The Golden Pints 2010: My Winners

It’s taken me hours to get this down to what it is. I’m cheating the brief by adding a number of nominees for some of the categories but I’ve drunk a lot of good beer this year...

Best UK Draught Beer: The Nominees: Fyne Ales Jarl; Dark Star Saison; Thornbridge Kipling; Gadds Uberhop; Fuller’s Chiswick; Tryst Corronade IPA; Saints&Sinners ABC; Lovibonds Sour Grapes. The Winner: Gadds Uberhop/Dark Star Saison/Lovibonds Sour Grapes...

Best UK Bottled Beer: The Nominees: Moor Revival; Thornbridge Halcyon; Old King Henry Special Reserve; Kernel Centennial Pale Ale; Kernel Export Stout; Marble Chocolate Dubbel. The Winner: Moor Revival (4% bottled pale ales can be terrible; this one is fantastic).

Best Overseas Draught Beer: The Nominees: Bear Republic Racer 5 at the brewpub and at the Toad in the Hole, Santa Rosa; AleSmith Barrel-Aged Speedway Stout; IV Saison in Moeder Lambic; Pilsner Urquell in the cellars under the brewery; Killer Harvest at Mountain Sun. The Winner: Bear Republic Racer 5.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: The Nominees: Birrificio Italiano Tipopils; Struise Black Mes; Bells HopSlam; De Molen Lood & Oud Ijzer; AleSmith Speedway Stout; 3 Fonteinen Schaerbeekse Kriek. The Winner: Birrificio Italiano Tipopils.

Best Overall Beer: Bear Republic Racer 5. For the theatre of the beer I drank in the cellars, Pilsner Urquell is runner-up.

Best Pumpclip or Label: Uinta Crooked Line Tilted Smile Imperial Pilsner. Loved the beer, too.

Best UK Brewery: Dark Star for a great core range, fantastic monthly seasonals and for their collaborations with others – they make beers I really want to drink (plus I’m representing the South here). Runner-Up: Moor Beer. Consistently good on cask and in the bottle; a great range of interesting beers. So many others deserving of special mention...

Best Overseas Brewery: Answering this one as the best I visited... Cantillon. Just the most handsome brewery with magic in the air.

Pub/Bar of the Year: Of all the beer bars, in all the world... the Euston Tap takes it this year. It’s a newcomer but it’s a great place with an excellent mix of beers and somewhere that’s exciting and that I’ll spend a lot of time in 2011. Honorable mentions to Cask Pub and Kitchen, The Rake (because I’ve drunk there more than anywhere else), Zly Casy in Prague and Moeder Lambic in Brussels.

Beer Festival of the Year: Planet Thanet is the one I also look forward to above all the others (except GBBF, of course).

Supermarket of the Year: Waitrose.

Independent Retailer of the Year: The Bottle Shop in Canterbury. It only opened in November but they’ve got a great selection in a cool location in The Goods Shed. They also do some 9 pint kegs of interesting beer. Definitely one to watch (and visit) in 2011!

Online Retailer of the Year: Got to go to two: BeerMerchants and myBrewerytap. They do different things and both do it very well. Unfortunately, as they are both so good, when it comes to placing an order for more beers I now end up ordering from both at the same time…

Best Beer Book or Magazine: Not a beer book, but still relevant – The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit. Just a brilliant book which made me gasp and coo in excitement and ache in joy and wonder at the turn of each page. I finished the last page and started again.

Best Beer Blog or Website: Stuart Howe’s blog is an unmissable read. I also really enjoy Beer.Birra.Bier, which has fast become a favourite of mine – engaging and very well written.

Best Beer Twitterer: @simonhjohnson – There’s always something interesting at the end of Simon’s fingertips...

Best Brewery Online: BrewDog do it well and I think Thornbridge have stepped it up recently, particularly on facebook.

Food and Beer Pairing of the Year: Little fried fish, squeeze of lemon, pint of ice cold Mythos, enjoyed while sitting on the beach as the sun sets. My idea of perfection.

In 2011 I’d Most Like To…: Drink even more good beer, learn more about wine and spirits (and drink more of them, too), brew some beer, drink in some different countries, see more bloggers and breweries collaborating and see lots of people attend the Beer Bloggers Conference!

Open Category: Best Canned Beer: Oskar Blues Ten Fidy.

It’s really tough to try and fill these in but it brings back so many good memories of a great year of drinking. If anyone wants to take part then paste it in below (or on Andy’s blog) or email me ([email protected]) and I’ll post a few of them in one blog – I’ve already got some to go. Lots have already given their winners here or at Beer Reviews.

Time to post this before I change my mind again...

