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 Devil is in the barrels

After an evening in the Bottleshop Bermondsey with the folks from Duvel Moortgat UK, who were launching the latest Duvel Barrel-Aged edition, I’m still in two minds about barrel-aged beers. Are they better as they come from the barrel, or should you taste them carefully and blend back for a ‘beerier’ flavour profile?

This is the third year Moortgat has run this project. The first batch used 100 Kentucky Bourbon barrels, said Duvel UK marketing manager Natalya Watson, while  the second had 190 and the latest was put into 351 barrels last year. She wasn’t sure if they were new barrels every year, but from reading Duvel's website I think they re-use them after re-impregnating with fresh Bourbon.

They now have barrels from six different distilleries, including Four Roses, Buffalo Trace, Heaven Hill, Jack Daniels and so on. This highlights the challenge of acquiring used barrels in bulk, which is why I reckon they're being re-used. The aged beer was all blended together for consistency before bottling, Natalya said. Bourbon barrels are 200 litres or 53 US gallons, and each yielded enough to fill around 240 75cl bottles – I suppose the 10% disparity must be leakage and other ‘process losses’.

The result is an amber-brown beer that almost glows in the glass and has aromas of sweet vanilla Bourbon, quite unlike the yellow of Duvel itself, with its lemony spicy-hoppy nose. The barrel-aged version is rather sweeter too and warming, with more vanilla and an unexpected faint salty note in the finish.

Draught Duvel

It’s a lovely beer, and people all around were enjoying it for itself, but for me it was a little too barrel-heavy – too much like drinking Bourbon. So since we had both on hand, I tried mixing some Duvel Barrel-Aged with bottled Duvel in about a 50/50 blend. The result was a little lighter, drier and more bitter, livelier (the barrel version had only a very light sparkle) and yes, beerier. I’m not sure what this proves, however, apart from the fact that tastes and preferences vary!

Natalya also introduced those of us who’d not met it before to Duvel on Tap. This is not a draught version of bottle-conditioned Duvel, but the same beer put into kegs and keg-conditioned (yes – if it weren’t for the carbonation that would make it real ale). She explained that the distinction is important because Belgian brewers typically adjust their recipes for kegging, in particular lowering the carbonation to avoid fobbing (excessive froth).

Duvel’s brewers didn’t want to do that, so instead they came up with a new dispense system for their branded fonts. The problem was that it’s a remarkably gassy beer – its CO₂ content is twice that of standard keg beers and three times that of many craft beers. The solution involved two metres of 3mm piping (far narrower than usual, and non-reusable as it’s too fine to clean) to ‘break’ the pressure in the keg, plus anti-fobbing training for the barstaff.

The initial problem for me was that it was too heavily chilled. Duvel recommends 5C for the bottled version, which I think is already too cold, but I reckon the tap beer was even colder (annoyingly, I’d no thermometer with me to check). Still, too cold is better than too warm, and once the chill had lifted the beer opened up considerably while remaining very drinkable.

Mind you, despite being the same 8.5% brew as the bottled Duvel (and Duvel Tripel Hop) we’d been drinking earlier, it didn’t seem as complex. The hops were still there, but not the lemony-spicy note – I wonder why, if they’d got everything else pretty much the same? Still, a lovely beer and one to watch out for.

My thanks once more to Duvel for supplying free beers and arranging the tasting, and my apologies again for how long it's been since I last posted here. Life keeps getting in the way...

What is bottle-conditioning – and why do we do it?

“Bottle-conditioned beers are not some sort of poor relation to cask, they exist in their own right,” declared John Keeling, former head brewer at Fuller’s, now retired. “A bottle-conditioned beer can never ever be the same as a cask beer, the reason is it will probably be a lot older.” He explained that while most cask beer has a shelf life measured in weeks, “most bottle-conditioned beers haven’t even left the warehouse at 6 weeks old!

“So it will have changed flavour, and secondly it will have more fizz in it. Bottle-conditioned beers are the supreme example of packaging beers. You do get some ingress of oxygen but the yeast mops it up – we opened a bottle of 1979 Vintage, for example, and the yeast was still viable.”

Introducing the panel

He was speaking at an event hosted by Marston's a few weeks ago, when a group of brewers and beer writers got together to discuss the past, present and future of bottle conditioning. We’d actually started by talking about the widespread assumption – fuelled in part by CAMRA’s ‘Real Ale in a Bottle’ (RAIB) validation scheme – that bottle-conditioned (BC) beers and real ales are the same thing.

