Red Or Brown?

Flanders Red Ale or Flemish Brown Ale?? Two styles of beer which can be a little confusing sometimes, (even to us whilst we try to explain which is which) and can quite often be blurred into one as they're usually very similar to each other.

They have their differences though, so I wanted to look into what makes them different, that called for a little dip into Michael Jackson's 'Beer Companion' - the ultimate tome for beer geekery.

He states that;

"The sweet-and-sour character is common to the brown ales of East Flanders and the 'red' of the West, and the two are brother brews, but there are differences between them. One is obviously that the brewers of West Flanders seem traditionally to have used malts that provided a redder colour. Much more significantly, the classics among the redder brew, while having their primary fermentation in metal, are aged in uncoated wood (not casks, but ceiling-high vertical tuns), and this makes for a teasing blend of caramels, tannins and acidity. As the brew matures, lactic acid begins to build up, and there is some interaction with acetobacters in the wood itself. Some of the lesser producers use metal tanks, but add lactic cultures. Unlike the most famous browns, the classic reds are stabilized by pasteurization."

It seems to me that there is a bit of an East-West divide going on in Flanders, with the East making Brown ales (or provision beer) like Liefmans' Goudenband, and the West making the Red Ales like Duchesse de Bourgogne for example. Michael does also go on to say that "There is no acknowledged appellation to identify the style" although the book is getting on in the years now, and this may have possibly changed.

I'd like to take you through a few of the Red Ales we have been stocking at the shop for as long as I can remember, (probably since we opened about 12 years ago) but because of their shelf location, they often get overlooked. This is a massive shame because these three are probably some of the most complex and deeply intriguing beers we sell, and their shunning is something that needs to change. They can be slightly challenging to a first timer, but if you stick with it, you'll be hard pressed to find anything else like it that you can enjoy.

I'm starting out with The Rodenbach classic. It's a 5.2% Red Ale which is produced by blending 3/4 of "young beer" and 1/4 of beer that has matured for over 2 years. It has a distinctive dark red/brown appearance and a very inviting cherry aroma. The first sip and flavour takes you a little by surprise. It's very dry and incredibly moorish and refreshing, with a lot of that sweet and sour-ness that Michael was talking about. It's slightly vinous with a long lightly tart finish. Apparently the slight acidity of the beer suits shellfish dishes and salads, and to be fair, I reckon it would go fantastically with some jumbo king prawns... This would be a perfect beer to start out with if you've never had any Flanders style Red Ales, although it may put a few people off if I said it smelled a little like smelly socks! ( I suppose that will be the Brettanomyces...)

To complicate things a bit more, next comes along Petrus Oud Bruin (Old Brown). It's complicated because, while it may be called Petrus Old Brown Ale, and is rather brown in appearance, it's actually part of the Red Ale family. It smells quite sweet, with notes of candy sugars and caramels. It has a big sweet and sour effect going on, but also has a big drying earthy/woody flavour too. Lots of fruits like cherries and grapes add to the sweetness and it's matched excellently by a big moorish sour dryness from lots of oak.
The beer is apparently aged in the huge 25000l casks "during 20 months". I'm not sure what they mean by 'it's aged during 20 months' though, I'm just going to tell people it's aged for 20 months in wood...

Last but not least is the big daddy, one for the more adventurous; Rodenbach Grand Cru. Pretty damn dark brown, with only slight hints of a red tinge coming through under the lights. This 6% beer is produced using a blend of 1/3rd "young beer" to 2/3rds beer which has been aged for over two years. It truly is a fantastic and amazingly complex beer. It's like Stout meets Gueuze! You get a much bigger slightly sweaty 'horse blanket' Brettanomyces aroma and flavour to this beer, and much more sourness too. Funky cherries, earthy drying wood, vinous, but wine beating complexities, acidic and magnificent. I've put down a few tasting notes here, but in truth this beer is really hard to describe, it's something that really needs to be experienced first hand.

These beers have a reputation. A reputation for being awesome. If you've not tried them before then they are a must for the adventurous beer geek out there.

So in conclusion..... what are you waiting for??

What Happened To The Big Beer Mats?

