12 Beers of Christmas - Day Twelve - Burning Sky Trafalgar Wines Celebratory Stout

I've already written and deleted several paragraphs in which I try to summarise a tumultuous 2017, each time concluding that nobody a) needs to know or b) really cares. Suffice to say, I'm not really into New Year's Eve, but this one does have some significance. Not enough to prompt me to do anything other than sit drinking beer on my Grandma's sofa, but still.

One significant thing about the dawn of 2018 is that it roughly marks the third year anniversary of this blog. The past two years have been busy, and I haven't posted as much as I'd like. In the meantime, it's seemingly become a beer and travel blog, which wasn't my initial intention but I'll take it. And, out of character as it may be to say it, I'm very proud of much of what I have posted. So it meant a lot to hear my name called for the Silver award in the Young Beer Writer category at this year's British Guild of Beer Writer's Awards ceremony. I think this picture sums up my feelings pretty well (that's me on the left).

That goofy grin stayed glued to my face until the last train back to Brighton, when I plugged in my headphones, tied my scarf around my eyes to block out the harsh light and caught some much needed sleep. (Incidentally, another big congratulations to James Beeson, who deservedly took home the Gold prize). So, amongst all the uncertainty and loss, there's been plenty in this past year to celebrate. Which calls for a celebratory beer.

I haven't posted a Golden Pints round-up for this year. One of the reasons for this is the realisation that I wanted to nominate the same names in the same categories as last year, and/or the year before, to the point where it seemed ridiculous writing it all out again. My favourite brewery of 2017, for example, is Burning Sky, just as it was last year. And my favourite bottle shop always was, is, and always shall be Trafalgar Wines. To put my puny blog's anniversary into perspective, Steve is celebrating a staggering 35 years in the business. And for that, he got a very special beer, which he was kind enough to gift to me and other loyal customers to share the love.

Day Twelve - Burning Sky Trafalgar Wines Celebratory Stout (UK, 8.5%)

Even at arm's length whilst I poured, a huge aroma of coffee, dark sugar and clementine hit me, and I knew I was in for a treat. On the first sip, the bourbon barrel in which the beer aged is clearly doing a lot of heavy lifting. Often that means vanilla and booze, which is great, but the bourbon character here is far more interesting than that. It's very woody, with notes of pithy clementine and sweet cherry. 

I can't be sure if there's something just a tiny bit tart in there, or whether that's the power of suggestion because the only other beers I associate with such a strong oak character are lambics. There's certainly plenty of smooth chocolate in there to temper if, if it is there. A gentle booze warmth emerges the more I drink, which happens a little quicker than it probably should due to both its deliciousness and an appropriately minimal level of carbonation - nobody wants fizzy imperial stout, do they?

Another triumph for Burning Sky, and a fitting tribute to Brighton's best booze merchant. Happy new year, one and all!

Golden Pints 2016

Best UK Cask Beer
After first drinking Kissingate's Murder of Crows at the Sussex CAMRA festival in March, I was lucky enough to sample it three more times, always in situations where a 10% monster was a foolhardy choice. But if it's on the bar, I have to order it, because it hits the perfect balance between straight-up delicious and fascinatingly complex. Rich coffee, caramel and muscovado sugar form its foundation, before a balasmic sweet and sour tang takes over, finally wiped out by a dry, tannic finish. A decadent treat.

Best UK keg beer
I'm awarding this to the keg beer most firmly imprinted on my memory - Wylam's Club of Slaughters, which stopped me in my tracks. The malt character is conventionally smooth and warming, all chocolate and berries, but acts as a vehicle for blue cheese funk and deep, savoury, lingering peat smoke.

Best UK bottled/canned beer
At the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, I opened a bottle of Wild Beer's Squashed Grape, starting as I meant to go on. This beer has the weirdest discrepancy between smell and taste; the aroma is of neglected public toilets and damp, which makes for a pleasant surprise when the taste is vibrant, refreshing and unusual. Sweet, then dry, tannic and quenching, with a final kiss of tart grapefruit.

