A weblog of one chap's attempt to try every one of the 300 beers covered in Roger Protz's classic book "300 Beers to Try Before You Die" without dying first.
Amid the vast sea of Belgian beer I’ve been obliged to drink my way through recently, it’s nice to have a change of scenery, and head back to Blighty and to the Lake District for a big old bottle of this famous ESB-style beer.
Jennings Sneck Lifter pours a very deep, dark ruby colour with a smallish tan head. The nose is all christmas cake fruits and toasty malts.
To taste, there’s even more fruit and rich caramel from the black malts, followed by a strong, peppery bitter finish courtesy of the whole flower hops. It’s dark and complex, though perhaps not to the same extent as Theakston’s Old Peculier.
All in all, a good winter beer, best served at toom temperature to let all those flavours emerge. I’d be happy to see this on cask in more pubs, but sadly it doesn’t seem to be widely available down here in London.
Now, here’s a post that I could probably write without even drinking the beer, being rather well acquainted with Thornbridge Jaipur IPA already.
Having said that, there are rules we must follow on this blog. I’m simply obliged to go and buy another bottle. Such hardship.
Thornbridge are one of the success stories of contemporary British brewing. Beginning life as a tiny craft outfit just eight years ago, they’ve managed to marry a traditional product—real ale—with bang up-to-date science and technology, along with an obvious nose and drive for business. In doing so, they’ve grown into one of the biggest names in the field today.
Over the years, Thornbridge have created a prolific range of beers, all of them innovative and of the highest quality, and at the same time, a burgeoning pub empire has emerged, particularly in and around Sheffield in the north of England.
Of their beers, Jaipur is probably the best known and most widely available, and it’s fast becoming the modern British IPA against which all are to be compared. It’s the epitome of a contemporary citrus hop bomb.
I must confess I’m a little spoilt when it comes to Jaipur, having last year enjoyed a couple of pints kept and presented to absolute perfection in one of Thornbridge’s own pubs, the rather lovely Coach & Horses in Dronfield.
Served from cask, the smooth head and restrained natural carbonation help to balance out those zingy hops, resulting in a terrifically satisfying, moreish pint.
In a bottle, Jaipur is a somewhat different proposal, as you’re hit full in the face by the huge fresh, bitter hops with their quite literally mouth-watering lemon and grapefruit nose.
It’s a bracing beer, yet served lightly chilled Jaipur is thoroughly refreshing. Then, as it warms towards room temperature, a biscuity, malty depth emerges and the finish gets longer and longer. This is an unmistakeable sign of a top notch IPA.
Jaipur is one of those beers that fits any occasion, but it’d be especially suitable as a chilled summer beer, as well as being the perfect accompaniment to a good curry. I simply can’t think of a better beer to go with a chicken biryani, for example, and that’s exactly how I enjoyed this one.
Time for another of the many widely-available, slightly less than exciting English bitters that pervade The Book.
Unfortunately Abbot Ale does little to counter my growing ennui with the style. It tastes like an English bitter, though it’s a little smoother than many. The malt and hops are very well balanced, but there’s a faintly stinky whiff to it that also comes across in the flavour.
If you concentrate, there’s a slightly dry, bitter finish, but at a mere 26 bitterness units we are going to require chess Grandmaster levels of concentration to spot it.
It seems possible that Abbot Ale has the potential to be a much better beer on cask, if well-kept and served at its best, but I won’t go out of my way to find out, since it has been quite unremarkable the few times I have had it in pubs.
On a more positive note, I can recommend the seasonal, and much stronger Abbot Reserve, if you can find it.
There are several beers in The Book which I don’t feel I have to actively seek out, knowing that their ubiquity means they’ll find me: some day I’ll be in a pub where they’re the only thing worth drinking, and bingo, another one ticked off.
And so it was with Timothy Taylor’s very famous Landlord.
Some say that this is Madonna’s favourite beer. I can only assume that she hasn’t tried many beers, since there isn’t really anything exceptional about Landlord.
Don’t get me wrong. This is a perfectly good example of a sessionable English bitter, but beyond a reasonably pleasing hoppy edge, I’m struggling to find a great deal to write about.
Not so our host Roger, who rhapsodises about the beer in The Book, citing in particular its “beautifully balanced” long finish, and its “tangy fruit, juicy malt and bitter hops”. I’m just not sure I can get that excited about it.
I feel I’m being a little harsh: in fairness, in the same circumstances, I’d actually buy Landlord again, and enjoy it too, but it’s not something I’d go out of my way for. Still, that’s another one under my belt.
Oh cripes, here we go again. From Wells & Young’s, the incorrigible beer-botherers who took a bitter and turned it into the lamentable Wells Banana Bread Beer comes another flavoured concoction. This time they’ve taken a stout and flavoured it with chocolate.
The thing is, there is actually a valid style of beer known as Chocolate Stout, but the term comes from the use of chocolate malts (named for the colour, more than anything). Young’s have apparently taken one of those and made it “double” by the addition of “natural chocolate flavour”, which doesn’t fill me with optimism.
Now, I do love a good stout. Enough to know that a good stout or porter should not really need any extra help to give out chocolatey, coffee notes. That this one does need a leg up has me fearing the worst.
Still, it’s in The Book, so I think we all know what comes next.
Sniffing the brew with some trepidation, I’m almost relieved that I’m not actually getting a lot of chocolate. In fact this smells a lot like a decent, normal stout with a faint whiff of something extra, yet subtle.
