Category Archives: Beers

The beers

63. Fuller’s Vintage Ale

Leave a Reply

To complete the set of three Fuller’s beers in The Book, we turn to something a little bit special. Late each year Fuller’s produce a limited number of bottles of their Vintage Ale. Each year’s brew will be subtly different, with head brewer John Keeling varying the choice of hops and malts to take advantage of the best available that particular year.

The beer’s style is always broadly consistent though, typically being an 8.5% ABV, bottle-conditioned barleywine-style ale based on Fuller’s own Golden Pride. The presentation of the beer is immaculate, with each bottle being individually numbered, labelled using the highest quality label stock and finally presented for sale in a handsome claret-coloured box.

There are quite a few beer lovers who make an annual tradition of snapping up at least a case of each vintage and squirreling it away, only to be broken out for very special occasions many years into the future.

And this certainly is a beer that benefits from some judicious aging. I tried a couple of bottles of the 2012 vintage pretty much as it rolled out of the brewery, and while it was a fine beer, it was clear that it was by no means the finished article.

I’ve a 2006 tucked away, though since I can’t bring myself to open it, I was rather pleased to stumble across bottle No. 014468 of the 2010 vintage innocently minding its own business behind the bar of the same pub in which I tried Fuller’s London Pride recently.

image

Fuller’s Vintage Ale pours a deep burnished amber colour, with a tight off-white head. On pouring there’s a huge waft of orange peel and booze escaping, no doubt pleased to be liberated after several years of gently fermenting in a confined space.

The barley used in 2010 was the endearingly-named Tipple, while the hops are the very traditional Fuggles and Goldings, and the beer is dry-hopped using Target and yet more Goldings. Three years on, though, there’s very little by way of hop bitterness remaining, and instead that barleywine sweetness is front and centre, once again complemented by the distinctive orange notes provided by Fuller’s signature yeast.

The mouthfeel is strikingly thick and unctuous, while the flavour is like orange marmalade and butter spread on fruitcake soaked in rum.

Indeed, there’s an indulgent booziness that reminds you that secondary bottle fermentation means this beer may actually be stronger than the nominal 8.5% on the label. It certainly gets to work pretty promptly, providing a warming glow that, while very welcome even in August, would make this beer especially well-suited for drinking in the winter. In fact, this may be the ultimate Christmas beer.

All in all, this is a very special beer, and certainly not an everyday tipple for many reasons. While numbers are finite, Vintage Ale from the last two or three years is far from impossible to get hold of, at least here in London. I recommend finding one of the smarter Fuller’s pubs and making friends with the staff. You never know what they may have lurking in the cellar.

Facts and Figures

Brewery: Fuller, Smith & Turner, Chiswick Lane South, London W4
Style: Old Ales, Barley Wines and Vintage Ales
Strength: 8.5% ABV
Found at: The Mad Hatter Hotel, Stamford Street, London SE1
Serving: 500ml Bottle

62. Fuller’s London Pride

Leave a Reply

This is the second beer to be featured here from London’s oldest existing brewery, after the excellent pint of Fuller’s ESB I enjoyed a couple of months ago.

Given the relentless ubiquity of both Fuller’s and their flagship London Pride around these parts—practically any London supermarket or corner shop will stock it, not to mention Fuller’s own network of 367 pubs, or London Pride’s countless appearances as a guest ale—it may seem remiss that it has taken me so long to get around to covering it here.

Clearly this isn’t the first time I’ve tried London Pride, and so I’m well aware that it’s a beer that, unless kept and served to absolute perfection, can make for a fairly underwhelming pint. For this reason, as with the ESB, it’s well worth seeking out one of the better Fuller’s pubs where they really know how to condition a cask ale.

And so it happened that a rainy bank holiday weekend saw me make my way back to the Mad Hatter Hotel in London’s Stamford Street, the very same pub in which I sampled the ESB.

image

Fuller’s London Pride is a lovely deep amber or perhaps burnished bronze colour, with a thinnish off-white head. It smells of good old-fashioned beer, in such an honest manner that it defies you to write anything pretentious about its “nose”.

