The beer is of course the one illustrated on the left. (It would have been perverse for it to be otherwise, though I did think of putting something else on to throw you off the scent for a couple of lines.) Hawkshead New Zealand Pale Ale is wonderful. It bursts on the palate with a cornucopia of tropical fruits, is bitter and citric and so very, very drinkable for its 6% abv. One isn't enough and three may just be too many, as it commands respect strengthwise, though the alcohol is cunningly disguised.
The Manchester Pub Guide produced by CAMRA in Greater Manchester is a handy book listing all of the pubs selling real ale in the City Centre and a couple of districts beyond. It is split up by area and there isn't a lot by way of editorial, rather, the reader - user if you like - is left to make up his or her mind from the pub descriptions. Typical CAMRA guide you might say. Give 'em the info and then let them get on with it. Fair enough? Certainly Rhys Jones, that doyen of many a CAMRA book review thinks so - and why not? In Stockport and South Manchester's Opening Times, he summarises by saying it is "an accomplished and professional volume with little to criticise".
I was out delivering our CAMRA Branch magazine (which I edit) today. As always I try and have a quick word with the licensee, just to see how things are. Maybe its different elsewhere or maybe we just have a better relationship with ours, but I always find them keen to talk to CAMRA. At one pub the licensee was bemoaning his limited cask guest beer list - a common complaint. He was also denied for reasons of which he was unsure, to a more wide ranging list which the PubCo also runs. I cooed sympathetically and asked "Is it Enterprise?" - as it usually is in such cases. "No" quoth he, I wish it was. It's Heineken. Bastards!". 
It is Golden Pints time again where we choose under a number of categories our favourites and runners up. I'm at a disadvantage here though. I don't tick, I don't buy fancy beers, I don't visit independent retailers to purchase said exotics etc. etc. But you know, even though I may not be the best person to ask, I can give it a go. So here we are. Winners and runners up and maybe the odd honourable mention.
I attended my last National Winter Ales Organising Committee Meeting on Saturday. Last this festival I mean. Almost everything is arranged. Last minute snags were identified and decisions were made and we are good to go - though of course there will be more last minute hitches and more decisions needed. I spent quite a lot of time last week doing a tortuous risk assessment for Greater Manchester Police and updating our internal stuff. Others have sweated over beer orders, cider orders, what we need from HQ stores, what we have to buy locally, how we will steward the event, advertise it, get sponsorship, print tickets, discuss and agree food availability, order glasses, design signs, design the programme, order transport for goods and staff, sign up staff to work, arrange duties and a million other less obvious things. It is a giant jigsaw that has to come together by the trade session on Wednesday 18th January. With Christmas and New Year, it doesn't leave a lot of time and plenty of us will be dedicating some of that holiday time to ensuring there are no last minute problems. I for instance will be pulling some stuff together for some of the legal requirements that we have to follow, but then forgetting about it for a week or two. Hopefully.
The Westfield Shopping Centre (or is it Mall?) is the destination. Out there in Olympic Land. Hop off the DLR, pass the Olympic athlete's village, go through the airport like ticket hall, look right and there it is. All glass fronted, wide open to the shopping centre (more of that later) and looking like a cross between Costa Coffee and an American Brew pub is Tap East. An L shaped bar, tables and stools, nice chairs and sofas, big windows. It is roomier than you'd think too and pleasantly laid out. Of course beer is the attraction but not being a geek, I didn't count the fonts for keg beer, nor the handpumps, but there was certainly enough to go at and my choice of cask beer included two from the brew pub, Thornbridge Kipling and Dark Star American Pale. I started with the Tap East Pale Ale (I think). Deeply bitter, with a good malt backbone, this was am enjoyable beer which perhaps needs a lighter more floral or tropical finishing hop adding, but was very drinkable indeed. Thornbridge Kipling followed and was in great nick. All it needed was a sparkler to make it perfect. There was of course, being an Utobeer outlet, a large array of bottled delicacies too.
Then the beer that knocked John Clarke's socks off. Hopfenweisse is heavily hopped with American "C " hops. It has a big booming taste to go with its big booming 8.2% alcohol. It is wonderful and dangerously and deceptively drinkable. Schneider say "This extreme wheat beer shows how far wheat beer taste can go." Indeed it does.
The Beer Writers Guild do was good, with decent company and some good beer. I liked the Orange Peel beer from Wadworth particularly, as did Eileen, but we could have done with a bit more of it. My pre dinner tipple was Thwaites Wainwright. Re-racked bright, but still in excellent nick and very drinkable. Thwaites are doing a lot of things right and will likely continue to do so I fancy.
