Charts - Saison

OOOOHHH!

One of the most consistently satisfying beer styles and perhaps also one of the most misunderstood. There's a double #1 in here as the farmhouse IPA is a hybrid BUT it tastes more saison than IPA so I'm fucking rolling with it...

1. Flying Dog/In De Wildeman - Farmhouse IPA
1. Glazen Torren - Saison D'Erpe-Mere
3. Quintine - Saison 2000
4. Silly Saison
5. Fantome Saison
6. Saison Du Pont
7. Brooklyn Sorachi Ace
8. Saison du buff
9. Saison De Dottignies
10. Nogne O - Saison (draught)

Apologies for the lack of links I'm on t'mobile and blogger isn't playing links today - will update in due course xx.

WE interrupt this broadcast

Justr to say that I'm rekindliing a great love for barley wine...

I love Brooklyn but Mr Oliver's balery wine ins incompplpetgv

Sauljlel sikiothsjk isnnmoihuibs

Oh god but strong golden!

Genitalmen prefer blonde

It's nice when summer kicks in isn't it?

Just the changing of the seasons makes you think of new drinks... Yellow ones!

Surely every hankers for something clean, bright and blonde on a warm day, you know; Sun scouring your shoulders, invisibly, relentlessly... silently. The deceptively quaffable 'summer water' slipping down, intoxicating slowly but surely... Until you eventually end up frazzled inside and out and wake up in the pissing rain, sunburnt to fuck.

OH BUT OF COURSE! I'm only joking, we're sophisticated drinksers here I'll have you!

Yellow beer was invented ages ago, it comes in many variations and has similar characteristics; Lager type beers, blonde or pale ales and light wheat beers are all blonde or indeed yellow in colour in the most part light in body and easy on the tongue. Lagers have an intense history and run the gamut from majestic golden refreshing brews, to dry but bright pilsner and indeed piss water laced with rice, corn syrup or some other unnecessary complication of the relatively straightforward brewing process.

Light wheat beers criss cross Europe and range from complex, phenolic German types to subtle, delicate and zesty Belgians. Cloudy but bright, big on refreshment and good with food. The former you can slosh about all day and night long, the latter deserves to be quaffed from a smaller glass next to a canal...

British pale, or more correctly; golden or blonde ale also has a deep deep history. But many of the beers you'll find on the wickets in your local 'decent beer' establishment are a slightly different breed from the traditional amber beers of this particular island. Bright, blonde or golden ales have surged in popularity and good job too as they were developed as a response to the rise of the afore mentioned piss water. The lightly roasted malt makes light beer and a great background for more volatile flavours, many of these subtle and lingering. The best way to drink these is in a good boozer, from the cask.

Ahem - you can of course get shite wheat beer and shite British ale of course, it's just the unfortunate state of affairs that the lager brand shite is particularly pervasive.

Anyhow, you want really great blonde ale? Try Roosters, Crouch Vale or indeed Wensleydale's Semmer Water which is fucking magnificent and has an amazing 'working brewery' pong.

We've been getting through a few of the Americans at North recently, especially the super snappy Brooklyn summer - a beer that I tried straight from the cask at the brewery. The bottled version is bracingly bright and fresh. Also one of my all time favorites of which I'm partaking of right now... Also Sierra Nevada and Goose Island Summer beers are worth looking up.

Anchor Summer is made from 50% malted wheat and the other half malted barley. A 'modern American wheat beer' no less... It's a down and out winner and I try to keep a case in at home all Summer. It marries the best of ale traditions with a dose of bright wheat, clear golden colour and fizzy fun-time! It's smooth, snappy and bright - the wheat brings a touch of acidity and a really good length...

heh... length.

Brooklyn Brewery Part 2: Blast & Wild 1!

HOT DAMN!

NYC is really leading the world in terms of beers and bars. FACT, whatever you think of the US they embrace variety and quality more than anyone else. The service is second to none and an experimental attitude is ingrained in the craft beer industry across the board.

Most of the bars I visited also had 15+ beers on tap and the majority were over 5%. They were also innovative and engaging venues and the staff were really knowledgeable and more importantly friendly and engaging.

Barcade in Williamsburg

The Black Rabbit in Greenpoint

Of course my view could possibly have been tainted by the fact that I went to all the best places dahling... Aged beer night at Barcade anyone? A bar full of 80's arcade machines, 15 aged imperial IPA's, Imperial Stouts and Barley wines on draught aged Gonzo, Brooklyn intensified coffee stout?... Come on now.

