Jubel gets crafty with the lager-top

Maybe you already saw Jubel’s attractive bright-yet-minimalist labels on the shelves in Sainsbury’s, but like me, you weren’t convinced by the idea of sweetened, fruit-flavoured beer. Flavoured beer is quite traditional though in some ways and places, so I was pleased when one of my local pubs announced a meet-the-brewer visit from Jubel Beer.

We had two varieties to taste, Alpine which is peach-flavoured, and Urban which has elderflower syrup added. They had just launched a third, Grapefruit, but it hadn’t reached London yet. I tried the Urban first and was pleasantly surprised. Yes, it’s sweet – much too sweet for my liking – but the elderflower adds an intriguing grape-like note, with the result ending up like a cross between lager and a sweet white wine.

Alpine is less subtle, with in-your-face fruitiness and the rather light base-beer almost lost in the background. “Craft beer is all the thing now, but it’s too hoppy for some,” noted Jubel rep Adam, which I’m afraid I translated as ‘This is beer for people who don’t actually like beer, but still want to be seen drinking it.’

Life is peachy

Adam passes the beers round

Everything has to have an origin story these days, it seems, and as Adam explained, this one involves two students on a skiing holiday in the French Alps and encountering Demi Pêche, which is the local variant of a lager-top – beer with a dash of peach syrup.

He says they came back to London and, after graduation, initially tried renting brewing capacity and making something similar using peaches in the brew. That didn’t work well though, so they decided to make their own peach syrup. They added this to a contract-brewed gluten-free lager – one of the two founders is Coeliac, says Adam – and sold the result in bottles. (There’s also a YouTube version of this story.)

So why was I meeting Adam, who’s actually on the sales side, covering London and the South East, rather than one of the founders? That was down to their need for more production capacity and money for expansion, both of which came from picking up the whole operation and moving it to Cornwall, landing in Penryn, near Falmouth. This is just 20-odd miles from St Austell Brewery, and it helped them get a grant from the EU’s European Regional Development Fund, one of whose aims is to boost the economies of places like Cornwall.

Just a taste...

A launch across the south-west of England followed, and then a listing with Fuller’s (we were talking in The George IV, a big yet cosy Fuller’s pub in Chiswick). And then late last year came the big one – a nationwide launch in 600 Sainsbury’s shops.

Should you buy some? Well, if you or your friends are sweet-toothed and enjoy drinks such as the mixes of beer and fruit juice* produced on the Continent – and especially if they are Coeliac too – then give them a go. The elderflower one could also be interesting for anyone who like sweet white wines and wants to try something a bit different.

*Note that these are fruit-flavoured drinks but they are not ‘fruit beers’, as the fruit is not there during the brewing or fermentation. They are closer to shandies, or what the Germans more practically call a Biermix.

Gluten-free beer tasting

To follow my blog on how gluten-free beers are made, I enlisted some selfless volunteers to help me taste several examples to see how they compared to standard beers. One was a coeliac who for several years has had little beer, apart from the occasional gluten-free light lager.

We started with a trio of barley-based beers. The first two say they use low-gluten barley and a brewing process that further minimises gluten, while the latter doesn't say how it's de-glutenised, which means it's probably Brewer's Clarex.

Bellfield Bohemian Pilsner: A golden beer with a very slight head and light aromas of dry hay, biscuit, a little sweetcorn – making it pretty close to style. The body did seem to me to be a little thin for a Czech-style Pils, but beyond that it is malty and dry-sweet, with light dry bitterness. It's a nice example of a lager, and was well liked by our coeliac taster.

Bellfield Lawless Village IPA: It's orange-brown and toasty, with touches of Seville orange and caramel, a note of grapefruit pith and a hint of lemon on the finish. Don't expect American hops or bitterness – this is a nice classic British-style IPA that you wouldn't know was gluten-free – and indeed, why should you?

Glebe Farm Wellington Bomber: Described as a Porter, it seemed more in the Brown Ale vein to me. It has aromas of toast, cocoa and a little cola, then the body was a little watery, with roasted malt, palate-drying cocoa, and a sweet, burnt sugar note. We found it a bit confused and thin; however, I suspect our bottle – bought from a farm shop – had suffered a bit of oxidation in storage.

We followed with a trio of non-barley beers, brewed instead from malted rice and other grains, including millet and quinoa. All are from Autumn Ales, and like the Bellfield beers were kindly donated by the brewer.

