Back to Bamberg

After a day in the Franconian countryside, it was time to head for the Big City – or at least one of the biggest in the world of beer: Bamberg. The local beer scene has changed a fair bit since I was there seven years ago, so I was really looking forward to exploring some of the new places. The challenge, since the plan was a bit of touristing and shopping in the morning with the kids, before I got the afternoon to myself, was to find somewhere the kids would enjoy. Luckily, while it wasn’t easy to spot on its dusty suburban street, Hopfengarten Bamberg proved an excellent and friendly choice. 

At first, it looks like the entrance to a yard, then there's greenery hinting at a hidden garden, then a passage between dusty greenhouses, and finally it opens up into a huge area behind the houses. Hopfengarten is just a part of it, but there is indeed a hop garden with long tables under arches of hops, there’s a sandpit and a pond (=happy kids!), fruit trees, a herb garden and more. Gardeners were at work fixing things up – I think that, like many places, it had not long been open again after the long Coronavirus shutdown.

It was still early in the day, we were the only visitors and although the bar was advertising their special edition herbal and fruit beers, nothing was pouring. Thankfully, after we’d said hello and poked around the garden a bit, we were asked if we’d like samples – Kellerpils and Rotbier, straight from the fermenters of “the smallest brewery in town” (it looked to be a 100 or 200-litre brewkit). And very nice they were too, while we sat amongst the greenery.  

As we walked into the centre for the shops and some lunch, I spotted another new place to check out – Zum Sternla. Well, it’s not exactly new, in fact they claim the site dates back to 1380, although it’s only been a pub for 250 years or so. What is new though is that last year they put a brewhouse into an extension built onto the rear of the pub.

The biergarten in the courtyard here showed how seriously some venues here are taking social distancing. Large panels between the tables turned each one into almost an alcove, table staff everywhere wear masks or face-shields, and even outdoors in a biergarten you have to cover your face while moving around – the mask can only come off when you are seated. (In contrast, it felt really weird going into a pub in Chiswick this week where no one, not even the staff, had a mask on.) 

Zum Sternla Roggenbier, nur ein schnitt!

The beers were fairly typical for the area and for a German brewpub – a golden lager (Vollbier Export), a Pils and a Zwickel, which I believe is the Vollbier but unfiltered. Luckily, my visit also coincided with the first tapping of their new seasonal Roggenbier, which proved to be a nice example of the style – it’s a top-fermented beer similar to a Hefeweizen, but made with rye not wheat.

Of course it’s not all traditional local beer styles in Bamberg, but it can be hard to find anything else! So while I wanted to catch up with a couple of ‘new wave’ Bamberg brewers we’d met while we were all visiting Hamburg earlier this year, I knew it wasn’t going to be too easy. For a start, both Blech.Brut and Atelier der Braukunst are what’s known in Germany as ‘cuckoo brewers’, sharing or renting brewing capacity from others, so a brewery visit was out of the question. And most of the beer shops just focus on the wealth of traditional local brewing. 

Fortunately I’d been recommended to one that didn’t, namely the local branch of Die Bierothek, a group of craft beer shops. Again it was somewhere new to me – or at least I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there seven years ago, as I’d have walked past it on my evening perambulations between our rented apartment and Brauerei Spezial.

What's in the hand sanitiser?!

I find myself in two minds about craft beer shops. On the one hand, everything costs more – there’s classic Franconian beers in this one at €2 or €3 a bottle, but which I’d picked up the day before for €1 to €1.50 at a supermarket on the Memmelsdorf road. On the other, they have beers that I doubt you’d find anywhere else in the area – even some of the rural Franconian stuff probably doesn’t normally travel into the city. So I picked up a few cans – and once you’re into the €6/can area the additional margin is minimal anyhow – and made way for other shoppers. 

Of course something was bound to go wrong, and it did. I’d carefully avoided making my trip on the Monday, as that’s often the day-off for places that open over the weekend (“Montag Ruhetag”), but what I’d missed was that quite a few venues now close Mon-Weds or even Sun-Weds inclusive – and one of them was my next target, another newcomer called Landwinkl Bräu. Ah well, a restorative mug of Rauchbier in the Brauerei Spezial courtyard was only a few hundred yards away...  

Just two more targets left on my list. The first was Aecht Schlenkerla, not for a drink as time was running a bit short, but to pick up bottles of their three new low-alcohol beers: the unsmoked Bamberger Heinzlein Hell & Dunkel, and Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier Hansla. They’re reputedly based on historical examples – the local equivalent of ‘small beer’, I assume. 

The last was a bit more of a struggle, but worth it – the long haul up Kaulberg to Brauerei Griefenklau. It’s another favourite venue, and I was just early enough to get half a table at the end of the biergarten, overlooking the gardens below and with this green and leafy view across to Die Altenburg on the hill opposite. A lovely place to sit and sip a Zwicklbier as dusk began to creep in. 

Small brewers are wilting under the COVID lockdown

Last week I was wondering how many UK breweries were still operating during the COVID crisis, and this week I found out: just one-third of them – and most of those are brewing less than usual.

It’s all connected to an 82% crash in sales reported by small independent breweries, according to a survey of 282 of them which was carried out by their trade body SIBA and released today.

SIBA says that despite beer production being part of the food supply chain, making brewers officially 'key workers', few independent breweries have access to supermarket sales and the like. So the fact that there’s no pubs, bars and restaurants open has resulting in 65% of them stopping production altogether. Another 31% have reduced production, and only 3% say it has stayed the same. Somewhat surprisingly, 1% on those asked – that’s two or three breweries! – reckon their production has actually gone up. 

SIBA adds that the vast majority of brewers – eight in 10 – do not believe the UK government is doing enough to support them, with 54% of the UK’s independent breweries saying they are unable to access any government support. Nearly a third (29%) are now considering redundancies.

