tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30767252054103704362024-03-14T09:02:08.317+00:00 CALLED TO THE BAR WORDS ON BEER,
PUBS, PEOPLE AND
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ADRIAN TIERNEY-JONESAdrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.comBlogger666125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-49800288670909529552021-07-28T08:48:00.000+01:002021-07-28T08:48:37.305+01:00On writing, especially beer writing<p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NViUXQ4zH28/YQEKtOUsc4I/AAAAAAAAE08/XG5SaUIHBUYzXoehe-pJMbUg7IcWe9HQQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2016/IMG_1563.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2016" data-original-width="1512" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NViUXQ4zH28/YQEKtOUsc4I/AAAAAAAAE08/XG5SaUIHBUYzXoehe-pJMbUg7IcWe9HQQCLcBGAsYHQ/w261-h320/IMG_1563.jpg" width="261" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;">Just write, gather and then scatter the words, like throwing seeds about on a field during the act of ploughing, a virtuous Piers-like act that is labour, monotony and in common with the circular practice of prayer. Words thrown up into the air, confetti at a wedding, the snowfall of language, the joyous act of writing, the bonds that link all the acts of writing — the grammatical glue, the clauses and cases, the nouns, verbs, adverbs and that most precious of all things — takes a deep breath — the adjective, the describing word as we were taught in school. </span><p></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Let the words land, let them join together, let them form meaning, let the sentences you write be the strongest sentences you ever wrote. Be thoughtful and don’t be caught by sensation, the need to scream and shout and let it all out (there is a time and place for that after all). The discipline must overtake the din that an over-expressive voice can often cause and silence the doubts that writing can often rise, like the dead from the grave (for you never thought that writing might bring out something within your subconsciousness that you didn’t really want to experience again but this is the risk in writing, the more you tap away at the keys, the deeper you dredge into your thoughts, and then there is more of chance that you could discover something that haunts and taunts you as you go about your day to day business). The parable, the story that makes sense and gives you strength, is that of the writer who calmly and considerately sits down every day and makes a journey into the deepness of the mind. They do not write drunk, whatever some might say.</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>On beer writing:</b> Describe something, a taste, an aroma, an experience, a finish at the back of the mouth or the start of the throat if you will, a person even. Is it fulsome, spindly, avuncular, like a merry monk of myth and legend; is it bawdy, haughty, a cavorting of flavour and favour, joyous and unbridled or brooding and melancholy like a general before a battle who knows it will be lost but continues to smile weakly at the soldiers with the conviction of a saint? Could it be perky and cheeky, and the kind of beer that laughs with a fullness of pleasure as it slips down the throat, or could it be the roaring engine of a Mustang bemused but still full of power as it somehow finds itself in a small street, its engine trembling with a sense of anticipation as it waits for the open road, the roar like the rush of waves during an autumn storm. Let us then think of the many ways we can write about beer and brace ourselves for the surge and the urge of expectation that a good beer often brings; for a writer who wants to really wave their wand and cast a spell must be prepared to smile and dance and chance everything to write the strongest sentences they must ever find within that rag-bag of thoughts and penances and clemency we call the mind. </span></span></p>Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-18268089313827691632020-09-09T09:00:00.031+01:002020-09-09T10:20:31.703+01:00The severed moods of beer<span style="font-family: "arial";"><b><i>I’m working on a book idea and trying to understand what I really want to say — this is a spontaneous selection of words that might or might not explain what I really really want to say as the Spice Girls might have sung (or not).</i></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span>And what has this immersion in the world of beer told me about my life? Those with a search for an easy headline but who do not know me would suggest that it has been a blight and kept me from realising life’s full potential, that I have lost out on Minotaur-sized pay checks and a job in a corporate organisation that would have seen me retired by now, free to take cruises up and down the Danube or across the Atlantic where the captain’s table would feather the nest of sociability every other night; I could have been a contender in a big publishing house, moved into management, joined a golf club and been able to afford season tickets for the Emirates, to which I would have travelled across from the southwest by first class (or would I have had a big house in the country nearer to London?); others might suggest that it has been a journey I, as an adult, an aware adult, chose to take, that I have seen beer’s equivalent of attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate, that I have been behind the scenes, been given a glimpse behind the curtain into the rich history of beer and brewing, seen the dreams, seen the magic lantern’s shadows on the wall, and been honoured to have had the chance to be able to write about it. </span><br />
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<span>Beer, however, has told me, like a whisper from a confidant in the back of a near empty church in the middle of an anonymous city in the Low Countries, that I have a restless soul, a restlessness that initated the search for beers and bars and breweries, first of all starting in the UK and then moving onto mainland Europe and then finally across the world; it is a restlessness that takes comfortable travelling out of my day-to-day existence and can, for instance, see me on an uncomfortable overnight coach to Heathrow, in order to get to Munich for a mid-morning snack of Weissbier and sausage in a sun dappled beer garden, or catching an early Eurostar (the coach once again) to Brussels so that I can get an early doors beer in a bar where the faces of the regulars have more stories than the Bible, or a cramped seat on a cramped plane across the world to somewhere like the city of Portland, where beer is the coinage and the currency and the wherewithal in tandem with a well-defined sense that beer is in the midst of the struggle and the message that black lives matter; it is a timetable of buses and trains and sometimes well-worn treks, a feat of logistics I once planned for three days of Bohemian breweries, sharing buses with small town shoppers carrying string bags straight from the days of communism alongside raucous school children who’d finished school at lunch and never wore uniform unlike I had to (and did I push the limits with school uniform); it is about this journey taking me through villages that I first of all think I will probably never visit again but I want to (and I probably will); it is a crammed budget flight, a strange city, the language of beer, the austerity of strangers, a loneliness as well, sitting in a well-lit bar whose beers sing with flavour and character and yet I cannot speak the language and neither can those around me speak mine and I so want to talk and be part of this family and when they go home it is to the familiar and the things that are similar from day to day, while I realise I have to be up early in the morning to move on up to my next destination from a hotel whose days last saw glory when I was young and cried for the death of a pet tortoise.</span><span> </span><br />
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<span>It is about the homely nature of a pub or a bar, which I always felt from my earliest times spent sitting in them but couldn’t articulate until I started writing about beer; it is about the flavour of certain beers, the delicacy of an elegant Helles or the broody boost of a stout that crams the mouth with chocolate, coffee and roast barley, a beautiful looking ornament of darkness in the glass; it is about the moment or moments that you wish would never end, where your friends are always smiling and laughing and explaining stories and telling tall tales and making plans that deep down will be forgotten come the next day but it doesn’t really matter as we return to our homes by Kensal Green; it is also about the downside, the one more beer you ordered or took out of the fridge at the end of the night that come the next morning you wish you hadn’t, the ill-chosen word or string of words to a loved one or a close friend, the joke you thought you made but only ladled on more hurt, the template of supposed honesty in the air that douses all passion and the obsession that leaves a rift in the home; and then there is the recognised urge for solitude that a pub in a strange city satisfies, the lack of responsibility and fecklessness that too much beer can bring, the wayward lurch of drunkenness when you realise you have had too much, but also the childish glee that accompanies a vision of a brewery that seems to have more in common with Jules Verne than anything else you can think of, and let’s not forget the snake oil patter of the marketeer who has swapped the cant of yesterday for the craft of today, all this and more is what this book of mine I aim to write is about. I think I’m ready to start. </span></span>Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-39811005198956278462020-07-02T10:04:00.001+01:002020-07-02T10:05:56.186+01:00Universal Stout <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sometimes when I wonder about the nature of beer I find it curious to think and ponder over the circumstances in which a particular name has been given to a beer that is brewed by countless people across the world. All of them have an idea that the beer they brew, under its given name, is going to taste roughly the same as the one with the same name that is brewed by other members of this host of countless people. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For ease, we write down beer style, or variety, or family member or type even, but the reality is that the stout (for that is the kind of beer I am thinking about) a brewery down the road makes will have a commonality with one that is produced by a brewery 204 miles away as the crow flies or one brewed in a brewpub high in the Andes that I once visited. But why, I ask myself, should I be surprised? After all, I expect a pickled herring bought from that stall next to the Amstel in the middle of Amsterdam on a Tuesday to taste the same as the pickled herring I went back for on the Thursday from the same stall, otherwise I might be disappointed. So maybe what underpins the idea of a beer style/variety/family member or type is a sense of familiarity, the knowledge that when you ask for a stout wherever you are you will get something that broadly dovetails with what you know a stout tastes like (unless of course the brewer has seen it fit to throw in various confectionary or joints of meat, in which case we are on the wilder shores of disappointingly different tasting pickled herrings).