Real Ale Reviews

A Hangover Cure

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Friday’s trip to London was a hectic one. I woke up knowing that it would be 13 and a half hours until my return journey commenced, about as depressing a thought as you can have at 6am. I was on a late train home from the capital and after rushing between meetings all day and frantically trying to find wi-fi around Marble Arch in the afternoon, I  spent a couple of hours with Glyn from the Rake sampling an eclectic mix of their finest beers and chatting about the busy few months we both have ahead of us. That was the eye of the storm as I then rushed up to Kings Cross for the home bound leg, eventually crawling into Morley just before the new day started.

The morning brought with it a heavy head from staying up with a nightcap to watch Mad Men on iPlayer (not to mention a quick half at Leeds Brewery Tap because I’m incapable of timing transport links with any degree of coordination). It was off to York for the day then with Sarah with the promise of a nice lunch and a slow paced amble around the cobbled streets. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: beer tickers, good beer guide, hangovers, keith floyd, prairie oyster, york

Highland Brewing Scarpa Special Pale Ale

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One of my favourite meals at the moment is grilled chicken, roasted vegetables and cous cous (interchangeable with rice, fried potatoes or other carbs to please your taste buds). Yes, the roasted veg is usually pre-chopped from ASDA – we’d never use a full courgette if we bought one – and the cous cous is Ainsley Harriot’s finest, but it’s a simple and hassle-free evening meal that’s healthy whilst ensuring we eat at a reasonable time.

It’s a meal that doesn’t want a big fancy beer. It needs something refreshing and palette cleansing, a light golden ale with qualities that mean the meal slips down easily and the night is mine to relax afterwards.

Step up Highland Brewing Company and Scapa Special. It’s a ‘world class pale ale’ and it fits the bill presented by its description: ‘golden and sparkling’, ‘light hop notes’ and a ‘balanced malt/hop middle’. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Evans – Desert Island Beers #3

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Jeff Evans writes about beer and loves it. You can just tell. The author of more editions of Good Beer and Good Bottled Beer guides than I’ve had hot meals, he shares a passion for running and Hook Norton Double Stout, both which I could easily get excited about. And to top his achievements – Beer Writer of the Year 2001, author of new beer book ‘A Beer A Day’ and contributor to numerous off- and on-line publications – Jeff can proudly add ‘World Record Holder of the fastest compiled Desert Island Beers ever’ to his email signature (with a link to the post of course!).

So, remember the rules? 3 beers, 1 meal, a record, a book, a luxury item. And one deserted desert island. To be fair our past two castaways have managed to bend the rules a little bit in their favour (ingenuity is vital for survival!) and once again we’ve succumbed to pressure. This time though their was no beating around the bush as Jeff simply asked for more beer! Read the rest of this entry »

Tax the beer why don’t you

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I hate the fact that Sarah has International Radio 1 on in each room of the house every morning, but I’ve got quite used to drowning it out. Today though, I couldn’t miss the news, in which the top story was about the new police powers to confiscate alcohol from under-age drinkers and bring in new laws to tackle persistent offenders. What grinded my gears though was the end of the piece, in which the enthusiastic news reader paraphrased the Conservative party’s comment on the news which I’ll re-paraphrase:

“These measures don’t go enough, if we get in we’ll raise taxes on alcopops and high strength beers.”

High strength beers? How are you classifying that? Beers that are over 2 or 3 units? Beers over 10% Anything stronger than a traditional dark mild? No mention of the simple fact that there are tons of other alcoholic drinks that can get you shit-faced a lot quicker and a lot more cheaply than even a head cracking barley wine.

Why does beer get the bad press when it comes to under age drinking? Something tells me I’m not going to see a bunch of 15 year olds (or perhaps 11 is it?!) swilling a bottle of imperial stout on a park bench. Nope, it’ll be a pocket-able bottle of methylated spirit and a few cheap cans from the corner shop. Taxing ‘high strength beer’ will have about as much chance of stopping under-age drinking as Manchester United do of winning the FA Cup this year.

Tags: alcohol, binge drinking, government, tories, under age drinking

Broken knees and broken keys

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There are arguably too many moments I cringe at to call myself a responsible drinker with any real level of conviction. The ones that came in the gap year before I university are mostly classified under the ‘regrets’ section of my brain. As year one of university unfolded the balance of ‘I never want to remember doing that’ versus ‘I’m pretty pleased with myself’ was evenly weighted and shifted towards to positive end of the spectrum as I matured, with a few ‘we’ll laugh at that in a few weeks’ moments thrown in for good measure.

But at 26 I thought I’d stopped doing things like singing Leeds songs in rowdy northern cities not called Leeds and waking people up in the middle of the night.

