Ghosty Golden Pints

Well, it's been rather a while so I figured I'd leave it right to the last moment to rock out my Golden Pints...

Best UK Cask Beer: Anything pale from Ilkley, but mostly Tribus.

Best UK Bottled Beer: Siren - Dippy & The Equinox DIPA, runner up Tempest Marmalade On Rye DIPA.

Best UK Canned Beer: Brewdog Black Eyed King Imp. (If not for the ridiculous price tag, I would have drowned in the stuff!)

Best UK Keg Beer: Roosters Baby Faced Assassin, if anyone says other wise, they're wrong...

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: Founders KBS (very well played to James Clays for getting this over here!)

Best Overseas Canned Beer: Firestone Walker Union Jack.

Best Collaboration Brew: Not hugely keen on colab brews, too much for the fan-boys in my opinion, but I'm currently drinking a Key Lime Tau from Crooked Stave and Hawkshead as I type this.. (it was a gift, I'm not a beer fan-boy)

Best Overall Beer: Talk about choosing your favourite child! Well if I did have any children, I'd have to choose To Ol Like Weisse Directors Cut Imperial Berliner Weisse - just purely for the shock factor of how damn good that beer was.

Best Branding: Tempest have done the magic for me this year. Great move to go into 33cl bottles, and they're flying out right now.

Best Pump Clip: I don't really pay attention to them, but I'd have to give my props to Northern Monk Brew Co for making possibly the biggest pump clips ever!

Best UK Brewery: It'll have to be Mad Hatter for me this year. Not only because their beers are very good, but also because of a few following things - They regularly email me stock lists and are very quick to reply to queries. They are very prompt in delivering beer, and never get it wrong. They are incredibly friendly. They also have great branding. Hard working guys if I ever saw.. If you want to sell beer in Beer Ritz take note.

Best Overseas Brewery: It's got to be Firestone Walker this year for the sheer quality of beer they produce.

Best New Brewery Opening This Year: I honestly don't know the dates that breweries open, but First Chop is new to us and does a storming range of very popular Gluten Free beers.

Pub/Bar Of The Year: In the last few months my regular haunt has shifted from Arcadia to East Of Arcadia so take from that what you will..

Best Festival Of The Year: Leeds International was solid as ever.

Supermarket Of The Year: Marks & Spencers for a great range.

Independent Retailer Of The Year: Have you heard of Beer Ritz?

Online Retailer Of The Year: HAVE YOU HEARD OF BEER RITZ??

Best Beer Book/Magazine: A book I'm always going back to is Michael Jackson's Great Beer Guide 500 Classic Brews.

Best Beer Blog/Website: Loving the balls-out approach thats been going on over at Zythophile this year.

Simon Johnson Award For Best Beer Twitterer: Martin (@6townsmart)

Dumbass Decision Of The Year Award: Goes to Green King to limiting the import of Goose Island beers to IPA, Honkers and Urban Wheat.. WHERE'S THE BOURBON COUNTY?!?

Let's hope 2016 brings bigger and better things..

Illusion Of Price

People just don't know how much beer costs, it's as simple as that. And it's a fact that's beginning to get on my nerves more and more.

How often do you hear people complaining about the price of a pint, or how much a bottle of lager costs in a pub? I hear it all the time! And I find it pretty funny that no one ever looks twice at the price of a bottle of wine in a bar!!

We get it in the off trade all the time too.. People asking if we "have any deals on" or "I'm sure it's a good beer, but I'm not paying that much"

We don't do deals. We don't have 3 bottles for a fiver or any of that selling strategy. We can offer a 10% discount when you buy a case, but that's about it. We stick to a strict mark-up across our whole bottle range and believe we offer a fair price for all our beers. If they cost more, it's because the breweries sell it to us for more! It's as simple as that.

People just don't seem to understand it though. When I say to customers that we don't offer any multi-buy deals they look at me like I'm from another planet and usually leave in a huff.

It's not these people's faults though, heavens no!

It's the Supermarkets.

They've been doing it so long now we just assume that what they do is the norm. Two bottles of wine for £5, 5 beers for a tenner, or a case of twenty stubbies for less! Supermarkets have been driving down the price of alcohol for so long that our attitudes towards price have become so poisoned and deluded that we turn our noses up at a bottle of wine for £8, but are perfectly happy to pay 2 POUNDS FOR A BAG OF LETTUCE!!

