Kommen sie bitte und listen to Kraftwerk

It is that Oktoberfest time of the year 'Lager! Lager! Lager!'
Now shouting out:
'IPA IPA IPA' with the continuing Hipster trend for the big hop profile American craft ales.
So let me get this straight from the offset, I know a bit about history, I know a little about beer and I know a tiny bit about brewing history.  I started off drinking bitter in the early nineties, was it my dad being a real ale fan? Was it me being into the alternative music scene and not wanting a beer as trendy and as vapid pop acts and boy bands? Was it I liked beer with some flavour?  So bitter was proper northerner, dark mild was proper granddad, lager was part poser part hooligan and IPA was a distant dream where American beer had flavour or proper great, great, great granddad's beer.

Just a second? Bitter must have come into being at the start of the twentieth century. Lager was being stored away in Germany from way before it made it to the UK in 1835. IPA was being sent over with the troops from 1840. However, dark mild must have been the new thing from beer pumps from about the nineteen thirties, so it was a granddad drink because our granddads were drinking it first.

There you have it, what's new is old, what's old isn't so old and I'm wanting some beer. It's Oktoberfest so I'm sampling lagers of varying price & origin and also looking at US craft style beer on a budget.

Let's start with US craft style. It's easy to hate on Hipsters, whilst musing on this social trend was working on the ideal that they were trying to ditch conformity whilst creating their own rigid set of what is acceptable, but isn't that any counter culture? What they have lost with a declining music industry they have gained with a golden era of beer brewing, however with austerity looking here at budget US craft style beverages with one top range for comparison.

Brains Craft Brewery's Black Mountain, £1.29 for a 330ml can from Lidl. The can promises a black IPA, a style that makes you ponder, where does that end and hoppy porter begin, well it isn't here. Luckily not a total wash out, just delivers more of an above average dark mild.

DE14's Fight Suit, £1.29 for a 330ml can from Morrisons. Owned by Marston's, their small brew set has made some good beers, this however is not one of them. It's aroma is of over used pencil eraser and tastes like flat unsweetened Tizer.

Bad Co Brewing's West Coast Pale, £1.29 for a 330ml can from Asda. West Coast? What like Blackpool? It's more North West Bitter, which is drinkable and better than average but it is like selling barm cakes as brioche rolls.

Crate's IPA, £1.80 for a 330ml can from Tesco. Actually a decent quality US style IPA, solid body giving a biscuit like malt base to highlight the classic grapefruit flavour.  Close, so close lets say B plus (The Session IPA pictured).

Torrside's Monster's Double Spartacus, around  £5 independent retailers. Thirteen percent abv, bottle conditioned, near perfect balance and flavour proving for genuinely authentic US craft, really, you need to buy top quality local (for hop freshness) or top quality American import.



Its also easy to be overly judgemental on lager drinkers. Drink what you enjoy even if that's big brand lager. What we have here is craft and import lagers, not all budget & not all from the UK. Do they give you more flavour than the big brand bland? Let's find out!

Bad Co Brewing's Perfect Pilsner, £1.29 for a 330ml can from Asda. Perfect, no. Drinkable, definitely. Enjoyable, slightly. However, it does bring to mind a near perfect pilsner, we'll discuss it later.

Frankfurter Brauhaus' Perlenbacher Hefeweissbier, 99p for a 500ml can from Lidl. Okay, stretching lager to include German bier so I get some variety. A decent bier for the price, I like it because there's wheat & clove but little banana. I'm with Kyle from South Park there, I hate banana.

Privatbrauerei Eichbaum's Festbier, 99p for a 500ml can from Lidl. Basically the flavour comes out like a malty strong best bitter. This I quite like it but will lager drinkers?

Fourpure's Treeline, £1.80 for a 330ml can from Tesco. An India pale lager, IPL Now regardless of top or bottom fermenting, yeasts and malts all of the India pale lagers that I've had up to now, when it comes to the actual drinking, with the higher hop profiles have been like session IPAs. I think the bigger five point nine percent abv takes us away from that. Like a lime cheesecake, not massively flavoured but not tasteless, cream, biscuit and citrus.

 

Cheshire Brewhouse's Dane'ish, £3ish, independent retailers. I'm not a big lager fan but the bottle conditioning and the quality ingredients shine through. Nice aroma with obviously malt led subtle flavours with some Saaz hops and bitterness but all very subtle and extremely refreshing and  near perfect mouthfeel. This is what I will expect from now on from lager. WOW!

