Ambiguity about bottle-conditioned beer

What are the best summer beers I tweet (still hate the damned word with its echoes of silly budgies and yellow canaries)? The Marilyn Monroe of the Mash Tun comes back with several suggestions. Thanks very much. Then a further thought, which ones are bottle conditioned? Why? So that I can avoid them. Apologies to all those hard-working brewers but I’m not the greatest fan of bottle-conditioned beers. With the sonority of Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty declaiming what he has seen as his programme runs out at the end of Blade Runner, I’ve witnessed things that are best left forgotten: a jet of yeasty foam, fiery in its anger, bursting out of its brown glass prison; the taste of TCP (or was it chlorine?) glistening and gliding like a virus across the mouth as supernovas of yeast hang in the glass; the still silent pool of nothingness as if a beer’s condition has vanished with the morning dew. Things are better, much better then they once were I will admit. Years ago I picked up an IPA from Safeway’s (that gives a time frame) and fell in love with the beer, fell so in love that I could still taste it next morning (and I’d only had one). Back in Safeway’s once more, there it was, I bought two, or was it three and hastened home to spread the good news on my palate. Still the beer sat on the tongue, not a sprite or sprightliness to hand, as dead as the proverbial dodo. I never bought the beer again (coda to the tale: I was talking to the brewer a year or so later and mentioned this problem, he said that Safeway’s were letting the beer out too soon. Too late for me. Safeway’s weren’t stocking it anymore and soon Safeway’s would be no longer). There are exceptions to the rule — old hands like O’Hanlon’s, Hop Back, Fuller’s, St Austell, and Young’s, while further down the food chain I have found heavenly fun with Kernel’s IPA Simcoe, Thornbridge’s St Petersburg and plenty of stronger beers, but if you show me a 4% bottle-conditioned beer I’m like a small child presented with liver and onions or some such other repulsive dish — suspicion and concern that I might have to drink it writ large on my face. I don’t seem to get so much of a problem with bottle-conditioned beers from other countries (though I have had the odd Italian stinker — Amarcord step forward and take a bow, though this was 2004 and maybe things have improved), so what is it that makes me so suspicious of ‘real ale in a bottle’? I’m not against it, I like the idea of the secondary fermentation in a bottle (hello Orval!), and when it works it works and I skip across the room with an unbearable lightness of being, I don’t like pasteurised or heavily carbonated beers either, but suspicion still reigns within when presented with a bottle-conditioned beer. 

In which the Sex Pistols make me think about the pros and cons of the Industrial Revolution as regards beer

Watching a reunited Sex Pistols concert in a Belgian hotel room (me that is not them), I am reminded about the need for consistency in beer; it’s an appalling concert, polished, cynical, well-played and attempting to be of its time 1977, but really belonging to now. They might as well have been an act on the X Factor. BrewDog say that their beer is for punks, but I wouldn’t have thought that they would want this bunch of pogoing, face-gurning nostalgists (both band and audience) drinking the stuff. Apply this sort of revivalism to beer and you have the mindset that uses visions of a golden age to sell its products — or even more depressing the dreary parocialism of a letter writer in the current What’s Brewing who lambasts CAMRA and Protzy for picking a ‘quite hoppy and bitter’ mild for its champion beer, ‘When I started drinking in England 50 years ago, the mild tasted mild and the bitter tasted bitter. Now we have an award-winning mild that tastes bitter. Can Camra still be taken seriously’. I mean, the words ‘too much time on his hands’ spring to mind.

I say all of this after five months of editing 1001 Beers You Must Try Before You Die (out next spring, be the first to disagree with the choice!), in whose pages there will be a goodly amount of fantastic IPAs and Porters, beers with a long history that, however, I would rather drink now than 150 years ago. I would far rather a beer where the brewer knew what to do with Brett than some beer in the 19th century when it varied from week to week and this variation wasn’t controlled — but then that is part of a larger conversation about beer, which occurred to me at a cider seminar in Spain in June.

Beer, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, is expected to be the same consistency brew after brew, while wine and cider have seasonal allowances programmed in. Of course, there are beers that follow that seasonal path but all of us expect our ales to taste the same year upon year — are we missing something here? It’s a wild dream to expect beer to go back to some sort of hit and miss character, but it might make things interesting (and the technology and foresight is there to make it all drinkable). I remember one landlord I know telling me that when he took over an Adnams pub in Walberswick that some of the locals (perhaps trying to put him in his place) used to say that they could tell when the Adnams Bitter had the new harvest of hops and barley as opposed to when they were drinking it a few months later. Beer has pretty much flattened out the variations, even though the idea of vintages is pretty hot stuff. But what if your pint of London Pride, Landlord or Tribute had different nuances from season to season? How on earth would it be sold to us beer drinkers who have been bred to expect consistency — consistency is only expected because the alternative is rubbish, but what about a mindset that expected an Adnams Bitter (I’m just choosing it because it’s a favourite) to be different in October and then in January and then in July — would this raise beer to the cachet of wine as much as the whole Vintage bottle thing? Imagine it: Tesco’s bring you BrewDog IPA October 09. I suppose I’m talking anarchy in the UK when it comes to brewing, but the sad fact is that we (including myself) want our pint of cask beer to taste the same every night otherwise we might have nightmares (the stuff of which for me after watching that concert would involve a geriatric John Lydon doing a duet with Mick Jagger).