Approachability

What's that then? Well the dictionary would say "the attribute of being easy to meet or deal with". "Accessible". Now hands up those that think (most) beer should be seen within those (reasonable) definitions.

On Saturday I had two beers at opposite ends of the approachability spectrum. First was the 3.5% pale, citra infused swigger, Hawkshead Windermere Pale, then, a few minutes later in a different pub, the strong, 6.5% hop bomb, Hoppiness from Moor Brewery. In the Angel, I was just beaten to the door by a group of six, three men with their female companions. They wanted to drink cask beer, so asked for tasters. I watched as they went through two or three. "Ooohs" and "aaahs" announced the result - Hawkshead Windermere Pale all round. I ordered it too, as it is rapidly becoming a favourite of mine.

In the Marble Arch, I had a pint of Pint. (As an aside, a gentleman beside me in the standing room only crush asked me what I was drinking. "Pint" quoth I. "I know" he said, "but which one?". Tedious explanations followed about arcane beer naming practice! ) I had however spotted that on the bar was Moor Brewery Hoppiness. Now this is 6.5% abv. Not big by some standards, but a beer requiring caution and respect I'd say. By then I'd found a seat and nipped to the bar for a half. The first thing I'd say is that it was a very well made beer. It was clean, no obvious brewing faults and clear as a bell. But boy was it hard to drink. The sheer amount of big C hops and obvious alcohol precluded anything but sipping and each sip required more effort than you should have to put into beer drinking. I'd struck up a conversation with two of my table companions. They were drinking cask, so I offered them a taste. I think it fair to say, neither liked it. So a very well made beer, but not very approachable on this very unscientific observation.

So why am I saying this? I suppose the background is the recent posting by Dave Bailey and the Publican piece by Caroline Nodder. I rather think this aspect (approachability) is related. Am I saying then that all beer should be 3.5% quaffers? Not at all, but I am saying that for most "ordinary" drinkers and for new ale drinkers, the attraction of drinking beer will be more slanted towards the weaker, easy drinking beer, than the other example I quote. Maybe that's obvious, but the need to reflect the likes and dislikes of the mainstream is sometimes overlooked in the search for the exotic or unusual. (That is possibly what Caroline Nodder was on about.) I'd contend that the gateway to a more diverse and appreciative view of beer is through better made beers that the ordinary punter can sup a fair bit of, understand and build upon. To read some beer commentators though, you'd think ordinary people, ordinary drinking and pubs are so "yesterday". Not so I'd venture. You don't get the egalitarianism of the pub so easily in upmarket bars or from drinking at home, nor do you get the easy chat that can lead to tasting beers with strangers elsewhere. (I don't subscribe to the view either that pricing people out of certain types of beer is a good thing, but that's not for now.)

To spread the word about beer, (assuming one thinks there is a point to that) we need to increase the quality, range and diversity at the everyday level, as well as swooning with pleasure over big beers the vast majority of us will never even come across and which, if we did, probably wouldn't like. Even for for niche markets, to ensure sustainability, we need a better focus on "entry level" beer, for that is the gateway to all beer for most, whether that beer is consumed in the pub or at home. Micro brewing is already challenging mainstream brewing and thinking very successfully now and is forcing change elsewhere. (I mentioned this in my response to Caroline Nodder). It looks possible too that smaller brewers will have the opportunity to sell their wares to a wider audience, as further pubs will become available as pub groups retrench and become smaller. Pubs aren't dead yet and those that survive will have pretty good prospects if allowed to do their own thing. (There is possibilities too in this for the niche by the way and though the big opportunities will always lie with the bulk of drinkers, I for one don't see why these things can't run side by side, rather than as separate posh beers bars on one hand and "bog standard" pubs on the other.)

So, summing up, while there is opportunity for all, ignore, or even worse disdain the majority at your peril. They are the niche drinkers of tomorrow and should be nurtured.

Most of what I say refers to pubs and bars. While soulless home drinking will increase, the need to nurture the majority applies there too, even though most are drinking Carling!

The Joys of Smooth

Remember Woolworth's? Woolies to us old'uns. They used to be big around here and had a large distribution depot a few miles from where I live. Now big businesses (remember them?) spawned social clubs and Woolies had a fine one, up a leafy (well not at this time of year obviously) side street, not far from the now closed depot. This still carries on and I read in a notice in the bar when we called for our quiz match last night, that the club has been bought from the receivers, which is good news. As part of that new freedom, they have immediately tied themselves (by loan I assume) to a brewer. Oh well, needs must and all that.

I have rather a long history with social clubs. It started with Denny's Social Club in Dumbarton, another club which long outlived its parent (shipbuilders in that case). In Liverpool it was the Docker's Club and through my years in the Liverpool Social Clubs Darts League, many others. Almost without exception, the ale (old fashioned CO2 keg) was bloody awful, requiring recourse to that old Scouse favourite, brown bitter, which accounts for my almost encyclopaedic knowledge of North Western bottled brown ales. The one exception was Walton Ward Labour Club, where a lone unmarked handpump dispensed Burtonwood Dark Mild. I don't recall cask in any other club back then.

