And not a bitter in sight

After a one-year hiatus by the festival, and ten years by me, I was back at The Great British Beer Festival last week, for the Tuesday afternoon trade session. The big change is that the venue is now Birmingham rather than London, spread across two halls of the gargantuan National Exhibition Centre. I detected a certain change in ethos too. Once upon a time, there was a corner reserved for high-end international beers, American in particular, and that's where what passes for cool kids in our pastime could be found. But while there was a token set of casks from the east coast USA, the Brewers Association no longer organises a bottle bar, and the American, German and Dutch/Belgian bars were somewhat sidelined, in a corner away from the main action. That, of course, meant that the main action was all lovely British cask beer, which should be the whole point. With a mere hop from Birmingham airport, I was in early and ready to get ticking.

The nearest bar to the entrance was full of awards nominees, with judging for Champion Beer of Britain happening nearby. Here I found my primary target for the day: Oregon Trail IPA from Elusive Brewing. It's become quite the cult beer in Britain recently and I had never seen it in the wild. In proper west coast style it's bright and golden, and is shockingly bitter at first, going beyond mere grapefruit into raw lime peel and concentrated pine resin. A rapidly-arriving finish adds an unwelcome savoury note of caraway seed to the picture. It's very dry and sharp, and needs its full 5.8% ABV to give it substance. As a result, while it's far from balanced, it's not harsh either. Still, my half pint was tough going and I think this may be an acquired taste. It has several points in common with Thornbridge's mighty Jaipur, but lacks that one's subtlety and (dangerous) drinkability. Maybe I'll have a better time when next I encounter it, but first impressions were that, in hop terms, this is too rich for my blood.

Before moving on, I thought I'd better have a go of the one mild that was in awards contention: Penzance Mild from Penzance Brewing. As it happened, this was later crowned Champion Beer of Britain, and while I'm sure the competition was intense, I think it was a very deserving winner. Right from the outset of the aroma, this ruby-russet beer is the last word in 3.6% ABV luxury. Heady roasted grain vapours mix with fine milk chocolate, creating an effect like bourbon cream biscuits. The texture is full and silky, making it feel wholesome and nutritious, like a throwback to when beers were treated as medicinal and, obviously, tasted better than nowadays. There aren't any surprises in the flavour from all this: it continues with darker chocolate, warm cookies and plump currants, given a tiny pinch of cut-grass bitterness in the finish. This is absolutely majestic stuff, fully deserving to carry the flag for mild, and for British cask beer generally. Do not miss it if you see it on the inevitable victory tour.

Liberation's Herm Gold had also found its way onto this bar, though I don't think it was in the running for any gongs. A shame, really, because it's a very decent golden ale. It has a touch of the beeswax bitterness of the best golden English bitters -- looking at you, Timothy Taylor Landlord -- plus an altogether more modern (whisper it: American) burst of lemon and lime. But not too much, of anything. I found it a perfect refresher at around my half way point, and would very happily lean into a session on it, in different circumstances. Golden ale is a highly unfashionable style, but when it's on point like this, it can be amazing. A new campaign, now that mild has been saved?

My token visit to the American cask bar landed me McGowan's Cream Ale from Brightpath Brewing in Pennsylvania. I'm sure I've said before that I've never really seen the point of this beer style. Like American Light Lager, it was created by the 20th century's giant industrial breweries to cut every corner available and make something that still counts as beer as cheaply and profitably as possible. That the craft movement has attached some retro credibility to it is bemusing. Anyway, this one was lovely. What they've done, right, is hop the hell out of it, so you get a 4.5% ABV blonde beer with a delightfully spritzy citric aroma and flavour. It's palate-cleansing, easy-drinking, and plenty characterful to boot. While it has lots in common with America's pale ales, I got a sense of witbier about it too, albeit rather more intense. I'm glad I gave it a go.

And from the continentals, there was the opportunity to try the three-brewery Trappist collaboration, produced at La Trappe, with input from Zundert and Tynt Meadow. The Three Rules of Authentic Trappist (lest you be in any doubt that there are such) is a dubbel of 7.4% ABV. It was served on keg and I found it a little cold and thin for that. I think the flavour suffered too, and it didn't seem as characterful as any of the classic Trappist dubbels. Still, it managed to hit the necessary style points, with a raisin fruit side melding with chocolate cake. It's slightly tannic, making it dry where I would have preferred more dark malt sweetness, and the alcohol expresses itself as a portwine heat in the finish. It's not bad, but I was prepared to be much more impressed by it than I actually was. I don't know how much of a rarity this is, but you aren't missing a lot if it doesn't come your way.

