On writing, especially beer writing

Just write, gather and then scatter the words, like throwing seeds about on a field during the act of ploughing, a virtuous Piers-like act that is labour, monotony and in common with the circular practice of prayer. Words thrown up into the air, confetti at a wedding, the snowfall of language, the joyous act of writing, the bonds that link all the acts of writing — the grammatical glue, the clauses and cases, the nouns, verbs, adverbs and that most precious of all things — takes a deep breath — the adjective, the describing word as we were taught in school. 

Let the words land, let them join together, let them form meaning, let the sentences you write be the strongest sentences you ever wrote. Be thoughtful and don’t be caught by sensation, the need to scream and shout and let it all out (there is a time and place for that after all). The discipline must overtake the din that an over-expressive voice can often cause and silence the doubts that writing can often rise, like the dead from the grave (for you never thought that writing might bring out something within your subconsciousness that you didn’t really want to experience again but this is the risk in writing, the more you tap away at the keys, the deeper you dredge into your thoughts, and then there is more of chance that you could discover something that haunts and taunts you as you go about your day to day business). The parable, the story that makes sense and gives you strength, is that of the writer who calmly and considerately sits down every day and makes a journey into the deepness of the mind. They do not write drunk, whatever some might say.

On beer writing: Describe something, a taste, an aroma, an experience, a finish at the back of the mouth or the start of the throat if you will, a person even. Is it fulsome, spindly, avuncular, like a merry monk of myth and legend; is it bawdy, haughty, a cavorting of flavour and favour, joyous and unbridled or brooding and melancholy like a general before a battle who knows it will be lost but continues to smile weakly at the soldiers with the conviction of a saint? Could it be perky and cheeky, and the kind of beer that laughs with a fullness of pleasure as it slips down the throat, or could it be the roaring engine of a Mustang bemused but still full of power as it somehow finds itself in a small street, its engine trembling with a sense of anticipation as it waits for the open road, the roar like the rush of waves during an autumn storm. Let us then think of the many ways we can write about beer and brace ourselves for the surge and the urge of expectation that a good beer often brings; for a writer who wants to really wave their wand and cast a spell must be prepared to smile and dance and chance everything to write the strongest sentences they must ever find within that rag-bag of thoughts and penances and clemency we call the mind.   

What is it that I like and love about beer?

Oh, hello old friend

I often ask myself in the manner of an absent-minded professor what is it that I like and love about beer? Given that the question is delivered with the vagueness and insouciance of this absent-minded professor I don’t bother with an answer. However, I’ve just asked myself the question again and the inner voice is more questioning this time, urgent and curious, interrogative and even insistent, the absent-minded professor replaced by someone better attuned to a job of asking questions and wanting answers, an Oxbridge examiner perhaps? 

So the first thing I have to do in order to answer this question is to pour myself a beer, which today is Jaipur, cans of which have been a major sustenance during the past few weeks. I can sense an anticipation in holding the can, an anticipation that is chatting like a canary about the beer to me before I have even pulled the ring-tab. 

The sound of the ring-tab being pulled is next, a psst, the slightest resemble to the sound of calico being torn and if I put my nose close enough to the opened can I can identify the aromatics of ripe apricot skin, ripe mango and a suggestion of pineapple. It is not sweet though, slightly musky, pungent and adult. 

So why does that appeal to me? Perhaps it’s a childhood memory of tinned fruit, whether a single variety such as mandarins or fruit cocktail, both of which I used to insist for pudding instead of the much-disliked rice pudding and anything involving semolina (the latter was common at my primary school, usually served with a skin on top, which used to make me feel sick and I once told my teacher that the doctor had said I could be excused semolina, as well as mashed potato, custard and beetroot). 

As I pour the beer, listening to the light fizz as it bunches in the glass, its snow-white collar of foam pushing upwards, I can sense a slight salivation in my mouth, that anticipation once more, but also perhaps there is a slight expectancy of the beer’s influence on the mood, expectancy of a lift in the mood, which is what a 5.9% beer will probably do. After all, the alcohol in the beer is a drug and drugs enhance our moods. So would I have this anticipation if I was opening a can of Special Brew, which is even stronger? Here, I have to return perhaps about 30 years to the only occasion I drunk Special Brew — all I can remember is a sweet gloopiness (nothing to do with Gwyneth btw) and feeling a bit lost after a couple of large cans. I think it might have been an experiment at the time, which I didn’t repeat.

The expectation of the beer possibly has links to the places where I drink beer, the pubs and the bars, where the prospect of an evening with friends, sociability (remember that?), stories being told, jokes being exchanged (usually in the guise of stories rather than the here’s another one, you’ll like this kind of joke party), people and events remembered, sharpens the thirst. I can still recall the cold crisp edge of the first beer of the night at dimly remembered social gatherings from years ago when the thought of analysing a beer would have provoked a rather bemused look from myself — and as a downside, the bloated belly feeling at the end of the night, six or seven pints in, when your mate would bring back a couple more pints to finish before chucking out time and all I would want to do is go home and go to bed (and especially not go for a curry). 

