The free state of Kemptown

The following is my contribution to The Session #133, hosted by Gareth at Barrel Aged Leeds. This month's theme is 'Hometown Glories'.

The year is 1989, and the Hand in Hand has no roof. Already 120-something years old, the pub is about to enter a new chapter; fermentation tanks are edging their way down into the cellar. The arrival of this kit marks the birth of the Hand in Hand as a brewpub.

Fast forward to 2017, and a fresh delivery of shiny stainless steel has arrived at the pub. Two new fermentation tanks are being lowered through a hole in the floor by the front door; leaving the roof intact, this time only floorboards are lifted. They’ll be returned and carpeted over again before the pub opens. Temperature controlled and able to contain the pressure demanded of beer destined for a keg, these tanks reflect the ambitions of Jack Tavaré, brewer at Hand Brew Co., the brand now operating out of the Hand.

Modern tanks aside, the basic brew kit is the same one that was installed those 28 years ago by then-landlord Bev Robbins, though the brews that comes out of it are very different. “The beers were awful apparently,” says Jack. “It was always the same base recipe and then when they were filling casks, the landlord just used to put different stuff in it to make it a different beer. I think there was one with… it wasn’t gravy brownings but it was something like that. Some kind of brown, food-based thing.” Another, dyed with red food colouring, was given the name Dragon’s Blood – an advertisement for it is still painted on the side of the building, but something tells me Jack won’t be reviving the recipe.

Crammed into a cramped, higgledy-piggledy space behind the scenes, the kit works on the principle of a traditional tower brewery. Rather than pumps, the flow process is propelled by gravity. The hot liquor tank and mash tun are on the second floor, and the wort flows down into the kettle on the level below. Once it’s boiled for an hour and hops are added, it’s transferred through a pipe, passing a heat exchanger on its way through the bar and into the fermenters in the cellar.

“We do actually use a couple of pumps now,” Jack laughs, “we’ve modernised”. He’s made small improvements here and there, like installing a manway on the kettle; previously, the only way to add hops was to drop them through a tiny hole which also released steam. “So far we don’t have a chimney,” he explains, “so when it’s boiling, steam just billows into this room. But that was the only hole I had, so when I was adding hops I had this steam blowing, hops going everywhere…”

Many of the old kit’s quirks remain, however, requiring some creative thinking. For example, Jack sets his hot liquor tank to around 92 degrees. “Normally you’d want your liquor around 77 degrees, depending on what you want your mash to be,” he tells me. “But below the element I get this pocket of cold liquor." Because the contents of the hot liquor tank can't be mixed, "I have to overheat the top part so that when that’s mixed with the bottom part and transferred into the mash tun, it will equal 77. You have to work around it.”

Bev and Brenda Robbins

Hand Brew Co. has been the house brand since August 2016. Since the initial installation, the brewery has been almost constantly used, with only short spells of inactivity. Bev ran the pub with his wife Brenda until he passed away in 2006. He brewed under the brand Kemptown Brewery, reviving the name of a historic brewery that operated in this part of Brighton until the mid-1960s. “I think the way he got round it was by making ‘Kemptown Brewery Co. Est. 1989’ the full legal name,” Jack says. The kit was then used sporadically until it was taken over by Gary Sillence. He maintained the Kemptown name whilst using any spare capacity for his own brand, Brighton Bier, now a much larger operation based in a unit just down the road.

Around the time Gary left, the pub was taken on by its current owners, Jen and Clark, leaving the brewery temporarily empty with the intention of starting brewing again once they’d found their feet. Jack was then operating a small brewery, Beercraft, from a pilot kit at the Watchmaker’s Arms micropub in Hove, whilst working bar shifts at the Hand. “I was working behind the bar here and we got chatting about the brewery. I said “I think I should do it!””, Jack tells me. As Hand Brew Co. grew, he had less and less time to dedicate to Beercraft, and took the decision to merge the two companies. He hopes to move the small pilot kit up to Kemptown for trial recipes.

