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Best beer and travel writing award 2015, 2011 -- British Guild of Beer Writers Awards
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"A necessity if you're a beer geek travelling to London town" - Beer Advocate
"A joy to read" - Roger Protz
"Very authoritative" - Tim Webb.
"One of the top beer writers in the UK" - Mark Dredge.
"A beer guru" - Popbitch.
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Top Tastings 2010
ABV: 9.2%
Origin: Vista, California, USA
Website: www.greenflashbrew.com
 Green Flash Le Freak Founded in 2002 by former pub owners Mike and Lisa Hinkley near San Diego, joined shortly afterwards by head brewer Chuck Silva, Green Flash has established itself as a favoured source of innovative and sometimes extreme beers with the West Coast’s characteristically liberal use of hops. A self-confessed cross between a San Diego-style imperial pale ale and a Belgian tripel, Le Freak is one of the flagship products. I enjoyed a bomber of the stuff courtesy of Argonaut in Denver.
Le Freak is a peachy light amber with an orange-tinged light beige head. The aroma is flowery and herbal with fruity pale malt and a very Belgian coriander whiff. Strawberry and peach fruit offsets big resinous herbal hops on palate, with a definite perfumed tripel note. The finish is complex with grapefruit, pepper, more peach and flowery perfume and some herbal hints, very long, quite warming and finally very dry. A huge beer that achieves just what it set out to do by fusing the two styles successfully.
The brewery’s name, incidentally, refers to a meteorological phenomenon where part of the sun appears to flash a different colour, usually green, at sunrise and sunset in certain coastal areas.
Read more about this beer at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/green-flash-le-freak/70945/
Top Tastings 2010
ABV: 9%
Origin: Horndean, Hampshire, England
 George Gale Prize Old Ale 2007 Gale’s Prize Old Ale is a real slice of British brewing heritage. Created by a Yorkshireman who worked at the company’s 1860s tower brewery in the early 20th century, it perpetuated an already declining technique in British brewing, the long ageing of strong ales which had once been a key component of porter production. When CAMRA was founded in 1971 it was one of the legendary five bottle conditioned beers still in production in the UK. Michael Jackson, in his 1993 Beer Companion, describes it as brewed in a Victorian cast iron mash tun and a copper dating from 1826, and matured for six to 12 months in glass lined cast iron tanks, before being bottled, unfiltered and unpasteurised, straight from the tank with no additional sugar or yeast, after which it can continue to mature for many years. One Gales brewer, he says, “argued that 20 years’ bottle-aging was an optimum, not a maximum.”
When Gales was bought and closed by Fuller’s in 2006, just before the final curtain the new owner farsightedly commissioned one final and specially large batch of Prize Old Ale, which was tanked to Chiswick for maturation. Some of it was then bottled and released as a 2007 vintage; some of the rest is still maturing and proportions of it are likely to appear in future Fuller’s releases of the beer. Fuller’s kindly sent me a review bottle of the 2007 which I managed to resist trying until it had at least a couple of years more of age.
The beer poured a dark red-brown with a very slight light brown head that soon subsided. Fruity, irony, cherry and chocolate aromas were reminiscent of sour Belgian ales like Rodenbach. The palate was complex, tangy and very fruity with a tasty malt body, sappy wood-like notes and big middle of chocolate and boiled sweets with a hint of hops. A lingering tangy finish yielded dates, olives, bitter herbs, nuts, vermouth and a well-balanced acidity.
That acidity, which certainly mellows but doesn’t disappear with age, has long been a noteworthy characteristic of the beer and makes me wonder about the glass lined tanks reported by Jackson, as it’s more characteristic of a wood matured beer. And indeed the 1993 account is contradicted by Fuller’s brewing director, John Keeling, who in an interview with Roger Protz says it was initially fermented in wood which was impossible to clean thoroughly, picking up the microorganisms that gave it its sourness, then matured in stainless steel tanks. Fuller’s marketing team regarded the 2007 as too aggressively sour, and had John brew a 2008 with only a small proportion of the Horndean beer, which rounds off the edges. But it’s still recognisably Prize Old Ale, now one of only two remaining of that historic 1970s five.
