Bigger... Stronger... Louder... Better?

Ken Weaver has written a great piece on his Hop Press blog about the increasing strengths of US beer. The above graph shows the average strength of new beers added to Ratebeer over the last 10 years - it shows a marked incline for the US and a steady rise for non-US beers. In another graph on Ken's post the figures show that last year over 70% of new US beers added to Ratebeer were over 5.5% (compared to fewer than 40% for non-US).

The second paragraph of Ken’s piece perfectly explains his changing feelings towards strong, rare beer: “Perhaps that’s overkill. Perhaps I’ve had just one too many accidental fusel bombs, one too many bad examples of barrel aging, one too many “Imperial Weizens”, or one too many encounters with Tactical Nuclear nonsense. Have I waited in too many lines for limited releases? Have 12% hop bombs actually made me bitter?”

The whole notion of session beer is different in the UK and US, where something around 6% could be considered sessionable in America but put that beer on the bar in most British pubs and it won’t get touched. It’s a cultural difference. British beer culture revolves around the pub, around drinking a few pints after work, around socialising. It’s modest, reserved and controlled. We had ales before we had the more recent imports of lager and every British brewery has a 3.5-4.5% pale ale or best bitter, which is the beer they are measured against. Every US brewery is measured against their IPA, a 6.5-7.5% beer. It’s hard to separate US beer culture with lager, brought over and brewed by Germans in the late nineteenth-century, surviving Prohibition and evolving into the proliferate beers we have now. The current and ever-growing US craft beer scene is an attempt to create a new history for beer by radically pushing past what is already there. And they keep on pushing.

We are in a period of experimentation, learning what beer can do and what people will drink. Extreme beer is there to satisfy a certain niche, but the foundation of drinking is with the beers you can drink every day - that’s why 5% lagers are the biggest selling beers in the world (that and their enormous marketing budgets). The thing with stronger beers is that they evoke a bigger reaction, good or bad. It’s almost like the beer glass comes attached with a microphone and the higher the strength, or the more processes the beer goes through, the louder it plays back. It’s easy to shout about a 10% rum barrel-aged coffee and coconut imperial stout (I would so drink that) because the experience of it is an amplified one; a 5% stout, no matter how good, will illicit less of a powerful response, especially in those with the loudest voices. It’s interesting to look at the ratings websites too and you’ll see that very few beers under 6% make the top 100 list on Ratebeer or Beeradvocate; it’s not that they aren’t worthy, it’s that there’s almost an inhibition to say that something 4% can be ‘better tasting’ than something that’s 9%, even if both bring the same enjoyment.

Brewers are aware that bigger beers illicit more response so they brew them and sate the thirsts of the most vocal end of the market which creates an upward-spiraling trend for the extremes of experience. Purely by their volumes of flavour they pack a punch where a 3.9% ale can’t, but this isn’t necessarily a reflection on overall enjoyment. Like those love-hate foods, which always have big flavours, people either get it or they don’t and there are passionate people on both sides. Session ale is different to big beer; we approach them and drink them differently. Each suits their own occasion and style of drinking and there is room for them both but it is a little concerning to see the upward trend in strengths. Are these pushed up by a few one-off 10% beers, or are they genuinely rising? Belgium has always had a range of strengths from 4-11%, so these ABVs are nothing new, but their drinking culture doesn’t circle around the pint glass.

I’m all for the strong end of the spectrum, I like experimentation, I’m interested in new beers which push boundaries, but good session beer in the pub is more important, especially if we want to encourage new drinkers. What I hope this amplification of experience and flavour will do is push forward the quality of session beers, creating low-ABV beers which are packed with flavour but still balanced (I think the definition of balanced has changed in relation to beer but that’s another post). Great, full-flavoured beer which you can return to day after day is surely more important than a 10% IPA which you can only drink a couple of times a year?

Should these figures be alarming or is there just a current trend towards making strong beers because of the vocal chorus or reactions to them? Is the session beer dying in the US and is it changing in the UK? Or are we just experiencing an upward spike in strength before we see an upward spike in flavour? In fact, maybe we need to measure the levels of ‘flavour’ in beer and plot these over the last 10 years – would we see an increase...?

I've Sunk the Bismarck

Maybe the hoppiest beer I've ever had, earthy, citrus, floral, imperial. So thick and full bodied, like syrup, like honey. It smells like a hop sack, so fresh, uniquely fresh, like hop resin, hop oil on the finger tips. It's sweet like candy but hot like bourbon, it's smooth but jagged, it's bitter, it's intense, it's astonishing. Five months in the making, this is insane US Extreme IPA meets Scottish whisky, an unimaginable blend.

I've bought a bottle and I'm glad. Sink the Bismarck, whatever you think about the name and the marketing approach (it's a bit of fun, nothing more - initially the name is shocking but it's more of a jovial up yours than a vicious fuck you), is a special beer. It might not be to everyone's taste - in all senses - but it's a remarkable achievement.

What is Extreme Beer?

I’m interested in extreme beer as a concept. I want to know what it means. I have a lot of questions about it.

Is ‘extreme’ about the ingredients used to give an extremity of experience - strength or bitterness, for example? Is it to do exotic ingredients like fruits or spice? Is barrel-aging a constituent of extreme? Wild yeast? Imperial yeasts? Does it now need to incorporate extra tricks to be extreme – Randall the Enamel Animal, perhaps? Does packaging or the beer name count? What about marketing?

I think the notion of extreme beer is changing. Not long ago a 9% beer would’ve been scoffed at but now it’s scoffed down. Beers which rip your tongue to pieces with hop bitterness are craved rather than feared. Strong beers are cool. Barrel aging is normal. The words Imperial and Double are familiar. I’ve tasted a lot of fruit and spice recently - the different ingredients being used are no longer shocking.