So there you go, whatever the popular trend, when it comes to the actual supping, you can't beat genuine authenticity and quality ingredients.

Seven year itch satisfied by two thousand five hundred beers!

September 2011, there is a real ale fan, let's call him Bevis. He's given up smoking for a year, doesn't go to the pub often due to restraints and needs a distraction to give up the nicotine patches. Right, I can't do that awful third person anymore! I had grown dissatisfied of beer that isn't real ale and the only bottle conditioned beers, well I was fed up with Worthington White Shield, couldn't find Moorland's Hen's Tooth anymore and Guinness Original had stopped being bottle conditioned.

So I'm doing the usual shop in Tesco and have accidentally wandered into the beer aisle. I see Anchor Steam, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale & Coopers Original for the first time. I laugh, American beer, that sickly watery flavourless joke. Australia? Like Fosters? I buy a bottle of each along with Brewdog Punk and Alice Porter with the intention of proving my prejudgement of them being bland beverages with no place to call themselves ales or with Brewdog associating with the word Punk. I'm gonna mercilessly rip the piss out of them on social media too.

How wrong I was!  Anchor Steam was so much better than Newquay Steam from nearly twenty years ago. Cooper's Original Pale Ale was like a good pint of real ale from a good pub. Sierra Nevada's Pale Ale blew me away with subtle hops, solid malt base & round body.  Yes I did go onto social media but it was to sing the praises of bottled beer from a supermarket shelf. The Brewdog beers were decent enough too but the other bottles had stolen my heart.

So the journey went from there, discovering microbrewers with smaller batches, better ingredients and superior bottle conditioning. First I found from Timperley Corks Out, an independent wine shop, Wincle, a brewer that bridged from real ale to the new craft beer movement. Then the Beeradvocate website. Then the Beers Manchester blog including so many great obscure alternative music references that it grabbed me and got me involved in the Independent Salford Beerfest. That brought me in contact with the Manchester Aleman (that now runs Heaton Hops) and that the North West had more than just Marble brewpub. My locale had Cheshire Brewhouse, Rammycraft, Torrside, Beer Nouveau and Vocation beers ontap. Occasional visits to Port Street Bar hilighting cask as among the best beer.

I really have to recommend that you get to a proper bottle shop and try out one of Cheshire Brewhouse's Govinda IPAs or Torrside's Monsters (strong ales from the dark side).  Or get down to Beer Nouvea's brewtap for proper real ale from a wooden cask. It's a treat that I wholeheartedly believe makes life a little less weary.

For my number 2500 unique recorded beer, I chose Weird Beard's Hello Grisette Me You’re Looking For, a spirited refreshing beer and I wanted something from Beermoth or The Epicurean for that significant numbered beer. There may be local brewers nearer that might be a little closer to my heart but Weird Beard brews have been accessible and innovative. I also love them for their support of Salford Beer Festival.

But let's get back to the practicalities of beer from the here and now, heading back to the shelve's of Tesco. There are ramping up their craft range and offering 3 for £5.25. Fruity brews seeming to be the main thrust.
Brewdog's Quench Quake, Grapefruit and Tangerine Sour that tastes somewhere between sour jelly sweets & citrus fruit wine. Nice but 'In Bed with Madonna' nice.

Thornbridge's Fresa, brewed in collaboration with Fourpure and my first strawberry milkshake IPA. Some strawberry ice cream flavour but it's battling the grapefruit IPA. Interesting.

Innis & Gunn's Mangoes on the Run, aside from the punny name, is I&G a Macrobrewer? A limited edition, so limited it's been around for four months in a variety of can sizes. The end result is like John Smith's Smooth with a splash of cordial.

Hop Stuff's Juicy Fruit, a 440ml can brewed in collaboration with North Brewing Co. Promising, Guava & passionfruit, which is there in a real fruit juice tasting beer but the aroma, it's like a day old fried egg. I had to drink it from a shot glass to overcome the smell.

So where do we go from here, is it down to a lake of beer? I'd like to get 750 unique breweries, cover every available style of beer. Five thousand different beers? I don't know but it goes on, so, never mind the cheering, get the fucking beer in!