The Beer You Are Drinking Right Now

[swill453]

If you have an Asda within shopping distance, they have four for a fiver and an excellent range (ghost ship was a semi-regular pick of mine until I encountered ethical reasons not to touch Adnams). I take a trip up there whenever the beer shelf in my kitchen is looking empty.]

Here in the frozen north we're not considered adult enough to be able to handle multi-buy discounts (though a crate of Stella for a tenner is strangely fine).

Some deals are converted to our advantage, typically Tesco has a number of bottles at a straight £1.50 each including Ghost Ship, others are silently ignored.

Scott.

[JMN2]

Frozen north = Scotland?

I am convinced Scotland's spiritual home is social democratic Scandinavia, hence all the nanny-state characteristics.

I am drinking a fancy beer, not that pleasant. Saison Dupont Cuvee Dry Hopping Brewers Gold. I feel a heartburn coming.

[JMN2]

Purity Mad Goose 4.2%, one of the better supermarket beers.

[UncleEbenezer]

Purity Mad Goose 4.2%, one of the better supermarket beers.

Never seen nor heard of it.

I think beers are one of the few things that are genuinely local in our supermarkets. Hence ours here offer a wide range of Devon and Cornish brews, some from further afield like Dorset and Somerset, and then just a relatively few big breweries from distant parts - like Shepherd Neame, Fullers, Wadworth, Greene King, Adnams, Marstons, Theakstons, Brakspear, etc. If you live in another part of the country, you probably won't encounter most of what I drink.

[Imbiber]

Never seen nor heard of it.

Your loss, it is superb, at least it is on draught.

[CommissarJones]

Your loss, it is superb, at least it is on draught.

Agreed, I quite like Mad Goose. At the moment, I'm just finishing a Whitstable Bay Pale Ale from Shepherd Neame.

[UncleEbenezer]

Never seen nor heard of it.

Your loss, it is superb, at least it is on draught.

I see it's a Midlands brew. Maybe I'll get to sample it sometime if I happen to be in your area.

Just for fun, I tried its postcode in the "where to find us" map for the brewery whose beer I enjoyed with my meal this evening - one of many excellent brews locally. The nearest to you it came up with was 121 miles. Your loss, to match mine in not having mad goose.
http://www.skinnersbrewery.com/our-beers/where-to-buy/

[Imbiber]

I'm not a Midlands lad but used to travel extensively for work. I think I had Mad Goose in Birmingham for the first time. I persuaded the landlord of my local to give it a try and it now makes a regular appearance and is very popular. I am in East Kent and the pub stocks mainly Kent beers, no problem there, lots of good stuff to choose from. If I could only persuade him to drop the Doombar.........

[bungeejumper]

Purity Mad Goose 4.2%, one of the better supermarket beers.

Pretty sure I saw it in Tescos yesterday. Yes, here it is: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/product ... =259516961 . Hmmm, at four for six quid it sounds worth a try.

BJ

[Hallucigenia]

Purity Mad Goose 4.2%, one of the better supermarket beers.

Never seen nor heard of it.

I think beers are one of the few things that are genuinely local in our supermarkets. Hence ours here offer a wide range of Devon and Cornish brews, some from further afield like Dorset and Somerset, and then just a relatively few big breweries from distant parts - like Shepherd Neame, Fullers, Wadworth, Greene King, Adnams, Marstons, Theakstons, Brakspear, etc. If you live in another part of the country, you probably won't encounter most of what I drink.

You get a pretty distorted view of the beer market in the West Country, thanks to the the dominance of tied pubs, particularly the Snozzle ones that hardly ever have guest beers. It's possibly the worst area in the country for beer choice thanks to those ties, parts of Kent come close but even in Faversham you can find alternatives to Sheps (just!). The geography in both cases reinforces it - there's sea where there could be nearby breweries to challenge the home team, compare that with say the North Midlands, where you're on the edge of home territory for everything from Robbies to Everards, and within easy distribution range of every microbrewery from York to the M4. But these days good beer travels - Skinners will probably only track pubs that they deliver casks to directly but have little chance with casks that go into the national distributors let alone bottles. For instance, the last few reviews of Betty Stogs on Untappd include ones from Lancashire, Cheltenham and Oxford, Cornish Knocker has recently been drunk from cask in Suffolk and in Faversham from a bottle bought in Tesco : https://untappd.com/SkinnersBrewingCo/beer

Purity seem to be one of the smallest breweries to have got their hooks pretty well into the supermarkets - I guess the geography helps (they're Stratford-ish) but I've seen Ubu in supermarkets all over the place, and Mad Goose in several. For me the pick is draught Pure Gold, a cracking session pale.

Adnams are marketing themselves pretty aggressively, I suspect that they feel Ghost Ship is a beer that could "do a Doom Bar" as a lowest-common-denominator interpretation of current trends. They're probably right, even if every county now has at least two local breweries doing something similar but better.

