Hilarious stuff! (via The Beer Justice)

I haven’t blogged here for a little while, due to the twin distractions of work and impending exams, which have also prevented me from brewing for a few months. However, this hasn’t stopped me thinking about brewing quite a lot of the time, which has meant I’ve been mulling over and mentally tweaking quite a few recipes, which I’ll be brewing as soon as things quieten down.

The recipe idea that’s preoccupied me most the last few weeks was inspired by a trip to an amazing Indian restaurant called Cafe Spice for a friend’s birthday. Cafe Spice is run by Cyrus Todiwala, an Indian chef who is of Parsi descent (The Parsi are descended from a tribe of Persian Zoroastrians who migrated to India in the 10th century), a heritage which informs much of his cooking, especially the meals for the Khaadraas Super Club which we attended - an occasional event where Cyrus prepares a set menu of Parsi-influenced dishes.

Normally, when I’m eating Indian food, I end up thinking about what beer would go best with what I’m eating - it’s rare to find an Indian restaurant that serves anything but Cobra and Kingfisher, but I can’t help but think that these don’t really do the food justice. Impromptu beer and food matching experiments at home (one of our flatmates makes amazing Indian food) have led me to both Thornbridge Jaipur and Sharps Monsieur Rock as decent accompaniments for heavily spiced, aromatic dishes (specifically my flatmate’s keema chicken, which is packed with turmeric, garlic, ginger, chilli, cinammon, coriander and cumin)- but neither of them are a perfect match - The Jaipur tends to slightly overpower even these sorts of aromas, while the Monsieur Rock is wonderfully refreshing, but all it’s subtlety of flavour is drowned by the aromas of the food. Clearly more research is necessary here - I’m thinking a Belgian Wit might make a great accompaniment to dishes with strong coriander aromas, and Phil’s said in the past that Kernel Export Stout goes amazingly with spicy food.

However, on this particular occasion, the amazing diversity of flavours I encountered made me realise just how reductive (and possibly rather ignorant) my quest for the ‘perfect beer to go with indian food’ was. There’s a huge variety of different indian cuisines from different regions, and even within individual ones, there’s a massive variety of different textures, aromas and tastes. Trying to find a beer that ‘goes with Indian food’ is just as ridiculous as trying to find one that matches all French food, and is unfair to both the food and the beer. What would be interesting would be a menu with individual matches, but I’m digressing. That’s probably a subject for another time.

Anyway, this meal was amazing, and like nothing I’d ever tasted before - especially the desert, an ice-cream spiced with Cardamom that was absolutely stunning. The aroma of the caramom complemented the creaminess and sweetness of the icecream in a way that I could never have expected, and it was this that got me thinking about another way of combining the flavours of beer and Indian food in the form of the recipe idea that’s been consuming most of my brewing attention for the last few weeks or so: A cardamom milk stout.

For anyone that isn’t familiar with the style, Milk Stout isn’t actually brewed with milk, but with Milk Sugar (or Lactose). While most sugars are fermentable, and therefore get converted into alcohol by the yeast, lactose is not, so adding lactose to the wort ensures that the beer stays sweet after fermentation. While also being sweeter than other stout styles, Milk stouts also tend to have a thicker, creamier body. They are delicious.

I think the addition of cardamom to a milk stout recipe could be amazing - I already know that it works wonderfully in sweet, creamy dishes, and I think that it could complement a lot of other flavours in beer. Some melanoidin or munich malt could add caramel and malt notes that would give a bit of depth and complexity to the beer’s sweetness, and the blackcurrant aromas of Bramling Cross hops would complement the cardamom spice nicely (cardamom and blackcurrant is a popular combination apparently, especially in teas) . I’d be tempted to throw some Cascade in there too for a bit of citrus, but am slightly worried about over-complicating the recipe and overpowering the spice.

Steve and Angelo from Brew Wharf made a vanilla and cocoa milk stout just before Christmas (I hadn’t been let loose there on brewdays at that point) which is a great example of the kind of effect I’m after. It’s a sweet, malty beer, but the malt flavours never overpower the vanilla and cocoa. By contrast, Left Hand Milk Stout has far more coffee and toast aromas from the roasted barley, something I can see totally overpowering the cardamom in my recipe. This is going to be a bit of a balancing act then - I need some dark grains for colour (and a subtle bit of flavour), but too much will kill the flavours that are meant to be the focus of the beer. At the moment I’m toying with small amounts of roasted barley or black patent malt, using some Carafa special (often used in black IPAs) to give it a dark colour, without the flavour of roasted or black malt. I’m still finalising the details, but this is turning out to be one of the most exciting beers that I haven’t brewed yet.

