Beers From A Little Valley In West Yorkshire.

A few months ago, my local tesco started stocking beers from Little Valley. It was during their last attempts at expanding their craft beer selection and was during the 5 for €10 phase they went through which was great while it lasted.

Withens Pale Ale is an unassuming beer. It's a brilliant thirst quencher and is almost like a bitter pseudo lager. There's lots of cereal, hay as well as a nice peppery quality. Citrus is a-plenty and is of the lemon variety.

My wife enjoyed the Ginger Pale Ale and also Tod's Blonde.

I haven.t seen them in a while, inevitably with tesco, no matter how much craft beer we buy from them, they decrease the shelf space to the point that it's not worth looking and with the 5 for €10 deal changed to 3 for €7, I don't even buy beer in tesco any more.

Alaskan Smoked Porter

Alaska is not somewhere I am ever likely to visit so it's nice that I can get beer from Alaskan microbreweries. There's a surprising number of breweries in Alaska, a massive state with only about half the population of Dublin. Anchorage for instance has about 7 breweries alone which is more than Dublin. It begs the question as to why a city with a metropolitan population akin to Cork (city) can support so many breweries? I can imagine that drinking is a popular pastime in such an unforgiving place as Alaska.

Smoked Porter from the Alaskan Brewing Company is the only beer I have had from Alaska so far. At 6.5% it's pretty weighty but not unmanageable. Drinking the 660ml bottle by yourself is perfectly reasonable, sure it's barely more than a pint! The aroma is just smoky bacon, but not real smoked bacon, the kind of artificial stuff they use on the likes of Rancheros or similar snacks. The beer sort of tastes like it was eh.. "dry hopped" with rancheros. The result is rather unpleasant as the fake bacon dominates leaving little room for the little coffee and chocolate that break through. It's not all bad though, I like rancheros and I liked this beer, it had a wonderful mouthfeel and I could certainly drink more of it. From many a tasting session, I get the feeling I pick up more smoke than some people so many purposely smoked beers I can find the a little one sided. By all other accounts, this beer is balanced nicely and is world class. Actually I think this beer would be very pleasant to drink on a cold evening in Alaska. And by cold I mean colder than my little country has ever been in recorded history. That said, summers in Anchorage for instance would appear to be better than Irish summers from what I have read so maybe it's not such a bad place to go for a visit, not with so many breweries to hand.

Hardknott Beers In Ireland? A Likely Prospect.

Drinking order: from right to left

I have met Hardknott Dave a number of times over the last few years. Beginning when he ran his old brewpub and moving on to when he sold that and moved his microbrewery to a new premises. Some of the things I like about Dave is that he is uncompromising when it comes to quality and also he loves to experiment with his beers. Think Brewdog but without the attitude that comes with them.

Dave has been twice over to Dublin this year in search of an opportunity to get his beer in to Ireland where I know it will go down very well. It's hard to believe but this was the first time he had been to Ireland and while the first trip was more of a package deal for small businesses, the most recent trip was simply themselves as a brewery going around and getting a feel for the Irish drinks market and most importantly, meeting with prospective importers.

Both times I met up with Dave and his better half at L. Mulligan Grocer. I had tried to get him to meet the proprietor as he himself is a beer importer but Colin was on a plane and only arrived after they had left. Not to worry as this time there was an actual meeting arranged well in advance. Though Colin was still coming in from the airport as it turns out.

We sampled 12 of the Hardknott beers that Dave had brought along and I have to say, they were all very impressive. Some I have had before and not thought a great deal at the time. I am happy to report that the recipe has either been altered for some of these beers and they are now wonderful, tasty beers or in the case of some of the bigger beers like Rhetoric, have been allowed to age and are now at the ideal time for drinking. 

Colin brought out his own Dr Rudi but unfortunately it seems to have gone past its best by because there was a wet cardboard like oxidisation going on and Colin was very apologetic. Dave picked out Oysters and I thought it pretty tannic. If you want to know what it should taste like, TheBeerNut already talked about it last year.

After this, we headed to The Brew Dock for a few more beers before calling at a night. It was a great beer filled evening.