And the beers? Well, they’re excellent, reflecting an obviously meticulous attention to detail despite the equipment’s vagaries. I loved Hans, a clean and bitter pilsner. This gets the full lagering treatment, spending a generous eight weeks in the tanks, currently tying up a large percentage of the brewery’s capacity but absolutely worth it. Ayyyy, a US breakfast stout is just as impressive; brewed with lots of oats for a decadent creamy texture, its richness is rounded out by cocoa nibs and beans from Hove’s wonderful coffee roasters, Pharmacie. Aside from these, the current focus is on dry-hopped pale ales, though Jack has ambitions to move into Belgian styles.

Initially, the beer brewed on the premises was exclusively sold here. Around 75% of the Hand beers are sold on the premises, but the remaining casks and kegs are sent to various bars around Brighton and the surrounding area. So whilst you don’t have to visit the Hand in Hand to try them, you really should. It’s small and well worn-in in the best way, walls covered with breweriana and ceiling beams decorated with a collection of ties snipped from the necks of punters by former landlady Brenda as a reminder that they were no longer at work. On my afternoon visit, there’s a warm community spirit to the place; regulars pop in for tea served in dimpled half-pint mugs as well as stemmed glasses of beer. It’s one of Brighton’s most characterful pubs.

Above the door hangs a sign that reads ‘you are now entering the free state of Kemptown’. I like the sentiment, but wondered if it had any further significance. “I really don’t know,” says Jen, landlady and director. “I think it just meant “anything goes” as its Kemptown and bonkers!?” And as such, it sums up why the Hand in Hand is such a wonderful place.

My sincere thanks to Jack and Jen for their hospitality. In the interests of disclosure, I'll point out that they refused to let me pay for my beers.

Clear as mud: in defence of the New England IPA

This post is a contribution to The Session #126, hosted by Gail Ann Williams at Beer By BART on the topic 'Hazy, cloudy, juicy: IPA's strange twist'.

Rarely has a beer style (sub-style? Pseudo-style?) been so divisive as the New England IPA — cloudy bordering on murky, often brewed with oats for maximum fluffy mouthfeel and smooth, juice-like texture, and hopped only in the whirlpool for intense hop flavour and aroma with minimal bitterness. In the US at least, grown men queue for hours to get their hands on these beers, then trade them online like Pogs. Meanwhile, cynics take to Twitter to energetically lampoon the ‘trend’ for ‘murk-bombs’.

Clearly, the NEIPA is not for everyone. I’ll nail my colours to the mast early on; I’m a fan of these beers, which to me seem less of a trend and more of a natural evolution in the IPA style, which has been growing ever fruitier for several years. What concerns me is the wilful ignorance and negativity amongst those who don’t like the style, which I think runs totally counter to the spirit of beer geekery.

 

For example, a brewing company who will remain unnamed recently tweeted (plus some emojis which I’ve removed);

WARNING. THERE’S A NEW BEER HEADED TO TOWN. Here’s a hint, its not a passionfruit mango barrel-aged oatmeal lupulin powder double IPA.

Perhaps I need to lighten up, as the tone here is obviously humorous and hyperbolic. The ‘barrel-aged’ bit doesn’t apply to the New England style anyway. But is it really necessary to mock other brewery’s products in order to sell your own? The inference here is, “we have a new beer, but it’s not one of those stupid New England IPAs everyone else is making. It’s proper beer.”

This tweet frames this company in opposition to other small, like-minded craft breweries. What it comes down to, I suppose, is positivity. I would suggest that marketing your beer based on what it is rather than what it isn’t — what you’re for rather than what you’re against — reflects better on your brand. And the same sentiment applies to the way all of us focus our energy in communicating about beer online, whether through blogs or Twitter. It’s futile complaining about beers you don’t like, especially if there’s nothing wrong with them beyond your own personal preferences, and it makes for pretty tedious reading. It’s fine to dislike a beer, or beer style, or perceived trend in brewing, but why not let others have their fun?

Alright, so they’re not especially bitter and you prefer bitterness in your IPAs. That’s OK. There are plenty of IPAs like that. I can think of only a handful of UK breweries who specialise in the style, and most others experimenting with the NEIPA also produce at least one standard IPA alongside it. Maybe it feels like all anyone is brewing these days is murky fruit juice, but I’d say that’s a warped conception based the fact that those who are making New England-inspired beers are currently getting a lot of social media attention.

