Craft Beer World, now and then

In the very first post on this blog, I acknowledged Mark Dredge’s book Craft Beer World as instrumental in changing the way I drink, and think about, beer. I found it around the time I first dipped a toe into the possibilities of beer outside of macro lager, and it enchanted me. When the book was published in 2013, Brighton already had several craft-leaning pubs, and beer started to take up more and more of my headspace.

I was transported back to that time when I read that Mark was releasing a sequel, The New Craft Beer World. I imagined a version of myself, seven years younger or maybe, in a much sadder scenario, stuck in the same dead-end retail job in which I first encountered Craft Beer World and with Holsten Pils still my favourite beer. What would that beer world look like now, and how would it compare to 2013?

Beer styles is one obvious change, and the most significant omission from the 2013 edition is the New England IPA, simply because it didn’t exist at the time of writing. Hazy IPAs are now so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget what a recent development they really are (although proto-NEIPA Heady Topper is included in the American Imperial IPA section.)

The descriptions of the other beers in the IPA chapters of the book seem pretty old-school today. The word “juicy” doesn’t feature once, and some of today’s most sought-after hop varieties are notable by their absence, too – although Citra features, it’s outnumbered by Cascade; none of the beers included use Mosaic, which was commercially available but far from commonplace in 2013.

Mark also points out that in 2021, “the IPA family has got a lot broader in general”. In the original edition, there was much less distinction between IPA sub-styles; in the recent update we have beers labelled West Coast, East Coast and even Northwest IPA, with a double page spread dedicated to sorting through the regional IPAs of America.

Today’s other style du jour, the pastry stout, is also pretty much absent in the first book. Again, a trailblazing beer does feature – Three Floyd’s “blockbuster” imperial stout, Dark Lord – but there’s little hint of the coming blurring of lines between beer and confectionary. A section entitled ‘German Curiosities’ includes examples of Gose and Berliner Weisse which seemed impossibly obscure at the time – most of the beers listed are American and very few, if any, UK breweries were making these styles then. Their current popularity would have been difficult to predict, as would the recent tendency to load them with smoothie-like fruit purees and lactose.

“Visually beer is so different now, with all the colourful cans and the opaque orange glasses of IPA,” Mark tells me, suggesting that the visual impact of some styles might be the secret of their success. “I don’t think hazy IPAs or thick fruit sours would be as popular if it weren’t for things like Instagram and Untappd.” I’m just an armchair commentator, and from where I’m sitting, it’s can be difficult to tell which styles are actually popular with a broad range of drinkers and which are the most Instagram-able. It’s hard to know whether someone in the position I was in 2013, picking up The New Craft Beer World as an guide to navigate craft beer, would even know about fruit smoothie sours.

The accessibility of craft beer is, one obvious change that has occurred in the intervening years between Craft Beer World and its sequel. “Back in 2012 when I wrote the book there were only a few places where I could buy or order interesting beers”, Mark says, “it’s now become normal to find great beer everywhere.”

Back then, I probably wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me that in the not too distant future, I’d be picking up a can of Mikkeller’s American Dream lager during my weekly shop at Sainsbury’s. I certainly wouldn’t have believed that I would purchase said can only once before losing interest, such is the variety of craft beer in 2021. (I would also have been pretty shocked to hear that Mikkeller would then end up on a personal list of boycotted breweries after accusations of harassment, bullying and misogyny, but that’s another story…)

If we consider the greater accessibility of craft beer, there is one big elephant in the room – corporate take-overs. Some of the breweries featured in Craft Beer World really are everywhere now. In some cases, that’s a great thing. Camden Hells is a small miracle, wedged as it is between pumps for Kronenbourg and Amstel all over the UK, frequently the only decent beer on the bar.

But at the same time, selling out to a multi-national can render a brewery’s output permanently uninteresting. I would place both Meantime and Beavertown in this category – note that both are included in Craft Beer World for excellent porters which have since vanished from their line-up.

Some of the beers and breweries featured here have become very easy to find, but in happier circumstances. Take Yeastie Boys, who feature in the original book several times – I was so intrigued by them. They’re from New Zealand, of all places! And they’re named after the Beastie Boys! They are now, happily, partly a UK-based operation, and I need daydream no more about how their beers might taste.

