Maui Brewing Co.

Sometimes, you look at a business and just say to yourself "what the hell are they thinking?". For example, the Orkney Islands host two breweries. The climate on Orkney must be something special to lure two breweries there, given that they have to import all the ingredients to make the beer, bar the water, which I'm told is plentiful. And then they have to freight the majority of the beer back to the mainland for it to be sold. Mental, I tells ya.

Orkney is about 10 miles off the coast of the Scotland. Maui, one of the islands that makes up the 1500 mile long Hawaiian archipelago, is 750 miles from mainland USA. One has to question why Garrett Marrero decided to found Maui Brewing Co there. I mean, why on earth would you want to live in a blue-oceaned, sun-beaten paradise, making craft beer (in the American sense)? It would be easy to paint the whole thing as some slacker "Aloha, whoah, surf's up dude" idyll, were it not for the fact that you don't make good beer without putting in a lot of hard work. And that hard work is evident in the beer.

The beer that perhaps most people will be initially drawn to, Big Swell IPA, is a really solid IPA - think Odell IPA, in terms of that classy Anglo-American crossover, where malt and hops actually work together to produce a rounded, integrated whole. Slightly more off the wall, but showcasing a local ingredient (at least, I'm assuming they use Hawaiian coconuts rather than importing them from the Maldives, although given the island brewer mentality, nothing would surprise me), is their Coconut Porter, which really does taste faintly of coconut, and is a pretty damn special porter to boot. Smooth, silky and slightly unctuous, with a heap of mocha flavours. Aces.

Not simply off the wall, but actually packing a bag and leaving for a long holiday from any semblance of sense is the Mana Pineapple Wheat. When I tweeted about this beer, someone mentioned that they thought it smelled and tasted like urinal pucks. All I can say is that it doesn't, it tastes like a wheat beer with pineapple in it, which is to say a completely bonkers riot of fruit and spice. I liked it, but I can see why others might not, because it treads the tightrope of being fun, and some people think that anything fun shouldn't be taken seriously. Which is a shame, because we can all use a little fun once in a while.

Please find enclosed herein.....

Hi Zak,

Please find enclosed herein a bottle of Bear Republic "Racer 5" IPA.

Many months ago, after I posted on the Wine Pages forum, you helped me find good beer. When my wife and I stopped into Beerritz, You kindly gifted me a bottle of the Brewdog "Avery, Brown, Dredge" Imperial Pilsner. At that time, you wouldn't take my money for that beer -- instead you told me to give you how ever much I though it was worth on my next visit to the store. As it was, I enjoyed the ABD quite a lot, but I feel that giving you money for that beer (which bears your name) would be too impersonal.

And so we arrive at the bottle sitting in this bag. I recently visited friends and family in the States, and was able to bring some beer back to England with me when I returned. This is one of those bottles. This beer is my favourite "regular" IPA, and a six-pack of it is always in my fridge when I'm at home in California. So rather than money, I give you this beer [smiley face]

I hope you enjoy this beer as much as I do, Zak. Please let me know what you think of it. Thank you again for your kindness.

All the best, Brian

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Dear Brian,

thank you so much for this. I remember sending you that message on Wine Pages, and I remember you coming to the shop. Although I don't really post as much as I'd like to in the beer section of Wine Pages, I do look at it frequently, and I see that you are a regular poster. I'm happy to see that about half of what you post about comes from the shop (or from somewhere in Harrogate more local to you).

When I gave you the bottle of ABD, I did so thinking that you would probably enjoy it, and I'm pleased that you did. I was delighted that you'd come to see us, not only because you brought a wallet full of money, some of which you were good enough to leave with us, but because you obviously love beer.

Part of the fun of being into great beer is turning people on to things that they've never had before. Hence me making free with the ABD. And I'm so delighted that you've returned the favour.

Oscar Wilde said that a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing. With this cynicism-free act, you've demonstrated that a gesture can be worth tenfold the value of any goods that it contains. I'm drinking the Racer 5 now, and am happy to report that it's bringing me a huge amount of pleasure, not just by being a good beer, but also in the spirit in which it was given.

