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.

The Down Under fundamentals

Back from my travels with much to report. After Singapore the rest of my time was spent in New Zealand. I was quite surprised that it has a wide and varied brewing culture very unlike its larger neighbour across the Tasman Sea. Small breweries abound, and the variety of product is impressive. I think I scratched the surface by trying seventy different beers, so it'll take me a few posts to get through them all. This one is about the basics.

What struck me most of all is that the basic beer style, the one that almost everyone makes whether they're a mega-corporation or a small brewpub, is not a lager but a light amber ale. The biggest brewery in the country is Auckland's Lion Nathan and they make Lion Red. It's rather plain, light and unchallenging. Tui is another common brand, and one step up, I think, being drier and more interesting than Lion. (Like Tui, lots of kiwi beers are named after local fauna - before the end of this we'll have had tuataras, moas and a black shag). Waikato Draught is an odd example of this type of beer. It claims on the label to be "Bitter Beer" but is in fact very sweet, almost sugary. It's pleasant for all that though and goes down very easy.

Moving away from the industrial end of the market, Speight's Gold Medal Ale is ubiquitous in the South Island especially and is pretty decent if a little unexciting. Though it is definitely an ale it's light enough to remind me of Carlsberg more than anything else. Monteith's is the other small South Island brewery punching above its weight. It's Original is also quite plain and easy drinking. Cardrona Gold from the Wanaka Beerworks is probably the best of this lot - leaning away from the pale ale towards the more flavoursome IPA. It is dry and zesty as well as pleasantly light. There will be more from these three breweries in later posts.

Of course, basic lager is inevitable everywhere. Steinlager is probably the commonest in NZ. It's in the bitter German style, reminiscent of Beck's in taste as well as the label. Export Gold is a rather more non-descript fizzy lager, as is the rarer Canterbury Draught. Neither are recommended, given the many alternatives in every bar.

That will do for a taster. I promise more interesting beers to come.

Beyond Tigers

Off on my travels again, and I paid a flying visit to Singapore, calling in at two of its microbreweries. Brewerkz is a monument to the faux industrial school of brewpub architecture: a huge converted riverfront warehouse. It does a sizeable range of beers across several genres.

On the lighter side, their Golden Ale is a typical grainy microbrewed lager, slightly cloudy and quite light. Unusually, also, they do a Fruit Brew which was made of strawberries on my visit but which apparently changes. I found it quite bland: too warm and with a touch of ale hops neither of which should feature in this kind of beer. The strawberries were barely identifiable.

Moving on, they do two IPAs: the plain one being very similar to the mainstream English IPA and the Xtra IPA having a subtle malty foretaste followed by a serious hops afterburn. It's 7.2% and tastes it.

Other dark beers include a bock lager, which is cloudy rather than properly dark and carries a delicious smoke and burnt caramel flavour which reaches parts of the nose other beers don't reach. They also do Hopback, which claims to be in the real ale style, and is indeed complex and bitter like the best of them, but is a tad too fizzy to be counted with proper real ales, in my opinion. There's also the inevitable stout, this one being made with oatmeal. It has a strong roasted grain flavour and is very heavy and satisfying.

All in all, the range and style of Brewerkz makes it one of my favourite brewpubs and definitely worth a visit should you need something other than Tiger or a gin sling.

Less worth the effort is the Singapore branch of the Paulaner brewhouse chain. I had to cross a ring of steel put up for the World Bank conference to get to it and I don't think it was worth it. They produce a helles and a dunkel, both rather insipid and neither as good as the mass-produced mainstream Paulaner. This is the first of this chain I've been to and I suspect it is just pointless big-brewery gimmickry of the highest order. You don't have to be independent to make great beer on the premises, but it helps.

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.

Maltsville USA

Raiding a friend's fridge recently, I happened across some Samuel Adams Boston Lager. Americans of my acquaintance rave about this beer as one of the world's greats. I have to say I'm not wholly convinced of that. It's good, certainly, and leagues ahead of most American mass-market beers. What I like most is the distinctive maltiness on the palate: a soft, velvety smoothness - quite unlike any other lager I know. A world-beater, no. But classy stuff nonetheless.

The Specialest Brew

Samichlaus Bier, from Austria, proclaims itself "The strongest lager beer in the world". At 14% I'm not going to argue. The gimmick continues with the statement that it is brewed but once a year, on December 6th, then aged a further ten months before bottling. So what does all this effort produce? Samichlaus fizzes violently out of the bottle, then settles immediately to a flat brown-red colour with a faint sparkle. On the nose it has a rich sugary character, somewhere between a fine Belgian dubbel and a nasty special brew. It tastes like a heavier version of the heaviest barley wine, heading into the dodgy liqueur or cough medicine end of the spectrum. The first sip is a shock, for sure. After a while, however, it does round out and become almost warming rather than creating the sickening overload I expected. It's a hard one to call. If you know your way around your Trappists and your barley wines then this as another one to add to the collection. If you didn't read further than the words "lager beer" on the label you can't say you weren't warned...

Sour times

A La Bécasse in Brussels is one of my favourite bars in the world. Their Lambic Doux is a very fine beer, being a sweet version of Brussels's bitter local speciality. I happened across a kriek being sold under their brand recently and decided to give it a go. I'm a big fan of kriek, in its sweet to medium-sweet incarnations. Liefmans is the benchmark, with honourable mentions for Bellevue and Timmerman's. I was expecting something similar from La Bécasse. I was wrong. While there is no doubt that Bécasse kriek wears its ripe cherries up front, at heart it is an unreconstructed, down home sour Brussels gueuze. The contrast in the flavour is remarkable and is unique as far as I know. Despite being made by monster brewer InBev, this stuff couldn't be more Brussels if it tried and is well worth sampling if you can find it.