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.

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Goodbye, TicketyBrew

The ‘free advertising’ side of beer blogging has never sat well with me (although I’ve taken, and written about, the odd freebie over the years). I often catch myself writing about having a particularly nice pint of Scruttock’s Best down at the Pig and Whistle, and think, is that the stylishly-refurbished Pig and Whistle with a wide range of artisan gins and food service from 12.00 till 9.00? good old Scrut’s, with its surprisingly fruity note that lingers on the tongue? Not really what I’m about. Not unless they were paying me, and in that case it definitely wouldn’t be what I’m about.

But there’s one brewery I’ve made an exception for, almost since the first time I encountered their beer; there’s one brewery which could always count me as a dedicated and vocal fan. I’ve referred to TicketyBrew in 35 posts on this blog, going back to 2013, including seven posts devoted to their beers alone. It started in July 2013, when I nominated their Pale, on cask, as my beer of the year; I didn’t think I’d taste anything better in the remaining five months of the year – and as it turned out I was right. I wrote: The aromatic wallop of a good contemporary pale ale runs head-on into the soft herbal richness of a Tripel, and they dance. Which still seems about right. On cask, the Blonde was pretty amazing too – not to mention the Jasmine Green Tea Pale, the Golden Bitter, the Invalid Stout, the Marmalade Pale… On keg and in bottle, there was a really nice Dubbel, a superb Tripel, the East India Porter, the Rose Wheat, the Rhubarb Weiss, the Ginger Beer and some terrific hoppy pales… the list just went on. Not to mention more or less experimental styles – Munchner, Grodziskie, Mumme – and dotty one-offs like Marmite Stout or Tea and Biscuits Mild.

Golden Bitter, Invalid Stout, Marmalade Pale, Rhubarb Weiss – it feels like I’m reeling off lists of ancient paintbox colours or weird Victorian sweets, rich, mysterious, unattainable. And I’m afraid that unattainable is what they are. Duncan has wound up the brewery and the company; his partner Keri, who left a career in marketing to start TicketyBrew back in 2013, has gone back into marketing.

I’m really sorry they couldn’t make it work. In the last couple of years TicketyBrew had had all-new brewkit, taken on new staff (the last time I saw Duncan he was complaining about how little brewing he got to do these days) and even had a redesign. Distribution didn’t seem to be a problem, either. When I saw the Blonde and the Pale in Wetherspoons fridges across central Manchester – and particularly when I ordered a Blonde for my Leffe-drinking son, and saw his reaction – I thought they were set up. Perhaps appearances were deceptive. For whatever reason, it doesn’t seem to have worked out.

I wish both Duncan and Keri all the best – and I hope this won’t be the last the world of beer hears of Duncan. Not all of the styles he tried his hand at were equally successful, but his hit rate was ridiculously high. The East India Porter, the Green Tea Pale, the Golden Bitter – in fact, almost all the beers I’ve listed – were solid, solid beers, and a couple of them were classics: I’d put the Pale and the Blonde in that category, as well as the Dubbel and the Tripel.

Looking more broadly, I guess this is another example of a small brewery falling by the wayside, like Quantum and Offbeat. Only this isn’t just another small brewery – this is TicketyBrew, with the mad bottle labels and the pump clips you could spot from the street (very handy, that’s been) and the ‘Pale’ that was like a cross between a Tripel and a best bitter and the Stout that tasted of black treacle and the ‘Manchester Tart’ that actually tasted of Manchester Tart, and the small bottles for everything and the first few large ones just coming in (9% in 750 ml, really?), and the Invalid Stout with real liquorice and the Marmite Stout with God knows what (probably not real Marmite), and the Blonde that me and my German friend got absolutely pasted on and the way the Pale was right at the start and that amazing Seville Orange Pale, and the bottled Blonde that was probably a bit over-primed and the Grodziskie that practically exploded (Polish champagne, they call that), and the cherry Weiss and the rhubarb Weiss and the Citra Pale that was just as good as anyone else’s Citra pale, and the, and the…

I’m really going to miss them.