[AleisterCrowley]

Yes, Purity stuff available in my local (Slough) Tesco - picked up some Ubu on Friday, and I'm pretty sure I've seen Mad Goose as well
Permanently available in bottles back home in Shropshire (about 30 miles from the brewery) but not seen it on in the local boozers. The most common beer (ignoring GK/Marstons stuff) is Hobsons (Cleobury Mortimer), with the excellent Salopian available in some places. Wye Valley HPA seems to be a popular choice also.
My semi-local in Eton seems to get a lot of Skinner's in - usually Knocker or Stogs - hardly 'LocAle' , it's about 200 miles to Truro as the crow flies...
I'd like to try their 'Lushingtons' if it ever escapes from Cornwall

[UncleEbenezer]

My semi-local in Eton seems to get a lot of Skinner's in - usually Knocker or Stogs - hardly 'LocAle' , it's about 200 miles to Truro as the crow flies...

Interesting (yours and Hallucigenia's comments). Skinners getting ambitious? I think Snozzle is the only native brewery on the peninsula one could call big (at least since Sharps got borged), but all the better if someone else can give them a run for their money. Hmm, come to think of it, Otter is pretty widespread too. As it happens I also think Snozzle makes some nice pints: both Tribute and Proper Job are among those I'm happy to drink. Oh, and I haven't encountered those tied pubs: Snozzle is widely available, but alongside other choices.

I wonder if you folks in distant parts have encountered some of our other local brews. Like the classic I had a couple of hours ago: http://www.dartmoorbrewery.co.uk/beer/jail-ale-abv-4-8 ? Or the very Cornish http://www.woodenhand.co.uk/ ? Or the very local new kid on the block I encountered when given some bottles for the festive season: https://berebrewery.co.uk/ ?

[UncleIan]

Tonight I'm off to a brewery tour, it's been open at least 20 years, and isn't far away, but somehow I've managed to contrive not to organise a piss up in a brewery, this shall be put right tonight.

Just to report back.

Hogs Back Brewery - they've done ok for themselves. Probably not really counting as a small brewery these days, though they're under some government threshold so they aren't *that* big. We all gathered upstairs in their shop. Downstairs is all Hogsback brews, upstairs is more interesting, with a wide variety of bottled (and canned) brews from all over the place. Easily spent a happy half hour browsing and nosing along the shelves.

We were led through each stage of the brewing process, and in each bit of the brewery had jugs full of a different ale in each part of the brewery. The tour was quite interesting, though the tour guide thought he was a stand up, and lets just say his style of humour didn't quite match what I enjoy, but other people thought it was funny. I guess lots of people like Mrs Brown's Boys, and I don't. Anyway, beer....

Started with HBB, Hogs Back Bitter. This was good. 3.7%. A satisfyingly bitter taste to it, if I saw this in a pub I'd probably struggle to look past it, a very good start.
Surrey Nirvana. 4%. A golden beer. More citrusy IPA type thing. That was alright too.
TEA. 4.2% - For years, I thought it was Tongham (where the brewery is based) English Ale, but apparently it's Traditional. This is another go to beer for me, though thanks to the other beers we'd already had, you really noticed its sweetness. If this and HBB were on the same bar, I'd probably go HBB.
Next was Hogswallop, 4.2%. This was another good one. They've bought some land opposite, and grown hops on it, Cascade went into this brew.
Then, the sinners served up a choice of lager or cider, now as the cider is actually brewed in the west country somewhere, Hazy Hog it's called, and the bottles just turn up, oh, and I don't like cider really, so I stuck to the lager. Hogstar. It's labelled a craft lager, I think that just means it's a beery lager. I.e. not bland like your fosters etc. It was alright actually. Apparently when they decided to start making a lager, M&S waltzed in, took 90% of it, rebadged it "Five Hop Lager" and put it in all their stores. Kerching!

Then we walked to a local scout hut and had a decent curry, and I left my half pint glass there. Probably for the best. Safe to say I've got more than enough logo half and pint glasses from beer festivals over the years to keep me going.

[Hallucigenia]

Interesting (yours and Hallucigenia's comments). Skinners getting ambitious? I think Snozzle is the only native brewery on the peninsula one could call big (at least since Sharps got borged), but all the better if someone else can give them a run for their money. Hmm, come to think of it, Otter is pretty widespread too. As it happens I also think Snozzle makes some nice pints: both Tribute and Proper Job are among those I'm happy to drink. Oh, and I haven't encountered those tied pubs: Snozzle is widely available, but alongside other choices.

I wonder if you folks in distant parts have encountered some of our other local brews. Like the classic I had a couple of hours ago: http://www.dartmoorbrewery.co.uk/beer/jail-ale-abv-4-8 ? Or the very Cornish http://www.woodenhand.co.uk/ ? Or the very local new kid on the block I encountered when given some bottles for the festive season: https://berebrewery.co.uk/ ?

Skinners are just doing what they need to survive in a region where so few pubs are free of tie. It's not being "ambitious", it's just the nature of the modern beer market for beers to be routinely found hundreds of miles from home. Qv the previous mention of Purity as a semi-regular in Kent, I know of several similar examples. You can poke around Untappd to get a feel for how well breweries are getting their beers out and about - as a random one, I note that the last two reviews at the Allied Arms in Reading are Ubu and Dartmoor Jail.