I find the notion of ‘extreme’ difficult to succinctly put down in a few words because my mind is on a rollercoaster of different thoughts: it’s awesome, hit me harder; it’s terrible; it’s so specialist; it’s us vs. them; it’s all too Dionysian (it’s becoming Apollonian); it’s a bastardisation; I want my beers hoppier, darker, crazier; I want my beers easier drinking, lighter, sessionable; I want to see what’s coming next, I want to taste it.

Beer is always changing and moving forward so it’s natural that the outer reaches of its capabilities are explored. But is this a progression of beer? Or is it just too much? Are brewers having to get more creative to satisfy the thirst for extremities? Or do they need to get smarter? What now counts as extreme? Are beers shocking now? And if not then how far will a brewer need to go to shock? Are British beers getting more extreme (not just BrewDog)? And, perhaps most importantly, do you like and drink extreme beer? Whatever that may be.

I got the picture from here. Maybe that’s the next step.

Some NewDogs

You know me; I want to try each new BrewDog with such voracious thirst that I don’t think twice about ordering every time a new beer is released. I’m not ashamed by this and in actual fact I love that a brewery can build up the same sense of anticipation that a blockbuster movie or new CD from a favourite band can, and that’s cool. At the weekend I finally got my paws on the newest BrewDogs: bashah and Nanny State.

Bashah first, brewed in collaboration with Stone. The eyes vote first and they give a massive thumbs up for the awesome bottle label. In the glass the thumbs rise again: opaque brown-black with a lacing tan head. Then it’s the aroma of chocolate and spice, an earthy bitterness, fruity hops with hints of pineapple and candy sugar. It’s a nose that makes me do those olfactory summersaults, loving it more with each sniff, dipping my nose so close that it comes out with a drip of beer on the end. And then the taste: chocolate, roasty and spicy, earthy then into those fruity hops, teasing and intriguing instead of thump-you-in-the-head, then a cakey sweetness and more fruit and all the time that chocolate. And that fruit. What is that fruit? I love that fruit. The only thing I’d question is the style - a Black Belgian Double India Pale Ale – but I quite like it, it’s very… BrewDog and Stone. I’ll happily go all out and say that this is one of the best beers I’ve had this year. But then there’s Nanny State. If bashah fingered the style over substance button, this beer full-on fists it. And I’ll be honest: I was wary. I said in this post that I would’ve loved them to make a 1% beer with moderate bitterness that I could happily drink a few pints of and not fall over after. I understand why BrewDog made this beer, I like why they made it, but I don’t like what they actually made. Firstly, it tastes like How To Disappear Completely. I was impressed that they used a lot of hops the first time, the second time it’s like an inferior cover track. Secondly, it’s just too bitter to be drinkable and the whole point of a 1.1% beer is for it to be drinkable (unless it’s ‘point’ is to provoke…); I put this one down and felt hop-stoopid and soporific as if I’d just finished a 9% DIPA without the boozy warmth. Thirdly, it’s great that this beer is weak enough that it doesn’t qualify for booze tax, but why didn’t that pass on to me? I paid £2.49 a bottle, which is the same price as bashah. If it’s that expensive because of the number of hops used then it’s a waste of hops and I just wasted money on a publicity stunt.

Not everyone likes BrewDog, I understand that and they surely understand that too. Personally, I love them, but sometimes you have to tell the ones you love that you don’t like it when they call you ‘pudding’, or when they always put your things away in different places every bloody time they put them away. Bashah is one of the best beers they’ve made, in my opinion, and it proves just how good they are be at brewing (see also: Tokyo*, zeitgeist, Zephyr). Nanny State shows how Punk marketing isn’t enough to make a good beer and, after all, it has to taste nice above anything else.

Their latest hullabaloo kicks off tomorrow in London. I will commit my guesses to the page, just in case I’m right: they offer to sell ‘shares’ in the brewery so we can be part owners, or they open up their doors for license brewing so that beer from around the world can be made and distributed quicker and cheaper in the UK (hopefully the 'new dog' in town will be from Dogfish Head...). I will be there tomorrow, I can't wait.

Drinking Beer is Like Going to a Theme Park

A theme park: a vast world of fun; rides, slides, rollercoasters, amusements; bright colours, loud noises; slow and steady or high-speed-high-thrill - all fun in their own way; upside-down, round and round, 100-miles-an-hour, losing your stomach, lots of laughter. Theme parks kick ass in the fun department. While some people are happy to queue all day to go on the big adrenaline bad-boy rollercoasters where you turn inside out, over, under and back to front, others are content to ride the slower rides all day long, enjoying the helter-skelter, the log flume, the tea cups. These are altogether tamer than the big-thrill coasters but not necessarily less enjoyable. This is kind of like drinking beer, don’t you think?

That 4% sessionable pale ale that you’ve had so many times already is like the log flume. You know that it’s fun and you know exactly how it goes and that’s why you love it. You can also ride it over and over again without getting sick. Yet there are some times, when everything is just right, that the tame little log flume brings such elemental joy that you never want to get off: it’s a warm day, the sun’s shining, you are with friends. It’s the beer that you know you will enjoy.

Next to the log flume are the tea cups and the ghost train. These are standard fare, often uninspiring but can be surprisingly good fun. These are your best bitters and standard stouts. Some are much better than others. The teacups may be rickety and old or they could be new and loud and bright. The ghost train is dark and it sometimes hits the same unscary notes all the way but others can be mysterious and surprising and addictively good fun.

There are also the things which you alone like. The cheesily good fun amusement arcade, the straight-down drop slide, the whack-the-rat, the 2p slots or the dodgems. This is the beer that you love that no one else seems to get; it’s a guilty pleasure, it’s something simple and fun and all yours. It’s a fruit beer, a Desperados, a Coors Light.

