Local? My Arse!

If you've been following Fuggled for a while then you will know that I generally hold the whole 'craft' beer thing rather lightly. I don't really give much of a toss about the corporate structure of the company making the beer I drink, as long as it tastes good then I am generally a happy camper. However, one thing that I do appreciate is honesty in advertising. You can imagine then my dismay at wandering into the store yesterday and seeing the following:

Now, this isn't some half baked rant about the 'crafty' beers as opposed to the 'real thing', but rather a half baked rant about the terminology in this poster adorning a stack of Blue Moon...'locally "craft brewed"'? Really? Who the fuck does the cretin that came up with this poster think he or she is kidding?

Last time I looked there is no 'Blue Moon Brewing Co' in Virginia, but then, as we all know, Blue Moon is a brand of the brewing giant MillerCoors (a joint venture between Molson Coors and SABMiller in the US), and there is a MillerCoors brewery in Virginia. Said brewery is just across the mountains, and perhaps it is the only part of this advert which is true as it is in the Shenandoah Valley.

Do the marketing geniuses behind this poster honestly think that anyone with half a brain cell is going to believe that Blue Moon is 'local' in the same way as Devils Backbone, Hardywood or the soon to open Three Notch'd Brewing?

Go Mad My Son

Yesterday, Mrs V, myself, and my parents went up to DC for a day trip. It's only a couple of hours by car from our house to the parts of Northern Virginia that have a connection to the city itself through the wonders of the metro, and so we parked up and rode into the District of Columbia.

Having bimbled by Capitol Hill, strolled along the National Mall, sauntered around the National Air and Space Museum, we were all well and truly foot weary. Earlier in the day my mother had mentioned that my parents would like to treat us to a good meal. Not being all that knowledgeable about the DC area, and the fact that our car was out near Falls Church, I suggested trying out Mad Fox Brewing.

I have only ever heard good things about Mad Fox, so it was with some excitement, and not a little trepidation, that we took our seats. I say trepidation because so often when a place is praised to the heavens it fails to live up to my expectations.

Mad Fox would be different. From the moment I looked at the beer menu I knew what I wanted to drink. Mason's Dark Mild, a 3.3% English style mild, served on cask, that could not have been any more spot on had it tried, and yes, it was served as cask ale should be, sparkled. I tried a few samples of other beers, a kölsch, both filtered and keller style, again excellent, an English Summer Ale, superb, and a porter which was entirely magnificent.

The beer was just one part of the deal, as there is traditionally food involved in dinner, and the food was as good as the beer. Whether is was my burger with caramelised onion jam, or my mother's fig and balsamic pizza, there was a general consensus that the food was delightful. Oh, and did I mention yet that the service was absolutely wonderful?

It's fair to say I have become a fan.

Old Mann Brown - The Tasting

I mentioned back in April that my parents were coming to visit us here in Virginia, and that I was planning to brew a clone of Mann's Brown Ale as it is a beer my dad quite often talks about. I made one change to the recipe as the homebrew shop didn't have any Kent Goldings hops when I popped in to get my ingredients, but they had Fuggles, so I switched.

Last night, after a week and a half in the bottle, I decided to see how it was coming along and popped open a couple of bottles for myself and my dad to try.

Early indicators are good, the carbonation is good, the colour is a rich mahogany with a light tan head, it certainly looks the part, and at just 2.9% definitely a session beer. The nose has a touch of apples and pears hidden in with caramel and chocolate notes. Tastewise, the chocolate and caramel are there again, with a good bready backbone and a spicy hop bite from the Fuggles. Three mouthfuls later the glass was empty and I was headed to the cellar for another bottle.

Overall, a very encouraging start to what could be my beer for summer...

Not Cool, Man

Life has been a tad hectic of late.

Last Monday I started my new job, back at the company that laid me off in October, but in a different capacity, which kind of explains the lack of posting of late. I have been getting back into the swing of working life, and thoroughly enjoying it.

One of my little habits is to go for a lunch time walk a few days a week, which is a pleasant way to while away an hour or so. Today, in the summer heat, I pottered off around the centre of Charlottesville to stretch my legs and enjoy the warmth. As I headed back to the office, I popped into a local bottle shop to peruse the selection.

For some reason I noticed that most of the beer was sat out on shelves at not much below room temperature, even the lagers. Keeping top fermented beers on the shelves at about room temperature might not be entirely awful, but treating a beer which has spent most of its life at cool to cold temperatures in the same way is simply asking for trouble.

The shop does have fridges, but they were full of...yes you guessed it...warm fermented beer.

Really, what is the point of selling a good selection of beer if you aren't going to treat it well before it goes out the door?

The Answer...

...is an emphatic 'YES!'

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

'friends let friends drink only pilsners?'

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

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

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

In Praise of Workhorses

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defining Passion

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

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

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

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

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

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