Craft beer hits Munich

It may have been a beer festival in Munich, but Braukunst Live! was about as far from the near-monoculture of Oktoberfest as it is possible to get. Instead of a choice of Festbier, Festbier and maybe an alkoholfrei for the drivers, there was everything from new twists on Bavarian classics, such as Hofbrau's double-hopped Hallodri Märzen, through local versions of stout and IPA, to some of the best and most interesting modern beers from countries such as the US, Denmark and Italy.

All of this was gathered together in a huge tramshed, now home to the Munich MVG public transport museum. All the small exhibits had been stored away at the far end of the shed, but some were presumably just too big to move easily, so here and there the brewery bars backed onto old tramcars, and at one point we found temporary seating on some kind of iron railway chassis thingy – though I don't know exactly what it was, not least because the explanatory signboards had also been stashed away.

As traditional as they come

The exhibitors were an interesting mixture: the new, often American-inspired, craft brewers from all over Germany were there in force, along with their friends from places such as Denmark and Italy, but so too were some of the big Munich breweries and quite a lot of very traditional brewers from around Bavaria, the rest of Germany, and Austria. There were also several beer distributors, and a stand from the US Brewers Association hosting 20 or so top US craft brewers. This being Germany, there were also oddities such as a smoking room run by a cigar importer.

As a country long accustomed to relative blandness rediscovers its interest in flavoursome beer, the craft beer concept is gathering traction in Germany. However, just as in Britain, where the older real ale breweries stress their craft credentials, the traditional German brewers are craftsmen too. So there's the same dichotomy between the new brewers for whom 'craft' is all about innovation and pushing boundaries in the American style, and the old-school brewers who see craft skills as the thing that differentiates them from the giant fizz factories.

"I also home-brew and sometimes I do those [new craft] styles," said Karl-Heinz Silichner, the brewmaster at 125-year-old AuerBräu Rosenheim, where he produces 13 different regular beers. He added: "Many people think the only art is craft beer, but it's not so. German-style beer, or Bavarian-style, is an art too. People don't just like craft beers, many people want normal beers too."

At the moment, the 'new craft' brewers in Germany face two big challenges. The first is that a few too many of the new, innovative brewers betray a lack of finesse. Braukunst Live! highlighted this by making their beers available alongside those of their more experienced Danish and American counterparts. Yes, there were some gems on the German side (Schoppe Bräu's Black Flag Imperial stout and Schlossbrauerei Au's Grätzer, for example), but there were also some that seemed muddied or confused – triumphs of enthusiasm over quality, or so it seemed.

BraufactuM's Weizen IPA

But they will learn – if they get the chance, that is. Because the second threat is that, just as in the US and the UK, big industrial brewers are trying to muscle in by creating or buying craft brands of their own – and at the same time, trying to equate craft beer with premium pricing. The boldest of these is undoubtedly the Oetker Group's BrauFactuM subsidiary, which does some pretty solid beers that sell for anything up to €15 for a 750ml bottle. By comparison, Gebr. Maisel's craft brand Maisel & Friends sells 750ml bottles for €4 or €5, and regular German bottled beer is maybe €1 a half-litre.

Still, the microbrewers are confident. "The industrial brewers try to copy us but they can't do it – I think they won't buy the same quality of ingredients, and they do the beer in two weeks, we take four," declared BrauKunstKeller's Oksana Himburg. "If you stay small, don't spend too much on marketing and keep costs low, it can work," agreed Thorsten Schoppe of Schoppe Bräu.

Well, here's to that! The two big take-aways from Braukunst Live! for me were just how much real curiosity there is now about interesting beer in the legendarily conservative state of Bavaria, and how many of the traditional brewers are dabbling in 'new craft' alongside their regular lines. Yes, some are obviously finding it hard not to be cautious, but others are applying their years of brewing experience rather well – a solid dry stout from Austria's Schlossbräu, the aforementioned Au Grätzer, and Schneider's Tap X Porter Weisse all spring to mind.

140 years on, Batemans rebrands as “Craft with heritage”

Batemans is one of those breweries I'm aware of as an old family firm, producing good quality ales in traditional English styles, with the occasional collaboration or other surprise. I don't pigeonhole it with the new craft micros though, so I was intrigued when I got an invitation to their 140th birthday party and the launch of what looked to be a crafty new branding.

