Brewery honours for Kissingate & Twickenham

Congratulations to Kissingate Brewery and Twickenham Fine Ales. At Kissingate's Spring Festival yesterday, they were presented with three awards and four certificates between them.

Gary & Bunny from Kissingate, R&H branch chair Charles

I was there with Richmond & Hounslow CAMRA to see Kissingate head brewer Gary receive the Beer of the Festival certificate from our most recent Twickenham Beer & Cider Festival for its Six Crows stout.

However, our chairman had also been tasked with making a second award – the Silver in the London and South East regional Champion Beer of Britain golden ales category went to Twickenham Fine Ales for its Naked Ladies bitter.

Stuart & Gary accept the Nooksack award

Why was Twickenham's head brewer Stuart at Kissingate yesterday? Well, the two breweries collaborated a few months back on Nooksack American Pale Ale, and yesterday they also received a shared Beer of the Festival award for this from the recent Sussex Beer & Cider Festival.

And yes, it was a classic English spring day – scattered sun to start, then came a mighty rainstorm to wash everyone indoors and under cover (hence the awards being done in a jam-packed brewery tasting gallery, rather than out in the air), and finally more sun so the Morris dancers could at last do their stuff.

Talking casks and kegs, with By The Horns

By The Horns was one of the first of the "new wave" of London breweries to commit itself to cask ale, while many of its approximate contemporaries took the (in many ways) cheaper and less complex path of kegging. So when the opportunity arose last week to visit the three-year-old brewery with a CAMRA group, I was eager to see how it has evolved, especially since it too is now kegging...

Clearly, the overall quality of its ale has not declined since its Diamond Geezer won beer of the festival at my local Twickenham Beer Festival in 2012, and the range has expanded. The most obvious change though is the brewery tap - when last I was there, probably two years ago now, founders Alex Bull and Chris Mills simply put some casks on gravity alongside the brewkit, plus some bottles and glasses on a table, and they opened to the public one Saturday a month, if that. 

They have now moved all the fermenting vessels - and they are up to five of these - into a second industrial unit nearby. That has freed up space to put in a proper bar, done in the modern 'recycled wooden chic' style, along with four hand-pumps, half a dozen keg taps and a couple of small fridges. There's even a few tables and stools, a table-football game, and not one but two loos! The five-barrel brewkit is now behind Perspex, and they are open six days a week for off-sales (bottles), with the bar open Thursday-Saturday.

Head brewer Alex says that while some 85% of their business is still cask, there are many places that want to offer a locally-made craft beer but which only have keg lines. So they are also using 30-litre Keykegs and Ecofass kegs - the former are disposable while latter are reusable.

Both types are in effect a giant bag-inna-box, with the beer in a plastic bag inside the keg. Alex explains that although they are physically kegs, the beer is still pretty much 'real' - it is not carbonated or served under pressure; instead it is brewery-conditioned and primed as you would for bottling, and forced out by compressed air injected between keg and bag. "Beer definitely can condition - undergo a secondary fermentation - in a keg," he adds.

We were able to try half a dozen ales, in all three dispense forms. Stiff Upper Lip, a bitter golden ale, was on cask, as was a new release called Ol Blue Eyes CInaTRA - this is brewed with Citra hops as the name implies, and is in the modern pale ale vein, with tropical fruit notes to complement the citrus bitterness.

On keg, we tasted Bobby on the Wheat - I was a little reluctant as I'd not found this especially interesting in the past, but it turned out that while the name's the same, this is actually a new recipe. Now at 4% ABV, it's a dry-hopped wheat ale, sort of like a hopped-up Hefeweizen Leicht. It has a refreshing hoppiness and a lightly spicy body. Alex says he's pleased with the new version: "The extra carbonation lifts it a bit, and the dry hopping works better."

And from bottles we tried Gift of the Gab, Lambeth Walk, Mayor of Garratt and Hopslinger. The former is a coffee milk stout - Alex says it starts as just a milk stout, made with British Pioneer and First Gold hops, and is then aged on oak and freshly ground coffee for two weeks. As well as some chocolate malt, I spotted some roast barley in there too - the latter is what gives Guinness and some other stouts that burnt-bitter edge. The result is delicious, anyway!

Lambeth Walk is a rich caramelly beer with hints of cocoa and toffee. It's sold as a London Porter, which I'd tend to go along with, but one or two in our party felt it was closer to Old Ale in style. Hmm! Mayor of Garratt is a toffeeish and faintly nutty London-style bitter, and last but not least, Hopslinger is Alex's interpretation of an American IPA, with plenty of dry hoppy bitterness plus touches of toasted orange and tropical fruit. 

