Just another winter's ale

I only barely escaped snowy Dublin last week to spend the holiday in frozen Hertfordshire, so my Christmas drinking was mostly along English lines, with just a couple of exceptions. One sister gifted me a bottle of Saint Landelin Spéciale Noël, a seasonal from Gayant, the Douai brewery perhaps better known for Goudale. It's a yulified Belgian-style blonde -- 6.8% ABV and quite sticky with it, piling in the honey on top of gentle pot pourri spices. While warming, it's light enough to stay drinkable and sharing the 75cl bottle is entirely optional, fully subject to one's personal levels of seasonal goodwill.

The other non-English Christmas ale came from another sister (they know me so well): Merry X-Moose by Porthmadog's avant garde Purple Moose brewery. This poured shockingly flat but redeemed itself with lovely big chocolate flavours, finishing on some intriguing lavender high notes. Similar-but-different was Three Tuns Old Scrooge. A bit more condition to this, though not much. It's a dense black beer with lots of treacle spiced up by cinnamon and liquorice: an excellent warmer.

On to less seasonal fare, and Dorothy Goodbody's Imperial Stout: a boxed-up limited run of 6,000 bottles. Advice was that this is best left a few years to mature, but the air travel liquids ban left me with no choice but to pop the cap almost immediately after taking it out from under the Christmas tree. Immature imperial stout can be an unpleasant experience, often spiked with harsh metal-and-cabbage hop tones. None of that here, though. At 7% ABV it's perhaps on the light side of the genre and the flavours are quite gentle: lots of sweet and slightly sticky dark malts, a touch of roasted grain and a balanced grassiness from the hops. It could well be that it gets more interesting with age, but really there's absolutely nothing wrong with this beer right now.

A bottle of McMullen AK XXX fell across my path at one point during my stay. A fairly plain brown bitter, this. Crisp with a touch of toffee, it immediately called to mind Bailey's observations on the substituting of London Pride for altbier. This hits a lot of the same places as alt, finishing with a dry hop bite and being a little over-fizzy for English bitter. Close your eyes and think of Düsseldorf. (For more on the historical brewers' code "AK", including McMullen's use of it, see Zythophile's analysis here.)

Speaking of over-fizzy bitter, I was unable to resist the opportunity to try Whitbread Bitter when I spotted it on keg at a hotel bar near Luton. You have to try the local specialities when you travel, right? It lends further credibility to my grand theory that Irish red ale and English keg bitter are the same ill-starred creation. Whitbread Bitter is monstrously watery, generally sweet, with just a tiny shade more hopping that you might find in the likes of Smithwicks. My other guilty pleasure came on an excursion to the pub near where I was staying. Ignoring my own rule about going for something good rather than ticking off new beers, I couldn't resist a swift pint of Wells & Young's Eagle IPA. Brewed very much to hit the same market segment as Greene King IPA, this is 3.6% ABV and every bit as light, plain, uncomplicated and inoffensive. After one pint it was over to the far superior St Austell Tribute on the next tap.

I got to do very little by way of beer shopping -- just one trip to Sainsbury's, yielding the new IPA from Fuller's: Bengal Lancer. I was really quite careless in how I poured this 5.3% ABV bottle conditioned beer, but it still came out a perfectly limpid shade of dark copper. Despite the gung-ho branding it's quite understated all-in-all: I needed a few nosefuls of the aroma to pick up anything much, eventually identifying jaffa, or possibly mandarin, oranges. The malt drives the taste, leading the hops behind it, creating a not unpleasant effect of marmalade on thick-cut toast. The tail end veers almost tragically towards the metal and puke of Fuller's execrable IPA but just manages to avoid it by finishing quickly. The texture is perhaps the beer's best feature: big and satisfying. It would be nice if there was just a bit more substance to it, but as a straightforward well-constructed English IPA it can't really be faulted and I would buy it again.

And that's where we leave things for 2010. By the time you read this I should be somewhere in central Europe, gathering material for a post or two in 2011. Happy New Year!

Round the Cape

I've not had the best run of luck with English IPAs of late. I couldn't stomach the Fuller's one at all (though have not yet had the pleasure of their new and very much admired Bengal Lancer). Samuel Smith's was better but I still couldn't shake that harsh, rather metallic, bitter sensation that I get from these styles. Is there anything out there that has the beatings of Proper Job or White Shield?

Ask anyone who knows anything about English beer and they'll probably tell you "Thornbridge Jaipur", most likely followed by some sort of "duh" noise. I've seen this beer on sale once, at the British Pavilion of the European Beer Festival in 2008. I was thoroughly underwhelmed by it: thin, sharp and characterless. I'm perfectly willing, as always, to give it another go but the opportunity never presented itself. Until, out of the goodness of his heart and to shut me up, Mark from Real Ale Reviews sent a bottle to me in the post.

