The Answer...

...is an emphatic 'YES!'

The question though comes from this article on Slate.com, which poses the deep and meaningful question as to whether:

'friends let friends drink only pilsners?'

One would have thought that a person who starts an article with 'As a beer writer' would actually have some vague notion of what they are talking about, but yet again people use terms like 'lager' and 'pilsner' as lazy shorthand for boring beer.

If your friend wants to drink 'only' pilsners, then bloody well let them. It's their body, their taste buds and their money, so they can drink whatever the hell they want to. If you can't have a good time while your friends drink 'only' pilsners, then I suggest you have a deeper problem than a person's choice of beer.

On that note, I'm going to buy a six pack of Pilsner Urquell...have a good weekend people.

In Praise of Workhorses

Last night I did something that I hadn't in a while. Having lost track of the time whilst pottering around in my garden and realised that I wouldn't have time to get cleaned up and out to the local homebrew club monthly meeting. So, with dinner cooking in the oven (a rather fabulous potatoes au gratin, to which I will add mustard powder next time), I wandered down in the beer cellar to pick something to drink.

My beer cellar, as I am sure is pretty common, is a mixture of my own homebrew, a bevvy of strong beers which are being aged (most of which are Fuller's Vintage Ales) and what I tend to think of as my 'drinking' beers - the ones which will be polished off well before their best before date. Looking at the collection of beer, which has been dwindling gently while I have been unemployed (thankfully I start my new job on Monday), the only beer that leapt at me was a beer I had not drunk at home in a very, very long time, Starr Hill's Amber Ale.

The Amber Ale at Starr Hill is one of those beers which gets labelled an 'Irish Red Ale', a style which according to some was originally just an Irish equivalent of keg bitter, the kind of beer to strike fear into the heart of any CAMRA member. Over here in the US it is kind of sweet, with a caramel element and a touch of earthy/spicy hops, some versions of the style are overwhelmingly cloying and as such it is not something I bother with very often, though on the rare occasions I get to have O'Hara's Red on tap then I fill my boots. Unlike many an Oirish Red Ale, Starr Hill's Amber is actually nicely balanced, with neither the malt nor the hop dominating, I polished off three bottles  in pretty short order - and it was at the right temperature, about 56° Fahrenheit.

This got me thinking about all the beers out there which don't get the love and praise they warrant, simply because they are not very hip, sexy or labelled as some form of IPA. Beers, like Starr Hill Amber Ale, which fulfil my very simple definition of a good beer, does it make me want another one? I like to term such beers 'workhorses', sure they might not prance around like Vienna's Spanish Riding School, but they are great at ploughing a field.

What are your local workhorse beers that deserve more praise and recognition?

The picture is from Starr Hill's website as I was too busy drinking the beer to even think about taking a photo.

Defining Passion

It seems to be a particularly modern malaise that it is no longer enough to be good at the work you have chosen to do, you have to 'passionate' about it. Whether we are talking about making beer, selling financial products or even cleaning the bogs in the Prague Metro, passion has become de rigueur in practically every industry.

Often, it seems, this 'passion' is presented as being excited by what it is you do (quite how one could be excited at the prospect of cleaning the bogs in the Prague Metro though escapes me), with all the attendant hoopla that seems to go with it. In the context of beer, as that is the main theme of Fuggled, every new product is greeted with the zythophilic fervour of Beatlemania, the constant pitch of the marketing efforts gets higher and higher, like the crescendo of noise which is cicada time. When a beer though fails to live up to the hype, the damning verdicts on Twitter, Ratebeer and the like is akin to the Hindenburg going down in flames.

It is time that we re-evaluate our understanding of what 'passion' means in a brewing context to bring the demand side understanding of passion for beer with one of the common attributes of every professional brewer I know, the passion to do things properly.

When I am working at the Starr Hill Brewery tasting room I quite often overhear people talking about how some breweries are 'passionate' about beer because they put all manner of stuff into their beer, making it 'innovative' and various other adjectives which I am not convinced aren't a cover term for 'a right bloody mess'. The implication in these witterings, often though not always from a spotty yoof out to impress the accompanying spotty yoofs with his deep knowledge of beer, is that the breweries that make classic beer styles, and make them well, somehow lack 'passion' for beer.

