Taste

What’s that you’ve got in your glass, I ask Magic Rock’s Stuart Ross. Salty Kiss comes the reply, with incan berries added at three weeks and then aged in Tequila barrels for about three months.

We’re at the launch of Unhuman Cannonball at Craft Beer Co in Islington and it’s good to catch up (I first met Stuart when he was at the Crown Brewery in Sheffield and we bonded over our love for Randy Mosher’s Radical Brewing, which is the only home-brewing book I have ever read with the intensity I usually accord to Hemingway).

He offers me a taste. It’s vinous, delicately sour and lightly salty, there’s a background hum of sweetness and I can just about taste something Tequila-like in the background.

Later on, next day, I’m thinking about the beer and how some drinkers would taste this and say that it wasn’t beer; then I start thinking about the variety of flavours and different directions brewers are now heading in, whether it’s about making their own interpretations of Gose, adding all manner of ingredients, letting this or that yeast in, or replicating their favourite hangover cure in a sour way (when I was interviewing Beavertown’s Logan Plant last year we were talking about Lemon Phantom Sour and he told me it was based on ‘that wonderful hangover cure, Lemon Fanta!’).

If you’re of a traditionalist persuasion, whether it’s keg or cask, then these might seem non-beery flavours, a strangeness in the way brewing is being done, a wayward exclamation of the arts and crafts of brewing, the cliffs of god that need to be climbed on your knees when a nice comfortable escalator will do. Go away, you might want to say.

On the other hand, such flavours and cravings are here to stay, but immersion in the sanctuary of beer can send one off on a crass course towards thinking that everyone, just everyone, thinks the same.

At tastings I have seen people who know their own minds about Pilsner Urquell, Doom Bar, London Pride or Peroni express surprise at their first experience of Saison Dupont or Westmalle Tripel and actually rather enjoy this experience, and with this in mind it’s easy to forget that when you chat and collaborate with those of a similar ilk, that not everyone has their palate calibrated into this brave new world of flavour, for that is what it is — a brave new (rediscovered, some might say) world of flavour, a grave bold cure away from what some might recognise as beer.

And after I taste the Salty Kiss, I return to my Unhuman Cannonball (lemon-gold in colour, juicy, bracingly bitter, forward facing in its grapefruitiness), another beer that traditionalists might care to dismiss — and then I think back to the tasting I had done earlier in the day when someone had asked me what constitutes beer? There and then, aloud, I had mused that beer is an alcoholic beverage made with malted barley, hops, yeast and water but that it might include other grains, and could have spices, fruit, vegetables or meat extract within, and might not have hops or might have more hops than was thought decent, or it might be aged in wooden barrels or even within clay (as I tasted a couple of years ago in Rimini from Birra del Borgo). 

And that is what I like about what is going on in beer at the moment — brewers might not always get it right but the search for (or the rediscovery of) different flavours and aromas is a great thing. Musicians and writers and bakers and builders use traditional forms to express their soul but if they discover a new way then it’s right that they take that path. Brewers can do the same.

Nothing much changes

Nothing much seems to change within the discourse of beer as this fragment of a letter from an WA Thomson (who could be a brewer) to the Brewers’ Journal demonstrates. The date? October 15, 1921. 

‘The more one ponders the subject the more one is forced to conclude that public taste in beer is largely a matter of custom and usage. It is a subtle question if we really do like the very new beers we are supposed to demand today. The pendulum has swung from the old time beers that, being brewed in an unscientific age, were often cloudy and sour rather than healthily matured, right to the other extreme of raw newness, And the scientific effort of the up-to-date age is directed to getting these new beers clean and brilliant on the cheapest cost of production. So that in both ages, at both ends of the swing of the see-saw, there appears no very great wholesomeness of production, In the former case good and plentiful materials were unscientifically used; in the latter a difficulty is present that taxes even modern science — the warding off of disease in weak solutions of fermentable matter. 

There is, or there ought to be, a hygienic strong beer of fair gravity, of the nature of a liqueur beer, for the English public house trade. Beyond doubt such should be there when it is asked for. The price is of importance, but not of such importance as in the case of common qualities. Such a beer is guarded against disease by its own body and strength assisted by modern science. We have nothing further to say of this quality. But there remains the common Public Taste to be dealt with further.

Do people really care for the heavily-hopped bitter beers of former days? Even in the districts where a bitter hopped 9lb per qr is supposed to constitute the demand, it is an open question if the deeper senses, let alone the hearts and intelligence of the people, demand it. Custom again, for if we dropped the hop rate to 7 lb per qr, the consumer would kick for a while. Yet in the writer’s opinion, and attempting to view human nature of the day with some breadth and insight, the public would soon learn to prefer the lighter hopped article when it had become used to it. To the writer this question of hop rate is one of the most easily discerned and decisive points about modern Public Taste. The people themselves know it — if but subconsciously. 

Do they know or visualise what really is their ideal in beer? Does it not seem apparent that custom decides this, the custom of the districts, and of a conservative people? How are we to reconcile the taste for acidity, common or peculiar to the cider districts, with the taste for soft drinking mild, free from the slightest acidity, pertaining to the next county?’