Keep the faith, Zak

Magic Rock Brewing: The Bottles

Last night's IPA day event at Mr Foleys in Leeds was a lot of fun. Beer, people, blather, and the chance for a few people to be utterly fabulous in their own way (yes, I was one of the fabulous, just for one night). But of course, it wasn't about the people, even people as fabulous as me. It was about the beer.

There's a bit of a paradox to good beer, in that if it's really good, it doesn't hang around for long. I'm not sure which was the first IPA to sell out - maybe it was the Rooster's Underdog? - but Magic Rock Human Cannonball, their double IPA, sold out early on too. But, as Leigh at The Good Stuff says, more on this later.

Magic Rock Rapture (4.6%abv) is a red ale, which I have a sneaking suspicion is becoming a style that more 'craft' brewers are seeing as a 'must-have' in their range. Rapture has a really nutty aroma, alongside a faintly spicy hop character. On the palate, more nutty malt leads the way - biscuity amber malt seems to be prominent, which is fine by me. Overall, the beer is quite malt driven, which I actually quite liked - a respite from the 'more hops with everything' approach that is so prevalent at the moment. [EDIT - as Neil from eating isn't cheating points out, this beer is hoppier than I make it sound here. A bottle tried today was much hoppier than I remember, so perhaps I had a duff bottle?]

Having said that, High Wire (5.5%abv) is hoptastic, and will be immediately familiar to anyone who has tried any of brewer Stuart Ross's beers before. Pale malt lays a blank canvas against which citrus and hop character is deployed, to dazzling effect. Mango, lime, jasmine, this pushes all my buttons, and at that strength, happily qualifies for my 'ruinously drinkable' tag.

If you were at Foleys on Tuesday, you'll have heard me say a little bit about the cross-pollination of ideas between British and American brewing cultures. Cannonball (7.4%abv - surely not the first beer to be brewed to strength with an eye on the incoming strong beer tax later this year?) straddles those two cultures like a colossus, keeping a weather eye on rumbustious malty English ales, and hop-led American beasts. It's big and chunky, and shows its strength with a little warmth, but I actually quite enjoy that slightly raucous quality.

And that would be the end of the bottle reviews, but for the kindness of the guys at Magic Rock, who hand-bottled me a sample of their IIPA Human Cannonball, pictured left arriving on a pallet of their beers. Hey, you might have to buy a pallet of beers to get it, but that's what being fabulous means. Human Cannonball (9.2%abv) picks up where Cannonball leaves off, more raucous and rumbustious, the sort of beer that kicks open your mouth, bum rushes your palate, and grafittis HAVE IT!! in fluorescent paint on your olfactory bulb. It's not big, it's not clever, and that's the point. There's room for grace and elegance, and there's room for stoopid fun, just as there's room for both Brian Eno and MC Hellshit & DJ Carhouse in my music collection.

And so when people started saying "noooo!" at the bar around 10pm, it was because the biggest, stoopidest beer of the evening had run out before they'd got a chance to try it. I was working up to it myself, and didn't get to try it on the night, stopping at Thornbridge Geminus (8.5%abv), a kick-ass concoction of hops, malt, rye and muscovado sugar. Happily, I'd tried it a few days earlier, and damn, anyone saying "noooo!" doesn't know the half of it.

Magic Rock. Hell yeah.

Is Saison the New Citra?

Lucky bastard Rob from Hopzine.com is in Rome, from where he posts this little video snippet. It's a great little snippet in lots of ways - on one hand, he's largeing it on holiday, and so he's already having a laugh at our expense. It's also great because he's responding with a video to something that he's read a few moments ago on Twitter - this conversation about saisons. We'll gloss over the fact that Baladin Nora isn't actually a saison - it's a spiced ale - the point is that Rob saw an opportunity and grabbed it with two hands, even though one was holding a brimming TeKu glass.

It's cool, it's now, and maybe this is the future of social media - people responding by video to things that they've seen a few moments earlier. This could be the birth of something big - rather than arguing in text, we could now do it with video, saving us the trouble of meeting up and getting drunk together. The misanthrope in me thinks that maybe this is the way forward - I recently had a request from Simon at Real Ale Guide for a 4-way Skype beer review. It didn't happen, but maybe a bit of video panel-drinking might be fun? I must give it a try - maybe it will be like going to the pub, or maybe it will be like sitting at home feeling slightly creeped out - only experience will tell.