Remembrance of Beers Past

I’m in my flat. It’s September and almost sunny. I pop the swing top of a chunky bottle and pour it out while I’m concentrating on making dinner and doing other jobs. I’m juggling and making a mess and I’m not thinking about the beer but as soon as I raise the glass to my lips and take one mouthful I’m whooshed away and I’m sitting in the Pivovar Modra Hvezda and microbrewery in Dobrany. I’m sitting at a table, the brewer at one end, me at the other, surrounded by others, with lots of glasses in front of me. My hand goes to the glass in the middle and lifts it up, takes a gulp and says, inaudibly, how much I like this beer. Back in my kitchen I feel a warmth moving outwards from my heart in a quickening of its beat; the memory comes alive in me. I remember that it had a striking flavour which hadn’t been present in anything we’d had all weekend, an egg custard tart quality, but in a subtle-not-weird kind of way. I remember how I drank more and more of this beer until it was gone. I remember its silky body, the sweetness and creaminess of it; I remember how much fun that hour at the brewpub/hotel was and how everyone was buzzing when we left. Standing in the kitchen at home, raising the glass to take a mouthful, I’m thrown to that memory.

The brewpub/hotel from the outside.

“I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence.”

Of course, it’s no ordinary cake which Marcel Proust is writing about in Remembrance of Things Past; it’s a madeleine. For Proust, “the past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us).” This material object could be anything. For Proust it was a piece of cake soaked in tea. For me, it’s beer.

The Modra Hvezda lager (it's the 10 degree unfiltered) isn’t the only beer to have this effect on me. A few weeks ago I shared a bottle of Racer 5 with Mark from BeerBirraBier and it simultaneously took me on a wild memory ride to four different places (such is the power of this beer for me) – just a mouthful of it is powerful enough to do that, which is probably why I call it my favourite beer. The strange thing is that I don’t remember the taste of the beer in the memories, instead it’s the rosy and hazy experience it conjures back in my mind.

Racer 5 in the Bear Republic brewpub.

“Our senses of smell and taste are uniquely sentimental,” writes Jonah Lehrer in Proust was a Neuroscientist. “This is because smell and taste are the only senses that connect directly to the hippocampus, the centre of the brain’s long-term memory. Their mark is indelible.” Lehrer explains that the other senses are processed by the thalamus, which is the source of language and the “front door to consciousness,” meaning that sight, sound and touch “are much less efficient at summoning up our past.” By taking a mouthful of beer (or cake or anything else), the brain can pin it to a distant memory and recall it from the library of our mind.

But the memories I’ve recreated are not fully complete. They are powerful flashes of the moment which brings back a feeling more than anything else. I can see the image of it but it’s almost static, like someone has taken two or three stills and is playing them back to back, creating a jarring video effect. I remember being there, I remember little details, but mostly I remember the feeling.

These memories “do not directly represent reality,” says Lehrer. “Instead, they are imperfect copies of what actually happened, a Xerox of a Xerox of a mimeograph of the original photograph.” Memories require a “transformative process... we have to misremember something in order to remember it.” By drinking these beers I’m flung to a great memory and in my mind this has a cumulative effect and makes it better; a halcyon glow fills the senses. I don’t remember how tired, drunk or hungover I am in any of the memories, that headache isn’t there nor am I was worried that I don’t have enough money for breakfast or that I don’t know where my hotel is, instead I bring back a snapshot of something which means a lot and I raise it up in my mind to something bigger and better and each time it happens the beers and the moments continue to get better and more important to me.

These are the sorts of beers we don’t forget. They are also the beers which we raise to be more than perhaps they should be. Is the Modra Hvezda lager a great beer or is it just the lasting memory of a great moment? Is Racer 5 my favourite beer or have I just been lucky and had some unforgettable experiences with it in my hand. Strangely, I’ve had it more times than just the four which flash into my mind, but they don’t come back instantly, instead they take a little more searching until I remember them.

Beer is a visceral time machine capable of lifting us from reality and dropping us back in a distant memory, visiting places we hadn’t forgotten, just merely stored in the annuls of what’s already happened. By having these transformative remembrances we raise the original moment in our minds and it gets better and better until it ostensibly becomes something of fictional quality. But this isn’t a bad thing. It’s good to have these special beers and special moments and they are rare drinking experiences; it makes beer an important part of our past and present.

Have you ever experienced this kind of Proustian remembrance? If so, what beer? Or what food? Or whatever else?

I’ve written something similar before. That time it was how Deus takes me to my last Summer Ball at university (the Taste of Memories). I have a similar thing with Mythos which, despite having countless pints in the last few years, I still recall a particular few. Desperados is there too and it’s my 21^st birthday and we’re standing in my garden, it’s freezing cold and dark and we’re drinking a mini keg. Then there’s the time we’re drinking a mini keg in a swimming pool. 

