12 Beers of Christmas - Day Seven - BrewDog Paradox Heaven Hill

Day Seven – BrewDog Paradox Heaven Hill (UK, 15%)

Having incorporated writing and posting a blog into the Christmas day festivities, on Boxing Day I was too busy having a nice time eating and hanging out with family to worry about blogging. I did manage to drink my intended beer, though, so I hope to post twice today to catch up.

Paradox is a range of imperial stouts each aged in a barrel from a different whiske/y distillery, and this incarnation spent time in casks from Kentucky’s last family-owned bourbon distillery, Heaven Hill. As the old-school BrewDog branding suggests, I’ve held onto this one for a while, partly because of its eye-popping ABV and partly because I thought that time might smooth out the intense bourbon flavour a little.

Whether that plan paid off or not, there’s still plenty of bourbon here, but I’m not complaining. The aroma is bold and boozy, a blast of vanilla fudge with occasional hints of blue cheese funk. The initial taste is pure bourbon – more of that vanilla, lots of caramel and a hint of honey. It’s very sweet and ever more so as it warms, but as your palate adjusts to the bourbon, the base stout offers a touch of burnt, treacly bitterness which just about balances it out. The body is full and the mouthful thick and slightly oily, with carbonation thankfully kept to a minimum, all of this encouraging a slow, contemplative approach; get carried away with too eager a glug and you’re chastised by an intense alcohol burn, but sip gently and this is largely absent. Nevertheless, as well executed as this is, it’s an intense experience, and even half of the 330ml bottle was a little too much for me.

Brown ale: some final observations

Since starting this blog, I've rattled on about brown ale a fair amount. I feel I've done the subject to death, but I've also spent so much time obsessing over it that I still have things to say. Despite the stylistic diversity of brown ale, there are noticeable trends within the style. As the final word on brown ale for this blog, I propose a series of sub-categories. Bear in mind I'm not taking myself totally seriously in this – brown ale is obscure enough as it is without being chopped up into micro-styles. It’s just a way of presenting the continuities across the various examples of the style I've tasted in the past year or so.

I still try any new brown ale I see. If a local pub tweets that they’re serving one, or a brewery announces they’re making one, I’ll be making mental calculations as to how I can get to try it. It’s a uniquely fascinating style precisely because nobody seems to agree on exactly what it is. 

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Your average beginners guide to beer styles tends to split brown ale into two categories – the sweet, low-gravity ales of the South of England, and the stronger, dry brown ales of the North. The truth is more complex; from the re-emergence of the style in the 1920s onwards, the beers were diverse and did not observe this imaginary north/south divide.

As brown ale stands today, archetypal examples of both the sweet/mild and strong-ish/dry versions remain. Mann’s Brown Ale, despite originating as one of the strongest examples of the style, now sits at 2.8% ABV and tastes largely of cola, treacle and toffee. Harvey’s Bloomsbury Brown, also at 2.8% has a strong caramel flavour, and may well be a relic of the days in which brown ale got its colour from caramel. I've never encountered any further examples of the low-gravity version of brown ale, and it’s easy to see why they fell out of favour – they’re interesting as a curiosity, but are bland and not very beery.

Newcastle Brown Ale remains the most commonly cited example of the stronger version. These beers are often dry and often described as ‘nutty’, although I've always thought this this is the power of suggestion at play – the phrase ‘nut brown ale’ is sometimes used to refer to the colour, but I've rarely detected a nutty taste. Newky Brown isn't a good beer, and it’s a shame it’s the only example of the style you’re likely to find in mainstream outlets. Far better is Samuel Smith’s Nut Brown Ale, which has a very dry quality that even veers towards red wine, and a deep, savoury malty body. (Edit; see here for some further interesting background on Newcastle Brown Ale from Martyn Cornell - "not, in any meaningful sense, a brown ale.")

Modern craft breweries have reinterpreted brown ale in several ways. The first sub-group pays homage to the traditional English brown ale, whilst not belonging to either the Mann’s or Newcastle camps. These beers are defined by a soft, comforting malt profile, which might include hints of caramel or toffee, milk chocolate, blackcurrants or blackberries or cola. A little roasted malt may creep in, but this will be more restrained than a porter or stout, and the beers are of a medium body. New-world hops might add a bitter, citrus finish but this will be subtle. Good examples I've tasted recently include Dirty Kitty by Denmark’s Beer Here and Maduro from Cigar City. Port Brewing’s Board Meeting deserves a mention for using these qualities as a foundation for a massive hit of coffee and rich chocolate – it’s terrific.

The ‘American brown ale’ style will take these characteristics and significantly amp up the hops, but not in a way that overpowers the malt backbone. Dark Star’s Rockhead is the best example of this I've tasted, and Fourpure's Beartooth is excellent, too.

Some beers call themselves ‘India brown ale’. What you’re getting here is obvious – a big hit of hops. This is generally my least favourite incarnation, though some are better than others, mainly because the brown ale base is wiped out and you end up with something closer to a black IPA. I would place BrewDog's recent “hopped-up brown ale” prototype in this category – I thought this was a poor beer all round, and tasted of little except overly bitter hops that left a citrus washing-up liquid taste that lasted for ages. Others whose tastes I trust found a lot more to it, so maybe I had an off bottle or my taste buds had an off day - either way, I stand by the assessment that the hop profile dominates everything else. Weird Beard’s No More Bright Ideas, whilst it tastes great, offers little to the brown ale enthusiast – it’s a very dry beer, bursting with vibrant and zesty hop character, but this renders the malt base irrelevant.

