Hamlet, cats, windmills and weed

Aside from BrewDog, the other non-Danish brewery I was overjoyed to see exhibiting at the Copenhagen Beer Festival was De Molen. As well as Menno and his helpers there was a good contingent of Dutch beer fans flying the flag (well, wearing the t-shirt) for De Molen around the city. It was unusual to see Menno at a festival unaccompanied by one of his huge barrels -- almost his signature at this stage -- but there was plenty of major barrel-aged goodness coming from the taps. Take Hel & Verdoemenis Wild Turkey Barrel Edition, for instance. The base beer is an absolute stonker of an imperial stout and why anyone thought it needed more complexity is beyond me. But they did and it worked. The heady super-fresh coffee notes take a back seat and you get sweet malty bourbon flavours at the front instead. Not too boozy (for a 13%-er) and remarkably, dangerously, gluggable.

Top of my personal hitlist was Turf & Veen, another imperial stout, this one carrying a health warning about how much peated malt it contains. Like heat warnings on curry menus, that's like flames to a moth for me. Turf & Veen is peaty but not in the medicinal, harsh, Laphroaigish way. It tastes like the smell of autumn evenings in Donegal -- fresh and aromatic turf smoke. Then, for balance, it has massive amounts of bittersweet chocolate. Perhaps not for everyone, but I certainly want more of this.

Menno seems to have an endless supply of binomial names for his many many beers, but it looks like he may finally have crossed off most of the words in his dictionary. Why else would the new coffee imperial stout be called Mout & Mocca 2? While the first one had almost Caribbean levels of sweetness, this is super dry with a burnt coffee bean crunchiness.

The only De Molen I didn't care for was Vuur & Vlam, a 6.2% ABV pale ale. Even though I had it early on the first day -- long before palate fatigue might become a factor -- I found it quite insipid. Where did the hops go? In the same general category, but with the ABV ratcheted up to 10% there was Luid & Duidelijk: smooth, spicy, warming and just what you want in a barley wine.

Last of the dedicated foreign-brewery stalls -- that I noticed, anyway -- was the minimalist showing from Italian brewery Revelation Cat (a wonderful name which I can't hear without thinking of Resurrection Joe by The Cult). Their gorgeous chrome six-pump Angram engines were pouring a series of lambics they'd made, each using a single hop variety. Fresh hops thrown in dry, mind, not the aged sort the Belgians tend to prefer. I went for the Nelson Sauvin Lambic and found that it lacked the saltpetre-and-bricks complexity you normally get with lambic and instead the sourness is topped with a massive fruity hit, white grapes in particular, from the hops. An interesting combination, for drinkers with more of a sense of adventure than the lambic purists and dyed-in-the-wool hopheads. For even more of an adventure they also had Cat in the Barrel. I'm not even going to look up what went into this, but it's mad: a crazily floral aroma like a summer meadow on steroids plus added orange blossom, and then an eye-watering sweet acetone flavour like drinking pear drops coated in nail varnish remover. I have no idea if I liked this or not, but after a 100ml glass I needed a bit of a sit down.

The remaining imports I tried were, shall we say, a bit of a mixed bag. One of the Irish attendees (hi Betty!) has a soft spot for Pink Killer from the aptly-named Silly brewery in Belgium, and I was afforded a sip. There's a sort-of interesting piquancy to this, presumably from the grapefruit, but mostly it's extremely sugary to the point of alcopopism.

To Austria and Schloss Eggenburg, best known for its Samichlaus winter lager. They also do a hemp beer which they've named Spirit of Hemp, presumably in an attempt to lure in the stoners. They'll be disappointed, as was I: this is another very sweet sugary beer with no discernible hemp character.

The importer One Pint has a large portfolio of UK beers on its books, and on sale in Copenhagen. I had been specifically looking for Harvey's Elizabethan Ale but it had sold out by the time I got round to it so the same brewery's Prince of Denmark had to do. It's an appropriately dank and melancholy winter beer -- heavy, sticky and warmingly spirituous. One for the hipflask when doing nightshift on the walls of Helsingør.

Which brings us back neatly to the local beers in time for the next post.

