In pastures green…or Golden Pints 2013

What’s best about best when it comes to beer and — if you think about it — pubs? Is it the moment, the surroundings and the time in which the moment occurred, the memory, the nostalgia, the feeling of being somewhere beyond the ken of day to day life, the spontaneous, out-of-the-blue event that can knock one sideways with its sense of chance; or is it the carefully considered, pondered over, politically correct, look-at-me, pencil chewing collection of choices spread out in front of one like a crowded table cloth?

I’ve made my living by working on books that celebrate the lure of the list, so another list should be easy, but given that the aim of this blog has always been to write outside the constricts of my working life, this listing is harder than a list I have to write that puts money in the bank; so there’s an inevitable laziness and fatness to its construction, an indiscipline even, but also a joyous sense of letting loose, running across a meadow like a dog after a rabbit. So let’s go. As the bloke at the bus stop said: trap one, trap two.

Best UK Cask Beer

As much as I like hops and the joy that they bring to my soul, I have also spent 2013 reminding myself that malt has a place in the construction of beer, which is why the most memorable cask beer that leaps to the forefront of my mind is Adnams Broadside, as sampled and glorified and glowed over at the Anchor in Walberswick. I would also like to mention: Exe Valley’s Winter Glow at their pop up bar in Exeter, Fuller’s Black Cab in the Mad Bishop & Bear and a pint of ESB in the Bear in Oxford, which was so entire in the way it embraced all points of my sensory compass that I remembered why I loved it. Oh yeah, Hook Norton’s Old Hooky continues to bring forth both smiles and similes. 

Best UK Keg Beer

Anything by Camden, but I really loved the collaboration they did with Doug Odell earlier in the year, am too lazy to look up the name, but it was very very gorgeous. How about a glass of Freedom Organic Dark? Yes please. Or maybe, Partizan’s muscular Quad, the finale to a good night out, as drank at the Jolly Butchers in Stoke Newington. And not forgetting Wild Beer’s gorgeous cucumber beer, which I had in a pop up bar in Bath, on a hot summer’s day.

Best UK Bottled or Canned Beer

I think I’ve only had one UK canned beer and that was from Camden, while on the bottle front I was bowled over by Ilkley’s ‘triple hopped IPA’ The Chief, which as I wrote at the time it lifted up its leather-trousered, boot-clad leg and got onto a Guzzi Cali and roared off along the highway. Buxton’s Axe Edge, Westerham’s Audit Ale and a couple of beers from Siren, whose names I didn’t note also impressed. Then Meantime’s Imperial Pils was an intriguing drop.

Best Overseas Draught Beer

Easy. I was in a bar in Malaga, a craft beer bar, which on the European mainland seem to becoming as ubiquitous as Irish bars were once (see my thoughts on them in the Czech chapter in Three Sheets to the Wind), and I ordered a glass of Dougall’s 942 Pale Ale, a fragrant (as in peach and orange ripe skins frotting each other until the cows come home) beauty of a beer with a weighty mouth feel and a dancing almost Sufi-like whirl of refreshment through the whole of the gulp. And it’s from northern Spain. I also ended up in Rimini twice this year on a couple of assignments and rather enjoyed Forst Sixtus in a sort of sports bar. And while I remember I rather enjoyed the creamy Schwarzbier at Hausbrauerei Eschenbrau in Berlin. Hold on a minute I’ve also just recalled Brooklyn’s Soriachi Ace and Lagunitas IPA, more of them please as well.

Best Overseas Bottled or Canned Beer

In can I enjoyed Ska’s Modus Hoperandi while in bottle I also continue in my reverence for Orval — I’m just about to start work on a bottled beers book (another list!!) so that might easily change.

Best Collaboration Brew

Is that between breweries or writers? With breweries I enjoyed Moor and Arbor’s Dark Alliance, while Wild Beer’s decision to invite Mark Tranter and Kelly Ryan over to produce Shnoodlepip also brought a smile to my face. On the writers/breweries side I enjoyed Melissa Cole’s Siberia with Ilkley and the various Brains continental beers; and in the spirit of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf I would like to mention the India Pale Bock I did with Arbor. Lovely beer, but then I’m not a brewer.

Best Overseas Brewery

I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Bellevaux in the Ardennes, where a coachload of beer judges were met by locals holding flaming torches and the village band; the beer, especially their Black, was good as well. Can’t recall if I have visited any other overseas breweries apart from Bellevaux and Val-Dieu this year. Oh and I enjoyed a couple of glasses in the brewpub U Tří růží in Prague earlier this year.

Best New Brewery Opening 2013

It’s got to be Burning Sky, whose Saison à la Provision had a leathery, lemony, bitter, orange, dry, bracing character while the large long dry finish reminded me of one of those long endless runs that I seem to vaguely remember on Ski Sunday. I drunk it with the ferocity of a wolf coming down on the fold.

Pub/Bar of the Year        

My local pubs the Bridge Inn and Woods never fail to satisfy me, good company and good beer — what else do you want in life; but in my travels I have also had my head turned by Hops & Glory in Islington, the Exmouth Arms just down the road and the Three Horseshoes in Batcombe; but my favourite at the moment is the Swan in Stratford St Mary, which is Mark Dorber’s second pub. It is brilliant — an old school village pub with a new wave range of beers, including Soriachi Ace, plus great food (pig cheek croquettes). And in the commodious garden at the back there are hop poles with First Gold and Bodicea growing. 

Beer Festival of the Year

Don’t seem to go to too many anymore, enjoyed the one at the Bridge Inn in May, especially as it is a five minutes walk for me; I also enjoyed the Birra del Anno event in Rimini.