LETTUCE!!!!!

Why don't we do it then? Well because we'd go out of business, simple as. All we sell is alcohol, so unfortunately we can't make massive fat profits on selling people a sandwich, packet of crisps and a drink, calling it a meal-deal for a fiver, whilst not making a margin on a bottle of beer they might buy as well.

Bring the ban on multi-buys to England, a ban on selling below cost price, and a cap on how low margins can dip on alcoholic products! We need it.

...and grow your own chuffin lettuce!

Don't Give Me That Crap!

I drank the worst beer I've ever tasted a couple of weeks ago. This is by no means an exaggeration or some sort of dick waving spiel, it was literally the worst beer I've ever had. I poured it down the drain after two mouthfuls, something I've never, ever done! (probably because I'm a Yorkshireman....)

If you're a newish brewery and you're trying to stand out, here's a really good idea/piece of advice: If one of your team comes up and says "why don't we make a beer and put A,B,C, X,Y,Z in it and then age it on some wood we found.." tell them politely, but firmly, NO. Especially if you don't have a single ounce of experience in the field said team mate suggested.

Spend some time learning how to make good beer first before you start churning out a conveyor belt of multi-ingredient garbage.

I shall not name the brewery or the beer..

Just don't give me that crap.

A similar experience was had last week which got my head in my hands again. We had just received a nice big delivery of beer upon which was a case of highly sought after and well known beer. We put it out and sold a few, job's a good-un... Two days later we got an email from the brewery.

The long and short of it was, the beer was not ready for sale. It needed few more weeks before it was ready. This was fine, at least they told us. But they also said in regards to if we should send it back or not, no, we should just keep the beer to ourselves.

Keep it till when? Keep it where? In our mass of extra cellar space?
I sent it back. If it's not ready for sale, I don't want it. That's not how you run a business.

I shall not name the brewery or the beer...

Just don't send me that crap.

Amongst the gloom there's always the good that shines through though. We got a case of beer in that was covered in a slight mold last week. Apparently the whole pallet was in a similar condition and rather unfit for sale. We called up the brewery and they said they'd get back to us.

They got back to us very shortly saying they'd used a wrong detergent in their cleaning process. They were very apologetic about the whole thing and sent someone to pick up and replace the whole lot. The whole matter was cleared up and managed very quickly, efficiently and professionally.

That's someone that cares about their product, and wants a successful business.

The brewery was Vocation and the beer was Heart & Soul.

Pretty fitting name if you ask me.

Flavour In A Bag

I recently was told of an article which sees an interesting if not bizarre new gadget (I'm not sure what else to call it!?) in the beer world.

Hop Theory have come out with what is essentially - beer tea bags. A bag of three ingreidients; Cascade hops, coriander seeds and orange peel are all packaged up in a bag (not sure exactly how you'd trademark that!) which you can pop in your beer to steep some more flavour into it. It's apparently a "solution for lackluster brews" - something that you'd stick in your glass of mass produced lager to make it taste a bit better than dirty dishwater I guess.

I have two thoughts on this product. Firstly the people already drinking crap beer aren't going to give two monkeys about making it taste better, and secondly people who do want beer with actual flavour aren't going to be buying these things, they'll be buying better beer! I know I won't want to be giving my money to the bigger companies and making their beer taste better instead of buying good beer from people who are passionate about making it..

Now there'll be people that say it'll make cheap Lager taste great, and it will still have lower calories than a 'craft beer', lower abv, be cheaper and all the rest.. but I do wonder how much these bags will cost, even if you can reuse them 4 times!

All that being said, I still actually would like to give it a go!

Small time non-starter fad, or trendsetting way the beer world is moving towards??

Check out the article here and judge for yourself:

Power Of The Negative

Giving a negative review of a certain beer or brewery is probably something we've all done, be it either on twitter, blogging or just in general conversation.

It's easy to do, and some of the time it can be quite fun! It carries no sense of responsibility from the person, or possibility of recoil done anomalously, and at the same time gives that person a sense (possibly a false sense) of power and authority over anothers product.

