Tir na nOg

St Patrick’s Day tomorrow and the usual beery hi-jinks will occur. Stout will be drunk, mainly Guinness though a few outposts will offer various alternatives. This is the bar at my local pub. The beer in the middle, from Cottage Brewery, has been produced for the day. A dark beer, perhaps? No, dark beers, apart from Guinness don’t do that well in my local (I reckon I was one of the few drinkers of the ravishingly beautiful O’Hanlon’s Port Stout when it was on). I had a couple of pints yesterday lunchtime and — surprise, surprise — it’s a golden beer with a tantalisingly fragrant hop character on the nose. Sometimes it’s good to do something different.

Top shop

300 words on bottle tops, or crown corks as they are properly known. How on earth can one manage that? Well if James Joyce can produce a whole novel based on a day in Dublin (beery fact: Bass’ No 1 is mentioned in one of the later chapters), then I’m sure I can deal with a much less demanding need for words. First of all, start thinking about those folk who collect them. What do they do with them? What does it mean to their lives? How much fun do they have when they visit conventions of fellow collectors? Is much beer drunk? What’s the rarest bottle top in the world.

I have an admission: I collect them and attach them to the wall in my beer cellar, just behind the bottles standing on the shelves. But what does it do for my life? Obviously it will not help to stop the caving in of the pub industry or bolster up the fragile sense of ego that beer seems to have in modern times, but it does give me a sense of continuity; a sense of calm; a sense of belonging — tops for the beers most enjoyed take one back to the time it was drunk. Bottle tops as time machines!

To my right as I write there is a pale blue-coloured top for a Watou beer. It was one I drank the other night — a gorgeously rich and unctuous beer that would be beyond the reach of those with modest incomes if the minimum pricing lobby had any success (the Watou I drank was 9% and very good it was too). The outline of a monk is etched against the background, and the words Prior and Watou top and tail the object. But what does it mean? It’s an identity for the brewery, a sense of who they are, a small add-on to the more visible and expected branding of paper labels. Then I wonder if bottle-top art is necessary? What does a bare bottle top denote? It could be an amateurish ignorance of the necessity for a full and complete branding image (you’ve got the label, why not complete the full set with a decorated bottle top?), or is it small brewery shortness of cash? For me, a bare bottle top connects with memories of my dismal attempts at home brewing; brown bottles full of yeasty yucky liquid and topped with bare dulled bottle tops. So there you are: we need bottle top art.

I’ll be honest, I like bottle top art, there, that wasn’t too difficult was it?

For a complete understanding of bottle top collecting and other forms of beery madness, Martyn Cornell’s beer Memorabilia is essential.

Getting lambic

‘Do you get your water from the canal outside?’ asked my mate the Maltworm, the first time I visited Cantillon in Brussels (living in the city for several years he’d been before and knew what to expect, but was still capable of asking the odd daft question). No answer came, just the sort of look the brewery’s totemic Jean-Pierre Van Roy probably reserved for those who asked for a glass of Jupiler, oh and could I have a slice of lemon on the side of the glass garcon. ‘What do you think?’ the look seemed to say. Of course the water came from the mains. This was 1997 after all.
Read more on Cantillon? Go to www.beeralewhatever.com/breweries.html for further enlightenment.

A Proustian pint for me and my friend

Nostalgia sells beer — doesn’t it? Stella Artois harkened back to pre-World War I rural France (and last year summoned up the ghosts of Sixties Cannes as Jean-Paul Belmondo once again pulled a good-looking bird); various IPAs evoke the Victorian age; porter sometimes goes back further — while post-modernist pranksters BrewDog look to punk and an 1980s art school aesthetic (Zeitgiest was a word a lot of us toyed with back then, and who knows maybe we’ll have Bauhaus one day — hopefully not, once was enough for that sorry band). They all look back, even though the packaging can be contemporary (‘with a twist’ is a word flayed and featured over and over again in gastro-publand and sometimes in beer).
Can beer escape its past or is it irrevocably linked to yesteryear? And why? Does it matter if it tastes good and takes us to another place.
I asked several brewers and commentators the question. Here’s Meantime’s Alastair Hook, with more to follow — what do you think?
Alastair Hook
"Beer is as irrevocably linked to yesteryear as organized society is….Humans look back if they want to learn, and consumers like the validation of history. Contemporary twists, cutting edge production methods, or modern presentation are the human manifestations of the desire to change and improve, and that is what separates Man from Beast. At Meantime we have the epic shadow of the history of brewing in London checking our every move, but we recognize a consumer, who typical in any modern urban metropolis demands more. They want vision and creativity, and what life has taught us all is that you can have neither without a conscious or sub-conscious respect for the past. Anarchy is ugly in beer, whereas in more complex life forms such as Music, or Art, anarchy can find a home. Beer is after all the nation’s favorite drink and is at the end of the day not a comfortable home for radical revolutionaries. Its simplicity is its beauty and its strength. So I am afraid your nostalgia factor with a contemporary twist is a hard one to escape from!"

St Bernadus 12

St Bernadus 12 — what a lovestruck poem of a beer, a rhapsodic outpouring of liquorice, mocha coffee, chocolate, spice and alcoholic richness that deserves to be worshipped; an end of evening thriller that sends one to bed mellow, beaming with a smiling sense of how wonderful beer can be. In my cellar it stands on the shelf, the deep rich blue label with the smiling monk on the front a high note of colour in a muted forest of other bottles with their labels of pale burgundy, light denim blue, Stygian darkness with golden lettering picked out like searchlights in the sky. This is a beer made to be studied. And next time I contemplate a glass of 12, I have a hankering for serving it alongside a plate of rabbit ravioli. I cannot wait.

Take a trip to Sharp’s

Take a trip to the brewery at Sharp’s, a febrile and fast-growing business comfortably at home in the village of Rock, a place that takes its place in the pages of tabloid shame as the place where the well-bred go to ill behave. Across the mouth of the River Camel from Padstow I and others go, a short ferry’s ride, shorter still when the tide is out. Vast expanse of golden sand stretches aside the ever widening waters; to the northwest where the open sea waits to embrace the Camel, waves break and foam over the Doom Bar — a place of wreck and toil; but also a name for the bar-friendly Doom Bar, Sharp’s signature beer (see it: amber in colour; taste it: dry biscuity chewiness embracing sweetish citrus marmalade on the palate, quick finish, easy to drink).
Read more on Sharps? Go to www.beeralewhatever.com/breweries.html for further enlightenment.

Why on earth Maltworms?

I first came across the word Maltworms in a drinking song written by the composer Moeran, who was a bit of a boozer himself — apparently it comes from the 16th century and its early modern origins reminded me of the joy with which I had savoured similar drink-orientated words of the time, such as pot-valiant, a word that I seem to recall being used in Shakespear, probably referring to the likes of Falstaff, whose martial boasts would depend on the amount of sauce he had put back. According to various dictionary definitions a maltworm is a tippler and a toper and — presumably — a pot-valiant, which puts Falstaff very much in the frame. These days I’ve not come across it being used to denote a love of malty beers, such as hophead gets chucked about when the IBU queens spring forth. Maybe the idea of someone being called a worm is not the same as being called a hophead, with its references to potheads and crackheads (a denuded belief that an excess of narcotics opens up the doors of perception and other such dopey things). At least we haven’t got yeast beasts…
Onto the words of the song. I do love the first verse, which suggests someone with a delicate constitution who, fair play, is not ill enough to give up the ale — ‘I cannot eat but little meat,/ My stomach is not good;/ But sure I think that I can drink/ With him that wears a hood.’ I think we’ve all been there.
*That simple looking maltworm is not me by the way.