Taybeh and Köstritzer beers

Among other things on Sunday night, we tasted two beers that were brought to me by different friends from Germany. The first was a few bottles of the extremely-hard-to-come-by lager "Golden", from Palestinian microbrewery Taybeh Beer (sold in many outlets in Palestine and Israel, but only three stores in the rest of the world, one of which is in Hamburg, Germany). The bottles we obtained from the Haus der 131 Biere were brewed in Germany under license; apparently the Japanese and Swedish distributors import the original beer, but I've yet to source a traveller to bring me either of those. Taybeh are still seeking distribution for their beers in the UK and USA, if anyone's interested. The second we tasted was a black lager from the venerable Köstritzer Schwarzbier (now owned by Bitburger) in eastern Germany between Leipzig and Jena. One bottle broke in our benefactor's suitcase on route from Germany, so this beer came at the cost of soiled souvenirs and a laundry bill as well as the store-price of the bottles.

History Down the Pub: London, August 28th

Harvey Quamen: Using Digital Humanities Techniques to Study the History of Beer and Brewing

Three major questions—all difficult to answer—prompt this talk:

1. what caused the sudden demise of porter around 1820?
2. how did the style called India Pale Ale spread so rapidly?
3. can we locate the historical London breweries?

Although surrounded in some mystery, these questions might be answerable using some techniques from the digital humanities. In particular, building a database of historical recipes will help us understand the movement and growth of beer styles (especially as those styles moved through homebrewing) and we can begin to track master-apprenticeship relationships with the use of propopographies, databases that serve as “collective biographies” of groups of people. Finally, using historical maps (like the Agas map digitized at the Map of Early Modern London project), we might begin to reconstruct the historical distribution of beer around the capital.

Harvey Quamen is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta, Canada. A longtime homebrewer, Quamen spent the 2009 academic year as a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College, London. Drinking with KCL and UCL friends began his foggily remembered interest in the history of London brewing.

This lecture is the inaugural event of the History Down the Pub series, and will be held in the Plough, 27 Museum Street, London (opposite the British Museum: see https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=WC1A+1LH), at 6pm on Wednesday August 28th 2013.

All welcome.

GBBF 2013: tasting notes

We attended CAMRA’s Great British Beer Festival in Kensington Olympia on the opening night, Tuesday August 13, which was also a friend’s birthday. It was a slightly odd feeling to be entering almost as soon as we were allowed to, but the drinking had already been going on for five hours because it had been the trade session all afternoon. I didn’t come to the GBBF last year, so this was my first experience of the Olympia venue, which compares favorably to the Earl’s Court where it was held for several years before. As usually, the event was well-organized, with lots of food and entertainment available; and as it was Tuesday night it wasn’t too crowded and there were enough seats for all of us.

I was hoping to start the night with a pint of Fyne’s Jarl, but it was just my bad luck that that beer won the bronze medal in the best ale awards, so it had all run out even though we arrived only half an hour after the doors opened to the public. Instead I settled for a glass of their Maverick, which was also very good: a lovely bright red-brown ale with impressively frothy head and a slightly acidic odor; a massive tart apple first taste; disconcertingly it was a bit sparkly further in the mouth, but had a good touch of caramel and satisfyingly bitter grapefruit pith in the swallow. I was happy.

The Lamb Beer and Liquor Beerfest

The Lamb Beer and Liquor on the Holloway Road, Highbury, had a London beer festival this weekend; thirteen breweries were represented, although only half a dozen beers were on cask when we turned up on Saturday afternoon. From the menu it seems most of their business is done with keg beers, and they had a bit of a problem with the temperate of the casks at the festival which they solved by passing beers up through a trapdoor from the cellar. This also involved an elaborate system of tokens (pictured below), which you could purchase from the bar and exchange for a pint. However you could also order a pint from the bar for the same price, and have it delivered from the cellar, so the function of the somewhat iconic tokens remains an utter mystery. (Perhaps they also offered indulgences?)

The Fox and the Elephant: a Belgian fairytale

If you happen to be in Brussels for a family reunion and to have some of the authors of this blog as friends, then buying some Belgian beers to bring back to London sounds like the most natural thing to do.