Cask as a precursor

Was John Keeling right, though? Certainly there are clear links between real ale and bottle-conditioning. For a start, if you produce cask beer then it’s easier to do a BC version – you just bottle the cask version, said Harviestoun’s Stuart Cail. The advantage is that if you bottle it right – he uses big hand-bottled flip-tops – you can make it ‘premium’ and add a bit of theatre in a market where as he put it, “cask is not esteemed.”

Aged & conditioned Ola Dubh

Where it gets more interesting is when you use bottle-conditioning as just one step in a more complex process, he added. By way of example he offered a BC version of Harviestoun’s already highly regarded Ola Dubh (Black Oil) which had been aged in Highland Park whisky casks then krausened – dosed with fresh wort – to return it to life. The result was stunningly good, rich and heavy with a whisky tint, treacle-sweet yet burnt-dry, fruity and complex.

Along with John Keeling’s reminder that “in BC you get negative and positive reactions. They go in waves” as different microorganisms get to work on different components in the beer, it made me think: They’re both right, aren’t they? Yes, you can readily bottle beer brewed for cask, but that doesn’t automatically mean it ends up as ‘cask in a bottle’, because what happens to it next can be very different.

It certainly can be a route to ‘bottled cask’, as Marston’s brewer Pat McGinty explained. Marston’s wanted bottled Pedigree to taste more like the cask version, so its brewers had to do a lot of trials to work out the best way to achieve that. “We got way more of a fruited flavour when we put yeast in,” Pat said. “After a couple of weeks it had more carbonation, and was more recognisable as the cask beer.”

Something a lot of brewers (including Fuller’s) do is to filter and then reseed with fresh yeast for the bottle – preferably a different ‘sticky’ one that will settle to the bottom. Marston’s didn’t need to do that though, thanks to its yeast and the celebrated Burton Union fermentation system. “The Burton system traps the yeast and we can crop it nice and fresh,” Pat said. “It’s great for brewing but also perfect for bottle conditioning – most yeasts flocculate at the top but Marston’s yeast hasn’t made up its mind!”

He added, “Two weeks after we produce the beer, we bottle and cellar it. We put a 12-month shelf life on it, you can consume it beyond that but really its flavour will develop beyond [the intention of] the brand.”

Going through the four seasons

There we have it again – give it time and it’ll go further, even more so if you give it a bit of variation in storage, added John Keeling: “They would not have had temp control in the past. To me going through the four seasons makes sense, why not let it go the way it wants to go – and the way the outside temperature wants it to go?”

John told a tale about the development of Fuller’s Vintage Ale to illustrate the changes that time can bring. “When we developed 1845 [in 1995] we put one year shelf-life on it, but when we tasted it at one year old it was even better, so we had the idea of doing a vintage like you would with wine. Because the first Vintage Ale was 8.5%, we decided to put three years on it, we couldn’t put longer because the labelling regulations said you couldn’t. Now you can, and we put 10 years on!”

To illustrate, he offered tastings of the 2017 and 2010 Vintages. The former was rich and warming, fruit and lightly peppery, while the latter had picked up light oxidation notes – iodine, a little dry dustiness, a faint woody note – reminiscent of an old Madeira wine, in fact.

Not everyone filters and re-seeds the beer with fresh yeast, mind you. St Austell head brewer Roger Ryman told how they used to do that, dating back to his strong witbier Clouded White winning the Tesco Beer Challenge. “It was unfiltered in the competition – we had to ask if market was ready for that, and we decided to filter then reseed,” he admitted.

When the St Austell brewers subsequently tasted aged beers, they discovered that while others were showing signs of age, Clouded White was not. So then they did a BC Admirals Ale and two years later they added Proper Job to the BC list.

“It took three-or four years to find traction in the market, we were worried about its reception in the supermarket,” Roger continued. “Every brewer gets those unhappy Monday morning emails, ‘I bought your beer and found bits in it,’ but for every one of those there’s thousands of other happy drinkers.”

The challenge, he added, is once your beer is selling well and you’re on double-shifts at the brewery, how do you find time to filter and re-seed it? So Roger experimented with unfiltered beer instead, and luckily the yeast in Proper Job settled really tightly, yielding an excellent result. So after a visit to Marston’s to see what they were doing, he designed a set-up that blends yeast and beer in controlled amounts as it goes to the bottle-filler.