All in all, it was a very enjoyable couple of hours and it provided a good catch-up, both on By The Horns specifically and on the state of craft ale in London more generally. Thanks again, Alex!

Golden Pints 2012

With 2012 in the Common Era almost over, I'm finally having a stab at the Golden Pints. This is a set of beery awards instituted by writers Andy Mogg and Mark Dredge; the idea is that anyone who wants to do so can offer their list, Mark then compiles a “best of” listing on his blog – I hope there will be an update to his initial posting here from 10th December!

The list starts with several standard categories, then we're free to add categories of our own as we wish – non-UK writers are invited to substitute their own location for “UK”; as I'm both, I'll add categories for Germany.

Best UK Draught Beer

1. Windsor & Eton Conqueror 1075 – all the Conqueror variants are superb, but I was lucky enough to catch the full-strength one on cask when it's normally only available in bottles. In bottle it's great, in cask and well-kept, it's stunning.

2. Thornbridge Bracia (Pedro Ximénez Aged) – I'm going to be strict here and only vote for beers I drank during 2012. This eliminates some of my favourites as they're seasonal and I wasn't in the country at the right time. This was one where I was in the right place and time – and fortunately had enough cash on me, as it was £12 a pint!

3. Twickenham Entire Butt – I got to try this at the brewery, it's an experiment by brewer Tom Madeiros to try producing an old-style porter by blending aged strong ale with fresh bitter and for me it worked brilliantly. I wasn't sure if I should include it here as it was a one-off, but apparently it has had a limited commercial release so here it is...

Best UK Bottled or Canned Beer

1. The Kernel Export Stout London 1890 – Evin's historical beers are just so complex and wonderful, especially the Stouts.

2. Fullers Vintage Ale 1999 – all the Vintage Ales are great, and usually more so with a few years on them, it so happens that this 13 year-old was the one I enjoyed this year.

I'm tempted to put the Twickenham Entire Butt in here too, as I was gifted a litre in a bottle to take home to Mrs BeerViking, but it's not regularly bottled, so...

3. The Kernel Imperial Brown Stout London 1856.

Best German Draught Beer

This is a tough one, because finding anything other than (boring) Pils or Weizen on draught is tough, except in places with local specialities such as Rauchbier and Braunbier in Bamberg, maybe Märzen in Munich, or Kölsch in Cologne.

1. Klindworths Sauensieker Pale Ale – where most German brewpubs' output is pretty staid, these guys like to have fun. Their take on an English Pale Ale is a bit of a hop-bomb, yet malty and well balanced.

2. Paffgen Kölsch – on tap at the tap. Fresh beer is not always best, but this was one time when it was – well, as fresh as lagered beer can be.

3. Maisels Dampfbier – one of the few darker beers I can get regularly on draught, this Steambeer is a lovely example of a Franconian amber ale.

Best German Bottled or Canned Beer

If I wasn't pulling them out separately, I'd quite possibly not have any German bottled beer in here at all. There's a lot of good German beer and some very good German beer, but I've not found a lot of really really good German beer yet. Some brewers are starting to experiment with different flavours and so on, but quite cautiously so far.

1. Kyritzer Mord und Totschlag – from a North German abbey brewery that's done a number of recreations of medieval dark beers, this one's a smoked black-beer from the 1700s.

2. Weltenburger Kloster Asam Bock – one of the classic Doppelbocks, rich and sweet, yet roasty and burnt.

3. Propeller Nachtflug - that rare beast, a German Imperial Stout, it's rich, dry, roasty and slightly salty (and no, it doesn't have double-headed eagles on the label!).

Andechser and Einbecker would both be in here as absolute classics, along with Störtebeker Stark-Bier, except I'm being even more strict in this section, and listing only beers that were new to me this year.

Best (non German or UK) Draught Beer

1. Emelisse Imperial Russian Stout – as black as sin, and almost as tasty.

2. Southern Tier Choklat – a superb Stout made with cocoa.

3. Evil Twin Yin – UK or not? I'll say not as it's a Danish brew, even though the brewing apparently took place at Brewdog. It's black and thick as liquorice, and as tasty as the best bits of coffee, port, liquorice and treacle toffee, all rolled together.

Best (non German or UK) Bottled or Canned Beer

1. Nøgne Ø Imperial Stout

2. Thisted Limfjords Double Brown Stout

3. Long Trail Brewmaster Series Imperial Porter

I have a sneaking suspicion that my drinking preferences might be showing by now....