I still have that expectation whenever I have my first beer in a pub, especially if it’s a favourite or an imperial stout/porter/sahti from a brewery I am fond of. There’s that thrill of discovery as well as the comfort of welcoming back an old friend who you haven’t seen for a long time. So going back to the Jaipur I have poured what do I feel about it now that I am ready to drink it. There’s that gleaming golden familiarity of the beer in the glass, the crispness and lush fruitiness, the bitterness and that feeling of satisfaction that usually elicits an aah, as if your soul was sitting back in a comfortable armchair. There’s a completion about the beer from the nose to the finish, but I’m still trying to understand what it is that draws me to beer in a way that wine, cider and various spirits don’t. As well as the flavour and the mood enhancement (two or three cans later, the world looks a brighter place even though grey clouds slumber like resting sheep over Exeter), there is the cultural association, the pub, the brewery, the people who drink it, the origin story of the beer, the tale told of Michael Jackson easing out a reticent Martin Dickie and Stefano Cossi’s thoughts on the beer when they first brewed it and even the colour of the can, which somehow reminds me of the orange football strip that Cruyff played in.

Having thought this far, I don’t think I can really answer the question I posed at the start — yes, culture, taste and mood enhancement are important, but there is something more that underlines my association with beer. Something metaphysical perhaps, something mystical, something beyond my reasoning, but I am going to keep asking the question and see what answers I come up with.      

My Milk Sour Chocolate Tripe Tripel

Here’s a nice pic of some real hops being sorted

Are home-brewers the real craft brewers? Untrammelled by the need to sell their beers or place them in front of the drinking public, who will then decide whether to buy or not, home brewers can make what they like without fear or favour; their beers also remain close to the original maker, so there is no concern about parties further down the line of distribution making a hash of serving them. True, if they enter competitions, then the beers are judged by their peers, but there is no concern for trends, financial constraints, indifferent bar staff and the fickle nature of beer geekdom. Is this the nature of true craft, of authenticity even, this isolation, this solo path, that the home-brewer, like a wandering monk sworn to discard all earthly pleasures, takes? 

If it is so, then why does a home-brewer then decide to become a commercial brewer, to be sewn into the fabric of the market and drinkers’ trends that some could think are a stifling clamp on creativity (‘what do you mean, my Milk Sour Chocolate Tripe Tripel wasn’t popular? The dog and my mum liked it. Ok, here’s my Sunny Delight, I mean NE IPA. Sigh.’)? What would have happened if Martin Dickie had remained a home brewer after his tenure at Thornbridge or Evin O'Riordain had stayed in the world of cheese and solely shared his beers with his confederates in the London Amateur Brewers? I suppose someone else might have come along, but Martin and Evin entered the market and this someone, who never came along, remained the unknown home brewer who stayed at home, his or her name unsung and invisible on a par with the composers and poets that we never ever heard of because they also remained silent at home.  

Are those who keep journals and diaries, untouched by the whims of editors and the dictates of space, the real authentic writers? Those who make music in their bedrooms, bake their own bread, or even train online to be front room lawyers, the real practitioners of their craft? What is authentic? What is craft? What is it that motivates the home-brewer, the home-baker, the home-writer and the home-lawyer to make the transition from this meditative silence of home to the noise and disruption of the market?

Border country

And so James at the Beer Cellar bar in Exeter asked me this yesterday

And then I replied

border country

— Adrian Tierney-Jones (@ATJbeer) May 17, 2018

 

I wasn’t entirely serious, I was looking around the room, which has books piled up everywhere and hunting for a title that would be both esoteric and perhaps make some sense. And there was a Batsford book called Welsh Border Country. Obviously I dropped the Welsh, which would make even less sense. This morning, I thought about it a bit more especially after reading Boak & Bailey’s monthly newsletter, which featured their commentary in the aftermath of a social media scuffle following their blog post on the possibility of Beavertown being made ready for sale at some stage. 

Border country? I like border areas, where two lands shuffle up against each other and you get the best of both. I would never return to live in Wales, but the borders would have its attractions. With beer writing, it feels as if on one hand there is the old traditional campaigning side of beer writing on one side of the border, nurtured in the once scared halls of CAMRA and now mutated to writing about diversity, brewery sellouts, why this beer festival is a game changer etc; on the other side of the border there’s the fanciful notions of beer, the poetic side of things, the sensory writing, the people watching, the personal experiences within the context of beer. Both have their validity and maybe someone somewhere will inevitably argue that beer writing is more of a federal state with a variety of identities. That might be true but for the moment my thoughts are in the borders. 

Trust

Red barley was used to make this beer,
it was chewy, full-bodied and rather enticing

After a visit to Carlsberg a couple of weeks ago I’ve been thinking a lot about trust. When various people at the brewery talked about the need to recall their origins, you know Emil Hansen, the good works of JC Jacobsen and so on (which suggested that they had forgotten who they were — as the last time I was there was in 2011 for the launch of a sodding advert and a meal), I thought, can I trust what you say; when I drunk a beautiful single malt lager that had been produced on their experimental kit, lightly fruity, delicate despite being 5%, uncomplicated but damned in the way it went down my throat, which was then followed by a beer that had green unripe barley as part of the mix (estery, grassy, clean), I thought about trust, would these beers ever see the light of day beyond the room we were in; and then there were certain phrases from people that acknowledged the revolution that craft had brought about, with almost like an air of sackcloth and ashes about it, mea culpa and all that, and as I drank the Jacobsen Yakima IPA in the brewery’s brewpub, I also thought about trust. And then several days ago Anheuser-Busch sacked several hundred employees from the High End subsidiary and I wondered what they thought of trust. I hope I can trust Carlsberg, I met some good people, and I respect the role it played in the development of beer in the 19th century, and I enjoyed the 1883 Vienna-style Dunkel-style beer that they are rolling out in Denmark (but not here), but I keep thinking about trust. 