When I went downstairs to the main floor, I was as surprised as you to find myself heading first to the Greene King bar, but I had reasons. The first of these is their own mild, XX, and while this doesn't seem to be a particularly rare beer, it has always eluded me. Could the fact that I'll generally avoid Greene King pubs when there's any other choice be connected to that? Maybe. Anyway, here it was in all its 3% ABV glory, and I got to scratch the itch. This one is properly black with stout-like garnet hints where the light shines through. The aroma says fudge to me, and the flavour continues that way, with a sweet mix of soft buttery toffee, some condensed milk and a light layer of chocolate or mocha. It's thin too, and I initially had that flagged as a flaw but, really, the sweet flavour profile needs this lightness of touch; any thicker and it would be hard work to drink. What's missing is the roasted grain and the dark fruit to give it an extra dimension or two. I can see how this would stand out amongst the other prosaic Greene King offerings, but it's far from a superstar. It won't be getting me through the doors of any of the brewery's pubs.

The bigger itch at Greene King was 5X. This is a genuine rarity, used as an ingredient in some of their blended beers, but you need to go to a special event to find it on sale, and I had missed it at GBBF before. At this point it was still a bit early for a third-pint of a 12% ABV beer but I didn't want to chance it running out. In the glass it's a very dark brown colour, and the hot solvent aroma is the first indication that it's not really meant for drinking. Bizarrely, it's very thin, which I was not expecting, and neither is it especially sweet. Instead, this is very fully attenuated and tastes quite vinous, with the cherry and redcurrant of a light Italian wine, leading quickly into a rough and stale old-cork finish, with acrid splinters of young and sappy wood. It does not taste matured, or rounded, or seasoned, or any of the other positive adjectives I had planned for it. While it has some features in common with English barley wine, there's a surprising lack of refinement. Sipping through it slowly, I was glad to get it finished, to deem it done.

Second place in the Champion Beer of Britain had gone to Sarah Hughes brewery, for their Snowflake winter ale, and that was next. This is 8% ABV and gives immediate cosy vibes from its chestnut colour and toffee aroma. On tasting, that unfolds into strawberry and raspberry, but without their tart, cleansing qualities. While that's fun to begin with, it wears off quickly. I found the sweet side grows rapidly and the beer turns sickly and cloying too soon, even with only a half pint to contend with. I see what they're trying to do, and it's not the first time I've found a beer in this style hard to drink. But I thought that a medal-winner would show rather more finesse. Sometimes a lack of subtlety is needed for the win, or at least for second prize. Maybe I'm the real snowflake here.

Time was running out and I needed to stop idling my way through the menus and grab the beers I knew I'd regret if I missed. Siren was next, and a variation on their magnificent Broken Dream stout, called Recurring Dream. This brings the ABV down to 4.6%, from the quaffable original's frankly dangerous 6.5%, and it was served here on keg. Trying the two side-by-side would have been interesting, had time allowed, but I did get the impression that this has a lot in common with it. The coffee is in full 3D Technicolour, beginning on an aroma of freshly roasted beans and proceeding to be enjoyably dry and free of gimmicks. The flavour's coffee is toasty, not sweet, and there's a balancing chocolate character to add a little fun while keeping things classically composed. With session-strength stouts seeing a bit of a boom in the UK these days, it's right and proper for Siren to be getting in on the act.

Having ticked off a Channel Islands beer early, Manx was next, represented by Kaneens brewery and their Dhoo "black beer". What type of black beer? Let's see. It's a light-bodied one, even at 4.6% ABV. When the internet tells me it's a Schwarzbier I don't disbelieve it. What I have noted as thinness therefore becomes lager-cleanness. There's a gentle hint of plum in the flavour, and a dash of chocolate too, so this probably could have passed as a mild if the brewery so chose. The finish goes a bit funky, unfortunately, adding a rough stale-sweat tang to the end. I had been enjoying the beer up until then but found it going a little off course here. On another day I might have welcomed it, but next to the general high calibre of the day's dark beers, it was disappointing.

Time for one more mild, and it's local brewery Green Duck with their Bostin' Mild, fully appropriating the regional beer style of the West Midlands. And it's a basic one. I liked its dark mahogany colour, and its ease of drinking, helped by a mere 3.4% ABV. The flavour is dry and uncomplicated with a burnt toast effect scrubbing the palate but not much else going on. If anything, this tasted more like a Schwarzbier than the one before. Clearly, it's designed to be sunk by the pint, so sipping a half at the tail end of a day's drinking means, I now realise, that I didn't really give it a fair shake. One to come back to, for sure.