TicketyBrew, 14/2/2013 – ??/5/2018

Image credit: Beerbods

Glass, Traps

“That old bit of land? It in’t pasture, that’s for sure… ‘tin’t grazing… I could go on…”

Why yes, since you ask, that is a glass of Tynt Meadow dubbel (a branded Tynt Meadow glass, in fact, although that part isn’t obvious). Bottle and glass are both rather nicely designed; note in particular the die-cut bottom edge of the label, showing the skyline in (presumably) the eponymous meadow. The projection to the left of centre is the abbey of Mount St Bernard, which I think is also what the logo on the glass schematically represents.

Mount St Bernard? Cistercian monastery in Leicestershire. Not ancient, for obvious reasons, but pretty well-established; it was founded in 1835 by a group of monks who had left France following the post-Revolutionary suppression of monasteries there. Cistercian monks have been there ever since (it’s now the only Cistercian monastery in Britain) and they’ve recently started brewing beer. I say Cistercian; you could also call the order Bernardine, or indeed Trappist.

YES IT’S A TRAPPIST BEER! TRAPPIST BEER IN ENGLAND!! ENGLISH TRAPPIST BEER!!!

When I spotted this beer in the fridge at the Head of Steam in Durham, I was initially going to leave it – I quite liked the idea of being able to say I’d spotted it, and putting off actually buying it for another time. (Also, it’s brand new and wasn’t listed in the beer menu, and I hate buying things without knowing what they cost.) But curiosity overcame me in the end.

What’s it like? First impressions weren’t massively favourable, I have to admit. The picture doesn’t lie: not a lot of condition – certainly nothing resembling a head – and a liquid that was frankly murky. (Perhaps it needed another few weeks or months for the yeast to settle out properly, and/or for conditioning to develop. It’d be interesting to keep a bottle for a while.)

Taste, though? Really nice; more importantly, really interesting. It has a lot of the caramel-backed oomph of a dubbel like Westmalle, but more bitterness and, I think, more complexity. This may be autosuggestion, but to both me and my companion it tasted ‘English’; there’s something of the way that a dark old ale develops into herby and medicinal territory, as well as a bit of stouty roastiness on the finish. This isn’t an imitation of any other beer; it’s a distinctive take on the Trappist dubbel sub-(sub-?)style, from what looks like being a really interesting brewery. I’m going to have to get hold of some bottles to drink at home, though, both for ageing purposes and just to be able to drink it a bit below room temperature rather than fridge-cold – chilling doesn’t do this style of beer any favours.

Distribution shouldn’t be a huge problem; this beer’s appearance in the Head of Steam presumably means that James Clay are on the case. I wouldn’t have jumped to this conclusion at one time; compared to other bars trading under that name, the Durham Head of Steam used to be a rather different, and rather superior, proposition. A couple of months ago I was rather uncomplimentary about the newish Didsbury branch, comparing it unfavourably to the Durham HoS

where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac

sorry, wrong quote (although the mood is the right one)

[where] I’ve spent many a happy lunchtime … getting quietly smashed on ludicrously expensive Belgian beer

Didsbury? beer descriptions … [that] seemed to have been downloaded from somewhere or other into a fixed-format template, with the result that almost all of them cut off with a string of dots; bar staff who, frankly, didn’t know their beer; the same ‘chain’ food menu as (e.g.) the Liverpool HoS; generic glassware with just a couple of ‘special’ glasses. Durham? Huge, properly curated beer menu; friendly, obliging bar staff who really knew their beer, Belgian beer in particular; the right glass for the right beer, without fail (something you hardly ever see in this country, even in self-styled ‘Belgian’ bars); and a short but individual food menu.

Well, now that’s finished; you’ll never see the Durham HoS (as it was). The powers that be at Cameron’s have obviously brought Durham into line with the rest of the chain: same food menu, same “guy on the Internet says” beer menu, same interchangeable bartenders with good people skills but a cavalier approach to glassware. (For our first round we ordered an Achel and a Spencer, which came with glasses branded for Duvel and La Trappe respectively; I wasn’t sure the Achel was going to benefit from the Duvel ‘thistle’ glass and got it replaced with a ‘chalice’ glass – which was branded Westmalle.) On the plus side, the beer range is still superb – and, as you can see, my Tynt Meadow did come with the right glass, as indeed did my companion’s Straffe Hendrik Tripel.