Ostentatiously opaque beer

Here’s a brief thought on the ostentatiously opaque beer saga, which seems to be excising so many fine minds at the moment. Last week, at a Mikkeller in Copenhagen I noted men and women enjoying glasses of ostentatiously opaque orange-coloured beers— they were sniffing like pros and sipping with ease and enjoyment. As I watched I wondered if these IPAs (of a kind) were the beer version of bucks fizz or sangria and then continued to ponder whether there was a time when wine purists went gaga over such a mix. This is a completely unscientific overview but from my observations (and at Warpigs as well) it did seem to me that a lot of women and men were interested in these kind of ostentatiously opaque beers and also that these drinkers were different from those who drink beer as a badge of honour. Perhaps it’s a case of these drinkers having a liking for ostentatiously opaque alcoholic fruit juice and breweries being businesses have to respond (recently I have heard from two brewers who were rather dismissive of well-received and popular beer styles they have produced — think fruit IPAs amongst other on-trend styles), so getting annoyed over ostentatiously opaque beers is a waste of time and effort perhaps. But back to the beers being drunk in Copenhagen, one of my favourite beers that night was a juicy and lustrous, muscular in its mouth feel, Dank & Juicy IPA at the marvellous Fermentoren (above). Ostentatiously opaque naturally. 

Resin. Pine. If a lion could speak.

Do you know what this guy is saying? Me neither.

Resin. Pine. I type in these words, my laptop resting on a pine table, which actually smells of nothing (apart from the beer I spilt on it a few minutes ago and the aroma like the day will soon pass away). These are words whose meaning has been gnawing at me for a while, not exactly the eagle pecking away at the liver of Prometheus but still gnawing away; these are words that are liberally thrown out like corn-seed for the birds when it comes to describing aromatics on a certain type of beer, usually an Imperial IPA (or Double if you so wish). Today I have drank deeply of a beer that I am certain hits the resin/pine bell with the same certainty as a prop forward wielding a hammer on a high striker in an out-of-town fairground. However, I’m puzzled. What does it actually mean? Heaven knows I’ve used it enough but I’m beginning to wonder if it is just my inner xerox reading about the resiny character of an Imperial IPA and then going on to faithfully repeat it? Am I reading the text or is it reading me? Or is it a weakness on my part? I have judged extensively in Britain and Europe and often been told by fellow judges that they have a genetic disposition for diacetyl or oxidisation; I do not doubt them. Do I lack a genetic disposition for resin or pine?

For initial guidance I turned to a file with tasting notes going back to the late 1990s. In 2000 I was at Adnams with the then head brewer Mike Powell-Evans. We tasted a test brew of Fisherman’s Ale (a replacement for Old Ale, which itself was replaced by, er, Old Ale) and the word resiny popped up. In July 2002, whilst researching my first book West Country Ales, I used the word resiny as part of the description of a beer called Speckled Parrot from the Hayle-based brewery Wheal Ale (it was based in a bird park, hence its name). Also in the same year I used it in a description of Fuller’s Vintage when I tasted several one Monday morning with John Keeling.

Then there was this from my Big Book of Beer in 2005 (the italics are my contemporary emphasis): ‘Hoppy aromas are fruity, resiny, aromatic, citric, peppery, herbal, spicy, lemony and floral. It’s possible to pick out Seville orange marmalade (sometimes even lime), tropical fruits such as lychees and passion fruit, resin (think varnish).’ That is what I believed at the time, even though the idea that varnish, a sticky, chemical-smelling creature you paste over the floor-boards, could have a warmth in the aromatic stakes, seems kind of odd. I know the connection when I smell it but there has to be a better word or is it somehow beyond our reasoning?

Then there’s pine. Sometimes it makes me think of a chemical cleaning fluid for the loo, an exaggeration of what we think as pine, almost in the same way a drag queen is supposed to exaggerate certain aspects of femininity — and then this leads me onto considering that a lot of descriptors we have for beer are linked to artificiality or synthetic recreations; fruity aromas and flavours are closer to the sweetshop or artificial flavourings than the real thing, for instance, when we think of raspberry do we think of the raspberry artificiality we might get in a cheesecake rather than the real thing picked from the garden in the summer, but then does it matter? (An afterthought: raspberry sours get closer than any old common or garden raspberry beer)

I would say it does. Despite writing my first article about beer 20 years ago (though there was little in the way of pine about then), it still bugs me, puzzles me, tears away at me like an itch; a twitch almost in the gap of the curtain of my knowledge. Maybe it’s like the fruity, malt and hoppy descriptors I started reining back on 12 years ago (after many late night discussions with other beer writers about the paucity of the language we used); but then on the other hand I do wonder if infinite breakdowns of the flavours a beer conjures up on a writer’s tongue (woodruff, bay leaf, white pepper, freshly laundered sheets, uncle Tom Cobleigh’s just polished shoes for instance) might be too off-putting to your casual type starting to dip their toe into the indie scene; it’s almost as if the beer is deconstructed into a sum of its parts that lacks romance (and I do think beer can have romance).

And so going out into the field and trying to understand resin and piny I headed off across the road to one of Exeter’s four Spoons and ordered a couple of cans of Sixpoint’s Resin. The nose was soapy, rich and herbal (perhaps bay leaf and sage), while I was reminded of a Bakewell tart-like spiciness (and almond creaminess) plus a sweetshop-like herbalness (cough mixture, liquorice, mint humbugs) and of course there was the obligatory grapefruit. Was I in a forest full of pine trees after a rain shower (in my limited experience whilst out shooting a few years ago I can recall a freshness, a one-note freshness unlike the broad symphonic cascade I get from Imperial IPAs deemed to be piny)? I don’t think so. Was I on my hands and knees daubing floorboards with varnish? Perhaps. I enjoyed the beer however.