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So the stout I have drunk is a universal stout, it has no name, has no home, has no parent, has no need of a name. It looks like a gentle sleep, beautiful in its shadowless sleekness, a mirror held to the soul, a soothing, soft and yielding shade that you immediately want to be friends with. If this is a stout, this is a stout, it is a stout, a stout that looks like a masterpiece in the glass. </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Let us now pass onto to the array of aromatics that emerge from the glass: the luxury of vanilla, the softness of childhood, the remembered laughter of a young child; the caressive nature of chocolate and coffee, the bittersweet memory of a long-lost espresso in a sweet-smelling cafe hidden away beneath the streets of Milan; the heft and weight of roastiness, the bracing bitterness of roasted malt that crackles with the intensity of a bonfire smelt several fields away on a still day. To drink a stout as complete as this is to start with the roastiness, which is then followed by the soothing chime of vanilla, coffee and chocolate and finally be replete with a dryness at the back of the throat which suggests that you do what you’ve just done time and time again until the glass is empty. Or maybe the ethereal presence of George Orwell comes along and asks if he too can have a glass of this stout he looked so diligently for when he wrote <i>The Moon Under Water</i> and I wonder if he ever thought of the anarchy that would be unleashed if when he asked for a stout he would be presented with a glass of something that smelt like a sweetshop he might recall from the days before the war swept all before it.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-47906866871746059452020-06-22T10:48:00.000+01:002020-06-22T10:48:33.534+01:00Do regional beer tastes still exist?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">During the lockdown I have made a list of places I want to visit, it’s a sort of game, an arcade of dreams with an element of playfulness. On my wish-list, amongst bars in Brussels, Bamberg and Berlin, is the Vine in Brierley Hill, home of Batham’s. I haven’t been there for a few years and for some reason this has become one of those places I want to visit. I have even tried to devise a sort of pub crawl that would also take in The Beacon, home of Sarah Hughes Brewery, which I last visited in 1998. As I considered and planned this expedition, which is several months in the future I suspect, a stray thought tumbled around acrobatically in my mind, unclear at first, then becoming more cogent and focused: are these two pubs and the beers they brew one of the last outposts of regional beer tastes in the UK? </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When I first started writing about beer in the late 1990s the idea of regional tastes was pretty simple — mild in the Midlands, sweeter beers in the Southwest (though flat Bass in Bristol), brown ales in the Northeast and so on. I pretty much followed the party line of what had gone before and was being written then but my belief started to waver and when it came to writing Britain’s Beer Revolution with Roger Protz I was of the opinion that the idea of regional beer tastes in the UK was dead. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It’s a view that seems even more steadfast these days as the most stubbornly resistant of regional beer tastes and styles seem to crumble before the widespread use of New World hops and a growing thirst for hazy, juicy pales. You’re more likely to find a beer style (albeit tweaked and turned inside out and in the company of fruit and herbs) from central Europe in a modern brewery’s portfolio than something your great-grandparents might have drunk. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I have spent a few days on and off thinking about regional beer tastes and am starting to wonder if they do still exist in patches, almost surviving in the manner of various speciality cheeses that Slow Food have always been keen to protect. Do drinkers in the Black Country still like the mild their parents and grandparents drunk even though the original drinkers were apparently drawn to it because they needed a low-ABV beer that could refresh and replenish after a day working in a car factory or foundry, most of which are gone? What was and remains the difference between a bitter made in Yorkshire and one made over the Pennines in Lancashire? I had an interesting conversation with Taylor’s head brewer Andrew Leman about that subject several years back. Do drinkers in the Northeast still hanker for sweeter brown ales?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">On the other hand, could it be that regional beer specialities become a future trend? When we get back to the pub will ice cream stouts or Haribo IPAs (ok I made the latter up but you know what I mean) still be as popular? Or will there exist a thirst for more balanced beers that have a link with the locality in which the drinkers live, as is seen in food with writers and chefs rediscovering and championing traditional regional dishes.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Could it be that if a Black Country mild with its sweetness and low alcohol or a Kentish ale with its dryness and use of local hops were French or Italian, there would be campaigns for its survival and it would become a celebrated style? Or will they inevitably go the way of Burton, Dorchester Ale and South Devon White Ale? </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When I can start travelling again I will start my search. I wonder what I will find. </span></span></div>
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Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-41009263386183955222020-06-17T11:00:00.000+01:002020-06-17T11:00:05.016+01:00Wednesday Beer — The Cream Ale<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Don’t laugh but apparently some people have been asking Anspach & Hobday whether their Cream Ale has lactose in it (as if the inclusion of lactose is some sort of craft beer Reinheitsgebot) — it doesn’t, but, being based on a beer style that was both pre-Prohibition and remains in the repertoire of a few US breweries, it contains flaked corn and oats. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I first read about Cream Ale when Randy Mosher filed his review of Pelican Pub & Brewery’s Kiwanda Cream Ale for the first edition of <i>1001 Beers</i>. The idea of this single-hop beer with a light colour and body but which Randy still thought good enough to be sampled intrigued me. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Fast forward to 2015 and I’m driving between Seattle and Portland over six days for a travel feature and aiming to get to as many breweries as possible, which is how on a gloomy Monday lunchtime I arrived at Pelican’s Pub right down on the beach at Pacific City in Oregon (city is a bit of a misnomer as from what I saw the place looked the size of a suburb of Rhyl). Naturally, I ordered the Cream Ale, which was light and delicate with a moussec-like mouth feel. It was an excellent beer for lunch and dovetailed magnificently with a plate of fish tacos. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This is a smooth and soothing beer, with a lot more character than I recall from Pelican’s Cream Ale. One other thing, The Cream Ale is a lightly hazy in appearance, which is a bit ironic as Cream Ale in the 19th century came about because US brewers wanted to emulate the brilliance of the lagers that were sweeping all before them (according to Jeff Alworth in his magnificent Brewery Bible). Next, I’d like to see a pre-Prohibition lager if anyone is interested in making one. </span></span></div>
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Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-74367848318216721172020-06-12T11:00:00.000+01:002020-06-12T11:00:02.280+01:00Travel stories<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uEqOhdip-u0/XuIG3wstkvI/AAAAAAAAEaE/9r58TFPxcOU-Px8WOGqPUVqU8SFVZ1I5wCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_3163.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uEqOhdip-u0/XuIG3wstkvI/AAAAAAAAEaE/9r58TFPxcOU-Px8WOGqPUVqU8SFVZ1I5wCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/IMG_3163.JPG" width="320" /></a><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I am feeling itchy, in need of a roam beyond the run of home. I want to be on my way to Prague, or Berlin, or Bamberg, or even, at a pinch, London. However, I’m still in Exeter, a lovely city and I love living here and I drink some great beers here but after 12 weeks of my universe being constricted to the local park, Aldi, Sainsbury’s and the butchers around the corner, to paraphrase Jim Kerr, who I once interviewed in the 1980s, I want to travel. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I want to walk along the platform at Midi in Brussels, and then make my way to Moeder Lambic Fontinas and order a glass of Tilquin Gueuze and feel its tingle and tapestry of flavours on my tongue. After several of these, I want to continue into the city centre, with the hope of catching the aromatics of fries drifting through the air like wraiths and aware of people going back and forth, with both purpose and the lack of purpose in every step, and I want to walk up the steps to Poechenellekelder, where I shall fall upon a freshly poured glass of Taras Boulba and then ask for a bottle of Dupont’s Moinette Blonde. Is that too much to ask?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Or if it is, maybe I want to walk out of Berlin Schönefeld in the direction of the train station and pop into the rustic-looking tavern that is run by Augustiner and set myself up for the roistering and rumbustiousness of Berlin with a litre of Helles. Then I shall get on the train into town, probably embark at the madness of Alexanderplatz and walk partly along the Spree to Markthalle Neun in Kreuzberg and drink beer at Heidenpeters, somewhere I have been visiting and drinking at for several years. And with a bit of luck, if it this time of the year, I might be able to order the brewery’s full-bodied Maibock. Later on? I shall make my way back over the river to Hops & Barley and drink deeply of the Dunkles brewed there. Currywurst? Yes please. And tomorrow afternoon I shall head over town to Foersters Feine Biere and drink a lot of Franconian beer. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I want to get off the station in Bamburg, glance at the massive maltings named after the town (there are two, did you know, the other being Weyermann’s) and then walk up into the old centre of the city and push my way into the wooden womb of Schlenkerla’s tavern, where I shall indulge myself in plenty of rauchbier and once my thirst is frequented I will stroll over, weather permitting, to Brauerei Greifenklau, in whose beer garden I once sat and heard the thunder in the surrounding mountains, while diving deeply into the brewery’s clean, malty, minerally and earthy Kellerbier. I think I shall be there for some time. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But I can’t do any of this at the moment so instead I think and I write and this is what I think and I write because I write about beer and travel. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Beer is the drink of the barbarians, the drink of the victors, the losers, the drink of the mother, the lover, the carer, the father, the misfit, the outlier coming in from the cold, the saviour, the coward, the bawler, the bawling baby, the refugee, the soldier, the minister, the spinster, the swimmer, the fastest person in the race, the one who preferred not to be paced, the other, the cut loose, the one with the juice, the tailor, the sailor, the tinker, the spy, the cry baby, the high roller, the stranded and you and me and you over there. That’s all. </span></span></div>
