Golden Pints 2017

So, 2017. Apart from anything else, it's been an interesting year from a personal point of view because my partner spent five months on a work placement in Brussels. Thanks to the magic of remote working, this meant that I was able to spend about one week in three charging around Brussels drinking everything that moved, a fact which is reflected in some of the picks below. In beer terms, the hype has been all about sweet, sticky "dessert stouts" and hazy, juicy NEIPAs, both of which are styles that I can normally take or leave. On the other hand, there's been a lot of other stuff going on, a lot of it very much to my tastes.

(For reasons of time, I've not proofread the following very carefully. Foreign names in particular are liable to be horribly misspelled. Apologies in adavance.)

Best UK Cask Beer

Moor So Hop. A classic example of how well fruity new-world hops can work in a cask pale ale. We had it in top form at the Mill in Cambridge.

Honorable mention: Magic Rock Dark Arts. Still good!

Best UK Keg Beer

Green Jack Baltic Trader (3 year aged). Despite drinking a fair amount of UK kegged, bottled and canned beer, I find these sections hard - I don't log my drinking so I can't go back through my tasting notes, but the nature of Cambridge bars means that interesting non-cask beers tend to pop up briefly and then disappear again, so I don't remember things because I've had them repeatedly, either. But I'm pretty sure I enjoyed the aged Baltic Trader at Cambridge Beer festival, and I also like the fact that it's a proper unadulterated Imperial Stout and that it was Imperial Stout being served aged, from a keykeg, at a CAMRA festival.

Best UK Bottled Beer

Burning Sky - Saison a la Provision. As above, I may have had individual British bottles that wowed me more at the time but they were generally one-offs and I've largely forgotten them, but this is great and I've drunk a lot of it.

Best UK Canned Beer

Magic Rock - Inhaler. Likewise!

Best Overseas Draught

No Science - Psycho. Genre-defying table beer from a new Brussels micro who might be going interesting places fairly soon. We spent a fun but expensive evening with some friendly beer geeks in Moeder Lambic after the Cantillon Open Brew Day, and out of everything on offer, this was the beer that no-one would shut up about.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer

Kees - Barrel Aged Caramel Fudge Stout. Yeah, so I can normally take or leave big sweet dessert-themed stouts, but this one has the depth to back up the initial impression and it's great.

Honorable mention: Oud Beersel Vandervelden 135. Just an exemplary youngish gueuze.

Best Overseas Canned Beer

De Molen - Rasputin. It's always been pretty great, and now it comes in a can. Another one for the Campaign for Real Imperial Stouts, too.

Best collaboration brew

Blaugies / Hill Farmstead - Vermontoise. This is just joyful stuff. Classy but just a bit rustic, there's a lot going on but you could happily drink it all night.

Best Overall Beer

It's still Orval, isn't it? As an aside, there seems to be some rule that all beer cafes in Belgium have to have Oude or Vieux Orval on the menu regardless of whether they currently (or ever) have the stuff in, which has resulted in me being on the wrong end of a lot of apologetic shrugs this year.

Best UK Brewery

For combining a solid, consistent core range with fun and exciting specials, this one's a toss-up between Northern Monk (the new Magic Rock) and Magic Rock (the old Magic Rock).

Best Overseas Brewery

Brouwerij De Ranke. Just a ludicrously consistent brewer. Nothing wacky, but pretty much everything they do - XX Bitter, Guldenberg, Noir de Dottignes, Saison de Dottignes, Cuvee de Ranke, Kriek de Ranke - knocks it out of the park.

Honorable mention to Cantillon. I mean derp, it's obvious, but they are just fantastic. They're also commendable for bloody-mindedly sticking to their guns in terms of ethics, style and quality while also doing their best to be affordable and inclusive and to welcome everyone who comes to the brewery.

Best New Brewery Opening 2017

Burnt Mill - I'm cautiously excited about what seems to be a new wave of East Anglian "farmhouse style" breweries, and Burnt Mill beat Duration to the punch here by actually having a physical brewery up and running with beer in pubs.

Pub/Bar of the Year

Amere a Boire, Brussels. Pretty much the local for Alison's flat in Ixelles, but I think it'd be one of my favourites anyway. It's convenient for the ULB architecture department, so it's always lively with immaculately dishevelled Rive Gauche types, the bottle list is generally excellent, with less bulking-up-numbers chaff than a lot of Brussels bars and you can normally get Tilquin Gueuze on tap at a reasonable price. The food offer is basically cheese with celery salt and mustard, but you can always get some of the best chips in town a short walk away on Flagey.

Honorable mention to The Castle, Cambridge, which is kind of our joint-local at home. A lovely settleable place that does a consistently immaculate pint of Ghost Ship.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2017

Small Bar, Cardiff. Didn't actually open this year, but it's opened since I was previously in Cardiff last year so I'm counting it.

