Zythophile

The time is 10am and there are 20 different beers to be drunk before lunchtime. It must be another supermarket beer judging.

I judged for the twice-yearly Tesco Beer Awards quite a few times, but this week’s was the Sainsbury’s Beer Competition, and although Sainsbury’s has brought in the same PR team to organise the entries and judging as previously ran its rival’s event, the Morrice Partnership, there are several significant differences between the two contests.

For a start, the beers in the Tesco judging were drunk “blind”: nobody except the organisers knew which brewery produced which numbered beer. But Sainsbury’s deliberately has “shelf appeal” as one or its judging criteria, alongside flavour, aroma, appearance and aftertaste, believing, correctly, that no shopper will pick up a beer and take it home to find out how good it is without initially being attracted by the packaging. So all the bottles bore their labels.

Second, while the Tesco competition had only two winners at a time, Sainsbury’s was looking for the best 15 beers out of the more than 90 being judged, The brewers of those 15 beers will each then get an order for 40,000 bottles, equivalent (for 500ml bottles) to 170 or so barrels, and worth, at wholesale prices to the brewer, maybe £30,000. Those 15 beers will be on sale in Sainsbury’s supermarkets from August 14 for a month as part of the chain’s “drinks festival”. The two best-sellers out of those 15 will them get 26 guaranteed weeks on Sainsbury’s shelves, which could be worth £150,000 or more.

For a microbrewer, even getting through round one is a real prize: if your entire turnover is less than £300,000 a year, then a 10 per cent boost is great news. Sainsbury’s and the Morrice Partnership offered help and advice to small brewers keen to enter but worried they did not have the skills and experience in such areas as label design and marketing, with the supermarket even supplying names and addresses of bottling firms and label printers.

This is all part of Sainsbury’s plan to increase the amount of shelf space it gives to premium bottled beers by 50 per cent in October. The off-licence bottled ales and stouts sector is now worth just under £400 million a year, makes up more than one sixth of all supermarket beer and cider sales, and has grown, according to Sainsbury’s, “1.5 per cent in the past 12 months”. I don’t know if they mean per cent or percentage points (I hate people who don’t make that distinction clear, I really do) but if it’s percentage points, that’s good growth in an otherwise static or declining market

Thus a rugby squad of experienced beer tasters, including Roger Protz, Michael Hardman (co-founder of Camra and currently PR man for Siba, the small brewers’ association), Paul Bayley, ex-head brewer at Marston’s, and my fellow beer blogger Melissa Cole, met at Sainsbury’s headquarters, the former Mirror building at the foot of Holborn in central London, to taste the entries. (Question: is it significant that the HQ of Tesco, the UK’s biggest supermarket chain, is a dull industrial building in a dreary quarter of Cheshunt, in the drab Herts/Essex borderlands north-east of London, while Sainsbury’s occupies a prime central London site with massive atrium, expensive interiors and the rest? Discuss …)

After a welcome from Sainsbury’s beer and cider buyer, the tall and enviably skinny Chris Craig, and a short briefing from RP, we picked up our bottle openers, 200ml tasting glasses (all branded with the logo of Fuller’s, oddly, though Fuller’s wasn’t one of the brewers in the contest) and scoresheets and tackled the first crown corks of the morning. On the tables in front of us were beers from 56 different brewers, ranging from tinies I’d never heard of through well-known regionals such as Brains, Adnams, Hydes and Hall & Woodhouse to the semi(?) national Greene King, and even one American, High & Mighty from Massachusetts. The only criterion for entry was that the beers had never been on sale in a supermarket before: they could be old beers, or new ones.

Each judge had 20 beers to try, meaning each one would be drunk by three different people. Methodology: start at the low end of the abv ladder, pick up bottle, study front and back labels, pour about two or three fluid ounces of beer into the glass, hold glass to light to check clarity and colour, swirl glass, shove nose into glass and sniff. Take mouthful of beer, slurp, swallow. Follow with another mouthful or two if not immediately convinced of beer’s worth. or worthlessness. Throw remainder of beer away, rinse glass with bottled water, write up score, move on to next beer.

Is it really possible to “speed date” a beer like this? Is it fair on a brewer who has put a massive amount of effort into his product, in the hope and dream that he will win a substantial commercial prize which could give his brewery a considerable financial boost if he wins? Well, yes, actually, it’s surprisingly easy to form an accurate opinion of a beer very quickly, and it’s about as fair as any judging can be If you don’t like a beer on first tasting, it’s really not very likely to grow on you if you drank another pint or two.

