International Beer-Geekery

I had a very nice evening out last night. I went for a beer with Rick Kempen of Bier & Co, who was in town for the night. He very kindly brought me the bottles shown in the photo, and I paid him back with bottle of Fuller's Gale's Prize Old Ale 2007. As we swapped bottles in the pub, his colleague Gaius Voûte commented that we looked like a pair of beer geeks. We were pleased, but I don't think he meant it as a compliment.

There's something nice about making a gift of beer from home, whether that's me taking some proper Yorkshire beer down to the family in Wiltshire, or swapping beers in person with a foreign visitor. It reminds of the time in the late 80s that I used to visit friends in New York - I'd always take some English beer with me as a gift, although the 4 pint carry-out keg of Tanglefoot didn't travel too well. They let me take it on as hand luggage. No, honestly, they did - it was acceptable in the 80s.

Taking it a stage further, there's always the trading forums on Ratebeer and Beer Advocate if you really need to swap something to get something (you need to be logged in to view them). I've never done that, and would be interested to hear if anyone has any stories of success or failure either way - not for any journalistic (bloggeristic?) reason, but I'm just curious. Plus a Facebook buddy who lives near to Russian River has suggested we trade bottles (hi Will, if you're reading this). Obviously the cost of postage doesn't make financial sense, but I like the idea that beer geeks on different continents will happily send each other rarities at their own respective expense.

It could be like the Cameron-Obama beer summit, only with good beer.

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The Physical Impossibility of Drunkenness In The Mind of Someone at a Beer Festival*

The thing about beer festivals generally, and the GBBF by extrapolation, is that there is only so much beer that you can drink. I don't mean that there is a limit on the number of beers you can taste, but ultimately, there is a finite number of units of alcohol you can take on board before you think "I'm hot, tired, and want to go home". In short, before you get too drunk for it to be fun any more.

This was admirably demonstrated to me very early on - my first beer, in fact. Hopshackle Hop and Spicy (4.5%abv) was the only beer from them that was on cask. Fulsome praise from the Reluctant Scooper made me think that anything by them would be fun. Sadly, Hop and Spicy was a dark brown ginger beer - a bit thick, muddy, and definitely not what I wanted as my first GBBF beer. I had a sip, and realising that this was taking up valuable units that might otherwise be expended on things that were more in my target drinking zone, asked the doughty volunteer barstaff to dispose of it.

Fyne Jarl (4%abv) proved to be exactly what I was after. My notebook says "Brilliant gold, lively, with persistent lacing. Softly spicy Saaz-like lemony aroma, soft on palate, with persistent pithy bitterness in the finish. Great" Wonderful beer, in great condition. Inveralmond Ossian (4.1%abv) was of a similar style, but "caramel, honey and vanilla on the nose. More honey in the swallow. Finishes with snappy biscuity malt. Nice". At this point, I lost patience with the layout of the British bars - breweries are listed alphabetically according to county of location, with no map of the bars in the festival programme [edit - I'm totally wrong about this - see Ed's comment below] - and hit Bieres Sans Frontieres.

Toccalmatto Zona Cesarini IPA (6.6%abv) will get a blog post all of its own in the next few days. Mindful of a time-specific invite, I joined a happy few in front of the Fuller's bar, and was led away to a tasting of Fuller's Vintage and Brewer's Reserve beers. I've blogged about Fuller's before, but this tasting served to demonstrate what Fuller's do well (produce classic English ales that are suitable for ageing), and cemented John Keeling's place as the brewer that consistently delivers, both in terms of beer and of entertainment. The picture of him and Derek Prentice I've used here is intentionally misleading - they are great company, and don't hate each other as much as the photo implies. And the pretend leaking of their heritage porter project was a nice bit of theatre - to summarise, Fuller's will be releasing a traditional porter later this year, from an 1891 recipe, that's a blend of stock (aged) and running (fresh) ales. If my notes are to be believed, they will also be using porter that has been aged in casks that have previously held Brewer's Reserve.

