Fuggled Virginia Cider of the Year

Turning my attention away from beer for a moment to finish up my booze review of 2025, we come to cider. Specifically, Virginia cider since that is the mainstay of my cider drinking world, and it would be disingenuous of me to have categories for outside of the Commonwealth.

Looking back over my notes for the year, I have also decided to cut back on the number of categories from last year. Out go "Flavoured" ciders and "Pommeau/Strong Cider", not because I haven't had any of those categories, but because I have really only had one of each. As nice as they were, and in the case of the Sage Bird Long Light superb, again it feels a little damning with faint praise to give them their own categories. So we have just the two:

• single varietal
• blended (including co-ferments)

Let's dive in...

Single Varietal

• Malus X Dolgo - Troddenvale, Warm Springs
• Virginia Hewes Crab - Big Fish Cider, Monterey
• GoldRush - Buskey Hard Cider, Richmond

Honorable mentions: Hazy Lady (Winesap) - Ciders from Mars, Staunton; Kingston Black - Sage Bird Ciderworks, Harrisonburg; Royal Pippin (Albemarle Pippin) - Albemarle Ciderworks, North Garden.

I mentioned last year that I could quite easily have had a category for single varietals of Virginia Hewes Crab ciders, but I wrote about that mass tasting for Cider Review recently. The highlight of that tasting, which features 6 examples from around Virginia is also the winner of the single varietal category, the one from Big Fish Cider over the mountains in Highland County. I described the cider as being "a pleasing blend of limes and lemons, set off by a green apple flavour that brings even more brightness" and that it is one "of life's most happy accidents" since the founder of Big Fish had intended to use it in blends, but it was too good not to shine alone. Every trip to Big Fish results in at least half a case of bottles clinking their way over switchbacks to Louisa County, and always, always, always their Virginia Hewes Crab is at least 2 of the 6. A cracking cider from one of my favourite cideries in the state.

Blends/Co-ferments

• House Cider - Troddenvale, Warm Springs
• Crab Apple Blend - Daring Cider, Stuart
• Maven - Ciders from Mars, Staunton

Honorable mentions: Foraged Cider - Troddenvale, Warm Springs; Cidermakers Choice #6 (Harrison and Dabinett) - Albemarle CiderWorks, North Garden; Crabbottom Pippin - Big Fish Cider, Monterey.

Back in November, I was privileged to be asked to speak on an author panel at the inaugural Cider Festival at the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton - one of my favourite little cities in the entire world, and a wonderful open air museum too. At the festival there were several of the best cideries in Virginia pouring their wares for visitors. It was a wonderfully civilised way to spend an afternoon. My blended cider of the year was available at the festival, and I made a point to stock up on a few bottles, that may have lasted little more than a weekend. Jocelyn Kuzelka is a cider maker of supreme skill, and it is her Crab Apple Blend that takes the accolades. It is a pretty simple blend, being 75% Virginia Hewes Crab and 25% Ruby Red Crab Apple - a variety that is only found in a single orchard. The blend sings with red fruit notes and a lovely floral character that makes me think of meadows in spring, and there is a delicate sweetness in the background that just keeps it from being too bone shatteringly dry (not that that is a bad thing in my world though).

A pair of quite simply glorious ciders to select a single winner from, and in common with my annual beery review, this is an "award" that comes with no financial gain, or even a certificate to print off and put up on the wall. Both ciders grace my wine/cider fridge regularly, and so it really is difficult to separate them, but given that Big Fish's Virginia Hewes Crab won out in my big summer tasting of single varietals, I am going to given them the plaudits. It is an absolute must buy whenever I head over to Highland County - a gorgeous drive in and of itself - as well as something I will pick up in local bottle shops, and there are few better ways to spend a sunny afternoon, regardless of season, than on the back deck with a bottle or two of Big Fish's finest.

Fuggled Beer of the Year

Ok then, the choices have been made, the runners and riders whittled down to just three beers, a pale, a BOAB, and a dark, and final decision must be taken to crown the 2025 Fuggled Beer of the Year. As in years past, and most certainly in years yet to come, the present awarding of the title comes with little fanfare, and a miserly pot of coin - i.e. no coin whatsoever. It does come, however, with the knowledge that this little part of the internet appreciates your beer and will happily drink more of it in the future.

Our finalists then are:

• Pale: Spoolboy 10° -  Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville, VA
• BOAB: Altbier - Bierkeller Brewing, Columbia, SC
• Dark: Aecht Schlenkerla Erle - Heller-Bräu Trum, Bamberg, DE

I am sure this comes as no surprise to anyone, but since Spoolboy has been available on tap at Selvedge, it has basically become my go-to beer. Pretty much whenever I walk in, the folks behind the bar know what my, and Mrs V's, first beer of the visit will be, and so fresh pints of Spoolboy appear without really having to be asked for. In my world, this is the sign of superb service from people who get to know their regular customers. Do I drink Spoolboy to the exclusion of all else on tap at Selvedge at the moment? Do I heck, after all they also have a fantastic 12° lager, a Munich helles, a cracking little schankbier, a rauchbier, an Italian pilsner, an ordinary bitter, an oatmeal stout....you get the point. However, Spoolboy is our point of reference, the one we come back to time after time. Desítka - the Czech name for 10° lagers - holds a special place in my heart simply because it is the go-to type of beer back in Czechia, and whenever I get back there, it is predominantly desítky that I drink. Were Spoolboy available in any of the hospody and pivnice that I frequent then I would be drinking it there too.

Well made altbier is as rare as hens' teeth in my experience. When I say "well-made" I mean using the appropriate malts to get its characteristic colour and bready sweetness. You know, German malts. Sadly too many examples of the style are made with crystal malts and end up being slick and overly sweet. Given their commitment to authenticity in all their beers, Bierkeller's lovely Altbier avoids all those pitfalls, and is suitably bitter to boot. Absolutely laden with toasty warmth and a slight unsweetened cocoa edge in the background, coupled with a delightfully soft carbonation, that rounded out the mouthfeel, this was a beer that screamed out for a wood paneled kneipe rather than a sun-drenched balcony, but fit the moment perfectly anyway. Classic beer styles made properly never go awry in my world, and hopefully we'll see more of this whenever I next get to Bierkeller.

I have a confession to make, and here I may be in a minority of 1, I tend to be a little wary of buying Schlenkerla brews that are made with woods other than the classic beechwood. An example, while I think the Eiche Doppelbock is a very respectable beer, and I usually have a bottle or two in the cellar, I let them sit there for at least a year, so that the oakiness can dampen down a tad. So it was when I opened my first bottle of Erle, I was fully expecting to put the other three in the cellar until, well round about now as it happens. The other three swiftly joined the first bottle in an afternoon session of rauchschwarzbier, and it was a wonderful way to see out the throes of winter, with spring finally making an appearance. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I think there is still some of this floating around the bottle shops of central Virginia, so I better go get me some for the weeks ahead...

As in years past, these are three wonderful beers and making the decision to choose just one as the Fuggled Beer of the Year is really difficult. Fun fact, I have been writing reviews of the year now since 2010, with a break in 2017, and I think it shows just how far we have come in the US that properly made lagers now form the majority of my picks. Yes it is true that cold fermented beers are just so much more my thing than the IPAs, pastry stouts, and fruited sours of the craft beer world, but when I reflect back to the challenges of finding a halfway decent Czech or German style lager back in 2009, the standard has improved exponentially. One thing though that had never happened in the past was a brewery picking up Beer of the Year twice in a row, well that two in a row is becoming a three in a row, as Selvedge Brewing take the plaudits again, so congratulations to Josh and co for making beers like Spoolboy, they make this lagerboy's life all the more delightful.