Unfortunately Saturday’s combination of Jermaine Beckford’s 95th and a half minute equaliser and Stone Ruination IPA being on draught (or draft should I say) at the last pub of our #twissup crawl, ensured the night was one that would bring back some of those youthful moments of folly.

Returning to the Hillsborough Hotel after a skinful of cask conditioned Wild Swan and a liquid supper of fancy beers from the newly opened Sheffield Tap, a bunch of bedraggled beer bloggers struggled to open the blue painted door at the front of the pub. Having no qualifications in door opening and a more general problem with late night coordination turned out not to be a career changing combination as the shiny Yale key duly snapped in the lock leaving the burning eyes of my beer chums planted firmly on my back. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: #twissup, bloggers, blogging

First past the post: binge drinking and spin doctoring to election victory

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This week is all about health and alcohol, binge drinking and the ridiculous attempts to win voters round with lies, damned lies and statistics. The debates rages across blogs; off- and online media report the press releases rather than investigating the true stories behind the official papers and reports; and I daresay a fair few people are a bit lost in the fast moving pace of the heated discussion¹. And I’m sure plenty of you will have heard much of what I have to say before as well.

I’m not jumping in with any stats – the job done by Mr PBBB is fantastic in highlighting that Disraeli’s old adage is as true now as it ever has been. Even more so the comments added to his blog and to other blogs, and the subsequent inspired posts (in the UK and beyond) has led to real, interesting debate and points of view that aren’t immediately at the forefront of everybody’s minds.

I’d rather stay clear of quantitative or qualitative data and focus a little more on the reaction to all this, the where do we go from here. Stats aside, alcohol misuse, abuse, even just plain alcohol use does cause society problems, whether in conjunction with other factors of not, and that regardless of if that’s increasing or decreasing, it would be quite nice to stop some of it and make our country a better place.

A few things strike me. One, that alcohol (or should I say the effects of abusing alcohol) is, like anything, intrinsically linked to behaviour and attitude and that isolating it as the sole cause of a specific misdemeanour or health issue seems, statistically, difficult. Anti-social behaviour (vandalism, crime, assaults), health issues (liver disease, injuries from being drunk) and other consequences (drink driving, loss of productivity) are all affected by numerous things – and many of the stats communicated to us by the powers that be seem to ignore this simple fact.

Secondly, it strikes me that there aren’t that many answers in the Great Alcohol Debate of 2010 and that’s not a criticism – it’s a delicate and complex matter. But what have the people sitting in Westminster done about this? Slammed producers of alcohol², branded publicans as irresponsible³ and patronised responsible drinkers who have continental, liberal attitudes⁴. Furthermore they’ve devised simplistic, slapstick tactics planned, from where I see it, simply to trick the public⁵. Banning dentist chairs? You really are out of touch with reality folks.

Two of the simplest points of all that undermine much of the policy makers outbursts have been made what seems like a thousand times (in one way or another) in the last 12 months but get little airplay with any major media outlet.

If people want to get drunk they will.

If an alcoholic wants a drink they will go to Tesco or the corner shop, they will buy a bottle of screw top wine/screw top vodka/ring pull cans of lager or bitter and they will head home, drinking them on the way most likely. If an alcoholic is hiding their problem from their family they will slip the bottle in their jacket⁶. They will hide a bottle under the sink⁷, in the toilet cistern⁸, in the greenhouse⁹.

If a young person wants to be the hardest bloke in town and wants the respect (fear) of everyone that heads out on a Friday night, he will get pissed and start a fight regardless of the price of a vodka red bull. If a young girl wants to throw spirits down their neck every evening and not have a job and shag around and stick two fingers up to society, they will. The price off alcohol won’t put them off.¹⁰

If people want to get drunk cheaply, they won’t buy fine wines or artisan beers

Yep, they’ll head for the offy, for the stack-em-on-the-floor-stack-em-high bargain outlets, for the supermarket. They’ll find it a lot more conducive to forgetting about live if they throw own brand vodka, aluminium beers and £1.99 white wine down their necks than ordering a Tokyo*, waiting 3 days for delivery and watching £17 (including delivery) disappear from their bank account.¹¹

There are lots of other ‘personas’ I can stereotype and situations I can try to second guess, some I have experience of some I don’t. I don’t have all the stats, I don’t have all the facts. But I know some of the psyche of both binge drinkers and alcoholics. I’ve lived the small town mentality of ‘going out’, ‘heading up the club’ and ‘getting smashed’ not that long ago. I matured and went to uni, I ‘got smashed’, I stayed out late, I missed lectures, I made friends for live, we did silly things. But fundamentally my attitudes towards society means that I consider myself a ‘law abiding citizen’, bar some breaches of copyright via music cassettes and being a month late with my vehicle tax. Oh and I owe the car park man £3.50 from last week and I haven’t reminded him on two occasions I’ve seen him since¹².