Best Overseas Draught
Birrificio Italiano Tipopils. Having previously been let down by a limp bottle, I was delighted to find this on draught at Ruzanuvol in Valencia, and on top form. I often daydream about its bubble-bath head and deep smack of grassy hops. 

Best Overseas Bottled/Canned Beer
Oude Gueuze Tilquin á L'Ancienne at Craft Beer Co. in Brighton after receiving some good news. Who needs champagne? Beautifully balanced between tart and sweet, with a savoury, husky fruit skin quality and a very crisp, dry finish. Simply beautiful.

Best Collaboration Brew
Three's Company, an IPA born of collaboration between Cloudwater, Magic Rock and J.W. Lees and utilising the latter's 4709th generation yeast strain. A glorious beer all round but conceptually, I love the idea of ultra-modern and established traditional breweries sharing ideas and learning for one another. Let's see more of this sort of thing.

Best Overall Beer
2016 was the year of the double IPA - a bandwagon style, but one that I rarely tire of when done well. Cloudwater led the way, and of their efforts I particularly enjoyed v3, v5 and v7. Brew By Numbers' 55|03 with Citra, Mosaic and Wai-iti was right up there, and Gun's Sorachi Ace DIPA was an absolute dream for those like me who can't get enough of this odd, divisive hop. However, Beavertown's Double Chin was the pick of the bunch, and gets extra props for amplifying an existing beer (their Neck Oil session IPA) without losing the essence of the original. 

Best UK Brewery
I've always held Burning Sky in high esteem, but they're on fire lately. All of their beers - from sessionable cask classics to IPAs to mixed-fermentation saisons - demonstrate great delicacy, and their ambition and imagination is astonishing. They introduced a few new beers in 2016, amongst them Gaston, which is probably the most accomplished use of an estery Belgian yeast strain I've yet encountered from a UK brewery. They've also just announced that they'll be installing a koelschip next year, so 2017 promises even more excitement.

Best Overseas Brewery
I'm not sure whether Stone Berlin really counts, being more of a European outpost of an American brand than a brewery in its own right. They're my pick, anyway, with the important caveat that I don't unreservedly love any of their beers. However, Stone was one of the first US brands to fascinate me as a beer novice, and I was repeatedly let down by stale bottles and lifeless kegs before giving up altogether. Cracking open a fresh can of Ruiniation, I felt a wave of boyish excitement and even if the palate-pumelling bitterness isn't really to my taste these days, I had to smile because my younger self would have been blown away. 

Photo: Rebecca Pate @ Brewing East

Pub/Bar of the Year
The Evening Star again. It's the pub I go to the most, and the one I'd insist all visitors to Brighton must visit, both for the beer and the people-watching. An honourable mention for The Westbourne in Hove - a smaller but lovingly curated cask and keg selection, good food and a friendly atmosphere. 

Independent Retailer of the Year
Trafalgar Wines, as ever. Scandi minimalism and growler stations are all well and good, but I prefer the unpretentious approach here - it's basically a small room packed to the rafters with beer. Prices are reasonable, and if I go in for something particular, I'll almost always find it. I'll also give Beer Shop St. Albans a shout for their always interesting selection, particularly on 750ml curiosities. 

Online Retailer of the Year
I don't need to rely on online retailers, but I put in at least one order to Beers of Europe every year, primarily for their German and Belgian selection which is slightly lacking locally.

Best Beer Book or Magazine
It didn't come out this year, but I've been really enjoying Jeff Alworth's Beer Bible. I'll use it for reference in the future, as it's well researched, but it's also a joy to read in cover-to-cover because Jeff is so fun to read.

Best Beer Blog or Website
Alec Latham's Mostly About Beer was a happy discovery this year. Nobody is writing about beer the way Alec does - pub crawls that verge on psychogeography, a beer festival write-up that includes an ode to a gas container, and so on. He's certainly never boring. 

