Let me get this straight

I noticed this story in the Publican’s Morning Advertiser:

The industry’s first draught vodka has been launched to speed up service and cut down on waste.

Vodka One – crafted and five-times distilled in the US, and distributed in the UK by Hi-Spirits – is dispensed by a font that delivers 25ml or 35ml shots at 1°C in just one second.

Hi-Spirits chairman Jeremy Hill said the font provides licensees the option not just to offer standard ‘vodka & mixer’ drinks, but also super-cold vodka shots and drinks such as Gimlets and Mini-Martinis. He said: “Vodka One has been shown to dramatically reduce serve time to the customer, not least because it’s a single-handed operation, allowing mixers to be added at the same time.”

So, if I have understood correctly, we are ostensibly reducing the strength of beer and hiking up the duty on it to combat binge drinking.

And at the same time, we are introducing draught vodka, so that bars can sell more vodka, faster.

Uh huh.

English Oil

Again and again I find it staggering how familiar the intelligentsia of the eighteenth century was with foreign beer. 

I’ve seen several references in old German texts to something called Englisch Oel or “English Oil”.

Englisch Oel is the nickname that was given to English ale imported to Germany around the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century.

“Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes”, Berlin, in 1856 quotes a manuscript supposedly written at the beginning of the seventeenth century about the habits of the English (unfortunately no more exact date is given):

“To drink they use mostly beer, which in that land is brewed and is also exported in large quantities. But it is brewed nowhere better than at Ochsenfort [Oxford?]. They have a kind which they call englisch Oel, … when it is brought in a jug which is stopped fast, it expels the cork with such a retort, that one thinks a gun has gone off. They like to praise the English beer in the highest, but in my view it is rarely deserving of such praise.”

It is mentioned in August von Kotzebue’s play Menschenhass und Reue (though the English rendition as The Stranger just says “Fetch us some ale”), and in 1801 the Jahrbücher der preußischen Monarchie can be found bemoaning that “the brewing trade in the towns has been universally suffering for 50 years due to the consumption of foreign beverages, tea, coffee, wine, Englisch Öl, etc.”

A lexicon of 1813 tells us it was “a strong beer of pale yellow colour, brewed in England (at Burton), which is more important to the Englishman than anything else. It is imitated very well in Germany too (Hamburg, Altona, Lüneburg etc.), but incorrectly called English oil.”

As late as 1860 the term still seems to be in use:

“The complete opposite of porter is the ale that is brewed in England or Scotland. The porter is black, the ale pale yellow, the porter is as thinly liquid as any other beer, the ale flows heavy as oil and has thus acquired the name “English oil” that is almost universally used in Germany. The porter tastes almost bitter, the ale sweet, spicy, seductive; the scent of the latter decidedly aromatic and at the same time reminiscent of malt; whereas porter has a sourish and bitter smell … [Ale] is a top-fermenting beer of barley malt, the best materials are used for it and it is made twice as strong as any other beer.” (Chemie für Laien, Dr. W. F. A. Zimmermann, 5. Band, Berlin 1860)

 A dictionary from 1830 also mentions that “certain beers are also commonly called ‘oil’ (ale): Englisch Öl, Rostocker Öl.”

Öl/øl is of course also the Scandinavian word for beer, and it makes sense that Rostock beer would acquire the name Rostocker öl — it’s nothing more or less than Swedish for Rostock beer, and Rostock is very near Sweden and there was a large export trade.

How would English beer get the name?

Well, there are three possibilities. It could be a corruption of ale – at least one source actually does explicitly say that Englisch Oel is a corruption or misspelling of Ale. It could also simply be a re-use of the same word that was being used for other export beer.

Or, the most adventurous explanation, but one which, as we have seen, is given in 19th century sources and congruent with what we know about the English ale of the time, it was called “oil” because it was so strong, thick and viscous. My guess is that it originated as a misspelling, which grew popular because the resulting expression sounded amusing and appropriate.

Beer culture

I actually only intended to stop for a quick pint on the way home from work.

Then a pal arrived in the pub and, although I was about to leave, insisted on buying me a pint. So we had another pint.

Then of course I had to buy him a pint in return.

After leaving the pub I passed another pub on the way home which had an amazing and rarely seen beer. I had to have a pint of that, and let my friend who lives round the corner from the pub know it was on.

When she arrived we had another pint.

Then I had to leave and go home, as I hadn’t had any dinner yet.

This is why we drink session beers.