Anyway, for me, the interesting question in that Twitter conversation is from Chris (@NorthernWrites on Twitter) - "Is saison the new citra?". It's a good question, coloured by Chris' unabashed dislike of what he sees as bandwagon-straddling me-too citra-infused pale golden ales. The short answer to this is, of course, no. But the long answer provides some insight into where the beer world may be headed in the next few years.

As International IPA Day draws close, what we are going to see is on August 4th is, I believe, a celebration of a style of beer that could do for beer what Australian wine did for wine in the late 80s and early 90s. IPA is a style that is easy to understand, easy to enjoy, and has the potential to draw more drinkers into the category. A citra-heavy IPA may not be the most sophisticated beer in the world, but damn, it's easy to enjoy, and I'm not sure how that can be a bad thing.

Contrast that open, easy-drinking appeal with the tart, tightly-wound, sometimes musty and dusty complexity of a saison, and it's clear that saisons are forever going to be marginalised. Saison is the riesling of the wine world - loved by those in the know and in the trade, but largely ignored by everyone else. Good riesling smells of diesel, wet stones and lime blossom. Good saison smells of hops sacks, old wooden spice racks and cellars.

Saison, like riesling, will always be a minority taste, but the future tastes of citra-laced IPA.

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NOW DRINKING: Captain Lawrence Imperial IPA

Me and the Mrs used to be fans of tattoos. We were really close to getting massive, full-sleeve ones done, and then, like a lot of people, we didn't get around to it. It wasn't that we chickened out, we just lost the momentum for getting in it done. In idle moments, I still fantasise about getting a huge tattoo done - a massive hop cone on my back, maybe, or even on my stomach so that it will gradually change shape as I age and succumb to middle-aged spread.

I only mention this because when I looked at the label to this beer - a flaming wooden firkin - my immediate thought was: "Damn, that would make an excellent tattoo". Not that I'll ever get it done, but it was a surprisingly powerful reaction.

Captain Lawrence Imperial IPA is a big beer, but surprisingly restrained. There a good, woody, piney, tropical-fruity hop character to the nose, and a faint hint of something that I struggle to grasp in the video - something pungently spicy, but earthy at the same time. On the palate, the 8%abv is hidden very well - there's a faint warmth on the gums and in the throat, and a telltale alcohol slickness to the swallow - but otherwise, this beer qualifies for the "ruinously drinkable" description. The pale malt on the palate offers a big, chewy sweetness in the mouth that is neatly counterbalanced as the bitterness kicks in after the swallow. It's a class act, and although it doesn't pack the absurd levels of dry-hop character that (for example) the new recipe Punk IPA does, this actually enhances the experience for me, giving it a smooth drinkability rather than a shrill, attention grabbing shriek.



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Now Drinking: Cigar City Jai Alai Humidor Series (Cedar) IPA

I've got an irrational hatred of wood-aged beers. Well, that's not quite true - my dislike is based on having tried dozens of wood-aged beers, and finding the majority of them to be an over-concentrated, spirit-influenced, hot, boozy mess, which I don't enjoy, so it's not entirely irrational. Let's start this post again, shall we?

It's my experience that wood-aged beers are over-influenced by the wood that they've spent time in. I like the soft, silky polish that you find in the Ola Dubh series, and of course Greene King's beers that incorporate their wood-aged Old 5X are usually a symphony of complexity. But what I really dislike is a 9% imperial stout put into a whisky cask and coming out as a 14% mix of beer and whisky. Your mileage may vary, but that's my experience and opinion.

So I'm not really sure what I was thinking when I bought this from the BrewDog shop - it's one of their guest beers, and I thought, well, why not. It has a good reputation, and sometimes you simply have to spend a bit of money and see what all the hype is about. The fact that the Cigar City Brewery's website is a touch hard to operate did nothing to inspire me, but hey, I wanted to try some new beer, and so I took the plunge.