(Image taken from Spreadshirt, where you can buy the pictured T-shirt if you wish to declare your love of sweet, dark beers to the world.)

“The venue used by a government minister to launch British Tourism Week is BANNED from selling beers above 5% ABV - but faces no restrictions on the wine and spirits it can sell.”

(via Pete Brown’s Beer Blog: Stunning hypocrisy proves alcohol regulators simply don’t get the point.)

I totally agree with Pete on this - my biggest problem with so much of the debate around alcohol policy, public health and taxation is that it’s grounded in snobbery. In particular, raising the rate of duty on beers above 7.5% (but not on Wines that weigh in at 12%+ or spirits at 30%+) indicates to me that the (working class) typical beer drinker has a ‘problem’, wheras the typical (rather better off) wine or single-malt scotch drinker does not. This habit of scapegoating beer for all the ills of ‘problem drinking’, as well as ignoring the incredible flavoursome beers made by smaller producers (that rival the best wines or whiskys in the opinion of myself and many others) is pure condescension, and is rooted in some really unhealthy attitudes about class.

I’m pretty confident that this is going to be the year that Crabbie’s alcoholic ginger beer ‘does a Magners’ and become the sickly sweet summer drink of choice for people who like the effects of alcohol but not the taste. All the big drinks companies will then rush out their own alcoholic ginger beers in time for Summer 2012 and will enjoy modest sales, before the adolescent of palate move onto a new craze, alcoholic iced tea, or a rediscovery of Lemon Hooch, perhaps.

However, it’s worth pointing out that there are some really excellent ginger beers (or rather, actual beers that happen to include ginger) available - here are two of the best I’ve tried:

Marble Ginger

Marble Ginger is as far removed from Crabbies as it’s possible to imagine, while still being identifiably a Ginger Beer. It’s absolutely bone dry, without any of the cloying sweetness of Crabbies, and has a massive amount of heat and  a delicious aroma of fresh root ginger - something that’s conspicuous by its absence in Crabbies.

Left Hand Juju Ginger

In contrast with Marble, Left Hand Juju has less of the ginger aroma. It’s still identifiably there, but the main thing that hits you when you lift the glass to your nose is a great melanoidin maltiness, with the ginger lingering just behind. This carries through onto the palate - Juju feels far more robust in the mouth than it’s 4% suggests, and the malt taste and aroma (with a hint of sweetness) balances the fire from the ginger very nicely.

Both these brews really showcase what a wonderful brewing ingredient ginger can be, and how it can be used in a way that complements the more traditional malted barley and hops, rather than overpowering or replacing them.

we’re at WEST brewery in Glasgow. I’m drinking their Munich Red, a Marzen-ish Red lager that’s amazingly balanced and refreshing, with a hint of caramel in the aftertaste. Vicky’s got a Dunkel that’s huge, chocolatey, and absolutely stunning.

(In response to Mark Dredge’s inaugural ‘brood’ topic)

One of my favorite blogs (whether beer related or not) is that of the peerless Bike Snob NYC, who writes long daily rambles that cover any and all cycling-related topics, but do so in a way that pokes gloriously vitriolic and hilarious fun at some of the worst examples of pretension, idiocy and consumerism that the ‘bike culture’ (quotes sic.) has to offer. I hope neither him nor Mr Lager would object if I described him as the Cooking Lager of the bicycle world.

Now, Bike Snob does not generally write about beer (at least as far as I recall), but I’m reminded of him every time I hear the term ‘Craft Beer’. This is because one of the things that gets BSNYC (and myself) riled up is the marketing tactic that involves taking something mundane and giving it a veneer of ‘rusticness’ or some notion of ‘authenticity’ (also the idiocy it panders to, and which allows people to spend £250 on a mass-produced axe dipped in paint, or £10 on a hand-sharpened pencil). For better or worse, to a jaded old cynic such as me  the adjectives ‘Craft’ or ‘Artisanal’ tends to be a signifier of this sort of empty approximation of tradition, quality, and consideration.

