Halloween Hobgoblin

It’s Halloween!

And if your local supermarket or beer shop doesn’t have pumpkin beer, then the next best thing to celebrate the might be the Halloween branded bottles of Wychwood Hobgoblin, found retailing for £1 at ASDA.

The £1 price tag didn’t scare us but the beer did a little. We must have grabbed a dogby bottle because the usual stewed fruit aroma had matured into rotting crab apples (old hops perhaps?) and the familiar fruit cake richness had become an earthy sweet ‘n sour tang, like rosé wine left unattended overnight.

A bad apple perhaps but if you get a better luck of the draw Hobgoblin is a robust strong beer for warming a cold and prickly Halloween evening (or simply accompanying an X Factor eviction should that be your Sunday night TV tipple). Read the rest of this entry »

Manchester sure does have a lot to answer for. It’s grim Lancastrian streets have provided us with Simply Red, political massacres and one of Britain’s best loved soap operas.

Despite these things, Manchester is a fine city. Red brick turrets and soot covered chimneys etch the skyline, broken up by the knife edge Hilton and the famous Granada television lettering. The streets are more city-like than Leeds – wide life-threatening avenues dotted with trams and other forms of exotic transport. It seems busier too, there are more buses, more taxis, more Greggs.

Casks at the Marble Brewery in deepest darkest Manchester

Outside the city centre Manchester sprawls in all directions. Without the naturally imposed boundaries of the cities of West Yorkshire, or the nearby Pennine towns that look down on the city from Saddleworth, Manchester was stretched like a rolling pin, much like Birmingham. Vast inner city estates and buildings housing myriad industries in ever varying buildings extend as far as the eye can see.

Wandering from Picadilly station the restaurants and pasty shops of the CBD soon turn into taxi offices and warehouses. And more pasty shops. Walking northwards through this area a Loiner might assume it to be the Holbeck of Manchester – once full of industry that fuelled the city’s progress, but now old railway lines and pot holed side roads in need of repair.

Deep inside the vaulted ceiling of one of the railway arches a quiet revolution has been taking place. Marble Brewery occupies a sloping archway, stainless steel vats tucked neatly under the curves of the painted brickwork, just a stone’s throw from their spiritual home, The Marble Arch pub.

And on a grey but dry Saturday in October, a menagerie of beer lovers gather in this magnificent watering hole. Tiled retrospectively to recreate a bygone age, it’s a marvel compared to your average Wetherspoon’s decor.

Twissup starts and familiar friends mingle with new and unfamiliar faces all in search of a perfect pint, whatever your preferred taste or dispense mode. Manchester might have even more to answer for by the end of the night…

Marble Arch, Manchester

Smoky as hell to smell and like a burnt caramel bar to taste, M&S’s London Porter is a sweet beer to devour with masses of chocolate or marshmallows over a camp fire.

If you don’t fancy the great outdoors then no worries, the lingering smoky presence hangs around for a long time in your mouth and may invoke daydreams of sitting under the stars and gazing at the heavens.

It’s packed with malt variety: you can settle for adoring it’s remarkably sweet Cadbury’s flavours, or close your eyes and take in the notes of liquorice, coffee and molasses that may or may not be hiding under the covers of darkness.

For best results wait for a cold, wet October night when the light recedes before you’ve even left work. Use as a slow burning nightcap, and crack open in place of a steaming mug of fluffy hot chocolate. Nestle deep into the sofa, dip into your gastronomic vice of choice and have a bit of mid-week you-time.

London Porter brewed by Meantime for M&S

You only notice the musty smell if you’re unfortunate enough to get stuck in a queue back past the bread plinth, towards the shanty town of chest freezers (the sliding doors are the backbone of each ageing unit rather than the doorway to claim Aunt Bessie’s Apple Pies and out of date Fab lollies. From the darker corner, six people deep in the line of dipsomaniacs, the mildew becomes noticeable, the shelves seem more yellow than cream and dust hangs on the rim of metal tins, clogging the air as winter jackets brush past the weeping shelves. Read the rest of this entry »

My goal recently has been to introduce the hygge to my life. The Danish concept of conviviality, cosiness, comradeship and Carlsberg is something that we simply don’t have in the UK. We have tipsy, we have drunk and, as Pete Brown so eruditely points out in Three Sheets To The Wind, we have a plethora of adjectives to describe alcoholic intoxication, every last one of them being decidedly negative. Read the rest of this entry »

5am Saint was one of BrewDog’s less controversial PR stunts. The beer simply didn’t have  a name, until ‘Adrian’ popped up on their blog and selected this little gem.

I’d love to carry on the heaven/hell theme that led to the colour of the label, but 5 am Saint is neither angel nor devil. In fact it took me a while to think of it as anything special at all. Of course, it is fundamentally better than picking up a tin of Grolsch from the supermarket…

Some beers simply burst out of the bottle. Some need coaxing and barely deserve the glass.

5am Saint is the former, brimming with energy and instant flavour, as our most BrewDog bottles (but not casks!). Fresh fruit smash your nose via some rock n’ roll hops, smacking you tastebuds into submission. The fruits are floral and fruity; the bitterness is sharp, cutting through the modest malt. Nectarines, roses and summer fruit sorbet turn my nose inside out. This is pleasant in the best possible sense of the word.

This is the 5th or 6th botle of 5am Saint I’ve tried, and it’s by far ‘the best’, full of vigour and flavour. If you try hard enough there’s essences of citrus and herbs (go on, try hard, let your imagination go wild!)