I manage to convince a Patient Friend to come with me to a shop that, according to my city guide, has a selection of more than 400 beers. When we enter Beer Planet we soon realise that it isn’t an overstatement.

The place is bigger than I thought and the style is quite minimalist. The walls are covered (almost from the floor to the ceiling) in simple shelves loaded with beers. I must confess: I’m lost. The beers are too many and look quite different from the ales I'm used to.

Because I am trying to approach beer-tasting scientifically, I know I need a criterion. I thought that the most appealing graphic could have been a good one...

Wandsworth Common Beer Festival, July 4-6, 2013

Wandsworth Common Beerfest is apparently not a CAMRA festival, but is co-sponsored by the London Brewers Alliance. The 100 or so beers on offer (only about half of which were still available on Saturday evening) were all from the 45 or so participating breweries in the London area—this makes everything we drank the whole weekend #LocAle, which is very cool. Held in the stylish Le Gothique Restaurant, part of the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building, a mixed residential and commercial complex kind of in the middle of nowhere, it was mostly outdoors, which was super-appropriate on this gorgeous July weekend.

The atmosphere was also somewhat different to most British beerfests—and not only because of the uncharacteristic weather—there was a markedly younger demographic than usual, and it was our impression that there was pretty even gender parity (in stark contrast to many such festivals where staff even actively make women feel uncomfortable or unwelcome). Although the beers and most people were outside in one of the gardens or courtyards, there was further food and drink available inside the bar, and live blues music from Robert Cray. I didn't try any of the food, but it seemed to be pretty basic pub or canteen fare (although the Basque-themed food van out the back was an exotic touch).

There is such a thing as Italian Real Ale!

An Italian friend of ours spent three months in England earlier this year on an exchange. She arrived hating beer (being from Italy, that's not all that surprising; look what shit they get served up. Plus, they have wine, which goes better with pasta ;-) ). She was open-minded enough to attend a few beer festivals with us, however, and seemed to be developing a taste for the less hoppy (and less lagery) real ales by the time she left. Imagine our pride when we received the following emailed report on the state of craft beer in her home town in Italy!

I looked forward to tell you that the craft beer bar eventually reopened, Birra Cerqua.

The venue is very small, so it gets crowded quickly, but there's space outside as well. The atmosphere is relaxed. The guys who work there are very friendly and easy-going, even too much perhaps late in the night! They invited us to attend I don't know which phase of brewing yesterday, but eventually we didn't go. Next time.

Bier Baron, Washington DC

On Monday night we visited the Bier Baron in Washington DC, which is a homely cellar bar beneath the Baron Hotel (on 22nd NW between P & Q). It's a nice, grungy, English-style pub, with lots of niches and corners to make it feel more private—although it's a pretty large venue—wooden chairs and age scarred tables, uneven floor and mismatched chairs. In some ways it's more like a club, with id checked at the door and regular music and other events (there's a burleque night lined up next month, which I think I'm more glad than sorry to be missing), but on a regular night it's pleasant, not too noisy, with good service and, most importantly, hundred of bottled beers on offer. (A small selection of draft ales too, as usual I think all from keg.)

Kingston Beer Festival, May 2013

We attended the Kingston Beer and Cider Festival on May 18th, for the Saturday afternoon session. We ended up not staying very late, because they were running out of beers very quickly, and the food had already gone by 18:00 and we were hungry. This was a pretty small festival, held in the Kingston working men's club, and it had that feel to it: a very large venue but a very small bar, not terribly comfortable, although it had the virtue of not being too crowded even as peak time. The first three members of staff we encountered on entering each made insulting or patronizing comments to women, which was a sadly old-fashioned approach to a beer festival (especially given the fairly large numbers of women present at this one). Otherwise it was friendly, if small, disorganized and with abysmally poor food supply.

Reading Beer Festival, May 2013

We attended the opening night of the Reading Beerfest, Thursday May 2nd. Despite having lived in Reading for almost a decade once upon a time, I'd never been to this legendary festival before, and wasn't expecting it to be so spectacular. Unlike most of the beer festivals we've attended recently, the Reading event was held in a large marquee in the King's Meadow field, with outdoor seating areas as well as the huge bars inside. On scale, as well as in range and supply of real ales, this festival rivals even the GBBF, and certainly stands head and shoulders over any of other the local festivals we've attended. The atmosphere was relaxed, lively, and friendly, never becoming unpleasantly crowded despite the huge number of people attending. There was a range of entertainment and food, including several outside food tents, again immeasurably superior to the canteen food or burger vans offered by smaller festivals. And the beer range was astounding: hundreds of LocAles made up over half the length of the main tent, with national beers continuing onto the overflow bar around the corner (along with country wines, ciders and perries, and international bottled beers).

