How can Innis & Gunn be both barrel-aged and available everywhere?

It’s rare to visit a brewery these days that doesn’t have a barrel-ageing programme of some sort. It might just be a dozen or so wooden casks stacked up in a corner, or it might be a dedicated storeroom or even a whole warehouse full of casks. For most though, barrel-aged beers are specialist small-batch products – a whisk(e)y cask is two hectolitres, and ought to yield enough to fill between 500 and 600 33cl bottles.

Dougal with samples of chips and beer

That’s scalable to hundreds of casks and hectolitres, which is tolerable for those speciality beers (700 hl of Duvel BA, say, or Goose Island BCBS). But what if your annual production is heading for 150,000 hectolitres, and you need to barrel-age pretty much all of it? If you’re Dougal Gunn Sharp, the boss of Scottish brewer Innis & Gunn, it means applying some science…

To start with, they developed the Oakerator, which circulated beer through treated oak chips in a tank. Then two years ago they switched back to using real Bourbon barrels – but barrels that had been broken into their staves, then turned into wood chips and toasted to differing degrees to “open up the wood” and yield different flavours. Both methods resemble the oak-chip techniques used by some large wineries and are used for the same reasons – to do more, and faster, with less wood. Though because in this case the brewers are also looking for Bourbon flavours, they don’t even have the option to use large wooden tanks.

Once the beer is on the barrel chips, “We apply different temperatures and pressures to get different flavours in, such as that Bourbon vanilla note. It’s like using a pressure cooker,” explained Dougal when we met at an Innis & Gunn beer matching evening in London last month.

Flavour targets

“We know exactly where we want to be, the flavours we want,” he added. “We’re about warm, smooth characteristics, but not too many of them. The starting beer is something of a blank canvas – not too hoppy, and brewed with our own yeast, selected for the flavours we want.”

Along the way, they have learnt a lot about what works when it comes to barrel-ageing. “For example, barrel-aging goes better with some styles than others – it needs some ‘weight’ to carry it,” he said, adding though that you don’t want to overdo it. As a result, most Innis & Gunn beers have quite a short aging period: “We don’t need longer than 5-30 days, though we could go to months [for certain beers].

“The timing also depends for example on the time of year – it really is quite a scientific process. The right flavours for us are vanilla, toffee and so on – once you leave the beer longer it begins to change and you begin to round off some of the more robust characteristics. The key thing here is to be able barrel-age a beer that isn’t 10 or 11%, without having to liquor it down.” (That’s to say, without having the aged version come out at 11% and then blend it down to a more saleable strength.)

The Innis & Gunn story combines serendipity with family history – Dougal’s father Russell was the head brewer who rescued Caledonian Brewery. Russell Sharp also had extensive experience in the distillery business, and he founded Innis & Gunn with his two sons – its name comes from their middle names – as a joint-venture with whisky producer William Grant, shortly before Scottish & Newcastle took control of Caledonian.

William Grant wanted ale to ‘season’ Bourbon casks before they were used to age whisky, the original plan being that the beer would then be disposed of. But workers who tried it liked it, and so a new business was born, one which is now run by Dougal after a management buyout a decade ago.

Looking back to when it all began , Dougal said that one thing the founders realised was that while a good product was essential, it wasn’t enough. “Beer at the time was unsophisticated compared to the wine industry,” he explained. “So we made it look different, and we got people to realise it wasn’t beer for just chucking down [your throat].” And it has to be said that they did a great job of getting the presentation right, from the name to the bottle designs.

Science for volume, age for speciality

The second release of Vanishing Point

The scientific approach has also enabled Innis & Gunn to considerably ramp up production – the company now produces six regular beers, of which only the lager is not wood-aged, plus a number of seasonals and specials. Most if not all of the latter are still aged in actual barrels, and many are primarily or exclusively for export, such as Vanishing Point, its delicious 11% Imperial Stout, which gets 12 months in first-fill Bourbon barrels.

The company currently contract-brews its volume brands at the Tennents brewery in Glasgow. However, for pilot brews, smaller runs and cask ales it has a 50hl brewkit at Perth-based Inveralmond Brewery, which it took over a few years ago. More ambitiously, it also has a £20 million project to build a new brewhouse in Edinburgh – part funded by private equity and part by crowdfunding – with the aim of bringing all production back in-house.

Whatever you think of the idea of using toasted barrel chips instead of real barrels, the resulting ales are both good quality and undeniably popular. They sell well not just in the UK but also in export markets, most notably Canada where it’s the number one imported craft beer*, but also in Sweden, the US, and elsewhere. Quite a success story both for beer and for barrel-ageing.


*In fact it’s so popular in Canada that the Innis & Gunn earlier this year announced plans to brew and keg several of its core beers at Brunswick Brewery in Toronto, using the same recipes, ingredients and processes as in Scotland. The two breweries have already worked together on a couple of collaboration brews, and plan to do more of those too.  

