings some twists of its own. It’s notably higher in gravity, and hopped with English Challenger, although I suspect some piny US hops have been included too. Both hop character and smoothness have been underlined by dry hopping the beer in cask and maturing for three months before bottle conditioning in Marble’s handsome Bordeaux-style bottles.

The beer is a lovely nut-brown colour with hints of amber, and a fine foamy light beige head. A beautifully fruity aroma has piney hop notes which, alongside the toffeeish, biscuity malt character, made me think of a modern US brown ale. There’s a grapefruit note on the palate which is dead dry and biscuity, though still contrives to be toffeeish, with a few lightly charred and burnt rubber hints, subtley softened by tasty fruit.

The biscuity quality persists in a finish where the piney notes recede under more fruit and a lingering peppery hop bite, lightly warming alcohol and some late candy notes. The beer is available in limited quantities – I found mine at the Pigs Ear beer festival but it’s also stocked by Marble and at the Fuller’s Brewery Shop.

Moonlight Death & Taxes

Des — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:03:34 +0000

Top Tastings 2011

ABV: 5%
Origin: Santa Rosa, California, USA
Website: www.moonlightbrewing.com

Moonlight Death & Taxes Black Beer

The name refers to the old proverb about certainty, attributed among many others to Benjamin Franklin. And it’s a quality that I’ve come to associate over the past few years with Moonlight beers – the certainty that the beer I’m about to taste is at least interesting and quite likely excellent.

Most people I’ve spoken to who’ve also encountered Brian Hunt’s beers feel the same, yet they’re limited to a modest production – only about 1,000 US barrels (1,200hl) a year, and with distribution over a limited area. Brian started the brewery in 1992 in an old barn in the countryside north of Santa Rosa, in Sonoma County on the outlying flanks of the San Francisco Bay Area. It moved to a purpose built facility closer to town in 2003. There are no bottles – Brian insists the beers taste their best only in kegs.

Moonlight beers are artisanal, eccentric and distinctive without shouting out for attention like some more notorious Californian craft brews. The fact that the flagship beer, Death & Taxes, is an inspired take on a Schwarzbier sums up the approach.

The beer is a very dark brown, near black, with a foamy beige head and a rich chocolatey dark malt aroma. A very firm but clean and smooth palate is dry and sacky with little sweetness, some coffee and chocolate flavours and a bit more hops than expected, but not overwhelmingly so. A long developing and perfectly controlled and balanced chocolate and bitterish roast finish turns powdery on the tongue. It’s sophisticated and flavourful but still wonderfully refreshing.

I sampled the beer during another very pleasant session at one of my favourite San Francisco beer venues, the Monks Kettle in the Mission.

Moncada Notting Hill Amber

Des — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:56:18 +0000

Top Tastings 2011

ABV: 4.9%
Origin: London W10, England
Website: moncadabrewery.co.uk

Julio Moncada at the London Brewers Showcase, October 2011

2011 was an extraordinary year for brewing in London. When I sent the final text of London’s Best Beer, Bars and Pubs off to CAMRA Books in early March, I felt the capital had done well to nurture six new brewers over a matter of years, particularly when they included Brodie’s, Camden Town, Kernel, Redemption and Sambrook’s. Then at the end of March I heard another new brewery, Moncada, was under development in west London.

I phoned up a rather surprised Julio Moncada, and discovered he was a former caterer from Argentina, who had originally planned to open a delicatessen business but then opted for brewing instead, partly as the ingredients were nearer to hand. I then wrote a last minute couple of paragraphs on the basis that Moncada beers would be on sale by publication date, feeling rather pleased with myself for producing something with its finger so firmly on the pulse.

As it happens, things turned out rather differently. In the succeeding months, it sometimes seemed I was hearing about yet another planned new London brewery on a weekly basis. Meanwhile Julio’s plans were delayed by trade mark and electricity supply problems, and several other newcomers such as Botanist, By the Horns, East London, London Brewing, London Fields and Redchurch beat him to it, with a rush of new openings in late summer and early autumn.