Gone to the dogs

I hadn't been expecting quite so many non-Danish beers to be available at the Copenhagen Beer Festival last week, but it was great to see them. Most were presented by importers, but a couple of foreign breweries had taken their own stand. One of whom, I was delighted to see, was BrewDog. I even braved the hordes on Friday evening -- the most crowded I ever saw the hall -- for a quick taste of Tactical Nuclear Penguin, just to see what the fuss was all about. It's pretty much undrinkable. At 32% ABV it's certainly boozy, but not quite strong enough to be spirity as such. The oak character from the base imperial stout has been concentrated by freeze-distilling into a rather sharp and harsh medicinal flavour and on swallowing produces a burning, tarry aftertaste. I can't imagine it'll work for most beer people, nor many whisky people either.

Nor was I impressed by a couple of others they had on: 5AM Saint was my kick-off beer on the first day -- a hopped-up red ale at a modest 5% ABV. The nose is marvellous: fresh and fruity promising luscious things to come. But they don't materialise: I found the flavour quite acidic and unpleasant, the hop-juice sensation compounded by a thin body. I had great hopes for Bashah, the black IPA they've produced with Stone from California, but I finished the glass confused. Once again a fantastic aroma, this time mixing those succulent fresh hops with rich chocolate, but they didn't taste right together -- harsh again, and a bit stale-tasting; perhaps even Bovrilesque. It's nearly wonderful, but I just couldn't get behind it. So, a bit of a bust on the BrewDog front for this drinker: in the words of the boul' Larry Gogan, they just didn't suit me. I did, however, get a taste of the new-recipe Hardcore IPA and heartily recommend it over any of these.

I had much better luck down at the stand of an importer of American beers who had lots of Flying Dog beers I've never had. I made a beeline for Raging Bitch and loved it. A warming spice coming from the Belgian yeast and a wonderful fresh mandarin hop flavour on top of it, fading elegantly to peaches and ice tea. Smooth, characterful and totally inappropriately named. Staying with the strong and pale, I also liked Horn Dog barley wine, a deep brown-red ale, just over 10% ABV, and with strange and interesting banana esters undercutting a citric hop bite; and Double Dog pale ale with its rich toffee mattress bounced on by massive zingy hops -- marvellously sippable at a stonking 11.5% ABV. On the dark side there was the wholly unsubtle Schwarz Dog, loaded with those lovely smoked ham notes I associate most with Schlenkerla beers while also providing proper schwarzbier roastiness, finishing dry like a porter, while also being big and warm, as one might expect at 7.8% ABV. The very dog's, this lot.

A respectful distance from these delights, the same stand was also selling Cave Creek Chili Beer, a Mexican travesty that seems to be doing for chillis what Desperados does for tequila: associating them vaguely with beer as a gimmicky marketing exercise. It's actually pretty hot, with a green-tasting chilli burn. But, like Desperados, there's no real beer character here. This is occasionally available in Ireland, but I think I'll be giving it a miss.

Celebrities were fairly thin on the ground, though I did spot this guy (left) towards the end of Saturday. However, I missed the special beers he'd brought along from Brooklyn Brewery. I did get a taste of a couple of the regulars. Putting the cart before the horse, my opinion of Local No. 2 is that it's a lot like Local No. 1. Except I've not reviewed Local No. 1 here yet. I will soon. The second edition is in a vaguely Belgian style: strong, dark and sugary with some big banana esters. Nice in its own way but there are plenty of actual Belgian dark ales I'd have in its place. I much prefer it when Garrett gets the hops out, and really liked the Brooklyn Monster Ale. It's a kicking barley wine which, while plainly packed with citric American hops, is balanced beautifully with super-sweet caramel malt base: as chewy and hoppy as you could wish a US barley wine to be.

One last set of North American imports came from a stall pushing the beers from Schoune, a farm brewery in Quebec. Obviously there's a major Frencher-than-the-French theme happening. There's also some serious maple notes in the beers, most of all in A L'Erable which is made using lots of maple syrup -- produced on site like all of the ingredients. The syrup has fermented out a lot of the way, so the base beer is dry, but there's a lovely woody maple taste left behind. Erabière is even more mapley, especially on the nose, though actually tastes sour. Strange and very interesting. On the sweeter side there's Premier Baiser, a very drinkable sweet blonde, and Trip des Schoune, made with hemp for a light and spicy sweetness. On the darker side there's 1608 which is warm and roasty and Hivernale an incredible sandalwood-spicy winter beer which is like drinking incense. Lovely.