“We put quite a bit of automation around it, I thought it was unique,” he laughed. “Then I visited Westmalle, I’m looking at the bottling line – and there’s their yeast tank the same as I'd designed! So we brewers find the same solutions to the same problems.”

Ageing in cask – and in cans

But to come back to the original question, is bottle-conditioned beer definitively different from real ale? Well, yes – if you take today’s real ales as your examples. But historically, probably not because in the past any vessel could potentially be used to age beer. In the old days, stock ales were aged in wooden casks, often in the brewery yard. While it’s rare to age cask beers these days, it is sometimes done, and I’d argue the difference is as much to do with expectations as anything else – we expect cask ale to be fresh, not aged.

Moor's award-winning OFW is now can-conditioned

And cask-ageing is making a comeback – if, like some commentators, you regard cans as tiny kegs or casks… One of the pioneers here is Justin Hawke of Moor Beer, whose canned beers were the first to be accredited by CAMRA as real ale – that is, they contain live yeast, and the beer continues to develop (condition or referment) in the can.

“We had to work with the manufacturer on can-conditioning,” he said. “It was a bit crazy! We measure the sugar and yeast content in our lab, then we literally package the same beer into can and keg.” Justin added that refermentation makes the beer more stable, such that “unfined casks will keep for ages.”

He continued, “We go through a full refermentation, we crash-cool the beer pretty much to freezing to settle it out, then we warm it up in special temperature-controlled areas to get that refermentation to happen. It’s at least three weeks, some beers are longer – it’s a massive cost because we’re sitting on beer for an extended period, but it gives that evolution of flavour. My friends who brew tank beer will get the perfectly-fresh hop aroma that we will not get – our yeast interacts with the hops and changes the flavour. It gives a much more rounded mouth, you lose a little flavour but gain depth and shelf life and stability.”

The numbers game

The aftermath....

One thing is for sure – whatever the motivation, the popularity of bottle-conditioned beer shows no sign of abating. Jeff Evans, formerly editor of CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide, and more recently of the Good Bottled Beer Guide, pointed out that “at the founding of CAMRA, only five bottle-conditioned beers were known to be in regular production,” a decline which he argued had been driven in part by better bottling technology which made it possible to give people the clearer beer they wanted.

It can hardly be a coincidence that the number started growing again as CAMRA first introduced a BC category into its competitions, and then began listing BC beers in the Good Beer Guide. By the time the listing was spun off as the Good Bottled Beer Guide the number was well over 100, and by the most recent edition it was a shade under 2000.

Producing a new edition would be a daunting prospect. It would need to consider over 3000 from the UK, said Jeff, plus more from abroad, where some brewers have long preferred the softer texture of unfiltered live beer.

Would it be worthwhile – do people still seek it BC beer out, I wonder? Or it is a case of it’s expected or assumed that some will be BC? Let us know in the comments below… Happy New Year!

Moor Beer opens up on the Bermondsey Beer Mile

Moor Beer's new Vaults and Taproom in London's Bermondsey is now officially open – it's actually been open for several weeks, but perhaps that was unofficial opening! Anyway, Friday last week saw various writers and other people from the beer business come to meet brewer Justin Hawke, sample his beers, take a look around his new venture, and if they chose, stay on for Arrogant Sour London, a festival of yes, sour beers from Italy that Justin was hosting that evening.

Located in the inevitable railway arch, the Moor Taproom is just a few doors (or arches) up from Brew by Numbers and The Kernel, and is on the other side of the viaduct from Anspach & Hobday, UBrew and BottleShop – yes, it's the latest addition to the Bermondsey Beer Mile. Indeed, one of the first people I saw on arriving was Kernel owner Evin O'Riordain, chatting with Draft House head of beer Alex Stevenson while making a neighbourly visit.

Justin (centre) opens Arrogant Sour London

As the name implies, this isn't going to house a brewery – that's staying put in Bristol, where Moor's original taproom is. But as well as a bar, it is also Moor's distribution hub for the London area and its new barrel-store – Justin explained that they've totally run out of space in Bristol, so it makes sense to move his barrel-ageing work to London, even at four times the rent.

Moor is committed to both cask and keg beers, and both feature on the bar here – six casks on a gravity stillage visible behind the bar, plus a dozen keg taps. On our visit the cask ales ranged from 3.8% Revival pale ale, to the stunningly good 7.3% Luke Sloewalker, which is Moor's Old Freddy Walker* strong ale, aged on Justin's hand-picked local sloes. The kegs featured several more Star Wars-inspired names, including Return of the Empire IPA, Dark Alliance stout, and a wonderful 8% Double New England IPA called Rey of Light.

