The Name's Double. Ampleforth Double.

As I emerge blinking from another round of the game I like to call "Dishing It Out About Beer" (go and join in the fun at the Fletch-curated Real Ale Reviews), I'm reminded of an event that happened 24 hours ago that throws the all the arguments about "craft beer", keg vs cask, the relevance of CAMRA in the 21st century et al into a cocked hat.

When you look at these beers, there's little to inspire confidence. Sure, they are pre-production samples, but there's nothing about them that makes you think "ooh, helloooo". You might raise one eyebrow at the monastic connections to Ampleforth Abbey, raise the other eybrow at the 7%abv. But then perhaps you'll lower the first eyebrow noting that sugar is listed as an ingredient, and then lower the second raised eyebrow when you note that the beer isn't brewed on site, but is actually contract brewed by Dutchman in exile Wim van der Spek at his Little Valley brewery near Hebden Bridge. All of this eyebrow waggling, resembling windscreen wipers on a rainy drive, might have given you the appearance of Roger Moore doing a mid-period James Bond. If, like me, your experiences with Little Valley beers have been a bit mixed - on cask, delicious and sometimes ethereal, in bottle, mmm, not so much - you might even have lowered an eyebrow by now.

Anyway, that frightfully clever, look-at-me-and-my-fancy-words preamble is a roundabout way of saying that last night I opened these beers, and they completely cut through the craft-cask-keg-CAMRA debate about where we go from here, because these are simply very well-made beers, and great examples of what they should be. Perhaps my expectations were lowered from all the eyebrow waggling, and I have to say that the initial banana and acetone notes that wafted out of the glass were a little unnerving, but given a couple of minutes to breathe, this blossomed spectacularly into a really solid, slightly sweet, slightly boozy Belgian-style double/dubbel.

I know, I know, it's really unlikely, but there you have it. I spoke to the guys at the abbey today and they have a colossal first bottling run booked in. I won't say exactly how much, but my initial "yeah, I could sell a bit of this, but I wonder how much?" finger-in-the-air estimate of how much to buy was about a half of one percent of the total production run. They're clearly slightly mad - the only English abbey beer, brewed under licence by a Dutchman 50 miles away - but like all mad things, there's an element of greatness to it.

More pertinently for me, it underlined that actually the key thing that makes a beer great is, very simply, that it must be well-made. No doubt some smart-arse will pop up and say "but that's the definition of craft". Well, bullshit. There are well-made beers, and then there are the rest. If you can brew a beer and get it into a glass free from any production flaws, and tasting broadly how it should taste (let's not use this as an argument about styles), then you'll have made me, and a legion of drinkers, very happy. It seems like a modest set of desires, doesn't it? Brew a beer free of flaws, ensure it carbonates properly, and tastes (for want of a better word) nice.

Anyway, I drank the first bottle of badly-labelled, contract-brewed Ampleforth Abbey Double, and when I got to the end, I thought "was it really that good?" and drank another one to make sure. And you know what? It really was that good.

We All Love Beer And We All Love Beer

This is going to be a great year for beer in Leeds. As Sweary Matt points out on his blog, it's North Bar's 15th birthday this year (it's nearly old enough to drink!), the Leeds beer scene is going from strength to strength, and we're hosting the European Beer Bloggers Conference. If you live in Leeds, it would be really easy to look forward to a great year of beer, to put your feet up at home with selection of fine beers purchased from a local independent retailer, or prop up the bar of one of Leeds' fine drinking establishments, and just congratulate yourself. But you know what, let's not do that just yet.

We're beer bloggers, and we blog about beer because we love it in all its myriad glory. We have our own ranking system run by Wikio/ebuzzing, we're a happy community of like-minded souls, and we're a splendid group of people. But something that's been levelled at the beer blogging community is that it's a bit insular - it talks to the converted rather than recruiting new drinkers to the cause. So given that the conference in May is going to be great - we'll take that as read - why don't we try and broaden the scope of the attendee list a bit?

I've been chatting to Leigh at The Good Stuff, and over the next few months, Leigh has agreed to host/organise/curate a series of beer and food tastings at Beer-Ritz in Headingley, Leeds (disclosure - that's my business). The idea behind this is specifically to try and recruit some of the excellent West Yorkshire foodie bloggers to the conference, and also generally to promote beer and/or beer and food together. Leigh is kicking off on Monday 6th February with an evening of baking and beer. I'm sure that Leigh will follow up at some point with more detail, but the poster (designed and executed by Ghost Drinker) tells you all you need to know - come along between 6 and 9pm, and have some baked sweet treats and a mouthful of beer to wash them down. Please do come along, and if you can bring one of our foodie blogging brethren or sistren, so much the better.