Read more about this beer at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/gales-prize-old-ale/5996/
Top Tastings 2010
ABV: 5.8%
Origin: Farmville, North Carolina, USA
Website: www.duckrabbitbrewery.com
 The Duck-Rabbit Schwarzbier (black lager) Only a philosopher could think to call a brewery Duck-Rabbit, after the ambiguous drawing seen as either a duck or a rabbit discussed in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations, 1953). And sure enough founder Paul Philippon was an academic and Wittgenstein specialist before opening the brewery in 2004. What had also piqued my interest when I heard about the brewery was that it specialised in dark beers, matching my own personal preferences, so I was delighted to find it well represented with various stouts and porters and this black lager at 2010’s Great American Beer Festival.
The beer is a very dark chestnut-brown, only a shade above black, with a light off-white trace of a head and a very chocolatey, slightly fruity aroma. there’s a medium-roast coffee palate that’s full of chewy, silky malt, yielding a bitterish burr. A crisp, roasty but smooth and soothing finish has lingering roast and lightly smoky notes. An excellent beer to get you thinking.
Read more about this beer at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/the-duck-rabbit-schwarzbier/105762/
Top Tastings 2010
ABV: 5.3%
Origin: Aurora, Colorado, USA
Website: www.drydockbrewing.com
 Dry Dock Brewing Kevin DeLange already owned a small homebrew store when in 2005 he decided to add a microbrewery with its own tiny taproom. Such was the success of this move that in 2009 the taproom and brewery relocated to a bigger space a few doors down on the same strip mall, its popularity immensely boosted through being named Small Brewing Company of the Year at the 2009 Great American Beer Festival. Some of Dry Dock’s individual beers were honoured at the same time, including this one which won a gold medal in the Altbier class. I caught up with it at the following year’s GABF, where it won a silver medal.
The beer is a lovely pale amber with a bubbly white head and a pineapple-tinged, biscuity, creamy and sweet aroma. There’s a delicious bite to the biscuit malt palate which also has spicy summer fruit, oranges and crisp nutty tones around the edges. A nicely dry and crisp malt finish has ripe orange notes, leaving a substantial but refreshing impression.
Read more about this beer at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/dry-dock-bismark-alt/108998/
Top Tastings 2010
ABV: 11.5%
Origin: Esen, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium
Website: www.dedollebrouwers.be
 De Dolle Brouwers Stille Nacht Reserva 2005 An extreme development of the cult classic ‘Silent Night’ strong, sweet Christmas ale from the eccentric Dolle Brouwers, this wood aged version takes a slighty stronger implementation of the same recipe, generously hopped with Nugget and matured for 18 months in refill Bordeaux barrels. There have been other vintage dated releases since, but I found this beautifully aged 2005 on the lengthy list of mature beers at Kulminator in Antwerpen.
This is an amber beer which poured with a light foamy head. A sweet liqueurish aroma was heavy with estery fruit. The palate had a very sweet, heavy, luxuriouslly peachy broad body with notes of sherry and very ripe — not to mention rotting — fruit, with obvious alcohol and a definite woody note. Oranges, peaches and apricot liqueur emerged in a coating, lingering finish with that slightly honeyed note often found in Dolle beers. There was also a notable and very pleasing touch of acid — the wood ageing would have encouraged this and other reviewers have described more recent versions as funky and ‘bretty’, but the characteristic was relatively restrained on this sample, perhaps mellowed out by age.
Read more about this beer at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/de-dolle-stille-nacht-special-reserva-2005/59477/
Top Tastings 2010
ABV: 27%
Origin: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Website: www.samueladams.com
 Boston Beer Company Samuel Adams Utopias 2009 I got an opportunity to try Utopias at a beer judging — it was presented anonymously but others on our judging team who’d tried it before instantly recognised it, and we later confirmed what it was, with the opportunity to taste it again. If you’re lucky enough to stumble across it — and it’s rare stuff, one of the first beers deliberately to be marketed as a premium price collectible, a limited edition retailing at up to $200 a bottle or more on the collectors’ market — you’ll realise why my colleagues found it so instantly recognisable.
The Boston Beer Company is one of the USA’s most successful and established new wave craft brewers, founded in 1985 by Jim Koch. It had already started to push the envelope with extra strong and extreme beers when it started experimenting with what became Utopias in the early 1990s, using a blend of yeasts including champagne yeast and a grist fortified with maple syrup to achieve a gravity of 24% by natural fermentation. The beer was then aged in a variety of refill barrels — Scotch whisky, bourbon, port and cognac — for up to a decade and blended to produce the first release of Utopias in 2001, distributed in a bottle designed to resemble a brewing copper.