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Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-10203488607924472452020-06-10T11:00:00.000+01:002020-06-10T11:00:00.503+01:00Wednesday beer — Mondo Colouring In<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Could you ever get bored of IPA? Will you ever get bored of IPA? Is there a kind of IPA that bores you to tears and makes you want to rip up your membership card of the great world of beer and return the celestial vouchers of beer appreciation by first class post? What is it that might rankle with you when it comes to IPA? The inclusion of fruit, spices and whatever else is hanging around and begging to be used in the kitchen? Or maybe it’s mixed fermentation, a Yeti-like yeast strain or the complete loss of hope when a soda IPA comes along (as it will)? I’m being rhetorical, not being me or you or anyone, but just wondering what it is about IPA that has made it the punchbag and the leaky cauldron and the three wise men of beer all rolled into one? </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">On the other hand, I could just enjoy an IPA, which is what I have done with Mondo’s Colouring In, a 6.2% extra pale version of craft beer’s constant presence, that according to the sleeve notes has been dry-hopped with Mosaic, El Dorado, Enigma and Simcoe (oh and yes there is oats in the mash). Mosaic indeed, if the chopped chives alongside ripe mango on the nose is anything to go by. This is the kind of aromatic that is almost green in its sensuality and — to take a different tack — it is perhaps reminiscent of chopped spring onion with orange and mango embedded in it. More chives when I drink it, alongside a suggestion of orange, mango and blueberry, followed by a full-bodied mouth feel and a dry and lightly bitter finish. If this beer was a canvas the hops used would be bright and bold colours with splashes of reds, greens, blues and oranges, the kind of artwork that you would hang in the hallway to remind you that no, you won’t be getting bored of IPA. </span></span></div>
Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-85192534441908136042020-06-01T11:00:00.002+01:002020-06-01T16:46:04.088+01:00Roger Ryman — an appreciation<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Roger Ryman with Brian Turner (left) <br />and Alastair Gilmour (right), when he was<br />the British Guild of Beer Writers <br />Brewer of the Year in 2006 (see the official<br />citation is at the bottom)</i></b></td></tr>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This is not an obituary of Roger Ryman, whose death was announced at the end of last week. It is an appreciation of someone I had known for nearly 20 years. I first met him at St Austell in 2001, whilst researching my debut book <i>West Country Ales</i> (though we’d spoken over the phone before this). We got on well and over the years I went back to the brewery many times, had beers with him in various places and always contacted him if I had a question on the brewing process (I found an email from 2006 where I’d asked him about lautering when I’d come back from visiting a couple of Alt breweries). I remember when the news came through that St Austell had bought Bath Ales, I rather cheekily emailed him to ask if he would sort out what I then perceived was a diacetyl issue with some of their beers. He took it in good heart. He took me around the newly commissioned brewery in late 2018, I was fascinated by it and you could also see the quiet pride he took in overseeing the project. He was one of the great brewers of the last couple of decades and is rightly hailed as the person who put St Austell on the national beer map (I also think he had a valuable ally in the shape of former Managing Director James Staunton). Here is the profile I wrote of St Austell with a particular emphasis on Roger’s influence for Britain’s Beer Revolution, which was published in 2014. This is my appreciation of him. I will miss him.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Here comes a double IPA, bruised gold in the glass, sharp and zestful on the nose alongside a blast of tropical fruit (ripe peach/apricot skin perhaps). A sip from the glass and a further run of tropical fruit on the tongue, a big boost of bitterness with a juicy malt sweetness holding it together while its long tail-end finish of bitterness seemingly goes on forever and ever. This is a beast of a beer, whose heart beats wildly on the American west coast. You can almost hear the waves bearing the surfers to shore. Or can you? There are waves and surfers close to the brewery from where this beer emerges — we’re not in southern California but southern Cornwall. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Big Job is crewed ashore at St Austell, the august family brewery that is definitely part of the British brewing revolution. There’s a delicious irony at play here — back in the 1990s St Austell (or St Awful as they were known then) would have been seen as just another brewery treading water as beer sales fell and pubs closed. Yet the brewery is still about and rocking the beer world. What happened? Two words: Roger Ryman. </span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Late in 2014 and I’m at St Austell with the </i></b><br />
<b><i>two Rogers </i></b><b><i>(thanks to Susanna Forbes for this)</i></b></td></tr>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Back in 1999, a tall, gig-rowing, rugby-playing Lancastrian took on the top job in brewing, that of a head brewer. He’d come from Maclay’s in Scotland, hardly a den of seething innovation but he was iron-like in his resolution to change things at St Austell. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">‘When I was interviewed for the vacant Head Brewer’s job,’ recalls Ryman, ‘I made it clear to the MD-in-waiting James Staughton of the opportunity that I saw for the company. The business had a solid estate of pubs and a strong regional identity, while the brewery itself, although not modern, was housed in a structurally sound granite building, and not threatened with imminent physical collapse. Why would this brewery not be successful? I was clear in my ambition that with the application of good brewing practice, innovation and focus on beer brand development I could see no reason why it could not double its sales in ten years, own a nationally revered cask ale brand and sit proudly at the top table amongst regional and family brewers.’</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If history, as James Joyce had Stephen Dedalus say in Ulysses, ‘is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’, then Ryman was the alarm clock for St Austell. Granted they had a heritage going back to 1851, but what Ryman did was merge its traditional values with a modernistic approach that continues to drive the brewery forward to this day. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The beer that made Ryman’s name and drew drinkers to the bar was Tribute, a luscious insurgent of a sparkling ale first brewed in 1999 under the name Daylight Robbery (a reference to that year’s eclipse). In his words, ‘it was a modern pale ale characterised by significant late hopping with US and continental varieties’. He used Fuggles from England, Styrian Goldings from Slovenia and the American hop Willamette with the result being a zesty, citrusy, juicy beer with a boisterous bittersweetness. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">However, important and successful as Tribute was (and remains), Ryman, supported by Staughton, has pushed to make St Austell one of the most successful and dynamic English breweries (it is said that some family brewers, when wishing to reinvent themselves, talking of ‘doing a St Austell’). A friendship with Karl Ockert from Bridgeport Brewery in Portland, USA, led to the birth of Proper Job, a sessionable strength (4.5%) American-style IPA. He did nano as well with a small microbrewery that can produce 10 firkins each brew. ‘It offers me,’ he says, ‘as head brewer the opportunity to get out of the office and back to sleeves-rolled-up-brewing. There is nothing better than a Sunday in the micro-brewery concocting a new recipe — no meetings, no e-mail and no phone calls!!’</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There has been a fleet of beers produced over the years, some of them blazing a trail across the sky never to return others taking their place in the pantheon of St Austell greats. Dark beer? Then how about a smooth stout based on a 1913 recipe or that controversial style Black IPA with Proper Black. Lager? There have been both Czech and German lagers produced, as well as a Bock complete with billy goat image on the label, while beers from the wilder shores of brewing have included barrel-aging, souring and the addition of all manner of fruits and herbs. Early 2014 saw the emergence of Tamar Creek, which Ryman described as Flemish sour red ale that had been matured in oak barrels with Cornish cherries. The finished beer was polished and pleasing and pulsated with a tart, vinous character on the palate. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">These days St Austell’s beers take the drinker on an exhilarating voyage around the modern world of brewing, a journey that wouldn’t have been possible without Roger Ryman’s innovatory approach along with the stellar support he received from James Staughton and, of course, his team on the brewing floor. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">‘St Austell Brewery have been brewing beer for 160 years,’ he says, ‘and we plan to continue brewing beer for another 160.’ </span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>A blurry shot of Roger Ryman at Thornbridge in 2007 after<br />the wood-aged beer seminar I organised for the<br />British Guild of Beer Writers — that plastic bottle at the end of<br />the table contain’s Greene King’s 5X, which the then head<br />brewer John Bexon had sent up to taste.</i></b></td></tr>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i><b>St Austell’s Roger Ryman</b> has brought a very traditional family brewer into the 21st century (making the old nickname of St Awful totally superfluous), made a success of Tribute in the guest ale market, introduced beers such as Proper Job, a Cornish Weisse and Admiral’s Ale, firmed up old favourites such as HSD and Tinners, as well as used his small micro-brewery to explore styles of beer not usually seen in companies like SA — Czech dark lagers, wood-aged barley wines, a luscious coffee beer, a Cornish Heavy and his refreshing take on a Kolsch amongst others. He is also the driving force behind the annual Celtic Beer Festival, which celebrated its eighth anniversary at the weekend — an event that celebrates beer and brewing’s connections with the local community. If you haven’t been to visit it then I suggest you do so now. All this, while still producing popular beers such as Tribute. You could say he works in a space where the pragmatism of regional brewing meets the innovation of craft brewing. He is our Brewer of the Year. </i></span></span></div>
Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-39636862215705983452020-05-13T11:00:00.000+01:002020-05-13T11:49:38.727+01:00Wednesday Beer — St Austell Proper Job<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I have had a long relationship with Proper Job, first drinking it when it was released in 2004, developed by St Austell’s head brewer Roger Ryman after he’d spent a month’s sabbatical in Portland’s Bridport Brewery (sadly no more, though during my only visit to the taproom in 2015 left me thoroughly underwhelmed). His inspiration was Bridport IPA, which is probably why the beer in cask and bottle was 5.5%, though the former was soon reduced to 4.5% to be more acceptable to British sessioneers. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It’s a mainstay of St Austell’s pubs, of which there are several in Exeter (my son used to work in one during vacation), while the bottle-conditioned 5.5% version is very much a supermarket sweetheart. My initial tasting notes of the beer back in the 00s are of a Carmen Miranda-like fruitiness, pineapple, melon and guava with a striking bitter finish bolstered by a sweetness that perhaps is a characteristic of beers and palates in the southwest. I still think it’s an excellent beer, though have recently wondered with some bottles I recently bought from Aldi (how funny that going to the supermarket now has the same risk as driving a 550cc Kawasaki at 100mph on the M6 as I used to do until a near accident calmed me down) if the Carmen Miranda fruitiness had been muted somewhat. Now, it’s in 440ml cans, not bottle-conditioned, but still fresh and fruity and Carmen Miranda is still flying down to Rio, all manner of tropical fruit embedded in her hat. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And while I’m thinking about Proper Job, I would like to raise a glass to Big Job, which I always had a couple of bottles while visiting (or should that be embarrassing?) my son when he was working at the quayside pub in Exeter. And now, even more thoughts crowd in on me — I do miss St Austell’s Admiral’s Ale, which was launched in 2003 during a British Guild of Beer Writers trip to Cornwall that I organised. This was chestnut/russet in colour with lush toffee/caramel notes balanced by a juicy citrusiness. It was a beer of which I drank deeply over the years, but it doesn’t seem to have been around for a while (there was a Big Admiral at the 2016 Celtic Beer Festival but nothing at the one last November). </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is funny but understandable that during this time of Covid-19 a nostalgia seems to pervade through the soul of beer — I have read of beers that are missed (some before I began drinking), the moods of pubs in the 1970s and before, breweries that are no longer around and what their products would have been like and breweries such as Boxcar, Anspach and Hobday and Five Points doing up and doing over mild and bitter as if it never went away. All of which makes me ponder (with the thought of a glass of Proper Job later), maybe beer is more about nostalgia than we think and maybe in this time of Covid-19 we need that nostalgia. </span></span><br />
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Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-53279434186512319472020-05-08T11:00:00.000+01:002020-05-08T11:00:03.127+01:00Travel stories — the Vale of the White Horse<div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Thirty-one thirsty years ago in the middle of July I went to a wedding in the Vale of the White Horse. It was not a great time for me. I had split up with a girlfriend and the idea of celebrating a marriage was the last thing I really wanted to do. However, it was the marriage of my mate with whom I used to play in the same band, used to write songs with and with whom I once shared a musical vision that never took us anywhere (but on the other hand it did help me with writing oddly enough). We’re still friends, though we haven’t written a song together for a long time. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I was staying in Goring-on-Thames and the wedding was in a small village called Aston Tirrold, in the non-conformist church where my mate’s father was minister. I walked from Goring to Aston, over the Downs in a suit and well-polished shoes beneath a gorgeous July sun and thought of how 100 years before my ancestors in Wales would have walked over hills to weddings and funerals similarly dressed. I felt connected. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Despite the emotional turmoil I was then going through I felt a real sense of tranquility in those hills (and later that year I even thought of moving out that way), but apart from the wedding my main memory of the day was arriving at the village pub, which according to Wikipedia was the Chequers and is now the Sweet Olive gastropub. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Here I met my mate, his brother who was the best man, and a couple of others, who sadly I can’t remember. I don’t remember the beer either, I don’t remember what I drank, but it was beer — but what I do recall is the quietness of the front bar, the murmurs and the conversations, nervousness in the ascendancy perhaps, the comfort of the bar, and then as I write this I recall the previous night when I had arrived from London and we had all gone to a pub by the Thames and drunk Brakspear’s and I thought how wonderful it was to live in a place like this where pubs like this were on the doorstep and were so much better than the pubs I knew in London. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Then it was time to go to the church and then the meal and that evening there was a spare seat next to me and I was told that the married couple’s friend couldn’t make it as he had been invited to a party on a boat on the Thames. </span></div>
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Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-4979659548438127982020-05-06T11:00:00.000+01:002020-05-06T11:00:01.267+01:00Wednesday Beer — Augustiner Helles Lagerbier Hell<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is now nearly two years since I was last in Germany and nearly two years since I had a large glass of the pristine Augustiner Helles in front of me, a beer whose pale golden sheen suggests a sprightly nature, a fine-minded creature that glistens in the glass like a drop of golden sun; a fawn, perhaps, in a sun-dappled glade in a forest, scattered bursts and trills of birdsong the soundtrack. I love the lightly toasted grain on the nose, the spritzy hint of bitter lemon on the palate and the appetising dry finish that also harbours a rerun of the saintly and dainty lemon note. For me this is a quenching, refreshing and satisfying bittersweet beer best drunk in a one-litre Maß, which is how I last had it nearly two years ago at that wooden cabin-like bar that Augustiner Brewery has at the entrance to Berlin’s Schönefeld airport, a weird juxtaposition of Alpine/Bavarian rusticity standing in contrast to the slickness of Schönefeld’s bland airport chic. I always try and have a final beer here if I have the time and even though it is not Bavaria it feels just right to drink this wonderful beer as a farewell to a country I know I will want to keep going back to. Sure, if anything from Schönramer were on offer it would be an almighty tussle what to drink and I would probably drink beers from both of them and hope that I had an aisle seat on the plane (mind you, when in Berlin you go to Foersters Feine Biere to drink Eric Toft’s beers), but for me there is an iconic and symbolic nature to my final beer on German soil — this is a beer that I have drunk both in bars in Munich and Berlin, but also from the bottle, bought from a corner shop and swigged as I join other pedestrians in their street drinking or on a railway platform waiting for a train to Regensburg from Nuremberg in 2015. It is an everyday beer, an easy-going crooner of a beer, undemanding but always demanding of my attention such is the completeness of its aromatic and flavour profile. I know I can probably find bottles of it in the UK, even now, but I shall wait until I am next in Germany, whether Berlin, Munich, Bamberg or somewhere entirely new and then shall drink deeply of it, Maß glass in hand. </span></span></div>
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<br />Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-73121506057484262852020-05-04T11:00:00.000+01:002020-05-04T11:00:04.707+01:00What is it that I like and love about beer?<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I often ask myself in the manner of an absent-minded professor what is it that I like and love about beer? Given that the question is delivered with the vagueness and insouciance of this absent-minded professor I don’t bother with an answer. However, I’ve just asked myself the question again and the inner voice is more questioning this time, urgent and curious, interrogative and even insistent, the absent-minded professor replaced by someone better attuned to a job of asking questions and wanting answers, an Oxbridge examiner perhaps? </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So the first thing I have to do in order to answer this question is to pour myself a beer, which today is Jaipur, cans of which have been a major sustenance during the past few weeks. I can sense an anticipation in holding the can, an anticipation that is chatting like a canary about the beer to me before I have even pulled the ring-tab. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The sound of the ring-tab being pulled is next, a psst, the slightest resemble to the sound of calico being torn and if I put my nose close enough to the opened can I can identify the aromatics of ripe apricot skin, ripe mango and a suggestion of pineapple. It is not sweet though, slightly musky, pungent and adult. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So why does that appeal to me? Perhaps it’s a childhood memory of tinned fruit, whether a single variety such as mandarins or fruit cocktail, both of which I used to insist for pudding instead of the much-disliked rice pudding and anything involving semolina (the latter was common at my primary school, usually served with a skin on top, which used to make me feel sick and I once told my teacher that the doctor had said I could be excused semolina, as well as mashed potato, custard and beetroot). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As I pour the beer, listening to the light fizz as it bunches in the glass, its snow-white collar of foam pushing upwards, I can sense a slight salivation in my mouth, that anticipation once more, but also perhaps there is a slight expectancy of the beer’s influence on the mood, expectancy of a lift in the mood, which is what a 5.9% beer will probably do. After all, the alcohol in the beer is a drug and drugs enhance our moods. So would I have this anticipation if I was opening a can of Special Brew, which is even stronger? Here, I have to return perhaps about 30 years to the only occasion I drunk Special Brew — all I can remember is a sweet gloopiness (nothing to do with Gwyneth btw) and feeling a bit lost after a couple of large cans. I think it might have been an experiment at the time, which I didn’t repeat.