The most incredible drinking experience (so far)

We’re underground. Possibly as deep as 12m. It’s less than 7°C. We are just a short way into the 19km of cellars, somewhere amid the 32,000m² of tunnels. It’s dark and cold. There’s a mineral cleanliness to the air, the air which hangs still. The cobbled floors are wet, the white walls are damp, the ceiling arches high above us. Every crossroad of tunnels leads off in new directions, visible only for a few metres before it fades to black. A map shows us the full network, an unbelievable snaking myriad of channels carved out of the rock. We try and work out how far they stretch under the city; what landmarks they lay dormant beneath. How many men have worked down here? What was the beer they made like? What stories can they tell? Our guide is leading the way but we’re only following in a strange not-quite-concentrating kind of way, our legs moving but our minds filled with wonder and awe, open-mouthed like school boys who have just seen the T-Rex at the Natural History Museum. It’s when we pass by the giant oak casks that we all stop and stare. Magnificent and grand, blackened by time, they run along the sides of the cellars, stacked two high, filled with beer, just waiting. I silently say ‘wow’ and a cloud of breath disperses in front of me. Around another corner and the cellar is stacked with casks on both sides, maybe 40 casks in total around us. Two dark figures wait in the middle, slightly hunched. They start pouring beer as we arrive by them, serving them charmlessly without even a hint of a smile. Beer in hand, we pass through the narrow corridor between the barrels and into another cellar where we stop briefly, looking back to where we were served, like the ultimate beer theatre. It’s here, in the cellars underneath Pilsner Urquell brewery, that I have the most incredible drinking experience of my life so far. The beer is unfiltered and unpasteurised and it’s come straight from the oak barrel. We’re deep underground, it’s cold and mesmerising; the stories that this place could tell are haunting. The beer is a cloudy gold with a chunky white foam. It’s unbelievably smooth and rich, there’s a slight sweetness to begin and a herbal, dry bitterness to finish. It’s perfect. It’s unlike anything else I’ve had before. It’s undoubtedly one of the best drinking experiences in the world.


Does anywhere compare with this? Is there a better drinking experience? What’s the most amazing beer experience you’ve had?

The map of the cellars. The tour only walks around a tiny block in the middle, which you can just make out as the white lines are thicker with wear from fingers tracing our route. 

FABPOW! Tipopils and Pizza

I have a theory: any beer works with any pizza...

Pizza is an inherently simple, eat-with-your-hands food. It’s the stuff of our childhood but we still eat it as a grownup, which has a cheeky appeal, like eating milky bars or fish fingers. Pizza can be one from a box (shop bought or take away-ordered) or it can be made from scratch, satisfyingly gooey in the middle and crispy at the edges, topped to your heart’s desire. On the grand scheme of food-things, making your own pizza is joyous and fun and bursting with childish appeal, like having free-reign to decorate a banana split with sauces, sweets and sprinkles.

Tipopils is a lager from Birrificio Italiano and it’s one of the best lagers I’ve tasted. It’s made with four hop varieties (Hallertauer Magnum, Hallertauer Perle, Hallertauer Hersbrücker and Hallertauer Saaz), it’s a little sherberty to begin, a little herby and floral and a hint of fresh bread in the aroma, which mellows out to an inviting orange and pineapple fruitiness. It’s incredibly smooth drinking which creates a cuddle-effect before the bold hops stamp through and leave their lingering trail of dry bitterness. It’s got so much character to keep it interesting throughout the glass, making you want to drink more and more after each quenching mouthful. Remarkably good, enough to make me look for flights to Milan leaving in the next 24 hours.

The pizza was homemade, both the dough and the sauce (the most flour-dusted and sauce-splattered pages of any cookery book I have are the ones in Jamie Oliver’s Jamie at Home for pizza dough and tomato sauce). There were four of them; Lauren and I both topped two each – mine were dramatically better, of course (she used mostly sweetcorn and onion which, in isolation, suck as pizza toppings). One of mine was smoked pancetta, chilli and lots of mozzarella, the other was piled high with flat mushrooms, red onion, basil and mozzarella (although, as Reluctant Scooper says, the toppings aren’t relevant, it's pizza and beer and that's what matters). Both of the pizzas are umami-bombs calling for the fruity sweetness and fizz which Tipopils deals up, while the dry finish at the end cuts the richness of the cheese and tomato. The match is helped along even further by the Italian heritage of the headliners.

This was one of those dinners where every mouthful is a pleasure and you eat and drink until you are a food-comatose lump on the floor, covered in crust crumbs and spatters of tomato sauce, but still somehow sipping at the beer because it’s so good, eyeing the slices which remain.

Pizza and beer belong together, a glass in one hand and a slice in the other. Like meat and potatoes they work, whatever the infinite varieties of recipes permit. It’s the simplest of pairings and always works, whether it’s a can of cooking lager or a bottle of something special. Pizza and beer: what do you think? Is there any beer which wouldn’t work with pizza (I won’t believe it if there are!)? Are there any which work particularly well with certain pizzas?

I’m now going to eat the cold leftovers and I’m dribbling at the prospect.

OMG MARBLE MANCHESTER BITTER IS TOTALLY AWESOME

Perhaps I was too hasty in my wild praise of Thornbridge Halcyon. It’s not that it doesn’t deserve it – of course it does, it’s bloody fantastic – it’s just that maybe I’ve found something even better.

