Beerfest Asia Singapore: the sublime and the ridiculous

Young Singaporeans love to PARTAAAY. Which means that while Beerfest Asia, held in the city every June since 2009, now places a hefty emphasis on craft beers from small producers, for very many of the more than 25,000 people who pour in over four days to the festival site, the 400-plus different beers available, from Sweden to New Zealand, and Japan to Belgium, are less important than the opportunities to get pissed with friends, wear very silly hats, listen to very loud music and dance on the tables.

This probably explains why no one seems to think it incongruous that alongside all the craft beers, such as the highly regarded and multi-awarded Feral Brewing from Western Australia, Mikkeller from Denmark via various other places, Hitochino from Japan, De Molen from De Nederlands, Stone from California, Moa from New Zealand and our own dear BrewDog, there was a large stand for Jagermeister, and big bars run by AB InBev, featuring Stella Artois, Becks and Budweiser, and by Asia Pacific Breweries, the Far Eastern arm of Heineken, selling the Dutch brewer’s eponymous eurofizz, plus Strongbow cider, Desperado tequila beer, and Sol. Truly the sublime being served alongside the ridiculous.

Still, this is a commercial venture, not a campaigning one, which is why there were 20 or so “official sponsors” involving everybody from an “official financial services partner” to an “official comedy club partner”, Magners cider (hush, that person who said Magners got the gig because it’s a joke anyway), an “official energy drink”, and even an “official personal brewery partner”, the guys from Williamswarn, plugging their “all-in-one brewing machine”. It also explains the “whisky and wine lodge”, where some 40 different spirits from Finland to Japan could be sampled (though if you were an oenologist I doubt you’d have been impressed with a wine selection that featured only France, Chile and Australia, and looked to be mostly Shiraz, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc). Spirits makers have much bigger advertising and promotional budgets than craft brewers, and will pay silly sums to get access to a young and impressionable audience.

The commercial imperative also explains the existence of a top-of-the-range “VIP ticket” offer at 180 Singapore dollars (£91) a pop for one night only, designed to separate – er, well, mugs like me, actually – from their money with the promise of an exclusive air-conditioned “VIP lounge”, an all-you-can-stuff-your-face-with hot buffet, S$50 in beer tokens and a free “beerfest asia” polo shirt. However, if you’re flying in from Hong Kong in the afternoon, staying overnight at a mate’s apartment and flying back the next day, paying a little extra not to have to mix it with hoi sweaty polloi …

Kinshachi Imperial chocolate Weizen Nagoya Red Miso Lager

It was certainly rather different to the Great British Beer Festival, where I cannot imagine Camra ever persuading young women from different countries to get up on the stage at Olympia and spell out “b-e-e-r-f-e-s-t” by waving their tits about. You wouldn’t see the huge selection of “flavoured” bottled ciders from half a dozen different countries, all presumably chasing a lucrative young market (must read Pete Brown’s new book – maybe it will explain this …) And, of course, there wasn’t a cask ale within several thousand miles. Here in Marina Bay, close by the F1 circuit, on the south side of Singapore island, it was strictly keg or bottles, at (mostl;) S$5 to S$10 (£2.50 to £5) a time. But the beers I tried – admittedly I was mostly going for stuff I knew by reputation to be good – was  uniformly excellent. Brewerkz, for example, a Singaporean microbrewery established in 1997, was offering a range of eminently drinkable beers, good, clean, all hitting the spot in their styles. They included a fine “Anglo-American” India Pale Ale mixing British and Pacific Coast hops, and Black Pig, a black IPA. This is normally a style I cross my fingers at and hiss, but this little piggy deserves to find a market.

I was also surprised to be very impressed with the beers from Archipelago, which is the “crafty” operation set up in Singapore by Asia Pacific/Heineken under the name of the city’s original brewery, founded in 1931 by Beck’s. Its Summer Ale is dry, sharp and, at 4.5 per cent abv, very moreish. Other beers recorded in my increasingly illegible notebook include Feral Hop Hog, sweet underneath, masses of lemon and grapefruit on top (hideous label for such a fine beer, though); and Kinshachi Imperial Chocolate Weizen, 8 per cent abv, full in the mouth, cloudy, sour, and with masses of chocolatey yumminess, from Nagoya in Japan. Chocolate wheat beers seem such an obvious idea, and yet this is the first one I’ve come across, I believe.