London Pride is somewhat lighter than the ESB, but the rich, underlying caramel and toffee sweetness is there, as befits a well-kept cask Best Bitter. That’s complemented by Fuller’s signature orangey notes, provided by their in-house yeast, and balanced by a dry, bitter finish full of peppery hops, making London Pride satisfying yet refreshing, and a cut above the average session bitter. It’s really quite moreish. So I had another.

At a sensible 4.1% ABV, you can afford to do so. It’s to Fuller’s eternal credit that they’ve created a beer of such complexity and depth at such a sessionable ABV, and so it’s no wonder that they shift well over 100,000 barrels of the stuff each year. To some extent London Pride is a victim of its own success in that its ubiquity means it tends to be taken for granted by Londoners, myself included.

Facts and Figures

Brewery: Fuller, Smith & Turner, Chiswick Lane South, London W4
Style: Best Bitters
Strength: 4.1% ABV
Found at: The Mad Hatter Hotel, Stamford Street, London SE1
Serving: Cask, pint

61. Pitfield 1850 London Porter

Leave a Reply

This is the second of three beers in The Book to hail from the Essex-based Pitfield Brewery, following their Shoreditch Stout, which I covered a few weeks ago.

This is another dark beer, this time an example of that most London of beer styles, and a confirmed favourite of your author: Porter. As with the Shoreditch Stout, the 1850 London Porter is entirely organic and vegan, should that be a factor in your beer selection process.

In a rather endearing Accidental Partridge turn of events, this one proudly bears the denomination “2010 Champion Bottled Beer of East Anglia”.

image

Pitfield 1850 London Porter is a deep reddish-brown, rather than truly black, and pours with an enormous sudsy head, despite having been sat perfectly still for several weeks. There’s a good, fresh hoppy whiff, backed up with some inviting toastier aromas, as befits a decent porter.

It soon becomes clear that I’ve overchilled this bottle, because at first the 1850 tastes what I can only describe as a little bit strange. There’s an odd sweetness in there, which perhaps originates with the cane sugar which is added to the brew, and there’s an overwhelming and not entirely pleasant bitterness which makes it hard to detect any other flavours.

However, this all changes as the beer warms a little and starts to near room temperature. The flavour really fills out and deepens, and becomes a complex combination of dried fruits, burnt toast and nutty black coffee notes. The difference is quite pronounced, so I’ve learned my lesson there.

And I’m glad, because I like this tiny brewery and didn’t want to post a bad review. I’m now particularly looking forward to the third and final Pitfield beer which I have to track down: a mighty 9.3% Imperial Stout. I’ve haven’t come across that one in London yet, so perhaps a trip to Essex is on the cards!

Facts and Figures

Brewery: Dominion Brewery Co, Moreton, Essex, England
Style: Porters and Stouts
Strength: 5.0% ABV
Found at: City Beverage Company, Old Street, London EC1
Serving: 500ml Bottle

60. Chimay Blanche

Leave a Reply

This is the third and final Chimay beer to be covered here, after the luxurious Chimay Bleue and the fruity and sinister Chimay Rouge. The Blanche has proven a little harder to get hold of for some reason, but a recent lunch hour stroll to City Beverage Company finally resolved matters.

Chimay Blanche is very much in the Belgian tripel style, so should be more reminiscent of Westmalle Tripel than of the previous two Chimays. Let’s find out.

image

As expected, Chimay Blanche pours a much paler colour than its siblings, a beautiful and typically Belgian golden shade, with a pillowy white head. It smells light, subtle and again very Belgian with those distinctive esters that their golden beers always offer.

One taste is enough to know that the Blanche is far more suited to the summer months than the Bleue and the Rouge. It’s a truly refreshing beer, but at a respectable 8.0% ABV, it’s no wimpy pale ale. Instead it’s deep and rich with a huge and satisfying bitter finish.