It was Friday. It had been a very long bitch of a week. I was hot and thirsty and tired. I slumped in from work, dragged myself to the fridge and pulled out a restorative beer: Marble Brewery’s Manchester Bitter. I’ve had it on cask in The Bull and loved it but was a little worried about how it would transfer over into a bottle... I needn’t have. It’s 4.2% of brilliant. It’s a stunning gold colour. It smells like you’ve been locked in a room full of sacks of deliciously fresh hops - passion fruit, tropical fruit and citrus – the kind of aroma you want to be able to inhale so deeply that it fills every last space of your lungs. It’s easy drinking, it’s completely delicious, it’s got these incredible hops that just keep on teasing and playing and nibbling away, so fruity, astoundingly fresh, vibrant, AWESOME. It puts almost every other bottled British beer I’ve had this year to absolute shame. Breweries: if you want to taste what a 4.2% hoppy bottle-conditioned British bitter can taste like then try Manchester Bitter. Please.

In fact, it’s so good, I put my money where my mouth is and just bought a whole case of it from myBrewerytap – it’s the perfect summer beer and I can’t imagine anything better when sitting in the sun than a chilled bottle of this.

myBrewerytap are also selling four other Marble bottles – Lagonda IPA, Tawny No.3, Ginger and Chocolate Marble. Beermerchants sell the special, limited edition Marbles, which are also fantastic (Special, the American-style barley wine is my favourite).

A Special Beer Night

Another beer night. This one reserved for those special bottles we’d been meaning to drink for so long but just never got around to it, shared with Mark from Real Ale Reviews and Pete Brissenden.

A Pliny the Elder to start. This was pretty much the reason Mark decided to come down from Leeds as I’d promised that I’d bring a bottle back from San Francisco for him. It’s a great beer, pithy, piney, dry and bitter.

Alaskan Smoked Porter 2009, another bottle I brought back from California, poured an opaque darker-than-burnt-out-wood back. Smoke comes straight out, followed by fire and chocolate. First the mouthfeel grabs you, silky and smooth, then the smoke whisps in at the end, bonfire, earthy, fiery but still with chocolate underneath. A great beer, exploding with flavour for 6.5%, and not overpoweringly smoky.

Petite Orval next, the beer kept for the monks at the brewery and only available there - a weaker version of the normal Orval. It smells like rhubarb and lemon, delicious. It’s smooth and dry, lemony and peppery, incredibly drinkable and just like a smaller version of Orval without so much of that familiar dry bitterness. I wish this was commercially available – it’s fantastic.

Russian River Supplication followed with its awesome aroma of glace cherries, lemons and wood. It’s smooth, clean, sour, peppery, full-flavoured. Great beer.

Then for a Fuller’s Vintage 1999. It’s packed with serious dried fruit, syrupy, Madeira, port-like in its age. The body is so full and smooth, there’s a huge marmalade and spicy malt flavour that’s so familiar to the Fuller’s beers, then more Madeira comes through, treacle and caramel and a peppery, intense finish. Wow – the last 10 years have been good to this beer.

Cantillon Saint Lamvinus, bottled about 6 months ago, aged with merlot grapes in a Bordeaux barrel. It’s cherry red with no head, funky and peppery but not massively sour, it’s easy drinking, woody, tannic and dry at the end and seriously tasty. A Cantillon Iris followed which is cold-hopped and has a shockingly good aroma of fruity, peachy and citrusy hops, but those hops clash wildly with the beer, going off like a nuclear reactor on the tongue, smacking bitter and sour simultaneously and it was all too much for me.

An Old Chimneys Good King Henry Special Reserve 2007 brought us back on track and what a beer this is. Rate Beer has this as the highest rated British beer (the Fuller's '99 is the second highest rated on there) and I can understand why. The aroma is coconut, oak, vanilla and chocolate; it’s thick and intense but still remains light and drinkable, there’s roasted berries in there, lots of chocolate, oak and hints of umami which adds a lot of complexity.

Then an Orval side-by-side, one from July 2008 and the other from December 2009. The old one was cheesy, funky and just generally bigger; the new was fresher, more floral. The old tasted leathery, dusty and dry with an underlying candy sugar sweetness; the new had funk and lemons, a fruity sweetness and more pepper. Very interesting to have them together to see the difference of age and both still tasted great. I had a year-old bottle recently which stopped perfectly in the middle of these two and that seems just about right for me.

Next a De Molen’s Lood & Oud Ijzer, a black and tan blend of Amarillo and Rasputin (both oak-barrel aged) made especially for the Pig’s Ear beer festival last year. We had bottle 103/120 – that’s small run stuff. It has the most amazing aroma and like a Proustian time machine I’m back in Hackney, at the bar, drinking with mates, the day after the BGBW Awards Dinner. It’s grassy, peachy, fruity and then comes chocolate, cocoa and some mint. There’s so much Amarillo in there, then dark fruit, then chocolate. It’s so smooth and still tastes wonderfully fresh.

A Drie Fonteinen Geuze was deliciously dry, crisp and sour. It's an awesome beer, probably my go-to geuze.

Then finally a BrewDog/Mikkeller Devine Rebel 2010, bumped up to 13.8%, possibly with a change of hops as I couldn’t taste or smell the usually pungent Nelson Sauvins. The beer is big and boozy, honeyed, very bitter, nose clearing, orangey and just a bit disjointed – it was just too strong for me. Time for bed after this one.

