By The Horns

I met the guys from By The Horns Brewing* and their excellent ales at last year's LBA Showcase at Vinopolis, so when I heard that they were having a couple of open days over the weekend my interest was piqued.

Like so many others these days, the brewery is tucked into one of a row of uniform industrial units, in this case just around the back of Wimbledon dog track. I guess the dogs keep the Wombles from nicking the casks... The five-barrel brewing kit looks good - managing director Chris Mills, who set up the brewery along with Alex Bull, says it's mostly ex-Amstel vessels, converted by Oban Ales up in Argyll. They currently have three fermenters and are planning to add a fourth, along with a conditioning tank.

While they had five ales for sale on gravity, the biggest change from what I saw last year when it was all cask was the large spread of bottles on the table. Having started bottling last month, Chris and Alex now bottle all their ales themselves as well as selling them in cask. As well as some local distribution - although of course they are on the look-out for more - Chris says they have beer going up to Manchester.

Interestingly, all the bottles are 330ml, rather than the 500ml I would have expected. Alex says that as well as reflecting how he and Chris like to drink (out of half-pint stemmed glasses), he feels the smaller bottles have "more of a young, contemporary look" that fits well with the bars they target.

The regulars are: Stiff Upper Lip, a 3.9% pale ale with Sonnet and Pioneer hops and a nice balance between a biscuity body and dry-bitter citrusy hops; Bobby on the Wheat, a 4.7% cloudy pale wheat ale with faint lemon and lactic tangs; Diamond Geezer, a 4.9% red ale with lots of sultanas and other fruit on the nose and then a nutty almost pecan pie body; and the newest addition Lambeth Walk, which is a tasty 5.1% dark porter with notes of treacle toffee, ginger and cocoa.

They're also doing specials and seasonals - I came away with an as-yet unopened bottle of Jolly Fatman, their winter spiced oatmeal stout, and they had a 6.4% 'double' version of the Diamond Geezer red ale in both bottles and cask. If you just thought Double Diamond I guess you're old like me - being younger, they called it Diamond Geezers instead.

I was driving, so after buying a few bottles and thanking Alex and Chris for the hospitality and the tasty samples, that was my limit. Fortunately the trip back was equally pleasant - a walk on Wimbledon Common and then coffee at the snack bar by the windmill, as the sun was setting. All Saturday afternoons should be like this!

*Their website's remarkably uninformative, apart from a link to the brewery's Facebook page, which is a bit more helpful - as long as you have a Facebook account, I suppose... There's also the brewery's RateBeer page which lists the beers.

A tenner a pint

It was on the train home afterwards that I finally realised what the barman in the Craft Beer Co had been trying to tell me through the din. I'd just ordered a Mikeller Santa's Little Helper and a Thornbridge Bracia, and gesturing towards the latter pump he said "It's six and a half" – as in percent, or so I thought.

That seemed a bit odd given that Bracia is normally 9% or so, but this was a special that had been aged for three years in Pedro Ximinez sherry casks, and I'd already had a couple of other very nice beers and was a bit zonked by the noise and the crush at the bar. I just figured I'd misheard so I shrugged and nodded.

Passing over a £20 note and getting £10.05 back was a bit of a surprise - £9.95 for two halves? Once I figured it out, I realised it was even more than that – the Mikeller must've been £3.95, or £7.90 a pint, which isn't really all that expensive for a foreign craft beer weighing in at 10.9%, but what he'd actually been telling me was that the Bracia was "£6 a half".

Yes, £12 a pint – if they'd even sell you a pint of a beer that's 9.3%, and if you could actually drink that much of something which tastes a bit like a liquid black treacle and liquorice pudding. It is a stunningly good and complex beer though, huge-bodied and delicious, with hints of sour cherries, some woody and vinous notes, and a bit of dark chocolate. And while it had less alcohol - nominally, at least - than the Mikeller which was also very tasty and slipped down far too easily, the Bracia somehow had more presence and body.

So, when can I get over there again to see if there's any left...?

Winter joys

Is it really that long since I posted here? Oops... Inasmuch as there's anything to blame beyond my own slackitude, it's work, plus the winter weather and the bugs it brings. Specifically a foul cold which has dulled my palate to the point where I can just about tell that a beer is beer, but that's pretty much all.