And you know what? I'm glad I did. I can't vouch as to whether this bottle is representative of what it should be, but it's a surprisingly robust, almost English-style IPA (think Meantime IPA) crossed with a typical American IPA, and aged with cedar wood. I'd guess that it's aged over cubes or staves - it's definitely not a barrel-ageing treatment. But regardless of the technique, it's the end result that counts. Alongside the brown-sugar and marmalade aroma, and the sweetish initial attack, the spiciness of the cedar wood swooping in mid-palate adds a dimension that I'm not sure could be achieved any other way. It's a pungent, resinous spiciness that sits between the malt and hops, and adds a new dimension that throws both into relief. Crucially, by doing this, it actually makes you concentrate harder on what's happening on your palate.

A really interesting beer, a really interesting treatment, and a really interesting experience, and crucially, it's one I'd like to repeat. A lesson in abandoning your preconceptions.

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Now Drinking: Moylan's Hopsickle

Look, I'll be totally honest here, the food in this video is what Alfred Hitchcock would have referred to as "the MacGuffin". I happened to be cooking the food that features in the video (yes, I know it seems like a eat merguez more often than is healthy, but I don't), and I happened to have a bottle of Hopsickle. And happily, they happened to be great partners (although the courgette fritters were a bit soggy - too much parmesan, I think).

I'm not really sure what to make of this beer. As you'll see in the video, the first sip goes down OK, and then about 5 seconds later, KABOOM!, a massive wave of bitterness comes out of nowhere and makes me go 'whoah!'. That's what this beer is like - it's one long 'whoah'. It's a 'w w w h h h o o o a a a h h h' of a beer. It's the antithesis of balance and elegance, it's a boot to the olfactory bulb and a punch to the fungiform papillae. In fact now I think about it, Hopsickle has all the grace of a couple of pool balls in a sock, as demonstrated by the young Ray Winstone in "Scum". You can see that scene here, but I warn you, there's an awful lot of violence and bad language in it.

I'm being a bit harsh there. Moylan's Hopsickle is a hell of a lot of fun to drink, but each mouthful stops just short of a physical assault. There is an initially sweet malty hit, then the chocolate/coffee notes hit from the malt (maybe crystal malt, but it tastes much darker). Then you get a burnt Seville orange character, then a wave of bitterness that is almost sensation rather than flavour. It's one of the hoppiest beers I've ever drunk - and that's not meant to sound like bragging, it's just a statement of fact. It's only just all in balance, but then I guess it only just needs to be.

Stand down Ray Winstone - Moylan's Hopsickle is the daddy now.

Beer and Curry (well, Halcyon and Kedgeree)

Because I'm such a frightful ponce, I like to try out food and beer combinations. I like to think that sometimes, you can get something that's greater than the sum of its parts - the beer and the food enhance each other, and you notice things in each that may have slipped by unnoticed. And of course, because I'm such a frightful ponce, I couldn't possibly do something as simple as compare a couple of IPAs over a chicken jalfrezi. No, tonight it's Thornbridge Halcyon (7.7%abv) and kedgeree.

I won't write a great deal about the beer, as I sort of cover everything I want to say about it in the video. But I will say that after a long chat on the phone with Kelly Ryan, one of the brewers who helped create Halcyon, it's clear that they are both a brewery who like to push the envelope a bit, and are quite open about what happens when they try to do that. Kelly didn't pretend to be delighted about having a lot of very loose sediment in the bottle, but neither did he think it was the end of the world. In fact, as I show in the video, there's nothing wrong with the sediment, and I'm almost sure it was more strongly-flavoured than the brighter glass of beer I drank afterwards. Who knows - maybe some of those flavour compounds are lipophillic and bound to the lipids in the yeast cells. Yes, I know I'm good, but I didn't figure that one out myself - egg-headed, Segal-bodied Stuart Howe of Sharps planted the seeds of it here.



The Halcyon wasn't a perfect match for the food - I think that maybe a hopfen-weisse would be a better match - but it did the job pretty well, acting as an admirably spicy, citrussy cut against the spice and smoke of the kedgeree. Irritatingly, a chicken jalfrezi with a load of mango chutney would have been near perfect with Thornbridge Halcyon


Kedgeree for two.