Yet I am still left bemused by the resin/pine conundrum and think about Wittgenstein’s assertion that if a lion could speak we would not be able to understand him; that is how I feel about the lion in the glass when it comes to Imperial/Double IPA and its claim to be resiny and piny. I don’t think I can always understand what this lion is saying. 

Soaring

Soaring. That was the moment I knew I’d nailed the talk. Using the word soaring. The beer that I loved sent my spirit soaring, handed me a warm feeling, made me think of childhood, of a river bank on which as a child I had sat watching the glassy-eyed flow of the water, of a particular lunch that had explained French food to me during a break between working on a magazine in Paris, of a glinting glass of amber coloured beer primed to refresh the palate, of a moment associated with a happy time that made me feel warm and wrapped up in a forever feel. Soaring. And then I moved on, Swanned on, ‘the hops in this beer are’.  

The evaluation of beer

How do we look at beer, how do we evaluate it? What do we think of it, how do we think it helps us to pass our days, how do we order it, how do we think it should be ordered?

First of all, the most immediate aspect of a beer is the colour, it is what it looks like in the glass, it is the baby who sees its mother for the first time on opening its eyes after emerging from the warm viscosity of the womb (but does the baby see and sense the relationship with the mother or even father, is it the novelty rather than the colour, the look of things, which leads us back to colour); is it the former virgin who realises that what he or she has just accomplished and experienced is on a par with feeling like a god (or does she or he feel good about themselves, replenished with a confidence that they never felt before); it is every new experience that has ever existed — and as for the colour it could be straw yellow, burnished gold, bruised gold, dark gold, amber, torn amber, dark amber, chestnut brown, Nescafe brown or perhaps it’s akin to the darkest night that has ever been, the caves of Moria, through which the ghosts and the phantoms of the dwarves still roam and the need for a glass of beer to calm the nerves and steady the imagination is still concurrent.

The colour of a beer is the first thing the senses detect, the first thing that is seen, that is witnessed and from this all too often flows the judgment of what the beer is — light gold is weak, dark is strong, but a mild is weak while a Hellerbock is strong and then the world is turned upside down and monsters roam the earth and cups and saucers rattle like skeletons that have been told their time is up. The world tumbled upside down.

Then we have the aroma but let’s be honest the aroma taking on the mantle of the next stage of beer evaluation is a rather tenuous conclusion — some beers have a stronger aroma than others. In the right circumstances it can be a crucial crucifixion of the character of the beer, a nailing down of its reason for existence. An IPA made with an excess of American hops will leap out of the glass, like a whirl of smoke, while an imperial stout, having spent time locked up in a joyous prison of wood, will send out signals of smoke, coffee, Brett, chocolate, cherries, aged wood and whatever spirit kept itself in the barrel prior to the entry of the beer. On the other hand, a mild’s nuttiness will be shy and hidden away in the corner, the recalcitrant child, the quiet teenager, and the softly spoken uncle that you rarely see. The aroma is important, the aroma is potent, and the aroma is the next stage in the journey of the beer.

However, it is the taste and the effect of the beer on the palate that is the most visible, most vocal, most vociferous, most identifiable particle of a beer — we taste and then we take ourselves back to some imagined golden age of Arcadia, looking for signposts that point to something that we had forgotten, to a comfortable bed that we once awoke in and broke into tears because it was so homely, so forgiving, so ‘is it really time for me to go?’. The full-bodied nature of a stout, the roastiness, the darkness, or is it the creaminess, or maybe the bitterness and the fruitiness and the herbiness and the dryness and the baked bananas, and the softness and the saltiness, and the spiciness and the unctuousness of it all. The sourness and the wheatiness and the lightness and the sprightliness and the pungent and the hunger for the overpowering urge of a flavour to lay down the law and say that it is the law.

Or is it the carbonation, the long walk towards refreshment, the short stalk, the fountain that bursts the air, the bubbles that fart and fidget on the tongue, the brisk and brusque scrub of bubbles that cleans the tongue for another draught? Then could we be forgiving towards the finish, the dryness and the fruitiness and the sometimes total emptiness of a finish that will leave you in an abyss that suggests another sip of this beer won’t be that beneficial after all. Or the finish of a beer, bitter perhaps, and don’t be afraid of the bitterness in a beer, it is your friend, the bitterness lasting, lingering, clanging, clinging, singing its way.

This is then the beer that will be in your glass and then in your mouth and then tippling down your throat, its constituent parts all playing a role in a play that has been going on since the first time a human drank something he’d made by accident and called it ‘beer’.

Inarticulation

What was it that stirred within me? What was the feeling that was brought to the forefront of my mind, a memory, an indication, a window sill on which I felt a brighter, sunnier time, a less stressful (or was that the filter that the brain always installs?) time, a time when my world was young, a place where it didn’t matter what went into my glass as long as it refreshed and occasionally stimulated a night out with friends. The past.

I was in the large barn-like expanse of the Fat Cat Brewery Tap, early doors, 11.30am, Saturday morning, a space that was already occupied by a brace of drinkers, their newspapers flattened in front of them, like maps, a guide to the internal landscape of their views, interests, prejudices and what they favour when it comes to switching on the TV. From the outside it looked unpromising, a youth centre from the 1960s, a slice of red brick, a short slope of roof on one side, a longer one on the other, utilitarian, an upside-down V shape with one side longer than the other.