Some fun-lovers might like to warm up using the log flume before hitting the big dipper. The big dipper is the 6% IPA. It has high points and low points, or in beer terms, it has bitter hops and sweet malt. You need both or it’s a crap ride. The sweetness starts off low, and that’s where the ascent is, by the time the bitterness comes in you reach the lip of the fall and you edge closer and closer until it drops and soars and you are flying then you hit the bottom and you drink again and it goes up again but this time not so high and it drops and you drink... There are no loops, it’s a straight-forward up-and-down-and-round but it’s still an adventurous one and bloody good fun (this also works for other 6-7%ers).
Then you might like to step it up. This is when you go on the aggressively named showcase ride. This is high-octane thrill seeking. This is out-there cool, this is fun, this is the sort of thing that you build up to all day; you are scared and excited and you don’t know what to expect. This is extreme beer. This can’t be your first ride ever; you are an experienced thrill-seeker. It can go in so many different directions. Maybe it’s a 10-loop coaster. Maybe it’s the highest freefall, maybe it’s the longest ride, the fastest, the loudest. Maybe it’s all of that and more. Maybe it’s a 10% barrel-aged something, maybe a 9% double IPA, maybe a 15% style-pushing stout, a puckeringly sour lambic or maybe it has exotic ingredients. These are the rides that some people hate and refuse to ride but they are also the ones that get the most passionate fans. And people will travel across the world just to get on this ride. Then the ride itself. It should be shocking and surprising. It should make you want to go back on again. It needs soaring highs and gut-dropping lows. It should be a loop of what-happens-next fun where the rider never quite knows which way he will be thrown next. That’s what good extreme beer is. It’s a rollercoaster of infinite joy when done well. It’s a see-sawing balance between too slow and too fast and anticipation and thrill and adrenaline and mystery and fun. You need to be able to do it but not be sure quite how it works. You need to be able to ride it over and over yet still enjoy different things each time (the view, the sound of the screams, the grinding growl of the coaster, the gut-turning speed).

There are also the other extreme rides which are not about any kind of balance but just try to do one thing and do that thing awesomely. It’s the free-falling, stomach-emptying drop. The 0-100 in two seconds. The ride in the dark that you know ends with a monster fall but don’t know when it comes. The 150IBU tongue-splitting IPA or the 22% tooth-rotting, fire-breathing stout. But, and here’s the ultimate downside, you can only ride these high-octane rides a few times before you feel sick. It’s just too intense to ride over and over.

Drinking beer is like going to the theme park and the ultimate beer theme park in the UK is on this week at Earls Court, where I’ll be riding the big ones all Tuesday long (although maybe I’ll heed my own advice and ride the log flume once before jumping on the 9% hop train to Drunktown).

Does this little allusion work? If so, which beers do you think are like which rides?!

I'll be at GBBF on Tuesday for the trade session and then again on the Saturday to finish of the dregs of the UK barrels. There's also a pre-GBBF/21st anniversary do with the British Guild of Beer Writers tonight, which should be good fun. And then The Bull (my favourite pub) has got a Marble showcase on from Thursday. It's going to be a long week... Oh, and I got these images from the Thorpe Park website.

BrewDog Tokyo* Yeah

All the commentary has been done on this beer and so now we just need to know what the damn thing tastes like, so here it is, a straight-up tasting note post and nothing else (except this fine piece of cinema). I decided to shoot a video of it for the whole world to see, but I’ll write about it too if you can’t face seeing me sniff, swirl and sip a beer and then struggling to describe it more eloquently than it’s good.

It’s 18.2% but everyone knows that by now, it’s brewed with jasmine and cranberries, aged over French oak chips for a month, dry-hopped to hell and fermented with a champagne yeast. It’s a thick black pour with a surprisingly bubbly head which soon laces sexily. Holding it up to the light shows the faintest glimmer of red which is really quite handsome. The aroma is big, but not as big as I expected. It’s fruity pretty much all the way with cherries and those cranberries, beneath that there’s a nuttiness and beneath that it’s a box of fancy chocolates and some vanilla-laced wood.

Take a mouthful and it’s big. But then 18.2% is pretty massive. It’s sweet first then into darkest dark chocolate and more fruit but then it flips over and gets floral and hoppy bitter. The cherry sweetness is excellent leading it into the darker flavours and the booze. It’s fascinating and intoxicating. The finish is long and it lingers all around; not just on the tongue but around the whole mouth and in the air and it calls you back in for another go. Then there’s a hotness to it, a freshness that develops as the beer warms, but this isn’t bad and if you put the bottle away for a few years (the best before date is 2019!) then this’ll mellow out.

It’s a remarkable beer. I was drinking it for well over an hour and enjoyed each sip. Now I’m going to buy some more and put it away. And if you go to the website then type TOKYO in as the discount code to get 20% off. This means if you get six bottles you essentially get free postage and each beer costs less than £6. That’s a bargain. Binge away people.

Here’s the old and new* Tokyos. I considered a side-by-side but then thought again… The 12% Tokyo is one of the best beers I’ve had this year and I’ve got a couple left in the cupboard so maybe I’ll get round to a comparison one day, perhaps opening a Mikkeller Black too or a World wide Stout if I can snag a bottle from somewhere! Oh, and one more thing... this beer probably contains about 400 calories per 330ml bottle. Does that bother anyone?!

BrewDog Tokyo* and the Incendiary Binge Winge

When I was at university we would buy a bottle or two of vodka/gin/whisky almost every week. Each bottle cost us less than £6. We used the spirits as part of drinking games with the intention of getting very drunk, very quickly and cheaply. Between six of us the 700ml of spirit would usually go, sometimes we drank more than this, all the time we drank a few beers too. We played drinking games and then we'd leave our house and go to the student union where we would have quite a few more drinks - alcopops, pints of lager, shots, shots and mixers. By the end of the night we'd be very drunk. Mission accomplished.

That is what we did. We didn't sit around in a circle tasting the drinks. Hell, we tried our hardest not to taste them. We spent as little as possible to get as much alcohol as possible and then drank it quickly. This is binge drinking. It's organised and calculated. This is what we are warned about in the news.

