The Seven Moods of Craft Beer

The Seven Moods of Craft Beer is my latest book and if you want to be snarky yes it’s a list book, 350 beers from around the world, about which I have written and I suppose recommended the reader try before he or she stumbles off this mortal coil. You can look at it that way and if so please be my guest. 

On the other hand, what I think does make it different from what I have written before is that I have tried to approach the beers metaphysically, go beyond the whole ‘this uses Fuggles/Cascade/ME109, weighs in at 4% ABV, was developed by Cajun renegades in the East End of London in 1855, and is designed to be drank from a fluted wellington boot made of coloured glass’. There is nothing about the price of beer, what is best for its dispensation and despite the book’s title nothing about the meaning of craft beer.

The kernel of the book, the approach that I have taken, is to harbour an intention towards each beer that marks it with a mood applying to both beer and drinker. It’s about imagining the beer’s mood, giving it a personality, letting it speak to me, going off on a tangent about the beer, seeing what it really says to me, letting it expose its mood as it settles or seethes in the glass. It’s about beer having a character, a personality, which I have tried to reflect through the mirror of my words. Usually in about 100 words.

You want a beer to have a social mood, to be as chatty as a mynah bird, as sociable as your best mate who’s just got paid, then beers such as De Prael’s IPA or Douglas’ 942 will be ideal; these are garrulous, chatty, flighty beers, frisky in their playfulness, sincere in the way they sway in the glass, words tumbling out like acrobats in a French farce from the 1930s.

On the other hand, if you want a beer with a bucolic feel, a mood that reflects your inner rurality, that makes you think of a lonely farmhouse in the middle of Wallonia where saison has been made for countless generations (you might even find a bucolic beer that does that even when it has been brewed in San Diego to a soundtrack of car horns and the frenetic pace of city life), then there is the incomparable Saison Dupont, but also Modern Times’ Lomaland. 

This is about beer being flexible, about being a friend, about beer gelling with how the drinker feels, about beer surprising and leading the drinker to surmise how little they knew about the beer in the hand. 

And the other moods? There are poetic beers, adventurous beers, gastronomic beers, imaginative beers and contemplative beers, all of which will reveal themselves to you whenever you are in a mood for a beer. 

I’m signing copies this week at GBBF at 6pm on Wednesday, so if you are around come and hear me rattle on more about moods (and of course buy a book), or on Thursday as part of London Beer City I’m at the Mermaid in Clapton where I’ll be celebrating the moods of London craft beer in the company of a few yarns on my beer travels in the last few years. You can get tickets here or turn up on the night and get them from the pub. I promise to be in a good mood. 

What have Brewdog ever stood for

I saw some tweet, from a friend, which said ‘what did Brewdog ever stand for’, in light of some legal stuff (which you can read elsewhere), and I thought of the piece I included in a book that Roger Protz and I wrote for CAMRA in 2015, and which we both suggested/demanded should include BrewDog. I wrote it and Roger was happy with it and in light of all the stuff about punks not being punks (I was a punk and dropped it like a hot coal when everyone and their mother became one — it was not about mohicans but more about an attitude, I learnt more about situationism and structuralism through punk than anything else and never passed into the fancy dress stage, which owed more to 19th century dandyism than anything else), here it is before it was edited. Despite the dreadful Raspberry Smoothie IPA and knocking over the furniture in the PR showroom of self-righteousness I still think they do a good job (as do Adnams, Fullers, Hook Norton, Camden etc etc etc). 

BrewDog’s brewery is a cavernous, cathedral-like brewing hall with its steel ribs reaching out and holding up the sky; it’s a lively animated space on brewing day as rock music plays and brewers mull about, clambering up steel ladders to check brewing vessels and ducking beneath metal pipes through which beer flows. Outside sit the fermenting vessels, silvery, towering cylinders that receive more hops as the beer sleeps, through something called a hop cannon. This feels like a brewery committed to the future.