Beer Festival of the Year

Probably the Tour de Gueuze, if only for the conga line that broke out in Boon at about 9pm. We wandered around the Lot / Beersel / Lembeek area on foot and by public transport rather than getting on an official bus, which I think was a good plan.

Honorable mention (as ever) to the Cambridge Beer Festival.

Independent Retailer of the Year

Bacchanalia, Cambridge. The shop that largely spoiled me for actually going to Belgium.

Best Beer Book or Magazine

About the only new beer book I've actually bought this year is Boak and Bailey's 20th Century Pub, which I haven't got around to reading yet. I'm sure it'll be great, though!

Blogs / Twitter

I've enjoyed a lot of beer folks on Twitter and on blogs this year, but singling one out as the best seems almost contrary to the spirit of the thing, to be honest. However, mentions should probably go to Boak and Bailey, Retired Martin, BRAPA, Ms Swiggy, the Beer Nut, Crema, Ed's Beer Blog, Ron Pattinson and Martyn Cornell among many others.

Best Brewery Website/Social media

Pierre van Klomp! Although Pilot run him close.

It's not NEIPA, it's me

It feels like it's speak-your-branes time on NEIPA as a beer style, so here we go: I'm still basically unconvinced. I try them, when I'm in the mood and there's a reputable example on hand, and I can tell that they're well brewed and I sort of enjoy them, but I never really feel the need to rush back immediately for more.

I think that for me the issue is that I love all those big whooshy tropical fruit flavours in a beer but I love them as part of a package that's light, fresh and refreshing. Whereas most NEIPA isn't light, fresh and refreshing - for all the talk about drinkability, they're still big, sweet, mouth-filling beers. I get cognitive dissonance - do I sip at this, like a big sweet stout, or swig it, like a hoppy pale ale? Should this beer be challenging? Comforting? Refreshing? What? Maybe a lot of people don't get this and enjoy appreciatively sipping their way through a pale and fruity beer. Maybe people with sweeter teeth and stronger livers than me are knocking it back like juice. Either way, I personally don't really get enough out of the experience to justify the price tag that often, let alone the sort of planning and queuing that seems to be involved in getting hold of the most sought-after examples.

Something that I have enjoyed a lot is beers at the "Session NEIPA" end of the Juicy Banger spectrum - similar hop whoosh and marshmallowy softness but in a package that's light enough to happily knock back. Another thing that sounds right up my street, but which I've yet to see in the wild, is the "Tart NEIPA" - still big sweet and fruity, but with a light kettle souring to balance it without adding bitterness. Yes please!

For now, though, I'm just going to enjoy the amount of FOMO I'm saved by not being overexcited by the currently trendy beer style.

The Importance of Crap Beer

There's an nice piece here inspired by people complaining about crap beer at office parties.

Leaving aside the utterly wankerish entitlement of anyone who'd be genuinely put out by the standard of beer that's provided at a wedding reception, one thing that I think is interesting is that the expectation of cheap, lowest-common-denominator beer at work events seems to be almost universal. You could put this down to penny-pinching, or the fact that corporate events firms may not always be particularly down with the kids, but I'm not convinced that's the whole story. I've been to some reasonably lavish work does (though I'm talking "reasonably successful and self-confident tech firms" here, not hedge funds or anything) and the beer still wasn't interesting - just more aspirational brands of basic lager. So maybe there's more to it than price?

I'm reminded a bit of an Andy Warhol quote:

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking."

Your beer choice is, among many other things, a badge of social identity and hence a line of social division. A work social event, on the other hand, is meant to be all about reinforcing a sense of shared identity and shared direction - "one team one dream" and all that sort of crap. It's not about the hipster web developers drinking Gamma Ray while the middle-aged database administrators chug Black Sheep and the warehouse team neck Carling. Everyone, from the CEO to the Office Junior is on the same team, they'll all eat the same food, they'll all dance to the same old tunes, and they'll all drink the same bottles of Becks.

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The Festival of Old Favourites

For this month's beer blogging Session, Brian Yaeger has challenged us to describe our fantasy beer festivals.

I guess the straightforward answer for me would be something like "Carnivale Brettanomyces but within walking distance of my house." But if I'm going to suggest something that's fundamentally unrealistic then I might as well go wild, so let's try something more imaginative... what if we gave great established British breweries the "craft festival" treatment? Could we have a festival where London Pride is treated with the sort of fanatical attention that beer geeks usually lavish on barrel-aged sours?

Welcome to FOOF, the Festival of Old Favourites.