“Pubs, bars and restaurants have been receiving help from the Government, but none of the same schemes apply to our small breweries who saw their sales fall off a cliff almost overnight. They urgently need a package of measures to keep them going otherwise many won’t be able to reopen,” said James Calder, SIBA’s Chief Executive.

He added, “While many [70%] have launched local delivery services or online shops to try to stay afloat, the increase in online sales is a drop in the ocean compared to the overall decrease their beer sales have seen.”

Even then, a quarter of small breweries simply don’t have the right licences to deliver direct to drinkers – SIBA is calling on the government to relax the relevant laws as part of a targeted package of support for breweries and the brewery supply chain. It says government help needs to match the level received by pubs, including the grants and exemptions from business rates, as well as allowing brewers to defer beer duty payments.

Have you taken advantage of a local brewery's online shop, and if so, how was it? 

Brew//LDN serves up a worthy beer fashion show

If you thought that maybe the current fashions in craft beer were wearing thin, think again. At least, that’s my takeaway from an afternoon at Brew//LDN, the tradeshow-cum-beer festival at London’s  Old Truman Brewery this week. Almost every brewery stand seemed to feature at least two out of a “dessert beer”, a sour of some sort and a hazy IPA, and sometimes all three.

I suppose the popularity of dessert beers – by which I mean all those rich and dark concoctions from pastry stouts, through milk stouts and Baltic porters, to barrel-aged Imperials and so on – shouldn’t surprise. After all, I don’t expect dessert to go out of fashion either.

Still, it was a bit of a surprise to hear just how fast they can sell. For instance, I stopped by the London Beer Factory bar to hear from brewery rep James that they were down to their very last keg of Gateaublaster, their 11.1% Black Forest Gateau stout. “They’re not core, but people love them,” he said.

Barrel-aged Baltic Porter on cask!

It was a similar story at Fourpure, where I was told that “dessert beers are big business.” They had not one but two on – Into The Woods is a 5.9% ‘festive gingerbread ale’, while Midnight Diner is a 7.5% New York cheesecake stout. Oddly though, I found that while both were almost spot on in aroma terms, the flavours didn’t match up. Oh well.

Roll out the barrel

As already hinted at, another way to get that dessert quality is barrel-aging. This can be a tricky one to get right, ensuring that the barrel complements the beer rather than overwhelming it. One that definitely managed it was Double Agent from Legitimate Industries of Leeds – all its beers have ironic crime-related names. Although it had spent an amazing two years in bourbon barrels and could have been harsh as a result, Double Agent’s heavy body and 10.4% ABV had instead left it mellow and rich, with smooth vanilla and cocoa notes.

Whisky barrel aging also did the job for Good Chemistry Brewing’s Becoming North, which easily qualifies as dessert despite being a ‘mere’ 6% ABV. Its smooth chocolatey texture is a result of the bottom-fermentation, according to brewery co-founder Bob, and while Baltic porters can be overly sweet, in this case the woody warmth keeps that in balance.

Sour, not 'just a bit tangy'!

Tart and tangy currant Gose

As to the sours, there’s been way too many naff ‘fruited sours’ in the shops that’re basically just sweetish beery fruit juice. So I was pleased to find several here that were actually sour or tart – not as mouth-puckering as a Lambic or Flemish Red, say, but tart enough to be interesting. The first I tried was Blackcurrant Brine Springs, a fruited Gose – I normally find these fit that ‘naff’ category extremely well, but this one was a revelation. Coming from Redditch’s Lab Culture Brewing – yet another brewery new to me – it even uses local salt (from Droitwich, one of several historic English Spa towns). The key is that there’s enough of that and the tart currants for their flavours to shine through unsweetened.

The second I’ll mention isn’t actually a sour – it’s a raspberry Witbier. It comes from another newcomer, Möbru, which has taken over this and other fruited Witbiers from Elgood’s (who now brew them for Möbru). The nice thing is it’s not over-sweetened, allowing the tartness of the berries to complement the tang of the beer. 

And what of the hazy IPAs? I’d a few of these in Germany last week, where some modern craft brewers make almost nothing else, and there’s no sign they’re going away in the UK either – though fewer and fewer people seem to be using the ‘New England IPA’ label now. But while some are delicious, others are just fruity hop soup – and a few have been harsh, with unpleasantly clashing textures and flavours.

Mantis passionfruit IPA

Thankfully, none of today’s fell into the latter group – for example, there was passionfruit IPA Mantis, from new gypsy brewers Flowerhorn, which was deeply herbal and dank thanks to its mix of Mosaic and the new Strata hop, and lightly tart from the fruit. And then there was Kveik Your Eyes Peeled, from Dundee’s 71 Brewing, was estery, tart-dry and funky-sweet, no doubt thanks to the use of orange zest alongside the eponymous farmhouse yeast – though hey guys, it’s Kveik, not ‘kviek’, and Kveik means yeast so you don’t write ‘Kveik yeast’.

Ageing hops in hazy IPAs

Talking to various brewer folk both here and in Germany, it seems there’s a few keys to getting these bigly-hoppy hazy beers right. One is the right hops and brewkit, but perhaps more important is the way the hops age. Straight from the fermenter they can be dank and fresh for a couple of days, but then there’s a period of at least a week and maybe longer when they roughen, before smoothing out again. It’s all most odd, and I welcome any clarifications or additional info from those in the know!

Anyway, it was a good afternoon out with an amazing range of beers (plus some ciders and other drinks) from all over the country and around the world. Yes, there’s big brewers there too, but as equals – it’s not ‘their event’. There’s still two Saturday sessions to go, and you have tickets – Eventbrite seems to think “this event has ended” for some reason – you’re in luck.

London's winter beer scene warms up

A few years ago, the winter beer scene in London was pretty dull. After the Battersea Beer Festival’s final run in February 2014, there was nothing much to break the gloom between early December’s Pig’s Ear festival and March or April, when events like London Beer Week kicked off.