I often think of Budvar, and not just for drinking purposes. Here is a pale lager, perhaps the most disparaged beer style on the planet, which, as far as I am aware, is still made in the same way as when the legendary Mr Tolar was the master brewer. Budvar's flagship beer, as I have mentioned before, takes 102 days to make, 12 days in primary fermentation and then 90 days in the lagering tanks, that's 12 weeks, or 1 week for each degree of Plato in the beer, as was the traditional norm in Central Europe. Would most consumers know the difference if they cut the lagering time to 45 days and thus instantly doubled their capacity? I would venture that very few would, but therein lies the heart of a consumers' confidence in Budvar, they do things as they have always done. This is passion as I understand it, sticking to doing what generations of brewers have handed down to you, because it makes the beer which the consumer wants to drink. There are few finer beers in the world than Budvar, admittedly preferably on draught. On a hot day, a cold half litre of golden liquid from České Budějovice is liking drinking the nectar of the gods.

We often talk about the 'fires of passion', as if passion should be all noise, flame and smoke. To take this analogy in a little bit of a different direction, when you first light your grill, you don't cook your burgers, sausages and chicken drumsticks straight away, you wait for the flames to die down and the charcoal to be good and hot. Passion is much the same, sure the flames and noise are impressive, but until they are gone and you know the coals are burning thoroughly all you have is light and noise.

Booze and Politics

Yesterday I went to a conference at Montpelier, which was once the home of James Madison, the driving force behind the Constitution of the USA. Part of the setup at Montpelier is the Center for the Constitution, and they organised the conference around the theme of election campaign finance reform. It was a very interesting day of talks, panels and Q&A sessions, and I will be writing some posts about things that popped into my head during the day on one of my other blogs. What the hell though does this have to do with booze?

One of the speakers yesterday mentioned a story about James Madison's early steps into Virginian political life. In 1777 Madison was running for election to the House of Delegates, the lower house of Virginia's bicameral General Assembly and successor to the Colonial Era House of Burgesses. His opponent during the race was a tavern owner called Charles Porter. As was customary at the time, Porter plied the voters with rum and punch, while Madison refused to do so. Unsurprisingly, the electorate voted for Charles Porter, though Madison's supporters claimed that this custom was effectively corruption, a complaint which got nowhere with the political powers that be, after all, George Washington was elected to the House of Burgesses in 1758 having used exactly the same methods.

That story brought to mind a book I read a couple of summers ago whilst lounging by the pool on our annual trip to Florida. The book is called 'Plain, Honest Men', by Richard Beeman, and is an account of the drafting of the Constitution of the USA, in 1787, and it recounts a drinking session held just before the final draft of the Constitution was signed, where many of the delegates of the Convention joined with the First Troop of the City Light Horse to honour George Washington. The bar bill for the festivities was impressive:

"fifty-four bottles of Madeira, sixty bottle of claret, fifty bottles of "old stock," copious amounts of porter, beer and cider, and some large bowls of rum punch".

Given there were, apparently, about 60 people at the event, that's quite a night's drinking per person there! I am assuming that the 'old stock' mentioned there is an old or stock ale which would have been pretty strong and then aged for well over a year.

Anyway, all this got me thinking that there may just be some correlation between booze and political life, the former lubricating the latter. Apparently, many of the compromises that eventually found their way into the American Constitution were hammered out not during the formal sessions of the Convention but after hours, in the taverns of Philadelphia over bottles of wine, beer and cider. Perhaps it would be helpful for modern political leaders to get down the pub and actually talk to each other over a few pints of 'old stock' and maybe a bottle of Madeira or two?

Next to Godliness

It's fair to say that I am a fan of the growler, that magical 2 litre bottle which you can fill with beer at a tasting room, in a pub, or even at a petrol station. I own a few growlers, it's true, and I have settled on the style I like best - swing top, good sturdy handle.  I have drunk barrel aged barleywine that had been sitting in such a growler for two years without losing condition and it tasted great.

On the days when I am working in the Starr Hill tasting room, I probably fill anywhere between 20 and 50 growlers, and while most of them are fine, we probably get about 5 or 6 every shift which are a pain in the arse to fill. Sometimes the problem comes from the shape of the growler itself, thin necks are more difficult to fill with our setup than the wider type that we use, but more often than not it is because the growler is not properly clean. Quite often it is enough to give the growler in question a quick rinse, but again, more often than I would like, it is because of a layer of caked on crap which would need a pneumatic drill to get through.

So, as a public service announcement, and in order to stop muttering to myself in Czech when behind the bar, here is the best way to keep a growler clean.

1. Drink the beer
2. Immediately rinse growler with HOT water
3. Fill growler with hot water
4. Put half a scoop of plain Oxi-Clean into the growler
5. Shake growler vigorously (think St Vitus Dance)
6. Leave overnight, with the swing top open to avoid exploding growlers
7. Rinse with more hot water several times
8. Drain upside down
9. If you don't use the growler for a while, leave the top open so the air doesn't go stale

Part of the pleasure of owning growlers is being able to have brewery/pub fresh beer in the comfort of your own home, keeping your growler good and clean means it will taste far better than if it sits on a layer of crud before you drink it.

