Fruit in a brewery: Cantillon, not for an IPA, though the time of the cherry IPA is presumably about to dawn, craft eh? |
Friday 15 January 2016
Fruit of the (IPA) Boom
Thursday 14 January 2016
The joy of drinking copious amounts of beer with gusto and abandonment
One photograph was taken in Munich during Oktoberfest in
2012, while I was waiting for the bus to take me to what is laughingly called Munich-West
Airport; the other snap comes from a visit to Pivovar Zatec three days before. On
that Saturday morning I think I was drinking their 11˚ beer, which was superb (my notes: ‘delicately hopped, good mid palate sweetness, dry semi-bitter
finish that lingers, grainy undercurrent that gives it a crisp chewy character’).
There is an immense sense of joy in drinking beer that those who come up with guidelines about how much we should drink seem to miss. There’s a sociability about it when it’s drunk in a bar or a pub — the beer is a bridge between people, transporting ideas, jokes and gossip, lightening up moods, bringing on smiles and also giving you a chance to make friends, especially if you’re a new kid in town (yes of course there’s the dark reflective nature of too much beer but I’m a grin reaper rather than a grim reaper). So then there’s that moment when the first beer of the day hits ground zero in your mouth, washes over the palate and calves great chunks off that iceberg that we call day-to-day life, the cares and hairpin cracks that we carry with us are gone for a while. More people should try it.
There is an immense sense of joy in drinking beer that those who come up with guidelines about how much we should drink seem to miss. There’s a sociability about it when it’s drunk in a bar or a pub — the beer is a bridge between people, transporting ideas, jokes and gossip, lightening up moods, bringing on smiles and also giving you a chance to make friends, especially if you’re a new kid in town (yes of course there’s the dark reflective nature of too much beer but I’m a grin reaper rather than a grim reaper). So then there’s that moment when the first beer of the day hits ground zero in your mouth, washes over the palate and calves great chunks off that iceberg that we call day-to-day life, the cares and hairpin cracks that we carry with us are gone for a while. More people should try it.
Wednesday 13 January 2016
Everything changes
Yesterday I asked a brewer what was the
reason for the apparent decline of a type of beer that remained comparatively
popular but seemed to have been in decline over the past 20 years. This was a
beer that also has a history going back over a century.
Was it changing trends, younger people drinking this or
drinking that? Was it the onset of clever advertising for rival brands, for
beers that maybe made people feel better about themselves or maybe convinced
them that their beers had less calories/units/whatever?
His answer was simple: fashions change and styles change
with them. When he was in college my brewer drank one kind of beer that was
drunk by everyone around him; then another kind of beer became popular and the
beer from his college days declined until it rose again. Now the style of beer
we spoke about was in apparent decline but it would come back again my brewer
opined. Everything changes.
Before anyone mutters mild or builds a barricade for Black
IPA/India Dark Ale, the brewer doesn’t make his beer in the UK and the beers he
drunk aren’t made in the UK, either. Where the beer is made is irrelevant — though I have always
said that there are reasons why some beer styles die on their feet: they’re
horrible, but then again that’s my opinion, which hasn’t stopped mild from
being the, er, comeback kid of the past 30 years.
However, what is relevant to me is that with his comment a
secondary point seemed to be worth thinking about. Throughout the 70s/80s/90s and
beyond for all I know, the rise of faux-lager and nitrogenated smoothies was
seen as the consequence of the wool being pulled over drinkers’ eyes; of them
(mainly men) being seduced by clever adverts, flash posters and the promise of
a lifestyle beyond their dreams.
Really? People aren’t children (unless they’re children of
course and some of them are pretty smart), they know how to make choices; they
are conscious of why they drink this over that (those of us who suggest these
lager/smoothie/good-knows-what drinkers are swayed by advertising can go away
and give ourselves a pathetic illusory superiority pat on the back). There were a lot of reasons why these beers took off, but people weren’t stupid.
So the next time, you hear someone rant about ‘stupid’
people drinking beers that this person doesn’t like, remind them that life
changes in the most random of ways (not too forcefully I hope, I’m not advocating a barney in the pub). But it does change, which in
some ways is the reason why I, for one, continue to be swayed and somersaulted over and over again by beer, its varying moods and its continual surprises.
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