Eric Steen of Colorado's Focus on the Beer blog posted this hilarious video. I love it. It's like reading Beer Advocate out loud.



I was going to offer a prize to whoever could be bothered to find the actual thread the video is based on, but there's no point; it's most of them.

I've been itching to post about this since I found out about it a couple of weeks ago, but I haven't been allowed until now. But now the cat is out of the bag and I can mention what's happening.

I haven't mentioned before the goings-on at Tennent's since they became independent of InBev eighteen months ago. At first the message was pretty much that it was going to be business as usual; and I recall being at a Scottish Brewing Archive Association event where the Tennent's rep said, in not quite so many words, that the strategy was basically Tennent's Lager for the boys and Magners for the lassies.

Evidently thinking is changing, for it is becoming increasingly clear that the Glasgow lager brewer is a big fish in a declining market. The solution was clearly to find a partner that complemented the existing strengths of Tennents — and they have now found it in Derbyshire brewery Thornbridge. The Jaipur brewer has an excellent reputation among beer drinkers and its brands have been much sought after up and down the country.

C&C, the parent company of Tennent's and makers of Magners cider, has agreed to take a "substantial" stake in Thornbridge and its beer operations will henceforth be grouped together under the Tennent Thornbridge badge.

"Both Tennent's and Thornbridge are staffed by highly trained people dedicated to making beer to a high standard of technical excellence," said Dominic Driscoll of Thornbridge this morning. "We expect there will be a great deal of sharing of expertise and it'll be great for both breweries."

"Under the name of Tennent Thornbridge we will be able to supply both the mass and niche markets," said a Tennent's spokesman. "Our brewers love the Thornbridge IPA beers. We were making East India Beer 120 years ago and Thornbridge has shown that there is a market for these beers today. Perhaps we'll dig out some old recipes and see how they compare!"

The unique brewery set-up gives the combined company flexibility to produce beer over a range of brew-lengths, from the small plant at Thornbridge Hall to the 1.3 million bbl per year output at Wellpark Brewery.

With immediate effect a limited amount of Tennent's Lager will be produced at Thornbridge's Riverside facility for the English market and there will be another interesting development: Riverside-brewed Sweetheart Stout will be introduced to the free trade on an experimental basis as a draught product, both cask-conditioned and in KeyKegs. "If we can put Magners on tap with Magner's Golden Draught, we can do the same thing with Sweetheart Stout," confided an inside source.

There are a fair few pub opening and closings going on around the George Square area of Glasgow at the moment. None of them are looking terribly promising, but I shall give them all a fair chance.

The saddest impending closure is the Ingram Bar. It’s finally been let after over six months on the market, and according to the license application in the window is going to become a “Mexican” bar-restaurant called Pintos.

Belhaven has seemed intent in running the place into the ground for quite a while, with the beer range reduced to Greene King IPA most of the time. It’s had a varied history — the old incarnation of the Ingram Bar was gutted sometime in the 1980s and the place traded as a Yates’ Wine Lodge for years, then was briefly Droothy Neebors before reverting to the Ingram Bar just a few years ago.

In the summertime hordes of European backpackers arrive at, or leave from, Queen Street, desperate to find what they imagine to be a traditional Scottish pub. If you can’t make a go of just such a pub right across the road from the station, you should probably jack it in. Maybe that's Belhaven's thinking too.

Just across the road, the fake Irish pub is being gutted and will be Droothy when it re-opens, apparently. No idea who’s behind that. Is the name calculated to attract punters using very old guidebooks who are looking for Droothy Neebors on Queen Street? It wouldn’t be the first time a pub has opened with a similar name to a previous establishment a couple of streets away. Shortly after the Bay Horse on Bath St “went on fire” and was demolished, a new Bay Horse opened round the corner in Hope St.