Fuggled Beers of the Year: Dark

Given the inherent subjectivity of the BOAB category, it is always good to be back on more solid ground with dark beers, and I do love a good dark beer. That said, most of the dark beers I have drunk this year have been my own. In the spring I brewed my annual dry stout, imaginatively monikered "Virginia Stout", for Mrs V's fiddle teacher, who hosts a St Patrick's Day party every year, and it is just de rigueur to have a session stout at such events. In the summer I brewed a dark mild, again for a party, this time a birthday bash. Going through my records for non-VelkyAl brewed dark beers it is clear that the pickings are very slim...so I will pivot and just mention a single beer from each of the geographies, and name a winner.

Virginia

• Tweed Dunkel - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville

Back at Yuletide 2024, I rocked up to the bar at Selvedge - gasp, shock, horror - and was given a bottle of Tweed, kellerbier style, in that it had been bottled straight out of the lagering tank with still a few weeks to go before being ready for prime time. When I cracked it open during the interregnum between Christmas Day and New Year, I thoroughly enjoyed it and partly rejoiced that it would be coming on tap once I was done with January being a month off the booze. If memory serves, this is double decocted, and all those extra Maillard reactions pay off in the silky smooth, deeply toasty flavours and mouthfeel of what was a great start to the drinking year.

Rest of the USA

• Schwarzbier - Bierkeller Brewing, Columbia, SC

Among the various lager styles of the world, schwarzbier is the closest to my first beery love, dry stout. However, I think schwarzbier has an edge over stout in the wonderful effects of cold fermentation and long lagering giving the beer a crispness that showcases the roasty snap of dark malts. Anyway, it was summer, and we were in Columbia, en-route to Florida for beach week, when Bierkeller had their Schwarzbier on tap. It was probably obscenely hot in South Carolina, but this was a beer that simply worked because it is so damned tasty, roasty without being acrid, clean without being boring, and eminently drinkable, so I did, pretty often.

Rest of the World

• Aecht Schlenkerla Erle - Heller-Bräu Trum, Bamberg, DE

As I mentioned in the BOAB post, rauchbier is one of my favourite types of beer in the world, I love a good slap across the face of beechwood, so when I saw Schlenkerla Erle at Beer Run, I bought a few bottles. Erle is another schwarzbier, but this time made with malts kilned over alder wood. Alder couldn't be more different from beech, deeply earthy, yet delicately sweet as well, paired with the roastiness of a schwarzbier and what you have here is a beer that speaks to the rustic peasant in me. I can only imagine how revelatory it would be from a stichfaß in the Dominikanerklause.

While the pickings may be slim for this category, the quality is far from wanting. I could happily drink these three beers all year round, but one stands out just ahead of the others, by virtue of being the confluence of two of my favourite things in beer, dark lagers and rauchbier. Yes, the Fuggled Dark Beer of 2025 is the magnificent Aecht Schlenkerla Erle from Heller-Bräu Trum in Bamberg - a beer that thankfully is still in stock in several bottle shops round here and will be finding its way into my fridge again very soon.

Fuggled Beers of the Year: BOAB

Audience meet BOAB, BOAB meet audience. If it is your first time meeting BOAB, you might just need to know that it is Fuggled-speak for beers that are "between orange and brown", so anything from Vienna lagers to brown ale and everything in between, erm obviously as that is in the name. Onwards ho!

Virginia

• Tavern Brown Ale - Alewerks Brewing, Williamsburg
• Beech Blanket - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville
• Loden Vienna Lager - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville

Honorable mentions: Threadenator; Houndstooth - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville; Fritz - SuperFly Brewing, Charlottesville; Wolf Gang Vienna Lager - Buffalo Mountain Brewing, Floyd.

Let's just get one thing out of the way Selvedge are going to dominate the Virginia lists for these reviews for the very simple reason I drink far more of their beer than any other brewery in Virginia. As I mentioned in a Vinepair article last year, they are knocking it out of the park, and if anything they are only getting better as Josh and gang get a full grip on their new brewing system.It may come as a surprise to some though that my Virginia BOAB beer of the year is not the magnificent Loden, but rather their rauchbier, Beech Blanket. I love rauchbier, to the extent that I am not interested in these silly little "hint of bacon" beers, hit me with lots of smoke! Beech Blanket is much more in the Spezial realm than Schlenkerla, and is absolutely redolent with pungent beech smoke, coupled though with a smooth drinkability that has made it a regular beer throughout this year. Also, fun fact, it makes a fantastic addition to many of Josh's pale lagers just to mix things up a bit.

Rest of the USA

• Altbier - Bierkeller Brewing, Columbia, SC
• Copper - Olde Mecklenburg Brewing, Charlotte, NC
• Munzler's Vienna Lager - Olde Mecklenburg Brewing, Charlotte, NC

Honorable mention: Little Nator - Tröeg's Brewing, Hershey, PA

It's pretty slim pickings in the rest of the USA section this year, largely because Mrs V and I haven't really got out and about the country much. Even with that said, the 3 selections here are all fantastic beers, but I have to choose just one, and that one is an example of one of my favourite styles, but first a story. The first time I had an example of this particular style from the place it originated, I was in Berlin, it was 2008 and Mrs V and I had gone to hang out with a friend. Wandering round that day we stumbled upon an art festival, and in the middle of festival was a mobile bar for Brauerei Schumacher in Düsseldorf. I was as giddy as a schoolboy to have my first real altbier actually from Düsseldorf as up to that point I had only had a version at Pivovar u Bulovky in Prague. Anyway, I fell in love with the style immediately, and it is still a bucket list item to drink Schumacher at source. The winner here though I drank in rather different circumstances, the kids were in bed, it was hot as hell in Florida, and so I went out to the balcony of the place we stay in and opened a one litre growler to Bierkeller Brewing's Altbier, and it was sublime. So good, I went and got my other growler of it, just to keep on drinking it. When we headed back north to Virginia, with a quick stop on Columbia, I stocked up. 

Rest of the World

• Pilsner Urquell - Plzeňský Prazdroj, Plzeň, CZ
• Oktober-Fest Märzen - Privatbrauerei Ayinger, Aying, DE
• Nut Brown Ale - Samuel Smiths Brewery, Tadcaster, UK

Again with the slim pickings, a combination of drinking mostly locally brewed beers and having really upped my homebrew game the last couple of years. The international BOAB beer of the year though is one whose arrival in the stores signifies the end of summer and the beginning of autumn, which by itself gives the game away. Ayinger are such a solid choice for German beer, though I wish I understood their production codes to work out the age of some of their beers, when it comes to seasonals though I worry less. I realise Oktober-Fest is not an official beer for the festival itself, but in my mind it captures the essence of a great festbier, hefty but not cloying, distinctive but not wacky, I relish every bottle I get my hands on.

Ah....decisions, decisions. Three great beers, three fantastic styles. Ultimately though, I have had a long affair with the winning style, ever since trying it for the first time in Prague (the suspense must be erm, well, suspenseful given I had all three styles for the first time in Prague)...but the winner is the style that won my heart ultimately in a park in Berlin. Yeah, altbier is just something I love and lament in almost equal measure given the scarcity of the style in the US. So, the BOAB beer of 2025 is the superb example of the style from Columbia's Bierkeller, a brewery that I recently highlighted in an article for Vinepair as one of the best in the US.

Fuggled Beers of the Year: Pale

It's that time of the year, the Winter Solstice is upon us, and what better to do than to review a year's worth of drinking? As has become my own tradition, I will break this down into multiple posts, one for pale beer, one for BOAB ("between orange and brown", and dark, and then an overall beer of the year, as well as one for Virginia cider of the year.

As I have done for several years now, I will highlight beers from Virginia, the rest of the US, and the rest of the world before crowning each category winner, so on with the show...