Here are some examples; which do you think contribute most to binge drinking? Having two pints of 5% ale in the pub; being able to buy a litre of 7% cider for £2; 24 cans of premium strength lager for £10; two bottles of wine for £5; a four pack of Bacardi Breezers; a 350ml bottle of whisky for less than £4 (almost the same volume as a bottle of beer); a £10 bottle of super-premium ale that's 18% (a little stronger than wine, as strong as port - which costs £4 a bottle, half the strength of gin).

There are different modes of drinking. Some are reckless and concerned entirely with being a means to a drunken end. Some become reckless through the evolution and degradation of an evening. Some are altogether more civilized; a few bottles of wine or beer to share, no plans on drunkenness but a certain inevitability that it will come. There are nights when it is all about the drink and the whole getting drunk side of things gets in the way and stops the evening prematurely. Then there is the quiet drink to relax in the evening, maybe a pint in the pub, a glass of wine with dinner, or perhaps opening a bottle of something at home. And as soon as it's taken into the home then it's the responsibility of the drinker, am I right? If I buy a bottle of whisky then I could drink it all in one go if I wanted to (if I could). I could buy a four pack of beer or alcopops and drink the lot, or maybe I'll just open one. I may open a bottle of 4% ale or I might fancy trying a bottle of super-premium strength, super-premium priced, completely esoteric beer designed for a select few and made on a small, hand-crafted scale from premium ingredients.

The difference becomes the way it's consumed and the mentality behind the drinking. If I had £20 to go out and 'get drunk' then I could buy 48 cans of lager and put myself into a coma. I could buy one bottle of wine or five. I could get three bottles of whisky or one. Some people would rather have one good bottle of wine than five cheap bottles. I'd say it's likely that more people in general would rather have five, thus putting the buyer of the one £20 bottle apart from the other drinkers. Some people are happy with a Big Mac for dinner; others want triple Michelin starred food and will pay hundreds of pounds for it. It's all about how people consume and how they want to consume. It takes a certain kind of ruinous drunk who would knock back a few bottles of £100 wine in an evening, or who would get lashed on six bottles of expensive 10% craft beer.

The debate about Tokyo* is inevitable but still frustrating. There has to be some common sense from the writers of articles like this and this before publishing such one sided arguments. I can see their side and selling a bottle clearly intended to be drunk in one sitting, which contains 6 units of alcohol, is a lot, but I could go to the pub and drink three pints and be over six units or I could drink a whole bottle of wine (something that's easily done), or I could drink two bottles of 9% beer, 3 bottles of 6% beer (there aren't lobbyists against the new four packs of Punk yet, are there?).

I will drink Tokyo*. It's most likely that I'll just have the one bottle in the evening. Why would I want to drink three bottles of it in one sitting? If I wanted to get that drunk then there are quicker and cheaper ways of doing it. And besides, I won't be drinking it with the intention of getting drunk; I'll be drinking it as a fan of the brewery who wants to try everything they brew. That's an important part of this: BrewDog are aiming their beer at a very particular crowd of beer enthusiasts. This isn't even just for those who enjoy beer; this is for the serious hardcore and it comes with a price tag to match. It may appeal to other people in a 'wow I want to try the strongest beer' way but the taste and experience will be too much. And while this may be the strongest beer in the UK, it isn't close to the strongest beers in the world and there comes a point where these beers only appeal to a very select audience, an audience who drink to appreciate something and are therefore willing to pay to appreciate it. And what if the beer was packaged in 250ml bottles (for the connoisseur) or 750ml champagne bottles (for sharing) rather than the ubiquitous 330ml bottle that we pop the cap off and suck down like water. It’s all about education still, it always is.

This is not a cheap case of lager, this is not a £6 bottle of vodka and this is not contributing to a binge drinking problem because it is working at the opposite end of the spectrum where smoking cigars is fun, reading a book in the sun is okay and enjoying a few sausage sandwiches isn't all that bad.

What do you think? And have you noticed how not even one of the journalists has given us some tasting notes before they dig into the hysteria?!

I know this debate is rolling around the beer blogs and the news but I wanted to add my thoughts as someone who technically regularly binges (on Friday I drank a bottle of Stone IPA followed by a bottle of Moor JJJ IPA – which itself contained 6.3 units of alcohol - followed by a Riptide stout which I think probably tops 10 units; does this make me a drunk? No. It made me drunk, but not a drunk and I only did it once in the week.) And yes, this is excellent punk marketing for BrewDog, so good on them for having the balls to stand out there. I also understand that The Rake have a cask of this and when that comes out I'll be jumping on a train for a pint (which I guess will cost me about £15!), who'll join me?!

Please, Sir, I Want Some Moor?

