Original Gravity% – Issue 16

issue 16

CRAFT BEER REAL ALES GOOD PUBS TASTING NOTES TRAVEL + other nice stuff

F R EE

GOOD NEWS FOR PEOPLE WHO LOVE GOOD BEER

BEER NEEDS HEROES Epic tales from Prague, Belgium, Ghana, USA and Leeds

BEAUTIFUL PUBS / LOST BREWS / YOUR PICS / ENGLISH IPA

NOT ALL HEROES WEAR CAPES, JOIN THE CAMDEN BEER TEAM. WWW.CAMDENTOWNBREWERY.COM/JOBS

Photo: TenInchWheels (beershots.co.uk) Cover illustration exclusively for Original Gravity by Chris Weston.

Issue 16 | Contents

The Mash /p04 • We can be heroes /p10 • Photo essay /p14 Essay /p19 • Prague /p21 • Tasting notes /p22 • Your round /p23

THE HEROES OF BEER... ...are not where you expect them

We wanted to celebrate heroes, but in true OG fashion we didn’t want to be obvious, so there’ll be no profiles of various hops or barley strains; celebrities and the brewing world’s famous have been avoided; we wanted the idea of heroes to be understated, not thwacked out of the ground or bugled parade ground-style, we hoped for subtlety and longed for the silent hero or maybe the forgotten one, or just perhaps the odd one.

In contemporary life, the idea of a hero has become so broad that it’s hard to know what

or who is one, which is perhaps the underlying concept of Pete Brown’s fascinating tale of beer as a hero. Before he became an awardwinning beer writer, Pete was embedded deep in the world of advertising, working on Stella and Heineken, and here he offers an overview of how the advertising of beer has changed since his playground days.

For some, parents are the heroes of their life, but Jessica Mason takes a totally different view in her searingly honest and compulsively readable tale of a pub table

and a beer; this is perhaps one of the most powerful pieces we have published. Some of it might not make for easy reading, but if you just want jolly tales about beer, sorry.

Do you know who Jack Payne was? We didn’t and if you don’t know either then go onto to read Katrien Bruyland’s excellent story of how a British soldier at the end of the Great War stayed on in Belgium and had a hand in developing one of the country’s most enduring beers, as well as introducing a new style.

Original Gravity’s founder and publisher Daniel Neilson travels often to Ghana – here he meets Clement Djameh and tastes his sorghum beers that burst with flavour and exemplify their maker’s brewing expertise.

Elsewhere, we have a tale of a Prague pub and what constitutes a lost beer, while Englishstyle IPAs and bocks are celebrated, beer meets love and all get on swimmingly. We hope you enjoy the issue.

Adrian Tierney-Jones, Editor

ORIGINAL GRAVITY What beer does your favourite superhero drink?

Contact daniel@originalgravitymag.com 01323 370430 Advertising originalgravitymag@gmail.com 01323 370430 Website: originalgravitymag.com Twitter: OGBeerMag Facebook: /originalgravitymag Instagram: ORIGINAL_GRAVITY Editor-at-large: Pete Brown Editor: Adrian Tierney-Jones Design & illustration: Adam McNaught-Davis Publisher: Daniel Neilson © 2018 Original Gravity is published

by Don’t Look Down Media. All rights reserved. All material in this publication may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without the written permission of Don’t Look Down Media. Views expressed in Original Gravity are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publication nor its staff.

Pete Brown

Katrien Bruyland

Editor and Beer Writer of the Year Adrian Tierney-Jones is a journalist who writes about beer, pubs, food and travel. / maltworms. blogspot.co.uk

Editor-at-Large Pete Brown is an author, journalist and broadcaster specialising in food and drink, especially beer and cider. / petebrown.net

Katrien Bruyland is a journalist who specialises in tasting the moment. She writes about what’s good, pure and true. /epicuralia.com

Chris Weston is a comic-strip illustrator and film concept artist. Most recently he worked as a costume designer on Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Jessica Mason is the Founder & Editor of Drinks Maven. She is an entrepreneur with a healthy interest in what we imbibe. / drinksmaven.com

I suspect Batman likes the odd glass of Anchor’s Old Foghorn, a broody, moody brew, just like him.

Rohrschach.

Watchmen. Dark places. Fecund. Sharp like knives. Cantillon Rose de Gambrinus.

Hercule Poirot drinks Chartreuse. He’s curious. I need a glass of Brasseurs Savoyards Génépi as bait.

Raised in Smallville, Kansas, Superman’s favourite beer would be from the Boulevard Brewing Company.

Dr Jane Foster is as much a superhero as Thor. I imagine she drinks the Brazilian tripel Wäls.

Adrian Tierney-Jones

Chris Weston

Jessica Mason

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THE MASH

The ART OF BEER NORTHERN MONK

It started as so many collaborations do, with a beer. Drew Millward was dropping off a portrait of John and Jane Marshall. John Marshall was responsible for building Temple Mill, Leeds, and by extension of that, the flax store, home to Northern Monk.

A bond was formed. Here we speak to Drew about his remarkable artwork for the new Northern Monk Northern Tropics series and his other work for clients including Bundobust, BrewDog and 21st Amendment.

What was the brief you were given from Northern Monk?

There really wasn't one. In fact, it was almost the other way around. We drank beer, we discussed what we like about beer, I told them that my ‘holy grail’, in beer terms, is basically to find something that tastes like a hoppy Um Bongo. They went away and concocted ideas for what sort of beers might fit that bill, and I just got to work drawing pictures that

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combined Leeds' industrial landscape and a load of tropical nonsense. It was pretty much a dream project really. Like having a suit tailor-made. The Northern Tropics series have genuinely been some of my favourite beers I've had in years and to play a part in how those are presented to the world has been an absolute pleasure. Long may it continue.

How did you first get into illustrating in the first place?

Somewhere, in the mists of time, I started making posters for gigs that myself and some friends were booking.

We needed to advertise the shows, so myself, and my buddy Luke Drozd took turns in designing flyers and poster for the stuff we were putting on. That friendly rivalry between us probably spurred us on to do better things as time progressed. From that, people saw the work and started asking me to make posters and such like for them. I think someone offered me about £35 to make

You have such a distinct style, where does your inspiration come from?

Anywhere and everywhere. I suppose my roots in posters and screen printing plays a massive part in the way I work, and the work I make, and certainly the worlds of music, DIY and punk rock all play a part in what/why/how I operate. I would say, stylistically it's probably a progression over the past 14 years of looking at design, illustration, art and ephemera, filtered through my own mind and limited capabilities.

know of, if not know each other, certainly in more independently minded circles, so things often come about fairly organically. Marko Husak asked me to get involved with what they were doing, and since I drank (at The Sparrow) and ate (their street food before they got the bricks and mortar place) there, it was foolish not to. I love what they do and how they do it, so it's not difficult to get behind working collaboratively with these people. I think a lot of people within the independent community, and you see it a lot in the smaller end of the brewing industry as well, have a great attitude and mind set about taking risks and working with artists or other like-minded people. It goes back to the principles that punk rock and the DIY music communities are built on. It's a good way of going about things.

You've done quite a bit for Bundobust, how did that come around?

Those folks are good people. Leeds is a small enough place that most people

/ northernmonkbrewco.com / drewmillward.com

a poster for a show in London, shortly after which I quit my job. That was about 14 years ago. Since that point, I've more or less, kept the lights on by drawing pictures. I suppose I fell into it, as it was never a goal or ambition to do this, but I wouldn't change it for the world.

THE MASH

The 6 PACK ENGLISH-STYLE IPA

Beer meets...