Moncada beers made their public debut on 22 October at the London Brewers Showcase organised by the London Brewers Alliance at Brew Wharf, Borough Market. This remarkable event included nearly all the new brewers alongside more established names including London’s remaining old established independent, Fuller’s. When I say that Sambrook’s, who couldn’t make it, were barely missed, it’s not at all a reflection on the quality of their beer but on the huge growth of the capital’s brewing industry.

I was glad to meet Julio face to face at the event and gladder still to taste his excellent beers, which really were worth waiting for. Notting Hill Amber was his first brew, served on cask but also available in the bottle, and a very promising start. It’s in this list of Top Tastings partly on its own merits, but also as a representative of all the new brewers that emerged in perhaps the most exhilirating year in living memory for the London’s beer scene.

My sample was a soft hazy amber with a fine white head and a very finely pointed hoppy aroma of grapefruit and exotic spice. A smooth, full and tasty palate turned rapidly bitter with grapefruit over underlying malt and a slightly petrolly note, first cakey and then slightly raspy on the tongue. The finish was bitterish and chewy but nicey rounded with a tasty smack of fruit and a little astringency. Long may the brewers of my home city keep producing such great beers.

Mighty Oak Oscar Wilde

Des — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:42:12 +0000

Top Tastings 2011

ABV: 3.7%
Origin: Maldon, Essex, England
Website: www.mightyoakbrewery.co.uk

Mighty Oak Oscar Wilde

This beer won Champion Beer of Britain (CBoB) at the Great British Beer Festival in August 2011, much to the consternation of some craft beer aficianados who saw this as further evidence of CAMRA conservatism and fustiness – with all those exciting new high gravity beers out there dry hopped with massive quantities of the latest alpha acid oozer from New Zealand, here they are giving their top award to a dull old 3.7% traditional English mild.

For my part, I was more than happy with the choice. I’m a great fan of mild, which, although it’s not quite in as imminent danger of extinction as it once was, is still a minority style, and at its best a brilliant demonstration of how brewers can squeeze remarkable amounts of flavour into a low gravity beer. Admittedly the CBoB judges sometimes make eccentric choices and tend towards conservatism, but all they can do is pick what they think are the best beers that are offered to them out of a wide variety on the day.

Much as I was pleased to hear of Oscar Wilde’s win, however, the main reason it’s here is more personal. Shortly after 1800hrs on Thursday 3 February 2011, I completed my exhausting schedule of research visits to potential places to drink for inclusion in The CAMRA Guide to London’s Best Beer, Pubs and Bars by calling in at Leyton Orient Supporters Club.

Due to the irregular opening hours of the club, I’d not succeeded in visiting it on previous research itineraries, and had even considered not bothering with it, but in the end I was glad I made a special effort. It’s certainly not London’s most beautiful place to drink, but it’s an unexpectedly quirky venue with an excellent range of cask ales at bargain prices and a very warm welcome from the enthusiastic volunteers who run it. It seemed a good place to draw a line under my quest for the capital’s best beer outlets.

As had become my standard practice with places new to me, I went in unannounced as an ordinary drinker, ordered a half and took stock of both the beer and the surroundings. Then before taking more detailed notes I introduced myself to bar manager Mike Childs and explained what I was doing. We ended up chatting further, and when Mike found out his club was my last stop he insisted I stay for a pint on the house by way of celebration. I unhesitatingly chose one of their regular beers, Oscar Wilde Mild.

Its brewery, Mighty Oak in the pretty Essex town of Maldon, on the Blackwater estuary, has a firm link to east London brewing heritage. It was founded in Brentwood, just over the London boundary, in 1996 by brewer John Boyce, who had been made redundant through the closure by Carlsberg of the Ind Coope brewery in Romford, one of the great historic ale breweries of the region with a history dating back to 1709. Reaching for the aspiration of its name, the tiny brewery prospered and moved to its current, much bigger, premises in 2001.

It’s unusual these days for a brewer in southeast England to do well with a mild but Oscar Wilde is an exception. Mild may also not have been the tipple of choice for the flamboyant Irish poet, playwright and wit with whom it shares its name, but of course it’s Cockney rhyming slang – not that I’d miss the opportunity of raising a glass to Oscar himself.