But (perhaps sadly), one can't spend the whole day at GBBF in an anteroom being fed rare beers. Plunging back into the fray, my notes tell a tale of a man reaching the end of his capacity. Beck Brau Zoigl (5.8%abv) was possibly my beer of the festival. As I mentioned earlier, there are only so many units of alcohol that you can take on board, and I remember having three thirds of a pint of this. My notes say "yeasty, unfiltered liveliness, full of vanilla grain character, splendidly bitter finish".

Looking at my notes, and from memory, I also had a few American beers from cask, including Oskar Blues Pale Ale (6.5%abv) and Ballast Point Big Eye IPA (7%abv). Ballast Point was full of marmalade and tangerines, and in my opinion, needed to be chilled and force carbonated to show at its best. Oskar Blues was surprisingly good from cask, although from memory, it was better from can when I last tried it (in New York, 2007, with Cajun food).

Finally, a couple of beers that I only had sips of. American Flatbread Solstice Gruit (5.4%abv, beer of the festival for Impy Malting) was an interesting unhoppped curiosity - the way herbs had been deployed in place of hops reminded me of the Stone - Victory - Dogfish Head collaboration Saison du BUFF - eccentric and intriguing, but not necessarily something that I'd drink a lot of. The only other beer that was noteworthy (and not in a good way) was the dry-hopped Revelation Cat lambic, a beer that not only missed that mark in terms of flavour, but also had the texture of liquid that had been retrieved from a saloon bar spittoon.

*with apologies to Damien Hirst

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”.

Fuller's Brewer's Reserve: Numbers 2 to 4

I was at Fuller's earlier last month, and the ever erudite John Keeling gave me a great tour. He's a passionate, knowledgeable and garrulous chap, with an interesting take on the nature of brewing, the history of Fuller's, and how one goes about making great beer. If time allows, I'll write a post about him and his take on brewing, but that's for another time. This post is about Fuller's Brewer's Reserve.

I wrote about the current release of Brewer's Reserve here, and the observant among you will notice that this beer is referred to as Number 1. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fuller's have a series of them lined up for release, although they are very much still works in progress. They are works in progress not in the sense that Fuller's are going to release anything that they aren't 100% happy with, but in the sense that they are still being aged in cask - they're not quite ready yet, but the release schedule is more or less mapped out.


Walking round the brewery, it's impossible not to notice all the wooden barrels littering the place. John Keeling said that they'd filled every nook and cranny with barrels; nook and cranny my earhole, they've filled the damn brewery with them. Every corridor, every spare bit of space, has a spirit barrel filled with Golden Pride shoved into it, or more often than not, a pile or a line of them. They're moving towards creating a special room for the barrel ageing, but until then, it's all endearingly makeshift.

The next releases, Brewer's Reserves 2, 3 and 4, will be Golden Pride that has been aged in Courvoisier, Auchentoshan and armagnac barrels respectively (I didn't get the name of the armagnac producer). Having tried barrel samples, which will be indicative (but not totally predictive) of the finished beers, I can say that No. 2 is softly rounded, with a fairly dry finish. No. 3 has a big spirit character, with a lot of smooth sherry notes, and a lot of the underlying beer hidden under the influence of the sherried character of Auchentoshan (which has a heavy sherry-cask finish itself). No. 4 has only had a few weeks in barrel, so it's hard to tell what will emerge - rum and vanilla is quite prevalent at this stage.

As if that wasn't enough, John and colleague Derek Prentice also wheeled out some experimental samples. Some of these I wrote about here - for example, the Golden Pride in bourbon barrel, which was incredibly smooth and rich, really rounded, but starting to show a bit of brettanomyces stinkiness. Perhaps it was at it's peak, but alas, we'll never know - this was the last bottle of that particular beta test of the concept. The example aged in a Glenmorangie cask was much wilder, a little tarter, but with a lot of depth and complexity. A sample aged in a Bowmore cask had a characteristic Islay note of ozone and beach at low tide - complex and enjoyable, but in a slightly threatening, elemental way.

