Archive for the ‘Beers and brewing by region and/or country’ Category

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Coca Cola flavours

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Re-reading Stan Hieronymous‘s Brew Like a Monk, we were struck by this statement from brewer Yvan de Baets on p213:

One of the main goals of Belgian brewers should be to fight against the Coca-Cola flavors and those kind of gadget tastes… We should be about cultural tastes, not animal tastes.

He sounds like an artist or writer rather than a manufacturer. It’s almost poetry. We don’t quite know what he means by “animal tastes” but the phrase “Coca-Cola flavors” chimes strongly.

When Belgians say things like this, they sound like Obi Wan Kenobi. When British brewers try it, they sound like berks. Our culture just doesn’t tolerate anything that smells remotely like pretension, does it?

For about the eightieth time, we must add that, if you haven’t read BLAM (hey, cool acronym!) then you should. Very readable, full of characters and stories, as well as technical detail.

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Posted in Belgium, opinion | 10 Comments »

Tastebud Twilight Zone

Monday, November 21st, 2011

On our trips to Würzburg, we haven’t merely tolerated Distelhäuser’s beers, we’ve positively enjoyed them.

So, it’s been a bit confusing to discover over the last few months, starting with a casual “Ugh!” in a comment on this post, that they aren’t much rated by the locals nor other people whose opinions on beer we trust.

But how can this be? We tasted them without prejudice and both of us had the same honest reaction: yum. We’ve been back several times, too, and our opinion didn’t change.

It’s not even as if we unquestioningly love every German beer we try (Brinkhoff’s No. 1 and Brauhaus Kastel? No thanks.)

Perhaps the thrill of being on holiday, and in the sun, in a city as pretty as the Big W, temporarily dazzled us? It probably doesn’t hurt that we’ve almost always drunk Distelhäuser at the Alte Mainmühle, an ever-so-slightly upmarket, very picturesque pub-restaurant on the river, where the beer is always presented impeccably in the correct glassware or stone krug, cold but not too cold, and with plenty of zing.

It’s probably best if we just get back to Würzburg asap and give them another go.

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Posted in Germany | 12 Comments »

Saison cracked?

Thursday, September 8th, 2011

Saison dupont beer in the glass with bottle

After our recent pondering on the nature of saison, several people, including Alan at A Good Beer Blog, suggested we read Farmhouse Ales by Phil Markowski. Thanks for the tip, chaps. It’s a great book and has, indeed, helped us ‘get it’.

It’s in the same series as Stan Hieronymous’s marvellous Brew Like a Monk and is designed to help home brewers understand the recipes and practices used by breweries currently producing biere de garde and saison. Even if you never intend to brew anything, if you love Belgian beer, these books are must-reads.

The centrepiece of Farmhouse Ales is an essay by brewer Yvan De Baets which attempts to summarise the history of saison and, crucially, explain what the heck it is. A key phrase occurs therein: saison, says De Baets, “has a small ‘wild side’”. He also cites a (primary) source suggesting that, in the late 1940s, saisons were very like what we would now call geuze.

At this point, something clicked for us. The idea of a spectrum with a point at which wild yeasts in the mix become evident makes a lot of sense, and also helps to explain why so many beers are described as “almost saison” or “saison like”. We slightly repurposed his phrase “wild side” and came up with this.

Diagram showing the relative wildness of various Belgian beers.

Ultimately, of course, it’s up to a brewery if they wish to call their beer a saison, hence some of the lucozade-like sugary beers flying that flag, and the idea of precise categories in this territory is a bit silly, but a beer just on the wild side — that is, with at a hint of wild yeast or ‘roughness’ without being downright sour — is probably what we would now understand to be a saison.

Now to drink some more of them and test this new understanding.

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Posted in Beer history, Beer styles, Belgium | 25 Comments »

The Big Session Comeback Tour

Friday, September 2nd, 2011

Beer mat from the Hausbrauerei Altstadthof, Nuremberg.

We haven’t taken part in the session for a couple of years, mostly because we found ourselves struggling to fit in an opportunity to, e.g., drink a particular type of beer before it rolled around.

Anyway, it’s time to get back in the saddle so here we are again to talk about the art of beer labels, caps and coasters, for this month’s session hosted by HopHeadSaid.