It all backs up what I discovered a few weeks ago – that the Bermondsey beer scene is undergoing growth and a welcome revival. Hopefully, this time it won't get swamped by stag parties and inadequate toilet facilities!

*This multi-award-winning ale and the slogan "Drink Moor Beer" are all that's left of the brewery's former incarnation on a farm in North Somerset. 

All barrel and no trousers?

Barrel-ageing is all the rage – especially in whisky or whiskey barrels, but also wine, rum, tequila and who knows what else. Sometimes though the results can be rather disappointing – the flavour and aroma from the barrel doesn’t so much complement the beer as overpower it. I mean, if I want a drink that tastes and smells of whisky, I’ll have a Single Malt…

But it doesn’t have to be like that, as I was reminded a couple of weeks ago at Imbibe, the trade show for the drinks trade, when I met Marty Kotis, the boss of Pig Pounder Brewery, one of three brewers who’d banded together under the banner of the North Carolina Craft Brewers Guild to take a stand at the show. He was pouring samples not only of his Boar Brown 5% brown ale, but also a tasty barrel-aged version of the same beer which was smooth and vanilla-accented – and had the same 5% ABV, even though it had spent time in Bourbon barrels.

“We blend the barrel-aged beer with fresh beer,” Marty explained, adding that getting the taste right and consistent is extremely important – the brewery is actually a spin-off from his restaurant chain, so he and his team are all somewhat flavour-obsessed!

It reminded me of a time around a decade ago, when I was in the Hock Cellar at Fuller’s Griffin Brewery for a taste training session organised by CAMRA and hosted by brewing director John Keeling and then-head brewer Derek Prentice. Towards the end of the evening, John brought out a pet project of his as a surprise – a sample of some 8.5% Golden Pride that he’d been ageing for months in a Glenmorangie cask.

It was intriguing, but also somewhat harsh and woody – and also very strong, around 12%. John said they were still trying to work out what to do with it and the subject of blending-back came up. Fortunately we also still had a jug of ESB on the table, so with a little bravado I topped up my half-glass of barrel beer with ESB to see how that might work – and the answer was “very nicely indeed!” The fresh beer filled out the body and mellowed the harsher notes, while still leaving the warming spirituousness in place.

When Fuller’s subsequently released John’s various Brewer’s Reserve vintages in bottle, they did the same. It wasn’t just for the flavour, though – John explained that there was also a crime called Grogging, which dates back to the 1800s. (You can read his longer version of the story here.) Not only can there still be a couple of pints of whisky left in an ‘empty’ cask, but some alcohol also seeps into the wood. So unscrupulous types would buy old barrels and slosh water into them to get out and sell the last of the alcohol – without paying tax, hence the offence, and the need to get the original ABV back in order to mollify the Revenue.

So, blending-back. Why don’t more brewers do this? Perhaps they do, but they prefer not to talk about it. Anyone seen it done elsewhere?

Bourbon County Stout's low-volume UK debut

‘Tis the season for publicity stunts, or so it would seem. Tomorrow at 11am, the UK’s entire allocation of Goose Island’s Bourbon County Brand Stout – just 100 bottles – goes on sale at Clapton Craft’s shop in London’s Kentish Town.

Goose's 'innovation brewer' Tim Faith

In the US this beer is legendary for attracting long queues of eager buyers when it goes on sale on their 'Black Friday', and Goose Island is hoping to create a similar effect here. That’s why it hosted a launch party last night in trendy Shoreditch, with brewer and barrel-ageing expert Tim Faith visiting from Chicago. He treated beer writers and other guests to samples both of last year’s and this year’s BCBS – the latter on tap, with only a single solitary bottle present, mainly for photographic purposes.

The irony is that while the bottles will be priced at £20 each, the total value of the UK’s allocation must be many times less than the cost of the launch party. To be fair though it was also the UK launch for Goose’s Winter Ale, plus it’s all part of a long-running charm offensive, as Goose owner AB-InBev seeks to build up its craft beer sales here via Pioneer Brewing Co, its UK distribution subsidiary.