However, there’s one thing missing. BrewDog don’t make cask beer, they stopped making it in 2011. They did make some very good cask beers such as 5AM Saint, Paradox and, yes, even Punk IPA, but that was then this is now. Their beers are either in bottle or what is called, for want of a better word, craft keg. Go to any of the brewery’s bars in Bristol, Sheffield and across London and you won’t find a hand pull (but you will find friendly bar staff who are exceptionally knowledgeable about beer, but it won’t be cask). The brewery has also a fractious relationship with CAMRA, to say the least. 

Yet, BrewDog cannot be ignored. Their craft keg might not be cask but it’s neither the tinny-tasting, strained keg of the past, which had as much a relationship with flavour as processed cheese has with the Slow Food movement. BrewDog is also seen by many drinkers as one of the most significant and — yes — exciting developments in the world of beer for many years, and that would probably include a fair amount of CAMRA members.

Important? For a start, without them we probably wouldn’t have had the likes of Magic Rock (whose High Wire could be seen as a tribute to Punk IPA), The Kernel and Wild Beer. For better or worse they have been an inspiration. BrewDog has brought many young men and women to beer and, in a similar way the Sex Pistols broke out of the punk ghetto, they have also transcended the beer bubble. They have been heard of by people who rarely drink beer, a recognition factor many breweries would love. Your mum has probably heard of them.

Even though it’s not cask, BrewDog brew some good beers. A bottle of Punk IPA has a pungent and arousing nose of ripe peach and apricot skin; lychee, papaya and mango trips off the tongue, while there’s a gentle touch on the elbow of white pepper in the dry and grainy finish. Meanwhile Jack Hammer is a big beast of a strong IPA with its bitter finish clanging away like an alarm bell and the even stronger (9.2%) Hardcore IPA has an intense swagger of grapefruit, blue cheese and pine cones on the nose while in the mouth it is fulsome with a concentration of sweet grapefruit alongside a resiny hoppiness — this is a beer able to hold its head high against anything the likes of Stone can produce.

Yes they can be wearisome. There have been the controversies: by and by the world of beer is a relatively cordial one but some of BrewDog’s comments on the nature of British brewing not only upturned the apple cart but starting throwing the fruit about. This is something that James Watt acknowledged when I met him up the north of Scotland, where the brewery have their home, early on in 2014: ‘there are things we wouldn’t do now.’

That was then, this is now and who knows, there might be things they will do in the future: such as brewing cask, because if you cast your mind back several years they brewed some excellent cask beer.

Gustatory in their joy

On my desk as I type, a bottle of Cloudwater’s Aus Hopfen Weisse, just finished. It was juicy and tropically fruity, full of passion fruit and banana, plus a peppery spiciness and a grown up lemon-brushed bitterness in the finish; a fascinating beer that managed to hold my attention all the way down the glass. Later on, I will take myself down to The Bridge Inn, dog in tow, and order a pint of Punk IPA, whose tropical fruit lushness (lychees and papaya) and malt sweetness contrasts with an almost Bachian counter-pint to the buzz-saw bitterness on the finish. If I have time I might also have a pint of Jaipur, whose lusciousness and lubriciousness puts me in mind of TS Eliot’s lines at the start of the fifth part of Little Gidding, What we call the beginning is often the end/And to make an end is to make a beginning.

Three great beers, gustatory in their joy, whole-hearted in the way they splash and spring about on the palate, enablers of taste and tailored to fun, enjoyment, consideration and a beseechment to a life well led. Oh, and for those who care about such things, one is served from a bottle, another is keg, and the final one is cask. As if it really matters.

Also on my desk, newly arrived in the post, still smelling of the printers (that fresh, brand new aroma that must be partly paper and partly the glossy, wet umami of ink), a size somewhere between A5 and A4, with a cover that sports a grid of colour photos and images pertaining to beer, is something from CAMRA called Shaping the Future. As everything is a project these days, it’s called the Revitalisation Project, a review, an exercise, a download of thought on the way CAMRA is going in during a time zone of beers that demand the attention and the attrition a man walking into a pub (unless of course it was a Belgian pub) in the 1990s would have thought a purity of fantasy and fancy.