Making March Mild* Month

I noticed recently a bar that’s been open barely six months arrogantly proclaiming itself “the home of great beer in Glasgow”. That’s reason enough to boycott the place, especially when its owners have anyway repeatedly made clear that they hate British beer and hate British brewers. Given that, I can’t understand why any British brewer would have so little self-respect as to allow their beer to be sold there.

There are several places that could much more deservedly lay claim to the title. One of them is the Three Judges at Partick Cross which has been in the forefront of the beer revolution for decades. The Judges is once again, as it often has done before, running a festival of mild, stout and porter during the month of March.


Here’s the line-up:

Acorn Old Moor Porter 4.4%
Bank Top Port O’Call 5.0%
Bateman’s DM 3.0%
Beartown Polar Eclipse 4.8%
Bowland Hunters Moon 3.7%
Box Steam Steam Porter 4.4%
Bradfield Farmers Stout 4.5%
Bridestones Dark Mild 4.5%
Elland American Robust Porter 5.2%
Fyne Cobblers Stout 4.2%
Fyne Sublime Stout 6.8%
Great Newsomes Jem’s Stout 4.3%
Great Orme Welsh Black 4.0%
Green Jack Lurcher Stout 4.8%
Hadrian & Border Ouseburn Porter 5.2%
Hornbeam Black Coral Stout 4.5%
Ilkley Black 3.7%
Ilkley Fireside Porter 4.2%
Kent Brewery Porter 5.5%
Leeds Midnight Bell 4.8%
Little Valley Organic Stoodley Stout 4.8%
Nethergate Priory Mild 3.5%
Old Bear Black Mari’a 4.2%
Palmer’s Tally Ho 5.5%
Partners/Anglo Dutch Devil’s Knell ??%
Potbelly Beijing Black 4.4%
Prospect Nutty Slack 3.9%
Purple Moose Dark Side of the Moose 4.6%
RCH Old Slug 4.5%
Saltaire Triple Chocoholic 4.8%
Strathaven Craigmill Mild 3.5%
Three B’s Stoker’s Slake  3.6%
Titanic Cappuccino 4.5%
Titanic Stout 4.5%
Vale Black Beauty 4.3%
Vale Black Swan 3.9%

 I’m often to be found complaining that pubs don’t stock these types of beer enough so I will be dropping into the Judges regularly in the next couple of weeks.


*And Stout and Porter

Nip this prohibitionist nonsense in the bud

Right, this is important. We are facing a potential alcohol ban on trains in Scotland. It is only a bit of flag-waving at the moment, but it needs a good hard kick in the goolies to put it off the agenda.

There has always been a streak of repressive puritanism in the Scottish Labour Party with regard to alcohol, and I’ve been in public meetings where sitting councillors have said things along the lines of “Why does anyone need to be out drinking at two o’clock in the morning anyway?”

It’s thanks to this small-mindedness that we’re not allowed to have a refreshing bottle of beer on the street in Glasgow, or to crack open a bottle of wine with a picnic in one of the city’s verdant parks.

Unfortunately, in this respect the SNP is even worse than Labour.

The SNP-controlled West Dunbartonshire Council, for instance, has a policy of granting no new licenses, the effect of which, of course, is not so much to inhibit the proliferation of squalid drinking dens, but to prevent any good new places from opening.

Now the prohibitionist hysteria has spilt over into the public transport sector. It was only to be expected, since over the last couple of decades one local authority after another has imposed a blanket ban on drinking in public. That one can still have a drink on a train has come to seem like an anomaly, rather than quite natural and ordinary as it once was.

Rail 2014, the discussion paper that Transport Scotland has put forward as a basic for renegotiating rail franchises, is a document which is going to be controversial for all sorts of other reasons, but the article pertinent to this blog reads:

“10.18 One of the most distressing ways to spend a rail journey is to be subject to the bad behaviour of other passengers. This can be fuelled by excessive drinking of alcohol. Currently BPT and ScotRail implement alcohol bans on specific services during events (such as services to/from rugby and football matches). However consideration is being given to whether there should be a ban on the consumption of alcohol on all trains in Scotland and we welcome views.”

Now a proposed ban of this kind is, as far as I know, unprecedented anywhere in Europe.

It would prevent hillwalkers having a dram from their hip flasks on the journey along the West Highland Line. It would prevent couples sharing a bottle of wine on a train. Absurdly, it would mean hen parties going to Newcastle for the weekend would have to wait to open their bottle of cava until Berwick-upon-Tweed. It would prevent thousands of completely innocent passengers legitimately enjoying a beverage in a responsible manner.

The purported benefit of a ban is extremely dubious. I’d wager that most drunk people causing trouble on trains are drunk before they get on. A ban on the train won’t affect them.