Tim first ran us through the history of BCBS, originally the celebratory 1000th brew at the original Goose Island brewpub. It was the first beer to be matured in Bourbon barrels with the intention of picking up the remaining whiskey flavours – the barrel-aging also adds a couple of % to the 11.5%-12% it’s brewed to. The barrels dramatically change the beer’s flavour, as it smoothes out the bitterness and picks up notes from the wood sugars, the charred lining and of course the Bourbon, and the result has been hugely popular – Tim said they brew it throughout the year now to meet demand, blending each year’s older and younger barrels for bottling at an average age of 10 or 11 months.

Just four of 5000-6000 in total

It’s not all been plain sailing though. For one thing, I heard that while there were still queues, it didn’t immediately sell out last year and was still available a while later, perhaps because of that increased production.

More importantly though, several 2015 batches of BCBS suffered from infection (or more accurately ‘contamination’, said Tim, who is a microbiology graduate) with an alcohol-tolerant lactobacillus bug. This seems to have got in while the barrels – they use thousands a year, mostly from Kentucky’s Heaven Hill – were in storage prior to filling with stout. The problem was that this bug is a late starter, so the beer tasted fine before bottling, and the off-tastes didn’t appear until later.

(This kind of thing is not unknown – the first brew of Harvey’s Imperial Stout in 1999 also had an unexpected late-starting secondary fermentation, from a wild yeast. It cut in around nine months after bottling, when its extra CO2 pushed out the cork, although thankfully it didn’t add off-flavours.)

Goose’s response was two-fold: refunds to buyers, and a decision to stabilise the 2016 edition before bottling by pasteurising it. The latter attracted a lot of criticism, with some saying they wouldn’t buy pasteurised beer.

For now, the 2016 stout is gorgeous – it’s rich and thick, with oak and umami notes, a light bitterness and warming alcohol to counter the sweetness. What’s unclear is how – or indeed if at all – it will age in the bottle.

As an example of the latter process, a friend who’d also tried the 2015 back in February confirmed that it’s changed significantly since then. The 2015 version we tried was not as thick as the 2016 but was perhaps a bit more complex – after a year in bottle it has a startlingly strong coconut aroma, plus I detected notes of vanilla, cocoa, old leather and dried fig.

I can’t help wondering if the 2016 is really worth £20 a bottle tomorrow, especially when it is only $10 or so in the US and when there are other excellent Imperial Stouts around now. On the plus side, there’s not many others at 14%, BCBS is something of a legend, and there should be a bit of a fuss made for those willing to queue up in advance at Clapton Craft tomorrow – I can't say what, but in the US you might get coffee and doughnuts for example, maybe with brewery swag too for the first few in the line.

One thing I do know is that Tim's due to be there tomorrow morning, so if you want to meet the brewer before he flies home, this could be your chance!

Goose Island’s Bretty push into the UK

There is a certain irony in an AB-Inbev brewery recreating a 19th century beer that demonstrates how wildly inaccurate craft IPAs are from a historical perspective. But that is what Goose Island’s one-off Brewery Yard Stock Pale Ale does – although if you look at it another way, it is also bang in line with modern craft beer fashions, being both barrel-aged and secondary-fermented with Brettanomyces. Irony indeed!

Ron & Mike show off Brewery Yard

Brewery Yard came about after Goose Island's brewing innovation manager Mike Siegel contacted beer historian Ron Pattinson, inviting him to help recreate a historical recipe. Speaking at the beer’s UK launch at the Rake, in London’s Borough Market, Mike said that with Goose Island being inspired by the English brewing tradition he wanted an English recipe, and to give Ron something to work with, “I came up with two things – I wanted it aged in wood barrels and I wanted to use Brettanomyces. He came up almost immediately with Stock Pale Ale.”

“I’d tried to persuade loads of people before to brew this beer, Mike was the first gullible idiot to take me up,” Ron joked. He added that in the 19th century, “Pale Ale [and by extension IPA] wasn’t meant to be drunk young, it was meant to be aged for a long time. For example, bottled Bass was probably at least 12 months old before anyone got to drink it. It is a very different concept, the complete opposite of how we do IPA today – people liked the aged flavour and were willing to pay extra for it.”

Unlike Porter, which was aged in giant vats, Pale Ale was aged in barrels. In some cases they were just left stacked for months in the brewery yard, hence the new brew’s name. Stock, which meant aged, was the opposite of mild – Ron pointed out that Mild was not originally a style of beer, it simply defined how the beer was treated before sale: “Mild and Stock would have been the same recipe, except Stock had 50% more hops and a secondary Brett fermentation.”

