I'll jump straight to the conclusion, because I'm going to use some words and voice some opinions here that may well spark a lively debate. I really like this beer, it's a classic English pale ale, with plenty of toffee, nuttiness and spicy, pithy bitterness - so much so that it might be said to be a modern take on a traditional style. It's bitter, edgy and pushes the envelope a bit. It's rad-trad, dad, and all the better for it. I don't like the branding one bit, but maybe that's just me. What I also find slightly jarring is the stab at contemporary branding while cocking a snook at traditional imagery. Is it post-ironic? Retro-modernism? I don't know, but I'm not keen.
Let's have a look at the label, shall we? Their tagline is "Flat Cap Beers: Top Notch Craft Beer". Hmm, craft beer. Well, it's beer, and it's been crafted, I suppose. Their take on the c-word is that it means "small scale and not mass produced, independent and created with human skill and care" - Flat Capper Andy Orr explained this to me in an email. Their Twitter feed adds to the debate: "Brewed in the West Country of England & the Czech Republic". Again, hmm. Am I being taken for a ride here? Am I getting the feeling I've been cheated? The other two beers in their core range - a Czech pilsner and a Czech dark lager - are still lagering in the Czech Republic. That makes them authentic continental craft beers, right?
Make no mistake, this is all rather rum. The knee-jerk response to this is that it is All Wrong, And Must Not Be Tolerated, Because, It's, Like, Not Very Craft Really, Is It? That would be too easy though. Think a bit harder. Know any brewers who brew great beer without owning a brewery? Let's call them gypsy brewers, make it sound more romantic. And do you know any craft breweries who, when suddenly faced by a huge surge in demand for their flagship beer, decided to have it contract brewed for them? Sorry to break it to you so harshly, but that's more common than you might think, and done by the most unlikely people. Some unwillingly admit to it when directly asked, others flatly deny it, but it happens. And every now and again, when a beer moves from a small plant to a big plant, with fancy modern gizmos like flow meters and hopniks, it gets better. How craft is that?!
Craft beer, authenticity, transparency - these are Big Ideas, but now I just don't know what to think. Care to help me out?
I'm stood at the bar of one of the finest tapas bars in Andalucia, Casa Balbino in Plaza del Cabildo, Sanlucar de Barrameda. The lunchtime rush has started, and things are starting to move. People come in, place their orders, and thereby spark a chain of further actions. The barman starts pouring drinks, and barks an order for a small plate of ham ('medio racion de iberico') and a couple of crispy fritters made from tiny shrimp ('tapa de tortillita de camarones'). The guy carving ham nods and gets to work, the kitchen splash a couple more dollops of shrimp-flecked batter into a shallow pan of hot oil.
Behind the bar, I recognise several of the waiters from previous visits over the past decade. Unlike the UK, being a waiter is a vocation here, a career, and good waiting staff regularly get headhunted by rival bars. But not here - the faces are all pretty familiar, and they dance a well-rehearsed ballet of bending, serving drinks, rushing to and from the kitchen. Everything is done with the practiced ease of something that has become part of muscle memory rather than voluntary thought.
This also extends to serving the drinks. Everything moves at a tremendous pace. Tiny beers are drawn, little copitas of manzanilla are poured from a barrel-shaped font on the bar-back. The drinks are whipped onto the counter, and for a moment stand there perfectly translucent. Then, as if having a moment of realisation that they are not long for this world, the glasses slowly start to acquire a shroud of condensation. It only takes about 15 seconds for a perfectly clear glass of cold beer or sherry to fog up, but watching it happen, with a sudden itch in the throat and an increasingly restless tongue, it seems to take much longer.
As if summoned up by one of my comments in the Blue Moon post, recalling an incident where a barman nearly served a bottle of beer over ice, a press release for Liefman's Fruit Beer plops into my inbox.
When Duvel Moortgat rescued Liefman's, I expressed an opinion that Liefman's were probably in safe hands. They messed around a bit with the fruit beers, producing a saccharine fluff-fest of a beer, of which one of its chief merits appeared to be that it contains only 99 calories. Now the suggestion is to serve it over ice, to make a cool refreshing summer drink.
