Fuggled

Landlord, landlord!

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 13:10:00 +0000

A quick post today as I am at the Society for Scholarly Publishing annual meeting. Last night though I went back to Church Key with some of my colleagues for dinner.

Highlight of the dinner was very simple, bottled Timothy Taylor Landlord, though the J.W. Lees Harvest 2011 aged in Lagavulin casks was also rather nice. There are many times when I wish there was an American brewer making English style pale ale with as much panache and flavour as Landlord, especially when paying more than $10 for a bottle. As a treat though, it was worth every drop of the amber nectar.

When I get back to Charlottesville tonight, I can see a few bottles of St Bernardus in my future, and possibly finally tucking into Evan Rail's homebrew...

Double the Darkness

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Wed, 30 May 2012 10:55:00 +0000

It was only after I discovered the delights of beer from small breweries in the Czech Republic that I started to develop a taste for dark lager, called either Tmavé or Černé depending on the whim of the brewery. Kozel's Černé is more of a dark amber while Kout na Šumavě's Tmavé absorbs light like a black hole, yet one is "black" and the other "dark respectively.

When I finally decided to make my own lagers, during a particularly cold snap in January, the style I chose first was tmavé, simply because I knew it would be more forgiving of any mess ups along the way than would be a pilsner. I wrote about the recipe and inspiration for the beer back at the beginning of the year. Having enjoyed most of my stash of Černý Lev, I learnt that Schell's Brewing Company up in Minnesota had done a limited batch of tmavé, calling it Stag 5 and so I wanted to do a side by side tasting of the two beers.

First up was Schell's, which is 5.7% and has 30 IBU of Saaz, if the info on Ratebeer is to be believed. Although this picture makes the beer look almost pitch black, it is in fact a dark brown which becomes a rich crimson when held up to the light. The head is light tan and lingers for the duration. It most certainly looked the part.

In terms of aroma there was caramel, like toffee really, a hint of roasted coffee, though it wasn't harsh and in your face about it, and the gentle, soothing spiciness of Saaz hops in the background. I wasn't expecting the smooth flavours of bitter sweet chocolate to be at the fore in the taste department, but it was and it worked well, that roasty edge was there, like toast that is between done and burnt, and the bitterness of the hops kicks in at the end. I found myself sucking this beer down, well assembled, easy to drink and medium bodied, yes I liked it. Where I would put it in the spectrum of tmavé that I have drunk in the Czech Republic? Well ahead of the likes of Kozel and Staropramen, that's for sure, so on a par with Bernard I would say (for the unitiated, that means pretty damned good).

Now for my Černý Lev, which is "Black Lion" in English, which ended up with 5.6% abv and 24 IBU, so in a similar ballpark to the Schell's. This time the picture doesn't hide anything, the beer is a very dark brown, bordering on black and edged with crimson in the light. The head is light tan and voluminous, when eventually it died down a bit, it stuck at about a centimetre for the time it took me to drink the beer. With the head duly receded, it again looked the part.

The aromas bouncing around in the glass for this were treacle, roasted coffee, with hints of spice and I thought a trace of lemony hay. In the taste department the coffee really came to the fore, coupled with sweet malty juiciness and a firm bitter bite which may have slightly unbalanced the beer. The body on my beer was fuller than the Schell's and there was a trace of something solventy about the beer, which I think may have come from underpitching the yeast and having it at slightly higher temperatures than recommended. I like my beer, always a good thing, but it isn't as well integrated and put together as Schell's. Mrs V expressed a clear preference for the Schell's, saying that my beer had too much roastiness in it for her tastes.

I think I might do this kind of comparative tasting a bit more often, as a way to gauge where my homebrew is going right and going wrong. Certainly a worthwhile experiment, I think the next one will be my German Pilsner next to Scrimshaw.

I just wanted to quickly thank Josh up in Minnesota for procuring and sending the beer down to fellow CAMRA homebrewer and occasional blogger, Jamey - have a read of his blog, Barlow Brewing.

Summer Session

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Mon, 28 May 2012 10:46:00 +0000

Today is Memorial Day over here, and as well as being a day to remember those that fell in combat, it is also traditionally understood as the beginning of the summer season in the US - and given temperatures in the high 80s this week (low 30s in Celsius), that sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Memorial Day is a public holiday, and so this morning, rather than writing all ready for the office, I am slumming it. Originally I had planned to brew both yesterday and today, but then on a whim I decided to just get it all done in a single day. As a result of which I now have two carboys fermenting away furiously, one with a honey malt and ginger saison and the other with my attempt to clone the magnificent Williams Brothers Scottish Session Ale.

I had to make a last minute change to the Dark Island Blonde as when I went to Fifth Season to get my grains, they didn't have any Bohemian Pilsner malt, so I upped the amount of Golden Promise and Vienna and used the following recipe:

50% Golden Promise
25% Vienna Malt
13% White Wheat Malt
6% Munich Malt
6% Caramel 20

The beer has, according to Hopville's Beer Calculus, 25 IBUs of First Gold, Cascade and Saaz and I am using the dry Windsor yeast strain for fermentation. Having mashed at a slightly higher temperature than normal, I am hoping for a beer with a reasonable amount of body and somewhere in the region of 3.8-4% abv.

Essentially I hope that Dark Island Blonde will be a good beer for sitting on the deck of our new house (once the deal finally goes through and I can stop caring about it all the time), with a bucket full of ice keeping several bottles cold. Never having had a lawn, I have never seen the need for "lawn mower beers", but the 1.6 acres of land that go with the house will no doubt see to that.