Now, all that’s changed. Perhaps it’s a symptom of just how crowded the craft calendar has become overall, but more festivals and other events are popping up in February and even January. As well as the keg-only Love Beer London charity event which I’ve written about before, the February weekend immediately after will see its cask-only counterpart Cask 2020.

Last year’s Cask 2019 was well organised with good and unusual ales on offer – some of them were normally keg-only but put in cask specially for the event. The one thing many visitors didn’t like was the venue: a set of atmospheric but damp and dripping (yes, really!) railway arches in Bermondsey. So this year it’s moving further south to Peckham, which has apparently gentrified now to the extent of having a Cultural Quarter. Anyway, at £35 a session for all you can drink from around 30 of the country’s best and most interesting brewers, I highly recommend this one.

And now it turns out we don’t even have to wait until February, as there’s January events popping up. The most worthy, and one I’m looking forward to, is another charity event – this time an ad-hoc one to raise funds towards the dreadful Australian bushfire crisis. Called Help A Mate, it’s on Saturday 25th January (with horrible irony, or perhaps Aussie black humour, this is also Burns Night) at Pressure Drop’s brewery in Tottenham. Several other breweries have already donated beers for the event, and there’s also going to be a raffle with an impressive list of donated prizes.

Charity beer festival goes London-wide

The popularity of Craft Beer Cares, the volunteer-run Hackney beer festival where all the beer is donated and the profits go to charity,  has struck a chord with the London Brewers Alliance (LBA) and the Society of independent Brewers (SIBA). The three organisations are collaborating to run a new charity festival next February near King’s Cross, called Love Beer London

The aim is to get as many as possible of London’s 100+ breweries taking part and donating keg beer. The proceeds will go to The Benevolent, which is the drinks industry’s own charity, supporting needy current and former employees and their families.

Taking over as festival organiser is Jaega Wise, who is head brewer at LBA member Wild Card Brewery and also an elected SIBA rep. “With Love Beer London we are bringing together all of the best breweries from across London and the South East into one huge new beer festival, serving a broad range of beer styles of the highest quality in an amazing event space just behind King’s Cross station,” she declared.

“It’s the first time that SIBA have partnered with the London Brewers Alliance and we’re hugely excited about the broad range of craft breweries and beer styles that will feature at the festival, so as well as modern hop-forward IPAs and Pale Ales there will be lots of traditional bitters, porters and stronger English ales, as well as speciality and mixed-fermentation beers. It genuinely will have something for everybody.”

The festival will run across five sessions, with the first on the evening of Thursday 13th Feb and the last on the evening of Sat 15th Feb. It’s actually in Barnsbury, but King’s Cross isn’t far.

The one thing that I’m a bit surprised by is that the tickets, at £12 per session, include a glass but no beer tokens – the beer prices are the same, as £2 a half for most and £3 for some, but the Craft Beer Cares tickets included your first £10-worth of beer tokens. Now, I know the latter were a bit too cheap, but jumping straight to GBBF-level pricing seems a tad steep. Then again, maybe it’ll work, even if getting there means hacking out to the vicinity of Pentonville prison!

Anyhow, it’s all in a good cause. To find out more and buy tickets, visit the event website.

Is New York's trendy sour-milk IPA a step too far?

I had evenings free before and after last month’s conference in New York City, which was my chance to try a couple of craft beer bars, one in Manhattan and one on Long Island. Both of course had ‘regular’ brews on, but quite a bit was gimmicky and adjunct-laden or simply fashion-crazed – the latter mainly meaning hugely-hopped hazy IPAs and the like.

The range in Long Island’s Amity Ales was fairly seasonal, with Hofbrau Oktoberfestbier and the first couple of pumpkin spiced beers ahead of Halloween, for example. A couple of hazy IPAs nodded to fashion, as did the sole dark craft beer – a 6.2% Chocolate Peanut Butter Porter from Maryland's DuClaw Brewing, called Sweet Baby Jesus (left), which proved remarkably tasty and drinkable for all that they seemed to have emptied the kitchen cupboard into it.

Also very drinkable was the house Amity Pale Ale, now contract-brewed across town rather than in the pub’s basement. Although described as an American Pale Ale, it is deep brown and much closer in style to an English Bitter, though of course with US hops and an American sensibility (it's 5.5% for example!). It’s a great twist on an old familiar.

Less impressive was my first experience of where New England fashion has taken hazy IPA. Juicy IPA from nearby Montauk was a bit untidy – not so bitter, but with sweet tropical fruit jarring up against aggressive vegetal hoppiness.

Worse was to come a couple of days later, however, when I met Lactose IPA. In a way it should have been expected – I mean, New England IPA as a style already emphasises the fruity-hoppy notes over the bitterness. Then came the trend to make it even fruitier by, er, putting real fruit in. So sweetening it up with milk sugar to complete the transition to hoppy sugary fruit drink was the obvious next step, am I right? Add in the fashion for ‘sour IPAs’ – sour in this context usually meaning just a little bit tart and tangy, rather than bracingly mouth-puckering – and the weirdness is complete.

DIY beer and cheese pairing

This was at Milk & Hops in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, which by chance was having a festival of beers from breweries in Upstate New York – that’s to say, from up north beyond the city suburbs. As the name implies, the bar’s schtick is gourmet cheese and craft beer, although unfortunately the tap takeover meant that the regular pairing plate wasn’t available that night.

Sadly, my first three choices were all drinkable but unimpressive. Obercreek’s Fall Into Place hazy DIPA seemed unbalanced and a bit harsh, and both Mortalis’ Tears of the Goddess and Beer Tree Brew’s Slightly Fuzzy were absurdly over-complicated. The former was a ‘sour IPA’ with lactose, fruit, vanilla and granola(!), and the latter a mango-lime Berliner Weisse, where the lime almost out-tarted the beer.

