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.

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.

Fuggled Beers of the Year - Darker Than Pale Lighter Than Dark Brown

How's that for a description of colours in this category? Suitably vague and broad of scope I would hope you agree.

Onwards then to the runners and riders

Virginia

• Franconia Kellerbier - Port City Brewing
• Rauch Märzen - Port City Brewing
• Alt Bier - Devils Backbone Brewing

Honorable mentions: Doppelbock - Port City Brewing; Bavarian Prince - New Realm Brewing.

As I mentioned in my last post, this year has been stellar from Port City, so it is no surprise to see them dominating the DTPLTDB category. I drank loads of the Franconian Kellerbier earlier this year, often while harvesting fresh green things from my garden, the experience was a series of delightfully rustic moments in the midst of this most odd year. 

When you compare a rauchbier to the glories of Spezial in Bamberg, you know you are drinking something, erm, special, Rauch Märzen is just such a beer. A gorgeous drop of rauchbier that hits my sweet spot with unerring accuracy. 

Technically speaking, Devils Backbone Alt Bier was my first beer of 2020, from the zwickel at the brewpub while brewing Morana back in February. When finally Morana was on tap, and people were allowed to reserve tables in the Devil Backbone meadow, we did so. With double digit numbers of crowlers of Morana acquired, I was drinking the Alt Bier, revelling in the sense of normality with a version of altbier that could actually pass for a German beer. 

This years Virginia DTPLTDB beer of the year is Port City's Franconian Kellerbier, a beer so good it pretty uch made up all of my drinking for a couple of months in the summer.

Rest of the USA

• Copper - Olde Mecklenburg Brewing, NC
• Oktoberfest - Von Trapp Brewing, VT
• 40 - Sierra Nevada Brewing, CA/NC

Honorable mentions: Winter Ride - JosephsBrau, CA; Yule Bock - Olde Mecklenburg Brewing, NC; Vienna - Von Trapp Brewing, VT.

Very much a tale of old favourites here. I wax lyrical about Olde Mecklenburg at length to anyone crazy enough to listen about the glories of decoction mashing, extensive lagering, and a commitment to making beers with malt, hops, yeast, water, and "nothing else". Whenever I have the opportunity it is Copper that takes up a fair amount of space in my fridge. 

For the second year in a row, I did a mass Oktoberfest tasting, and Von Trapp's eponymous beer is probably my favourite version of the style, though it didn't win the blind tasting. However, a maß at Kardinal Hall on an overcast Friday afternoon brought a ray of sunshine to an otherwise grim day. 

I know you are shocked, a top fermented, American hopped, IPA made it on my list of contenders this year, but it is Sierra Nevada and they are simply one of the best breweries on the planet, and in "40" they had the perfect beer to mark such an august anniversary. 

Sierra Nevada then, in their anniversary year take the honours as the best DTPLTDB beer in the rest of the US for 2020.

Rest of the World

• Vintage Ale 2016 - Fuller's, England
• Oktober Fest-Märzen - Privatbrauerei Ayinger, Germany
• Maudite - Unibroue, Canada

Honorable mentions: Orval - Abbaye d'Orval; London Pride - Fuller's.

With the lockdown in its infancy I decided to hit the cellar for some of the old ales, barleywines, and other assorted heavy hitters that had been lingering for a while. From those DTPLTDB beers the 2016 iteration of Fuller's Vintage Ale was the standout beer, and I am eyeing at least one more bottle of it before the year is out. 

Sure, I know Ayinger's autumnal festbier is not strictly speaking an Oktoberfest lager, it is though the one German lager of that season that I look forward to most, chewy, fully bodied, warming, echt lecker.

I renewed acquaintances with Maudite early in the year for an Old Friends post, such a nice beer, one that I have had a couple of times since, when the urge for a well brewed dubbel strikes (admittedly something of a great conjunction in my lager driven world). 

Not only was it the standout cellar beer of 2020, Fuller's Vintage Ale 2016 is the standout DTPLTDB beer of 2020 from the rest of the world. A worthy taker of the accolades.

Decisions, decisions...As ever it is tricky for me to choose one, but in reality given the amount of it I drank earlier in the year, and the fact I drove 60 miles round trip to pick up several unexpected 4 packs, the winner of the Fuggled DTPLTDB Beer of the Year is Port City's glorious Franconian Kellerbier, and I look forward to indulging in more in 2021.

Old Friends: Unibroue Maudite

From time to time I wonder if I have ever really got over the fact that my parents moved back to Scotland after about 6 years living in the Haute Vienne region of France. Don't get me wrong, I am glad to have somewhere to stay when Mrs V and I go to Scotland, but I loved going to the part of France they lived in.