I will be doing plenty of brewing in the weeks to come, both for the inevitable house warming party and the forthcoming Dominion Cup homebrew competition, so there should be no shortage of beer for those lazy afternoons on the deck...

Session Hopping

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Fri, 25 May 2012 10:52:00 +0000

Reading the ever interesting Boak and Bailey yesterday, I was intrigued by a comment about St Austell's Proper Job as failing "as a session beer because it is too intensely hoppy". This got me wondering whether there exists an upper limit on "hoppiness" when it comes to session beers.

Clearly the hipster lupulin loonies in the crowd will immediately shout that such a thing is impossible before going back to taking self portraits with their iPhone camera in an attempt to recreate Blue Steel. To me, as someone who actively likes drinking beer (I am convinced there is a difference between being a beer geek and actively enjoying drinking good beer, though I am yet to thrash that out in my head) the idea that there is an upper limit to the "hoppiness" of session beers seems self-evident.

A couple of the criteria for a session beer, as proposed by Lew Bryson, are that a beer be:

flavorful enough to be interesting
balanced enough for multiple pints

Balance and flavour then are key identifiers of a session beer. If we accept Lew's proposed ABV limit of 4.5% means a beer with a starting gravity of 12° Plato, or less. Whilst acknowledging that different yeast strains have differing attenuation properties, I think 12° is a perfectly acceptable ceiling for gravity in session beers. When I think about 12° beers, my mind automatically ambles over to the many dark, perhaps dingy, drinking dens in Prague that sell Pilsner Urquell. Brewed at about 12°, with an ABV of 4.4% and 40 IBUs, Pilsner Urquell is a dream of a session beer.

Perhaps that then is the ball park upper limit of hoppiness for session beers, somewhere in the 35-40 IBU range? I realise that IBUs tell us nothing about the flavour and aroma of a beer, but as a general guideline, I think 40 is a good place to stop with the hops, so that the important part of beer is not impeded, the drinking of it with mates.

BTW - if you haven't read Boak and Bailey's blog you really should, it is an excellent read.

The picture above was taken by my good friend Mark Stewart of Black Gecko Photography

Turn to the Dark Side

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Wed, 23 May 2012 11:07:00 +0000

For the next installment of the Charlottesville Area Masters of Real Ale Iron Brewer project, as I mentioned in a post last week, we have to use the following ingredients in our beer:

Honey malt
Hersbrucker hops
Ginger

I mentioned that my intention was to make a ginger saison. That is still the plan, broadly speaking, but as I was tidying up my beer cellar at the weekend, and making a list of the various ingredients I have floating about, I thought to myself, is this something worth messing around with in order to use up some random odds and sods? In particular I am considering using up the remnants of Caramel 120 to turn the beer into a "dark saison".

One thing though is clear from my stock take, I need to make a bath tub beer to use up the various bits and bobs that are in the malt store that don't really feature in my 5 brews to perfect plan. The grains I want to use up are:

Rauch malt
CaraMunich I
Peated malt
Chocolate Wheat

My immediate thought is to put the peated malt to one side and get some Munich malt or similar base malt and make a smoked dark weizen, if anyone has any better suggestions, I am all ears.

Drinking In The Rain

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Mon, 21 May 2012 10:49:00 +0000

I wasn't expecting the rain this morning when I took my dog for his morning walk, but I have no complaints about it. I like rain in general, rainy days make me happy for some reason, whereas the heat and humidity of summer makes me grumpy and lethargic.

We often talk about beers which are great for a summer day, or for when you have just finished mowing your lawn, but we don't seem to talk much about the beers which are perfect for drinking in the rain, perhaps sat outside under an umbrella.

In my experience, the best beers for rainy day drinking are ones which lend themselves to slow savouring rather than 4 mouthfuls and its gone kind of things. Clearly then it has to be a beer which isn't negatively affected by the rise in temperature during the half hour or so of its existence in the glass. Just perhaps it is days like today, overcast, rainy and mild, that something like an IPA comes into its own? Preferably one hopped with English varieties, not lemon suckingly bitter and soul destroyingly strong, about 5% is plenty.

It would be a nice day to sit in a beer garden, covered by an umbrella, reading a book, or the papers, with a pint for company and listening to the gentle patter of rain against the leaves. It's that kind of day today.

Input Wanted

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Fri, 18 May 2012 10:56:00 +0000

I mentioned in a post last week that I am planning to perfect my homebrewing of 5 particular types of beer when Mrs V and I move into our new house. Top of that list to nail down is an Ordinary Bitter, which would I hope eventually become my house ale, once I have a kegerator and starting kegging my beers.

Bitter is one of those sadly overlooked styles here in the USA, very few professional breweries have one in their portfolio and given the low alcohol content they rarely get shipped from Blighty. There are many, many days when after work I would just love to sit down with an imperial pint of something like Young's Bitter.

You would think then that having won a gold medal for my Ordinary Bitter at last year's Dominion Cup that I have a recipe pretty much sorted. However, that was a partial mash beer and converting a beer to all grain brewing is more than just replacing malt extract with pale malt. The main consideration is which pale malt to use, Maris Otter, Golden Promise or Optic? Here is the grain bill for a recipe I recently brewed, in preparation for an upcoming Pro-Am preliminary competition:

67% Maris Otter
13% Crisp Amber Malt
13% Crisp Brown Malt
7% Briess Caramel 10

Having done a little research, it would seem that using brown malt is fairly unusual in a bitter, of any strength, but as this was a recreation of my medal winning brew from last year, I felt it would be incongruous not to use it. The question remains though, should it stay as an ingredient in the new Dark Island Bitter? That then is the first set of tweaks for the recipe, pulling out the Brown Malt and upping both the Maris Otter and the Caramel, so the grain bill will look something like this:

77% Maris Otter
13% Crisp Amber Malt
10% Briess Caramel 10

I am looking forward to eventually trying the two variants next to each other, and hopefully with a few learned friends from the local homebrew club, to decide which grain bill is better.