LOVE Love is in the air or has the neighbourhood prankster popped a St Val’s card through the post-box? Whatever, spring is also around the corner and our thoughts turn with the sure steadiness of a merry-go-round to love and romance and also a glass of beer at the bar.

And just like love, beer comes in all shapes and sizes, in all kinds of moods and mazes, but whoever or whatever you’ve found to fall in love with, why not celebrate this sense of gladness with this trio of tempestuous romantics. ATJ

/ Siren Craft Brew, I Love You Honey Bunny, 6.3% Love is the only answer when you’re faced with Siren’s self-proclaimed honey smoothie IPA (blossom honey and oats have gone into the mix), and you know what it’s rather good – lemonyellow in colour, blessed with a juicy fruity nose.

I took a gulp and uncovered more fruit, a smooth hint of sweetness in the background and a dry and bitter finish. / sirencraftbrew.com

contemporary IPA drowning out the more subtle nature of our heritage hero.

After World War One, it became the beer that lost its mo-jo, that threw away its will to live and fostered itself out to a weaker world,

becoming a shadow of its former glorious self. Throughout most of the 20th century, IPA was a weak-willed beer, a staple on the price list of many British breweries, flying beneath 4%, wishy-washy even, though a handful kept the imperial flame going. One of these was (and remains) White Shield, a survivor from Victorian Burton where a contemporary advert showed the words India Pale Ale on the bottle label. However, even though IPA straddles the globe of beer, there are not as many English-style IPAs as you would think; maybe younger brewers and drinkers believe that the style has the charm of a much-loved but ignored grandparent. Or maybe it’s just the noise of

/ Shepherd Neame IPA, 6.1% Deep from the archives comes this Faversham favourite, deep gold in colour and singing the praises of Kentish hops, a solo of citrus here, and a chorus of bittersweet dryness in the finish.

/ Harvey’s Brewery, Wharfe IPA, 4.8% Harvey’s standard IPA is 3.2%, but this recent addition to its portfolio puts local Sussex hops into the spotlight and lets their zesty, fragrant and citrusy voices speak loud and clear.

/ Moor Beer, Return of the Empire, 5.7% Jester might be the hop, but this exceptional beer is a serious swigger of an English-Style IPA with a firm lasting bittersweet and dry finish from the much-loved Bristol brewery.

/ Hook Norton, Flagship, 5.3% The home village of this venerable brewery is about as far from the sea as you can get, but sip after sip of its lustrous citrus, zesty and English hop heft will see your sails unfurled.

/ Meantime Brewing, London IPA, 7.4% Even though Burton was the spiritual home of IPA, London was its birthplace, a fact that Meantime acknowledged when they first brewed this beer back in 2005; grassy, earthy, bittersweet.

/ Worthington's, White Shield, 5.6% Still being brewed, despite a rocky kind of history in the last couple of decades; nutty, woody, bittersweet, blessed with a Cointreau-like orange character and finishing dry and bittersweet.

Just imagine this for a moment. You ask a beer what style it is and the reply comes back, in a tone of voice straight out of Kubrick’s Spartacus: We are all IPAs now.

And what a loud and vibrant beer style an IPA is: colourful, zesty, promiscuous, rebellious, everything to everyone, apart from that most rarest of IPA styles, the English one, the ur-IPA that, long before the emergence of the gap year, travelled all the way to India and became the beer that made Burton great.

So let’s celebrate the English-style IPA, deep, brawny and muscular, a baritone booming out, sparks flashing though the air amid the ringing of the hammer off the anvil. It’s Wagnerian, compared to the zesty, bright, citrusy, tropically fruity, Paul Gauguin, luminescence of the IPA that a lot of brewers are currently making; a love song to English hops such as Fuggles and Goldings (and more recently, as is the case with Moor, Jester), a heroic moment in this country’s brewing history, which deserves to be drunk deeply and deferentially. ATJ

/ Thornbridge, I Love You Will You Marry Me, 4.5% Named after a well-known well known piece of graffiti in Sheffield, this blonde-hued beer has a subtle aroma of strawberry sweetness on the nose (real strawberries) alongside a hint of citrus, while there’s more strawberry on the palate alongside citrus, a refreshing tartness and a creamy mouth feel. An elegant thirst-quencher and a passionate pint. / thornbridgebrewery.co.uk

/ Marble/Fuller's Gale Prize Old Ale, 10.9% There’s a romance about Gale’s Prize Old Ale, a beer that used to be regular but then became a special occurrence when Fuller’s bought the brewery. With this expression, Marble has brewed the beer and left it to sleep in four separate barrels.

This one has a kiss of Brett, dark fruit and the deep vinuousness of the barrel. / marblebeers.com

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THE MASH

The big PICTURE The Big Picture is a series that focuses on one single image. It doesn't have to be beautifully shot, but it tells a story.

You're never far from a pub in London, but some stand head and shoulders above the rest. Every summer my friend Lee

Beer

PODCASTS

and I spend a weekend exploring the capitals boozers and bars. Sometimes we're disappointed, but more usually we're reassured by what we find.

Sometimes we're even enraptured – as we were by the Nag's Head in Belgravia. It's in a mews round the back of the corkingly

Good Beer Hunting Alongside in-depth reporting, industry news and fantastic photography, Good Beer Hunting also excels at the long-form podcast. Each show focusses on an interview with one person. In the UK that’s included BrewDog’s James Watt and John Keeling of Fuller's. Each offers a fascinating insight into the people behind the beer. / goodbeerhunting.com

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posh Berkeley Hotel, all toffee-coloured panelling, faded Punch cartoons and dangling brass nick-nacks. This a freehouse with a fondness for Suffolk legends Adnams, pulled from century-old Chelsea china pumps by the charming Noreen, pictured here. It's singular, eccentric and

Beer O'Clock Show Entertaining, information and educational (wait, isn’t that another organisation’s mandate?). Either way the jovial hosts Mark and Steve crack open some beers and let the conversation flow. They are often joined by friends to share their opinion as well. One-off podcasts report from their travels abroad. / beeroclockshow.co.uk

a very welcome escape from the draining bustle of central London. It's a pub where one swift pint can easily become several slow ones.

You may know Gareth Dobson as Teninchwheels from Twitter. He's also a beer and brewery photographer / beershots.co.uk

Craftwork Fortnightly stories, insights and lessons from the people behind the UK's craft beer industry.

The shows are presented by Andy Thorburn and offer deep dive interviews with a different person each week. Recent guests have included Partizan's Andy Smith and Brewgooder founder Alan Mahon. / hallway.agency/podcast

THE MASH

The Q&A

Bob Pease, CEO, The Brewers’ Association

So how’s craft beer going in the United States?

We have 5200 breweries that have now opened — that’s a dramatic increase in the number of openings in the last two years. There are another 2000 breweries in planning that have already joined the Brewers’ Association. Not all of those will open but a healthy percentage will. In 2016 we had over two a day opening.

Is there are a particular pattern?

It’s happening all over the country. Every state, every congressional district, has a craft brewery. There are a few areas that are underdeveloped, down the middle of the country, but other than that it’s pretty heavily concentrated. But there’s a new trend towards taprooms. Some of these brewers aren’t looking to package their beer and sell it anywhere else. We’re seeing that all over the country. Local has always been important, now it’s hyper-local. That is a

double-edged sword, because some of our larger brewers may not be seen as local if they’re away from their home market.

What about export? Isn’t that a growth area for you?

