The Blog. And BrewDog Cask

I 've been neglecting this for a bit now, largely because I'm to to my eyes in the Manchester Beer and Cider Festival for which I'm Deputy Organiser, but hopefully when all that is out of the way, I'll buck my ideas up a bit.

In the meantime, I forgot to give my views on the return of Brewdog to cask beer via a cask version of Dead Pony Club (3.8%) which I tried at the Draft House in Seething Lane a few weeks ago. Well I say a few weeks, but actually it was 21st November when I was last in London, so not so long ago really.

A couple of things. I wondered if there would be much change in the Draft House offering since Brewdog took them over and first impressions are that nothing much has changed. Maybe a bit more BrewDog on the bar - well definitely that - and possibly a decrease in choice in other areas - but still plenty to go at and all much as before.

I'd previously given up on the rancid cask offering here, preferring by far to drink Tankovna Pilsner Urquell. Many visits and really poor cask had put me off trying, so given that it was a quiet Wednesday afternoon, I wasn't optimistic.  Nonetheless a pint was obtained and duly supped. It was fresh, well conditioned and actually pretty good. With its malty base and hoppy finish, it was a very decent pale ale (or standard bitter since it was in cask form) which I would happily drink again. OK, it didn't set the heather on fire, but I can well understand why BD chose this and I look forward to seeing more (and more adventurous) stuff on cask from them soon, remembering as I do some of the fantastic beers they used to produce. Trashy Blonde (not an acceptable name now I guess) and Alice Porter being two I remember very fondly.

So from me, a qualified "Welcome back" and well done on sorting out the cask quality at the Draft House, though I'll be back later this week to confirm improvement has been maintained.

Don't forget to come along to Manchester Central for the Manchester Beer and Cider Festival. It will be fab and is of course very reasonably priced.

We are having a day out in Winchester on Saturday - so tips for musn't miss pubs welcome.

Don't Bam Tennent's

Yesterday I happened to notice the tweet mentioned in this great article in the Daily Record.  Our dear friends BrewDog, thought it might be awesome to have a pop at the great Scottish icon Tennent's Lager, by suggesting that anything you do would be better that drinking good old TL.


 Very droll I thought and promptly forgot about it.

They are made of sterner stuff though over at Wellpark and they responded with the following:



The subsequent comments by the Record's readers are well worth a look. As one said "Come at the King then you best not miss." BrewDog subsequently removed the tweet.Tennent's 1; BrewDog 0.

I might just have a glass of TL on the way to the station today on that account. I fondly remember drinking pint screwtops of TL in my youth and still have one now and then. Well not screwtops sadly, but TL still.

I thank the Daily Record for reminding me of this tweet. Funnily it brought to mind the daily trot to the newsagent for a copy of same when I was a child. I kind of grew up with the Record, another Scottish icon.

This Is Lager?

It isn't often that I disagree with the Beer Nut when he describes and recommends a beer, above all because I rate his beer tasting notes as second to none and therefore his recommendations as ones to be taken very seriously indeed. As I neither have his dedication nor inclination, I'm generally happy to enjoy his tastings vicariously and of course, being a lazy git I'd rather sup beer than write tasting notes. So very unusually and with a caveat, I'm going to tentatively disagree with the Beer Nut over this post about BrewDog's This. Is. Lager. (TIL).  The caveat is that the Beer Nut describes the bottled version in his post and I have been drinking the draught version.

Now given my poor views of the state of cask beer in London,  I tend to drink a heck of a lot more lager there. And a lot more gin too.  Drinking cask beer in London (an aside in this post) is far to often the triumph of hope over experience, with its attendant coming down to earth with a bump.  This brings me back to TIL. I was very pleased when BrewDog introduced it and looked forward to it when I heard it was coming to JDW. But it is so variable.  All too few times the beer is clean, hoppy, full bodied, mouthfilling and refreshing and all too many times,  metallic, ridiculously over-carbonated, brasso like and weedy.  I asked E whose palate is excellent and who likes lager nearly as much as I do, to describe it. She summed it up thus: "It's usually too harsh. I used to like it, but I don't now". How can this be?