Once inside, though, I was brought face to face with a collection of inn signs and tin plate brewery signs — Lacon’s Yarmouth Stout and Dinner Ale; Kops Stout; The Fusilier. On a chalkboard above the bar, which ran along the side of the room and behind which was the brewery, there were beers to be served from cask (both hand pump and by gravity), keg and bottle. There was cider and for those who eat there were pork pies, but it wasn’t the food that I was interested in that morning.

I wandered about the room, neck craning, looking at the signs, recognising something within me that was young, not child-like, but something going back to the 1980s perhaps, when I lived in Cambridge, Paris and London (not at the same time). I cannot articulate this feeling, cannot articulate the reason why I felt the way I did, it was like when you dream and then wake up and know that you’re dreamt but whatever it was that you dreamt about is over the horizon of known vision. If you could only concentrate enough you might know what it was you dreamt about but it is tantalisingly out of range, out of sight, out of the mainframe of everyday life.

So on that Saturday lunchtime, I tried to understand, to work out, to articulate why it was the way I felt like this, and through the prism of a couple of glasses of Fat Cat Marmalade and Beavertown’s Bloody ’Ell, I continued to consider memory and beer and pubs and inn signs and how the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at the beginning and start all over again.

Diversions

…And there are times when I don’t know what words to clink together when it comes to beer (and its accompanying spheres of conflict, comfort and crumbling ideals); and there are times when I don’t know in what way words should follow each other. Should it be a pre-ordained path of understanding? Should there be understanding at all? After all, words come into the world unformed or perhaps uninformed about the path that they should follow — that understanding is the plan of the writer, or is that more the slow camera pan of the words of the writers the writer has read that form themselves into squares, at arms length, Frederick the Great’s giant guardsmen assembling, an understanding of human form. That beer in the glass there, the one that glows on the table, whose colour suggests the sun of the Mediterranean, what should I make of it, how should I approach it? How do you do? What’s your name? Shall we dance? Or should I just engulf myself in it, let it take me over and wait for the next one to pass?

Is it just a liquid in a clear glass, or is it something more amenable when it comes to understanding? The flavour, the aroma, the feel of the liquid on the tongue, the stroke on the throat, the taut line when a fish is caught, what does that mean when the beer is drank. Enjoyment for sure (unless of course it’s a beer whose only lure is a bright, fluorescent light, a clowning glory, a false story that all will be well if only the drinker picks this beer), the swell of the ocean, a mighty movement on the palate, a realisation that here is something that makes you remember why one day, long ago, you chose to add beer to that happy band of companions that shall always be at your side until the day the great ride is done (the deep well of literature, the soaring peaks of music, the deep wine-dark breadths of the sea, the earthly powers of mountains, the companionship of history, the simplicity of friendship and love, the faithful pleasure of the table, the immortality of sport, the instinctive bond with canis lupus familiaris).

And on that day beer, and all the notes that appear on its own chromatic scale coming together in as many different ways as there are days in a life (the people, the places where beer is drank and made, the parade of flavours and aromas, the nothingness with which one grapples with to understand its place in the world), became embedded in my life and yet there are times when I still don’t know what words to clink together when it comes to writing about beer. 

Yesterday never really dies

Does it matter if a style/variety/type of beer vanishes, does it matter if, say, Burton is no longer made or if it becomes known under another name? Do we ask if this beer in the glass is really a Burton or is it something else — and should we care? Can one feel a sense of sadness if a cherished style of beer is subverted and converted into something else and how would this metamorphosis take place?

A brown ale becomes a mild and then goes on to be a rootless subject in the world of beer, wandering and clambering around the steps of this world, an Ancient Ale Mariner, an eternal refugee from its original identity, unknowing, bellowing its anguish and throwing no shadow when the sun comes up. Gone before we knew it was going, expect it’s not really gone, it’s invisible and might as well be gone. 

But let’s have context: it’s not the tragedy of the fall of the African elephant or the end of a tribe whose language might have turned a key and opened a door onto the origins of early human discourse. Its passing is rarely noted by many. However, on the other hand the end of a style/variety/type of beer is the end of one small part of the way we map the lives we live, the way we order the food and drink and place it in the place from whence it came, the way we give our food and drink an identity, a relationship with a city, a town, a region, a country. London and Porter, Burton and IPA, pale lager beer and Pilsen; or maybe it’s a history with which a beer style can be associated, such as IPA and the Victorian age, Porter and Georgian London. So all of this does and should matter.

Sure, the death of a style/variety/type of beer is part of the forces that the market thrives on and a death in the family can come from no one wanting to drink a beer anymore, be seen with it, quit of it, but styles/varieties/types of beer (or whatever you want to call a variation in the beer brewed) bounce back, reanimate, reappear, and take a life out of the pages in the book that Porter wrote.

And with this in mind I take a break from an article I’m writing about the English-style IPA and what I see as its submersion in a sea of bright coloured, boldly hopped, briskly carbonated, Carmen Miranda-ed and occasionally unbalanced beers that call themselves IPA. I like subversion in beer (and submersion), but I also have a fondness for the English-style IPA and would hate to see it go the way of Burton, but as we see with Porter and IPA, yesterday never really dies. 