Whilst clearing out some old stuff from the attic, I took another nostalgic look at my fathers 10,000 plus beer mat collection, and wondered - "When did beer mats become so boring??"

And no, I wasn't thinking that about any of the beer mats I was rummaging through, I thought it about the common beer mat you find in your modern pub.

Where did the huge beer mats disappear to???

Yes that is a big beer mat, not a tray.

I think beer mats today have lost quite a bit of their fun appeal, and a lot (if not all) have lost all their imagination in design. It seems everybody is content with sticking the logo for their brewery or beer on a mat and mass producing it, without even giving it a single thought. It's too easy these days, and it seems whenever you walk into a pub, you'll have a beer mat from one brewery with it's logo, plastered on every table in the pub. Create something different. Beer mats from just 40 years ago had much more character, and sometimes they weren't even for beer.

More art than bad drink....

The humble beer mat gets a bit of a beating these days. It gets torn into little bits, ripped up, put in empty pint glasses, stacked at the end of the night and thrown straight in the bin. Seriously where's the love? After all the flak that our beloved beer mat gets, the average beer lover would still prefer it's place to be under our pint pots, and not something to be discarded so easily.

Even some of the bigger brewers used to produce really nice looking beer mats, that more often than not, (if your like my dad) you'd take home at the end of the night and not treat it badly.

It wasn't just limited to the alcohol industry either. The tobacco industry saw the image market potential, and came up with some really fun ideas for the beer mat.

I could name over a dozen new breweries with awesome designs for their branding, beers and bottles, but for me I think you have to be a bit more imaginative when it comes to your beer mats. They deserve a little more respect and consideration, after all they've been holding your beer for a lifetime!

Get designing people. And don't make them square....

P.S. I do notice that the pictured bar mats aren't to the highest standard of design to everyone, but I like them. Besides it would have been a very long post if I'd pictured all the mats in the collection which I thought were interesting, design wise...

Epic Black IPA Battle: Kernel vs Kernel vs Kernel

We are currently stocking these three beers.

There has been a bit of talk recently on the blogosphere about Oxymoronic beers recently (see Velky Al's post about the buzz here) and how putting the word 'black' in front of existing beer styles could be a bad thing, a fad, or just plain wrong. I have my own opinions on this subject, but today I'd like to go back to (for me, what is) the source of the Black IPA: the Kernel Brewery.

The first time I ever tried Kernel's first Black IPA, I instantly fell in love with it, and no other Black IPA has been able to measure up to it. We now, however, stock three different Black IPAs from the same brewery, so I thought this would be a good chance to give them a side by side by side tasting and see what's going on.

I'm still 50/50 on some brewers trying to make all their pale beers black, but still pale tasting. It seems to me like a bit of a hark back to when all beer was pretty much black (things go round and round in the world of beer) and quite a few of them get it wrong, which is unfortunate, but this Kernel tasting screams of good times, so how could I object! And while the lightest of the three came in at 6.9%, I was confident it was nothing a sunday roast with all the trimmings couldn't handle.

Coming in at number 1:

Kernel Black IPA, 6.9% - an instant classic in my eyes.

The beer presents itself with aromas of citrus, oranges and mangos. Some dry straw and a little blackberry sweetness. Initially you get a big roasted bitterness and quite a bit of coffee in the body, but it's not as big as some of the other Black IPAs I've tasted, which I think can really spoil a brew. You get a lot of dry pine, apricot fruit and some peppery dryness too. This pepper lends itself to a nice spicy finish which is very long lasting.

I know it goes against my love for this beer, but I don't think it's an Black IPA, it's not close enough to an IPA for my tastes. I do think Kernel has produced a completely new style of beer with this one though, I don't know of any other beers like this.

Black 2 comes in at number 2:

The new recipe for the original.

Now I don't know the details of this brew. I don't know if it will be completely replacing the old one... but for now, thank goodness they've called it something else, and lets hope they continue to call it something else - because it's a completely different beer. I for one hope they make the two black IPAs side by side and don't discontinue any one of them. (yes, I'm looking at you Brewdog.)

