On Beer Festivals

There is a great tale that after attending the 1982 Great British Beer Festival, beer guru Charlie Papazian said to beer writer Michael Jackson "Do you think we could do something like this in the States?". "We could, but what would we do for beer?" was Jackson's retort.

You might imagine that all beer festivals were much of a muchness, although the fact that you are reading this suggests that you are one of the self-selecting few who know that there are beer festivals, and then there are Beer Festivals. Like any festival, each event has it's own particular vibe, and to assume that all beer festivals are similar is to make a mistake akin to assuming that all music festivals are similar. They're just not.

I have a surprisingly limited experience of beer festivals, although I like to think the breadth of experience outweighs the frequency. From the archetypal regional CAMRA festivals (Salisbury Beerex, early 1990s), to the many-tentacled beast that the Great British Beer Festival has become, to the slightly off-the-wall Beer Exposed (September 2008), to the somehow urban-yet-pastoral vibe of the Copenhagen Beer Festival, the modern beer festival experience is as diverse as the modern music festival. You can draw your own analogies, but maybe start with the GBBF being the beer equivalent of Glastonbury, and work down from there.

Two festivals in quick succession are currently on my radar. This weekend sees the 4th Borefts beer festival, which has been described by various commentators as the sure-fire way to restore faith in craft beer (if it's in need of restoration), and the best beer festival in the world.I'm sure that the hyperbole of the latter is a recipe for disappointment, and we'll see how craft beer acquits itself on the day, but a quick peek at the beer list tells you that this is a beer festival with an agenda.

Also with an agenda was the recent Leeds International Beer Festival, although their idea was more about putting a beer festival into an urban (rather than suburban) setting - Leeds town hall, to be precise. The mix of beers was good, I thought, from cask stalwarts such as Taylor's and Ossett, to the vanguard of UK craft, to some rarer US imports. There has been some internet grousing over queues and pricing, but overall I thought the event was well thought-out and stands as an excellent foundation for another run at it next year.

Yet another agenda, albeit one questionably enhanced by my good self and a cast of other rapscallions, can be found on the first weekend in October. The 5th-6th sees the inaugural Independent Manchester Beer (& Stuff) Convention, or Indy Man Beer Con for short. Again, a glance at the beer list makes it clear that this is very much a beer festival of the moment. And that's no bad thing - there has been enough bleating about how the CAMRA/ the GBBF has "excluded" (that wouldn't be my choice of word) a certain sector of the brewing fraternity, and so it's good to see that rather than play victim, there has been a call to positive action. This is, I'm sure, a topic that will come up at what proves to be a lively discussion on Friday night about What The HELL Is Craft Beer? I look forward to finally reaching a definitive conclusion on that topic on the night.

Great North Run (Update)

I won't make this any longer or more detailed than it needs to be, but I've been suffering with a stomach bug all week, and have made the decision to pull out of the Great North Run this weekend.

It was a hard decision. The organisers make it very clear that if you don't feel 100%, you shouldn't run, and not having eaten properly all week, combined with a fair amount of, ahem, fluid loss, has made me reluctantly see sense and bail out.

I will be registering for another half marathon in the next few days. Birmingham Half Marathon is another BUPA-organised run, in mid-October, and seems the most likely candidate at this point. If you've sponsored me, thanks very much, it really means a lot to me. I'll still be honouring your pledge with 13.1 miles, just in a different city.

Onwards and upwards.

SPONSOR ME! Great North Run 2012

Those of you who follow me on t'Witter may have noted that I've been engaging in a slightly unnatural activity of late - to whit, running. And those of you with an attention span longer than 140 characters may remember this post about Ant Hayes, who sadly took his own life last year, leaving a wife and two children.

Long story short, on Sunday 16th September, I'll be running the 2012 Great North Run to raise money for Child Bereavement Charity. CBC is a national organisation that coordinates a network of workers who offer support to people in times of bereavement - parents who lose a child, or children who lose a parent.

It's hard to put a positive spin on this, but I just think that when the worst happens, the best we can hope for is that there are people around to help those left behind make sense of a terrible situation. I think that Child Bereavement Charity offers that, so please dig deep and donate.

That's all a bit sombre, I'm afraid, so on a lighter note, the picture above is of me in the running vest.  I'll be wearing while I plough through the 13+ miles of the half marathon that is the Great North Run. It's yellow and so tight it makes me look like a banana with nipples. I should have got a larger size. Oh well.

You can donate at my Just Giving page here. Thanks for reading this far.

The Symbiosis of British & American Craft Beer

On Thursday night, I was delighted to give a short talk to the Northern branch of the Institute of Brewing and Distilling (IBD). The topic that I'd been asked to address was the relationship between British and American craft beer cultures, which is something that I like to pretend I know a bit about. Of course, when faced with an audience of very well-respected brewers and other assorted luminaries, it's hard to remain cool, so rather than major on trifling things like facts, which are either right or wrong, I fell back on the safety net of telling a story anchored to a couple of key points.

