Crazy frog

I'm mad, me. Absolutely hatstand, no question. How mad? Well, the other day I paid €3 for a bottle of beer. A pale lager. From France. In a 33cl bottle, a green one.

What could possibly justify such a high price for something with the same provenance as Kronenbourg? Well, the beer in question is Kasteel Cru and its unique selling point / gimmick / device for separating money from fools is that it's made using champagne yeast.

On opening there was an immediate lightstruck whiff, no doubt resulting from the green glass. It pours extremely pale and thin looking, with lots of bubbles. This made me think immediately of fellow Alsatian Fischer, a beer I enjoy a lot. On the first sip there is indeed a similar sharp gassy dryness, but there's more as well. It really does carry the fruity, toasty flavours of champagne and the chardonnay grape (when fermented) in particular.

It's an interesting experiment, and a genuinely pleasant beer. It's still overpriced though: nice, but not that nice.

A sudden chill

It's a damning indictment of the state of Irish beer that our largest independent brewer, owner of a chain of pubs which does not stock the vapid products of Ireland's macrobrewers, has always had a Bud clone in its repertoire. Because it has to. (Ireland's Bud, for the record, is brewed by Diageo down at the old Smithwick's plant in Kilkenny.)

I'm sure I tried this Chiller way back when the Porterhouse (or The Porter House, as it was then) first opened the doors of its Temple Bar brewpub. Recently, however, after years of tireless beer education I've become curious about it. How accurate a rendition is it? How do you make a tasty, hand-made beer that trades on its tastelessness?

Today I gave in and had my first Chiller in eleven years. Believe it or not, it really does take the worthwhile elements from pale American cooking lager and put them in a proper beer. It's very dry, but in a refreshing way, almost like my old friend Fischer. The mouthfeel has a stimulating sparkle to it which leads to criticism number one: the gassiness. I can't imagine drinking very much of this without becoming bloatis in extremis. Perhaps the reason the Porterhouse is so fond of ear-splitting skiddley-eye music is that it covers the belches of the Chiller drinkers.

More problematic was the chemical aftertaste that came with it, a bit like disinfectant. Could have been a bad glass or stale beer, but I sincerely hope it's not supposed to be there. I'll confirm this on my next tasting in 2018.
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Michael Jackson, inspiration, RIP.

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that

Since I discovered that a neighbour runs a home brewery, my approach to buying beer has changed somewhat. I've promised to supply my empties for reuse, which has led to a preference for beers sold in bottles suitable for this purpose. So it has to be brown glass, it should be as large as possible and the jackpot is a swing-top cap. Not that there's any fear of me buying nothing but Fischer from now on: it's a good beer, but I don't swing that way. Instead, the effect has been to quicken my decision of which of a number of new beers I'll take home.

My last trip to Redmond's was rather truncated as a result. I only paced the floor a couple of times before coming away with Kapsreiter Stadtbräu. (Brown, 500ml, swing top, since you ask.) At first I was disappointed: I had no idea before pouring what style this was, and for no reason was expecting something dark and caramelly. What I got was a cloudy lager, with very little up-front flavour. It took a couple of swigs before I really got it, however. This beer shares ancestry with Munich lager, but hasn't had so many of its edges knocked off: there's a malty roughness that puts the brakes on the underlying sweetness. At a mere 4.9%, you could easily drink another one straight away if it wasn't for some fairly serious gassiness.

Oh, and it's organic as well. Perhaps the answer to the problem of organic blandness is to lower the hops quotient. Central European lager A-OK, but English ale, fuhgeddaboutit.

Dry Maoth

I'm a longtime fan of Mao, the Irish Asian restaurant chain (being Irish, the chain currently consists of just two branches in Ireland). They now sell their own brand of beer, made in Ireland by an anonymous brewer and featuring the Chairman hisself on the label (which also matches the upholstery -- see right).

My last run-in with restaurant-branded lager was in a Mexican place in Brum a couple of years ago and I wasn't impressed. Mao Beer is pretty good, however. It's overwhelmingly dry and malty with very little by way of aftertaste which gives one that palate-cleansing mineral water sensation I associate most with Fischer.

It's possible that Mao is supposed to taste like one of the common oriental lagers, like Asahi, in which case it fails miserably. But as Irish-Asian lagers go, this is far and away the front runner.

I wonder who makes it?

Too damn subtle

At the back of my cupboard since I got back from France has been a bottle of Doreleï, an amber ale from Fischer of Alsace. Part of the reason I haven't opened it is the stunning art nouveau bottle. This evening I succumbed.