Virginia

• Spoolboy 10° Czech pale lager - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville
• Chain Stitch Helles - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville
• Coat Czech 12° Czech pale lager - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville

Honorable mentions: Ten - Sojourn Fermentory, Suffolk; Pylon Pilsner - Patch Brewing, Gordonsville; Voda Czech style Pilsner - Caboose Brewing, Vienna; Vested Interest - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville.

A clean sweep for the brewery I visit far more than any other, but in my defense, Josh makes beers that are simply delightful and would grace any kneipe, keller, hospoda, or hostinec throughout Central Europe. I didn't write my annual Top 10 Virginian Beers this summer, but it would have been overwhelmingly Selvedge Brewing products. All that said, even choosing one from the three mentioned is a monumentally difficult task as on any given time I am at Selvedge at the moment it is pretty much a given that I will be rotating through the three of them. Even so...I can only choose one, and that is the one that both Mrs V and I pretty much immediately order when we sit down, the one that both of us have raved about to friends, acquaintances, and anyone within earshot willing to listen, the one that takes both of us back to our spiritual home in Czechia. Spoolboy, the most perfect desítka imaginable, and one that I wish I could sit and drink with Evan, Max, and co back in Prague.

Rest of the USA

• Notch Pils - Notch Brewing, Salem, MA
• Gold - Live Oak Brewing, Austin, TX
• Urhell - Bierkeller Brewing, Columbia, SC

Honorable mentions: Bavarian Pilsner - Von Trapp Brewing, Stowe, VT; Pilsner - New Belgium Brewing, Fort Collins, CO; Captain Jack Pilsner - Olde Mecklenburg Brewing, Charlotte, NC; Pilz - Live Oak Brewing, Austin, TX; Kirkland Lager - Deschutes Brewing, OR

Despite being an abysmal beer tourist, as I have mentioned many a time in the past, when I do get to travel for work, I always make sure to find some time to unwind in a local brewery with a decent lager selection. I am sorry folks, but if you haven't worked out that pale lagers are my go-to beer style, and have been for many years, you simply haven't been paying attention. Probably my favourite annual trip to to a conference in Austin, Texas, that gives me the opportunity to get to Live Oak Brewing. So it was this spring, myself and colleagues rolled up and spent an excellent few hours in the tap room enjoying the many fine beers on offer. It was much to my delight that they had just tapped this year's batch of Gold, a Bavarian style pilsner that is, in my as ever unhumble opinion, the best pilsner that Live Oak brews. Yes I love Pilz, but Gold is just a nose ahead in my mind, and so I enjoyed plenty of it.

Rest of the World

• La Fin du Monde - Unibroue, Canada
• Jura - Pivovar Chroust, Czechia
• Tannenzäpfle - Badische Staatsbrauerei Rothaus, Germany

Sadly no foreign trips this year for me, so my international drinking has been limited to whatever I could find in the store, or in the case of the winner, something new and exciting that I hadn't expected to see at ChurchKey on a business trip to DC. Also, a fun fact, the beer in question comes from a part of Prague that many, many moons ago, I actually very close to, as in just one metro stop away. Obviously then the international pale beer of the year is Jura from Pivovar Chroust in Prague. As I say, I was sitting in ChurchKey, perusing the beer list and my eyes were drawn to the word "Jura" partly because I had just bought a couple of bottles of Jura whisky and was surprised to see that collection of letters in a beer list. What followed was a fantastically bracing, bitter 12° Czech pale lager that was an exceedingly happy surprise.

Three fantastic examples of Central European pale lagers in the Plzeň tradition, but obviously I can choose but one. That one will come as no surprise to anyone that knows me, or follows my Instagram, it is the one that come the end of this week I will be drinking having finished work for the year. Yes, then the Fuggled Pale Beer of 2025, a prize still unencumbered with the grubbiness of filthy lucre and commercial considerations is Selvedge's magnificent Spoolboy 10° Czech Pale Lager, a beer I will miss deeply when this batch is gone, and then I will begin my campaign to bring it back as soon as possible.

Morana: Tmave's Birthday in America

This Thursday is the 15th anniversary of the day I spent at Devils Backbone Basecamp brewing the first ever batch of Morana, a Czech style dark lager that I designed for them. I had spent the previous months diving into archives, emailing with multiple brewers, and beer experts, in various languages - English, German, Czech, and Slovak - to learn everything I could about a family of beers that at the time only consisted of about 5% of Czech beer production. Obviously, having only fairly recently decamped from Prague to Virginia, I was also relying on my own remembrances of beers that I had got a taste for in the last couple of years there, when I moved beyond the realms of Gambrinus, Staropramen, and Velkopopovivký Kozel.

My go-to dark lagers at the time were brewed by Kout na Šumavě and available at the fantastic U Slovanské lipy, but it was the 14° version that I was using as my model for Morana. They also had an 18° that as a 0.3l malé pivo made for a wonderful nightcap.

Back in 2010, Czech style dark lager wasn't an accepted "style" on sites that advocated for the rating of beer and it didn't exist in the BJCP style guidelines until 2015. Fun fact, there is a post in BeerAdvocate in which I pointed out that tmavé is different from both schwarzbier and dunkel and thus deserved it's own category, a point met with howls of "too many styles" already, meanwhile black IPA had a moment in the sun and immediately got recognition from the gatekeeping banshees mods.

From my research and deep diving since, I am convinced that Morana was in fact the first authentic Czech style dark lager brewed in the modern American craft brewing industry. By "authentic" here I mean using appropriate ingredients and methods, so yes it has always been double decocted, as well as giving it the time to lager extensively. When it was first released, I was transported, Anton Ego style, back to the pubs of Žižkov, Nusle, and Karlín. It has since been brewed about half a dozen times, and as Jason and co have invested in open fermenters, horizontal lagering tanks, and the like, it has got better and better with every brewing.

All of this came rushing back to me this last weekend, as I was lazily scrolling through the Memories feature on Facebook and saw something mentioned about looking forward to being at the brewery to help make the first batch. With that in mind, I changed my homebrew plans for this weekend, out went my next batch of Vienna lager, and in came a 15th anniversary brew of Černý Lev, my homebrew version of Morana.

Previous batches have used the traditional German malts from Weyermann, but as you may know if you've been following my social media for a while, I am committed to using my local malting company, Murphy & Rude, for all my malt needs. As such, a slight redesign was required. My grist for this weekend then is:

• 75% Virginia Pils
• 10% CaraMel Light (similar to CaraVienne)
• 10% Munich 9
• 5% Cimmerian Black (similar to Carafa III Special)

For the hopping, I am of course using Saaz for flavour and aroma, but going with Sterling for bittering:

• 16 IBU Sterling for 60 minutes
• 9 IBU Saaz for 30 minutes
• 6 IBU Saaz for 15 minutes

For the yeast, good old W34/70 is getting to chew through the planned 14° wort to hopefully give me an ABV of around 5.6%. Brewfather says that 34/70 has an apparent attention of 81%, but going through my notes on previous brews, I average about 75% so I am not too worried about drying it out.

One major change from the last time I brewed this recipe is that I will be doing a decoction mash, in this case a double decoction, as I outlined in this post last year.

Once the yeast has done it's thing, it will get 42 days at near zero before being tapped in my kitchen as the first homebrew beer of 2026, on February 1st. The last 14 days of that will be gently, and slowly, carbing in the kegerator - though I am toying with the idea of getting a spunding valve and letting it carbonate naturally...

If this batch turns out like previous batches of Černý Lev, I will be very happy.

UPDATE: I only got round to brewing this on January 2nd, so it won't be ready until the end of February now.