Enthusiasm aside, 5 am Saint still isn’t a beer I’d buy all the time. It took a few bottles and the perfect temperature to achieve the smorgasbord of flavour we knew it was hiding, and even then whilst it’s interesting it’s not satisfying or balanced in the way my favourite beers are.

5am’s perfect place is along side the barbecue beers reserved for chilling low and coolling down on when Britain managed to snatch a day or two of really hot sunshine each year. The colour of the label is probably apt as it’s the perfect partner for the day when you worship the little white ball in the sky, only to return to work on Monday with bright red marks around the fringes of your clothing and a hangover because you stayed up until summer sunrise.

Brewdog 5am Saint

Beer information:
Beer: 5am Saint
Brewery: BrewDog
Style: Amber Ale
ABV: 5%
Country: Scotland

Once upon a time there was a beautiful island paradise. Its gentle hillocks were topped with white fluffs of sheep and from the approaching fishing boats it glinted golden as the sun’s rays bounced off husks of barley in the fields that canvassed the ground.

The islanders rejoiced in the fertile soils and nestled contently in the island’s curves, appreciating its temperate nature and voluptuous harvests. From the mainland, scores of visitors were drawn in by the island’s abundant bounty, and sometimes purely on the effervescent energy the land seemed to glow with.

At sunset a gentle haze hang around the shoreline and dissipated the reflected sunlight that the fisherman watched for. The light receded over the tall hop plants, unrepentant structures of grace and beauty that lined the fields of grain, but was not lost forever. Captured in the crops, that sunlight would eventually reach distant shores, mixed with dune-filtered water and seasoned with the fruit of the hop plant, a broth stirred into life with an eccentric yeast and ready to deploy that same solar energy for the benefit of mankind. Read the rest of this entry »

Beers these days are hoppy. Well, I reckon they probably are more hoppy than they used to be. Hoppy hoppy hoppy. Such…an easy word to use. And such a generalisation. I never wrote about beer 20 years ago. I was a young Yorkshire lad acclimatising to life in North Oxfordshire, still a decade or so away from being able to legally drink. But I don’t reckon the bitters were as hoppy nor the hops as citrusy. Hopback Summer Lightning was as young as I was, yet to influence the brewing scene in ways its creators couldn’t imagine.

But Summer Lightning and the US craft revolution have definitely had an impact on the direction of contemporary beer. It’s got paler and it’s got hoppier, right?

Very occasionally I’ll read beer tasting notes waxing lyrical about yeast or malt character, but still the hop talk outweighs the discussion of other ingredients 10 to 1. Hell will freeze over before we see tweets raving about how the mineral content of water affects mouth feel.

Well here’s a beer to shout about, and not because of hops. Co-op Harvest Ale. Read the rest of this entry »

Beer brewing in the UK has been enjoying a renaissance of late. At least that’s what we’re told by the enthusiasts: from bloggers, brewers and drinkers alike. There has never been a better time to enjoy good quality, locally-brewed and ethically-sourced beer.

Kent Beer Festival 2010

One of the best ways to put this cheery rhetoric to the test is that staple of the drinkers’ diary, the beer festival. One of the grandees of the scene is the CAMRA Kent Beer festival

Now into its 36th year and, judging by the amount of brewers in attendance (around 120, or so we were told), and the decent-sized crowds packing the bars, the UK beer industry must be in pretty decent shape. Kent beers were well-represented as you’d expect, ranging from the Mild, Star and Light ales of Goachers of Maidstone, through to the honest hoppy Gadd’s bitters of Ramsgate.

Once we’d negotiated the dusty pathways of Merton Farm, paid our £4 entrance, and collected our tokens from the CAMRA volunteers manning the glass station, we were off into the murk of the cowshed.

First up was a good half of British Bulldog (4.3% ABV) which had a good dark amber colour and long hoppy finish. Strong one that, and a couple too many could have seen us raiding the snacks before time. But we moved on through the crowds towards Goachers where a pint of Real Mild Ale (3.4% ABV) and a half of Gold Star (5.1% ABV) went down easier than a Portuguese centre-half. Good beers, enough malt in each to make them drinkable summer pints.

My companion was pining for the ‘Pink Girlie Bar’, an exclusive area dedicated to the first time real ale drinkers. The staff here were excellent and even though busy, were handing out tasters to the more ale-shy. A half of Little Sharpie (3.8% ABV) from Humpty Dumpty of Reedham was a flowery, hoppy treat while the Cascade Pale Ale (4.8% ABV) had enough bitter thump to satisfy even the most un-girly drinkers in attendance. Kent’s oldest brewer, Shepherd Neame of Faversham, were well-represented with five beers to try: pints of Master Brew (3.7% ABV) and my all time favourite Spitfire (4.5% ABV) took the evening to a sound finish.

Although the toilets remain questionable, as too the bands playing atop a dodgy rigging of scaffold, the true stars of the show were the micro-breweries. Millis Brewing Co of Gravesend and Swan of West Peckham were just two of the many small-scale brewers on display, and bucking the trend in this so-called age of austerity. Kent beer drinkers have never had it so good.

Does sexism still exist in the beer industry. Nah, surely not?!

Beer festival information:
Festival: Kent Beer Festival
Organiser: CAMRA
Dates: 22nd – 24th July
Country: Merton Farm, Canterbury, UK