That carries through to the taste. Again, there are no strongly discernable chocolate notes beyond what might be expected from a stout. In fact Young’s Double Chocolate ticks all the stouty boxes: it’s full-bodied and smooth with a good long bitter finish. If anything the chocolate addition just helps to take away a little of the rougher smokiness that many stouts have.
To my surprise, the result is really quite a nice beer, and I soon find myself settling in and enjoying it.
This perhaps doesn’t attain the level of “pure luxury/pur luxe” that the label aspires to, and it’s not a patch on, say, the Guinness Foreign Extra we saw recently, or my current favourite, The Redchurch Brewery’s Hoxton Stout, but it’s really OK.
Whether by luck or by judgment, this time Wells & Young’s haven’t created a monster by ruining a perfectly good beer. This is, on its own merits, a perfectly good, enjoyable beer.
This was the easiest beer so far to find, as I had a bottle stood in the kitchen even before 300 Beers was conceived.
It seems strange to think that it took Marston’s, founded in 1843 and based in Burton upon Trent – the home of IPA – until 2003 to brew an India Pale Ale. When they finally did, they came up with a real winner, and one which I enjoy fairly regularly.
From the nose alone, you can tell Old Empire isn’t one of the current wave of citrus hop bombs like Thornbridge Jaipur or the Goose Island IPA from a few days ago.
In fact this is a more subtle and complex brew, where the toasty malty flavours are given equal billing with the hops. That said, it’s still very hoppy, as befits an IPA, so it’s really quite a strongly flavoured beer, with a lot of layers to it.
Lightly chilled, Marston’s Old Empire is a perfect curry quencher, but as it warms up there’s more and more to savour. Definitely a favourite.
Now, this one I really have been looking forward to, not least because I already know it’s a cracker. This is not my first encounter with Brakspear Triple.
Brakspear are based in Oxfordshire and are known for some fairly well-regarded bitters, none of which I’ve tried, but this is their extra special premium beer. It’s painstakingly crafted: double dropped, triple hopped then thrice fermented and nicely presented in individually numbered bottles.
Let’s see if it was worth the effort.
Triple pours a lovely golden ruby colour, with more of a lacing than an actual head. It smells rich, toasty and promisingly boozy.
It tastes of, well, more booze, but it’s a lovely Christmas cakey, sherryish, mince pie sort of booze. There’s a long-lasting and pleasingly bitter finish, offset by just the right amount of butterscotch sweetness.
Brakspear Triple is a complex and decadent yet smooth beer which slips down a lot more easily than its potent 6.7% alcohol payload would suggest, making it dangerously moreish.
An absolute treat.
Incidentally, readers who enjoyed Brakspear Triple may also like to check out the quite similar, and equally lovely Little Brew Ruby. Little Brew is essentially one bloke named Stu, currently making some of the very best beer in London.
Masham in North Yorkshire is a tiny market town that lives and breathes beer, perhaps almost literally. With two significant breweries – the Black Sheep brewery, and its older brother, Theakston – between a population of barely over 1,200 people, the air must be potent with the aromas of the brewing process.
Masham’s most famous export is unquestionably Theakston’s Old Peculier, a genuine legend which will be deeply familiar to most beer lovers, myself included.
Old Peculier absolutely must be served at room temperature to really appreciate its depth and complexity. This is a thick, dark, strong Old Ale with roasty, toasty and smoky fruit flavours and a respectable 5.6% ABV.
There is nothing wimpy about this beer whatsoever, but it’s remarkably easy drinking, as the hop flavours are subtle enough to avoid a lot of bitterness, quite in contrast to something like an IPA. It’s really quite moreish, but I think Old Peculier is a perfect beer to be slowly savoured by the fire.
Best of all Old Peculier is available almost everywhere. I found this bottle in the least glamorous of convenience stores. It wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last!
I haven’t been looking forward to this one. In fact, the only reason it has cropped up quite so early on is that I wanted to get it out of the way. That, plus it is available in my corner shop. It’s to their credit that they stock such a wide range of real ales, and it’s not their fault that this one is banana flavoured.
You read that right, this is a banana flavoured beer. But it’s in The Book, so let’s hold our noses and get this over and done with.
There really isn’t much to say about this, other than it’s an unexceptional bitter which has been artificially flavoured with banana. That’s what it smells like, and that’s what it tastes like.
The underlying beer is pretty bland and watery, since no brewer in their right mind would waste a batch of good ale this way. The banana flavour tastes nothing like actual bananas, and everything like those yellow foam sweets you used to get as a kid. The only saving grace is that it is less sweet than I expected.
This isn’t my thing, and more objectively, I really don’t see who this beer is aimed at or what the point is. Judging by the dust collecting on the bottles in the shop, not many people do.
This is the first of the 300 beers that I tend to drink from time to time even when I’m not obliged to by this ridiculous challenge.
Shepherd Neame Bishop’s Finger is a bit of a classic. It’s a Best Bitter and has been brewed in Kent since 1958, but only on Fridays, for some reason. I’m led to believe that it’s the only British beer to be granted a Protected Geographical Indication by the EU, meaning that only Bishop’s Finger may call itself a “Kentish Strong Ale”.
It’s a distinctly dark and full-flavoured brew, which is no bad thing in my book. It packs in hefty malt, dried fruit and hop flavours along with an interesting wine-like finish. There’s a lot going on, but it really does combine into a balanced whole.
Bishop’s Finger would go particularly well with traditional food, such as a hearty beef casserole or game sausages and mash.
Highly recommended, and relatively easy to find these days too. I picked it up in my local corner shop along with a couple of other goodies that I’ll be sharing with you before long.