Moor Beer’s JJJ IPA is a beer that I’ve heard a lot about; it’s got one of those reputations that pushed it up high up my must-try list. It’s an elusive brew unless you live in Somerset (I don’t live in Somerset) and as UK beers go a 9.5% triple IPA (albeit brewed by an American) is a terribly rare thing. So when I heard that beermerchants were getting a pallet-load up from the West Country I rubbed my grubby little hands together in preparation of an order. The beer finally arrived at mine last week after a voracious wait with nights of wild thirst (ooh, if you’ve read Oliver Twist you’ll now see that the title of this is not a totally tenuous allusion after all!). The first thing to know: everything about JJJ is BIG. This is not a pussy-footing, pretend imperial IPA. This beer is balls-out and in your face and it’s not scared of what it is; to be honest I think it revels in the fact that it’s harder than every other beer. The big bomber bottle is a good looking thing to start and who can resist a handsome looking beer? Out of the bottle it pours a deep copper red with a thick and creamy head. Sometimes you can look at a beer and know that it’s going to be something special; this beer looks like that. Dip your nose in but don’t expect it to be an olfactory hop-festival, no, that surprise is hidden away. You get the big malt, the toffee, some nuts and almonds, a boozy warmth as it grazes the nasal passage and a distant spicy whiff of those green grenades. And then you drink. For me the greatest joy of a beer like this is the mystery of it. There are moments during a gulp of beer when you don’t quite know where it is or where it’s going next and there’s a thrill to that see-sawing balance. JJJ’s body is huge and strong, creamy and smooth and mouth-filling. It’s huge caramel sweetness first and then comes one of those ‘moments’ where what happens next is a mystery. It’s a split second. It could go too sweet, it could flip-over and shrivel out or it could take off. This takes off. But it takes off slowly, gradually building up, wrapping itself around your tongue; bitter, floral, earthy, spicy and then more bitter and sweeter again with over-ripe tangerines, pine forests and roasted fruits and more bitterness, growing all the time, then the swallow leaves behind the dryness which grips tightly and hangs and pulls you up back for more sweetness; it’s that essential kiss-on-the-cheek, slap-on-the-bum of big malt and big hops that makes very bitter beers so drinkable (you get a malt kiss then you get the slap, but you want another kiss, but the kiss is attached to another slap, then the slap starts to get fun…). And it drinks so well too; I finished a bottle in no time and loved every sip. I had a Stone IPA before it which I chugged with dinner and the combination of that and JJJ left me with the stupefied, hop-stoned beer buzz. And I love that feeling; it’s just totally relaxed and chilled out and happy; it’s the ‘ahhh’ of finishing a beer followed by the calm afterburn. But don’t expect an IPA as you know it. It’s not one of those 9% American hop bombs; this is more of a super-hopped barley wine given the fullness of the body, the roasted caramel maltiness and the fruit. It’s really very good, you know, and there isn’t much like this being brewed in the UK right now either.

You can also get two other Moor beers from beermerchants: Somerland Gold and Old Freddy Walker. I’ve just finished a Somerland Gold (5.5%) now and I’m impressed again. Here’s the important stuff: it’s golden in colour, but you’d expect that given the name; the nose has a sweet, cakey creaminess to it topped off with citrus, tangy apricot skins and very distant pine; the taste is superb, a big mouthful of clean pale malt, smooth and crisp and sweet and then the tropical fruit bitterness rolls up and attaches itself to the insides of your mouth, clinging on for dear life as you swallow. It reminds me of Thornbridge’s Jaipur in many ways and it’s fantastically drinkable. JJJ IPA is a triumph of a beer, Somerland Gold is a classic-in-waiting and beermerchants is the only place you can buy these bottles. You really should drink Moor beer.

Beer with a Story

There’s something about the creative possibility of big beer which excites me. I found this article in the New Yorker and this article by Michael Jackson about extreme brewing and Sam Calagione and they really are superb reads. If you haven’t already read them, and you love the creativity behind beer, then you must take a look at them. They aren't short, especially not the New Yorker, so get a beer and sit down and take the time out. They are fascinating, inspiring, exciting. They form part of the essence and ethic of why I love beer so much.

The articles show the heart of Dogfish Head brewery and the craft/extreme beer movement in general. The New Yorker is punctuated by the always-intelligent Garrett Oliver who provides the malt to Calagione’s hops while Michael Jackson grabs hold of the creative side of things. And that's what it's all about. It's not just about getting the hardest or the fastest on the extreme beer roller-coaster, it’s about creating works of art, and for some of Calagione’s beers it’s about rejuvenating ancient works of art.

Many of the beers have a story. The Palo Santo Marron, for example, is aged in a super-rare and super-expensive barrel ($140,000 expensive). Calagione explains the inspiration for the continuous hopping of the 60/90/120 Minute IPA series (the combination of a chef talking about seasoning food and a kids game). And he is recreating history with post-modernised nods towards past drinking - Midas Touch, Sah’tea, Pangaea, Theobroma and Chateau Jiahu.

I may be fickle and romantic but this kind of thing really grabs me. Maybe it’s a desire to understand past drinking, maybe it’s the scooper in me who wants to try everything going, maybe I just can’t resist the premise, whatever it is I feel an enormous thirst towards a beer with a story. Especially one told by someone like Sam Calagione.

But what do you think? Do you care about the stories behind particular beers or doesn’t it bother you? Can the story behind a beer make it ‘better’ or more appealing than it deserves to be? What about recreations of old recipes – good or bad? Does the article about DFH make you want to try the beers or does it have the opposite effect?

As-Live Tasting: BrewDog How To Disappear Completely

17.10pm. Evening all. It’s been a bloody lovely day here in Kent, I’ve just got back from Whitstable and now I want/need a beer. And it’s a new beer tonight – BrewDog’s How To Disappear Completely. A 3.5% imperial mild-slash-imperial IPA with a theoretical 198 IBUs. Yeah, 198!! This surely renders all hope of balance out of the question!?

17.14pm. It’s poured and the picture’s been taken. It’s darker than expected; a deep caramel colour. Time to get in there and see whether a superheroically bitter beer can work at 3.5%!

17.16pm. Wow, what a nose!! It’s an immense monster; a billowing tower of olfactory pleasure. The hops are properly condensed and turned up to way beyond 11. The first and most startling aroma is fresh tobacco and tea leaves; it’s a musty sweetness, intoxicating. Beyond that it’s grapefruit and tangerines roasted to just before burning point. There’s also caramel too, in a toasted sweet bread kind of way and possibly overcooked vanilla custard. It’s really something to dig your snout into.

17.19pm. Before I dive in, a word on balance. Balance in beer is good. It’s that delicate see-saw between sweet and bitter. Anything that tips the scales at either extremes loses some of its enjoyment, in my opinion. It’s pretty tough to get body into a 3.5% beer, and not that easy to get a heck of a lot of sweetness but it is easy to make it bitter by adding a lot of hops. What the hell will come of this beer?! I’m going in, watch yourselves tastebuds!

