Front line, back line

In the last week I’ve drunk about twice as much beer in pubs as at home; it looks as if the period when my beer drinking consisted mostly, or entirely, of bottled beers at home may – touch wood – finally be coming to an end. Let’s hope so.

Still, I do want to talk a bit more about the bottles under the stairs (and in the garage); specifically, about the front line and the back line.

Over the last two years I’ve ordered a lot of “mixed cases” (mostly from Thirst Class, Marble, the Petersgate Tap and Rotsaert – not the Belgian beer merchant I was using a couple of years ago, but the one that was first off the blocks in resuming deliveries to Brexit Island). I’ve also done a lot of bulk ordering – either beers that I knew I’d get through or beers that were only available in multiples, or in a couple of cases both: Jaipur, Boltmaker, Batham’s, Harvey’s Elizabethan… Perhaps especially during lockdown, I found it very reassuring always to know that any time I fancied an X, there an X would be. (I only got the Batham’s once, though – they just went down too quickly.)

Over time I’ve refined the bulk ordering process, generally by a process of realising over a period of time that (e.g.) six Ram Tams was one too many. (It goes out as Landlord Dark these days, seeming to endorse the old rumour that it was just Landlord with added caramel – which is odd because a side-by-side tasting confirms that they’re totally different beers.) But there’s been addition as well as subtraction; in fact I’ve now got six beers that are my ‘go to’ example of a particular style & which I’ve bought in quantity. So my stash has a definite front line of multiple-purchase reliables, along with everything else that catches my eye (the back line).

What’s in my front line? There are six (or seven) beers involved, and in ascending total alcohol content order (doesn’t everyone order their stash by total alcohol content?), they are:

1. The bitter: Marble Pint and Bitter (3.9% and 4.1% @ 500ml = 3.4% and 3.6% pint equivalent)

For some reason I largely went off hoppy beers during lockdown; I drank quite a bit of Boltmaker and indeed Landlord, but the Jaipur took a long time to get through. More recently, though, I’ve reacquired the taste for Bitter, Marble‘s contemporary stripped-down refit of a best bitter. More recently still, I’ve started finding even that a bit on the malty side, and preferred to go pale’n’oppy with Pint. To cut a long story short, when I fancy “a bitter” at home what I reach for is a 500 ml can of Bitter… or sometimes Pint.

2. The… well, the Orval: Orval (6.2% @ 330ml = 3.6% equiv.)

It’s Orval. There isn’t anything else like it. You can get it in bulk from Belgium. (Mind you, by Belgian standards it’s on the expensive side for a Trappist beer, making the differential with sterling pricing less steep than it is for many beers; if you can find it in bulk at a British beer merchant it’s sometimes worth a punt.) It does tend to be ‘young’ when you buy it from Belgium; for the last year or so I’ve been attempting to buy enough Orval to allow some of it to age in the garage, but I’ve never got much beyond a year. Young Orval’s still pretty good, though.

3. The Czech lager: a supermarket Czech lager (almost invariably 5% @ 500ml = 4.4% equiv.)

There’s nothing quite like a světlý ležák, even in the inevitably less than stellar examples that British supermarkets stock. That said, both Marks and Spencer’s own-brand Czech lager and, bizarrely, Lidl’s (Staravice) are pretty good examples of the style, IMO – and Sainsbury’s own-brand isn’t bad. (All three are brewed in the Czech Republic, for what that’s worth.) And even the Marks’ is cheap enough to buy four at a time.

4. The stout: Shepherd Neame Double Stout (5.2% = 4.6% equiv.)

Like a lot of people, I sampled Shepherd Neame‘s ‘brown label’ revival recipe beers when they appeared, and like a lot of people I found most of them a bit underwhelming – not bad, and certainly a cut above Sheps’ standard supermarket fare, but not particularly memorable either. The exception, as far as I’m concerned, was the “Double Stout”. (It’s certainly not a historically accurate Victorian double stout: they would have been a lot stronger, as well as having a relatively thin body and more than a touch of Brett. But then, if I want one of them I know where I can find it.) What this is, is a strongish but still “pintable” stout, big in body and flavour but without the sharp roasty edge of a Guinness. When it appeared in Lidl I stocked up.

5. The tripel: Westmalle (8.5% = 5% equiv.)

Got to have a tripel in there somewhere… I’ve had several orders from Belgium over the last couple of years and tried quite a few tripels, but very few of them come close to Westmalle. It’s oddly hard to describe: it’s dry, but with no sharpness (which is where a lot of other tripels fall down); there’s some sweetness, but it’s not sweet; it’s got herbal notes to it but no flowery or tropical-fruit overtones; it doesn’t exactly drink its strength – it’s certainly not ‘hot’ – but it doesn’t hide its strength either. It’s a really fine beer. (Honourable mention: De Ranke Guldenberg, which is even drier but perhaps not quite as complex.)

6. The quadhigh-end abbey beer: Rochefort 10 (11.3% = 6.6% equiv.)

I don’t call Rochefort 10 a quadrupel, if only because it had been brewed for some time before anyone thought of extending the dubbel/tripel naming convention up another level. It’s just… Rochefort 10: a third of a litre of beer that’s stronger than a pint of Wobbly Bob and tastes like plums in brandy – although, again, without any alcohol heat to speak of, despite its considerable strength. I don’t fancy this kind of beer all the time, but when I do there isn’t a better option. (Unless it’s Abt?)

There’s room for refinement – not least because the Sheps’ stout won’t last forever. I haven’t yet identified “the mild” (not enough candidates) or “the IPA” (too many candidates); “the black IPA” might also be worth a punt (and at the moment would probably be Thirst Class Penny Black). “The old ale” and/or “the barleywine” would be good – but as with milds, the field is small. I might replace the stout with “the imperial stout” if I can identify a good candidate (I had twelve of Harvey’s Imperial Extra Double Stout right at the start of lockdown, but that’s a bit too much its own thing). I have had “the porter” in the past (it was Thirst Class Any Porter In A Storm), not to mention “the old-school BB” (Boltmaker) and “the low-end abbey beer” (Rochefort 6); none of them made it past the first six, though.