Raw Sensation / Unmediated Pleasure

Look, bear with me, there will be a point to this.

I studied psychology as an undergraduate degree. Along with a lot of contentious nonsense, a few interesting things stuck with me. One was the phenomenon of being at a party, or in a busy pub, and hearing someone say your name against a chorus of 50 people talking. The implication here is that your brain is unconsciously monitoring everything in the room, and then when something interesting happens - like someone saying your name - your brain shimmers into the room like Jeeves and politely draws your attention to it.

Another thing made an impression on me was seeing a couple of my tutors argue about 'raw sensation'. That's the idea of the moment that brain senses something is going on, but hasn't yet made sense of it. The example that was given was if you touch your finger on something and can't tell if it's really hot or really cold. Your reflexes just go "NO!" before your brain can figure out exactly why it's going "NO!".

All of this was brought back to me recently when I was watching an episode of Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations", where he hangs out with jefe of El Bulli, Ferran Adria. Part of the programme is Bourdain, Adria and couple of others eating their way through the El Bulli tasting menu - a few dozen courses, each just a mouthful or two.

One of the most striking things was the joy that Adria clearly got from eating the food he'd designed. He obviously didn't get to sit down and eat his way through his own menu every day, and to see him have a succession of "HA! WTF?!" moments was beautiful to behold. There's a fairly rudimentary description of this sensation here in paragraph seven, where I have my mind blown in a way that I never have before, and I also touch on it here.

Maybe what made me think about this was Boak and Bailey's flagging of my reaction to a beer. Or maybe it was the pint of Tetley's I had tonight that had a weirdly evocative hint of orange blossom the reminded me of spring in Seville. Or was it the pint of Wadworth's Henry's IPA I had at Christmas that had a faintly stale backnote to it that reminded me of my parents drinks cabinet at Christmas, but when I was ten years old.

Well, I promised a point at the start, so I guess I'd better make one. How much of drinking beer is an intellectual exercise, using the front brain to analyse what's going on, and how much of it is an almost pre-cognitive reaction to what you're drinking? Can we give finely graded 100 point ratings to beers, where we pull it to bits, or is a simple binary yes-no system good enough? And returning to the image in my mind of Ferran Adria rolling his eyes and grinning at his own food, isn't it important to have a visceral reaction to what we drink, as well as a cerebral one?

Sucking Up A Social Class: Some Further Observations

As Boak and Bailey point out on their blog, there is a lot of debate at present around "craft" beer and snobbery. I was going to post on their blog about why this is, but then realised that it probably warranted a post all of its own.

There are a couple of things going on here. One is the conflation of money and class, a peculiarly American concept. Could it be that the "craft" beer movement, as well as drawing beery inspiration from the USA, has also imported a load of social values along with it? There are a lot of naysayers who object purely on principle to paying £10 for a bottle (or a pint) of beer. I'm not exactly sure why that is - it would be easy to say that it's jealousy, but I think there's something more fundamental going on. I think it's the idea that there is something posh, snobby, pretentious - call it what you want - about spending your money on fancy, rare or expensive beer. Just as I'd defend anyone's right to spend their money on anything that they want (as long as it isn't criminal, in the legally defined sense), I'd also defend anyone's right to express their discomfort about it. But that's just what I think - I'd love to hear your views on that idea.

Tied into this is the idea that people who buy fancy, rare or expensive beer are doing so because they somehow think they are better than people who don't. For this to be true, there would have to be a substantial amount of blog content denigrating the sort of beers that "only" cost below £3 a pint. But I can't find anything, anywhere that says anything like that, BrewDog's publicity machine aside, of course.

Ah, the B-word. Has BrewDog stance on "industrial" beer become so well disseminated that now people are conflating their views with that of the "craft" beer movement as a whole? Or are they closer than "craft" beer lovers would like to think? Or is it really simply about money and snobbery?

WE ARE LEEDS!

This pic was taken in Rome early 2010. It's at the beer dinner hosted jointly by Birra Del Borgo and Dogfish Head, which sort of doubled as the launch for the Italian-only book "Eur-Hop!" - it's a beer-lover's guide to Europe. As well as the brewers Leonardo Di Vincenzo, Teo Musso and Sam Calagione, the chap on the left, holding a copy of said book, is Lorenzo Dabove (aka Kuaska), Italy's most celebrated beer writer.

At the launch, Kuaska talked to me about the "Holy Trinity" of beer cities in the North of England (that's how they are described in the book) - Sheffield, Manchester and Huddersfield. I also note that the author for the portion on northern England is some guy called Dave Szwejkowski, who has apparently "viagiatto attraverso i cinque continente in cerca delle birra perfetto" - which makes Dave Unpronounceable's international scooping exploits sound impossibly glamorous.

