Golden Pints 2016

Oh, hello. It’s yourself is it? Well, as you’ll have noticed, I’ve been blogging less in 2016. I have not stopped drinking beer, just found it increasingly hard to find the time to write about it. In fact, I’ve been on more trips than ever, even though there is also more going on at home in Glasgow than ever before.

Please note that I am so far behind with blogging that some of these awards are due to experiences that have not been written about here yet. If you’re curious about any of my choices, wait a while…

Best UK Cask Beer:

I know everyone is saying it (though I was saying it before them, if you must know), but these days I am looking for drinkable, subtle beers. However, due to the butterfly-like drinking behaviour that I, like many others, have succumbed to, it’s tricky to find examples that I have drunk more than once or twice. Aside from the usual suspects (Harveys, Bathams, etc), I guess the acid test are beers that I have gone back for a second pint of, and one of those is Orkney Brewery’s Corncrake, which was found in stunning condition on more than one occasion. On the face of it, it’s a fairly run-of-the-mill golden bitter with nothing particularly notable about it, yet I find it massively drinkable. A chance encounter with RCH Hewish Mild in December was also extremely pleasant.

Best UK Keg Beer:

I don't drink much keg – more for financial reasons than on principle – but one that sticks out was Lost & Grounded Kellerpils. Even with more and more lagers appearing from independent breweries, it’s still rare to find one which comes close to the fresh, malty unfiltered lagers of Franconia. This one doesn’t quite match the best of them, but is well on the way there. A great achievement for such a new brewery. (Mind you, the only other beer I've had from them I didn’t like at all, so take your chances...)

Best UK Bottled or Canned Beer:

Ahab from Up Front Brewing in Glasgow. Jake Griffin, the head of this outfit, is a master of stout grists, and this “American Stout” dances between coffee and chocolate Ready Brek. If drinking 6% stouts every day were sensible (it isn’t), it’d be in my fridge all the time. Look out for an Ahab variant in 2017.

Best Overseas Draught:

Ulrich Martin Pilsner from Hausen, Franconia; a delight of a beer, with marvellous foam and a magnificent citrus hop aroma; the perfect antidote to ignorant idiots and ideologically motivated craft beer fanatics who claim that German beer all tastes the same. Although looking at my photos would suggest I have drunk more draught Päffgen Kölsch than any other foreign beer.

Best Overseas Bottled or Canned Beer:

Probably Rodenbach for 65 cent a can from a Belgian supermarket.

Best Branding, Pumpclip or Label:

Cloudwater undoubtedly have have some of the slickest and most tasteful labels. Unfortunately every beer I've tried from them has been meh (see below), but one lives in hope. Boundary Brewing from Belfast have similarly attractive artwork, but the print quality lets them down. An honourable mention goes to Glasgow cuckoo brewer Gallus, whose minimalist branding is reminiscent of 1980s photocopier acrobatics (Their production is so tiny that you have to be quicker off the mark than me to actually get hold of their beer – I think I managed two of them all year – one literally the last glass out of the keg).

Under-Hyped Brewery Of The Year:

I’ve had a few very nice pints from Cumbria’s Fell Brewery, but never seen a blog or feature about them. Going by the quality of their beer, you ought to be hearing more about them.

Pub/Bar of the Year:

It was devastating to hear of the death of Jason Lyons of the State Bar halfway through the year. Hard as it must be to pick up the pieces and keep going, that is precisely what the State Bar has done, with the beer quality still holding up enough to win it the local CAMRA Glasgow Pub of the Year award for the third year in a row.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2016:

While Glasgow has a fast-changing restaurant scene, the rate of change in the pub scene is more relaxed. But there have been quite a few new openings worth mentioning. It was particularly delightful to see the Old Toll Bar re-opening after over two years of closure, bringing back a historic mahogany pub interior as handsome as any in Edinburgh. I have high hopes for the new Crossing the Rubicon in the west end, which adds another outlet to the Williams Bros empires and offers fine beer with freshly cooked curries. I have a soft spot too for the wilfuly unfashionable MacGregor’s Ale and Pie Howff, which as the name implies serves ale and pies and that’s it. My favourite of the new openings though is the Hippo Taproom on Sauchiehall St: an unlikely location given that street’s reputation for Stella binges and taxi-queue fights, yet the quiet basement space is an oasis. With seven changing keg lines and three casks, the draught beer selection is small but refined. That it is just round the corner from the State is a bonus.

Beer Festival of the Year:

I haven’t been to many festivals this year, something which needs to change.

Supermarket of the Year:

Not much change in this category. This has to be Booths (again): the last branch I was in had a display of cans and local bottles which outdid a few specialist retailers I can think of. Mind you, they were running a promotion of Warsteiner and Marston's EPA too.

Independent Retailer of the Year:

In Glasgow, several excellent new retailers are well bedded in that didn’t exist five years ago. The one I've been to the most, though, is Grunting Growler, which in March finally opened in its own location after a series of pop-ups. Sadly it doesn’t have an on-sales licence yet, which has limited boss Jehad’s ability to offer samples or run tastings. Hopefully the licensing board will see sense in the new year.

Best Beer Blog or Website:

For several years Lars Marius Garshol at Larsblog is going out week in, week out, doing the primary fieldwork that nobody has ever done before, interviewing Scandinavian farmer brewers about their beer and their way of brewing, breaking new ground in beer research. All this without any outside funding or sponsorship from a commercial operation. If you want to out-nerd your friends, buy his book on Norwegian farm ale now so you can say you had it before it was translated into English.

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer:

Goes to @pilotbeeruk for frequently hilarious tweets.

Most Overhyped Brewery: 

Well, maybe it was just a dirty glass.

Even before Cloudwater had launched, complaints appeared about an alleged backlash against them which was, as far as anyone could tell, completely imaginary. A series of, in my view, deeply mediocre beers followed, which were praised to the heavens. Being fair, as far as I can make out none of the hype has actually come from the brewery. Their double IPA has been praised to the heavens elsewhere, but I won’t be forking out or queueing up for it, as I gave up when served this Mittelfrüh Lager which had lost its head entirely by the time I was half way down the glass.

Most Embarrassing Attempt To Be Down With The Kids:

There’s really only one serious contender for this: Marston’s rebranding of their entire range which throws their old-fashioned labels overboard in favour of new designs in a grungy style which was briefly fashionable ten years ago and makes their bottles look like supermarket own-brands. But hey, marketing consultants were paid a fortune to come up with this, so it must be good. My tip to Marston’s: it’s your beer that’s the problem, not your branding. Well, actually, now it’s your branding too, so well done there.

But this thing from Harviestoun for the new canned edition of Old Engine Oil is pretty poor, too. It doesn't match the branding on the bottles or on the other cans, and is gaudy and juvenile (It'll sell like hot cakes then).

Runner-up in this category is Hawkshead with their green-bottled Lakeland Lager, which, as they know full well, will be lightstruck by the time the drinker cracks the cap off. But craft brewing is all about quality over marketing, right?

Weirdest Own Tasting Note Of The Year:

“Amber, peaty, hot, toffee-ish. Smoked courgettes.” Absolutely no idea what I was thinking here.