The fun and challenges of beer and food matching

It’s been a bit of a feast of beer and food pairings lately, first at the annual dinner of the British Guild of Beer Writers and then at the rather excellent Hero of Maida gastropub in London’s Maida Vale, where UK beer distributor Euroboozer kindly hosted a “beery brunch” for writers. The former focused on British beers, naturally enough, while the latter included Austrian, Belgian and Danish brews – Euroboozer represents Schremser, Steigl, Boon and Mikkeller, among others.

It was fascinating to see how much better some pairings worked than others, but also to be reminded that although there was general agreement, different people of course preferred different pairings.
The rule of thumb with beer and food matching is you either go for complementary flavours or contrasts. For instance, a hoppy IPA can work well with curry, which to me implies complementary, but it can also match cheese, where the bitterness doesn’t so much contrast as cut through the oils.

Interestingly, both menus featured scallops – they’re clearly the shellfish of the moment. In one case, seared scallops were paired with Chalky’s Bite from Sharp’s, in the other the scallops were baked and served alongside Sonnenkönig II, a 9.5% Double Witbier aged in Tequila barrels (left), which comes from the pilot brewery of Austria’s best-known lager brand Steigl.

Both combinations worked very well. The dry tang of Sonnenkönig against the fishy sweetness of the baked scallops, and the spicy maltiness of Chalky’s Bite – a 6.8% herbed strong ale that makes me think of a Belgian Tripel – with the toastier seared scallops. A second fish dish, smoked haddock tartare, was paired with Riesling People, a hazy IPA brewed with grape juice – it’s one of Danish brewer Mikkeller’s takes on the modern beer-wine hybrid style. Again, a lovely beer, almost gin-like in its dryness, but for me it didn’t bring out the flavour of the fish.

Moving on, brunch brought us brioche buns filled with bacon, cheese and egg, paired with Boon Oude Geuze Black Label. This is a stunningly good beer, the driest Geuze that Boon produces, and it did a great job of contrasting with the lightly fatty and salty character of the bacon and cheese. I’ll try to remember Gueze as an option for cheese and charcuterie in the future!

The main course for dinner, roasted Welsh lamb, brought not one but two pairings. The intended one was Fourpure’s smoky-sweet and rich Oatmeal Stout. This is a very fine beer, but somehow the combination of that sweetness with the equally rich meatiness of the lamb didn’t work as well for me as the second beer on the table – Marble’s tropical and resinous Hopoplata. This gorgeous 7.2% West Coast IPA was intended to pair with the vegetarian option, but worked extremely well with the lamb – its hoppy and bitter fruitiness contrasted with the meat, each bringing out the richness of the other.

Back at brunch, the meat course was an amazingly delicious Gascon black pudding with white beans (right), served with Steel Toe Milk Stout from America’s Ska Brewing. This time, the creamy and slightly smoky sweetness worked excellently well, perhaps because of the softer – though equally rich and lovely – flavour and texture of the black pudding.

Time for dessert, and a sticky-toffee pudding paired with OTT, a classic 7% old ale from Hog’s Back. This match did a great job of bringing out the cocoa and fruit cake notes in the beer. We also had on the table a bottle of Greene King’s Heritage Vintage Fine Ale – a rather excellent strong ale brewed with Chevallier heritage barley – so for curiosity’s sake I also tried that with the pudding. Dry-sweet and lightly toasty, it too worked very well, confirming strong ales as a good pudding choice!

While brunch now moved on to a liquid course – a tart and tangy Boon/Mikkeller collaboration where they aged Geuze in white Vermouth foeders – dinner wrapped up with an amazing range of British cheeses, quite simply the best cheeseboard I’ve had in a long time. They were served with another strong ale, this time from the far north – Orkney Brewery’s 10% Dark Island Reserve. With such a variety of cheeses, the aim (according to the tasting notes from fellow writer Jacopo Mazzeo) was to provide a beer complex enough to complement them all. It worked well, although now I can’t help wondering how the cheese would have gone with something like that white Vermouth Gueze or perhaps a strong Farmhouse Saison…

How beer could rival Scotch for Highland affections

As described in my previous post, a few months ago I spent an evening meeting brewers from the Scottish Highlands, learning about the market challenges they face – and tasting some of their beers.

Cairngorm Brewery will already be familiar to many both north and south of the border, partly because of the array of awards on its wall, most of them for its Trade Winds golden ale and its gorgeous Black Gold stout, but also because it has participated in several of JD Wetherspoon’s national real ale festivals. As many brewers will admit, while there’s no financial profit for them in these festivals, they're a great publicity boost.

