Ode to ABV

There just isn't enough low alcohol session ale around Ireland. The only draught bitter available at the moment is The Porterhouse's TSB, which for some strange reason I got a freezing cold pint of the other day instead of the usual cellar-ish temperature. It didn't taste the same either, though on a recent Irish Craft Brewer tour of their brewery they did mention a few changes around the place.

Drinking full flavour low alcohol ale is a real joy. I like to be able to put away a few pints, enjoying every last drop and still be in a respectable state afterwards, so I was very happy to come across this 3.2% ABV bitter in the off license last week. Sadly the cost of bottled English ale in Ireland prevented me from grabbing a multiple of it, but it's good to see such beer hitting the Irish shores. I had previously tried Brakspear Triple and found it to be an immensely complex beer with flavours I couldn't hope to pin down. Their Bitter clearly indicates that a specific yeast strain is responsible for this flavour mix because it is as complex as the Triple, but the over all flavour isn't as intense. There is a satisfying lengthy bitterness balanced well with rich malt followed up with a mesmerising mix of flavours and aromas stemming from a combination of English Fuggles and yeast effort. Over all a very enjoyable session ale with a flavour profile you won't confuse with any other.

A winning combination

I rarely get the opportunity to avail of an after work pint owing to my use of a fossil fuelled Ford Fiesta to travel to work, but sometimes I brave the shabby bus service in North Dublin and leave the car at home. This always seem like a terrible idea while I walk grumpily to the bus stop, but the day takes a decided up swing when I sit down with a pint of something tasty after I am liberated from work. I took my most recent after work pint yesterday in Messrs Maguire pub on the quays of the river Liffey where I settled in with a superb pint of Extra, a full on stout that shames Guinness or any other of the commercial stouts on the Irish market. Paired with this pint I had a P.G Wodehouse Jeeves and Wooster caper in one of those wonderful early orange and white Penguin editions. I can't really ask for much more than this to make me happy when I am whiling away a lazy evening. Messrs Maguire serve two other stouts on rotation so it's always worth dropping by to see which is on. Plain is another of their offerings which is lighter than Extra but still knocks the socks off most other stouts. If you're really lucky their Imperial might turn up and this one is worth travelling for. I spoke with the brewer about it and he explained that he had the old style stout in mind which he surmised was smoky due to the manner in which the malt was kilned back then. Whether he managed to recreate the flavour of these old stouts I know not, but it's a real treat when it turns up.

Nepalese Apples

My fiancee treated me to a birthday dinner last weekend in the very tasty Monty's Nepalese restaurant in Dublin's Temple Bar. Being fully cognizant of my beer predilection, she joyfully informed me that Monty's stocked its own lager specific to them and brewed to complement Asian food. I have never really understood the notion of beers brewed to suit particular food types. Some are better than others, but most beers work quite well for me. With respect to spicy Asian dishes, I would much prefer something with more flavour than the light lagers that are invariably paired with it.

I was certain that Shiva was contract brewed for the restaurant and likely farmed out to any other number of establishments with differing labels to suit the marketing needs of the buyer. The label boasted of the sole use of malt, hops, water and yeast with no GM ingredients. I'm not too hung up on GM food and the all malt grain bill was promising. I was happily surprised to see a deep golden hue when I splashed the beer into the glass which dispelled my preconceptions of this being a light bodied beer in the predictable Asian lager genre.
The nose was rich in malt, and the first mouthful was promising with a fullness likely derived from Munich or Vienna malts. The hop bitterness was restrained, but a tell tale tang on the swallow indicated that all was not well with the beer. It took me a few moments to pinpoint it as my palate had been somewhat assaulted by some spicy tidbits provided by the waiter. After a second mouthful I had pinned the flavour down as green apples, the telltale sign of excess acetaldehyde stemming from poor fermentation control or insufficient lagering. The beer was all but undrinkable within half a glass, resembling cider after 30 minutes of sitting on the table. It was a shame because the hue and initial malty note was very promising. Despite the unfortunate off flavour the beer was rapidly appearing on tables around the restaurant, though M did note that it was subjected to a thorough sniffing by quite a few diners, and I wondered if they too had noted the fruity nature of the beer. Perhaps it was merely a batch issue and I may well risk this beer again if I revisit Monty's in the future.

Cold Real Ale? Surely Not.

