Second chances and new beginnings

I've tried a few of the beers from Bristol brewery Lost & Grounded over the years and haven't particularly liked any of them. It has made me very aware of the near-unanimous high regard in which their core beers are held. I have form on this sort of thing: it took me a couple of goes to get the hang of other English classics such as Jaipur and Landlord and I was quite prepared to believe that Lost & Grounded was another example of that. So when they showed up locally, I took the opportunity to revisit. Today I'm giving two a second spin and trying one I've never tasted before.

First it's Keller Pils: perhaps England's best lager, or maybe just the one with most frequent favourable mentions on my Twitter timeline. My previous encounter was in the arcade bar on Bristol's King Street. My aversion to certain German hop varieties when used in quantity was strongly triggered by the beer, to the point where I found a pint difficult to finish. Let's see if it's any better by the can.

Pale yellow, slightly hazy, soft textured and a fine white head: yes, it's keller-y all right. It's sweeter than I remembered, with an almost candy sugar foretaste and an inappropriate burst of tangerine or mandarin, building to less-inappropriate lemon zest. A second or two later the hops kick in fully. Not rotten wood this time, but a weedpatch herbal kick of dandelion and nettle, finishing sharply on grass, wax and plastic: those naughty nobles again. I like a pillowy soft Helles, and can appreciate the crisp edges on a north-German pils (hello Jever!), and while this offers a big slice of both, it ends up less than the sum of its parts. I'm not repulsed by it this time, which is progress, but neither do I "get" it fully. It's too much of a mish-mash of other beers I enjoy, the flavours clashing and not working well with the texture. The best I can describe the impression it leaves is as an uncanny valley take on German lager.

Running With Sceptres I only had a thimbleful of before, at a festival where it shared my palate with about forty other beers. That's no life for a lager, even if it is of the India pale persuasion. "Cloying" and "musky" said 2017 me. I can sort of see where he was coming from. This is very strongly flavoured, set on a dense body with lots of resinous dank and incense spicing. It's complex and impactful, bringing big flavours to the picture at only 5.2% ABV, but it's too busy for me, and too busy for a lager, I think. There's a certain clean crispness in the finish but it makes you go through a lot to reach it. I've blathered before about how "India pale" and "lager" rarely combine to make anything worthwhile, and this is a prime example of why I don't like them. That dank oily thickness needs a warm-fermented base; the light crisp base it got would suit a much more subtle hop presence. By the end of it I was starting to get fed up and thinking that "cloying" was apposite after all.

Time for a clean slate and a totally new beer. Helles is a recent addition to the Lost & Grounded range and has been getting good notices. That said, I don't recall reading any detailed reviews (hardly anybody writes those any more) so had no preconceived notions when I cracked the can on a sunny early-summer afternoon. It's unfiltered and hazy, which is not something I've seen done with anything called Helles in Bavaria. Does that make it a kellerbier? The ABV is only 4.4% which seems unreasonably low. Yes, none of these things are relevant to how good the beer is, but if you're co-opting German labels you can expect variances to be noticed.

From the first sip I decided that kellerbier was a fair descriptor: it has that gentle roughness of brewpub lager; a charming absence of polish. Here the noble hops are present but understated, bringing just the requisite amount of grass and herb. The soft candyfloss malt typical of Helles follows it, and seems untarnished by a lower-than-usual gravity. The fuzz means it doesn't quite get the clean lager finish it deserves but there's a pleasing dryness in how it signs off. It's obviously a conscientiously made lager, and if it were local to me I'd doubtless be enjoying it on the regular, but for this old geezer, the Bavarians do it better, and half a litre at a time too.

I came out of the experience with a more positive feeling about Lost & Grounded, and I will definitely keep trying their beers whenever I see them. Their wares do need to be judged as English takes on German brewing, however, because I don't think they stack up well when the real thing is an alternative import.