To summarise thirty minutes of rambling into a few sentences: a lot of the early American brewers came out of the homebrew scene, and looked to Europe generally and Britain specifically for inspiration; Jack McAuliffe at New Albion was just ahead of the curve; when Ken Grossman brewed an English-style ale with local Cascade hops, he set the blueprint for the industry; for a country whose culture has dominated the world, the craft brewing scene in the US is still mostly about local beer, drunk fresh; there is an ongoing, symbiotic realtionship between American and European brewing traditions; dragging bottled beer from California to Europe is, if you stop and look at it, a really stupid idea.

Let's expand on some of those, shall we?

When Ken Grossman brewed an English-style ale with local Cascade hops, he set the blueprint for the industry.

The beer that became Sierra Nevada Pale Ale was a local interpretation of what brewers in Britain were doing at the time. It was born out of expediency, using local ingredients feremented in converted dairy tanks, a tried-and-trusted route into the game. The key point here is that the beer is about what is available, a bottom-up approach to craft foodstuff production. That Sierra Nevada have become the worlds largest consumer of whole-cone hops is born out of that mindset of wanting to do something in a traditional way, but just do it on a scale that boggles the mind.

For a country whose culture has dominated the world, the craft brewing scene in the US is still mostly about local beer, drunk fresh.

Americans don't mess about. They take everything very seriously, even fun, perhaps down to the fact that they have so little paid holiday that when they are on their own time, they want to have fun RIGHT NOW. Craft beer is an expression of that. But despite the fact that Sam Adams Boston Lager, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and Brooklyn Lager (or at the very least, one of those three) are available in most UK supermarkets, American beer is still about local production and consumption. For example, Odell Brewing have a wider presence in the UK than they do in the US, but they only export a half of one percent of their output to the UK.

There is an ongoing, symbiotic relationship between American and European brewing traditions.

This just can't ignored. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is Fullers ESB brewed with local ingredients. Access to cheaper air travel in the 1980s meant that people and brewers (actually, brewers are people too, aren't they?) were able to travel to the USA and discover these new-fangled beers. You can't brew American beer without American hops, and so back over the pond they came, vac-packed and ready for action. British drinkers turn their back on traditional British ales, and the UK hop industry starts to founder. With wonderful symmetry, American craft brewers become interested in traditional British (actually, damn it, they're English, aren't they?) hop varieties, and the UK hop industry is saved via export to the US (This was put forward by Venkatesh Iyer, head brewer of Leeds Brewery - I think it's such a wonderful idea that I'm going to start passing it off as my own).

Dragging bottled beer from California to Europe is, if you stop and look at it, a really stupid idea.
Most beer is around ninety five percent water, and comes in a heavy glass bottle. Why wouldn't you move the key raw ingredients nearer the point of consumption and make the beer there? It will be fresher, tastier, and cheaper in the long run. So while Sierra Nevada are approaching carbon-neutral status by virtue of solar power, CO2 capture and anaerobic digesters, they they squander all that by insisting on refrigerated transport for their beers. You can look it it the other way too - they've earned the right to use refrigerated containers by virtue of being so eco-friendly at the point of production. Of course, this raises the issue of whether a beer brewed under licence is the same beer. Sam Adams Boston Lager for draught dispense is now being brewed at Shepherd Neame. Some moan about this, I'm on the fence about it. Would we feel happier if Sam Adams built a European brewery? What about a generic European American Craft Beer Facility that contract brewed for, say, Sierra Nevada, Brooklyn, Sam Adams and Stone? Or do we need the brewery's badge on the door to make us happy?

A couple more further thoughts. I was asked what I thought future trends would be. I think freshness is going to be a real driver of growth over the next 10 years, and allied to that, I also think that gap between the producer and the consumer will become smaller, and maybe the brewpub will make a return. But simply put, nothing tastes better than fresh beer.

The second point comes out of this. As British consumers come to realise that freshness is important, so understanding will grow about the ingredients in beer, and how those ingredients are key to enjoyment. I've said it before, but what American craft beer is doing to the beer industry in the UK is similar to what happened in the late 80s with Australian wine - it demystified the subject and made it easier to understand. Citra is basically Aussie Chardonnay in hop form, and that's actually good thing. But a lot of the key American hops - Citra, Amarillo, Simcoe, Ahtanum - are owned by individuals and grown under licence as registered brands. The question was asked of me; what to do when the year's crop runs out. My answer is to stop production of that beer, and explain to the drinker why. This was, you reinforce the idea that beer is a natural, agricultural and, to a certain extent, seasonal product, and imbue with all those qualities beloved of foodies the world over. Maybe the reason that BrewDog stopped making Chaos Theory is that it rested solely on a particularly sensational crop of Nelson Sauvin one year? (Thanks to Stuart Ross of Magic Rock for suggesting this to me). If that's the case, why not make a virtue of it?

These aren't finished ideas, or even close to being fully-formed, but I'd still love to hear about it if you agree or disagree with any of them.