17.22pm. Oh my goodness… The words are in there but not coming out… need another mouthful… woah that’s HUGE! Bitter yes, but it’s got such a great mouthfeel (how much crystal malt did you use?!). It’s toasty grain for the smallest fraction of time before your tongue gets beaten into a hop submission. And it’s unabashedly unrelenting. It doesn’t roll in, it smashes in. It’s that super-condensed kind of bitterness, a tangy, clawing, fill your mouth bitterness. But I think it works…

17.26pm. I’m feeling a bit dizzy with that hop-induce fug of calm. This is another intoxicating brew from the furthest reaches of outer Scotland. It’s intoxicating because it flips your head inside out. It feels like 8.5% not 3.5%. It’s as bitter as a beer can go. And it’s got a roll-around-your-tongue thickness. Have you had Sierra Nevada’s Torpedo IPA? It’s like that in the mouth.

17.30pm. I just read the BrewDog blog about this beer and it was mash-hopped and first wort hopped, two virtually unheard of practices. The dry hopping was pretty epic too; 15HL of beer was abused by 20kg of hops! And it really does showcase the raw brutality of the hop in its most condensed form.

17.33pm. I said in a previous post that this is brewed with the same hops as Stone’s Ruination IPA (Columbus and Centennial) but that it’s half the ABV and double the bitterness. It doesn’t taste like Ruination IPA. It doesn’t taste like anything I’ve had before.

17.36pm. My Grandad, my Dad’s Dad, used to smoke a pipe. I remember going to his house and pretending to smoke it as a young boy. It had a very distinct smell. It was him, plus the pipe, plus its leathery case, plus the sweet flecks of tobacco. It’s a surprising olfactory madeleine; a re-enactment of 15 years ago and a memory which I didn’t know I had.

17.41pm. I’m listening to Radiohead’s How To Disappear Completely. It seems only right as that’s what the beer is named after. The combination of beer and song works strangely well in a juxtaposition kind of way; it’s a contemplatively haunting song while the beer is a 1,000 mile per hour hop rocket which makes you dozy. The lyrics have a haunting similarity too. Strobe lights and blown speakers, fireworks and hurricanes, I’m not here, this isn’t happening.

17.48pm. I’m fascinated by this beer. I love bitterness and its potentially innate physiological powers, which I wrote about here. It’s a beer which commands your attention; the fear is that it might just be able to kill you. But I like it (of course I do, it’s a BrewDog for goodness sake). I like how it has got just enough sweetness to make it drinkable and I love how it hovers just below the that’s-too-bitter threshold; it’s an unbalanced balancing act.

17.55pm. I can’t decide if I want another now or not? Half of me does (the pleasure-pain loving Id) and half of me doesn’t (the sensible side, the Ego). I can smell the barbeque from where I sit so I probably won’t; it’s possibly the least food-friendly beer I’ve ever tasted (remember the Hardcore IPA As-Live?). Just don’t bother having it with dinner unless it’s a meal you hate.

17.58pm. As the BBQ is getting nearer I think I’ll open a bottle each of 77 lager and Zeitgeist to eat with it. And if you didn’t read it, check out the latest food and BrewDog stuff that I did here (believe it or not it’s 77 and Zeitgeist with a BBQ!! – what a coincidence!). Oh yeah, you can buy How To Disappear Completely from the brewery here. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Bonus Features... I also shot a video of me opening this beer which I have posted on my youtube channel. I’ll probably start uploading a few videos over there which I don’t put on this blog. There are some pretty cool video beer reviewers out there on youtube and they are worth a look.

How To Disappear Completely

That’s the name of BrewDog’s newest beer. I heard about it in an email from BrewDog’s James at the weekend. He twittered (@BrewDogJames) about it today and it’s now reached the ratebeer forums so I thought I’d give it some hype too. Plus I want to see what you guys think of it.

It’s a double IPA hopped with Columbus and Centennial (the same two hops which make up Stone’s Ruination). So far so good. Well, it’s 3.5%ABV and 198IBUs!! Shit. That’s just insane. For some perspective, this beer will have twice the bitterness of Ruination IPA and half the strength. If I thought the Hardcore IPA (9%ABV and 150IBU) was a brute then this one will be a proper monster of a beer.

I think this could be the most unbalanced beer ever brewed. And definitely one of the most bitter (check out this list to see some of the biggest IBU beers around, including Mikkeller’s theoretical 2007IBU beast). I have no idea whether it’ll work but I know that I want to try it. I really want to try it. And at 3.5% I’m sure I could manage a few pints, whether my tongue will be able to handle it is another thing. Bring it on!

Update... I’ve had a quick edit to add the picture and because a little while after I posted this BrewDog posted their own blog about it here. The beer sounds ridiculous, the hops are everywhere but the grain bill makes it sound wicked. And you can also pre-buy it here (I need to set aside a BrewDog fund each month I think!).

Juxtaposition: Stone/BrewDog/Cambridge

I mentioned the collaboration between Stone, BrewDog and Cambridge in the last post but here’s some more info which has been posted on the Stone blog. And the news is pretty flipping cool.

What would you expect from this beer? I certainly wasn’t expecting anything less than awesome and extreme and they haven’t disappointed. But, ale fans, the news is this: they’ve made a pilsner (Stone’s first ever lager).

But this ain’t no ordinary pale beer. Hell no. It’s called Juxtaposition and is a 10% Black Pilsner which Stone are calling their hoppiest beer yet! Sweet! And remember Stone brew the hop rocket that is Ruination IPA! There’s are more details on their blog but I won’t copy them here, just add that they are mash-hopping! Mash hopping?! Now that sounds good to me.

Anyway, that got me all excited this morning so I thought I’d share it. I’m sure there’ll be more info about it soon from BrewDog. Just one thing… It was announced yesterday so I just hope that it isn’t an evil April Fool joke (but this link suggests that it was a double bluff, so fingers crossed). Juxtapose me baby!

The Next Big Thing Will Be...