The beer is a very, very dark amber brown with a light foamy beige head and a malty, sappy, slightly caramel tinged aroma of the precise sort you’d expect from a good example of the style. There’s also a bit of caramel on the malty palty, with some liquorice and a touch of ashy roast, offset by a pleasant fruity tanginess on the tongue. A nice drying and slightly roasty finish has a bit more brown bread flavour with notably bracing hops around the edges – perhaps a bit more than would be typical in more traditional examples, but not enough to overpower the firm malt character.

I’ve found Oscar Wilde delicious on several occasions and this was no exception, though perhaps with an extra boost of pleasure given the task I’d just accomplished. If this beer is in the gutter, it is certainly looking up at the stars, and I urge you to follow its gaze.

Is cask craft?

Des — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:56:29 +0000

Cask or craft? Can Boris tell the difference? Opening of Lovibonds brewery 2006, with brewer Jeff Rosenmeier (right). Pic: Lovibonds

This is the first in what will undoubtedly become an occasional series of posts addressing some of the theoretical and policy debates currently besetting British beer culture. If your interest in beer is entirely in drinking and enjoying it, then I recommend you read no further. However for those that are interested, what follows isn’t just rabbinical hair-splitting. Such debates can, and have, had a major impact on the way beer is produced, marketed, consumed and appreciated.

What do we mean by craft beer and craft brewing? And more specifically, what do I mean by these terms, which I use regularly on this blog and in my other writing? The issue has arisen because it’s becoming increasingly apparent that, in the British context, not everyone uses the terms in the same way.

When I write “craft beer” I’m thinking globally, across international brewing cultures and irrespective of particular brewing techniques. To me, a craft brewer is one who prioritises brewing as a craft, using quality ingredients, skill, experience and imagination to produce beers of character and distinctiveness, whether that’s by adhering to deep-rooted local brewing traditions or innovating with new and experimental recipes and styles.

This definition is inevitably fuzzy-edged and requires a certain amount of value judgement and insight into particular brewers’ intentions, and it’s easy to think up particular cases to test it. And of course brewery staff have to make a living, so commercial considerations enter into the decision making of even the most artisanal producers. But I do think there is an important and useful distinction to be made between this vision of craft brewing on the one hand, and large scale industrial brewing on the other, where decisions are primarily driven by the need to pay dividends to shareholders who otherwise have little interest in brewing, and branding and marketing techniques are at least as important as brewing skills.

I admit my definition doesn’t correspond with some of those used by bodies that are more authoritative and influential than me. The term ‘craft brewing’ originated in the United States in the 1980s to designate the emerging counterpoint to the prevailing dominance of large-scale monopolised national brewing, encompassing both new brewers producing more flavoursome beers and the handful of old-established local and regional brewers that had survived Prohibition and postwar consolidation.

Originally US brewers and drinkers used the term as fuzzily as I do, but the Brewers Association (BA), the trade organisation for smaller, independent brewers, needed a less disputable definition. The BA now defines a craft brewer primarily by size, as a brewer producing up to 6million US brewers’ barrels (just over 7million hl) – raised in 2011 from 2million barrels (2.35million hl) when some of the Association’s most successful members came within reach of the previous threshold. Volumes like these have little relevance to the UK where, for example, the three breweries owned by the world’s biggest brewer, AB InBev, produce barely 11million hl between them and a major independent like Fuller’s is unlikely to chalk up more than 500,000hl a year.

The BA definition does, however, go on to specify that a craft brewer must also be independent, with no more than 25% ownership by a non-craft alcohol producer, and either produce an all-malt flagship beer or dedicate at least half of its production to “either all malt beers or…beers which use adjuncts to enhance rather than lighten flavor”. This last stipulation arose from the US context where industrial brewers took to using significant proportions of ingredients like maize (corn), rice and refined sugar to create blander mainstream beers. But within that context, it begins to address the issue of quality, and the significance of brewing tradition.