There’s a man in a pirate outfit

It must be a beer festival as there’s a man in a pirate outfit on the stage where bands normally play in the bar at Exeter City FC; the stage is small and there are about four tables and chairs arranged upon it. The pirate and his equally buccaneering companion are on the table that is directly opposite the small stairs that lead onto the stage — this means that if you want to get onto the stage then you cannot miss the pirate and his missus. It must also be a beer festival as at the other end of the stage there’s a lonely looking man on a small table on his own, with books stacked in front of him. He’s got a pen in his hand and looks so relieved when a man climbs up the small stairs, passes the pirate and crosses the stage and asks to buy a book and yes he’ll have a signature. I, Ghent-loving reader, was the writer at the other end of the stage to the pirate, the lonely man sitting at a table looming gently over a bobbing, hob-nobbing crowd of drinkers at the Exeter beer festival last Saturday. Yet I always enjoy this sort of thing. Who wouldn’t? You get to chat and drink at the same time.

Book signing is the slap on the back, the ego booster, the brief spot in the sun, the this-wouldn’t-happen-if-I-was-a-subeditor moment of journalism, which I have always enjoyed, but then I like the sound of my own voice (though I’m not always sure on the accent); so there I was on Saturday lunchtime with a glass of Coastal’s Erosion and then one of Penzance’s Scilly Stout, finding something fascinating about a piece of paper I had found in my pocket, looking at my pen with a new sense of admiration, and willing more people to come up on the stage (and let’s not forget they had to pass the pirate, who at one stage at my public exile on the stage poked a — I presume — plastic sword at a balloon above his head).

I have always enjoyed Exeter’s festival of winter beers: they’re strong and I like beers that have the ability to place themselves in the front row and grunt and groan as if pain was a word that involved more than mending windows; I see people I have known for years there; this beer festival also gives me a nostalgia for a time when I used to visit quite a few, not travel the country you understand like some folk did and presumably still do, but they would be ones I would go to if I was in London or there was one on a farm or in a village near where we lived before moving to the beyondness of Exmoor (which we hope to escape this year to more benign surroundings). 

These were times when I used to search out beers with names that resonated with me or they were from parts of England that I loved (usually East Anglia, where I lived for six years); I don’t think that I bothered much about beer styles, even though I was reading Michael Jackson and in love with Bavarian Weiss (I do remember ramping up on the Rauch once though); it was fun, it was beer, it was getting drunk with a friend or two or sitting in a corner with a good book, but it was never about education (alright a few tasting notes, but they were more like the autographs my mother collected from friends when she was a kid) and it was certainly never about ticking; it was about inebriation, sociability and a vague link with landscape. Those times are all gone and I don’t think I miss them, apart from a brief moment on the stage, looking at the glass of Coastal’s Erosion in my hand and thinking about big waves hitting some Spartan slice of Cornish coast. Time passes and the drunken man continues to look at the thistle.

Local

Local: another one of those debates that is running through beer with the assurance of an arrow in flight, possibly during the battle of Agincourt, let loose by an archer from the Welsh Marches, whose right arm is markedly stronger than the other, unless he’s left-handed of course.

Drink local, drink beer from the brewery or brewpub that has just opened down the road, make mine local; if you don’t drink local you could be letting down the side, hiding the light that the brewery down the road lets shine on the wall behind a bushel, or something similar — or on the other hand, you could just drink good, imbibe intelligently, guzzle with due diligence and just before you dive into the idea of local you should really think about the beer, is it any good?

  

Drinking local is ok if you live somewhere like Southwold, Bermondsey, Chiswick, Seattle, just outside Bakewell, Bamburg or across the road from Cantillon, but in other places? Local doesn’t necessarily mean good as I recall when a brewery briefly opened up on Exmoor over a decade ago. Even though its sole beer won beer of the festival down in Minehead (due to the nefarious influence of the neophiliac drinker who had mastered writing the art of jabbing a Biro on a clip of paper; ten years on not much changes — some elements of beer remain a neophiliac’s game), it was a beer that I didn’t get on with and I rarely drunk it. It’s long gone.

But this is not some digestive tract on local; instead it’s a memory I have of a local beer, which I recall from when we moved out of London in 1994 to a small Somerset village outside Bridgwater called Chedzoy (one of a trio of –zoy villages in the badlands of the Somerset Levels — our neighbour, an old farmer, who crossed the Styx a few years back, made his own cider with an ancient cider press, it was as acidic as a working day with Haigh with just one glass being enough to dissolve the following day into tears). The local pub was a bit American werewolf but in other pubs in other villages along the Polden Hills I fell heavily in love with the beers from a — trumpets and accolades please — local brewery, called Bridgwater Brewing Company. I haven’t got any tasting notes and I can’t remember too much about the beers’ characters, but I do recall that I loved one of their beers, which was called (you have to recall that this was a different time, for instance, the word awesome was more useful in describing an American air force strike in the first Gulf War) Copperknob; there was also Cannonball. Both of these beers, I described (in retrospect I apologise for the use of the word) as being ‘very tasty’ in my journal at the time — tasty is one of those prescribed words that should be sewn into a Hessian grenadier’s sack along with a ratebeer of rats and then thrown into a very deep cavern; it is a word on a par with ‘nice’ and ‘lovely’, words that are commonplace and irritatingly cosy and somehow coordinate themselves with slumped shoulders, rumpled cardigans and well-meaning grannies.

Back to the beers though, back to the local beers — I do remember being incredibly enchanted by Bridgwater’s beers (naturally you could not find them in the seven circles of hell that comprised the pubs of the eponymous town), enchanted enough to ask my wife-to-be if we could have a cask of the brewery’s beers at our wedding reception alongside the traditional glass of carbonated carfuffle. She wasn’t very impressed (it was 1994 after all) and we didn’t. I tried.