Supplying real ale across the country is a major task, said Cairngorm's Merlin Sandbach, not least because it means having 400 or 500 casks to fill. Two factors make it practicable – one is that Wetherspoon has its own distribution centres, and the other is that you can now rent casks for one-way use, with the rental company recovering and cleaning them afterwards.

As well as its mainstays, at this festival Cairngorm was offering its bottled Highland IPA. This was an interesting Scottish take on an old friend, with lots of toasty caramel adding to the citrus hops, herbal bitterness and malt that you’d expect.

Confusingly, there were two new microbrewers present from the Speyside area – Speyside Craft Brewery, and Spey Valley Brewery. “We do cask, kegs and bottles. That was a no-brainer, there was no reason to limit ourselves,” said Speyside’s Seb Jones. “It's predominantly a local market, we do definitely get seasonal influences though,” with local craft beer proving popular with the many summer visitors to the area.

A former home-brewer, he joined the oil & gas industry “but didn't enjoy it much, so I moved back. The brewery took 18 months of planning and fund-raising. It was just me at the start, now there's six of us, including a head brewer.” He added, “The beer range is what I want to drink – how else can you be passionate about it?” How else indeed!

I tasted his Findhorn IPA and Bottlenose Bitter – both were good, the former having notes of bitter orange and burnt caramel while the latter, named for the dolphins that live nearby in the Moray Firth (I've seen them), was dry-sweet and lightly bitter.

Of course, beer isn’t what the Speyside area is best known for, so it wasn’t too surprising to learn that the founder of Spey Valley Brewery, David MacDonald, originally worked in the whisky business as a distiller at Cardhu (now part of Diageo). Of course, every whisky distillery is also a brewery, although they don’t make this obvious, because fermented but unhopped ale is what they distill.

He initially put together a 200 litre brewkit more as a hobby, but was looking to expand when he met local farmer and hotelier Innes MacPherson, now his partner in Spey Valley. “He wanted a 10-barrel plant,” said Innes. “The window of [craft beer] opportunity was closing fast though, and when we priced it a 20-barrel was as cheap, and the opportunity meant capacity was needed.” So David has retired from Diageo and gone into brewing full-time. His smoky and berryish Spey Stout is a tasty mainstay, but I also tried the eponymous David’s Not So Bitter, a well-balanced light bitter.

To add a little more confusion, Spey Valley, via its floral and crisp Sunshine on Keith blond ale – although I see they’re now more fashionably calling it a Session IPA – also overlapped with the next brewer along, Keith Brewery. A little name-sharing shouldn’t surprise though, given that Keith is one of the main towns on Speyside (and is home to Strathisla, reputedly the oldest distillery in Scotland).

The Keith Brewery name is just a year old and its labelling is both tasteful and amusing. Everything is named Something Keith, for example, such as its barleywine (actually a Strong Scotch Ale) being Sir Keith and its lager being Larger Keith. Its brewkit is older and has ‘history’ though – it was formerly operated by Brewmeister, a poorly-executed attempt to out-do Brewdog in the shock and outrage stakes. Brewmeister’s clownish claims to have brewed the world’s strongest beer were ridiculed and largely disproved, and new investors took over.

“Almost everyone involved with Brewmeister has gone,” said Keith assistant brewer Alex Saramaskos – the only exception looks to be Tony Kotronis, the head brewer recruited right at the end of the Brewmeister era to be a new broom and clean things up. “It's the same brewkit but there's also lots of new stuff, such as new cooling gear.”

Alex was pouring Sir Keith and Stout Keith. Both were excellent, with the barleywine carrying its warming 10% ABV very smoothly. The stout, which is dosed with five litres of cold brewed coffee (from 5kg of coffee beans) per 2000-litre brew, was unsurprisingly coffee-roasty with a burnt bitterness and pleasing hints of old wine and tart currants.

Wooha Brewing’s founder Heather MacDonald was the only brewster present, and despite a name that’s about as Scottish as you can get, is originally from America. A microbiologist by training, she learnt to brew commercially (meaning consistently!) as a way to start up a business as her children grew up. “I brewed wherever people would let me, and at home for recipe development,” she explained. “I have a lab background so I'm very much into record keeping.”

Her 10-barrel brewery has now been in production for a year. She started with four 10-barrel fermenters but when we spoke she had just ordered a 20 as well. Her beers are a hoppy lager that is unusually full-bodied – perhaps because it is lagered for five weeks, an easy-drinking porter, a wheat ale and an IPA.

The wheat in particular I liked as a hoppy twist on the Ur-Weisse style, although Heather says “We don't call our Wheat Ale a Hefeweizen – it's fermented at 18C because I didn't want banana and cloves,” while the IPA seemed more like a hopped-up Strong Scotch than a traditional IPA. All four showed Heather’s desire to explore flavour in its entirety. As she said, “I want it to be about the whole beer, not just bitterness.”