I could have stopped there – especially there wasn’t much under the equivalent of £10 a UK pint. It was tipping down with rain outside though, so I plugged on – and I was rewarded… Everything else I tried that evening was good-to-excellent, including the cheese plate above! District 96’s dry-sweet, fruity and funky Summer Campaign was, at 7.2%, a fine example of a strong Saison, and Mortalis redeemed itself with Hazel, an excellently complex Imperial Coffee Stout – syrupy sweet yet warming and cocoa-bitter.

The one brewery to really score was Prison City, which is a brewpub just south of Lake Ontario, in a small town which does indeed possess a ‘correctional facility’. Quite a few of their beers have crime-related names, including the duo on the bar that night: In Prison Again (left) and Wham Whams, which is apparently US prison slang for the little goodies inmates can buy from the canteen.

Several also have hop bills that change from batch to batch – this version of In Prison Again, a very nicely balanced 6.7% hazy IPA which almost had an internal glow, was brewed with Galaxy & Waimea. At the other end of the beer spectrum, Wham Whams is their Imperial Stout, this version having been aged in Woodford Reserve bourbon barrels coconut and vanilla, and weighing in at 11%. It was rich and very impressive, if a little cloying on the finish, with so much chocolate and coconut character it was a bit like Bounty bars melted in a heavy dark beer. Lovely sippin’ stuff!

Next it was time to move upstate myself. More on that in a future blog...

Proper lager in America

Somewhere up there is where Capt Chesney Sullenberger
safely ditched his stricken Airbus in the river 

It was at the pre-conference welcome party on a Manhattan roof terrace overlooking the Hudson river that I realised how much the New York beer scene had changed since I was last there more than half a decade ago. The canned beers on offer were all ones I did not recognise, they mostly came from New England breweries, and they were all good – in some cases very good.

What really impressed me were not the me-too IPAs but the lagers: a couple of Pilsners (Happy Hour from Peak Organic, and Mermaid from Coney Island Brewery), either of which could have come from one of the better breweries in Central Europe. In other words, they were not only well crafted, they were also impressively authentic.

Peak just calls it a Pilsner, but it's
bang-on for a Czech Světlý ležák 11°

They also sparked an interesting discussion with a couple of fellow conference-goers on craft beer’s return to lager. I’d already seen it in the UK and Germany, where it seems to fulfil two roles. One is to have something on tap for those used to lager but who want something better, and the other – especially in Germany – is as a demonstration of the brewer’s skills.

Satisfying the first need by making something lagery is relatively simple. Heck, you even brew a pale ale with lager malt, then cold-condition it for a few weeks and claim it’s Kölsch. But meeting the second need, by doing lager properly, is hard.

Anyway, the same trend’s happening in the US, where for all the hype over craft beer, the vast bulk of what’s actually consumed is still the beery liquid known as Lite Lager. And as one barperson I chatted with told me, it’s a trend worth following: you get a lager drinker in, they try the craft version, and they’re like, “Damn, this stuff is good! Is this what lager is really meant to taste like?!” – and all of a sudden they’re regulars. And they're now open to other beers. Bingo.

A macrobrew lesson in the middle of the Med

Mahon's magnificent harbour

When we went on holiday last month to Menorca, in the Balearic islands of Spain – it’s the smaller counterpart of Majorca (hence minor/major) – I was curious to see what interesting beers I might find. I’d already had a look on Untappd which suggested there were a couple of breweries on the island, plus a couple of bottle shops, one in each of the main towns.

We were staying near the current capital Port Mahon (Maó in the Catalan dialect used locally), while at the opposite end of the island is the former mediaeval capital of Ciutadella. The switch from one to the other happened in the 1700s when the island was under British control, not Spanish, but it reflected changes in naval technology as much as nationality. The harbour at Ciutadella is closer to the Spanish mainland, but is shallower and far smaller than the magnificent 5km-long Mahon harbour, which was much better positioned and sized to suit an 18th century fleet of battleships tasked with controlling the Western Med. 

Anyway, quite how we missed Birra O’Clock in Mahon/Maó I don’t know – we must have walked almost straight past it. But that was on Sunday afternoon, so maybe it was closed and less noticeable, and anyway I’d have been more focused on keeping the kids from getting lost and/or run over.

So what I drank while there was what I found in the supermarkets. What I didn’t expect, even though technically we weren’t all that far from Spain’s craft beer capital of Barcelona, was that it was almost all macro and crafty macro. Sure there was variety – amber lagers, Märzens, a Hefeweizen and even a few ales of various sorts – but with just a couple of microbrewed exceptions, they were all from Damm, Mahou-San Miguel or Heineken Spain.

As for local brews, it wasn’t until we visited bottle shop Sa Bona Birra on a trip to Ciutadella that we found any, and that was from Sant Climent back near Mahon. Yes, they had beers from Barcelona micros as well, but they had beers from all over the world, as you’d expect in a specialist shop.

Ciutadella

It reminded me just how much of a bubble the beer scene in, say, Barcelona actually is. But it also demonstrated how much the big brewers have invested in crafty brewing to ensure that outlets such as supermarkets have no need to go elsewhere in order to add a dusting of modernity and variety to their beer shelves. (Like washing powder manufacturers, they also grab for shelf space by having secondary brands for their generic beers – pretty poor stuff in the main.)

By chance, a week later I found myself chatting with one of the brewers from Mahou-San Miguel after we’d both spent the day judging in the International Beer Challenge. He confirmed that, as I already knew from elsewhere, it’s all about the extra margin on craft, not the sales volume. And it’s not about doing it on the cheap, either, although he noted that the Mahou Barrica barrel-aged strong lagers (the Bourbon one is rather good, by the way) are deliberately priced low to get shelf space and attention.

