Wednesday beer — Cheshire Brewhouse Gibraltar Porter, 8.1%

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. 

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.

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?

Changeling or not, this delicious porter is available from www.cheshirebrewhouse.co.uk

What do I see in a glass of porter?

What do I see in a glass of porter? A barista-influenced cream-flow foam, 2-cm high, undulating in its surface, collapsing slowly, like the Roman Empire, a province at a time. What else do I see, a dark, dark, dark blackness, a dark night of the soul, a night in which the old moon is dead and the new is waiting to be birthed, a darkness of invisible hands and beasties imagined and conjoined, the lacing of the foam as it subsides coating the glass like a congenial virus, a puzzle of foam, a query, a cantankerous head of foam refusing to vanish. So what does it taste like? Burnt toast with a thin layer of butter and marmalade that suggests acridity, fruitiness and sweetness and then within nanoseconds there is a dryness that crackles and cackles like a coven of witches rehearsing for Macbeth; there’s a chewiness, an appeal for mastication, as well as a creaminess suggestive of softness and childhood. And what does it taste like? A cover disturbed, aromatics of mocha, chocolate, toast and fruit (cheap marmalade if caught from the other end of the breakfast table). Someone, and I cannot recall who, suggested that this beer could be closer to porter’s original outlook on life. I’m not sure, I will leave that to the beer historians and their soaked volumes of statistics from a time that went long ago. Whatever, it’s a damn good beer, unflinching in its approach to acridity, and dense in its character on the palate. Oh and I’ve been drinking Burning Sky’s Robust Porter.

Different directions

Lagering tanks in the hillside

Sometimes what breweries want and what beer writers do go off in different directions (and long may it continue): here are some photos of a press trip I took to Zywiec Brewery several years ago. The brewery wanted to show off its brand new plant and — as this was the time when Polish beer was becoming ubiquitous in pubs and the off-trade — its premium lager, an inoffensive drink that was ok in a tight spot. However, as soon as we were taken to the rundown Brackie brewery on the Czech-Polish border, where the wonderful Zywiec Porter was produced, that was all we could think about. There was a brewery cat, a magnificent pale lager, lager tanks burrowed into the side of the hillside, a three-month brewing, fermenting and conditioning cycle for the Porter and, of course, the rich, muscular, brawny, tenebrous nature of the beer itself. That was it — when we got back to the UK we had our features to write, all of which focused on the porter and its brewery, though the sparkling new Las Vegas of a lager plant did get its due mentions (we were a polite crowd). I don’t think any of us have been back and I do wish that the Porter was available over here, but on the other hand going over to Krakow and trying to track it down and drink it served on draught in a small side-street bar is more fun I would have thought.

And this is what a couple of us discovered in Krakow

The gleam of the new

The elliptical nature of beer

Elliptically the beer spreads itself out on my palate, a series of wide spaced dots of darkness-influenced flavours — a coal tar sweetness, a honey roast hazelnut hint of toffee and an iron hand of English hop (perhaps Fuggles) that acts like a whip to bring these meandering flavours to attention. I like it and it’s an English, West Country, bottle conditioned beer that has the gumption (or should that be audacity?) to call itself a porter. Oh who cares, it’s a beer whose soul has a depth I would willingly plunge into if it were a pool where a fast flowing river took its rest on the journey to the sea. Oh it’s Cheddar Ales Totty Pot. 

And who is this that walks amongst us, a dark framed figure whose shape changes as often as the sand in the Sahara? Black IPA, Cascadian Dark Ale, black bitter, or just a mere mortal of a beer? Who cares? What I have had in my glass this Christmas has been a magnificent beast of ringing singing hop diligence and dark tarry eroticism, a beer that once again comes out of the West Country, via West Point and the West Coast. Oh it is Moor’s Illusion, with which I have spent some time with and hope to explore more of. Black IPA — I kind of like it, its detractors remind me of the accounts I have read of some unnamed person who shouted ‘Judas’ at Bob Dylam when he started rocking up his folk (and did you know that the Stasi allowed their informers to choose any name apart from Judas — the power of names indeed). Elliptically yours…

A Proustian pint for me and my friend

Nostalgia sells beer — doesn’t it? Stella Artois harkened back to pre-World War I rural France (and last year summoned up the ghosts of Sixties Cannes as Jean-Paul Belmondo once again pulled a good-looking bird); various IPAs evoke the Victorian age; porter sometimes goes back further — while post-modernist pranksters BrewDog look to punk and an 1980s art school aesthetic (Zeitgiest was a word a lot of us toyed with back then, and who knows maybe we’ll have Bauhaus one day — hopefully not, once was enough for that sorry band). They all look back, even though the packaging can be contemporary (‘with a twist’ is a word flayed and featured over and over again in gastro-publand and sometimes in beer).
Can beer escape its past or is it irrevocably linked to yesteryear? And why? Does it matter if it tastes good and takes us to another place.
I asked several brewers and commentators the question. Here’s Meantime’s Alastair Hook, with more to follow — what do you think?
Alastair Hook
"Beer is as irrevocably linked to yesteryear as organized society is….Humans look back if they want to learn, and consumers like the validation of history. Contemporary twists, cutting edge production methods, or modern presentation are the human manifestations of the desire to change and improve, and that is what separates Man from Beast. At Meantime we have the epic shadow of the history of brewing in London checking our every move, but we recognize a consumer, who typical in any modern urban metropolis demands more. They want vision and creativity, and what life has taught us all is that you can have neither without a conscious or sub-conscious respect for the past. Anarchy is ugly in beer, whereas in more complex life forms such as Music, or Art, anarchy can find a home. Beer is after all the nation’s favorite drink and is at the end of the day not a comfortable home for radical revolutionaries. Its simplicity is its beauty and its strength. So I am afraid your nostalgia factor with a contemporary twist is a hard one to escape from!"