The Session 120 Round-up

For The Session this month, I asked beer bloggers to write on the deliberately broad topic, 'brown beer'. The idea was to direct attention to a group of beers (brown ale, bitter, mild, dunkel) that are often overlooked and underrated. Thank you to all those who contributed - I'm delighted with both the quality and diversity of the responses.

Alec Latham at Mostly About Beer got the ball rolling with a characteristically philosophical approach to Tring Brewery's wonderful Death or Glory barley wine.

"This is where the beer was conceived and grew up. It isn’t refreshing but nourishing. It makes sense here in the biting jaws of January to help relax, thaw out and loosen sinews. It would make no sense in Sydney or in Palm Beach. It might have been fate that it was originally brewed at the end of October – just as we say goodbye to the sun and beer gardens."

Boak and Bailey took a "stream-of-consciousness" approach, pondering the colour brown, its associations and its meaning in beer.

"Back in the 1990s Sean Franklin of Rosster's ditched brown in favour of pale because he wanted a blank canvas on which hops could shine. If pale is blank, is brown noise? Or texture? Texture can be good. Noise too. There's a reason people put dirty old Polaroid filters on their iPhone photos."

Gareth at Barrel Aged Leeds sampled a couple of forward-thinking modern incarnations of brown ale.

"Instead of digging up the time capsule and finding nothing but a mouldy newspaper and a badly spelled letter, I picked up two bottles I thought would be at distant ends of the modern brown ale scale."

Andreas Krennmair at Daft Eejit Brewing offered up a traditional recipe for a dunkel lager which had me longing for a huge glass of brown beer in a shady beer garden.

"The resulting beer may not be cool, neither in the hip beer scene nor in the conservative Bavarian beer culture, but it's nevertheless a great beer style. If you're too lazy to brew it yours, here's my suggestion for a fantastic example of the style: Augustiner Dunkel. At 5.6% ABV, it is spicy, malty, with hints of chocolate and licorice, but never sweet."

Lisa Grimm's account of her relationship with brown beer acknowledges a British influence on her preferences and palate.

"I discovered that 'the good stuff' was often simply from a local family brewery, and they didn't always make enough to export. But I loved my go-to beers, even if they weren't 'fancy' - a pint of Theakston's Best, Brains Dark, Moorhouse's Black Cat, Lancaster Bomber. I tended to go for beers on a chestnut-to-dark-brown continuum, and while I do go for more variety today, overall, that pattern still seems to hold."

David J Bascombe found himself pining for the simple pleasures of a pint of bitter after moving to the US.

"I have been in the USA for just over a year now. I have found many good IPAs, and many good stouts. Brown beers, or rather beers resembling the sort of beer I could easily find back home are somewhat harder to come by. This makes me think that brown beer, or rather an English bitter in this case, is something I (and possibly many others) take for granted."

Roger Mueller at Bottled Roger's Beers somehow compares brown beer to Audrey Hepburn's hat. It makes sense in context.

The Beer Nut evangelises the brown malt porter, reviewing an example from Ireland's Galway Bay brewery.

"Among the handful of beer recipes I brew repeatedly at home is a low-gravity job I call a brown porter. It uses brown malt as the primary speciality malt - about 10% or so of the grist - seasoned with just a token bit of roast barley or black patent. I love the moreish mocha flavour that brown malt delivers when used in sufficient quantity, and it's something that one rarely seems to encounter in commercial beers. Until a couple of weeks ago, anyway."

Also in Ireland, Reuben at Tale of Ale praises the humble dark mild, focusing on an example from Dungarvan Brewing.

"The mild is a little thought of style these days and there are very few of them ever released in Ireland. They do make the perfect cask ale though and I find them a little more complex than your average pale ale/bitter but easier to drink than a stout. There's something comforting about a good mild ale. One of my favourite UK commercial examples is Thwaites Nutty Black on cask. It doesn't rate very highly on beer rating websites, but then again, do any milds?