There isn’t the complex fruit of the Westmalle Tripel, and that beer’s distinct banana notes are largely absent, being replaced by slightly darker toastier notes.

image

All in all this is a lovely beer. It isn’t a particularly easy one to describe, not least since it constantly reveals more depth as the glass drains, and the beer edges towards room temperature. I think I’m going to need to try another one!

Facts and Figures

Brewery: Bières de Chimay S.A., Baileux, Belgium
Style: Trappist Beers
Strength: 8.0% ABV
Found at: City Beverage Company, Old Street, London EC1
Serving: 330ml Bottle

59. Grolsch Pilsener

Leave a Reply

In retrospect, I may inadvertently have given The Commercial a bit of a hard time
when I reviewed that underwhelming pint of Hop Back Summer Lightning last week.

Which, all told, is a bit of a flimsy excuse for drifting back there today and ordering a bottle of Grolsch.

I know what you’re thinking. Grolsch doesn’t exactly have the finest reputation around these parts: in the UK, it’s typically a flavourless, slightly-too-strong-to-be-sessionable keg lager with very few redeeming features. I was surprised to find it in The Book at all.

In fairness, this is no ordinary Grolsch. This is the proper, imported, Dutch-brewed Pilsner in the tactile, sculpted green glass bottle with the famous swing-top. Young people of my generation might recognise the ceramic cap from the shoes of such popular modern beat combos as Bros. Google them, kids.

It may be my imagination, but imported Grolsch seems to get harder to get hold of as each year passes. No problem: The Commercial have it on permanent standby in the fridge, and a chilled bottle of lager seemed irresistible on this, the muggiest day of the year so far.

image

Well, there it is. A slightly stingily-sized 450ml bottle of lager with a fancy lid.

It tastes like a halfway decent lager, which is to say that there’s the slightest hint of malt in there to prevent it tasting of nothing at all. This, in essence, is where the imported Grolsch differs from the UK-brewed keg stuff.

It was cold and I didn’t hate it, but yeah, pint of Brooklyn Lager, please Zöe.

Facts and Figures

Brewery: Koninklijke Grolsch N.V., Enschede, Netherlands
Style: Pilsners
Strength: 5.0% ABV
Found at: The Commercial, Railton Road, London SE24
Serving: 450ml Bottle

58. Hook Norton Double Stout

Leave a Reply

After a hard day patching up potholes on the information superhighway, there isn’t much that can beat putting your feet up with a good bottle of stout. Fortunately, there are an inordinate number of porters and stouts in The Book, so it’s probably time to open another of them.

This is our second beer from Oxfordshire’s Hook Norton Brewery, having tried their Old Hooky a few weeks ago. That was a good beer, but I couldn’t quite place what it was trying to be. There should be no such ambiguity with this, their 4.8% ABV, bottle-conditioned Double Stout.

What is slightly unclear is what the “double” in the name refers to. At just 4.8% we’re clearly not talking in the same terms as a Double IPA, which would typically be, well, double that strength. The bottle loosely implies that it might be to do with the fact that both black and brown malts are used, while The Book declares that it “recalls the period in the 18th and 19th centuries when porters and stouts were labelled X and XX”.

Perhaps we’re splitting hairs: what matters is whether it’s any good.

image

Hook Norton Double Stout looks much as a stout should, pouring such a dark brown that it appears black, and with a good frothy tan head. There’s a big, creamy malt nose with both toasty and floral notes that certainly seems promising.

There’s a slightly sharp, hoppy twang that’s front and centre, a nicely rounded body, and a subtly dry finish which manages to be satisfying without being in any way overpowering.

Overall the beer is quite fruity and—dare I say it—delicate for a stout, but served nicely chilled, it’s remarkably knock-backable. I suspect this might be a good stout for those who wouldn’t usually venture quite so far towards the dark side, as it’s a little less challenging than some stouts, whilst remaining a very good example of the style.

After the last couple of beers haven’t quite hit the spot for me, thankfully I’ve very much enjoyed this one. It certainly didn’t hang about long, and I’d happily opt for one of these again, especially if it popped up somewhere on draught.