I also remember feeling slightly crushed that Leeds wasn't part of that group, but hey, that's life. And what a difference a couple of years makes.

This is a time of year when it's natural to look backwards and assess, but let's be the perverts we want to be and look forward and speculate. I think 2012 is going to be a good year for Leeds. Not only is the European Beer Blogger Conference coming to Leeds in May, but it's also North Bar's 15th anniversary, which must surely be the cue for all sorts of unusually fabulous events. Throw into that mix the rumours fact of the long-awaited opening of a BrewDog bar in Leeds, and it looks as though next year is going to see Leeds adding another point to the that Holy Trinity, making it into, errr, no idea - an Unholy Rhombus?

Included below is a little piece I did this morning on BBC Radio Leeds about the EBBC 2012. The keen observer will note that I'm getting my years confused a bit, but live radio is quite intense. I'm just pleased I got through it without freezing, corpsing or profanity.

It's good to see the mainstream media showing an interest in the event so far ahead - I hope that we can all keep some sort of momentum up, and put Leeds and great beer on the map for May next year.

Golden Pints 2011

Everyone loves a list, don't they? A "Best of..." list is a great way of condensing information, although of of course there is a lot of detail and nuance lost in this approach, and anyone not appearing on it might feel slighted.

Oh well, here's my contribution:

Best UK Draught (Cask or Keg) Beer Magic Rock High Wire
Best UK Bottled or Canned Beer Buxton Brewery Axe Edge
Best Overseas Draught Beer Odell IPA
Best Overseas Bottled or Canned Beer Anchor Porter - a hugely underrated beer, in my opinion
Best Overall Beer Magic Rock High Wire
Best Pumpclip or Label Magic Rock
Best UK Brewery The Kernel - defining 'craft' without ever thinking too hard about it
Best Overseas Brewery Mikkeller (yes, I know he hasn't got a brewery, but you know what I mean)
Pub/Bar of the Year I don't get out much, but The Euston Tap is a repeated draw when I'm in London
Beer Festival of the Year I've not been to many, but GBBF is an obvious call
Supermarket of the Year Haven't shopped widely enough to have an opinion
Independent Retailer of the Year modesty forbids - has it only been 9 months....?
Online Retailer of the Year modesty forbids
Best Beer Book or Magazine not read enough to choose
Best Beer Blog or Website Adrian Tierney-Jones at Called to the Bar
Best Beer Twitterer Simon H Johnson
Best Online Brewery presence Magic Rock
Food and Beer Pairing of the Year couldn't choose, sorry.
In 2012 I’d Most Like To… get back out to the USA, and judge at the World Beer Cup
Open Category: You Choose Best commodity/craft crossover beer - Worthington White Shield. I can't think of a single other beer that has got such a great lineage, tastes amazing, and yet you can still pick up for a couple of quid in most UK supermarkets. Garrett Oliver's maxim that "you can buy some of the best beers in the world for the price of a double latte at Starbucks" has never been more true.

Hi, My Name's Zak, And I'm A Hypocrite

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been 1,716 weeks since my last confession, and in that time I've been guilty of the sins of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, acedia, lust, envy, vanity and pride"

"You said lust twice, my child"

"I'm sorry father, I like lust"

I like to think that I'm as even handed with "ordinary" beer as I am "craft" beer. A nervous glance back through my recent posts (did I only post once in October? That's sloth and acedia for you) suggests that although I do post about rare and hard-to-find stuff, I also post about easy-to-find stuff too.

Coupled to that, a recent theme in my posts has been to support independent retailers - no particular reason, other than it's what I do for a living, and I think that independent retailers have a very clearly defined role in the beer market. Having said that, I'd be interested to hear what you think that role is.

However, I have to admit to having strayed from the path recently. I live a 3 minute walk from a Morrisons supermarket, and the other evening, having just driven home from a warehouse with around £100k of great beer in it, I discovered that I didn't have any beer that was appropriate to my mood. I didn't want any homebrew, any Fuller's Gales Prize Old Ale, any Stone Old Guardian, any Birra Del Borgo KeTo Reporter, any Hair Of The Dog Adam, any Hardknott Granite (Batch 1), any Williams Bros Fraoch 20, any Thomas Hardy Ale. What I wanted was a couple of bottles of BrewDog Punk IPA. And Mozzers sells it.

I confess, I went to a supermarket and bought some "craft" beer. I don't know how I feel about this. On one hand, I'm delighted that it's available to me (and other shoppers) so readily. On the other hand, I'm saddened that it's available to me (and other shoppers) so readily.

What do you think? Is the chase part of the fun? How hard should you have to look for "craft" beer? Is it any less "craft" for being in a supermarket?