EBBC2013 - Live Beer Blogging

Badger Roaming Roy Dog 7.5% - "dark porter style ale" according to the brewery, complex malt, Galaxy and Bramling Cross. Big mouthfeel, warming, very characteristic Badger style, melony ester, bitter finish. Very fruity, not really a porter-style beer, a bit sweet and light bodied, perhaps too much fruit and not enough fruit [this should read "too much fruit and not enough chocolate"]. Bottled straight from the fermenter and recommended from keeping. It's OK, very Badger, good to see them pushing the envelope a bit

Traquair Jacobite Ale 8% - big on the heritage story, and rightly so - brewing since 1965, fermenting in unlined oak tuns, output of 1000hl per year (tiny). Like dark black tea in appearance, quite bright for an unfiltered beer.Sweet, big burst of spices on the palate, silky smooth, superb balance and length. Epic, needs to be rediscovered

Innis & Gunn Oloroso Cask 7.4% - be still my pounding heart, a beer aged in a sherry cask should be right up my calle. Sweet oak dominates the nose, and the palate. Perhaps thrown into the shade a little bit by the previous beer, this seems a little one-dimensional. Perceptive questions about provenance and process from my compatriot bloggers. The beer is "dry-oaked" rather than dry hopped. Smooth, easy to drink, a little tannic - not really my thing.

Toccalmatto Surfing Hop Double IPA 8.5% - wanted to create something new, with a bigger malt profile - Blegian malt profile, special B, and other speciality malts. Big dry hopping charge, really American technique. Copper brown, but really massive hop character - citrussy and slightly floral, big and sweet mid-palate, drying out nicely at the end. Hilarious disconnect between brown appearance and huge punchy hop character. Really a PHWOAR beer - appeals to the monkey part of my brain.

Inveralmond  Blackfriar 7% - described by head brewer Ken as a Scotch ale. Made with a double mash and "boil the bejaysus out of it", getting caramelisation through Maillard reactions (nice to hear this term, you know your your shit Ken). Pitch yeast at 20c, rises to 26c, producing lots of of fruity esters. Really sweet but not cloying on the palate, superbly enjoyable.

Harviestoun Ola Dubh 30th Anniversary Ale 11% - from a 40yr old first-fill sherry cask, and click on my face if yu can't tell the sherry character bursting out of the glass. Thick, gloopy, oozing onto my palate like Eartha Kitt shimmying out of an opium den. Chocolate, spice, sherry, and slight hint of funkiness. I cannot conceive of getting a better beer today.

Shepherd Neame Brilliant Ale 5.6% - part of a heritage range of beers trawled from the brewer's logs, the recipe for Brilliant Ale is based on an old recipe, augmented by an addition of new hops. Brilliant bright gold, classic Sheps character (the use of East Kent Goldings hops probably makes that) with a hint of fruitiness. Bears up amazingly well after the sexy shimmy of Ola Dubh, feels brilliantly clean and bright, refreshing. A hit!

WEST Brewery St Mungo 4.9% - "a lager somehwere in between a pils and a helles" say Ruth from WEST. Brilliant gold colour, slightly grainy nose, nice carbonation on the palate. Easy-drinking, slightly sweet on the palate, some dryness building in the finish. Nor very beer needs to be a symphony, but this is a decent opening movement.

Ilkley Brewery The Mayan 6.5% - "Ilkley is a spa town, so we have fantastic water" explains Luke. The Mayan is part of the Origins range, part of the specials range where they explore different styles of beer around the world. Chocolate chilli stout, majoring perhaps a bit too much on the chocolate flavour, with cocoa nibs and powder in the mash. Luke claims to have enjoyed a second pint of this - it's a good beer, but not one to session

On Badgers, Wild Swans, Crooked Lines and Dishwater

Uinta Detour Double IPA is part of the 'Crooked Line' series of beers which, setting aside whether they're any good or not, have some of the coolest labels ever to appear on a beer bottle (pic from Ratebeer.com). Want to know what the beer is like? This is a quick round-up of some of the beers I drank over this weekend, notable for no other reason than it was my birthday, and a year ago I did this.

