Style

I’ve written a couple of times about London breweries, here and here, over there and over the hills, but since the time of these two articles things have raced on, taken various bends, crossed continents, frosted up arguments and then warmed and warned them up again; things have accelerated and accentuated the positive, grown up and thrown up all manner of conundrums and now there are god knows how many existent in the capital; countless amounts are capping bottles and kegging kegs, but that’s not what I want to write about.

I’m in the Dean Swift, a few moments from where Barclay Perkins used to send out beers to perk up Londoners; the Institute of Brewing and Distilling is a corner away, my happiness being a final trawl through a variety of brewing publications from the late 1950s onwards: finally I have all the results of every brewing competition for what is now the InternationalBrewing Awards since its inception in 1888 (I’m writing a book). Four cask beers and — I don’t know — six or eight craft keg beers (it’s ridiculous that I feel the need to identify the dispense system of the beers I want to choose from) face me and my throat desires the first drink of the day, the drink that I want to percolate down through my palate and whose character I want to stay around and get me to remember it in 100 years. So I chose the pub’s own branded London Lager. I ask questions. Is London Pilsner a Czech style then? No it’s a London style. I try a tasting, there’s a billowing diacetyl note that I’ve always associated with Pilsner; there’s a bite of bitterness. It’s Czech I mutter to myself, very happy that there are breweries bold enough to take on this style (it’s Portobello btw). However, what it also makes me think. So what is a London style, how can a city influence a beer style?

The next day, I’m drinking Kernel’s London Sour with founder Evin; mindful of the previous day’s thoughts about London, I’m thinking about the beer: it’s sour but not too sour, not too assertive in its sourness, but still sour enough for someone not attuned to sour beer to make a face a contorted as jazz and ask what on earth are they drinking. It’s a refreshing beer, a beer Evin tells me has Berliner Weisse, the idea of Berliner Weisse as its idea, but I then think about London Pilsner and wonder if there is such a thing as a London style.

Could there be a London style and what would be the influence? I know about the water of London and the availability of the hops and the malt, but there’s got to be more to a style than this? What about the people, what do they eat and what do they like to drink with their food? What about the climate, the temperature, the summers and the winters, the happiness and the sadness, the carefree index or the lack of care, the influence of wine, the silence of temperance, the ghosts that haunt people’s palates, the food that they eat and dream about and then there‘s the feats of strength they like to boast about and toast. All these must surely contribute to a contemporary London style? Or any style?

London, Saturday morning

London, Saturday morning. The sourness of a smile when the owner of the smile realises that life has taken a wrong turning and the profitable journey that this person, this owner of the smile, this moaner of every mile taken, thought that they were embarking on, is not the most appropriate way to describe Kernel’s London Sour. Instead, I would be thinking of an expansive smile, a hug perhaps, a friendly nudge in the ribs, a salad of avocado with mozzarella, rocket, basil upon which balsamic vinegar has been spotted, a cradle of civilised behaviour, a juicy, well-tempered kind of beer, a spike of sourness, a palate-changing game, a rounded, grounded kind of beer that tarts, rasps, fruits, Berliner Weisse’s it up like nobody’s business. Then there’s Partisan’s X-Ale, which seems to suggest the sort of beer that hopheads tremble alone at night in their garrets about. ‘It’s a Victorian mild,’ I’m told by Partisan Andy, who I originally met at the Jolly Butchers in the company of Pete Brown. He supplied the British Guild of Beer Writers with his deep and gastronomically able Quad last year, a robust cluster of dark flavours that soar out of a glass, the mast of an arc of flavours that park themselves on the palate with a mallet-hard persistence. I grew up despising mild, the skinflint’s beer as we used to say around the table in the King’s Head, northern old men’s muck, towels and hankies beer; but that gulping sound is me swallowing words, galloping backwards in time and bringing back favour: X-Ale is the kind of beer (if this mild be a beer) that lounges with a long-limbed languor, a beer full of fortitude and luxuriousness that — for once — puts mild into another, more enjoyable, bracket of sensuality. Over at Brew by Numbers the voices are throwing shapes, the voices are knowing and fateful. A man with a flat cap onto which a brace of roe deer’s antlers are embedded stands with his friends; I think I get the message. In my glass goes the Coffee Porter, which gives me a message — drink me; it’s brittle and bright, brisk and breakfast-like; a beer with which I would normally start the day perhaps? And finally I go into another railway arch, where Anspach & Hobday call themselves home and a double IPA plinys it for me, a great blast, a deep, deep well of orange, the kind of deepness in which you can imagine a Game of Thrones bad guy is thrown, alongside an ecstatic bitterness, an all encompassing bitterness perhaps, that lifts its arms to the air and thanks whatever deity it presumes to worship on this day that was a Saturday in Bermondsey.

