I love you, Mary Jane
The first brewery tour I ever went on was to the Black Sheep brewery in Masham, with my Dad and brother. That’s a fascinating tour if you ever get the chance - Theakston’s brewery was bought up by Scottish & Newcastle, and Paul Theakston set up his own, more traditional brewery right under their noses - and Black Sheep remains one of my favourite bitters (I wish it had occurred to me to pick up a bottle for a side-by-side comparison).
While I remember some details of that tour, what sticks in my mind most was that it was the first times I heard Dad tell drinking tales. He’d lived in that part of Yorkshire when he was younger, and by the sounds of things had taken full advantage of the rich local brewing tradition. I can understand why he’d been reticent to share the stories before - as impressionable teenagers, telling us about the time he and a friend drove home from the pub with one steering and the other doing the pedals would probably not have been very responsible - but the fact he did seemed extremely important at the time.
This, of course, has little to do with Mary Jane apart from a spurious geographical connection, but there’s something comfortingly familiar about this ale. It’s clean and crisp, mildly caramelly and refreshingly hoppy. It shares some characteristics with the Pale Ales I’ve been enjoying of late, but isn’t as aggressive or expansive as any of them. At 3.8%, it’s also a decent conversational pint. I think Dad would have liked it.
The last couple of weeks were a bit busy with one thing and another, and I got a bit behind on my Beerbods box. Sunday was filled with jobs, including the unpacking and stacking of a whole load of oak floorboards which apparently need to ‘acclimatise’ for 2 weeks before we can have our lounge back. That was a job of Krypton Factoresque complexity, as I had to shuffle long bits of wood around to make space for other bits of wood without the fox eating the chicken or the chicken eating the corn. Once that was over with, I felt highly justified in playing beer catch-up while preparing dinner.
I was not familiar with the eccentric philanthropist Joseph Williamson before now, which just goes to prove that beer is educational. He was responsible for the building of a network of labyrinthine tunnels under Liverpool’s Edge Hill in the 1800s for no apparent reason; favourite theories are that it was either a way to provide jobs to the unemployed of the city, or that he was a barking Doomsday nutcase. Either way, according to Wikipedia “his clothes were patched and untidy but his underclothes were clean and fine”, and I can’t think of a better way to be remembered than The Mad Mole Man With Clean Pants.
This beer is a proper autumnal ale. As I poured it, caramel and toffee wafted up from the glass and I was immediately reminded that we’re probably not going to get a bloody summer now, are we? It’s October, the leaves are changing and I need to get a wriggle on choosing my Hallowe’en films. The ale has a lovely dark chestnutty brown colour, and it tastes like bonfire night. More caramel and treacle toffee, with a hint of stone fruit like plums or cherries.
An hour or so later, it was time to move onto something very different. I think Thornbridge Brewery’s Jaipur might be my favourite beer since the fantastic Yellowhammer in Week 1, unsurprising when you consider it’s another of the light, hoppy Pale Ales that I’ve fallen hard for over the last couple of years. On the nose it’s quite sweet - syrupy lychees, maybe, but this is really quite misleading - it’s incredibly, lemon-suckingly dry. In my Granddad’s words, “it’ll make you water at t’gills”. It’s rather dangerous, having something this tasty and moreish at 5.6%. A definite find, this one.
During my third year at University I lived in Paris. Drinking in Paris is expensive at the best of times, but on a student budget it’s pretty eye-watering, so we soon got to know the Happy Hours of various establishments by heart. The Chesterfield Café, an American bar just off the Champs Élysées, had such an Hour between 4pm and 8pm every weekday. Half price cocktails seemed as good a way as any to kick off the weekend, and so it became a Friday fixture.
I didn’t really drink cocktails at the time, and found the choice bewildering. Somewhere along the line, an impatient bartender suggested to me I pick a ‘go-to’ cocktail. “Something you like that you can order anywhere. Then while you drink that, you can read the menu”.
My first go-to was a Manhattan, but at some point this got supplanted by the Old Fashioned. It then took a further few years to realise that despite the heroic efforts of bartenders the world over, the Old Fashioned isn’t a difficult drink to make. A decent whiskey (I favour bourbon), sugar, bitters, ice. That’s it.
My Old Fashioned
Put a half-teaspoon of caster sugar in a rocks glass or tumbler.
Add a few drops of water, and stir until the sugar has dissolved
Add a couple of dashes of Angostura bitters, stir again
Add a decent handful of ice, then pour over a double measure (70ml) of your preferred whiskey. I like Woodford Reserve, or Makers Mark.
Stir.
Drink.
At some point along the line, I managed to convince myself that I don’t like a certain style of Belgian beer. There’s something in the yeasty tang of a Hoegaarden or Leffe which immediately reminds me of a particularly nasty cough medicine I had as a child, and I’ve found it difficult to get past that initial reaction. However, a couple of years ago, I had the honour of being @bladkin’s Best Man. I decided the theme of the Stag Do should be “Beer”, and that is how we ended up on a brewery tour in one of the last remaining original breweries in Brussels.