Has any research been done? Or is it just the result of prejudice on the part of people who, like the Labour councillor of old, can’t imagine why any respectable person would want to have a drink on a train?

Tourists from other countries who come to Scotland to visit the hills and glens will have no comprehension of this policy at all. It does not exist in their home countries, and can only convince them that Scotland is an odd, miserable, grey wee statelet ruled by fanatics, where you can't even have a beer on a train.

I urge all my readers to write to Transport Scotland and their MSPs opposing this proposal. You can download a response form at http://www.transportscotland.gov.uk/strategy-and-research/publications-and-consultations/j203179-19.htm and read the document in its entirety here.

If you’d like to make your opinions known in person, there are a few more meet-the-managers sessions to go: 10 January at Glasgow Central railway station, 12 January at Edinburgh Waverley, 17 January at Inverness, 20 January at Perth, 24 January at Kirkcaldy, 31 January at Ayr, 2 February at Stranraer.

Ewwww

Excellent way to get the message out to punters that you are a crappy pub run by sleazy people.

Is this even legal?

Bonnie beers of Loch Lomond

As I have been saying for quite some time, you can’t move in Scotland at the moment without a new microbrewery popping up while you’re looking the other way.

One of the newest is Loch Lomond Brewery in Alexandria just south of Balloch. Fiona and Euan  have been homebrewing for a few years before setting up the brewery, which made its first beer in October. I took the train up on a drizzly Sunday in December to have a look (I wasn’t the first blogger to visit – Adam got there before me).

The beers are currently being sold in the Village Inn in Arrochar and have been sighted in the Bon Accord and Pot Still in Glasgow too. The brewery is also in talks with a well-known department store about stocking bottled beer. I think bottling is a smart move – what tourist at Loch Lomond wouldn’t want a bottle or two of local beer?

Of the beers made so far, Ale of Leven is a sweetish heavy-type ale while Bonnie ’n’ Bitter is a hoppier beer somewhere between Deuchars and Bitter & Twisted. A darker ale called Kessog was being brewed when I visited.

To be honest, I was expecting an amateurish little brewery making dull beers. I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. No awards for innovation (yet), but the beers are good and polished with none of the dodgy notes that sometimes plague start-up breweries. It’s difficult to believe they’ve only been brewing commercially for three months. I look forward to tasting more of their products in the coming year.

Greene King Strong Suffolk

The less popular beers from big breweries, to me, often make better drinking. I’ve long suspected that this is because they don’t sell enough for it to be worthwhile reformulating the recipes to save cash.

It’s not often that I have anything good to say about Greene King, but credit where credit is due.

Old people like me who grew up on Michael Jackson’s books will have heard the story of Strong Suffolk. Greene King brew a massively strong barley wine, Old 5X, in Bury St Edmunds, age it for years in oak and blend it with a younger beer to make a strong ale they call Strong Suffolk. None of their surviving contemporaries do that any more. It’s a unique relic in British brewing.

Imagine my surprise when a local pub tweeted that they had it on draught!

This is a real slice of brewing history in a glass, worth trying for that reason alone.

What I like about these old-school strong ales is that the hopping hasn’t been dumbed down to suit the timid palate of neophytes. Rich, winey and treacley though they may be, there is a decent tongue-sucking bitterness on the finish.

I may be imagining things but I think you can taste the aged beer.

The only quibble I have is that the strength has been reduced — down to 5.0% from the old strength of 6.0% in bottle. I suppose this is excessive caution on the part of the pub company, who don’t want people downing six pints of it and throwing up behind the Christmas tree, but it does mean that it is rather more watery than the unctuous bottled version.

Nonetheless it’s a delight to see this on the bar in a pub. There may be microbreweries who are aging beer in wood now, but Greene King – albeit marketing-led blandmongers most of the time — are the only ones in England still doing it continuously since the old days. I’ll salute that.

(Listen to me Greene King. Promote this stuff. You are good at this.)

(Listen to me readers. There may still be some of this beer about in M&B pubs. Drink it if you see it.)

My Golden Pint Awards: 2011 edition

Here we are again. I’m having a quiet Hogmanay this year with just a few selected bottles and it’s time between the mince pies and chimes of Big Ben to announce the winners of my Golden Pints.

My top choices are not the beers I’ve drunk or enjoyed the most this year (that would be Fyne Ales and Harviestoun, who won everything last year anyway). But they are beers that have stuck in my mind through being good, interesting or thought-provoking. I’ve deliberately chosen beers that I haven’t blogged about specifically, but are worthy of more attention than they’ve had.

