You know how you listen to some early recording from an indie band and it’s rough and ready, dirty and grainy, but utterly compelling, an accomplishment of rude health, a two-fingered swagger — but then you hear the same band when they’ve been signed up to some major label, got models for girlfriends (even the drummer) and they’re polished and perfected, produced, revolution in a sweater, undoubtedly popular but not the same? I feel the same way about some indie beers — drinking Kernel’s IPA at the moment, it’s dirty and buzzy, peachy and pungent, oily and sexy, resiny, resonating and uttery compelling. I love it. Then I think of other IPAs, cleaned up, presentable, Phil Collins or Robbie Williams, ok, popular but just not the same. This cuts to the heart of all the dilemmas of anything that we aspire to like — beer, books, music, clothes, cheese, TV shows, all change as they become popular; however that doesn’t mean that I want to drink dirty all the time, but it does mean that I want that option, to drink deeply of a dirty, pungent, swaggering, roistering IPA that the majority of beer drinkers would turn their noses at. Gateways are all very well, but I would argue that beer needs the bad boys, the truculent types, the beers that challenge, the beers that hit the spot even though your palate’s saying ‘hold on I don’t get this’. That’s because it might then say: ‘chill out, I get it’.
I want that option, to drink deeply of a dirty, pungent, swaggering, roistering IPA that the majority of beer drinkers would turn their noses at
ReplyDeleteSo make your own. Sorted.
quote taken out of context your honour: however that doesn’t mean that I want to drink dirty all the time, but it does mean that I want that option, to drink deeply of a dirty, pungent, swaggering, roistering IPA that the majority of beer drinkers would turn their noses at.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what you've been told about amateur brewing, but it doesn't preclude the brewer from consuming other people's beer, or indeed from making clean IPAs as well.
ReplyDeleteMy point is just that it's a great solution to any lack of variety in one's drinking diet, especially when seeking something that "the majority of beer drinkers would turn their noses at".
Actually, wouldn't the majority of beer drinkers turn their nose up at any IPA or otherwise full-flavoured beer?
I don’t know where you got the idea I was having a pop at amateur brewing, anyway I’m rubbish at it unless it’s a 10 barrel outfit with a proper brewer in charge (like Otley) — I am not talking about faulted beers, but beers with a rough and ready edge that really excite, beers that are faultlessly brewed but have that extra something that would possibly be lost on a bigger more populaist scale — to me the skills of BrewDog is that they maintain that edge, if we look at it another way for dirty think Raymond Carver for instance or Money-period Amis.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes the majority of beer drinkers would probably turn their hooter up at any IPA, you should have heard the Exmoor Ales regularin my boozer when Thornbridge’s Kipling swanned into town, ‘that’s not beer…’
I don't know where you got the idea that I got the idea that you were having a pop at amateur brewing. And I'm not talking about faulted beers either.
ReplyDeleteIt's like with books: I've heard several authors say that they wrote the books they wrote because they couldn't find them in the bookshop.
To a large extent, amateur brewers brew the beers they can't get in the pub. You can do stuff that would make no commercial sense for even the wackiest commercial microbrewery.
Thing is I’ve got too much else to do before taking on brewing, much as I would like to, I would like to make cheese and have my own hams hanging in the cellar, but I just about manage to get the vegetable plot up and running, so I would rely on the likes of Kernel, Thornbridge, BrewDog et al to provide my beer rock and roll; I know what you mean about the book analogy, I tried that once, a great Anglo-Welsh novel — all that happened was a wad of reject letters before it vanished in the great halls of the Amstrad 8512.
ReplyDelete