A cyclist eases along the uncluttered embankment; a couple stand contentedly at the waters edge peering towards their future; a couple of suits stroll happily in the yellowing evening light towards an ice cream van sat under the shade of a riverside tree.

So is printed the scene on every bottle of Meantime London Lager. I imagine the inky outlines slowly awakening into a perfect city portrait, rustling and rising to the cafes and bars for a peaceful drink.

The reality is more likely to be Boris bikes avoiding brisk paced briefcases and couples cringing into cameras, tensed outstretched arms aiming backwards to frame faces in front of famous skylines; seagulls, crisp packets and gust-strewn hair swirl and swoosh in an orchestrated effort to ruin the shot.

Luckily I can gaze at the winning shot hanging on the wall whilst sipping a brisk and fizzy lager, reminiscing on our recent trip to the capital (the winner was the best of a bad bunch). The creamy body, cornflake flavours and subtle lemony scent are a picture perfect beer, a long way from the stereotypical lager of crummy pubs and industrial processes. Even the bitterness feels calm and natural, light and transient like the crunch of celery.

The London Eye creeps skywards over the serene label edge. The only way to enjoy this surreal version of the city is to jump aboard; and with that I grab another bottle of this seductively crafted (and marketed) beer.

A Meantime Picture of London

Step down below the boardwalk into a cushioned seat, rest against a table cut directly from the stump of an strong, thick tree. Magnums of sake screen the subterranean dining area from the narrow stairs that bring merry groups down from the street level bar.

There’s noodles, soup, sushi and specials, with beef, duck, chicken, vegetables and fish (some raw, some cooked). But the bento boxes mesmerise everyone with their cute and stylish partitions of BBQ ribs, chicken teriyaki, fillet steak, pork cutlets, deep fried king prawns and more. They are suitably accompanied by wasabi, ginger, chestnuts, courgette, sweet potato, cherrys, orange slices – and a smorgasbord of deep fried titbits to share.

Sapporo lager seems the honourable thing to do and it’s cleans up after fatty mouthfuls of the battered tasties that start proceedings. A pint of Asahi will do the job too. But not too much – food is abundant here, take things slow.

Asahi Dark, roasted husky cereal beer, is much better complemented with the sticky sauce saturated meat, but even better still with the seaweed drizzled profiteroles for afters – a dry, bitter finish highlights the acute sweetness of the chocolate, complements the sauce; the creamy dessert then reveals something earthy and mellow about the beer.

Don’t ask what to pair with Itchy Lychee ice cream or pink grapefruit sorbet. You may be better off with a smouldering sake or a hot spirit infusion.

“We should do Japanese more often.”

“Yeah, and the beer ain’t half bad either”.

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Deep in a basement bar not far from Bohemia, the cerny pilsners of the brewery up the road changed my perception of lager. Sweet and rich but surprisingly light, they distributed refreshment and nutrition as if feeding me and five thousand other thirsty drinkers.

Meantime Union shares a similar contradiction. Broody and brown, this is is no pale bodied pushover. Lagered it is, and a tad metallic to boot, coupled with a dark caramel composition and a surprisingly roasted finish suggesting mustard seeds, honey-soaked biscuits and bitter Bourneville.

Union shares the creaminess of some of the golden pilsners that stole a march onn Vienna style lagers many years ago.

It’s enigmatic to say the least. Coloured like a bitter, tastes like a bitter, but brisker, bolder, livelier. It’s interesting, ebbing and flowing between it’s different elements, but it’s hard to see how it would fit into my everyday drinking.

Except for with pizza. Michael Jackson recommended amber beers with pizza and at a basic level this shares many facets – creamy texture, bitterness, effervescent, mouthfilling malt and sweet roasted finish.

So being under £2, being under 5%, and offering refreshment, intrigue and solace, this is one beer that will be on the shopping list alongside doughballs and garlic bread.

Caught my eye as I thought it was a football beer!

A Union of dark malt, pizza and beer. Mmm.

Vienna style beers have a special place in my heart as I once named a Vienna influenced beer. Thornbridge Equinox was a one off ‘Vienna IPA’, so a little different from the copper coloured lagers of continental Europe, but I only ever got to try one pint of it. I’d love to try it again one day!

