Two Countries Divided By a Common Beer Style

For those of you who are not aware of my employment, or lack thereof, situation at the moment, at weekends I work in the tasting room of the Starr Hill Brewery. On Saturdays and Sundays you are very likely to find me at the bar in the tasting room, serving samples of the brewery's range of beers to visitors, it is a job that I enjoy immensely. One of the most common questions I get asked by visitors is which of our beers is my favourite, and I am very lucky to work for a brewery whose range I genuinely enjoy. At the moment, because these things change, I have to admit that I have two favourites, we currently have a bourbon barrel aged, dry hopped barleywine available to which I am particularly partial, but from our core range, my clear favourite is Northern Lights IPA. For some time then I have been planning to get my hands on a bottle of a British IPA and do a comparison tasting of British and American IPA, that bottle arrived on Wednesday and was St Peter's India Pale Ale from Suffolk in England. As ever, I am using my variation on the Cyclops system for my tasting notes (the sooner American brewers adopt this system as well the better as far as I am concerned).

First up the English IPA, naturally as England is the home of IPA.

• Sight - amber with a definite orange, small white head
• Smell - bitter orange peel, faint caramel
• Taste - sweet maltiness, spicy hops, mellow citrus
• Sweet - 3/5
• Bitter - 3.5/5

What a nice beer this is! Seriously, it is delicious, an excellent balance between the hops and malt, both kind of up and in your face, but neither dominating so much as to make it either sickly or like sucking lemons, there is a noticeably bitter aftertaste which I really enjoyed. A beautiful beer.

And now the American contender:

• Sight - sparkling amber, loose white head
• Smell - heavy grapefruit hoppiness (it's the Cascade!)
• Taste - In your face grapefruit, smooth marmelade background
• Sweet - 3/5
• Bitter - 4/5

Damn it I love this beer, I really pity people who can't get this beer in their neck of the woods, seriously it is such a nice IPA. The thing it has for me over most IPAs in the US is that there is far more going on than just a hop bomb. Yes there is that classically American C hop, in your face, grapefruit citrus that you expect, but the malty sweetness of the body, and a subtle boozy glow, set that off perfectly. As I say to a lot of people in the tasting room, it is like hoppy marmelade. It is interesting the number of women who tell me that don't like hoppy beer, usually after they have just tried our Pale Ale, and thus don't want to try the IPA, but love it when I eventually persuade them just to try.

There really isn't much to tell these two excellent beers apart, other than the hop varieties in use. Perhaps then Northern Lights is closer to a genuine IPA than many of the hopbominations out there in the American market because it has the extra maltiness needed to balance out the big citrus flavours. My only gripe with the St Peter's is the use of a green bottle, but that is purely because my experience here so far is that green bottles don't travel as well as brown - thinking about Pilsner Urquell here for sure, so much so I have sworn not to drink it until I am again in Prague and can have it unpasteurised, it really makes such a difference.

Now if only I could find somewhere with Northern Lights as a cask conditioned ale, who happen to have a cask of St Peter's India Pale Ale, then I would be in IPA nirvana.

Brewing Tunes

Once again I am brewing today, for something like the third time in a month. I bottled the Machair Mor yesterday and this morning, while waiting for UPS to deliver a case of beer from Vintage Cellar, I will be making Biere d'épices - my spiced Christmas ale.

While I am brewing, I will of course be listening to some of my favourite music, so here is my selection of brewing tunes for each stage of the process.

1. Steeping the grains: Hope Street - The Levellers



2. Boil: Amerika - Rammstein



3. Hop Additions: Uprising - Muse



4. Chilling The Wort: Obsessions - Suede



5. Pitching the Yeast, Fermentation: The Sun and the Sky - The Violet Burning

Some Things Mean More

Starr Hill Barleywine, superb;
Primator Weizen, magnificent;
2-0 against Manchester United, priceless

Nitro Nostalgia

As much as I would be classified as a "beer geek", or "beer anorak" if you prefer, I am not adverse to taking trips down beer memory lane, despite the fact there are more than several nights where the beer stole my memories entirely, although I would like to claim that the Scotch on top of the beer was to blame. I have mentioned on Fuggled before that before I moved to Prague from the UK, I drank ale instead of lager as a rule, beers like John Smith's, Murphy's and Caffrey's were my staple tipples.

If those beers weren't available then my back up plan was Boddington's, which I vaguely remember being available on draught in a few places in Birmingham, but when I moved back to the Highlands I could only get in cans. About a week ago I noticed that our local Food Lion was selling four packs of Bod for only $6.79, and so for purely nostalgic reasons I dropped a pack into the shopping trolley - sorry guys, "cart" just sounds wrong - they won't let me bring my horse into the shop to pull it.

Well it certainly still pours with the bubble cascade and thick, creamy white head I remembered so well - I was tempted to try the old Czech quality test and see if I could balance a coin on the head, it is said that being able to do so is a sign of a properly made beer. Whereas I used to enjoy watching the cascade, and though that the head was great, these days it just annoys me. Eventually though the head settled and I drank my Bod, and although it isn't great, it isn't that bad - I have certainly drunk far worse, and that from the "craft" beer world.