The Camperdown Place is now open. JD Wetherspoon have opened another pub on George Square bang slap next to their existing one, the Counting House. Rumour has it that JDW snapped up the site to stop anyone else getting it. It’s certainly atypical in that it’s a lot smaller than the huge, cavernous buildings they usually take on. One might think this would be quite pleasant but in reality it means the pub gets cramped and stuffy quite quickly. Other than that, well, it’s a Wetherspoons …

The final new venture is Brown’s, on the south side of the square, next to Jamie Oliver’s joint in the former Post Office and due to open on the 8th of April. The format is one of Mitchells’ and Butlers’ numerous chains. M&B have recently upped their game a fair bit with regards to beer (even All Bar One has Sierra Nevada nowadays), but looking at the drinks menu on the Brown’s website I lost count of the pages devoted to champagne, cocktails and wine, not to mention the twelve different kinds of rum — not a word about beer. So it remains to be seen whether the place will be, as I suspect, a dead loss for beer drinkers.

Forty years ago today the Campaign for Real Ale was founded. At the time it seemed a hopeless cause. Big brewers claimed that keg (or "container beer" as it was called then) was the future and, just in case drinkers weren't convinced, ripped the hand pumps and tall fonts out of their pubs. Some areas of the country, like mine, are still suffering the effects of this historic vandalism.

Forty years on and the trend towards bland, ersatz beer has been reversed. Not before time, real ale is finally becoming hip. Despite the efforts of the ad men, a new generation is discovering the joy of proper beer; something they wouldn't be able to do if the CAMRA bashers had succeeded.

The likes of Fullers and Caledonian, to name but two old-established breweries, would have closed years ago. There wouldn't be over 700 hundred breweries, most of them established since CAMRA was founded. There wouldn't be the seedling micropub movement that is just beginning to take root.

CAMRA has survived because it was willing to be unpopular. Members were willing to put in years of volunteer labour. Willing to put up with ridicule and sometimes abuse from the mass media. Though denounced as luddites and beardy-weirdies, the grim determination of these stubborn old buggers inspired a beer revolution.

So get down the pub tonight and raise a glass of real ale. It's thanks to CAMRA that you have the choice.

They already have a beer called Cart Blanche, which is a pun on the name of the nearby River Cart, so the natural choice for the new dark beer was to call it Cart Noir.

I love porter and I find it a great shame that more breweries don’t have one in their line-up. I’ve been told that the reason for this is because it’s harder to sell to pubs than pale beer. Nonetheless the crowd in Blackfriars only take a little over an hour to empty the first firkin.

It’s a nice beer that’s easy to drink. The head is pleasantly beige, reminiscent of much stronger stouts, but it lacks density so its light frothiness is a little disappointing. Bitterness comes from hops and roast malts in equal measure. A little sweetness is countered by slight acidity. Roastiness does not predominate — the most distinctive feature is a strong, very pleasant bitter chocolate character.

Five grains are used: pale, chocolate, brown and colour malt and some roasted wheat, while the hops include Northdown and Bramling Cross. Interestingly, Franconian Carafa malt is used to ensure a deep black colour, rather than the usual black malt or roast barley.

Mark Dredge, award-winning cheerleader for everything new and exciting in the world of beer, has invited blog posts on the subject of "craft beer". Not the beer itself, that is; the expression "craft beer" and whether it's useful in the context of the UK.

I've put forward my position on several occasions: it doesn't mean anything in the UK, hence using it is redundant and stupid.

Those of us who hold this view are boring, according to Mark, so to spare you the mind-numbing tedium of having to read my argument, here is a link you can click to skip to the end of the post where there is a quiz.

Now then. As everyone probably knows, craft beer as a concept comes from the US. It was a reaction against the process of consolidation in the brewing industry which saw the number of breweries fall to just over 80 by the beginning of the 1980s. Six companies had 92% of the market, mostly selling the same sort of fizzy yellow beer of the "making love in a canoe" variety.

When people started opened microbreweries and brewpubs, they naturally saw themselves and each other as part of a movement. So craft beer has a context in the USA, where it originated and where it makes sense.

But those advocating its use in Britain should note that even in America people are encountering the limitations of the concept and beginning to question it. Is Yuengling, the oldest surviving brewery in America, craft? Should the definition of craft be changed to accommodate the success of Sam Adams? Is it still craft if you have a computer-controlled brewery? Does it really matter whether beer is craft or not?

Terms are useful if they serve a purpose in the culture where they're used. A British term which makes sense in a British context, for example, is "session beer". It's a beer weaker than standard beers, that you can drink four pints of and still go back to work sober. It's not just a word for a low-strength beer. It depends on the pub context and the pre-existing concept of a session. It belongs to a particular culture.