However, as Pete Brown pointed out earlier this week, it’s not just achingly fashionable ‘boutique’ businesses that indulge in this sort of nonsense. Pete is one of the few people I’ve read who writes about marketing in a way that makes me nod in agreement rather than making me want to stick pins in my eyes, and he provides a much more thoughtful and knowledgeable denouncement of this particular strategy than my ill-informed griping. However, he also wrote another comment that made me think perhaps I’m being a bit hard on ‘craft’ - the poor word didn’t choose for its adjectival form to be appropriated by idiots, after all:

one reason wine is surging ahead, taking people from beer, is that it’s premium, yet easy to understand - it’s made from grapes.  There are different varieties of grapes, and you’ll prefer some to others.  People aren’t really aware of what beer’s ingredients are, what each contributes, and what the brewing process does.

Here, in a nutshell, is exactly the reason that, while I like wine and drink it often, I don’t love it in the same way as I love beer. The thing that distinguishes a particularly revered wine is the terroir - the land it’s grown on, the climate, the particular variety of grape from which it’s made. While winemakers undoubtedly have a great skill, it’s not typically their work that the wine buff will focus on - it’s the climate, the soil, the grape variety. The wine buff celebrates the guy lucky enough to own the particular patch of land on which the grapes were grown, not the guy whose hard work and skill went into producing the drop that they’re enjoying. 

In contrast to this, beer geeks focus far more on the process when evaluating beers. The combination of ingredients used, the method, time and temperature of fermentation and conditioning - we celebrate the hard work, passion and knowledge of the brewer, or to put it another way, his craftsmanship.

This, ultimately is why, despite my initial misgivings, I think Craft Beer is exactly the right word to describe all the wonderful beer that’s produced with love, care, knowledge and skill by so many brewers around the world today. As beer drinkers, we appreciate the craft of the brewer rather than simply the raw materials he’s working with, and we should celebrate and use that term. If it seems pretentious, it shouldn’t - we should reclaim the adjective ‘craft’ from the poseurs, marketers and douchebags, and return it to a more fitting use - celebrating the hard work of exceptionally talented people, and all the wonderful things they make - starting with damn tasty beer.

(Photo: © Alex Cockroach. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA)

I’m going to kick off my attempt at writing about beer with something that, to me at least, is a little special.

I’ve been reading Stuart Howe’s blog pretty much since I took an interest in beer beyond merely enjoying the consumption of it - about a year ago, when I decided to have a go at homebrewing for the first time, it was one of the first UK blogs on the subject I found and started to read regularly, and of all the 52 brews that I read about last year, Monsieur Rock was the one I’ve most been itching to taste for myself rather than simply reading about. I’m not alone in this, and with good reason - Monsieur Rock was brewed in collaboration with Jean-Marie Rock of Orval, and therefore is not just the work of one of the UK’s best brewers, but one of Belgium’s too. The minute the half-case I ordered last week turned up this afternoon, two bottles went in the fridge, and I waited as long as I could before opening them.

The beer doesn’t disappoint - it’s nothing like Orval or anything I’ve had before from Sharps, and not much like any other beer I can think of. Opening the cap with a surprisingly sharp ‘FZZZZT’ noise, there’s a dense but brief plume of lemony vapour, followed by a beer that pours paler than any lager I’ve seen, topped off by a huge but light head of foam.

Other heavily Saaz-hopped beers have reminded me of Rowntrees Tooty Frooties (which isn’t in itself a bad thing), and that’s present here, but barely perceptible behind the massive aroma of candied orange peel, lemon and grenadine that the beer gives off. Taking a mouthful of it, it starts out with a delicate sweetness that compliments the fruit smells amazingly, but which tapers off sharply to leave a lingering dryness in the mouth that compels you to take another swig.

Ever since I got to be interested in beer in a way that went beyond just enjoying the consumption of, I’ve not been a massive lager drinker. This isn’t really out of preference, or out of some kind of misplaced loyalty to ‘Real Ale’ - I just love hugely hoppy IPAs and Pale Ales and dense, complex stouts and porters so much I very rarely look beyond them (to my shame). Way back before I’d tried any of these things however, Sharps Doom Bar was once of the first cask bitters I tasted and really noticed - one of the first that made me realise that there was a whole load of subtlety and interest in beer flavour, and I think that they’ve done the same for Lager with Monsiur Rock - it showcases all the wonderful flavour and complexity that lagers (and beers in general) can have.