I offer two explanations. First the old BrewDog problem of inconsistency of product is one possibility and this may or may not be the case. I just don't know. The second and possibly more likely one, is that I'm drinking it in the wrong place. I drink it in Wetherspoons. Why should that be an issue I wondered?  I turned to a friend of mine who manages a leading JDW for his thoughts.  "It doesn't turn over as quickly as it needs to to be fresh and consistent" he said.  "And most people just don't like it."  So is that the explanation?  One piece of evidence for this, in this neck of the woods, came on Saturday in the Art Picture House in Bury.  This Is Lager was being offered (or was it remaindered?) at £2 a pint. E had a half and didn't have any more. She didn't like it.  I tasted it and found it thin and unappealing. Going back to the Beer Nut, I'm not quite so tentative when I say I am somewhat taken aback when he says "Put it in a grown-up serving size and you'd have a rival for Pilsner Urquell"

I disagree. On draught at least, for me and in my opinion, This. Is.Lager doesn't have the same complexity and consistency as PU. Moreover, to me, it just hasn't got the sheer quality of PU. Maybe though I'll have to find a bottle one day to see how that stands up.

Perhaps someone that regularly drinks it in BD pub could give their views? On the plus side, and thinking on, at £1.99 a pint, it is most certainly "Craft Beer for the People"!

I note too that BN had a few eyebrow raised comments about his views and some support.  That's interesting.  Maybe he just got a very good bottle of it?

Mainstream Craft

I was rather intrigued by the piece yesterday on Boak and Bailey about the post craft world. It got me thinking that perhaps there isn't just one set of "craft" brewers, but at least two. (Well more really if you count all the small cask brewers). The first set are those that actually know what they are doing, do it on a reasonably big scale, do it consistently and with a clear idea of what kind of beer they want to produce and what sort of business outcomes they have in mind. Whether that may be to get bigger or better, or more trendy, or to attract a certain kind of customer may vary, but they all have something rather grander and more ambitious in mind than, say, brewing muddy beer under a railway arch - even if they started out somewhere similar. They are the grandees of this craft business and while they may have been pioneers, they aren't really operating in the same world as they were any more, but in a rarefied version of it. These would include BrewDog, Thornbridge, Hawkshead, Summer Wine, Dark Star, Magic Rock and maybe even Hardknott.

At the other end of the scale is the trendy craft breweries of London, which, although they vary considerably in business models,  operate at the trendy end, more as a hand to mouth kind of business.  There cash is supplemented (maybe even generated) by opening their breweries up to fanboys and hipsters.  These wander about getting pissed of a Saturday by tottering between the new outlets, drinking overpriced and (often) underwhelming beer in overcrowded breweries, which themselves have in effect been transformed into pop up pubs for a day each week. When we think of craft though, it is increasingly those that spring to mind first, either by joining the Bermondsey boozers, or by vicariously doing so in trendy bars mainly in London, but increasingly elsewhere too. And always at top dollar.  These are not the same at all as the vast majority of cask brewing micro-brewers, although micro-brewers they undoubtedly are.

Of course I suppose I could and probably should have added a third bunch to this craft set.  That is the bigger brewers producing more interesting (that is short run, more challenging beers) within their own breweries, usually by having, as in the case of Thwaites and Brains, dedicated breweries within a brewery and a label that says craft very prominently indeed.  Given the resources that go behind these beers, they are usually pretty damn good too which also helps a lot. In fact it would not be that difficult to make a case that in many ways, Thornbridge and BrewDog  have much more in common with Thwaites and Brains than with the Shoreditch mob.  The flip side of this argument is no doubt that these breweries within breweries are parts of, but not the whole of their brewing operations and therefore lesser entities because of it.  Not a convincing argument if you believe that beer quality should be the ultimate determinant though.

British brewing is in a kind of odd flux at the moment.  The reawakening of London from its long sleep has profound inferences for beer drinking, not just there, but everywhere, as like it or not, London influencves almost everything in this country.  It will though be limited in how it exports itself, by that old North/South divide, so eloquently illustrated by Evan Davies in his recent series "Mind the Gap".  To a large extent, London will do its own thing, as there is sufficient population and more than enough money to sustain it, no matter how poor the product there often is. (In fairness, there is often too a lag before quality and consistency kicks in when anything new is offered.)  For the rest of us that aren't in London, maybe we should just enjoy the diversity, affordability and quality of what we have and if that means buying mainstream craft from BrewDog, Thornbridge et al, we should be glad to have the opportunity to do so, usually at a decent price. Either way, such diversity is good, but surely just underlines that as long as there is a demand for more interesting beer, it will be met, one way or another by those that have the nous to supply it.