Some more beers from abroad next, before we get back to Denmark.

Beyond the elephants' glare

I'm back from four beery beery days in Copenhagen, based largely at the Danske Ølentusiaster Beer Festival at Tap1, a venue inside the Carlsberg complex, just down from the iconic Elephant Gate. It was, obviously, a smaller event than the 2008 European Beer Festival which was held just across the street. But it still offered an excellent mix of beers from Denmark and beyond. I think the number of new beers I had (and will now make you suffer through reading about) is still in mere double figures. But that's still plenty of notes to make sense of so, first up, the main news: the beers that struck me as particularly worthy of comment.

As in 2008, my favorite of the whole shebang was by Herslev: their customised Stjernebryg Christmas beer which they barrel-aged and then dried out with brettanomyces yeast. It's a big-flavoured beer, as you might expect from a seasonal ale, but instead of heavy pudding-like sugar it's mildly chocolatey, warmed by the oak and then given a palate-tingling sourness by the brett. Gorgeous complexity and extremely drinkable (and, fortunately, their asparagus-infused beer was also on and is still as crunchily brilliant as I remembered).

Herslev handle the brewing side of operations for Bryggeriet Djævlebryg. The guys in charge of the satanic-themed brewing company put the recipes together and do homebrew-sized test batches before handing it over to Herslev for scaling up. I was very impressed by their beers at the 2008 festival and enjoyed the opportunity to have a chat with metalhead-in-chief Per Olaf at the trade session last Friday. He claims, jokingly, that Herslev's current fascination with brettanomyces came from them, and there were two brett-based brews in the Djævlebryg line-up. Hjul & Stejle is another Christmas-themed one and is only mildly sour, an easy going pale ale designed to go with the delicatessen of a traditional Danish Christmas lunch. Mareridt ("nightmare") has much more of a kick to it, very dry and with supreme smoky notes from a generous dose of rauchmalt. Bizarrely, it's a bright pale yellow, which a heavy smoky beer like this has no right being. I skipped the stouts they had on and went for an unfamiliar pale ale called Darwin's OriginAle -- a strong spicy and warm pale ale with a good balance of toffee and hops.

Three paragraphs on Danish beer and no mention of Mikkeller: that's odd. I attended the event at Ølbutikken on Saturday morning where they were pouring a special edition of Beer Geek Brunch One-for-One, an already-special imperial coffee stout with added cherries and some time maturing in a calvados barrel. Oddly, it doesn't really taste of any of those many individual elements. It's sweet and almost sugary at the front of a massively thick body. Mellow vanilla wood was the main thing I noticed, with underlying milky coffee and just a touch of phenols. A lovely start to the day's drinking.

At the Mikkeller stand itself I enjoyed the super-orangey ("oniony", said Séan) Big Worst and the dry and chocolatey Barack stout, which featured a lovely zingy hop vibe at the finish. 1000 IBUs sounds like a pointless exercise in number-chasing, but however bitter it may technically be, it's very tasty, with lots of toffee to balance the citric hops, which provide a little bit of acid burn at the end, but don't really spoil it.

There was also a Mikkeller collaboration gracing the large Nørrebro Bryghus stall: Mikkel's Monster is a smoky, woody barley wine with lots of punchy hops -- a great sipper at 13% ABV. I got a massive kick from their Tripel de Lente too: this was aged in a sauternes barrel and rather than the sugary spice you'd expect from a tripel it's light and fruity and a bit sour, a bit like a lambic but even more like a good dessert wine. Other dessert options from Nørrebro included the immensely oaky porter Imperial Skärgaards: 9% ABV and run through Bordeaux barrels; and Seven, a heavy and dry imperial stout. For something dark but much more pedestrian there was their dry, quaffable, but unimaginatively-named Robust Porter, straight out of the BJCP manual.