Naturally I am open to thoughts and input from brewers, both home and pro, on the grain bill as written, so feel free to weigh on in!

Let Them Drink Session!

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:04:00 +0000

Obviously I can't speak for you, but I remember my first beer, it was a half pint of my dad's homebrew when I was about 10 years old. We were living in Wales at the time and had built a huge patio behind our house, so naturally my parents had a bash to celebrate it being usable. I can't remember exactly what kind of beer it was, though I remember it was brewed in a polypin, most likely from a kit bought at Boots, and that it was brown, perhaps it was a generic bitter of some kind?

As kids we were allowed the occasional glass of wine with dinner, or cider during the summer. With the onset of the teenage years we were allowed a can of beer from time to time, by which point we had moved back to Scotland and said cans were Tennent's Lager featuring women in various states of comtemplating undress. By the time I had my first legal pint on my 18th birthday, I was no stranger to beer, cider and wine.

A couple of days ago, a friend on Facebook posting this article from the Huffington Post about how America's ridiculous legal age for alcohol consumption when compared to Germany's actually serves to create a culture of binge drinking. What though does this have to do with craft beer?

Let's assume the existence of some mythological American youth who when they get to their 21st birthday has never had a drop of alcohol pass their lips - yes I know such a creature is somewhat rare but for the sake of argument let's assume that the law isn't entirely out of touch with reality. On said young person's 21st birthday, having waited 3 years longer than their British cousins, they go to a brewery for a tour and tasting. Every beer they try is over 6% abv and they walk out having bought a case of double IPA or Foreign Extra Stout, whatever is on special that day. They chose the stronger beers simply because "it get's me where I want to be quicker", which is of course young person speak for , "I want to get pissed and pass out as quickly as possible, because that's what drinking is for". Still the question remains, what does this have to do with craft beer?

I suppose directly the answer would be "not much", but tangentially I wonder if the industry's reticence, and I am painting with broad strokes here, to brew session beers is contributing to binge drinking among beginner drinkers? I dread to think what kind of state these kids get themselves into as a result of going from nothing to high octane brews literally overnight.

Is there an answer? Well, yes I think there is. More sensible laws would be a good place to start, acknowledge that older teenagers are going to drink, so why bother making criminals out of them? Bringing the legal age for alcohol consumption down to at least 18 would be a good start, though personally I would bring it even further down, to 16, though I would make the minimum age for being in a pub 18. I would stagger what is available to kids of different ages like so:

16/17 year olds, nothing over 3.5% abv
18/19 year olds, nothing over 4% abv
20 year olds, nothing over 4.5% abv

Assuming the Jesuit concept of getting them while they are young, this would be a good time for craft brewers to introduce younger people to flavourful session beer. It would also, and I claim nothing but self interest here, mean that there would be more session beer available for the rest of us, which is never a bad thing.

A Beer Vacation

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:57:00 +0000

I am starting a 2 week booze fast today, well strictly speaking I am doing a complete cessation of carbohydrate intake, most of which in my case is beer anyway.

Although I won't be drinking for a fortnight, I still need to keep up with brewing for the inevitable house warming party in August, which means brewing more lime witbier and hopefully a batch of Dark Island Blonde Ale, from a recipe based on Williams Brothers magnificent Scottish Session Ale.

One beer that will definitely be brewed is whatever it is I decide to do for the next installment of the Charlottesville Area Masters of Real Ale Iron Brewer competition. The three ingredients that must be used for this round are:

honey malt
Hersbrucker hops
ginger

My first instinct is to make a ginger saison, using Kazbek hops for bittering, Styrian Goldings for flavour and the Hersbrucker for both aroma and dry hopping. I am planning to use the French Saison yeast from Wyeast rather than their Belgian mainly because my cellar is nicely in the temperature range for the French whereas the Belgian likes life a little hotter.

Stifling the South

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Fri, 11 May 2012 10:44:00 +0000

I want to preface my post today with a clarification, basically so I don't have to explain myself later if people get the wrong end of the stick. I like the beers of Sierra Nevada, Oskar Blues and New Belgium.

With that out of the way, let me continue. If I were in the planning stages of starting a brewery over here on the East Coast of the USA, especially in North Carolina, but also Virginia and South Carolina, I would be worrying right now. I would be worrying because all three of the aforementioned businesses are planning to build breweries in North Carolina, all of them clustered in the Asheville area.

On one hand it is excellent news, it will create jobs, which will spur local economies as workers spend their money, so from a economic point of view this development is very welcome. A further benefit that has been mentioned is their beers on the East Coast will be fresher and of a higher quality, personally I am a little dubious on this, but there we go. Certainly they will be cheaper to distribute, but I very much doubt the consumer will benefit from that in any way shape or form, just as the consumer doesn't benefit from the transportation savings of using cans instead of bottles.

My concern then is that these expansionary moves will stifle the local craft brewing industries and that market share which previously supported much smaller operations will be lost to the bigger company. Of course, the economist will say that this is simply the invisible hand of the market, but I have an aversion to invisible hands grabbing small companies by the neck and squeezing the life out of them. Naturally there is the argument that having these big businesses on their doorstep should encourage the smaller local breweries to up their game so they can compete with the big boys, but the question remains will they have the resources to do so?

