Brock and roll

Fashionable beer. Hip beer. Popular? Best selling? Innovatory. Favourite beer? What is a beer? I can answer the last question but trying to pin down a meaning for the rest of them is a Sisyphean task — when I get to the top and start metaphorically punching the air, the great big boulder of disbelief and cynicism starts tumbling helter-skelter down the slope and the questions keep being asked again. And during the last few days these questions have been tumble-drying around my brain for a couple of reasons. Last week I filed a piece on craft beer for the MA, which had involved a lot of questions and replies (people wanted to talk and I had over 7000 words of quotes), this had in its turn sparked off plenty of thoughts, which can be a bit cyclic, irritating even, a bluebottle buzzing around in the bedroom on a summer’s eve, but of one thing I am sure — all this talk about craft or not craft is good for beer.

Then there was a trip to Badger, where Pete Brown and I were shown around their new brewery and discussed beer with head brewer Toby Heasden, who was obviously proud of the new kit that started working last year but he was also very pleased with the 120-litre brew-kit that he was going to use to make some experimental runs when it was linked up. We also tasted an imperial porter that was slumbering like Smaug in the depths of a stainless steel conditioning tank. It was fruity, juicy, roasty and dry, with a finish that lingered and lasted in the mouth like an echo in a cave; there’s a lot of Galaxy hop in the boil and it’s going to be 7.5%. It’s part of a series that last year featured Wandering Woodwose — an old ale, dark chestnut in colour, with sticky banana and berries on the nose and a palate that was at once smooth, rigorous, spirituous and liquorice-like.

Head brewer Toby Heasman is also good company, a brewer who did a stint in the US, was then at the heart of Bass and now has his own brewery to play with. Like all family brewers he is passionate about brewing and can do it rather well as the imperial porter I tasted suggested. Sometimes, as I suggested in my last post about the men in the white coats, it’s easy to forget just how good some of these brewers are when they are given the freedom to let loose.

Badger is one of those breweries that are very successful but rarely feature on the radars of beer geeks. And why should they? They produce commercial beers, a fair amount of them being for the off-trade (there’s a 80-20 split between off and on, a figure that surprised me no end). English hops are mainly used, which was not a crime last time I looked, and I do enjoy their First Gold bitter — it’s a beer beer with the spring’s first flowering of magnolia on the nose; a restrained bitterness that remains appetising, mid-palate sweetness and a dry and I’ll-have-another-swig in the finish. Meanwhile their range of fruit-flavoured beers is not to everyone’s tastes and I will be honest they’re not my game either, but a brewery is also a business and if sales of the fruity-flavoured beers help to pay for imperial stouts then I’m happy.

So will Badger’s imperial porter be a fashionable beer? Hip? Popular? Best selling? Innovatory? Or just a favourite beer? My money’s on the latter.

An ad for Bombardier featuring Rik Mayall, that’s it really

Occasionally enjoy Bombardier now and again, if it’s in good nick, I think it was the first pint of ale that I drank when I went to college, though I can’t remember what I thought of it. Cider, lager, bitter, whatever, I wasn’t too choosy what I drank in those days, with the ferocity of the hangover the next morning being more of a yardstick than anything else (for that reason I avoided Abbot). So (along with many others I suspect) I get an email to tell me about a new ad for Bombardier featuring Rik Mayall doing a riff on his Blackadder Captain Flashheart character, except here he’s called Bombardier. It’s vulgar in a seaside postcard sort of way, Young Ones-ish with cobwebs on, Sharpe rather than Sharps, while the shots of Mayall nutting cannonballs brought a smile to my face, but it’s an advert (and you can see it here). I’m not interested in whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s good for beer’s image or not (plenty of others can mount the podium on that score), whether it’s effective in its message. It’s an ad. Others with an interest in such things can disconstruct, declaim and dissent about the meaning. But it’s an ad. Bombardier, like Greene King IPA and London Pride, is one of those beers that you will probably pass if there’s a Thornbridge, BrewDog or whatever is the beer of the week on at the bar, but it’s still a beer and I’ve enjoyed the odd pint, last time about a year ago, a freshly tapped glass in a country pub while out cycling. Delicious. Maybe it’s time for my yearly pint.

What’s an unfashionable brewery?

What’s an unfashionable brewery? Is it one whose staff don terrible clothes and refuse to look like rock stars? Or is it a brewery whose beers refuse to — as what is commonly known — stretch the boundary of what we know as beer (guilty of using the phrase several times but…shrugs shoulders)? What’s a fashionable brewery then? That’s an easier question to answer. BrewDog, Thornbridge, Kernel, Camden: four names that swim into my consciousness with the sleekness of a torpedo slamming into the steel plates of a rusty old destroyer (the latter a metaphor for unfashionable beers perhaps?). Hops, collaborations (it’s good to see that beer has reclaimed the word collaboration from its taint of Vichy and Quisling), a certain swagger, shout-outs from the fans, expectations, great epoch shattering beers (if beer can shatter an epoch which it palpably cannot but what the hell). What about the unfashionable breweries then? Are they doomed to linger alone and unloved by those who see themselves in the vanguard of beer fashion? To be picked up and preened by the nameless many?

These navel-gazing thoughts come to me after I’d drunk a bottle of The Leveller from Springhead, a defiantly unfashionable brewery in defiantly unfashionable Sutton-on-Trent. Visited them several years back, always enjoyed Roaring Meg, their strongish blond beer whose naming following the brewery’s tradition of using an English Civil War theme for their beers’ names (Roaring Meg was a cannon used during that period — it roared and like ships the guns were given women’s names, perhaps a subconscious male desire to haul pacifistic women onto the militarist bandwagon). At the time the Springhead brewery was an internal landscape of stainless steel, pumps and undeterminable metal instruments. A brick-built, single-storied home that had little romance about it — they had moved there in 1992 and expanded to four units. Now their expansion continues and they’ve recently moved to a converted old mill in a north Notts village and I suspect that the new plant will have a similarly abstract ambience about its interior. They might be unfashionable but they’re doing well.

And The Leveller (I don’t think I have to explain the origins of this name)? It’s a dark chestnut colour with crimson tints. The nose has a dusty, powdery chocolate — milk — character. On the first gulp I’m minded to enjoy its milky, coffee-mocha chocolate feathering with the sweetness kept under reins by a resiny, earthy, almost woody-like sternness; there are also some hints of blackcurrant. The carbonation is a bit brisk but it’s nevertheless a beer that I rather enjoyed. And all this from a brewery that slips below the radar — it’s not going to change the world but it’s rather delicious and a pretty satisfying partner to roast lamb (even use some in the gravy).