Am I being too grumpy about this or is this just a harmless bit of summer fun? If I think that serving a wheat beer with a slice of orange in it is OK, then who am I to complain that serving a saccharine sweetened fruit beer over ice is a step too far? Should anything and everything be acceptable in the quest to get more people drinking beer, or is there a line that can be easily drawn, that we can point to and say "No, THAT is too far"? And which side of the line does this fall?
It's easy to be cynical about a beer that is supposed to be served with a chunk of fruit in it. When I asked about the fruit at the Leeds launch of Blue Moon (or rather, the "pre-launch" - so much more hip than the actual launch), I was told that it wasn't a marketing gimmick, but it was something that had come straight from the brewery. Being a fairly bright button, I realise that these things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, and on paper, a Belgian wheat beer brewed by the Blue Moon Brewery (essentially Molson Coors) and marketed as American Craft Beer is such a confused, irritating and almost straight-up deceitful concept that one might justifiably ask "why bother?"
But bother I did, getting off the sofa as Brown exited Downing Street and Cameron visited the palace - what other response would be more fitting than going to the pub, I wonder? Blue Moon in keg form is an unfiltered, unpasteurised Belgian wheat beer. Well, it's more of a weissebier to my palate, having a fairly big body and a touch of digestive biscuit maltiness, and none of a classic witbier's tart spritziness. There's the biscuity malt, a pronounced orange and coriander note, fairly big and chewy on the palate, with some hop character showing up late in the day to keep everything in shape and lend a little more complexity. If you elect to have it without orange, it's a little flabby - the slice of orange peel in the glass adds a little zing of acidity and quite a lot in the way of aromatics. It has a certain freshness and vitality that isn't down to the peel alone. The beers are alarmingly perishable, with just 90 days to expiry put on them at the brewery, and a keg needing to be used up within 5 days of being tapped.
So what are we to make of a beer that actually needs to be served with a slice of orange to show at its best? Is it really all about The Serve? Certainly, the fruit isn't solely there to add flavour (like lime in the neck of a bottle of Mexican lager), although to my palate it improves the beer a bit, giving a faintly gin-like botanical edge to it. Is the slice of orange in Blue Moon Coors' equivalent to the sparkler - how do you like yours served? To be totally honest, unironic and straightforward, I quite liked it. It was a decent enough beer, and with a slice of orange had quite a nice bite to it.
Am I their target consumer? No. Is it worth trying if you come across it? Certainly, in my opinion, and in unfiltered, unpasteurised keg form it's a much more interesting proposition than the thin, watery flash-pasteurised bottles. Is Blue Moon here to stay, and will it become more than the flavour of the month? That is for the drinkers to decide. For my money, Grolsch Weizen (another beer in Coors' Different World Drinks portfolio) is a more interesting beer, but then that has no USP beyond just being a really great beer.
IPA, IPA, IPA. Bloody IPA. What does it mean? As Stuart Howe, brewer at Sharp's points out: "IPA, the most meaningless set of initials in brewing." And yet they are everywhere. I'm drinking one right now - Port Brewing 3rd Anniversary Ale, kindly gifted to me by Phil at beermerchants.com. It's a classic, a splendidly concentrated West Coast IPA, almost too concentrated, but still very drinkable despite the 10%abv, so you know who to blame if this post becomes as long and incoherent as this first paragraph might suggest it will.
Bloody IPA. I wussed out of giving a sensible definition in the book what I wrote, preferring instead to rechristen IPA as International Pale Ale. Sure, I explain what "real" IPA is, but really, the initials have become so debased as to be more-or-less meaningless. Is it going to be a 3.5%abv session beer, or a 10%abv hop monster that will knock you on your arse after one large bottle? I don't think there's any style of beer that has a greater range of flavours within it.
You'll know by now the story of IPA - a strong, hoppy beer that made the journey from England to India, via the circuitous trade routes that took it west across the Atlantic, east round the Cape, and up to India. In a moment of idle curiosity, Pete Brown wondered out loud what a beer might be like that made the journey, and then spent the best part of a year cursing himself for this idle pub thought. He did it - he brewed as authentic an IPA as he could, then took it on the authentic trade route for IPA.