It’s certainly not the first time I’ve had a dubbel and a tripel in one visit to the Head of Steam, and probably not the first time I’ve had two Trappist beers. It is the first time I’ve had two Trappist beers from two different breweries outside Belgium – let alone from two different breweries in the English-speaking world. (As for the Spencer, it was fine, but not very special.) But then, that wasn’t possible before 2018 – in fact, it wasn’t possible before the 9th of July 2018, ten days ago. Yes, it’s Oh Good Ale, your source for breaking news in the world of beer!

NB other sources are available. Seriously.

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.

 

Stout, stouter…

I’ve been buying some strong stouts and tasting them – well, drinking them, let’s be honest – in the hope of answering the two eternal questions about strong stouts. Firstly, do they have to be that strong? And secondly, are they actually any better than Guinness Foreign Extra Stout, which is a lot cheaper and easier to come by than most of these? I’m drinking them in strength order, which means the beer I start with comes from none other than:

Guinness Antwerpen 8%
“Roasted malt, smoked wood and dark chocolate notes”
I got… that thing where front-of-mouth sweetness gradually and imperceptibly develops into a bitter finish, while at the same time the flavour of vanilla develops into aromatic bitter herbs. I never knew that was a thing, but apparently it is. This isn’t a multi-dimensional beer, and some might find it a bit straightforward and ‘clean’. It does what it does really well, though.
Better than Guinness FES? Yes. No. Not sure – I’d have to do another taste test. Put it this way, it’s definitely as good as Guinness FES.

Thornbridge Eldon 8%
“bourbon oak imperial stout … brewed with demerara sugar … chocolate, caramel and coffee notes and hints of vanilla” (Oddly, the ingredients list includes vanilla but makes no mention of sugar)
I got: whisky; lots and lots of whisky. The taste of a fairly basic and undistinguished porter was swamped almost immediately by whisky-toned full-bodied bitterness, whisky-edged sweetness and a finish dominated by whisky. I hate to say it, but it reminded me of Innis & Gunn. But to be fair, I’ve never had a whisky-aged beer that I liked – or that I didn’t think was too heavy on the whisky – so maybe it’s just not my thing.
Better than Guinness FES? No.

Anspach and Hobday The Stout Porter 8.5%
I got: something recognisable as a porter – more Soreen than burnt toast – but heavy and boozy: from the first taste you can’t miss the alcohol. It wears it surprisingly well, though. It’s something like eating liqueur chocolates, but made with a really good dark chocolate; there’s sweet coffee in there too and caramel (salted caramel?), before the soft landing of a charcoal finish. If you’d told me this one was aged in bourbon casks I’d have believed you.
Better than Guinness FES? Well, it’s certainly got more going on. But ultimately no – just a bit too boozy.

Saltaire XS Imperial Stout 8.9%
I forgot to write this up at the time, but what I remember is a big, smooth body with a charcoaly, moderately bitter finish, marred only by an insistent top-note of booziness. As I’ve said about strong pale beers before now, this tasted like a well-made mid-strength beer that had had a glass of tequila tipped into it.
Better than Guinness FES? No.

Buxton Subluminal Imperial Stout 10%
Getting nasty now, on the a.b.v. front at least. Surprisingly, this one isn’t at all boozy, despite being stronger than the last couple. It pours like ink, and the mouth-feel isn’t so much heavy as downright thick (although it’s not flat; there’s quite a pleasant prickle of carbonation). We’re in Soreen territory again, but now the malt and molasses are joined by something unmistakably savoury: an meaty note of Marmite umami. As it warms up the sweetness of the malt develops, building into something like a salted caramel effect. A bitter finish balances it out, but the bitterness is dialled down – not so much charcoal, more coffee grounds and dark chocolate. There’s no acetone overtone and not much alcohol heat, but it really drinks its strength; it’s a sipper, in a way that none of the others up to now have been. A mighty beer, really. Like all right-thinking beer drinkers, I’ve thought considerably worse of Buxton since they effectively got out of cask beer, but some of the stuff they do do they do rather well.
Better than Guinness FES? Yes, yes, yes I said yes I will yes.

