Cloudwater

Scraps of conversation swirl in the air, torn pieces of paper, rising, whirling, falling, settling on the ground — sour mango salt two weeks same pale ale cold chain time — phones are handled and deployed, words tapped out, memo to self, this is what I drank last night, the rumble of trains above, deep, brutal, an imagined blow to the solar plexus, the echo inside when I knuckle tap the corrugated metal that lines the walls, reminiscent of the kind of container architectural fantasists might call home and the rest of us a container. There’s a daub of colour on a banner at the back of the railway arch (for this is where I am), with more colour-filled banners tacked to the curved ceiling. The bar in the corner has wood for its counter, but below, its base looks as if it wouldn’t be out of place in a garden centre feature. The beer menu is printed on plain paper, with the beers listed beneath the titles of yeast, malt and hops. I have a 2/3rd glass of the Helles Tettnanger, which with its light grainy malt, clean lemony notes and dry and juicy finish reminds me of fresh Augustiner Helles. I then have the Super Noble, an amber lager brewed in collaboration with US brewery Notch. It’s rather delicious, cool and crunchy, full-bodied and boding well for my soul with every sip. Meanwhile, more drinkers talk and amble and gesticulate about me, a crowd of boots and trainers and the odd pair of brogues and hoodies and pea-jackets and a couple of dogs. Not bad for the first night of the Cloudwater Bermondsey tap.

• Early days I know, it needs time to warm up, it’s a bit cold perhaps, but it’s early days and I will be back. 

It’s in London

It’s in London and it’s by a canal, a canal whose surface is a skin of softly spoken repression and has a kinship with the flutter of air that strokes and pokes the skin of water and sometimes makes the house-boats bump against each other like beasts at a waterhole.

It’s in London and there’s the tut-tut, looking-through-the-curtains rhythm of machines across the canal, the movement of hi-visibility yellow, the governance of the land as this part of Hackney Wick keeps being developed. 

It’s in London and there’s a van, and a man with another man, clanging kegs and casks, the lion and the lamb, the van picking up beer that’s ready to stake its reputation right out there on the Margate pier that London’s beer arena has become. Crate Golden Ale, a glowing glass of goodness that revitalises a style I, day to day, find so unawesome but Crate Golden Ale turns things topsy-turvy and makes me glad to have found it.

It’s in London and there’s a gleaming glass of dark golden beer, held in front of me, a refreshing zip and spritz on the tongue, an amber-sweet cloud of comfort that reminds me of lying down in a warm meadow, with a sob of hop and a Beretta shot of bitterness in the finish. Truman’s Runner.

And outside in the street a once pub, once called the Lord Napier, stands on the corner, blitzed —a word abroad in the manor 70 odd years ago — with colour and words spread across its façade, jam on toast, now closed, boarded and shut, a sign of the cross to Crate, where the van with the man and the other man with the kegs and casks of beer, the lion and the lamb, pick up the beer.

And somewhere in London, somewhere where the postcode signifies a city, someone sets up a mash tun and boom it’s…

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?

Pure Evil

Thick and vicious in the glass the darkest shade of chestnut brown before it becomes as black as the actions that lead men to Hades; that tingly, tick-tock of  ripe orange infused with the merest hint of vanilla (or was I imagining it, being brought on by the colour of the beer?), the bracing bitterness, the spiciness of the hop, the come again come again call of the hop, which clarion-like bangs away on the soul of my palate for what seems an age; it’s 8% but it’s as light as the conscience of a serial killer, as drinkable as a drink should be; the fruit of the Sebright Arms Homebrew project, in which a local artist called Pure Evil has worked with the pub and Redchurch Brewery and the result is this raucous, Rasputin-like ursus of a beer. 

I look forward to tasting the next one, in which a local tattoo studio creates a milk stout.

Let’s go to the Exmouth Arms

Exmouth Market. I haven’t been to this part of London for years. I used to drive this way on my Kawasaki 550 back in the mid 1980s, briefly opening up the throttle on the stretch past Sadler’s Wells (my idea of hell: the ballet), dreaming of the weekend when I could hit the A10 and see how fast I could go. And I don’t think I ever went to the Exmouth Arms. I probably noticed it as you cannot but help note the green tiling that clambers up its jutting, pugnacious jaw of a street corner like ceramic ivy. Courage it used to sell, in some distant past, announces the branding; Courage, whose Directors I remember drinking in my third year and being told it was ‘fruity’ (incidentally I think Charlie Wells are doing a good job with it at the moment); Courage whose Best Bitter used to give me indigestion; Courage, of which a bottle of a vintage Russian Imperial Stout I once won in a CAMRA Somerset raffle in the late 1990s and then gave away (my love of dark beers is comparatively recent). And now, it’s not Courage the Arms sells but beer from a hipster’s choice of spindly, rickets-like selection of taps including Schlenkerla, Arbor, Camden, Stone etc alongside a quarter of cask beers. And about me the world of this fabulous pub spins. Big windows open onto the street, passing figures roving home from work, while three folk conjoin and stretch their time on a table in what seems to be a work meeting (Adults drinking cola? In a pub?); elsewhere a group of blokes hog their space at the bar, laughter erupting, sudden irregular bursts of gunfire in a city under siege, tales told, jokes spared; the sound of country and western incongruous in the background, my wife left me for a John Deere or some such fantasy of a mind designed like a gated community. Bare board rather than bare arms, bare bricks, open spaced, flush and spaced with the quality and quantity of the beer on sale, the Exmouth reminds and rejoins me with the joy of discovery, that there are still pubs in London to which I will come and go time after time again. 