Not a bad beer night, although I had a vicious hangover the next day, one that left me running for the bathroom in fear of being sick while I was frying some bacon! Thankfully it was all made right with a pint of Marble Pint and a fish finger sandwich in the sun at The Bull, which Mark has written about here. It’s good to clear some of the better bottles from the stash every now and then.

We didn’t score the bottles this time, like we usually do for Beer nights. If I had to list my Top 3 it’d be Good King Henry, Petite Orval and De Molen’s Lood & Oud Ijzer. What isn’t mentioned is that the fridge still had a bottle of Pannepot Reserva 2007 and a BrewDog Tokyo*, while a Marble Raspberry Decadence was loitering just in case. 

Beer: We Can Do It!

Here begins my campaign for canned craft beer in the UK. The official slogan is currently ‘Cans are not just for baked beans’, but I’m still working on that bit.

In 2002, Oskar Blues started putting their beer into cans; they were the first brewery in the US to see a future for canned beer. Now over 50 are doing the same, including 21st Amendment, Anderson Valley, Maui Brewing Co, New Belgium and Surly ('Beer for a glass, from a can'). 21st Amendment have recently announced their Insurrection Series, which will be ‘a limited edition, four-pack release of a very special beer that rises up in revolt against common notions of what canned beer can be’. They started this series with Monk’s Blood. The beer in these tins are not your mass-market, corn-fed, yellow fizz.

There are significant pros to the argument for drinking canned beer, they are: Cans are lighter and more space-efficient than bottles (378g vs. 592g in a 355ml container); they are roughly the same diameter, but cans are stackable; there are no worries of smashed glass with a can; any light struck issues disappear in a can, so the beer stays fresher; cans now have a thin layer attached to the inside so any worries of it ‘tasting like tin’ disappear; aluminium is eco-friendly and recyclable; cans chill quicker than bottles; you don’t need to put labels on a can; cans suggest that you drink the beer fresh and in most cases fresh is best; and, you will also likely get away with drinking a can of beer in a public place or at work and people will just think it’s one of those loudly coloured soft drinks, if that’s of any interest.

For balance, there are some negative issues: The mentality of drinking beer from a tin is the main one as canned beer is seen as the cheap, mass-market stuff which you open, drain in one hit and then smash the empty tin against your forehead. This is a difficult mentality to overcome. Also, the addition of canning facilities to a brewery is an extra, initial expense alongside (or instead of) a bottling line. And here’s a point I’m unsure amount – we have cask and bottle conditioning, how about can conditioned? I don’t know if it’s possible, so real ale in a can may be a no-go, which some might not like (though real ale is not the be-all and end-all of good beer, of course).

Ultimately it comes down to taste. It’s easy to list reasons why cans are good but if, when that ring is pulled back and the beer is poured out, it doesn’t taste good then the argument is wasted. 21st Amendment’s regular cans are Hell or High Watermelon Wheat and Brew Free or Die IPA. They are great looking cans, bold and colourful. The Watermelon Wheat is literally a can full of fruit, it’s light and quenching, relatively low in alcohol and like sinking your teeth into a juicy piece of melon (just don’t try this if you don’t like watermelon). Brew Free is a fantastic IPA, bready-caramel base with a flood of tropical and citrus fruit and pine - very tasty and neither too-sweet nor over-bitter.

Two of the beers I brought back from California were in cans and I now wish I’d squeezed a few extra in. Maui Brewing’s CoCoNut Porter is 5.7%, comes in a great looking can and is made with hand-toasted coconut. It pours a dark chocolate colour and straight away that coconut comes through, like liquid Bounty. One sip and I was in love. It’s great fun, it’s fresh, it’s different and the mix of fragrant coconut with roasty, chocolatey, dry porter is a complete revelation (the brewer is currently in the UK doing something for the Wetherspoons beer festival... look out for it, you’d be coco-nuts not to). Oskar Blues Ten Fidy is the A-list superstar of canned beer. It’s a 9.5% imperial stout and it pours a gorgeous inky brown with one of those creamy, dark heads that you want to spoon up and eat. The aroma is the intoxicating mix of doughy sweet bread, oatmeal, dark chocolate and berries. It’s richly full bodied, a fresh bread flavour kicks it off which gets darker and darker passing through toast, cream, chocolate and coffee, heading into cocoa-covered roasted berries. It’s as good an imperial stout as I’ve ever had.

I’d like to see canned craft beer in the UK. But I don’t think we are close to that yet. Tins of Hobgoblin and Green King IPA don’t count, I’m afraid, but I think there’s real potential for others. The mentality of drinking canned beer might be the biggest thing holding it back, but times are changing and there are many pros to canning beer - brewing is constantly in evolution, the world is changing, the need for more efficient practices are gaining importance and this is one thing that the beer industry can do. Not all breweries could succeed to begin but there are some who definitely could. Maybe it needs a new brewery to come in with a radical game-plan to try and shake things up a bit... Whatever happens, expect my Can Campaign to be on-going – We CAN do it!

