Oxfordshire Marshmellow

BrewDog Dogma after rehab?

An aroma of seeds, thick and sticky. Open it up with a bit of oxygen and red berries burst in the nostrils. It tastes of marshmallows of course, with dashes of toffee, spice, poppies…

This might not be to everyone’s tastes in the same way as Theakston’s Grouse Beater whch has a similar complicated taste that cuts through the usual bitterness of British brown ales.

It’s what BrewDog’s Dogma might be like after a few months in the Priory.

I probably had to work quite hard on this beer, but underneath the initial taste, there’s much for than a hop or malt character to it – it’s interesting if not immediately ‘wow’.

This weekend I spent £10 on beer.  Two Elizabeth Fry’s. A pair of fivers.

In return Wm Morrisons Supermarkets PLC handed over 36 bottles of beer for my imbibing enjoyment, 2×18 pack boxes of Bière Continental.

Despite some taunts on twitter I stacked half of the first case in the freezer and the remaining half in the fridge, plonked myself on a chair in the garden and necked the sweet golden liquid as quickly as I sweated it out in the blistering heat.

A waste of money? Absolutely not. The same amount of branded lout or fancy bottled beer would have set me back twice or thrice as much, depending on your tipple. The chubby 275ml were just about the right size to stay cool in the blistering sun instead of turning in a tepid vial of…yeah, you know what I mean.

Bière Continental

This wasn’t a blind, test. A 500ml bottle of Saltaire Fuggles was boiling like Eyjafjallajoekull by the time I’d got half way down it. Carlsberg Export became an insipid green bottle of water, dashed with a trace of barley.

I'm being serious, it's great stuff!

Which kinda ruined the experience.

Morrison’s ‘French’ stubbies on the other hand were ice cold, liquid refreshment. Take them as they are – no craft brew, no care and attention. You can freeze them to smithereens and they perform even better, they hydrate you better than anything else I tried.

Plus they brought back fantastic family holiday memories of rotisserie chicken, cheese filled baguettes and Eurocamp in the Vendée?

Perfectionner de la bière?

In the specific conditions of Saturday afternoon, c’est possible…

Once upon a time Britain was an industrial nation. The population were manual workers, skilled or miners, all contributing towards the rise of the Empire.

Nowadays we work at screens, behind partitions, “in services“.

Those grey, growing gas stores, the vast warehouses, the corrugated factories; they’re alien to much of Britain; a spec on the landscape, an irritation to an otherwise green and pleasant land.

These gunmetal structures, whilst reduced in their visibililty, still make up the backbone of everything we do. Power stations are an enigma, distribution centres an eyesore and factories an unkown quantity to sneer at from incoming city-link trains.

Sneer all you want but you wouldn’t be accessing Twitter on your long-haul commute without them.

Industrial wonder: Coors Maltings Stores

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Tonight I went to 3 pubs I’ve never been to before. I’ve lived near them all for over 3 years, but tonight was the first time I’d ventured over their thresholds.

I’ve long believed that much more than the smoking ban has caused the British local to wither to it’s current state. I’m right as well, I know it. I don’t doubt the smoking ban has exasperated problems that some pubs faced, but there are many more issues that have led to bars, clubs and people’s living rooms beating pubs to share of wallet.

Tonight is a micro example, a tiny embodiment of how things have changed yet not changed in Britain. I will write about this another time and in greater detail, but to summarise my thoughts, the demise of British pub is finite, it’s a numbers game and it won’t end in extinction, merely a change of nomenclature and form.

The first pub we visited tonight, I will never go back to. It was rubbish. They promote local music and serve local people, which should be applauded, but it smelt and the music was shite (it may keep me up all night, up all night…) The band played Van Halen and Bon Jovi badly.

The second pub looked twice as good from the outside. It was lively: impromptu darts and possibly impromptu karaoke thrived. There was a nice lounge but a decrepit bar. The bar staff were downright ignorant. We felt completely unwelcome. Newcomers? How dare they come in here and spend money.

The third was the liveliest of the establishments, with a full on disco visible only when you hit the front porch. Remarkably, it was the most amendiable to conversation. Perhaps we’d just warmed up, lubricated with two pints previously. Or perhaps signs of human life simply woke us up. And possibly the bar staff, who were all remarkably attractive.

On a less positive note, midway through our first pint of cooking lager, my good friend was told “I’d nut you, but I can’t be arsed.” We drank two pints each there and chatted enthusiastically between us. Apparently that’s enough to piss off some of the twats that live in this country.

If you think I’m being snobby, at one point police officers were called to quell the increasingly tense mood. Just prior to this, 6 chaps had left the pub in a particularly argumentative moment, and only 3 came back. I can only presume the other three left with broken pride if not broken noses.

The British pub is alive and well in many places. Despite probably 1/3 of pubs around my area being boarded up, the ones that aren’t are doing a fine trade. There’s little in the way of cask ale, there’s little in the way of customer service, but the people love and hold dearly these locals that are their preference over heading into the city centre.

These locals won’t die out soon, but they will diminish in numbers. And the reason? They are bloody horrible places to go to. Increasingly they will serve a smaller audience, and, unfortunately, where better pubs could historically do well, the image of worse pubs will mean that the public house is an inferior alternative to the modern living room.

I’m sitting at in front of a my flat screen monitor, head buried deep in pencil squiggles, crossings out and Excel formulas. Square eyes set in hours ago and everyone else left the office at home time. “What the hell am I doing still here?” I ruminate to myself. With that I’m running for the 20.54, a potentially mythical bus which the various timetables disagree on the existence of. It arrives, albeit a different route number. My demons always start with a bus journey like this…

Home and tired, half a pizza pings in the microwave and I’m just in time to crack open a Saltaire Cascade as Dimbleby open up the Beeb’s election proceedings. It seems like a lifetime ago since I was in the polling station before work. Sarah’s gone to bed, I’m staring straight through the TV as the country peers in on itself from little boxes and social networks.

