A hoppy weekend in Lower Saxony

We're in Germany on holiday, and last week I spotted an article in the local free newspaper* mentioning that nearby microbrewery Sommerbecker Dachs was having a family-friendly** summer festival for its fifth birthday. So on Saturday afternoon we headed out of town to the tiny village of Sommerbeck.

When the boy and I walked in, 30 minutes after the nominal 3pm opening time, we could only see two other visitors and the staff were still setting up the tills. He jumped onto the (free) bouncy-castle and I went for a beer.... I hadn't tried the Dachs Pils before – it proved to be a Landbier Pils in the northern style, so slightly hazy with a yeasty note, and with lots of bitterness but very little actual hop flavour. Not really my thing, in other words.

Once the girls arrived and we got a table, things picked up. The boy got his face painted (also free) and played on the slackline/tightropey thing, the baby was passed around and much admired, we were assumed to be local because, well, everyone else was, and my choices of beer improved. The Märzen was darker than the last time I tried it – more orange-brown than gold, with nutty and toffee notes and a touch of orange marmalade, while the Schwatt – their version of a Schwarzbier – was creamier and more Stouty than I remember.

Also interesting was the Hopfenstopfer – basically a hopped-up Helles or Pils that actually tastes and smells of hops, and in particular of hops other than the usual grassy German and Czech types. I think it translates as hop plunger or hop tamper, and to me it signifies that the brewer wants to do something a bit crafty, but doesn't want to "go foreign" with a Pale Ale or IPA. It was a nice example anyhow, with citrus and melon aromas and a spicy, tropical fruit accented body.

Also on tap, slightly unusually for the time of year, was the Dachs Bock. (Dachs – as in Dachshund – means badger, and the brewery mascot is indeed a stuffed badger.) Dark mahogany in colour, it had a malty nose with sultanas and cocoa notes, then a spicy-bitter body with touches of toffee, dried fruit and orange marmalade. Rather like a stronger version of the Märzen, and pretty tasty, hiding its 7.5% ABV well.

Then on Sunday we had planned a visit to Klindworths, easily the best brewpub I've found in northern Germany. Yet it's one that's not much known outside, in part because they don't sell their beer anywhere else – apart from a few beer festivals and parties where you might find their Beer Bus, an old VW camper converted into a mobile two-tap bar.

Things nearly went awry when the rest of the tribe announced that they wanted to go swimming first, but fortunately I remembered there's a Freibad, or open-air swimming pool, almost next door to the pub. So we were lightly sunned and watered by the time we sat down in the beer garden – and started batting away the flies while we waited for our dinner....

On tap were the Landbier Pils – a far better example of a flavoursome bitter lager than the Dachs one – plus the Weizen, the Keiler German brown bitter, the Pale Ale and the IPA. I went first for the Pale Ale, as I already knew it to be excellent and I thought going for the 6.7% IPA on an empty tummy might not be wise. It did not disappoint – refreshingly dry-bitter, with loads of hops and a malty body. Brewer Niko calls it his interpretation of British Pale Ale; I'd say it is as hoppy as an American Pale Ale, but fuller bodied than the average APA.

Then it was time for the IPA – the only one of his regular or seasonal beers that I'd not tried yet. It's a chunky and thoroughly moreish IPA in the American vein, full of hops and with a warming alcohol bite, yet malty enough to not be overpowering. Even at 6.7%, it's balanced enough to go back for seconds, which I duly did.

Thankfully I wasn't the one driving back – one of the challenges of Klindworths is that it is awkward to get to unless you're already in the area (there's a campsite by the Freibad, and the pub does B&B). There are buses from Buxtehude, but the service is not very frequent and it stops running quite early too. I'd have gone there a lot more often otherwise!


*These still report stuff and are widely read, unlike the UK equivalents which are almost all run now by bread-heads too stupid to realise that if they cut or de-skill all the running costs, ie. journalists, no one reads the result and they lose all the advertising revenue that they're so greedy for.

**One of the things I miss in Britain is that very few beer festivals seem genuinely family-friendly.

Avenir Ladencafé

Good heavens, Luneburg now has a craft beer café! Avenir Laden & Café also sells cold-brewed coffee, organic wine and deli stuff, second-hand books and so on, and is just off the main shopping area on Katzen-Strasse, not far from the market square.