And here’s some proof that 21st Amendment use fresh watermelons... We didn’t break into the brewpub, by the way, that’s Richard from Elizabeth Street Brewery and he was picking up a keg of beer for a party, which I went to. And yes, I did quote Dirty Dancing as this picture was being taken.

The Hop Press: San Francisco Beers of my Week

I’m back! After a week of drunken (or hungover) posts, blurry pictures and general bleurgh, this blog should return to its usual state. As it’s Sunday it means something on the Hop Press (I did line a post up last week but it didn’t publish itself and is still in the draft folder, which is annoying). I wasn’t in much of a writing mood this morning so I put some words down about the best beers I had on my trip (and there were a lot of good beers). Here's the full post!

I think it’s fair to say that you can expect a few more posts in the next weeks about my trip. This one just lazily gets it rolling with a few favourites (and you know me, I like to list my favourite things).

And so it begins...

I made it to San Francisco. Wake up at 4.30am; drive to the airport; a delayed flight; a short layover in snowy, grey Germany; 11 hours in a shitty, cheap plane seat with crap food and terrible movies (made bareable by two very good books and some good music); a landing which I thought was going to be in the bay; a BART ride made interesting by a weird trampish guy with gangsta hair; lots of rain; the smallest hotel room ever seen; a shower shared between 20 (not simultaneously); something called the MUNI; a few wrong turns; and finally, sweetly, wonderfully, I arrive at the Toronado.

The Toronado: I love it. I'm here now. Grungy, dark, beer memorabilia everywhere, a dizzying number of pumps, a board full of beer, cool tattooed barmen, rock music. I choose Pliny the Elder, of course. It's incredible. Racer 5 next. Incredible too. This is the beer I was drinking before and after I won the award which paid for this trip. It's a special beer to me because of that. Right now it tastes perfect. Absolutely perfect.

I've been awake for 24 hours but fuck it, I don't care. I'm drinking great beer in an awesome bar. So begins my week in San Francisco.

(By the way, expect swearing, excessive use of exclamation marks, bad or non-existent grammer, woeful spelling and general silliness from these gonzo posts, most of which will be in a bar when I'm half-pissed)

Beer Blogger Awards 2009: My Winners

Personally, I’ve had a good 2009. I graduated from a Masters degree, I started a career, I moved in with my girlfriend, I wrote the first draft of a novel (and another 35,000 words of a second), I became an uncle and the BGBW award topped it all off. Beer-wise it's been a great year too. Lots of new beers tasted, new favourites found, new friends to drink them with and lots of great memories. But... it's time to announce my winners for 2009. It’s been really hard to select most of these, hence why I’ve gone for some honourable mention choices too. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while then most of the winners will be familiar names – I like to talk about the beers I enjoy the most. I did a semi-similar thing last year and my choices are quite different and I’m sure that this time next year they will be very different again.

Feel free to take these categories and the logo (designed, like Beer Swap, by Robsterowski from I Might Have a Glass of Beer – cheers!!) and paste them into your own blog, alternatively you can email me your winners and I’ll post them on here or you can comment yours below.

Here are my winners for 2009:

Best UK Draught Beer: Marble Pint (Thornbridge Jaipur is a very close second)

Best UK Bottled Beer: BrewDog Tokyo* (Thornbridge Bracia and Zephyr are close behind)

Best Overseas Draught Beer: Too many choices... Stone Imperial Russian Stout, Captain Lawrence Reserve, Bear Republic’s Racer 5, De Molen Amarillo... Ultimately, Racer 5 reminds me of a good couple of days in London and I won’t forget it in a hurry

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: Pliny the Elder (a few Mikkellers are up there)

Best Overall Beer: Marble Pint

Best UK Brewery: BrewDog for being constantly interesting, pushing and progressing British beer and making people talk about beer (Thornbridge, Marble and Gadds need mentioning and with all moving to bigger breweries it’ll be interesting to see how 2010 fares for them)

Best Overseas Brewery: Mikkeller

Best Bottle Label/Pump Clip: BrewDog’s Atlantic IPA (shame the beer isn’t as nice as the label!)

Pub/Bar of the Year: The Bull, Horton Kirby (The Rake is runner-up)

Beer Festival of the Year: GBBF (Planet Thanet is second – love that festival)

Supermarket of the Year: Sainsburys (Tesco almost got it for introducing Gonzo Imperial Porter, 77 and zeitgeist but they took away Orval in the process...)

Independent Retailer of the Year: Utobeer

Online Retailer of the Year: Beermerchants

Best Beer Book: Pete Brown’s Hops & Glory

Best Beer Blog: Reluctant Scooper

Best Beer Twitterer: @reluctantscoop

Best Online Interactive Brewery: BrewDog (for their ability to go viral – no one else in UK brewing has that power)

Food and Beer Pairing of the Year: Anything with the pork scratching at GBBF!

Open Category: Best Beer-Related Thing about 2009 is...: All the new friends I’ve made and all the great new people I’ve met through beer (The Best Non-Beer-Related Thing...: Becoming an Uncle!)

Next Year I’d Most Like To... : Drink in the US and make some beer-money from writing...