Admittedly I didn’t do my research on Cubanero Fuerte. It made a perfect birthday present for my brother, who having visited Cuba a few years ago, has become quite the fan.* So, in the process of buying him a few bottles I of course dropped a few on my side of the beer carrier and popped them in the fridge for a sunny day (yeah, optimistic I know).

For some reason I was expecting something more than a bog standard lager. Perhaps I was somehow charmed by the Jack Sparrow wannabe on the bottle and some sense of hidden treasure and adventure. So with that ever-present hope that every long suffering football fan will recognise I waded straight in.

And it turns out that Cubanero Fuerte is quite the bog standard lager. I mean, it’s not bog standard enough that I wouldn’t drink it (I surely would served cold on a hot day or in a hot bar) but it’s pretty bog standard. No hidden treasure.

It’s pale. Marketers would describe it as golden but that’s marketers for you, always selling the dream. There’s more gold in an Elizabeth Duke catalogue. It comes complete with a touch of roasted cereal but it doesn’t have quite enough earthy vigour to hide the sugary, corn syrup and metallic-like twangs that stand out like the green marks on a cheap ring finger. Surprisingly there is just a touch of actual hop flavour to tempt you further down the bottle. Well, compared to some lagers, that is…

The Bucanero might not be my cup of tea but I won’t turn him down in a moment of need. This is my brother’s Mythos after all, and that’s something worth sharing.

Cubanero Fuerte Cuban beer

*In Cuba, and the rest of the World, Cubanero is actually Bucanero (the picture make more sense now, yeah?!). Apparently copyright prevents it’s sale under it’s real name, which is a shame. Anyone know what copyright this is?

Statuesque lager the label says.

Hop Rocker.

So why is it almost entirely made of the sweat of digestive biscuits? This beer personifies Hobnobs on holiday without a care in the world, sucking lemons and painting the town red with the blood of hops. Think Holsten Pills brewed by McVities with all the ingredients on steroids. Nothing prepared me for the sweet and fruity injection or the flurry of malt near the end, malted barley rushing with blazing blues and twos to counter the whopping astringency that punches you in the face when you take a sip.

Funny how Hop Rocker slipped off the radar, because this beer is BrewDog through and through.

BrewDog Hop Rocker lager

Read the rest of this entry »

When I’m reading on holiday (and spouting verse to rival Simon Armitage) I’m never far from a little notebook where I can jot down words I’ve never come across before. That either make me sounds like a geek or perhaps slightly illiterate, but I read a lot of popular science and it can get quite…technical.

More often than not I can guess the meaning of words from their context and a dash of arbitrary knowledge. That’s because nothing is without context, nothing exists in a perfect vacuum, and that includes beer.

Luckily it only rained once on my recent holiday to Skopelos which allowed me 13 and a half days to lap up the piercing Grecian sunshine. At 36 degrees celsius to was hard not to break into sweats just lazing around with a book.

In such conditions you wouldn’t dream of picking up the same types of beers as you would at home. No matter how much a dry pale ale is perfect with the saltiness of olives or how much a German weisse would compliment the crispiness of a Greek salad, it’s just too hot for everything.

Everything that is except Mythos.

Without meaning to labour on my love for Mythos (I actually drank more Amstel on this holiday once the sun had gone down) Mythos rightly deserves it’s name and holds a special place in beer folklore. Mythos is a mythical creature that brings with it dismay and disappointment when drunk anywhere outside Hellenic border controls, yet chilled to within a inch of it’s life and deployed at critical moments of a boiling hot day on a Greek island, it’s  powers to revive might only be bettered by a cardiac defibrillator.

Admiring the distant olive groves and drying off after a dip in the swimming pool, Mythos is just…perfect. Nothing more, nothing less.

And in the context of the above weather conditions, Mythos is the best beer in the world. Period.

Mythos: the best beer in the world. The Hellenic one, at least.

On the last day our energetic shopkeeper asked me if I drank Mythos at home in England. She was delighted when I said it’s just not the same without the sun and the backdrop of Greece. “Everyone says that!” she exclaimed, wondering how such a thing could be true.

