Wednesday Beer — St Austell Proper Job

St Austell in 2002, I dunno what the car is

I have had a long relationship with Proper Job, first drinking it when it was released in 2004, developed by St Austell’s head brewer Roger Ryman after he’d spent a month’s sabbatical in Portland’s Bridport Brewery (sadly no more, though during my only visit to the taproom in 2015 left me thoroughly underwhelmed). His inspiration was Bridport IPA, which is probably why the beer in cask and bottle was 5.5%, though the former was soon reduced to 4.5% to be more acceptable to British sessioneers. 

It’s a mainstay of St Austell’s pubs, of which there are several in Exeter (my son used to work in one during vacation), while the bottle-conditioned 5.5% version is very much a supermarket sweetheart. My initial tasting notes of the beer back in the 00s are of a Carmen Miranda-like fruitiness, pineapple, melon and guava with a striking bitter finish bolstered by a sweetness that perhaps is a characteristic of beers and palates in the southwest. I still think it’s an excellent beer, though have recently wondered with some bottles I recently bought from Aldi (how funny that going to the supermarket now has the same risk as driving a 550cc Kawasaki at 100mph on the M6 as I used to do until a near accident calmed me down) if the Carmen Miranda fruitiness had been muted somewhat. Now, it’s in 440ml cans, not bottle-conditioned, but still fresh and fruity and Carmen Miranda is still flying down to Rio, all manner of tropical fruit embedded in her hat. 

And while I’m thinking about Proper Job, I would like to raise a glass to Big Job, which I always had a couple of bottles while visiting (or should that be embarrassing?) my son when he was working at the quayside pub in Exeter. And now, even more thoughts crowd in on me — I do miss St Austell’s Admiral’s Ale, which was launched in 2003 during a British Guild of Beer Writers trip to Cornwall that I organised. This was chestnut/russet in colour with lush toffee/caramel notes balanced by a juicy citrusiness. It was a beer of which I drank deeply over the years, but it doesn’t seem to have been around for a while (there was a Big Admiral at the 2016 Celtic Beer Festival but nothing at the one last November). 

It is funny but understandable that during this time of Covid-19 a nostalgia seems to pervade through the soul of beer — I have read of beers that are missed (some before I began drinking), the moods of pubs in the 1970s and before, breweries that are no longer around and what their products would have been like and breweries such as Boxcar, Anspach and Hobday and Five Points doing up and doing over mild and bitter as if it never went away. All of which makes me ponder (with the thought of a glass of Proper Job later), maybe beer is more about nostalgia than we think and maybe in this time of Covid-19 we need that nostalgia. 

Luxury

Beer as a luxury item? That’s right, the drink you love, the drink you linger along with and look to to provide a guide on how to pass through life, a good friend, a pal, a paid companion (for when you hand over some money to the bar-man you are paying for the companionship of a glass of beer) — a luxury item?

For a moment let’s ponder on the meaning of luxury. Sometimes luxury is a catnap, time off from an arduous life, a snatched moment with a loved one, or it can be the possession of something that might make you feel good and gives you a platform from which you can observe the rest of the world and hope that they see how good things are for you, a miserable, pale-faced attempt at elitism oh-do-look-at-me-up-here-on-the-catwalk. 

But back to beer as a luxury item? If you believe this website luxury is about expensive beer, expensive processes, expensive ingredients and possibly taking the punter for a long ride around the houses and back again. It’s about the money, about the honey that glides down the throat and sweetens the soul of the beer-inclined one who harbours a need to stand on the platform and stir up and stare at the rest of the world.

Really?

Chocolate can be luxury, as well as smoked salmon (not the one bought in the Co-op though), but fruit pastilles and coley cannot be luxury, unless perhaps the coley has been smoked in a smokehouse on the edge of the earth in which case the smoking process and the place in which it took place is the luxury item but what we eat is still the fish that my grandmother always reckoned was fit only for cats. Fruit pastilles equally have no chance at being anything other than fruit pastilles, unless perhaps they are served in a tube of pure gold, but then the tube is luxury (how vulgar a tube of gold seems though) but the pastilles aren’t. Rare beef is a luxury as is lamb coming from a flock located on an island with unusual seaweed, but on the other hand this breast of chicken that that I have just bought from the supermarket in order to be breaded and go into a sauce is not a luxury. It is a commonplace piece of food that can be made and served any time during the week. It’s all very complicated this idea of luxury and I haven’t even started on suitcases. 

So perhaps luxury if we think about beer is scarcity as well as isolation and showing off good fortune; the scarcity of a grain or a hop or its price which means that the scarcity devotes itself to the brewing process and in the process turns the beer into a luxury. Or does it?

I don’t think beer is a luxury item, unless of course in the case of the fruit pastilles you have the bottle in which it is served made out of a valuable luxury item (such as a dead animal I suppose) and then it becomes a luxury item but there is still the beer, whether it is delicious or not. So the whole point of a luxury beer is something that would make you feel better about yourself or even higher on the evolutionary stakes than the person who says that Beavertown or Hook Norton or De La Senne or Carling is the drink for them. So as you caress a bottle of beer that cost you more than a case of something you would normally drink then are you doing luxury? Or is the one-off, rarely brewed, showed-off-on-Twitter bottle of Double IPA or the one made with ingredients sourced from Holland & Barrett that is an act of luxury? Or is luxury best left to those who fancy standing on a platform and spying on the rest of us? Answers on a fur-lined papyrus postcard please and btw I rather enjoy coley when making Thai fish-cakes (for myself that is, not next door’s cat). 

I’m just pondering on things at the moment, trying to work out ideas in the public sphere, reading and writing my way through a variety of things, bit like a mental workout, with beer in hand.