Old Friends: Unibroue La Fin du Monde

Let me take you back in time. It is late December 2008 (yeah, I know, it seems like entire lifetimes ago), Mrs V and I have yet to leave Prague for the United States - in fact, at this point we didn't really know where in the US we would be moving to, given Mrs V hadn't found a job. At that time, my parents lived in an impossibly gorgeous hamlet in the Haute Vienne region of France, in an old farmhouse that still had a couple of acres of land attached. They had a small orchard, a pond, and green fields as far as the eye could see in every direction. Around 5pm every afternoon, the neighbours ran their herd of cattle, and the ground would gently tremor at the stampede. With Christmas just a week or so away, Mrs V and I flew to Paris Orly at some ridiculous time of the morning, to catch the train from Gare d'Austerlitz to La Souterraine, where my parents would pick us up and head to their hamlet.

That particular winter I had ordered a load of beer from the UK, since my parents were visiting my eldest brother, who lived in Kent at the time, so that was waiting for me when we arrived. However, I wanted to try local French beer, such as the La Lémovice I found at Limoges market (fun fact, they are sitll in business and now have a website), as well as some thoroughly disgusting shite being made by an English bloke, for which we drove an hour or so for a night time market - oh well, at least the market was delightful. As was traditional with our trips to the French countryside, a jaunt to the nearest sizeable town, the aforementioned La Souterraine, and a supermarket revealed new horizons. Unrelated to this post, but I love French supermarkets, in this case it was an E.Leclerc. It was at this E.Leclerc that I discovered that it was possible to get Orval for an insanely reasonable €1.30, as well as picking up today's Old Friend beer, Unibroue's La Fin du Monde, for the first time, along with a couple of other Unibroue beers.

Back to the present and having spent Sunday morning in the garden, moving raised bed frames, pruning blackberries, and cleaning up in preparation for winter, I sat on my front porch with the 750ml bottle to dive on in and revisit a beer I hadn't had since before the twins were born, which is 8 years ago now!

I have to admit I was a little surprised by just how hazy this one poured, though it had been in a pretty cold beer fridge for a while, so some of it is likely chill haze. Goodness me though, look at that glorious, dense, cloud of foam sitting there atop the orange beer. It was at this point I took a moment to read the back of the bottle and that Unibroue market this beer as a tripel, not a style I drink very often to be honest. That foam though, it lingered, slowly collapsing in on itself until about a half a centimetre remained, and stayed around until I refreshed the glass - yeah I kept this all to myself, Mrs V was off playing fiddle, in my defense.

Sitting on my deck, the kids playing whatever games they were, I stuck my nose as close to the foam as I dare, and was regaled with a notable graininess, subtly backed with a spiciness like coriander and ginger, and some light citrus that reminded me a lemon zest. Swimming around in the mix was also a gentle sweetness, like light honey or simple sugar syrup. As I mentioned, tripel is not a style I readily gravitate to, but the aroma was doing a number on my senses and I just wanted to dive on in to the taste, so I did.

That sweet syrup thing I had been smelling was definitely not a figment of the imagination, it was there in the flavour, though perhaps with hints more of very light caramel, to be honest it floated between that and honey. Beneath the honey was a biscuity thing that made me wish there were a middle ground between the venerable digestive and a more savory water biscuit - I have a digestive recipe in one of my cook books, perhaps a project to make a less sweet variant is in order? The citrus thing from the aroma decided to join the party too, this time as a marmalade character, but not traditional orange marmalade, rather lemon marmalade - not sure if that is still a thing back in the UK, but I had a moment of thinking about how much I liked lemon marmalade on my toast as a kid. 

Did I mention yet that tripel is not really a style I am regular drinker of? Well, that might have to be caveated with "unless it is La Fin du Monde". So many tripels that get made in my neck of the woods tend to be cloyingly sweet and almost sickly, so much so that I wonder if they are being brewed as a distinctly untraditional all malt beer? By comparison, this had quite a dry finish that, when coupled with the aroma and flavor notes, made me think it may actually use a decent amount of sugar. There is just enough bitterness as well to offset the sweetness, and at 9% abv the absence of an alcohol hit was much appreciated. Thinking back on that foam, yay for bottle conditioning and the carbonation being noticeable but not spikey, as some highly forced carbonated beers are.

Yeah, I'll be buying this again, and not leaving it for goodness knows how many years.

Old Friends: Boddingtons Pub Ale

I am starting to think that my eldest brother has an awful lot to answer for, and not just the horse racing I mentioned in the last post. Fun fact, when my younger brother and I were around 11/12 years old, the eldest, then about 19 I think, came home to stay for a while, and so naturally he taught us how to read the form for the horse racing. 

We loved having our big brother at home, he was our hero and we thought him the very epitome of cool, every Saturday morning we would head up to the local shop, at the time we lived in a place called Sebastopol, not in Crimea, but just outside Cwmbran in Wales, and buy the paper. We would then sit and go through the races for that day, and my brother would give us both a quid to put on any horse we wanted, when the National came round he bumped it to a fiver. It was he that told us to always keep an eye out for a horse that has come fourth in both its previous outings, the frequency with which they win is interesting. Anyway, said brother, the one with an awful lot of answer for, is who I think of whenever I think of Boddingtons, which we called "Bod", it was one of his tipples, along with Guinness.

Apparently Boddingtons is undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment back in the UK, with it being brewed under license by J.W. Lees and available on cask in the pubs of Manchester - not going to lie, I'd be a pig in clover if casks of that found its way to Virginia, but alas it is unlikely. I was blissfully unaware of these developments when I was picking cans and bottles of stuff I hadn't drunk in ages from the shelves of my local Wegman's, including a can of today's friend for a revisit...

It may well be heresy to pour a Lancashire beer into a Yorkshire pint glass, the nonic didn't feel appropriate, nor yet the dimpled mug, and of my British glasses that would have left another Yorkshire glass anyway, so the Sam Smith's tulip it was. Little side story, I was once sat in a diner in Charlottesville when the folks in the booth behind Mrs V and I asked the waitress "what kind of beer is Boddingtons", to whuch she replied "it's kind of like Guinness", I almost spat coffee all over the diner. I guess she was referring to the nitro nature of Bod, but that light copper is as far from Guinness black as you could imagine (artistic license there, yes I know there are paler beers). Still, topped with a healthy amount of firm nitro white cream and strikingly clear, it was a beautiful looking almost pint of beer.

When I drank Boddingtons as a student I wasn't paying much attention to the aromas and all that jazz, seriously did any of us? We were more consumed with whether the drink in our hands conveyed any sense of cool to those around us, though being more of a Guinness/Murphy's/Caffrey's drinker at the time, the only cool I could muster was likely the cold shoulder of hoping nobody would speak to my shy arse, whilst desperately wanting someone to talk to me - ah the joys of youthful insecurity coupled with crushing shyness and the need for Dutch courage. So, having given up ambitions to coolness, I stick my nose on in the glass and came back with...well, not much really (yay nitro beer head that blocks anything interesting). There was a slight sweetness that reminded me of golden syrup, maybe a little earthiness, some fruity notes, like blackcurrants that made me wonder if Bramling Cross hops are in the mix somewhere. That sweetness thing was present in the tasting as well, though more in the realm of Hobnobs than specifically golden syrup, think gentle biscuit and you are there. Alongside the biscuit was an orange marmalade thing that made me think East Kent Goldings, but the kind of marmalade with finely shredded zest in it, including a little pith to just add a whisper of bitterness.

So there you have it, Boddingtons from a nitro can, in my notes I have the phrase "non-descript" and that's really not very fair as that term has become short hand for "boring" or "bad" but Bod ain't bad, and it certainly isn't boring, it's just kind of there, perfectly inoffensive, technically accomplished, and something I'll be happy enough to drink from time to time. It's kind of like coming back to where you grew up and everyone except yourself has stayed at home and is still living like it's 1995, no alarm, no surprises, no changes, no growth. Fine to come home to, but you'll be on your way again soon enough.