Anyway, I don't know if a deal has been struck between Hardknott and any of the people he talked to and I imagine it's a little too soon anyway but it does seem fairly likely that Ireland is going to get Hardknott beer at some point this year if we are lucky and not just bottles but hopefully kegs too.

If I hear anything more, or they start to appear, I will mention it on here. In the meantime, keep an eye out yourself.

Brew #54 - Belgian Fool

Galway Bay Brewery is holding a home brew competition soon. Entries are to be dropped in to one of their pubs. If you are Dublin based like myself, they need to be in by May 6th to one of the Dublin pubs but otherwise, May 9th in The Oslo, Salthill.

It was a last minute change that brewer Chris decided to restrict the style to Belgian. No problem until I realised too late I didn't have some of the ingredients I needed to make my witbier.
So I threw together the beer below on the fly and just took note of the recipe as I went along and then entered in to beertools and this is what it looks like.

I tasted a week old bottle conditioned version. It's not bad, seems to be like a Belgian amber ale.
The real version is in the keg and is force carbonated. Something I don't usually do but time was against me.
I won't know until today how that beer turned out.

One thing to note, the yeast I used was T-58 and that's the most explosive yeast I have ever come across. It knocked my blow off tube clear off the carboy and it did this twice with a foaming mess coming out. Finally it settled down but it was a lot of fun. There were some interesting sulphur smells too. Every morning it smelled like a fart downstairs.

Belgian Fool

16-E Belgian Specialty Ale
Author: Reuben Gray (Saruman)
Date: 01/04/2013

Size: 26.03 L @ 20 °C
Efficiency: 75.0%
Attenuation: 75.0%
Calories: 189.36 kcal per 12.0 fl oz

Original Gravity: 1.057 (1.026 - 1.120)
|=============#==================|

Terminal Gravity: 1.014 (0.995 - 1.035)
|===============#================|

Color: 46.42 (1.97 - 98.5)
|===============#================|

Alcohol: 5.6% (2.5% - 14.5%)
|============#===================|

Bitterness: 21.2 (0.0 - 100.0)
|===========#====================|

Ingredients:

4091 g (64.1%) Maris Otter Pale Ale Malt - added during mash
1012 g (15.8%) Belgian Biscuit - added during mash
484 g (7.6%) Wheat Malt - added during mash
300 g (4.7%) Crystal Malt 250 - added during mash
500 g (7.8%) Candi Sugar Dark - added during mash
23 g (48.9%) Perle (7.3%) - added during boil, boiled 60 m
24 g (51.1%) Northern Brewer (10.9%) - added during boil, boiled 5 m
1 ea Fermentis T-58 Safbrew T-58

Results generated by BeerTools Pro 1.5.24

#IHP2013 - The End Result

I've been drinking my re-creation of Truman's No 4 for about 3 weeks or so and it turned out rather well, though as usual with these historical recipes, it never turns out exactly as expected. The recipe I used can be seen here. I didn't have quite enough EKG for the 30 minute addition so I added 10g of fuggles to make up the difference. I doubt there was any real impact to the beer.

The real differences are as follows:

• The Original Gravity was supposed to be 1.079 but I only managed 1.065
• The Finishing Gravity should have been 1.024 but mine was 1.021
• This means, the 7.3% beer became 5.8% which is a little over 1% off target.

So all in all, the beer is not going to be the same as it originally was, but then from tasting it, I have to say it's probably rather close.

Al's description is that it should be both sweet and bitter at the same time and that's exactly what I have here. 

It starts off with a little butter and honey, a product of some fermenting temperature extremes. Mostly though, there's a real sweet caramel like malt with some cereal. Then the hops comes out and you get the hint of the 125 IBUs. A little fruit and slightly grassiness are about as much as I could detect through that heavy body. It's almost chewy and even meade like.
It was a fun experiment as always and I look forward to next year. Having a drinkable beer makes it worthwhile.

A Tasting With TheBeerNut

Recently, TheBeerNut hosted a beer tasting night at his house. I guess he needed help emptying his stash of beers so myself and Richard Lubell (freelance beer writer for the likes of Dubliner magazine) were only too happy to help him with such a serious problem.