Or I might just go back to drinking actual pints in pubs. Who knows, it could catch on.

 

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Good Czechs

While I’m getting out a lot more than I did during the Omicron wave, I’m still mostly drinking at home. A mainstay of my beer stash is some kind of Czech lager… but what kind, exactly?

On returning from my only visit to Prague (thus far) I made sure to stock up on Czech beers when I saw them, but generally found them disappointing. There’s a curious quality of drinkability to an ordinary 11- or 12-degree Czech pale lager. They aren’t (for the most part) spiky or complex – in fact there’s nothing in the flavour that might get in the way of the beer disappearing down your throat. At the same time I’d never call them bland or characterless; on the contrary, they have enough character to make you want to keep drinking.

It’s a good trick, and one I was hoping that available imports of Czech brands would replicate. So I was sorely disappointed to find a couple of the leading candidates tasting full-bodied, slightly sweet and slightly bready – very like you’d expect a lager from an ale brewery to taste, and very much lacking the cleanness and simplicity of the beers I remembered having on draught.

I gave up on the Czechs for a while, before one of the beers listed below came to my attention. After a bit more research, I can offer a definitive Top 5 of Mass-Market Bottled Czech Beer. You lucky people.

5. Staropramen

Avoid, unless you like your beer to taste of sweetcorn and milk loaf. Brewed in the UK, quite badly.

4. Budvar

Much, much better than #5. Really, much better. That said, it’s not the best example of the style by a long chalk; the malt is a significantly bigger presence in this than I remember it ever being in draught beer in Prague.

2=. Sainsbury’s Czech lager

With a name consisting of the word ‘Czech’ and a label seemingly aping Staropramen, this beer didn’t raise high hopes. But it’s cleaner and lighter than Budvar, which makes it significantly more drinkable; it evokes a bog-standard undesitka, which is not a bad thing to be evoking.

2=. Pilsner Urquell

This is a contender in a very different way. It doesn’t go down the “clean and light” route; the body’s heavy and the flavour’s herby and aromatic. But none of that gets in the way of sinkability. Bonus points for being available in Prague, and tasting an awful lot like I remember it tasting there.

1. Marks and Spencer Czech lager

Brewed by the Regent brewery in Bohemia, this… this is the good stuff. In my admittedly limited experience, nothing comes closer to the světlý ležák experience than this middle-ranking supermarket own-brand. Strong recommend.

But what am I missing? Are there any (reasonably easily available) bottled Czech beers that outclass the M&S (and indeed the PU)? Am I too easily impressed – alternatively, have I been too hard on Budvar? Let me know what you think.

Fancy a pint (or equiv.)?

Back in August 2020 – when Covid deaths were running at 9-10 a day, I was unvaccinated (like everyone else), the pubs had only just reopened and I was mostly drinking at home – I came up with this table as a device for comparing beers of different sizes and strengths.

Third	24
275 ml	35
Half	36
330 ml	42
US 12 oz	45
440 ml	56
US pint	60
500 ml	63
Pint	72

So you’ve had a 440ml can of something at 7% and a 330ml bottle of a 9%er – what’s that in pints? Simple: it’s the equivalent of a pint at ((56 * 7) + (42 * 9)) / 72, or 770 / 72, which is very slightly more than 768 / 72, which is 10.75, so call it 10.8.

(Well, I say ‘simple’.)

Now, I’m triple-jabbed, Covid deaths are running at 90-100 a day, it’s too damn cold to sit outside and I’m mostly drinking at home. And I wonder if that table – marvel of concision and information-density though it is – could be improved. Perhaps we could focus on the main can/bottle sizes and redo the whole thing as fractions of a pint?

275 ml	35/72
330 ml	7/12
US 12 oz	5/8
440 ml	7/9
500 ml	7/8

Then how about extending that into a table of pint equivalents for different sizes? The principle’s simple: 500 ml at 6% is the equivalent of a pint at (6% * 7 / 8) = 5.3%; 440 ml at 6% is the equivalent of a pint at (6% * 7 / 9) = 4.7%. I’m limiting the table to (strengths corresponding to) the range from 3.4% to 6.8% – over 3 and under 7, broadly speaking – because that’s still the kind of strength I’m looking for from a single beer. (Not that I don’t occasionally buy beers outside that range, but they do tend to hang around for longer.)

Here goes then. The numbers along the top are the strength of the beer; the numbers in the table are the equivalent strength of a pint delivering the same amount of alcohol.

	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
275 ml				3.4	3.9	4.4	4.9	5.4	5.8
330 ml			3.5	4.1	4.7	5.3	5.8	6.4
US 12 oz			3.8	4.4	5	5.6	6.3	6.9
440 ml		3.9	4.7	5.4	6.2
500 ml	3.5	4.4	5.3	6.1

From which we learn that

• 275 ml bottles (7%+) are good for the upper reaches of loopy juice but not for much else.
• 330 ml (6-11%) is ideal for anything less than entirely sessionable; also, a lot of those punchy-looking Belgian beers are really fairly weedy when you take the bottle size into account. (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)
• Those American 355 ml bottles… they’re fine, too.
• Conversely, 500 ml (4-7%) is ideal for anything you’d drink when you’ve got a thirst on.
• 440 ml (5-8%) is a bit betwixt and between – and besides, in practice people are putting stuff that’s much too strong into big cans (10% at 440 ml is a pint at 8.6%, which is… not a pint).
• And don’t even get me started on 660 and 750 ml.