So why do we do it? Well there's many answers to that question, but I bet the question that you're all thinking right now is WHAT BEER AM I DRINKING AT THIS MOMENT???

People love a bit of juicy gossip. I think it's just a part of human nature, but the thing I find really interesting is how negative gossip can effect people. They say there's no such thing as bad press, and I think there is a lot of truth to this.

If someone I know, who really likes their beer, knows their stuff and doesn't bullshit the truth - if he tells me he doesn't like a beer he's tried, I'm not sure what it is, but I need to try that beer!

Maybe that's so I can agree, tell him he's wrong, or whatever - but I still want to try the beer.... If people are drinking a similar thing and everyone is just blowing smoke up it's arse, how boring is that? If you don't like it and everyone else does shouldn't you say something? But at the same time, you might be afraid to disagree with everyone else in fear of your thoughts being rejected as ludicrous.

I think a lot of people are so afraid of getting bad press that they completely miss the fact that it could be good for them in the long run! On the other hand, if you weren't completely convinced in your own product, you wouldn't release it for public consumption...
Right?

I think the question of why we're drinking beers that make us feel this way is another topic all together though...

Hmmm.... The beer industry can be a funny place sometimes....

Peer Pressure

There's been some interesting goings on recently around one of our local pubs which seems to almost border on the Hot Fuzz-esk shenanigans. I feel the recent actions of the Far Headingley community can only be classified by the term "for the greater good."

We have a well know pub in Far Headingley - it's second on the 'Otley Run' and is called The Three Horseshoes. It's stood in it's location for many many years, probably about a thousand... (not actually sure, but it feels like a thousand years when some people talk about it!)

The pub recently changed hands and this was the scene I observed when coming back from the deli one afternoon;

Crap quality photo I know, but you might just be able to make out that the name changed to the Industrialist - a pub that was going to push "All day food, Live sports and Craft beer" once the referb was completed.

This obviously had mouths agape and tongues started wagging whilst fingers pointed and heads shook... you get the gist. I personally thought it was a bit silly, but held some silent optimism and waited for opening night.

Now I was too busy to pop in for a pint on opening night but assumed it went down well. About a week later me and some friends decided to go check it out only to find the doors locked and closed. Without seeing any explanation I didn't think much else of it until I saw this tweet from Greg Mulholland;

@GregMulholland1: Well done & thanks @SpiritPubCo for listening to the #FarVillage community & re-renaming the #ThreeHorseshoes! pic.twitter.com/D2yikS6PmH

The tweet had these two accompanying photos:

There it was, plain as day.. the name had changed back to The Three Horseshoes.

Now some of these women in the photo come in the shop from time to time and I see the rest of them out and about in Far Headingley a lot. I'm pretty confident when I say that I'm 99% sure that they do not drink in the shoes. I'm also pretty confident in saying that I'm 99% sure that these were the only people who will have complained about the name change.

I knew the Far Headingley community had a lot of power behind them, but for all of this to go down in the space of 2 maybe 3 weeks is very surprising to me.

All this pushed to one side for the moment though, name aside the referb is a vast improvement to the place. We went in for burgers and beers the other night and had to go back the very next day as the quality was that good. Call it what you want, surely it's the quality that matters the most?

Enjoy By

I'm not sure I fully understand brewers need to put an 'Enjoy By' date on their beers instead of a best before date... What the hell (as a retailer) are we supposed to do with these beers if they pass this date? Treat them as out of date? Because they certainly seem to be without a BBD if they have an Enjoy By..

It seems to be a phrase creeping into a lot of pale ales and IPAs at the moment and its seeming to annoy me a little. Why not just use the phrase 'Drink Fresh' and stick to a best before date?

Maybe I'm making mountains out of mole hills, but as a retailer if you send me a pallet of beer with only three months to sell it, you're either totally convinced in your product to stand out against all competition - to sell out just like that, or oblivious to said competition at all!

Is an extra couple of months really going to make that much of a difference to the taste of your beer? If so maybe you need to think about making a beer that isn't so focused on just the hops. There's another three ingredients in beer too! We all know that hop deterioration does exist, but I've never been shown any sort of time scale for this phenomenon much less pair two of the same beers made one month apart...  I'd really be interested to know if someone had tried a beer that was five months old in the bottle compared to a beer that was one month in the bottle. Honestly tell me you'll be able to tell the difference, cos I bet you wouldn't be able to - unless your mind totally convinced you otherwise!