The pub used to be a gastro

The pub used to be a gastro I am told, which makes complete sense when I look around the décor: stripped down oak floorboards the colour of sand, Farrow and Ball style paint scheme on the wall (lamp room grey perhaps?), lots of light coming in through the large latticed collection of glass panes, an ironic mix of old school pub tables with metal clawed feet, seaside fish and chip restaurant red banquettes and a couple of stools and their accompanying tables that might have been made in the workshop at the local tech. The music at the moment is In The Midnight Hour, not Wilson Pickett but more of a Commitments’ version perhaps? Outside London passes by, buses, mopeds defecating their shrill sound of two-stroke hell, off-white van man, Boris bikes and Londoners going about their way, large, tall, fat, thin, small and in-between. The bar is L-shaped, and I hazard a guess that before it was a gastro it was a traditional boozer, the place where the racing might have been on all day, the beer dispensed with a minimum of fuss and food limited to whatever the licensee could forage in the local cash and carry. Outside the Grand Union canal stills itself, a long dark green rippled skin of water larging itself through this part of west London. The beer? I’ve just had a glass of Redemption Pale Ale, and spent what felt like an eon (but was probably only a couple of minutes) evalutating the ‘fruity’ nose. In the end I think of sensual ripe apricot skin with wisps of berry (raspberry) floating into the action as well. The malty sweetness is caramel influenced and I also pick out an edgy spike of spiciness reminiscent of rye; the finish is a dusty and grainy dryness that turns the mouth into an agreeable sort of Sahara. For 3.8%, this is a beer that really makes me want another. But there’s a lot of choice so (while watching a man spear his salad into his mouth with the sort of lust that I imagine only happened on some medieval killing field) I have a glass of Kernel’s Centennial Columbus IPA — I can smell it across the bar as it is poured. We are looking at a fragrance that I can only imagine as a cross between a hop field where all the hop devils are hard at work night and day and the early morning descent I once took, windows open, gentle breeze off the Med, after a night crossing the Maritime Alps, into the town of Grasse. Oh and I’m in the Union Tavern, Fuller’s tremendous take on a craft beer bar. Love it.

Bermondsey saison country

Bermondsey is hardly saison country, and by that I mean the province of Hainault in Wallonia:  a landscape of flat fields upon which cattle graze and stalks of ripening corn and sheaves of wheat wave in the gentle breeze. Farmhouses dot this sylvan landscape, places where farm-workers once gathered in the hay, working up a thirst, which a bottle or two of home-brewed saison would quench. I’m in Bermondsey, Druid’s Road. Railway arches, which upon one there’s a plaque to the victims of a direct hit from a Blitz bomb, the rumble and tumble of noise that marks the passage of a train, the waspish buzz of traffic from the Tower Bridge Road; patches of builders in high-vis vests banging and clanging as the city’s landscape continues on its never-ending cycle of change. Saison country? But within the brick-built cave of an arch I try one of the best saisons I have ever had. At Kernel brewery I am, a brief visit, my curiosity piqued by what drives one of the best breweries about and also in connection with a feature I’m writing. Inside and under the arch, a jumble of equipment: the brewing kit here, the open fermenters there, bottles, kegs, brewing schedules hanging on the wall, the whole paraphernalia of making beer. Brewery founder Evin O’Riordin is not about so Nate shows me around, a brief tour and then ‘would you like to try a couple of beers?’. Yes please. First up the Export Stout, kegged, a magnificent wraparound taste sensation of espresso, roast coffee beans, milk chocolate, juicy fruit and dry cereal graininess. Then would I like to try the saison?  Yes please. I love saison, I love the fact that it’s a moveable feast, a beer that changes with breweries; it has its sense of place but this, like its flavour and character, is also a movable feast. I have enjoyed saisons from Pennsylvania, New York State, Vermont, Flanders, the south coast and South Wales (as well as Wallonia) and now I hope I will enjoy one from south London. Kernel Saison is 7.2% and dark coral in colour, orange with gold highlights. Its nose is austere and flinty with tightly laced bitter lemon notes. The palate is dry and tart, sprinkled with orange, peach and tangerine notes with an undertone of pepperiness that discourages the fruitiness from toppling over into a blowsy old caricature. Amarillo is the hop at the start with Mount Hood at the finish. No sugar or spices either, though that’s not something that’s discounted for further expressions says Nate. It’s a beautiful beer and I can close my eyes and be in saison country for a moment before the rhythms of the city reel me back in. Bermondsey: saison country. 

A rubbish bottle opener fails to stop IPA heaven

I’m sorry Shepherd Neame. I like your beers but your bottle openers suck. Late night in a small hotel room in Bayswater, after an evening visiting several hostelries. Glyn from the  Rake had given me a bottle of Kernel’s IPA earlier and I fancied it. I had one of Sheps’ beer openers because I was on my way to Orval the next day and having learnt from Chuck Cook in Baltimore that the nearest bar was closed, it was suggested that some cheese and Orval be brought from the souvenir shop and consumed al fresco. So I packed a Spitfire bottle opener, an item I have had problems with before. So in my room I opened or tried to open the IPA and the neck of the bottle opener broke. I got a micro-second of tinny martial music and loads of IPA went over my legs. Thanks Sheps. Hold on a minute though, let’s have a taste of Kernal IPA. Hello, I thought, is this Chicago or Portland rather than Borough where the brewery is based? It’s a thumper of a hop driven IPA with grapefruit and pine notes, and a big thick appetising bitterness that yomps all over the palate, Bergen and all. Great beer guys. Not so great bottle-opener Sheps.