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The expectation of the beer possibly has links to the places where I drink beer, the pubs and the bars, where the prospect of an evening with friends, sociability (remember that?), stories being told, jokes being exchanged (usually in the guise of stories rather than the here’s another one, you’ll like this kind of joke party), people and events remembered, sharpens the thirst. I can still recall the cold crisp edge of the first beer of the night at dimly remembered social gatherings from years ago when the thought of analysing a beer would have provoked a rather bemused look from myself — and as a downside, the bloated belly feeling at the end of the night, six or seven pints in, when your mate would bring back a couple more pints to finish before chucking out time and all I would want to do is go home and go to bed (and especially not go for a curry). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I still have that expectation whenever I have my first beer in a pub, especially if it’s a favourite or an imperial stout/porter/sahti from a brewery I am fond of. There’s that thrill of discovery as well as the comfort of welcoming back an old friend who you haven’t seen for a long time. So going back to the Jaipur I have poured what do I feel about it now that I am ready to drink it. There’s that gleaming golden familiarity of the beer in the glass, the crispness and lush fruitiness, the bitterness and that feeling of satisfaction that usually elicits an aah, as if your soul was sitting back in a comfortable armchair. There’s a completion about the beer from the nose to the finish, but I’m still trying to understand what it is that draws me to beer in a way that wine, cider and various spirits don’t. As well as the flavour and the mood enhancement (two or three cans later, the world looks a brighter place even though grey clouds slumber like resting sheep over Exeter), there is the cultural association, the pub, the brewery, the people who drink it, the origin story of the beer, the tale told of Michael Jackson easing out a reticent Martin Dickie and Stefano Cossi’s thoughts on the beer when they first brewed it and even the colour of the can, which somehow reminds me of the orange football strip that Cruyff played in.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Having thought this far, I don’t think I can really answer the question I posed at the start — yes, culture, taste and mood enhancement are important, but there is something more that underlines my association with beer. Something metaphysical perhaps, something mystical, something beyond my reasoning, but I am going to keep asking the question and see what answers I come up with. </span></span></div>
<br />Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-756960722166739142020-04-29T11:52:00.000+01:002020-04-29T14:03:08.936+01:00Wednesday beer — Westmalle Tripel<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WRbN9fZzjpM/XqlbU3uS1TI/AAAAAAAAEV0/kzQda1Z916MnX9scmjATvczyQsImmEqIACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/P1150127.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WRbN9fZzjpM/XqlbU3uS1TI/AAAAAAAAEV0/kzQda1Z916MnX9scmjATvczyQsImmEqIACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/P1150127.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The first Belgian beer I ever drunk was Stella Artois. I was 15, it was in a hotel in Ostend during my first holiday on the European mainland. I can’t remember much about it but I did like it (I recall a little off-licence right next to Harringay Station in the late 1980s that used to sell little bottles of imported Stella, which I loved. I didn’t know that it used to be dry-hopped then, which perhaps explained my brief devotion to it). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It was during this time when I really started to enjoy beers from Belgium. First of all there was Duvel, thanks to a friend who worked in Eindhoven (I know it’s not in Belgium but he introduced me to it, and one night we had eight bottles, which is not to be recommended if my hangover the next day was anything to go by). Other beers followed: Chimay, Dupont, Orval and Hoegaarden, the latter being hard to avoid in early 90s London. Since then I have been over many times, visited breweries, interviewed brewers and remain devoted to many of its beers (though my love for Belgian beer is not blind, there are some stinkers). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I was last over in November and am currently hankering after Belgium, especially as I recently bought a copy of <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01LZAA9OQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">The Belgian Beer Book</a></i>, by Erik Verdonck and Luc de Raedemaeker. It’s massive, full of lots of lovely photos as well as plenty of text on the beers, bars and drinking cultures of both Flanders and Wallonia. When it arrived last week, I just sat there, flicking through the pages, and my thirst for Belgian beer continued to evolve and has since taken me by the hand and led me to my Wednesday beer, Westmalle Tripel, bottles of which I have been getting delivered from Exeter’s fantastic bottle shop <a href="https://hops-and-crafts.myshopify.com/">Hops + Crafts</a>. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Trappist brewing for me is a collaboration between the sacred world of Cistercian monks and the profane one of commercial brewing, a bridge between the spiritual and the temporal. After all isn’t brewing just another form of prayer, doing the same thing, day after day, with maybe the odd change of words or recipe? And for me, Westmalle Tripel is one of the most generously flavoured and elegantly structured of this union of beers, a corn gold apparition that shimmers in its Grail-like glass beneath a well-blessed billowing head of snow-white foam. There is lemon, barley sugar and a siren call of sweet orange on the nose, while on the palate there is rich orange, a hint of peach, malt sweetness and a Mousse-like mouth feel, before it finishes with a sprightly hop tingle that makes me want to dive straight back into the glass. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I visited Westmalle five years ago. Actually, a correction: I visited the onsite cafe/restaurant but the closest I got to the brewery was on an autumnal walk around the site with a group of judges from the Brussels Beer Challenge. Apparently, some of us were jumping in the air with the aim of seeing over the wall and getting a glimpse of the brewing kit. Maybe this is how I got the photo below — I should have bought a stepladder. Next time I will, unless, of course, I’m allowed in the brewery.</span></span></div>
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Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-71842002736049994802020-04-27T11:00:00.000+01:002020-04-27T11:00:06.706+01:00When you go to the pub<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tCMHuWE8WG4/XqaQd-x6_hI/AAAAAAAAEVU/OHUX-jiWDOg43I2mUokk22VZTMbsPJoEgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_6439.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tCMHuWE8WG4/XqaQd-x6_hI/AAAAAAAAEVU/OHUX-jiWDOg43I2mUokk22VZTMbsPJoEgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/IMG_6439.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>I think they’re open</i></b></td></tr>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You go to the pub to meet people or get away from people, but when you cannot go to the pub you sit in the kitchen, or in the back garden or perhaps in the front room, where shelves and shelves of books might be your only company. But the ambience still works as you pour yourself a glass of something from Duration or Lost and Grounded or Thornbridge or whoever’s beer you have in front of you and the characters from the books emerge from their word-ridden hiding places and begin to chatter and charm and put a balm on the harm that being locked up in at home can inflict on your soul.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You go to the pub to try out beers from breweries whose ethos or output is appealing to you, whose judicious mix of hops and malt and well thought out regime of fermentation is a wonder and worth spending money on. But when you cannot go to the pub, you go online and find the beers that you like and love and spend some money and hopefully bring a smile to a brewer’s face. And as you sit there with a book and the characters spring out of the pages with the agility of acrobats you say to yourself softly, that this isn’t bad, but you still miss the pub.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You go to the pub as a home from home, somewhere soothing and comfortable and whether you’re on your own or with a band of like-minded souls, you are home. But when you cannot go to the pub and you’re stuck at home, you try your best to give your home a comfort zone similar to the pub, whether it’s getting stuck in on Zoom or crunching out the words on your laptop with those who want to talk or shout or rave or just pretend to clink glasses with the object of sociability in mind. Or maybe you just listen to the stories and tales and histories that emerge from the books and characters you are spending your time with.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But when you eventually return to the pub it’ll be good not to forget what it was like when you couldn’t go to the pub and maybe, just maybe, you’ll not take things for granted again and give thanks to those invisible folk who kept you company during these trying times. </span></span></div>
