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.

Håndværk øl i København

At one point, I wasn’t planning to blog about my trip to Copenhagen. I felt like I was always reading about the city, especially in the wake of the annual Beer Celebration festival, and that anything I wrote would just be noise. But when I came to compile a list of bars to visit, I realised that that wasn’t actually true. Beyond the multiple Mikkeller-operated venues, I didn’t know anything about beer in Copenhagen beyond (accurate) reports of eye-watering prices. So, here's what I found.

Carlsberg’s dominance is immediately apparent, as the airport is swamped with adverts for the stuff. Most cafés and bars seem to offer only that or Tuborg, and one of the world-class restaurants I was lucky enough to dine at had nothing more exciting than their mediocre Jacobsen sub-brand. Plan ahead, though, and Copenhagen’s astonishing beer scene reveals itself. What follows is far from comprehensive — the number of intriguing bars was so high that I actually felt anxious about not being able to visit enough of them in the time I had. If you’re visiting, my advice is to hire a bike. Copenhagen is flat with cycle lanes all across the city, and whilst it’s not such a big place, some of the beer spots are a little far out by other modes of transport.

My first stop was BRUS, a brewpub in the trendy Nørrebro area run by the To Øl brand. It’s a large, clean space in a former factory, with a dedicated restaurant area (the food was excellent) and adjacent bottleshop. As you might expect, the interior is remarkably clean, sparse and stylish as per the Scandinavian fashion. However, it has bags of character and a buzzing atmosphere, which is sometimes missing in such self-consciously hip venues. I stuck to the house brews, although plenty of To Øl and guests were available. One Ton … of Blackberries, a generously fruited sour, was a great start. Like the fruit itself, it was well balanced between sweet and sharp, and the earthy, husky flavour from the blackberry seeds added satisfying depth. Das Fruit, a double IPA, wasn’t as intensely tropical as I expected. Hazy and full bodied, its restrained juiciness included a twist of tart berry and a little pepper in the finish, and was both satisfying and interesting. Finally, a Baltic porter, Jackie Wants a Black Eye. It's a style I love and this is a great example — clean and easy-going like a dark lager, but with a big, semi-dry cocoa flavour and just a hint of warming booze. 

Just around the corner is another brewpub, Nørrebro Bryghus. Though named after the local area, the large space is decked out to look like a New York subway station, spreading out over two levels and proudly displaying shiny fermentation tanks. The crowd here was mostly younger, perhaps students from the nearby university, and it had a pleasant, down-to-earth atmosphere. Sadly, it was last orders soon after we arrived, so I tried just one of the beers. King’s County Brown Ale was billed as American-style, but was really a comforting festival of malt — treacly, with a little caramel and some earthy, twiggy notes, and yet finishing somewhat dry. I'd like to have spent more time here, but I had further ticks to chase.

The next day, my party all went their separate ways for a couple of hours, and I took the opportunity to bomb over to Mikkeller Baghaven, the newest addition to the cuckoo brewer’s mini-empire. I didn’t necessarily mean to, but I saw a lot of the city on the way, incompetently weaving across the bike lanes, taking endless wrong turns as I unwisely tried to follow the map on my phone whilst preventing it from bouncing out of the basket. I rather like the unreconstructed industrial aesthetic of the place, and it’s a wonderful spot to sit and drink in the sunshine. Vesterbro Spontanale was my hard-earned thirst-quencher. This is the straight version of the lambic that is sold in a variety of flavoured forms, and was very impressive. Crisp, tart apple skin was the dominant flavour, followed by puckering sour lemon, just about balanced by some honeydew melon sweetness in the background. The finish is bitter like quinine, and extremely dry.

To follow, Beer Geek Riesling caught my eye. I assumed this was another in the Beer Geek series of stouts, aged in a Riesling wine barrel. Wacky stuff, and surely worth a try. Just after ordering, I said, “it’s a stout, right?” The barman looked puzzled, and replied, “no, it’s wine.” I was just about to say “I know Riesling is a wine, but…” when the penny dropped — no beer involved at all. “How does that work?” I asked. “I mean, how is Mikkeller involved?” He shrugged, and his colleague chipped in “He just wanted to make wine. It’s made in Germany. We call it a collaboration…” Perhaps ‘commission’ might be a more honest word, but since I’m trying to be more open-minded about wine anyway, I decided to give it a shot. The aroma is wheaty, with a hint of barnyard, as funky as any Bretted saison. Perhaps as a consequence of following the Spontanale, it was intensely sweet at first, like a too-strong glass of elderflower cordial. This mellowed as I drunk on, and some dry tannins emerged before a lightly acidic finish. It was delicious, and not something I’d normally have tried, so cheers to Mikkel for that one.