They've rebranded since then!

Last but not least, I stopped to chat with George Wotherspoon from the Loch Ness Brewery – besides Cairngorm, this was the only other brewery here that I already knew of, from meeting (and enjoying) their cask ales in London.

As well as a core range of four, they do a wide range of seasonal beers, many of them available in both bottle and cask – and some cask-only. For sampling he'd brought along bottles of HoppyNess, a hop-dank and bitter-sweet pale ale which I see they've now rebranded as an American IPA, and LochNess, a malty Scotch ale that made me think more of a brown Porter.

Overall, it was really interesting to see how responses to the craft beer opportunity can differ, yet all reflect a shared heritage – in this case, centuries of Scottish and British brewing. And of course there wasn't a bad beer in the bunch!

Beer is a welcome taste of the Highlands

The news that Scottish brewers have done well at the SIBA BeerX 2016 trade conference and festival in Sheffield, taking 25% of the gold medals despite being less than 10% of the UK’s brewery population, reminds me that it’s an area I’ve been meaning to write about for some time – ever since meeting half a dozen interesting brewers from the Highlands & Islands area a few months ago, in fact.

Beer, beer, beer...

We met at a special one-day Highlands Craft Beer & Cider festival run in London’s Covent Garden on behalf of Highlands Islands & Enterprise (HIE), which is the local economic and community development agency. As well as six breweries and a cidery, it featured excellent Scottish cheese and the inevitable – but very welcome, as far as I’m concerned! – haggis, and pulled in well over 300 visitors during just a few hours.

As an insight into the Scottish beer scene today, layered on top of reading the likes of Ron Pattinson on the history of Scottish brewing, it was fascinating. For instance, talking to Merlin Sandbach of Aviemore’s Cairngorm Brewery confirmed my understanding that Scottish brewing consolidated in the mid-20th century even more than English brewing did, leaving great swathes of the country with no real ale and little choice of keg beer.

Merlin noted that as one of the elders of Scottish craft brewing – it is 15 years old now – Cairngorm has taken the opportunity to work with some of the newcomers to mutual profit. “We have invested in our own bottling plant and we contract-bottle for others, so they become customers rather than competitors,” he said, adding that “We're working with Highlands & Islands CAMRA too. We have worked to bring back cask, we also do craft keg.”

It is hard work though, according to George Wotherspoon of Drumnadrochit’s Loch Ness Brewery. “Scotland still has a very young craft beer market, [new brewers are] still trying to pitch lager drinkers who will only take a risk on golden beer,” he said. On the plus side, there is plenty of heritage for craft producers of all sorts to build on, and nowhere is that as true as Loch Ness. “One thing we do not have to explain is the brand,” he laughed. “About a million tourists come through our village every year.”

Like most of these breweries, Loch Ness does cask ale for beer festivals, but bottled beer is the mainstay for all of them. That’s partly down to the peculiarities of the local market, with so much of the on-trade being both tied and keg-only, but it’s also because even where there is interest in cask ale, there isn’t always the knowledge and skill to look after it. Plus it needs turnover, because even properly-kept cask beer is good for at most a week once tapped.

Heather & sales manager Alan of Wooha

“We have our own bottling line, and while we do own 24 casks for local beer festivals and the like, everything else we do is bottled and bottle-conditioned,” said Heather MacDonald of Wooha Brewing Company. “I've been to too many pubs with badly-kept cask beer. There's no way I'm putting all that energy into brewing and having it go to waste. I had one publican ask for cask beer and say he knew how to look after it and make it last three weeks!”

“We do a little keg, the rest is all bottles plus some casks for local festivals,” agreed Alex Saramaskos of Keith Brewery. “In my immediate region, everyone is tied to Tennents, Carlsberg, etc. But a bit further away we can find free outlets – we have to go 60-plus miles out. Some delis and cafés are very interested too, for example in Aberlour where the tourist market is.”

The other opportunity for the new brewers, just as it was for Scottish brewers in the 1800s, is to export outside the region, both abroad and to the rest of the UK. Scotland’s bonnie image helps as much here as it does with the seasonal visitors: “The export market is absolutely key,” said Spey Valley Brewery’s Innes MacPherson. “We also have a canning line in mind in three or four years – there's plenty of bottling capacity around.”

Some have targeted exports from the get-go – Wooha already has its own bottling and pallet racking lines, for instance. It even spent last December selling at a Christmas market in France! “Our aim is to export 65% by the end of our second trading year,” said Heather MacDonald. But most are not big enough to do it alone, according to HIE development manager Caroline McLellan, hence events such as the Covent Garden one to raise awareness and build contacts. “London and the South-east are really key markets for our area,” she said. “So now I'm trying to get people working together, collaborating to get scale.”