I won't telegraph the punchlines in the book (for they are legion), but it's a great read. There's a lot of information about IPA in there, as well as travel writing, psychology, and the most perfect description ever of falling into a canal. But what is even more enjoyable (and I'm sure he's had a blast doing it) are the many IPAs that Pete has had a hand in over the last year or so.
I was surprised that I've only tried one of them, Crown Brewery India Pale Ale. But this IPA is so good that I almost don't care about missing the others. There's a lot of things going on here, and I don't just mean the flavours. Stuart is a great brewer, and has spared no expense in making this brew chock full o' hops - it's a total hop monster, but still brilliantly balanced. The bright, pithy, olfactory assault of grapefruit, lime, orange pith and backnote of toffee malt is mouthwatering. It's just as good on the palate, with a bonus that, being bottled from cask, the carbonation on this is bang on. Not only does it taste like real ale in a bottle, but it has the same texture and mouthfeel too. It's clean, bright and forceful, but delicate and elegant at the same time. I'd be lying if I called "the English Pliny", but it is really, really good.
It's also worth noting that Stuart has warm-conditioned this beer, partly to try and replicate the conditions that it might have experienced on the long journey to Calcutta, and also partly from a "let's just do it" experimental attitude. I can't tell you what the beer was like before conditioning - a total lupulin beast, I would guess - but what has come out at the end is a great beer. There is one cask left of this brew, and Stuart has said he will bottle it.
OK, there you have it. A beer, a book, and a (slightly too long) story about them both. Neither are currently available, the IPA being still in cask, and the book being out of print until its paperback release in June. If you live in Leeds, and come to Beer-Ritz, we should soon be able to sell you the last release of this batch of IPA, and (if you promise to return it) lend you a hardback first edition of Pete's book. Don't say that we don't try to win your custom.
I'm not really one for labelling or cataloging beer, and I'm certainly not a style slave, but when you drink beer, it's nice to get a sense of where it's from, and the ethos behind it.
There was a tweet today from The Reluctant Scooper asking Is Moor JJJ IPA an IPA or a barleywine?. Normally I wouldn't get involved in this line of questioning, but (a) it's a bloody good beer and (b) when I tried it, I was surprised to be disappointed that it tasted like a really great West Coast Double IPA.
Now don't get me wrong, I love that whole USA West Coast IPA thing - it produces some of the most enjoyable beers I've ever had the pleasure to drink. But most of those have been imports, a direct link to the progenitor of a style, from a particular locality. Having a stunningly good DIPA coming from the West Country rather than the West Coast is simultaneously (a) a pleasure and (b) confusing. Yes, I know Justin is not of these isles, but still....
It's in the nature of beer that it can be brewed anywhere. If there's a brewer with enough gumption, they can make almost any style of beer, anywhere they chose. I guess the exception would be the classic Belgian lambics - they have a sense of place, and nothing really comes close to replicating the beers that are so intimately tied, of necessity, to a geographical locality. Actually, plenty of people come close (Russian River, for the win), but even thought the replicas are great, there is still a sense of ersatz rather than echt.
Still, these are the facts: Moor JJJ IPA is a great beer. It seems that no-one can really pin this beer down. I don't think these two points are mutually exclusive, unless someone can convince me otherwise.
Beer geeks (and I include myself in that non-derogatory term) will be delighted by the news that Vertical Drinks (their Facebook group is here) have just become UK importers for Delaware-based Dogfish Head, producers of many celebrated beers including their 90 Minute IPA, one of the classics of the Double IPA style.
Flying Dog also seem to be on a roll at the moment, with some of their more unusual offerings landing in Europe yesterday, including Raging Bitch (terrible name, great beer). Stone are musing about opening a brewery in Europe. BrewDog are building a reputation (and a deservedly successful business) on unashamedly bold, American-inspired ales.
This is great, but I wonder, does it take some of the magic out of beer geekery? Mark Dredge is talking about his forthcoming beer trip, and in fact it's something that I am (or rather, was) hoping to do next summer. To me, it makes sense going to the source and drinking these beers in their natural habitat. But having them easily available in the UK? Doesn't having these beers dropped in your lap take some of the shine out of it? Do these beers speak of a place and an ethos if you can mail-order them to your door, or go and buy them in Tescos?