Admittedly, it’s not currently possible to filter the beers on any of my friendly local Webstores by strength and container size, but a table like this is handy as an aide memoire. And it’ll be handy until I’m mostly ordering over the bar again, which hopefully will be sooner than it currently looks like.

Disappearing beers

This isn’t a lockdown post, except in the sense that lockdown has reacquainted me with The Bathams’ – which turns out to be a lot easier to get hold of in bottle than Pete suggested a few years ago. And Bathams’ bitter is a rare beast: it’s a disappearing beer. Not in the sense that it’s getting harder to find (see links above), but in the sense that it disappears; it goes beyond being drinkable, into a zone where the beer seems to drink itself. Essentially, if you buy a pint, take it back to your table, sit down, then look round a minute later to find the first half’s gone – that’s a disappearing beer.

Not all good beers are disappearing beers, by any means. I grew up on darkish, chewy bitters – sweet and fruity (Buckley’s) or dry and tannic (Harvey’s) – and I’m a huge fan of old ales and big stouts; some of my favourite beers are beers that you can’t knock back, or not without a conscious effort.

Come to that, being ‘smashable’ isn’t really the point either. Boak and Bailey wrote the other day in praise of Fyne Ales Jarl:

For us, it has the perfect balance of bitterness (high), aroma (also high) and booziness (low) so that one more pint always feels both desirable and justified.

I’d agree with that; Jarl’s a properly sessionable beer, and there are other beers I’d put alongside it – Marble Pint, Redemption Trinity, Magic Rock Ringmaster (although in its heyday (as Curious) it was arguably a bit too hoppy to be really sessionable). But even Pint doesn’t quite soak itself up the way that a true disappearing beer does.

If I’m not talking about style or flavour, and I’m not talking about sessionability, what am I on about? Is there really such a thing as an über-drinkable beer? Am I perhaps over-generalising from a beer that I happened to drink when I was thirsty? Yes, there is, and no, I’m not. Evidence: my 2018 visit to Prague, where the bars serve very little else: světlý ležák is the epitome of the disappearing beer. I had some interestingly diverse beers while I was in Prague, but I also had four pale lagers at 11 or 12°, from four different breweries, all of which threw themselves down my throat at a slightly alarming rate. “I sat down, I looked at the food menu, I looked at my glass – 2/3 empty.”

To sum up: my list of disappearing beers doesn’t include any sessionable hoppy bangers – even they require a bit too much effort to qualify as disappearing of their own accord – but does include

1. Many (most?) Czech světlý ležák in the 10-12° range
2. The Bathams’
3. er, that’s it

On which note I’ll throw it open to the floor. What do you think? Am I right about the Bathams’… what kind of question is that, of course I am… How about the světlý ležák – was I just thirsty all the time I was in Prague? And what beers have taken you by surprise, by apparently drinking themselves and confronting you with a half-empty glass?

“Time in lockdown behaves slowly”, I wrote at the top of my last post. Evidence: this post, which (at the time) I was planning on writing the following day or maybe the one after that. Nine days later, here we are.

Lockdown beers

Time in lockdown behaves strangely. I was about to write “I remember the early days of lockdown” but then felt ridiculous – of course I remember the early days of lockdown, it was less than two months ago!

Things did feel very different, though. The first Saturday of lockdown, I remember we ordered a pizza instead of the usual Chinese takeaway, then had to wait two and a half hours for it to arrive. (I even chased them up.) The worst of it wasn’t the wait, but the sinking feeling that this was what it was going to be like from now on. Similarly with beer; after watching my under-stairs stash dwindling for a while, I took the plunge and ordered a case from Thirst Class and a mixed case of nip bottles from Harvey’s (of which more another time). When those started to go down, I looked at the breweries’ Web sites and found, to my mounting horror, that Thirst Class’s range had been greatly reduced since I’d ordered, and Harvey’s – although the Web site did say they were continuing to brew, to give their yeast strain something to do – had nothing at all on sale. Was this what it was going to be like? Were breweries going to stop brewing, one after another – then run down their existing stock, one after another – and then there would be no more beer? Was I going to have to start drinking gin?

Happily, I can report that Thirst Class currently has an extraordinary range of beer on sale – quite a lot of it isn’t their own, so presumably there has been some running down of stock, but it’s still a very fine range. As for Harvey’s, I don’t know why absolutely everything was marked as ‘sold out’ on that one alarming evening, but it certainly isn’t now; either they’ve been re-brewing quite a few of the weird and wonderful beers in their range, or they’ve found a lot of bottles somewhere (pub cellars, possibly) and assigned them to the Web shop.

So that’s the first effect, or the first two effects, of lockdown on my beer drinking habits: 1. buying in bulk and 2. panicking periodically. (Mind you, 2. is so familiar a feature of lockdown in general that it hardly deserves its own ‘beer’ sub-heading.)

My bulk buys to date are:

• 12 assorted bottles from Thirst Class (free delivery)
• mixed case of nip bottles (3 x Imperial Extra Double Stout, 3 x Christmas Ale, 3 x Elizabethan Ale, 3 x Tom Paine) from Harvey’s (courier)
• 12 bottles of the Batham’s plus 3 x Enville Ale from The Wine Press of Stourbridge (courier) (hat tip to the Pub Curmudgeon)
• a case (12 nip bottles) each of Imperial Extra Double Stout and Elizabethan Ale from Harvey’s
• a case (12 33cl cans) of Jaipur and a mixed case of 12 bottles and cans from Thornbridge (free delivery on orders over £30, but orders by the case only)
• 6 bottles of Orval and 12 other mixed Trappist and Trappist-ish beers from biere-speciale.be (international delivery, but bottle prices low enough to make orders of 10+ bottles cheaper than buying them locally)

The first Harvey’s case is long gone, as are the Envilles and all but one of the Thirst Class (you need to pick the right moment for a 9% black IPA); most of the Orvals and the IEDSs are for ageing, or at least that’s the plan. The rest should keep me going for another few weeks.