It turns out there has been a lot more going on in Wainfleet than I'd realised: as well as all their seasonals and specials (Rosey Nosey is a favourite of mine), there's now a series of English Strong Ales infused with coffee, chocolate, Amaretto and such like, sold under the new Bohemian Brews brand, and another series constructed to taste like biscuits – the example at the launch was the Chocolate Biscuit Beer winter seasonal, and if like many people you think this beer tastes like chocolate digestives, well that's exactly what it's meant to do.

Even odder is the Black Pepper Ale, which isn't actually brewed with pepper, instead you get a bottle of ale (a 5.1% version of XXXB, I understand) plus a Batemans-branded sachet of pepper with instructions on how to add it. Then there's English BBock, Batemans' top-fermented interpretation of the North German (not just Bavarian!) classic, and so on...

The brewery has made other, more subtle, changes too. A big one is adding storage capacity so they can extend the ale maturation period from five to nine days. Stuart Bateman explained that the idea is to ensure drinkers don't get 'green' beer that isn't properly ready yet: “Our beer drops bright very quickly, but we don't want licensees selling it just because it's bright,” he said. “Not everyone will cellar-condition for four, five or six days now – if I was running my own pub I'd do it for 10 days! – so we have taken it on for them.”

Introducing the new beers – there's also Black & White, which is an uprated 3.6% version of the former 3% Dark Mild – Stuart was keen to stress how much Batemans is already doing in terms of variety and innovation. Having been quite surprised when I saw just how many beers it has listed on Ratebeer and Untappd (at least seventy!), I'm inclined to agree.

Stuart Bateman

“We want to prove you can be a craft brewer with tradition, with heritage since 1874,” he declared, in a direct reference to one of the problems the 'craft beer movement' has here, i.e. that while the term makes sense in America, where 'craft' pretty much equals 'innovative and new', in Europe we still have plenty of brewers who fit all the dictionary definitions of 'craft', yet are centuries-old.

He added that Batemans last rebranded in 1979, so it's not like they've rushed into it, and that it's all been done in-house – or perhaps I should say in-windmill, since the iconic mill is still there, albeit in a cleaner, more stylish form.

“The days of just brewing fairly standard pale ale style beers, all fairly similar in flavour, but with slight colour variations, called ‘funny’ names and often with ‘funny’ pictures on the pump clips, bearing little relevance to the beer style or flavour, are gone,” he continued. “We want our customers to see our new branding and know exactly what we stand for as brewers – craft brewers since 1874 – and from the beer names and pump clips, to know exactly what the flavour characteristics of any of our beers are: 'it does what it says on the tin'.”

So what are the beers like? To some they might seem well OTT – the Orange Barley beer smells rather like Fanta and tastes like a mix of Fanta and a fine and spicy Rye beer, you can taste the hazelnuts and chocolate in the Hazelnut Brownie beer, and the Amaretto Mocha beer is full of almond and coffee. Yet they all seem to work, and achieve a pretty decent level of integration. Sure, for some people a 330ml bottle will be plenty, but others are already happy to drink them in pints – and it turns out that black pepper is an intriguing match for XXXB.

Not too surprisingly, Stuart energetically denied that they are in any way gimmicks. He cited the awards they've already won – first prizes in both the 2013 Sainsbury's Beer Hunt for Batemans Mocha, and in the 2014 one for BBock, a win for cask Hazelnut Brownie in the JD Wetherspoon Autumn Beer Festival, and now first place for cask Mocha Amaretto at the CAMRA Manchester Beer Festival. He pointed out too that if you are trying to get new people interested in beer – which he is – then you need to allow for a certain sweetness of palate. And it has to be said that on the evidence of the quite excellent XXXB on cask at the party, and of other excellent cask and bottled beers such as the Salem Porter and Dark Lord, there is no sign that the new stuff will detract in any way from Batemans commitment to fine traditional ales.

So, I wish a very happy 140th birthday to Batemans – thank you for all the great beers, and I look forward to drinking plenty more!

The Truman show

Anyone who has lived around London will probably recognise the name Truman. It still decorates pubs all over the city, the legacy of Truman's Brewery, one of the great 19th century London brewing companies – and for a short while in the late 1800s, the largest brewer in the world.

Truman's was one of the victims of the British brewery mergers of the 1960s and 70s, murdered by Grand Met following a vicious battle with Watney's. Its huge brewery on Brick Lane closed in 1989, and although many of the buildings survive they now house all sorts of start-up businesses and shops.