The idea that all NEIPAs taste the same is also somewhat misguided. As The Beer Nut has already highlighted on his post on the subject, there is actually considerable diversity amongst these beers. Whilst many are intensely tropical, there are plenty that retain a dank, resinous tang. Some have strong savoury notes — onion and chive — and others don’t. Some, like Cloudwater’s recent IIPA Centennial, marry the East and West coast approaches beautifully, using the intensity of the New England style to beef up the fleshy citrus quality of a now relatively old-school hop variety.

But most importantly, we need to steer clear of the idea that beer should be a certain way. Those who vocally reject the New England IPA because it doesn’t look or taste like beer are edging towards What’s Brewing-letter-page territory. Lambic is beer, and so is porter, so what does beer taste like, exactly? Hefeweizen is beer, and murky beer at that, so what’s the difference? Whether the NEIPA represents progress or not is open to debate, but the idea that producing juicy, hazy beer is somehow inappropriate opposes the experimentation I love in craft beer.

Criticism has its place, for sure. Badly made, infected beer? Call it out. Perfectly well-made beer that many others enjoy but that you happen not to like? Let it be. 

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.

The Session #120 - The Five Points Brick Field Brown

This is my contribution to The Session #120, hosted by yours truly. A full round up of the posts will follow.

I chose the topic of brown beer for The Session in an attempt to direct attention to some of the beer world’s underappreciated styles. Top of this list for me has always been brown ale, a subject to which I’ve dedicated plenty of words already on this blog. What more can I say on the subject?

Pondering this, I visited The Black Dove in Brighton for a pint of Brick Field Brown, a fairly new beer from The Five Points brewery in Hackney. I was instantly impressed by its hue; a dark, woody colour that would sit perfectly between bitter and stout on a beery colour chart. Taking a first gulp, smooth chocolate flavours were first to register. A very gentle coffee roast follows, a bit like you’d expect from a good dark mild and far subtler than that in a porter or stout. As it warms, that malt character becomes a little sweeter, with a suggestion of dulce de leche. Key for me is the hop profile – a subtle wave of peach and apricot before a bitter finish.

But what’s particularly exciting about Brick Field Brown is that, unlike most modern brown ales from British breweries, it is not a seasonal or one-off brew; it’s a permanent addition to Five Points’ core range. Which makes sense really – Community and Marketing Manager Doreen Joy Barber has described Five Points’ brand as “norm-core”; they’re not firing out limited edition beers or chasing trends, concentrating instead on a small portfolio which is executed to absolute perfection. Like myself, former Lead Assistant Brewer, Vito (now at Meantime) is passionate about brown ale, which Doreen calls “an unsung format”. Brick Field Brown began life as Vito’s Brown on the brewery’s pilot kit in late 2015, appearing for the thirsty public at that year’s London Brewer’s Market before joining the core line-up.

Brown ale may not excite everybody, but I hope that Five Points’ reputation for consistency and quality will tempt punters to give it a go. I certainly wasn’t expecting a brewery in hip East London to advocate the style, but I’m absolutely delighted they have. Seek it out if you can. 

Announcing The Session 120: Brown beer

A couple of weeks ago, I made my first contribution to The Session, a beer blogging community event held on the first Friday on the month in which bloggers all post on a selected topic. For February, it's my turn to set the agenda, and I'd like you all the write about brown beer.

The colour brown has certain connotations, some of which I won't dwell on. But used in reference to beer, it can signify a kind of depressing old fashioned-ness - to refer to a traditional bitter as 'brown' seems to suggest it belongs to a bygone corduroy-trousered era. As breweries who pride themselves on their modernity focus on beers that are either decidedly pale or unmistakably black, the unglamorous brown middle ground is consistently neglected.

So for Session 120, let's buck the trend and contemplate brown beer. This might be brown ale, or the aforementioned English bitter; it could be a malty Belgian brune, a dubbel or a tart oud bruin; even a German dunkel might qualify.

The date is Friday 3rd February, so please aim to post on or before then. Once you've contributed, please let me know either by commenting on this post or via Twitter. You can find out more about The Session here. I look forward to your posts!

Wholly smoke

This post is a contribution to The Session #119, hosted by Alec at Mostly About Beer. The topic is 'Discomfort beer' - "which/what kind of beers took you out of your comfort zones. Beers you weren’t sure whether you didn’t like, or whether you just needed to adjust to."