Dubbel, Rabidbarfly and John Clarke have commented their winners here. Chunk, Knut and Andy have blogged theirs. And I think Kelly from Thornbridge needs a special mention for putting the year of blogging into a poem!

2009 has been a good year... Here’s hoping 2010 is even better!

The Hop Press: *That* Question

My first proper Rate Beer Hop Press post is now online. It’s about that question, the one which I’m sure we’ve all been asked many times before: What’s the best beer you’ve ever had? Or, what’s your favourite beer? Or, what beer would you take to a desert island? Or any variation on that.

The full piece is here. If you'd like to comment then I don’t mind whether you did it here or there. My Hop Press page is here.

If you had to...

I thought I was done with the beer festival stuff for a while but there’s one more thing to ask and it only feels right to do it in my own favourite way: An If you had to…

Imagine the most recent beer festival you went to, whether it was the GBBF or a small local one. If you are like me you probably checked the beer list online before turning up. There are familiar names and unfamiliar ones. Some make you shout ‘I gotta get some of that’, others don’t even register. You plot out a little route through the beers you want, starting there, then that one, then that or one. You get there. You see the lines of silver casks, see the printed cards telling you the brewery, the beer name and the ABV. There are as many casks as you’d want or expect depending on the size of the place. But at the far end is a new bar, one not advertised online. This is a special bar with three last-minute additions. But, and this is the question, If you had to choose, which three beers would you want to see on cask sitting behind that bar?

Any three beers from any where. These are the three dream beers that you’d want to see right now. This is total fantasy stuff but it doesn’t have to be super-rare or one-off, it can simply be a favourite beer that you’d love to see at every beer festival you go to. What do they have? And, for a little extra fun, if this Friday begins to drag, who would be the person serving the beer to you? Anyone, male or female, dead or alive, a hero or just someone really fit.

The Taste of Memories

I’m trying to work on my monstrously over-sized post about GBBF but in the meantime here's something I wrote a few months ago. I’ve been waiting to post it and seeing that Pencil&Spoon has risen to number 5 in the Wikio wine and beer top blogs it seems like the perfect moment! Thanks all, that’s made my day. I’ve laughed over beer and cried over beer. I’ve used it to celebrate and commiserate. It brings us together. Let’s go for a beer. It’s always there. It’s a part of life. So many great memories punctuated by glasses and bottles and the faintest recollection of how it tasted. And the taste is a feeling. It tastes of more than just the beer. The time I first had Deus. I don’t taste the Deus in my memory, I taste the way I felt that night. I taste the moment: it was warm, I was surrounded by my best friends, it was a special night, one of the best nights. I remember drinking it, I see the photographs now, it brings a smile, it brings that feeling back. It was for celebrating. It was to toast a changing point in our lives. It was a special beer for a special moment. A one-off moment, never had before and never to be had again. That memory will always come when I see Deus. Deus is how that memory tastes. It’s a time machine. A journey back to a great memory. I travel through space and time in an instant. I am back there, I see it, I hear the laughter, I feel the warmth, I taste it. Do you remember when…? We smile when we talk about it. He shares the same memory, he has the same feelings as I do, he remembers the beer, that night, that time, the place, the people. The memory tastes good. And every memory tastes different.

That's Iain, Pez, Matt from a few posts, me and Lee, who wrote this. We're all drinking Deus apart from Iain who is drinking something pink. He did drama. We drank some other cracking beers that night but I can't remember what they were!

FAB POW! Orval and Paella

The call of the flowery superhero returns and FAB POW! is here as the antidote to non-believing beer drinkers who think that a pint of Kingfisher and a chicken balti is the furthest stretch of the imagination when it comes to having a beer with dinner. To them I say, eat this!

It took me a while to ‘get’ Orval. The first few bottles, spread over a few fledgling beer drinker years, did nothing for me, perhaps being too esoteric, perhaps just being out of my ‘5% dark ale’ comfort zone. Then, on a hot day, I poured myself one and sat in the garden with a book and all of a sudden it was entirely clear to me. It’s elegant and light but it’s mysterious and intriguing. It’s the swathe of opaque orange, the simplicity of the malt, the mouth-filling body; then it’s the big peppery hops, that bitterness and then that burst of brett with its almost-impossible-to-describe, ever-evolving lift.

And it’s an almost perfect food beer. It’s got the spritzy tart finish, it’s got boozy strength to stand up to big flavours, it’s got a savoury peppery quality and it’s got palate-sweeping fizz. Fish, check. Cheese, check. Salads, check. Battered cod and chips, check. Curry, check. Hell, I reckon it’d probably even be awesome with the king of dinners: sausage, chips and beans.