I can't help but think that this is the first stage in the consolidation of the craft brewing industry, where the bigger companies start to force their way into markets by opening brewing facilities in various parts of the country. While we will see more and more Sierra Nevada, New Belgium and Oskar Blues beers in the supermarket aisles, we will see fewer local brews except at specialty outlets like Beer Run here in Charlottesville.

As I commented on my Twitter feed the other day these expansions are really no different from AB InBev buying up facilities to brew Budweiser in around the world, it's just that the beer is a bit better.

Perfecting Homebrew

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Wed, 09 May 2012 10:48:00 +0000

There are very few beers that I brew which I go on to brew twice or more, LimeLight is an obvious exception, as is my strong Thanksgiving ale Samoset, though the recipe changes most years. I have been thinking though of late that one of the things I would like to do when Mrs V and I move into our new house is to get a kegerator and develop a range of "house" ales, a couple of which would always be on tap.

In thinking about the types of beer to focus on, I gave myself some fairly simple criteria:

at least 2 session beers
at least 1 style which is difficult to get in Virginia
one lager
to cross the spectrum of colours

Having pondered, I decided on the following:

3.5% - 3.7% Ordinary Bitter
3.9% - 4.1% Blonde Ale
5% - 6% Porter
4.2% - 4.8% Pilsner

I wanted to have 5 beers in total though, and it wasn't until I had the magnificence of Oliver Ale's "Ape Must Never Kill Ape" last week that I knew what I wanted to do, a "Belgian Mild" which would have an abv of less than 3.5%.

Yes, they are all styles that I have brewed before, and in the case of my Ordinary Bitter won a gold medal for, but they are the styles that I enjoy drinking the most and at the end of the day homebrewing is all about having beer that I want to drink.

Naturally I will still make bits and pieces that either take my fancy or are brewed for special occasions, such as my Samoset Thanksgiving ale, whatever the International Homebrew Project throws up and our internal Iron Brewer project with the homebrew club, the next round of which requires honey malt, Hersbrucker hops and ginger.

If you also homebrew, what beers would you want to perfect to have on tap regularly?

And the winner is...

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Mon, 07 May 2012 11:04:00 +0000

It seems like only yesterday I was having a little moan about the awards handed out as part of the World Beer Cup, especially the Bohemian Pilsner category. As it is, that particular moan was from June 2010, when Gambrinus Excelent somehow contrived to come second in the aforementioned category. It was then with a modicum of interest that I read my way through the winners list for this year's edition.

Good news for this part of Virginia in the form of Devils Backbone taking gold for their Vienna Lager. As I mentioned recently, the Charlottesville area breweries do well with lager and now boast both the current World Beer Cup gold for the Vienna lager category and the current Great American Beer Festival gold, in the form of Starr Hill's Jomo Lager. There was also a silver in the grammatically incorrect "American-Belgo-Style Ale" category, for Blue Mountain's Blue Reserve. Correct grammar would have be "Americo-Belgian Style Ale".

I was also very pleased to see Jeff at Lovibonds picking up some shiny yellow bling for his Sour Grapes in the "Wood or Barrel Aged Sour Ale" category, and I say this more in hope than expectation - could someone please start importing Lovibonds beer in the US?

However, there were a few bits and pieces that I found either startling or down right ridiculous, let's start with my favourite hobby horse, Bohemian Pilsners. Of the 62 entrants, the top three were Starobrno Ležák, Krušovice Imperial and Gambrinus Premium, or to put it another way Heineken, Heineken and SABMiller. I have read that Krušovice has improved of late, and given that Starobrno is owned by the same company perhaps they have likewise got better, but Gambrinus Premium is the third best pilsner in the world? While it is true that I haven't had Gambrinus in a few years, I keep in touch with my mates back in Prague and they consistently tell me that it is getting worse than it was, and that many of them have given up on Gambrinus entirely in favour of Pilsner Urquell. Once again I would love to see who the other 59 entrants were, because if this crop of swill is the best available then there are real problems with the Pilsner brewing community (which I actually believe there are, but mainly because too many people don't have enough experience of proper pilsner within it's "sitz im leben" to brew it properly).

Then there are some of the categories themselves, but in particular "German-Style Kölsch/Köln-Style Kölsch" category. How gracious to allow for a "Köln-Style Kölsch", though the fact that Kölsch can only ever come from Cologne in order to be true to the Convention governing the style makes the category something of a tautology. Would it not be better to use a name like Kölsch-style Ale, which basically says everything necessary, a blonde ale made in the style of a Kölsch but not actually from Cologne. Now, I know nomenclature is not really wildly important to a lot of people, but I think these cack-handed categories simply breed confusion and are unnecessary when definitions such as the Kölsch Convention already exist.

I realise that competitions really need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but I wonder sometimes if all the meddling makes the pinch more of a hefty slug?

In Excelsis!

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Fri, 04 May 2012 11:07:00 +0000

As I mentioned on Wednesday, I spent a chunk of this week up in Washington DC at a conference and that I was hoping to find a good pub to while away a few hours after everything work connected was done with for the day. Eventually then a colleague and I jumped in a taxi and headed to Churchkey.

I had heard mention of Churchkey from various sources. Having climbed the stairs and had my ID checked, I stood in wonder at the bar. I barely noticed the 50 something tap handles crowding the wall behind the bar, for there, at the very heart of it all were handpumps, five of them. Yes, you read that correctly 5 handpumps in an American pub. Sure, Charlottesville has a couple of places with a solitary handpump but having a choice of cask ales was magical, perhaps even mythical. I have to admit though that I can only remember 2 of the available beers, because they were the two I drank, Williams Bros Midnight Sun Porter and a beer called Ape Must Never Kill Ape, a 3.3% abv beer from Oliver Breweries up in Baltimore.

