Golden Pints 2013

New Year is coming, the blog is looking thin, please put an article in the old man's tin... So I'm finally getting around to the Golden Pints 2013*, it won't be as long as last year's massive posting, not least because we were out of the country most of the year, but there you go...

1. Best UK Cask Beer - Great Heck's Dark Force Treason Stout, I found this at the Egham beer festival back in October, and its complex blend of treacley, fruity and citrus flavours blew me away.


2. Best UK Keg Beer - Given the unjustifiable price premium charged in the UK for keg over cask, I rarely drink UK keg. An exception was during some recent brewery visits where it was keg or bottle, and when I was rather impressed by Brew By Numbers' Saisons.


3. Best UK Bottled or Canned Beer - Siren Broken Dream. Having encountered Ryan's Danish beers, I was intrigued to see what he'd come up with after he moved to the UK, and those I tried at Copenhagen Beer Celebration this year did not disappoint. Nor did his Broken Dream stout.


4. Best Overseas Draught Beer - Klindworths Sauensieker Imperial Stout, amazing stuff, like a cross between an aged stout and a barley wine.


5. Best Overseas Bottled or Canned Beer - Lervig Brewers Reserve Konrads Stout, wonderful stuff, and a reminder that good as Nøgne Ø is, it's not the only fine brewery in Norway.


6. Best collaboration brew - Adnams / Pretty Things Jack D’Or. A version of a US beer, brewed in the UK as a special for Wetherspoons.


7. Best Overall Beer - Hmm, tough one. It's not a new beer to me, but right now it's the Acorn Gorlovka Imperial Stout that I was drinking last night!


8. Best Branding, Pumpclip or Label - I still love Magic Rock's artwork, but this year it's been just a tiny bit outshone by Siren.


9. Best UK Brewery - There's so many new names and smaller breweries I could choose - eg. Siren, Gloucester, Kernel - but I'm going to choose one that this year did it all. It produced great beers for the mass market and at the same time showed it can innovate as well as any of the smaller boys, and that brewery is Adnams.


10. Best Overseas Brewery - Klindworths, how this brewpub in a small North German village manages to produce - and sell! - such a huge range of exceptional beers still boggles my mind.


11. Best New Brewery Opening 2013 - Brew By Numbers.


12. Pub/Bar of the Year - Sad to say, I've not really spent enough time in any of them to call myself a proper judge, but in Berlin I enjoyed Hausbrauerei Eschenbräu, in Franconia it's Brauerei-Gasthof Kundmüller, home of the Weiherer beers, and in London my favourite place remains my local - the Magpie & Crown


13. Best beer and food pairing - stout and ice cream!


14. UK Beer Festival of the Year - I missed GBBF and several others, but somehow I don't think I'd have enjoyed them as much as I did an afternoon at the Egham Beer Festival. A stack of new and interesting cask ales, almost all in perfect nick, and in friendly surroundings. Perfect!


15. Overseas Beer Festival of the Year - this is a tough one! Hamburg's Craft Beer Days expanded to Berlin this summer, although sadly I couldn't be there then, and continues to be a fine showcase for characterful, non-industrial German beer. And then there's the loveliness of drinking Franconian festbier in the greenwoods at Annafest. For me though it was Copenhagen Beer Celebration, a festival of total beer geekery, loaded with rare and one-off beers from around the world.


16. Independent Retailer of the Year - It's a little pricey by local standards, but Hamburg's Craft Beer Store has a great local and international selection plus helpful staff, and even beer on tap.


17. Online Retailer of the Year - I didn't use any.


18. Best Beer Book or Magazine - I wish I had time to read more!


19. Best Beer Blog or Website - For the off-beat writing, it's Called To The Bar.


20. Best Beer App - UnTappd for being such a useful beer logbook, plus it has such tremendously responsive developers and moderators. Disclaimer: I am one of those moderators... (-;


21. Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer - @broadfordbrewer (-:


22. Best Brewery Website/Social media - Oh go on then, it's Sambrooks for its extensive Twitter, Facebook and the wibbly-wobbly web.