UK Draught (Cask or Keg) Beer
Harvey’s Mild: possibly the perfect session ale, still packed with subtle flavour after three pints. I worry that old-fashioned, idiosyncratic beers like this suffer from being less immediately accessible than those lovely New World pale ales that taste of Um Bongo.

Runner-up: Belhaven IPA. Yes, yes, yes. Nobody is more surprised than me to be giving an award to a Belhaven beer. Most of their draught products are frankly dreadful, having lost any character they once had. This new IPA is not one I expected much of. The first pint, drunk out of a sense of duty, was alright, better than Greene King IPA. Subsequent pints were better, with the spiciness and sulphuriness that other ales from the brewery lack. At 3.8% it’s obviously intended to compete with Deuchars IPA and does a more than creditable job. It’s never going to be a flavour bomb at that gravity but is a very palatable session pint. And at least their pubs are starting to offer this instead of the ubiquitous Deuchars or Greene King IPA from the parent company, which, quite apart from its defects as a beer, always looks to me like an angel of death when I see it in Scotland, implying that the closure of Belhaven is coming closer.

UK Bottled or Canned Beer
Worthington Celebration Shield: although I only drank it once, it stood out from the crowd. Being strong, it’s rich and boozy, but also dry and minerally as a proper Pale Ale should be. Unique among all the beers I’ve tasted this year.

Best Overseas Draught Beer
Haven’t drunk one … not one that stood up to those brewed in this country, anyway. With one exception: Stone Old Guardian barley wine, superb, oily and bitter. I have a lot of time for Stone. You don’t see Greg Koch going around shit-talking Charlie Papazian and Fred Eckhardt.

Best Overseas Bottled or Canned Beer
I don’t drink many of these either. As I’m writing this on New Year’s Eve, I’ll just put the last one I had: Odell 5 Barrel Pale Ale, which is fair enough as it’s a very nice beer. I like Odell beers; the problem is that they are too British to do well in the UK. You would think this would be an advantage, but as imports they are inevitably twice the price of a comparable local product.

Best Overall Beer
Tryst Nelson Sauvin Hop Trial. Tryst are a brewery I haven’t written about enough on this blog. Their beers can be inconsistent, but that means when they are poor they are merely good; when they are good they are spectacular. Nelson Sauvin Hop Trial is a beer I have ordered every time I’ve seen it this year, and each pint has been better than the last.

Best Pumpclip or Label

Nollaig, the seasonal beer from Williams Bros. The litre swing-top bottle looks so badass. The label is typographically superb, starkly beautiful so you don’t even notice it’s just white type on a black background. The beer is pretty good too, rich and chewy, a little on the sweet side with a marvellous dense head. There’s probably none left now. They will surely make it again.

Best UK Brewery
No award for this as it’s just not fair. There are so many good breweries now.  Can't think of it as a competition any more.

Best Overseas Brewery
Schlenkerla of Bamberg. I could quite happily drink their beer all the time. Märzen in summer and Bock in winter. Oh yeah. I know there are some people who don’t like Schlenkerla. I secretly subtract about 20% from the value I place on such people’s opinions about anything else.

Pub/Bar of the Year
For me, it has to be the Laurieston Bar. When they put on a cask of Fyne Ales Highlander for Glasgow Beer Week’s Cask Night, I had no idea that it would lead to them serving cask beer regularly. I certainly never expected it, but when I was in for a quick pint a few weeks later I was met with complaints that the brewery hadn’t been in touch to sell them any more beer! One thing led to another: after an interregnum of putting on a firkin at weekends, the pub now has two handpumps and at least one cask beer on all the time. Other places will always have a wider range of beer, but there’s nowhere cosier than the Laurieston for a few pints with friends.

Beer Festival of the Year
Alloa. I’ve been disappointed by the beer quality at a few festivals this year. Alloa was brilliant because it was held later in the year when the weather was starting to get colder. As a result there were no cooling issues and the beer was in spectacular condition. We also seem to have banished the spectre of toffee-flavoured dishwater masquerading as “traditional Scottish beer” at these things, with both brewers and drinkers moving to well-bittered, hoppy beers.

Supermarket of the Year
No award. Sainsbury’s might have been in with a chance if the staff in their stores had actually been told about the Beer Challenge they were ostensibly having. I don’t really buy beer in supermarkets anymore — it’s either in the pub, independent shops or homebrew.

Independent Retailer of the Year
After a couple of years in the doldrums, The Cave at Kelvinbridge has returned to form and now seems to stock everything they can get from James Clay. Pricing can be painful sometimes but that’s the price we pay for access to specialities.