Blackjack Ace of Spades (red wine barrel) 10%
The Buxton beer impressed me, if anything, even more than the above review would suggest – it really felt like a milestone, one of those moments when my personal spectrum of excellence gets winched open to admit something new. So I came to this 10%er, 48 hours later, with high hopes. I’m afraid they were dashed almost immediately. Despite the strength, this is thinnish in texture. The initial flavour is all red wine; this is backed by a fairly heavy charcoal bitterness on the finish. And, er, that’s it. On the positive side, there’s no alcohol heat; it’s well put together in that respect. But it drinks like a cross between red wine and a lightish stout, with red wine predominating – and it is red wine rather than port, no density or sweetness to speak of. Disappointing.
Better than Guinness FES? Nope.

Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout 10%
If I describe the elements of this one it’ll sound a lot like the Anspach and Hobday. So you’ve got malt loaf to begin with, just edged with a brandyish heat; then you’ve got the build-up to a dark chocolate and coffee-grounds finish; this is lightened with airy notes of vanilla and another dash of brandy. Overall it’s another “liqueur chocolate” job. What’s hard to explain is how this one does it so much better. It’s not that it hides its strength – as well as the moments where you actually taste the alcohol, the whole thing tastes strong; there are some varied and interesting flavours, but you’re never in any doubt that they’re being delivered through the medium of strong beer. But maybe that’s the point: it tastes strong, but what it doesn’t taste is boozy. There’s a glimmer of pure alcohol at the start and finish, but in between the two this is just a great big beer.
Better than Guinness FES? Yes indeed.

De Molen Rasputin 10.4%
Something I’ve noticed in a lot of these beers – right from the Antwerpen – is a gradual transition from one set of flavours to another; I think it’s a trick that strong stouts pull off particularly well. This is a masterclass in flavour transitions. It opens with jammy forest fruits, transitioning almost immediately into chocolate milk shake. Then something happens; tobacco notes appear and grow stronger, building to a finish that’s all coffee grounds and charcoal, overlaid with an unobtrusive tinge of brandy heat. I’ve had some IPAs that seemed to go off like fireworks – it’s sharp! it’s smoky! it’s sweet! it’s bitter! – but this beer isn’t anything like that; the contrasts are just as extreme, but the smoothness of the transition is such that you don’t notice them unless you stop to think about it. The chocolate predominated as it warmed up, making the beer a bit less interesting – not so much jam/chocolate/tobacco/coffee/charcoal/brandy, more ‘alcoholic Nesquik’. Still powerful stuff, in more ways than one. Black as ink, thick as gravy, lightly carbonated, pretty damn good.
Better than Guinness FES? Yes, but not a world-beater.

Marble Lost Your Marbles 10.4%
“Red wine barrel aged forest fruits”
This is a good beer to finish this series with, because it doesn’t do anything I haven’t already described; this suggests either that I’m running out of things to say or that I’ve pretty much got this sub-style nailed. (Or both.) So, this is also a masterclass in flavour transitions; this also begins with forest fruits, a big jammy blast of them (but then, from my reading of the label, forest fruits are actually added to this one); this jammy flavour is wrapped up in chocolate milkshake, like tasting a jam mini-roll from the inside out; and you then get dark chocolate and coffee grounds, predominating towards the end, lifted finally by a touch of vanilla. There are two main differences between this and the De Molen, which put this one ahead: no loss of balance and complexity as it warms up, and no alcohol heat; it doesn’t drink its strength in that sense at all. Having said that, you are aware from the start that you’re drinking a really big, complex beer. (My wife’s unprompted reaction: “Oh my God!” She didn’t mean that in a good way, but never mind.) It’s a really excellent beer; if I were ranking these I’d say it’s second only to the Buxton, with the De Molen and Brooklyn in third and fourth places respectively.
Better than Guinness FES? Yes, absolutely definitely; in a different league.

Nine beers; one more or less on a par with Guinness FES, four better and four not so good. My preconceptions about top-end strengths were well and truly challenged. On one hand, every one of the ‘good’ beers was 10% or above; on the other, only two of the nine tasted obtrusively ‘hot’ and boozy, and they were both below 9%. Results with regards to barrel-aging were more mixed; my prejudice against was confirmed by the Thornbridge and Blackjack beers (both of which, to me, tasted in their different ways of nothing but barrel) but strongly challenged by the Marble beer (which tasted of more or less everything under the sun).

Difficult to draw any broader conclusions. On one hand, there’s no guarantee that a strong stout, even from a brewery with a good name, will be worth splashing out on. On the other hand, sometimes the labels don’t lie, you certainly can’t assume that something with an a.b.v. in double figures will be a cranked-up ethanol monster. You pays your money and you takes your choice. (How much money? That’s another question.)