Exports are up — about 5-6% in the UK, which solidly remains our second-biggest export market. The biggest hurdle for our members is quality — for that, cold chain distribution and infrastructure [whereby a beer remains chilled from the moment it’s packaged to the moment the consumer picks it up] is critical.

Everywhere you go now, people want American beers or American-styles, brewed with American hops. Does that worry you?

American hop growers export a lot of hops and that’s a good thing. Where it becomes a sensitive issue for us is availability. If there’s enough Amarillo and Citra to go

around, that’s great, if there’s a shortage, that’s different. But it’s not a bad thing that brewers around the world are trying to make beers that emulate the American style of beers. We’re fine with that. The more people that are drinking things other than lite lager, the better.

Every time I go to the US I feel you’re about two years ahead of us. So what are British craft brewers going to be doing in two years’ time?

Lagers. People want lower ABV and — this term from you guys — sessionable beers.

So you can have two or three and still be in control, and it’s drinkable. They’re harder to make, and they are more expensive to make because you need more tank space, so now they’re figuring out how to do that — breweries are opening now where they are lager focused from the start. PB / brewersassociation.org

Anatomy of... BOCK There’s something so comforting and willing about a bock’s capacity to please the palate. It majors in malt, holds back the hop and summons up the sight and sound of an ancient Bavarian tavern whose regulars drink and sing deeply before sleeping the sleep of the just back in their neat farmhouse. Darkness is its friend, dark chestnut

STRENGTH

or dark amber, though Hellerbock is a light-coloured bock with a nod in the direction of noble hops (you could also argue that it is really a Maibock). It’s a beer you drink in half-litres, rather than thimbles. It’s also a noble beer, with which monks allegedly subsisted on during Lent (much better than water and crackers I suspect). ATJ

AKA

Traditional bocks usually flex their pecs between 6-7.5%, as do Hellerbocks, though a Doppelbock is a usually a beast of a beer up to 9%.

Many of the stronger bocks such as Celebrator (see below) have a ‘tor’ added to the end of their brand name.

FLAVOUR Given the use of Munich and Vienna malts, bocks are toasty, creamy, smooth and chocolaty, with a hint of mocha and/or caramel; hop bitterness is low and the finish can often have a subtle sweetness.

A very adaptable beer style, which can be swigged on its own, or served alongside a grilled sirloin; bock is also good with cheese, something like a well-aged Gouda or Gruyere.

APPEARANCE Aside from the gold-hued Hellerbock, traditional bock seeks darkness as its friend, ranging from a dark copper to a chestnut brown reminiscent of a well-aged sideboard that a relative left to you.

HISTORY Einbeck in Lower Saxony is the place where it’s generally thought bock first emerged in the Middle Ages, though in the 18th century it become more associated with Munich and the beer for local monks.

THREE OF THE BEST

/ Dark Star, Bock, 5.6% Even though it flies in below 6%, this dark brown beauty is a smooth and soothing drop of delight in the glass, with an appetising dry finish.

FOOD

WHERE TO DRINK If you can find a pub or bar that treats German beer serious, then bock should be present in winter. A small but growing number of Brit breweries make a bock.

WEIRD FACT The best-selling Portuguese beer in the world is Super Bock, which as anyone who has been to Portugal knows is a – wait for it – pale lager.

/ Donzoko Brewing, Rock Bottom Doppelbock 10% A rare thing: a British brewery making a Doppelbock. The brewery says to look out for a rich, caramelly and spirituous beer. Out March / Ayinger, Celebrator, 6.7% A strong, warming, Doppelbock that is best drunk at the brewery’s tap in Munich during the strong beer festival held in the middle of March.

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YEASTIE BOYS

FRIDAY

SUNDAY

THE MASH

Vital SIGNS

CAMRA's revitalisation gets a step closer. But what on earth does that mean?

Grow your own...

BEER Finally, beer sommelier and advocate Ben Richards gets to taste the beer whose ingredients he’d grown on his own allotment — will it be any good?

Unless you’re obsessed with beer to the point of insanity, the arguments that swirl about CAMRA’s ‘revitalisation’ project seem rather ridiculous, with confused looks, fuddled faces and stuttering questions breaking out like a particularly nasty rash amongst the friends we speak to about it. It’s understandable: “No, but, yeah (that’s a very good Vicky Pollard — Ed), the beer that comes out of a cask is supported, but that which comes out of a keg isn’t.”

“What’s the difference between cask and keg?”

“Well, back in the 1970s CAMRA were fighting against…”

“Wait, what’s ‘camera’?”

“The Campaign for Real Ale, see back in the 1970s…”

At which point, shoulders are shrugged, eyes roll like a set of Las Vegas-bound dice, and they usually return to the bar and ask for a ‘beer’.

If they’ve managed to lend their attention to what started out as a fairly simple question, we get onto the ‘revitalisation’ project. “So, now that good beer comes out of a keg, a can, a growler, a, well, anything, CAMRA is asking their membership if it’s OK to support those beers.”

At which point they usually give a look

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somewhere between confusion, astonishment, and mild anger, retreat to the bar and get a ‘beer’.

So what is this project? The press release, which landed on our digital desk towards the end of January, read: ‘The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) is set to widen its remit to represent drinkers of quality beers, ciders and perries of all types, as well as moving its focus beyond traditional pubs, if its members approve recommendations put before them in April.

While continuing to advocate that real ale is the pinnacle of the brewer’s craft, the Campaign’s wider focus will mean all drinkers who enjoy a range of beers, ciders and perries will feel welcome in the organisation.’

Putting it bluntly in his column for the Morning Advertiser, our Editor-at-Large Pete Brown wrote: “CAMRA’s stated aim to move from arguing over dispense to prioritising beer quality more broadly is precisely the thing that cask ale needs desperately to survive.

“More broadly, despite the exciting dynamics that are happening within it, the beer market in general is also in steady, long-term decline. So is cider, only more so. By broadening its remit to cover great beer and cider more generally, CAMRA will now be helping the market as a whole rather than being pettily divisive within it.

“If the whole beer market grows, led by the top end, then cask ale will grow with it.”

We can now join the others at the bar.

DN / camra.org.uk

Beer & Cider Marketing Awards returns Established in 2015, the Beer & Cider Marketing Awards returns in 2018 setting out to discover the UK’s best marketers and celebrate the most innovative and effective campaigns across the beer and cider industry.

Co-founder of the Beer Marketing Awards, Pete Brown, said: " Over the last three years, these awards have celebrated brewers and cider makers of all sizes and budgets who,

It's difficult to describe the mixture of anxiety, stress and hope that filled me as I sat next to the first bottle of my beer. I was waiting for Adrian Tierney-Jones to join me in the pub on a cold December evening, as we were about to find out if my year-long experiment to brew a beer just from my allotment was to end up as a success or not.

It was just one month earlier that I had spent the evening at a friend’s brewery, combining the 4kg of malted barley, Fuggles hops, two yeast cultures and rainwater from the plot to produce 15 litres of now fermenting beer. Another week later and the beer was primed (using some of the original wort in a technique known as krausening), bottled and labelled, and after much procrastination I had settled on a name that I felt summed up the project, the location and ingredients – the plot number of my allotment, 10S.

How did it come out? As the recipe was for a classic English pale I was amazed when Adrian tasted the first glass. He described banana and clove aromas from the wild allotment yeast, a full mouth feel from the unfiltered 5.3% body and a gentle sweetness that quickly moved into a crisp, dry finish. Overall, a perfectly good example of a continental Hefeweizen and one that wouldn’t embarrass itself in competitions.

