What have Brewdog ever stood for

I saw some tweet, from a friend, which said ‘what did Brewdog ever stand for’, in light of some legal stuff (which you can read elsewhere), and I thought of the piece I included in a book that Roger Protz and I wrote for CAMRA in 2015, and which we both suggested/demanded should include BrewDog. I wrote it and Roger was happy with it and in light of all the stuff about punks not being punks (I was a punk and dropped it like a hot coal when everyone and their mother became one — it was not about mohicans but more about an attitude, I learnt more about situationism and structuralism through punk than anything else and never passed into the fancy dress stage, which owed more to 19th century dandyism than anything else), here it is before it was edited. Despite the dreadful Raspberry Smoothie IPA and knocking over the furniture in the PR showroom of self-righteousness I still think they do a good job (as do Adnams, Fullers, Hook Norton, Camden etc etc etc). 

BrewDog’s brewery is a cavernous, cathedral-like brewing hall with its steel ribs reaching out and holding up the sky; it’s a lively animated space on brewing day as rock music plays and brewers mull about, clambering up steel ladders to check brewing vessels and ducking beneath metal pipes through which beer flows. Outside sit the fermenting vessels, silvery, towering cylinders that receive more hops as the beer sleeps, through something called a hop cannon. This feels like a brewery committed to the future.

However, there’s one thing missing. BrewDog don’t make cask beer, they stopped making it in 2011. They did make some very good cask beers such as 5AM Saint, Paradox and, yes, even Punk IPA, but that was then this is now. Their beers are either in bottle or what is called, for want of a better word, craft keg. Go to any of the brewery’s bars in Bristol, Sheffield and across London and you won’t find a hand pull (but you will find friendly bar staff who are exceptionally knowledgeable about beer, but it won’t be cask). The brewery has also a fractious relationship with CAMRA, to say the least. 

Yet, BrewDog cannot be ignored. Their craft keg might not be cask but it’s neither the tinny-tasting, strained keg of the past, which had as much a relationship with flavour as processed cheese has with the Slow Food movement. BrewDog is also seen by many drinkers as one of the most significant and — yes — exciting developments in the world of beer for many years, and that would probably include a fair amount of CAMRA members.

Important? For a start, without them we probably wouldn’t have had the likes of Magic Rock (whose High Wire could be seen as a tribute to Punk IPA), The Kernel and Wild Beer. For better or worse they have been an inspiration. BrewDog has brought many young men and women to beer and, in a similar way the Sex Pistols broke out of the punk ghetto, they have also transcended the beer bubble. They have been heard of by people who rarely drink beer, a recognition factor many breweries would love. Your mum has probably heard of them.

Even though it’s not cask, BrewDog brew some good beers. A bottle of Punk IPA has a pungent and arousing nose of ripe peach and apricot skin; lychee, papaya and mango trips off the tongue, while there’s a gentle touch on the elbow of white pepper in the dry and grainy finish. Meanwhile Jack Hammer is a big beast of a strong IPA with its bitter finish clanging away like an alarm bell and the even stronger (9.2%) Hardcore IPA has an intense swagger of grapefruit, blue cheese and pine cones on the nose while in the mouth it is fulsome with a concentration of sweet grapefruit alongside a resiny hoppiness — this is a beer able to hold its head high against anything the likes of Stone can produce.

Yes they can be wearisome. There have been the controversies: by and by the world of beer is a relatively cordial one but some of BrewDog’s comments on the nature of British brewing not only upturned the apple cart but starting throwing the fruit about. This is something that James Watt acknowledged when I met him up the north of Scotland, where the brewery have their home, early on in 2014: ‘there are things we wouldn’t do now.’

That was then, this is now and who knows, there might be things they will do in the future: such as brewing cask, because if you cast your mind back several years they brewed some excellent cask beer.