Probably one of the main contributing factors for a lad of my age drinking Boddington's back in the 90s was the advertising, with the lovely Melanie Sykes fronting a series of commercials based around the theme of Bod being the "Cream of Manchester", my favourite though stars Sarah Parish:

Swimming in the Rip Tide?

So BrewDog have decided to sell a 9% stake in the company to, hopefully, 10,000 lovers of the brand - describing it as the "single most exciting, influential and ground-breaking thing to happen in the British brewing industry for decades". I will say quite openly here and now, as I have on several people's blogs - were I still living in the European Union, I would no doubt be one of those 10,000 people. Would I be doing it because I think it would make me rich? Probably not. Would I be doing it because of the 20% lifetime discount on BrewDog beer? Again, probably not. I would be doing it because I genuinely and sincerely want BrewDog to succeed, grow and show that British brewers can be as iconoclastic as their American cousins. Basically anything that means I can walk to a beer store in Charlottesville and pick up bottles of Hardcore IPA, Paradox and Rip Tide is a good thing in my world.

As things stand, BrewDog appear to be in a very fortunate situation at the moment. Their edgy and aggressive marketing is backed up by seriously good beer. They have a groundswell of goodwill from many in the beer blogging world, and I would be surprised if many of the British bloggers I read don't go out and buy a share in the company, most likely for reasons very similar to why I would if I could. However, this rosy situation could so easily turn sour, and that is the tightrope that James, Martin and the BrewDog guys will now find themselves walking along - and to be honest it is one place I wouldn't want to be.

Having read on BrewDog's main site about their plans for the investment, I must admit that a somewhat parochial question went through my mind, why build the new carbon neutral brewery in Aberdeen? I am assuming here of course that the facilities in Fraserburgh will be closed down in the process. Would the jobs created by building and running the new brewery not be welcome in Fraserburgh? I am aware that the Broch's unemployment rate is below average in Scotland, but while having a nice shiny new brewery is a nice thing, why not keep the company's roots in Fraserburgh?

Another part of BrewDog's plan is to create a new range of beers under the brand name "Abstrakt", you can see the promotional picture here. Now, please, pardon my French and perhaps I am wrong but it seems entirely out of keeping with the concept of BrewDog as the brewing world's "punks" and more like yuppies in denial. Seriously, who wrote the bollocks on that picture? "directional boundary pushing beers"? "will release a small amount edition batches per year" - someone perhaps was in the Foundation class doing Standard grade English? As I have said elsewhere, I am not convinced that Abstrakt is really all that ground-breaking - Fuller's annual Vintage series springs immediately to mind.

As I said at the outset of this rambling, I wish BrewDog nothing but success at bringing excellent beer to the drinking public, and if in the process they make themselves wealthy men then well done to them. What they have done with their new plans is take a difficult path, and one where I am sure it won't be long before some people feel disenfranchised from the brand, and begin to label them as sell outs - much as embittered Pearl Jam fans did with Nirvana when they achieved commercial success. For me though, as long as the beer remains good then I am a happy BrewDog fan.

A Change in Christmas Beer Plan

When I was a kid, we lived in Celle in northern Germany - or West Germany as it was back in those days - and every Christmas my mother would make a gingerbread house. Now, my mother isn't one for buying ready made kits or foods for Christmas, whether that be a gingerbread house, the mincemeat for the pies, Christmas pudding, Christmas cake, pretty much everything was prepared from start to finish the traditional way. Around this time of  year, mum would make the Christmas pudding and Christmas cake, and let them mature and age until the big day itself - every weekend feeding the cake with brandy. For all the work my mother would put into the making of the Christmas feast, it took my little brother and I moments to bash through the gingerbread to get at the sweets inside, and then days to slowly eat the house itself.

It was this gingerbread house tradition that we had as kids which has inspired my Christmas beer this year, and the fact that until I go all-grain in my home brewing, I would have problems with my original intentions of making a dark top-fermented Baltic Porter in the style of Nøgne Ø's fantastic Christmas beer. I also wanted to use a French hop as a nod to the fact that my parents now life in the Limousin area of France, so I am using Strisselspalt in the brew.

The recipe is as follows:

• 1.3kg Amber DME
• 250g Caramel 80
• 1/4 tsp crushed cloves, boiled 10 minutes
• 1/4 tsp grated ginger, boiled 10 minutes
• 1 tbsp ground cinnamon, boiled 10 minutes
• 15g sweet orange peel, boiled 10 minutes
• 30g Strisselspalt @ 60 minutes
  
• 15g Strisselspalt @ 15 minutes
• 15g Strisselspalt @ 5 minutes
• Wyeast Belgian Abbey II

I am hoping for an OG of 1.048, and eventually an ABV of 4.5%. Brewing is scheduled tentatively for next Wednesday as I will be bottling my Machair Stout on Tuesday once it has had two weeks in the carboy. Given a couple of weeks in the primary fermenter followed by being in bottles for about 5 weeks before Christmas itself, I am hoping that everything will work out well.

The name for my new beer? Biere d'épices!

Heretic? Me?

As much as I love Guinness, I have always loved Murphy's more.

I have a four pack of cans to enjoy with myself tonight - perhaps I am a heretic, but every prospect pleases!

And a wee song to get you in the mood....