From my limited understanding it’s all about where CAMRA goes now. Does it embrace all beers or remain what it set out to do when it started — promote and defend cask-conditioned beer. Does saving pubs fit in and other things?

To be honest, I’ve been as enervated by the announcement of this review as much as the whole EU referendum circus — bored and not really bothered. So why write anything? I suppose as a member, contributor to the excellent Beer magazine and CAMRA Books author, I should try and articulate something about it all, but the motivation is not there. I suppose I should have a look at the website and fill in the survey in the same way that I will drag myself down to the polling booth on June 23 or whenever it is (it was hammered into me when growing up one should always vote, suffragettes etc) and vote, but as the three beers in the first paragraph demonstrate, I’ve long stopped worrying where my beer comes from, whether its makers designate it craft, cask, bottle-conditioned, chill-filtered, pasteurised (well maybe not in this instance), or if it is served in a gourd or from the polished skull of a captured Frankish knight. Mind you, I still harbour a dislike for handled glasses and nonics, which are the work of modern-day devils with the aesthetics of the man who designed the cardigan.

But to get back to the project that CAMRA is putting forward, good luck to them and good luck to those who have long geeked off in a different direction. I’m just going to have a beer and think and talk and write about what it tastes like, what it does to my life, how it accompanies Beethoven, Eliot, a game of rugby or football, a conversation with a friend or a farewell to a friend or just maybe a moment of transcendence; how it props up an economy, how it defines a region, a district, a country, a way in which one lives a life; how it conducts itself in the presence of food and how it looks when it’s spilt on the floor and lapped up by a dog. And maybe that’s what my future is shaped like.

Steam beer

Seems like that there’s a lot of steam being blown about regarding craft beer etc in the world of CAMRA at the moment. In the letters pages of the current issue of What’s Brewing a couple of correspondents seem to be standing up for craft keg: ‘while a good pint of cask ale is always going to be nicer than a keg beer, these newer beers are not, as Peter Jackson writes (WB, Jan), the spawn of Satan’; ‘CAMRA should be all-encompassing, supporting and promoting all good beer, whether it is real or craft’. Then on page 7 there’s a piece with the headline ‘Taste not ideology must rule’; this is written by Jim Scott who has been in CAMRA since 1988 and the line that jumped out at me was this one: ‘I think we should judge with our palates and not ideology or — heaven help us — be shackled to that obstructive corpse called tradition. We should welcome the newcomers as separate but, unlike their effervescent predecessors, equal, and unashamedly enjoy both’. 

However, CAMRA also have their AGM coming up in Norwich and the Bradford Branch has put forward a motion, part of which says: (this Conference) ‘recognises and asserts that the terms ‘craft ale’, ‘craft beer’, ‘craft keg’ and similar terms are meaningless and misleading. Conference therefore instructs that these (and similar) terms should not be used in any CAMRA communications and publications except where absolutely necessary, for example when quoting other sources and use of the term cannot be avoided. Where it is absolutely necessary to use any such term in CAMRA’s communications and publications, the qualifier (sic) should be used after the term and where appropriate the term should be put in inverted commas.’ 

Some interesting conflicts seem to be arising here and I expect the steam to keep billowing for some time yet, though while all this agonising is going on more and more great beer is being made and drinkers are not worrying what container it arrives in. 