Golden pints 2015

After a couple of day's worth of extremely gruelling battles with Microsoft Word's "jazzy" formatting of my text - only resolved by typing the whole thing out again - I present my first ever Golden Pints round-up.

Best UK cask beer
The one cask beer that really knocked me out was Cloudwater's Special Edition IPA. Reportedly made with 22kg of hops per litre and yet surprisingly mellow drinking, this is the perfect example of the kind of 'tropical fruit juice IPA' that Mark Dredge identifies here. It may not be a style usually identified with cask, but this format is brilliantly suited to the beer, rounding out the hops and accentuating the juiciness. You know when you take a first sip of a beer and realise you'll always remember that moment? This was one of those.
Honourable mentions - Dark Star's American Pale Ale was a cask staple throughout the year - an important beer for me which continues to impress. Brighton Bier's cask offerings were a pleasure, too - they've become extremely accomplished at cramming juicy hop flavour into beers of moderate strength.

Best UK keg beer
Burning Sky's saison l'ete is a beautifully judged beer - tart and complex yet clean and refreshing, endlessly interesting but never hard work. Their seasonal saisons have always been good, but they're seemingly better year on year.
Honourable mentions - Other keg beers that stopped me in my tracks this year included Magic Rock's Cannonball and Siren's Life's a Peach peach cream IPA.

Best UK bottled beer
This category should go to a beer that actually benefits from the bottled format, rather than one that I only tasted in a bottle at home or that was only released in bottles but might have been even better on draught. Another shout out to Burning Sky, then, for their Vatted Porter. Quite ordinary when I tried it from keg, possibly because it was served far too cold, but the bottle was something else entirely - a beer whose mysterious flavours you chase with every sip, somehow eluding you and demanding another taste.
Honourable mentions - the second of BrewDog's Born to Die bottles, released in November, was one of the year's best overall beers - so fresh and vital.

Best UK canned beer
Fourpure Pils has almost constantly been in my fridge throughout 2015. I loved its assertive hop character and bitterness at first, but I swear it changed throughout the course of the year, becoming cleaner, less bitter and more floral with noble hops than before, and even better for it. I'm all for cans in principle, but the quality is still hugely variable - some beers I know to be excellent have really disappointed in this form. A beer that's consistently good in canned form is all the more commendable.
Honourable mentions - the aroma of tropical fruit on popping the tab on Vocations' Heart and Soul session IPA is inviting, and the flavour delivers, too. One of the best session-strength beers of the year.

Best overseas draught
I was lucky enough to travel a lot this year, and there are many contenders, but Schlenkerla Marzen straight from the barrel at their Bamberg pub is unbeatable.
Honourable mentions - I think about the house pils at Berlin's Eschenbrau brewpub shockingly often; its creamy body, bitterness and savoury depth of flavour, the gorgeous, tight, fluffy head which tastes of lemon pith. I'd give anything to have a litre in front of my right now.

Best overseas bottled beer
I loved 2015's Duvel Tripel Hop, this year with Equinox. When fresh, it was vibrant with lemon and hemp, and a little age allowed for a harmonious union with the classic Duvel taste.
Honourable mentions - Birrificio Sorrento's Syrentum - another beer that makes a virtue of the bottled format - made a lasting impression on my summer holiday this year. I tend to daydream about it a lot.

Best overseas canned beer
I can't think of any spectacular examples, but canned US IPAs seem to reach these shores in better shape than their bottled equivalents. Westbrook IPA, Oskar Blues' Pinner and Ska's Modus Hoperandi all vastly exceeded my expectations in the can.

Best collaboration brew
I only tried Magic Rock and Siren's MRS Brown in a bottle as the keg version was (understandably) prohibitively expensive, but it was a stunning beer. For an idea that sounds wacky on paper (bourbon-barrel aged imperial brown ale with pecan, maple syrup and vanilla), it all came together beautifully. Sipping a glass of this beer is a fun experience, exploring the flavours as they slowly reveal themselves one by one. Considering the attention paid to scandalously rare, imported barrel-aged stouts, by rights everyone should have been losing their shit over MRS Brown.