And clearly it works, with some of the crafty ones actually being pretty good – San Miguel’s Manila Vienna lager for instance, and Heineken Spain’s Cruzcampo ales (but not its eponymous Eurolagers), although yes, the real independents were on average rather better.

Interestingly, Heineken seems to have recognised the need to separate off its crafty element. It worked with a local hospitality group to set up a brewpub in Malaga called La Fabrica de Cruzcampo where its brewers can get creative. It then brews and bottles some of the results back at HQ for nationwide distribution.

Will this crafty-creative approach be a model we’ll see more of across Europe and elsewhere? I suspect so. The question is, how can real micros and independents respond?

London's Summer of Beer

There’s a lot for the beer-lover to look forward in London over the summer. I guess it started with last weekend’s Ealing Beer Festival, under the giant oak trees and in the grassy surroundings of Walpole Park – and once again mostly in the sunshine this year. A great selection of cask beers this year, all in good-to-excellent condition.

Beer judging underway

Perhaps to show that any style can work in cask, my absolute stand-out there this year was a cask Belgian Saison – but then, the original farmhouse Saisons would have been cask, so why not? Called Go With a Smile, it was a collaboration between two small Kentish brewers, Boutilliers and Iron Pier. By coincidence, my second favourite was also Belgian – but not just in style this time. One of the two kegs on the foreign beer bar, it was De la Senne’s Jambe de Bois, an 8%er billed as the most bitter Tripel in Belgium. Lovely!

I wasn’t just there for the drinking, mind you – I was helping judge CAMRA London’s Champion Beer of London, along with assorted luminaries from the world of brewing and beer writing. For the record, the overall winners were:

Gold:  Five Points Railway Porter
Silver: Tap East’s East End Mild
Bronze: Wimbledon XXXK Vintage Ale

This weekend, there's still a few tickets left for tonight and tomorrow at Craft Beer Cares, which was the subject of my previous post, then in two weeks time on Saturday 3rd August there’s an open-day at the Weird Beard brewery in Hanwell, after which we dive into the week of the Great British Beer Festival at Olympia (August 6th-10th). That kicks off with the judging of Champion Beer of Britain on the morning before the Tuesday trade session.

The 2018 LBA festival in Fuller's sunny courtyard

Overlapping with GBBF this year, which I guess ought to make it easier for some people to get to both, is London Craft Beer Festival (9th-11th August). It’s back at the Tobacco Dock event space this year, and when last I looked there were still tickets left for all sessions. It’s typically £50 for each five-hour session, but unlike GBBF where most sessions are £11 but you buy beer separately, the LCBF ticket includes all your beer. Then again, your GBBF ticket covers twice as long, at ten hours.

And last for now, but not least, the London Brewers Alliance has announced the date of its 2019 summer beer festival: Saturday 14th September. Hosted in the courtyard and carriage house at Fuller’s Griffin Brewery in Chiswick, this is another all-inclusive event. Tickets are £35-ish including fees, and you can expect to find more that 50 of the capital’s brewers, each pouring at least two or three of their beers.

Charity beer fest returns for a 3rd year

Last year's event was very enjoyable

Craft Beer Cares, the festival where all beer is donated and all profits go to charity, is back for a third year. It's this coming weekend, Fri/Sat/Sun, at the London Fields Brewery event space in a set of railway arches just off the eponymous park in Hackney.

The sessions will run from 6-11pm Friday 19th, 12-5pm and 6-11pm Saturday 20th, and 12-5pm Sunday 21st July. Apparently there's still tickets available for all three days - they're only eleven quid (inc. booking fees), which gets you a festival glass and enough tokens for five halves or thereabouts. You can buy more tokens of course, and I assume there will also be food and merch for sale as in past years.

This year all the profits - that's £10 from every ticket since pretty much everything is donated, including the volunteer servers - will go to Hackney Winter Night Shelter. This is a charity that provides food and shelter for homeless people during the coldest months of the year. Last year, the festival raised over £10,000 for the London-based anti-violence charity Art Against Knives.

More than 30 breweries, representing some seven different countries, have so far offered beer for Craft Beer Cares 2019. They include:

Beatnikz Republic
Big Drop
Brew By Numbers
BrewDog
Brixton Brewery
Brooklyn Brewery
Canopy
Cloudwater
Collective Arts
Dry & Bitter
East London Brewery
Fierce Beer
Fourpure
Gipsy Hill
Hale Brewing
The Kernel
Lervig
London Fields
Lost & Grounded
Magic Rock
Mikkeller
Mondo
NZ Beer Collective
Partizan
Siren
Solvay Society
Stone Brewing
Toast Ales
Verdant
Weird Beard
Whiplash
Wylam
and Yeastie Boys
with more to be confirmed.

We already have our tickets for the Sunday - see you there?

The beers we almost forgot

If you’re running a craft beer bar or specialist real ale pub that caters to aficionados, it’s relatively simple – in concept at least, though less so in execution! You offer a range of styles, rotating as often as you can manage, always with something new and/or weird – and also with a known-brand but unusual lager for your less adventurous visitors, or the non-aficionado friends and other halves.

But what about venues where craft beer isn’t the main or only offering, such as restaurants, cafés or ‘regular’ pubs. The constant chasing after fashion and novelty is a never-ending game. Constant novelty, but it’s a business model that’s tough to scale and make reliable. Even those brewers famed for their frequent special releases usually try to build up a solid baseline of regular beers as well, just like craft bars needs that regular tap for those customers who ‘just want a beer’.

I arrived late at this month’s Imbibe Live trade show at Olympia, but just in time to catch Mitch Adams’ final talk and tasting, “Back to the Future”. In it, he encouraged retailers in particular to forget modern beer trends and fashions for a moment, and instead pay attention to some of the beers – and perhaps more significantly, beer styles – that have dropped off the headlines, but still deserve some love.