This third version, released in 2009, has upped the gravity still further to 27% and includes a wider variety of barrel-aged beers, some of them 16 years old. Two-row pale Harrington and Metcalfe, Caramel 60, and Munich are the barley malts with a very European mix of Hallertau Mittelfrüh, Spalt and Tettnager hops. Buffalo Trace bourbon and Portugese muscatel finishing barrels have joined the ageing armoury.
The result is a completely flat iodine brown beer with no head, leaving forbidding yellow traces on the edge of the glass as it swirls. The aroma is rich and complex, with vanilla, sawn wooden boards, leather, cherries and an obvious alcoholic note. The palate is sweet and spirity with cherries, madeire fruit cake, mint and a gaseous cloud of woody retronasals. A hugely long finish has a sweet, alcoholic slick with vanilla, crackling herbal hoppy notes around the edges and the mouth coating dryness of sappy sucked wood.
I hesitated to include Utopias in this top tastings list as it’s not really like a beer at all, more like a sherry or a port, although rather more expensive than some examples of the former that are comparable in quality. But it’s certainly well worth experiencing.
Read more about this beer at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/samuel-adams-utopias/12228/
Top Tastings 2010
ABV: 8%
Origin: Lembeek, Vlaams-Brabant, Belgium
Website: www.boon.be
 Boon Oude Geuze Mariage Parfait In 1977, after a period perfecting the skill of lambic blending at the old De Vit blender and former brewery in Lembeek, Frank Boon became the first person in decades to start a new brewery specialising in spontaneously fermented lambic beers on the same site, in the village that’s the spiritual home of the style in the Pajottenland near Brussels. At the time lambic seemed in terminal decline, but Frank was one of the people that helped establish its profile on the developing international beer appreciation scene, and he’s since become one of the most successful ambassadors for real lambics. A longstanding partnership with Belgian new national Palm has helped provide wide distribution.
The ‘Perfect Marriage’ series of beers, blended from the best barrels of lambic selected by the brewer and at a considerably higher strength than is normal for the style, are the pinnacle of Boon’s craft. 90% of the blend for this geuze comprises mature lambic of around 18 months old, about 5% is three year old beer and the rest young beer with adequate unfermented sugar and live yeast to develop a fresh sparkle. The various beers are mixed in a 25,000l capacity blending vessel, cooled, bottled and returned to fermentation temperature in a temperature controlled room. They then enjoy a long, cool maturation before being released.
A well-matured 2001 example made an appearance at the Zythos Beer Festival in 2010. With the reddish-amber ‘foxy’ colour of a good mature lambic, it had a fine white head and a sweet-sour aroma reminiscent of wet plastic, with a vinegar note. The palate was beautifully lambic-sour, but very approachable for the style, with tasty, complex apple pippy fruit, and a slightly creamy texture with some sweet notes. A chewy, fruity applecore finish developed tart notes way back in the mouth, with an emerging and lasting nuttiness and edges softered and rounded by maturity. Sublime.
Read more about this beer at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/boon-oude-geuze-mariage-parfait/12027/
Top Tastings 2010
ABV: 5.8
Origin: Trabelsdorf (Lisberg), Franken/Bayern, Germany
Website: www.beck-braeu.de
 Beck Bräu Trabelsdorf Not to be confused with the massive AB InBev subsidiary in Bremen, Beck Bräu is a brewpub in a small village in the hilly, wooded country of Upper Franconia’s Steigerwald. Over the past few years a number of its beers have found their way to British beer festivals, but the brewer responsible for expanding this trade, Andreas Gänstaller, gave up the lease at the end of 2010 and took over the old Friedel brewery in Schnaid. Brewing in Trabelsdorf may yet be revived by the property owner’s son but the brands might be different.
This fresh, unfiltered lager, enjoyed several months before the move at the Battersea Beer Festival, was an excellent example of Andreas’ skill. A deep gold, almost amber, in colour, it had a generous off-white head, and a relatively restrained malty and creamy aroma with a lightly perfumed touch. The palate was full, natural and rather yeasty with honeyed malt, generous biscuity flavours and a notably edgy and very clean and distinct dose of hops. A long, drying chewy finish with a slightly vegetal hop character turned slightly peppery and chalky. A delightfully refreshing beer — Andreas will be one to watch at his new home.