Cook a couple of handfuls of rice (I like basmati and wild mixed). Towards the end of cooking, add a couple of handfuls of peas. You can also steam the fish over this - 300g of undyed smoked haddock will do it. And you can either boil a couple of eggs in here also, or poach a couple of eggs to go on the dish at the end.

Fry two finely sliced onions with half a finely diced green chilli, until the onions are golden. Add ground cumin and ground black pepper to taste (about half a teaspoon of each). Add the rice, peas, flaked fish, the chopped boiled egg (or top with a poached egg), and a handful of chopped coriander. Stir, season, serve.

Bitter End Brewing Co.

Quite some time ago now, those nice folk at Bitter End Brewing Co. sent me a mixed case of bottled beers, and a glass from which to drink them. The glass is still in the cellar (I need to get clumsy in the glass cupboard to make some room for it), but the majority of the beers have now passed through the evaluation process.

Before they sent me the beers, they messaged me explaining that they didn't want to change the world, they just wanted to brew good honest beer, and I have to admire that modest ambition. It's somewhat at odds with their claim to produce innovative, progressive and exciting beers, but that's the nice thing about beer - you can try it and make up your own mind. There's more than enough innovation, progression and excitement in beer at the moment, and although it makes me sound old, it can just be bloody tiring and annoying. One thing that a few years working in restaurant kitchens taught me was that it's better to achieve consistency, than to over-reach and be erratic with occasional flashes of brilliance. That sounds like I'm already damning them with faint praise, but consistency is a much overlooked attribute.

Lakeland Bitter (3.8%abv) is a good ordinary bitter, with some soft toffee malt character working well alongside a brightly bitter hops. Lakeland Amber (4.2%abv) is a good example of the maxim that you should always try two servings of a beer before passing judgement - the first bottle seemed slightly flat and phenolic, although the other two are softly nutty, rounded, with hops serving only to add structure rather than to dominate. Lakeland IPA (5%abv) is a pale golden ale, with some floral character on the nose, a citrussy palate, and a snappy finish - "solid but unexciting" say my notes, and I know better than to argue with my notes. The best of the bunch, to my surprise, the Lakeland Honey (5%abv). Starting out with a softly floral aroma, becoming sweet mid-palate, and then finishing pleasantly dry and spicy, the sweet-dry double whammy is interesting and enjoyable, with the honey contributing significantly to the character, but never being overpowering or cloying.

So there we have it - good, solid beers, brewed with an eye to the modern style, and on this showing, not a duffer among them. Will they set the world alight? Unlikely. Will they become a cult, sought out by beer geeks everywhere? Unliklier still. Are they the sort of beers that you'd be delighted to drink after a long day on the fells? Absolutely.

Fuller's IPA and Bengal Lancer: The Facts

This is just a follow-up to the previous post, after a quick phone conversation with John Keeling, Fuller's head brewer, where he very kindly explained the genesis of the Fuller's Bengal Lancer and how it relates to Fuller's IPA.

I won't keep you in suspense any longer – they are different beers. I was going to say “totally different”, but they're not TOTALLY different – they are both IPAs brewed by Fuller's, around the same strength, with similar grain bills, so you'd expect them to share some similarities. But they are from different eras, and created by different brewers.

Fuller's IPA is a beer that dates from Reg Drury's tenure as head brewer. It was a fairly traditional take on IPA*, being produced at 4.8%abv on cask, and also a version that was brewed specifically for bottling. This brew used only one hop, Goldings. It was produced on and off for many years, as a special and for the export market. It wasn't a tremendously successful beer, but it added variety to the range.

Bengal Lancer is the result of a few factors, but mainly a result of John Keeling and Derek Prentice's tendency to tinker, and brew beer that they themselves would like to drink. Bengal Lancer for cask is brewed with Goldings and Fuggles in the copper, and then dry-hopped with Goldings and Target in the fermentation vessel. An identical version is brewed for bottle, but slightly stronger, and it is chill-filtered and pasteurised before being bottle-conditioned [UPDATE 6TH APRIL 2010: John Keeling just got in touch and explained that Bengal Lancer is NOT pasteurised, but the original IPA was].