Facts and Figures

Brewery: The Hook Norton Brewery Co Ltd, Hook Norton, Oxfordshire, England
Style: Porters-and-Stouts
Strength: 4.8% ABV
Found at: Bossman Wines, Lordship Lane, London SE22
Serving: 500ml Bottle

57. Hop Back Summer Lightning

Leave a Reply

Occasionally you don’t have to go looking for these beers: they come to you.

And so it was when one of my local boozers tweeted that they had just put Hop Back Summer Lightning on the bar.

I didn’t hang about: I developed a taste for Summer Lightning when I first moved to London, about 13 years ago, and I haven’t had it for a very long time. Needless to say, there I was a few hours later. Pint of Summer Lightning please, Zöe.

image

Hop Back Summer Lightning is your typical summery Pale Ale, golden in colour, with a smallish white head that fades quite quickly.

It smells of…wait…no, it actually doesn’t smell of anything. I’d better taste it. Nope, still nothing. No hops, no malt, nothing. Maybe a slightly dry, bitter finish if I concentrate really, really hard, but no. In all honesty, there is absolutely no flavour to this beer whatsoever. This is probably the blandest beer I’ve come across since the woeful Du Bocq Blanche de Namur.

Something’s up, but I don’t know what. This is not the beer I know from a decade ago. I would hesitate to blame The Commercial’s (admittedly not always impeccable) cellaring. Maybe it’s the two halfs of the utterly stunning Pizza Port Night Rider imperial stout I had in Brixton earlier numbing the proverbial out of my tastebuds. Maybe Summer Lightning just ain’t what it used to be.

Not a great pint, by any stretch of the imagination, but I don’t want to write this one off. It can’t have fallen this far, can it?

Facts and Figures

Brewery: Hop Back Brewery, Salisbury, Wiltshire, England
Style: Golden Ales
Strength: 5.0% ABV
Found at: The Commercial, Railton Road, London SE24
Serving: Cask, pint

56. Oude Geuze Boon

Leave a Reply

Here’s another beer that should be a completely new experience for me. Oude Geuze Boon hails from Belgium and is an example of a style of beer known as Gueuze*, itself a sub-type of Lambic, a sour wheat beer synonymous with the town of Lembeek in Belgium.

This is the first time I’ve tried a beer labelled with any of the terms Gueuze, Lambic or “sour” and, truth be told, I’ve had the bottle sitting around for quite some time while I plucked up the courage.

That may be no bad thing, since Lambics are well known for their tendency to improve with age. This one dates from the 2010-11 bottling and sports a “best before” date of early October 2032. You get the feeling the date is only on there at all simply to satisfy an EU bureaucrat somewhere.

image

Oude Geuze Boon is presented in a smart 375ml bottle, and is Champagne-corked, to let you know you’re dealing with something a bit grown-up. It pours a typically Belgian and slightly cloudy deep golden colour, and has a tightly frothy white head backed up with a lively fizz.

There’s an immediate and unmistakeable pong of cider, in particular the distinctive sweet-yet-sour stench of the lamentable Scrumpy Jack, which briefly transports me straight back to memories of the early 90s.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the beer tastes sour, but unfortunately, aside from a fairly standard Belgian ale hiding in there somewhere, there isn’t really much more to it than that. As with Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier, it’s hard to taste anything beyond the main gimmick of the beer, and as with the Rauchbier, I soon wish the bottle were smaller.

I fully accept that a lot of that will be down to my own inexperience with the style: these kinds of beers are quite literally an acquired taste, though I don’t foresee myself drinking enough of the stuff in future to acquire it. That said, there are a few more in The Book which I’ll have to wade through at some point.

Of course, at a mere three years old, this bottle has a lot of growing up to do, so it would also be fascinating to see what 20 years or so worth of cellaring would do for a beer like this.

All in all then, this is not to my taste by any means, but I’m glad I finally tried it.

* If it appears that I’m spelling things inconsistently here, my justification is that “Gueuze” is the name of the beer style as given in The Book, and on Wikipedia, while “Geuze” is the spelling used in the name of this particular beer, as seen on the label.