Things have changed. In our quiz league, we often come across clubs with cask beer, though bright fonts still dominate. Back to Woolies. Their new supplier is Hydes and all the beers are smoothflow. I had the Hydes Black, a mild which knocks Guinness into a cocked hat flavour wise and doesn't taste "just cooked" and which, despite its Arctic temperature, was a decent beer well worth drinking. The boys had various Hydes' smooth beers and professed themselves as more or less content. As they pointed out, Hydes aren't known for pronounced flavour, so it was put uppable with.

My own view is that smoothflow only really suits milds and stouts. If only it wasn't served at 3 or 4° C!

She Knows What She Likes

There's an interesting and somewhat provocative article by Caroline Nodder who is the editor of both the print and on-line versions of the Publican, in the Publican On Line today. Basically when you boil it down, she is saying that there's too much beer geekery around and it and the brews it spawns are doing the industry a power of no good at all. She says "I’m worried that the revival of the cask ale sector has gone to some people’s heads.....What we have is a wave of over-indulgent niche brews that are only going to be of interest to beer geeks."

Now I'd say she's wrong on a number of points when she expends her argument, as clearly the niche brews she is concerned about are not likely to be on cask and anyway, no real ale brewer is going to risk its future by a deliberate dependency on brews that are of limited interest and saleability. Nor for that matter will producers of such bottled exotics as exist. They have their own markets and that's what they aim for. Not that I'm hugely bothered about most of them, but I don't think experimental or adventurous bottled beers - for that is what most of them are - are likely to change the brewing industry as a whole, for better or worse, despite the wishful thinking that I have remarked on before. Nonetheless there is an underlying point that building the on trade with modern interpretations of classic British brewing is the way to go for most. Where she is wrong again is in her assertion that few such beers and brewers exist. Clearly she is unaware of the activities of Phoenix, Pictish, Dark Star, Purity, Elland, Crouch Vale, Thornbridge and many more. Even Adnams are branching out a bit and the slow moving Family Brewers are starting to turn their own Titanic round, little by little. Horror of horrors, I'll even give a nod to Lovibonds here.

Caroline goes on to say "I’m not going to be overly popular with some of my fellow beer writers for saying this but they haven’t helped the situation by indulging brewers in their shoe-gazing activities either." Now I've always argued that brewers should concentrate on their pub trade and producing beers that people want to drink in volume and have argued the toss with fellow beer writers on these points many a time. It's still a bit of a departure though to see some of us accused of counter productive fawning and doing actual harm to beer and pubs. I do know that most beer writers and bloggers care deeply about the future of beer and brewing and indeed, pubs, despite leaning sometimes too far in their indulgence of certain brewers and over-reverence of the exotic. I can therefore imagine quite a few being a little miffed by her opinion of them when they read the article. Still, comment is comment and needs to be looked at seriously when it comes from such a source.

While we may disagree with her conclusions, there is a lot to think about in what she says. It is (among other things)a warning that as beer writers, we shouldn't move too far from the majority and and that we need to think a little more clearly of how we can sometimes appear to those who agree with her statement " I am passionate about beer, just as passionate as they are, but from a drinker’s perspective. That doesn’t mean I don’t know what I like. "

We are all just drinkers in the end and the more we move from that to geekery, the less we'll matter. The majority isn't always wrong.

Her Jamie Oliver analogy is interesting too.

When Every Town had a Brewery

My interest in beer started a long time ago, but it wasn't until meeting Charles McMaster, the former curator of the Scottish Brewing Archive, that I found out my own home town had a brewery. Whisky of course, but a brewery? I didn't know. Charlie was able to give me photo copies of the labels, unfortunately in black and white, but I know where the originals are (in the University of Glasgow Archives) and I dare say colour copies could be obtained these days.

The brewery was Gillespie and it was taken over by Scottish Brewers (or maybe even McEwan's or Youngers pre merger)and inevitably closed, probably in the 1940's. My curiosity has been piqued though and I've written to the Scottish Brewing Archive (within Glasgow University) for more info.

The name was briefly resurrected in the 90's with a stout no less from S&N. God knows why.

Rare Beast

It is on these shores anyway. I've never seen it, but here we have a bottle of Lees Harvest Ale, Sherry Version. It was brewed in 2008, though the one in the picture was brewed in 2004. ( I can't bothered photographing it so this was nicked from the webosphere). I was given it by a mate, though it came from the brewery, not from abroad.

Not sure when I'll drink it, or who with, but I've been promised one of the Calvados versions too.

Anyone ever seen these on UK shores other than as a personal import?

The Start of the Revolution?

Not many who read this will know of Brendan Dobbin. Many will know of the Marble Arch and the Porterhouse Breweries though. Brendan designed both of them in their original incarnations. He was an advocate of heavy hopping and more than that, long before it became a usual thing to do, twenty years ago, he used American and New Zealand hops in his brewery in the bowels of the King's Arms in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester. (That's the rough one, not leafy Chorlton-cum-Hardy in case you are wondering.)