I’m not just saying this to brag about the supremacy of my palate – I’ve rarely felt out of my comfort zone with beer, and hardly ever have to work hard to enjoy it. I’ve always enjoyed the taste – as a youngster, my grandpa would occasionally slip me a tiny portion from his stubby green lager bottles, and besides the ego boost that came from swapping Ribena for a grown-up’s drink, it was always delicious to me. Bitterness was probably the main appeal – my other favourite thirst quencher as a child was straight tonic water, which makes a lot of adults wince.

There are styles that test your perception of what beer is – acidic and sour flavours in beer took some getting used to, for example. But there is only one traumatic incident that really sticks out in my mind, and it’s the closest I’ve ever come to spitting out a mouthful of beer.

The brew in question was Flue Faker, a smoked lager from Camden Town, sampled at The Craft Beer Co. in Brighton some years ago – thank God I asked for a taster first. I don’t remember it tasting of bacon, the common descriptor for the niche lager sub-genre known as rauchbier. I just remember it tasting disgusting and wrong. “Urgh! No!” I exclaimed to the blank-faced barman, unable to disguise my horror.

I’m not sure how I went from this unpleasant experience to continually pestering my girlfriend about visiting Bamberg, home of the rauchbier style.  I’d read about the beer in books by Michael Jackson and Mark Dredge in the meantime, putting it in some context, which probably encouraged me to persevere and learn to like it. In fact, rauchbier is probably the ultimate discomfort beer. In Jeff Alworth’s The Beer Bible, Schlenkerla boss Matthias Trum says;

“At the first sip, the smoke flavour is extremely dominant on your palate. If you’re new to this taste, you will notice nothing but the smoked flavour. Only as you go through your first two or three pints does the smokiness step back in perception and then the malty notes come out, the bitterness, the smoothness.”

On my visit to the Schlenkerla pub, I do remember remarking that their famous marzen was a brilliant lager underneath the smoke, and this aspect is probably worthy of further contemplation. However, I love that smoky flavour – that’s the appeal of the beer, not a challenge to be overcome. As such, it’s rare that I’ll ever drink more than one rauchbier on the trot. So, I decided to do just that, and procured three bottles of Schlenkerla marzen.

Even on the first mouthful of the first glass, I realised that the intensity of the smoke didn’t hit me in the way it used to. I’ve heard of a ‘lupulin threshold shift’, the idea that we build up a ‘tolerance’ to hop bitterness, and perhaps there’s something similar going on here with smoked malt. I think I’ve drunk this beer often enough that I’m just used to it, which slightly undermines the idea behind this ‘experiment’. Not to say it isn’t smoky – it certainly is. I’d say it tastes like bacon, but as I haven’t eaten bacon in over a decade, I’ll say it tastes like bacon flavoured WheatCrunchies. The bitterness is notable from the outset, something like the slightly acrid malt-derived bitterness you sometimes get in stouts and porters.

Around a quarter of the way into the second glass, the smoke flavour has really faded. It registers mainly as a background savoury flavour, with occasional bursts of bonfire and meat on the palate. I’m starting to notice a bready malt quality too, which in combination with the bitterness suggests slightly burnt wholemeal toast. As interesting as it is to draw out the backgrounds elements of the bee, for me the most exciting moments are still those flashes of smoke.

By the final glass, the prickly carbonation is starting to irritate, putting an obstacle in the way of the smoothness Matthias Trum suggests is waiting beneath the smoke. It feels like it should be silky, but that fizz jabs at my tongue. I’ve never had a problem with the carbonation in bottles before, but the accumulative effect is distracting. The traditional gravity-tapped serving method would solve this problem, of course. Towards the end, I’m beginning to notice a woody, tannic element. Further complexity clearly awaits, and I’d probably have opened a fourth bottle if I’d had one. Who knew that a beer style I first found so challenging would prove so sessionable?

The interesting thing about all this is that, now that I’m past the discomfort stage, I miss it. It’s like watching a difficult film for the second or third time – I’m always jealous of those experiencing it fresh. Those who are new to rauchbier shouldn’t hold their nose and joylessly gulp down the first few pints, waiting for the smoke to fade – they should revel in the discomfort and enjoy the challenge.