Best Beer Book or Magazine

Beer continues to impress, while I love All about Beer and look forward to seeing what new (ish) editor John Holl has in store. Audacity of Hops, Craft Beer World and the regular Brewery History Society quarterly publications (if you are not a member then I would recommend joining them immediately) also made my life more bearable.

Best Beer Blog or Website

When he can be bothered to stir himself out of his cave, Pete Brown still smashes it (you could say the same for Zak Avery), while I also enjoy (and occasionally get infuriated by) Boak & Bailey, Alan McLeod, Martyn Cornell, Chris Hall and Pivni Filosof. However, if I am going to choose a best of, then it’s Northern Snippet — it’s more about pubs than beer, but for sheer enjoyment on the ups and downs of the licensed trade it’s unmissable. 

Beer App

Will Hawkes’ thingy. Are there any else?

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer

Simon was the best, but my favourite tweeter these days is Dai Llama, but that’s not beer.

Food and Beer Pairing of the Year

Bit of self PR here, but I was very proud of the BritishGuild of Beer Writers dinner, where myself, Mitch Adams and Tim Hampson arranged Camden US Hells with chilli jam brushed smoked salmon, Wild Beer Modus Operandi with pheasant and a venison sausage roll and Partizan’s Quad with stout ice cream and a salted caramel dessert. Try it at home and let me know how you get on.

Cor that seemed to take forever.

Reel ale (what else?)

You know that you are changing into a beer geek when during a scene in the Watchmen you wonder what beer the former Nite Hawk is drinking; you also worry about your sanity when you think that an excellent quiz question would be: name two occasions when James Bond drinks beer. Answer, he has Red Stripe in the book of Dr No and an unidentified Peruvian brand in a bar in Quantum of Solace (though I am sure someone else can trump me on that). 

So given that I have written a fair share of film reviews in my time I start thinking of pubs (or bars) in films. So here they are in no particular order of course.
1 The Prancing Pony in Lord of the Rings, when Frodo makes himself invisible.
2 The Fool & Bladder in Sir Henry of Rawlinson End — you wouldn’t want to go there. A man gets up and sings and another man gets up and chins him. Seth One-tooth is the guv’nor.
3 I think an evening at the Crow purrs Richard E Grant in Withnail & I — ‘I thought you had the look of a military man,’ slurs the landlord when the lads come in. Of course, there’s also the London pub where perfumed ponces are ten a penny.
4 An unnamed pub in The Battle of Britain — as the Home Guard lot do their drills outside, carrying on in that loveable British shambolic way that hides the fact that they are really trained killers, inside RAF pilot Christopher Plummer has a tete-a-tete with fellow RAF-ee Susannah York.
5 Then there’s the bierkeller in Where Eagles Dare — buxom Ingrid Pitt serves Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton with foaming steins of lager. Apparently it’s set in 1944, but brewing is supposed to have stopped in the Third Reich in 1943. Must have been a secret stash.
6 Villain Harold Shand and entourage are driving towards an East End pub with Mafia guests and the place explodes before them in The Long Good Friday.
7 Virginal policeman Edward Woodward walks into a keg-friendly hotel bar in the Wicker Man; later on in the evening Britt Ekland’s body double will do an hilarious naked dance.
8 Arthur Seaton falls down the stairs of his local after a skinful in Saturday Night, Sunday Morning; he’s not hungover enough to bed Rachel Roberts though.
9 Fun amongst the snob screens with Tony Hancock in The Punch and Judy Man
10 In Get Carter Michael Caine orders a beer in a busy bar when he gets to Newcastle; have a look at the second local staring at him; he’s got five fingers and a thumb.

Beware of geeks bearing gifts

I don’t do lists normally, but working on a recent project (now hit by the ubiquitous credit crunch) that involved lists of beers I started to do films and then thought books and then thought beer books. It didn’t take me long and is just a bit of fun, but here are my top five favourite beer books (not to be taken seriously — these are books that currently call out to the beer-sodden wraith that haunts my soul). They’re not in any particular order either.
The Book of Beer — Andrew Campbell: published in the 1950s and a thorough celebration of beer, including a wonderful section that suggests how the beerman (and let’s face it this is a book for blokes) can get through the day with beer as companion. ie a glass of mild perhaps with breakfast to aid with digestion…
Radical Brewing — Randy Mosher: published several years ago; I’m not a home-brewer but this is a riveting and rollicking journey through the happy soul of home-brewing along with much information about beer, including many lost beers; exceptional useful for spotting faults; I took it down to the pub the other day to show the barman why the beer he was selling was phenolic.
New World Guide to Beer — Michael Jackson; my first ever beer book, bought as a Christmas present by a then girlfriend’s mother; this is the late 1980s edition and even now it still manages to enthuse and entertain in equal measure; however, there’s also a poignant element about it, a sense almost of a lost world when even Interbrew were not the behemoth they have become. I love the colour pic in the British Isles section of drinkers in Adnams’ Harbour Inn, Southwold, with a caption, part of which says (referring to the fact that the pub occasionally got cut off by high tide), ‘Students of these brews have sometimes been stranded for days’.
The Brewmaster’s Table — Garrett Oliver: makes me hungry and thirsty at the same time; he makes great beer, conducts wonderful tastings and writes like a dream, a true Renaissance Man; this is a gorgeous odyssey through some of the greatest beers in the world.
Travels With Barley — Ken Wells: an entertaining journey through the world of American beer culture that takes in yeast rustling, extreme beer, retro beers, craft beers, A_B and so on; a fantastic book.
As I say, this is just my opinion, there are other great books, Ambitious Brew, Three Sheets to the Wind, Brew Like A Monk, The English Pub (both MJ and Peter Haydon), The Ale Trail, Prince of Ales, The English Inn, An Inn-Keeper’s Diary, Tim Webb’s Belgian series, but this is just a bit of fun.