Given the differences in both scale and historical context, there’s little to be achieved in attempting to force the BA definition onto the UK brewing scene. But it’s notable that there’s nothing in the BA definition that specifies particular technical aspects of beer production, like fermentation, conditioning and dispense, and certainly nothing to preclude cask beer – the traditional British style of draught beer that is still fermenting in its container when dispensed without additional carbon dioxide pressure – from being counted as craft beer. Indeed while cask beer accounts for a tiny proportion of production in the US, interest in it is growing among craft brewers.

Yet in Britain there are growing signs the term is being used more narrowly, to exclude cask beer. This confusing new usage has arisen partly to fill a vacuum in terminology that’s been exposed by changes in the beer market. When CAMRA coined the term “real ale” in the early 1970s to distinguish traditional British cask ale from the new low quality, low alcohol, cheaply produced and overpriced pasteurised and artificially carbonated draught “keg” ales and lagers that were being foisted on the drinking public through the monopoly positions and marketing budgets commanded by the industrial brewing groups, the overlap between cask beer and beer worth fighting for was almost exact.

In the early 1970s, CAMRA publications such as the first Good Beer Guide (1974) defined “real ale” more broadly, including quality considerations such as adequate conditioning periods and the avoidance of cheap adjuncts, extracts and chemical additives, alongside cask conditioning and unpressurised dispense. But the messages were soon simplified, and generations of British beer drinkers grew up with the notion that whether a beer was “good” or not was somehow entirely determined by the presence of live yeast cells and the absence of extraneous CO₂.

This oversimplification was always problematic, leaving out for example considerable numbers of British bottled beers that though filtered and sometimes pasteurised had a least as much tradition behind them as cask ales. In recent decades it’s become more and more unsustainable, challenged first by increasing awareness and availability of international beers of self-evident quality that don’t fit the definition of “real ale” and now by still small but growing and influential numbers of small and high principled British brewers producing beers that don’t fit the real ale parameters.

The rather clunky term “craft keg” is in relatively common use to describe such beers in draught form, encompassing both domestic and imported brews. The techniques used in producing and dispensing some of these beers challenge easy categorisation. Unlike industrial keg beers they are not necessarily pasteurised and artificially carbonated – many are unpasteurised, some are conditioned in the keg and with some the natural carbonation produced during fermentation is captured and added back in later to aid a sparkling dispense. Their brewers can make a good case that, for some beer styles, the additional sparkle and the generally lower serving temperatures enhances the taste experience rather than compensating for the lack of it, as with industrial keg beers. But they still don’t count as real ale.

It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that people reach for the simple term “craft” to designate non-cask beers of this kind. Here’s Robin Walton, author of The Search For The Perfect Pub: Looking For The Moon Under Water, writing on the Huffington Post website on 9 January 2012:

Craft beer isn’t real ale. In fact, in some ways it’s the antithesis of real ale. Where real ale might be (fairly) represented by scenes of beer festivals populated by lovable old Gandalfs, craft beer might be two demented blokes driving a tank up Camden High Street to promote a bar launch…Where real ale is cask and handpull, craft beer will proudly pour from the keg or the bottle.

Admittedly the tone of the article is lighthearted, and Robin later admits he is making “huge, sweeping generalisations”. His reference to real ale drinkers as “lovable old Gandalfs”, and, later in the article, to young people and women drinking craft beer, suggests he’s talking about cultural perceptions as much as about technical definitions. Nonetheless a newly minted beer enthusiast reading the article might at best end up confused, and at worst be prompted to avoid cask beer, which Robin implies, perhaps unintentionally but nevertheless completely mistakenly, is less flavourful than “craft” beer from keg or bottle.

Yet this confusing usage is in danger of spreading even to brewers. Soon after the above article was published, US-born Jeff Rosenmeier of Lovibonds in Henley-on-Thames, one of the small breweries now specialising in “craft keg” beers, caused a stir on Twitter by stating that what he brewed was craft beer, as distinct from real ale. “You have craft beer,” tweeted Jeff, “and you have real ale (cask). Including real ale as craft beer just confuses things…real ale is bedded in, people know it. Why does real ale get included?” Jeff seemed to be saying that beers like his deserve a category of their own, and “craft” is that category.