Facts and Figures

Brewery: Brouwerij Boon nv, Lembeek, Belgium
Style: Lambic and Gueuze
Strength: 7.0% ABV
Found at: Utobeer, Borough Market, London SE1
Serving: 375ml bottle

55. Shepherd Neame Master Brew

Leave a Reply

This is another beer that I’ve had sitting around for a while, and never quite got round to trying. With some of the amazing beers that small London breweries like Beavertown and The Kernel have been putting out recently, it has been difficult to summon up much enthusiasm for a 4.0% English Bitter from the corner shop.

Of course, that sort of lackadaisical approach to the 300 Beers project isn’t going to have the thing finished any time soon, so let’s crack this one open and see what I’ve been missing out on.

image

Well, Shepherd Neame Master Brew is certainly a fine looking beer, pouring an inviting deep bronze colour with a generous off-white head. The aroma is remarkably malty, with delicate hops and the faintest hint of the distinctive smell of a beer that’s been sat in a colourless glass bottle for slightly too long. That’s entirely my fault, rather than the beer’s, of course.

And it tastes…absolutely terrific. I’m taken aback, as if I’ve learned nothing from my expectations turning out to be entirely misguided countless times already. Master Brew is full of biscuity malts and peppery English hops, and there’s an underlying toffee and dried fruit sweetness that’s the signature of a good Bitter.

Those toffee and fruit notes remind me of the last Shepherd Neame beer we saw, Bishop’s Finger and also Fuller’s ESB, though Master Brew is much lighter and more floral than both of those.

At a fairly tame 4.0% ABV, this one would be eminently sessionable too, and I suspect it has the potential to be absolutely wonderful on cask if kept and served well. I also discovered by accident that it pairs surprisingly well with cheeses such as Camembert, and no doubt other food too.

Good stuff from Shepherd Neame once again.

Facts and Figures

Brewery: Shepherd Neame, Faversham, Kent, England
Style: Bitters
Strength: 4.0% ABV
Found at: Maxy Supermarket, Norwood Road, London SE24
Serving: 500ml Bottle

54. Kelpie Seaweed Ale

Leave a Reply

Jonathan Swift famously and quite rightly observed that “It was a bold man that first ate an oyster”. One might say the same about the person who, on happening upon the bladderwrack seaweed, no doubt during a leisurely stroll along a near-tropical Scottish beach, thought to themself “you know, I reckon this would taste pretty good if I put it in my beer”.

Yes, this is an ale brewed with seaweed, “Kelpie” being the Gaelic word for that most improbable of beer ingredients. Kelpie Ale is brewed by Williams Brothers Brewery, the same chaps who recently brought us Fraoch Heather Ale, an altogether less ill-advised concept.

It has taken me a little while to pluck up the courage to crack this one open, but the 300 Beers project is a relentless mistress, and so the time has come.

image

Kelpie Ale pours an especially dark ruby colour, and in fact is almost black in bad light. It has a very distinctive nose reminiscent of a strong stout, with quite pronounced Scotch whisky notes. In that regard I’m reminded of Harviestoun’s Ola Dubh, a strong porter aged in whisky barrels.

To taste, Kelpie is again distinctive. It’s very fruity and tangy, with a vinous edge and perhaps the faintest touch of saltiness. It’s also slightly smoky, so there really are a lot of different flavours vying for attention

That smokiness further reminds me of a stout, as does the beer’s remarkably full body. Whilst I can’t detect any flavours that I can definitively identify as seaweed, there is a slightly gelatinous texture to the beer, which could simply be my imagination playing tricks on me, but it does call to mind the rubberiness of freshly beached bladderwrack seaweed.

All in all, this is an interesting beer. As with the brewery’s heather ale, whilst I can’t see it becoming a regular tipple, I’m glad I’ve tried it.

Facts and Figures

Brewery: Williams Brothers Brewing Co, Alloa, Scotland
Style: Beers made with Fruit, Spices, Herbs and Seeds
Strength: 4.4% ABV
Found at: Utobeer, Borough Market, London SE1
Serving: 500ml Bottle