You can see instantly on the nose that there's a much bigger dose of fruit to this beer, loads more mango, loads more blackberries - it's a regular fruit cocktail. It's a lot smoother in the mouth feel and with a much bigger fruity/juicy flavour. It's lost pretty much all of the dryness and spiciness and all of the roasted bitterness, except from the tiniest hint of coffee in the back of the mouth. This is a Black IPA in the truest sense of the style. Mangos, lychee and a long bittersweet finish. Is this a preferable beer to the first though? No, because it's completely different to the first.

And then came forth the monster:

Kernel Double Black IPA; a 9.8% leviathan!

This is a DBlack IPA and once again, is completely different to the previous two. If fact this beer is like no other I've ever tried before!

The aroma is incredible, think coffee and thick cream and your on the right track. My main observation though, is that this beer stinks of strawberry and raspberry yogurt! It really does, there's no getting away from it. And it's not a bad thing! It's a bizzar thing! The beer is super smooth, and uber rich. It's almost like a mixed fruit beer; massive amounts of strawberries, raspberries and black currents dominate the initial flavour. As I sit back and enjoy the last of the three beers I've had today, I can't help but think that this beer is like strawberries and cream on a crisp autumnal evening whilst the sun goes down, and your reminded once again that;

Beer is never static, it changes and evolves like everything in our planet, and it's a fascinating evolution, and one I'm very happy to be riding alongside. The boundaries of the Black IPA may still be a little blurred, but at least we're pushing those boundaries. And for beer, (and us) that's fantastic.

Now, in the words of someone else... where's my Pale Schwarzbier!

Oh.... I almost forgot, the first of the bunch still remains my favourite!

Typos

I got this email today from a shop up in Scotland who have just expanded their range of beers:

BEER RANGE EXPANDED (Much like your waist band will be...) We are always on the look out for great new beers. Here is a selection of recently acquired new products. (Click on links below for product details) ANCHOR Steam (4.8%) £2.15 ANCHOR Liberty Ale (4.8%) £2.35 ANCHOR Porter (5.6%) £2.35 WEIHENSTEPHAN Hefe Weisse (5.4%) £2.65 WEIHENSTEPHAN Kristal Weiss (5.4%) £2.65 ODELL 5 IPA (5.2%) £2.85 ODELL 90 Shilling (5.3%) £2.85 ODELL Cutthroat Porter (4.8%) £2.75 TRAPPISTES Rochefort 10 (5.4%) £2.65

A good cause for celebration when anyone gets in better beers, but it seems they have got the last line rather wrong! Trappistes Rochefort 10? Sounds more like Rochefort 5 at that strength.

I know I can't talk when it comes to typos, I do them all the tyme, but if your trying to promote a new exiting range of beers to people, get the details right.

Ghostie's Rough Leeds Bars Volume 1.

I suppose it's only fair that, because I did a list of my favourite 10 Leeds bars, that I do a list of some of the bars/pubs in Leeds which are for the clientele with more stones than (me) the rest of us...

First on the list is the Three Legs.

This was the only picture I took. I was a little concerned for my personal property when I finally plucked up the courage to go inside.

An interesting sight was seen when inside. The building itself was very nice. That was the only real nice thing about it really. Groups of people (middle aged men/women, grey & round) propped up the bar whilst shouting at each other whilst standing 10cm away from each other, it was like I just walked onto the set of the Jeremy Kyle show....

I popped myself down on a bar stool (which was broken) and tried to keep my eyes down as I felt everyone else's eyes stare holes through me. There was two hand pumps which looked like they hadn't been used in years - and had nothing on, so my choice of drink was something smooth-flow or of the cider/lager type.

I asked for a half of the first beer I saw; John Smiths smooth. It came in a straight sided tumbler and it was ice cold. I supped as quick as I could; a large group of large gentlemen had turned up behind me and were shouting about the races which were blaring out of the big plasma flat screens.

I didn't dare visit the restrooms, least of all ask for where they were.

I don't think I've left a pub quicker.

In fact it wasn't a nice experience. At all.

I'm not going to entertain this idea. I don't want to visit any other pubs like this.

One and done.