Peripherals

Today it's a mopping-up exercise after Monday's pub crawl around St Albans: other beers I drank while spending the weekend in that corner of England.

I arrived, late-ish on the Saturday evening, in Watford. One might expect town to be busy, especially with an English team playing in the Champion's League final at the time. But Watford centre was exceedingly subdued. I stopped by Mad Squirrel, a roomy craft beer bar and part of a regional brewery-tied chain, which was showing the game on the big screen to no more than half a dozen punters.

I was paying more attention to the screen with the beer list on it, and there were a lot: 23 in total, and two ciders, all from the Mad Squirrel brewery itself. One was even on cask, a 4% ABV bitter called Mister Squirrel. Something this trad in a Craftonian environment was incongruous, and so was the TeKu glass they served it to me in. I could call it "brown" but it's a more attractive red/amber. Still there's not much by way of hop action here, only a basic tea-like tannin, a very mild forest-fruit background and no more than a pinch of bitterness in the finish. Vertically integrated pubs often have these workmanlike to-style beers for drinkers who would normally have a different brand, and this is one of those. If your demands go no further than just-a-bitter, here's a perfectly acceptable one to keep you quiet.

The black IPA was the one that caught my attention next, called Blackout. This is 5.8% ABV, properly black and with a strongly floral aroma, full of summery lavender and violet. You can almost hear the bees buzzing around it. In the flavour this turns into a bathbomb, the purple flowers joined by a sharper citrus -- bergamot in particular -- building in bitterness to weedy resin and finally full-on pine sap. There's a certain funky farmishness as well for added complexity. More roast might have been nice, but this unorthodox take on black IPA brings it to interesting places, and that's OK too.

A couple of beers from the supermarket, next. Both chosen for Reasons.

First it's Brooklyn Pilsner. I'm told that we'll be seeing a lot more of this in Ireland soon, as Diageo begins brewing and distributing it locally. This bottle was brewed in England's equivalent of trendy Williamsburg: Wolverhampton, at the Banks Brewery. It's a very dry pils with a significant bite of bitterness all through. Its German heritage is very apparent in a certain vegetal pepperiness in the hopping. It still does all the basics you would want from "a lager", being clean and drinkable, and only 4.6% ABV, but there's bags of character in here when you look for it, and I think serious lager aficionados would enjoy it too. Here's hoping the folk in St James's Gate do as good a job when the time comes.

Off Menu is a 5.8% ABV American-style IPA by Camden Town. The can says it's largely built around Simcoe hops but it's oddly sweet, its hazy orange body holding a raft of orange-flavoured hard candy with only a mild kick of bitterness. Maybe it's because I had been drinking it on a warm day, and perhaps the can hadn't been chilled down to the requisite temperature, but it all felt a bit soupy to me, being neither cleanly refreshing nor full and rounded. I wasn't impressed. And the reason I picked it is because I'd heard it scored very highly in a recent blind-tasted assessment. The opposition mustn't have been up to much.

And so to the airport. Thunderstorms across Europe were disrupting flight patterns, and London Luton was full of harried people with nowhere to go. The Big Smoke Brewery has a concession bar here, one which had run out of ice and several of the beers but was bravely muddling through with two very capable teenagers at the helm.

I started on a Citra pale ale called Cold Spark, only 3.6% ABV. It's a pale and sickly-looking hazy yellow but tastes wonderful, with a fruit-driven bitterness which suggests actual citrus peel. After a moment, the lemon rind sweetens out into lemon curd or posset, and this complementary mix of sweet and tart continues into a pleasingly long finish. I'm surprised this one hadn't run out as it's ideal stuck-in-the-airport session material.

The other running tap was Electric Eye pale ale. This 5%-er is another pale one, although it's heavily textured in spite of that. The chewy malt opens the flavour and is then pursued by lots of also-chewy lemon and grapefruit. It's very apparent that this one is no stranger to Citra too, and looking it up reveals Simcoe and Chinook are also included. While it might not be clear in the west-coast way, it's still an excellent expression of these American hops, given enough of a malt base to optimise their impact.

Fruju had run out on draught but there were still a handful of cans in the fridge. This is the hazy pale ale of the set, 4.9% ABV, and either travel frazzledness or too much departure lounge relaxation means I neglected to take a picture of it. It is, according to my notes, a lightly cloudy yellow and, typically for the style, features both garlic and vanilla in the flavour. There's also a hint of caraway in the background, doubtless provided by the Mosaic, here with Citra and Azacca. For all that, it's inoffensive, if a bit basic. New England by the numbers.

With a further delay on the board I wandered across to the other departures bar, The Smithfield. Of note here was Stella Artois Unfiltered. I miss the unfiltered Carlsberg that was briefly available in Ireland before the pandemic, and wanted to find out if the Stella version similarly polishes up a very plain macro lager by leaving it unpolished. And it does! You get exactly the same wholesome crunchy oat cookie and an extra little smack from the noble hops. This would work really well as a distress purchase when nothing better is on offer.

Eventually we made it into the sky and home to Dublin. I'll be back in England for more very soon, however. Stay tuned.