Eco-illogical

I was a little disheartened when organic beers was chosen as this month's Session topic. I've had quite a few organic beers over the course of this blog and very few have been memorable. To the best of my knowledge, Ireland has only ever produced one organic beer: a lager in Celtic Brew's late Finian's range. I don't remember much about how it tasted, just that it was gassy as hell and a bugger to pour. There are some real stinkers from Britain, like Honey Dew, Whitstable Bay and Lomond Gold, though redemption comes in the form of St Peter's Best and a number of beers from the Marble Brewery in Manchester.

New Zealand's Green Man Bitter stands out as the first organic beer I tried and actually liked. It seems that most of the organic hops we get in these parts come from Down Under and this beer uses them in spades. New Zealand also provides the green for the beer I'm actually reviewing for this Session: Broughton's Angel Lager -- not something I'd be running to try normally, but the only organic beer I could find that I hadn't already tried.

Leaving prejudice and apprehension aside, I'm rather enjoying it. It's a dark gold colour and every bit as crisp and dry as one would expect this style to be. There's plenty more, however: a heavy aley body for a start, and an interesting hoppy spice which leans towards a mediciney bitterness. This runs in parallel with some sweet malt and diacetyl butterscotch notes. There's a lot to this, which is always good to find in a pale lager, not to mention in an organic beer

All that said, I have to wonder what the point of the organicness is. There's nothing in the flavour that couldn't be achieved with non-organic ingredients and I can't help thinking Mother Earth would prefer us to use chemically enhanced Hallertau from local German farms instead of flying nature's own from the other side of the world. The overall environmental benefits of most of the organic beers we get is questionable.

If it's not going to save the world and doesn't taste any better, why are we doing organic beer? Could it be that the Soil Association badge is just another marketing gimmick to appeal to a certain sort of drinker?

I'm not a masochist, but...

... there seem to be an awful lot more organic beers around these days. Which is my excuse for continuing to try them despite having, I think, only ever encountered one I was impressed by: New Zealand's Green Man Organic Bitter. Today, the one that jumped into my glass and forced itself down my neck is Brakspear Organic Beer. And, surprise surprise, it was rather dull. For an ale, even a light light one, it's an inappropriate shade of orange. There's very little aroma followed by very little taste. Sure there's hops, and malt, and all the taste characteristics of good ale, but the flavour knob is turned down far too low. Compared to the Ferret the other day, this doesn't really rate for me.

Miscellaneous kiwis

New Zealand certainly has no shortage of breweries. As well as several big players and a couple of brewpub chains there are innumerable small-to-middle-sized operations all making a surprisingly wide range of beers. In the time I was there I could only hope to get a taster of what was on offer from these breweries, and with several I only managed to try one of their beers. So before I move on to the breweries I am most familiar with, this post is about the individual beers whose stablemates never reached me.

Duncan's Founder's range offers a broad selection of beers, of which Generation Ale was the only one I managed to try. It's a very smooth and satisfying dry nutty brown ale. Monk's Habit is an even more complex bitter with a strong burst of grapefruit on the nose and a taste both fruity and spicy at once. Green Man Organic Bitter is remarkably pale, but is most definitely bitter - probably the bitterest bitter in New Zealand. It has a full-on vegetal taste with notes of sprouts and broccoli, but in a good way.

On the lager front, the local Indian-style curry lager is called Monsoon which isn't a success, being blander and fizzier than Cobra or Kingfisher which it is presumably trying to emulate. The Pig and Whistle bar in Rotorua serve an own-brand lager called Swine which is very light, but carried an overtone of mustiness which spoiled it for me and I'm not sure if it was intended. Could be I just got a bad pint.

The Limburg brewery make a Witbier which is both orange in colour and taste. So overpoweringly fruity is this one that drinking more than 33cl would be a tall order, I think.

Lastly, and most interestingly, is Spruce Beer. The label claims this is based on an original recipe used on Captain Cook's voyages and incorporating the nearest thing New Zealand has to spruce, the rimua, as well as tea-tree leaves. The result is a fairly smooth beer but with a bizarre and distracting mediciney taste. It's certainly nothing at all like Scotland's real spruce beer Alba. Still, Kiwi as.