Badger very kindly sent me a case of the reformulated Hopping Hare (4.4%abv), which like all Badger beers, is a perfectly decent example of what an English beer should be. Mercifully free of flavour additives, its soft, straw-like flavours were a surreally spring-like accompaniment to watching snow hammer down for six hours on my actual birthday.

Thornbridge sent me a three-pack of beer – Wild Swan, Italia and Bracia. The Italia was excellent – grab some of this limited beer while you can. An unfiltered pilsner stuffed with herbal and citrus notes, and a pleasant slightly savoury edge that beer maven Jeff Pickthall once memorably described as 'celery salt'. The Wild Swan suffered a little from being bottled – at 3.5%abv, not surprising, but having tasted it from cask, I think the exotic flavours (lime leaf and lychee) lose quite a lot of definition.

Happily, it was still much better than the piss-water that was being sold from a pump marked 'Springhead' at the Cross Keys in Leeds on Saturday night – the name of the beer escapes me (I was having a night off, but checking their website, it may be their beer 'Springhead', described on their website as “a clean-tasting, easy drinking amber coloured bitter with a dry, hoppy finish “). It was in perfectly good condition, but having had only fleeting association with ingredients usually used to make beer, tasted (according to one of my friends) “like dishwater that has been shown some twigs”. Further alarm bells ring when you note that the website informs you that “It was winner of the Best Bitter, Northern Beer Festival 1995” - that was 16 years ago guys! Come on! In that time, Sharp's brewery has grown from being a hobby in a garage to producing the fastest-growing real ale brand on the planet, and been purchased by Molson Coors! This surprising failure from what I've come to view as an otherwise reliable brewery drove us to drink Sierra Nevada Pale from keg for the rest of the night, the CO2 from which I think might blame for the hideous bout of indigestion that woke me in the night.

Sunday brought with it another bottle of Hopping Hare, still perfectly decent, and to my palate slightly drier than it was last year. I mean this in a nice way, but it's the sort of beer that doesn't jump up and down and demand your full attention – you can drink it while you do something else, like slow cook a frying pan full of onions and trim a steak while you listen to BBC6 Music. A bottle of Uinta Detour Double IPA (9.5%abv) rounded off the night nicely, and came pretty close to delivering the lysergic lupulin lightshow that I was hoping for. And it made a great counterpoint for a steak and onion sandwich, which is a noble and worthy end to any beer's life. To paraphrase Wilfred Owen: Dulce et decorum est pro steak sandwich mori.

Two From The Back Of The Shelf

One of the nice things about having a cellar - a proper damp, cool underground room in the bottom of the house - is that it keeps beer close to serving temperature most of the time. It's like a big cool room, about 10°C, and so I can just wander down and find something ready to drink most of the time. And the nice thing about working in the trade, and being sent beer, is that there's usually quite a bit of beer down there. Inevitably, beer tends to stack up on the shelves in good times, and in lean times the shelves get emptied. So it is tonight, when having exposed the bottles at the back, I find a couple of forgotten bottles: Badger Cricket (aka Lemony Cricket, 4.4%abv) and Fallen Angel Hopped Up Cider (4.8%abv).

I've had Badger Cricket on cask while visiting the family down South. It's an ordinary brown beer (and I mean that in a good way) with pretensions to being a spring/summer ale by virtue of having lemongrass added to it. I have to say that on cask it suffers a bit from a surfeit of lemongrass, like the other lemongrass beer I've recently tried, Hopback Taiphoon. Happily, this beer appears to have suffered a bit in the bottling process - all of the perfumed nonsense is thankfully knocked out of the beer by rough handling on the bottling line, and what emerges from the bottle is a brown beer with a faint hint of lemon balm in the background. It's really good actually, and makes me wish I had another bottle. Sadly, my signature move of reviewing the last bottle in a free case deprives me of that option.

I have to say that I had zero hopes for Hopped Up Cyder, "A strong cider brewed from pure apple juice but with the addition of malt and a large dose of Sussex hops to give a unique fresh flavour not found anywhere else". As if that doesn't sound bad enough, the labels on their beers are the most unreconstructedly offensive crap I've seen in a long time. It really goes beyond laddish, postmodern or even post-ironic. They're just crap. Offensive crap.