GBG: pub-listing Proustian porn

And the latest Good Beer Guide lands on my desk. Hefty beast but not as heavy as 1001 Beers, but I bet the word count isn’t far off the 250,000 words I spent six months sifting through in 2009. I first bought the GBG in 1992 when I soon discovered the difference between recommending a pub in its pages to my then girlfriend (whom eventually became my wife) to one that was in the Good Pub Guide. One Sunday lunchtime we visited a GBG-recommended boozer in Dorset. I think she expected grub and gingham, but she got a room full of old guys leaning forward and peering at these two out-of-towners, one of who was burbling with excitement because Eldridge Pope’s rare porter (Blackdown Porter?) was on tap. After that, it was the Good Pub Guide if she was in the car and the GBG if I was out on my own or with friends (though many pubs overlap between the two). Roger Protz has been editor (on a second stint) since the turn of the last century (1999 that is) and he’s been doing the rounds of the media today — I suspect this is one of those times when beer is guaranteed to get a good hearing (BTW I got an press release email today that told me about the Pope’s love for Spitfire…flippin’ heck, what next a t-shirt with ‘I downed a Spitfire’?). Thoughts on it? The GBG is an institution, and like all institutions it doesn’t please everyone (like my wife) but it’s strong enough in its own skin to ride over those who might snipe at it; because of the voluntary nature of CAMRA and despite the best efforts of the members (I’ve done the surveys, I was out on Exmoor on a cold January night, went into a pub I thought worth recommending and the barman pulled me a half and said that he hadn’t pulled one through that tap for a couple of days…) it can’t always cover everywhere; there are occasions where I have gone into a GBG pub and thought like my wife-to-be did all those years ago (a sign of increasing age or just irritation with wall to wall tickers?). I also miss the articles at the front from various writers — I have an old GBG from the 1980s where Michael Jackson writes about American beers. The stuff on the Global Giants can be a bit Dave Spart too but hell this is CAMRA’s (and Roger’s) gig and it hits the solar plexus where it counts (ie promoting beer). It’s magnificent that it continues on its way and even as I use it for the now I also use it to delve back into the past  — Cambridge for instance has many of my old haunts; then there’s the King’s Head in Llandudno, the first place I ever called my local. So there you go: pub-listing Proustian porn for all. I recommend it for that alone (not sure if the wife does). 

Good Beer Guide 2011, price £15.99, though you get discounts if a member or go through Amazon.

Keg is no longer the devil that I was frightened by for years

Just the other day someone asked me what I thought about CAMRA and I said that I no opinion (10 years ago I would have ranted on for ages about defending cask beer, promoting world beers etc). After a brief moment of contemplative silence I then went on for 10 minutes, arguing that CAMRA, one day, will have to seize the chance to celebrate all British craft beer, not just cask; that they needed their Clause Four moment, that they needed to ‘modernise’. What it came down to was that one fine day they will have to acknowledge a well-crafted British beer that isn’t cask is just as valid as one that has mellowed and matured in a cask. Thoughts along this way have been swirling about in my head for years, the result of late night conversations held at various booze-ups and events (I remember being quite shocked when someone at a beer dinner said that the second part of CAMRA’s name, ie Real Ale, was a bit of a prison; this person then went onto to point out that CAMRA had changed its name once before so it could do it again).

I think another catalyst for me was Meantime’s beers, which you never seem to see at the Great British Beer Festival; then there were the lagers produced by the likes of Cotswold and Freedom, once again missing from the bash. Will it be the same with BrewDog (though their cask versions of 77 and Trashy Blonde have turned up here in the Bridge in Dulvie)? It would feel strange to go to one of the greatest beer festivals in the world and not see a BrewDog (maybe they wouldn’t want to be there anyway?). After all, there’s a load of great beers from Germany, the Czech Republic and the US on draft — do they all meet the CAMRA criteria? I am told that they do, but is this the way they are served back home? Anyway, this isn’t a gripe about CAMRA — they seem more of a trade body dealing with such esoteric subjects as minimum pricing (which I don’t have an opinion) and OFT (whoever they are), rather than beer but then they are a pressure and campaigning group, so can you blame them?