Only one beer almost tripped me up at Sainsbury’s, Amarillo from the St Peter’s brewery (not a tribute to Tony Christie but made with Amarillo hops), which did need several tastings before its worth came through. Though that may be because I’m not an automatic fan of citrussy American hops, which many British brewers seem to fling into pale golden ales without any thought about achieving balance and in the apparent believe that the mere presence of lemon/grapefruit flavours in their beer makes them cutting-edge brew dudes.

There were, in fact, far too many pale golden ales entered into the Sainsbury’s competition: can we move on from this category, now, British brewers? There are more interesting places to go if you want to make an impact. I did find some appealing darker beers, though: I was disappointed my fellow judges didn’t like Brain’s Milkwood, which I though was very attractive, and which Dylan Thomas himself might have approved of (according to one source the poet’s favourite tipple was mild-and-bitter, and not the whisky that legend incorrectly claims killed him). They did, however, agree with me about Bath Ales’s Barnstormer, a lovely dark ale (and not the “dark bitter” it claims to be on the bottle label).

Talking of, the labels were almost all visually attractive, though too many fell into the pit of printing too much information in tiny type: many of us older ale drinkers can’t read six-point any more, particularly when it’s printed in a colour that doesn’t contrast sufficiently with the background. And please – no more “brewed with the finest hops and malt …” Who’d have thought? Today many drinkers are interested in what sorts of malts, and what varieties of hops.

Few of the beers, for me, really stood out – I only gave five of my 20 higher marks than 40 out of 60, and the highest was 44, or 73 per cent. I’d have hoped for at least one 80 per cent score. There were very few real duds, though I didn’t like the one whisky beer: tasted just like someone had topped an own-label scotch into a glass of flat beer, with no integration of flavours at all. But I think the selection that came out at the end as the top 15 will almost certainly contain at least one, if not two, real stars.

The names of the winners were meant to be embargoed until Monday, to give the competition organisers time to tell the brewers they’d got through to round two, but since one of the judges, who works for a grocery trade website, put the names out on the net yesterday (that means you, Mike Dennis) I feel I can list them myself:

• Old Tom Ginger from Robinson’s – despite my doubts about Old Tom, I thought the addition of ginger worked very well. A chocolate version, however, didn’t succeed with the judges
• Crazy Dog Stout from Red Rat brewery near Bury St Edmunds – great to see a new minnow get success
• Sundance, from Red Rat’s neighbour, Greene King: the “pinch” of the name from the beer Marston’s brewed exclusively for Wetherspoon’s caused Paul Bayley to raise his eyebrows …
• Amarillo from St Peter’s brewery; fine beer, horrible label, with the letters of “Amarillo” printed in different colours. Hope they change it before it gets on the Sainsbury’s shelves …
• Barnstormer “dark bitter” from Bath Ales: excellent beer, but it’s not a bloody bitter!
• Beer of the Gods from High & Mighty: a genuine, and much-rated American brewer apparently named after the outsize menswear chain. (Late-breaking news – apparently not …)
• Good Times from Williams Bros, the innovative Alloa brewer
• Harvest Sun, also from Williams Bros, the only brewer to get two beers into the top 15 (though they entered at least five, as far as I could see
• Scotts 1816 from Copper Dragon of Skipton, a brewery I confess I am entirely unfamiliar with
• Golden Glow from Holden’s, the Black Country brewery – several judges rated this very highly, although it did little for me - sorry
• Arthur Pendragon from the Hampshire brewery
• Dr O’Kells IPA from Okells on the Isle of Man
• Prize Fighter from the Arundel Brewery
• Highgate Old Ale, one of my favourite draught old ales from a wonderful, historic brewery – I hope very much this does well, I shall certainly be buying lots of it
• Honey Spice Wheat Beer from Sharp’s of Cornwall

Cheers to Sainsbury’s, and Richard Morrice and his crew, for a very well organised and enjoyable morning, thanks to all the brewers, and can I come back again next year please?

When Fuller’s announced in 2005 that it was acquiring Gale’s of Horndean, I couldn’t get very upset, in large part because I was angry at what Prize Old Ale had been allowed to become.

This should have been a proud and heavily promoted flag-carrier for British beer, about the last survivor of the “strong old ale” type made by almost every brewery in the country in the 19th century, still bottle-conditioned at a stomping nine per cent alcohol by volume and still, amazingly, available in corked bottles.