*This is a set of beery awards instituted by bloggers Andy Mogg and Mark Dredge; the idea is that anyone who wants to do so can offer their list, Andy and Mark then compile “best of” listings.

Happy New Year everyone, and may next year bring us all even more wondrous delights to drink!

Keg or cask for stronger beers?

I try not to get involved in Cask vs Keg debates*, each has its advantages and disadvantages, but I had an unexpected experience at the Pig's Ear Beer Festival last week. Very unusually for a CAMRA festival they had - what a great change - a key-keg beer bar as well as the cask bars.

Both had strong beers on, by which I mean 7% and over, and I tried several. Yet of the cask examples I sent two or three back, which is to say I asked the bar staff to bin them and I then bought something different. whereas their keg cousins all worked beautifully.

I also had several gorgeous cask ales, by the way. They demonstrated just how good a properly cask-conditioned beer can be, and how much more depth the process can add over kegging, even when the kegged beer is unfiltered and unpasturised, as keg craft beers almost always seem to be.

So what conclusion should I take from this? Does kegging suit higher ABV beers better, or was I a bit unfortunate - it was the last day of the festival after all - to find a few cask beers that had got a bit tired over the week?


*I'm with the quiet majority within CAMRA, for whom it's the Campaign FOR Real Ale, not the Campaign "against other methods of serving good beer". Attitudes of "if you're not with us, you're against us" have no place in the enjoyment of good beer.

Free camping in a pub garden, tents included

The only drawback is it's in the rural English Midlands, in December...

A press release arrived today, announcing Worcestershire pub creates pop-up drunk tanks to curb xmas drink-driving. It says the landlady of the Drum and Monkey, Newbridge Green had the idea while talking to one of her regulars, a chap who runs a camping equipment business.

The press release - issued by his PR company rather than hers - says he "immediately offered a range of camping gear including several large tents, three-season sleeping bags, nightlights and a toilet tent" to be put in the pub garden (see left, in warmer times) from December to New Year's Day.

The landlady, Liz Jennings, says that anyone over the limit at the time of leaving the pub will be offered a free sleeping place. "There was so much interest in paid-for drunk tanks earlier this year and I thought it was a good idea," she's quoted as saying. "But I wanted to offer my customers a free facility as it’s the season of goodwill. I’ll even be offering my overnight guests a mug of hot tea and a bacon butty the next morning before sending them on their way."

It looks like a bargain to me - get trolleyed on good real ale at a pretty country pub, free crash space for the night and free breakfast! The downside is night-time temperatures around freezing. Plus, if you're that far over the limit at closing time, you could still be over the limit after breakfast. Best stay on a bit longer, then. Oh, hang on - you're in a pub. Hmm, I wonder if she takes weekly bookings...?

Stone's Self-Confusing Ale conundrum

An ale that repeats a name from a different ale two years ago, and is also brewed on two different continents to different recipes. Confused? Once upon a time maybe you wouldn't have been – the versions would have been too far apart in time and space. But with the advent of the Web, all that has changed.

A few months ago, several US brewers travelled to visit UK breweries at the invitation of the JD Wetherspoon pub group. They were here to brew versions of their ales that would be cask-conditioned and sold exclusively in JDWs, nominally for its real ale festival. So far, so good – and indeed, some of the resulting beers were very good.

But it also resulted in a discussion on Untappd last night: the site had acquired three listings for what, at first glance, appeared to be the same beer: Stone's Supremely Self-Conscious Ale, which appeared in the most recent JDW festival as Stone Supremely Self-Conscious Black Ale, brewed at Adnams in Suffolk. All three listings included mentions of Wetherspoons – so what was going on?

It took a bit of Web digging, plus a hunt through the 'archives' on Ratebeer and BeerAdvocate, to come up with an explanation. Along the way I found an entry on Stone brewer Mitch Steele's blog where he described his trip to Adnams and the fact that the Black Ale is a variation on a SSCA, which was a Black IPA brewed at Stone's Liberty Station 10-barrel brewpub, initially at least from the second runnings of its Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale.