 
It is a fact of revolutions too, that almost invariably those with the highest motives, those that gained the power first, are later knocked off their perch by those who come along subsequently and usurp the early adopters by outdoing them in the zealous department. We see this in the craft beer business too, where it is important to many to challenge how beer is produced currently, to buck existing practice as for example, in forsaking clear beer and to convince a receptive elite, that somehow this is better and tastier.  It is instructive (to this writer at least) that you don't see BD or Thornbridge producing muddy imprecise beer, but beer which is produced to the highest standards, while still maintaining in taste terms, a clear divide from bigger and more established operators.  But it does put them in a position where there interests lie more with the establishment than the usurpers.

That probably means that BrewDog and Thornbridge will be increasingly regarded as mainstream craft brewers.  One of them at least may not like that, but it's happening already.

And no. I have no idea what the formula means either.  Just thought it fitted somehow.  And of course we could sub divide this even more, but really, I regard "craft" as a synonym for "better keg."

And while the UK beer scene is in flux, it is worth pointing out that to most ordinary drinkers, it just passes them by.  As it should.

Craft Definition by BrewDog

Remember that debate about what craft beer is?  Course you do, it was rather popular until we all more or less gave up on it as every time we thought about it, our heads ached intolerably.  I sort of think we all decided on our own definitions and went off muttering words to the effect of  "I can't define it, but I know what it is when I see it."  Then we sort of put it aside and went off to lie in a darkened room. You might also remember that BrewDog same up with their own definition which bore an uncanny resemblance to what happens over the pond in the US.  It was rather derided on this basis and that too seemed to die a similar death.

Now I learn that this very afternoon, that BrewDog, far from giving up on it like most of us, will put a new definition to the Society of Independent Brewers' (SIBA) AGM  The BD website does give some details and urges those with thoughts on the matter to get in touch with them.  The actual proposal to be put to SIBA members for discussion is rather elusive though. The links to previous definitions and discussions both give a 404 error (not found) and BrewDog Jonathan hasn't responded to my request for details (and seems today to have been removed as contact on the BD Blog), so I can't tell you what it is.  What the blog does say seems to relate, not to craft beer, but to craft breweries.  Here's what it says:

"We believe that to earn its title a European Craft Brewery must be:

1) Authentic
a) brews all their beers at original gravity
b) does not use any adjuncts to lessen flavour and reduce costs.

2) Honest
a) All ingredients are clearly listed on the label of all of their beers.
b) The place where the beer is brewed is clearly listed on all of their beers.
c) All their beer is brewed at craft breweries.

3) Independent
Is not more than 20% owned by a brewing company which operates any brewery which is not a craft brewery.

4) Committed
If the brewer has an estate, at least 90% of the beer they sell must be craft beer."

Notice what's missing? Yep. Definition of craft beer.

So?  Any the wiser about what BrewDog are going to say today?  Me neither, but hopefully we will find out after the event, as clearly we aren't going to beforehand. 


It'll be interesting to see what the assorted SIBA types will make of all this.  Are they craft?  Dunno, but probably.  Er. I think.

BrewDog - More Than Meets the Eye

Fraserburgh is cold. The wind whips off the North Sea in a salty smack that hits you like a brick wall. The waves are grey and angry and it doesn't take much imagination to feel for those that earn their living from it. BrewDog Fraserburgh isn't at all what I'd been expecting.  In an old, rickety looking warehouse, surprisingly still standing against the sea front elements is, what was until recently, BrewDog Central.  Their brewery and offices.  It is hard to believe.  Inside on a wet concrete floor a  few stainless steel brewing vessels remain, the main kit having been whisked off to the spanking new brewery at Ellon, 27 miles away.  While you do get a bit of a Ghost Town feel, there is nothing sad about Fraserburgh. It has two (very hardy) permanent staff here and they still brew, store and mature beer. And Boy are they enthusiastic about it.

James Watt you can tell is still proud of it. It all started here and from this spot, BD bluffed, begged, borrowed and outrageously gimmicked their their way to the success they have now.  James, himself a veteran of the chilly seas outside (he was a trawlerman) tells us and reminds himself of how it began. Of the way they contracted for a million bottles without a bottling line, of the struggle for money and always the belief that the vision he shares with friend and business partner, Martin Dickie that selling better beer to people, beer made in their own vision, was something they were simply going to do. As we pondered all this, we supped a wonderful Passion Fruit Sour, so clean, yet so redolent of the fruit itself , that the sourness was an almost unnoticed counterpoint. So beautifully balanced at 3% I had two. A Jasmine IPA followed, straight from the conditioning tank. It was still being dry jasmined and had some time to go, but it was distinctive and different.