It's very much "in the mould" – bare floors, jam-jars as glasses, furniture upcycled from crates and so on. The beer is mostly modern German craft and crafty brews – eg. Crew Republic, Ratsherrn, Kehrweider, the Brewers & Union beers which are nominally South African but are brewed for Europe by Arcobräu in Bavaria (or so I understand), plus one that's new to me – Hamburg-based Von Freude.

There are a few English examples – I've noticed than when German beer fans turn to British beer, it is often for the darker ones, and here it's Fuller's London Porter and Sam Smith's Oatmeal Stout. You can't go too far wrong with those two!

It's also the first place I've found Mumme on sale – a legendary rich, sweet and relatively low-alcohol ale that's possibly the only German beer mentioned by Shakespeare. This particular rare survival is Segelschiff Braunschweiger Mumme: this turned into a non-alcoholic malt drink over the centuries, but a few years ago a 5.2% ABV version was reintroduced as a special edition. There's a bottle now in my bag, and I'm looking forward to trying it....

West Coast IPA - English launch tour

Green Flash head brewer Chuck Silva is in England right now to launch the European brewed West Coast IPA. The brewery's UK distributor The Bottle Shop has set up a tour for him to visit outlets around the country – and no, I've no idea why they have no dates in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.

The remaining dates for this tour are:

Thursday 24th July - Leeds
6.30pm: North Bar - 24 New Briggate, Leeds, West Yorkshire, LS1 6NU

Friday 25th July - Sheffield
3pm: Beer Central - Outlet MS3, The Moor Market. Sheffield, S1 4PF
5pm: Shakespeare’s Pub - 146-148 Gibraltar St, Sheffield, S Yorks, S3 8UB

Saturday 26th July - Liverpool
3pm: The 23 Club/The Clove Hitch, 23 Hope Street Liverpool, L1 9BQ

Thursday 31st July – London
5pm: Harrild & Sons - 26 Farringdon St, London, EC4A 4AB
7pm: Earl Of Essex - 25 Danbury St, London, N1 8LE
9pm: Kings Arms - 11A Buckfast St, London, E2 6EY

Friday 1st August – London
7pm: BrewDog Shepherds Bush - 15-19 Goldhawk Road, London, W12 8QQ

Saturday 2nd August – London (Beer for Brunch Event)
Midday: BrewDog Shoreditch - 51-55 Bethnal Green Rd, London, E1 6LA

Sunday 3rd August – Cambridge
2pm: The Pint Shop - 10 Peas Hill, Cambridge, CB2 3PN

Annoyingly, the entire tour takes place while I'm out of the country. Bah!!

San Diego invades Europe

American craft brewers are waking up to European opportunities. Oh sure, they've been exporting here for years, but this week has seen not one but two super-hoppy San Diego brewers announce that they will actually brew in Europe.

Stone's site in Berlin

The biggest news was Stone Brewing, well known for the likes of Arrogant Bastard Ale. There's been rumours about Stone opening a European brewery for a few years now, with at least one redundant old English brewery fingered as a possible location, but the reality has turned out quite different: Stone is building a brewery and pub/beer garden in Berlin!

First to the draw however was Green Flash, which is already co-brewing its iconic West Coast IPA in 240-hl batches at St Feuillien in Belgium. It's claimed that this is not just a licence deal, like the one that saw Shepherd Neame brew imitation Sam Adams, but a 'production partnership', whatever that exactly means.

“We’ve been pursuing European distribution of West Coast IPA for some time, however the obvious challenges in delivering fresh IPA to the region have been a huge roadblock,” said GF co-founder Mike Hinkley. “After testing various export scenarios on a small scale, it became apparent that the quality of our IPA when transported to Europe was not ideal and cost-prohibitive for consumers. We were not satisfied with the customer experience and felt we had to come up with a better solution.”

St Feuillien is already noted for its hoppy beers and has done collaboration beers with Green Flash in the past, so the two teams already know each other well. GF's brewmaster Chuck Silva has spent a fair portion of the last year in Belgium, working on getting the flavour profile just right – the one difference between the US and Belgian versions is that the latter will be bottle-conditioned “to protect beer quality in areas of Europe where unrefrigerated conditions may be unavoidable.” I can see this version becoming a hot item with US beer aficionados....