By the beginning of the 21st century, however, there was something very wrong: when you opened the bottles the ale inside was utterly flat, showing no condition at all, and the flavour was one-dimensional and over-sweet. Gale’s apparently bottled Prize Old Ale without adding extra priming sugar or yeast, relying on the yeast cells still in the beer, and the unfermented sugars that remained after the primary fermentation, to bring it into condition. Obviously, whatever the yeast used to do in the bottle in the past, it wasn’t up to the job any more. But nobody at Gale’s seemed to care, and what should have been a triumph was a disaster and an embarrassment.

The news that one last brewing of Prize Old Ale had taken place at the Gale’s brewery in Horndean just before it closed in March 2006, and the fermented beer had then been trucked up to Fuller’s brewery in Chiswick for maturing, gave me a little hope. At Horndean the beer was apparently matured for six to 12 months. Fuller’s looks to have taken at least 19 months: the last Horndean Prize Old Ale was only bottled in December last year, given the three months that Fuller’s likes to give its bottle-conditioned ales before it puts them on sale (believing they take that long to settle down after bottling), and they were released to the public in March.

Continue reading ‘The Prize goes to Fuller’s’

I’ve just put up a new myth page on this site completely debunking the story that medieval ale conners ever sat in puddles of drink in order to test it - so it’s a bit naughty to plug this page, which tells the (totally inaccurate, remember) story of the ale conner and the leather breeches test, using Lego figures, and is just simply terrific. Click on the links below to see the pics:

How to be an ale conner

Are you fed up with cleaning up other people’s mess? Want a job that’s a bit less smelly? (and a bit more sticky!) Do you like drinking beer and wearing leather trousers? Then you should become an ale conner! These vignettes will teach you the basics…

1) Find a place that serves ale

2) Buy a pint of ale to test

3) Pour half the beer onto a wooden stool

4) Sit on the stool (and drink the rest of the ale!)

5) After 30 minutes stand up - if your leather trousers stick to the seat then the ale contains too much unfermented sugar. Fine the brewer (and confiscate the ale!)

Enjoy - but don’t forget, ale conners never did sit in puddles of ale.

In the mid-1970s I had a girlfriend who was a student at Liverpool University. The campus pub-of-choice was (and still is, I believe) the Cambridge on the corner of Mulberry Street, which was, back then, a Burtonwood Brewery outlet.

Its popularity was partly down to its closeness to the university, of course, but also for the excellent, well-priced food - ham and cheese cobs – and the more than acceptable beer. The Burtonwood dark mild, although top-pressure, was always good, and cheap, and it sometimes looked like most of the pub was drinking Guinness: tables loaded with inky-black pints.

Burtonwood also brewed a light mild, but that was a rarity for the time, both as a beer in its own right and as a style. An analysis of the 1976 Camra Good Beer Guide shows that of 130 milds being brewed by 106 brewers, 101 – 77.7 per cent – were coloured dark through to black, while just 29, or 22.3 per cent, were pale or light. Even some of those, like McMullen’s AK, were actually misunderstood low-gravity bitters, not really pale milds at all.

Mild was a style that came into its ascendancy from the 1830s onwards, pushing out the previously dominant English beer style, porter, until itself being replaced after 1960 as the best-selling style by bitter. You’d assume, I think, that dark mild, easily the leading variety, nationally, in the lifetime of any drinker alive today, must be the ancient, original version. Most commentators certainly believe this was the case: the Handbook of Brewing, by Priest and Stewart, published in 2006, for example, says:

Victorian mild was … a strong dark brown beer …

Ron Pattinson of Shut Up About Barclay Perkins, however, seems to have demonstrated convincingly that dark mild is actually a 20th-century phenomenon. Looking through the records of brewers such as Barclay Perkins, Whitbread and Truman, Hanbury & Buxton at the London Metropolitan Archives, and analysing the grains they used, Ron found that

… all these beers use only pale malt. They weren’t dark as we would expect milds to be.

Further investigation has led him to say more recently, looking at the standard X mild ale of the last half of Victoria’s reign, that

In the 19th century X Ales were usually pale in colour, but with fewer hops and a lesser degree of attenuation than pale ale. At the end of the 19th century, fashion turned back to darker beers and ales became darker again … Mild [moved] from pale to amber to dark in the period 1890 to 1940.

You can’t dispute the facts as recorded in the contemporary brewing books, and you can’t brew a dark beer from just pale malt (or, not unless you run the wort off at a very high OG and boil it long enough to induce caramelisation, and as these were cheap “running beers”, that wasn’t happening). But it all seems counterintuitive: the general trend over the past century and a half is for the popular drinks to move from dark to pale, so red wine was replaced in popularity by white wine, whisky and (dark) rum by gin, vodka and white rum, bitter by pale lager. Why did mild apparently go the other way?

Continue reading ‘What colour was mild?’