It seems to me, irrespective of a sterile and futile keg versus cask debate, that the main dichotomy in beer drinking is coming from the increasing divide between those that like to, for want of a better term, neck a few, and those that want to have something stronger and more complex (harder to drink) in much smaller measures. The other great divide that is emerging is that between the younger more experimental type of beer drinker and those more traditional types that drink mostly cask beer in volume. I am ignoring for the purposes of this argument, the vast majority of beer drinkers that do neither, preferring their tipple to be Carling, John Smith's or whatever. (It is instructive sometimes to remember that whatever we imagine about the beer scene, most people neither drink cask nor craft keg, so in one sense, whatever camp you mainly fall in, the so called discerning beer market, whether craft keg or cask, has more in common than we sometimes recognise.)
Eric argues that German brewers have in effect led themselves and their customers up a blind alley of sameness, by interpreting the beer purity law in a singular and unwise way. He says in effect that there has been a gaderene rush to produce identical beers, dictated not by the Reinheitsgebot, but a lack of vision. He points out that "the Reinheitsgebot says nothing about what hop varieties and barley varieties and yeast strains you should use" and that "the Reinheitsgebot should be an inspiration to try and create within these so-called ‘confines". Like so many things in life, it isn't what you've got, but the way that you use it that counts.
The Government ended uncertainty about the future of the tie as it pertains to the vertically integrated family brewers - that is - those family owned breweries such as Adnams, Robinsons, Bateman's Lees etc. that both brew, and own pubs which are tied to their beer. 
So I'll redress the balance just a little. On Monday night, in Oldham, I had two different beers (though not just two beers) from two exceptional breweries. Both are, gratifyingly in my CAMRA branch area, and it was a CAMRA meeting that caused me, rarely, to be drinking beer on a Monday night. Both were 4.5%, which is just a touch above my normal drinking strength, but when the beers are from these two, you know not only that you can drink them with confidence, but indeed you must.
Funnily enough, one of the breweries, despite a great reputation is fairly hard to come by, though being brewed only 5 or 6 miles from where I live. (The other is even nearer.) The brewery brews at capacity, has no plans to expand and when I looked at its web site for my blog post, I realised I hadn't ever had the vast majority of their beers, such is their comparative rarity. The other brewery also brews to capacity most of the time and is much bigger. I have tried the vast majority of those beers many a time and always with great pleasure.
Tyson has mentioned the Bury Beer Festival and Darren Turpin here. This used to be run by CAMRA for many years - in fact I've organised it more than once - but is now run by the hall owners themselves, on a different basis. CAMRA did run a small membership stall this year though and I did my bit on Friday afternoon, by spending a few hours there with my "Ask me about CAMRA" badge on. Quite a few did and one of the questions I was asked more than once, was "Why isn't CAMRA doing it now?"
There is a plethora of books about beer and fortunately there seems to be a fairly never ending set of customers for them. One of the first in the UK to take up this theme was, oddly enough, the Campaign for Real Ale, who have been producing beer related books for many years, as a follow on from their first effort, the Good Beer Guide. They are still doing it.
We are told that one of the best ways of encouraging people to try cask beer, is to offer tasters. Indeed the principle can be stretched to all beer, but I'd guess that it is to cask beer that it most often applies, given the huge number of different beers available and the lack of information provided about what's on sale in most pubs. There is a touch of psychology involved here too. Perhaps it is a British thing particularly, but there is a degree of obligation then put on the drinker, in his or her mind at least, that having tried a beer, you must buy a beer. I can't recall many, if any times, where I or others having tried a sample or two, then said "No thanks" and left. It is you would say, a "win win" situation. The drinker gets a beer they are more or less content with and the pub makes a sale. Simples.
Hawkshead Windermere Pale. The Champion Beer of the Society of Independent Brewers Northen section and very well deserved it is too. I first alerted my readers about this beer way back in 2009. You can read about it here. For those that don't know it, Windermere Pale is a very pale, highly hopped beer of a mere 3.5%. When we read so much about hop monster triple IPAs or other such, weighing in at 9% plus, it is good to remember what we are, possibly uniquely, so great at brewing on these islands - very drinkable low gravity beer that you can just straightforwardly sup in volume. 
I am still getting my head round keykegs. OK, I've examined them at close quarters at GBBF and understand how they work, but my question is about how they are filled and how the beer inside gets its CO2. Now a conventional keg, is filled upside down (usually) through its central extraction spear. Is it the same for a keykeg where the bag takes the place of the spear? Additionally since a keykeg is not subject to applied external CO2 being in contact with the beer and therefore does not "gain" CO2 from the dispense process, my assumption is that the volume of internal CO2 is set as (or before) it is filled and then it stays at that rate during dispense, as it is pushed out by the collapsing sphere. Is the beer pressure set at the filling unit? Can they be filled with beer set at whatever CO2 content the brewer needs? 