In all, Beerfest Asia IS a great party, the Led Zep tribute band were terrific, the crowd, a vastly more mixed scene than you’ll see at GBBF, all obviously enjoying themselves hugely and mostly, too, much younger than the GBBF constituency (there were certainly few, if any, people as old as ME there). But it’s perhaps not worth making a trip to Singapore for, unless, like me, you’re in the region, you can get a cheap walk on/walk off flight, and you can stay at a mate’s …

It’s party time … the green hats were given awaqy by Magners, the red firefighter ones by Fruli.

Never mind the quality … some people were there for the beer – any beer, so long as it was wet and alcoholic.

A few familiar names: I confess I went for the St Bernardus Witbier

The local brew: beers by Archipelago, the Heineken-owned Singapore “craft” set-up

The evil empire attempts to lure Singaporeans away from the One True Craft Path …

Are we having fun yet, Kevin? A couple of expat ladies and a real Singaporean

Sugarcane juice and limes, an excellent morning-after-the-beerfest pick-me-up

The ten best songs about beer

Singing about beer: almost as good as drinking it. Except there are as many rubbish songs about beer as there are rubbish beers: which is to say, far too many. When the Beer Crimes Tribunal is convened, Tom T Hall will be among the first in the dock for “I Like Beer”, a dreadful dirge. Alongside him will be David Gordon “Slim Dusty” Kirkpatrick, for the even more awful “Pub With No Beer”, a song than which there is none so dull or so drear. Just because the song has the word “beer” in the title, or the lyrics, doesn’t make it any good.

Search among the dross, though, and you’ll find beautiful gems. Here’s my top ten selection, some of which you’ve probably never heard. I sincerely hope you’ve heard Bessie Smith’s “Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer”, though. Written by Wesley Wilson and his wife Coot Grant, and released 80 years ago, just when it was legal to drink beer in the United States again, this is still, for all its years, as powerful a call to combine pork products and the juice of malted grain as you’ll find on the planet.

Atongo Zimba, griot and beer celebrator

“In Heaven There Is No Beer” is generally performed by cheesy polka bands, but the marvellous Atongo Zimba from Ghana had a big hit in his homeland in 2004 with a version called “No Beer in Heaven” that is so far above the accordion band renditions they should slink away off stage in shame. Why this isn’t better known in the West – why Zimba isn’t better known in the West – is beyond my comprehension.

India Session Ales – tremendous new trend or oxymoronic category fail?

“All the IBUs, half the ABV” is how the American beer writer Brian Yaeger describes the newest (?) beery trend in the United States: the “India Session Ale”.

As you’ll have gathered, the ISA is meant to have the flavours of an American-style IPA, but at a more “sessionable” gravity. “Sessionable” is in the eye of the beer holder: I’d curl my lip at any beer over 4.2 per cent describing itself as “sessionable”, but to many Americans the term means anything under 5 per cent. However, what worries me most is the idea that a beer with 50 IBUs, and hopped with at least six different and powerful varieties, including Warrior, Columbus, Citra, Simcoe, Amarillo and Chinook, even if it’s only 3.5 per cent alcohol, like Ballast Point of California’s Even Keel can in any way be regarded as a session beer. Indeed, at least one “India Style Session Ale”, from the 10 Barrel Brewing Co in Oregon, is 5.5 per cent ABV.

As I wrote in this space nearly four years ago, I love session beers, but to me an essential part of what makes a good session beer is its restraint. To quote myself:

A great session beer will not dominate the occasion and demand attention … A good, quaffable session beer should have enough interest for drinkers to want another, but not so much going on that they are distracted from the primary purpose of a session, which is the enjoyment of good company in convivial surroundings.

I’ve not, unfortunately, had the opportunity to try any of the India Session Ales (also known as “American session ales”, “Session IPAs” and “Light IPAs”) Brian Yaeger talks about in his piece, but in April I did get to try something I suspect may be similar, DNA New World IPA, the collaboration beer made by blending concentrated “essence of Dogfish Head 60-minute IPA” shipped over from Delaware with beer brewed at the Charles Wells brewery in Bedford.

How long have English brewers been using American hops? Much longer than you think

How long have British brewers been using American hops? Far, far longer than you might have guessed: for around two centuries, in fact.