Some people are going to abuse alcohol, some people are going to abuse the goodwill society shows them and the opportunities they are presented with. Some people don’t have as many opportunities as others and this affects their behaviour in life. Some people have bad starts in live that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and those bad starts result in bad endings (of course many people start this way and end up ‘just fine’ as well). Some people have the best opportunities, great jobs, loving families, and fall into a downward spiral of disease that ruins their live). My point: you can change how you measure alcohol, you can faff about with pricing, you can ban adverts, ban references to alcohol, ban sponsorship and tell everyone alcohol will kill you. But you are never treating the problems.

So, I urge I urge politicians, journalists and all those in the business of selling alcohol (whether on- or off-trade) to take a read of what is being said online this week and listen to a broader spectrum of opinions than less-than-independent-bodies¹³ and the scaremongering press releases¹⁴. Then not just consider, but actually try to do something about the real issues. Education, anti-social behaviour (for which alcohol is often a catalyst rather than a cause), alcoholism. Stop putting your nation of drinkers in one big basket promising to tax the high hell out of everything in easy-target-quick-win PR stunts. Tax where appropriate; tackle the attitudes that cause people to not give two flying fucks about anyone else around them and smash up our towns and cities when intoxicated; find help for victims of alcohol abuse before they fall into an A&E ward; encourage respect for alcohol, respect for the communities we live in and appreciation of the slog, the climb, the rewards of life rather than the quick fix, the instant gratification, the I-want-I-get attitude that underpins society today.

How do we, as a country do that? If I knew I’d be Prime Minister, or the next famous philosopher or anthropologist. But for a start, try being honest about alcohol rather than spinning data into PR-able facts. Be open about alcohol, don’t hide it behind closed doors. If I’m getting really adventurous I’d say let’s spread altruism across our schools and teach our children that they will be rewarded for helping others not punching others. Let’s nip anti-social tendencies and prejudice in the bud early on and encouraging people from a younger age to have a broader ‘group’ mentality. My youthful visions of utopia might not be realistic, but where else do we start?

And start by trawling our blog roll for blogs that have written superb words on the subject this week too…

¹ Me included.
² As an example, BrewDog Tokyo* on which you can find multiple online sources of ridiculous outrage at this beer and it’s potential to either cure binge drinking  or cause a beer based apocalypse, depending on your bias…I mean point of view.
³ Branding the whole industry as irresponsible is a bit harsh, many other sources I’ve read have made clearer distinctions.
⁴ I refer mainly to discussions with drinkers, beer bloggers and friends who feel like they have already adopted a responsible approach to drinking and that policies seem to neglect that and penalise their drinking habits with little effect on the problems they set out to solve (e.g. increasing taxes).
⁵ Such as this reported today in The Times and other media publishers
^{6, 7, 8 and 9} Seen them all done.
¹⁰ That’s my opinion, based on my growing up and drinking experience in Banbury, Lincoln, Nottingham, Leeds & more (and isn’t restricted to young people)
¹¹ That’s a fact that doesn’t require a footnote and I’ll retract it statement if anyone can argue it’s not true.
¹² Which I thoroughly intend to pay him after pay day!
¹³ I refer here to Melissa Cole here who I trust!
¹⁴ Read any newspapers websites over the last three months and the same article and stats are reported verbatim with little or no questioning. And I will blog on my digital marketing blog about this worrying trend in the next few days at http://digitalmediamonkey.co.uk

Tags: advertising, alcohol, alcoholism, beer stats, beer tax, binge drinking, culture, government, legislation

Brass in pocket – a fresh start for Copper Dragon

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Shrouded in uncertainly it’s been a a funny ol’ festive period for Copper Dragon. Since mid December rumours of administration and liquidation have been quietly circulating and the future for Skipton’s growing brewery wasn’t looking bright.

But fresh from the Christmas holidays with their finances restructured Copper Dragon seem to be back on their feet and fighting fit for whatever 2010 can throw at them.

Online business news website The Business Desk and Bradford’s Telegraph and Argus newspaper report that Copper Dragon’s pub business was liquidised in November 2008 throwing the brewery into a turbulent period, during which the administrators were called in on the Friday before Christmas by a high street bank, which is pretty annoying by anyone’s standards. Steve Taylor, the brewery’s founder and MD subsequently took his stake in the company from 75% to 100% after refusing to give up further equity or intellectual property rights.