Read more about this brewery’s beers at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/brewers/brauerei-beck-trabelsdorf/3701/
Top Tastings 2010
ABV: 10.5%
Origin: Boulder, Colorado, USA
Website: www.averybrewing.com
 Avery Maharaja Imperial India Pale Ale Regularly topping polls of the world’s best beers, this super-hopped pale ale comes from a Colorado brewery founded by home brewer Adam Avery in 1993, since much expanded and greatly admired for its cutting edge repertoire of extreme hop beers and barrel aged specialities. I picked up my ‘bomber’ bottle at Argonaut in Denver.
Made from two-row pale, caramel 120L and Victory barley malt, with Simcoe, Columbus, Centennial and Chinook hops added in numerous additions to a whopping 102 IBUs, this is a reddish copper beer with a fine yellowy off-white head, taking its name from the Sanskrit word meaning ‘Great King’. Unsurprisingly the aroma is pungently hop dominated, a complex haze of soapy, piny, coconut and fruit notes.
The smooth nectary palate soon develops a piny hop bite, with notes of citrus, wood polish and tropical fruit. The finish is drying but surprisingly rounded, with pungent and vivid resinous hop flavours and mint, though softened by an almost honeyed touch. It is indeed a very hoppy beer, but achieves an impressive delicacy around its vivid flavours which should explain why it’s held in high regard compared to some more aggressive entries in the genre.
Read more about this beer at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/avery-the-maharaja-imperial-india-pale-ale/44485/
Originally published in BEER February 2011. Click on the links for extended reviews.
 Hardknott Granite 2009 The good Real Ale in a Bottle just keeps on coming, and this column can barely keep pace! And pleasingly, many of the new bottlers aren’t just bottling cask but aim to tempt a discerning audience with something special.
An excellent example is the Hardknott Brewery deep in the Lake District. Their bottled range includes a tasty 6.5% “oxymoronic ruby red IPA” and a complex 8% barrel aged Imperial Stout. But my pick of a very strong bunch is Hardknott Granite (10.4 per cent), a dry hopped dark ruby barley wine with a rich caramel malt palate set off by chewy hops, spice and an odd but pleasing whiff of Stilton cheese. A vinous, sherryish finish yields chewy roast and slightly burnt tones, plum jam and tobacco. Brewer Dave Bailey is also one of Britain’s most respected and perceptive beer bloggers, and demonstrably practices what he preaches. The flair and imagination in these beers marks him out as a brewer to watch.
Also exercising his imagination is John Bates at Ole Slewfoot brewery near Norwich, named after a bear in a Johnny Horton song. His range of corked and wired 375ml bottles includes Red Wing (5.1 per cent), an attempt at a Flemish red ale with a whiff of roses on the woody aroma. It’s lightly sour – I suspect the addition of brettanomyces yeast – with fruity malt, chocolate, and an authentic irony tang. While not a clone of any Belgian original it’s impressively true to style and very drinkable in its own right.
Green Jack in Lowestoft are unafraid to put strong stuff on the bar and they’re now putting some of it in handsome swing top 750ml bottles, including Green Jack Ripper (8.5 per cent), their award winning barley wine-cum-abbey tripel. This blond beer has a citric, peaches and cream aroma with mineral notes and a grainy, herby palate (coriander, perhaps?) with a distinct note of apricot jam. Rooty hops finally emerge on a spicy dry finish to give a bitter kick that’s pronounced but not excessive.
I admire Edinburgh micro Stewart’s for reflecting Scotland’s distinct brewing tradition in their beers, unlike some of their peers. Among their new bottle conditioned range is the very Scottish Stewart’s St Giles, named after the landmark Presbyterian High Kirk on the capital’s Royal Mile. It’s a cherry red beer with a ripe cinder toffee and malt aroma and a classic malty-fruity palate. Burnt cake and a gentle hint of hops dry the soothing caramel-tinged finish, ideal for relaxing with after a bracing winter stroll in Holyrood Park.
Blythe Ridware Pale, hand bottled deep in rural Staffordshire, is a strikingly pale and delicate yellow colour with a fruity and flowery lemon and honey aroma. A crisp, dry, lightly bitter palate has floral and mineral hints and the tasty finish develops earthy pepper flavours over plenty of firm and fruity malt. This perfectly balanced and very refreshing beer is one of the best I’ve tried of the new breed of bitterish golden ales.
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