And one last honorable mention for this post: Midtfyns Chili Tripel. It's about time the general messing-about-with-classic-Belgian-styles went in this direction. The result has all the spicy depth of a good tripel blended harmoniously with a totally different sort of spice from the peppers. Beautiful.

That's it for starters. More tomorrow.

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Greetings from the middle of last week!

If the Icelandic volcano behaved itself and no other misfortune befell me, I should be back from Copenhagen by now, filled with exciting tales of beers I stood in a shed and drank tiny samples of. It'll probably take me a few days to sort through my scraps of paper and turn them into the usual boring scribblings you find here, so in the meantime have some comments on a beer which, last I checked, did not feature in the 324-page festival programme.

Chapeau Exotic pineapple lambic is a particular favourite of Ruth Deveney's and is supplied more or less exclusively to her shop by the importer. It took a fair bit of hard sell to convince me to try it, but I eventually succumbed, having rather enjoyed the sweet and unfussy kriek from the same stable. If you've not tried this you probably won't believe me when I say this, but here it is anyway: this is not an alcopop.

I confess I honestly was expecting an artificial syrupy sort of confection the likes of which Huyghes churn out under their Floris and Mongozo marques. I was surprised, then, to get a whiff of proper dry and gunpowdery lambic from the surface of the slightly hazy honey-gold beer. That comes through a little on the flavour too, but the pineapple dominates. And it really does taste of pineapple: I got that pithy, fibrous taste of real, fresh pineapple. Yes it's sweet too, but in a nuanced way, and the sour lambic notes do a great job of balancing it.

Sadly, the label is totally lacking in useful information, so I don't know what sort of percentage of fruit we have here, nor even the strength (it's 3.5% ABV: I looked it up). All I'll say is: don't dismiss this. If you went "ugh, pineapple lambic" yet don't normally have a total aversion to fruit beers, it's worth looking out for (if you do have a total aversion to fruit beers, hey: you're a bigot -- work on that first). Thanks for helping me see the light, Ruth.

Denmark-based blatherings up next...

Mash up

It's one of the major weapons in the arsenal of the internationally-renowned small-scale brewers, one which helps spread their recognition into new territories, whilst providing a fun couple of days out for the brewers: collaboration, the subject of this month's Session. For some it's a necessity: you'll see lots of Mikkeller collaboration beers, for instance, because there's no Mikkeller brewery. But the like of Stone and BrewDog -- more established breweries -- it's a way of attracting a little bit of the attention which the other one gets. Since the end result almost always tends to be top-notch beer, this is a good thing.

I'm keeping it big this time, though, with a collaboration from two giants of quality beer in the US and Germany respectively: Brooklyner-Schneider Hopfen-Weisse. You will doubtless remember the reverse version, brewed by Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn at Schneider in Kelheim and reviewed back here. The return leg involved Hans-Peter Drexler of Schneider brewing more-or-less the same recipe in Brooklyn and this is the result: a bigger, brasher American in a 75cl bottle, probably an advisable move given the large quantity of sediment in this beer.

Sadly I didn't have them side-by-side to try, but the taste is very similar: major fresh fruity American hops giving off the flavours of bitter grapefruit and sweet nectarine. These sit comfortably next to a different sort of fruitiness, a spicier kind, deriving from the yeast and the esters it produces. This harmonious combination of flavour profiles from the different ingredients is a whole other aspect of collaboration.

Let's have more joint efforts where the signature styles of completely different brewing traditions are mixed up. Dai-san biiru mild, anyone?

Mai-Ur-Bock be with you

Another inadvertantly silly name from the home of bock, and yes I know Star Wars Day was yesterday. Einbecker Mai-Ur-Bock looks lovely in the glass -- a beautiful reddish gold colour. The name conjures warm, carefree late-spring afternoons. But the fun ends there. This beer goes all out for big German-hop bitterness and winds up musty as all hell (no bilingual pun intended, for once). The hops have a sort of medicinal flavour and a plasticky taste that appears to be highly-prized in certain German beers but which I can't take at all. I suppose the weight -- 6.5% ABV -- is supposed to provide balance, but it just ends up intensifiying the yuckiness.

Definitely not the maibock I'm looking for. Move along, move along.

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.