Old Friends: Leffe Blonde

Dipping into some of the dimmest and most distant of crevices in my drinking memories today for this resurrection of my Old Friends series. Back in the days when I was a college student in Birmingham, I got the train from New Street early one Saturday morning to go to Esher in Surrey. The main purpose for the trip was to spend the day at the Sandown races with my eldest brother, who lived down that way back then. Having spent the day frittering money away on thoroughbreds of varying uselessness, we headed into central London for dinner at a non-descript curry house, non-descript in the sense that I don't have the foggiest as to what I ate, but weirdly 2 beers are lodged in my memory, the Żywiec I was drinking and the Leffe Blonde that was my brother's choice that night.

Being a good younger brother, by 8 years, I was suitably in awe of his sophistication and worldly wiseness, and so at some point back in Brum I made a point of trying Leffe, in the comfort of the All Bar One. Given that I studied theology at Bible college, I was definitely not supposed to be there as we were supposed to not partake in the demon drink and all that jazz - I wonder if the college authorities knew that plenty of the married students kept a stash of booze in their flats that the singles among us would take advantage of from time to time, or that I would disappear for a few pints of Caffrey's at a pub called The Trees most afternoons?

Anyway, I developed a liking for Leffe Blonde, and so in the shop the other week, seeing it available as a single bottle in a build your own six pack, I thought, what the heck, and on one of the rare occasions the house was empty, I cracked it open to head down memory lane...

Wracking the old grey matter for hints of what lay ahead of me, I had a notion that what I was going to find would be distinctly sweet, even slick and syrupy, with a nose full of sugar. Still, it looked grand going into my one and only vaguely appropriate glass for a Belgian abbey ale.

It certainly poured the colour I vaguely recalled, a beautifully rich, deep, golden with superb clarity - I assume it is filtered. The head was a half inch of white foam, with some large bubbles that soon popped as it dissipated to a thin schmeer. I don't recall if my urbane brother sniffed his beer that night in London, but I certainly did here in Central Virginia, and prominent was a spicy character that made me think of ginger and cloves, not quite Christmas gingerbread from a European Yuletide market, but subtly lingering there, along with traces of golden syrup and marmelade.

Ok, just drink the damned beer already...cloves again - the thing with that clove thing is that it really is like the dark side of the Force, once you head down that way "forever will it dominate your destiny", there is no escaping it, even if it is a yeast derived ester. In the mix though was also dark honey, a trace of oakiness, and dried fruits, almost a rich spiced fruit cake, but with a light pithy bitterness in the background to keep it interesting.

So that sweet attack that my memory had me expecting didn't happen, don't get me wrong, it is sweet, just not syrupy and overwhelmingly cloying. I was actually pleasantly surprised and while it is hardly the most characterful abbey ale in the world, he says as if he drinks them regularly, it was decidedly drinkable and might have to make more regular appearances in the beer fridge, especially for soaking the currants, raisins, and co for my annual Yule cake.

Homebrew - Victorian Style

There is something delightfully pompous, perhaps a little insane, about book titles in the Victorian era that always reminds me of the "Connections" TV series presented by James Burke. In episode 2 there is a segment about Victorian weather science in the Highlands, that describes the effect of science on the people of Victorian Britain, in that it:

"made them all lunatic in the same way".

An example of a daft book title is this magnificent tome from 1852...

Can you get much more condescending than the head chef to the Royal Family should advise the working classes on how to cook? Admittedly I bought the book precisely for the title and out of curiosity about what the servants of the upper echelons though regular folks should, could, or even would be willing and able to cook. Francatelli even gives a list of equipment that said "working classes" require for the recipes and techniques in his book, which would cost £6 12s 4d in pre-decimal currency, that's about £700/$930/€800 today, and includes such things as a potato steamer for 2 Shillings, a 2 quart tin saucepan for 1s 6d, and a 12 gallon copper "for washing or brewing" to be had at the princely sum of £1 10s or £160/$213/€185 in today's money.

A 12 gallon copper for brewing you say, don't forget that in 1852 the Imperial gallon had been standardised for nearly 30 years as being 4.6(ish) litres, as opposed to the old gallons being 3.8 litres, and still in use in the USA. A 12 gallon copper would hold 54.5 litres. Also included in the list of essentials is a "mash-tub" for another 10 Shillings (£50/$66/€60) and two "cooling tubs" again for 10 Shillings, though Franctelli does allow the downtrodden masses to use "an old wine or beer cask, cut in halves" as this "would be cheaper, and answer the same purpose". Seemingly used casks were to be had for a mere 6 Shillings (£32/$42/€37).

All of this detail would suggest then that the book has a recipe for brewing your own beer, and thankfully it does not disappoint, as number 130 is handily titled "How to Brew Your Own Beer", though confusingly our chef friend recommends a 30 gallon copper and a we actually have a size for the mash tub, 54 gallons, which is 245.5 litres. The other equipment recommended is:

"another tub of smaller size, called an underback; a bucket or pail, a wooden hand-bowl, a large wooden funnel, a mash-stirrer, four scraped long stoutsticks, a good-sized loose-wrought wicker basket for straining the beer, and another small bowl-shaped wicker basket, called a tapwaist, to fasten inside the mash-tub".

A recipe though, a recipe? I hear you cry as you so dearly want to go and make some Victorian style homebrew. Hold your drays sunshine, first things first, water. In a world without universal in home plumbing, what is a homebrewer to do? Well, apparently not to use spring water for a start as "its hardness...is unfit for brewing", remember that at this time geology was very much in its infancy. Ok then, no spring water. Rain water perhaps? Sure, if it is collected in clean vessels, but Francatelli recommends "water fetched from a brook or river" being "free from all calcareous admixture", basically water lacking in calcium carbonate, because the "consequent softness gives them the greater power to extract all the goodness and strength from the malt and hops". Ok, soft water it is then, though if you are an industrial labourer in the cities of Britain leading the Industrial Revolution, I am not convinced you'd be dipping into the Thames, the Trent, or the Clyde for your brewing water.

Eventually, we do get to a recipe, of sorts.

"In order to ensure having good wholesome beer, it is necessary to calculate your brewing at the rate of two bushels of malt and two pounds of hops to fifty-four gallons of water".

More maths...an Imperial bushel is 36.4 litres, a litre is a kilogram, therefore an Imperial bushel is about 36.4kgs, or 80.2lbs, we need two of those for making 54 Imperial gallons, so 160.4lbs of malt and 2 pounds of hops, whole leaf of course, since T-90 pellets weren't a thing yet. After a lot of head scratching and double checking my work, I think this means we would be looking at a starting gravity of about 1.067, and potentially an ABV of 6.4% - assuming the use of pale malt.

What about the hopping? Well for a start, no named variety is mentioned in the book, and if I understand the process correctly, the Victorian homebrewer would have practiced "first wort hopping" as we call it today, viz:

"put your hops into the underback tub, and let the wort run out upon them".

The first mash lasted three hours, and while the runnings were in the underback with the hops, a second mash of 2 hours took place. Eventually giving the brewer sufficient wort to require 2 boils, with the hops split between them. The boil lasts for 90 minutes, and again assuming my numbers are correct we would end up with about 35 IBUs - making the assumption that something like Fuggles were used at about 4% alpha acids.

According to Francatelli, this will eventually "produce three kilderkins of good beer".

Now, I have yet to try and make a beer based on this text, but I do intend to try at some point, though sourcing period appropriate ingredients may be a stumbling block, especially as Francatelli doesn't say what kind of malt his working class readers should use - my hunch is that given diastatic brown malt was still a thing, it might have been that given that Francatelli doesn't mention starting gravities or alcohol content at all, but elsewhere is focused on price of ingredients, and brown malt was cheaper than pale from a monetary stand point.