Forget the Enjoy By, forget even the Drink Fresh! Just stick to a best before date (which let's face it, unless you're making a wheat beer doesn't matter at all)

And how about you all stop making beer which you know will lose half it's flavour a couple of months after it's been produced... It's not a realistic time scale to sell your product!

Yeah, but.....

We're starting to see a little bit of a trend forming at the moment whereby a brewery will take one of their well know beers, basically double the strength of it and release it as a limited edition, special beer. I don't see this as a hard thing to do. Upping the abv of a beer is an easy task for an experienced brewer. Charging twice as much for the beer, at the end of the day, is a bit of a marketing ploy. And a clever one at that, don't get me wrong!

Let's look at some of the recent examples that've come through the shop over the past few months:

William's Brothers Joker & Double Joker
Buxton Imperial Black & Battle Horse
Buxton Axe Edge & Double Axe
Ilkley Mary Jane & Mary Jane IPA
Pressure Drop Bosko & Bosko Absoluto
Magic Rock Cannonball & Un Human Cannonball

I'm sure there are more, but asked for the beer I'm drinking right now; It's that well talked about Jaipur X. It's a beer they brewed to celebrate their 10th birthday, and rightly so, I'm not saying don't celebrate. What I will say is though that I personally think there's about 75% of these amped-up beers that don't work because of their increased abvs..! They seem too big for their own good. The alcohol masks the flavours with a prickly warming heat which distracts from what the beer was in the first place.


I can foresee a few coming in the current year as well...

Siren Soundwave & Ultrasonic
Weird Beard 5 O'clock Shadow & 10 O'clock Shadow
Beavertown Gamma Ray & Quasar Beam
Wild Beer Co Madness & Beyond Madness
Red Willow Ageless & Deathless
Roosters Baby Faced Assassin & Babygesichtige Attentäter

Ok, maybe these are a bit far fetched, but are they though?? I think the problem lies in the fact that if you have such a good beer to begin with, why would you want to mess with it? When you have a beer that's so well know, so well loved, there's going to be a few things to happen when you make it stronger..

On the one hand you're going to get the beer nerd die hards who'll say yeah, it's good, but it's not as good as the original. Hashtag 'not my beer!' totes..

On another hand you'll get people saying, yeah it's really good, I really like it, but it's completely different.. Why didn't they just package it as something else...

And then you'll have the beige group who'll just stump at the cash without having an opinion because it's what everyone else is buying.

For me it's not progression.. Of course you should, and need to pay homage to the past, but it's not moving forward. Love the beers you've made, respect them, keep them alive and move on. It's not forgetting them! Jaipur X is a really nice beer, (go out and buy it, you should!) but I'd prefer a pint of regular Jaipur and set my lustful eye on their Bamberg Smoked Bock that's coming out soon. That for me is progression.

Beer "Hype"

We've been having discussions in the shop recently about a phenomenon which I'm going to call Dark Lord-itis. We feel that some breweries are making one off beers and creating such a hype about them on social media that by the time they're put on the shelves they're already sold out! And some of the time these beers in question aren't even very good! (but that's another blog all together..)

A current example I can call on is Beavertown's Bloody Ell Orange IPA. We had people asking us for this beer over twitter weeks before we got any in.. It's a beer we got in yesterday (Thursday) and in under 20 hours we sold out of all three cases we received. More are coming, but they won't last long. That's 72 cans, if you look at our five best selling products (not just beers) for those twenty hours it seems pretty ridiculous;

1- Beavertown Bloody Ell cans - 72
2- Beavertown Gamma Ray cans - 22
3- Carlsberg Lager cans - 16
4- Roosters Fort Smith cans - 15
5- Beavertown Neck Oil cans - 14

These are our five best sellers for the past twenty hours in a shop that has around 1000 items. Just let that sink in....

Another few breweries that have had a similar beers pull at people's heart strings only just recently are as follows;

Magic Rock Un-Human Cannonball
Buxton Double Axe
Roosters Baby Faced Assassin
The Rainbow Project Beers

I'm sure there are plenty more but don't even get me started on Thornbridge X which will be hitting our shelves next week. People have been asking after that for over a month!