Of course this is just a snapshot of Scottish brewing today, and most importantly it excludes the major population centres of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Scotland as a whole now has well over 100 breweries according to SIBA, which on a per-person basis is about twice as many as London has. I think it bodes very well for the future though. In particular I hope that as well as seeing more Scots beer south of the border, we will also see the Scottish pub & bar trade open up to beer variety pretty rapidly, just as it has in other similarly-sized European countries.

More on the breweries and beers at the Highlands & Islands festival in my next blog post...

Two things BrewDog's not short of: ambition and excellent beer

With BrewDog's trademark hyperbole it was trailed as “something f**king spectacular”, but to many people the news that the Scottish Brewery has kicked off a fourth round of its Equity for Punks crowd-funding scheme will look more like evolution than revolution.

What's different though is the scale and ambition: the company is this time aiming to raise £25 million, more than five times what it raised in its last investment round – and way more than the £2.5 million that Camden Town Brewery raised in its recent crowd-funding campaign. It may even be the biggest independent crowd-funding scheme in the world.

And by crowd-funding it circumvents the restrictions it fears would come with venture capital or a stockmarket listing. “It's so we can continue making beer that's stupidly expensive to make, so we can continue making beer that's hopped to hell,” said co-founder James Watt at the project's launch in BrewDog Shepherds Bush, to cheers from existing EFP investors.

Some of the investment will go to expand brewing capacity. Work is about to begin on a £3 million brewery that will quadruple production volumes, and BrewDog has identified the site it wants for its US brewery, in Columbus, Ohio.

Then there is the sour beer project. At the moment, all the beers go through Ellon, either the main brewery or the 10hl pilot brewery that replaced the old Fraserburgh site (they kept the latter open for a while after opening Ellon in order to have somewhere to do small-batch beers. It proved too awkward working on two sites though, so it was replaced by a new pilot plant at Ellon). Clearly it's not ideal having sours and non-sours sharing a brewkit, so the answer is a new sour beer facility with its own brewkit.

Also on the wish-list is a distillery. Although the super-strong beers such as End of History and Sink the Bismarck were technically freeze-distilled, I understand they were declared as beers – like Eisbocks, I suppose. A proper distillery will allow them to produce whiskies, gins and the like – there's already other British brewers doing this of course, most notably Adnams. “We could distil Jack Hammer and add botanicals for gin,” said James. “It's easier to get distilling licences now than it used to be, it's still not easy though!”

And new BrewDog bars are on the way, both in the UK (including a new flagship in London's Soho and a mega-bar/restaurant in Glasgow) and abroad. There's almost 30 already, with a dozen or so more on the way. As to the latter, if you look at the company's map, there's bars in northern Europe and in Spain and Italy, but nothing in between, and that will change. Among those due to open later this year are BrewDog Brussels and BrewDog Berlin – the latter has been rumoured locally for some time now, but the story was that they were having difficulty finding a suitable site. They've found a site (Ackerstrasse 28, in Mitte) so it's now a licensing issue.

The company also would like to open a craft beer hotel in Ellon, not least to service the many visitors to the brewery. I'm not convinced James will get his semi-serious wish of having Punk IPA on tap in every bedroom, but you never know.

On the surface, the shares look like a good bet. Brewdog claims to be Britain’s fastest-growing food and drinks brand, opening 27 bars worldwide since 2010, exporting to 55 countries and employing more than 360 staff, which is about 358 more than in 2007. It just announced its sixth consecutive year of record growth, having increased its annual turnover by 64% to over £29.6 million in 2014, compared with £18 million in 2013. It expects turnover to exceed £50 million this year.

However, rather than pay a dividend, it rewards shareholders with discounts and invitations to its AGM – which as far as I can tell from past reports is basically a big party in a brewery. Given that you need to invest a minimum of £95 (that gets you two shares), and that to get the maximum shareholder discount of 10% in bars and 20% online you have to invest quite a bit more, you're going to have to buy a few thousand quid's worth of BrewDog products to get a return on your investment. (Fans don't find that difficult, of course, and some early shareholders have already covered their investment this way.)

The share price also values the company at around 10 times its turnover and 100 times its annual profit, which is pretty expensive by stockmarket norms. (And BrewDog got into trouble with the UK Listing Authority, part of the Financial Conduct Authority, by mistakenly claiming that UKLA had “accredited” the scheme, whereas in fact it had merely approved the investment prospectus.)

But to many Punk investors, all that misses the point. They believe in the company, they wear BrewDog shirts and hats, they cheer at meetings when James and Martin speak, and of course they enjoy its beer – as well they should, because despite (or perhaps because of) all that expansion, it remains excellent.