In recent years the US craft beer movement has super-sized beer all round. Beer is brewed to extremes of strength and bitterness. There has been a lot of barrel aging, mainly oak barrels which previously held whisky or bourbon. ‘Old’ styles have been brought into the 21st century – imperial stouts, new-skool IPAs, porters. Bottled beer choice has got wider, while limited edition cask beer in brewpubs achieves major notoriety. Beer release dates are talked about as if they are the opening day of the summer’s most anticipated blockbuster movie. Certain beers are creating legends of themselves. But what I’m wondering is what is next. Here’s a few possibilities…

Is sour the next big thing? Beer forums seem to be predicting that sour is the new bitter. I don’t know about this one, and I’m not convinced by wild beers and lambics yet (I haven’t had one which has made me fall in love with it). I haven’t quite acquired the taste for tart, dry, acetic, sour beers. They could be the next (logical?) step but I don’t see them becoming mainstream, at least not in the UK.

There’s bound to be more barrel aging. Maybe with the use of different barrels like brandy, cherry brandy, calvados, wine and madeira explored further. Aging styles other than imperial stout could soon take off too. Or perhaps there will be blends from different casks - the same beer but half of it aged in bourbon and the other half aged in cherry brandy - then mixed together.

On the topic of blending, maybe the next craze will be the pimping of the black and tan. IPAs with stouts; double IPAs with imperial stout. Maybe kriek and porter; lager and dark lager; two different vintages of the same beer; lager and bitter (?!). I made a snakebite at a beer festival once with an 8% cider and an 8% ale – I can’t honestly remember what it was like (it was the last beer of the night and seemed like a good idea!). Maybe this kind of thing is best left to personal experimentation.

And what about new styles of beer? Black IPAs, imperial lagers (is such a thing even possible?!), 10% ABV bitters, malty-sweet wild beer, vegetable beers, savoury beers.

Belgian-style beer is cool in the US, so maybe we will see more British brewers copying Belgian styles? Or US brewers Americanizing Belgian beers, creating bigger versions of the styles (turning the triple up to a quintuple or sextuple?!).

I think the market for ‘special’ beers will increase as will the production of ‘vintage’ beers. This’ll probably mean more one-off brews, better bottle conditioning for super longevity and more expensive single bottles. Beer as commodity.

On the reverse of the vintages, what about ultra-fresh beers designed to be drunk within a few days or weeks out of the fermentation tank. Especially designed to grip hold of that fresh hop aroma and flavour.

One trend I’d like to see is more single hop beers showcasing the unique qualities of just one hop variety, perhaps using the same base beer with each brew having a different hop added to it.

Super-sessionable beers, like milds and golden ales, to be drunk in the pub.

Will cans be the new bottles?

What about the use of ‘active’ ingredients? Look at BrewDog’s Speedball. Or the use of things such as ginseng, taurine, omega-3, vitamins and minerals. Just the thing for those searching for something more nutritious or more ‘out-there’.

And beer will hopefully become more global with more access to beers from all over the world. This will be helped by collaborations between brewers from different countries.

Is this what the next year-or-so has in store? What do you think?

Bitterness

“Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.” Martin Luther King.

I’ve found myself more and more drawn towards getting a huge smack of bitterness in my beer drinking. The hop is an addictive little chap, calling me back for more and more. But when I was drinking a particularly gorgeous but aggressive American IPA last week it got me thinking…

The beer was Ruination IPA from Stone Brewing Company in San Diego. It’s incredible. The bottle announces it as ‘A liquid poem to the glory of the hop’; it’s more of an anthem. It scores over 100 in the International Bittering Units scale and that’s a lot (lager scores 5-15, a ‘standard’ IPA around 50).

It pours a sexy bronze colour with a large lacing head; it’s a great looking beer. The aroma is huge with fresh oranges, grapefruit, pineapple and pine - the nose is intoxicating on its own. Sweet malt hits the tongue first and this is bready and full of caramel, but it’s soon overtaken by the massive hops: oranges and grapefruit; juice, flesh and pith; a long, clingy-bitter, dry, zingy, zesty finish. It’s just so drinkable, gluggable, well balanced. An awesome beer, but certainly not for those who are aren’t hop-lovers; it’ll blow your socks off!

All that bitterness got my brain going. Now I’m certainly no scientist, but here’s my basic understanding, with a beer slant put on it.

As kids we hate that bitter twang at the back of our mouths, but we love sweetness. As our palates develop we acquire the taste for bitter flavours, such as citrus, coffee and dark chocolate. It is innately within us to avoid bitter tastes. To our distant ancestors bitterness (usually when tasted from a plant) was bad and it signaled the possibility of poison; if it tasted bitter we avoided it incase it harmed us.

So what happens when we drink an aggressively bitter beer? Our bodies innate response would be to throw out warning alarms to let us know of potential danger. The chemical mechanisms would say: ‘Watch out, that could be poisonous!’ and then the brain and body need to make a life-critical decision about whether it’s safe to continue or not. The trouble is that underneath the bitterness is a whole load of sweetness, and sweetness = good. So there’s even more chemicals and decisions flying around: it’s good/bad, life/death.

We take another sip to be sure. We experience it like this: sweet first on the tip of our tongue, brief but powerful, but then as the beer moves over the tongue it hits the bitter-taste receptors right at the back of the mouth and down the throat. The bitter area dominates that part of our palate (it’s the last thing we taste before we swallow) and so the bitterness stays around for the longest, especially in a strongly hopped beer.

Now, whatever it decides, the body is flooded with chemicals simultaneously. It gets a ‘Go’ signal from the sweetness, but a ‘Stop’ from the bitterness. On top of this, sweetness actually dramatises the sensation of bitterness. So a beer that has a high ABV will generally have a depth of sweetness which then impacts upon the sensation of the bitterness. Here’s what your brain might be deciphering: ‘If this is bitter - which it most certainly is - then it could be poison. Maybe I’ll take another sip to be sure. Wait a minute! It’s sweet too… and it tastes so good, so how can anything bad be so delicious?’ Again there is a flood of chemicals, a mass of decision making.