I am planning a trip to Baltimore with my best friend in August.He is from the city and when we were flatmates in Prague in 2000 we drank shed loads of beer on the balcony of our flat while he told me that one day he would show me his home town. Suffice to say that the Pratt Street Ale House, home of Oliver Breweries is very much on our list of places to get slaughtered in. Quick side note, sampling dozens of weird and wonderful beers is all good and well, but sitting with your best mate getting totalled is the pinnacle of the drinking world. Anyway, the AMNKA is a session strength Belgian inspired dark ale, which according to the commercial description is made with:

"English pale malt, dark crystal, chocolate, carafa 3, Belgian biscuit and caramel vienna. Bittered with Kent Goldings and Czech Saaz, finished with Fuggles and German Tettnanger then fermented with Belgian DeKonick yeast and cold conditioned with vanilla beans"

Absolutely packed with flavour this beer is, a veritable melange of coffee, chocolate, toffee, grass and so many other flavours that you need a good few pints to really examine it well. I didn't have my note book so I had a good few pints just because it was so damned good. Another silly little aside, the glasses at Churchkey are 16oz nonic kind of things, which just look weird to my proper pint trained eye.

We sat at the bar for a good few hours, watching ice hockey, drinking beer and talking about work and life in general. We chatted with random strangers at the bar, naturally plugging this here blog, and if they come back and read this post then I hope they took the time to learn a bit more about the Scots language.

Churchkey seems to be finding that most elusive of balances, at least in my experience, of being a beer bar which keeps the tickers happy and a pub where regular drinkers feel welcome, and they have simply excellent bar staff. What a great way to waste several hours.

Hoping for the Unusual

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Wed, 02 May 2012 12:40:00 +0000

I am in Washington DC today, at an industry conference for the company I work for. There is a rumour that once today's activities are done and dusted with, I will have the evening free, which naturally means finding a bar to park in for a few hours and indulge in some amber nectar.

A possible venue for said bum parking and pints is Churchkey, a place I have heard much about and am eager to peruse the apparently extensive list, here's hoping for some of the following:

Just a quick aside, we went to a restaurant called Cityzen last night, and they had Gaffel Kölsch which was nice. Out of interest, does anyone know how you powder olive oil?

Little Lager Land

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:00:00 +0000

It seems that the term "Little [insert country name]" is used with abandon to describe places in New York where immigrants from a given nation settled on arrival. Hence you have Little Poland, Little Italy and Little Germany. It is the spirit of that naming convention that I think Nelson County, with a bit of Albemarle County thrown in, here in Virginia should be given the name "Little Lager Land".

On Saturday, Mrs V and I decided we would head out to Blue Mountain Brewery as the brewer there had told me that they now had their new maibock available. Blue Mountain is very, very popular and knowing that we hate crowds, Mrs V suggested going for opening time. Having stationed ourselves at the bar, Mrs V asked for samples of the Classic Lager and their summer seasonal "Summer Loving", a hazing wheaty looking thing that was refreshing and clean, it was almost a shame it was pissing down. I had come for just one beer, Maggie Maibock.

As you can see from the picture it is a nice deep golden colour, though with no much head. Something that baffles me is bars that serve you beer with no head. I won't bore you to tears with tasting notes, suffice to say that it was big, sweet and a touch boozy - basically everything you expect from a maibock, and it seemed to suit the pouring rain much better than Mrs V's Summer Loving.

Pints polished off we headed down to Wild Wolf Brewing as we had not been before. Wild Wolf, as a brewpub, has only been going for about 6 months and as such I won't write too much here about their beer, other than there is potential there and Mrs V commented on the Alpha Ale that it would be much better if it had more body to balance the hops.

Having had the sample equivalent of a couple of pints, we were getting hungry and as we were in the area we popped by Devils Backbone, for the first time in a few months. Again stationed at the bar, a couple of Vienna lagers were soon in front of us, followed, in my case, by a 1949 Lager, a pale lager based on a period recipe, and not bad it was. I finished up abandoning lagers though for a Ramsey's Draft Stout.

There are many moments here that I am very happy for the local breweries and the fact that they have lagers at the very heart of their offerings. Blue Mountain's Classic Lager and Devils Backbone Vienna are two of my favourite beers and in general both breweries do lager well, which naturally makes me a cheerful chap on a rainy day.

Simplicity

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:15:00 +0000

One of my favourite words is "simplicity".

Looking at the dictionary definitions, the word means:

the state, quality, or an instance of being simple.
freedom from complexity, intricacy, or division into parts: an organism of great simplicity
absence of luxury, pretentiousness, ornament, etc.; plainness: a life of simplicity
freedom from deceit or guile; sincerity; artlessness; naturalness: a simplicity of manner
lack of mental acuteness or shrewdness: Politics is not a field for simplicity about human nature

While it is true that beer can seem like an ever changing kaleidoscope of colours, flavours and aromas, beer is ultimately a very simple drink, possible to brew with just four ingredients. Given my bias toward Czech pale lagers, you can't really get much more simple and beautiful than Pilsner malt, Saaz hops, yeast and water.

I like to think that beer is the very essence of the third definition above. It is not a luxury item, there is no pretension with it, it is not an ornament to get out when vicar comes for tea, it is an integral part of life. You could call it a commodity, and indeed in many parts of Europe that's exactly what it is, along with bread, butter, and salt, it is an essential. I like that way of thinking about beer, it is the everyman drink, from lords to layabouts, the majority of people drink beer.

