The pub used to be a gastro

The pub used to be a gastro I am told, which makes complete sense when I look around the décor: stripped down oak floorboards the colour of sand, Farrow and Ball style paint scheme on the wall (lamp room grey perhaps?), lots of light coming in through the large latticed collection of glass panes, an ironic mix of old school pub tables with metal clawed feet, seaside fish and chip restaurant red banquettes and a couple of stools and their accompanying tables that might have been made in the workshop at the local tech. The music at the moment is In The Midnight Hour, not Wilson Pickett but more of a Commitments’ version perhaps? Outside London passes by, buses, mopeds defecating their shrill sound of two-stroke hell, off-white van man, Boris bikes and Londoners going about their way, large, tall, fat, thin, small and in-between. The bar is L-shaped, and I hazard a guess that before it was a gastro it was a traditional boozer, the place where the racing might have been on all day, the beer dispensed with a minimum of fuss and food limited to whatever the licensee could forage in the local cash and carry. Outside the Grand Union canal stills itself, a long dark green rippled skin of water larging itself through this part of west London. The beer? I’ve just had a glass of Redemption Pale Ale, and spent what felt like an eon (but was probably only a couple of minutes) evalutating the ‘fruity’ nose. In the end I think of sensual ripe apricot skin with wisps of berry (raspberry) floating into the action as well. The malty sweetness is caramel influenced and I also pick out an edgy spike of spiciness reminiscent of rye; the finish is a dusty and grainy dryness that turns the mouth into an agreeable sort of Sahara. For 3.8%, this is a beer that really makes me want another. But there’s a lot of choice so (while watching a man spear his salad into his mouth with the sort of lust that I imagine only happened on some medieval killing field) I have a glass of Kernel’s Centennial Columbus IPA — I can smell it across the bar as it is poured. We are looking at a fragrance that I can only imagine as a cross between a hop field where all the hop devils are hard at work night and day and the early morning descent I once took, windows open, gentle breeze off the Med, after a night crossing the Maritime Alps, into the town of Grasse. Oh and I’m in the Union Tavern, Fuller’s tremendous take on a craft beer bar. Love it.

Old Manchester

A 7.3% ale from Marble that is brewed in collaboration with Fall fan and Fuller’s head man John Keeling is what I have in front of me. Opens with a soft phut — like the sound of a bullet being shot through a silencer in a Hollywood movie where the heroes get one in the shoulder and carry on rather than suffer major blood loss. The sweetness of the malt reaches me from the glass as I stand typing on the kitchen counter and then I raise it to my nose and there is a jellied fruit aroma of English hops (some grapefruit and some sweat), plus a sweetshop aroma of slightly baked bananas (before the caramelisation takes hold), and then the floral, ripe tropical fruit skin (peach perhaps and some papaya?), plus a hint of cherry brandy even. Spritzy on the palate at first, champagne like, the bubbles and beer gathering together in a host upon the tongue to let the dark malts in the beer lift upwards like angels — it’s a bitter beer, old fashioned bitterness perhaps, you know that fist in the face, that call from the captain, that rousing to action that gets good teams going; there’s a hint of bubblegum and ripe plum, some marizpan or is that Bakewell tart?, some white pepper, a sweetness without sweetness, a nutty alcoholic sense of its own finery; this is not a hop bomb, neither is it a malt bomb, it wears its strength lightly. I wish I had two as I would like to compare it with one in a year — there’s also a dustiness, a dryness within the bitter finish, a counterpoint as beautiful as any employed by JS Bach. I’m reaching towards suggesting that there is a hint of a Brune about it as well, that candied brownness (though lacking the medium to high carbonation). Old (Brown) Manchester — dare I use the word brown again? 

What does vanilla smell like?

When describing a beer the scent of lychees and oranges and bananas pinches the nose time and time again, or maybe ripe skin of apricot, mango and melon; but oddly enough I’ve never sat down with a lychee, orange or banana and thought about how it might or might not smell of beer. The traffic is strictly one way. Even as an avid user of such descriptors I’ve always wondered if there are other analogies I can bring into play. It’s the continual battle over how to describe beer without falling into that massive elephant trap of cliché. This time my naval gazing has been occasioned by the reading of the introduction to the Penguin Book of Food and Drink, edited by Paul Levy. In said intro, Levy notes how you might find a raspberry note in Burgundy but no Burgundy notes in a raspberry. But what does a raspberry smell of? Raspberry.

Yes, we all want to say something about the beer in our hands that escapes the miasmic suck of cliché and so beer writing sometimes loops itself into the language of wine — and why not? At the end of the day what the writer wants is to feel a good job has been done, that what is on screen is something that they are happy with. Yet, you could also argue that to take the in vino veritas route is a bit of a cop-out, rather like dressing up like Clarissa Dickson-Wright even though you cannot cook or talk on telly.