Contrasting the sparse, open spaces of Mikkeller and BRUS, Søernes Ølbar is so unassuming from the outside that I initially cycled right past it. Situated on the edge of one of Nørrebro's lakes, it has a small, cosy inside space and tables by the water. Though the beer list is long and impressive, only a few taps are Danish, of which I chose To Øl's Mochaccino Messiah, a brown ale. More than mocha, this reminded me of tiramisu, with sweet milky coffee leaning towards hazelnut complimented by dry, bitter cocoa flavours rather than the rich, deep chocolate I'd expected. It would make a great desert beer. Søernes could form part of a mini-Nørrebro crawl along with BRUS and the Bryghus but if, like me, you prefer to drink local when travelling, you may not want to linger too long here.

My final stop was Fermentoren, a tip I picked up from this Good Beer Hunting article and sought out based on the vibe-heavy candelight and lack of (fellow) tourists. As it happened, I found myself in the old meat-packing district during daylight hours, but the indoor space was still pretty dim in a bohemian rather than dingy way. The beer list here is truly world-class, and if I wasn't so hell-bent on sticking to Danish brews, I'd have been sorely tempted by the offer of Schlenkerla Urbock or Rodenbach Caractére Rouge. Instead, I plumped for New Slang, a New England-style IPA from Gamma. Although demonstrating the pillowy mouthfeel typical of the style, New Slang is less milkshake-thick than some, which made for easy, thirst-quenching drinking. The flavour is pure sticky tangerine, perhaps a little on the sweet side but far from cloying, and there's little bitterness to speak of. Whilst I'm a confirmed NEIPA fan, there are undoubtedly examples which use hazy appearance to disguise inattentive brewing and muddied, indistinct hop character. New Slang demonstrates that clarity of flavour is crucial in even the most opaque of beers. I loved it.

I managed to squeeze all of these venues into just a few days on what was not primarily a beer-focused trip, based on minimal forward planning. You could stay in Copenhagen for weeks and still not make it round all the beer spots, perhaps bankrupting yourself in the process. It's one of the most exciting beer cities I've visited, all the more impressive given the apparent dominance of macro lager.

For more tales from Copenhagen, I recommend the series of posts on Martin's blog starting here. He made it to lots of interesting places that I didn't and even tracked down a pint of cask Harvey's Best...!

12 Beers of Christmas - Day Eight - Mikkeller SpontanPassionfruit

Day Eight - Mikkeller SpontanPassionfruit (Belgium/Denmark, 7.7%)

And here's today's second post, bringing us back up to date. To begin, I must apologise for the so-called 'Iceman pour', which was purely accidental and resulted in me spilling what should have been the first mouthful over the counter, further proof that this is a bloody stupid trend. The beer is Mikkeller's SpontanPassionFruit, one in a seemingly endless series of fruit-infused lambics. These beers come from De Proefbrouwerij in Belgian, and if I understand correctly are produced by fermenting wort bought in from lambic breweries in wooden barrels with the added fruits.

The aroma is fantastic, full of vibrant passion fruit but also hinting at acidity. As you'd obviously expect from a beer of this style, the taste is tart, with the usual lemon and Granny Smith apple along with a touch of wheat and oak character. The addition of the fruit is nothing short of masterful, the two elements blending perfectly - the result is a beer which is tart in exactly the way that passion fruit is and incorporates all of the nuances of the real thing, including its honey and floral components and the crispness of the seeds. The best part is the finish, a kiss of passion fruit flavour which is as tropical and sticky as it is dry and wine-like. The ABV is staggeringly high for the style - the Cantillon Kriek I drank at the start of this run was a mere 5% - but there's no sign of elevated booze in the flavour, and its smooth and harmonious throughout.

The Spontan beers may be pricey, and may not involve ol' Mikkell himself doing much more than selecting a fruit adjunct, but on the strength of this I'll be seeking out others in the series.

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.