Alt Brew No.01: Labelled as a Bavarian-style Pilsner, it's light-bodied – certainly a lot lighter than the average Eurolager, and maybe even a bit thin. I don't think it's bitter enough for Bavarian Pils, but it went down well with the other tasters, who agreed it made a nice summer drink.

Alt Brew No.02: A Golden Ale, it pours a bright amber-brown with a lasting head. The nose is hoppy-fresh with a hint of citrus. Then there's crisp bitterness and lightly sweet, with a toasted edge and a slight astringency. This a nice zesty beer, and was the only one liked by all our tasters.

Alt Brew No.03: Brewing a dark and roasty Stout without barley is a challenge, but Autumn has come pretty close with this dark brown brew. It's a little thin compared to many other Stouts, and was too 'burnt' for some of our tasters, but for dark beer fans there's a light milky sweetness in the midbody, plus notes of bitter chocolate before an ashy-burnt finish.

Overall, even though these are such different beer styles, I think some conclusions are fair. As a regular drinker of all sorts, my favourite was the excellent Lawless IPA, while the Pilsners seemed not quite authentic. However, the latter were popular with the tasters who hadn't drunk much ale in recent years, but who still appreciated something better than Eurolager.

The one we all agreed on liking was the Alt Brew No.02. Yes, it's that classic golden ale crossover beer – well put together, and appealing to ale and lager drinkers alike.

Ultimately though, the most amazing thing is that while Autumn Brewing and Bellfield Brewery are special, in that they brew only gluten-free beer and don't rely on Clarex, this was just a sample of what's available now in terms of gluten-free beer. So whether you're a super-sensitive coeliac or simply have an intuition you're gluten-intolerant, at least now you can enjoy a decent beer. Cheers to that!

The brewers going gluten-free for health and profit*

There's been specialist gluten-free beers for a while now, often using the same gluten-free grains as the traditional sorghum and millet beers of Africa. However, few have managed to really replicate the aroma and flavour of beers made from malt, or indeed the range of beers possible with malt – light lagers were just about the only thing possible. Until relatively recently, that is.

Why does it matter? While gluten-free and wheat-free are lifestyle choices for some people these days, for those who have coeliac disease, gluten can genuinely and seriously damage your health.  So when you're diagnosed as coeliac, as a close relative of mine was, you need to give up gluten – and it's in an amazing number of things these days, one of them of course being beer.

Yes, there's the specialist free-from brands such as Greens, as well as obvious gluten-free (g/f) alternatives such as cider and wine, but it's not the same. So over the last three years or so I've been intrigued to see more regular breweries adding g/f beers – often as versions of their regular beers, such as Greene King's g/f IPA and Old Speckled Hen, and Damm's Daura range – and so I set out to learn more.

The first thing I learnt about was Brewer's Clarex – not to be confused with the many other Clarexes out there, which range from assorted pills to a form of acrylic glass. Brewer's Clarex is an enzyme that was originally developed to stabilise beer faster, but it was subsequently discovered that it also has a de-glutenising effect. It doesn't remove it all, but beer treated with it will typically have well below 20 parts-per-million (ppm) of gluten, which means you can legally call it gluten-free (once it has been lab-tested as such, of course), and it should be safe for all but the most sensitive of coeliacs.

This is how the majority of the new wave of g/f beers are made, and it means they taste little or no different from beer that hasn't been Clarexed. Indeed, the widespread use of Brewer's Clarex simply as a stabiliser also means there will be beers out there that are g/f for practical purposes but are not labelled or accredited as such, typically because the brewers don’t want the additional cost of testing, or can't guarantee every single batch will be below 20ppm. So if you were to taste-test g/f beer versus non-g/f beer, you could find you're accidentally comparing like with like!

However, even this process is not good enough for every coeliac. In addition, some, such as the coeliac founders of Edinburgh's Bellfield Brewery, argue that the by-products of de-glutenisation can themselves be harmful. So instead of enzymes, they use very-low-gluten barley malt, along with g/f adjuncts such as maize, in a brewing process that they say also minimises gluten.

I met Bellfield back in February at Craft Beer Rising, where beer seller Robert Shepherd said that the result of all this is beers that routinely test below 10ppm, which counts as 'gluten-absent'. (This level is not hard to find – Daura claims 3ppm, for example – but it’s unusual in a barley beer that's not been enzyme-treated.)