The relief was huge. Growing Beer was always about understanding what it takes to make a

to borrow a hackneyed marketing phrase, genuinely have ‘surprised and delighted’ the judges with ideas and campaigns that raise the profile of the category as a whole, as well as the individual companies."

The awards are open to all brewers and cider makers, domestic and international, with a presence and focus in the UK. Details of how to enter the awards buy tickets to the awards evening can be found at: bestofbeerandcider.

beer from scratch, but it was wonderful to have created a good beer after 670 hours of my time and that of many, many supporters of the project. So many people in fact, that if this beer were to be sold it would need to do so at just over £1,000 a pint to break even, possibly making it the least commercially viable ever brewed.

com with a closing date for entries of 1st June 2018. Winners will be announced at an event on 20th September 2018 at the Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London.

• Stoke Newington Beer Festival also returns for 2018. It will take place over four sessions at Abney Hall on February 17-18. Breweries include Hammerton, Moncada Verdant and Oliver's Cider. / stokeybeerfest.com

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F E AT U R E

WE CAN BE HEROES

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F E AT U R E

The grassman DO YOU KNOW WHAT SORGHUM IS? DANIEL NEILSON DOES AND HE MEETS A MAN WHO’S MAKING BEER WITH IT

O

n a large plastic sheet weighed down with bricks, a thin layer of a reddish grain is drying under the intense West African heat.

Clement Djameh picks it up and plants it in my hand. The tiny red grains have a little tadpole-like tail. The grain is sorghum, a grass crop that grows abundantly across large parts of Africa. It is used for making porridges, couscous and, in this case, beer.

Accra, Ghana. It’s a place full of life and excitement. It’s a tropical jumble that assaults all five senses. The shattering heat, the pulsing music, the smoking grills, the spic’n’span malls, the crashing surf, the cocktail terraces, the chugging exhausts, the pavement hawkers and swish hotels; it all combines to create a frenetic and thrillingly unpredictable city. The unexpected is to be expected so that there is a guy in Accra who is starting a microbrewery using only sorghum I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I had to see it.

We meet at a petrol station on the very outskirts of Accra, beyond the posh bits and beyond the shanty towns. We hop into Clement’s old 4x4 and bounce along the rough roads to an old house with a large garden. There’s an old car, a large metal container about the same size as the car, and some greenery. At the house, he

opens up a large wooden door to reveal the small brewery. Corny kegs that would be recognised by homebrewers are stacked up on one side. On the kegs are tied little labels: “IPA”, “Trial beer, Belgian type”, “sorghum lager” and “pito", a local alcoholic drink. There’s a large refrigerator and a bottling unit and I reckon the brewhouse has a 100-litre capacity. He pours a spectacular wheat beer and we walk into the garden.

The set-up embodies the positive Ghanaian spirit “This is sorghum,” he says clasping a leafy eight-foot-high plant. He picks apart the grain head and isolates a little seed. “All of our beer is made from sorghum.” I’m noticeably taken aback. Taking another sip of my wheat beer, I don’t note any discernible difference. I try the lager, again no difference, I try the IPA, same. “You have to use what you have available,” Clement tells me. Sorghum beer is also naturally gluten-free. The potential is astounding.

Sorghum is malted in a similar way to barley: soaking and then drying. Clement malts his own in the metal container in the garden and then dries it under the hot equatorial sun. The whole set-up embodies the adaptable and positive Ghanaian spirit

I’ve come to love over the eight annual visits I’ve made.

The real skill is brewing with it, however.

The husk on barley acts as a natural filter when draining the sugary liquid during sparging. Sorghum has no husk, and it is very glutinous. Clement, who trained at Weihenstephaner, is a pioneer in the use of sorghum. Pointing welders in the right direction, he adapted the brewery equipment to deal with this difficult grain and will have to do so again, when his much larger brewhouse arrives later in the year.

I look again at the beer in my glass and delve into its smooth bubbles. This is a beer 40 years in the making. A beer that could tell of trial after trial, set back after set back. It tells of brewing in a country without a constant electricity supply, with no hop merchants, with almost no barley. It reflects the heat of the sun, the torrential downpours of the rainy season, the ground that nurtures the sorghum plant. It tells of the farmers in the north that send the sorghum to Clement, bought for a steady price. It tells of overcoming great adversity, and of love for beer. Forty long years. This beer I have in my hand is bursting with more than hop aromas, it is alive with the spirit of an unassuming man who is quite remarkable.

By Daniel Neilson

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F E AT U R E

A pub table and a beer THE PUB IS A MEDIATOR TO EVENTS LIFE CAN OFTEN THROW YOUR WAY. BY JESSICA MASON

I

t is a setting where we can unravel as people — where we can laugh and where we can cry without judgement. And it can, on some occasions, nurse our hearts and minds back to health.

I didn’t know my real father. He was Indian-Malay and I only met him a handful of times. Even though my mum had a court order to keep him away, if he showed up on our doorstep he’d be welcomed in. Sometimes, he would bring stories. Other times, new siblings.

By the time I was a teenager, the man with the leather trousers who I had seen approximately five times in my life had completely disappeared.

When I was 20 and the internet was just getting going, a friend and I tracked down my old surname and found an uncle of mine living in Germany. He’d been the best man at my parents' wedding. He didn’t know where my father was either, but he asked me to visit. It was the first time I had ever been in an aeroplane and flying out to meet him and his son, a cousin of mine, I felt a deep surge of hopefulness. I was going to discover a family I had never known.

Two days later, after running barefoot down the streets of Dortmund at night, flagging down a car and spending time in a police station, I was flown back to the UK chaperoned, for safety reasons, by the British Consulate. My uncle, after telling me rather a lot about his brother, “the person whom everyone liked,” took away my naivety and replaced it with a fear I had never known.

My university pals, who had helped in my escape, took me to the pub and, within the walls of the Mash Tun and the Black Boy in Winchester, they nursed me back to life with love and beer and the unspoken familiarity of friendship that bound us like a family of our own.

At age 26, to my bewilderment I became a parent myself. So when an out-of-the-blue phone call led to information on my real father’s whereabouts, I was wary. I greeted the event not as the animated optimist, but as a protective, yet numb sage. I suggested meeting on neutral territory – a pub.

I knew I had mere hours with a man I didn’t know. But with a hundred questions in my head none of which could be answered by someone intent on impressing me, I would need to put my questions aside and make him feel at ease enough

He wanted to be admired, only the version of himself he had conjured didn’t really exist. He was the Moon Under Water, personified. to remove his veneer. But how would I do that?

Strangely enough, I did know. I needed just two simple props: a pub table and some beer.

I recognised him immediately. Not because the crumpled wedding photograph of the smiling man I’d been carrying around for years resembled the homeless man in front of me, but because we shared the same eyes. Two deep dark pools of despair looked back at me like a foreboding reflection. His carrier bag of possessions was at his feet and he was wearing a suit at least three sizes too big for his frame and a red baseball cap. He told me he had taken the day off of work especially to meet me and that he was “a business consultant”. I smiled and

By Jessica Mason

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bought him a pint, saying I hoped he wasn’t going to be missed at the office that day.

That evening, he introduced me to his friends and I bought the rounds. His friends, who also had their work bags or kitbags stowed beneath the table, regaled me with proud stories of my father’s cheekiness, his humour and willingness to help others. Traits I’d never personally been privy to, but nor could I dismiss as non-existent. The man had nothing, but he clearly still had mates.