Many of the folks I have met as a result of beer would qualify for definition number four, good, honest, down to earth working people who enjoy pints afterwards. I remember a story about the word "sincere" which literally means, or so I recall, "without wax". A sculptor made a bust of a Roman dignitary, it might have been one of the Caesars, and accidentally broke off the nose, which he re-attached with a blob of wax. In the heat of the midday sun the wax melted and the nose fell off, revealing the sculptor's fraud. It seems to me that the people who most "get" beer are not the ones making all the noise about the latest, greatest trend in beer styles, beer cocktails or fad breweries, it's the ones in the pub drinking with their mates, or sat reading the paper, passing the time with a pint.

Perhaps then we should celebrate more of the simple beers, the Pilsners, Stouts and Pale Ales, instead of being blown about by the winds of fashion, looking for the next great thing and in doing so miss the very heart of beer.

So Stylish

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:04:00 +0000

Sure, beer styles aren't perfect, and yes it is true that brewers, whether pro or home, brew beer rather than styles. However, beer styles do serve a purpose as a frame of reference for both drinkers and brewers. If I brew, for example, a 10% pale lager, hopped with Tettnang to 55 IBU and lagered for 60 days, then it is quite clear that it is not a Premium American Lager. The question though that has been bouncing around my head for the last couple of days is "who decides what style of beer a product is?".

It is clear in my mind that the final say should rest with the actual brewers themselves. The one group of people who should resolutely not be allowed anywhere near the decision making process for a new beer is the marketing department. If a brewer, for example, brews a generic pale lager, and the company markets it as a Pilsner, it does nobody any favours, least of all the consumer.

Someone with sufficient knowledge of Pilsner beers, whether German or Czech, will be disappointed drinking a generic pale lager which has been labelled a Pilsner because it doesn't have the requisite hoppiness, body and flavour. If said drinker is also a member of sites such as BeerAdvocate and RateBeer, they will then give their opinions on the beer as a Pilsner and likely how it fails as one and score it accordingly.

Worse yet are reviewers who, through no fault of their own, have never had the inestimable pleasure of travelling to Germany or the Czech Republic to drink the real thing in it's natural environment. Having grown up on beers from green bottles which have been pasteurised and then travelled long distances in less than prime conditions, it is no wonder they come out with some of the drivel you read on the rating sites. It makes me want to scream when I read that an American made Pilsner "has the right amount of skunkiness" for the style, when in Germany and the Czech Republic such a beer would be entirely unacceptable. You only have to drink fresh Pilsner at the source to know that the bottled version is a travesty.

Having said that, if a brewery sticks with the decision to market a generic pale lager as a Pilsner, and the beer is listed as such on the rating sites then the brewery deserves being beaten with the big stick of public opinion. It is a different situation when the beer is clearly labelled as a certain style but listed on the rating sites as something else, take this example for one of my favourite beers:

Why, oh why, is Williams Bros 80/-, known in the US as Heavy, listed as a "bitter"? The commercial description attached to the page claims that the beer is a:

"traditional Scottish ale brewed with an emphasis on the malt characteristics. Lightly hopped, as is true to this style of beer, with fruity malt aromas and a toffeeish mouth feel"

this despite the fact that the site's definition of "bitter" reads:

"gold to copper color, low carbonation and medium to high bitterness. Hop flavor and aroma may be non-existent to mild"

while their definition of a Scottish Ale is:

"generally dark, malty, full-bodied brews"

Whoever listed Williams Bros Heavy as a Bitter is clearly as clueless as people that believe Miller Lite to be a Pilsner.

My problem with all of this is that ultimately two constituencies are affected, the consumer because they are buying into false expectations and the beer itself because when it is mislabelled by either the brewery marketing department or the self appointed arbiters of style it will be panned for not being something it isn't.

What's In a Name?

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:59:00 +0000

Like most homebrewers, I am sure, I like to give my beers names, and I like messing around with fonts to create labels - not really having much of an artistic talent for drawing. As well as naming my own beers, I have chosen the name for a couple of commercial beers.

When we brewed a Tmavé at Devils Backbone I came up with the name "Morana" as she is the Slavic goddess of winter and death, an effigy of whom is burnt each spring to mark the end of winter. More recently another local brewery, Blue Mountain, had a spot of bother with the labelling authorities here about a beer they wanted to call "Chocolate Orange Bourbon Porter" but were told the name is misleading. To solve their problem they turned to the power of social media, and asked their fans on Facebook to come up with the name, my entry won. The name I chose was "Isabel", named for the Princess Imperial of Brazil, which is the world's leading producer of oranges and cocoa and Isabel herself was descended from the royal House of Bourbon.

With my own beers, I like to give them names which are linked to either the style or the place where they originated, or some link to the ingredients. My Charlottenstädter Pils is named in part after the town I live in, but with the French "ville" replaced with the German "stadt" as it is a German style Pilsner, which I will be bottling tomorrow as it has been in the lagering tank for 35 days now. When I eventually make a Czech version I will have to come up with an alternative to Šarlotovický Ležák, because our new house is about 15 miles outside of town. Our new address is, officially at least, in Gordonsville, and one of the meanings of the name Gordon is "large fortification", so my Czech lager could be called "Pevnost" which means "fortress".

Talking about German beers, I am awaiting my score sheet for the only beer I entered in this year's National Homebrew Competition, an altbier called Cobbler's in honour of the first Altbier I ever had, from the Schumacher brewery. I am kind of nerovus about the score, as altbier is such a difficult beer style to find over here, other than Uerige that is, which I haven't seen around for a while.

Anyway, just a few random, and likely unconnected thoughts, having been inspired by Boak and Bailey's post today about naming their beers.

Brew Tunes

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 10:47:00 +0000

I might brew this weekend. I am working at Starr Hill tomorrow, but Sunday morning is always a nice time to break out the mash tun and kettle. If I do brew then I will make the first batch of this year's LimeLight, my annual witbier with lime peel instead of orange and hopped exclusively with Saaz.

