Lager of the week — St Mungo

What on earth is going on? This is a seriously good British (or should I say Scottish?) craft lagered beer. West is inspired by the enviable beer culture of Franconia, but their best seller St Mungo reminds me of a Bohemian Pils — whatever side of the border it falls on it’s a pretty stupendous lager, emanating from the home of Tennant’s, the grandfather and grandmother of cooking lagers. The nose is resiny, I’m thinking good Pilsner Urquell, a bodacious and sensual body with a dry bitter finish, a very dry finish that suggests you might need another (and I bloody will have another). I would contend it’s closer to a Bohemian Pilsner than a Helles, but I would also say this is a very modern lager, and perhaps indicative of the attitude that Franconia has to beer as opposed to the Reinheitsgebot-happy drones of a lot of the German brewing industry (though West do adhere to the Law). It’s fantastic and it’s probably one of the best British craft lagers I have had for ages (I also worship at the feet of Meantime’s Vienna, Pils and Festbier, while Taddington, Cotswold and Freedom, as well as a growing clutch of others, have my vote — and just in case you are interested, this is all part of ongoing research for a feature). West: where have you been all my life?

Take a drink with a stuffed baboon

If you’re in and about Winchester and fancy a cracking pub stuffed full of curios (including a stuffed baboon, see pic here) then the Black Boy in Winchester is your man, or read what I think of it in today’s DT.

Roll out the barrel for Alastair Simms (not the actor)

Amid the tales of glasses, pubs closing and whatever else gets you down about the beer we love, here’s a positive beer story I’ve written for tomorrow’s DT about the master cooper of Wadworth’s. I’ve also done articles on inn signs and hops for them, and it has a regular pub review every week (as far as I can work out the only one of the broadsheets to do so), so beer has a voice here.

Lager of the week — Nils Oscar God Lager

This is a Swedish beer which has long been a favourite of mine: dark orange-gold in colour, while the nose is soft and sweetish, reminiscent of gently toasted white bread; there’s also a sort of dry biscuit/cracker character on the nose as well, with a restrained citrus orange in the background. A breakfast beer perhaps? Initial impressions in the mouth are of its intense bitterness and a lasting dry finish reminiscent of the breakfast cereal Grape Nuts; or imagine a hay barn in the summer when it hasn’t rained for a while and you can almost taste the dryness in the air. The beer delivers a vigorous piney and resiny palate-scrubbing effect to the palate, there’s also a light bittersweet side; it’s a sexy Marilyn Monroe of a lagered beer, a beer that sways onto the palate expressing big bold flavour colours as well as soft and seductive notes. In other words I like it — should you? I do.

Can the can

On the train back west after a BGBW committee meeting at the sinister headquarters of the BBPA in the open spaces of Vauxhall. As the Secretary of this illustrious organisation I’m the person who takes notes of the gnomic utterances of folk such as Zak Avery and Pete Brown, whom those in the blogworld will know as well as their own mother, as well as the ever cheerful Larry Nelson, who edits the invaluable Brewers’ Guardian, the dapper head of Cask Marque Paul Nunny, and the inscrutable Chairman Tim Hampson. However, this post isn’t about them, it’s about the plastic glass of Tribute that sashays about on the drop-down desk (what else could I call it) in the seat next to me. It’s from a can and is absolutely delicious (and I have matched it with a bag of cheese and onion crisps, which is a match that Garrett Oliver will be not celebrating any day soon). Having enjoyed a canned Steam Engine lager (though Stan Hieronymous tells me he’d had a duff one at their brewpub recently), I’m willing to give decent beers like Tribute a go when they come in a can. This is lovely — floral, aromatic spring cut flowers leavened by a light undercurrent of soft caramel, it helps to put up a sunny wall against the darkness outside. I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between this and a bottled version, though draught might be more of a challenge. More please. How about Proper Job in a can? In the words of the Marxist historian (whose work and utterings were the bane of my first year in college) Christopher Hill, the world is turned upside down. First, canned beer is good, whatever next? Oh I know the pre-meeting pint of Young’s Bitter in the Riverside at Vauxhall had a mouth-zapping, palate snapping bitterness that I don’t recall in the Wandsworth model, and I loved it. The world’s gone mad.

What to swig with jugged hare

The end of the shooting season and what better dish to celebrate it with than jugged hare, a pungent, gamey, earthy dish that my family loathe but I love and descend on from above at least once every winter. And then what beer shall be served alongside? I cracked open a Cantillon lambic, thinking of that old wine and food adage — champagne goes with everything and lambic is close enough to champagne (I have got a five-year-old bottle of Deus cooling in the cellar but I am saving it for a special occasion), so ipso facto crack open a bottle of Cantillon that I have had for at least 12 months. Its effervescence scrubbed the palate clean between mouthfuls and it was sharp and funky; they worked together but it didn’t enhance the dish, so I opened a bottle of Lost Abbey’s Ten Commandments. This was a revelation as the pepper and rosemary spice in the background melded and moulded itself around each mouthful of hare with its coating of a rich sauce slightly sweetened by the addition of homemade rowanberry jelly. If Moses had been around he would have thought ‘bugger the exodus, give me a glass’. And afterwards its old spice mellowness also worked well with the chocolate cake I’d bought half-price from the Co-op en route back from my Sunday lunchtime beers. The chocolate creaminess of the cake and the spice and warming alcohol of the beer got on famously like they’d been pals forever and I toasted the hare.

A night in the pub

The barman says to her ‘he’s a beer expert, you’re a wine expert, you should all get on’. Then goes off to deal with a wanna-be ancient toff who is moaning about 50p added to his bill. It’s gone 10.20pm and I sip on a pint of Vale’s Gravitas, all tropical fruit and soft mellow hop. ‘Not bad is it,’ says her husband who confesses to drink London Pride until ‘it comes out of my ears’. What an unpleasant image. She works for one of the top wine houses and is down for a couple of days. ‘Would you like another drink,’ says a chap to my right. She says: ‘wine is best because it has layers of complexity that beer doesn’t.’ She looks smug and complacent when I counter with words that talk about the carbonation of beer cutting through fatty food, the yin and yang of hops and malt, the sweet and the sour of the lambic, the world of beer beyond London Pride — a good beer but hardly something that is the Bordeaux of beer, unlike Fuller’s’ Golden Pride, which Michael Jackson used to describe as the cognac of beer. After a lot of friendly banter, we end up like the other’s night’s Villa-Gooners match, a draw (I would have been thankful for that result with the Mancs yesterday) — there’s still a lot of work to be done with the wine world though.
The pic is not the pub where the chat took place, but somewhere I went last week and was totally enthralled by.