It’s rarely a good time for a company to go into administration but teetering on the edge of oblivion at Christmas time is particularly unpleasant, with customers looking for mini-pins for parties, pubs filling up for the festivities and staff looking forward to well earned family time. Just getting home in the snow in Yorkshire was bad enough!

So we’re really pleased that it looks like it’s all sorted and that the jobs, brewery, bistro and six of the pubs have been secured, and we look forward to sampling some of the new beers that come out of Skipton’s finest this year.

Chocolate Pudding with Custard & Wheat Beer

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As my housemate very kindly offer to cook me tea the other  night I decided to repay the favour by making a big old chocolate sponge for us all to have after. The recipe is really simple and takes minutes but the results are fantastic although they do come with the warning that this is a really filling chocolate pudding, not a  light ‘posh’ dessert.

Ingredients (My Nan gave me this recipe so it’s in oz – I make my apologies to the EU!)

6oz – Self-Raising Flour

2oz – Cocoa Powder

8oz – Butter

8oz – Castor Sugar

4 – Eggs

1 Packet Chocolate Chips

Method

The method really is easy, the first bit being the most labour intensive. Cube the butter and castor sugar together in  a bowl with the back of a metal spoon. Crack the eggs into the bowl and stir in until the mixture is smooth then sieve the flour and cocoa into the bowl and stir that in too!! Finally chuck the chocolate chips into the mix and give it one final stir. The mixture should be smooth but not too runny and, although my Nan tells me off for doing it, should taste delicious if you put a finger in!!! Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Beer and Food, Chocolate Sponge, hoppy, Moosbacher, Pudding, Wheat Beer

The Ginger Revolution

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In honour of the recent brilliant defensive  performance put in by the nation’s new favourite ginger, Paul Collingwood, (although things in South Africa have taken a turn for the worse in the last couple of days) I think it’s time to Ginger Beer it’s day in the sun.

You probably would have had to have had your head buried very deeply in the sand since last summer in order to have missed the rise of Crabbie’s. In their defence there is no attempt to hide the fact that Crabbie’s is an alcoholic version of the Ginger Beer that you get as a soft drink. I have to say that I really like it but that I don’t really like myself for liking it!!! You haven’t seen a Real Ales Reviews review of it because I wouldn’t have the face to come on here, where we espouse the virtues of micro-brewing and real brewing processes, in order to sing the praises of a mass produced and mass marketed ‘alcopop’.

The problem with Crabbie’s isn’t that I don’t like it, I have already said that I do, I just don’t see it as a beer. It’s great ice cold with a nice picnic but it just doesn’t hit any beer buttons. So what are the alternatives for us beer nuts? Well you could do a lot worse than starting with this Ginger Beer offering from Naylor’s Brewery. Details of the brewery, based near Keighley, can be found on their website. Ginger Beer is a seasonal brew but can be found in Beer Ritz at the moment.

First and foremost this is a beer. Golden amber in colour and with a lightly hopped taste the beer is present but subtle enough to allow the ginger flavour to come through and compliment it. It is not an alcoholic ginger beer but rather a genuine ginger flavoured beer, in the same way as a strawberry or peach flavoured beer. I wouldn’t expect a fruit beer to taste like fruit juice with an abv and I feel the same about this ginger flavoured beer. There is a distinction to be made between a ‘ginger beer’ and a ginger flavoured beer. Naylor’s is the latter and, in all honesty, while there is  nothing wrong with liking it, the former probably has no place in the real ales sphere.

Tags: Crabbie's, Ginger Beer, Naylor's Brewery

Man walks into a pub…

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A nice piece about beer in a tabloid sized newspaper? Surely not.

Ok to be fair it’s this months ‘What’s Brewing’, but I love the story on page 10 about Martin Brunnschweiler.

More than a decade ago Martin went to visit his sister at her pub on the Isle of Man and ended up staying there to set up a brewery called Bushy’s. The paper is a bit hazy on the details (I’m intrigued as to whether he drank the pub dry and then set up because he was thirsty and what he left behind) but I like to think the Martin fell in love with the island, the pub, the atmosphere and the opportunity. His brewery has ties to the nuclear industry (and sounds like it could double up as a bunker should a Dr Strangelove armageddon arise) and the equipment is based on a headache inducing tower arrangement that requires a certain amount of agility from head brewer Curly (yes, Curly!).

The best I can do is that I have on two or more separate occasions walked into a pub and ended up 1) working behind the bar and 2) doing the dishes, but never quite made the leap to brewing.

Tags: brewery, bushys, CAMRA, isle of man, pubs, whats brewing