But just to give you an idea of what the new normal looks like in middle class towns in mid-Britain, here's a brewery tap in a town about the same size as Truro : https://www.instagram.com/p/BRNtjOphWSh/ Admittedly they don't normally have more than one >£7 exotic (I suspect they were trying to impress some special visitors), but you'll see they have everything from £2.90 session beers on cask through chocolate stouts from Yorkshire and Brett beers from Somerset, to cult stuff from Amsterdam and Denmark. But it's notable that the further the beer has travelled the weirder and more specialist it has to be - there's any number of local-ish breweries (not least themselves) producing "normal" pale hoppy stuff.

However, it's a crowded market, and Cornish beers will always suffer from the geography, which means much of their potential local market is in the English Channel, and that 100+ mile trip up the A30 will always put 20-30p on the price of a pint without any gain in beer quality. On the flip side, there is the holiday beer effect which was definitely important in Doom Bar's growth, and I suspect Tribute as well. But overall it's hard for Cornish breweries - qv the demise of Rebel recently.

[Hallucigenia]

Just to report back.

Hogs Back Brewery - they've done ok for themselves. Probably not really counting as a small brewery these days, though they're under some government threshold so they aren't *that* big.

Thanks for this - Hogsback are an interesting one as an example of one of the early wave of microbreweries who seem to have settled into doing OK for themselves but didn't quite "kick on" in the way that others did like say Sharps or Oakham. The "government threshold" is the 60,000hl limit for duty relief, which is pretty big - only the bigger family brewers and multinationals go over it. They seem to be going down the ultra-terroir route which is not unreasonable, some of the most interesting stuff they're doing is on the hopgrowing side rather than the brewing (although chocolate lager definitely intrigues me....) Did they say much about the whitebine, which is certainly one of the oldest hop varieties if not necessarily the oldest like they claim?

[UncleIan]

Thanks for this - Hogsback are an interesting one as an example of one of the early wave of microbreweries who seem to have settled into doing OK for themselves but didn't quite "kick on" in the way that others did like say Sharps or Oakham.

At some point there was mention of three or four years ago someone else taking over, that would probably tie in with the lager and cider creation, and a "marketing refresh" new logo etc. Looking at where they are, they couldn't really kick on without getting someone else to brew it too, or a wholesale move to a much bigger location. I'm assuming Doombar isn't all brewed in Cornwall. Maybe they don't want to be the new Doombar. Though their TEA is almost as ubiquitous as Doombar around here, but I guess it would be.

They seem to be going down the ultra-terroir route which is not unreasonable, some of the most interesting stuff they're doing is on the hopgrowing side rather than the brewing (although chocolate lager definitely intrigues me....) Did they say much about the whitebine, which is certainly one of the oldest hop varieties if not necessarily the oldest like they claim?

They did mention they're one of the biggest grower/brewers, but that's because there is virtually no one else doing it. Their growing space is 3.5 acres. Not even a very big field. They made mention that they also source a lot of their hops from a local estate. Would be good if a few more fields were turned back into hop fields, there were plenty around here at one time, the local town pub The Hop Blossom used to have acres and acres hop fields behind it, and the local arts centre (and location of the longest running British beer festival in one location) is called The Maltings. Probably a common tale across many parts round here though.

I do recall talk of "Farnham White", which they grow on their land, amongst other hops. If memory serves, it was rediscovered with help from either Kew Gardens or the RHS*, and a hop grower in kent that managed to trace back the origins of some of their hops to find they still grew it. If you went on a tour in the summer you get to wander around the hop field, which must be nice of a warm summer's eve.

* Talking of the RHS, they bottle one called Gardener's Tipple which they made as a special for the RHS's 150th birthday celebrations. It's a damn fine beer. So fine it was my "need to get some beers in for Christmas" choice.

[tea42]

4 bottles of Wychwood Hobgoblin for a fiver from Aldi this morning. It's not far from Reading to England's best unspoilt secret pub, The Black Horse at Checkendon.

[chas49]

I'm assuming Doombar isn't all brewed in Cornwall.

You're correct in your assumption. See this search - and one quote:

The beer is named after the dangerous Doom Bar sandbank at the mouth of the Camel Estuary in north Cornwall. Cask Doom Bar is brewed at Rock, but bottled Doom Bar has been produced, 267 miles (430 km) away, in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, since 2013

[Slarti]

Tonight my choice was London Pride or about 8 different choices of fizz.

I had London Pride.

Not bad a London Pride goes.


Slarti

[AleisterCrowley]

I don't mind Pride in good condition. I was lucky as I used to drink it in the Victoria (Paddington) near our old office and all the beer was in good nick. Lovely little pub.
http://www.victoriapaddington.co.uk/
http://www.victoriapaddington.co.uk/360-tour
I'm also quite partial to Chiswick as a nice refreshing sunny-evening-in-the beer-garden beer