Murky beer at Fuller's - and it's deliberate

Last week I accidentally found myself at the launch of a new beer. There I was at the Fuller’s brewery for a very interesting seminar on re-creating historic beers (of which, more later), when a brand new beer was announced – and it wasn’t a Fuller’s brew, either!

John & Justin

Brought up from Bristol specially by Moor Beer Co’s head brewer Justin Hawke, Relentless Optimism was immensely fashionably – and very appropriately, given our location in a real ale heartland – available to taste in cask-conditioned, keg-conditioned and can-conditioned form. Once CAMRA’s technical group catches up (and they’ve already validated keg-conditioning), all three formats will be acknowledged as real ale.

It’s a three-way collaboration between Justin, his guest Fernando Campoy of Spain’s Cerveza Domus, and Fuller’s John Keeling. It seems Justin and Fernando decided to brew a "non-traditional" interpretation of ESB, and thought who better to ask for advice than the man whose ESB is that rare thing – a brew that founded an entire new style of beer.

“They contacted me because they wanted to make an ESB, and they thought I might know something about it,” John joked. “So one Saturday I got the train down to Bristol and helped them brew one.”

“We wanted a modern twist on ESB,” Justin added. “It’s unfined because that leaves more flavour in the beer, and we worked with some modern British hop varieties – Admiral, Minstrel, Keyworth and UK-grown Chinook. We used a traditional ale yeast too.”

So what’s the beer like? For a start it was cloudy in all three formats – not quite Bristol Murky, but close! It looks and tastes quite different from Fuller’s ESB, yet you can see similarities in how the toffeeish malt balances the herbal and resinous bitterness.

It was also very interesting to see how each serving format emphasised different aspects of the beer – as John said, the cask version had a bigger mouthfeel, while keg dispense emphasised the hops a little more. Some people preferred the can-conditioned version though, perhaps because it came somewhere in the middle – a nice bright hoppiness, but still with that caramelly body and a decent alcohol warmth.

John said Fuller’s will buy some casks of Relentless Optimism and release them to some of its pubs, though he added that “It will be a step forward for some of them, because they won’t be used to hazy beer. We generally prefer finings because our customers expect it.”

Cloudy beer in a Fuller’s pub, yet nothing’s wrong – who’d have thought it? :)

More stuff to read....

A few interesting reads from around the web. The first's an article from Craft Beer & Brewing, a US site that's mainly aimed at homebrewers. Many of its articles are too US-centric for my taste, but it does also carry some thought-provoking pieces, including this one, Do IBUs matter? Some drinkers – notably hopheads – are obsessed with IBUs, apparently believing the higher a beer's IBU rating, the better it is. This article explains why IBUs tell you something about a beer, but not everything, not by a long chalk!

Like CAMRA's technical committee, which has finally acknowledged that you can have keg-conditioned real ale, I've had more than a few of those cask vs keg discussions where you try to point out that today's kegs are a world apart from the Red Barrels of the 1970s, then someone says “Well, what about the xyz-keg?” and you have to admit that, actually you don't know that one. So it was great to read this long piece on the Ale is Good blog which is basically explaining from a distributor or server's point of view what all the different kegs are. He doesn't really cover the real ale aspects, but hey, there be dragons...

Original 1930s conetop beer cans

And then earlier today, I picked up an item on Jeff Bell's blog where he quotes a tweet from Fuller's John Keeling, expressing the latter's doubts over micro-canning – doubts which Jeff shares. It reminded me that I never really flagged up my own article on the subject of micro-canning, which was published earlier this year in Engineering & Technology, the magazine of the Institution of Engineering & Technology. I was very pleased with the way it came out in print, and the online version's pretty nice too.

This last one was sent in to me, it's an incomer's view of The Best Bars in Neukölln – a hip district of Berlin that is now gentrifying, after decades as a big Turkish & Lebanese area. I mention the article partly because it reminds me how different people have quite different motives for loving bars and pubs. Berlin is home to a bunch of great breweries, several of them in Neukölln including Berliner Berg which is one of the newest, and Privatbrauerei am Rollberg which is inside the old Berliner Kindl brewery building (and which seems to have overcome my initial misgivings to become very well liked). Yet in all his discussion of bars the only beer he mentions is Neumarkter Lammsbräu which is from Oberpfalz in Bavaria!