Britain and British beer are of course my first love but we're only very slowly waking up in this country - I'm sick of hearing about the "cask ale revolution". It's a fucking "revival!". In the past there were masses of beers on offer in pubs of varying strengths and compositions. It's only since pale cask conditioned ale came back into fashion that modern British brewers have started to delve in to the past. The "Great British Public" are slow to pick up on the diversity of ale available.

As such we're getting there but resting on our laurels is something we do in this country all too often.

As such Brooklyn beers in the UK have taken a while to take hold, whereas in the US everyone seems to be sampling the many and varied delights of Mr Oliver and his brewing chums! So lets think back a little to a couple of weeks ago... Through the mists of drunkenness to Williamsburg and the Brooklyn brewery.... diddley doo... diddley doo... diddley doo

One of the first beers we tried with Garrett Oliver was Brooklyn Blast! A US double IPA that really exemplifies the style. US IPA was the first time for me that I was convinced that the US has a style to call their own, extremely bitter, dense and sweet with a complex depth of flavours.

Blast is a wonderful honey orange beer with big big hops. The hoppiness is on the floral side and for me that's something you don't get so often with US beer. Garrett had a lot to say about balance in ale, he's schooled in the UK you see and that subtle approach has translated in to something quite profound in the US - full flavoured, distinctly American beer with a nod to the past. So Blast! is choc a bloc with tropical flavour, sweet malt and flowery cannabis-y goodness. It also has a notable dry finish which make it super moreish...

I was also incredibly privileged to try a beer called Wild 1. This is a bit of an experiment that has been kept within the brewery and is not available to the public! OH! In simple terms it's Brooklyn Local 1, wine barrel aged with brettanomyces added. Oh god how we love the wild yeast - it does something like no other to beer. Wild 1 has a nose like nothing I ever smelt before; full, dusty, winey, sour and utterly spectacular! The beer is ultra complex and intense with spice and citrus alongside fuller black grapey, raisiny, woody notes. A bit of a Willy Wonka beer.

I suppose you'd call it a double saison or something then... Cheers Garrett!

'Representing' in the Brewery

This is exactly what many US brewers did from the word go but then they had a bit of catching up to do I suppose.

Brooklyn Brewery Part 1: Garrett Oliver's Dark Matter

I'm not given to hero worship... I try to avoid celebrities if I come near them, as I always like to speak to people on a level which is difficult when said people are interesting, inspirational or extraordinary. Also I have a tendency to trip them up, trip myself up, spit in their face or make fumbling, embarrassing remarks about their shoes. Despite this, oddly enough I seem to meet them quite regularly.

The head brewer at Brooklyn, Garrett Oliver, is an absolute legend and the foremost authority on beer in the US so i was a touch nervous. Mr Oliver's beers are renown throughout the world and his collaborations with brewers, chefs and fancy cocktail types are the stuff of beer legend. Moreover I was in a bit of a state from the silly amount of strong beer and rye whisky I consumed the night before so the whole meeting heroes thing was on my mind a little.

We had brilliant tour with Carla at the Williamsburg brewery who was utterly wonderful to us and took us through some lovely beers - in particular a cask of Brooklyn Summer that was a year old and tasted really fresh which was remarkable for the low alcohol level. Then Garrett rocked up and showed us things in a bit more depth.

I had a butchers at the conditioning rooms and some of the stuff that they have been working on recently. Garrett, luckily for me, was tremendously affable and interesting and had some unique insights into some great great beers which I try and incorporate in the next few posts. In particular on Dark Matter, Blast, Local 2 and Wild 1.

Brooklyn Dark Matter is a brown ale aged for four months in bourbon and rye whiskey barrels. Some barrels previously held a beer called Black Ops, some contained a beer called Manhattan Project, others came straight from the distilleries as soon as the whiskey was decanted.

It's a great brew with that wonderful bourbon vanilla cask-ness but with a soft milky chocolate sweetness and a rye beer oiliness that coats the mouth. Not too much mind blowing alcohol taste which means that it creeps up on you a bit. Bearing in mind that it is 7.5%... Yes... It creeps up on you a bit... Bearing in mind that we had tasted pretty much everything else available it was probably time to get on the road before I did anything daft...

Brooklyn Brewery

Garrett Oliver

Outtatown! BROOKLYN & NYC

Oh yes I am!

