Craft beer rises into Brew London

Apologies, but I missed a London winter event off my last post - somehow Brew//LDN 2020 had completely failed to appear on my radar. Was it the tricksy name? The fact that it's taken over from Craft Beer Rising, but without taking over CBR's media list because the CBR founders jumped ship? Who knows!

Anyhow, it's a drinks industry showcase with producers of all sizes and origins booked in, ranging from lots of UK microbreweries to international brands such as Guinness (via its Open Gate brand/subsidiary), Brooklyn and Lagunitas. Obviously a lot of the overseas names will be via their UK distributors - for example, as well as Mikkeller I see other Euroboozer clients such as Steigl, Schremser and To Øl on the list. There's also several drinks other than beer represented.

And although there's macrobrew names involved, the 'LDN' name is not at all unjustified - there's a large chunk of the London microbrewery scene booked in.

The people behind Brew//LDN are the ex-founders of CBR, which explains a lot. For example it's at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, which was formerly the venue for CBR, and at the same time of year - which this year means Thursday 27th to Saturday 29th February.

The format is remarkably similar too - the Thursday and Friday afternoons are trade sessions while the others are open to the public, with tickets starting at £15 plus fees.

CBR got a lot of stick from some people for the way it mixed genuine independent craft producers with brands owned by multinationals. But while some macrobrewers are guilty of deceptive practices in making their products look like independent craft, and they can use their weight and distribution strength to squeeze the independents out, I always enjoyed CBR when I went along to the trade sessions. It was interesting to see what 'the big boys' were up to - it gave a more comprehensive view of the overall market. Plus of course the big boys have money, which I'm sure helped keep the event afloat!

Brew//LDN will undoubtedly get similar criticism. Plus there's the question of how successfully you can turn what's basically a trade show into a beer festival for the paying public. Especially when there's already a lot of competition in London for events targeting the drinks trade, what with The Pub Show next month, Imbibe Live in June, and several others including trade days at GBBF and elsewhere. It will be very interesting to see how it goes - I'm looking forward to it!

PS. If you're wondering what happened to Craft Beer Rising, as far as I can tell the company running it first got sold to a midsized drinks company, then that company was bought by an even bigger one. After that, the founders jumped ship and the CBR company was closed down. 

Personally, I'd argue that a drinks company has no business buying or running a trade show, but what do I know? The company backing Brew//LDN, Brewbroker, looks a rather better fit as it is more of a beer industry intermediary. 

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.

Changing your Signature

It's all change at London's Signature Brew following an oversubscribed crowdfunding campaign last year - new brewery and taproom, new logo and cans, and even a few new brews - new to me, at least.

The launch party at the new site is taking place this weekend, and there’s lots of shiny stainless steel on show. Given the brewery's history of collaborating with bands to create one-off beers, of course there's quite a bit of live music too.

There’s already a Signature Taproom in Haggerston, London E8, so the new site’s drinking space is instead called The Brewer’s Bar. For this weekend’s launch there’s also tables and benches in the yard outside and on the open area in the brewery proper - I’m told these will also be out once the Brewer’s Bar is open regularly, which is set to be Friday/Saturday evenings and Saturday/Sunday afternoons. At this time of year, the open areas are a tad chilly, but the bar itself is enclosed and warm!

Inside the bar there’s various mementos on the wall of the brewery’s history and its musical collaborations, from its origins in 2012 when it contract-brewed, to 2015 when they got their own brewkit, which they outgrew within four years.

I had a chat with Chris, one of the assistant brewers, who filled me in on some of the changes. Although the actual ‘brew length’ hasn’t changed massively - the new brewkit is 32hl (20 barrels) where the older was 24hl - the new one is much more modern. In place of a manual two-vessel system, they now have a four-vessel system with lauter tun and whirlpool, so brewing is easier and faster.

Alongside a set of 32hl fermenters, they also now have six 120hl (75 barrel) fermenters for core beers such as Roadie, Backstage IPA and Studio Lager - big enough to get three brews into each. They’re currently brewing three days a week, two or three times a day. One of the advantages of upsizing your brewkit is quite simply that you can produce more beer in a shorter time and with less effort!

The venue is family-friendly, too!

As for the beers, as I discovered when I first met them they’re quality brews. Alongside the regulars I found an excellent 3% hoppy modern bitter - they badge this as a Table Beer, but to my mind it’s more of a Pale Ale ‘light’, a gorgeous Bretted lager (sadly a very limited production run), and a modernist Farmhouse/Saison.

Then there’s the collaboration they did for the recent Brewdog Collabfest, which aims to cram a cream tea, complete with cucumber sandwiches, Earl Grey, scones and raspberry jam, into a hazy IPA. It sounds ghastly, but it’s actually complex and fascinating. They also have a cask containing some of the very last of their original Anthology 10% Imperial Stout, now two years old and tasting quite gorgeous.

Technically the weekend event is ticket-only, but I’m told there should be room for some extra visitors if you’re looking for things to do tomorrow! It’s an easy walk from Blackhorse Road station. Also in the area are the Wild Card brewery, although sadly that’s not open tomorrow, and the intended site of Exale Brewing, which is the new project - again, crowdfunded - from the former Hale Brewing team. Ex-Hale, yeah…

Many thanks to the Signature crew for inviting me over - cheers!

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?