I learnt a few things on that tour, and in the excellent bar they subsequently directed us towards. I learnt that some traditional Belgian beers (Lambic) are brewed using a process of Spontaneous Fermentation, where they rely on naturally-occurring yeasts to, um, occur naturally rather than adding yeast to kick-start the fermentation process. I learnt that it is the fault of the Americans and Coca Cola that no-one likes proper beer any more. I learnt that the beers I was conflating as being all of a type were distinct and different, and that if I could get past my initial antiproustian response, there were tasty moreish treats awaiting me.
Saison Dupont is one fizzy beer. The head in the picture above is after really careful pouring and letting it settle down a bit. I cleared a bit of head off to get my nose in for a sniff and - ugh, there it is; the cough medicine smell that put me off a whole country’s beer output for a good many years. The first sip was equally unpleasant as I tried to put that association out of my head, and then I started to taste the beer, rather than what my brain told me the beer should taste like.
There’s a lovely sweet/sour interplay in this beer, and something almost doughy about it. There’s a hint of vanilla, and some kind of fruity spice (cloves maybe?), but the lasting impression I was left with was those foamy banana sweets, then the refreshing tang of a good, sharp homemade lemonade.
I think I’ll always find these beers something of an acquired taste, and this is no exception. By the time I was halfway down it I was really enjoying it. Shame about the wasted first half, really.
While not right on my doorstep, Wye Valley brewery is reasonably local to me, and you occasionally see their beers on tap around our way. Their HPA has lubricated many a hungover Sunday afternoon pool session, and Butty Bach was my ale of choice for our wedding last December. So, I was intrigued to see this beer, with its retro-sexist label, in my Beerbods box.
Also, I was on a mission this week. Last year, almost to the day, I was decorating the kitchen and I promised myself a beer and a Chinese while watching Doctor Who as my post-blue-job treat. I was looking forward to it all day. Thing is, having only recently moved house, we had no local intelligence around the quality of the various takeaway establishments and I ended up with one of the worst I have ever had. I was bitterly disappointed and so, as I set about decorating the lounge this Saturday I resolved to lay this disappointment to rest.
First coat of emulsion drying, I secured myself a Singapore style Chow Mein and some Capital spare ribs and settled down with Dorothy and The Doctor.
It has to be said, I’m pretty rubbish at identifying flavours when I go to tastings. It’s not so much that I can’t pick out the notes, more that I can’t place or describe them out of context. So I’ll be floundering to find a word for the flavour I’m tasting, until someone says “green apples” or “toast”, and that’s exactly it and I just have to agree and nod.
All if which is to say that I was surprised when I popped the cap off this and immediately got a massive waft of pineapple. I wasn’t expecting it, and I certainly wasn’t expecting to recognise it. Less sharply citrus than the Yellowhammer, this is creamier and sweeter and has a faintly bananaish finish. Tropical fruits seem to get picked out as flavour notes in a lot of these Pale Ales, and they’re definitely present here. It had enough body to stand up to the big flavours of my dinner (the label recommends it with Lamb Tagine, which seems weirdly specific), and was a refreshing cut-through the spiciness. That said, I don’t know it was memorable enough for me to seek it out, or to stock up the shed with it. Enjoyable, but slightly underwhelming in the end. Not unlike that week’s Doctor Who, actually.
Lager’s a funny old drink. On the continent, it is variously a refreshing, civilised afternoon tipple on a sunny terrace; a tourist attraction steeped in years of brewing history; not considered alcohol. In the UK, it’s fizzy, watery fighting-juice. I often drink lager out if the only alternative is nitro-keg ‘smoothpour’ bitter - annoyingly many of the big brewchains will do a reasonable premium Czech lager but not a proper beer - or when what I really want is alcoholic water (ie I have a hangover, or am on a gig). But in all honesty, a pale ale like last week’s would be my choice over lager on a sunny day if it was available.
This week’s Beerbods selection is a 4% premium lager from The Cotswolds Brewing Company, who are based not far from me in Bourton On The Water (home of Brum). It bills itself as ‘easy drinking with hints of tropical fruits and elderflower’, but for me it’s just too light. I get the elderflower, but a hint is right - it’s barely there, and is gone almost straight away. There’s no discernible finish, and I can’t imagine this holding my attention for any length of time.
In the interests of science, I decided to taste this alongside one of my favourite lagers, St Mungo, from Glasgow’s West Brewery. Admittedly, it’s a Bavarian-style lager, more amber than straw-coloured and an extra .9% on the Cotswold, but this isn’t just ‘hints’ of flavour. Kiwi fruit on the nose, dry and hoppy on the palate and a creamy finish (IKAGLTO), and enough character to accompany food rather than just provide lubrication.