Best overall beer
Of those mentioned so far, it would be the Cloudwater cask IPA. But in truth, their DIPA was the best beer of any kind I tasted in 2015. Achievements like this suggest a shortening of the gap between the UK and the US, and it's extremely exciting.

Best branding, pump clip or bottle label
Something about the design for Thornbridge and Brouwerij 't IJ's American Wheat Ale is irresistible to me. Luckily, the beer is also very good. I loved the simplicity and elegance of the original Chorlton branding, and it's a shame they've now changed it. I also have to mention Hopvana from Guinea Pigs!, which I drank in Seville. Confronted with a fridge full of unfamiliar Spanish beers, I chose this purely because of the audaciously goofy label and ended up loving the beer.

Best UK brewery
Something tells me Cloudwater will be doing well out of this year's Golden Pints. The beers are excellent, the seasonal approach is original and really works, and they're making exactly the kinds of beers I want to drink, to the point where it's almost like they're reading my mind. UK hopped lager, cream ale, hopfenweisse, brown ale - these are all styles I wish more breweries were attempting.
Honourable mentions - The aformentioned Chorlton would have been my choice for brewery opening of the year, but I just checked and they actually opened in November 2014. Still, they've had a great run. Sour beers were a persistent trend throughout this year, but nobody took such an interesting and creative approach as Chorlton. The Woodruff Berliner weisse is a great example - a simple idea, but ingenious, and a great beer. They're also doing interesting stuff with yeast strains salvaged from DDR-era Berliner weisse bottles and canning their beers. I can't wait to see what they come out with in 2016.

Pub/bar of the year
I've always loved the Evening Star in Brighton, but throughout this year it's become the pub I visit the most. The beer list is always great, even better now that they've installed more keg lines, and the atmosphere is uniquely interesting whilst always hospitable and friendly. A proper pub serving a variety of great beer.
Honourable mentions - Visting Kulminator in Antwerp was a highlight of my beery year, even if I was unfortunately pushed for time. Just sitting in the cluttered bar, flicking through the jaw-dropping beer list and sipping on a draught Avec les bons veux was pretty much beer perfection.

Supermarket of the year
Marks & Spencers. Some of their new 'craft' range is god-awful, but some are excellent, especially where Adnams are involved, and they're the only supermarket stocking a good range of British craft beer. Yes, we all prefer to buy our beer from independents, but supermarket beers were an important step in my discovery of great beer, and I'm sure there are shoppers stumbling across Buxton and Fourpure in M&S and embarking on a wonderful beery journey.

Independent retailer of the year
It's still Trafalgar Wines and it always will be. They always have what I'm looking for, the prices are the best in the city and you've got to love the sheer unpretentiousness of the place - it's all about the beer here.

Online retailer of the year
I've only ever used Beers of Europe - it's good enough that I've never wanted to try anywhere else. The website can be a pain to navigate, but the range of (especially German and Belgian) beers is excellent, the delivery costs are reasonable and they get your order to you in no time.

Best beer book or magazine
Obviously it wasn't released this year, but Michael Jackson's Beer Companion has been constantly by my side this year, always an inspiration. The Best Beer in the World by Mark Dredge did come out this year, and was a great read from another writer who has been a massive inspiration to me. A far more interesting book than it sounds, its really the antidote to the proliferation of 'best beer' list books - a thoughtful meditation on what makes a beer great, giving equal attention to the Orval monastery and the 'proudly macro' Budweiser facility in St. Louis.

Best beer blog
I've lost many hours of my life to Ron Pattinson's Shut Up About Barclay Perkins this year. This stuff should be required reading for anyone with an interest in beer, even if many of the details in the table he's so fond of go right over my head.
Honourable mentions - Chris Hall writes eloquently and seriously about beer without veering into Pseud's Corner territory. Mark Johnson's output has been funny, insightful and affecting.

Simon Johnson award for Best Beer Twitterer
Twatty Beer Doodles, for a (very funny) taste of reality whenever the beer world takes itself too seriously.