Teak

What colour do you think that this beer is, I ask a friend and fellow judge at the Dutch Beer Challenge (to give it some context we are are at Brouwerij Noordt in Rotterdam and drinking its Bok). I suggest the colour is mahogany brown, but he says it reminds him of the teak coloured deck of a sailing ship, which is perhaps an apt description, as the river that has made Rotterdam is only a street or so away. And then I think of the connection with the open sea — the beer is cold, 5˚C perhaps, a watch bundled up and shivering on the deck in the Atlantic, and then I think of the great steel ships abed in the harbour, the ships I’d seen earlier in the day, standing at anchor, their hulls a story of the travels that had taken them about the world. Then I smell the beer, the chocolate and coffee on the nose of the Bok, which suggests to me the emotional cargoes of Europe brought to the port, a history of several centuries brought together in a glass. Then there is the alcohol, 7%, alcohol that combustible constant of civilisation. The beer is also crisp and cold — a night spent on deck, keeping watch, crossing the Atlantic, and then there is more coffee and chocolate, followed by a brisk carbonation and finally a quick finish, as if this beer suddenly decided it wanted the BlueRiband. The tales that beers do tell.

Are sours the new alco-pops

A train of thought is waiting at the station and if you don’t mind it’s waiting for a new passenger: ah here they are, a little late but on they go. Are sours the new alco-pops, asks the passenger to no one in particular. One person looks up and asks in what way are sours the new alco-pops and the answer is shot straight back, down a well-rifled barrel: when they were first introduced alco-pops were seen by some as easy going drinks that those hitting 18 went straight to, an easy avoidance of trying to work out trying to get one’s tongue around the contusions and customs of bitterness? And did those who walked the green hills of ancient pub land have to work so hard and heft their shoulders to the wheel before they left the sweet seductions of their childhood behind (though lager/bitter top and diesel are remainders of this memory of times gone by), while those who enter this magical world through the portal of sours not have to do much at all (hence the comparison with alco-pops).

And so why does this passenger think that way? The other night they drank a can of Chorlton’s Amarillo Sour, followed by Cloudwater’s Vic’s Secret Tart IPA, both beers going down as easily as a soft drink, despite their relative alcoholic strengths of 5.5% and 7.3%. They were, I was told by this passenger, juicy and restrained in their sweetness, while the tartness was unbridled in its friendliness and sense of wonder, like the face of a child, eyes closed, slyly smiling, as it lifts its face to a warm sun. They were both beautiful beers, of which the passenger said ‘I could drink deeply’. They were also both what are generally called sours,

Similar thoughts had whisked over me with the soft petulance of a feather duster a couple of weeks ago whilst giving a talk at a beer conference in Cusco, Peru, on the state of sour beer in the UK — within the audience of brewers, both newly pro and stay-at-homers, there was a real interest in sour beers, with several putting their hands up when I asked who was making a sour. A few days before I’d also filed a piece on sours for Imbibe magazine, making the point that sours had the ability to appeal to those who had always said that they didn’t like beer, ie wine drinkers who like their acidity, of which there is plenty within a sour beer.

Sours (or wild beers or acidic beers, or whatever you want to call them), when they work are exemplary in the way they both tease and trounce the palate with their visions of a beer beyond what we know as beer. They have the ability to shush the palate and to rush their way along the gustatory highway to deliver refreshment and also compress sensations of acidity, juiciness, sprightliness, dryness, saltiness, tartness and a piquant bitterness all in one. And because they have the ability to introduce those who say they dislike beer they are the new alco-pops, but on the other hand I hardly think Amarillo Sour is the new WKD. But you never know.

Peruvian Gold

Yes, that’s one of them craft jam jars

Here is an IPA, an India Pale Ale. Hazy, orange-yellow in colour, flurries of tropical fruit (ripe fruits sitting in a bowl in a sunny kitchen, on a pine table) emerging from the glass like the furies of Greek myths, benevolent though, beneficial even, bending one’s thoughts towards taking a sip or maybe a complete submergence in the beer. Petrol, as in Riesling, tropical fruit, that ripeness again, that sun-stroked ripeness, and then a dry rasping finish that lingers like the memory of a long lost love affair. That savoury allium note of a West Coast IPA (the Pacific rather than the Cornish Riviera), the tropical fruit sweetness and pungency and sensuality, the dry graininess of a malt backbone, the charkas of grain, and that dry finish all combine, a combination once forbidden and now bidden to all, and create an assertive and expressive IPA, the dominion of lupulin. And outside in the sun, the foothills of the Andes rise, steep and sudden. This is IPA country but it also the Sacred Valley of the Incas, and I have been drinking Inti Punku IPA from Cervecería del ValleSagrado and immersing myself in it with the rhapsodic and revelatory nature of a traveller who’s found themselves in a new land and discovered a small slice of home.