The good people at Ridgeway Brewing suggest that their Blue beer is chilled cooler than your average bottle conditioned ale as it has been brewed specifically to be enjoyed cold on hot summer days. This brewery has previously served me well with a wonderful IPA brewed entirley with whole leave aroma hops, so I followed their suggestion and chilled this bottle to cooler than my preferred real ale serving temperature. I am not altogether sure what they have done with this beer to make it more drinkable at colder temperatures, but it is a flavour packed ale with lip smacking bitterness and a long, long English hop finish. Perhaps their attempts at making this beer cold friendly extended little beyond packing it with flavour so that it still satisfied at the lower temperatures where many ales lose their character. Upon warming other flavours present themselves, a slightly lemon note creeps in and the malt starts to speak giving a better balance. I'm very happy with this beer not only because it taste great but it also reverses the trend in bland golden ales that I have experienced over the last while. This is clearly a golden ale that is attempting to penetrate the lager market, but in this instance it really is a genuine alternative to the more tasty lagers available.

Shocking Pink

I can still recall the feeling of satisfaction I enjoyed when I introduced a non beer drinking work colleague to Kriek, who knocked it back and declared her undying love for stuff. And who wouldn't enjoy it? It's refreshing with a tang that crackles on the tongue accompanied with delicious, wholly natural fruit flavour. I'm wandering onto dodgy ground when I say that this type of beer is one for the ladies, but there is no doubt that fruit lambic are accessible beers and do appeal to those people who don't ordinarily drink beer.

It is only with this shaky social observation in mind that I can hope to explain why Gulpener Rose has been concocted. They must have in mind drinkers who do not know what beer tastes like, because it tastes terrible, with a vile artificial sweetener flavour (curiously artificial sweeteners actually taste slightly bitter to me) with no trace of the 'pure wheat beer' beneath, while the red berry fruit flavour that has been added makes this beer taste like the tooth rotting nasty fizzy raspberry drinks I consumed as a child. I can't for the life of me figure out why a brewer would consider adding this degree of artificial sweeteners and E numbers to a beer and then attempt to pass it off as a quality product. No doubt it'll find its market share, but it can't be considered a positive contribution to the beer world.

Drink Of England

I wish it was, but surely Bombardier is no more the drink of England than Guinness is the drink of Ireland. True, Guinness is available in every pub in Ireland, but it is on the decline and outsold by generic lager and alcopops. In the same vain Bombardier, and ale in general, is outsold by lager in England by a vast degree. Clearly this is the rare occurrence of a decent ale getting the professional advertising treatment with the familiar marketing blurb that comes with it. It's unusual for beer with such a sophisticated advertising campaign to taste so good. I agree with the Porterhouse Brewery here in Dublin who advise us not to drink beer that is advertised on television, and generally this is sound advice, but it falls down with Bombardier because this is a wonderful beer and presses all my buttons when it comes to flavour and texture. It has made me realise that I need some more crystal malt in my home brew to achieve the toffee like richness I love about this beer. Also it is a lesson in hop restraint, as it has little or no hop aroma but lots of peppery flavour and the malt is permitted to speak for itself without the fear of being muffled by aggressive hopping. Two items of note that have changed since I last tried this beer a number of years ago; the traditional English pint measure has given way to a continental 500ml (clearly patriotism doesn't extent to weights and measures) and a couple of E numbers seem to have appeared on the list of ingredients, one of which, a caramel colouring additive seems unnecessary because I find it hard to believe that the brewers at Wells are incapable of getting the colour they want through natural ingredients alone. The E numbers are a little disconcerting, but clearly this ale is enjoying extensive export and perhaps some degree of stabilisation is required to maintain quality during transit.

Making Progress

Since I hadn't got around to packing away my brewing equipment and having shaved over an hour off my brew day thanks to a few tweaks, I decided to put an English pale ale together today. I have brewed quite few aggressively hopped American pale ales and find that American aroma hops are very well suited to liberal dosing, but I have never attempted the same thing with English hops, fearing that it just wouldn't work out. This brew was an attempt to see if English hops can be used in almost the same quantities with good results:

4.60 kg Maris Otter
200g 75L Crystal

36g Target @ 60 minutes
16g First Gold @ 20 minutes
12g Progress @10 minutes
12g First Gold @ 5 minutes
12g Progress @ 0 minutes

Mashed at 66 C

Anticipated IBU 40

OG 11 Plato

Gervin English Ale Yeast

I am not familiar with Progress and don't know what exactly it will bring to the beer, but part of the idea of these fairly aggressively hopped ales is to decipher the specific flavour profile of certain hops and discern how they might best be used. I have used First Gold before and don't consider it that special, but it has further interest to me because it is a dwarf variety and therefore much more amenable to growth in my back garden because it will only grow to 2 or 3 metres compared to traditional hops that grow to twice that and require extensive rigging. I have a spot in mind, a sunny corner that gets quite toasty warm when the sun bothers to come out from behind the permanent carpet of cloud that cover this small country. It would have to be a long term plan because little can be expected until at least two years into cultivation, and the yield would be little even after the plant had matured. I wonder what kind of barley yield I'd get from my back garden....