Bridgwater Brewing Company’s beers and I got on famously (when I could find them that is, which was usually beer festivals and the odd Polden pub) for the next two years until I went along to my first ever CAMRA meeting at the Ring o’Bells in Moorlinch and discovered that the brewery had closed: ‘over-reached themselves with the battle of Langport celebrations I was told by the sepulchral-looking landlord,’ I wrote in my journal. And that was that. Was it the end of local for me? Not consciously of course, but over the years I’ve spent writing about beer and spoken about this and that with all manner of people the idea of local beer has waxed and waned, a totem pole one minute, an irrelevance on a par with golf the next. Now? It’s about the beer in the glass, rather than the elasticity of the relationship with where it’s made, but I still remember Bridgwater Brewing Company’s beer with fondness.

The drift from the Pangaea of craft beer

Tables overturned in a crowded restaurant; temple columns shaken and toppled on a Mediterranean island; lipstick daubed on the Mona Lisa. Then a Wall Street Journal piece covers a Belgian spat between those who sweat and toil and build a brewery and those who come up with an idea and have it brewed elsewhere — the two main protagonists seem to be De La Senne and the Brussels Beer Project; I have interviewed both outfits and love what they do, especially De La Senne.

Then over in the USA, Andy Crouch, a beer writer I really respect and enjoy reading even if I don’t always agree with him, produces an excellent story on what you could say is the drift from the Pangaea of craft beer by one of the founding fathers Jim Koch. It’s the sort of in-depth beer journalism I wish I could read (or find an outlet for) over here. Both stories have stirred up passions, especially Crouch’s.

Others have written much more concisely and adroitly about the controversies here and here, but what I wanted to do was to think aloud about the nature of beer and how it’s always had this obsessive undertow, always had an ability to drag people along in its wake. Certain beers encourage a sense of ownership amongst a segment of drinkers, an obsession even, that brings the beer (and the brewery) in their own psychological Google + circle. It reminds me of the outrage that exists amongst Archers fans whenever a plotline hits the bumpers and Nigel whatshisname falls off the roof to his death on Christmas Day or whenever.

Is it about the breakdown of the boundary between one’s personal life and the imagined? I’m not suggesting that Dark Lord Day fans hear voices telling them to camp out three days before the beer’s release or that London beer drinkers dress up in animal masks and robes for the release of Camden’s IPL (you never know), but I do wonder if what for the lack of a better word we call craft beer is something that fills a gap in the life of the most devoted of followers (the rest of us just like the taste, the branding and the feeling of being part of a club, like teenagers wearing Abercrombie & Fitch) as does cask beer in a different kind of beer drinker’s life (or as Guinness used to do for others).

I’m not suggesting I’m any different. At various times in my life, punk rock, Joy Division, Inspector Morse, beer and football have probably been unhealthy in their presence. I presume it’s the psychological need to be part of a gang, to belong and of course this also expresses itself in the way people dress (along with that all important haircut); again we’ve all done it at one or two (or three) stages in our lives. I would also hazard a guess that beer has always had an element of tribalism in it, perhaps linking back to perceived regional differences; for many drinkers it seems to have engendered a sense of belonging (or disconnection even — my mate used to call anything from a brewery called Wilson’s ‘death brew’, because he thought it so dreadful; growing up I loathed mild and couldn’t understand why anyone under the age of 70 would drink it as it seemed to watery and thin). Maybe the ups and downs in the British brewing industry after the Second World War also sharpened that sense of ownership (while paradoxically loosening it). The beer that your father drank and your grandfather drank was there for you and there didn’t seem to be no reason why it wouldn’t be there for you too when you were their age — unless you were part of the generation that didn’t want to drink what the old feller drank and didn’t want to sit in the snug or stand around the piano singing rubbish songs.

This is all thinking out aloud, writing along a thread of notes that I made, an attempt to clarify what I feel about Yvan de Baets’ objections and Jim Koch’s sense of rejection and some of the reactions on social media (the latter story has provoked the most florid and bizarre reactions — blimey it’s only beer, but then on the other hand I had a conversation with a British brewer yesterday about sour beer, bugs and time which at last brought to life my slumbering post-New Year apathy towards beer). These are issues that are more complex than some of the comments and counter-arguments I have seen online make out, especially on Facebook. But then social media is the modern equivalent of a noisy drunken bar where opinions are enflamed and declaimed and someone somewhere puffs out a bullfrog of a chest and says ‘boo’. On the other hand, I’m glad that people care enough to think and drink and plink the piano keys of their outrage and approval, otherwise what is the point of that beer in the glass?

Eternal

Eternity captured in a glass. Bubbles, rising, long lasting, forever, a chain forging links between the beer and the drinker; eternal as long as the beer remains in the glass. In the city, in the day, in which I drank this beer, the streets around the Basilica were striped with cheerful anarchy, chaos with a soulful grin, ice cream and coffee, spliffs and sausages, sitting on steps, the act against authority, the nimble mind of revolution, skipping from stone to stone, crossing with ease the river of wine that this city is most often associated with. But back to the beer that is forever in the glass, drunk to the accompaniment of the scrape of a chair leg on the floor by the bar, the bow across the violin, the tuning up before a performance; a reverentially splashed glass of bock (though I could have had an IPA but I chose to drink different). And outside after the day had dropped its head and as I drank this eternal glass of beer the snow began to fall, the streets cheered and then cleared, but for this moment and forever more I had this glass of beer.