(There's an interesting thing in itself – it's been a while since I heard of a separate ale being made from second runnings. It makes sense though because Sublimely is a bit of a monster – 8.7%, so it needs the highly concentrated wort that comes off the mashed malt first, otherwise you'd be boiling it for days to get the sugars concentrated enough. And there's bound to be lots of sugars left in the malt after that first wash.)

Here's what I think happened: in 2011, Stone released a 3.5% dry-hopped Black Mild (nowt wrong with that – 'mild' means un-aged, not un-hoppy, and milds can be light or dark), this was around for a short while and got listed on all three of the beery sites mentioned above.

Then in 2013, it revived the name for a 4.5% Black IPA – here's the keg label – which was brewed twice (says Mitch Steele) and was also served at this year's Great American Beer Festival and at several Stone events. This too got picked up by the beer listers, all of whom seem to have rather carelessly (given the different ABV & style) assumed they were drinking the 2011 beer. The Ratebeer entry comes out weirdest – three-quarters of the rates are the BIPA, but it's still listed as a 3.5% mild; the Untappd one had its description and ABV adjusted earlier this year, the latter from 3.5% to 5.2%.

Why 5.2%? I don't know, but by the look of it the ABV changed from 4.5% to 5.2% - probably the former was the pilot brew from second runnings and the latter was the commercial brew at Liberty Station.If anyone from Stone is reading this, could they comment please?

Then there's the UK 're-creation', which was made at a different brewery, uses different yeast (Adnams) and a different hop bill, has a different ABV (5%), was cask-conditioned, and has a different name on the pumpclip – SSC Black Ale, rather than SSC Ale. Yet there's a bunch of Wetherspoon listings bundled in with the US version on Untappd, presumably by drinkers who didn't get past reading 'Supremely Self' before they went “Yeah, whatever.”

And then there's a couple of listings for something called Sublimely Self-Conscious Ale. I can't find this name anywhere apart from Untappd, and I will be astonished if it's not either a conflation or typo, especially as Supremely Self-Conscious's parent was Sublimely Self-Righteous. As they used to say on TV, “Confused? You soon will be.”

Me? I'm Stoned-out, and off to do some real work....

Beer and sniffles

It was over to Egham this afternoon for the 16th Egham Beer Festival - there's three a year, so it's not quite as old an event as that makes it sound! I'd been to there before, although not for a few years, so I kind of knew what to expect: half a dozen real ales on handpump inside, and several more on a gravity stillage in the yard outside.

Burning Sky Plateau

It was even more impressive than I remember, though - more like a dozen handpumps inside, and more handpumps outside, as well as several casks on gravity. The beer list was really interesting too, with lots from new breweries, especially around the London area.

(When we left London last summer, there were 20-25 breweries in the area, up from just two or three not so many years ago. When we came back to London this autumn, it's nudging 50-odd breweries. Maybe we should go away again - we might be able to get it over 100!)

The festivals take place at the Egham United Services Club, which is open to CAMRA members and guests as well as to club members. It's a great venue and very supportive of the event. Indeed, as the festival organiser noted, with that many handpumps it's pretty much a permanent beer festival...

Jedi baby...

It's also a very friendly venue, and as a members' club it is not just open to families but actively welcomes them. À propos of which, I know this blog has been a tad quiet of late, well here's why: this is the youngest attendee at the festival, aged just over a week, so as you might guess I've been a bit distracted of late. And yes, she and her elder brother were very well behaved and didn't annoy anyone, in fact she slept through the whole thing.

As to the beers, there were two or three standouts, only partly defined by how well they cut through the foul cold that has me sneezing and sniffling all over the place. I was especially impressed by Black & White IPA, which is the latest London Brewers Alliance special, a black IPA brewed at By The Horns, and then by two beers from Kent Brewery, which I don't remember meeting before despite it being three years old.