The thing is I've not really come to a conclusion if Dark Lord-itis is a good thing or not.. I guess time will tell. If there is one thing I know for absolute certainty though, it's this - If you're going to make a limited edition beer, there will always, always, be some people left disappointed.

I think a future blog post will be focussing on when exactly did the hype created by twitter outweigh the quality of a beer...

Foreign Export Orval

After dabbling back in blending beers again recently, it seems I'm not the only one.. I've been inspired by Boak & Bailey's Orval blending over the last few weeks and thought it time to try one of my own, so here goes!

One bottle of Orval, one bottle of Partizan Foreign Export Stout, all in one glass!

You'd think a big punchy 8+% Stout would dominate the meager comparison of Orval's 6.2%, but it seemed to do the opposite! The sweet hay like Bretty flavours were really at the forefront of the drink, and the big roasted Stout flavours came in the finish.

You get all the flavours of Orval, and they are complimented by a big boozy, roasted punch in the finish. This could be because of the heavier nature of the Stout and it sinking a little beneath the Orval.. We'll have to see at the end of the glass!

For now though, I'm thoroughly enjoying this mix and am thinking of others I could do! After all I do work in a place full of possibilities....

Black n Tan Business

It's been a while since I did any beer blending so I thought it about time I put down some ideas. If there's anyone out there who says blending beers together is heathenistic well I can only note that it's been common practice in this country for a few centuries now, so get off your high horse...  

Mad Hatter brewery have been around on our shelves for a while now, and it's good to see them still churning out the good and interesting stuff. This black n tan was a creation of immense proportions. Rye IPA supercharged with Columbus hops meets the eight robust and complex malts of one hell of a porter! These two just work so well in a glass together it's actually rather amusing to me! It has it all, it starts off with the clean citrus, grassy style hops which are so dominant in US beers. It then moves to a big caramel malts and burnt sugar sweetness which is perfectly balanced against the yang of rye spice which creeps in the background. The roasted porter flavours are present all the way through, but they don't linger. They just melt away in the finish and you're brought back to  the clean citrus bite which makes you want more.

You need to try this.

My next mix of the night was from Buxton. These two beers just seemed so damn obvious to blend I was mad at myself for not doing this months ago! Axe Edge with it's hoppy glory, and Tsar Imperial Stout, famous for tearing up rule books of how to make beer. This was another blend that was just too good! I mean really so good I can't put it down. That being said....

Enough words, time for beer.

(that could be the 4 strong beers in quick succession talking..)

That Type of Weather!

It seems winter is on the war path at the moment, with Leeds seeing it's fair share of blizzard conditions today. Let's just say it made our regular beer delivery rather interesting...! That being said, one of the advantages of January is snow, and that means beer snow cones!

I'm steering clear of the Belgian fruit beers this year, as they just weren't sweet enough for me. I'm sticking to the tried and trusted: The Imperial Stout. And one with a lot of flavour too! A 13% Imperial Oatmeal Stout brewed with copious amounts of vanilla and coffee :)

This was a good choice. The high alcohol wasn't fazed by a little bit of an ice addition. Massive flavours of icy vanilla dominated the palate just like the first big gulp of iced coffee smothered in a chocolate and vanilla frosting. While I enjoyed the cone, I couldn't help but feel that this one (like last years) just didn't match up to the original Bourbon County Stout snow cone I made.

I shall have to keep trying I guess. Till the thaw occurs I'm going to try enjoy this brief flurry of powder. I probably only say that now as I'm typing this in front of the fire eating Guylian chocolates with the rest of this 13% beer... What a match!!

The Great Craft Beer Swindle

Reading Boak & Bailey's post this morning got me thinking about something I heard about the other day..

Big takeovers by multinationals of breweries is one thing, but the other side of the coin is big breweries taking over distribution rights for other breweries. This is something that's happening in the UK right now. A lot was said when Brewdog became the sole distributor for Mikkeller beer in the UK, and it now seems that they're now the sole distributors for Stone beer too.

The thing I heard though was that James Clay have given up the selling of Goose Island and the distribution of such beers has gone to Green King. This will no doubt have it's good and bad points..