This Food and Beer Pairing of the Week! is Orval and paella. For me paella is a ray of sunshine. It’s a memory of the summer, of a sea-breeze, of sitting outside in Barcelona by the water side, the smell of cooking, of the sea, of the warm air, the feeling of warm skin, of a beer or two already drunk, of being chilled out. I cook paella when I want to recreate that feeling; it’s a burst of summer warmth. And why Orval? Why not just some Spanish cerveza? San Miguel, Cruzcampo, Estrella Damm? Well, paella is salty and rich and fishy and it comes with lemons to cut some acidity through it, but why use lemons when you can use a beer to do that job? The just-sharp finish of Orval picks up everything, glides through it and rounds it all off, while that hop bite matches the chorizo and loves the fish and rice. Add to this the primal, summer breeze-like aroma of the beer and it’s a totally awesome match. And what could be more summery than that? Forgo the lager on this one, pour the beer into a fancy glass and enjoy.

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

Is there a better beer on a hot, sunny day? Does anything hit the spot quite like a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale? I don’t think it does. Does the perfect summer beer exist? If it does then I guess it’s quite close to this. You have to serve it cold. Drink it from the bottle if you like (but you’ll disturb that gorgeous moonscape at the bottom of the bottle - you can kind of see that below if you click on the pic and enlarge it) or pour it into a glass. It’s a golden glassful, the nose is juicy with citrus and tropical fruits, the body is all biscuits and toffee, the mouthfeel is spot-on and oh-so quenching with those nibbling hops. It isn’t challenging, it doesn’t demand you to pull out distant memories of forgotten flavours, it doesn’t want you to intellectualise it; it just wants to be drunk. Why do people drink cans of Carling when this is only a few feet further up the beer aisle? Sometimes only a beer like this will do. Sometimes only Sierra Nevada Pale Ale will do.
And have you tried their Torpedo Extra IPA? That’s one damn fine beer. It seems that Americans can’t drink an IPA unless it’s 7% so Sierra Nevada have made one. It starts with sweet malt, then the hops pound in, bitter first and then dry. Bread, caramel, pine, grapefruit. There’s something so addictively drinkable about this, it’s just ace.

Zephyr Let Loose

It’s out. Brace yourselves. BrewDog have finally set free the 750ml bottles of Zephyr. But be quick. There are only 100 bottles on sale in the UK and only 40 of them from the BrewDog website. Check out their blog here.

I can honestly say this is one of the most remarkable beers I’ve ever had. It has this amazing see-sawing quality between elegance and brute force and it has a depth unlike anything else: truly unique, a beer masterpiece. It also inspired one of my favourite blog posts.

It’s a beer which has got a big story (imperial IPA, whisky barrel, strawberries, time) and now that it’s been released we see that it’s got a big heart too: all the proceeds go to the RNLI. Nice one BrewDog. I think they could’ve easily cashed in on the rarity and brilliance of this beer but they are supporting a very worthy cause with it.

You can buy the beer here and it’s something that everyone who loves beer really must try.

Plin Love

Just a midweek quickie about a brief love affair I had with a gorgeous Californian babe. I’ll never forget her. Although I’ve heard that her Younger sister is pretty tasty too...

Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger were top of the ‘I want these beers’ list I gave to my mate Lee when he went to San Francisco. To my supreme delight he managed to get me a Pliny the Elder and soon became my hero. I opened the beer a few weeks ago and oh-my-goodness let me tell you this: it was one of the finest beers I’ve tasted.

It’s 8%ABV with a deep gold colour and a beautiful oh-so alluring aroma-vault of juicy citrus, tropical fruit, pine and grapefruit pith. The balance over the palate is what makes this beer special: it’s so fruity and this dives quickly into the bitterness - the sappy dryness of pine, loads of citrus, loads of tropical fruit - but beneath all of this freshness is a huge malty base of biscuit, bread and caramel; a sweet buffer for all that quenching and clinging bitterness. It’s so smooth to drink too. Fizz pisses me off and I have a low threshold for it, but this was just brilliantly, elegantly clean. My tasting notes are peppered with superlatives, ending with ‘an amazing beer’.

While we’re here, Pliny the Younger is currently the 2nd best beer on the BeerAdvocate best of list (PtE has risen up to number 8! And PtY is pretty high up Rate Beer's best too). Of course this is because so many drinkers have rated it so highly, but why is that? It can’t just be because it’s such a good beer, can it? Look at the rest of the list (Westvleteren 8 and 12, some Dark Lords…) and you’ll see a mystique surrounding a lot of the beers. But why PtY? Well, I read over at The Beer Nut’s place, in this post, that the Younger was only released on draft this year. Ah, now I see why. This means that drinkers have to go in search of it which instantly raises their anticipation of it (hunter-gatherer style) – it is coveted. Add to this that the hype is already huge (the hype is very affecting) and the fact that an 11% IPA is going to leave you feeling pretty happy (the fun-time/drunkenness/remember-the good-stuff-and-make-it-better proportional scale) and I think you get the drift. Although, if it’s anything like the Elder - only better! - then I totally get why it’s there in that position.

Oh, and I also got Russian River’s Blind Pig IPA. A 6.0% beauty along the same lines at the Elder. It’s a glass of orange, pine and grapefruit, fresh and juicy but dry and bitter. The malt isn’t in-your-face which means it isn’t cloying, but it still has a mouth-filling thickness which is addictively moreish. It doesn’t get top billing in this post but it’s still a super beer.

I really hope Russian River start shipping beers to the UK soon…