Friends Of Ham, Leeds

You can tell a lot about a culture from their use of language. I remember having a slightly drunken argument with my Spanish cousin about who had a better language. He insisted that Spanish was better because it has a greater vocabulary (it doesn't - English words outnumber Spanish about 2:1). He pointed out that Spanish must be better because it has two words for "olive" (oliva and aceituna). I laughed at him, and pointed out that Spanish doesn't even have a word for toes - in Spanish, toes are los dedos del pie, literally "the fingers of the foot".

Like many drunken arguments, it wasn't resolved on the night, but Rafa's pointing out that the Spanish has a surfeit words relating to food has some merit. He's right about olives, of course, and without bothering to do any research, I'll bet that there are more words for different styles of dried meat in Spanish than any other language. Not only that, they also have words for the accoutrements of food. The device in the picture is a jamonera, basically a stand that holds a leg of jamon steady while it is carved. You don't see many jamoneras in the UK.

Friends of Ham has a jamonera.In fact, it's the one in the picture. It also has great range of really good quality meats and cheeses, Scotch eggs, a great of-the-moment beer list, and a shuffleboard table. I hear they have wine and spirits too, although my beer obsession is such that I genuinely didn't register either.The comestibles all live upstairs, the shuffleboard table is downstairs in the surprisingly large lounge.

The lounge (there's not really another word for it) is really well thought-out, delineated into different areas with different seating, but very open-plan. I'd almost go so far to say as it has a pleasingly gender-neutral feel. It's a bit blokey (a wall of faux book spine wallpaper, scaffoldy shelves) and a bit girlie (cut flowers, candles, nice pillows and cushions - and before you get outraged, yes nice pillows and cushions are a girlie thing). It's great, balanced, a soothing little oasis, made all the better by the surprise of how nice it all is.

In the month that North celebrates its 15th birthday, it's wonderful to see emerge another qualitatively different take on the whole idea of what makes a great bar. Rather than being competition for anyone, Friends of Ham is bringing something unique to the table, adding another option to the Leeds beer scene. Great beer, great eats, great staff, and a great space to do it all in.

Friends of Ham, New Station Street, Leeds.

The Session 65: So Lonely…

There are lots of reasons for going to the pub. One of my favourites is cask ale - it's just a bugger to have 72 pints of ale sloshing around at home, and the pub usually does it so much better than I could. I like the sociable aspect of sitting around with friends, drinking beer, inhibitions slowly being worn away, defences slowly lowering. By the end of it, much to my surprise given my misanthropic streak, I feel slightly more human for having spent time with people.

But equally, I love the solitary pint or two. For me, the pub is the third place, between work and home, a public house where I can be at home. But I don't think I've ever gone to the pub just to drink. More often it's to make phone calls, to look for inspiration to write, to actually sit there with a netbook, pecking away at the keys, trying to hit a deadline, or trying to turn number crunching into something slightly less dreary.

Sometimes I like to get really comfortable and take my shoes off. I'd never dream of going to the bar without shoes, but there's something incredibly relaxing about slipping off your shoes while you work, Tweet, or just make plans on the phone. It's not something I'd do in company - that would just be weird - but on your own in a pub, with a pint, shoes off, brain zinging away on a project - that's something else.

Maui Brewing Co.

Sometimes, you look at a business and just say to yourself "what the hell are they thinking?". For example, the Orkney Islands host two breweries. The climate on Orkney must be something special to lure two breweries there, given that they have to import all the ingredients to make the beer, bar the water, which I'm told is plentiful. And then they have to freight the majority of the beer back to the mainland for it to be sold. Mental, I tells ya.

Orkney is about 10 miles off the coast of the Scotland. Maui, one of the islands that makes up the 1500 mile long Hawaiian archipelago, is 750 miles from mainland USA. One has to question why Garrett Marrero decided to found Maui Brewing Co there. I mean, why on earth would you want to live in a blue-oceaned, sun-beaten paradise, making craft beer (in the American sense)? It would be easy to paint the whole thing as some slacker "Aloha, whoah, surf's up dude" idyll, were it not for the fact that you don't make good beer without putting in a lot of hard work. And that hard work is evident in the beer.

The beer that perhaps most people will be initially drawn to, Big Swell IPA, is a really solid IPA - think Odell IPA, in terms of that classy Anglo-American crossover, where malt and hops actually work together to produce a rounded, integrated whole. Slightly more off the wall, but showcasing a local ingredient (at least, I'm assuming they use Hawaiian coconuts rather than importing them from the Maldives, although given the island brewer mentality, nothing would surprise me), is their Coconut Porter, which really does taste faintly of coconut, and is a pretty damn special porter to boot. Smooth, silky and slightly unctuous, with a heap of mocha flavours. Aces.

Not simply off the wall, but actually packing a bag and leaving for a long holiday from any semblance of sense is the Mana Pineapple Wheat. When I tweeted about this beer, someone mentioned that they thought it smelled and tasted like urinal pucks. All I can say is that it doesn't, it tastes like a wheat beer with pineapple in it, which is to say a completely bonkers riot of fruit and spice. I liked it, but I can see why others might not, because it treads the tightrope of being fun, and some people think that anything fun shouldn't be taken seriously. Which is a shame, because we can all use a little fun once in a while.