For the second time Manchester is hosting this prestigious event, with beers being exhibited by most, if not all, SIBA North members. There is a new venue too, at the Ramada Piccadilly Hotel (though since booking, it is now actually the Mercure Piccadilly Hotel - hotels change hands a lot) and bang in the centre of the city. Publicity has been a lot better this year too - we do learn as we go along - so combined with that and a new and reduced pricing structure for entry, we should hopefully see a huge turnout. All cask beers will be served by handpump and will be sparkled and served with a tight Northern creamy head, as the brewers and God intended. 
My modest role yesterday was to ensure that the racked beers were in the correct serving position, stable and ready to be cleaned before tapping and venting. Tomorrow I'll be doing Health and Safety checks, as I will on Thursday before we open to the public and throughout the event. I'll also be a judge in the beer competition and looking forward to that too.
In a fit of nostalgia, earlier today, I was looking back at my old beer reviews on the Oxford Bottled Beer Datbase. Along with some other dodgy characters like Des De Moor and Jeff Pickthall, I used to search out the exotic and write about them for the benefit of the great unwashed and was part of a beer community before blogging and while Usenet was still going strong. I had forgotten some of the beers I reviewed and that, in part at least, I used to be reasonably good at it. I have proof of that, which I'll share with you later. 
I have noticed that some pubs and publicans have decided, now that the weather is colder and nights are drawing in, that a dark beer, or sometimes several dark beers should replace lighter "summer" offerings. This seasonality seems logical enough to them presumably, but speaking as someone that likes his quaffing beer pale and hoppy, I don't see it that way.
It was nonetheless a very enjoyable event and good to meet a number of interesting and pleasant people. The winner was, perhaps then unsurprisingly, a dark beer, Good King John from Ridgeway Brewing, who remarkably had two beers in the final eight. The runner up, Caesar Augustus from William Brothers, could be described as a "speciality beer" being a hybrid of lager and IPA, though to this drinker, it had more characteristics of the former than the latter. It was an enjoyable beer though, like most stuff from this brewery and worthy of its place in the top two. My own favourite was Wild Hop IPA from Harviestoun. I could imagine a few bottles of that would not be a hardship at all, though that's clearly not what the judges thought. Some veterans of Sainsbury's Beer Hunting remarked to me that the best beer wasn't there, namely Williams Brother's Profanity Stout and certainly this has been echoed on the blogosphere, though I can't opine, as I haven't been able to find it myself. 
A murmur of excitement ran through the room as pumpclips appeared on the last bank of six handpumps. No thirds were available due to late delivery of glasses, so halves were procured. Bend Eclipse Cascadian Dark Ale, wasn't that dark really and though the hops showed through strongly, it was oddly watery. Stone San Diego Session Ale was much better, but again somehow didn't quite hit the spot. Odell's 90/- was dominated by caramelly malt, which managed to overwhelm the Perle and Cascade hops. Fathead's Yakima Sun was more pleasing, though again malt seemed to have won its battle with hops. Last up was Kalmazoo Black Silk, which was to my mind, the best of the bunch, being toasty, smooth and moreish.
So why the title? Occupying last place on the handpull bank was Adnams American style IPA. What a great beer. Resinous, oily hops, a firm smooth and biscuity malt base, a tight creamy head and at 4.8% proving you don't need to overwhelm with alcohol to make a bloody great beer. I switched to pints and filled my boots, leaving too late and somewhat the worse for wear.
Beer wise I had variously good experiences and bad in London last week. On the good side obviously was the lovely weather, which made a little outdoor drinking possible, as well as pleasant strolls to and between pubs. Lists can be boring, but I won't let that stop me, so I'll mention some of the best, just so you know where to go. The Gunmaker's Arms as always keeps their beer immaculately. Landlord Jeff even took me into his cellar to try an impressive new beer from East London Brewing. I suspect that they may be one to watch, so let's er.. watch them. Making a handy little pub crawl is nearby Craft. I've praised them before for very well kept beer and do so again, this time enhanced by three (or was it four?) Mallinson's beers. Only black mark was the mind numbing overly loud music, but then to this old git, modern repetitive beats go into my head like driven nails. None of that nonsense in the Euston Tap though, where I enjoyed my farewell to London beers. I have never had a badly presented beer here.
According to HM Revenue and Customs, illegal imports of beer - beer that has not had UK duty paid on it - amounts to 14% of UK beer volumes. Now I am assuming here that legally imported beer for personal consumption is not included in these figures, but then again can that be so, as including those beers would make the problem much worse? On the other hand then legally imported beer for personal consumption can be sold illegally. Is that what they are saying, or is it some kind of some kind of combination? What do these guesstimates really mean? It's as clear as mud.
The Cask Ale Report for 2011/12 is out. Well sort of. You can't download it from their site yet, so if you want to know what's in it, you have to rely on its author Pete Brown (who better?) or the good old Morning Advertiser.
