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.