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.

Cloudy with a chance of idiosyncrasies part 1

We're pretty proud of our idiosyncrasies in the UK - you know, things like our wonderful sense of irony and intimate understanding of sarcasm.

Interesting headwear, tea drinking, stoicism and a tendency towards inebriation on holiday, at the weekend, midweek and at weddings, births or funerals.

A confusing propensity for self flagellation in our inability to understand the terrible nature of the Conservative party and thusly electing the fuckers again and again...

It has been said that we enjoy warm beer (not always a bad thing) and are somewhat obsessed with clarity in our beverages.

Now I like a beautifully clear golden pint as much as anyone else but it doesn't always have to be like that. If the beer has a haze or is cloudy it doesn't automatically mean it's off now does it? There's plenty of reasons why a beer could be cloudy and most are to do with GOOD STUFF.

Just looking at a couple of beers I've had recently there is plenty of cloudiness or haziness about, but you still get the odd punter bringing them back or turning their nose up - but why do we care about this at all?

I trace a hell of a lot of drinking habits back to the bad old days before CAMRA took hold of the cause of championing real ale in the UK. I say this as I've found that gentlemen of a certain middling age (yes only gentlemen!) get quite freaked out about their beer being served in a dimple tankard. One of the explanations for this is that they were once closely associated with gentlemen of a certain older, flat capped generation. Another is that they make fairly solid weapons in a bar 'swedge'.

My informed opinion is that the aversion to cloudy ales comes from a similar time when cloudiness indicated an oxidised and thus 'off' beer. There's some mileage in this explanation as it was common at one point for a landlord to save his waste beer to squeeze a little extra profit. So old beer, bar and cellar drips would go back in to the barrel. More oxidisation will usually mean more chance of the beer spoiling and getting infected with dirt, unwanted wild yeast and bacteria, sling this back in to good beer and you're going to turn it sour.

Quite a few places still use the dreaded 'auto vac,' basically a drain in the drip tray that recycles the drips back in to the line or worse into the barrel. For me it's too much of a risk and strikes me as a little tight, and I'm a Yorkshireman.

All of this however should not put you off drinking cloudier or hazy ale. Most bottled ales will have some sediment in, and stronger hoppier beers will carry a 'hop haze'. Don't panic! Taste the beer and trust your tongue!