Based on an 1877 Trumans recipe for a Pale Ale from Burton-on-Trent, Brewery Yard seems about as authentic as you can get using modern ingredients. Mike used floor-malted English barley, plus English Goldings and US Cluster hops – American hops were widely used in Britain in the 1800s, but for bittering and their preservative value, not for their flavour which was generally disliked. In the absence of the neutral Memel oak barrels that 19th century brewers preferred, he took Bourbon barrels that had already been used for beer twice, so most of the whiskey character was gone, and steamed them thoroughly.

“It was a year in the planning, it spent 11 months in barrel and was then bottled in June,” Mike said. “Two and a half years is a long time to work on a beer project, I had to keep telling Ron to be patient!”

So was it worth the wait? From the drinker’s perspective, very definitely so. The first thing you notice about the beer, apart from its golden-brown colour and initially fluffy head, is a characteristic Bretty aroma – tart and almost fruity, reminiscent perhaps of ascorbic acid. Then there is a potent dry bitterness with herbal notes to it, and a tart woody winey palate. It really is fascinating – and worryingly drinkable for something that weighs in at 8.4% ABV!

Ron reckoned it was also quite possibly the most expensive beer Goose Island has ever done – its Chicago brewery is a 50-barrel (almost 6000 litre) plant, but by the time all the losses in the process were accounted for, there only about 20 barrels left. Of that, just over 2000 litres made it into 75cl bottles, and 600 of those have come to the UK (where they’re priced at £20 each).

As well as losses in the barrel-ageing, a huge amount was lost during hopping – Brewery Yard used whole-leaf hops, which the brewkit was not designed for, and a lot of wort was left in the wet hops afterwards.

Mike talks beer with a happy drinker

“We’re really happy with how the beer turned out, it is truly the definition of unique,” Mike said. It’s likely to stay that way too – when I asked if he’d consider re-brewing it, he implied it was unlikely: “I’d probably look for an even more difficult project!”

It’s great that Goose Island is still able to do projects like this, even if, as one of the other guests at the launch (brewer and Brett expert Ed) pointed out they’ve perhaps played it a bit safe by using Brettanomyces Claussenii, which is one of the subtler Brett strains. And of course one reason they have the capacity for projects like this and their sours at Fulton is that their main brands such as Goose IPA, 312 Urban Wheat and Honkers are now produced at massive east and west-coast breweries belonging to their parent company, AB-Inbev.

The financial weight of AB-Inbev is also behind Goose Island’s push into the UK. The Brewery Yard launch was part of this, but so is the UK edition of its Block Party series tomorrow in Shoreditch – basically an afternoon of live music, with bars and food stalls – and so too was the appointment last year of a European brand ambassador, Josh Smith, who was formerly at the White Horse on Parsons Green.

“We don’t want to send beer over with no support – the storytelling and training is a big part of it,” Josh explained. He added that, unlike US brewers who’re brewing in Europe, Goose will continue to bring its beers in from the US. He explained it’s all about the logistics – an area where AB-Inbev has been a big help – with the beer being shipped and stored chilled all the way.

As well as introducing Four Star Pils and Green Line Pale Ale to the UK this month, Josh is keen to get 312 Urban Wheat as a regular on draught – he sees it as a good crossover or gateway beer for lager drinkers – and on bringing Goose’s seasonals in too. In the battle for the soul of craft beer, it really is 'interesting times'!

My Golden Pints for 2015

Just the first half of these for now, I'm afraid - I will try to catch up with the rest soon, although I know I'm already a little late! What with family visiting over the winterval, plus quite a few work deadlines impending, I've not had a lot of time for blogging, I'm afraid.

    Best UK Cask Beer
Oakham Hawse Buckler – it's been around a few years but I only caught up with it in 2015, when I had it a couple of times in different places, and it was excellent both times. It's a very hoppy (as you'd expect from Oakham), roasty-winey dark ale, verging on a Black IPA or Export Stout.

    Best UK Keg Beer
The Kernel India Pale Ale Amarillo – there's so many Kernel IPA variants, but this one was the best so far. The thing I like about these IPAs in general is they're pretty full-bodied, and in this one the hops added aromas of pineapple and orange, followed by more fruit on the palate along with hints of wintergreen and rosemary. Delicious.

My runner-up – and it was very close – was Brew By Numbers 100/4 Baltic Porter – Sherry. Again, this was part of a set, where the same beer was aged in five different barrels, and having tried all five this emerged as my favourite, perhaps because it was just barrelly enough without being like actually drinking sherry – just touches of dried fruit, dusty caramel and a light herbiness to enhance the lovely flavours of the base beer.