Derick Peterman at Ramblings of a Beer Runner gives his own potted history of brown ale appreciation, from Samuel Smith's to local brews from his native California.

"One could derisively call brown ales the cockroaches of beer, continuing to persist despite commercially eradicative indifference. The thing is about brown ales are, whether in traditional form, modern renditions, or contemporary reworkings, they have their passionate believers."

Stan Hieronymus at Appellation Beer turns the 'brown beer' topic on its head somewhat.

"I might not be thinking about this in the right way. I understand the definition of "brown ale" and the variants, but I don't think "I'll have a brown beer" when I am considering what to drink next. Whatever brown brings to beer is part of a matrix."

F.D. Hofer at Tempest in a Tankard investigates a fascinating range of brown ales, including some particularly intriguing examples from Austria,

At Tuesday Pints, a personal history of brown ale appreciation, and notably another American blogger to name Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale as an influence.

"I drink more IPAs than anyone really needs to these days - they're inescapable. Much like many relationships, we never had a falling out, but we drifted apart. I'd say hello every now and then but mostly sought out the new and exciting barrel aged sour and didn't have time for this steady ale. I honestly don't remember the last time I brought a bottle home. So, as I write, I am also enjoying a fine pint of Nut Brown."

John Abernathy at The Brew Site also chose to focus on brown ales.

At Deep Beer, a consideration of Dogfish Head's Palo Santo Marron, a strong wood-aged brown ale which sounds very interesting indeed.

"I find this beer fascinating not only as a wonderful drink to enjoy, but also for the effort exerted to bring it into being. The fusion of the the wood and beer, ancient culture and domestication makes me pause as I sip it in - and not only because its 12% ABV. Not all browns are created equal."

And finally, my own contribution - a quick look at Brick Field Brown, a new addition to The Five Points' portfolio.

"Just beer"; struggling for words to describe pale lager

Recently, after enjoying a bottle of Hell from Bamberg’s Keesman brewery, I attempted to throw together some quick tasting notes for an Untappd check-in. Here’s what I eventually came up with;

“Fresh biscuits & steamed broccoli aroma. Tangy biscuit malt, refreshing carbonation, mineral bitterness in the finish. Wish I had another.”

I threw in the last sentence because I felt that those preceding it failed to a) communicate that I had actually very much enjoyed the beer, or b) make it sound like anything anybody would ever want to drink. Whilst these notes accurately represent my experience of drinking the Hell (I didn't claim to be tasting things I wasn't really tasting), the truth is I was desperately grasping for anything to usefully say about it. That doesn't mean it was boring or unremarkable – I'm just starting to realise that I have a hard time describing the experience of pale lager.

One reason for this might be that pale lager is pretty much my base point for what “beer” means. Since lager is the dominant beer in our culture, this is not unusual; a Google image search for the term ‘beer’ results in pages and pages of  images of foaming glasses of lager, sometimes joined by other glasses of varying ale-like colours but never absent. The first beers I ever tasted were lagers, and lager was almost all I drank between my teenage years and my early twenties.

The result of this is that lager is, often, “just lager”. In my discovery of good beer (revelatory pint of Camden Hells notwithstanding), it took a long time to separate good lager from bad, even if the contrast is night and day to me at this point. I would argue that the differences between macro fizz and properly brewed lager are far more subtle than between, say, Punk IPA and (what I then perceived to be) a boring cask bitter.

But then lager is subtle, even at its most sublime. And that’s definitely part of why I'm lost for words when it’s time to write about one – I recently had the same issue trying to write about mild, a similarly non-imposing style. The complexity of a barrel-aged imperial stout means that tasting notes write themselves. Drinking one, there’s so much going on that you hardly have time to jot down one thought before another hits you. Lager is comparatively simple – this is a large part of its appeal, but it doesn't make for great writing.