London

You have to laugh
I first thought this said
Ale Cider Mead…

When I was young I had a credo about London: live there in my 20s and move out in my 30s, which is what I did. My time in London coincided with the rise of Wetherspoons and I used to spend a lot of time in the White Lion of Mortimer in Finsbury Park, a place where I discovered to my surprise that I enjoyed cask beer. As for London beer though, I think one of the few places I was aware of it was at the Fuller’s pub The Ship in Soho, otherwise that was it though I do recall driving my motorbike past Young’s at the end of the 1980s and being enthralled by the smell of brewing. Now of course, London is undergoing a massive brewing renaissance and you can read my take on it in today’s Daily Telegraph here. Oh and while I’m at it, Will Hawkes’ Craft Beer London app is also well worth getting, and you can find more info here.

Camden Town Brewery

A scrap of paper in my hand is all I have as a memento of my visit to the Camden Town Brewery — and the significance of this scrap of paper is? I haven’t returned from somewhere promising peace in our time or waved it at the crowds waiting for me in Croydon airport (as was). On the other hand it has a small quorum of words that I jotted down as I went round Camden Town Brewery today, where the British Guild of Beer Writers held their committee meeting (committee man Mark Dredge also works here hence the invitation). A brief collection of scribbles, blue Biro ink, seasick in their rhythm. RAILWAY ARCHES (though I don’t normally  write in capitals, this is just for effect) — the first two words stretch themselves languorously like cats getting ready to move to another side of the sofa. Railway arches. There are five railway arches in which the brewery is located — glass, protractor shaped, a mirror image of the brick arch, stretches over the front of the brewery, while above in the station (Kentish Town West and overground, the idea of which seemed to bamboozle at least one committee member) the sounds from the trains are gentler and more restrained than you would expect if the brewery was further along the line. Light is let in rather than expelled, all the better to appreciate the gathering of stainless steel equipment in the space beneath the arches. The lager — halfway house between Helles and Pilsner we are told — has the clarity of gin, though is obviously of a different colour. Ooh look there’s a bitter lemon note on the nose, while the palate sways sexily beneath its bittersweet character. I like the characteristically Munchen bitter finish. Gorgeous and this is a beer that emerges into the world, heavy lidded and sultry with sleep after 28 days in the tank. As the meeting progresses, Mark tops up our glasses. The Wheat Beer is a sensation — banana custard, softness, friendliness, fatness from 5% alcohol, no cloves, but it’s definitely bring your dirndl time. Next up the stout, nitrogen giving it an espresso coloured head of foam; mellow roastiness, toast in the afternoon perhaps, milky mocha coffee, while there’s a controlled hint of herbal inspired sourness that emboldens the taste buds to bow down before this grand design. Finally, try the Pale Ale, which is immeasurably miles better than I have had before — almost carrying an erotic charge that only a whiff of the hopsack can give. Oh and we tasted a wit straight from the tank, which had been infused with lemons baked with bergamot oil. I’m in Bruges I sang, much to the consternation of other committee members, but they know what I meant. And you will do when it gets released.

NB I love the fact that there is a brewery in Camden Town. It is a special place for me. I worked there through the 1990s, drank there through the 1980s, saw the Clash for the fourth and final time at the Electric Ballroom, interviewed Alex Cox in an office above the cinema that used to be opposite the tube, drank with Shane McGowan in the Goth pub at the back of Sainsbury’s and tried to prise some quotes from him (without much success) and most importantly of all had my first date with the woman who became my wife in Bar Gansa just off the High Street. 

Euston Tap

Where’s the Tap keened we three? Lost at the front of Euston and looking for a way across the bus line, as keenly defended as the goal in front of Petr Cech (until last Sunday — heh heh), then we found it. A blockhouse in front of which stretched a banner for Bernard provided the answer — and on our way we were. Spatially the Euston Tap is the Rake twice two, expanded into the air. Two floors of keenly fought over London space where craft beer (yes craft beer) can be consumed and enjoyed, whatever the consequences of the medievally inspired how-many-angels-can-you-get-on-pinheads debate over dispensation that has roused such passions recently. A specially made metal (copper?) underback, bristling with taps the like of which I last saw in the US, looms over the bar; resorting to cliché I believe it’s great theatre. Several businessmen and an indie fan and his girl walk in and scrutinise the taps — and then order: a Wild Swan for her and a Saranac Black Forest for him. The ceiling is high, while a massive spiral staircase takes the drinker away from the compact bar to the second floor; it’s a magnificent concept, in an unlikely but welcome position offering great beers — I had a Bernard unfiltered, which was then followed by a Mahrs’ Pilsner (bitter lemon without the sweetness of the soft drink), while the Matuska IPA called out its siren song, but I had to leave for a train. It was a rush to get there after a Budvar event at the Draft House at London Bridge (great place, great beer, need to get there again soon), but I was glad I made the effort. London has just gained another stellar place in which you can drink great beer.