But what of the other g/f grains used in European-style brewing, such as maize and rice? Although they have been used for many years, they have not had great reputations – their main purpose is to add fermentables without adding body, making a 'thinner' beer, hence the beer-geek distaste for American Bud as "thin, tasteless rice beer".

It turns out though that does not have to be the case. When I met Peter Briggs (left) of Autumn Brewing at the PubShowUK earlier this year, he introduced me to a stout, a lager and an amber ale which are gluten-absent but still taste like all-malt beers – because they are malt beer. It's just not barley malt.

He uses malted rice, millet and quinoa (!), sourced from specialist maltsters in the US. Malting, where the grain is germinated then kiln-dried before it grows too much, is a key process in making beer. Not only does germination help convert the starch in the grain into fermentable sugars, but both it and the subsequent kilning also alter its flavour and colour. Indeed, the degree of kilning used can produce a broad range of drastically different results, from light lager malts to the dark roasted malts that give stouts and porters their colour and flavour. Peter reckons Autumn is (or was – who knows!) the first brewer in Europe to import these malts and brew with them.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of all this – and the most positive thing to come out of the g/f lifestyle movement – is that it's boosted the availability of g/f beer for everyone, including the coeliacs who need it most keenly. Bellfield's Robert Shepherd even spun it into a business benefit for the g/f brewer: "Most beers can only reach around 90% of the market – there's people who can't drink them. We're both gluten-free and vegan, so we can reach 100%."

Coming up next: the coeliac's gluten-free taste test! 

*Profit? Maybe – I hope so, anyway. This is a tough market to operate in, because it normally involves extra production & testing costs and therefore higher prices, which makes it harder to also reach the mainstream buyer. 

65 beers in one day – easy, right?

Off we go for round one

Judging at the International Beer Challenge for the first time was both hard work and great fun. You might expect the latter for something involving gallons upon gallons of beer, but not the former, right?

Well, look at it this way: our table was just one of ten, each of which had around 60-70 different beers to taste. Every one of us judges needed to taste each of our beers and discuss it, before deciding if it merited a bronze, silver or gold medal. That’s a lot of different flavours to assess – then try to clear off your palate, ready for the next one!

As usual with beer judging – I’ve judged other competitions before, but not one on this scale – the beers were presented in groups. Some of these were obvious, for example a tray of British-style pale ales and bitters or one of Hefeweizens, while others were defined more broadly – by the use of cherries, say, or by being gluten-free. The beers were all anonymous, and because they can be from anywhere in the world, the chance of accurately recognising one without any clues was pretty slim.

The most interesting bit was the interplay with the other judges, who in my case included another writer, a beer sommelier who also runs beer tours, and two people working in beer retail. For each beer, we’d examine, sniff, taste and then write notes, before discussing its medal-worthiness. Sometimes the accuracy of their descriptions or flaw-spotting was startling – the exact tropical fruit aromas, say, or that a sample was oxidised – while on occasion I’d spot a flaw before they did.

The IBC asks you to judge each beer on its individual merit – “would you recommend this to someone else?” – rather than ‘judging to style’, as you do for the big American competitions. Judging to style means each entry not only has to be a good beer, but it also has to fit the often hair-splitting technical definition for the style of beer that it purports to be. The best-known style guide is the US-originated Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) listing which you can download or find in mobile app form.

Still going, several rounds later

If you are planning to taste several different beers, the general rule is to start with the lowest in alcohol strength and work up, and that’s how each grouping was presented to us. Mostly this worked well, though occasionally you’d get a stronger-flavoured one in the middle of the group and have to nibble a cracker and sip some water (actually we sipped a lot of water!) so it didn’t affect your judgement of the next one. The alternative rule for beer tasting is to start with the subtler ones and work up to the stronger flavours, but of course you have to know what beers you are drinking to do that.

Fortunately we got very few that were either faulty or lacking in some other way, although we also only got a few absolute gold-medal crackers. Almost all were competent, and a decent proportion were ones I’d happily order again – if only I knew what they were, of course. The oddest was probably the soured Dunkel – I like sour beer styles, but this one didn’t quite hang together well enough, so we requested a fresh sample from a new bottle, and yup, it wasn’t meant to be sour...

So, a really interesting day’s work, and a very impressive effort by the organisers at Agile Media, which publishes several drinks-related titles, such as Off Licence News and Harpers Wine & Spirit. I was especially impressed by the patience and dexterity of the servers bringing us the samples, and by the thoroughness and efficiency of the organising staff, who ensured we both got and turned in all the right paperwork at the right time.