A UK supermarket wanted an own label IPA, and they were shown a prototype of Bengal Lancer. They liked it, and asked Fuller's to jump through all the hoops required to gain a British Retail Standard Certificate. For what we shall euphemistically refer to as “various reasons”, but mainly relating to time and money, Fuller's decided that they didn't want to arse about completing this box-ticking exercise, and so the supermarket's own-label IPA didn't make it to their shelves.

Around the same time, the System Bolaget held one of their regular competitions to list a new beer. Unlabelled samples are submitted to System Bolaget for evaluation, and Bengal Lancer was the beer that was chosen by them. That's quite a big contract (about 600 brewer's barrels a year, or 172,800 pints), and so Bengal Lancer went into production. If you're brewing a beer, then I guess it makes sense to try it in as many markets as possible, so Bengal Lancer was launched in the UK, to tremendous success – so far it's selling about twice as much as anyone expected it to.

And that's the story, straight from the horses mouth (except for the phrase “arse about” with relation to the British Retail Standard Certificate. In a fit of writerly creativity, I inferred that from the tone of the conversation).

* if you've read Pete Brown's “Hops and Glory”, or read anything by Martin Cornell or Ron Pattinson, you'll know what a lot of nonsense this statement is. But I'm not getting into that here. I maybe should have said “a fairly conservative take on IPA”.

Now Drinking: Fuller's Bengal Lancer

At the start of February, I spent an action-packed couple of days in London. In the space of 24 hours, I attended a committee meeting for the British Guild of Beer Writers, went to the Drinks Retailing Awards at The Dorchester, slept, met friends for breakfast, and visited Fuller's of Chiswick. The Fuller's visit was great fun, and I'm going to write in more detail about it over the next few days. But I'm going to start by talking about what I didn't get to do at Fuller's.

The tour and tasting that John Keeling and Derek Prentice laid on was so enjoyable that time flew by unnoticed, and by the time we got to the end of it, I had to literally run to the tube to make my train back to Leeds. So what I didn't have time to do was (a) visit the Fuller's shop to buy Vintage Ale for my birthday (I ended up getting it couriered to Leeds), and (b) stop in at the Mawson Arms for a pint of the newly released Bengal Lancer IPA. However, being a decent bunch, Fuller's forwarded a couple of bottles to me.

The beer is a copper-gold colour, and pin-bright in the manner that Fuller's beers tend to be, despite being bottle conditioned. The aroma is classic Fuller's - so classic that having visited the brewery, I can say that it smells like a cross between their brewhouse and hop store. If you haven't visited Fuller's, that's not very descriptive, so I'll try a bit harder. Bengal Lancer smells of spicy whole leaf hops (although they use pellets), toffee, ginger cake and ozone. On the tongue, there's an initial burst of medium-bodied malty toffee, which is slowly reeled in by a dry, spicy bitterness, finishing with bitter flourish and a faint puff of geraniums.

I like this beer a lot - it's got a lot of understated hop character which might fool people into thinking that it's lacking in hops, but when you actually pay attention to what is going on, there's a huge wallop of spicy dryness in the finish. It's a worthy addition to Fuller's roster, rooted in history, but produced with an eye for the quality and consistency that are Fuller's bywords. It's got that classic Fuller's character that reminds me of gingerbread and, most importantly, I've got another bottle of it that I'm going to eat with this burger and onion rings that has materialised miraculously next to me.

The Session: Cask vs Keg: American IPA

One of the things that I love about the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF) is the stunning array of foreign beers on offer there, on the Bieres Sans Frontieres bar. I know it sounds wilfully perverse to go to the biggest cask ale festival in the world in order to drink foreign beer, but I do.

One the things that makes this bar a highlight is that they usually have a huge array of American IPAs (and all the style variants thereof). But this being a CAMRA festival, they ask for these beers to be cask-conditioned specially for the festival. I think it's safe to say that the majority of American IPAs (and American beer in general) is not often dispensed in this format.