In particular, he highlighted Helles & Vienna (golden & amber) Lagers, Hefeweizen, Golden Ale, West Coast IPA, and Tripel. I might quibble with one or two of his exemplars – Stiegl Gold isn’t my favourite Helles, I’m afraid – but others were excellent choices. Erdinger Weisse for instance, and Ska’s Modus Hoperandi for classic American IPA, while I'd say Brooklyn Lager is the best Vienna Lager in volume production. 

He’s got a very good point here, although as implied earlier I have no fears for lager. We’re seeing more and more craft lagers – it does seem to be lager that most ‘just-a-beer’ drinkers go for. So you make your craft lager a bit more malty and flavoursome than the big brands, easy drinking but nothing too scary, nothing too different…

The crafty (re)birth of lager

Even in Germany, where the craft beer movement grew up in large part in opposition to the industrialisation of beer, you can see this happening. German industrial Pils is yellow, fizzy, light-bodied and remarkably samey. Craft beer therefore set out to be the opposite – it’s at least hazy if not downright murky, amber-brown or even darker, malty, and comparatively heavy with aroma and flavour.

While that trend’s not gone away, more and more modern microbrewers are now producing a Pils or a Helles too. It’s partly that they have customers who want novelty, but familiar novelty, and partly the realisation that making a really good lager is hard. So if you want to show your skills as a brewer, it’s one way to do it.

Choose your guests

But while offering a regular craft lager for the ‘just-a-beer’ customers works for the specialist beer venue, what about the reverse – a ‘regular’ catering for aficionados? Maybe it should be a guest Vienna, or a blond lager and a West Coast IPA. And it can’t hurt to have bottles of a reliable Weizen and Tripel (or Dubbel) in the fridge.

What do you think – are we worrying too much? Does this happen already? Or is there still too much focus on fashion?

What's wrong with Bavarian Pale Ale?

It’s getting so that, when I see the words Bayrisch Pale Ale, I reach for my sink plug. Bavaria is famous for several beery things, but precisely none of them is Pale Ale.

I can see why they try – a crisp American Pale Ale is what most traditional German brewers seem to think of when they “Hmm, we really ought to do something about this Craft Bier fashion.” That or possibly an American IPA – but mostly APA.

It’s partly because Sierra Nevada Pale Ale has been readily available there for a good few years now, so it has come to epitomise Craft Bier for many Germans. Of course, SNPA was just as enlightening for pioneering British brewers back in the 1980s, the difference perhaps being that they already knew how to brew ales, they were just trying to make them less old-fashioned.

To be fair, in a few parts of Germany ale is understood to a degree. I don’t count Cologne here, mind you, as modern Kölsch is a warm-fermented lager, nor do I count Hefeweizen, which bears only technical similarities with ale. But knowledge has survived in a few of the Alt (old-style, ie. top-fermented) traditions – and of course there are now many brewers who have trained abroad, in places where ale never died.

So I’m not dissing all German Pale Ales, not by a long straw. It’s just I can’t remember when last I had one from Bavaria (or nearby) that was any good. Just recently, the ‘not good’ list has included Hohenthanner Schlossbrauerei Bayrisch Pale Ale, and Perlenzauber German Pale Ale from Herrnbräu in Ingolstadt (yes, that Ingolstadt, the home of the Einheitsgebot), but there’s been others.

The commonest fault is vegetal or cooked sweetcorn notes, which means DMS. This is a big giveaway as far I can see, because while it’s a fault in ales, a bit of DMS is part of the character of many lager styles. It suggests to me that these are experienced lager brewers working off their patch and getting it wrong.

It’s ironic really. Most ale brewers I’ve spoken to acknowledge how hard it is to make really good lagers. Perhaps there are Bavarian brewers who believe that lager is therefore the pinnacle of the art, and that ale should therefore be easy by comparison.

Or perhaps they imagine it’s like making a Hefeweizen, just with a different yeast and without the wheat... That might explain why there’s so much loose yeast in there that if you want a reasonably clear pour, you’re going to have to leave 15% or 20% in the bottle. For Pete’s sake, either give it a light filter, or if you do want to bottle-condition, use a properly sticky yeast for it!

OK, rant over. As ever, please feel free to recommend good Bavarian ales – or even to disagree with me! – in the comments below. Cheers!

Checking out the Czechs

If you’re a beer-lover, Czech Beer Week UK from the 17th-23rd of June is something to look forward to. Czech beer culture is one* of the world’s greatest, yet curiously it is one that most people will have only seen a small slice of.

From traditional to craft, and back again.

Indeed, pretty much all we saw in the UK until a few years ago were a those big-brands owned by multinationals – chiefly Staropramen (owned by Bass, now Coors), Pilsner Urquell (SABMiller, now Asahi), and perhaps Krušovice (Heineken). That has been changing, with a few more coming in, but while some are family-owned, such as Bernard, others are yet more big-brand subsidiaries – Kozel and Radegast are both Urquell/Asahi, for example.

There is plenty more change to come, though – even more so this year, as their government export agency CzechTrade is working to bring more small brewers to the UK market via importers such as Euroboozer and Pivovar UK, as I discovered last summer at the Czech Beer Day event that it held for the trade.

Just as English brown bitters tend to resemble each other, many Czech beers are also very similar in style – some are better than others, but most are recognisably similar golden lagers. That’s no surprise, according to one of the brewery reps I chatted with at Czech Beer Day last year. “Czech customers are still very local-orientated, so all the breweries produce similar beers, but for their locale,” he said.

He added an important note on naming: “All are Pilsner-style. Nobody says ‘Pilsner lager’ though, they just say Lager. Urquell is from Pilsen so it’s Pilsner, but they all use the Pilsner technique.” In other words, don’t call a Czech lager Pilsner if it’s not from Pilsen! (You can probably get away with 'Pils' though...)