So that was Craft Beer Rising - London 2016

Quite a queue

I’m a couple of weeks late saying it, thanks to paid work intervening, but this year’s Craft Beer Rising was a blast. Despite the fears of some, who thought high cost of booking a stand and the increasing presence of Big Beer would dumb the event down, there were interesting new beers and brewers from all over the world, all eager to offer their brews to a thirsty British audience.

I especially liked the layout – all the beer bars in one long room, plus a second room for Cyderspace, the "Craft cider" section, and then another room for the music and stuff (of which there was none during the trade session). There was yet another space for talks and food, but I had enough to do in the main space and never got that far!

If there was a problem, it's that there was too much to explore in just a few hours. I started by the entrance and then worked my way around the outside – there were two long double-sided parallel rows of bars down the middle of the hall, plus more all around the edge of the room. OK, so I did spend a fair bit of time at each stop chatting to the exhibitors, especially the overseas ones to learn more about where they came from and their home market, but I ran out of time before I got to visit most of the bars down the middle.

Although I did visit a couple of brewers I knew that had new beers to try, all the rest were breweries I'd never met before, and mostly ones from overseas. The first of these visits killed three birds with one stone, because it was a bar shared by three brewers, all from Northern Ireland – and with a three-way collaboration IPA on tap to boot. Each of the three has a bit of a speciality: Farmageddon tends to hoppier beers, Hillstown to Belgian styles (although it started brewing solely for its beer-fed Wagyu beef cattle!), and Pokertree to Irish styles.

It seems like the craft beer scene isn't taking off in Northern Ireland anything like as strongly as it is south of the border though, thanks in large part to the alcohol laws having been written by Presbyterians who'd prefer it 'dry'. A particular bone of contention is that 2016 is NI's Year of Food & Drink, yet the threesome told me that small brewers are largely shut out. Not only does Big Beer already have the main events and much of the licensed trade sewn up, but NI law makes it impossible for the new brewers to sell direct, which means they can’t open brewery taps to pull in the tourists, or even sell online.

And yes, Big Beer was also at CBR in volume – though mostly incognito. For example, the Backyard Brewery turned out to be Carlsberg Sweden in crafty guise, Marston's was there as Revisionist Brewing, Diageo/Guinness as The Brewers Project, and Goose Island was one of I think several AB-Inbev properties present.

On the other hand, it was interesting to see that even UK microbrewers are now getting into the craft beer import business. London's Truman's is now distributing Lonerider from North Carolina, for example, while I was told there are family links between Charles Wells and South Africa's Devil's Peak Brewing Co, whose beers Wells is going to bring in. It turns out South Africa is an interesting – in the Confucian sense – market for microbrewers. It is largely sewn up by SABMiller (SAB of course stands for South African Breweries) which also owns all the South African hop farms!

Gradually though the SA micros are converting drinkers away from the ubiquitous yellow fizz – Devil's Peak has a pretty toasty and fruity IPA for instance. However, it looks like Wells will lead in the UK with Devil's Peak's 4% craft lager, a sessionable and inoffensive brew that apparently hits an emerging sweet spot in the UK market – think Beck's Vier and Holsten Vier, I guess.

It wasn’t all foreign beer though. Next to catch my eye was Peterborough’s Nene Valley Brewing which is one of a growing number of breweries making gluten-free beer – indeed, brewer Paul Woodcock said that all NVB beer is now gluten-free. He doesn’t use alternative GF grains such as sorghum to make it, either. Instead it is deglutenised during fermentation by a special enzyme, taking it to less than half the 20ppm cut-off point that the law defines for ‘gluten-free’ labelling. And to judge from Release the Chimps, NVB’s fresh and fruity American IPA, there’s no reason to miss gluten.

It was off to Spain next, but not one from the established craft beer heartlands of Barcelona and Madrid – Mateo & Bernabé is from the famous wine region of La Rioja, and it makes use of the fact in several of its beers. These include its dry-sweet and winey Little Bichos Spider, which is an 8% Porter aged 10 to 12 months in wine barrels. “It goes in black and comes out deep mahogany,” said M&B’s international rep Dominic Lombard.

