The Circle Squared at York Beer Festival

There was a pleasing symmetry to a drinking experience this week at the York beer festival. No, it wasn't the surprise appearance of Saints & Sinners / Steel City Hopsession #2 at the festival (complete with shabby chic pumpclip), but I was surprised to find a cask of Birra del Borgo / Dogfish Head My Antonia. It was exciting because this has been one of my favourite beers of the year. From sampling it in 75cl bottle format, to drinking it on draught in Rome, to finally finding it on cask in Yorkshire, I'm starting to get the sensation that this beer just can't get enough of me. I half expect to turn on the tap to make a cup of tea and find it pouring out. That would be nice.

The first picture shows a couple of casks at the brewery in Borgorose. As I was being shown around, I asked who they were for, and the reply was a bit noncomittal - it was just to go to England. I can tell now why brewer Leonardo Di Vincenzo was so economical with the truth - clearly this had been casked exclusively for my enjoyment at York beerfest, and he didn't want to spoil the surprise. How thoughtful!

Seriously though, this is something of a coup, and down to Jamie Hawksworth and his sterling work in creating a series of iconic beer business in Yorkshire (Pivo, The Sheffield Tap, plus a wide and varied importing and wholesale operation). And while we're at it, thanks to Vertical Drinks for their importing of this great beer in a rare format. But still, it's something of a credit to Jamie that he came along and judged at the festival, toting a bottle of what I think might have been a pre-release of BrewDog's AB:03, a stunning, mellow red berry ale. BrewDog James had come to see me a couple of days previously and left me with a bottle, which I selfishly didn't bring to the beer festival to share with my fellow judges. Clearly to rectify this, I will have to travel with a bottle of beer about my person at all times - Jamie's generosity proved the maxim that beer is better shared.

But back to the point - casked My Antonia. It was a beautifully hazy golden beer, with an aroma of peaches and apricots. The Saaz snap that made the keg version so brilliant was there, albeit subsumed into a more rounded, fruity character. It was alarming easy drinking for 7.7%abv. I had a half, and then tried to slowly wean myself onto weaker beers, via Hardknott Infra Red (oddly chewy in cask), Crown Red Barron (again, weirdly full bodied - maybe red IPA is a blind spot for me), Marble Dobber (brilliant, but surprisingly bitter) and Five Towns Niamh's Nemesis (beer of the festival, but by my reckoning, not even close to the best beer I drank that day).

So, York beer festival - delivering beyond expectations, and providing closure to my peak beer drinking experiences. And I didn't even have to leave Yorkshire.

Birra del Borgo: Coming for Your Taste Buds

A few weeks ago I visited Birra del Borgo's new brewery (pictured left) in Borgorose, about an hour outside Rome. As I rocked to and fro on the train, I pondered the truth of the fact that you can make good beer anywhere, and the question "Why?" kept popping into my head. Why Borgorose? When you are from Rome, a city that has an incredible beer scene fuelled largely by the explosion in Italian craft brewing in the last five years (a tenfold increase in breweries in that time), why would you locate your brewery in a remote village in the foothills of the central Apennines?

The answer that Leonardo di Vincenzo, founder of the brewery, gives is a touch prosaic, but with a romantic twist; it was cheap, and he had family ties in Borgorose (his grandparents live there). His attachment to the locality is so strong that he hopes eventually to open a bar in the tiny village, which is an impressively humble aspiration for someone who is also about to open a brewpub in New York in collaboration with Teo Musso (Baladin), Sam Calagione (Dogfish Head) and Vinnie Cilurzo (Russian River).

We start off the tour trying a few of the newly bottled 33cl offerings - My Antonia, ReAle, ReAle Extra and Duchessa are all about to be bottled in this format for export to the UK and the USA. My Antonia (reviewed here) is my favourite, now just pipping ReAle to the post. In small format, it loses a little of the foghorn-like blast of malt and hops, but it is still wonderful. We have a look at their new 25hl brewplant, which is in fact the old brewplant from Baladin. I ask Leonardo how production is increasing, and he says that they have brewed as much in the first six months of 2010 as they did in the whole of 2009. They've got great beers and, with the addition of ten new tanks later this year, they'll have spare capacity. Bottling, kegging and casking will all take place on site by the middle of 2011. Birra del Borgo are coming for your taste buds in a big way.