Or perhaps for longer than that, considering another effect of lockdown: 3. reduced consumption. I was never a huge pub-goer, but in the average month I’d probably fit in

• 8 swift ones after work (15 minutes, 1 pint)
• 4 trips to the pub to order the takeaway (30 minutes, 2-3 pints)
• 2 folk sessions (2-3 hours, 3-4 pints)
• 1 pub quiz (2 hours, 2 pints)

On one hand, when I stop work these days it’s because it’s time for tea (or to make tea), and it’s hard to fit in the swiftest of beers on my way from one room to another. On the other, following one beer with another beer – let alone following that one with a third – seems like a much bigger deal at home than it does in the pub. When – the week before lockdown – we switched to ordering the Saturday takeaway for delivery, I tried to make the effort to have two drinks in the half-hour before it came, but an effort is what it was. One beer in an evening – even one 33 cl bottle or can, which generally packs less of a punch than the weediest of pints – is not at all unusual these days; and the more I get out of the habit of session-style boozing, the less I’ve got the capacity for it. I hardly ever have an even moderately heavy session now; on the other hand, I also have fewer completely dry days – not least because I’m hardly ever hung over. It’ll be interesting to see whether I go back to how things were, whenever this thing is finally over.

Note I’ve been disinclined to write on this blog lately – along with most other things – but I’m planning to crank it up again. I’ve currently got another three posts planned; hopefully inspiration will strike again after that.

 

 

 

Some beers in

I’m a bit of a solitary drinker – particularly at home – and I like a bit of variety, even if it’s only alternating Landlord with Proper Job and Ghost Ship. So the only quantity I usually buy bottled beer in is 1. I have occasionally wondered what I’d offer a beer-drinking visitor – or rather, not what I’d offer them (I’d offer them a beer, quite clearly) but how I’d phrase the follow-up question: “What would you like, there’s a Boltmaker and a Harbour Pale and an ESB and an 1845 and a Champion, it is a bit strong that one, although you’re welcome if that’s what you fancy, or if you want a smaller beer there’s an Old Tom and a Duvel and a Guinness Foreign and… What am I having? No, you choose first, I really don’t mind…“. But I only ever seem to meet beer-drinking friends and acquaintances in pubs, so as yet the problem hasn’t arisen.

So I’ve never really “got some beers in”, or not until recently. My first multiple buy was around the beginning of the year, when I bought six bottles of Greene King‘s limited-edition bottle-conditioned Vintage Fine Ale after being rather impressed by the first bottle. This wasn’t a huge success, as I promptly went off it; too malty, too heavy, too much like beer with a cough-mixture depth charge (I imagine). That said, I’ve gradually worked my way through the batch since then & can report that it’s starting to dry out; by the time I get to the last bottle it should be pretty good.

More recently, there was the Aldi promotion which saw bottles of Holden’s XB, Felinfoel Dragon Heart and – in at least one store – Dark Star Hophead going cheap. I bought six of each – why wouldn’t you? Shortly after that we got the sad news about TicketyBrew, which naturally made me want to grab whatever beer of theirs I could still find; an online beer merchant obliged with six bottles each of the Pale and Blonde, and four of the Dubbel. The same retailer had a deal on Tynt Meadow – six for the price of five – so I went for some of those as well.

So for the time being I haven’t just got beers, I’ve got a stock of beers; I can get out a couple of beers, or have a beer and replace it with an identical example of the same beer. It’s a novelty. The main use I’ve made of it is to drink nothing but Hophead, at least as far as low-strength beers in large bottles goes; any time I fancy a pint of bitter, or the closest thing to it in a bottle, I’ve gone for the Hophead. It’s given me a distinct sense of what a pint of bitter tastes like: loose in texture, thin yet oddly oily or soapy; strongly aromatic, herbal (rosemary? sage?); a fresh-tasting attack, sharp but not sour enough to be citric; then a long, bitter finish, persisting almost long enough to be unpleasant, then fading away, leaving your mouth dry and ready for a repeat.

It’s a lovely, lovely beer – and it is, quite definitely, what bitter tastes like. Although I may feel differently when I’ve drunk nothing but XB for a couple of weeks. Watch this space…

UPDATE Three weeks and six bottles of XB later, I can confirm that what a pint of bitter tastes like is… hard to describe. It’s not a complex flavour as such, it’s just hard to pin down. What you taste to begin with isn’t sharp or citric, it’s not strongly bitter and it certainly isn’t aromatic – but I wouldn’t call it bland, either. It just tastes like beer – or rather, it feels like it tastes how beer ought to taste. Perhaps the texture is what’s most striking to begin with; it tastes heavy, like a much stronger beer. It’s not especially sweet, though; it certainly doesn’t taste ‘malty’ or have that slug of caramel you get with some stronger old-school beers. The finish is much easier to describe: it’s bitter, in a complex, lingering way; not tannic (yet another negative!) but herbal, medicinal, a clean-tasting contrast to that heavy start. It’s then that you really taste the sweetness of the beer, in an odd sort of front-of-mouth aftertaste. Like the Hophead, it’s very much a session beer – one mouthful sets you up for another – but in a very different way; I don’t know when I’ve drunk a pint (well, 500 ml) so quickly while being so unsure what it was I was tasting. Lovely stuff. Not like anything else (apart from Batham’s), but lovely stuff. Now for the Felinfoel…

UPDATE Another three weeks and six bottles down, and I can confirm that what a pint of bitter tastes like is, in fact, remarkably easy to describe. It tastes like beer – you know, beer, that brown stuff, puts hairs on your chest. Beer. Beer like it always was. When brown meant beer, and darker meant sweeter but also stronger… You wouldn’t say ‘fruity’ exactly, and ‘malt loaf’ isn’t quite what it is, but if you take granary bread on one hand and damsons or black cherries on the other, and aim for somewhere right in the middle, you’d be about right. It’s well-conditioned and lively, but it’s big – heavy-textured almost to the point of tasting thick. No surprises – this isn’t one of those beers that do one thing on the nose, one on the tip of your tongue, another in your mouth and another again in the aftertaste; what you taste is what you get. It’s brown, it’s heavy-ish, it’s sweet-ish, it’s strong-ish… it’s beer.