Yet we know that it’s alright. We bought it from the store. It’s made to be enjoyed. It’s just the body isn’t fine-tuned to think that way.

As I see it, we have a delicious beer which is intoxicating, strong, sweetly malt but bitterly hopped. It tastes mighty fine but the chemical mechanisms still aren’t convinced, they’re still on alert. So your brain is caught in between two ways of thinking: fight or flight (fight means drink and enjoy!). This double-trouble, dual thinking can surely only be a good thing for our enjoyment of the beer. We’re on high alert over the flavour, but we’re also alertly enjoying it because it is so full of flavour. The life-critical decision is to fight it, to drink that highly-hopped masterpiece and to enjoy every last sip, even if your brain is still having niggling doubts. It also gives us a burst of adrenaline and everyone loves a bit of that.

Drinking an exceptionally bitter IPA is like being on a roller-coaster: you love it, but your body is in a state of heightened arousal, worried for your death, which then increases your enjoyment even more, in a masochistic kind-of way. Maybe I love the smack of puckering bitterness, maybe I’m addicted to the thrill of it.

Harder, Faster, Bigger, Better… Double my IPA!

Our tastes change and develop. And because taste is subjective, everyone is different. My favourite cheese used to be a mature cheddar, now I want the mouldiest, stinkiest, creamiest blue I can find. A few years ago a sprinkle of curry powder was too much, now I want whole chillis, freshly ground spices and I want my mouth to tingle. I started drinking my coffee with ½ a heap of granules plus two of sugar, now it’s no sugar and three times the coffee. Booze too: Malibu and coke is now bourbon and ice; beer was lager; white wine was mixed with lemonade; Guinness started with a dash of blackcurrant to soften the roast bitterness…

But what is common about all these?!

The more we have them, the more we want them as we ‘acquire’ the taste. These acquired tastes are for those things which are unnatural to our palettes: spicy foods, dark chocolate, salty oysters. To begin we have sweet chilli sauce, milk or white chocolate, fish fingers…

But tastes change.

I got into beer by drinking lager-pop. I’d have bitter shandies. I eased into Guinness, with a shot of blackcurrant cordial. I started on ales by having smoother, sweeter dark beers, and for the last few years it has been these dark beers that I have regularly leaned towards. I love them for their richness, the sweetness, the flavour of the grain, the taste of autumn fruit, dried fruit, caramel, chocolate or coffee. I preferred them for their relative lack of hop bitterness. And I was always searching for bigger and stronger beers, winter warmer’s, barley wines, Belgian triple’s, anything black and imperial. I was a malt monster.

But my taste is changing.

It seems there are two growing divisions in the beer world. These aren’t divisions away from each other, rather two interweaving and developing trends. Both are towards the extremes of flavour; one is for IPAs and the other for stouts. These new imperial or double IPAs are mega-hopped and massively bitter; the imperial stouts are thick, strong beasts, often aged in some-kind-of barrel to impart bourbon/oak characteristics. You just have to look on Beer Advocate at the best rated beers in the world right now to see this, and the trend seems to be growing. It started in America as they brought older styles to modern drinking.

We all know the history of IPA, which was shipped from England to India with added strength and hops to stop it going off on the boat trip. While (imperial) stouts have a similar-ish background, being brewed in London in the 18th century and transported to Russian Czars. For this reason it had to be extra-strong and well-hopped to survive the distance and the extreme cold. The styles have been around ever since, but it’s only in the last years that they have become the phenomenas that they are. Any why? Because tastes change.

In beer, the change has come as drinkers want ‘more’. More booze, more grain, more hops, more character, more flavour, more extremes, more history, more age, more more more. It’s the IPAs which have really piqued my interest of late. IPAs never really did it for me. That was until I tried BrewDog’s Punk IPA (available in Tesco’s – a perfect modern IPA) and their Chaos Theory (simply amazing and currently available on their website, but hurry!). After these the malt monster in me transformed into a hop-headed thrill-seeker.

The bitterness in these beer is high, but that’s what makes them so awesome. They have a supreme drinkability which makes you want to go back for more and more. In the mouth you get the sweet caramel grain then the hops flood in and ambush your palate, making the saliva glands gush, as the tropical fruits, citrus and pine flavours come through. It’s intoxicating what a few extra hops can do to you. For me, they work because the beer develops in layers: massive malt (it has to be massive to attain the extra higher ABVs) followed by the wave of juicy hops. The reason the ‘best beers’ are the ‘best beers’ is because they are so well balanced. It’s easy to go extreme on a beer, but it’s surely much harder to make it good. The same applies to food. Look at the top chefs in the world and their food – it challenges what we think we know about eating and food combinations, but it works because of the chef’s skill and supreme palate make it work.

I find it fascinating how our taste buds change, especially with stronger flavours. Blue cheese, slippery-salty oysters and coffee are foods which take some getting used to. The same applies to stronger, bigger beers. And the limits are always being pushed. Sam Adams’ Utopia is brewed at around 27% (it’s a beer!). Your ‘standard’ imperial stout now comes in at around 10% and if it isn’t aged in a bourbon barrel for extra complexity then why bother? And where a mass-produced lager may have 5-20 IBUs (International Bitterness Units – the scale of measuring a beer’s bitterness) and English bitter 20-40 IBUs, there are some double IPAs which measure in at 120 IBUs and beyond! That’s enough to make your taste buds explode!!

Barrel-aged stouts are incredibly exciting and complex and they are brilliant to sit down with on a cold night, swirl around a snifter and sip for while. It’s sophisticated, it’s smooth, rich in flavour, it’ll make you think about the world, think about the barrel it came from, the history that it has. But a double IPA is like a rollercoaster ride with ups and downs and twists and turns. It’s fresh, fun, intoxicating and exciting. It makes you want more and more as your taste for it develops. Who knows where it’ll go from here!