When I took the train back home that evening, I thought about the dimly-lit pub and the things I had learnt on the premises. It had only taken an hour to deduce that the man before me was, quite possibly, the worst man I had ever met in my entire life. He wanted to be admired, only the version of himself he had conjured didn’t really exist. He was the Moon Under Water, personified. He was not the father of which anyone might dream. Yet, in his presence, while my heart silently moved from my throat to the pit of my stomach, hopefulness was replaced by avid fascination. He was a performer and the pub was his stage. I didn’t need to like him; I didn’t need to know him. He was the jester in his court and I was simply his audience for the night.

And there is no remorse. Because we are all kinds of people, drifting through life and some of us are better at getting things right than others – these hostelries we have in Britain taught me that. They strip us down to the bare souls of the people we are and they bind friendships and relationships.

They make us people of mirth and they remind us that being ourselves is enough. They are there for the good days and the bad, because life does that – it just keeps throwing things our way.

And even when things don’t go our way, there’s something we can do about it. We can reset our perspective and, within mine, there’s always a pub table and a beer.

R.I.P. The man who gave me my eyes.

F E AT U R E

War Baby

ALL BEERS HAVE A STORY AND BRASSERIE SILLY’S SCOTCH HAS THE KIND OF TALE THAT WOULD MAKE A RATHER GOOD FILM AS KATRIEN BRUYLAND REPORTS

I

n dry old Egypt, private Jack Payne had his share of thirst.

After that, service with the 1st Battalion, Suffolk Regiment, brought him to rainy, muddy Belgium in the Great War. Both brave and lucky, he survived the Second Battle of Ypres, but never spoke of the horror. Years later, he got an Ieper war medal; Mons, on the Wallonian side of the linguistic border, did the same. Thirsty for beer and thirsty for love, Jack Payne found both in the village of Silly. His girl’s name? Emilie Timmermans. Her Flemish roots replanted in Walloon fields, Emilie stood out from the local girls with the same names.

Here we are now, a century after the war finished.

Ronald Payne is Jack and Emilie’s youngest son, 75 years old. The town of Silly has two hairdressers and Mister Payne is one of them.

‘Silly people still think my name is spelled “Peigne”, French for comb,’ he tells me with a smile. ‘The local people called my father “Jek”.

He never mentioned the war. Except in indirect ways. And only when I was cutting his hair.’

Ronald Payne’s salon is the place his mother Emilie grew up in. A cross-eyed drunk would say it’s across the street from the brewery.

Here, during the Great War a Belgian brewer outsmarted the Germans by painting his mash tun black. Black, to have them believe the installation was cast iron as, when the occupants wanted to plunder copper for guns, they were too befuddled to tell faux cast iron from the real stuff. They left with no Silly copper to feed their

war machine with. Or so the story still goes.

The Silly brewery was granted the Hainaut region’s ‘central brewery’ position, which meant that those breweries forced to hand over their coppers could brew small batches in Silly. The brewery imported English hops from Kent. A farmer-brewer, the man who owned Silly, grew his own barley and malted the grains on site.

That is, up until he allowed British soldiers to dry their soaking wet truck tarpaulins to dry on the malting floors. Overheating sent flames through the tarps, which caused the malt house to burn

Thirsty for beer and thirsty for love, Jack Payne found both in the village of Silly.

His girl’s name?

Emilie Timmermans

‘back home, my father only cared for Scotch ale.

To this day, I don’t know how he instructed the brewer to make Silly Scotch. Jack Payne was a military man. He didn’t have brewing experience.

He managed, somehow.’

The French awarded Jack Payne their Croix de Guerre. Shortly after the war, Sergeant Jack Payne received the British Military Medal for bravery in the field in the war. Contrary to those men who didn’t live to tell the tale, he returned to England.

He was then sent to Ireland. When he got back, he left the army, vowing to never again shoot a man whose language he spoke.

Emilie had followed Jack home after the war was over. Jack followed Emilie home after the army was over. Back in Silly, Jack Payne lost his leg in an accident while working at the village chicory factory. Jack got a wooden leg and went to work at … Brasserie de Silly. ‘One evening, after the village fair, I had to help my father get home. He had downed nineteen beers. Nineteen times Silly Scotch. It’s the only beer we ever drink.’

down. At one point, Jack Payne’s brother Albert was stationed at the brewery with his platoon.

Soldiers aren’t fire fighters.

In Belgium, English ale-inspired beers were on trend before and during the Great War. Jack Payne was 30 and thirsty in Silly when he first suggested the village brewer to consider brewing a new beer. His favourite according to his son:

By Katrien Bruyland

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P H O T O E S S AY

BLACK FRIAR The astonishing Black Friar serves as reminder of the urban planning vandalism of the 1960s that it was so nearly lost to. We owe a lot to Sir John Betjeman, who led the campaign to save this Arts & Crafts/ Art Nouveau beauty from the wrecking ball. The pub's wedge shape is an echo of its past as part of a vanished network of narrow streets.

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P H O T O E S S AY

THREE PUBS You may know Gareth Dobson as Teninchwheels from Twitter. He's also the name behind specialist beer and brewery photographer beershots.co.uk THE PRINCESS LOUISE The Princess Louise in Holborn is like a spinster aunt’s display cabinet, a rhapsody of mahogany, mirrors, brass and tiles. It's a bit like having a pint in the V&A. Enigmatic custodians Samuel Smith restored this high Victorian gem in 2007, most notably replacing the partitions which had been ripped out in the 1970s as part of the mania for one-room pubs.

THE TEN BELLS When I lived nearby in the '90s, The Ten Bells was a pub to avoid, with blacked out windows and still suffering from its close association with Jack The Ripper. Reflecting the thundering gentrification of Spitalfields, it's now a welcoming freehouse. The restored tiles gained the pub its grade II listing.

Seen here are its 19th century ceramic mural 'Spitalfields in ye olden times – visiting a weaver’s shop', and its modern counterpart painted by Ian Harper.

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F E AT U R E

BE ER S

S

ome beers are lost like the Amber Room of St Petersburg or the Ark of the Covenant, gone, vanished, submerged in history, never to be found again.

They are the kind of beers that make the eyes of elderly barroom bores glisten with tears (‘I recall Boddington’s Mild in 1962,’ was one refrain I heard from a man who trembled with the memory of it all). I’m not much better: much as I dislike the nostalgic trend in some beer writing, I too have lost beers, Morrell’s Graduate, a beer from Bridgwater Brewery whose name I

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have forgotten and Adnams Extra as it was in the 1990s. Some might argue that the first expression of Punk IPA is a lost beer.

I understand the mourning behind the beers that we once drank and are now lost – the brewery closed, the recipe changed, the owners got greedy, your own tastes changed. If you are interested in beer beyond the edge of normality, then that lost beer is a representative of your past, in the same way you might get all wistful when discovering a ripped and torn, long-defunct punk fanzine when all was bright and fresh in your world. Loss is as much a part of the human condition as love, laughter and raging against the joylessness of clean eating.

On the other hand, we can consider another idea of lost beers; beers that are lost just like a friend you haven’t seen for years who then hails you from a bar stool at the market in Malaga (it sort of happened to me). How are you doing, what are you doing here, won’t you have a drink with me, remember old so-and-so? When we think about these other lost beers, it is obviously not such an apocalyptic action – the sun will shine once more (unlike Scott Walker’s mood), the birds will sing, and you will have a glass in front of you of a beer that you have found once more, a treasure of a beer that you had forgotten in beer’s recent gold rush when it has become so difficult to keep up with what is being brought into

the world. We always have a chance to make up with these beers and hopefully they will enchant and entertain us in the same way that they used to (that is always the danger when we return to our lost beers, or even friends, will they disappoint us?). Whatever, the consequences, these are the lost beers we are here today to celebrate.

