Nam!

How's about that then? I'm in Vietnam on my honeymoon and I'm on a beach with tropical flowers, palm trees, coconuts, amazing seafood, mopeds and amazing beers!

Fucking a!

Travelling through the forests and jungles of Vietnam is amazingly like watching the films I so loved in my youth. You almost expect hueys to come panelling over the horizon and hard bitten GI's to start shouting shit about DANANG and LV'S!

Of course they don't and clearly the 'traveller' world has moved on a bit since I took a drug addled year out in Mexico some 11 years ago. Back then (yes I cringe to say it) all we had was an out of date rough guide and a will to get smashed on anything we could get our hands on. Cue dangerous incidents in shanty towns, loud hallucinations and worrying weight loss.



Right now I'm sitting in an agreeable colonial-ish bar on a strip of road, adjacent to a beautiful beach, listening to a big Mexican chap playing Eric Clapton, Louis Armstrong and Hey Jude and bleeding Lady in Red! Fuck it eh - wherever you go in the world there's always a fat Mexican playing the Beatles...

It's nice!

Even nicer as this particular bar is Joe's and Joe, knows good beer. We have all the Belgian biggies and a spot of Hofbrau too... Granted in comparison to the, very good, Saigon beer it's a bit pricey but hey what's £2 when a lobster costs you £4?



So Saigon export red is tops, clean and full and not so far from a Dortmund lager, saigon green is pilsner-esque and lighter but unfortunately not better than the local brewed heineken.

My Chimay has travelled many miles and is better for it, we get through plenty at north so it's aleays pretty fresh and the stuff I've put down to age really isn't ready yet. So of course I have to come all the way to Vietnam to try the aged stuff...



Genius eh? While all the nobs in Europe are buggering around with this and that there's brilliantly conditioned Trappist ale right under their noses at the other side of the world!!! Goddamittttt.

This Chimay red is woody to smell with a sherry barrely thing going on, get inside it and there's tons of fruit. Predominantly and unexpectedly it's strawberry that really comes through followed by layers of malt and softer fruit flavours, hints of pear, Blackcurrant, berries etcetecye.... Nice? O god aye...

I'll go do a blue...

Trading on ale

phew...

that was a sweaty night - busy again at North, which is great, there's something to be said for putting everything to one side and just hammering out loads of great beer to happy punters. The last year or so has been difficult for the on trade. Disastrous for many landlords I'm sure but I'm lucky to run two great forward thinking craft bars that can adapt to the new market...

YES the new market. You see the recession has hit pubs and bars just as it's hit everything else, the reliable routines have become erratic and the tea time rush/11pm rush/last orders rush have gone out the window and licensees have been fretting as people just haven't been drinking in the same way as they did in the early part of the 2000's.

For those who haven't picked up on the craft beer boom the recession has been a sorry tale. Yet despite pressure from the Government, the prohibitionists, the scare-story-medical-bandwagon and underhand supermarket 'below cost price selling' tactics, pubs and bars who have embraced real ale, decent drinks, food and service are glimpsing light at the end of the tunnel.

Eyes are open once more to the immense potential of beer and it's wondrous health giving properties! There's a million reasons why the on trade has been in decline but it's a fact that the rediscovery of real beer in its many forms has become a rallying cry and a boon for those who give a shit about pubs and the communities they maintain.

A good time to drink exceptional beer then, tonight I had a good hour or so after a busy night having the obligatory after work bevvy with my staff. I've been fairly exhausted over the last few weeks what with one thing and the other and I've been eyeing the 2008 JW Lees harvest ale, knowing that with 2 years of age on it there will have been some fantastic things happening inside those bottles.

Aging beer can be a little hit and miss, some won't take it - others, especially those with lower ABVs might only improve slightly before dropping off. Even then light, temperature and randomness can damage beer. Not so for the good barley wine of which JW Lees are purveyors of.

Harvest is regularly right up there with the best, a UK beer coming top of the polls in the mainly US based beer advocate. When I first tasted it there was full fruit, massive oloroso sherry-ness and a swish of bitterness to balance a very sweet beer. I caned it occasionally and it occasionally took the wheels off leading to out of hand whisky type incidents that I won't bore you with tonight. Two years in the cellar and it's even more delicious - light enough on the tongue but choc a bloc with amazing walnutty depth, datey sticky toffeeness and yet that tiny bite of bitterness that balances the sweetness. Marvellous.