Beer Mormons will want their addresses

Reading comments about the New Yorker cover where someone with a hat on his head and a smirk on the face presents a beer to someone else is a bit depressing; it’s the New Yorker for a start, which is one of those magazines that I didn’t know was still going (and besides who has the time to read it?). I think it’s great. It’s beer and it doesn’t look fusty. It’s not got people getting legless and it represents beer as something more than wallop. However I don’t understand why it needs to be dissected and its inaccuracies pointed out with such a weird fervour. The magazine is not part of beer culture, and those people who see the cover won’t realise that there exists this tribe of people who weep over beer style inconsistencies and argue with themselves late into the night over beer; on seeing the cover they might start thinking about beer for themselves and although they might not go for a beer whose hop constituent compares to the amount of ordnance dropped on Dresden they might be encouraged to invest in something other than a beer that vaguely resembles something ants spray over each other for fun (however I just realised that beer Mormons will want their addresses so that they can knock on the door and ask them if what they are drinking is craft or whatever and can they have their dead relatives names for inclusion on the craft register?). 

So the next thing — does this mean that craft beer or whatever you want to call it is recognised? Possibly but there seems something needy in the necessity of so many people who blog about beer to make clear their displeasure about it — it’s as if they want to censure every independent media’s comment on the ‘craft beer community’. I presume the NY is independent and doesn’t seek to show its comments or cartoons on various events to every ‘community’ out there? I must admit, given the hysterical response to the Let there be an app out there or whatever it’s called (which I haven’t seen not because I’m against it but because I’m rather busy and it also has no bearing on the writing on beer that I do — I’m quite interested in people rather than ad campaigns) and the raft of complaints about the New Yorker cover, it feels like those in beer want to be treated special, that they should have the right to look at every ad campaign and mag cover that mentions beer. Hey we’re a community (everyone’s a community these days, even the cannibals down the road). It makes beer people, of whatever intensity they inspect beer with, whether it’s flighty and flirty or with the devotion of a monk looking for angels on a pinhead, look rather strange. For the record I thought the NY cover great, but it’ll be forgotten in a week or so, apart from those who communicate about beer. 

Because it tastes good and smells enticing

Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories is one of my favourite cook-books, full of great recipes, musings on food and dotted throughout the book with compact capsules about some of the author’s favourite chefs and cookery writers such as George Perry-Smith and Elizabeth David. However, as I browsed through it this morning in search of something for the weekend I came across this paragraph that opens the introduction; it occurs to me that if I substituted brewing for cooking, beer for food and drunk for eaten then I would have my manifesto for beer.

‘Good cooking, in the final analysis, depends on two things: common sense and good taste. It is also something that you naturally have to want to do well in the first place, as with any craft. It is a craft, after all, like anything that  is produced with the hands and senses to put together an attractive and complete picture. By “picture”, I do not mean “picturesque”: good food is to be eaten because it tastes good and smells enticing.’ 

Happy

I have seen these beers at the break of day. Commonplace, grey, staid and staying in the memory (for the wrongest reasons); a flash and a flush of bubbles on the tongue, a brisket of carbonic acid house on the roof of the mouth, the brief guff of sweet-corn on the nose (shake-a-leg there), crooked lagers croaking for customers in need of non-reflective refreshment. And it’s in this pub there and where these beers grimace at the bar-top, beery yobs leaning at the counter, come-and-drink-us clowns leering and cheering the nature of brinkmanship. And it’s to this pub I retire for a final beer before the night completely begins its progress towards the end. At the bar-top, having scanned the scowls of low-browed brands, a factory-handled Farange of brands that abandoned their homes in Burton, Glasgow, Northampton early one morning, I order a Guinness, a simple action, a stout that is purely one act, one note, irreversible in its decline, but now, at this time of night, in this part of town, it’s a beer that sounds chimes within the soul. Five minutes pass, the beer poured, the foam soared and then stopped and then topped and then passed past the sour-faced brands of crooked lager and I invest myself with a table and chair in the midst of this big chubby-faced club of a pub in which I feel myself both home and alone. A scattering of men, yes it’s mainly men, swapping tales of turmoil on scaffolds, down-he-went-broke-his-leg-like-it-was-an-egg, in a Yorkshire brogue, thick, yeasty, tarry-voiced, a contrast to the draught of Happy emerging like air from a juke-box that stands, hands on hips, bold as brass, beneath an altar-like scene of TV screen, upon which Gareth Bale, Alice-band intact, gurns and turns and shoots…but doesn’t score. Ah, the Guinness, creamy and in the theme of stout, watery coffee, a finish that fails to find a backer, a funder, a clouder, but in this ineluctable moment there’s something about this pub that brands me to it, that makes me want to join in and sing with Pharrell. Happy.

Beer with a view

A flight of pigeons, Venice echoed, Don’t Look Back, St Mark’s Square perhaps, wheel in the tight space above Christmas Steps, while the backbeats of some dance tune, I know not what, whirl from somewhere amongst the slow, jerky trail of Friday evening traffic down below the balcony on which I sit. A bruised gold glass of English — Bristolian — Pilsner stands sentinel-straight on my table as I watch both birds and cars make their different shapes in and above the space we call a street. I like Bristol’s Zero Degrees, I like the stainless steel vessels, the lagering tradition and the temptation of time; I like the quiescence of a brand that doesn’t really shout but still makes great beer (and wood-fired pizza too). As I sit and gulp my Pilsner, a glass of beer that brims to the rim with Saaz spice and niceness, its brisk and frisky character gambolling on the palate, and its bracing bitter finish putting me in mind of Zatec 12˚, I enjoy the view of an irregular roof-scape of turrets, chimneys and spires and another sip later, and a turn of the head, take in the contrast to the clean and angled shapes within Zero Degrees. Sometimes a beer with a view is all I need.