So it pains me to say that Hopped Up Cyder actually isn't bad. I'd suggest attempting to create something that is halfway between a beer and a cider is doomed to failure. The tart dryness of the cider is suggestive of beer that has gone bad. The earthy bitterness in the aftertaste hints at an overly tannic finish. But neither of these dominate, and the end result is clearly a cider with a bit of of a wild yeasty bite to the finish, although the hop note in the finish does send one for something of a loop.

The Badger Technique: Premium Canned Ale

I'm writing an article (real writing! for real money!) about premium bottled ales (PBAs), which as we all know is the category that will save the beer market from ruin (tongue only slightly in cheek). The market for PBAs has bucked the trend of decline, and has been in steady growth, by value and volume, for the last several years (roughly 6-8% per annum). I went to visit Badger (aka Hall & Woodhouse) last month, and they are one of the breweries who have seized upon this statistic and run with it. I've mentioned elsewhere the tenfold increase in the proportion of their output that is bottled - in fact, checking the figures, they've moved from bottling 5% of their output to around 60% of their output. I find that quite staggering, and in fact I made myself look like a simpleton by insisting we go over that point three times, just to make sure I was interpreting the data correctly.

Not content with this, Badger are also trying to create a new category, that of premium canned ale. It's a theme that has been touched on here, by young Dredge and an awful lot of respondents, but I'm not sure that the concept of British premium canned ale is one that has been floated in the same way as American craft beers. Badger are perfectly serious about this - Tanglefoot in a can is their first effort, soon to be followed by other beers in their portfolio - First Gold seems to be the next likely candidate for the can treatment.

I'm not sure what to make of it. In much the same way as some people don't really drink bottled beer, I don't really go for cans. The last beer I drank out of a can was Bass, and it was four months past its 'best before' date - I was curious to see what had happened to it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, nothing had - it tasted exactly as I remembered Bass to taste. If it can keep average beer tasting perfectly average well past its expiry date, maybe Badger will make a success of creating a premium canned ale category.

Cask Ale Week: The Badger Technique.

Yes, its the arse end of Cask Ale Week, and I've managed the princely amount of two and a half pints of cask ale. It's a bloody poor show on my part, although I will say that it's two and a half pints more than I drank in the preceeding few months. In my defence, all the draught beer I've drunk this week has been cask. As you can tell, for one reason or another, I don't get to the pub as much as I'd like.

But you don't have to go to the pub to drink cask ale. If you're very lucky, you can go to a brewery and do it. Last month, I was the guest of Hall & Woodhouse on a brewery day - a chinwag with the on- and off-trade brands managers, lunch, and then a brewery tour with head brewer Toby Heasman.

During the chinwag (which I'm using as a polite euphemism for a Powerpoint presentation, although I did enjoy it immensely - seriously), it emerged that Badger (which is used interchangeably for Hall & Woodhouse) has seen phenomenal growth in its bottled beers. Their bottled output has trebled in the last 5 years, and in the last 15 years they've seen a tenfold increase in the percentage output of their beer being bottled. Their bottled output is in growth by volume and by value, and they are even trying to create a new small-pack category: premium canned ale. But wait, this is Cask Ale Week, so let's move to their cask output before coming back to their bottled beers later in the week.

Badger ales are only currently available within their own estate of pubs, of which they have 260, all south of the M4 motorway (for overseas readers, that's an east-west line on the same latitude as London). They are probably best known for their strong golden ale Tanglefoot (4.9%abv), which during my teenage years was my nemesis on more than one occasion. I once drank a gallon of it, with predictably dire consequences on my sobriety. But such is Tanglefoot's soft, fruity drinkability that I can still drink it happily today. It's medium gold in colour, with a softly fruity aroma (pear, peaches and ripe melon, to my nose) a gently spicy finish. It's a bit of a classic and, in my opinion, does pretty well in the bottle. On cask, it is, as it's tagline proclaims, deceptively drinkable.

Badger's other permanent beery-beer (as opposed to flavoured beer, which, again, we'll come back to later this week) is First Gold (4%abv). It's a single hop beer, using the eponymous First Gold for both aroma and bittering. It's almost an ordinary brown bitter, having hints of toffee and even chocolate on the palate, but its robustly spicy hop character gives it a little lift. It punches well beyond its modest weight, and I liked it a lot - in some ways, it's more grown-up than Tanglefoot, with less sweetness and more chewy malt and hop character.