Online Retailer of the Year
No award, simply because I haven’t bought any beer online this year.

Best Beer Book or Magazine
In a world in which a work as sub-standard and sloppily produced as the Oxford Companion to Beer can make it into bookstores, it seems wrong to give an award at all.

Best Beer Blog or Website
I’ve been impressed this year not just by how prolific Jeff Alworth of Beervana is, but how insightful his posts are. Runner-up is Adam’s blog Walking and Crawling, because he goes to places nobody else does and I really enjoy vicariously touring Scotland through him.

Best Beer Twitterer
This would have to be @ThornbridgeDom, just because his tweets make me chuckle.

Best Online Brewery presence
I can't remember the last time I went to a brewery website for information. But they are usually a good source of the type of "we use only the finest malt and hops" woffle that plagues brewery marketing. Twitter is where it’s at for breweries, and here Hardknott has developed a reputation that is out of all proportion to its size. Runner-up is Magic Rock for similar reasons: they’ve achieved coverage far beyond that which rivals of a similar size get.

In 2012 I’d Most Like To…
Drink more tasty beer in great pubs. And to see crappy beer ticking sites collapse under the weight of their own fucking idiocy.

Happy new year, folks!

Real ale at Tennent's, 1983

In 1983 Tennent’s launched a new cask beer. Tennent’s Times, the house paper of the company, reported thus on the trials in two pubs in Glasgow and Edinburgh:

Almost 18 months ago the Company re-introduced Draught Bass into a number of selected Managed Houses in Edinburgh as part of a test-marketing campaign in the cask-conditioned ale market. The success of the Edinburgh project brought about the re-introduction of the same product into a number of outlets in Glasgow and again the result has been a success.

Now as part of the overall exercise — and to consider all possible options — a new cask-conditioned ale, known as ‘Heriot Brewery Traditional 80/– Ale’ has appeared in Tennent’s Bar in Glasgow’s Byres Road. Brewed at Heriot, it has already been tasted — under the name of ‘Sheep Heid Inn Ale’ — in Edinburgh’s Sheep Heid Inn and was voted ‘a winner’.

Said Marketing Manager, Andy Lowe, “We recognise that the cask-conditioned sector of the market is very small at less than 2% of the entire Scottish market but we have to look at and consider all options, including brewing our own product in Scotland.

After all, Draught Bass is currently having to be shipped north and we would like to consider something brewed locally too.”

Note how cautious the article is. How the reader is repeatedly assured that this is just a test, just considering all options. They didn’t even want to put the Tennent’s name on it (it’s interesting to note that the same approach has been applied to the recent launch of Caledonia Best). Perhaps the project was not popular within the company. Unsurprising considering that they’d spent the previous twenty years eliminating cask beer from their pubs.

Here’s a young George Howell filling casks at Heriot. George is now Head Brewer at Belhaven.

The reluctance with which Tennent’s did this is palpable even 27 years later; next to the small two-column article reporting on the new beer, there is a larger opinion piece denouncing CAMRA. Relations were apparently less than good:

It’s always a very sad thing when people begin to exercise any kind of blind prejudice and particularly when that group is speaking on behalf of an obvious minority. No one denies anyone the right of protest or the right to try to expand the range of choice available to the consumer.

But what is offensive is when a small body begins to make unwarranted attacks upon a quality product which is already enjoyed by many people and one which has stood the test of almost 100 years of taste.

Yet that is what CAMRA in the West of Scotland has done in the recent weeks. They have made blind attacks on Tennent’s Lager on the basis, purely and simply, that they know best. They — a small group of misguided, albeit well-meaning individuals — have decided that Tennent’s Lager, enjoyed by millions throughout the world is not a top quality product!

And this comes from a group of individuals whose own spokesman was unable to tell Tennent’s Export Ale (brewery conditioned) from one of their so-called ‘real ales’ … and even admitted that he preferred Tennent’s Export!

CAMRA has a role to play and it plays that role very well in many parts of the country. However, it is doing itself no favours by ‘knocking’ other brews in a misguided fashion.

Better by far to promote cask-conditioned ale on its own merits, and let the public decide.

AFTER ALL DOESN'T THE CUSTOMER KNOW BEST???

Two per cent of the market. I wonder what it is now after the growth in recent years? It’s probably still substantially lower than in England.

The Heriot Brewery was demolished in the 1990s, but the Sheep Heid Inn, which claims to be Scotland's oldest pub, is still going strong, is now pretty focussed on cask beer and apparently still had Sheep Heid Inn Ale brewed for them until recently.