It was always said that many drinkers (invariably men) were very happy to drink the same thing night after night (this was when people, both men and women, went to the pub night after night) and presumably there are plenty who have carried on in this manner; a pint of the usual, same again, etc. However, for me,

F E AT U R E

Lost & found IN REMEMBERANCE OF LOST BEERS, IN ANTICIPATION OF FINDING NEW ONES

STU MCKINLAY THE YEASTIE BOYS ‘I’ve lost a bunch of beers, forever, like fallen soldiers who stormed the beaches in a war that looks promising but is not yet won... but their call to arms, for a world with better beer everywhere, is now a part of my DNA. Emerson’s 40 Winks is an absolute classic in that regard. A spiced dark ale that is up there among anything I could call an epiphany. A perfect beer on a comfortable couch, after a spectacular meal,

with the best of friends (who ended up going in to become the co-founders of Yeastie Boys).

‘As for ones that I’ve lost and then come back to…

I think that’s something I experience on a bi-annual basis, each time I return to my roots in New Zealand. Beer is a part of my daily life. I don’t do days off, detoxes, or dry anything, so going six months without tasting the wide array of beers made by friends in New Zealand is like missing my

family. But it’s all the more pleasurable to go back to them each time I return: Liberty Yakima Monster, Panhead Supercharger, Garage Project Beer (yes, it really is called that) and especially Emerson's Bookbinder – an English style ordinary bitter with the faintest flourish of chocolate and the fruity and vinous notes so commonly picked up from NZ hops. Just writing about Bookbinder makes me want to fly back, head to Dunedin, and visit their tap room.’

STUART ROSS MAGIC ROCK ‘I’ve rediscovered cask beer. It’s been a gradual thing that started around May last year when I moved to a more rural location in a small market town in South Yorkshire.

There are a couple of unappealing pub-co pubs in the centre, which I’ve still not been inside but a 30-minute walk across fields with the dog gets us to one of the next villages where they have a range of cask beer (six pulls I think) and a good local country pub vibe. I realised recently that I’d stopped choosing cask beer when out in other towns and cities traveling and doing events for work. I’d been ordering kegged beer out of habit

and not really paying attention.’

‘I was always a bitter drinker and grew up drinking Stones, maybe some Tetley bitter, then I think the earliest experience of more modern and also microbrewery cask beer was Abbeydale Moonshine in the Sheaf View in Sheffield. I then ended up working in a small brewery that only made cask beer, and then a couple of other cask breweries before Magic Rock started.

‘Cask beer is what got me into beer! During the year preceding Magic Rock and for probably around a year after we started I was still very much a lover

of all packaging formats but I started to find myself looking at the keg taps more than the cask offerings. I’d also found myself drinking more hop forward pale ales and IPAs and always the US-brewed or influenced ones, which suit being carbonated and served a little cooler.

Hoppy, cold, fizzy beer became my drink of choice.

‘Now I find myself wandering through the fields to the next village for a few pints of Landlord and a roast dinner while one of our other favourites is a longer walk looping round a local reservoir and over the moors for few pints of Barnsley Bitter and meat pie.’

I so easily forget the beers that I once so cherished, the quietly spoken beers, the beers with poise, elegance and even a hint of danger the concept of these lost beers is about memory, is about how in such a fast-moving and dynamic beer world, I so easily forget the beers that I once so cherished, the quietly spoken beers, the beers with poise, elegance and even a hint of danger. So, you might ask, why are they lost? What happened? For me, other beers came along, other beers with headier scents, more bruising profiles and a sense of the now, which like many who like the kaleidoscopic chaos of the current beer world I couldn’t help being swept along with.

For me, the style that most exemplifies the lost beer is wheat beer, both the Bavarian and Flemish versions (ironically enough both considered as lost beers in the 1960s).

I have gone through periods in the past

when both these styles have sustained me through many a long night in a bar in both Bavaria and Belgium; even as I write I think I would like a long tall glass of Schneider Weisse, with its bubblegum, vanilla, cloves and ripe bananas, its bracing carbonation on the tongue, a slight hint of lactic sourness in the mid palate, before its vanilla, banana, herbal and medicinal finish. Or I might want an Abbaye des Rocs Blanche des Honnelles, thirst-quenching with a soft oily texture on the palate alongside the jingle-jangle of spices and fruit such as dried Curaçao orange peel, grains of paradise and coriander.

I forgot about these beers as they were subsumed by others with varying degrees

of sourness, hop character, dark desires and just the general diversity of what we call beer now. However, by virtue of just writing about them, they are no longer lost to me.

Like Indiana Jones, I have found them again… and it’s not just this style.

For a while, IPA became lost to me, but that was more about the quality of the IPAs I was encountering (and I am not having a moan about milkshake IPAs, smoothie ones, ones with all manner of kitchen sink material in them, where’s the chocolate IPA? Ok I’m having a moan).

Bitter certainly became lost to me, but once again it was found again over the course of a few days when I sampled Adnams, Hook Norton and Harvey’s.

We all have lost beers. Our memory has been unforgiving. For a while (a century perhaps) British brewers forgot and lost what they used to do. They lost the art of ageing beer, they let their minds lose the memories of how they used to blend old and new; they forgot that fruit, herbs and spices could be an integral part of the beers they brew; they lost the knowledge that beers could be left to ripen, to grow old and elegant, ready to be embraced and engaged by a younger generation of beer. The last 25 years has seen the lost fog of forgetfulness lift and that is why we are living through the most exciting period in beer since the 19th century – try and remember your lost beers, they have a story to tell, of your life and their journey through life.

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#MEAN IT

S H O RT S

HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO

By Pete Brown Moving from playground to boardroom to Instagram, Pete Brown charts beer’s journey from hero to zero and back again

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

“Did you see it? Did you see it?”

“Can we hero the product?”

“Stop! Stop! We’re going round in circles!”

Around the boardroom table, eyes roll.

“What’s the point in advertising anyway?”

“New England IPA is a product of Instagram culture.”

In the 1980s, there were two commercial channels. Now there are hundreds. Even if you could somehow make a great beer ad, the mass audience that would see it has now shattered into a million fragments.

The words of Garrett Oliver flash across the global beer community thanks to sensationalist reporting of a chat about 2017’s most controversial beer style. Beer writers, bloggers and Instagrammers line up on both sides of a debate about the style’s validity. It’s the biggest argument over beer styles since the spat over whether ‘black IPA’ is a valid style.

We all remember what it was like. You’re 12, and one of the most important veins of playground banter is repeating the latest sketch from your comedy idols.

If you weren’t allowed to watch last night’s episode, you are no one. If you can remember more of the lines and catchphrases than anyone else, and get the funny voices right, you’re a classroom god.

Depending on your age, for you, it might have been Monty Python, The Young Ones, The Fast Show or Little Britain.

For me, it was adverts.

In the space between Python and the 1980s alternative comedy boom going mainstream, ads on TV seemed funnier than the programmes. Terry and June may have been critically rehabilitated now, but it was hell to live through the time when it set the standard for sitcoms.

Salvation came in commercial breaks. In the 1980s, it was considered rude to try to sell you something directly, so a good ad would make you laugh, move you or dazzle you, and then politely remind you of the product’s name at the end.

Beer ads bossed the box. Christopher Biggins was a Roman emperor sinking pints of lager; a young Jonathan Ross drank Harp to ‘stay sharp’; and back in ancient Rome, the slaves rowing on one side of a galley were refreshed by Heineken, while those on the other were given ‘another leading lager’, and our school playground had its latest catchphrase.