We (journalists and bloggers) had started earlier with a tour of the new stainless steel cathedral that is Ellon, on an industrial estate between Aberdeen and Fraserburgh.  The kit, designed mainly by Martin Dickie and funded by "crowd sourcing"  is state of the art and purpose built. Steel piping snakes along the walls, it wraps itself around fermentation vessels, mash and lauter tuns, conditioning, CO2 and glycol tanks.  We dodge outputs from the centrifuge as it spits out spent yeast and trub (they believe in clear beer here). We climb stairs, inspect a state of the art lab, watch hypnotised as the bottling line cleans, labels, fills, caps and nudges the bottles on their way to packing. They seem almost human as they queue to meet their transport to any one of the 30 or so countries they could end up in, patiently waiting in line, then rushing forward, eager to be next.

The brewery is still being tweaked. Engineers are moving kit, but the business continues unabated. The staff seem at ease in their job and there is an easy egalitarian feel about the place.  Martin shows us a small pilot plant where a brewer is busy putting together her own recipe. Someone asks what her normal job is. "Oh" he says vaguely, "anyone that works here and wants to know more can have a go at brewing" he remarks. And adds "Who knows? It might well end up as a production beer". We enter a vast warehouse, only just handed over from the builders a few days ago.  Mountains of kegs, keykegs, bottles, products marked for export and all kinds of sundries fill the place. On the far side a veritable distillery of whisky, bourbon and rum casks sit in serried rows, full of maturing beer.  Bottled beers and kegs imported for their own bars are there too.  This is a big operation, but Martin tells us, they have room to expand. James tells us later that they will do.

It is time for a drink and a chat. After all we are invited there to see what's behind the facade.  To be charmed after some bruising encounters. To scotch some myths. We start, where else with Punk IPA, fresh as a daisy, with Seville orange, peaches and tropical fruit, it gets universal approval.  Then Jack Hammer, straight from the conditioning tank, all big C hopping, but with cask like mouthfeel as it hasn't yet been brought up to bottling carbonation. It is 7.2% but tasting nothing like it. No jaggy alcoholic edges in this beer.  Dead Metaphor is quietly coffeeish, with chocolate and subtle smoke. Not overdone as some are, it is as smooth as a baby's bum. AB15, an imperial stout, has spent time in both rum and bourbon casks and has vanilla sweetness, with a touch of rummy raisin. We are told to expect salty caramel and popcorn, but advised it was more of an impression than a taste.  Whatever; it was a beer you'd imagine yourself sipping, late at night,  from the depths of a deep armchair, in front of a dying fire. Rich and contemplative.

Questions and answers follow as we sip. James tells us all that it has been a struggle to get where they are and you can believe him. Anecdotes flow about the early days when money was tight, contract deadlines tighter and brewing capacity tighter still.  There is still a revolutionary zeal in there, but behind the hype there is an undoubted pride and a determination to brew good beer.  They believe in training, in educating customers, they talk of new openings, company ethos, getting better at what they do, but they come back to the same theme. They don't care what it costs, but they want to brew beer that stretches, that challenges, but which tastes good.  They want to educate the public and give staff professional beer qualifications. One proviso is repeated. If James and Martin don't like it, it doesn't go on sale.  We talk about hops. This is everyone's favourite subject. Facts and statistics fly around.I write them down conscientiously, but what it boils down to is an infeasible amount of hops per hectolitre, in many varieties, for one of which (it may have been Simcoe*) BD is the world's biggest user.  I ask about cask beer. James is somewhat reticent about it, but doesn't rule it out for the future.  That's good, particularly as they are looking at having more session beers and they did make very good cask indeed. At least he didn't laugh me out of court.

Later we meet at BrewDog Aberdeen, their first bar.  It is very pubby in fact, apart from the rather stern line of grey keg fonts watching over proceedings.  The staff are enthusiastic and (even though they didn't know I was a guest) keen to explain in a very non condescending way about the beers on offer.  James is pleased about that when I tell him later, but in fairness it has happened to me before in other BrewDog bars.  Nor do I recall there being a Captain Haddock like beard in sight, which does set them apart too. But in a good way.  We ate in MUSA also BD owned. The beers are good and we are talked through them, not by James or Martin, but by various BrewDog managers. This came as a complete surprise to at least one and it compounded a sense that the employees are all fully on board.