What I wanted to write about has been covered by some but it’s also been buzzing about in my head for a while, helped on its way by conversations with brewers. The subject is: keg isn’t the devil, it’s bad keg that’s the frightener. I’ve chatted with SIBA members who don’t do cask beer (or do very little of it) and they have wondered what membership has to do with them, given that the vast majority of members are cask ale people. More recently though I hear that SIBA are looking at a category in their competitions for keg beer, though they will be calling it brewery conditioned. I think it’s a great idea (think the name needs tinkering with though). Jeff Rosenmeier at Lovibond’s producing some cracking beers but they are not cask; Freedom had that much reported ding-dong with CAMRA when they had to withdraw their beer from the Burton festival; Meantime’s Helles is a splendid beer but it’s not cask or bottle conditioned. I interviewed BrewDog’s James Watt recently and he reckoned that an IPA was better served brewery conditioned (filtered but not pasteurized I believe), the first time I heard someone say this. This is not an anti-cask post, god knows I drink enough of it in my local and on my travels, but I also adore  Meantime IPA (and any of their beers) from the keg and would like BrewDog’s lagers from the keg; meanwhile I drink filtered beer at home (unless it’s a bottle-conditioned beer that I have grown to trust through long experience) — they are all good beers. 

I guess CAMRA will pooh-pooh the need for them to accept what is fast becoming a pluralist beer system (especially as cask is doing well but who knows how fragile this growth is), but I would like to think that sometime in the near future good cask (there’s crap cask lest us not forget) and good keg (for want of a better name) will co-exist in a beneficial spirit of mutual love at the bar and we will all gain something from this.

The Canary in CAMRA’s coal mine

In London Drinker I read that the CAMRA branch in Bexley (which is somewhere between the Thames and Brighton I think) is in danger of being wound up because they are not getting people coming through to serve on their committee. I wonder if any branches have actually gone that way? Will Bexley be the first branch to turn out the lights and leave the area to ravaging hordes of WKD-swigging Vandals?

As CAMRA gets more and more successful and bigger, it seems that getting the people on the ground is getting harder. Branches seem to be ageing from my limited knowledge here in the southwest and the same people serve year after year. CAMRA might talk of a change in the public’s attitude to its much mocked image as a sandals-and-sores society, but maybe that is not the perception at a local level. Or are people generally not willing to get involved in anything? Morris Dancing is supposedly on the wane (though not Rapper or clog dancing), while the WI probably has a problem in getting people in to sample their jams and calendars.

The point of this post: is Bexley the canary in CAMRA’s coal mine?

CAMRA newsletters

Here’s something to put the cat amongst the pigeons. CAMRA newsletters are quite useful sometimes. Yes, they feature articles that speak of ‘a good time was had by all’ and reports of visits to beer festivals are pretty good in the middle of the night when sleep won’t come. However, looking back through the ones I have saved over the past few years, they are pretty invaluable when it comes to cataloguing the changing nature of the way CAMRA people look at beer (they’re not bad for looking at local brewery history at the ground level). For a start I must declare an interest: I used to edit the Somerset one and amongst submissions on bus timetables (honest), there were reports on visits to the US, Australia, the Czech republic and lambic breweries. Looking back through them, this was the raw stuff of history, evidence of changing views towards beer. I had reports on Aussie micros, Singaporean micros and even a beer festival in the Galapagos or somewhere like that; on the other hand I remember some right stinkers: one chap said he had a report on the Boston beer scene and would I like to print it. Along came 2000 words of closely typed nonsense, which I managed to cut to 50 words; another time I printed two letters about the same pub in the beer desert that was (and presumably still is) Bridgwater. One lauded its recent beer festival, the other complained about its (unfair) pricing policy at the same festival. The pub made a fuss, kicked out its real ale pumps and closed some time ago. Yes of course the newsletters laud CAMRA, but they wouldn’t do otherwise — it would be like a copy of Radio Times telling everyone not to watch the TV (what a good idea); they are provincial, again so what. As someone who collects all sorts of beer memorabilia rubbish, I still find myself — guilt free — slipping one into my pocket when I find them in a pub somewhere out in the wilds and off they go on the second shelf right in the picture.