It was especially annoying over the weekend - presented with a traditional German yuletide dinner of Sauerbraten with red cabbage and Knödel (dumplings), I pulled out my remaining crate of German beer for our guests, and realised I could barely tell the difference between Brauerei Simon Spezial, Riedenburger Historisches Emmer Bier and Andechser Doppelbock. Sigh.

Ah well - here's hoping it will have cleared by the time the festivities start...


*This is a beef joint marinated in red wine, vinegar, herbs & spices, and chopped onion and carrot, roasted and served with a sweet and sour sauce, and it's delicious - if you can taste it.

Plastic fantastic?

I've been meaning to write about this year's London Brewers Showcase at Vinopolis for a couple of weeks now, but other things kept intervening - most notably the Twickenham Beer Festival.... (Congratulation, by the way, to Hammerpot for winning Beer of the Festival for its truly excellent Bottle Wreck Porter.)

The first thing you noticed at Vinopolis was just how many breweries London now has. It may even be up to 20. Most are members of the London Brewers Alliance, but the main LBA website is woefully in need of updating as it is missing a bunch of them: East London Brewing, By The Horns, London Brewing (=The Bull brewpub), London Fields Brewery, and my local Botanist Brewery, to name but five. (There is a decent-ish list in this article though.)

The second thing that caught my attention though was just how many were using plastic casks. These have been around for a a few years, but I wasn't aware of them being very successful. Their advantages are low weight and low cost, plus of course they don't get nicked and melted down by metal-thieving scumbags, but they had a reputation for being more fragile and likely to split.

"Plastic casks are a lot more reliable now - all the recent London start-ups are going for them," said Alex Bull of By the Horns. 

Fullers head brewer Derek Prentice agreed, but added that bigger brewers will most likely stay with metal for now - if only because if he tried running plastics down an automated filling line, their light weight would probably have them bouncing off and careening around the hall...

One other reason why they work for the smaller brewers could be that their beers are not so widely distributed - even if a cask leaves the brewpub, in many cases it stays within that company's small pub estate. That means less heaving casks in and out of lorries and dropping them on pavements.

Other problems remain though, most notably that the other bits and bobs involved - the shive and keystone - were originally designed for use on metal casks, not plastic, and of course how the materials bind together will vary. This was demonstrated at Twickenham where we lost one plastic cask due to the keystone blowing out overnight and another was withdrawn by the brewer because the shive was no longer airtight. So, more work still needed, eh?

Happy birthday CAMRA!

An excellent afternoon out yesterday at the London CAMRA 40th birthday party. We took over the Counting House - the Fullers one on Cornhill, in the Square Mile, not the JDW - for a superb range of beers from a variety of London brewers, plus a few speeches, and pub quiz where all the questions (pretty much) were about the history of CAMRA and yours truly's team didn't even feature in the top 6...

The Fullers beers on offer included the brand new Black Cab Stout, which was launched last week. On Twitter, John Keeling said, "Many people are surprised we have made a stout considering we already make a porter.We are a London brewery by the way." Yes indeed, and don't forget the Double Stout...

Anyway, Black Cab is a lovely stout, black with brown hints and a beige head, then roast malt, milk chocolate and a hint of red fruit on the nose, and a roasty dry yet sweetish body with burnt fruit, plus hints of fruitcake and toffee. Perhaps a little sweeter than I normally go for, but I'll definitely be trying it again!

Others on offer, according to my failing memory, included Brodies American Brown (which is quite excellent), Twickenham Sundancer, Sambrooks Powerhouse Porter, and Redemption Trinity. (There was also one from London Brewing, AKA the Bull Highgate's pub brewery, but I forget the name and the Bull's website appears rather broken...)

Hmm. You won't see that sort of range in a Fullers pub very often, methinks.

As well as speeches from various CAMRA folk, including one by regional director Kim Martin who ably summarised the London branches' desire to see the Campaign embrace craft beer rather than rejecting it, our host Richard Fuller gave a good summary of the history of Fullers and its relationship with CAMRA from 1971.