That’s good news, of course. But the greater visibility plus the sheer number of breweries there are now does mean a certain lost romance. I asked Mark if there was anything he missed about craft beer in 2013, and he replied, “ten years ago, there were a lot of beers which I’d never tasted but I’d read about them online and I have really visceral memories of imagining how they’d taste and longing to drink them. There was something thrilling about the beers I’d never tasted.” That happens less and less in today’s craft beer world.

Whilst I can confirm that Mark’s infectious enthusiasm shines through just as clearly as ever in the new book, it is easy to become jaded. But for me, the beers listed in Craft Beer World still hold an indelible romance. The pages are so well-thumbed that I will recognise a beer from the book instantly – if I find one I haven’t tried, it becomes an essential purchase.

I was able, recently, to get in another tick, albeit in a round-about way. Some of the breweries in the original book are no longer with us, such as Boston’s Pretty Things. Conveniently for me, Boston’s loss was Sheffield’s gain, and the same people are behind St. Mars of the Desert. Not only that, but they’ve revived some old favourites. So, seven years later I can finally say I have tasted Jack d’Or saison – and it was every bit as good as I’d hoped.

I doubt I’ll be quite so dedicated to hunting down all the beers in the new edition – but for some readers, this book will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship with beer.

The New Craft Beer World is out now. For what it's worth, I bought my own copy. Thanks very much to Mark for answering my questions.

Do you remember drinking Friary Meux?

 

For the past six months or so, I've been digging for information on the Friary Brewery in Guildford. In 1956 it merged with the Meux brewery to become Friary Meux, and was taken over by Allied Brewers in 1964.

Deep Google searches and newspaper archives are bringing up lots of fascinating stuff on the history of the brewery, but it's much more difficult to find any material on the beers themselves.

So I thought I'd put out an appeal. Do you remember drinking Friary Meux beers? 

Any first-hand recollections would be hugely appreciated. Leave a comment, or if you prefer, drop me a line at joetindall at hotmail dot com. 

I know very well, but all the same...

Our ability to succumb to the immersive illusion of fiction film is often referred to as ‘suspension of disbelief’. From what I remember from my time as a Film Studies student, Christian Metz tells it differently – we don’t simply switch off the part of our brain that consciously knows that the world playing out on the screen isn’t real. For Metz, it might be more accurate to say that we allow ourselves to become immersed in the film, whilst simultaneously marvelling at the workings of the ‘machine’ that enchants us.

Borrowing a phrase from psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, Metz suggests that the viewer in the cinema tells themselves “I know very well, but all the same…” This is what I tell myself when I drink alcohol-free beer.

A common retort to alcohol-free beer is that other drinks, naturally lacking booze, are available. Rather than have a beer you could just drink tea, sparkling water, juice, and so on. This is a reasonable point, except it supposes that beer is merely a drink. Especially in the current miserable circumstances, it is also often part of a special sort of personal ritual, signalling the moment when the working day is done, dinner’s eaten and the washing up done. The point at which I sit down on my sofa and enjoy a couple of hours of freedom. These moments are important – they’re pretty much as good as it gets at present - and deserve some ceremony. But at the same time, I don’t want to drink every day.

So I might sit back with an alcohol-free beer instead. On one level, I am trying to suspend disbelief, buying into the fantasy that I’m relaxing with a ‘real’ beer. If it’s no good, the illusion is shattered. But at the same time, the very fact that I am assessing whether the beer is good or not means that the illusion is never total. And if the beer is good, I might find myself thinking, “hey, this actually tastes like beer! How did they do that?” Like Metz’s film audience, I am both allowing myself to be swept up in the illusion, whilst also admiring the brewery’s ability to sweep me up in the first place.

All of this means it is difficult to assess the quality of alcohol-free beer from a neutral standpoint. Beer is never going to taste the same once you take the booze out; equally it’s easy to overrate some examples just for tasting vaguely decent. There’s no accounting for taste, but I have seen people whose opinions and palates I trust very highly raving about a 0.5% stout that I poured down the sink because it tasted like damp sticks.

I wanted to write something on this subject that says something beyond, “some alcohol free beers are nice, actually.” So what follows is a brief attempt to categorise the sub-genres I’ve found on my travels through the 0.0 – 0.5% beer world.