What to follow that with? Well I'm on the case of a Paradox from Brewdog - Isle of Arran to be precise. It's heavy but the Arran cask that this imperial stout has been aged in has treated it well. You get all the wonderful bitter chocolate and lively espresso flavours that you expect but with a dollop of vanilla ice cream too...

You like the sound of that? If you're a licensee open up you mind and your pub to craft beer - you won't regret it. If you're a punter - don't accept anything less than a really great, satisfying drink, if your local doesn't do good beer, ask why, demand it. You might just be doing them a favour...

NORTH

JW Lees

Brewdog

Great British booze haul

Reet! So right now I'm writing from the Great British Beer Festival, this is an experimental post to see what happens when I try writing through a session.

A quick note on our morning as Mark and myself popped to the ace St John bread and wine for a coffee and some madeira and seedcake at breakfast after a gruelling national express ride in the bogey seat right by a particularly fruity bog. Apt I suppose as St John is the home of the nose to tail eating of Fergus Henderson. Unfortunately we didn't have time to go the whole hog (HA!) but the Madeira set us up nicely to ease in to the festival. If you ever get down to the big smoke please visit either restaurant, they do some great stuff with some dubious animal parts - the food is amazing and it's really well priced.

Replemished by madeira and joyous of a public transport system that works, we are in full effect and have a crate in tow so we can haul some treats back to Leeds and a loaf of brilliant sourdough to soak up the booze.

For a few days a year Earls Court turns in to the centre of the beard wearing world as thousands of beer botherers descend to get rotten pissed in a celebration of beer. It's like any local CAMRA beer festival but MASSIVE and today is trade day so it's full of jockeying press types and strug out bar/pub workers dearly in need of some time off.

We quickly realised that buying thirds is the way to go... Taste as many as possible, and you know, pulling a third ain't so easy, the venerable voulenteers at the GBBF quite often miss the line, which for our purposes, is just the ticket.

Flash forward 2 hours and we've motored through through 14 beers and now been joined my mr Ed. Standout beers so far? Tons!

Thornbridge have managed to make a balanced eldeflower ale in which the elder matches the hop in a way that is so fucking good that it seems obvious, I've never tasted an elderflower beer like this and it's brilliant. I'm not always as convinced as most as to the brilliance of everything Thornbridge do but this is tops and highly recommended.

There's a beer from Spectrum in Norfolk called Stoatwobbler which I urge everyone to try for its sheer brilliance in malty depth, powerful fruit and balanced bitter core.

Flash forward another 2 hours and the sourdough loaf from st john is really showing its worth. A third of old hooky is a little bit of a levller after some discombobulating ales from Liverpool organic - their IPA is as true to the traditional style as you can get and delicious to booot.

Shoom! Forward to 4pm, an hour left and things are starting to go west I think I just confused Pete Brown or someone who looks like Pete Brown with some heavy ipa form Green Flash. He's smaller than I expected and the IPA much bigger, I feel that the combinatiknof these achievemnts makes me level. So. on to de molen....

Crap... The de molen is better, it points out the
K utaec I'd British berr when something ha suceh abcenyw. Nwybny. KoeUZ

z)) nuyj

The. End. Only my good friends know the rest x

De Molen

Spectrum Brewery

Liverpool Organic Brewery

Green Flash

Flim fram...

I've been in the middle of a post about 'balance' for some time now, four or five weeks at least... I clearly can't write properly in Summer, or some other such excuse... Perhaps 'balance' is too poncey a subject, we'll see...

Good, now I've got that out of my system I'm going to talk about raspberry beer or rather framboise or even frambozen if you fancy.

I don't drink a great deal of fruit beer but I certainly appreciate a good one. For me a good one has to be lambic, a beer made with wild yeast. The wild yeasts in lambic beer create a multitude of sour flavours - perfect to balance fruit. Some use just this type of brewing some a portion of lambic added to a more robust ale. Get in to lambic - it's ace...

I was dismayed when duvel moortgat decided to kill off Liefmans Frambozen. This beer was a thing to behold, a Flemish brown ale laced heavily with raspberry and for me one of the truest expressions of fruit beer. Sweet and perfumed with the fruit and the complex sour maltiness befitting the king of Flemish brown ales. Unfortunately the big boys didn't see it that way and tossed the little pink beverage into the canal... Beautiful packaging and all.