Whenever I brew though, I love to listen to music on my Spotify account, so I though today rather than bang on about something or other in the beer world, I would introduce you to some of the new stuff on my Spotify and give you an insight into what I am listening to at the moment.

Vukovi - Schwagger

I first heard about Vukovi, a Scottish band with a Serbian name that means "the wolves", whilst listening to Vic Galloway on BBC Radio Scotland. You have to love being able to listen to Radio Scotland online! Anyway, they were on his show and did a few live songs, including a heavied up cover of Katy Perry's "Part of Me" which was fantastic. I have become something of a fan, listening to them regularly, and loving this song.

Jakil - Swings and Daffodils

One of my favourite functions on Spotify is the "Related Artists" option, and it was clicking on that from Vukovi that brought this band to my attention, and this track from their EP Swings was the stand out.

The Vatersay Boys - The Gael

Last of the Mohicans is a film that I can watch anytime, and the most distinctive piece of music from it is The Gael. The Vatersay Boys are from the Outer Hebrides and to get my brewing going of a morning there is nothing like listening to some ceilidh music from home.

Vukovi - Vincible

More Vukovi, just because.

Have a great weekend people!

What Happened?

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:55:00 +0000

Later this year I will be 37 years old, which means that for more than half my life I will have been drinking legally. Ever since that first, legal, pint of Guinness in the Dark Island Hotel back home on Benbecula, I have had a taste for beer. Oh alright then, I was known before I turned 18 to enjoy the occasional can of whatever muck was available, Tennent's Lager most often, though also the odd Budweiser. I was never one of the "sit in the bus shelter on a Friday night drinking whatever we could persuade the older kids to buy for us" set, but I had a beer from time to time.

Bit of a digression there, but anyway, a couple of weeks ago I wrote a post listing five beers that changed what I drink and how I think about beer. Another slight digression, but one thing that hasn't changed is the kind of place I enjoy drinking in, pubs, proper pubs, not bars or clubs or glorified restaurants, but pubs, even if they are something of a hen's tooth over here. Without wanting to sound like a complete curmudgeon, here are a few beers that I once loved, which now leave me disappointed...

In 1999 when I moved to Prague, Velkopopovický Kozel was something of a minor beer celebrity. I had heard so much about this pale lager which was so unlike the Carling and Fosters most pubs served in Britain, it had a real hop bite to it. My first pint was at the sports bar I went to every weekend for ten seasons and I loved it. Eventually the brewery was bought by Pilsner Urquell and in turn Pilsner Urquell was bought by SABMiller, and so began the desecration of a once lovely beer. When I left in 2009 I found a Kozel bar whilst out walking and popped in to sample the wares, and while the 12° was ok, the rest of the range was thin, insipid and a mere shadow of its former self.

The other beer I drank a lot of back in my early Prague years was Gambrinus, the picture here is their 11° Excelent. While Gambáč was available as both a 10° and a 12° beer, it was the 10° that you saw most often - most pubs would have three taps, Gambrinus 10° on one, with Kozel Černý and Pilsner Urquell taking up the other two. Again Gambrinus was something of a sad story, perfectly drinkable for many a year and then around 2006 strange things started happening, it became thin and noticeably watery. I am not sure when they started watering down a 13° beer, post fermentation, to create the 10° and 12° but they should never have started.

Once upon a time I drank smoothflow ales, I liked them and then I moved away from Britain and didn't have the option. Perhaps they were always bland, watery messes, but I have a sense that in the 13 years between leaving Blighty and sitting in my Charlottesville living room this morning, they have got worse.

Over to you then, what beers did you once love and now find disappointing?

A Little Bitter Would Be Better

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 10:48:00 +0000

About this time last year I decided that I wanted to brew a best bitter but ended up falling way short on the gravity I was looking for and made the beer an ordinary bitter instead. Skip forward a few months and Fuggold Bitter, named for obvious reasons, was, I felt, the weakest of the various beers I entered in the Dominion Cup. The world being full of little quirk, my bitter placed ahead of a couple of ESBs to take gold for the English Pale Ale category.

Coming back to 2012, one of the local breweries here has decided to work with the homebrew club I go to, the Charlottesville Area Masters of Real Ale, to pick a medal winning beer from 2011 for the Great American Beer Festival's Pro-Am competition later this year. Hence I brewed a new batch of Fuggold Bitter yesterday.

I tweaked the recipe in two ways yesterday, last year the beer was a mini-mash to supplement dry malt extract and was fermented with the Windsor yeast strain, this year the beer is all grain and I am using Safale US-05 as it is similar the brewery's house ale yeast.

The recipe itself is quite simple really:

67% Maris Otter
13% Amber Malt
13% Brown Malt
7% Crystal 10
19 IBU Fuggles for 60 minutes
10 IBU Kent Goldings for 15 minutes
1 IBU Fuggles for 1 minute
Safale US-05

I hit my gravity just right at 1.038 and within a couple of hours of pitching, the Safale was doing a right number on the fermentables. If everything goes well, I will have a 3.7% abv bitter to bottle in a couple of weeks.

Knowing the standard of the other brewers taking part I will be quite surprised if Fuggold Bitter gets the nod, but you have to be in it to win it.