There are certain stock phrases and descriptors I keep going back to in my blundering attempts to describe the lager experience, of which crisp is probably the laziest. I know what I mean by it – a suggestion of freshness as well as refreshment, like biting into a juicy, crunchy apple. But in this context, the word has a whiff of corporate copy about it – words like ‘crisp’, ‘cool’ and ‘refreshing’ are often used in advertising macro lagers, presumably as they divert attention away from the lack of actual flavour in most of these products.

Similarly, I know what I mean when I say a lager is clean. A well-made lager given plenty of time to mature has a certain purity to it, and those brewed with less attention to quality don’t – they often have distracting notes of sweetcorn or cabbage, or are weirdly, synthetically sweet or metallic. But it doesn't apply to all great lagers; I love Pilsner Urquell, but it’s big ol’ scoop of diacetyl adds a complexity which, whilst it might not be exactly dirty, isn't clean either.

I mentioned biscuits in reference to the Keesman beer that prompted this post, and variations on biscuity seem to pop up often in tasting notes. There are probably more varieties of biscuits than there are styles of beer, making this about as useful a statement as ‘tastes like beer’. But it does, at least for me, mean something specific. Think of Maltesers. Now, ignore the chocolate (or imagine you've nibbled it off) and focus on the biscuit ball within. There is a specific malty tang within that biscuit that is exactly what I'm referring to when I say ‘biscuity’, and I find that particular flavour in a lot of lagers (obviously malt flavour is part of it, but there’s more to it than that). Until I can find a way to sum that up succinctly and pithily, lager will remain forever ‘biscuity’ for me.

So pale lager, much as I love it, probably won’t be inspiring any upcoming poetry collections.  

The Fatal Glass of Beer

I am a man who enjoys beer, and enjoys reading beer blogs, so I thought I’d start my own. I don’t claim to be an expert, just an enthusiastic consumer.

I’ve named the blog after a film I’ve never seen. Well, actually, I have seen it now, since I felt I should if I was going to steal its title. It’s a short comedy starring W.C. Fields.

Some years ago, when I was taking a course on Hollywood comedy at university, I was supposed to see the film in a programme of shorts, but when I arrived at the screening, nobody could get the DVD to work. I began to guess as to the content of  the mysterious film, and suggested to a friend that perhaps it was about the ill-advised pint that can take you from pleasantly refreshed into stumbling, dropping-your-chips-on-your-way-home wooziness. I began to refer to this as ‘the fatal pint’ and was often heard to say things like “I’m not sure whether I should have another; it could be the fatal pint” or even, foolishly,  “I think I’m drinking the pint after the fatal pint.” Of course this behaviour should not celebrated, even if it was fun at the time, but it’s one of the reasons the W.C. Fields title stuck.

There was another fatal glass of beer, though, that is perhaps more relevant to this blog, which I drank a couple of years ago. I’d begun to take something of an interest in beer, developing a fondness for Dark Star’s core range and sampling the occasional American import, when the shop I work at began stocking Mark Dredge’s Craft Beer World. On a slow afternoon at work, I very professionally leant on the counter and got stuck in, dazzled by the variety of beers chronicled, itching to taste them, but finally concluding that I was unlikely to find any of the beers featured in the book. As I headed over to Craft in Brighton to meet a friend, however, I was delighted to see one of the titles I’d read about that afternoon was on the bar. It was Camden Hells. I ordered a pint, and was knocked out by its cleanness, its freshness, its fullness of flavour, and I vowed that another can of Holsten Pils would never touch my lips.

This glass of beer, then, was ‘fatal’ in the sense that it sealed my fate as a beer obsessive. Obsessive is a relative term, of course, and I’m sure I’m an absolute dilettante compared to most beer bloggers. But in my own mind, beer is pretty dominant, something I think about all the time. I am, however, starting to feel a little guilty about boring my girlfriend, friends and family to death rabbiting on about it. So the fatal glass of Camden Hells leads me here. More to come.