The Seven Moods of Craft Beer

The Seven Moods of Craft Beer is my latest book and if you want to be snarky yes it’s a list book, 350 beers from around the world, about which I have written and I suppose recommended the reader try before he or she stumbles off this mortal coil. You can look at it that way and if so please be my guest. 

On the other hand, what I think does make it different from what I have written before is that I have tried to approach the beers metaphysically, go beyond the whole ‘this uses Fuggles/Cascade/ME109, weighs in at 4% ABV, was developed by Cajun renegades in the East End of London in 1855, and is designed to be drank from a fluted wellington boot made of coloured glass’. There is nothing about the price of beer, what is best for its dispensation and despite the book’s title nothing about the meaning of craft beer.

The kernel of the book, the approach that I have taken, is to harbour an intention towards each beer that marks it with a mood applying to both beer and drinker. It’s about imagining the beer’s mood, giving it a personality, letting it speak to me, going off on a tangent about the beer, seeing what it really says to me, letting it expose its mood as it settles or seethes in the glass. It’s about beer having a character, a personality, which I have tried to reflect through the mirror of my words. Usually in about 100 words.

You want a beer to have a social mood, to be as chatty as a mynah bird, as sociable as your best mate who’s just got paid, then beers such as De Prael’s IPA or Douglas’ 942 will be ideal; these are garrulous, chatty, flighty beers, frisky in their playfulness, sincere in the way they sway in the glass, words tumbling out like acrobats in a French farce from the 1930s.

On the other hand, if you want a beer with a bucolic feel, a mood that reflects your inner rurality, that makes you think of a lonely farmhouse in the middle of Wallonia where saison has been made for countless generations (you might even find a bucolic beer that does that even when it has been brewed in San Diego to a soundtrack of car horns and the frenetic pace of city life), then there is the incomparable Saison Dupont, but also Modern Times’ Lomaland. 

This is about beer being flexible, about being a friend, about beer gelling with how the drinker feels, about beer surprising and leading the drinker to surmise how little they knew about the beer in the hand. 

And the other moods? There are poetic beers, adventurous beers, gastronomic beers, imaginative beers and contemplative beers, all of which will reveal themselves to you whenever you are in a mood for a beer. 

I’m signing copies this week at GBBF at 6pm on Wednesday, so if you are around come and hear me rattle on more about moods (and of course buy a book), or on Thursday as part of London Beer City I’m at the Mermaid in Clapton where I’ll be celebrating the moods of London craft beer in the company of a few yarns on my beer travels in the last few years. You can get tickets here or turn up on the night and get them from the pub. I promise to be in a good mood. 

Predictability

Elland’s 1872 Porter becomes top dog in the Great British Beer Festival and I note shreds of predictable behaviour rag and rash their way through social media. There were no bomb hop amidst the winners while trills of old man’s beer comb their way down the wires; elsewhere I read we’re cooler than you schoolyard taunts and the fact that third placed Jarl at least has some hops is a poor consolation.

I wonder why some people feel disappointed?

This is CAMRA’s show and dismayed as I am that there’s no Kernel, Camden or Magic Rock on show (as predictable as the signs of craftites’ tedium at the winner) and that the American cans on display cannot — apparently — be sold, this is their show and they can do what they like.

I judged on Tuesday morning and out of the five beers I received I am pretty sure I got Elland and it was brilliant — my first thought was how Lowestoft, in that I took in the sort of smoky hints on the nose that wouldn’t be out of place in a box that had once held smoked herrings; then there was plenty of chocolate (milk), coffee (mocha), vanilla and raisins as well as an all enveloping darkness that put me in mind of that hour before the first silvers of dawn start to appear in between gaps in the curtains. I think this was our table’s winner. 

I also had a best bitter, which — having being unimpressed down the years when judging this category — surprised and delighted me with its sprightly condition, lychee-like notes on the nose and a fan-dance of tropical fruit (without being too overwhelming) on the palate.