If I ever figure this out, it would be fun to try and create a recipe and maybe brew it with one of my local breweries...all that is for another day though.

What The Schnitt?

Yesterday I introduced you to our friend Mr Bílek, shoemaker and fundraiser for Czech national causes extraordinaire, yet he was far from alone in his endeavours, as I discovered in the German language daily "Znaimer Tagblatt" from January 1900.

Znaim is the German name for the modern city of Znojmo in Moravia (minor aside, I always find typing "Moravia" rather than "Morava" weird) and if ethnic maps of the late 19th and early 20th century are accurate the city, and its attendant region, was predominantly German rather than Czech. The history of Bohemia and Moravia within the context of the wider Austro-Hungarian Empire is delightfully complex and multi-ethnic, and I don't want to get into that fun here. However, what is clear is that Czechs and Germans living in Bohemia and Moravia used each other to prod and cajole their fellow citizens into ever greater demonstrations of national fervour.

According to this story, the fund raising undertaken by the likes of Mr Bílek at U Fleků had raised a total of 26,614 Florins in the 20 years since 1880. One thing that I find fascinating is all the different names for the same basic currency throughout the Empire. If the 14,000 Złoty raised by our shoemaker friend was about $90,000 then over the course of 20 years, the proud Czechs of U Fleků raised about $170,000/£126,000/€146,000 for various Czech national associations, specifically the Czech School Association, Czech Association in North Moravia, and the Sokol, a gymnastics association.

And so this success makes the "Deutsche Blatt" ask the question "and what are we Germans doing?". Seemingly there were a pair of Moravian "Bunds", one in the North and one in the South, for whom an annual contribution of a mere 20 Kroner or even a single Krone respectively was, perhaps hyperbolically, considered "already too much".

The writer continues to berate their fellow German Austrians that a single "schnitt" fewer every day wouldn't be so bad and that the savings would build up to a sizeable fund for civic associations tied to the ethnically German population of the Empire. And here we have again an example of the cross pollination of cultures that was Bohemia and Moravia in the 19th century, evidenced today through the use of a transliteration of "schnitt" into Czech, "šnyt" as the name for effectively a half pour of beer and lots of foam. "Schnitt", if you know your German means "cut", because it is a cut down pour of beer, that is "better than nothing", at least according to Bohumil Hrabal, or was it Karel Čapek, when he wasn't inventing the word "robot"?

Anyway, clearly the writer in the Znaimer Tagblatt thinks Czechs are more effective as patriots, reminding his audience with his closing line "organising festivals and dancing for national purposes is far from fulfilling one's duty".

Collecting Coins in the Pub

I am always fascinated by the social and political aspects of the pub, perhaps more so even that the beery ones. Pubs, beer halls, biergartens, are all inherently social and political spaces, because they are places where humans get together and talk about the things that are important to them, or at least on their minds. Sure, folks can prattle on about not talking about politics or religion in polite society, but the pub, beer hall, or biergarten are not necessarily polite spaces, and so it is no surprise when you dig into the role such places have played in history that you learn interesting things...such as this story from the "Kuryer Lwowski" - that's Lemberger Courier for the non Polish speakers amongst us...

As you can probably tell from the highlighted sections, I was doing a search on the legendary Prague beer hall, U Fleků, but this story from May 4th 1893 has nothing to do with black beer, or any other shade of booze, rather it comes from a story titled "How Czechs Collect Donations". For historical reference, at this point in time, the Polish people were divided between the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empire. There was no independent Polish state, Gdansk was in the German Empire, Krakow in Austro-Hungary, and Warsaw in the Russian Empire.

In the 45 years since the popular nationalist uprisings of 1848, many of the national minorities in the Austro-Hungarian empire has asserted their identities as distinct from their German or Hungarian speaking overlords, and none more so arguably that the Czechs. This assertion of national identity often took the form of civic society projects, such as the building of a national theatre dedicated to performing only in the Czech language - which the Czech had to do twice because the original building suffered a catastrophic fire just a couple of months are first opening. If I remember rightly, the Imperial crown refused to provide funds for such an independent Czech cultural institution, and so the money was raised from the people themselves.

How did they manage to raise the kind of money needed to buy the saltworks upon which the theatre was built, and then to actually build the thing? One way was that people asked for donations in places like U Fleků. People like the shoemaker, Mr Bílek in the story above, would collect small amounts in popular places, and where is more popular in Central Europe than the beer hall? By collecting loose change, Mr Bílek raised 14,000 Złoty (as Poles in the Empire referred to the Austro-Hungarian Krone), or about $90,000/£65,000/€75,000. According to the story in the Kuryer Lwowski, having done his rounds Mr Bílek would put the donations in a box, the keys to which were held by two other people, and thus he collected such a sizeable sum for the "People's School Society".

The writer of the Kuryer Lwowski article finishes off their piece recommending that the people of the province of Galicia, which included much of modern western Ukraine, take lessons from the Czechs and likewise raise their own money for similar projects.

I wonder what else I will find about U Fleků in the archives...

Haus Lagerbier Update

In the very first post on Fuggled this year, I wrote about my main homebrew project for 2025, namely to take my many, many years of lager drinking, my fewer years of experience brewing my own beers, and come up with a beer that would be my "house" lager. I have named it, somewhat unimaginatively I am sure, Haus Lagerbier.

The aim is to have something I brew 4 times a year, on the first Saturday of each quarter, to compliment in many ways my house best bitter, a brewday that I could probably do in my sleep. For this year, I wanted to dial in my preferred yeast strain before messing with hops and malt, etc. As such, batch 1 was brewing using the near ubiquitous 34/70, while batch 2 switched to S-189, which is a strain from Switzerland.

Batch 1 went on tap in March, and looked like this in the late winter sun...

I was most remiss with Batch 1 in that I didn't take the time to sit down and really analyse it with my modified Cyclops set up. A fact likely due to the fact that it tasted good and between Mrs V, myself, and some of the neighbours, we cranked through the keg in double quick time.

Thank goodness for it being a year long project, and so a couple of weeks after kicking batch 1, I brewed batch 2, exactly the same beer but with the different yeast. One thing I noticed about S-189 as opposed to 34/70 was that it took an extra couple of weeks for the green appley thing of youth to fade out of the beer. Those early pints looked like this.

However, I got my shit together and sat down one Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago to write some notes, with the beer pouring absolutely beautifully and looking like this.

On to the notes then:

• Sight - yellow to light gold, good couple of inches of white, rocky, foam, fantastic clarity (not fined with anything), and good head retention.
• Smell - Lightly toasted malt, some crackeriness, floral hops, kind of like walking through a mountain meadow on a breezy day.
• Taste - nicely bready, with slight toasted edges, nice hop spiciness, think cinnamon in particular
• Sweet - 2/5
• Bitter - 2.5/5

Damn it I am happy with that beer. The mouthfeel and body were just what I wanted, medium bodied and such easy drinking. The bitterness hits right at the back of the mouth, leaving me wanting more, and invariably more is what I had. I was genuinely sad when the keg kicked last weekend.

Now though, I find myself on the horns of a dilemma for batch 3 as I would happily stop and just make batch 2 the default for Haus Lagerbier. Yet, there are plenty of other bottom fermenting yeast strains out there that might be even better than S-189...what to do, what to do?

Stuck

I'm stuck in a rut.

It has been 49 days since my last post, I have several other writing projects stacked up, waiting to be completed, I am just not happy enough with them yet. I need something to break the log jam. 

So here is my crazy idea, I am just going to write whatever random boozy thoughts pop into my head each and every day for the rest of July, including when I am in Florida on vacation.