And that's all I managed to... wait... Theakston's has made an Old Peculier tie-in IPA? What? I spotted this on my way out the door and inched towards the exit with it in hand. I don't think Peculier IPA really has anything in common with its part-namesake: it's a 5.1% ABV amber-coloured cask IPA, brewed with an unlikely combination of Simcoe, Cluster and Bullion hops, plus some of the brewery's home-growns. It absolutely works, however, being a little on the sweet side, but allowing the malt heft to soften the hops. There's plenty of modern, new-world, hop zing, but instead of a pithy, piney bite, there's creamy and dessertish lemon posset or curd. It's beautifully mellow and, not for the first time that day, I found myself wishing I could settle into a slow pint of it.

But that's where I called it a day. Commentary on the good points and shortcomings of the festival and its new venue had started before I was even home, and I'll leave that to others. I had a jolly day out and feel I managed a happy cross section of the sort of British beer I like, with a couple of interesting foreigners to add colour. That's all I was after.

Good things in small packages?

I had an interesting conversation with a brewer at a recent beer festival about bottle sizes. He pointed out that in the UK there's a tendency for breweries to use bottle size as an indicator of which side of the craft divide they sit. I can't say I'd noticed, but having run a few examples in my head, I now see what he means: 330ml shows you're young and hip and craft, whereas a half litre leaves you open to the accusation of being a fuddy-duddy family-owned provider of boring brown bitter. As a home drinker and a pint man, I'm very glad that this worrying trend hasn't really caught on here. But today I'm exploring some British beer from very much the "craft" side of the house, all sold 330ml at a time. As it happens, it's also Session day and our subject is Cans or Bottles, so I'm including both formats and may even throw in the odd observation on their respective merits. But back to craft beer as applies to British brewing...

The archetypal self-declared UK craft brewery is BrewDog and they had embraced the 330 even when they were still brewing cask ale and writing their best-befores in biro. Nowadays they're big enough to send random bloggers free beer, like this here bottle of Bourbon Baby which arrived in the post a while back. As the name suggests, it's barrel aged but of a modest strength: just 5.9% ABV. Cola-coloured with a cream-toned head, it does have the spicy vanilla scent of bourbon, but enticingly so, and not overpowering. The base beer is a sweet and toffeeish scotch ale and that's still just about detectable in the taste, but the woody whisky dominates the flavour completely. I'm used to the roundness you get in stronger, darker bourbon-aged beers and this is showing me why they're made that way: there's a thinness at this beer's core which doesn't do it any favours. If you love the taste of bourbon in beers, and don't mind it being there for its own sake, then this is for you. Seekers of a more integrated beer experience need not apply, however.

Siren is a brewery whose beers I've only ever encountered on draught before, so this bottle of Undercurrent oatmeal pale ale is the first I've ever had in the house. I'm a frequent ranter against the bottle conditioning of small-pack hoppy beers and this is a definite offender: murky orange to begin with and then a surprise extra swish of yeasty goo going in accidentally at the end. Arrgh! At 4.5% ABV that's bound to have detrimental effect on the hops. But I don't think it did. Undercurrent has a simple but lovely aroma of oranges and grapefruit while the flavour screams freshness: piney resins, juicy mandarins, sweet tinned peaches and a pinch of gunpowder spicing. It's a session-strength hop tour-de-force (though quite possibly a waste of oatmeal) but I'd still like a pint of it. At a recent focus group for a new Irish beer brand I said some very rude things about the test version of their pale ale. Standard-setting beers like Undercurrent are the reason why.

So I was totally stoked facing into Broken Dream "breakfast stout". It's not so spectacular, however, being a damn decent but rather plain thick, strong stout of 6.5% ABV. There's lots of roast, or possibly even generous amounts of burnt; dry overall with a streak of very dark chocolate to lighten the mood. Usually, breweries of Siren's calibre toss in a dash of fruit or flowers, but that's all absent here, more's the pity. I'll need to look elsewhere for that sort of action.

And here it is, in the aluminium overcoat of Beavertown's Holy Cowbell stout. Once again the yeast gets the better of me as overenthusiastic pouring dumps some beige lumps from the bottom of the can into my otherwise flawless black beer. But yet again the beer gods smile down upon me because there's nothing that can interfere with this beer's greatness. The exotic fruit aromas entice, Bisto-style, from three rooms away and the flavour is a punchy mix of bitter veg leaves, fleshy tropical fruit and invigorating bath salts. Whereas something this strong and dark normally departs from the palate on its bitterer aspects, it's the sumptuous juicy fruit that's the parting shot here which makes the beer very moreish indeed. It's only slightly weaker than the first beer of this post but packs so much more in.

Is it the packaging format that makes Holy Cowbell so amazing? No, I don't think so. It's spectacular on draught too, for one thing. I'll admit I like the practicalities of canned beer: the robustness and stackability, and the speed at which they chill. But I also respect the opinion of those fusty half-litre merchants at Thornbridge when they say the case for quality is unproven. For the moment I'm not fussed what a brewery puts its beer in, as long as what comes out is the grade of Undercurrent and Holy Cowbell.