Beer ads have had their teeth pulled.

The Hofmeister bear has been shot with the fatal dart of regulation. His alleged crime? Being so popular that he made children want to drink beer.

He didn’t make me want to drink beer; he made me want to do something far worse.

He made me want to work in advertising.

Fifteen years after chanting Heineken slogans in the playground, I’m in the boardroom of their ad agency. It’s my job to look after the strategic direction of the Heineken and Stella Artois ad campaigns.

Advertising has a way of mangling the English language. It doesn’t have to invent new words when it’s happy torturing old ones. We often have conversations about who or what the ‘hero’ is in the ad we’re working on. Is it the housewife trying Daz instead of her normal powder? The frog in the Budweiser ad croaking out the brand name? Or could it actually be the product itself ?

Inevitably, ‘hero’ becomes a verb as well as a noun. ‘To hero’ the product is to put it centre stage and forget the distractions. Unfortunately, each time we try this with beer, it stands there mute and awkward. No one knows or cares what ‘cold filtered’ means or what ‘dry beer’ is.

Just as I get my chance to work on them, beer ads start getting boring.

Instead of wasting money on anodyne ads that no one will see, the great beasts of the beer world now spend their budgets on supermarket price deals.

Where beer was once chosen based on its image, it’s now chosen on price.

Instead of being loyal to one brand, there’s a range of ‘acceptable’ brands, and people choose whichever is on the best deal.

Having left advertising and now written on beer for 15 years, I realise that heated conversations about beer styles have been a common theme across all my feeds since 2010. My last book was about beer’s ingredients. Every day on social media, I see professional writers and amateur drinkers alike trying to encapsulate the flavour of the beer they’re drinking.

Finally, the beer itself has become the hero.

The big, commoditised brands that once had heroic advertising still dominate market share, but they look enviously at craft beer, at the buzz of excitement around it.

They remember what it was like, and make half-hearted attempts to steal the language of craft, to reflect in its glory. Beer is now bought and drunk on its own merits, rather than because of its manufactured image.

Or is it?

I’ve heard people recently saying that sour beers are ‘over’, despite the fact that there are more excellent examples available than ever. Beers that were once hailed as the world’s best on rating sites have sunk

without trace, despite the fact that they haven’t changed. And then there’s the question of New England IPA… Beer helps us express ourselves and mould our identities. It doesn’t

need dancing bears and croaking frogs to do that.

The image of beer is as important as ever, even if it is now based on what’s in the bottle as much as what’s on the label.

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PILSNERS

LAGERS

PALE ALES

IPA’S

1000 AMAZING BEERS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS www.beerhawk.co.uk

AMBER ALES

RED ALES PORTERS

STOUTS

Prague images: Prague City Tourism (prague.eu)

BEER

T R AV E L L E R

Prague

By Adrian Tierney-Jones

I am in Prague, a city that I fall in and out of love with, a city that brings joy, but can also frustrate, but on this Sunday morning it is a city with which I am very much smitten. And when the stars come out and the planets strive to influence my moods, I love to walk the streets of Prague without purpose, to stroll with no ambition of arrival, to be a flâneur, to be an observer, to vanish into the beauty of its cityscape.

The joy of this urban-based wandervogel is that I never know what I will find but I do know that I always build up a thirst, and so on this grey Sunday morning the end result of my aimless amble in the Holešovice district on the north bank of the Vltava is Klášterní Pivnice.

I had heard its name before, old school, smoky, an authentic corner pub and an antidote to the city’s craft beer joints that look like coffee shops and where IPA is the lingua franca (not that there is anything bad about this, I love Zlý časy, Pivovarský klub, Illegal and Ale! Bar, for instance, but sometimes I just want to drink a Saaz-ravished světlý ležák — and lots of it). So there I was, taking time out from my travels, outside the pub, along with a couple of smokers, a thirst continuing to build up like an array of buses stuck on Oxford Street. Before I went through the door, I played a little game and tried to imagine Klášterní Pivnice as a person — perhaps a gruffly-spoken, take-nononsense bar tender, male or female, the

kind of person that turns even the biggest of mouths into timid people-pleasers.

After all, it’s an unremarkable looking place, located on the ground floor of an apartment block, maybe built under the communists and tarted up in the last few years, but then I noted the three windows, each of which was stuffed with odds and sods such as old typewriters, empty bottles and a lone laptop from the age of steam. Instead of being unbearably quirky (like children’s TV presenters who shout out that they are ‘WHACKY!’), this felt more like a let’s-put-some-old-tat-in-thewindow-for-a-laugh kind of thing, which I rather liked (though I could be wrong and maybe the typewriters represent some kind of literary crusade).

Inside, there was a silence reminiscent of a church before the service begins — the odd laugh, the murmur of conversation, and a sense of tranquility. It was 11am but there were only a few drinkers about.

In the back room where I took my pint of Klášter Ležák (crisp and refreshing, an ideal companion for this first sip of the day), there was an harmonious balance between the silence of several drinkers reading their newspapers and the occasional clunk of glass mugs as a group of four guys toasted the morning once more (though I did wonder if they had been to bed yet, as a couple had the look of the swiped, slack faced pot-

valiant about them). Meanwhile the bar tender was unceasing as he roved the back room looking for who wanted their glass replenished.

If you’re interested in such trifles, there were four draft beers on (none of them an IPA): as well as the one I was drinking, there were beers from Chotěboř, Primátor and one other, whose name I couldn’t be bothered to record. I think the mood of the pub affected me, got me to forget my constant rattling around the taxonomy of beer and join in the sheer joy of this unpretentious boozer, where time seemed to stretch and turn in on itself. As I gulped my beer (it started as sips, but it was soon apparent that this was a beer to gulp), an elderly man came in and sat at a table, his face like a map of a distant fabulous land.

Up sprung the bar tender once more with a pint and a chaser, and the man with the face of a world we shall never see sat with his magazine, silent and still, each gulp (the gulping was infectious) of the beer like a soliloquy to his place in the world of this pub.

The back room had the feel of a hideaway, a cave perhaps, a wooden, panelled cave, painted green, while the tables and chairs were brutalist brown. As if to demonstrate the room’s communal aspect, a bench travelled along the three walls. Old faded prints of local football teams lined the wall alongside scarves and – curiously – a

pennant for West Ham. Once more the sense of local was emphasised.

A dog (a French Bulldog called Rocky), who’d come in the company of the four revellers, roamed the room and settled beneath a table where a man in reflective clothes, his night shift finished perhaps, sat with a friend and ate his lunch (a robust, meaty menu, old school). The man surreptitiously slipped the dog scraps and I continued diving deeper into my beer (24 crowns for a pint if you’re interested in that sort of thing, which makes it about 90p). It wasn’t the best beer in the world but it was perhaps the best beer in the best pub in the world at that moment in time. There was an informality and a homeliness about the place even if I didn’t share the language and the life choices on display.

If you want to see the Czech love for beer before craft took over or away from the PU, Staro and Budvar pubs, then somewhere like this is an essential place to visit. It’s a boozer’s paradise, a hiding place, an easy place to write and a lair where enough time might make you part of the crowd. Which is sometimes what beer and pubs are all about: belonging.

Meanwhile Rocky continued to scout across the room and the bar in search of fallen titbits and his human companions kept carousing.