Maybe I will find something new in the Austrian newspaper archive that I love to trawl, maybe it will be a few lines of total tosh that just needs someone to comment that I am completely wrong, or right, or that you've been feeling the same but unable to say it. Maybe I won't stress myself out with long form essays, maybe I'll just post pictures of my homebrew, or other good beers I am enjoying, or more likely at the moment, something about the glories of cider in Virginia. Maybe a commenter (remember those?) will ask a question looking for my opinion on something? Who knows?

I need to break the log jam, and so I will post every day, at some point of the day, maybe more than once.

One down...

Lamentationes Desperatorum

I was wandering around the supermarket where I do the weekly shop recently, and as is my wont I bimbled over to the beer section to have a browse. I was pretty sure I wouldn't be buying anything, my beer fridges being pretty full of excellent lager after all, but it is a habit at the end of the shop to just take a peek. Now, while owning the fact that I do my weekly shop in a supermarket, and that I understand they have to offer what is more likely to sell, it was still a dispiriting experience.

Unless you have read a vanishing small number of my posts on here, or any other social media platforms, you will know that I am a very irregular drinker of the old India Pale Ale - side thought, it seems almost jarringly quaint to see it spelt out in full rather than just acronymed down to IPA. Yes, I am predominantly a lager drinker, especially of beers I am buying in the shop or at the pub/taproom. Most of the top fermented beers I drink are my own homebrew, stuff like bitter, mild, stout, and my lime infused witbier, which is currently on tap.

Of course, being a lager drinker gives me plenty of scope for diversity of style, and I love mixing things up with pilsners, Vienna lager, a dunkel or six, the occasional rauch doppelbock, you get the picture. Anyway, coming back to my wander around the beer aisles and their groaning under the weight of many a bottle and can of IPA with cartoonish labeling, it suddenly hit me that there are many beers I have enjoyed which seem no longer to be available, not just in my local store - there are some things that I pop into the northern Virginia branch when I have the chance specifically to buy - but as in gone, and invariably replaced by an IPA of some level of bastardisation.

As I bimbled those short aisles, and not counting here the import section, I noted a single brown ale, the excellent Tavern Brown from Alewerks Brewing in Williamsburg, just the one amber ale, Satan's Pony from Charlottesville's South Street Brewery, and precisely zero milds, hefeweizens, Scottish ales, Czech style dark lagers, and even an utter dearth of Extra Special Bitter - I have given up hope of ever finding a worthy bitter, ordinary or best, on the shelves of the supermarket. Thank goodness for Selvedge, who produce excellent examples of both, and have them on cask, from time to time, as well as my own best bitter than I brew at least 4 times a year.

It seems actually vaguely ironic then that at the recent Beer World Cup, there were 112 categories - and don't get me started on the iconic Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, the very archetype and poster child of the American Pale Ale being submitted as an ESB and winning gold. At last year's Great American Beer Festival there were 102 categories, and yet an alien visiting a supermarket in central Virginia would be forgiven for believing beer was called IPA, and that was pretty much all that was available. Yes, I appreciate that I am not talking about specialist craft retailers here, who tend to have a much better selection of beer in terms of stylistic variety. Even then, the prevalence of badly out of date beer, lagers stored at room temperature, and badly oxidised imports gives me pause when dropping full price money on a six pack of duff beer.

Maybe I am just entering my curmudgeonly dotage as I creep ever closer to my 50th birthday later this year, but I have found little joy of late browsing the aisles and shelves of the beer retailing world, whether supermarket or specialist. Of course there are beers, usually seasonally available lagers such as Tröeg's Little Nator, that I happily stock up on when they are available, but usually my little bimbles are more a ritual performed through a misplaced sense of duty, with a hint maybe of self-flagellating hope of something other than yet another "innovation" in the form of an IPA.

Hop to Murphy & Rude Mother

I don't really post all that often on here about my homebrew, or at least not as often as I actually brew beer in my garage. I am more likely to post pictures of grains, hops, and packets of yeast on my main Instagram account, I have a separate one for my book, "Virginia Cider: A Scrumptious History", if cider is more your thing...

Since the twins have reached an age where they don't need constant oversight, I have been able to find the necessary time to myself to brew. Kid related side, I popped into Selvedge last Friday and the bar staff made a point of thanking me for the fact that when my kids are in the taproom they are impeccably well behaved. We had been in for lunch and a pint the previous weekend and there were kids roaming the taproom unsupervised, which I know is a pet annoyance for many, and I fully understand that. In my world it is one thing to be a "family friendly pub/taproom/whatever you want to call it" but it is incumbent on families to likewise be pub/taproom/whatever you call it friendly as well. I like having the option to take my kids with me to the pub, and would be mortified if they abused that privilege so that fewer places would welcome families - after all, how else do you teach people to be good pub goers if not through teaching them when they are young?

Anyway, back to homebrew. I probably brew twice a month or so these days, having the chest freezer fermentation/lagering chamber means I can have a pretty regular supply of beer in my kegerator, and best yet I don't ever have to look at the menu and wonder if there will anything I want to drink. Currently carbonating, and hopefully ready to tap on Friday, is my first all grain version of LimeLight, my Belgian style witbier that uses lime peel in place of Curaçao orange, and batch 2 of my Haus Lagerbier project is in primary.

As with all my beers in the last couple of years, all of the grain has come from Murphy & Rude, our local craft malting company that I did a profile of a while back for Pellicle. I am not ashamed to admit it, and I realise here I am insanely privileged, but being able to support a local malting company, who in turn buy all their grain from local farmers, and also get involved in projects to make sure that historic Virginian corn varieties remain available to the like of Josh Chapman for making their gorgeous malted corn lagers, is deeply, deeply satisfying. It definitely helps that M&R malts are right up there in terms of quality and freshness. My house best bitter has been brewed for more than 2 years now with just Murphy & Rude malt, and it is the best it has ever been.

Speaking of my best bitter, a few recent batches have been brewed using Virginia grown Challenger hops from Mountain View Hops down the road in Floyd County, and now thanks to Murphy & Rude I will have more options for making near completely Virginia versions of that beer. Over the weekend, they announced that they are now stocking Virginia grown hops, in particular those of Greenmont Hopworks in Albemarle County. At present they have three varieties available, Cascade, Crystal, and their own unique hop called Mother, a wild hop that was discovered on their farm and has proven excellent for brewing - a recent version of Selvedge's landbier, Local Fabric, used them to great effect.

As a result of Murphy & Rude selling hops as well as grains now, my next batch of best will likely use Mother for the 40 odd IBUs that go into it. Now if only they sold Virginian yeast strains, such as that isolated by Jasper Yeast from an oyster plopped in some wort by Josh Chapman, my dream of a purely, and genuinely, local homebrew will become a reality.

Session 146 - What Value in Beer?

 

Yikes, where did the last couple of months go? The cynic side of me says "right down the shitter" whereas the more considered side says "life's just busy". Anyway, it's time for the Session again, and this month is being hosted by Ding and he has asked us to consider the "value" of beer, in the sense of:

"when I part with the cash, no matter how large or small the amount, does what I receive in return meet or exceed the value of said cash? Subjective? Sure, but we all have our own sense of value."

 Yeah, very subjective topic here, but one that I feel gets to the very heart of why we drink beer at all, or at least why we don't submit ourselves to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator brew that is ubiquitous with wherever we live. That's not to say that industrial brews like Budweiser, Carling Black Label, Stella Artois, or Gambrinus are inherently bad, just that they lack value for me.

So, yes, let's think about value, at least the word itself. Value is by its very nature relative, where I might balk at spending $5 on a pint of a given pale lager, I am more than happy to spend $7 on a pint of some alternative lager. For the sake of discussion, let's assume both beers are of the same style, similar ABV, and fairly equivalent IBUs derived from the same family of hops. What factors then make me willing to spend more money on the beer with the higher price point?