While I’m sympathetic to brewers like Jeff wanting to boast about their excellent beers in their own right and not just as a subcategory of something else, I disagree strongly that the way to do this is by attempting to claim exclusive rights to the term “craft beer”. Education of the consumer matters, and terms like “real ale”, far from being “bedded in”, are widely misunderstood – they may be familiar to people like Jeff, myself and other members of the beer twitterati that participated in the exchange, but what about those new beer drinkers potentially excited by the flavour potential of both cask and non-cask craft-brewed beer?

Exempting cask beer from the craft category would send out the unhelpful implication that cask beer isn’t crafted, which is patently untrue. Although there are a handful of high volume bland brews out there from bigger brewers that might stretch our generosity a little, by and large cask beer is crafted by definition, given the greater levels of care and skill required to brew and serve it compared to industrial pasteurised beer.

More importantly, anyone constructing a definition of craft beer around the question of whether it is or is not cask will fall into precisely the same trap that has ensnared CAMRA ever since it attempted to define the value of beer according to the technicalities of conditioning and dispense. While it’s undeniable that CAMRA’s approach has brought great success, which brewers and drinkers of both cask and non-cask craft beers should be grateful for, that success came at a price.

For forty years since, rather than focusing on beer quality and integrity, CAMRA has been riven by divisive, destructive and ultimately rather pointless debates about detailed technical issues that mean nothing to the average drinker, from an early furore about air pressure dispense that almost split the organisation, through endless hours of anguish about cask breathers and “fast cask” yeast, to the current craft keg debate and its resulting terminological impasse.

Surely, as several contributors to the Twitter discussion suggested, we should be concentrating on the things that really matter when deciding whether or not a beer is worth drinking or celebrating – its quality, flavour, distinctiveness, provenance, appropriateness to occasion, its sense of tradition or indeed of imagination, and other factors that speak to whether or not it was brewed with pride, and craft.

We can be sure the categories will come – they’ll be foisted upon us by marketing people, most of whom know little and care less about the technicalities and traditions of brewing, not to inform the public but to help “grow the category” and assist supermarket staff in deciding which shelves to put the bottles on. And doubtless those of us who care about such things will fulminate online about how inaccurate and unhelpful they are, just as we do when we see Leffe Blonde and Erdinger Weissbier labelled as lagers or read that a beer has been brewed to the same recipe for a thousand years. But please let’s not give such confusion and misinformation a head start.

Kernel Imperial Brown Stout London 1856

Des — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:17:00 +0000

Top Tastings 2011

ABV: 10.1%
Origin: London SE1, England
Website: www.thekernelbrewery.com

The Kernel Brewery

Beers from the Kernel, surely London’s second world class brewery, loomed large in my drinking in 2011. I admit I was a bit late in catching up on them – my first encounter was in January when I visited the brewery as research for my London beer guide, by which time the online beer enthusiast community had been buzzing about them for months.

I could easily have picked three or four Kernel beers as Top Tastings – including the 1890 Export Stout that my fellow judges and myself named top beer at the International Beer Challenge last summer. Several of British Guild of Beer Writers Brewer of the Year Evin O’Riordan’s other beers are reviewed elsewhere, but I’ve limited myself to one choice per brewery for the Top Tastings. The Export Stout seemed a shoe-in until a few weeks ago, when I happened on this Imperial Brown Stout, another historic recipe, on sale in the bottle – bottle conditioned as always – at the Pigs Ear Beer Festival.

The beer pours a very dark brown, with a thick orange-brown head leaving copious amounts of lace. There’s a very smooth and tempting aroma dominated by chocolate, with hints of plummy fruit and cream. Chocolate and stewed prunes are evident in a rich palate with a wonderful garnish of fruity hops dancing over thick caramel and liquorice malt, with tingling alcohol, spices and dark treacle sweetness.

The finish is lingering, elegant and complex, first coating the mouth with a sticky slick of cakey malt, with chocolate, coffee and mint flavours and a long developing but contained charred roast note complementing the sting of alcohol. A very big flavoured and challenging beer, but with much to enjoy.