 

 

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.)

Brandwatch

It’s been a bit quiet around here lately, and I think I’ve worked out why. Work’s been busy, since I last posted here, but that’s not it; apart from anything else, in the same period I’ve written nine posts totalling 22,000 words on my other blog.

No, it’s a blogger’s problem: the stuck post. I had a couple of ideas for posts lined up, but I never got round to writing them, and after a week or two I’d lost interest. But somehow those posts kept their place on my mental to-do list; any time I thought of this blog, I thought yeah, ought to write that or that… and then lost interest in the whole idea.

You know what? I’m never going to be able to take an interest in this blog again until I get those posts out of the way; I’m just going to have to write them. Here’s the first.

I wrote a while ago – both here and in the local CAMRA magazine (cheers, John!) – about brewery takeovers and what they mean for beer. My position then was that, from the moment a brewery is taken over, its beers are effectively dead. More precisely, from the moment a brewery is taken over, its beers may cease to exist – or be replaced by inferior substitutes – at any time, and there’s nothing anyone outside the new owner company can do about it. The new owner hasn’t bought beers, it’s bought brands and their market share. If the new owner is genuinely committed to making decent beer, the beer backing up those brands may continue to be good, but even that can’t be guaranteed – and, of course, the new owner can’t actually be held to account by anyone else. Even when the new owner continues to make a particular beer the old way, nobody can tell whether they’re going to start cutting corners or simply stop making it – let alone stop them doing so.

In the earlier post I gave Brakspear’s Triple as an example of a beer that had been living on borrowed time in just this way (Marston’s have now stopped making it, citing declining supermarket demand). The next time I was at the supermarket, Brakspear’s Oxford Gold caught my eye, and I realised I’d never actually tried it. I opened it a few nights later, expecting nothing much more than malt-and-caramel soup, and I was absolutely blown away – a sharp, citric foretaste, a big tannic finish and just enough malt in the middle to hold it all together. It reminded me of nothing so much as Harvey’s Best; it was a seriously refreshing beer. Naturally I picked up another bottle when the opportunity presented itself… and poured myself a big glass of malt-and-caramel soup, somewhere between Deuchar’s IPA and Doom Bar.

The brand! The brand! I thought to myself. They’ve lost the beer and kept the brand! I wondered if I’d been lucky enough to get one of the last bottles brewed on the old Brakspear’s kit, followed by one of the first of an awful bland imposter. But I thought I’d better at least make it the best of three, and got another bottle of Oxford Gold as soon as the disappointment had worn off. And it was fine; better than fine, it was really good. It wasn’t the same beer I’d had the first time, but it was well over on that side of the spectrum. Fourth and fifth bottles confirmed the impression – they weren’t as great as the first bottle, but they were nowhere near as bad as the second.

So I don’t know what’s going on in the Brakspear’s bit of Marston’s. Brakspear’s beers effectively died a long time ago – I stand by that – but I have to concede that Marston’s kept them on life-support very effectively until quite recently. Even now I’d say the Oxford Gold is worth a punt, as long as you don’t expect too much (the malt-and-caramel fog could roll in again at any time).

But rather that than Meantime London Pale in its dinky redesigned 330 ml bottle, which I bought on a whim and because I was bored with looking at the same beers every week (come on, Sainsbury’s, sort it out!). The label attempts an odd balancing act between the corporate scale and the artisan personal touch, acknowledging that the beer is produced by Asahi but crediting the Meantime brewery and Alistair Hook personally. (From Blue Moon to Camden, affectations of craftsmanship within a corporate setting are becoming typical of the ‘craft’ scene; BD are starting to look like the odd one out for still being independent.)

And the beer? Dear Lord, the beer! I’ve had worse, but not very often, and certainly not from a well-respected brewery. It was dreadful.

Drinking a Meantime London Pale Ale. Shockingly bland – if Singha made an English Bitter it might taste like this.

— Phil Edwards (@Flandyke) August 25, 2016

In other words, it didn’t just taste like a bland pasteurised bitter; it tasted like a bland pasteurised bitter made by someone who’d never actually drunk bitter and was more used to making lager on a budget. The first impression was a bland, maize-like sweetness, which gave way to nothing much (certainly no discernible hops); just a bit of malt and tannin in the middle, and the ghost of a bitter aftertaste.