During our 2008 Christmas trip we went into the Leclerc supermarket in La Souterraine, as ever I made a bee line for the beer aisle, where I noticed a few bottles of beer that looked markedly different from the massed ranks of French macro pale lager. Naturally I picked up a couple of each, and some Orval, hoping to try local French craft beer. Those bottles were all Unibroue, and I didn't read the back label at first, so only at my parents' place did I learn said brews came from Canada.

From that moment on I knew that Unibroue beers would be something I would enjoy from time to time when Mrs V and I jumped over the Pond, and so it has been, though usually their tripel, La Fin du Monde. Over the years I have found my tastes shifting ever further away from big hitters, as you probably know if you follow Fuggled with any sense of regularity. Having recently been reminded that I quite like the occasional dubbel, I figured I'd resurrect the Old Friends series and get myself a 750ml bottle of Maudite, Unibroue's dubbel...

First things first, I love the fact that the label is still basically the same as it was in 2008, showing the chasse-galerie of French Canadian lore, which may, if my reading is correct, itself be a version of ancient Wild Hunt stories. Any way, the beer...

This is an interesting one when it comes to describing how it looked on pouring into my goblet because so much depended on the light. Sat looking out of a window, sunlight streaming through, the beer was a deep dark copper, with red highlights, but sit with the light behind you and it appears to be a muddy brown. Whether light is to the fore or behind, the head is slightly off white, rocky, and lingers, leaving some delicate lacing down the sides of the glass.

The aroma is dominated by spices, hardly surprising as this is a spiced ale according to the label, mostly I was getting nutmeg and ginger, with a touch of clove. It immediately put me in mind of the fruit cake recipe I make each Yuletide. Lingering among the spices was a touch of molasses. some grassy hops, and just a hint of dried fruit. All of those characteristics carried on over to the flavour department as well. The fruitcake motif was reinforced, and augmented, with prunes, brown sugar, and just a light trace of banana as it warms - I drank it at the recommended 50° but inevitably it warmed as 750ml of 8% booze is not something for chugging fresh from the fridge, unless you are a philistine of course.

Maudite is definitely on the sweeter side of the spectrum, but the hops that are there give it just enough of a scrape to make drinking the entire bottle anything but a syrupy struggle. While a hefty beer for sure the alcohol is not really all that intrusive, it could even be called dangerous as it lies well integrated in the background. Overall a lovely beer that it was delightful to spend some time with again after many years, and having re-established contact I think I'll go hang out with the accursed crew of the flying canoe again some time soon.

Fuggled Review of the Year - Pale Beer

As I said on Friday, for this year's review posts I am sticking to three very broad categories of beer - pale, amber and dark. What I didn't mention though was how I planned to draw up my shortlist of three beers for each category, from which the over all winner would be selected. I thought long and hard about this question. Well, ok then, I decided to do the first thing that popped into my mind. The three beers will be as follows:

• best from Virginia
• best from the rest of the US
• best from the rest of the world

So, without further ado, the contenders for the Fuggled Pale Beer of the Year (a prize still unburdened by history or monetary value) are:

• Devils' Backbone Trukker Ur-Pils
• Sierra Nevada Torpedo 
• Unibroue La Fin du Monde

If you know me, you know that Bohemian Pilsner is one of my favourite styles of beer. It is a style of beer that is very easy to get wrong, and exceedingly difficult to right, despite the simplicity of the ingredients. I will continue to maintain that only a triple decocted, 100% Saaz hopped brew can be called a Pilsner, anything else is just pale lager. It might be very drinkable, it might even garner rave reviews, but it is not a Pilsner. When I read on the Devils' Backbone blog, written by the brewer, Jason, that he was planning to make a Pilsner based on a recreation of the 1842 recipe devised by Josef Groll, I was immediately intrigued. That Jason then invited me to come out and help brew the beer made it all the more special for me - I say "help" in the broadest possible sense, that sense being the helping by not getting in the way, as much as possible. When the beer was lagered and available, avail myself of it I did, with gusto. It was simply an excellent version of one of my favourite styles. As I have said before, if I had been served that in one of Prague's many fine watering holes, I would have been delighted. There really is no higher praise.

This is quite possibly the grossest heresy you will ever hear from a beer lover living in the USA. I am not a hop head. Don't get me wrong, I can appreciate hoppy beers, but I think that a lot of "craft" breweries focus too much on the little green cone to the detriment of the malt. For an IPA to get into my list of beers always in the cellar, it needs to have a good malty body to stand up to the hops. Enter, then, Sierra Nevada's quite simply gorgeous Torpedo. I think the thing I like most about Torpedo is that it isn't just another grapefruit bomb, the dry hopping with Citra lends it a more tropical fruit flavour which I find very appealing and a refreshing change from the Cascade/Amarillo dominated IPAs of this world. Balanced and yet nicely bitter, Torpedo achieves those three elements of good beer in my world, balanced, complex, drinkable.