We have a particular interest in commercial design and illustration and when it relates to beer, all the better. We’ve posted about it on more than one occasion and have been really enjoying this excellent blog about beer branding recently.

The image above is one of our favourite bits of beer-related design and, perhaps not so coincidentally, comes from one of our favourite breweries.

What’s not to like? There’s sans serif typography (we have some sympathy with the Helvetica nerds), a simple colour scheme reflecting the flag of Franconia and an equally simple graphic. All of this reminds us vividly of their pub in Nuremberg and their beers, all of which are also simple, unpretentious and clean.

You’ll note that the image above is a bit rough. It needed some restoration because this beermat, along with a stack of others from Germany, the Czech Republic and Belgium, lives in our kitchen and gets used every day. It’s a little bit of Nuremberg we can enjoy every day. As a result, it is covered in beer stains.

Mind you, that Satan cap art isn’t bad either, and nor are the twin labels for the Brooklyn/Schneider collaborations.

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Posted in design, Franconia, Germany, marketing, The Session | 7 Comments »

Cornish Bock is a winner

Sunday, August 28th, 2011

We weren’t massively impressed with St Austell’s Korev Lager but were nonetheless keen to try it’s sister beer, Cornish Bock. It’s proven a tough one to track down but, today, we finally chanced upon a bottle in a remote pub off towards Land’s End.

Overall, our verdict is that it is a really good beer and one we’ll be drinking again if we get the chance.

The first thing that struck us was how much it looked and smelled like Voll Damm. It is, indeed, a very similar beer, albeit more complex.

Having got to know the aroma and flavour of Perle a couple of years ago, we were then struck by its obvious presence in this beer. (It helped that we’d read it on the label, too….) The big metallic, coppery smell of the beer reminded us (and this will sound weird) of blood. In a good way. On a less Gothic note, it also brought to mind one of the brasher alt biers, such as Diebels.

Once it began to warm up, the metallic quality of the Perle gave way to Saaz and, suddenly, we were reminded of Duvel. In fact, this beer has a big enough, fluffy enough, white enough head, and sufficient alcoholic poke (at 6.5%) that it could stand in for Duvel as an accompaniment for food.

Finally, in the dregs, with the beer a bit too warm, syrupy caramel won the day.

So, an excellent effort, which would be even better served in a nicer glass (we got a Guinness-branded pint glass) and perhaps in smaller 330ml bottles.

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Posted in beer reviews, Germany | 2 Comments »

Is saison in the eye of the beholder?

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

The cap and cork from a bottle of Dupont Saison beer.

After several years of taking beer seriously, and more than four years of blogging about it, we still don’t really understand what saison is or why it has such status amongst beer geeks.

The first saison we tried, Saison 1900, was underwhelming (like Lucozade) but, everyone told us, we’d been drinking the wrong one. No-one rates 1900 much.

In their excellent book 100 Belgian Beers to Try Before You Die, Tim Webb and Joris Pattyn describe Saison Dupont as “either the last or the first of the great saisons”, and it was also the example recommended by our commenters back in 2008, so we decided to make that our subject for the next attempt to ‘get it’.

We had the big 750ml champagne-corked bottle which instantly made it feel special.

It is an extremely delicious beer. We picked up a hint of whatever aroma it is that wafts out of the open cellar door of an old pub — stale beer, rotting wood and mould? — and then lots of what you might call the usual suspects of Belgian beer flavours: coriander, bitter peels, sugar and dusty hops. It doesn’t contain coriander or peel, apparently, those flavours supposedly coming from the yeast.

It seemed a very clean beer to us.  We had expected a little wildness with all the talk of farmhouses and barns that surrounds saison.

So, yes, it’s great, but we’re still stumped. How is this different enough from the interesting ‘blondes’ that many Belgian breweries produce to warrant a different label? Is Poperings Hommelbier a saison? That’s what this most reminded us of.

Any suggestions for what we need to do to get our heads round this gratefully received. We’re beginning to feel like those people in the nineties who couldn’t see magic eye pictures.