There was no real theme other than drinking some of the harder to find beers and with the exception of the bottle of Left Hand Smoke Jumper I brought to the table, I had not had any of these beers before and thankfully Smoke Jumper was new to the others too so it all worked out.

   

We started off with Noblesse from De dochter van de korenaar. It's a 5.5% blonde ale. Notes of grain/straw, slightly metallic, hint if bubblegum. Slightly spicy and sour finish. Little honey and lemon making it a little like lemsip with whiskey with a little spice on the finish. It was rather enjoyable I thought and a great start. I believe it was a fair bit past it's best before date and it was none the worse for it.

From the same brewery came Finesse. An aroma of peaches, hint of grape and pine. The pine is due to the beer being aged on pine resin.

In the mouth I got citrus, pine, alcohol, peach and orange. Very nice sipper. Drying finish. Similar to an IPA in some ways but without the in your face hopping. Quite bitter. In reality it's a 3 grain tripel according to the label. Then again, don't trust the label because this 660ml bottle has a label that thinks it's 330ml and is translated in to Engrish.

Sticking with de dochter, we have Bravoure, our first smoked beer for the evening. It's an amber with an ABV of 6.5%. The smoke on the nose is quite subtle but undeniably there. I also got a whiff of prunes and alcohol. This was a bit of a bottle bomb with beer geysering everywhere before it was directed in to a glass. To say it was over-carbonated is an understatement, it was almost painful to drink. It sort of tasted like fizzy prune juice with some kippers thrown in. It sounds unpleasant but it wasn't as bad as all that. Still, I won't be rushing out to obtain a bottle for myself.

On to a different brewery this time and a different country, and a Black IPA from Emelisse. An aroma of milk chocolate and fresh cut grass. On tasting it starts off bitter a little grassy with an alcohol burn. On to some caramel then. It's not as bitter as I might expect. There's a little citrus and as the carbonation dies, some smoke comes out. It's a beautiful beer and quite subtle too. 

On to the ridiculous now. Southern tier's black water series Imperial Choklat Stout is a 10% beast of a beer.

First off, the aroma, it's like like chocolate syrup used to pour on ice cream with a slight cherry liqueur. 

On tasting, I'm met with what can only be described as a desert beer. I seriously believe I could pour this over ice cream, though that would be a waste of good beer. There is lots of cherry, a hint of coffee and so much chocolate. The beer keeps giving, the chocolate stays with you long after you have taken a mouthful. It's very sweet but a marked bitterness towards the end. I'm not sure how much of this beer I could honestly handle before becoming diabetic but as a beer to share it's brilliant. It makes a great digestif!

Pijiu Goji  is a 5% sort of fruit beer. It's very fizzy, incredibly tart, fairly sweet but also a little sour. Quite interesting I suppose but I'm not sure I would be looking to drink another one. Not having had a goji berry before, I was unsure what I should be tasting but tartness seems to be the main thing. I will say this, having looked up goji berries to see what they are exactly, it seems they can be somewhat dangerous. They are used for medicinal reasons in Chinese medicine and can have some nasty unwanted effects. I can't say for certain if it was related but I did feel a little nauseous and had some bad intestinal cramps and diarrhoea later that night. Initially I just put it down to too many Scotch eggs, I don't do very well with too much egg but it might be that the goji berries didn't help either.

Catso is a 5% Saison/Blonde from the Struise brewery in Belgium. It's part of a cartoon series, so pay attention to the label. I found it slightly sour, like a good saison should be, at least for me. It's also quite floral and bitter, packed full of herbs and spices. There's some slight cheese funk. Does it use American hops? It seemed to, pine and citrus, especially lemon made me think that. The finish is spicy and fairly astringent. I liked it but it's not easy to drink though neither is it difficult.

Still with the Struise brewery and our final beer for the evening, we have Coffee Club Black Damnation IV, a 13% barrel aged imperial stout. From what I can tell, the base beer is called Black Albert, something that already gets 100 on ratebeer. It's then matured in old rum barrels for 6 months. 