It's hard to summarise what Fuller's are doing with these beers. On one hand, they are so complex, so interesting and so different that all I can do is urge you to seek them out and try them. Conversely, these beers are produced in such limited numbers, and are only available from the brewery shop, that they are only ever going to be the preserve of the curious and the dedicated. What I will say is that these beers really are worth seeking out, and if that means making the journey to the Chiswick brewery, then so be it. It will be good practice for when they release their next project - that really is going to raise a few eyebrows.....

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.

Birthday Round-up: What Have We Learned?

The lines are closed, the votes are in, and the general consensus is that my splendidly self-indulgent 40th birthday bash as outlined here was a great success. Everyone drank beer, and almost everyone liked almost all of it.

There were a few hiccups, of course. The Mort Subite Oude Gueuze raised a few eyebrows, and I was happy that there was a jug of cassis on hand to soften it for those who found it a bit challenging. It was a great reception beer though, and went well with all of the canapes.

I had the duck confit terrine to start, served with Chimay Premiere, and it was a killer match. The richness of the duck and the tang of the pickled beetroot worked brillantly with the soft fruitiness of the Chimay. Even a hardened wine veteran gave it a go, and pronounced it a great success.

My main of pork with apple and vanilla sauce was good, although the Schneider Weisse was a bit heavy for it. Grolsch Weizen might have been a perfect match - oh well, you live and learn. However, everyone went nuts for the cheese course, served with 2005 Fuller's Vintage Ale, and rightly so. The beer had just the right amount of age on it, with an incredibly smooth richness to it, malt and hops integrated into a seamless fusion of flavour that was somewhere between ale and some sort of crazy sherry/port hybrid. Sensational.

By the time dessert rolled around (and I use the term rolled to reflect my physical state as much as anything else), everyone was past their best - the cheese course had done them in. But my match of Black Forest gateau and Ola Dubh 40 was great, a good flavour match, although perhaps a tad on the rich side for anyone without a bovine complement of stomachs. I left some cake and finished the beer, the only sensible thing to do under the circumstances.

Look, I know you're reading this blog because you're interested in beer, and unless something terrible happens to you, you've got a birthday coming up within the next twelve months. Why not find a local restaurant who will let you bring beer in for a corkage charge, buy a copy of The Brewmasters Table, and put a menu together with the restaurant? Have yourself a cheery beery birthday - it was more fun than I ever thought it could be. Just don't give people a choice of what to drink.

That picture of a ravaged plate of cheese and a spent bottle of Fuller's 2005 Vintage Ale lines me up nicely for a report on a visit to Chiswick's finest. Watch this space.

Now Drinking: Fuller's Brewer's Reserve No. 1

Off to visit Fuller's next week, which I'm very much looking forward to. Head brewer John Keeling is a very interesting guy, a nice combination of scientist and aesthete, which in an ideal world is what a brewer should be.

Although I was looking forward to the "ordinary" tour, it turns out that I'll be touring with Melissa Cole. Wonderfully, we are in for the full experience, as I got an email from John saying "it looks like we will be tasting some of our barrel experiments that day- if you don't mind strong beer in the morning". I replied "I love the taste of strong beer in the morning - it tastes like victory". He'll either get the Apocalypse Now reference, or think I'm a tit. Oh well.

I'm looking forward to revisiting some of the beers that I wrote about here, and finding out what Brewer's Reserve No. 2 will be. To get tuned up, I broke out a bottle of Reserve No.1 tonight. A stunningly good bottle, lacking some of the bretty/barrel flora notes that I've noticed before. Lots of spicy gingerbread, parkin and golden syrup initially, fruit mid-palate (over-ripe melon, nectarines, apricots), figs and rum in the finish. Full, satisfying, with great length and complexity, beautifully balanced, with just a hint of alcohol poking through in the finish.