The earliest evidence I’ve collected so far of hops from the United States in England is from exactly 196 years ago: May 1817, when the Liverpool Mercury newspaper carried a notice of the arrival in the city of a ship from New York, the Golconda, carrying 417 bales of cotton, 319 barrels of flour, 1,322 barrels of turpentine – and two bags of hops. Rather more came across the Atlantic a few months later, in November, when two ships arrived, the Pacific from New York and the Triton from Boston, with cargos including 49 bales of hops and 30 bags of hops respectively. An even larger consignment, 185 bales (a bale being 200 pounds), arrived the following month, December, from Boston on board the ship Liverpool Packet.

Not coincidentally, these imports of hops from the United States were arriving in Britain right after the famous (to climatologists) Year Without a Summer of 1816, itself the result of the biggest volcanic eruption in recorded history (with the possible exception of the putative proto-Krakatoa), when Mount Tambura in Indonesia blew up on April 10 1815 with a roar heard 1,600 miles away, sending 50 to 100 cubic kilometres of rock into the air and dumping tens of millions of tonnes of sulphur and ash into the stratosphere via a column of smoke and fumes 27 miles high, covering the northern hemisphere in a sulphate veil. Temperatures in North America and Europe dropped by as much as 3C for at least two years, rainfall rose by as much as 80 per cent, and agriculture was badly hurt.

The year after the eruption, the hop harvest in Britain, in particular, was hammered. Newspapers from September 1816 onwards engraved a picture of misery. The Hereford Journal reported that locally “the hops have nearly all been destroyed by the inclement season.” At Worcester fair, the Morning Post said, “there was not a pocket of new hops”. At Stourbridge Fair, just outside Cambridge, normally one of the country’s biggest hop marts, “the supply of hops was very small, not more than half a load.” In Farnham, Surrey, the hop cones were “uncommonly small”, and the harvest was set to be no more than a quarter of its usual size. At Weyhill fair in Hampshire in October just over 700 pockets of hops were on sale, down from 3,000 the previous year.

So who are the big beery twitterers?

Jamie Oliver, the thick-tongued TV chef and hugely successful restaurant entrepreneur (and son of an Essex pub landlord), has 3.3 million followers on Twitter. Which is, you’ll not be shocked to hear, about 2,600 times more Twitter followers than I have. Indeed, it’s quite possibly more followers, my very rough survey suggests, than all the tweeters about beer in the world, (including brewers, bloggers, beer writers, pubs and bars and ordinary drinkers who tweet occasionally about the drink), have  together, in one big overlapping and multiple-counted pile.

But how many “regular” beer tweeters are there? And how many followers do the most popular ones have? Here’s my entirely unscientific and probably definitely unreliable take on the beery tweeting scene.

In addition, there’s a poll for you to fill in, just to try to get an idea of the overlap between people who read beer blogs (or at least, people who read this beer blog) and people who follow tweets about beer on Twitter.

The earliest use of the term India pale ale was … in Australia?

The continuing fantastic expansion in the number of old documents scanned, OCR’d and available on the internet is presenting the lucky historical searcher with constant opportunities to push back the boundaries. The latest terrific find is an ante-dating of the first use of the expression “India pale ale” by almost six years, taking it from Liverpool in January 1835 to Sydney, Australia in August 1829.

Advertisement for East India Pale Ale, Sydney Gazette, Saturday August 29 1829

In Bruges

In Bruges

I first drank in the Brugs Beertje in Bruges in 1985. I didn’t realise at the time that it was then only a couple of years old: it already felt like a classic beer venue, small, comfortable as an old suede gardening glove, welcoming as your favourite cousin, the walls lathered in Belgian brewery memorabilia, the selection of hopped beverages extensive and eclectic.

At the time, it was pretty much unknown outside Bruges: I was guided to it by a pamphlet listing the city’s beer outlets that I picked up in the Bruges tourist office while trying to find a hotel. Would the tourist office in any British city have carried a list of good local bars and pubs in 1985? Would the tourist office in any British city carry a list of good local bars and pubs today? Not, I think.

Despite Britain and Belgium each being soaked in beer culture to their respective marrows, there still, 40-plus years after the founding of an organisation specifically set up to encourage appreciation of British beer, seems something much more celebratory about Belgium’s relationship with beer than you find among the British generally. Belgians seem far keener to announce to everybody their beery wonders, than we do in Britain, eager to hand you the massive beer menu when you sit down in the bar, cafe or restaurant, happy to let you know that this little country of 11 million is one of the four or five greatest brewing nations in the world, and pleased to point out that they make more unusual beer styles than anywhere else, too.