Irish males lured to Bud Light

This post might prove a little more political than most, but that can be squarely put down to my horrifically sleep deprived state, thanks to a terrible night in the lab last night, and also my irritation at a Bud Light campaign that is playing endlessly on Irish radio at the moment. Budweiser (soon to be In Bev) and Diageo, who brew it under license, are fiercely pushing Bud Light in Ireland at the moment and making depressingly good headway in cetain quarters. It seems to me that the obvious target for a low carbohydrate beer in Ireland is diet conscious women, but this is not enough for Bud who want to capture the souls of the average Irish male too. I haven't got the hard figures to back up my claim, but this marketing campaign will fail in this respect. Not because of a lack of marketing expertise (who could fail with a budget like that?) but rather because the Irish male is very conservative with respect his preferred tipple and a titanic shift in attitudes would be required.

Aside from this, my main concern is the way that Bud Light is marketed. The radio ads take the form of a humorous set up, followed by the tag line 'typical male types choose Bud Light because it is 4.1%'. Their main concern appears to be that Irish males will stay away from Bud Light because they mistakenly believe it is lower in alcohol than other beers on the market, and God forbid the Irish male might get cheated out of his alcohol quota of a Friday night. No doubt this conclusion was drawn from numerous market research interviews with Irish males and reflects the up hill struggle that we have in our attempt to reign in our destructive drinking culture.

Another Golden Ale

It's Summer time here in Ireland (apparently) so it is only proper that I brew a golden ale to reflect the lazy summer days. In truth, summer hasn't really kicked off in Ireland yet and is unlikely to, save for a few sunny days here and there, so this isn't the real reason I brewed a golden ale. My true motivation is a sustained disgust with so many of the golden ales that have been inflicted upon me over the last year or so. They proved more often than not to lack any body or flavour and were invariably gassy as hell, no doubt in an attempt to offer a refreshing experience. My previous golden ale was a similar protest brew with an American slant. This one has a decidedly English lean to it, except perhaps for the Styrian Goldings, but they strike me as a good hop for a golden ale so I tossed them in.

4.60kg Maris Otter
200g Cara Pils

40g Challenger 7% AA @ 60 minutes
Styrian Goldings 4% AA @ 20, 10 & 0 minutes

Mashed at 66 C

37 IBU anticipated

Saf Ale 04 yeast

SG 12 Plato

I'm running low on barrel beer so the tendency of Saf 04 to drop like a stone after it has done its work will enable me to sup on this beer very soon indeed. I've never used it before, some people have described its flavour character as 'bready' which should prove interesting, or ruin the beer entirely. We'll just have to wait and see.

I'm Afraid It's Terminal

My most recent attempt at propagating a yeast starter has proved disastrous. I had hoped to produce a large cell mass and use my nerdy beer equipment to do a cell count and pitch a known number of cells per mililitre of wort, but this plan came to an abrupt end when I removed the foil from the flask to take a sample for counting and was met with the unmistakable smell of contamination. In case you don't know, this smell is identical to the phenolic fluid that the local council use to wash out lanes and such that have been used as a communal urinal by non community minded individuals. If you have been spared the unpleasant experience of passing a lane that has been washed out thusly, the classic association with this smell is hospitals in the old days when everything was scrubbed with phenol and super bugs gave them a wide birth.

I was miffed with this turn of events because I have never suffered a spoiled yeast starter before, but know exactly where the contamination crept in. My usual method of aeration is to vigorously shake the flask of wort in much the same way I strenuously shake the 25 litre carboy of wort before fermentation kicks off. This time, however, I took the advice of an American website which suggested shaking smaller volumes in a separate vessel and pouring into the primary flask. I was keen to get as much oxygen into the wort as possible, but was all too aware that this method required the wort contacting far more surfaces and atmosphere than I like. I'll be sticking to the tried and tested next time.

The pictures with this post are microscope shots of the contaminated starter. I must admit to being a little confused by it all because my experience with yeast morphology is limited. What we are looking at is either the smaller desired yeast strain along with a typically larger wild yeast strain that caused the nasty smell, or we are looking at the larger desired yeast strain accompanied with smaller bacterial cells. I'm not certain, but there's definitely something in there that shouldn't be.

Under Presssure

I love beer served from my pressure barrel. It even beats cask dispensed to my mind, though I suppose they are one in the same in many respects; both are naturally carbonated and served at around 12 degrees centigrade. The manner in which the beer is discharged from the vessel is different though, and perhaps this makes all the difference. When I fill the barrel I prime it to around 3 or 4 parts CO2, a shocking degree of carbonation, just the thought of which makes my trigeminal nerve ache and no doubt dedicated real ale drinkers cry into their pints. However, this vast amount of CO2 merely propels the beer from the barrel and provides a degree of turbulence from the tap which brings a satisfying head to the beer. After dispense I'd wager the beer contains little more than 1 to 1.5 parts CO2, and feels perfect on the tongue.