Of course, there are other Czech beers too, including the inevitable IPAs and ales of other sorts. As everywhere, Czechia is having a Craft Beer revolution of sorts, and true to form this has generated quite a few local copies of styles from elsewhere – American IPAs, English pale ales, and so on. We had a few at Czech Beer Day, those I tried (mainly from Pivovars Permon & Clock) were very nice examples of their styles.

Sometimes the tradition is the craft. 

This variety is also a sign that Czech brewing is definitely on the up. It’s a far cry from just a few years ago, when things looked pretty bad, when the nationalisations of the Communist period were followed by a somewhat botched privatisation process which led to yet more brewery consolidations and closures. Now, as well as newly-formed breweries, there’s even been some closed ones brought back into production, such as Jarošovský, whose Ležák 12% was definitely my favourite lager of last Czech Beer Day, and a few contract-brewed brands, such as Praga (pictured).

Useful things to know if you want to get into Czech lager culture include a few key words such as Světlý – pale, Tmavé/Tmavý – dark, and Ležák – lager. Then there is Granát, which translates both as grenade and garnet – the semi-precious stone being the appropriate one here! Originally it was a blend of light and dark lagers that produced the deep red colour it was named for, but now it is often brewed ‘entire’, as we say in English, meaning as a single beer. It’s also sometimes called Temně, or semi-dark.

And there’s how the beer is poured. A few years ago, I went to an event hosted by Urquell, where their spokes-barman explained that there’s at least three main styles of pour, some of them distinctly weird. I was a little sceptical at the time, but another brewery rep at Czech Beer Day last year confirmed at least some of the details, adding that it varies between breweries too.

A thick head is essential, she said, adding that “People also believe the head retention shows the quality of the ingredients.” Apart from ‘beer with a head’, the other main pours are ‘milk’ which is all foam, and ‘snyt’ which is more foam than beer – drinkers believe this helps the beer stay fresh in the glass. Yes, I’m still sceptical! Still, however you pour it and whatever the colour, Czech out the beers – you'll almost certainly find something you like...


*Alongside British, of course, which is where Groll & co got the pale malt technology for Pilsner, and Belgian, which has become the custodian of legendary and almost-lost beer styles that were once common across Northern Europe. 

Then of course there’s German beer culture. Americans often prioritise this one, perhaps biased by their huge influx of German brewers in the 1800s (think Anheuser, Busch, Pabst, Coors, Schlitz et al). But even there, much is owed to what’s now Czechia – most obviously, Bud is named for Budweis in Bohemia, although a local surely wouldn’t recognise it as a Bohemian Lager. 

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!

What's so special about £12.50?

London's beer scene is kicking into gear again, with two excellent events coming up on consecutive weekends. They are quite different though – the only things they have in common are beer and a ticket price of £12.50, and the latter similarity puzzles me more than perhaps it ought to! Is this going to be the "new norm" for festivals – I guess it's equivalent to three beers at central London rates – or is there something else about this number that I've missed?

First up is Goose Island's LDN Block Party this coming Saturday 22nd at The Oval in Bethnal Green. Sadly it’s sold out already, but there’s a few people selling spares on the event’s Facebook page. If you do have a ticket (and note that they cover admission but not your beer and food), you should be in for a good time – I went last year when it was at a venue near Old Street, and it was excellent. Good bands on stage, with bars and foodstalls nearby, or if you wanted a change of ambience there were other bars indoors.

Last year these included the Alpine-themed Blocktoberfest bar where they launched their Spaten-brewed Keller Märzen, another pouring many of the variations on Bourbon County Stout, some of them rather rare, and House of Funk, a bar specialising in Goose Island’s many sours and wild ales. The evening’s more music-focused, with indie band The Vaccines headlining this year, but if you go earlier – it runs from 3pm to 11pm – there’s other activities going on. Last year there was a guided cheese & beer pairing in the wilds & sours bar, for example.

Yes, I know Goose Island is macro-owned these days, but it’s hung on to at least some of its indie soul – and let’s face it, without AB-Inbev’s money behind it, we in the UK probably wouldn’t be enjoying nearly as many of its excellent beers now.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, £12.50 is also the cost of a ticket to Craft Beer Cares in Hackney on Saturday 29th and Sunday 30th. It’s a very different event from the Block Party – the beer’s more independent, there’s no live music that I’m aware of, it’s all for charity – and perhaps most importantly of all, your ticket includes your first beer tokens!

There's also several contributing breweries to add to the list I mentioned last time, including Five Points, Lervig and Whiplash, and there's still tickets available. So if you’re in town and haven’t booked one yet, get over there and get one – or if you're a bit more of a glutton, get one for each of the three sessions... I wonder if there's anyone who'll do that! All being well, I'll see you there on the Sunday afternoon (yes, change of plan).

Charity beer fest Craft Beer Cares is back

Last year's festival

There's a bunch of beery things coming up in London over the next few weeks, but the one I think I'm looking forward to most is Craft Beer Cares – I've already bought my ticket. This beer festival run for charity was a really good event last year – excellent beer, all donated by the brewers, plus side-events such as a beer raffle with great prizes.

This year's edition takes place at London Fields Brewery in Hackney – or rather, at the brewery's event space around the corner on Mentmore Place E8. They're expecting beer from more than 20 breweries, and proceeds from the event (which raised more than £6000 last year) will be donated to London-based anti violence charity Art Against Knives.

“We have the fortune to be able to build on our first event with a bigger venue, more beer, and more sessions, to be more accessible and hopefully raise even more money for charity this year,” said Gautam Bhatnagar, the event's founder. “We couldn’t do it without the kindness and donations of the breweries involved, the volunteers and the logistical help of many distributors in the industry.”

Craft Beer Cares will run three sessions, from 11am-5pm and 6pm-12am on Saturday 29th, and 12pm-6pm on Sunday 30th. Tickets are £12.50 per session, which includes a festival glass and tokens for four half-pints – you can of course buy more tokens on site.

