Friday 24 February 2012

Blend is best

This post is prompted by an influx of Southern Tier Gemini in to Leeds - via Beer Ritz of course.

I approached with some trepidation at first...

me: "ooh Gemini..."
Jeff: "hell yeah"
me: "is it fresh though Jeff?
Jeff: "Dunno man, there's no date that's for sure,"
me: "fuck it I can spare £12 on one beer."

*winces*

Despite the ins and outs of spending quite a sum of money on a single beer (I'm fine with it) it is lucky that it WAS fresh and well... Extremely fucking good. You see I had a bottle last year some time in London and it was really disappointing as it had travelled half the world and then sat in a warehouse Sweden for god knows how long, then ended up as part of a trophy collection in a pub with shit service. Hops totally gone, malt bready, flaccid and boring.



So very glad it is fresh then, not quite as fresh as when I tried it first time around in Brooklyn, on draught, but fresh enough. But fresh isn't todays issue.

I popped back to Reer Ritz and purchased more of this cracking beverage. Hazy orange, heady fruit, greenly herbal, hedgy nose, mouth coating mega complex balance of citric, herbal and bitingly bitter hops and really solid, quite sweet & smooth malt core. The great, great thing about this beer is that it's VERY complex but VERY well balanced. The key? Blending two beers.

Blending in the UK has a bad rep, the initial, and noble history of bar and brewery blended beer starts with Entire gives way to Porter and leads to Stout to a practice undertaken in secret by many breweries in the UK, especially the larger ones. It hit the buffers when scrupulous and unscrupulous landlords started cutting corners and blending slops on the fly to try and increase their margins, usually as a result of monopolistic owners squeezing them very hard. It is also the fault of the terrible Auto Vac.


It seems fairly obvious to me that blending is a good thing, I mean why not? Take some good beers, unique recipes, several ingredients. Then mix them, with other beers, with care which also have several ingredients. Find the best combination. Sell the fucker.

It's a technique employed in the greatest of sour wild beers: Gueuze. A practice used by brewers of Flemish brown ale, fans of Black & Tan, hipsters in Scotland and Denmark (the superlative I Hardcore You) and of course our friends and current inspirations across the pond.

It was quite popular in UK a few generations back but the art has been lost or at least hidden. Look in to some of those winter beers you've been drinking recently, look in to those breweries that only brew four or five beers - there might just be a blend in there. Drink a beer like Gemini or I Hardcore You, Drie Fonteinen or Rodenbach.

We have at present some singularly brilliant beers in the UK, but perhaps we should mix it up some.

Friday 3 February 2012

Beer & Sex pt II

BANG!

Industry sexism is right up there on the news agenda due to the 'Top totty' saga currently distracting the likes of Jeremy Vine, the BBC and upwards of 22% of the House of Commons.
If it's passed you by then this is pretty much a pumpclip parade post made flesh by the likes of MP Kate Green who complained about serial pumpclip offenders - Slaters brewery's 'Top Totty' pouring in the Strangers bar in the Commons. Not only is it rubbish to drink, it also has an utterly crap pumpclip featuring a playboy bunny girl from the 70's. 

Stupid that it got in to the Strangers bar, although apparently a barman commented that "We haven't had any complaints raised with our bar staff." Clueless eh? Also presumably clueless are our elected representatives who had been quaffing this swill all evening and lunchtime before anyone thought that the breweries chosen method of marketing the beer was so fucking outdated as to miss the point entirely, alienate 50% of the drinking public and firmly entrench Real Ale as a habit for furtive singletons who are 40 years past their prime.

It's stupid that it would get in to any bar, we really should be past this sort of nonsense by now, but still I get 'funny' or 'sexy' beer listings in the post no matter how much I ignore the breweries who send them in - someone is selling this. Beer is not funny or sexy at source, the fact that it can make you funny and probably more likley to have sex is a matter of post consumption.  

It's about time the industry engaged all people on a level which is not smirking behind the bike shed, pre enlightenment twattery. That means not just purile pumpclips but sex based marketing as a whole - focus on the damn product for once or in a short space of time you won't have one.