So why was I there?  Firstly because I was invited, but secondly because I was invited by James with whom I've sort of clashed swords with before.  Why were we invited?  Officially to show us the new brewery and how it is going, but I think the unspoken sub plot was so we could see there is more to BD than a dead squirrel and ridiculously strong beer.  I got the impression that rather like Ryanair's Michael O'Leary, there will be a slightly different public face - this is a big serious business now - but innovation, quirkiness and downright cheek won't be far under the surface. After all this is a young company run by young people with fresh ideas and a happiness to cock a snook at things. James and Martin are understated bosses, but they know what they want and how to bring their own people along with them which can never be a bad thing.  Both are impressive in different ways, with James shyer and more thoughtful than you might imagine and Martin the brewer and engineer, getting the brewery as it should be.  Hopefully too there will be great quaffing beer and maybe even a return of cask, though I won't be holding my breath.  You can bet too that there will be a lot more to hear about in the next few years and loads of interesting beers from this shiny new brewery. Was I impressed? You bet I was.  Was I wrong? In many ways yes. Things are often a lot clearer close up.
 
But you know, I don't think that matters so much as the fact that these guys are beer people through and through and unafraid to say so. Beer people, even when they don't brew cask are invariably impressive.  It was good to hang out with them for a bit.

At MUSA, while I particularly enjoyed the Jura Riptide, who could fail to like a beer with "Hello My Name is Vladimir" complete with a label featuring Mr P.

Disclosure: BD paid for and organised our visit.

* Simcoe was mentioned, but it was actually Nelson Sauvin

Bethnal Green Blues

I've written before about how much I enjoy Mason and Taylor on Bethnall Green Road, London. It is handy for our flat and I've found it to be one of the friendliest of places, with excellent bar staff and a great range of beers. It embraces the best of both worlds, in that while it is undoubtedly a craft beer bar, it is one that has the good sense to sell both cask and keg beer, thus appealing to a broader crowd and of course, providing something for everyone. A bringing together of the new with the old, rather harmoniously and dare I say it, with some style and charm?

Imagine my disappointment therefore to find that the owners have not only decided to sell it, but to sell it to those most divisive of upstarts, BrewDog. No doubt the handpumps will be ripped out and replaced by ultra expensive BD plus even more expensive, imported, fancy pants beer at top dollar. Certainly a look at the promises for the future of the place on the BrewDog site holds out little hope for the retention of cask beer.  It wouldn't fit in with BDs's image and of course, it couldn't be sold at the eye watering prices that BD will undoubtedly wish to charge.

I don't know why Mason and Taylor are turning up their toes, but there can be only two plausible reasons.  Either they were losing money and this is a way to cut their losses and run, or, they were made an offer they couldn't refuse.  The twitter rumour is that they are using the money to open a new place in "Hipsterville Hackney", but who knows? So, despite the chorus of "awesomes" - is there a more annoying word around than that? - on the BD website, BD would have expanded in London sooner or later anyway. It is a great pity it had to be at the expense of rather a good boozer with a much more inclusive outlook.

 I don't feel at all that this is progress. I reckon we've all just lost much more than we've gained here. 

I see too that the Scottish Government has just given BD a half million quid to help them expand. Hope it will be spent wisely.

A Sinner Repented? Nah!

It was reported yesterday on one of the newsgroups I subscribe to the a contributor had thoroughly enjoyed a cask conditioned pint of BrewDog IPA (sic) at an unknown Wetherspoon outlet in Manchester.

Extensive enquiries dashed hopes that the upstarts of Scottish Brewing had seen the light. It was in fact not Punk IPA or indeed anything at all, from BD, but Offbeat Out of Step. So you can see how the mistake was easily made. I have no doubt that it was a genuine error, possibly out of wishful thinking - or bad eyesight. Not excess alcohol I'm sure. And in this case, I am sure, but disappointing nonetheless.

My hopes,thus cruelly raised are lowered once more. I suspect it won't be for the last time though.

The pumpclip is from 2008. Appropriate name for one of theirs, though I recall this was actually good.