I wouldn't even use the term "session beer" in a Belgian or German context, never mind an American one. It's simply out of place if you try to introduce it into a beer culture other than the British one. That's probably why the Americans get their knickers in such a twist trying to define it.

The German Frühschoppen is a nice custom of going for a drink on a Sunday morning. But if I go to the pub on Sunday morning, I'm not Frühschoppen. I'm just going to the pub. The German word is meaningless out of its context.

Problems arise when you take a term like "craft beer" and try to graft it on to an alien beer culture, where it has no history and no context. As The Beer Nut has argued, it works reasonably well in nations that, in beer terms, resemble(d) the United States in 1980: Ireland, Denmark, Italy.

It doesn't work nearly as well in countries like Britain and Germany where the beer landscape remains much more diverse. We haven't had a Year Zero against a monolithic backdrop of crap (although I appreciate that Fraserburgh did). There are big megabreweries punting their international lager brands; large companies (what CAMRA used to call the super-regionals) that brew a lot of cask beer; conglomerates that incorporate a bit of both; old-established family brewers; a host of little micros that have been set up since the introduction of progressive beer duty; rather larger breweries that started as micros in the 1970s and 80s.

What this means is that nobody in the UK can say clearly who is a craft brewer and who isn't with any consistency. Are Fuller's a craft brewer? Bateman's? Harviestoun (set up at the same time as Sierra Nevada)? What about Marston's? If not, well, why not?

The beer scene has its problems, of course, no one denies that. But I don't see how using the term "craft beer" is going to solve any of them.

Everyone knows the beer range of the third-rate microbrewery. There's the 5.0% boring golden ale; the 4.2% brown bitter that tastes mostly of toffee; the 3.7% session ale, suspected to be the 5.0% ale with more water in it; and the seasonal beers which are the 4.2% bitter rebadged with a lewd cartoon on the pumpclip. I don't see any reason to dignify this stuff by labelling it "craft"; nor do I understand how, if we are to refuse it the label "craft", we can objectively distinguish — other than by taste — between it and beers that we like better. In which case, the definition has become "beer that I like".

Does it have to be a strongly-flavoured, unsubtle beer to be "craft"? Then you're excluding Harvey's Sussex Bitter, for example. That is fair enough if you prefer something with more hop and less yeast character, though it does imply something else: it means, once again, that your definition of "craft beer" has become "beer that I like to drink".

Why not just say "hoppy beer" if that's what you like? At least that means something. I like hoppy beer too but I don't make out that it's more virtuous or more sophisticated than other types.

I was arguing with Woolly Dave about something a while back, and he suggested that "craft beer" was beer brewed with passion. My response then was: what about all the little third-rate microbreweries who are passionate, but not very good at brewing? Are they "craft"? If so, if the expression doesn't mean the beer is going to be good, what's the point of it?

In any case, people are passionate about different things. I've spoken to people who brewed cooking lager for a living and they were convinced their product is great.

Talking of cooking lager, there's the role of big companies. They're always a sore point. Residual small-is-beautiful thinking permeates the minds of beer geeks on both sides of the Atlantic, and the idea that a big company can brew something good seems to be particularly mentally irritating. Here, people mutter darkly that Doom Bar will be ruined; over there, people complain that "faux craft" is driving real craft out of the market, even though they might admit the beer itself is quite nice (Bear in mind that CAMRA are called dogmatic for far less).

So, to sum up, "craft beer" in a UK context is meaningless and undefinable. At most it's a marketing term for the wannabe avant-garde and the self-important. Neither of which I particularly want to encourage.



Welcome back to those re-joining the post without reading the boring argument. Now here's the quiz.

Quiz

Here is a list of thirty British-brewed beers. For each beer in the list, please state whether you consider it "craft beer". If yes, state why. If no, state why not.