Why the worry? I’m rarely happy with my tasting notes. There’s always a feeling that the perfect description is just over the horizon, just out of sight. I recently polished off a bottle of Fuller’s Vintage from 1999. I wrote some brief notes: ‘vanilla, ice cream with bitter bite, fudge and vanilla fudge’. That’s it. Did I enjoy it? Yes, but really? Vanilla? You could do a tasting with beer virgins and it would certainly perk things up, but what does it mean? What does vanilla smell and taste like? Vanilla of course. However, you might want to use abstract words to describe vanilla — luxurious, sensual, elegant, and moody. What about fudge? It smells of vanilla if it is vanilla flavoured, but would you call fudge luxurious and sensual. Of course not. It’s cheerful, workaday, pleasing. So do abstract words for beer work? Instead of vanilla and fudge with a bitter bite, the Fuller’s Vintage 1999 is a sensual, luxurious beer perhaps? Work it out a bit further — is it silky? No the bitterness wouldn’t work with the silkiness (bit like massively hairy legs in silk stockings…). Smooth perhaps? No. I have an aversion to the word smooth — it makes the beer sound like a piece of music from Smooth FM, but there’s an idea, why not use music as an analogy? Ravel’s Bolero, perhaps? The slow and majestic movement that accompanies Siegfried’s funeral pyre in The Ring? 

So far, it’s a sensual and luxurious beer, but there’s also a need for a word that’ll describe the bitterness reining in the vanilla fudge. How about stern? Might be too redolent of some seedy basement flat where Mistress Stern does her business, but lose that association and I think it works. So here’s the starting point for my tasting notes for Fuller’s Vintage 1999 — sensual and luxurious on the palate with a stern bitter bite keeping any over indulgent tendencies at bay. Not perfect but it’s something to work on. 

John Keeling is a sort of Dr Who-ish chap

Fuller’s head brewer John Keeling is in the latest line of northern comedians including Mark E Smith, Morrissey and  Frank Randle (interviewed the first two but not the latter as he was dead before I was born, just thought I would slip that in)— he’s deadpan and slightly mocking, tells the odd rubbish joke and wears his authority with ease as if it were a jacket placed over his shoulders by a leery mate during a stag do before it becomes an exercise in aggression. He’s also one of the lads (the sensitive one at the back). However, unlike the chaps who told us how they wrote elastic man and that every day was like Sunday, he makes damn good beer and also wants to breaks through the boundaries of what we mere mortals think constitutes beer. And Fullers, god bless ’em, let him run riot. 

In a room not far from the Hellenistic and hedonistic hive of the Great British Beer Festival, he takes us through a couple of years in the life of Vintage — along with Derek Walsh Prentice (who didn’t open his mouth, but I reckon he still deserves a name check), these two Dr Who-ish or Wellsian beer time travellers go off on a mission to elucidate and encourage us all to indulge in a great escapade of brewing (‘the game is on’ as Holmes would have it). 

Vintage Ale 2009 is the colour of a light-coloured sandy-ish horse saddle that has been hunted by several generations, has an alcoholic brew of a toffee nose (think brittle nut toffee), then on the palate torpedoes one below the water line with a massive marzipan, Çointreau Christmas cake icing sweetness and ferocity of flavour, before its dry and bitter and chewy finish. 

Then we had Vintage Ale 2006 — a deeper chestnut in colour than 2009, a tone of brown/chestnut shade that you wouldn’t be ashamed to let your child wear if they fancied cords from Gap (and believe me they do). This was softer and less fiery in its alcoholic attack than 2009; orange notes were thrusting their way through and I thought in a moment of madness of booze-soaked raisins. ‘An interesting experiment in ageing,’ said John, ‘I want to explore time, put time back into making beer.’ As someone who spent three years picking over the ruins of the Romanovs and writing the odd essay about the rise of the NSDAP who am I to argue? 

But we weren’t over and time was not done with us yet: next up was Brewers Reserve No 1, which if you want the empirical details has spent a year in bottle and 500 days in cask (Glenmorangie). It was buttery (think Chardonnay), fat, leathery, horse blanket-like, earthy — my notes say Orval with whisky (and I also asked about Brett). With our tummies waiting to be tickled we were then rolled onto Brewers Reserve No 2 (cognac cask) — there’s a sense of serendipity in the way JK gets the casks, it’s whatever is available at the time (as someone who once dabbled with The Diceman and the I Ching I like this sense of chance). This has a tighter orangey marmalade character on the nose. I’m thinking orange jelly, with a hint of white pepper in the background; it’s light and fruity, brisk and bracing, And as this first day of the GBBF comes to its natural end, all I can think about is the wood-aged 1890s porter that John has prepared for the autumn.

Keeping fit the Fuller’s way

When my publishers were researching visuals for 1001 Beers (out in the spring when you can criticise the choices) they came across this wonderful image for Fullers (sic) — I presume it’s sometime between the 1930s and the 1950s, almost like a golden age of beer advertising. I seem to remember some information being released earlier in the year that beer is the best refresher after sport, so this ad is spot on in its beer advocacy. If I didn’t do my runs at 7am then I would be quite happy to rehydrate myself with a glass of Chiswick rather than my normal water.
PS don’t let the Daily Mail or Liam Donaldson see this, they’ll be livid and probably — in the spirit of New Labour’s love of apologising for everything that has happened in the past millenium — want Fuller’s to say sorry for tempting some of the leading athletes of the day to forgo all for a life of rack and ruin orchestrated by the demon drink and all its imperious imps (or not).