The beer advertises itself as being spiced with vegetable extracts, but really there was very little sign of that. In the absence of instructions I drank it at a little below room temperature and found it so lacking in taste I wondered if it's meant to be served cold where flavour is less of an issue. True, it has a faint hint of gingerbread in the foretaste and the characteristic Fischer dryness at the very end, but it's too little too late.

Probably the only beer in the world better in the bottle than out.

Allez les Bleus! (et les blondes et les blanches)

So, recently I was complaining about Ch'ti, and about how France can do better beer. I'm back from France now and can confirm that there is a vast and fascinating brewing tradition in the area of north France which backs on to Flanders. And I didn't even touch the Jenlain.

Starting with one of the more prosaic, barbecue lagers, we have something called 33 Export which is drier than your average lager, and slightly, but not unpleasantly, bitter. It works well as an aperitif, I found. Moving up a level, Pelforth is a fairly ubiquitous brand. The blonde has a strong sticky honey flavour which is delicious. The brune is also sticky, but in a caramel sort of way, with a touch of coffee. Surprisingly easy drinking, for all that.

No visit to France would be complete without some Kronenbourg. They make Wilfort, which is a very thick, dark, sweet beer, similar to a Czech or German dunkel. Quite impressive, given that most of what Kronenbourg make is muck.

The Fischer brewery in Alsace had a number of beers on the shelves in Pas-de-Calais. Their ordinary lager is another of the dry ones. It has a sharp, tangy flavour and a heavy fizz, creating a sensation not unlike drinking mineral water.

The main St. Omer brewery makes four artisan style beers, sold in 65cl swingtop bottles. Blonde de Brasseurs is the lager, and is fairly humdrum: the least interesting of the strong lagers I tried. Pelforth set the standard here. Blanche de Brasseurs is similarly unimpressive: dry and ash-bitter, like Ch'ti Blanche. The Brune de Brasseurs is decent, however: very caramelly and sweet. I was glad that the bottle was only 65cl instead of the stanard 75: this was tough, heavy going. Finally, Réserve de Brasseurs, the ambrée, was the best of them. This is a light ale, clearly related to the Brune but much easier-going.

On to the smaller breweries, producing the bigger, corked, bottles. Vivat is a smooth, dry, malty lager, while the blonde made by Abbatiale de Sant Amand is gently flavoured with juniper berries, giving it a subtle but strong geniver taste. The other Sant Amand I tried was their Speciale Noel beer: this is a copper-coloured ale, spiced with almond, coriander and lots more besides. The overall effect is of Christmas pudding as a beer. In season, this would really be a winner. Goudale is another common artisan blonde beer from the area. It has the rich honey taste but without any of the sticky cloying one might expect, plus a gentle fizz, making this a very easy-drinking beer.

There are a number of brewpubs in the area, most of which belong to the Les 3 Brasseurs chain. This afternoon I visited the branch in the Cité Europe shopping centre in Coquelles, called Le Moulin à Bière. It's a fairly normal looking shopping centre food court family restaurant, which just happens to have a working brewery along one wall. They do four beers in unsurprising genres: the blonde is dry and crisp; the brune is heavy and stouty; the ambrée is quite light; and the blanche is the best: soft and lemony. What spoiled all of these, except the last, is that they carried a distinct aftertaste of fish. On the blonde and ambrée it was particularly unpleasant. The blanche had a little bit of a fish kick too, but given the lemon element, it worked with the flavour rather than against it. I'm all in favour of novel ingredients in beer, but I think something may have gone wrong with the recipe here.

And on to the top prize so far. Christophe Noyon appears to be the area's only Big Name Brewer. He makes two main beers. 2 Caps is a cloudy blonde which is fantastically smooth and wheaty: utterly refreshing. Blanche de Wissant is streets ahead of all the area's blanches, being very light and gently frangranced with a bittersweet lemon aroma. Both are very high quality product. M. Noyon has teamed up with the area's Big Name Cheesemaker (Philippe Olivier) to make a special beer-for-cheese. A bottle is in my bag somewhere and I'm really looking forward to making a report.

Also in my bag are some beers from the Audmaroise microbrewery in St. Omer, and a few other odds and sods, which will keep me in blog entries for the next couple of weeks. For the moment, I shall say that the beer tourist could do a lot worse than travelling the roads of Nord and Pas-de-Calais, between the endless fields of barley, picking up some samples of some really top class beer on the way round.