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Posted in Beer styles, Belgium | 30 Comments »

Baedeker on Schöps

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011

We mentioned schöps beer in a post about the beer war of 1380 ages ago. This week, we came across another titbit in Baedeker’s Northern Germany (1893) in the entry for Schweidnitz (now Świdnica):

Schweidnitz (Thamm, at the station; Krone, Scepter, both in the market-place; *Deutsches Haus, R., L., & A 1.5km,;Riedel's; Gruener Adler), a town with 24,700 inhab., formerly the capital of a principality of the name (since 1741 Prussian), is prettily situated on the left bank of the Weistritz. in the Wilhems-Platz, near the station, are the handsome Law Courts. The tower (328 ft.) of the Roman Catholic Church commands an admirable prospect. The old fortifications were removed in 1862 and partly converted into handsome promenades. The beer of the place (*Bierhalle, with garden, in the Wilhelms-Platz) is famous, especially the 'Schwarze Schoeps' (in autumn only), which was largely exported in the 16th century.

As Evan Rail incubates grodziskie yeast in his fridge; and Ron Pattinson and John Keeling brew Fuller’s beers to recipes from the archives; does it matter if beer is all played out?

We think these folks are brewing and selling a version of schöps… can anyone with better German than us confirm that?

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Posted in Beer history, Germany, Poland | 6 Comments »

Blind tasting lager

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

Commercial lagers lying in the fridge.

A couple of weeks ago, we posted something about the lager spectrum, suggesting that lagers range from nasty (e.g. San Miguel) to good (Estrella Damm) via neutral (Becks).

We had a nagging doubt, however, that there might be some prejudice in our rankings of these various very similar industrial beers. Do we prefer Estrella to San Miguel because it’s imported rather than license brewed in the UK? Did we think of Becks as neutral because the brand suggests ‘german purity’?

So, inspired by Lars Marius Garshol, and by the results of blind tasting for the Champion Beer of Britain at GBBF, we set out to test ourselves.

Bailey served four beers to Boak, who didn’t know which were in the fridge. They were chosen on the basis that none of them was especially highly regarded or characterful (i.e. no Brooklyn Lager or Jever). The serving order was randomised to prevent any temptation on Bailey’s part to save the perceived best for last, or vice versa.

Boak’s notes were as follows.

Beer 1 (San Miguel, UK brewed)
Tastes like generic lager! Good malt profile; a bitter, slightly metallic edge; no hop aroma or flavour. Not much after-taste at first. A bit unpleasant as it warms up. Not unpleasant when cold. Spanish? Is this Estrella Damm?

Beer 2 (Becks)
Good, pungent, hempy aroma, like Jever, which totally fails to deliver on tasting. Disintegrates. Bland. Like drinking spit. German?

Beer 3 (Estrella Damm)
Crisp and refreshing, but tastes of nothing, apart from a little tartness. Fizzy water with a twist of lemon. Spanish?

Beer 4 (Bitburger)
Similar hoppy aroma to number two but flavour persists a bit longer, definitely accentuated towards the hop. Pretty good. German?

At the end, she named San Miguel her favourite because of the solid maltiness, with Bitburger the runner up because of its hoppiness; Estrella Damm was her least favourite. We were both surprised by this, and a little embarrassed.

This was a fun, eye-opening exercise, and (as if it were needed) once again proves the value of blind tasting.

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Posted in beer reviews, Spain | 8 Comments »

Avoid Belgian beer in Brussels

Sunday, July 31st, 2011

A scan of the text from an old guidebook.

Great advice from the 1901 edition of Baedeker’s Belgium and Holland, especially the last line: “Belgian beer… is largely consumed by natives, but will probably be found unpalatable by strangers”.

Posted in Beer history, Belgium | 4 Comments »

Ein Pils, bitte

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

A glass of Wuerzburger Hofbrau Pils.

What with moving house this spring, we didn’t get to go on our usual May or June trip to Germany. As a result, amongst other things, we are Jonesing bad for a decent pils.

Pils is a broad term in Germany. Depending on the region, it can mean anything from a fairly gently hopped, 4%, golden lager served by the half litre in a chunky krug, to something super-bitter and very pale served in a delicate stemmed glass.

Right now, with the sun shining, we’d happily take a Spital, a Wuerzburger Hofbrau, or a Distelhauser. Anything, really, as long as it had the appropriate level of zing and touch of the Gothic about it.

Even one of our own Eppingwalders would do.

Sigh. Or we could just enjoy being where we are, drinking the excellent beers we do have at hand. But, you know, a craving is a craving...

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Posted in Germany | 1 Comment »

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