All in all, an excellent event, and I wish I could have stayed longer!

Splitting the Atom

It's been a low-key launch, but Fullers has joined the growing group of brewers taking advantage of the government's new tax break for sub-2.9% beers. Its offering is Mighty Atom, which is gradually making its way through the pub estate, and is currently in the Princess Royal in Brentford, among others.

I had a pint today and rather nice it was too, if it little light-bodied as you'd expect. The landlord said he expects it to go down well with the football crowd, especially those who drive over but still fancy a pint or two. Damn, yet more furriners nicking our parking spaces every other Saturday!

Whew, what a week...

With the restored Twickenham Beer Festival now over - wow, that was a long week! And that's even after I had to work Monday & Tuesday instead of helping with set-up right from the start.

Into the beer festival on Wednesday morning - I was the bar manager for the main ale bar - to discover they already had all the casks up on the stillage. Hurrah! We set up the bars, customer seating and what have you. At least that wasn't too late a finish.

Then Thursday morning in again around 9, completed the set-up and as the day went on I started briefing the bar staff and sorting out stuff for later in the week, such as going to meet the estimable Tom Madeiros of the nearby Twickenham brewery who'd agreed to let us have samples of hops and malt for the planned introductory beer tasting session on Saturday. The beer manager and his crew had done a brilliant job of getting the beer ready in plenty of time, and once the labels were all up we were ready to open at 5pm.

It's three years since the last Twickenham beer festival, so in a way it's like a new event and it was a bit slow getting started. We had also been given an almost absurdly low fire limit by the council H&S people, so the organisers hadn't promoted it as heavily as in the past. Nonetheless, by 7pm it was humming - the bars were busy and everyone was having a good time, volunteers and customers alike. As bar manager, one of my more important jobs is to make sure the volunteers take breaks whenever possible and practical, as it's easy to overdo it and burn yourself out when you're enthusiastic.

During the evening quite a few local publicans were around as our guests, along with the brewer from the new Botanist Brewery in Kew. The branch's new Pub of the Year was announced, with the Prince of Wales in Twickenham just pipping runners-up the Magpie & Crown (Brentford) and the Roebuck (Hampton Hill).

Come closing time at 10.30pm, I thanked the bar staff and headed straight home, as I knew the alarm would have to be set for 5.30am to get Helma and Roric to Heathrow for their flight to Germany. We were up and they were checked in mostly on time, and after walking the dog I cycled back to Twickenham for Friday which was to be the first full day's opening.

It was getting harder now, and then when during the afternoon I cycled home again to give the dog his afternoon run my energy was really running low. Still, it was back to the fray, and our fears on the festival fire limit were realised when around 6-7pm the hall was nominally full - though in fact there was still spare room - and we had 40-50 people queuing outside waiting for others to leave so they could get in.

Fortunately, the council folk saw sense - they acknowledged that the space available to us was sufficient for another 10%, and that pretty much instantly cleared the queue. At the bar we were thoroughly busy all of a sudden, but the volunteers were brilliant. In fact, I don't think anyone will have had to wait more than 2 or 3 minutes all festival, and most were served within a minute.

Come Saturday morning, I have to confess I found it difficult to get there even by opening time. The tickers and a few other keen types were in early, but it took a while to get busy. By lunchtime though it was pretty lively, especially with Harlequins rugby fans in ahead of their game. It quietened down once they went off to the match, then picked up once more around 5-6pm. The afternoon tasting session went very well, with some good interest and plenty of relevant questions from the participants.

By now beers were running out all the time, but we still had plenty left, and come 9.30pm we decided to cut prices and start pushing takeouts, which shifted a few extra gallons. On the one hand, by closing time we still had a good choice of beers left - festival-goers often complain about festivals running out before the close - but on the other hand, by closing time we still had quite a bit of beer left...

In again Sunday to help take everything apart and clear the venue - we had to be out at midday. By rooting around for all the plastic bottles I could find, I managed to salvage a few beers for later. Unfortunately one of the wretched bottles then leaked in the car onto the carpet, the smell of which will not help if I'm stopped by the cops...

A day later, I've finally managed to catch up on some sleep, but it's still hard to get back into work mode!