On the one hand it's good that Green king are going to be able to use their money and influence to get Goose Island beers into the hands of consumers who have probably never tried them. And probably for much cheaper too.

The downside of this though is that distribution will be on the big scale, i.e. if you want to buy Goose Island beer for your shop you're probably going to have to buy a pallet of it. That means that about 99.9% of small independent beer shops will no longer be able to buy Goose Island beer.

The thing I'm most sad about personally is they've cut down the range of beers to Honkers, 312 wheat and the IPA. This means no more Matilda, no Pepe Nero, no more specials, and probably most damning of all - NO MORE BOURBON COUNTY STOUT!

If this means that I'll have to go the supermarket to get some Goose Island I guess it's not that big a deal. At the end of the day, we won't be able to stock it at Beer Ritz, but that does free up space for a new brewery!

Go Back To School

There's a building on what's probably the outskirts of Headingley, just a stones throw from Hyde Park (not the one in London, we're taking about the greatest city in the UK here - LEEDS, haven't you been told..) It's a very nice building too, and while it's seen better days at the moment it's not the fault of the building itself.

I like this building. If you live in Headingley you pass it all the time. It stands proud, atop the hill, while not imposing on it's surroundings.

This building used to be part of a school. Unfortunately, like most of the school buildings in this country, it stands unused, empty, and closed to children who are in desperate need of some teaching. If I had taken this picture a couple of years ago it would have been a lot different. Solid wooden doors, white -graffiti free- stone walls, sparkling clean windows, trimmed and neat gardens. But it's closed, and now looks like it's seen better days.

Why should any of this matter though? It's not about beer!

Well... It's going to be a Weather Spoons.

Yes that's right, they've bought the building. Where once kids learned maths and took English tests, they'll one day learn how many drinks you need before you puke and all about test-tube shots. Does this matter though? Well not unless you live around the area. Like we really need another pub along the infamous Otley Run. Like we need another Super-Chain bar coming in and squeezing all the little guys in Headingley's centre. The biggest issue I take with this though is what's directly opposite the building;

I don't care how many 'craft' beers you claim to sell, these people - who live literally over the road, are going to be pissed!

Now I know it might take them a couple of years to turn this place into a functioning Weather Spoons, but I truly am going to loath the time where there once stood a proud building and it's soon going to look like this;

Technology Dependent Industry

Working in the off trade has it's ups and downs. 99% of the time the downs are compromised of technical failures. You really don't know how utterly dependent you are on the internet until you lose it. Well we didn't anyway. Our internet was down for around 24hrs this week which threw our regular routines into a bit of confusion.

We got a new Epos system installed with our referb a couple of years back and to use the till system requires the internet. It does not necessarily need the internet to put through sales, it just needs it to turn on and off as it needs to sync data to some sort of cloud ridiculousness. Now when our internet went down luckily the till was already on, so we kept trading and kept the till on until the problem was resolved. This was very quickly, but during that time I couldn't do much else. I couldn't invoice stock, change prices, hell, I couldn't even put new bar codes on the system!

Things like this are nothing new to us at Beer Ritz. Just last year in fact we had a complete power failure for the whole shop in the middle of a busy Saturday. For a few hours! We managed mind. We busted out the phone camera torches, the calculators and worked with a basic open till system and wrote everything down. Shame we didn't have an abacus at the time really!

It does make you wonder how dependent we are on technology though these days. Now I'm not going to go into some sort of Bear Grills survival situation crap here, and heaven knows I'm no luddite, but I do think we need some form of fail safe. It really got me thinking about the brewing industry. You see all these new fangled brew houses with their automated brewing systems, and you have to wonder how dependent they are on human interaction.

We're in the middle of winter. Let's say a tree falls on some power lines outside a brewery and cuts off their whole power. Let's say they're right in the middle of a brew and need the computers to finish.. What do they do? Is that whole batch destined for the drain? This is all hypothetical mind, and I'm sure most places would have plans in place (hopefully!) but it's still something that caught my mind today and is something that deserves some thought.

And with that in mind, a little bit of time without the internet really didn't seem to be such a huge issue. After all, we could still sell beer.... Problems only become major when you can't do the things you need to. Not being able to invoice would be a problem, but not being able to sell beer would be a major problem.

Defo need a beer now though... I frickin hate technology!