 1. Samuel Smith Alpine Lager
 2. Belhaven Wee Heavy
 3. Yates' Solway Sunset
 4. Caledonian Deuchars IPA
 5. Courage Directors
 6. Tesco American Double IPA
 7. Fuller's Past Masters XX
 8. Greene King IPA
 9. Greene King Strong Suffolk
10. Grolsch
11. Harvey's India Pale Ale
12. Harvey's Sweet Sussex
13. Holt's Bitter
14. Houston Helga's Big Jugs
15. Innis & Gunn
16. Morland Old Speckled Hen
17. Newcastle Brown Ale
18. Belhaven Best
19. Samuel Smith Nut Brown Ale
20. Tennent's Sweetheart Stout
21. Fuller's London Porter
22. Theakston's Best Bitter
23. Thwaites Nutty Black
24. Harviestoun Ptarmigan
25. Whitbread Gold Label
26. Worthington P2
27. JW Lees Moonraker
28. Meantime Helles
29. The Kernel SCANS
30. Black Sheep Imperial Stout

Over at Beervana there's an article asking optimistically (or rhetorically) if one day IPA could be the dominant style of beer in the USA. 

Jeff points out, correctly, that fashions in beer change, often quite dramatically when you look at it from a historical perspective. This shouldn't really surprise us — who would imagine trends in politics, clothing or music to stay the same decade after decade? — but most of us have been trained to think of beer as something traditional, reliable and unchanging, so it's important to keep pointing out that beer is dynamic, not just today but throughout its history.

He then goes on to argue that since public taste changes, it's possible to envisage a dramatic shift towards craft beer, and I have no quarrel with that idea. Where I think he gets it wrong is in the assumption that American IPA could become the everyday beer of the average American.

To demonstrate the historical volatility of beer consumption patterns, Jeff uses the example of Berliner Weisse, which declined from 700 breweries in the 19th century to virtual extinction today; but it actually shows the opposite of what he wants it to show. It means that most people, excluding a small number of aficionados, moved away from Weisse as soon as something less challenging became available.

I can't think of anywhere that very bitter beer has been to the taste of the majority for an extended period. Just look at the past and what the most popular beer was. When Porter went into decline in Britain, Mild, not India Pale Ale, took its place.

Jeff says, "A hundred years later, mild accounted for more than half of all draft sales--but it was on the wane. Bitter was already on the rise." Bitter did indeed supplant Mild – but not for long. It only took another fifteen years for Lager to decisively take the lead in the UK beer market.

And what happened to Bitter? It held on in the cask sector, but at what a price. Buy a big-name Bitter now and it's often a sweet, toffeeish exercise in blandness. I'd rather have a decent Mild. Most of the drinkers of such beers would probably like Mild better too; it's just that they won't actually buy it because it's too unfashionable — or brewers and pubs won't offer it because they think it's too unfashionable. So instead, Bitter adapted itself to the sweeter palate of those who should by rights be drinking Mild.

The same thing happened in Germany. When Export became unfashionable, drinkers switched to the seemingly more upmarket Pils. They liked the sophisticated image, but not the bitterness, and mass-market Pils have become less bitter as a result. More recently, German brewers have found success with so-called "Gold" beers, even less bitter than Export.

My conclusion: Really bitter beer is never the most popular kind for more than a few years. Most people actually want something a little sweeter and less challenging. That doesn't mean they won't go for a beer that's tastier and fuller in flavour than what they drink now; it just means the majority will choose wheat beers and amber ales rather than 80 IBU hop monsters.

So while I think Jeff is right that the craft beer sector is going to keep growing, more than any of us currently imagine, I don't believe IPA will ever be the most popular beer in America.

Unless they take the hops out of their IPA like we did with most of ours.

Over at CannyScot they have galleries of Scottish beer cans, which is where I nicked this image. It’s little known that in addition to the lager lovelies, Tennent’s also had a counterpart beer brand that bore changing images of men on the back of the can — Piper Export. Each can had a hunky stunna in full Highland dress, usually playing the bagpipes (this is not a euphemism).

But that's not why I’m posting this. What I want to know is what does “deep brewed” even mean?

It’s bash Horst Dornbusch week over at Shut Up About Barclay Perkins, and I’m joining in the fun.

Self-proclaimed beer “expert” Horst Dornbusch has got a detailed website with a long list of descriptions of German beer styles.

Each article is generally made up of some vague historical ramblings, some usually unobjectionable tasting notes and, if you’re really lucky, some populist Cold War politics incongruously shoehorned in. Then he goes over the article again and spikes it with choice gems of utter made-up garbage.

