Meeting Cornelius

We were introduced to Cornelius yesterday, via its rather tasty Baltic Porter. It's a subsidiary brand of the Sulimar brewery, a big one, mostly turning out standard lager but which has recently given itself a bit of a shake-up to take note of the way the Polish beer market is evolving. Cornelius is the on-message yoof label, hoping to surf the wave of cool to the next big thing in beer. Or something equally cringeworthy spitballed by middle-aged men in a conference room.

We had the whole arrangement explained to us by one of the company execs at an EBCU event in Łódź Polytechnic. The brewery also provided beers for the lunch afterwards, giving us a chance to taste the strategy in action. To begin, though, one of Sulimar's non-fancy lagers, Trybunal Export, named after the royal law court that was once based in the brewery's home town of Piotrków Trybunalski. It's 5% ABV and hits all the visual cues: clearest gold, topped by a fine white froth. It smells bitter and tastes just as sharp and waxy as the aroma suggests, with more than a hint of sulphurous skunkiness, even though I assume this bottle arrived straight from the brewery. It's a beer that really needs to be served cold to be enjoyed, I reckon. But even then I'm not sure it would be any good. Moving on...

Cornelius Dunkel is a pretty spot-on copy of the classic Munich style: 5.9% ABV, a clear dark red and packet-loads of  bourbon cream biscuits in the flavour, with added muscovado sugar and an aroma that's all damson and plum. It's perhaps not quite as clean as the real thing, with some lightly marker-ish phenols floating about, but it does a satisfactory impression for the casual observer. Or the person who's drinking it for free.

Sticking with the Bavarian stylings, next up is Pszeniczny, a 5% ABV weizen. The bang of banana off this is insane: pure, distilled essence of banana. The platonic ideal of curved yellow fruit, right up your nose holes and making noise. Remarkably it's the clove elements that present in the flavour but that's not the main feature. This is, by a long way, the sweetest straight-up wheat beer I have ever tasted. The body is riddled with heavy residual sugar and every mouthful is like shovelling another spoonful of granulated into your gob. It tastes like diabetes in a glass and I didn't get too far with mine. Having achieved this feat, the geniuses at Sulimar reckoned what they needed to do next is add more sugar.

And they were probably right too. Fruit-flavoured radler-type beer mixes are the fastest growing segment of the Polish beer market and the one that is answering the perennial problem of how to get women to drink beer. Perhaps it explains why brewers closer to home, until recently, persisted with lurid coloured, tissue-box branded, sugary concoctions in the belief that it would woo the female drinker. It Poland it seems to have, and more besides.

Before us, then, were two Cornelius offerings, both based on that sugarbomb weizen, though oddly neither tasted as sweet as it did. Bananowy is made with added banana, like that was what the base beer needed. 3% ABV, a light haze and not much aroma. The scale on my sweetness analogy meter doesn't go this high so I'm going to grope blindly at "children's medicine": it has a similar sort of unpleasant plasticky artificial thing too. I managed to scrawl the words "fizzy Yop" in my notebook before I stopped drinking it and moved on to...

Grejpfrutowy, made with grejpfrut, er, grapefruit. I actually really enjoyed this one. Right from the start, up from the hazy pink liquid, there's that acidic spiciness you get from the outside of real grapefruits, and it's real grapefruit all the way in the flavour, with maybe a sprinkling of sugar over the top. It's fantastically refreshing and I'd be very happy to drink it, in the right circumstances. To give an idea of the circumstances the brewery has in mind, they're launching this in a can with a built-in straw. Everyone will be using these by next summer, mark  my words.

One last beer from Cornelius before we go in search of more pubs, and yet another pitch change in the branding. Triple Blond, is young, colourful, vibrant, and fairly horribly sexist. But it was pouring at the festival I attended and I wanted to complete the set. And it's not bad: too sweet (again) for your classic tripel but with peach and melon notes that, with the estery Belgian booze, bring it close to the spec for a decent Belgian IPA.

We shall leave Cornelius there. Between the lager and the straws and the radlers and the tripel they certainly seem to have a lot of plates spinning. I'm sure they can well afford to let one or two smash, and I'd be happy to make recommendations.

Baltic cruise

There was a full house in the upstairs lecture room at the Polish Regional Brewery festival in Łódź for a tutored horizontal tasting of the beer Poland considers its own: Baltic Porter. Eight examples were set out, sequenced to place the award-winners, and multi-award-winners at the end.

So, starting in the wooden-spoon zone on the right of the picture: Grand Imperial Porter. It's grand, like. Really. Light-bodied but with lots of warm, Horlicks-like, malt on the nose and a sweet main flavour: mostly chocolate plus a very understated bitterness. Moving left to Witnicki Porter Lubuskie and espresso is the dominant theme here: a thick and oily roasted quality, mainly in the aroma but coming out in the taste, next to higher-alcohol marker pens and a softer brown sugar caramel thing. It's intense stuff and I was surprised to discover it's one of the weakest beers in show at only 8.5% ABV. Lwówek Baltic Porter was quite the palate cleanser after that, or maybe its attributes were simply drowned out by the foregoing. It's a simple, plain little number, some light liquorice bitterness but nothing more troubling than that. And bringing us to the half way mark, Cornelius Baltic Porter, a 9%-er and rather hot with it, though smooth enough to keep its drinkability intact. There's low-key liquorice again and no sharp edges. It's a slow sipper, but an enjoyable one. More from Cornelius in the next post, when we flip the tasting from horizontal to vertical.

I'm certain Grand Imperial Porter: Chili was put in to wake us up at this point. As you'd expect, this is based on the first beer and still tastes very much like it. But they haven't been shy with the chilli and the beer is big enough to bear the heat. The end result is a lovely late burn and a catch in the back of the throat. There's no real flavour contribution from the chilli but the extra heat alone makes it a more interesting beer than the original. This was followed by one from the big boys: Perła Porter Bałtycki. Though Perła is part of Danish giant Royal Unibrew, its Baltic Porter certainly seems well-regarded by the locals, and I liked it too. While the style has a certain tendency to dourness, this one is fun, with giggly notes of strawberry milkshake in with the chocolate and coffee. There's nothing off-style about the 9.2% ABV, however, even if it is very well hidden.

The two medal winning beers left for the end were, first, Kormoran's Porter Warmiński, a deftly balanced beer which takes the weight off its dense body with light and dry coffee and cocoa complexities. And to see us out: Komes Porter Bałtycki by the Fortuna brewery in Miłosław. This one won its plaudits through complexities, adding more than a strawberry milkshake into the Baltic Porter flavour repertoire. The aroma is an apothecary shop of bittersweet herbs, while the flavour packs in classic smooth chocolate and assertively bitter liquorice. It's like every element of the flavour has been taken out, examined, polished and put back in place. No shortcuts here.

I'll confess I went into the tasting as not the biggest fan of Baltic Porter, but I enjoyed the session and came out of it a lot more likely to choose one when the opportunity arises. I guess that was the point of the event.