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. 

La Capsule Lille

Six silver stainless steel tubes stand on the bar at La Capsule in Lille and reflect the world — 18 inches high, miniature silos, places of storage from which beers such as 5AM Saint, Duchesse de Bourgogne and Mikkeller Snowball emerge. The tubes reflect a distorted world, a world that exists as long as these tubes keep being polished, a looking glass world filtered through a post-industrial gauze. Alice fell down a hole and took up a job selling credit-enhanced dreams long ago, so these six tubes at La Capsule will do.

And what do they reflect?

Two men, out on a Monday night, laughter brought along like an extra friend, guttural northern French, glasses of St Bernardus’ fragrant, orange blossom witbeer to hand, a bright bosomy beer that emerges from the glass and demands a chicken samosa; meanwhile a quartet of students, two guys, two girls, sitting at a high table near the door, one of them darting in and out with her mobile, quench their thirst on what I know from overhearing their orders is Roman’s Epsom salts fury of a Pilsner. I and son sit in a corner, I with a Abbey Des Roc Brune, he with a cola, talking over the day’s battlefields.

There’s a definite Belgian beer bar feel about La Capsule: dark wood along with the shining stars of stainless steel mix and merge; the lighting is dim but the music is refreshing different, being what seems to me a nostalgic soundtrack of Antwerpian hardcore metal disco from the 1990s.

And it strikes me, as I have another glass of Vivant’s luscious, sensuous triple, that the sort of beer or bar I like is reminiscent of a tilted smile from a beautifully imperfect woman; a feeling that has its ups and downs and peaks and troughs and rough edges and smoothed out corners, all of which make life more interesting than if you are married to Barbie who makes the perfect dinner every time but really leaves you feeling: is that it? It is a beer or a bar that is worth taking a journey with to see what happens as time passes.