Here endeth the lesson...

#IHP2013 - The Tasting

Finally the day arrived, the day to drink my recreation of a beer from 1877 - a beer which was commercially brewed 136 years ago. The beer in question was the Truman's No 4, from a brewery which was once the biggest in the world.

Number 4 was a Burton Ale, which in 1877 meant it was pale, bitter and sweet all at the same time. In 2013, my recreation looked like this:

The beer poured a rich amber, which surprised me given the grain bill of 100% pale malt (I wish I could get my bitter the same colour from a single grain). The nose was sweet toasted malt laced with traces of spice, toffee and a touch of boozy orange peel - think of a rum baba made with a pinch of white pepper and caramelised brown sugar and you are in the right ball park.

Tastewise, sweet malt juiciness dominates, kind of, balanced by a bitter tang that threatens to give balance to the beer but ultimately makes it like biting though the rind of an orange in your morning marmalade - marmalade was very much a theme running through this beer, specifically thick cut Seville orange marmalade, preferably from Marks and Spencer.

This is a full bodied, smooth, beer which fails to be either cloyingly sweet or overwhelmingly 'hoppy' - as in lots of late addition hops that make you feel like you are sucking your way through a grapefruit grove. As cheesy as it may sound, it really is very well balanced, the malt sweetness is there, and the hops play off it to perfection, giving a smoothness that belies its, calculated, 125 IBU.

In short, this is a very drinkable beer, especially given its strength and the amount of hops that went into it, and from a brewing perspective, one of the best beers I have made in quite some time.

This post is about another homebrewer who made the beer, thanks Derek for taking part! If you also brewed the beer, post a link in the comments, or tell us how it turned out!

Old Dark Prague

When we think about the history of lager brewing and the evolution of beer 'styles', for want of a better word, we usually talk about how the dark lagers like Schwarzbier have been around for centuries, while Pilsner and Helles are relatively modern creations. Lager brewing didn't really become common until the 15th century, and as malting technology improved, new, paler lagers were developed, thus the history of lager is predominantly one of dark lager preceding pale.

Except in Bohemia, where it is generally accepted that the first lagers to be brewed there were pale, based on the 1840s Pilsner phenomenon which was sweeping the brewing world (hhmmm, where does this story sound familiar from?). Up until about 1890, the dark beers of Bohemia were warm fermented, the breweries took their recipes, switched to a cold fermenting yeast and essentially created the Tmavé style which makes up about 5% of modern Czech brewing production. This story is exemplified by the legendary U Fleků beer hall in Prague, whose almost stouty 13° Tmavé was warm fermented until about 1892, if I remember rightly.

I have brewed a couple of Tmavé lagers since moving to Virginia, both homebrew and at Devils Backbone, but when my best friend suggested that we do a brewing project together, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to recreate a little bit of history - and not just in terms of he and I sitting on a balcony necking beer, like we did in Prague back in 1999/2000. I already had an idea for a recipe in my head and my friend liked the look of it, so this Saturday will be our first joint brewday when he gets down here from DC way.

The beer is being called Staropražské Tmavé Pivo, which translates as 'Old Prague Dark Beer', and the recipe is:

• 76% Bohemian Pilsner Malt
• 22% CaraMunich II
• 2% Carafa III
• 7 IBU Kazbek for 90 minutes
• 13 IBU Saaz for 60 minutes
• 10 IBU Saaz for 30 minutes
• Wyeast 2565 Kolsch yeast

The hop schedule is based on that of my favourite Czech dark lager, Kout na Šumavě's magnificent 14° Tmavé, which was itself the inspiration for Morana, the Tmavé I brewed at Devils Backbone. When it came to deciding on the yeast strain, I knew I wanted to use a European warm fermenting strain rather than a British or American, which pretty much meant going with a Kölsch or Altbier strain, and so out of pure whimsy I plumped for Cologne rather than Düsseldorf. The recipe, assuming everything goes well, should give us a beer with the following:

• OG - 12.5° P (1.050)
• FG - 3.3° Plato (1.013)
• ABV - 4.9%
• IBU - 30
• SRM - 21 Brown to Dark Brown

I haven't decided whether or not to lager the beer for a couple of weeks yet, but it should be ready sometime in June either way.

The pictures in this post were taken by Mark Stewart of Black Gecko Photography when we were working on our book - The Pocket Pub Guide to Prague.