International Homebrew Project - The Drinking

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 11:05:00 +0000

It was eight weeks ago that I mashed my grains, added my dry malt extract to bump up the gravity and chucked in a shitload of hops into a kettle to make a mild, a Scottish mild no less, for the International Homebrew Project. Based on a 19th century recipe from the William Younger's brewery for a 120/- ale, my wort was 1.110 (about 26° Plato). By the end of the boil, having added judicious amounts of Kent Goldings and Fuggles, the estimated IBU rating of the beer was 93, so much for Scottish beers being "traditionally" low on hops. Once primary fermentation had slowed to barely a flicker, I dumped my dry hops into the carboy and then bottled a week later. For 6 weeks now the beer has say conditioning...

Finally the time had come to open a bottle and see what had become of the beer, and with that reassuring pffft that is every homebrewers favourite sound I popped off the cap and poured.

I was kind of surprised at the colour of the beer, a deep, entrancing amber which failed to form a head, though swirling the glass after the initial mouthful produced a decent layer of firm, whipped cream type foam. The aroma was a heady mix of grass, spice, perhaps a touch of tobacco and a little background alcohol. Drinking it though was quite a shock, thoroughly, thoroughly bitter, but at the same time a juicy malt biscuity thing make sure the hops didn't rip my tongue out and stomp all over it. The finish was long, as in progressive rock guitar solo long, and bitter, puckering while not being like sucking a lemon. Goodness me, what a lovely beer! The body was positively voluptuous, the mouthfeel a sensual satiny smoothness, like melted chocolate, goodness me this is a beer that could get me into trouble, so dangerously, and temptingly, delicious it is.

All in all I very happy with how this one turned out, and I am planning to enter it in the Dominion Cup later this year, probably in Category 23, and also in the Strong Ale category of the Palmetto State Brewers Open, in the meantime, I might just have another over the weekend.

International Homebrew Project Reminder

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 10:25:00 +0000

For those that took part in the brewing of the historic Scottish ale, remember to blog about it tomorrow, please remember to put a link to your post in the comments section after my post tomorrow.

If you brewed the recipe but don't blog, feel free to leave tasting notes and any comments about the beer in the comments after my post tomorrow.

I am really looking forward to this beer when I get home from work tonight...

Session Beer Every Day Please!

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:47:00 +0000

I had a very nice Session Beer Day, or at least a very nice Session Beer Afternoon. I spent it propping up the bar of McGrady's Irish Pub, drinking Williams Brothers Scottish Session Ale and chatting with mates. That's what going to the pub is really all about. We didn't avail ourselves of the pool table, this time, though I will admit to chucking a couple of songs on the jukebox, all the while wishing they had more Rammstein, Smiths and Smashing Pumpkins options - sometimes though T.a.T.u. hits the spot even it is was in English rather than Russian.

The only dark cloud on an otherwise golden afternoon was the sinking feeling that once the session beers have run out they will again be few and far between until the next Session Beer Day. Before you know it, the taps will again be flowing with over strong, over hopped pale ales, with only Guinness available for the rest of us.

I don't want to sound like a grumbly malcontent, but having a choice of flavourful session beers on tap should not be a once a year thing. If every pub in Charlottesville were to ditch Guinness and replace it with Starr Hill's Dark Starr Stout, which is 4.2% and has won more awards than any other dry stout in the US, it would be a major step forward.

Yes there are more brewers making session beers, so pubs it is your turn to start selling them on draft more often.

Snack Time!

noreply@blogger.com (Velky Al) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 11:30:00 +0000

"Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps please".

Sure that might be something of a cliché, but it does illustrate that few things go together like beer and snacks. Here I am strictly speaking about snacks rather than some little pretentious morsel, usually in a tower, with a smear of cat's piss jus or some such silliness on the side of a square white plate the size of the City of London. Beer and snacks are just perfectly natural bedfellows, like bacon and egg or fish and chips, everyone I know gets the munchies when they've had a few pints, and on Saturday in honour of Session Beer Day I drank mostly Williams Brothers Scottish Session Ale.

In the pubs I frequent here in Charlottesville, snacks either don't seem to be part of the menu or are a mere dollar cheaper than a sandwich or main course. If I am at Beer Run and get the munchies I will often have their Hogwaller sandwich, which consists of ham AND bacon AND cheese, with a side of potato salad. If the venue happens to be McGrady's then a Philly Cheesesteak wrap with tater tots is in order. While they are both delicious, they are sometimes just too big for my purposes. So this got me thinking about the beer snacks I loved in the Czech Republic, and here are a few of my favourites.

Let's start off with Nakládaný Hermelín, possibly my favourite cheese dish on earth other than just eating straight up extra mature cheddar. Hermelín itself is a soft cheese similar to Camembert or Brie, though normally sold as small wheels of about 4 or 5 inches in diameter. To make nakládaný Hermelín you simply slice a wheel in half, lengthwise, and then marinade it in oil, garlic, onions, peppers and various spices. It takes about 3 days to be ready, though I know some people who wear you have to wait 2 weeks for the full flavour to develop. Once it is ready, spread it on some nice thick cut rye bread and have a pint of the best Pilsner you can find.

The one delicacy that I loved most when living in the Czech Republic was called Škvarková pomazánka. Škvarky are basically bits of fried bacon, though usually they come with a healthy dose of lard as well. Whip it all up with some eggs, onions and mustard and hey presto you have a lard and bacon spread which is utterly delicious on toasted rye bread, and serve with a pint of the finest Pilsner you can find.

Inevitably when you get home, having had many pints of finest Pilsner you can find, you might still have the munchies, and this is where topinky come into their own. Quite simply, take old bread - most Czech bread is rye bread - and fry it in oil. Once it is nicely fried up, rub cloves of garlic on the bread and enjoy. Personally I think this is best done at home rather than in the pub mainly because you don't want to be breathing garlic fumes over your friends, and it is definitely not recommended if you are out on the pull.

So what are your beer snacks of choice?