Let me out

Nip bottles? What’s a nip bottle? Six fliud ounces, a third of a pint, what? Stupid. Nothing in there. What kind of size is that? Wouldn’t even fill a glass. Beer probably wouldn’t be that strong anyway. Beer in a nip bottle, why would you want that? Pointless. Ridiculous.

Quarter of a litre? Quarter of a litre? What kind of size is that? You know who uses quarter of a litre bottles, don’t you – supermarket lager. Supermarket own-brand lager, twenty bottles for a fiver, but what they don’t tell you is each bottle’s a quarter of a litre. Hardly even taste it. Not that you would anyway, supermarket lager, I ask you. Quarter of a litre – pointless, why would you want that? Ridiculous.

Then you get your third of a litre bottles, and have you seen some of the stuff they’re putting in them these days?

(What’s that? Third of a litre cans? Give over. Why would you want that? Ridiculous.)

So, yeah, your third of a litre bottles – seems like a good enough size, you go to Belgium, they’re all in third of a litres aren’t they, all the abbey stuff, all the loopy juice… But wait – look at some of the stuff they’re putting in them now! Four per cent, three point eight, three point five – I’m not joking, I got a third of a litre bottle the other day and it was three point two per cent. Three point two! What’s that in real money? That’s like, if you had a pint and it was that strong, overall kind of thing, it’d be like one point nine! Straight up – one point eight six recurring if you must know. Pointless – I mean, you wouldn’t know you’d had a drink! Why would you want that? Third of a litre bottles – ridiculous.

As for your 355 ml bottles, well, I’m sorry, but what is that? What is that all about? Some kind of American measure, and it’s, what is it, three quarters of one of their pints only it’s five-eighths of one of ours… please. How are you going to know what you’re drinking? How are you going to know how much you’ve had? Pointless. 355 ml bottles? Why would you want that? Ridiculous.

440 ml cans, I mean we’ve all seen those, we know about those, but for me it comes back to the same thing, the same question: have you seen some of the stuff they’re putting in them these days? Have you seen how strong it is? Ten per cent! Twelve per cent! Twelve per cent alcohol in a 440 ml can – I tell you, you’re not going to pile into a few of those on the train, are you? That’s like a pint at nine per cent – all in a nice handy can! Putting all that booze in a can, it’s ridiculous. Why would you want that? Pointless.

Now, 500 ml bottles, I have to say I haven’t got a problem with 500 ml bottles generally, but again, you look at some of them and you think, seven per cent? eight per cent? Did you run out of the small bottles or something? Ridiculous. If you’re buying a seven, eight per cent beer in the first place, you’re not going to want a big bottle of it – I mean, why would you want that? Pointless.

Then every so often someone gets clever and brings in a pint bottle. Thing is, though, for me that’s just confusing. So you’ve got a 500 ml bottle at five per cent and a pint at four point seven, and that one’s actually stronger. Why would they want to confuse people like that? Ridiculous. Besides, it’s not as if we aren’t used to sizes in mls by now. What are they going to do, bring back pints and quarts and fliud ounces and everything? Pointless.

And then you’ve got your big bottles – three-quarters of a litre like a wine bottle, two-thirds of a litre, or that weird American size that comes out about 650 ml – and what I say is this: the beer is too strong to drink that much of it! I mean, it wouldn’t be so bad if we were talking beer beer – four per cent, five per cent, 750 mls of that isn’t going to hurt anyone – but it never is, is it? When you get a massive great bottle, chances are you get a massive great beer in it – eight, nine, ten per cent, or more than that even. Even eight per cent – 750 ml of that is like a pint at eleven per cent, would you believe. Ridiculous.

Different sized bottles? Why would you want that? Pointless.

 

Ticketybrew tasting notes – 2

Jasmine Green Tea Pale 4.0% Malted barley, malted wheat, hops, jasmine green tea, lemon rind, yeast 9/10
Pale yellow, clear, light but effective conditioning. A fresh-tasting golden ale with a bit of body; faint herbal overtones keep things interesting, and there’s a distinctive tannic bitterness on the finish. The overall effect is clean but slightly medicinal, in a good way: the first time I tasted this I was on my way home from a beer festival, and it felt like a healthy choice. (On the other hand, I was on my way home from a beer festival, so my judgment wasn’t perfect.) The bitterness builds: after a while I notice bitterness buzzing on the tip of my tongue between mouthfuls, as well as at the back of my mouth; as I get further down the glass I start to get bitterness at the edges of my tongue as well. A pleasantly bland golden ale in mid-mouth, surrounded on all sides by medicinal bitterness – it’s an interesting combination, and rather pleasant.

Before I go much further with this review of a series of beers with additions, I should say that in general I’m not a fan of beers with additions, particularly where the additions seem designed to replicate flavours that can be found in beers without them – look at all those Christmas beers with cake spices or soft fruit added for flavour, or BrewDog’s Elvis Juice (craft beer that tastes of grapefruit because it’s got grapefruit juice in). So the realisation that the green tea here is carrying some of the aroma and bittering duties that the hops ought to be doing should really put me off this beer. It doesn’t, though, because the beer works so well – really pleasant, drinkable without getting bland or boring. Perhaps they should go the whole hog and leave the hops out – anyone for a Green Tea Gruit?