There is also a small breed of what appear to be brown ales, but aren't. When I wrote about Brighton Bier’s Free State, billed as “21st century brown” here, I remarked that the nevertheless delicious beer had very little ‘brown’ quality. Brewer Gary Sillence got in touch with me to clarify his intentions - “My main ambition was the break down the mainstream perception that brown beer means dull or old fashioned”, he said, and the beer was never intended to be received as a brown ale as such – his alternative tagline was “brown beer for a new generation”.  Magic Rock’s The Stooge, though billed as an American Brown Ale, seems to be doing much the same thing. It’s a far lighter shade of brown than most examples of the style. You might call its shade 'chestnut' – closer to a bitter (that's it in the photo at the very top of the first, if you'd like to see for yourself). And it drinks like a bitter, too, albeit one hopped with assertive US varieties alongside earthy British staples – the luscious malt character has an easy-drinking crispness to it that doesn't belong to brown ale. Are we at a point when the agonisingly unglamorous name ‘brown ale’ is more fashionable than ‘bitter’?

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I don’t know it just seems this way because I've been actively looking for them, but I'm sure I'm seeing more brown ales than ever recently. With talk of a hop shortage, are breweries falling back on malt-driven styles such as this? In any event, I promise not to drone on about it any longer.

Who shares wins

Sharing beer with friends is great. That sounds obvious, I know, but I hardly ever do it. I sit down to drink with friends often, of course, but beyond the occasional “here, taste this”, or, “can I try a taste of yours?” we don’t share beer, and usually sit together drinking different things. The phenomenon of the bottle share clearly appeals to this desire for a group to experience the same beers together. It’s also a great excuse to actually open some of the special beers in your collection. It’s a near-universally acknowledged truth that once beers have been squirrelled away for a special occasion, this occasion never arrives. Some beers improve with age, but it’s a lot more fun to drink beer than to hide it in a cupboard.

In the absence of a more formally organised bottle share event, I recently invited a couple of friends round for a small but perfectly formed gathering of my own. The idea was to bring a beer that you wanted to share – not necessarily anything expensive or rare, though larger bottles are best, but something that you might not casually crack open and might benefit from some discussion.

We kicked off with Wiper & True’s plum pudding porter. I usually wouldn't start with a dark beer, but before I’d had a chance to raise the issue of sequencing, my friend Scott had eagerly popped the cap off with a lighter. An astringent, roasty bitterness is my first impression – this is something I enjoy in dark beers - followed by a boozy, brandy-like warmth. The plum and other additional flavours are far from overpowering, and in fact I might not have picked them out without being told they were in there. The fruit comes across as a general richness and depth of flavour, and whilst there’s some warming spice in the finish, it stops well short of tacky novelty Christmas beer territory. Classily done.

My own headlining contribution was BrewDog’s latest Born to Die double IPA. Despite having said I wanted to open something from my stash, I decided to go out and buy this instead. I've been reading a lot about US IPAs recently, and reports of fresh pours of the likes of Pliny the Elder and Heady Topper, legendary hop-bombs which I have never been lucky enough to taste, provokes a state in me which I can only describe as anguish. A beer like Born to Die is, I figured, the closest I’ll get for now. And, whilst I find the blundering BrewDog P.R. machine extremely tedious, they do pale and hoppy very well.

Born to Die smells like Haribo, and tastes like fruit juice. It’s very pale – IPAs of this strength are often closer to amber in colour. The object, it would seem, is to produce a beer as pale as possible, with little malt character, to further accentuate those fresh, juicy hops.  It’s citrus zest, pineapple and mango and, despite the hop dominance, to me it’s not excessively dry or bitter or extreme. The slick mouthfeel only makes it more drinkable. This might be my Platonic ideal of an IPA, or as close as I've come to it thus far.

Next was Wild Beer’s Ninkasi. I’ve tried this before and was distinctly impressed, and this occasion is no different. It’s instantly reminiscent of Orval in it’s peppery yeast character and dry effervescence. There’s more tropical fruit hop presence than I remember – as Scott points out, it actually tastes a bit like Lilt. It’s an indulgent, decadent beer, and I'm happy to have another bottle in my possession.

I’d also previously enjoyed Mikkeller’s It’s Alive! –specifically the Grand Marnier barrel-aged edition, which is exactly what my friend Ollie brought along. That was around two years ago, and got me very excited – it was probably the first beer I’d tried with such a prominent Belgian yeast character, and I remember exclaiming “this beer tastes like champagne!” Unfortunately, tonight’s bottle is an example of time being unkind to a beer. All the complexity I remember is gone, leaving behind a beer that’s flat, overly musty with Brett, and tasting overwhelmingly like sherry.

Thornbridge’s Rhubard de Saison followed. The recipe comes from a homebrewer who won the chance to have Thornbridge brew his beer. It smells bizarrely like Sprite (the second fizzy pop comparison of the evening), and my first mouthful seems to taste of almost nothing – it’s unbelievably bland. But the flavour builds and builds, and a beer of significant complexity reveals itself. The ever-so-slightly tart rhubarb and dry, spicy saison yeast is a perfect marriage, and a medicinal, herbal quality (eucalyptus?) adds depth. The body is a little thin for my liking, but that’s a small gripe.

I stopped taking notes then, though a few more bottles were opened. They were, from memory, Thornbridge and Wild Beer's Tart (disappointingly bland, especially as I really enjoyed it on keg), Duvel Tripel Hop 2015 (still great, though the hemp-like hop dankness has mellowed since I last tasted it, and more of the classic Duvel flavour shone through) and Buxton’s New World Saison (simply a beautiful, harmonious beer).

So if, like me, you haven’t made time to share beer with your friends in too long, clear a Saturday night and fill the fridge. It’s a lot of fun.