Immediately, I knew this was going to be a different experience. The aroma from Jaipur is fantastic: lots of those peachy, sherbety hop flavours that I enjoy in American IPAs, but this isn't a simple clone of a west coast hop bomb. On tasting, the citric punch is missing. Instead there are nice soft melons and peaches, plus lively orange flavours which are zesty though not any way sharp or aggressive. Indeed, it's one of the least assertive IPAs I've met. There's a bit of a bum note on the end however, where a soapy off-flavour creeps in and spoils things. I think I've got a better sense of the beer now, but also that it has to be tried on cask to get a proper feel for it. I'm still reluctant to put it in my tiny pantheon of good English IPAs. Sorry Mark.

I didn't think I'd be putting St Peter's India Pale Ale in the pantheon either. Ken in DrinkStore told me the bottle was something of an antique, having been taken in by him as a refugee from another off licence, one with a less-discerning clientele. The best-before date had rubbed off some time previously and the hard-wearing label had a definite frayed look to it. This, along with the green glass of the bottle, meant I was not expecting the fresh hops of a mint condition IPA.

But it was wonderful. Fantastically full-bodied for 5.5% ABV with a base of delicious toffee malt. It's not fresh and fruity, but spicy and complex, giving out exotic undertones of sandalwood and incense. And yet, like all the St Peter's beers, it remains incredibly drinkable throughout: all gone in under ten minutes. If this is what St Peter's IPA is like after months of ill-treatment and harsh lighting I can only imagine how good it must be fresh.

I'd also forgotten how great the St Peter's beers are generally. Whatever happened to them? They used to be everywhere.

In the deep Smith-winter

Travel. It's just as well I love it. Not just the Being Somewhere Different, but the act of Getting Up And Going does it for me. Which is just as well, given the amount of time I've spent on the road recently. I'm in Germany when you're reading this, but I'm writing it holed up in my parents' house in rural Northern Ireland, with the snow falling and nothing much to do except drink beers and try desperately to make my phone take a half-decent picture of them.

Offering me comfort right now is a bottle of Samuel Smith's Winter Welcome which I picked up in a local supermarket. It pours a lovely red-gold shade with quite a bit of fizzy froth from the 55cl bottle. Toffee and golden syrup are hinted at on the nose, but while it's strong and malt-driven, it's no sticky park-bench paper-bag job. There are sophisticated glimpses of licquorice and honey in here as well, and the 6% ABV produces just the right amount of warming sensation, without overdoing it. It's one of the best seasonal-type beers I've had this, er, season.

I'm following it with the same brewery's India Ale, an IPA very much in the rough English vernacular. It's surprisingly forward about the malt, with lots of hard toffee chewiness. The hops aren't in the least bit subtle -- adding a jolt of bitterness, finishing very slightly metallic and only offering a little hint of gunpowder piquancy by way of contribution to flavour complexity. The two elements maintain an uneasy truce, and the finished product is nicely drinkable as a result. It wouldn't be a favourite of mine though, and as it warms it's giving me echoes of the rather unpleasant Fuller's IPA. I can't see myself swapping a nice juicy, zingy American IPA for this rather dour Yorkshireman.

And that's it for 2009. Join me on Friday for more auto-posted delights and the first Session of the new decade.

More puker than pukka

I like writing. Even more, I like having written. I like the discipline of writing to order and on schedule. But I could never have been a journalist because I am a painfully slow reader. Digesting press releases on the hoof, ahead of press conferences and deadlines, would just not have been my forte, and I take months getting through even the shortest of books. Which is why it was only yesterday that I published my review of the excellent Hops & Glory by Pete Brown, despite having been sent a copy shortly after it was published.

I had an English IPA sitting in my beer fridge and I reckoned I may as well crack it open to mark the end of my own two month voyage (of the armchair variety) to India with Pete. It's Fuller's India Pale Ale and comes in a bottle with a breathtakingly classy royal purple label. 5.3% ABV and bottle conditioned: this is a beer going all-out for the IPA purist -- the people who'll buy it based on the words "faithfully recreated" on the back label. Close your eyes, imagine a balmy tropical evening on the veranda, and try to ignore the way your beer smells of vomit.

It does smell of vomit, though, and this acidic harshness carries through into the flavour. There's a good body under it, and a hint of caramel sweetness, but those utterly unfruity bitter hops are very hard to get past and make the end beer really quite unpleasant to drink.

Prior to cracking the bottle open I had been drinking Big Daddy IPA by Speakeasy in California, recently on tap in the Bull and Castle as a limited-time guest beer. Here, there are firm and fruity mandarin and grapefruit notes in super-smooth harmony with the caramel malts. Mrs Beer Nut suggests that the Fuller's beer is just suffering by comparison, but I disagree: whatever way it's looked at, I think it's simply a poor quality beer. Crank up the alphas, throw in more crystal, then we'll talk.