Mac’s Gold All Malt Lager would simply fly off the shelves if you stuck it in UK supermarkets.

It’s the perfect barbecue beer: it’s lager, it’s sweet golden nectar with just a hint of pilsner influence from the brewer.

It’s gimmicky ring pull gives it points simply for the lack of dependence on those pesky bottle openers that inevitably go missing mid-way through the evening, lost in decorative stones or knocked off a low brick wall into a thicket of patio plants. It happens, you know it does.

The distinctive bottle and ringpull of Mac's Gold

Mac’s doesn’t distinguish itself by being different, bold or arrogant. It’s simply good lager – a sweet not-a-million-miles-from-honey twang.

Hops don’t dominate, in fact hey barely offer any bitterness to counter the sweetness infused by the malt.

This is probably the endearing factor that might make Mac’s Gold suitable to beer lovers from all walks of life, even hop head vampires whose blood runs thick with DIPA. I believe they have a predisposition to chilled wholesome lager anyway. Even BrewDog James.

Tell me I’ve been done by the fact it looks different to the others.

Tell me actually its not better than San Miguel, Sam Adams or even Sam Smith’s Alpine.

I’ll say ‘whatever’ – whether it’s branding or body copy, Mac’s should be brewed on license over here, because it’s a winner through and through.

Macs Gold from New Zealand: Perfect for bbqs

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…

Cotswold Premium Lager - 330ml bottle

Following the brief response I made to comments asking about this lager left on an earlier unrelated post, I have now taken delivery of a batch to get a full review done. Firstly I would note that I was wrong before when I said that this came in a 500ml bottle. It does in fact come in a 330ml and so is right there in my opinion to take on the mass produced bottled lager area of the  market. I could not stand in a bar drinking Old Hooky from it’s bottle but I would have no problems doing so with a 330ml bottle like this. Having said that, the brading itself does perhaps leave a little to be desired and the label does not really have the colour or liveliness it would need to cut it on the shelves of a busy bar. The outward appearance of the bottle unfortunately does not do justice to the contents.

Golden Premium Lager

The beer is pale golden with a lingering malty aftertaste, probably down to the Maris Otter malted barley. The beer has as strong a flavour as those that it would, in my perfect world, displace from the shelves in all bars, but it is less aggressive with it. I am having a bottle with Winnie and Jim, I have been the most disciplined and dragged mine out for 15 mins but Jim polished his in less than 5 and Winnie was under 10. All three of us agree that this is drinkable, with the 5.0% abv maybe too much so!!!

I would love to see a day when locally produced lagers, available in 330ml bottles, take over from the mass produced bottles that are available in Vodka Revolutions up and down the country. If this work from the Cotswold Brewing Company is anything to go by there are certainly British lagers more than capable of taking up the fight.

After discovering this week that some friends of ours have brilliantly spoofed our efforts to appreciate good beer with their own lager reviews site, it seemed fitting that I should come across a bottle of lager I picked up in Beers of Europe a few weeks ago brewed by a company that have had rave reviews for their ale products on our own site.

Grozet: A quality lager the real-lager-reviews boys should sample.

Williams Brothers Brewing Company have couple of lagers in their range, including Ceilidh (reviewed here). Rather unusually, this beer is described on the bottle as a ‘lagered fruit beer’, which suggests that it is something of a hybrid product aimed across a couple of beer styles. Based on an old Scottish harvest beer recipe from the 16th century, we should anticipate a fruity beer infused from the gooseberries prevalent in the ingrediants.

The nose is extremely sweet, with the citrusy, fruity aroma backed up with a chocolatey note that cuts through at the end. In the glass, the liquid is a very pale blonde that lets the liveliness of the lager shine through. Despite the fruit beer connections, the appearance is definitely one of a lager, so it seems natural to describe it as such.

Despite the effervescence of the beer in the glass, the fizz on the tongue quickly fades away to something of a creamy mouthfeel that is surprising as it is pleasant. The taste continues the sweet theme set up in the aroma, but does have a citrusy sharpness about it as well. Read the rest of this entry »