The first of these was Elderflower Saison, a beautifully complex, crisp and floral Belgian-style pale ale. The second was Dead of Night, a variation on Kent's highly regarded 5.5% porter that includes cherries - the result is dry, herby and ashy-bitter, with a noticeable red fruit tang.

But perhaps the most impressive of the lot was Plateau, a pale ale from a brand new - as in, so new they only started brewing about six weeks ago - Sussex brewery called Burning Sky. Just 3.5% ABV, Plateau features a mix of American and New Zealand hops for a spicy and tropical fruit character, and is immensely refreshing and satisfying, drinking considerably above its strength, if you know what I mean.

Medieval schmedieval...

Spurious claims to history and tradition are ten a penny, but sometimes one comes along that's so egregious and annoying that there's nothing for it but to start digging. So it was when a Facebook friend highlighted the launch of Heverlee Blond Lager, a beer variously promoted as being based on a 12th century monkish recipe and as a Belgian Pils style lager.

Ah yes, that would be the mysterious medieval Belgian Pils that pre-dated the 1842 Bohemian version by 700 years.

Initial comments from others on Facebook highlighted that it was only launching – for now – in Ireland and Scotland. That was the first clue: it turned out it's from Dublin-based C&C, which is mainly a maker of industrial ciders, most notably Magners, but which also owns Scotland's Tennents brewery, and those lands are pretty much its home turf.

Joris Brams discusses Heverlee Lager

That then took me to an interview in The Scotsman with Joris Brams, the MD of C&C's international division and the man behind the new beer. Born in Belgium, not far from Heverlee which is now a suburb of Leuven, he has a background in beer, having worked for both Scottish & Newcastle and Alken-Maes (though apparently not AB-InBev, which is headquartered in Leuven). In the interview he describes missing authentic Belgian lager during his time in Scotland – as well he might, because the UK version of Leuven's most famous export, Stella Artois, is a licensed fake.

The Heverlee website picks up the theme: "Returning to his birthplace of Leuven, our master brewer embarked on a mission to rediscover and recreate this classic bygone taste. Exploring the abbey library he learned of a light, fresh tasting lager and used descriptions of the ancient beer to create Heverlee."

Ah yes, those would be the ancient times before the accountants took over and cut the typical lagering period from months to days.

Oh, and just to top it off, they claim that this 4.8% Belgian Pils is actually an Abbey beer as it's "brewed in association with" Heverlee's Park Abbey. Honestly, what a load of marketing clap-trap – it's just a blond lager that's essentially been brought in to add a high end 'premium Pils' offering to the Tennents line.

On the plus side, it really does appear to be Belgian, for now at least. I've not been able to discover which brewery is responsible, although Brouwerij Haacht, a few miles outside Leuven, reputedly brews the 'real' Park Abbey beers, Abdij Van 't Park Blond & Bruin, both at 6% ABV.

So what's it like? Interestingly, the beer geeks at Ratebeer haven't discovered Heverlee Blond yet. I can only assume that the Ratebeerians of Scotland and Ireland don't visit Tennents pubs very often. Over at Untappd things are different and the beer has over 100 check-ins. Here's some of the verdicts:

Incompetent lager.
Standard Belgian lager.
Quite a smooth & creamy texture - not bad actually.
Awful. Just as bad as Harp if not worse.
Hint of Saison yeast flavours, sweet, but pretty ordinary.
Cold, smooth but no depth. Better than average lager.
Clean, clear lager but nothing more and nothing less, a lager.

I'm not sure which is more annoying – the marketing clap-trap, or the fact that papers such as The Scotsman swallowed it whole.

Exactly what is exacting?

Nonsense like this - from brewpub chain Gordon Biersch, which I visited this afternoon in Broomfield - makes me go "Grrr!"

"Exacting standards"? All it does is specify the usable ingredients, very generally.

The beer was OK, but it reminded me too much of just how average the average German brewpub is.