Monday 27 June 2011

White Shield — some personal thoughts and a mention of Holsten

Holsten for me mate! I can remember when I first came across White Shield. Third year of college. Several of us in a pub — for some reason I always think the Free Press, but am not sure; it could have been the Blue Ball or some god-forsaken hole en route to one of the climbing club’s weekends away. But all I remember is my mate Simon ordering this bottle of ale and the barman pouring it out very carefully — did he say so as not to disturb the yeast? I don’t recall. I do remember tasting the beer, pulling a face and going back to my Holsten (a popular choice in those days — 10 bottles on a Friday night and I’d come up smiling on a Saturday morning ready for a cooked breakfast, the Guardian and lusting after Sally James on Tiswas). Was it this one-sip stand the reason that I’ve always had a rocky relationship with the beer (I call it a beer rather than a brand, hope that’s ok…) — looking at my notes for the King & Barnes-brewed one in 1998 I felt it too ‘fizzy’ (email me if you want whole chapter and verse, the learning curve was yet to come). I was pleased when it returned to Burton (history and all that) and Steve Wellington became its curator — he was my first ever beer interview and I remember being nervous about what I would ask him, I mean I’d been interviewing pop stars for years, but brewers… Anyway, over the years I kept being disappointed with White Shield, it was ok, but… I didn’t get it. Fast forward to the end of last year and a chat during a Burton beer dinner saw some White Shield coming my way for ageing — my theory was that the beer is released too young, too frisky, too coltish, too prone to dancing the light fantastic on the palate and making you think: so what… So I have left my White Shield for six months and this is what I thought. Am I right?

Dark golden caramel in colour; on the nose notes of nuttiness, wood, a bittersweetness (almond hints), some marzipan, a brief flurry of sherry-like notes with a Cointreau like orange character though without the fullness; the palate is bittersweet with a dry finish if you want to be basic, but there are hints of orange (orange blossom even), that nutty woodiness, and a fatness from the alcohol. It’s a library of beer with a babel of accents and voices, but there’s also a subtlety of taste; I’m not interested in raising the ghosts of IPA but it is a pretty noble beer at this age; in the finish there is a hint of roast hazelnut — talking of which the finish keeps reverberating away like the last notes of a finished symphony moments in a concert hall (if you’ve experienced this, you sit there and have a struggle in reconciling the reality of the end of the concert with the almost physical sensation of the music still extent in the air — I think Mahler’s 2nd is best for this). The beer is refined, restrained but yet cleavage-like in its tantalisation (this is the article that inspired me here) — rounded, luxurious, voluptuous. I rather think I like it these days but I would always leave it for several months. As for Holsten? Whatever happened there?

5 comments:

  1. Nitpicking, I know, but I think you mean Holsten. Holstein is a breed of cow :)

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  2. Holsten was "got at" by young marketers in the mid 1990s who thought they could dumb down the recipe in the UK and challenge Beck's for sales. Instead they screwed it up, lost all the people who had previously found it (like me, and like you too, clearly) an acceptable North German lager when there wasn't anything better available, and failed to gain the new sales they were hoping for. As classic an example of how to bollix up a brand as was ever seen.

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  3. Hi Martyn I tried it several years back in a Lees pub in North Wales for nostalgic reasons (I think Lees were brewing it?) and it was foul…

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  4. Lees dropped it about 3 years ago. It was shit. They brew Carlsberg now. That's shit too. On the other hand Lees Golden Original Lager is perfectly nice if you like that sort of thing.

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