Pilot brew 008, aka Whisky Sour

At the Equity for Punks IV launch, we were offered what co-founder Martin Dickie called a “deconstructed Whisky Sour cocktail”. He explained that it started as a lactic-soured barley wine, “so it's massively sour, a tiny batch, brewed with a good bit of crystal malt for that marshmallow sweetness.” It was then laced with lemon juice, lime juice, vanilla pods and “a tiny bit of cinnamon” before being aged on toasted oak chips. The murky amber-coloured result was bizarre yet delicious  – sour and tart, but with hints of wine and oaky vanilla.

Also excellent at the launch were BrewDog's seasonal Alice Porter, a version of its Paradox Imperial Stout aged in Compass Box whisky barrels which came out at 15%, and Shipwrecker Circus, a barley wine brewed in collaboration with US brewer Oskar Blues. The regular beers remain good too, such as 5am, Jack Hammer, and of course Punk IPA. You see the latter all over the place now, but that hasn't stopped it being a fine beer.

So where next for BrewDog's beers? More variety for sure – James noted that one advantage of EFP and craft beer's growth in general is that “it's easier to sell new small [product] lines, because the audience is already there.” And he dangled a tantalising hint that the company might even consider a return to the cask ale market that it loudly abandoned several years ago, now that craft cask is fashionable again. As he mused, “When we stopped doing cask, the beer market was very different from today.” Interesting times indeed.

Beer reviews: Deeside Brewery

Deeside Brewery's beers haven't been a common sight here in the south-east of England, although in their home region of Scotland I understand they are getting a fair bit of brand recognition now. That's in part thanks to deals with the likes of Aldi, who seem to be becoming a bit of a retail version of Wetherspoons – sniffed at by the snobs, but capable of both providing an excellent deal for consumers and supporting small brewers (alongside certain of the major regionals of course).

So when Deeside asked if I would like to try their beers I cheerfully accepted, and a little while later a box arrived containing five different bottled beers, all happily intact. They were quite a variety – as you might expect there's a bitter, a pale ale and a stout, but there's also a lager and a California Common, otherwise known as Steam Beer.

I'm going to run through them in alphabetical order, which by chance also happens to be roughly the order in which I preferred them, from least to most!

Craft Lager (4.1% Pale Lager)
Not just a lager but a Craft Lager, whatever that means these days. It poured light amber with a thin head, a little corn and apricot on the nose, herbal bitterness and a faint lemony tang. I'm not a great lager fan and for me this was the weakest of the five, but it was pleasant in a Helles-ish way.

LAF (California Common, 3.9%)
Now this was a curious one. It's a style that has been getting more attention recently – the idea behind both this and Germany's remarkably similar Dampfbier is to use lager yeast at ale temperatures, historically in shallow open fermenters. It poured golden with a fast-settling head and lightly honeyed, faintly herbal aromas. The body was fairly full, with golden fruit, drying bitterness, more herbal notes and touches of honey. It finished bitter-sweet. The herbal notes and dryness are typical of the style, and I think this is one that could easily grow on you.

Macbeth (4.1% Best Bitter)
Now this was one that needed no growing. Brown with a thin head, and aromas of caramel malt and faintly of toasted nuts, it is a tasty example of a classic Best Bitter. Crisp and nicely balanced with a firm dry malty backbone and earthy hops, and hints of spice and bread.

Swift (3.8% American Pale Ale)
More of a Golden Ale really – it's hoppier than the average British Pale Ale, but maltier than some APAs. Whatever, it's a rather nice hybrid! It's amber coloured with a thin head, and light notes of pepper, citrus and toffee on the nose. There's Seville marmalade bitterness and caramel on the palate, and a touch of biscuit in the body.

Talorcan (4.5% Stout)
The ABV is Porter territory rather than Stout, but Talorcan holds up well. It's near-black with a big coarse tan head – it really is quite gassy. (Burp.) it is also pretty complex – there's cocoa and a touch of tobacco on the nose, the body has a dry-creamy texture, with roast malts, cocoa, liquorice, touches of tart plum and old leather, a faint metallic mineral note, and a dry-bitterness. Interesting, and the best of the bunch, once I'd swooshed most of the gas out.

Overall, a decent range. I'll happily choose Macbeth (“the Scottish beer”?) or Talorcan whenever I see them again, and the others are worth trying too, especially as your palate probably differs from mine...

1. Hannoversches Bier Fest

Today (Friday) was the opening day – or late afternoon at least, as it didn't start until 4pm – of the first Hannover Bier Fest. We were promised an international line-up, which is still something of a novelty in a country where many people believe foreign beer isn't worth drinking, served from stalls in the old market square – as with their beer gardens, Germans love doing stuff al fresco.

In hindsight, deciding to drive down on Friday afternoon might have been a mistake, given that it's a holiday weekend here and half the bloody country seemed to be on the road. We hoped to be in the city well before 3 but didn't actually arrive until 4, so missed the official opening, if indeed there was one.