Over carbonation is disasterous in a beer that doesn't warrant it. When it's a part of the experience, such as a tangy refreshing wheat beer I enjoy it greatly, but fizzy ale is just terrible. I find the carbonic flavour overpowers just about everything and the sting on the tongue is not welcome at all. The problem is, I find this happens quite often with many commercial ales, but if so many breweries think this is a suitable way to serve ale, perhaps it is the accepted norm and I am merely being overly sensitive, much like my dislike of beer sold in clear glass bottles ( a whole other post, that one...). So many brewers continue to do both with seemingly little affect on their popularity that the vast majority of ale drinkers must be happy with it.

Dutch wolves are smaller than you might think

I couldn't resist this beer when I spotted it today. The blue bottle drew my attention, but on closer inspection I noted the beer within appeared green. When I fished it from the fridge I discovered it was a wheat beer and the green colour was merely a curious illusion resulting from the hazy beer within interacting with the blue glass doing funny things with photons. Along with these optical antics the beer has appeal because it is Dutch and while my beer knowledge isn't as encylopeadic as some, I'm sure we don't see much in the way of beer from The Netherlands in Ireland (except the obvious, of course).

Upon a bit of reading and tasting it turned out to be a wit beer with plenty of spice and herbs and somewhat warming. The head shrank to nothing very shortly after pouring which was a little disappointing, but it has quite a collection of grains in it including spelt, rye, wheat and barley. I think I can detect the drying affect of the rye which is nicely quenching.

The furry guy on the bottle is a 'Korenwolf' - a hamster indigenous to the Maastricht hills where this beer is brewed. He sounds much feircer than he really is.

Professional disagreements

Oscar, the brewery cat, is going through a rough patch at the moment. The neighbours acquired a new cat who has taken to attacking him at every opportunity. I'll think you'll agree that this is an unfortunate turn of events, but it is compounded by the rather embarrassing fact that the neighbour's cat is half the size of Oscar and called Nancy. That's her to the left. Adorable, I know, but not to be messed with. Oscar and I have recently had some professional disagreements with respect to recipe formulation and a clash of opinions on Ron Pattinson's definition of Kolsch. I'm prepared to stick with the ale category because it just makes it easier for me to explain things to non beer enthusiasts I mingle with, while Oscar had decided that the shear weight of Ron's research points towards lager being the only acceptable definition. Well, what with Oscar being a little tetchy about being beaten up by a girl, named Nancy, he was more aggressive than usual and we came to blows. The result can be seen on the right. I think it's entirely obvious what he had in mind. He planned to murder me and make it look like suicide.

Porter, existential blog crises and smug beer knowledge challenged

It's been a month since I last posted, far longer than I ever planned to let this blog languish, but I was somewhat distracted over the last while with brewing exams and wedding preparations. While these things were factors contributing to my absence, the biggest problem has been the sickeningly small amount of time I have spent brewing, which throws up another more fundamental problem; is this a brewing blog or a beer blog and does it matter a damn either way? I drink as widely as possible with respect to bottled beer and have had any number of beers to comment on over the last month but relented because I'm not all that comfortable with reviewing beer. But if I hold off to post until I find the time to brew, there won't be much substance to these pages at all. So, to get things rolling again I'll briefly blow my own trumpet by informing you of the the second prize my Industrial Stout won at the inaugural Tara's Specialty Beer House home brew competition, and tell you a little about a porter delivered to my door from the nice people at CAMRA.

I greatly look forward to my quarterly CAMRA delivery, and what with the euro beating several shades of night soil out of sterling at the moment I'm getting the stuff for half nothing by Irish standards. This delivery contains, among others, Entire Butt English Porter from the Salopian Brewing Company Ltd of Shrewsbury. It's a surprisingly straight forward beer despite the boast of 14 different malt malts and 3 hop varieties with far more condition than many of the other bottle conditioned ales I've chanced upon. It is decidedly porter like in the sense that it wouldn't be mistaken for a stout, but this is rarely a problem with English porter. The name is a problem though, as it appears to play upon the propagation of a beer myth that that just isn't true according to the historically rigorous Zythophile. I'll have to put my hands up and admit to propagating any number of beer facts in the past that I have since learned to be more than likely mythical. My personal favourite is the birth of IPA, which is sadly dispatched with ruthlessly once again by Zythophile. Ron Pattinson is carrying out similarly devastating work on my once comfortably held opinions on beer styles and derivation. It's actually pleasant in a painful kind of way to have one's knowledge and opinions shook up in this way and I always eagerly await new posts from these learned beer lovers.