This left somewhat of a void in the world of raspberry beers. The better known Timmermans falls at the first hurdle by 'virtue' of being utter rubbish. Bacchus stepped in and made a perfecty good brown ale based Framboise that North still sells on draught. There's also a very good one from lambic superstars; Lindemans but it's two and a half percent alcohol so really it's a fizzy drink. Incidentally it's a good beer for anyone who's lost faith in rehab or indeed has only just fallen off the wagon - we have a good offer on at North, I won't tell...

The other I know well is Girardin, this is a famous lambic house that makes spectacular, balanced gueuze - blended young and aged lambic. The Girardin framboise is light, bracingly sour and almost champagne like in its sherbet fizziness, this is truly a beer to rival the frambozen BUT it's not got everything I want, it's amazing but not so balanced and not as good as what I'm drinking now...

A while back I met a lovely chap called Alan Kovan, it was actually about a year ago during our US beer festival. I took him on a boozy tour of north's finest tipples and, bless him, he gave me a bottle of unbelieveably brilliant Belgian red from New Glarus in Wisconsin. It was a cherry beer of true distinction and considerable rarity. I've only ever seen empty bottles since as it cannot be exported from Wisconsin. The empty bottles are usually on the shelves of the type of people who speak about beers like this in slightly hushed tones if you catch my drift...

Cut to the chase - my good, old friend Mr Simon mentioned a few weeks back that he was on his way over to that part of the world. I duly lashed him to his chair and made him promise to bring back New Glarus beer... Thanks Si!

I'm drinking some Raspberry Tart right now... It's delicious, the smell of the damn thing hits you before you take a sip and is so bleedingly perfumed and bright that it actually makes you stop before take a sup. The beer is a raspberry shotgun full of sherbert and sorbet and bang! It lasts forever on your palette and has a brilliant almost salty bite... Yes Salty!

If you are ever in a situation where you can get hold of anything from this brewery... You bring me some back... Fucker...

New Glarus

Lindemans

Girardin

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.

Dogging...

Yeah ok so I haven't been writing much recently... May is a busy one for me and I've been doing some partying which is lovely but means that I don't feel right motivated to write.

Ho hum - I'm not going to harp on about it, I'm just going to post some links instead to get the ball rolling again.

I8NY

This is the quarterly night I help run and DJ at, we play a big mix of genres and have a great time. Fear ye not beer lovers as I haven't written anything recently so I'm not neglecting you.

http://vimeo.com/7812379

The chaps dressed as penguins are the people behind some of the most interesting developments in UK beer brewing and marketing. They brew some pretty amazing stuff and are actually top guys to boot. It's easy to love what they do and easy to knock it, as many beer bloggers have done. James came over to do a tasting with us at the Cross Keys the other night which was top flight and one of the best we've done, due in no small measure to the utter enthusiasm and dedication of James and Brewdog... Oh and Tokyo* is a work of genius.

I'm currently eating a cheese and mayonnaise sandwich with tobasco, salt and pepper. This is also a work of genius, I'm washing it down with 2 day old Sam Smiths oatmeal stout. It's better than it sounds and still a bit fizzy...

xx

Asam Aleikum

Christ... So a fair bit's happened happened since my last post. To be honest I found writing about my holiday a little trying...

I had a really amazing time as you may have gathered, but I don't like feeling that I must to write something and one of the original intentions of this blog was to publish writing and tasting as I am doing it... With hilarious consequences!

So I'll get back to that eh...

I've been damn busy recently, if you've not been to Leeds recently then you've won't have seen our festival and you won't have seen me sweating cobs over a shit load of Belgian beer at North.

I'm really happy with the way the whole thing went down, it's amazing how people have become so much more receptive to new beer in the last few years and it's great to now be in a situation where some of these weird and wonderful examples of the brewing art aren't such a hard sell as they used to be.

That said and thoroughly ... and flying in the face of such a wonderful experience, I'm just getting down some German beer.

Weltenburger Kloster - Asam Bock

My fucking christ what a beer.

Smooth as hell, like being thrown down some 'block o flat' stairs whilst wrapped in a duvet. It has bumpy caramel malt like nothing else and deep hops, god knows, perhaps they are hallertau... I don't right know but I've reached a point in German beer where I'm starting to marvel about the nutty, tawny, fruitgum flavours that seem to run through so many beers of so many styles....

This is one of the best beers I've ever had.

kloster

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.