For my best Rest of the World beer, I head over the border to Canada and Unibroue's wonderful La Fin du Monde. Admittedly there was a late charge in the form of Unibroue's Don de Dieu which I polished off last night, but I followed that up with another bottle of La Fin du Monde, and the winner was easy really. For a 9%abv beer, La Fin du Monde is very drinkable, smooth and laced with banana aromas - almost as though they had been soaked in spiced rum. I first had some Unibroue beers by chance a few years back in France, and still count it as one of my favourite beer discoveries.

Three excellent beers then, but in the immortal words of Connor MacLeod, there can be only one, and that one is:

• Devils' Backbone Trukker Ur-Pils

Authentic ingredients, traditional methods and a spectacular result. This is what craft brewing is about in my opinion, and the Trukker Ur-Pils hit the mark in every conceivable way and is thus the Fuggled Pale Beer of 2010.

A Lazy Look at the Cellar

For some reason, my brain has all the activity of an arthritic slug today. I am sure the cause is not having worked in the Starr Hill tasting room on both Saturday and Sunday, and being asked what specialty beer I would brew to follow the Double IPA which is currently gracing the taps - my answer was a Baltic Porter, something hefty and akin to either the Pardubický Porter or Primátor's lovely Double from back in the Czech Republic. Part of the reason could be the lack of beery joy since June 1st as I decided to take a month off the beer, so rather than witter on today, I thought I'd just put some pictures up of my cellar and some of the delights that await for Thursday and beyond.

The Cellar, large amounts of homebrew in there, and a case of Budvar to boot.

Stout - my favourite beer "style"

A sample of my Unibroue collection.

Some more dark beers, perhaps to save for the rainy days of autumn and chill of winter.

Getting It Emphatically Right

A couple of months ago I had a gripe about the standard of a large number of breweries' websites, though admittedly I then balanced that with a piece about a couple of website which I think are very good. Well, Unibroue's new website is just about the best brewery website I have seen, anywhere.

It looks great, is easy to navigate and is packed full of interesting information for the beer lover, including where you can find there beers, I think just in North America though because I know I can get them at the L'Eclerc (it is I.....) in La Souterraine. Anyway, here are a couple of screenshots to prove my point, and I for one am happy that the great beers at Unibroue finally have a website worthy of them!

Slacking off

Mrs Velkyal, myself and a friend from England have driven down from Charlottesville to Columbia, South Carolina to spend Thanksgiving with the in-laws. Of course making sure I had plenty of good beer was in order, thus a trip to the local booze store was in order, and the beer for the next few days comprises:

• Starr Hill Northern Lights (bought from home admittedly)
• Unibroue La Fin du Monde
• Unibroue Les Trois Pistoles
• Unibroue Maudite
• Unibroue Ephemere (made with apple juice, coriander and curacao!)
• Budvar

A good triumvirate of beers there for the holiday, and I am sure some stuff will make it's way back up the Interstate.

Eau Canada!

Some countries are inextricably linked with beer; Belgium, Britain and the Czech Republic for example. Other countries bring to mind wine; France, Australia and Argentina. Others are linked with spirits; Ireland, Russia and Poland. One country I had never thought of in connection with alcohol at all was Canada. That was until I saw beers from Unibroue in the L’Eclerc in La Souterraine. A quick text message to Beer Culture’s Evan Rail for his opinion of them and one of each available was soon in the shopping trolley.



Starting with the least alcoholic of the three, the 7.7%ABV Eau Bénite pours a dark gold with a big frothy head and lots of lovely bubbles. The nose was full of fruit and spice, and at the same time somewhat musty. Taste wise, the Eau Bénite continues the fruity theme from the nose, sweetened with honey and gingery spiciness. This beer put me in mind of the La Goudale I had enjoyed earlier in the holiday, although with a fuller body and a smooth softness in the throat.


Slightly stronger at 8%ABV, Maudite pours dark brown with a big cream head which hung around doggedly. The nose was dominated by licorice and gingerbread, the perfect Christmas aroma! The taste though was rather surprising, lots and lots of caramel, backed up by cloves – almost like a light Christmas pudding, with a very subtle bitterness underscoring the sweetness. Despite the somewhat hefty kick of alcohol, Maudite is very smooth and was like drinking liquid fudge.

Last up came the big hitting 9%ABV La Fin du Monde. What a magnificent beer this is, light amber and a thin white head, with a floral nose and touches of clove and banana. This was somewhat similar to the Eau Bénite but bigger, with a more pronounced fruitiness and refreshing spiciness. Again, given its ABV, this was a superbly smooth beer and not at all harsh.

Not only were the beers excellent, the labels were very well conceived and executed – including on the back of the Maudite a recommendation of the type of glass to use – hence using one of my dad’s brandy snifters. I have learnt that Unibroue have a somewhat extensive range of beers, which I trust will be easier to find in the USA - rather than relying on a random meeting in France - so a quick plea to my Canadian readers, please let me know what other treasures you guys have been keeping hidden!