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Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-87733806840672066802020-04-24T11:00:00.000+01:002020-04-24T11:00:00.540+01:00Travel stories — Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fà<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QyigmEiXHE0/XqHNMy-JIZI/AAAAAAAAEUw/SJYUBA7Ka1ckSrjVFXN1j4ZUhupB2EBdwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/P1130107.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QyigmEiXHE0/XqHNMy-JIZI/AAAAAAAAEUw/SJYUBA7Ka1ckSrjVFXN1j4ZUhupB2EBdwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/P1130107.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><b><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;">Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fà on the night I </i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue";"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><i>visited</i></span></span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;"> </i></b></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So it’s like the early part of 2014, the first week of March to be exact, and on a sunny Saturday morning I’ve just boarded the 6.59am train from Rimini that goes all the way to Rome and gets in at half ten, and I’ve never been to Rome before but I’m only there for 36 hours, the first of three cities I’m going to visit by train over the next six days, on assignment for a travel article, so it’s Rome first, then Florence, and I’ve never forgotten the time back in 1990, when I drove from London to Tuscany via Paris with a then girlfriend and when we got to Tuscany I kept seeing signs for Firenze and wondering where it was, and I’m going to finish off in Venice where naturally I’m going to be thinking <i>Don’t Look Now</i> and funeral boats gliding along the canals, though back in Rome, I have a job to do and that’s about wandering through the famous places with my notebook and jotting down impressions, people’s behaviour, overheard conversations (English of course, my language skills diminish by the day) and which restaurants and bars can be recommended, but by the early evening, I have a full notebook and it’s time to relax and I go to a bar, which is an easy choice for me because I have wanted to go there for several years.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So six years ago, Italian craft beer was cool stuff, was becoming established, and Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fà in the Trastevere district was seen as one of the coolest bars in the country, which was where I went twice during my very short stay in Rome, first time on the Saturday evening where I felt it had the feel of compact log cabin, a couple of rooms, wooden floor, chalk board with names of beers, lots of Lambrata, whose beers I have always enjoyed since visiting the brewery in 2008, and there was a real sense of a pub about the place, which was a contrast to the chrome and minimalist craft joints that were springing up all over the UK (well ok London, Leeds, Manchester etc), people greeting each other and I sat at the bar watching Ireland play Scotland in the Six Nations, while the music of Nick Drake played in the background and a couple of Brits talked about sour beers close to me. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Next morning, Sunday, I went back, after visiting the Vatican Square where people were gathering for something or other, and it was the first day of the bar’s famous Franconian beer festival, which if I hadn’t have to get a train to Florence, would have been my home for a few hours, but I still managed to spend 90 minutes reconnecting with the previous night’s pub atmosphere, in the company of several beers including Schlenkerla’s dark chestnut coloured Fasten Bier, which had a quiet and reflective smokiness on the nose that somehow made me think of a wooden box that had once held smoked herrings ready to be shipped out of an old Hanseatic port, while the palate had an appetising smokiness and a malt stickiness, all of which were as well integrated as the parts in my Apple laptop, but were much more exciting, and as I drunk deeply of this beer I knew that if I didn’t leave soon I would miss my train and there was this slight tremor of rebellion about throwing everything up in the air and just changing my life, but that moment passed and a couple of hours later I was in a five-star hotel in Firenze/Florence/whatever ready for the next stage of my journey.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Have you ever found a pub or bar so sublime that you have considered throwing up in the air all your best laid plans and thought I’m staying? I have several times but that’s a different story. </span></span></div>
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<br />Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-28131857539714491912020-04-22T11:00:00.000+01:002020-04-22T11:00:01.587+01:00Wednesday Beer — Lost and Grounded/Burnt Mill Big Thaw 2, 6.8%<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wHaCJdiJ2qk/Xp8IROpujcI/AAAAAAAAEUY/n0G7Tg7GVBEmxBkVnbOEzzZd4ZEMkapRQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/PICT1436.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wHaCJdiJ2qk/Xp8IROpujcI/AAAAAAAAEUY/n0G7Tg7GVBEmxBkVnbOEzzZd4ZEMkapRQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/PICT1436.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Enough hops for you?</i></b></td></tr>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When I first started writing about beer back in 1996 my beer tasting notes basically followed what everyone else at the time was writing — the beer was malty, hoppy, fruity, very drinkable or various combinations of the theme. Then I started visiting breweries and began making connections, especially when it came to putting my nose in a big sack of hops. And given others were using the descriptor, I started to use the phrase hop-sack quite often, as in these words on Brakspear’s Live Organic sometime in the late 1990s: ‘Almost like putting your nose in a hop-sack.’ Sometime in the next decade, however, I stopped using it after a newer crop of beer writers suggested it maybe it was redundant given that very few people that we were writing for had smelt a sack of hops, so that was that.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I thought of the descriptor the other day when engaging with this exceptional collaboration of a West Coast-style IPA from Lost and Grounded and Burnt Mill. I felt the aromatics were resinous, oily, tropically fruity (mango, guava) and — here we go — had a raw hop note, a straight to the source character, as if there was no filter between the hops in their raw, pelletised state and their presence in the beer. I thought-hop sack with fear (because I have a visceral fear of using cliches), though the aroma from pellets is less intense than that of whole flower hops. But you would know what I meant if you had ever put your nose in a silver foil-like bag of hop pellets. Beyond the expression of the hops, this beer is a delight to drink and to study and to have and to hold, with its pizzazz, zest and general air of hop and malt showtime on the nose and the palate. It’s bold but light and has a good mid-palate malt bridge between the tropical fruit at the front and the suave piny bitterness in the finish. This is a beer that is bilingual in the way it talks the language of malt and hops with equal articulation. Hop-sack? Whatever. </span></span></div>
Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-8994061629767566682020-04-20T11:00:00.000+01:002020-04-20T11:00:01.824+01:00Not so much waxing lyrical about pubs<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RLcC0dnhsOY/XpyYtGDxAkI/AAAAAAAAEUE/68Z_TlAEumQrAMWKaOkmZSVgrtj6dy45gCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/P1010334.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RLcC0dnhsOY/XpyYtGDxAkI/AAAAAAAAEUE/68Z_TlAEumQrAMWKaOkmZSVgrtj6dy45gCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/P1010334.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>I just like this picture</i></b></td></tr>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I am prone to wax lyrical about pubs but here are few of the things I recall, either personally, or have been told about, that are not so lyrical. Fun at the time maybe — or maybe not — and I suspect there will be more stories like this. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The time when a mate of mine was in a North Wales pub and someone was glassed and then bled to death in front of him. He had nothing to do with the fight but was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The time in a rural pub in Somerset when my wife and I were eating a meal and someone on the same table lit up a gasper and basically turned what was a pleasing meal into something of a smoked ordeal.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The time when a gay friend of mine (as well as me and a then girlfriend) were thrown out of a pub because the landlord (yes it was a man) was mocking a copy of <i>Gay Times</i> that had been left at the bar and my friend said something along the lines of, ‘if your mind is as small as your cock, then you have problems’. As an aside, Sean kindled my interest my lifelong interest and passion in <i>Ulysses</i>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The evening I spent in the French House in Soho waiting for a girlfriend and talking with another music journalist who had a white chalky line of coke under his nose — I didn’t want to say anything and besides this was Soho in the late 80s. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The time a mate of mine broke such an evil gust of wind that most of the pub moved to the other end of the bar leaving us two there, obvious culprits. Oddly enough it was the same pub that I recall meeting with a couple of members of the band I was in then and one of them said, ‘have you heard, Ian Curtis has killed himself’. The Elm Tree in Cambridge if you must know.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The pub in Hampstead whose condom machine fell off the wall just after I put the money in and at the same time someone came into the loo. I suspect it was a metaphor for the relationship I was then in anyway. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The pub in Devon where the landlord (long moved on you’ll be glad to know) told the bar-person to pull the sole cask beer through the taps, ‘as it hadn’t been served for a couple of days’. I sat there with a pint of Sarson’s while our then Jack Russell tried to take on the pub dog. I never went in again even though my mother-in-law, who used to babysit for us then, lived across the road.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And of course the classic: the time my wife asked a landlord in a pub just outside Dolgellau (where I have many members of my family in the ground) if she could have a Bloody Mary, and he replied, ‘you can have anything the bloody well want’. I think he was English, as is my wife. </span></span></div>
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Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-18586050930024069152020-04-15T11:00:00.000+01:002020-04-15T15:03:12.927+01:00Wednesday beer — Saison Dupont (with a little nod to Orval)<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Dupont’s bottling line when I visited <br />the brewery in the autumn of 2009</i></b></td></tr>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Last weekend, I also had a bottle of Saison Dupont and the same crash bang wallop of word association trampled through the undergrowth of my mind. I just loved the austereness on the palate, the flintiness, the herbal-like spice, the restraint on sweetness, the champagne-like effervescence and the quick dry and spicy finish. This was Belgium (or Wallonia if you want be pedantic and someone undoubtedly will be) and even though I was in Exeter I knew one of the first places I will be visiting when I travel again will be Flanders and Wallonia. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b><i>I visited the brewery as well as Cazeau for an article on saison that was my first ever commissioned article from All About Beer — if you are so inclined you can read it <a href="http://allaboutbeer.com/article/saison-flavors-of-the-countryside/">here</a>. </i></b></span></span></div>
