Weekend Beers Round-Up

It seems a tad prosaic after the epic response that the previous post elicited, but I thought I'd quickly round a few of the beers opened this weekend - the majority are samples, and so I guess I should do my duty and at least pass comment.

The Dogfish Head/Birra Del Borgo My Antonia that I'm drinking as I write is still great - not as great as BrewDog Avery Brown Dredge (which seems to have been getting a bit of a mention on Twitter this week), but still a corker.

Last night was a couple of dark beers - Zatec Dark, which is a great black lager, soft, smooth and creamy - and Brain's Original Stout, which is a great mediumweight stout with a lot of lovely leafy hop character in the finish.

Adnam's Ghost Ship and Salopian Oracle are two beer cut from a similar cloth, both having the sort of pungent hop character that first caused me to use the phrase "hop-forward, and in the modern style" - pungently hoppy, zippy, and palate-awakening the both.

Natural Selection Finch is descibed on the label as a "robust red ale". Other people have written kindly about this beer, which makes it all the stranger that I found it to be an undrinkable crystal malt bomb. I like crystal malt, but this was just OTT.

A brief detour into a homebrew, which is going to be my entry for the Nicholson's / Thornbridge homebrew competition, confirmed that I'm going to walk away with the first prize - if you'd like to try it and be in awe, it's the beer that I'll be bringing along to the inaugural Leeds Homebrew meet-up - and then things got serious with a Thornbridge Bracia, a stunning beer, both metaphorically and physically. I needed a long lie down after that one, for sure.

This is the full and frank account of a weekend's drinking, recorded this day, the 25th of September, in the two thousand and eleventh year of our lord. Amen.

NOW DRINKING: Salopian Darwin's Origin

(or: A Tale of Two Beards)*

Unlike Cooking Lager, I didn't get into blogging just to get loads of free beer, although equally, I don't try to send it back when it arrives. I actually get a lot less freebies than you might imagine, and am very poor at sending feedback to breweries when they do. So I'm going to try to write up free beers as and when I drink them, which tends to be anything from a few days to a few months after I get them.

Salopian Darwin's Origin is a cracking drop of beer. It's not smothered in Nelson Sauvin or Citra, it's not brewed with a fancy yeast, it's not 'if your just having one, have THIS ONE" strong (it's 4.3%abv). But it is a classic British ale brewed with one eye looking forwards, and one eye looking back, a bit like Marty Feldman if he were a brewing historian. It's a classic pale copper colour, and the aroma is spicy and citrussy. I'll throw caution to the wind and make a stab at the hops being trad and new world - maybe a mix of EKG and Challenger. The malt bill is, I'd guess, mainly pale malt with a few percent toffeeish medium crystal, a sprinkling of biscuity amber perhaps. At least, that's the sort of formula I'd use if I were trying to make a beer like this. It's classic, yet modern, drawing on a traditional style, and yet quite contemporary in feel. Best of all, it's got Charles Darwin sporting massive white beard on the label. I'm drinking it out of my Beer Hunter Session Glass, which has a bearded, ghostly Michael Jackson printed on it.

I'm sporting a beard too, not a big, bushy one, but a neatly trimmed evil-genius style beard. But keeping it modern, I'm wearing a shirt that has a William Morris-style print on it. I'm sort of Pete Brown meets Lenin meets Mr Spock, minus the pointy ears (Spock's pointy ears, not Pete Brown's). But I digress.

It's slightly coarsely fizzy (the beer, not my beard) as it's force-carbonated and not bottle-conditioned, but you know what - just pour it a bit more carelessly and knock some of the gas out. I wouldn't go so far as to say 'hop-forward and in the modern style', but it's definitely 'classic ale with a weather eye on the trends'.

Lovely.


*or three, if you include mine


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