As impressive as all this is, at this point in the tour, I'm starting to feel that I've underestimated both the scale of the operation, and the drive behind it. This is reinforced when we take a drive through the cobbled square at the centre of Borgorose, to the original brewery (pictured right), fronting onto pastures at the edge of the village. It's being cleaned down ahead of the following day's Discovery channel shoot with Sam Calagione (see here for more info on the programme). The smaller capacity that this offers means that it will be kept on as the brewery's experimental plant - in fact, Leonardo mentions that he quite often sends one of the brewery team down here to make a beer of their choosing.

It's here that I realise how badly I've underestimated Leonardo. In a shed at the back of the old brewery, there is a cage pallet of their signature 75cl bottles, packed with a new beer, Equilibrista (Italian for tight-rope walker). This beer is a blend of regular wort and clear Chianti must. The pressed grape juice had no contact with the grape skins, and so is completely clear. The beer is surprising in many ways; it hides its 11%abv very well; it tastes both like a beer and a wine; and it is at once familiar and easy to understand, but does it's balancing act in a way that means your brain is constantly flipping back and forth between wine and beer. The remaining bottles are to be disgorged in the same way as champagne, removing the majority of the sediment. I ask where the disgorgement will take place, and naturally, it will take place right here. "Have you done this before?" I ask. "No, but we were shown how to do it, and I'm sure we can handle it" is Leo's predictably confident response.

We round off the visit tasting a couple of barrel-aged beers, the 2008 edition of 25 Dodici (25th December, their Christmas beer) and two barrels of Sedici Gradi (Sixteen Degrees, their strong, dark barley wine). The 25 Dodici is decaying more or less gracefully, exhibiting a lot of the same 'spoiled' character that Greene King's Old 5X has, an experiment waiting for a conclusion. The two barrels of Sedici Gradi (16%abv) are different from each other, one a new fill, one a refill. The plan is to blend the two barrels for a single release, and after trying the oaked, slightly tannic-textured new fill and the rounded, sherried notes of the refill, we blend them together in one glass for an impromptu preview of the final beer. Despite the 30°C heat in the brewery, I can't stop sipping at the enormous, voluptuous blended barley wine in my hand.

There's a higher force at work here, reflected in the symmetry at the heart of Sedici Gradi. The beer has sixteen months in oak, is 16%abv, and should be drunk at 16°C. The playfulness at the heart of everything - the devil-may-care blending of beer and wine, the blended beers done with Cantillon, the simultaneous production of My Antonia in two different countries by two different breweries - doesn't mask the fact that this is a world-class brewery gearing up to take over the world.

One final statistic that Leonardo gave me during the tour. As I mentioned earlier, in the last five years, the number of Italian craft breweries has gone from 40 to 400. In that time, production of 'industrial' Italian lager has dropped by 15%. If, as seems likely, the younger generation of Italian drinkers are rejecting wine as something their parents drink, and aren't interested in generic yellow fizzy, then as blogger Knut Albert claimed a few weeks ago, Italy really is set to become the new California.


TRANSPARENCY STATEMENT - I paid for my flights, but Birra del Borgo accomodated me in Rome, and made sure I didn't go hungry or thirsty.

Bar Open Baladin, Rome.

Spurred on by Knut Albert's pronouncement that Italy is the New California, I find myself having a hell of a time in Rome. Yesterday saw a trip out to Birra del Borgo, about an hour from Rome. That was quite an eye-opener in itself, and will be the subject of a couple of posts in the near future. But last night was a corker - Leonardo di Vincenzo and I met up with Sam Calagione (of Dogfish Head), and his Discovery channel entourage. He's being shadowed for a month for a forthcoming documentary, which having spent an evening in Sam's company, should be a riot.

We met up at Bar Open Baladin for draughts of My Antonia, a collaborative brew between Sam and Leo, before moving on to Bir&Fud for great pizzas and more beer. I think everyone was too scared to order anything but My Antonia, which was fine by me, as it's a great beer, with the herbal, lemony Saaz character coming to the fore much more in the draught version than the bottle. Ruinously drinkable, we drank it until we, like Rome, were partial ruins.

Here's a quick snippet of video from Bar Open Baladin. Don't be so impressed by the huge wall of beers that you miss the fact that there are 38 taps and a couple of handpumps on the bar too.



Must dash - more pizza and beer for lunch. Ciao ciao!