So with the article on Roggenbier. Lots of people in America appear to believe for some reason that Roggenbier — in its modern form, basically a Bavarian wheat beer made with rye instead of wheat — is a major German beer style. Still, at least they have heard of it, which is probably more than most Germans have. In fact it’s a novelty beer and I doubt the number of breweries who make it reaches double figures. It is not remotely comparable with the popularity of wheat beer.

Did I mention Dornbusch seems to specialise in putting the most ridiculous stuff right at the beginning? That’s handy at least. We are told:

“Roggenbier is a medieval ale usually made from a grain bill of about half barley malt and equal portions of wheat and rye malts. Today, a Roggenbier may be either an ale or a lager. Modern renditions of the brew have about 5 to 5.5% alcohol by volume. Rye ales are mildly hopped, which allows the grain flavors to be dominant. Filtration appears to be optional in a rye ale and many, such as the Paulaner (depicted right) are "naturtrüb," meaning naturally turbid. A yeast-turbid Roggenbier is more authentic, considering that the style had been around long before beer filtration was invented in 1878.”

Where shall we start? 

Well, for one thing, it’s not a medieval ale. There were medieval rye beers, but there is no connection between them and modern Roggenbier. Rye beer was extinct in Germany until Schierling/Thurn & Taxis started making it in the 1980s. It was such a novelty that they were able to get a patent on the modified mashing regime they used. And it certainly isn’t “a lager” because you’re not allowed to put rye in bottom-fermenting beer. You would think he’d know something as basic to modern German brewing as that.

According to Ludwig Narziß — a genuine expert — it’s also obligatory to have at least 50% rye malt in the grist in order to label the resulting beer Roggenbier, not the 25% Dornbusch claims.

Filtration optional? It’s more that the wort is so goopy that the beer remains cloudy even after filtration. Thurn & Taxis state in their patent application that the beer is filtered, as this improves head retention.

It would be more accurate if Dornbusch said “A turbid Roggenbier is more authentic, since it’s the only bloody way a 70% rye beer is ever going to turn out without the use of the most space-age filtration techniques and exogenous enzymes.”

To sum up: Horst Dornbusch doesn’t know the history of modern Roggenbier. He hasn’t read the very short section on brewing with rye in Narziß, one of the standard German brewing manuals. He hasn’t read the patent written by the people who invented the modern Roggenbier, and he apparently doesn’t even know what ingredients the Reinheitsgebot allows in top-fermenting beer.

There’s nothing useful any beer lover can learn from Horst Dornbusch, except perhaps how to pass yourself off as an “expert” to the credulous.

You know what I hate most about old brewing books? It’s not reading stuff in eighteenth-century German or blackletter type. It’s the weird archaic weights and measures. Just trying to read stuff in Fahrenheit hurts my head most of the time. But look at this; this is just taking the mickey.

In Göttingen, for an entire brewing, that is, as much as is brewed when the Scheffel of barley costs 10 Mgr. and the Scheffel of wheat costs 20 Mgr., one takes: the malt of 18 Malter raw barley, and of 3 Malter 5 Himpten raw wheat, i.e. 22 1/2 Malter barley malt and 4 1/2 Malter wheat malt, making 27 Malter of malt, which must weigh 4840 Pfund. From this 26 to 27 1/2 Fass of beer are made, each Fass reckoned as 104 Stübchen, and 8 1/2 to 9 Fass of small beer, and 60 Zuder of draff is left.

Have you got that? There are five measures in there that I’ve never even heard of before, never mind know what they are in new money. I’ve seen Scheffel before, that’s a volume measure. Mgr. is obviously some sort of unit of currency — note that wheat is twice as expensive as barley. Suddenly we stop using Scheffel and start measuring grain in Malter. A Malter is divided into several Himpten. 27 Malter of malt weighs 4840 Pfund, but since 4840 isn't divisible by 27 I’m not sure how, or why, they worked this out. Fass is barrel, of course, but is divided into 104 Stübchen. Was there a standardised barrel? Maybe if we compare the number of Stübchen in other barrels we can get a clue. Finally, once grain has been mashed and is spent, it gets its own unit and is now measured in Zuder.

I suppose converting Himpten into Zuder must have been how people entertained themselves before the Internet.