Cascade is all lemon flavour eco-friendly washing up liquid and digestive biscuits. It disappears before Sunderland’s first ballot boxes are returned and a second beer follows quickly. The Kernel Brewery Centennial Pale Ale wows me. It’s the refreshing tonic I need, it’s Um Bongo aroma cuts through my zombie-like state. Ribena, oats, not too bitter: it’s perfect.

Little do I know it but control of the evening has long since slipped away. It was always heading this way but as always, I didn’t realise until much later. Lack of sustenance and a fragile state of mind soon lead to self-reflection, self-doubt and self-pity.

The pale ale is gone all too quick. By the end the first few seats are announced and a huge Tory swing looks likely. I’m pondering on my vote, on the country’s votes, mulling over the issues that really matter. I ponder over work, over the numbers still swirling in my head. 95% of what I’ve done won’t get used during tomorrow mornings meeting. C’est la vie!

The evaluation that began on the bus journey continues, and Moor JJJ IPA is an enthusiastic catalyst to soul searching. What am I doing sat drinking alone, how will this help me in the morning? I sniff the pungent liquid in the glass, simply to justify the drinking of it (and not admit I’m drinking to get away from the world). I jot down some token phrases – ‘fruit pudding’, ‘peaches’, ‘robust alcohol’ and even ‘aniseed’. ‘This is no IPA’ I add. Just like my job isn’t real marketing… Like my blog isn’t real writing… Like the Lib Dems popularity won’t translate to real votes…

In a flurry I scribble lots of things down. A book idea, a vision for a greener earth, a world without borders, a few illegible words on the beer I’m drinking, a song lyric that will never be put to music… The country are musing on their future, beer bloggers are looking inwards in order to start writing outside their comfort zones, I feel at a crossroads in many different aspects of my life and something is compelling me to make a change, or a difference, or a stand.

It all feels pretty insignificant. My grand designs are a fallacy. It’s hard to accept that you simply aren’t prepared to make the sacrifice needed. There’s a certain irony as MPs who’ve decided to do just that are rounded upon on the television. Democracy at it’s best and worst.

What can a man do but open a Thornbridge Halcyon and settle for life’s simple pleasures. As I do everything feels better and for the first time in 48 hours I feel relaxed. My attentions turn away from my inner sanctum, away from utopian dreams. I knock a big swig of beer back (passionfruit, pineapple, dashes of peaches and strawberries, Halcyon is an Innocent Smoothie on acid). I daydream of promotion celebrations on Saturday and smile under the weight of a happy memory. A Lib Dem seat comes in. I slump into the sofa content and let my brain turn off.

Waking up with the lights on and TV blaring at 5.05am that euphoric feeling wore off a bit. Especially as I looked at the grim blue constituency scene overlaid on the familiar map of the UK. It’s weird how all those weary, slightly inebriated thoughts disappeared too, only to come flooding back in the shower a day later. Sometimes you can look too deep, and sometimes not look inwards enough. Sometimes you just need a beer to see the wood not just the trees.

Burton Bridge Tickle Brain

So far, I’ve not found Burton Bridge’s beers the easiest to drink. Their labelling challenges the normal conventions of beer branding and similarly their beers challenge the in-vogue tastes. But Henry VIII and a lack of Amarillo/C-Hop infused smack-you-round-head flavours aside, there’s something else different about this brewery.

At Christmas I tried their Pale Ale and by a country mile it was the hardest beer I tried to write about during the festive period. I’ve still not got round to buying another bottle to formalise my views on it. So writing about the Tickle Brain is a bit of a gamble, especially as I’ve yet to distinguish what (if anything tangible) makes Burton Bridge so different.

Tickle Brain pours amber with a hint of ruby. It’s foreboding, with little head or carbonisation. It looks…difficult.

On the nose there’s noticeable brown apples, I can’t tell if the red or green kind. Esters or acetaldehyde, I guess. Alcohol dominates the first taste but further sips pull the curtains back on a complex interaction of bitterness and sweetness. Subsequent sips are washed around the mouth revealing the faintest tiniest hint of something Orvallian: root veg, pepper, spice; a weirdly sweet and perhaps imagined drop of raisins, Belgian Christmas-ale esque. Near the end I chuck the sediment in and the musty remains develops a buttery body, a surprisingly pleasing anecdote to the vinegar feeling the rest of the bottle left around my gums.

Tickle Brain is Old Thumper as barley wine (or Abbey Beer as the branding suggests) with a dash of Belgian seasoning and unmistakeable alcohol. Two pours in to the bottle my head feels lighter and heavier at the same time. I guess you could call that Tickle Brain.

CAMRA says...

Tickle Brain Ale. Does what it says the monk says on the tin.

*I wanted to say ‘undisguisable alcohol’, but my oversized Penguin dictionary (1,642 pages long) claims this does not exist as a word. Which seems silly. Language is fluid after all and undisguisable seems fairly standard. Am I missing an obvious alternative?!

The run up to the 2010 election isn’t looking like much of a beery affair. There may be some lively debate between scaremongering neo-prohibitionists and staunch defenders of personal freedoms, but I’m yet to be convinced we’ll see mandatory tee-totalism as the main focus of the next live television debate.

Back in 1874 the general election was a distinctly beery affair. ” Read the rest of this entry »