But in 2010, the name was revived, bought from Scottish & Newcastle (which had been left holding the parcel when the merger music stopped) by two Londoners who wanted to bring it back to the East End. When I read last year that they were building a 40-barrel plant in Hackney Wick – for a start-up, when the norm is more like 10 barrels! – it would have seemed like extreme hubris if they hadn't spent the intervening years proving the market by brewing and selling beer, first brewing at Nethergate and then when its capacity was insufficient, at Everards.

And when the Kew Gardens Hotel just 10 minutes away held a meet-the-brewer evening with Truman's, I jumped at the chance. Sadly, the brewer himself couldn't make it, even though Kew Gardens is just a single train ride of 50 minutes from Hackney Wick (wimp!). Fortunately his substitute, the brewery's on-trade sales boss Paul Ramsay, was well able to talk about the brewery and its plans – and he had plenty of beer with him...

Truman's Runner is the new – sorry, re-established – brewery's flagship, but Paul says they are going straight into offering a range of three regular beers, with four seasonals, plus occasional one-offs as well. A classic 4% brown bitter, Runner was on tap alongside Swift, a clean, crisp and well-balanced 3.9% golden ale with Cascade and Saaz hops. The third regular will be Eyrie, the recipe for which isn't final yet, but the plan is for a best bitter of around 4.5%.

The current seasonal was on tap too – Emperor, with a penguin logo, is a brown ale – American Brown Ale style, says the brewery, but I'm not sure it's hoppy enough for that – featuring the original Truman's yeast plus Cascade and Aramis hops, the latter being a French variety that's new to me and I suspect to most people here. It's very nice – fruity, with hints of coffee and a little chocolate. Confusingly though, while the recipe is new, the name isn't, as Truman's did a bitter called Emperor two years ago – this is not the same beer!

Holding the banner for the occasionals was Truman's Original Porter. Made from a mostly brown malt grist in the old style London Porter, this is chocolately yet quite light bodied despite its 4.6%, and was sadly the least impressive of the beers on offer.

Paul had also brought along some Truman's London Keeper 1880 Double Export Stout, a limited edition of 2000 bottles priced at £17.50 each. Every bottle is sealed with ivory wax and bears a hand-printed, hand-signed and numbered label from a specialist craft printer also in the East End. A publicity stunt to help publicise the new brewery, where this was the very first brew on the new brewkit? Absolutely, but not just a stunt – the 8% beer is based on two recipes in the Truman's archive, and is hugely rich with umami dryness, cocoa and treacle notes, and an earthy bitterness. Somehow reminiscent of a Dunkel Doppelbock, it should indeed improve with keeping. 

An interesting aside was that Paul said the Truman's seasonals will all be 4.2% ABV. This is to make it easier for SIBA to list them as pubco guest beers – they will appear as a single entry, and the publican will get whichever one is current. I heard the same story from the guys at Twickenham Fine Ales a couple of months back (their seasonals are 4.4%), so I suspect we will notice a lot more of this tactic.

All in all, Truman's is a great addition to the London brewing scene, and has already done a good job of getting its beers embedded on bars and its name back in the pubic eye. It's certainly one I'll be happy to see on a bar in the future.

How not to open a brewpub

The beer's good quality, but the brewery is really just decoration

My thanks to Boak & Bailey for pointing me at this interesting piece on the Bear-Flavored blog, How Not To Open a Brewery. In it, the author Derek points out how many US craft breweries are now the product not of passionate brewers but of investors who see it as a good bet and a hot business to be in. He wonders which ones will last - the products of passion, or the investments.

It immediately made me think of my experiences with German brewpubs - I realised that while the best fitted the 'passion' category (eg. Klindworths, Heidenpeters, Eschenbrau), many of them really just felt they'd been added to give the bar a bit more atmosphere and identity, and make it a bit more of a destination. OK, they'd hired a trained brewer so the beer was good quality, but otherwise they were little different from any other investment in the premises, from new furniture or an updated loo, and the beer was little different from all the other Pils around.

With a brewpub the risk could be less than with a brewery, because you have a guaranteed market for the product. It costs money and management time though, and as an investor you need to get a return on that investment. And there is evidence of this return not happening, in the number of brewpubs that have closed and reopened under new management, or which are still operating as bars but with the brewkit standing derelict, now merely a decoration.