Best Overall Beer

W&E Conqueror 1075 – I've been doing some thinking and reading around Black IPA, as well as discussing it with beer historians, and I've come to suspect that it is a genuine historical style, but with the wrong name. Everyone knows the story of IPA, that it was shipped to India for the troops – well, no it wasn't. IPA was shipped to India for the officers and gentry – the troops got Porter. Indeed, Ron Pattinson's research suggests Porter shipments to India were more than double those of IPA – and that Export India Porter was a hopped-up 1800s Porter at around 7-8%. Not far off a Double Black IPA, eh? 

Best UK Brewery

Magic Rock – for consistency, variety and fun. OK, so none of their beers made it into my top three individually, but Magic Rock's average is significantly above almost any other UK brewery working today.

Best German Brewery

Klindworths, I must go and visit them soon!

Best (non German or UK) Brewery

Alvinne, for great beer and also for the Alvinne Craft Beer Festival.

Pub/Bar of the Year

It's a bit of a zoo, but as a bar and for craft keg I still like the Euston Tap. For cask ale and a proper pub experience, it's my London local, the Magpie & Crown in Brentford.

Beer Festival of the Year

Another tough one. It was great to have GBBF back at Olympia this year, and I enjoyed working at the Twickenham beer festival too, but for the variety of both people and beer I think it has to be the Alvinne Craft Beer Festival.

Supermarket of the Year

OK, this is a beer supermarket, but all the branches of Hol'Ab I've used have impressed me. Like most German drinks shops there's crates and crates of boring Pils, but there's usually a whole wall lined with unusual stuff as well, a lot from Franconia and Bavaria-proper but also some others too. Don't expect to find much foreign beer though, unless you're desperate for Guinness or Heineken, or are a gastarbeiter needing Tyskie or Lech for a taste of home.

Independent Retailer of the Year

Bierland in Hamburg, for a great selection of hard-to-find German beers, plus a sprinkling of decent foreign stuff.

Best Beer Blog or Website

1. Shut Up About Barclay Perkins – more beer history than you can shake a stick at, the dry numbers amply counterbalanced by Ron Pattinson's erudition and dry wit.

2. Pete Brown's BeerBlog – great writing.

3. Boak and Bailey – almost always thought-provoking.

Food and Beer Pairing of the Year

The London City of Beer launch at the Red Herring, in particular Fuller's Bengal Lancer with a variety of cheeses. I should try more IPA/cheese pairings.

In 2013 I’d most like to...

Get more beer writing gigs, lead more guided tastings, get to the European Beer Bloggers Conference again, and generally get to more beer events.

Dear gods, I'm already over 1300 words – no wonder this has taken days to research and write... Merry Yule and Frohe Weihnachten, everyone!

Shine on you Diamond Geezer

The results are in, and the Beer of the Festival for the 2012 Twickenham Beer Festival is a nearly local brew: Diamond Geezer, from Wimbledon-based microbrewery By The Horns.

I'm really pleased, because it's a lovely beer - a full bodied, fruity and malty 4.9% red ale. I've had it before in bottle, and it was excellent on draught at the festival so I recommended it quite a bit to visitors who were unsure what to try next.

As it happens, the brewery's managing director Chris Mills dropped into the festival on the Thursday evening. It took me a few moments, but I recognised him from meeting at the brewery at a couple of their excellent monthly Saturday afternoon Open Brewery events earlier this year. We had a bit of a chat and I complimented the Geezer; sadly though he has no immediate plans to repeat the 6.4% 'double' version, Diamond Geezers, which I thought was even better.

I don't know if I'll be in London in time for the presentation at the brewery, but I hope so!

Back on the ale...

Last Friday I had my first real ale in two months, this week I am having a bit more of it, as I'm at the Twickenham Beer Festival. If you've never been deprived of something like this, you don't realise what you've got or how lucky you are!

Anyway, we're open today and tomorrow until 10:30pm, and we have a great beer list and a great team of volunteers, so if you're in the area do please come over. One caveat is we don't have a foreign & bottled beer bar this year due to the council limiting the number of people we can have in the hall - sorry about that.

There's some lovely dark beers on the list - last year's festival champion Hammerpot Bottle Wreck Porter is back an in superb form, I also liked the Binghams Doodle Stout - and some lovely bitters and golden ales.

There's a few that are new to me, such as Windsor & Eton Canberra, which is on my list for this afternoon, Southport's tasty Cyclone, the Botanist's spicy Pumpkin Ale, which is a different version from last year and has been selling really well, three ales from new micro XT, and Mauldon's Octoberfest, which is a remarkable blend of a classic Märzen and a real ale. And of course some old favourites - Purple Moose Snowdonia, W&E Conqueror, Dark Star Hophead and more.

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?

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!