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Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-78200443115132070022020-04-13T14:04:00.001+01:002020-04-13T14:14:22.538+01:00Expectation <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I fancied a little romp of writing fun and so flicked through the ancient pages of the copy of <i>Roget’s Thesaurus</i> I always have next to my desk with the aim of picking a word and then writing something on it— and so as if by the kind of magic we once used to enjoy as part of our lives, <b>expectation</b> jumped out, a choice as easy and decisive as a lion immediately deciding that the biped in front of him was just right for supper. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So here is expectation — and what I thought of was a trip to The Bridge Inn in Topsham before Christmas, where a brewer friend and I would be subjecting several pints to our benevolent gaze. This is one of my favourite pubs, a place where I feel at home, a place where I’ve never had a bad glass of cask and a place where I feel comfortable whether I’m sitting with a book or chatting away about nothing in particular (usually with other people, I don’t think I’d feel happy holding a noisy conversation with myself). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So where does expectation fit in? Here goes: I was early, 10 minutes before the opening time of 6pm (the pub keeps old school hours). I stood in the darkened car park, looking out northwards, watching the light of an approaching plane to Exeter airport and then turned to the pub, which was still dark. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Then, happily, lights began to appear, a figure moved behind the window, and all of a sudden I felt this sudden expectation of opening time, of how much I looked forward to the first pint of the evening, and of the comfort and wood-fire warmth of the parlour where I would drink my pint. What beers would be on? Let there be a beer as strong as the hammer arm of a blacksmith, as bitter as Vermouth and as dark as the reed beds and river that lay just beyond the pub. My expectations went into overdrive and my mood (it was midwinter and I was very much in a cocooning mood) suddenly changed — I was looking forward to the evening.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I always feel an expectation and anticipation of the first pint in a pub, especially in one such as the Bridge Inn. There is familiarity but there is also a sense of wonder in what the evening will bring, beyond the beers that you will drink. Who will you talk with, what stories will you hear, what feeling of warmth and belonging with be engendered? And how many pints will be sufficient unto the day thereof? That’s the meaning of expectation. </span></span></div>
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Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-86412621333348165542020-04-10T11:00:00.000+01:002020-04-20T11:37:29.405+01:00Travel stories — the senses<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So there I was thinking about how we use all our senses in evaluating beer and thinking about the taste, the aromatics and the finish when I suddenly thought that perhaps to get the full sensory nature of beer I would have to deconstruct it, take it to bits and put those bits on an imaginary worktop and evaluate everything. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So what did I mean by this? Let me take <b>SIGHT</b> — for a start there are the various tones and hues of the beers we drink, the palette of colours with which each beer style represents itself, such as the TV show host gleam of golden ale, the brooding, bad-tempered poetics of an imperial stout, the hazy-sunset-end-of-a-day-with-the-weather-about-to-turn of a juicy DDH and all the shades and circumstances and turns of phrase and collaborations of colour in between. So that’s sight sorted, or is it? I then thought about what we see when we drink our beers in various bars and pubs, the various colour moods of these homes from homes, including the sombre browns that sit unbidden in the memory of an ancient aunt’s parlour from a visit during childhood, or the verdant greens and blue skies of a beer garden on a perfect day, which we always remember and wish to recreate (oh if only we could). The ground and the earth and the green and the gold of the fields of barley and hops; the shimmer and shiver of water before it takes hold of the mash and transfigures the boil and turns our dreams into a presence in the glass (and let us not forget the pale jaundiced yellow of the transformative yeast). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So then I thought about <b>SMELL</b> — starting with the aromatics of the raw materials at the base of beer production, the perfume of hop-picking, the dusty throat catch of the harvest in a field of barley, the silence of barley as it sits in a bag (some suggestion of dust), then the chiming fruitiness of crushed hop pellets, dust to dust, beer to beer, the echo of a vibrancy and floral energy from whole flower hops. Then I thought about the aromatics of the production process — the smell of Weetabix or any other grainy breakfast cereal during the mash, decoction or otherwise, and the warm infusion of cereal and spice during the boil. The aromatics of the beer, whatever the style, in the glass and the aromatics of the aftermath (split beer, the pub in the morning, the leftovers in the glass, the breath of the newly awoken); but on a more positive note let us finish with the aromatics of a freshly poured glass of beer, whatever the style — this is the hook that draws us into the glass. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So then I thought about <b>TASTE</b> — the sweetness of pale malt when chewed prior to its great dive into the mash, the remnants hiding away like partisans in the forest that has become your teeth, the no-you-don’t-put hops-in-your-mouth taboo learnt from the first brewery visit, the acrid nature and the coffee bean just ground world of black and chocolate malt and the ghostly nothingness of soft water (I tried Budvar’s once straight from the source and thought it so) verses the liver salts nature of hard water, and once brewed the spice and the floral petting of the hops, the fruitiness, whatever part of the world it originates from, the effect of fermentation, soft fruits, raspberry, apricot, strawberry perhaps. And, of course, we cannot forget when thinking about taste that we should forget the effect of the beer and its base metals on the palate — the fullness, the thinness, the intermediate space, the dryness, the bitterness like a suitor abandoned at the altar or an memory of a hurt once done. All of this we must think of. Oh, and all the various faults that we can find in a beer, from the popcorn Saturday-night-at-the-cinema butterscotch of diacetyl to the I’ve-got-a-little-bit-of-sick-in-my-mouth effect of a taste of butyric-infected beer.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Then there is <b>SOUND</b> — the machinery that drives the collection of barley and hops, the tractor all on its ownsome in a field of barley where sea frets visit when the temperature is much cooler than this afternoon in the late summer or the early autumn; the hiss and the clang and the drive belts of progress that mark out the brewing process, the silence, reminiscent of a church in between services, of fermentation, whether short or long; the clang and tinkle of the racking and bottling rooms, before the lorry or van takes the beer away to the pub or bar from where it is dispensed amid the sounds of voices, the bark of TVs and — then, reverently — the soft, pliant groan of appreciation. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And finally, let us consider <b>TOUCH</b> — the rub of hops between hands, whether it’s the crumpled green powder of pellets or the leafy crackle of whole flowers; then there is the bullet-hardness of barley grains, both between fingers and crunched (or attempted to be crunched) in the mouth, the inherent danger of the hot water during the boil, the stickiness of spilt beer, the dimpled surface of a handled glass, the upright smoothness of a sleeve the bulbous shoulder of a nonic a crime against aesthetics, the simplicity and delicacy of a stemmed glass, the smooth surface of a polished table top or brass railing, the shake of hands or the hug of welcome when friends meet each other. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Remember when we used to do that? We will again.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-84980047399036892792020-04-08T11:00:00.000+01:002020-04-08T11:00:02.824+01:00Wednesday beer — Cheshire Brewhouse Gibraltar Porter, 8.1%<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Here is a porter from Cheshire Brewhouse, based on a 1889 recipe from Mew Langton Brewery, which plied its trade in Newport on the Isle of Wight and was eventually acquired by Strong in 1965 and shuttered four years later. It’s a muscular, robust kind of porter with plenty of toffee, dark fruits (currants, raisins) and coffee on the nose, while it has more coffee, chocolate, a charred dark fruitiness (maybe dark plums in a crumble?), a slight roastiness and berry notes on the palate before finishing sweetish, dry and bitter. It is also soft and silky in its mouth feel —I see it as a reclining kind of beer, which is what you would be doing on your comfortable divan after several of these. </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As I drank and thought about this beer, another strand of thinking emerged, on porter, about how modern porter represents heritage, resurrection, revivalism, survival, sleekness and elegance, creaminess, soothing hands on the brow, sullenness, versatility, generosity, history, bats flitting through the twilight, the hug of remembrance and comfort and solitude and fortitude that darkness brings and then I came to the word changeling, the old idea of a newly born baby being replaced in its cot by a wily, rough and corrupted substitute.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I then moved onto thinking about how our modern tastes might not have liked porter in the 19th century and that its contemporary re-imagining is almost like a changeling in reverse, the wily, rough and corrupted porter variants of the Victorian age being replaced by a more pleasing and sweeter-smiling child. And then further along the thought process I ask myself the question — are all the traditional and historic beers that today’s breweries are playing with resurrected changelings?</span></span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Changeling or not, this delicious porter is available from <a href="http://www.cheshirebrewhouse.co.uk/">www.cheshirebrewhouse.co.uk</a></span></span></div>