Also barrel-aged but this time in Pedro Ximinez sherry barrels, is Little Bichos Mosca IPA PX. This time the result has almost Lambic aromas and dry bitterness, with sweetish sherry notes. Barrel-free but still unusual was a brown ale brewed with a local rum & raisin cake called Trenza added to the boil. According to Dominic, Spanish consumers like to look for something a bit out of the norm, though he added that many people only accept that Spanish products are good when someone abroad validates them, which is why M&B went first for the export market – it exports 98%, he said.

And they claim that the brand name is not as rude as it sounds to an Anglophone. Bichos is local dialect for a small creature (in Portuguese it means vermin!) which is why all the labels carry animal pictures – there’s a spider, a moth and a crab, for example.

Next stop was back in the UK, and a part of the country I know fairly well. Electric Bear Brewing might sound and look American, but is actually from Bath – although brewer Guillermo does indeed hail from North America, being from Mexico. It was also one of relatively few bars present to be pouring cask beer as well as keg. The beers I sampled were good, one of the stand-outs being his Samurye, a complex winey and almost Saison-like beer brewed with 50% rice in the grist and a Sake yeast.

We also talked about his Heisenberg’s Double Decoction, a Doppelbock produced as the name suggests by the classic Continental decoction method, where the mash is heated by moving a portion of the wort to a separate kettle for boiling, then returned to the mash tun to share its heat with the rest of the brew. Even in Germany, while some still swear it produces better beers, many have given it up as too awkward and moved to infusion mashing as used elsewhere.

And as Guillermo admitted, doing it on the wrong brewkit was even more awkward. “Engineering a double-decoction mash in a traditional English brewkit with an infusion mask tank was a labour of love,” he signed. “It was one of my famous hours!” The result was not exactly refined but was otherwise pretty authentic – rich amber, with dusty toffee notes and hints of peach and strawberry.

I already mentioned the Backyard Brewery that turned out to be the 20 hectolitre pilot brewkit in Carlsberg Sweden’s Falkenberg Brewery. They’d brought over cans of The Bee 17 (Bomble Bee 17 in Sweden) which is allegedly a dry-hopped Pilsner though it’s more like a faintly honeyed Eurolager, and Lawnmower, a sweetish and lightly toasty amber lager. More interesting than macrobrew for sure, but very much a big brewer trying to do crafty.

The one other foreign beer scene I learnt a bit about was Austria, thanks to a chat with Michael of Vienna’s Brew Age. I was intrigued to learn that not only are some of their traditional beer styles different from the German equivalents, but that Austria never had a Beer Purity Law as such. Instead, its brewers are preexhibitotty much in the position that many in the anti-Reinheitsgebot camp want for Germany, which is that if an ingredient’s safe and legal in food, it should be OK in beer too.

So while artificial additives are banned (and no, I don’t yet know how they’re defined), things like honey and fruit are allowed. Michael said they can even use up to 25% of adjuncts without having to declare it, although he added that most small brewers are proudly all-malt. As in most of central Europe, the craft beer scene there is very young – he reckons it only took off three years ago. Inevitably there’s plenty of beers styled after American IPA and Pale Ale – Brew Age’s Hopfenauflauf (Hop Casserole) was a drinkable and pleasant example of the latter.

They’re also experimenting though. For instance, Brew Age’s excellent Dunkle Materie (Dark Matter) is presented as a Black IPA but comes over more as a hybrid of that and a Munich Dunkel, beautifully rich and marrying its bright hoppiness with roast coffee and dark chocolate.

Amusingly, the last unfamiliar beer to catch my eye as the festival session ended was almost the opposite: Fireweisse is a German style brewed in West Sussex. It’s from Firebird, a brewery that’s only three years old but has a long heritage – it's the latest project of career brewer Bill King, formerly of King & Barnes and then WJ King. Fireweisse’s texture nodded slightly more towards ale (interestingly, this was also true of the American Hefeweizen from Lonerider, mentioned above) but it was otherwise a sehr typisch Hefeweisse, crisp and dry-sweet with banana and bready notes.

So that, mostly, was my time at the London Craft Beer Rising this year. I learnt (and enjoyed it) a lot, with my one caveat being that I was there for the trade session and could not get to one of the public sessions. As a result I found myself wondering (as fellow blogger Sophie Atherton did) whether it would have been as much fun if I was there as a paying punter.

Did you go to one of the public sessions, and if so, what did you think? Were you able to explore and learn, or was it a fight to get to the bar?