I didn’t make my mind up about the Oxford Gold on the strength of one bottle; if I’d really wanted to be fair, I would have had to consider the possibility that this was a duff bottle and gone back for a second try. The thought of drinking that beer again – let alone paying money for it again – made up my mind for me: I’d rather be unfair. That is, I’d rather leave my findings provisional. What I can say is that, if that bottle is in any way representative, Meantime London Pale is about as much a craft beer as Boddington’s Bitter is the cream of Manchester – because Meantime, like Boddies’ (and Brakspear), isn’t a brewery any more; it’s just a brand. And you can’t trust brands.

Shopping

Dry January was never really going to be an option for me, if only because I invariably over-purchase before Christmas. If you can abstain for a month with a sizeable stash of weird and expensive stuff looking you in the eye every time you go for the hoover, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

Last weekend I finally drank the last of this year’s pre-Christmas purchases; since this left my beer stocks looking dangerously low (1 x each of Duvel, Old Tom, McEwan’s Champion) I also did a bit of re-stocking. So here, without much comment, are two shopping lists.

22/12/2016 (Tiny’s Tipple, Chorlton)

Marble Earl Grey IPA (500 ml; remainder are all 330 ml)
RedWillow Thoughtless imperial stout (can)
RedWillow Perceptionless New England IPA (can)
Rochefort 6 nectar of the gods
Marble Portent of Usher imperial stout
Flying Dog Horn Dog barley wine
Hawkshead Oak Aged No 5 strong porter
Wild Modus Operandi barrel-aged sour
Cloudwater Mosaic IPA
Blackjack Devilfish saison
Blackjack/Garage Gyle 700 bretted double IPA
Chorlton Goldings Sour (can)
Siren Broken Dream oatmeal stout (I have no recollection of choosing this)

Price range: £2.70 to £5.00
Average price: £3.88
Price range per litre: £8.10 to £15.00 (predictably enough)
Average price per litre: £11.30

Bit spendy, really. Was it worth it? Well, the first five – everything down to the Portent of Usher – struck me as rock-solid stone-cold five-star classics, and the next three after that were pretty damn good. I won’t go through the last five, except to say that with my beer-judging hat on I’d rate them all as good to very good. There certainly weren’t any stinkers – but a couple of them, for me, would qualify as fairly expensive experiments.

29/1/2017 (Sainsbury’s, Salford)

Timothy Taylor Landlord (500 ml, as are the rest)
Adnams Bitter
Brakspear Oxford Gold
Harbour IPA
Fuller’s Bengal Lancer
Adnams Ghost Ship

I agonised over that Adnams bitter – it was that or a Proper Job – but in the end the idea of filling my bottle carrier with three old-school bitters and three pales appealed to me.

Price range: £1.80 to £2.00
Average price: £1.84
Price range per litre: £3.60 to £4.00 (again, predictably enough)
Average price per litre: £3.68

So far I’ve had the Oxford Gold, which I’m planning on writing about separately; my mouth is actually watering at the thought of the Harbour IPA, and for that matter the dear old Landlord. All that for two notes for the best part of a pint. On the other hand, I did really enjoy that Portent, which set me back £4.50 for 330 ml. But was it three and a half times as good as Landlord? Yeah… no… maybe.

What’s the point here?  Just to say that the market is segmenting, and that the prices on the ‘craft’ side of the street really are rather high, when you stop to think about it. On the other hand, having a segmented marketplace doesn’t necessarily mean that beer drinkers have to commit to one segment and no other, or even that brewers have to – although sticking to one market segment would save you the bother of managing multiple different price ranges, which would have to be a challenge. Playing both sides may even become a necessity. There may not always be enough people willing to pay the equivalent of £7-8 a pint for an unknown style from an unknown brewery (or collab); equally, there may not always be enough people willing to pay even a couple of quid for yet another familiar bitter from yet another mid-table brewery. Sadly, beer owes nobody a living.

…and with that gloomy thought I approach the end of Dry Tuesday (would have been Monday but my wife opened some wine). Twenty-four hours, no problem! Not going to stretch it to 48, though – there’s a Meet the Brewer with Ticketybrew at the Ford Madox Brown tomorrow night. More on that in due course.