The breweries due to take part in Craft Beer Cares 2018 include:
Beavertown
Brew By Numbers
Brooklyn
Canopy
Cloudwater
Dry and Bitter
Fourpure
Gipsy Hill
Kernel
London Fields
Magic Rock
Modern Times
Northern Monk
NZ Beer Collective
Partizan
Siren
Thornbridge
Weird Beard
Wylam
Yeastie Boys

There's more to be confirmed, say the organisers. Based on last year's event, we can expect maybe eight or ten beers to be available on draught at any one time, plus others in bottle or can, and new kegs coming on tap as others run out.

Tickets for Craft Beer Cares are available via Eventbrite.

A Goose on the Thames

2018 is Goose Island's 30th anniversary, and last week, Fuller's – which was a major inspiration in the Chicago brewery's founding – threw its young cousin a birthday party in London. Pride of place went to the 30th Anniversary Ale, a 5.9% collaboration brew based on Fuller's original ESB recipe, but with modern and experimental US hop varieties.

It's a beer that's been available in the US since early May, but not here – kegs were brought over specially for the party at The Hydrant, a Fuller's pub named for its location next to the Monument to the Great Fire of London. Also getting a relatively rare draught outing there was Fuller's 2017 Vintage Ale in cask, so I'm afraid my first question for Goose Island president and general manager Ken Stout was: how come the Anniversary Ale isn't in cask too?

"We do quite a few cask beers, but the only place we serve them is in our own brewery tap," he said. He explained that it's the same problem so many British craft brewers have with cask beer – you're totally reliant on the skills, or lack of them, of the pub cellar manager.

The Anniversary Ale, very nice with a sossie!

I'd just come from a CAMRA meeting where those who couldn't get to the recent AGM (where votes were taken on adjusting CAMRA's aims to widen its campaigning remit and educational coverage) could hear and discuss reports from delegates who were there. So Ken and I went on to talk about why there's still this perceived divide between cask and keg – he's a big fan of British cask ale.

He loves classic Bavarian beer too, so we also talked about what's going on with German craft beer (with almost everyone now making Pale Ale and/or IPA, German and even Bavarian PA/IPA have emerged as genuine substyles, but the aficionados and beergeeks have moved on to Porters and Stouts, preferably barrel-aged Imperial ones…); about Franconian Ungespundet which is Germany's equivalent of cask-conditioning; and about Goose's collaboration with fellow AB-InBev property Spaten last year. The resulting Keller-Märzen was served at the Goose Island London Block Party last September, and like the party it was excellent.

It got me thinking: here's two macro-owned breweries, but they're still making great beer, and they seem to be getting nothing but help and support from their owners. Is this, and not the dumbing-down that many assume will follow when you 'sell out to big beer', the real threat from macrobrewers buying into craft? That the result will be too good – or at least, plenty good enough – and too well resourced for others to compete? I'm going to have to think (and write) some more about this…

Ken also introduced me to Andrew Walton, the newly appointed head brewer for Goose's Shoreditch brewpub, which is due to open in September – there's already brewpubs in Toronto, Seoul and Shanghai, as well as the original one in Chicago of course, and we're next. Andrew is from Canada, but has spent the last couple of years brewing in London, at Fourpure.

Samples of Belgian-brewed Midway are air-freighted back to Chicago so they can be tasted for consistency with the US version. If there's one thing companies like AB-InBev understand and can help their craft brewers with, it's expertise in quality and consistency management. Interesting times, eh?

The Bermondsey Beer Mile is flourishing again

A couple of years ago, I came to the conclusion that the Bermondsey Beer Mile had lost its appeal. It had jumped the shark, a victim of its own success. The Kernel had closed its drinking area, and the other brewery taps were often overwhelmed – some, like Partizan, had a bar but little seating space.

What a difference those two years have made. OK, even on a freezing day in February, respected and well known places such as Brew By Numbers and Anspach & Hobday still get busy, and Eebria – one of the newer bars – was so rammed I didn't even bother trying to get served. Apart from that, and despite the many groups of people strolling from venue to venue, it mostly felt comfortable.

Fourpure, now times two

The overall story is expansion – existing breweries moving and growing, new ones moving in, more beer retailers, and so on. At the eastern end, Fourpure has taken over into the industrial unit next door. This has added a lot of production and workspace for them, but has also allowed the taproom to expand, with more seating space and a new bar. They also now have a proper spacious indoor toilet block, which highlights just how shamefully dismal are the loos in pretty much every other local brewery and bar.

Heading west, Partizan’s move to a new and much bigger site, with both indoor and outdoor seating, was long overdue. Being an industrial building, the taproom might be a bit overly echoey and noisy for some, but it has much more space and a bigger bar (right) with guest taps too – when I visited, there were several Kernel beers on.

The move also freed up two railway arches on Almond Road, making room for not one but two new breweries. Well, one isn’t totally new – the highly experimental Affinity Brew Co moved down from Tottenham. And the other, Spartan Brewery, isn’t totally a brewery as it doesn’t yet have its brewkit in (they’re brewing up the road at Ubrew for now).

To make it even better, while the other breweries on the Mile – with the notable exception of Southwark – are keg-focused for their draught beers, both these new ones plan to package a significant proportion in cask. Sadly, neither had cask on when I visited, although Spartan co-founder Colin Brooks said he’d like cask to eventually become the majority of their production, and they’ll have casks at London Drinker Beer Festival next month.

Meanwhile, Affinity (left) is organising a weekend Bermondsey cask beer festival for April 7th-8th. Co-hosted by Partizan, this will feature 30 breweries from up and down the country, each brewery supplying two different casks, one for Saturday and the other for Sunday. Tickets are available online and cost a fiver for each day – that covers a glass, a programme and your first half, then it's a fiver a pint. And no, I don't know if there's a refund on Sunday if you still have your glass from Saturday!