So, it's the best cask ale festival in the world, and it's great that these beers are on offer. I'm even a fan of serving cask ale by gravity, straight from the cask tap into a glass. But still, it feels like there's a little something missing. That something is the tart prickle of CO2.

I think that the majority of American IPAs are better drunk as they were intended to be served - with a little zizz of CO2, and on the cold side of cool. This isn't a moan about quality of cellarmanship at the GBBF (or anywhere else), or a moan about CAMRA's insistence that beers shouldn't be served under CO2 pressure. Those are different arguments, and ones that I have a lot of respect for. But what I am saying is that all too often, the big malty backbones and showy hop characters of these beers are lost through lack of carbonation. There is just too much flavour in them to be showcased with the sort of gentle carbonation that cask conditioning gives. It needs the slightly coarser aeration of forced CO2.

So to be clear: CAMRA run the best cask ale festival in the world, and I'm grateful to go there and drink the beers on offer, cask-conditioned or bottled. But these big beers need a little spritz to lift them, and I'm not talking about a sparkler. Now that really IS a different argument.

POSTSCRIPT: yes, I know The Session is a Friday thing, but as you can see, I was drinking beer and making enchiladas


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Now Drinking: Gadd's India Pale Ale

Oh. My. God. I've just had one of those peak beer experiences that you read about and think "Oh piss off, that never happened". I'm doubly delighted that it's happened with a Gadd's beer, as a few days ago, I was a bit less than complimentary about one of Eddie's beers - hey, it's not fun, but you have to call it as you see it.

Anyway, tonight I made enchiladas. It's very easy, and if anyone is interested, I'll give you the recipe. It's veggie too - we try to eat veggie a few times a week. As I served the food up, I thought "Damn, I wish I had a nice hoppy beer to go with this". I think spicy food works really well with hoppy beer, so I went and had a rummage, and found a lone bottle of Gadd's India Pale Ale lurking in a case of Innis & Gunn beers (we'll be having them with a tarte tatin in a few days).

With the food already on the plate, I just wanted to pop the cap, pour and eat. As I took the cap off, there was a gush of foam, and a momentary thought of "Christ, these Gadd's beers are turning out to be a nightmare". Then I notices there was something in the foam at the bottle mouth. With a brief thought of "Christ, these Gadd's beers are turning out to be thoroughly pestilent", and then a moment of realisation - "Christ, that's a whole hop!"

I've no idea what variety of hop it is - Eddie, if you're reading, maybe you can tell us. But it added a fantastic spicy, earthy edge to a beer that I've had before and thoroughly enjoyed. It was an IPA++. And it was exactly the beer that I wanted to drink, at exactly the right time. And it was such a fantastic bonus to know that, at the point of production, someone had taken the time to push a whole hop cone into a bottle, with the simple thought in their mind that it would bring a greater amount of pleasure to the drinker.

And it did. So thank you.

Roosters American IPA Meets the Twissup

How great a brewery are Rooster's? Let me count the ways. Actually, let's not, let's just mention a few of them. I don't know why I was surprised to see them turning up time and again in all my favourite beer books - you know, the biggies by Michael Jackson, Garrett Oliver and, latterly, Ben McFarland. Maybe it's because they're local to me, and have a (relatively) modest output, I think of them as small. Relatively small they may be, but you don't get feted in classic beer books and win gold medals at the World Beer Cup without being on top of your game.

This beer is a great example of what Rooster's do. Head brewer Sean Franklin has a wonderful philosophy, saying that pale malt in a beer is like a blank canvas upon which hop character can be projected. Or, in a more prosaic mode, he's described his beers as being just one single flower standing alone on a lawn - your attention is drawn to a singularity, rather than overwhelmed by lots of different things going on.

They have a lot of projects going on at present, some of which I get the impression that they would rather I didn't talk about too much, so let's just talk about the beer in the video. It's a beautiful pale golden ale, combining all the attributes of this youngest of English ale styles with an American approach to hopping. The result is unmistakably English, and unmistakably Rooster's - soft, rounded, balanced, but with a pungent hop character that never overwhelms the aroma or palate.