Meanwhile, Stone's plans are considerably more ambitious, and involve an initial investment of $25 million, plus an Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign to raise more. The company is leasing a massive 7000m2 of space in three refurbished buildings that were built in the 1900s as part of a gasworks – they had to be expensively decontaminated as part of the refurbishment process. Due to open in late 2015 or early 2016, the buildings will house a 70-barrel brewery, a shop, an event space and a farm-to-table restaurant – Stone is keen on the slow food movement.

There will also be an 'American-style beer garden', though quite how that differs from a German-style beer garden I don't know, especially when so much about US beer is derived from Germany. Many of the earliest American brewers were German immigrants, from Anheuser and Busch onwards, and while Stone is pretty eclectic, some US breweries still focus on German-derived beer styles rather than British or Belgian, say.

“Once open, we will bring Germany and the rest of Europe a taste of our craft beer vision, and look forward to sharing the unique beers that we have spent the last 18 years brewing,” declared Stone CEO and co-founder Greg Koch (another German surname, of course).

Yet while some of the US media has taken a nationalist 'young upstarts teaching the oldies how to do it' line, ignoring – or more likely, ignorant of – the fact that many German and other European brewers are already aboard the craft beer bandwagon, Koch was more modest.

“We have no attitude that we are coming to save anybody or conquer anybody,” he said in an interview. He acknowledged that there is already a craft beer movement challenging the German brewing giants, and added, “We are coming to add our shoulder, to help push that boulder up the hill.”

So why Berlin and Belgium? I can think of several reasons, an obvious one is they are in the Eurozone, which simplifies your exporting to the rest of the EU. Another is they both have strong beer heritages, which should make it easier to find both staff and customers, and of course they have good English language skills.

The last thing is that, unlike the UK where there is already a strong craft brewing industry (both new-wave and traditional), the beer revolution has only recently kicked off on the mainland. Sure, there's lots of micro and nano brewers, and many of the old brewers are trying to adjust and produce crafty sidelines, but the market is still growing, with plenty of opportunity.

Cocoa, lemon and freshly sharpened pencils

Here's my notes on the Pilsner Urquell London Brew-Off beers. An instructive aspect was that the beers were offered for tasting with small plastic cup, in part to discourage people from pouring too much, as there was only a few litres of each one.

Unfortunately the smell of these cups overwhelmed those of the beer, and it was only when I switched to tasting similarly small measures but from a PU small glass tankard that I could appreciate the aromas.

Soundbite (4.8%) was a well constructed hoppy golden lager, with light caramel and nut notes and a touch of apple. Here's the board listing its recipe and brewing profile – there was one of these printed for each beer. My vote: 3.5/5

Pegasus (4.8%) was reminiscent of a pale ale, with light aromas of lemon and cedar – or as I wrote at the time, freshly sharpened pencils. I noticed this on a couple of the others too, and I think it must be down to the Czech Kazbek hops, which I've not knowingly encountered before. In the glass it was faintly nutty, with a touch of melon and a dry-bitter finish. My vote 2.5/5

Another Fine Mash (5.7%) was intended to be amber but actually came out closer to the average Munich Dunkel. Hazy brown with cocoa on the nose and a spicy malty body with hints of forest fruits, it was dry-bitter yet faintly sweet in the finish. My vote: 4/5

Czech Please (5.2%) had touches of golden malt and honeydew melon on the nose. The body was more like a Vienna/Pils hybrid, with faint spicy notes and hint of toffee leading to a sweet finish. My vote: 2.5/5

Velvet Pilsner (5%) was hazy gold – the Brew-Off beers were all bottled unfiltered – with a faintly woody and nutty nose (those pencil sharpenings again). I detected faint cocoa notes and a light nuttiness. My vote: 3/5

Citron (4.6%) as the name implies was meant as a modern citrusy twist on Pilsner. Cloudy yellow, its light aromas of lemon and grapefruit continued into the body, where they played along with a faint pepperiness and a hint of sherbet. My vote 4/5

When is a Pilsner not a Pilsner?

“It's a lovely beer, but it's not to style/not an X” is one of the cliches of beer judging, especially where the revered-by-many BJCP (Beer Judge Certification Program) guidelines come into play. And so it must have been at the final round of the Pilsner Urquell London Brew-Off, which was judged at the White Horse on Parsons Green last week.

The competition's premise was simple: six teams of non-brewers and amateur brewers were invited to brew a new beer using classic Pilsner ingredients. Two of the teams were from the London pubs that sell draught Pilsner Urquel from the tank, while the rest were mostly beer writers, broadcasters and bloggers. In a nod to various popular cookery shows, as well as the main ingredients they were given a bunch of other ones to choose from to make their beer distinctive. They also had technical support from London Beer Lab and Windsor & Eton Brewery.