Holiday time and I'm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I really hate flying (all the best people do) and I think that it seems that my horrible flight with American Airways ended in disaster as I have crashed and died and gone to beer heaven!!

We went out for a couple of scoops last night in Greenpoint and over the frigging moon with the number of beers available and the quality of the bars...

The day had started in rather a different fashion at about 9am in Heathrow having a Guinness and a Jamesons for St Patrick's Day - that was fairly ropey and put me off having another one all day but at least I'd payed my dues to my 25% Irish blood.

Get out ye snakes!

Greenpoint is just above Williamsburg in Brooklyn, you're constantly aware of the madness of Manhattan on the skyline but it feels a world away, it's fairly quiet but in a gnarly NYC way. Plenty of Polish delis (that's another 50% of blood accounted for) and some great great bars...

In particular the Black Rabbit which is a fantastic bar, it's a perfect balance of old black wood fittings and booths and quirky mismatched lighting and paintings. It has a really classy beer menu and cracking snacks including mini burgers! I drank some cracking 'soft hoppy' Green Flash IPA and Black Rabbit porter which was also a rather good, caramelllllly and fairly light bodied session-er.

Also on my list was Diamond which was also quite lovely, with a classy, wooden, curved bar and an ace mini shuffleboard which caused no end of amusement despite the 'no shouting' rule! I had some cracking malty German Maibock on draught whose name escapes me and some Otter Creek Copper which was an alt beer - another malty beer style which I have a great amount of time for. This one was fruity and smooth.

So we crawled on a little - starting to feel a touch lagged - to the Brouwerij Lane, a smashing little beer shop with space to have a drink and 20 beers on draught... Yes. owner Ed Raven has been collecting great beers for 10 years and the selection in here is second to none... The phenomenon of the Growler is very much in effect here - essentially a half gallon jug which you fill up and take home. It hasn't quite reached the UK yet but I'm sure it will... Watch this space.

We'd popped in earlier and had a glass of Southern Tier Unearthly IPA which was utterly brilliant, along with super resinous hops it was extremely thick and bitter which sounds a bit much but it really worked. It also has a really interesting pear drops kinda thing going on which I thought was smashing.

So anyway we brought home some Pigslap pale ale and some Hitachino Nest beer. The pigslap was mentioned by Leeds blogger Leigh a couple of weeks ago and as soon as I saw it I knew I had to try it. Quite interesting - good beer in a can! Kinda creamy, tropical-fruity, buttery APA and rather good. The Hitachino has probably the cutest label in the world but I ain't drunk it yet...

So looking back that's a good amount of beer to drink after an 7 hour flight combined with 4 hours of pissing about in airports... I've drunk some great stuff today too and I'll let you know about it soon no doubt...

The Black Rabbit

The Diamond

Brouwerij Lane

Get your stoats!!

Ahhh stout... it's probably my best friend, when all else fails a good stout works all year round. The optional additions to stout also rarely fail;

damson, oyster, port,

oats, lactose, coffee.

.

Yes... Full stop. As far as I'm concerned (at this very moment... unless proven otherwise) there is nothing else you worth adding to stout. Chocolate is the obvious one I suppose, but really, those utterly wonderful chocolate flavours in most cases are best obtained from the malt.

Every stout I've had with melty brown stuff added has been... Well... "shit". That's one of the things about beer, you can do a hell of a lot with the basic ingredients. Think about it for a minute, wine is made from grape juice, flavours may be added via barreling and blending different types of grape juice. The complexity and prestige of wine is well documented. Now look at beer you've usually got grain, water, yeast and hops... I'd say grain and hops in all their incarnations each have just as much complexity as grape juice... SO YOU"VE ALREADY GOT TWICE THE BLEEDING COMPLEXITY... There's no need to start filling it with fucking dairy milk...

Anyhow... Some additions work, not many but some, I've had some wonderful examples recently, Crown's collaboration with Zak Avery was one of the highlights of last year. A 'Double Damson' beer, the wonderfully named Django Reinhart (incidentally a name I chose for my last cat) was heady, deep and fruity with an inspired kick from Belgian yeast.

Other winners were Flying Dog's Gonzo Porter, Marble's Irish and Chocolate Stouts, Brooklyn Chocolate 08/09, De Dolle Stout plus HP's from Riverhead, Brown Cow and Elland AND a memorable espresso moment from Saints and Sinners - the delectable Insomniac!

So anyway that was supposed to be a review coz I got my laptop charger back so I'm... well... back. It got out of hand I admit.

Here's some drinking and writing.