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Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-28809246134877250362020-04-06T10:52:00.000+01:002020-04-06T10:52:13.529+01:00By way of Southend Pier<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Time is an essential ingredient of this pub, which first started receiving travellers sometime in the 16</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><sup>th</sup></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> century (though not before a local landowner was burnt at the stake for heresy at the back of the inn in 1553). As the village was on the main coaching road between a busy county town and a fording place over the river that goods, animals and people upstream, we can imagine the rumble of wheels, the call of the driver, the sound of the horses, steam rising off their flanks on an early morning, plus the promise of a warming drink and something nourishing to eat. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The licensee’s parents came to the pub in 1938, when it lacked electricity and running water. There was snug at the back of the bar, were women used to sit as was the fashion then, in order, it is told, to avoid the prying eyes of village men, especially one who was noted as a bit of a rake. ‘You had to watch him,’ recalls the licensee, ‘one story I recall about him was when he was old and I asked him where he went to for his honeymoon. He looked at me and said, “to bed, of course”.’ </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This has always been an agricultural area, though time once more has changed the surrounding countryside, but it is still a place of stories about the farmers and the men who worked their fields and the head cowman who would come in during calving. ‘He would ask for two bitters, one would be the expensive one and the other the cheaper. I think my mother once asked why he bought two bottles and he said one was for him and the other was for the cow, which was supposed to help with the calving. Of course the farmer paid for it.’ </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then there was the tale about the two locals who during the harvest would work nine miles away. ‘My dad noticed that they did this long walk every day and also noticed that when they set off one would walk ahead of the other. He asked why and the reply was that if they talked during the walk they would have nothing to talk about during the day!’</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The pub is an outstanding example of survival and prosperity. The world has changed and the village inn that survives on selling beer and the odd snack is a rare thing; now it has developed an enviable reputation for its food, which you could argue is reflected in it current interior layout. It remains traditional within: flagstones, timber paneling, ceiling beams and a sense of comfort and joy. One part of the main bar is devoted to the contemplation of time with a glass of beer or wine, a chat with friends or a leisurely read of a newspaper. The second has more of the feel of a dining space with tables arranged as neatly as a parade of guardsmen.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Time flows like a river, but it’s easy to sit in the pub’s main bar, a pint of beer (this is about the moment rather than tapping in) to hand and remember the men and women that have passed through its doors over the centuries. And if you listen carefully you might hear a tinkle of laughter as a long-dead regular tells a tale of the day he went to Tilbury by way of Southend Pier. </span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span>Adapted from</i> London Local Pubs<i>, published 2015</i></span></b></div>
Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-58146654114613771442020-04-03T11:00:00.000+01:002020-04-03T11:00:11.367+01:00Travel stories: rural pubs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We all have our memories of the way we walked, possibly ran, or even cycled, in the search for a rural pub (that someone somewhere told us about). For me, one memory is of a lane, to the left of which the ethereal curves of a field of uncut grass waving in the breeze, can be seen through a self-isolating cordon of bent and twisted trees, planted several generations ago when the people who bore the name that maybe I would one day also bear worked in fields like these. In the blue sky, the sun tick-tocked its way towards the south and ahead of me, roughly in a southeasterly direction, a hippo-like hump of a hill awaited, over which the lane, its track, like the badly hidden bald patch of a low comedian, invited me to follow.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sometimes the way to a rural pub is the actual pleasure as opposed to the pub that you have chosen finally to visit. It’s the walk through a bucolic landscape, often in a lonely place, a challenge to which you hope your boots will cope (oh how you wished you’d put some dubbin on them), that lays down the anticipation for what you hope will be the cool interior of a rural pub, where the beer is just one bitter, but what a hitter of a bitter it is. Or it might be brewed around the back, somewhere in the village, or it might just be an enticing couple of beers that will hold your attention for a couple of hours (what do you mean you want food, haven’t you brought sandwiches with you?). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">My favourite rural pubs have included the Salutation at Ham, a short walk from Berkeley, but whose views of the distant hills of the Forest of Dean and the knowledge that the River Severn continues on its slow stately progress in between sharpens the appetite for beer brewed onsite; then there was the Locks in Geldeston, down river from Beccles, an out-of-the-way pub that has grown around a lock keeper’s cottage from the 19th century and at which bargees on the River Waveney at the bottom of the garden used to stop for a pint during the time of Queen Victoria; or it could be the London Inn in the Exmoor village of Molland, to which I once walked 10 miles to and back, in July, without taking any water with me. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I have experienced other trails to rural pubs, forgotten over time, in the company of a walk or a climb through heather or bracken, over rocky tracks or along the coast, where the blue-grey surface of the sea seems like the back of a behemoth, which is mainly hidden from view. But I have forgotten them or they are recorded in a journal that now lies gathering dust in the attic of my soul.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Let’s end on a positive note though — I am already planning my next walk to a rural pub, when freedom of movement is not a stranger — Dartmoor or the South Devon coast perhaps? But until then my memories and imagination will free me for my roaming. Oh and where was that walk to a rural pub that I started off writing about? Like Orwell’s Moon Under Water, it is a fiction, a wish and a exercise in perfection. Or is it?</span></span></div>
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Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-78456552562266124742020-04-01T11:00:00.000+01:002020-04-01T11:00:04.629+01:00Wednesday beer — Bitburger X Sierra Nevada Triple Hop’d Lager, 5.8%<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Who would have thought it, boring old Bitburger whose beer is easy to drink but can cause a sigh of desperation if it is the only beer on the tap — who would have thought that the brewery would have combined with Sierra Nevada towards the end of 2019 (for the second time), ordered in locally grown Cascade, their unique hop blend Bitburger Siegelhopfen (also locally grown), alongside Chinook and Centennial to come up with this elegant lager, dressed up and pomaded as if ready for a night on the town, but cool enough to have a copy of Kafka in the side pocket. I suppose I’m being unfair to Bitburger by calling them boring, as its signature beer is crisp and refreshing, slightly bitter in the finish but — I suppose here’s the damning word — rather inoffensive, even if it’s one of the best selling draft beers in the German market. But what about this beer, I hear from an echo in the cave that is beer writing these days? Ok then, I detect guava and a suggestion of lavender on the nose, accompanied by a floral headiness, plus some spice in the background. Swig after swig reveals tropical fruit (that guava again) alongside a breadiness (or the aromas of baking you get when standing across the road from a bakery), plus herbal suggestions and a lingering bitter finish. This is a friendly and fulsome beer, which engages itself with the palate reminiscent of the joy of two old friends meeting for the first time in ages — I now have a plate and a knife and fork and on that plate are the words ‘boring old Bitburger’. Anyone got any condiments? </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b><i>Available from <a href="http://www.adnams.co.uk/beer/bitburger.htm">www.adnams.co.uk/beer/bitburger.htm</a></i></b></span></span></div>
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Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076725205410370436.post-1740153892963062102020-03-30T12:00:00.000+01:002020-03-30T12:01:40.273+01:00Stories<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The people come and go talking about Michelangelo, except they don’t when they go to the pub. Here we tell stories, weave a web of tall tales and low occasions, sometimes told in whispers about so-and-so and what they did and how they did it, but at other times our stories are bellowed out and butted up against the hard surface of the occasional lie and conspiracy. Did you know about what he was doing when he went into that house, or whether the money that changed hands was legitimate or as dirty as the mind of a person who longs to bring the dreams that torment into full view? Or in between pints, the man whose wife left him for a religious cult when they were on holiday in Tenerife repeats his loss with additional tears and when finished gears himself up to tell the couple over there, minding their own business, of how low and lamentable his wife’s behaviour was (a true story, believe it or not, that happened to me in a pub many years ago). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">So this is what I miss during this (hopefully brief) interregnum of pub life — the stories, the gossip, the laughter, the exaggerated tale and the overheard adventure that drifts in from the next table, fragments of words, which when patched together give a glimpse into a stranger’s life. The young man, I once heard in a London pub, who had just arrived in the city, and was sitting with an older man, a mate of his late dad, who was drunk but telling him that he had a room where he could stay; the self-proclaimed beer expert from somewhere in the North of England in a Munich pub whose three (or was it four?) friends sat reverently at the table as our hero explained the difference between cask-conditioned beer and the lager they were drinking; or the 20something couple who somehow engaged me in conversation at the bar with the man explaining that he was enjoying his first pint since coming out of jail and then seeing the expression on my face adding ‘it was nothing serious’. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But for the moment the pubs are closed and our stories are on furlough, waiting for that moment (which will come) when with the scrape of a chair on a stone floor and the whoosh of sun-flecked or Bible-black beer into an empty glass, we can start our lives again.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">I have a pile of books to read during the lock-in, I mean lock-down. Beer and pubs are represented by the1946 edition of Old Inns of Suffolk (finished yesterday), while Niki Signit’s The Flavour Thesaurus is the food entrant. Everything else is eclectic — history, topography, myth, semiotics, short stories, crime novels and ordinary novels. One of the latter is Once Upon A River by Diane Setterfield, which as soon as I started to read I knew what I wanted to write about. It begins at The Swan in Radcot, where according to the author, ‘was where you went for story-telling’.</span></b></i> </span></span></div>
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Adrian Tierney-Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421802854011395300noreply@blogger.com0