So it is with their American IPA, which brewer Sam describes as 'just something Sean and I did so we could have something nice to drink'. You flash git - what about the rest of us? Bursting with tropical fruit and floral aromas, there's a big spike of bitterness that quickly subsides, leaving the fruit and flowers to blossom on the palate, before a little bitterness creeps back in at the finish, making it a particularly moreish beer.

We don't normally have draught beer at the shop. We used to sell a few, but we couldn't get the throughput to make it work preoperly, and anyway, cask ale is what pubs are for. But when the rolling pub crawl that became known as "the twissup" (a cross between a tweet-up and piss-up) made it to Leeds following a beerathon in Sheffield, I wanted to make sure that there was some proper refreshment for them at the shop. Thanks to Rooster's generosity, the Twissup arrived looking rougher than a badgers tongue, and left looking a tad more sprightly (the beer was donated for this purpose).

A Year of Beer 2010 #2 - Crown Brewery India Pale Ale

IPA, IPA, IPA. Bloody IPA. What does it mean? As Stuart Howe, brewer at Sharp's points out: "IPA, the most meaningless set of initials in brewing." And yet they are everywhere. I'm drinking one right now - Port Brewing 3rd Anniversary Ale, kindly gifted to me by Phil at beermerchants.com. It's a classic, a splendidly concentrated West Coast IPA, almost too concentrated, but still very drinkable despite the 10%abv, so you know who to blame if this post becomes as long and incoherent as this first paragraph might suggest it will.

Bloody IPA. I wussed out of giving a sensible definition in the book what I wrote, preferring instead to rechristen IPA as International Pale Ale. Sure, I explain what "real" IPA is, but really, the initials have become so debased as to be more-or-less meaningless. Is it going to be a 3.5%abv session beer, or a 10%abv hop monster that will knock you on your arse after one large bottle? I don't think there's any style of beer that has a greater range of flavours within it.

You'll know by now the story of IPA - a strong, hoppy beer that made the journey from England to India, via the circuitous trade routes that took it west across the Atlantic, east round the Cape, and up to India. In a moment of idle curiosity, Pete Brown wondered out loud what a beer might be like that made the journey, and then spent the best part of a year cursing himself for this idle pub thought. He did it - he brewed as authentic an IPA as he could, then took it on the authentic trade route for IPA.

I won't telegraph the punchlines in the book (for they are legion), but it's a great read. There's a lot of information about IPA in there, as well as travel writing, psychology, and the most perfect description ever of falling into a canal. But what is even more enjoyable (and I'm sure he's had a blast doing it) are the many IPAs that Pete has had a hand in over the last year or so.

I was surprised that I've only tried one of them, Crown Brewery India Pale Ale. But this IPA is so good that I almost don't care about missing the others. There's a lot of things going on here, and I don't just mean the flavours. Stuart is a great brewer, and has spared no expense in making this brew chock full o' hops - it's a total hop monster, but still brilliantly balanced. The bright, pithy, olfactory assault of grapefruit, lime, orange pith and backnote of toffee malt is mouthwatering. It's just as good on the palate, with a bonus that, being bottled from cask, the carbonation on this is bang on. Not only does it taste like real ale in a bottle, but it has the same texture and mouthfeel too. It's clean, bright and forceful, but delicate and elegant at the same time. I'd be lying if I called "the English Pliny", but it is really, really good.

It's also worth noting that Stuart has warm-conditioned this beer, partly to try and replicate the conditions that it might have experienced on the long journey to Calcutta, and also partly from a "let's just do it" experimental attitude. I can't tell you what the beer was like before conditioning - a total lupulin beast, I would guess - but what has come out at the end is a great beer. There is one cask left of this brew, and Stuart has said he will bottle it.

OK, there you have it. A beer, a book, and a (slightly too long) story about them both. Neither are currently available, the IPA being still in cask, and the book being out of print until its paperback release in June. If you live in Leeds, and come to Beer-Ritz, we should soon be able to sell you the last release of this batch of IPA, and (if you promise to return it) lend you a hardback first edition of Pete's book. Don't say that we don't try to win your custom.