    Best UK Bottled Beer
Twickenham Hill 60 – blended in the best Belgian traditions by combining soured dark ale that had been so long in the barrel that it was very hard to drink straight with fresh strong Mild to lighten it and give it zing. The result was complex and refreshingly drinkable for a sour, with hints of sour cherry, burnt treacle and an earthy bitterness.

    Best UK Canned Beer
Beavertown Holy Cowbell India Stout – that rich piney hop nose with roasty black treacle and a touch of smoke just blew me away.

    Best Overseas Draught
Evil Twin I Love You With My Stout – another midnight-black beer, its heavy body, with notes of coffee, liquorice, pine and grapefruit, was almost too much but thankfully managed to stay on the “Wow, utterly amazing!” side of the border.

My runner-up was an Italian farmhouse ale – Toccalmatto's Tabula Rasa. It's a complex and multilayered brew, with aromas of lemon, white grapes and a little floral perfume and horsey funk.

    Best Overseas Bottled Beer
3 Fonteinen Oude Geuze – back in the summer, I toured the Lambic region immediately after the European Beer Bloggers Conference in Brussels, and amazing beer this was one of the real stand-outs of the trip. Lemon-sour and with faint strawberry notes, its initial sweetness immediately turns to a complex dry and lightly earthy bitter-sourness.

Runner-up was Ratsherrn's Wintertiet. Brewed on the Hamburg brewery's micro kit as one of last winter's specials, it masterfully showed how to create a complex and flavoursome winter ale without chucking the whole damn spice cabinet in there. Rich and drily soupy, it offered notes of treacle toffee, bitter orange, liquorice, christmas cake, dried figs and a light earthy bitterness. Delicious.

    Best Overseas Canned Beer
St Feuillien Saison – canned for the US market, I think, it combines the peppery hoppiness of many farmhouse ales with toast, bread, spice and fruit notes that almost remind one of an Ur-weisse. Well within the Saison boundaries, yet with a very tasty twist.

    Best collaboration brew
Adnams / Magic Rock The Herbalist – another Saison, again with those characteristic spicy, earthy and hoppy notes, but this time also with hints of tangerine and pineapple on a fruity, dry-sweet and herby-bitter body. Oh, and it was properly cask-conditioned, like the original Saisons would have been. 

Guinness looks to the past for new Porters

After many months of planning, here we have it: two new Porters from Guinness, both of them “inspired by” historical recipes and aimed, if not at the craft beer bars, then certainly at those pubs and bars who like to carry a varied beer menu. They come from Diageo's relatively new The Brewers Project, set up to enable its brewers “to explore new recipes, reinterpret old ones and collaborate freely”.

The first, Guinness Dublin Porter, is a 3.8% dark beer based on a recipe from 1796, which will surprise those who believed that historical beers tended to be stronger than this. "3.5% to 3.8% would have been typical of working men's Porters at that time," explained Guinness archivist Evelyn Roche, adding that Porter strengths started rising from this sub-4% region coming into the 1800s.

This version was described by its brewer Peter Simpson as “more accessible than Guinness Draught,” and will be available in keg and bottle. It's all-grain, with small amounts of both roasted and raw barley, and hopped with English Goldings. “One of the biggest challenges was interpreting the quantities and units used, and then it was the type of hops used,” Peter explained. “It got to the point where we settled on Goldings which would have been one of the most common types at the time.”

I found it a pleasant Porter, if a bit watery. There's a touch of coffee on the nose, then caramel, hints of roast chocolate and a light bitterness. It's not so different from the many other Porters at around this strength, including several supermarket own-brands, but of course they don't have the Guinness name on the label.

Available in bottles only and at 6%, Guinness West Indies Porter is based on a recipe from 1801 which Evelyn said was the precursor to Foreign Extra Stout. It's dry-bitter with notes of coffee, liquorice, a touch of old leather, and maybe a hint of nuttiness. By comparison, FES is drier, a little more bitter and has sourish notes – the latter deliberately concocted these days, in a special bacterial souring plant within St James's Gate.

Sadly for the Guinness folk, who had planned a surprise launch at a secret venue in hipster Spitalfields, their embargo was broken by Morrisons which had the new beers on its shelves the day before the official launch. I suspect that Words Have Been Had....