The watery ones

If you had never tried an alcohol-free beer, but had to guess what one is like, I think you might assume they were watery and bland. In many instances you’d be right. Some examples go beyond mere blandness and are actually quite impressive in terms of their near-total absence of flavour. Brewdog’s Nanny State, for example, has a promising hop aroma which briefly translates to the palate before fading to absolutely nothing. California Uncommon, from AF-beer specialists Mash Gang, does it the other way round. Bizarrely sold as an alcohol-free malt liquor, which is meaningless gibberish, it starts off tasting like straight-up H20, but then a hollow ghost-flavour of toasted malt niggles at you in the finish. Both are pretty unsatisfying.

The sweet ones

AF beer often has a lot of residual sweetness. This sounds unpleasant, and in some cases it is – dry-hopped wort, anyone? But in others it works very well. Hoppy styles seem to particularly benefit from the extra body this brings, and the sweetness rounds out the flavour and offers a good foundation for hop character to assert itself. Mikkeller’s Weird Weather is the best alcohol-free IPA I’ve encountered so far. Allow for the extra sweetness and it is convincingly beery, with juicy stone fruit notes and a citrus kick in the finish.

The various IPAs from Coast are quite similar, perhaps because they are also contract brewed at De Proefbrouwerij in Belgium. Their standard IPA has an odd strawberry jam flavour which is quite pleasant but not likely to let you forget that that’s merely near-beer in your glass. A recent range of single-hopped beers are much better, with much more precise hop flavour.

One big success in this area was the short-lived Guinness 0.0, which had a sweetness that would stop the flagship product from tasting so acrid and bland. Famously withdrawn in record time due to disconcerting possibilities of contamination (announced just slowly enough for me to finish a 4-pack), I hope it’ll return in a form fit for human consumption.

The ones with lactose

Picture the scene; the brewing team are sitting around having a post-shift pint, pondering a potential new line.

"I think we need to diversify our range and make it as inclusive as possible. We should make an alcohol free beer – lots of people are more mindful about their drinking these days and we don’t want to alienate customers."

"Great idea! And let's put dairy products in it!"

Look, I don’t want to get militant vegan on you, but I do think its safe to say in the current climate emergency, we all have a responsibility to think again about our consumption of products that derive from intensive animal farming. May I suggest that milk in an alcohol free lager is just about the most pointless, wasteful use of animal products imaginable?

The ones with adjuncts

One way to paper over the less convincing elements in alcohol-free beer is to add in some additional flavours. This is a delicate balancing act. It’s already not real beer; take the adjuncts too far and you end up with a sort of simulacrum that supposedly simulating beer, whilst predominantly tasting of grapefruit, or coffee, or rhubarb and custard sweets.

When done right, though, this is perhaps the most enjoying and deceptively beery category of them all. Non-alcoholic stouts are tough to pull off, and a lot of those I've tried just taste like malt extract, if not Marmite. However the aforementioned Mikkeller’s coffee-infused Beer Geek Flat White 0.3% is superb and I had settled on this being my go-to school night treat until I bought 4 bottles, all of which were infected and sour. I'll try again soon and hope that was a dud batch. Hamburg’s Kehrwieder also do wonderful things with coffee in their Road Runner porter.

On the fruity end of the spectrum, I’m a big fan of Lowlander’s 0.0 Wit (another brewed under contract at De Proefbrouwerij, who clearly know their stuff). Made with waste lemons and limes from bars, this threatens to teeter into fizzy pop territory, but retains an element of rustic wheat that hits the spot. Another shout for Mikkeller, too – they’re the best in the AF game, for my money – whose Limbo series of fruited sours is superb. Riesling is the pick of the bunch for me, with a complexity and dryness that almost matches its boozy equivalents.

And the others

Then there are some beers that don’t fit really fit into any of the sub-genres outlined above. Two recent highlights come from UK brewers. Signature Brew recently released Lo-fi (DISCLAIMER - my samples were gifted by the brewery), which although maybe slightly on the thin side, could never been accused of being watery. It’s billed as a New England IPA, and does a good impression of one. This includes a couple of the less desirable tendencies of that style; tropical notes not quite gelling with savoury caraway, and a touch of asprin-like hop burn, but these are minor enough to overlook. It’s good fun and I’d definitely add it to my regular weeknight rotation.

Ridgeside’s Currant Wisdom is a sour so heavily fruited that the blackcurrant and apricot qualify as stars of the show, rather than adjuncts. It starts off a little watery, but the sour fruit tang soon overpowers that, whilst a smooth vanilla note fills out the middle.

So there you go. Some alcohol-free beers are nice, actually.