So things were well under way, with many of the tables filling up, by the time I took a tour around to see what was on offer. The answer was, as I had suspected, many of the "usual suspects" – plenty of nationally-distributed German brands, such as Lausitzer Porter, König Ludwig, Erdinger and Krombacher, plus the local Hannover breweries and the big AB-InBev names, including Franziskaner, Löwenbräu, Spaten and of course Becks. Many of these were on what was claimed as the longest bar in Northern Germany, with 40 taps in 30 metres (above). Prices varied from €2.50 to €4 for a 25cl measure - not cheap.

Zischke Dunkel

Where it started to get interesting was rarer names such as Zischke and Allerheim, plus some of the new wave of internationally-inspired young brewers, notably Propeller and FritzAle.

The foreign country with the widest range was Belgium. However, as well as Kwak, Delerium Tremens, Grimbergen and Tongerlo on tap, this also included AB-InBev pap such as Stella and the yucky (well, the boy liked it, but he's 2 and also likes chocolate milk) Hoegaarden Rosé.

Actually, looking at it again there were probably as many British beers present as Belgian, but the organisers broke those up into England, which was mostly Fullers (though Boddies and Newky Brown were also listed) and Scotland, represented by a certain bunch of canines... Actually, given enough time I would have visited the latter tent, badged as Brewdog & Friends, as it was also supposedly serving Harviestoun Ola Dubh, Boruvka Cerna Hora from Czechia, and Sierra Nevada. The latter's Pale Ale is remarkably popular here, by the way: I guess it is a perfect stepping stone for a Pilsner drinker who wants to expand their flavour horizons.

Sadly I didn't have time to check out the African tent properly either, to see if the South African, Tanzanian, Kenyan, Namibian and Ghanaian beers listed in the programme were anything more than generic international lagers. (I did spot a couple of groups necking Castle from the bottle, and that's pretty generic in my book.)

Where we sat was opposite the Chilean bar, though – and just up from the cheese stall, which had an excellent range of potent delicacies. All around were young Germans, again necking from the bottle, but this time it was varied non-lager from a microbrewery in Chile – and yes it was the real thing, not a licensed copy made in Europe like some of the 'African' beer.

The only one dancing!

There was also good live music, with more promised, plus of course a choice of eats, including sausages, grill-kebabs and filled crêpes. It would have been nice to stay longer, but we were already a bit frazzled from the drive down and my designated driver was not looking forward to a repeat experience on the way back. Plus the Chileans were happy to sell me a couple of takeaways for later...

I'm going to try scanning the programme and dropping it in below for anyone who's thinking of going along – the festival is open from noon on Saturday and from 11 on Sunday. The programme includes a reasonably accurate beer list, which the festival website does not.

A grand day to be indoors with craft beer

The location for the second Craft Beer Day – an old limestone factory converted into an arts centre, on the icy and windswept shore of a lake in a distant suburb of Hamburg – seemed unpromising to me. Yet by the end of last Saturday, around 2500 people had made their way there to enjoy a fine variety of good beer, plus good food and music, and of course good company.

Grönwohlder and Zeugenbräu

Around a dozen breweries took part, I think all were northern German except two: Schneider Weisse from Bavaria, and Black Isle from Scotland. (The local newspaper coverage of the latter was amusing – the writer seemed amazed that "the land of whisky" should also produce beer.) The northerners ranged in size from Stralsund's Störtebeker – formerly the Stralsunder Brewery – which is now up to 100,000hl a year, according to brewer Christoph Puttnies, to hobby-brewers turned professional (or semi-pro) such as Grönwohlder, Sommerbecker and Zeugenbräu, the latter producing just 50 litres at a time.

The one thing they almost all shared, apart from not being factory brewers, was an interest in challenging the conservative monoculture of mainstream German beer – the popular assumption that Beer=Pils/Helles, and is more for quaffing than tasting. I was particularly amused when Grönwohlder boss Torsten Schumacher said no to visitors asking for Pils, telling them he was presenting only his Dunkel and Landbier on draught. He told me afterwards that he makes Pils mostly for the supermarkets – he said his other beers are unfiltered and don't have the required shelf-life.

I suspect that people coming to a craft beer festival and looking for Pils shows that the German craft beer movement is sending out mixed messages. On the one hand, there are people pushing the historical, experimental and creative sides of brewing, while on the other are people using the term simply to mean local and non-industrial production of Pils and Weizen. Can the two co-exist? I guess we have to hope so, and that the latter will gradually shift towards the former.