I knew Brendan a little as he supplied the pub I used to drink in, which sold among other beers of his, Ginger Beer, a forerunner of many. His bottled lagers (all done laboriously by hand) were interesting too (the diat pils had an OG of 1040 and an ABV of 5.5%) and his Guiltless Stout cocked a snook at a certain large Dublin brewer. His Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, later changed under threat of legal action to Yakima Grande was the stuff that set him out from the crowd. If you tasted it, you'll remember it. He even brewed an ESB as I recall. Famous "scooper" Gazza Prescott, now of Steel City Brewing rightly has him down as one of his "hop heroes". You can read what Gazza says here. There is also some interesting background about the area the pub was in. If anything Gazza is kind to it. It was decidedly scary.

The guy was a legend and still consults and builds breweries apparently, though he was also known to be growing bananas in Ireland! Why this nostalgia? The labels again. When I visited Brendan many years ago for a tour round the brewery, he gave me a few labels. Some of them are in the photo.

So was the micro brewing revolution started by Brendan Dobbin? Maybe not, but he was a pioneer and where he went, others have followed.  That's worth raising a new world hop filled glass to surely?

Guinness took Brendan to court for alleged infringement of copyright. Read about that here. I won't spoil it for you by telling you who won.

When Tennent's Brewed Stouts

A few years ago, well 15 or so, I was given some old Scottish beer labels. Writing about Belhaven the other day made me nostalgic for a quick look at them. These caught my eye.

I'm guessing they are early sixties. Anybody know?

Another Top Tip

Those of you lucky enough to live in the Manchester area will know that the Waterhouse by the Town Hall is one of the better Wetherspoons around. It just got even better. The house beer (Waterhouse Pale) is rebadged Hawkshead Windermere Pale, which though only 3.5%, just bursts with Citra flavour. It's a tremendous beer and my usual advice in such situations applies. Seek it out.

That's it.

Disregard a lot of the above - well the house beer bit. See comment. This is live and updated! Still seek the beer out though.

A Few Good Beers

Like much of the population, I've got a cold. Not one of these streaming horrors, but one that just lurks there making you feel a bit off and sore throaty, but not by any means ill. However, apart from a quick trip to the quiz match, I haven't been out this week, or had a pint. A quick phone call to my mate Graham corrected this anomaly and for a change it was Rochdale, not the Northern Quarter, that was our destination.

The Baum has only been a pub for 30 years and is flourishing. It sells a varied range of beers and importantly, it keeps them well, so we entered with eager anticipation. Phoenix was on the bar, so all was well. Here's a thing for you to know. It doesn't actually matter that much which Phoenix is available. Like potatoes, in the McCains's ad, they're all good. This particular Phoenix was Pale Moonlight and I'm guessing you know already that it is pale and hoppy, but in this case with a very firm malt base which holds the whole thing together very nicely indeed. Simon the owner proffered an ominous word of caution though. "I think it's near the end." Damn. Before we finished our perfect pints, another couple of pints pulled for others saw it off. So what next? Dark Star Espresso Stout of course. This was a rare chance to have this fabulous beer served through a tight sparkler, emphasising the coffee and coal dust notes. Lovely stuff.

In the Regal Moon (voted on Sunday as Wetherspoon Cask Ale Pub of the Year) the line up was mouth watering for a man in severe need of refreshment. More Phoenix on the bar included the strong Wobbly Bob and despite the temptation of Elland, Milestone and others, Phoenix it had to be; this time in the tantalising shape of Flash Flood. It didn't disappoint, with a very hoppy finish to a very enjoyable beer. However man does not live by Phoenix alone, though of course he could, beer wise at least, so good is the range. Next up for the full pint treatment, after some tastings, was Adnams Yuletide, with spiciness throughout, which suits the distinctive Adnams yeast so well. This divided opinions though, with Graham and Steve the cellarman being unconvinced. Trust me on this one, it is good. Having seen that off down red lane, one more had to be sampled before the 17 bus and so it came to pass, that for the first time in two years (it wasn't brewed last year), I had a Lees Plum Pudding. This dry, fruity, bittersweet beer is one you either like or don't. I do and the good news is that it will be on in my local soon. Seek it out on the guest trail and do ask for it to be sparkled.

So there we have it. An ordinary drinking session in Rochdale and some tip top beers and tip top tips. Drink any of them. You won't be disappointed.

Belhaven Blues

I see that Belhaven Brewery in Dunbar is to be "fully integrated" within Greene King. While the brewery will be kept open , it means the end of the company, founded in 1719, as a separate operating identity. The 300 odd tied pubs will be subsumed into the current Greene King estate. The integration will save a (measly) £1 million a year.

This is in marked contrast to the way that Marstons manages its owned breweries such as Jennings and Ringwood and the cynic in me would predict that this is merely a prelude to the inevitable closure of Dunbar, which rather than an operating division of Greene King, becomes just another (the other in fact) brewery in the company and thus rather vulnerable. If you want to predict the future, look at the past and you will see that Greene King has a record of closing every brewery it takes over. Think Morlands, Ridley etc. Don't suppose that recent investment at Dunbar will make a jot of difference. It won't in the long term.

This is another nail in the coffin of major brewing in Scotland and a good reason, as if you needed any more, to regard Greene King as a merciless devourer of breweries.