I wasn't there for the two brew days, but various of the people involved have written or filmed about it, including Martyn Cornell, Tandleman, I Love Good Beer and the Craft Beer Channel.

In each case, the first brews were done on a 20-litre Speidel Braumeister home-brew machine from Germany – the project was a promo for those guys, as well as for Pilsner Urquell and its parent SAB-Miller. The resulting beers were fermented and lagered, bottled and labelled, and them presented for (free!) public consumption. As well as signboards introducing each brew and proper labels for the bottles, PU's PR team had even printed up beer mats with the six names on, so you could tick the one you liked most and post the mat into a ballot box.

The top three went on to a run-off panel comprising PU brewmaster Václav Berka, PU marketing man Mark Dredge, and flavour psychologist Greg Tucker. They picked a winner, which will be scaled up and brewed commercially by Windsor & Eton, to go on sale on September 12th at the White Horse's European Beer Festival. 

All the beers were decent – a tribute to the teams and to Braumeister, I guess – and some were actually rather good. Speaking to people at the judging about which of the beers they liked best, the names that kept coming up were Citron and Another Fine Mash, yet neither of these was the eventual winner.

Why not? As far as I could tell, it was because the blogger teams who'd made them had been a little too cavalier in their interpretation of the challenge. Another Fine Mash came out as a Dunkel for example, and as one of the PU crew said, there was no way a dark beer was going to win. The golden colour is just too intrinsic to the PU mythos, never mind that other brewmasters are today cheerfully producing Black Pilsner, hazy Landbier Pils and who knows what else.

So the beer that will be brewed commercially is Soundbite, brewed by a team from Bethnal Green's Strongroom bar. The runners-up were Pegasus, brewed by a team from the White Horse, and public favourite Another Fine Mash. Interestingly, the Strongroom and the White Horse are PU's two London tankovna – pubs that sell draught PU from a large tank. Was favouritism involved? I suspect it was more a case that barstaff used to selling Pilsner know what to aim for when invited to create a new Pilsner.

De-skilling the pub trade to shut out competition

The Church

Just after I wrote about Irish cask beer, mentioning the widespread lack (or loss) of line-cleaning and cellaring knowledge in the pub trade there, an interesting comment came in via Twitter from our conference venue The Church:

"The trade has been dumbed down with any real training/apprenticeships gone."

It reminded me of a couple of conversations I had with other EBBC attendees last week, when we wondered why mega-brewers would behave like this - basically, they are taking over all the technical beery stuff that goes on in a pub. After all, doesn't it cost them extra to do that?

As far as I can see the answer is simple: it raises the hurdles facing any competitor looking to break into the business. You now have an on-trade - and to some extent also a customer base - that is fearful of change, of the unknown. Better the devil you know, and all that.

It extends especially to cask ale - something else Ronan Brennan said to me was that "Bars want to take it on, but they worry about waste." He explained that they see you have to pull beer through each day, you can't sell the dregs and so on, and they contrast that with a keg where they know almost to the millilitre how much they can sell.

But it also extends to new keg beers. If you as a microbrewer want to sell into a de-skilled bar, you have to provide the same level of support that the mega-brewers do. You have to provide taps. You probably have to provide cooling gear too, as what's there will belong to the mega-brewer.

As for the pub, it's so much easier just to take another product line from your existing supplier. See that bar now offering Kilkenny, Smithwicks Pale Ale and Carlsberg alongside Guinness? They're all Diageo Ireland brands. The one offering Amstel and Sol alongside Beamish or Murphys? They're all Heineken brands.

It's sad but true. In a market where others are stressing how skilled their staff are - think coffee shops and their baristas - it's in the big beer suppliers' interest to keep the publican dependent on them, being a shopkeeper rather than an artist.

Thankfully, it doesn't always work. The photo above is of the Black Sheep pub in Dublin, and shows just what's possible with determined and knowledgeable management and staff (there's also three handpumps around the bar).

And with Wetherspoons about to open its first pub south of the border, in the Dublin suburb of Blackrock - reportedly with a big real ale presence - you can't exactly see them handing their cellaring over to outsiders, can you?

Still, it might explain why in most places you go, the choice will be keg black stuff or keg yellow fizz.