The last cask beer available was Hopping Hare (4.5%abv), their current spring seasonal, a pale golden beer that has a bright, sweet citrus hop character. It's clean and bright, gently zingy in the mouth, with some familiar fermentation-derived (as opposed to added) fruit notes - it has some peach and melon character in common with Tanglefoot, although the hop character is much brighter and vibrant. As with First Gold, I liked it a lot, and the bottled form of Hopping Hare also passed the crucial wife test - tasty enough to be worth drinking, but not so tasty as to be off-putting. That sounds like an insult rather than a compliment, but it isn't. Maybe that's the key to drinkability?

But I digress. That's a round-up of Badger's cask offering, as sampled at the brewery. Next week, we'll talk about their bottles. For Cask Ale Week 2010, this is Zak Avery, signing off.

On Pub Quizzes and Hop Cannons: A Birthday Ramble

It's my birthday. I'm 40. I'm having a beer and food dinner with friends later, as mentioned here, and as you may guess, I'm going to write about in excrutiating detail. But for now, a ramble of things that have happened lately.

First up, there's an effort being made to stage the world's biggest pub quiz. I haven't seen any other bloggers mention it (apologies if you have, I can't read everything), so why not have a look at their website, or follow them on Teitter. Go on, it's for charity.

Secondly, at the start of the year I wrote a spoof piece about the worst beer in the world. In it, I mention that the brewery resorted to shooting hops from a cannon. What a ludicrous thought - who in their right mind would do such a thing? Well, at the Dogfish Head dinner the other evening, I was talking to Andreas from Vertical Drinks (the importers), and he mentioned that the 90 Minute IPA actually does have hops shot into it from a gas-activated cannon. You can see the video about it here.

Finally, thanks to everyone for their best wishes, via Twitter, email, text and old-fashioned but much-prized cards - I'm touched. With astounding timing, as I sat typing this, a courier arrived at the door with a gift case of beer from Hall & Woodhouse, or Badger as they are more commonly known. Thanks very much to Badger for their generosity. I'm off to see them in a few weeks, and you can expect a write up on that, and their beers, in the fullness of time. Cheers!

Now Drinking: Badger Pickled Partidge

I'll kick off by declaring that I have a soft spot for Badger beers. Tanglefoot on cask was a beer that I drank quite a bit of in my youth. I can't claim that it was the first cask ale I ever drank, but by volume, it was easily the beer that I drank most of as I learned about beer

Pickled Partridge is a beer I should have blogged on quite a while ago. Badger were good enough to send me a case of this beer (a metric eight-pack rather than an imperial dozen, but that's the way of the world), and after drinking a bottle, I was favourably imoressed. In fact, I was so impressed that I drank the whole case of beer. Not in one sitting, you understand, but I repeatedly thought "ooh, I fancy a beer" and after scanning the cellar (and as you might expect, I have quite a bit of beer in the cellar), I'd grab a Pickled Partridge.

So rather embarassingly, I had to 'fess up to them that I'd drunk the whole case, all the time with the intention of blogging on it, but sadly, went back for more once too often. I promised that if they could send me another bottle, I'd blog on it. I actually went to a couple of supermarkets to see if I could buy it, but as it's one of their seasonal beers, it was all gone.

That's the thing about this beer - it's really drinkable, but has plenty of character. Don't get me wrong, this beer lies firmly in the Ordinary Brown Beer camp, but towards the upper echelons of that category. There's plenty of fruit on the nose (some dried fruit maltiness coupled with a slightly brighter red fruit character) alongside a noticeably hoppy note. It's medium-bodied, dry with a fairly bright hop character, which is nice to find in a slightly darker beer. I'm sure I don't have to comment on how moreish or drinkable the beer is - I've already mentioned that I reached the end of the case before putting pen to paper (or finger to keyboard, as it is these days).

I'm off to visit Badger (or Hall & Woodhouse, as they're more correctly known) mid-March, and am really looking forward to it. You can expect a few reports back from the visit. One question I'm looking forward to asking is which mentalist came up with the idea of flavouring Poacher's Choice with damson and liquorice. I quite like it, but I imagine that it's the sort of thing that might put legions of casual drinkers off Badger's beers for good.