Marmalade Pale 4% Malted barley, oranges, malted wheat, hops, ginger, spices, yeast 8.5/10
Amber, clear, decent conditioning. Fresh, mildly citric foretaste, building to a substantial sweetish body with a bitter finish. So far, so ‘best bitter’, but I should add that I got bitter oranges in the body and, in a more pronounced form, on the finish; after a while I could taste orange peel on my lips as well. In short, yes, I was tasting the pith.

What impressed me about this was its balance and drinkability. A marmalade beer sounds like a gimmick, and in many brewers’ hands it would be – it’d be a jangle of jammy sweetness, harsh bitterness and obtrusive orange flavouring. This doesn’t have any of those things – it drinks like a best bitter, but one that happens to take a lot its body and bitterness from bitter oranges. It’s a surprisingly unified and un-spiky flavour profile, and it goes down very easy.

Ginger Beer 4.1% No ingredient list (but presumably includes ginger); 500 ml bottle 9/10
Golden, clear, lively conditioning. An initial biscuity heaviness – with just a hint of sweetness – dries out rapidly to something more like a golden ale, with a touch of that ‘gassy’ mineral quality; there’s a bit of soapiness coming through from the ginger, too. A definite but not extreme bitter finish is rounded off very satisfactorily by ginger heat. The overall effect is of a three-way cross between old-school best bitter, pilsner and ginger beer – but a ginger beer that’s been left to ferment out, so that the sweetness has gone but the ginger remains.

I’ve got two touchstones for ginger beer – Marble‘s Ginger Marble and (a distant memory of) Brendan Dobbin’s West Coast alcoholic ginger beer. Neither of them is/was at all sweet, a test which most ‘ginger beer’s fail badly; the West Coast beer, in fact, tasted almost exactly like (an even more distant memory of) home-made ginger beer that had fermented in the bottle. The clean and dry flavours of these beers, backed by the ginger hit on the after-taste, make them serious thirst-quenchers. This one is worthy to stand alongside them.

Peach Iced Tea 4.6% Malted barley, peaches, malted wheat, sugar, hops, tea, yeast 7/10
Golden, slight haze, low but adequate conditioning. Peaches in the aroma, unquestionably; sweetness and fruit in the foretaste. Not sickly or heavy, but doesn’t open up or dry out very much in mid-mouth; becomes a bit fresher, but stays fruity. The bitterness at the end is all tannic, with a touch of herbal perfume (China tea?).

As with the Jasmine Green Tea Pale, my immediate reaction to this is that they’re using additions to get flavours that (with the right malt, the right hops and the right technique) could have been wrung out of malt and hops alone. But let’s park that and just ask whether the beer works. I suppose there are two questions to ask of any beer whose flavour profile is dominated by additions. One is whether you feel like you’re drinking something distinctive, or just a bland base beer with a bunch of flavours dropped on top of it; the other is whether you feel like you’re drinking beer, or the flavourings have taken over to the extent that it might as well be an alcoholic version of (whatever the flavour is). The first of these, the PIT passes with flying colours: it’s an interesting combination of flavours, well combined and none of them obtrusive. On the second I’m less sure; there wasn’t really enough hop character to keep it out of the ‘alco-pop’ zone. Nice stuff, though, and I was still smelling peaches half an hour later.

Summer Fruits Stout 4.6% No ingredient list, but includes raspberries, blackberries and vanilla; 500 ml bottle 9/10
Black, good conditioning. Opens with a sharp – raspberry-flavoured – sourness; as the flavour develops this is replaced by a mellow, dark chocolate bitterness, lightened with some sweetness and a distinct edge of vanilla.

I’m having to rethink my position on beers with additions. I think back to Titanic‘s Damson and Vanilla Stout; despite the obvious similarities, that was nothing remotely like this. The Titanic beer tasted like a stout, but also tasted of damsons – the fruit flavour emerged out of the flavour of the beer. What Ticketybrew seem to be doing with these beers is quite different. The ‘sharp opening, smooth bitter finish’ combo is very characteristic of stouts. What’s unusual about this one is that both the foretaste and the finish come from the additions – just as the sweetish ‘best bitter’ body of the Marmalade Pale comes from the oranges and the dry ‘pale ale’ finish of the Jasmine Green Tea Pale comes from the tea. These are Frankenstein beers, with hops-and-barley flavour profiles duplicated – and heightened – by the use of additions. It’s a really interesting approach, and mostly it seems to be working really well.

Rose Wheat 4.7% Malted barley, malted wheat, hops, yeast, rose water 8.5/10
Pale gold, clear, light carbonation. Sweetish foretaste, perhaps slightly heavier than most of these; develops to a light, fresh flavour with a bit of that lager-like ‘gassy’, almost menthol edge to it. No bitterness on the finish – just more of the same and a return of that (rose water?) sweetness.

Immediate reaction: “Goes down like an absolute dream, and I don’t even like it.” A beautiful beer, and very, very drinkable. I still feel vaguely as if I don’t like it (or maybe just that I ought not to like it?); it’s certainly sweeter than most things I drink, and the rose water addition is the kind of thing you get in those made-up beers marketed at women from time to time. But you can’t argue with an empty glass. It’s just a really nice beer – and I think it is definitely a beer, not an alcoholic carbonated rose water drink. Incidentally, I’m sure I remember an earlier version of this one having more additions – ginger comes to mind – but I’ve got to say it works fine as it is.

Coffee Anise Porter 5.1% Malted barley, malted rye, coffee, hops, star anise, yeast. 8/10
Mahogany brown, nearly opaque, very light but adequate carbonation. A surprisingly straightforward beer, despite the unusual ingredient list (malted rye and all). It starts out like a heavy-ish, dark-ish brown bitter – not much bitterness or overt sweetness – before an aftertaste dominated by the titular coffee and star anise. And repeat – like so many beers on this list, this is a beer that goes down surprisingly easily. The flavours are quite distinctive and wouldn’t automatically combine to make a good beer – in fact the first time I tasted this, on draught, I found the star anise a bit overpowering – but here they work together well. As so often, the secret is balance.