My first consideration is likely to be process. If said beers are of a Czech lager style, regardless of strength and colour, then I would be asking questions like "was the mash a decoction?", "how long did it lager for?", as well as expecting a voluminous foam head when poured. I will put this out there from the start, I don't give a flying monkeys if it is poured from a Lukr tap. For nearly the entire time I lived in Czechia, Lukr taps were not a thing, they really only started showing up in around 2008, oh and I don't recall ever seeing the choice for different pours. You asked for a beer, you got a beer, a well poured beer more often than not, with a voluminous foam head, from a flow control beer tap like the ones in this picture^*.

All of that is not to say I won't drink beers if poured from a Lukr tap, just that I don't buy the marketing that has built up around it - after all it's not as if Czechia was a beer desert in the half century or so between the original side pour taps being replaced by modern flow control taps and their making a re-tooled with filter screen re-introduction.

Anyway, got a bit off topic there. Yeah, process, why do I care if a Czech style lager has been made with a decoction mash and extensive lagering more so that how they are poured? Well for starters even when ripping our the original side pour taps, the breweries weren't ditching their process for actually making the beer. From my reading of history, there was no en-masse move to step mashing, there was no trimming of lagering times to get product out the door as soon as possible, there was a well established way of doing things that didn't need changing, so why bother? 

Part of the value then of a beer for me comes from the brewer's own sense of wanting to make an authentic product. Sure you can make a tasty pale lager with an infusion mash, a touch of melanoidin malt, and Saaz hops, but it will never be a truly Czech style lager, and I value that authenticity. Coming back to Lukr taps for a moment, I actually love them when the beer being served from them has been produced in a manner that a Czech brewer would recognise as the correct way to make it. Like this 12° pale lager from Selvedge here in Charlottesville.

Even then this brings up the question of "what is authenticity?". If a pastry stout, hazy IPA, or syruped up fruity gose is an genuine expression of the brewer's view of beer then fine, I am not going to drink it, but everyone has their own thing and will likely find a market for it. And that is another question in my mind that creates that additional value, does the brewer actually drink what they are putting out? If I am in a taproom and see the brewer drinking the only pilsner on the menu, for example, then I am more likely to try that than all the variants of IPA on offer - let's not deny it, we all know many a taproom with 25 taps of IPA, a lager, and Guinness as the guest stout. The beer that the brewer drinks most, is likely to be the only they pour the most of themselves into, and thus it becomes the one that is their "house beer", and that adds value.

Value is intangible, personal, difficult to really describe. What I value in a beer, or even entire breweries, others don't give a rat's arse for, and maybe that comes to the crux of why I am such a crap beer tourist, when I find a place that makes the kind of beers I like, in a way that feels authentic, whether to the brewer themselves or my own little collection of prejudices, then I am a happy, loyal, and potentially slightly tipsy customer.

* - the picture is by my good friend Mark Stewart, was taken at my old local in Prague, Pivovarský klub, on the occasion of my wedding reception.

The Session - Best at Home

This month's iteration of The Session is being hosted by Ray and Jess over at Boak and Bailey, and the theme they have presented us with is:

"What's the best beer you can drink at home right now?"

Until Mrs V and I decided to encumber the universe with children, the vast majority of our drinking was not done at home. We had several regular haunts to sit and have a pint or two; whether the original Three Notch'd Brewery tasting room, Beer Run, or even the bar at Whole Foods - seriously, at one point it was social central as we invariably ran into folks we knew and so another pint was had. We still do a fair amount of our drinking outside the home, often at Selvedge, Patch, or still Beer Run. Even though we used to drink mostly at taprooms or pubs, I always had a very well stocked cellar, often including lots of my own homebrew, but going out was the norm. Times however have been a'changing, and drinking at home has become almost the default for various reasons that I am not going to bother going into here.

I still have a pretty well stocked cellar, including a couple of dedicated booze fridges, one for beer, and one for wine and cider. There are still beers in the regular fridge, and I have shelves lined with Fuller's Vintage Ales of various, ummmm vintages, as well as other strong ales that I haven't got round to drinking yet. And then there is the kegerator...

It might be a single tap setup, but given that I am usually the only person drinking beer at home these days, Mrs V being more of a wine drinker, a single tap suffices for my needs. I do have all the necessary gear to run commercial beer through it, but to date I have only used it for my homebrew. As a result of having the kegerator, I have been brewing a lot more in the last couple of years, which brings us back to the question from Ray and Jess, what is the best beer you can drink at home right now?

The word "best" is no doubt going to get an awful lot of interpretation in posts for The Session. While I wouldn't make any claims for my homebrew being on a par with the professionally brewed stuff that is available in Central Virginia, it is decent. When I have something in the kegerator, pouring an imperial pint or a half litre - pretty much all my glasses are one or the other - of something I brewed is an absolute pleasure.

So, I am going to re-phrase the prompt a little and make it "what is the best beer to drink in my home, from my kegerator"? Sadly I have to leave off the "right now", as I kicked my most recent keg last weekend and have nothing to take its place for a couple of weeks. In terms though of the best VelkyAl beer to drink from my kegerator, it is probably the beer I brew most often, my house best bitter.

If you have ever travelled much in the US, you will know that best bitter is rarer than the proverbial hen's teeth, as are various other styles that I love and therefore brew my own versions of those too. My house best bitter began life as a collaboration with Three Notch'd Brewing, was originally called Session 42 but became Bitter 42. That first iteration was heavily influenced by the paler bitters of the North of England, think Timothy Taylor Landlord, as well as the divine Bitter & Twisted by Harviestoun in Scotland. The aim was to brew a best bitter using US ingredients rather the classic Maris Otter and East Kent Goldings. At one point Session/Bitter 42 was brewed almost annually, but inbetween those brewings I made my own batches and kept on tinkering.

For a long time now, I have had most of the recipe nailed down and largely repeatable:

• 88% Murphy & Rude English Pale Ale malt
• 12% Murphy & Rude Biscuit malt
• 19 IBUs of something for 60 minutes
• 10 IBUs of something for 15 minutes
• 8 IBUs of something for 5 minutes
• Safale S-04 yeast

The original gravity is always 1.042, yes I have my process so dialed in on my homely brewing "system" that I know what I am going to get before I even begin, and I invariably end up with a 4.2% abv best bitter. Until recently though, the "something" hops constantly changed. My initial batches used US Goldings, but I have played with Cascade, Galaxy, Citra, El Dorado, and Motueka, and most recently I have found the hop that really makes the beer everything I want it to be - Endeavour.

Endeavour is a modern British hop that is a cross between a hedgerow hop and Cascade, so you get the blackcurrant and red berry character of something like Bramling Cross with the citrus notes of Cascade, not quite grapefruit, but not entirely lime either. Chuck in some fantastic spiciness, think cinnamon and maybe even a hint of all spice, and you have an absolute dream of a hop, one that I have used to several recipes lately and in each of them it has shone.

If I had a batch of my house best bitter on tap right now, that's exactly what I would be drinking at home today, either from the keg or perhaps from one of my 5 litre mini-kegs I use to approximate gravity poured real ale. That pint would look something like this...

Yeah it would have a touch of chill haze from the kegerator, but I am not fussed about that when it tastes so damned good. 

Thankfully I can say that about several of my homebrew recipes, whether my blonde ale, stout, or Vienna lager, and I hope to add a house lager to my regular lineup on the keg this year - first batch starts carbing this weekend for a middle of March tapping. So to come back to Ray and Jess's question, the best beer to drink at home right now for me is my own, especially as the price of a pint creeps ever higher...but that is a conversation for another day.