Peter Simpson and the new/old Porters

The Porters are the first commercial fruit from the pilot brewery at St James's Gate. This has both an automated one hectolitre (100 litre) brewkit and a manual 10hl plant similar to what you'd find in many microbreweries. Peter explained that the pilot brewery is used for several things besides developing new beers – brewing the winners of the Diageo annual staff beer-creation competition, testing ingredients for flavour stability, trying out new processes and so on.

However, he stressed that they are not specials or one-offs – they are now permanent members of the Guinness range, and have graduated to being brewed several hundred hectolitres at a time in the vast and brand-new Brewhouse no.4 at St James's Gate.

And he says Diageo is not jumping on the craft bandwagon – rather, this is an attempt to widen the Guinness range in a market that increasingly seeks variety. As he explained, “I think craft has enabled us, in that it really is a revolution in taste, and we're bringing Guinness back to what it used to be.”

So what of the beers? Sure, the tickers and completists will hunt them down, if they haven't been to Morrisons already. For the rest of us, they add a more modern take on Porter – and yes, Guinness is hoping to win another foot of supermarket shelf space in the three-for-a-fiver 'premium beers' rack, where it has only been represented by FES. They are well made and presented – though not bottle-conditioned – and certainly worth trying for anyone who likes dark beers (as I do).

As a beer aficionado though, I can't help sensing a missed opportunity. It's fascinating – Guinness is full of wonderfully skilled brewers who are passionate about what they do. They have first-rate gear to work with and massive resources in terms of sourcing ingredients and so on, yet the finished product almost always has an ever so slight feel of dumbed-downness about it. It's as if it gets filtered through the Diageo bureaucracy, and in the process made just a bit safer, just a bit more average.

The one exception I can think of is the 8% ABV Guinness Special Export, which as I understand it is produced not to the specifications of Diageo but to those of its Belgian distributor John Martin. There might be a clue there.

Still, as one of the Guinness staff said, these are the first two of what they hope will be a bigger range. Perhaps if they see success in the market the Diageo high-ups will relax a little and trust their brewers, allowing future brews to push the envelope a bit more. It is a challenge though – Peter mentioned that his team's been experimenting with barrel-ageing beers, including a Special Export aged in a rum barrel that came out at 13% and was “absolutely delicious!” The problem of course is translating such things to the sort of volumes that Guinness needs to operate at. 

A tasty slice of tart: Hardknott's Æther Blæc 2011 Sigma

Inspired among others by Belgian classics such as Lambic, Gueuze and Rodenbach, and more recently by experimental American craft brewers, there is a barrel-aged and sour beer revolution underway. It won't be on everyone's radar - or to everyone's taste - but if you enjoy drinking something a bit different then it is definitely something to look into.

This example, from Cumbria's Hardknott Brewery which has been building itself an outstanding reputation for powerful, flavoursome ales, came to me as a very kind leaving gift when we were moving from London to northern Germany last month. Now we're mostly unpacked, I thought it was about time for something a bit different from the Pilsener, Weizen and Dunkel that pretty much sums up the local beer culture here.

Listed as a 7.8% Imperial Stout, this particular batch of Æther Blæc spent six months maturing in a 1982 Inchgower malt whisky cask - I had bottle 520 of 540. The result is fascinating - a black beer with a coffee crema that's not sour as such, but it has a light fruity tartness on both the nose and in the mouth. Also on the nose are vanilla, peach, treacle toffee and wood, all of which are to be expected from the barrel.

Then in the mouth there is an initial dry lemony tartness, followed by a touch of roast coffee and a sort of tart peach note with hints of strawberry and plain chocolate. Finally, the finish brings the treacle toffee and lemon flavours back, before sliding into an unusual dry smoky fruit character.

Perhaps it’s not ’style’ for an Imperial Stout, but it’s delicious and fascinating stuff. Interestingly, for me it comes across more as sour than barrel-aged, although it's clear that the former derives from the latter. In contrast, many other barrel-aged beers, especially branded ones such as Innis & Gunn, are more about getting wood flavours into an otherwise regular (ie. non-sour!) beer.

Perhaps tart beer won't be to your liking - but perhaps it will, if you give it a chance. Belgian Lambics already have a keen following, while in the US so many drinkers have acquired the taste that brewing giant Molson Coors has allocated a chunk of its giant facility in Golden, Colorado to producing sour and barrel-aged beers. Who knows, maybe its UK operation Sharp's, which is already doing Belgian-inspired Tripels & Quadrupels, might follow suit.