Salted Caramel Coffee Porter 5.4% Malted barley, lactose sugar, malted wheat, coffee, cocoa nibs, hops, yeast, salt. 7.5/10
Mahogany brown, opaque, very light but adequate carbonation (i.e. not flat). Heavy, with both sweetness and salt on the foretaste; doesn’t lighten much but builds to a rich malt-loaf flavour, finishing with bitterness (and a definite hit of coffee), together with a brief return of that salt/sweet combination. Grew on me as I got down the glass; there are some strong and definite flavours bumping into each other here, and the combination initially tasted a bit in-your-face and medicinal. By the end, though, it tastes like itself and nothing but.

Quite full-on, this one – it drinks its strength and then some. I’m not sure I’m really on board with the recent rediscovery of lactose, ‘breakfast stouts’ and all; I feel about this one rather as I felt about Wild‘s Millionaire, that the fact that you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. It’s different, though, and it certainly tastes like you’d expect a salted caramel coffee porter to taste. More to the point, it passes both the tests I mentioned earlier on – it’s a distinctive flavour combination, and there is recognisably a beer underneath it all (the Wild beer didn’t really pass this second test, as I remember). It’s not quite as seamlessly put together as some of the beers here, though.

Summer IPA 6% Malted barley, malted wheat, pineapple, mango, hops, spices, yeast 8.5/10
Pale yellow, hazy, good condition. A sweetish foretaste gives way to spiky and aromatic fruit flavours; thins out a little – to something like home-made lemonade – before a buzzingly intense bitter finish. You’d swear there was grapefruit in there.

Drinking this straight after the Spring IPA (see previous post) was interesting. Of the two, this is much more successful as a beer. I still can’t help feeling I’d rather be drinking an IPA that had got pineapple and mango flavours out of hops and malt – rather than out of pineapples and mangoes – but this is a very well put-together beer. So often, flavour additions swamp a beer and turn it into a novelty (looking at you, Marble Mango). This one has certainly got fruit flavours in it, but they don’t overpower the beer at all. (And the bitter finish is presumably just from the hops.)

Minor update 13/8. Seen on a shelf (in Whitby): Tea and Biscuits Mild 3.5% Malted barley, lactose sugar, malted wheat, tea, hops, yeast. BB March ’18, so presumably knocking on a bit. Although I’m an inveterate Ticketybrew-spotter, I didn’t buy it; this was partly because I was about to head off on a walk but mainly because the shop was charging £3 for it (as they were for just about everything else on the shelves). I’m used to paying over £2 for Tb’s small bottles (although it’s always nice when you can get them for under £2), but £3 – for a 3.5%er – was a step too far. Possibly the good people of Whitby felt similarly, which is why those bottles were still on the shelf.

Ticketybrew tasting notes – 1

Munchner 4.5% Malted barley, malted wheat, hops, yeast 7.5/10
Amber, clear, good conditioning; developed quite a satisfactory fountain of foam from the bottom of the glass. It’s a curious and distinctive-tasting beer; opens with bready malt (toasty, to be precise) and finishes with something similar; no sweetness (and definitely no caramel), but no bitterness either, even by the standards of a brown bitter. And I keep thinking of toast: both the foretaste and the aftertaste are strongly reminiscent of toasted brown bread, maybe toasted granary even. Between the two the flavour opens up into something fresh and citric, a clean taste with a subtle bitter edge that’s strongly reminiscent of German lager. I’m trying to specify that specific bitter edge more precisely, but my mental flavourbank is only coming up with ‘gas pipes’. It’s bitter, but it’s not caramel or burnt toast or charcoal or tobacco or woodsmoke or cloves or bitter herbs; it’s a clean, mineral bitterness, with an almost menthol quality, that tastes a bit like the smell of cooking gas. (So basically, if you’ve ever toasted brown bread over a gas ring, you’ve tasted this beer.)

I have to confess, I don’t entirely like this one, but I still go back to it – I buy a bottle from time to time to see if I’ve changed my mind. It’s certainly distinctive, interesting and well put together – and for all I know it’s true to style (if a Munchner is an unusually malty German lager).

American Hopfen Weisse 5.1% Malted barley, malted wheat, hops, yeast 8/10
Pale gold, clear, good conditioning. A sharp citric foretaste, opening out to big fruit-salad flavours; smoky, herbal and musty overtones give a slight medicinal bitterness, which grows to dominate the aftertaste.

I’m not sure what a ‘hopfen weisse’ is, or what this beer is supposed to taste like. It’s not obviously a wheat beer, and it certainly isn’t a witbier. It does have a family resemblance to Duvel Tripel Hop – both of them taste like a base beer with an absolute ton of smoky American hops piled into it, which I guess is what they are. It’s good, that’s the main thing. In particular, it’s well balanced – the fruit is never bland, nor the bitterness harsh.

East India Porter 5.3% Malted barley, malted wheat, hops, yeast 8/10
Dark brown, clear, slightly excessive conditioning – the (500 ml) bottle was a bit of a gusher. Begins like a stout, with those slightly sour ‘roast’ flavours; develops like a stout as well, on the full-bodied espresso/dark chocolate end of the spectrum, although not excessively heavy. The finish, particularly apparent at the front of the mouth, is an intransigent, tarry bitterness.

Is this a black IPA? I wouldn’t say so. The aromatic dryness that ‘East India’ might seem to promise only really develops in that tongue-scouring aftertaste – and even that wouldn’t be out of place in a stout. You don’t really look to Ticketybrew for hop-led beers, though. Considered as a stout – or as a porter if you’d rather – this works rather well.