Ratsherrn and Ricklinger, getting busy

There were certainly signs of this happening among the breweries present at Craft Beer Day. Most had a had a variety of flavoursome beers on offer, including an excellent Stout and a rather nice Rauchbier from Finsterwalder, a classic Winterbock from Klüver's, and a tasty Porter from Privatbrauerei Bosch. Ricklinger, who I met at the first Craft Beer Day, was also there with a great range of beers. Most brewers had Dunkels and several had a Porter or Stout as well – I had a chat too with Christoph about the similarities between Baltic Stout and his excellent Störtebeker Stark-bier, which is technically a Doppelbock.

As well as all the good beer, it was wonderful to meet and talk with some really creative German brewers. Perhaps the most experimental is Zeugenbräu's Boris Georgiev – his proud motto is "Guaranteed not brewed according to the Reinheitsgebot", as he creates new twists on ancient North German spiced and fruit beer traditions such as beer with mango or spiced with cardamom.

I also had a great chat with one of the event's organisers, Axel Ohm of Ratsherrn Brauerei. I have to confess I wasn't too impressed with Ratsherrn when it started out – it seemed to be taking a very cautious let's-not-frighten-the-horses approach, with a beer range led by yet another Pils and a decent but not inspired Pale Ale. More recently though it has struck out a bit, with Iggy Hop, which is a single-hopped Weizen using American Simcoe hops, and now a crisp Zwickel too. Axel confirmed that there has indeed been a policy shift, with the realisation that there really is a market for something a bit different. We also talked about how different it is compared to the south of Germany, where the dead hand of tradition is so cold and heavy that breweries are almost scared to innovate.

Readying the bierstacheln

 One final highlight was discovering another tradition on the Schneider Weiss bar: mulled weissbier – or more accurately, mulled weizenbock. Beer sommelier Timo Hinkel took a special red-hot poker called a bierstacheln, or beer-sting, and plunged it into a glass of Unser Aventinus; instantly the beer began to foam as heat shock threw CO2 out of the liquid, along with an aroma of toasted caramel.

and mulling the beer

The resulting drink was fascinating – perhaps the oddest part was feeling the still-cold upper foam on my lip while drinking warm beer from below, with flavours of toasted bread and burnt caramel. I know ale was mulled with red-hot pokers in medieval England too, but sad to say I've never tasted that version, so this was a new experience – and one I'd like to thank Timo and the Schneider team for.

Hamburg Craft Beer Day #2

I'm looking forward to this Saturday - it's the second Hamburg-area Craft Beer Day, taking place at Kulturwerk-am-See, a cultural centre in the suburb of Norderstedt.

The event's website isn't being updated, but the Facebook page is. The participant list currently appears to be:

Ratsherrn Brauerei
Ricklinger Landbrauerei
Finsterwalder Brauhaus
Grönwohlder Hausbrauerei
Propeller Bier
Sommerbecker Dachs-Bier
Klüver’s Brauhaus
Störtebeker Braumanufaktur
Blockbräu
Black Isle Brewery (yes, the Scottish one)
and some members of the HobbyBrau Hamburg home-brewers group.

Peat and honey: Old Worthy Scottish Pale Ale

It's not often that I get a bottle of ale in the post – and while I'm here in Germany it will probably be even less common! So it was a very pleasant surprise to receive a carefully-wrapped bottle of Old Worthy Scottish Pale Ale just before we left London.

It's all part of a promotion for a new brewer on the Isle of Skye, although until it gets its own kit set up, Old Worthy Brewing Co. is contract brewing on the 20-barrel plant at the Isle of Skye Brewery. The bottle was a gift from Nick Ravenhall, who set up Old Worthy to create a distinctively Scottish beer, made with a portion of peated malt as whisky is – but not trying to go down the barrel-aged route. It's also the only beer Old Worthy will offer, at least for now.

Scotland has a great brewing heritage – back in Victorian times it was a big source of Pale Ale for the India trade (IPA, in other words – which also makes this my IPAday post!), albeit mostly from Alloa on the east coast, not Skye on the west. And whisky starts its life as ale, although it is not hopped. Old Worthy, which claims to take its name from the “old worthies” who worked at the distilleries, adds both hops and a touch of honey.

The beer pours a medium-gold colour with a big foamy white head, and yes, there's the honey and a little smoke on the nose, along with a touch of biscuity malt – Maris Otter is the variety used – and a faint note of dry hay from the hops. In the mouth, there's more malt and honey, juicy to begin with but rapidly turning drier, the hops then come through more strongly in a dry and faintly spicy aftertaste. The smokiness comes through again at the finish, but it's quite restrained, and all in all Nick's achieved a very nice balance here. My only reservation is that my sample was a bit gassier than I like.

Nick's also been promoting Old Worthy to craft beer fans in the Nordic countries – in fact by the look of it it's gone on general sale there about a week earlier than its UK retail launch, which is due next week. (I'm hoping that means it'll be at the Great British Beer Festival, like me...)