New England & E Coast tasting notes

On a recent trip to New England and the Sprawl (Boston -> Providence -> New York -> Washington DC) I made notes on a few ales I tasted, and in some cases the venues I tasted them in. Notes below are in roughly chronological order, and include state (or country) of origin, so that I can label the beers from the same state I was in as #LocAle).

Bottled beers at house party in Providence (at which a wonderful spinach pie was also served):

Lagunitas Rich Copper Ale (CA): a light smoky copper color, with thin frothy head and a constant stream of bubbles; this pint had a very gentle, sweet, slightly maritime smell to it. The taste is very bright, bitterly metallic, but a bit sweet and lambic too; it tastes a lot stronger that its 6.5%. There are quite coarse charcoal and hop notes on the swallow. As it warmed up, the smell of sap and green leaf got stronger and nicer. Should have taken it out of the fridge half an hour ago.

Four London Beerfests

Since the last regular posts on this blog, we have visited four London beer festivals, and usually posted our micro-tasting notes on Twitter (with the hashtag #RealAle). I'll comment here mostly on the venues and the ambiance of the festivals overall, with comments only on the most memorable ales.

Twickenham Beer Festival, October 19th, 2012

Our annual pilgrimage to the Twickenham Beer Festival continues. The venue is spartan and very crowded, with almost no seating available for the more sedate drinker. Food was pretty embarrassing—sub-canteen level swill served on paper plates. They could really do better. Beer range was good, with over 50 real ales on tap (although not all at once) and a cider stall in the foyer, although ciders and perries were not listed in the programme, so it was a bit more hit and miss. There's a large stage in York House, and our companions pointed out that a bit of local live music at some point in the evening would not have been a bad idea.

The Moulin Brewery

Moulin is not, perhaps, a place name that springs immediately to mind in the context of beer. In fact, this small village in the shadow of Mount Ben Vrackie, near Pitlochry in Perthshire, is home to one of Scotland’s first microbreweries. The Moulin Brewery’s main market for its four beers is the village pub, the Moulin Inn, although they are to be found in other nearby hostelries too and, in bottled form, also further afield. So while Moulin itself may be off the beaten track for some, it would not surprise me if Moulin beers popped up in well stocked off licences in Edinburgh or Glasgow.

William IV, Leyton

The latest leg on our tour of De Moor's Top 25 London bars takes us to the William IV, on High Road Leyton. After a bracing walk (the pub is a good 20 minutes from the nearest London Underground station), we found the pub to be unassuming and quiet on a Thursday evening. Kitted out like a old-fashioned local, but with an unusually large floor space and a huge bar running the whole length of the building, there were bare tables, mismatched chairs and threadbare carpet. (And a bar billiards table, which we didn't play but the mere sight of took me back to an earlier generation!)

I mention that there was lots of space in the bar both because it was nice to be able to find a quiet corner to drink in, and because despite the quiet evening, the bar seemed to be understaffed. In fact they had to close the kitchen half an hour early (after we asked about the last food orders only 40 minutes before), so sadly we're not able to review the food available (although the menu looked nice).

The Market Porter (Borough)

Last week, right after shopping at Utobeer (review), we went to the nearby pub The Market Porter, another one on our Top 25 list.

The place looks well kept from the outside, but is fairly plain inside, with game machines and all. There's a restaurant upstairs that we didn't visit;  though, judging from the photos on the pub's website, it look considerably nicer than the downstairs area.

I've been here on a weekend market day and the pub's immediate proximity to it makes it a very busy place. This time we went on a week day, just after the market's closing time. The pub was considerably less busy, though the nice sunny evening meant that a lot of people gathered drinking outside. The staff at the bar was probably still set to "busy market day" mode, served us a bit dismissively and insisted on giving us plastic cups even though we had a table inside (got our glasses after some discussion).