The aroma is a  woody vanilla, sour espresso and alcohol. Moving on to the taste, it's very much like a strong espresso. While quite sweet around the edges, the overriding feature is a sour espresso. Dark Berries and some cherry along with a little rum try to make their presence known but this is all about the coffee.

Unfair Play? Or Solid Business Sense From The Macros?

Before I start this rant, I should say that this is hearsay and rumour. It's the word of some people on message boards or in passing who were talking to bar men or even just some lad down the pub. It's not fact so don't take it as such. It does however sound like the sort of thing I expect.

Here is something that is fact though, so gives credence to these claims. On Arthur's day just gone, and for those not familiar with Arthur's day, it's now a yearly celebration to celebrate Arthur Guinness and his legacy. There's a sort of festival atmosphere with free or cheap pints of Guinness and entertainment all around the country. In other words, it's a way for Diageo to promote their products.
What they did last year, and possibly even previous years was in a number of pubs around the country, they demanded that non Diageo taps be covered up and there's a real feeling that it was mainly the craft beers that were targeted. The reason they could demand that is simple. They were providing the pubs with free stuff, be that free kegs of beer or free entertainment so it's reasonably fair enough for Diageo to make that request I suppose. In case there is doubt, here's an official source from the Belfast Telegraph.

There was also the crap they pulled at the BII awards last year where they threatened to pull sponsorship if Brewdog were given the award. This was at the last minute. Brewdog already knew they won, the trophy had their name on it so when someone else was called... well you can imagine the result. This got plenty of press so there's no need to expand on it here.

The new claims that I've heard go a lot further though. If true, this is a targeted and malicious attack on the small independent breweries of Ireland that have little to no marketing budget and certainly none to fight back such media giants. To me, and this is a gross exaggeration obviously, but to me, this targeted campaign is not far off something that happened in Germany to a certain population in the 1940s.
What I've heard is that Diageo are offering pubs significant sums of money of they take out their craft beer taps. It might not even be all of them, it might just be on a certain side of the bar, perhaps where the Guinness tap is. but they are still making the offer. One such pub apparently refused the offer. If this is indeed true, then it's very worrying.

I have also heard that Molson Coors have replaced genuine craft beer in some pubs with their own "Craft Collection". Now, it may very well be that the craft beer was not selling well and it was simply replaced by the pub rather than Molson Coors muscling in. I still have quite a high opinion of Molson Coors as a company.

If anyone from Diageo or indeed the other large breweries are reading this, I implore you to stop bullying pubs into getting rid of the small independent breweries products and instead concentrate on the quality of your own product. Take a leaf from Molson Coors perhaps and bring out your own craft range. Re-introduce Guinness on cask using the original recipes from 250 years ago. Produce limited batches in your pilot brewery if needs be. Increase your market share by making quality products that people want to drink. You already do that for the majority of stout drinkers in this country so why you see the need to bully the little breweries is beyond me. If Guinness was available on cask, I might drink it. If it's good, I would continue to drink it. And don't just stick your normal stuff in a cask. Brew it properly with a variety of malted barley and not just pale malt with extract to darken it. Use an old recipe from before the introduction of the nitro keg. There will be too much flavour for the modern Guinness drinker but for those of us that like a good hearty stout, we will probably love it.

I know Guinness released their recipe variations years ago, the brewhouse series. I for one enjoyed trying them all. It would be nice if a small batch of old original recipe Guinness was released and was only available in Ireland. Guinness is already a great tourist attraction for Ireland so the draw of a special batch of original recipe Guinness would boost our tourist industry somewhat.
I think the main reason the brewhouse series failed was firstly, the Irish people were not ready for it. The craft beer revolution only started after North Star disappeared.
Secondly, it was still a nitro stout so many of the variations in flavour were lost.

I'm going to finish here, I doubt anyone from Diageo reads this and if they do it will likely be ignored but just please.... stop with the bully boy tactics. You do yourselves absolutely no favours and worse, you do the pubs no favours. Irish people (some) are starting to vote with their feet when it comes to choice of beer. If you "encourage" a pub to only stock your products and take away the independent beers, that pub could lose customers who will nip down the road and get the drink they want to drink elsewhere. And if this latest rumour is just that, then please don't start doing it.