Pale 5.5% Malted barley, malted wheat, hops, yeast 9/10
Amber, clear, good conditioning. Sweetish, biscuity malt to begin with, opening out into… well, into more malt, to be honest; even the finish has a malty sweetness with a burnt-sugar bitter edge. But it’s not at all a heavy or cloying beer; the bitter finish builds steeply, drying out the flavour and rounding it off nicely. It’s a really interesting beer, doing something most new-wave beers don’t even attempt; it reminds me of old-school best bitters, but only the really good ones (Harvey’s Sussex Bitter, or Landlord at a pinch).

I go back quite a long way with the Pale; it’s not the first Ticketybrew beer I tasted, but it’s the first I fell in love with. These days it doesn’t have quite the endless depth and complexity it did back then – not in bottle, at any rate – but what’s there is still really good.

Blonde 5.8% Malted barley, malted wheat, hops, yeast 9.5/10
Gold, clear, lively conditioning. Just a touch of citrus on the foretaste, but the main flavour is a smooth, almost creamy cleanness, with a slight herbal edge and a definite touch of that ‘gas pipe’ bitterness (I’ve got to find a better word for this). The finish: still clean, still creamy, just a little bit of bitterness to dry things off. The overall effect is French or even Belgian; if you tasted this blind and somebody told you it was from Huyghe, say, you wouldn’t argue.

Like the Pale, the Blonde has traded a bit of edgy complexity for stability and consistency, but tasting it now it’s hard to find anything to regret. When a beer really impresses me I sometimes catch myself just looking at it, partway down the glass, as if it could give me clues – what’s this, then? how do you do that? I did that with this one just now. It’s not the most complex flavour profile, but it works so well.

Spring IPA 6% Malted barley, malted wheat, hops, yeast 7/10
Dark amber, hazy and over-conditioned – an uncontrollable gusher, frankly. Surprisingly fruity; the citric foretaste opens up into apples and peaches, with a slight medicinal edge. Doesn’t really ‘dry out’ at all; even the finish is more burnt sugar than clove oil or charcoal.

My difficulty getting the beer into the glass – and its unattractive appearance when I did – didn’t do this one any favours. But the actual flavour profile is similar to what I remember tasting when Ticketybrew had a keg IPA available; indeed, given that that one was also 6%, it may well be the same beer. In terms of contemporary style expectations, it’s an odd one: the fruity flavour isn’t tempered by that drying bitterness you tend to expect from an old-school IPA, but neither is it as aromatic and flowery as you’d expect a ‘craft’ pale ale to be. More than anything, it put me more in mind of a ‘fruity’ strong bitter like Wobbly Bob.

Dubbel 6.5% Malted barley, candy syrup, malted wheat, hops, yeast 9.5/10
Dark amber, slight haze, good conditioning. Flavour-wise it’s oddly difficult to describe: begins with heavy sweetness, developing into sweet heaviness before a finish which is, um, not light or lacking in sweetness…  The flavour does develop, though, even if it’s basically variations on a theme: the initial sweetness gives way to a full body with some fruitcake complexity, with herbal aromas developing before a burnt-caramel bitterness rounds it off. Heavy but not dense, sweet but never cloying; it’s a really well-balanced beer.

Beers put together as well as this can seem simple and unchallenging, particularly if they’re outside the hop-led mainstream. I’ve underrated this one in the past; I saw the error of my ways when I drank a Westmalle Dubbel and discovered that the Ticketybrew version stood up rather well in comparison. A beautiful beer.

 

Strong and stable

I’m returning to Ticketybrew, and in particular to my plan from a while back to write a comprehensive run-down of their beers. I’ve been a bit less ambitious this time and confined myself to beers that you can get hold of in bottle – so no Invalid Stout, no Manchester Tart and no Grodziskie.

But why am I doing all this again, having devoted several posts to the brewery last September? One word: stability. The first time I tasted Ticketybrew Pale, I was knocked out by the ramifying depths of the flavour, which belied an initial sweetness. I went back the next night and was bowled over once again, but surprised by the initial sourness. The next time I tried it, I thought for a moment it was on the turn, before ‘tuning in’ and recognising the same massive, complex beer. The fourth time we were back to sweetness; I was surprised, but I wasn’t complaining. Something similar happened when I first had the Blonde on draught, or rather the first and second times I had the Blonde on draught; later, I had a similar “was it sour like this last time?” moment with the Golden Bitter, and then with the Summer Porter.

It’s obvious now what was happening: those beers were in fact going sour in the cask, quickly enough to be noticeable but slowly enough for the beer to remain drinkable. So far, so bearable; the Golden Bitter was nicer when it was new, but the Pale and the Blonde really seemed to thrive on a bit of staling. Then I started getting beers that were starting to go sour in bottle, and sometimes not just starting: I had to tell myself to ignore that initial citric edge in quite a few different beers (although never the really pale ones, like the IPAs or the Jasmine Green Tea Pale).

So stability was a problem for Ticketybrew, as Keri wrote on the brewery’s blog last November – but the issues were eventually tracked down to a persistent and hard-to-fix lactobacillus problem. Hard, but not impossible: since the beginning of this year, to my certain knowledge, the problem has been fixed. These are new beers: if you’ve ever drunk Ticketybrew beers before now, you owe it to yourself to try them again. (And if you haven’t, where have you been?)

Over the next couple of posts I’m going to review everything that’s currently available in bottle, tackling first the ‘standard’ beers and then the ones reliant on additions – from Marmalade Pale to Coffee Anise Porter. Duncan and Keri, and their ever-expanding team, are doing some really interesting things up in Stalybridge – and you can rely on these beers to taste like they’re supposed to. (And if some of us rather miss the unreformed, unstabilised Blonde and Pale, with their dirty edges and scary depths… well, some of us are awkward so-and-so’s.)