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TA S T I N G N O T E S

Fallen Brewing THE BIG 1 [8.5%]

Camden Town Brewery Robinson’s Brewery BEER 2017 [10.2%] OLD TOM [8.5%]

A devilishly good DIPA that makes you want to keep drinking more

Camden Town's annual barrel-aged release hits new heights with the imperial pilsner

It's a classic, but can the rebrand revive the brand? When it's this good, yes

A deeply satisfying IPA that relishes in the history of the IPA

Here we are another DIPA, a phrase handed about as if it were candy for kids, but what does it mean? Sometimes, I think, amidst the murk and dank of a DIPA that its true explanation is like a distant peak in the clear mountain air – you know that it’s far away but if you suspend judgment and belief it looks so close. For Fallen’s The Big 1, what I do know is that it has a Cointreau-like oranginess, a fullbodied muscularity, a muted sweetness, the biscuit-like firmness of malt in the mid-palate, a juicy and chewable mouth feel and a dry and tingling finish. It is very good, devilish in the way it makes you keep on drinking it, friendly in the way it welcomes you in the glass. I am enticed by it and want to get closer to that mountain. ATJ / fallenbrewing..co.uk

I’m going to be honest: It seemed like a long time since I had a great beer. I don’t mean a good one, or even a very good one. I was actually getting upset about it. I thought it was me. I really did. For a few brief weeks I was Losing The Faith. That does not feel good. I declare I’m excited again. I’m excited that there are people out there who will not only attempt to barrel age an ‘imperial pilsner’, but create something out the otherside that is smooth and drinkable, but has the personality of all the New York Dolls in full crisis. The lightness of the beer allows the wood curl around the liquid, intwined like rings on a tree. Malt, hops, yeast, water.

Time. Wood. Love. Care. Knowledge. God I love beer. DN / camdentownbrewery.com

A smart new rebrand seems like a great excuse to review an old classic that may well be overlooked in the craft beer world of 2018 but belongs right at the heart of it. Old Tom was first brewed in the northern Industrial town of Stockport in 1899 and is little changed.

Old-fashioned cocoa and sweet shop cola bottles hit the nose, opening up to a smooth, rich orchestra of chocolate, red fruit, caramel and alcohol warmth, full and quite chewy, but with a dry, moreish finish. The brewery may be pushing things a little too hard when they refer to it as ‘the original craft beer’, but ignore the dad-dancing – if this was from Belgium, you’d already know it and think it was awesome.

PB / robinsonsbrewery.com

Wylam Brewery, Newcastle. What a place! And yes it deserves an exclamation mark (normally banned in this publication). Based in the Grade II Palace of Arts, it has been delicately transformed into a brewery, taproom and events space. Wylam Brewery has been operating for 18 years, but the 2016 move to this location, in the heart of Exhibition Park, has inspired some beautiful brews. Sweet Leaf (a lovely name for a beer) is a 7.4% IPA and a curious one at that. Pouring the colour of a cloudy lemonade, this as a deeply earthy, agricultural beer. It’s an ‘East Coast IPA’. None of the pine, more of the savoury citrus, English in character. It's bone dry yet fruity, delicious and, best of all, it is a curious beer with all the character of the brewery. DN / wylambrewery.co.uk

Yeastie Boys PULLYU [7%] A fantastical collaboration with a New Zealand brewery

For the Yeastie Boys it’s collaboration time again, but this time with a NZ vineyard, whose wine called Pushmi was used to make a candisugar, that was then used in this self-titled strong white ale. Golden and gleaming in the glass (hazeteers take note), its nose is quite dirty, not muddy, but showy in a dirty sense, rock ’n’ roll maybe. On the palate, it scrubs up well, being rich and honeyed, glossy and

Redchurch Brewery TARTELETTE [4.5%]

Wild Beer Co ICED MODUS

A Berliner Weisse out of Redchurch's experimental brewery

This is not a beer

Since 2011, Redchurch have been turning out decent beers that don’t vary too much from the standard range common to most of London’s breweries. In 2016, in response to growing demand, they crowdfunded the costs of building a new, bigger brewery in Harlow, Essex, and turned their existing arch in East London into an ‘Urban Farmhouse’, brewing wild and experimental beers. Tartelette smells sweatily of overripe fruit on the nose, like late summer about to turn. It’s fruity and refreshing at the front, with a hint of orange juice, and the sourness builds at the end, late but swiftly to grab the sides of your tongue, leaving you with a pang of wanting to get on and go round on the ride again. PB / redchurch.beer

The definition of beer in the Oxford English Dictionary is 'an alcoholic drink made from yeast-fermented malt flavoured with hops'. Iced Modus is, therefore, a beer. But it’s not: Iced Modus bears no resemblance to the drink that our culture commonly accepts as ‘beer’. Nothing about this drink, from the box it arrives in, to the kind of bottle, to the sharp, acidic aroma, to the way the liquid pours unctuously into a glass, suggests its a beer. Nor does the taste: a vinous, sherry-like taste with an overarching rainbow of dark cherries. Wood is apparent, with its sharp tannins and suggestion of a lush forest floor after rain. The beer is a barrel-aged iced beer, blended, frozen, and aged again in Pedro Ximenez sherry barrels. God it’s lovely. DN / wildbeerco.com

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[10%]

creamy, bittersweet and candied, with a dryness breaking through in the finish.

It also has the heady musk of a rich white wine, but there’s also the tread of barley and hops that keeps things in perspective. Heady is a good way to describe this beer — or maybe you could say it has the dryness of a Belgian strong golden ale, the plumpness of an

Siren Craft Brew SHELTERED SPIRIT [14%]

Wylam Brewery SWEET LEAF [7.4%]

abbey and the tingle of a grape ale. A triumph.

ATJ / yeastieboys.co.nz

Five Points Brewing DERAILED PORTER [5.2%]

Barrel-aged imperial porter with tamarind

Porter gets barrel aged, just like it used to

A session beer then, something to neck down while you chat away about the day’s events and hope that you can make it home – it’s not much stronger than your normal glass of shiraz, so what’s the issue? Mill-pond still in the glass, it’s the darkest chestnut brown sideboard in the manor house, aged and elegant in its colour; take a sniff and pinpoint the Marmite-like meatiness (the tamarind perhaps?), that is then overwhelmed by the caramel-like softness of the time spent in the barrel. There’s a vanilla-caramel crossover, a pepperiness, a spiciness, a joyous sense of fruit, a stickiness of booze and a drying finish that also has a sense of voluptuousness about it. Gorgeous. ATJ / sirencraftbrew.com

If you haven’t already tried Five Points’ Railway Porter, you might want to try that first, just so you can appreciate the base beer that went off the rails. The original has massive coffee on the nose with hints of tobacco and leather. This version was then aged in barrels for six months with Brettanomyces. Its triumph is that the Brett supports and enhances what was already there, rather than barging in and shouting. All porters were once aged in wooden barrels and funky Brett was part of their character, but that doesn’t mean they were ‘sour’ beers. They were probably more like this: a little earthier, slightly funkier, but overall fuller and rounder with no one flavour dominating, and all the more satisfying for it. PB / fivepointsbrewing.co.uk

YOUR ROUND

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Always need a special heroic drinking partner !! Cheers Ray.

Craft beer grandad! This is Baz

Stanley Beerhound

Anthiesis @GammonBaron

My grainfather is my hero @Dalecleaningco

Tom from @CraftBeerHour

I n d e p e n d e n t & U n f I lt e r e d

Cheshire Brewhouse Big Shane - and Jack

What about this Craft Legend @TheRchase @WeBroughtBeer

fivepointsbrewing.co.uk

This guy's running Barony Mill, a 300 year old water mill on Orkney that still produces malt for brewing @BeerNouveau

@fivepointsBrew

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