Meanwhile once down in the hall, I got in line with the likes of oak-smoked Schlenkerla Rauch, Sierra Nevada Hoptimum, Matuska Raptor, De Molen Rye IPA, St Arnold Amarillo Hefe, Greene King 5X, Boulevard Tank 7 and, er, on the recommendation of a fellow writer, Barnsley Bitter. Even though I love well-hopped beers (judging in Rimini earlier this year I fell in love with several Italian DIPAs) I don’t just want hop bombs, that’s like those big fat men who always insist on having the hottest curries.

Following on from my post about smugness, there does seem to be this element of spite and childishness developing within some sectors of the craft beer ‘movement’, which ironically enough is a natural mirror to the Colonel Bogey, green ink letter writers to What’s Brewing who treat cask beer (though they call it real ale) like a holy relic. Both sides are exceedingly irritating and increasingly foam-flecked — or as Orwell put it: ‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which’. 

Oh well, wish I were going to the London Craft Beer Festival this weekend.

Great British Beer Festival

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.

Beer Glasto

Another GBBF, another splendid cavalcade of characters from the world of beer, old friends, new friends. I find I don’t approach the GBBF with the same excitement I used to. It has — for me — become more of a social and business networking event than an attempt to drink myself around the world (though I always manage to give it a good go). Maybe it’s because I go to the trade session or maybe because it’s part of the establishment now: a media partnership from the Indie, a big piece on the science of beer in the DT and posters everywhere, even people I know in the non-beerwriting world ask me if it is worth going to (whereas once they saw me as a bit odd). It’s become the beer world’s Glastonbury or any number of those festivals that seem to mark the summer’s passage. All that is missing is the rain, though several years ago Olympia got a hammering during a cloud burst. But what’s wrong with that — if beer (and I am not just talking about real ale) is to remain part of the matter of Britain then events like this are essential. From its energetic presence other celebrations of beer (both cask and non cask, British and global) can draw sustenance.

Evidence of ennui though? A peek at the list online last week failed to excite. On the other hand I enjoyed the cask beers I tried — Lord Maples, Cwrw Eryri and Screech Owl. Then it’s over to BSF where I discovered several things: I don’t like every beer that has been matured in whisky barrels (cue handing over Blood Sweat & Tears to a mate); will there come a stage when barrel aged beers become the Emperor’s New Clothes? De Ranke XX Bitter was bitter hop juice, and I normally love it, while Messers Maguire’s Bock was a thin thimble of roast malt and nowt else.

On the positive side, Mummia from Birrificio Montegioco was fun — lambic like, complex and refreshing. Augustiner Helles and Beck Brau Pils were elegant and crisp on the palate, but not Schlenkerla’s Rauchbier Urbock (unsophisticated in its smokiness, unlike its mother Marzen). Lagunitas’ Pils (parma violets on the nose) disappointed, but have bought a bottle home to reassess as it was recommended to me by an American beerwriter. Firestone Walker’s Union Jack IPA was tremendous (as if someone had grabbed me by the back of the neck and plunged me into a hopsack), though the beer from the US that impressed most was Victory’s V12, tasted at a US craft brewers reception the day before — fermented with Westmalle yeast according to Bill Cowaleski, it was rich and spirited, smooth and feisty, and hard to resist.

As for the festival itself I didn’t really take much notice of what elsewhere Pete Brown has talked of ‘freakish volunteers’ (none of us are perfect), though a first sighting of the Hobgoblin made me start (however I have seen a Merlin strolling the streets of Glastonbury) — and then I realised I wasn’t at a heavy metal concert whose adherents swear by their bodkins. It was just someone done up to promote Hobgoblin (10 years ago I remember a man in a budgie suit, I think that was his normal outfit). Someone else, in a shabby shiny suit, wore a lovely damp lock of hair pressed down on his forehead as he staggered from ale to ale. Then a brace of monstrously overwhelming drag queens in coloured tin foil, hellbent on signing up for Melissa’s tours. All very Glasto. However, I suspect as the day wears on and the beers go down, very few people look ‘normal’ when the bell rings (I know I certainly don’t). Which is why, for once fearing for my normality, I reluctantly but resolutely made an exit at 4.15. See you next year .