And it reminded me of the tag-line that English ale brewery Batemans ("Craft brewers since 1874") came up with: A brewery run by brewers, not accountants.

Of course you can't do without accountants - or at least, a knowledge of how to do business and an eye to the bottom line. Yes, running a brewery is still a business.

But really, how much mileage is there left in craft beer and ale if it's now just another "hot investment opportunity" for shysters and spivs?

Greene King's crafty rebrand

Greene King is in the process of rebranding several of its beers with new, more consistent labels in a hand-drawn style clearly meant to look handcrafted. Here's a pop-up exhibition banner showing several of them.

The existing beers getting new labels are St Edmunds, Strong Suffolk (which also now gets the suffix "Dark Ale" instead of "Vintage Ale") and Yardbird. You can (for now) see the original labels and pumpclips here.

Also getting a new label are Twisted Thistle IPA (an ex-Belhaven brand) and Noble - yes, in case you hadn't realised, "Noble Craft Lager" is a GK brew. Even the manager in one of my local GK pubs was surprised when I pointed this out to him!

And there's some new beers coming to this family, including Double Hop Monster IPA, Suffolk Porter and St Edmunds Anniversary Ale.

What do you think - does GK stand a chance, branding these as craft?

Contract or collaboration?

The other week I dropped into the Moon Under Water in Hounslow - a JD Wetherspoon that's a Good Beer Guide regular - to see a Bale Breaker Field 41 Pale Ale pump-clip. It wasn't from Yakima in Washington State though, where Bale Breaker is based, but from Devizes in Wiltshire. Yes, it was another of JDW's popular guest beers where they get the US brewer to come and do a beer at one of several UK breweries - Wadworth's, in this case.

It set me thinking - are these contract brews, or are they collaborations? JDW is rightly quite clear where they come from, with most clips proudly bearing the name of both the guest brewer and the host brewery, and they are never exactly the same beer. For a start, the UK versions are cask-conditioned, whereas the US ones will mostly be kegged or bottled.

Typically the ABVs will differ too - UK Field 41 was 4.8%, versus 4.5% in the US for example - and the recipes may need to be adapted. For example, Mitch Steele of Stone Brewing wrote extensively on his blog about the process of brewing a version of Stone's Supremely Self-Conscious Ale at Adnam's (5% UK, 4.5% US), which he describes as a true collaboration. The two versions used different hops and yeast - as well as different water of course.

Most times though, all we have to go on is the information that brewer X brewed their beer Y at brewery Z. Does that make it a collaboration, or is it merely a contract brew, where the same recipe could be brewed, with appropriate adjustments, on any number of different sites? And do they count as different beers or as the same one?

On the Untappd forums, it's been interesting to see what appears to be a geographic split on this. US voices have tended towards the "same beer" view, I guess to them it's no different from contracting your best-selling beer to a bigger brewery in order to meet demand. Maybe it's also important for it to remain "an American beer". UK voices on the other hand seem to see them as American-inspired but different and collaborative - perhaps it's partly nationalist, but it's also a recognition that the recipe and process will need to change to produce a cask-conditioned ale, and that local expertise will inevitably need to be involved.

(On Ratebeer the two versions always get separate listings. but then Ratebeerians were already very serious about differentiations such as where a beer is brewed, how it's served, etc.)

So is there a dividing line that makes one beer a collaboration and another not, and if so, where is it? Or should I stop worrying about it and have another pint? (-:

A sad sight

The derelict brewkit in the now-misnamed Lamb Brewery pub in Chiswick (formerly the Barley Mow, among other names). Installed in 2012, the brewery ran for barely a year before being closed last October by Mitchells & Butler when it bought the pub from Convivial.Indeed, it closed so fast that I never got to drink here while it was open (though I did try a couple of the ales elsewhere).

I'm told a final decision on the future of the brewery (and on its sibling at The Botanist in Kew) is due in February, when the pubs close for refurbishment, presumably to fit them into M&B's Castle chain. It looks most likely that both will go, especially as both brewers have left, but you never know...

One piece of good news that's come out of it is that the Lamb's former brewer, Conor, has a new job at the George & Dragon in Acton - they're installing the kit to turn this into one of London's newest brewpubs later this year.

Another possible silver lining is that if two smallish brewkits come onto the market around February, we might see two more new London brewpubs before too long. Here's hoping!