The venue is an attractive old building - one of those grand public edifices that the ascendant Victorian middle class built as monuments to their own wealth, taste and civic-spirit. Although FOOF is fairly big, there are plenty of tables and seating - people have plenty of space to settle comfortably and give their beer the attention it deserves. Punters have two choices of festival glassware - straight-sided lined pint glasses for people who like to keep it simple, or stemmed tulip two-third glasses for anyone who prefers to drink with a bit more ceremony.

The beers are, basically, things that you've heard of. There are flagship and core-range beers from respected British family and regional brewers. There are also beers from newer breweries - generally the more successful of the post-CAMRA startups - but they're all familiar names from successful and established breweries - Dark Star's Hophead, for instance, and Crouch Vale's Brewer's Gold - and serious tickers will find slim pickings. Most of the beers are in styles that would sit comfortably on the bar of any real-ale oriented pub - bitters, porters, milds, golden ales - but anyone after something a bit more "out there" can head to the Strong Ales bar, to find a range of oddities and survivors from the dustier corners of the traditional brewers ranges - JW Lees Harvest Ale, Adnam's Tally Ho, Harveys' Prince of Denmark. Some of these have been aged in the cask for a year or two, or are available in aged and unaged versions.

Importantly, beer is all in absolutely immaculate condition. It's becoming a cliche to say that a lot of these beers can be revelatory if they're in perfect nick and uninspiring in anything less, but FOOF serves revelatory pint after revelatory pint. The casks are kept in a temperature controlled store, and the beer served through handpumps, with sparklers being used or not at the brewery's preference. A few beers that you'd expect to be available are actually missing - they just didn't quite hit perfect condition in time. All this attention paid to storage and condition, combined with the expensive and not overcrowded venue mean that FOOF was never going to compete with Wetherspoons prices, but there's nothing outrageous.

With my rational head on, I can see why something like this is never going to happen. But on the other hand, I guess there's a little bit of FOOF going on in pubs all over the country - anywhere that has a perfect pint of Harveys' Sussex Best or draft Bass. And in between supporting "local micros" and "cutting edge craft", some of us could probably do more to appreciate and celebrate that.

The Psychogeography of Fenland Mild

Our weekly session at the climbing wall in Cambridge is almost always followed by a visit to the Free Press.

The Free Press is a classic homely backstreet local, a Greene King house that makes you forget that you don't like Greene King. The beer is always well kept, and there's a leisurely rotation of occasionally-interesting guest ales that tend to the pale and moderately hoppy. As the weather gets colder, though, I'm increasingly turning back to one of their regular beers, Greene King's XX Mild, as a standard order.

The strange persistence of mild in the Fens and East Anglia has been commented on before, and although it's a style of beer more commonly associated with the industrial towns of Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Black Country, this will make sense to anyone who's spent a few winters in the area. If you've cycled across the Fens on a bright, frost-bitten morning or walked on the beach at Dunwich in a cold Easterly wind, you'll know that this landscape in winter can be bleak or beautiful but without romance or drama. The sky is clear blue from horizontal horizon to horizontal horizon, the rich, black mud sticks to your boots, and the cold gets in your bones and makes your jaw ache. This landscape and this climate demand a beer that's soft, sweet and warming - a spritzy floral pale would feel entirely out of place. Incidentally, Ely was said to have one of the highest rates of laudanum use in Victorian Britain - this seems like a plausible consequence of the same conditions.

Terroir is a recurring hot topic in craft beer circles, and to me, the sort of terroir that's interesting isn't about locally foraged herbs, homegrown hops or wild yeast, it's about this sort of psychogeographical groundedness. My advice to a brewer wanting to make beer with a "sense of place" is that they should stop worrying about where their ingredients come from and look at where their end product goes to. They should sell locally, and drink locally themselves. They should see what people respond to - what makes sense for their local drinkers, in their surroundings, with their climate - and adapt and evolve to the place where they're based.

Wild yeast, foraged herbs and locally grown barley are all interesting things to experiment with in their own right and great beers can be made using them, but fundamentally they only reflect their origins on the level of microbiology and biochemistry. The pint of mild in the Free Press reflects its origins on the level of landscape, climate and culture, and to me, that's really where the interest lies.

The Third Wave

Interesting comment here from Martin on his village local replacing Punk IPA with "a weaker Black Sheep craft keg wannabe." I tried a (presumably) similar thing earlier this week from Greene King - their East Coast IPA, a pleasant enough blonde ale with a some lightly fruity hop flavour sat over a clean malty base. I didn't try Long Man Brewery's Crafty Blonde, which we saw on keg in a hotel bar in Eastbourne a few days earlier, but suspect that I can guess what it'd be like. (The best bitter was drinking well, but that's another story...)

But it's interesting, because these beers seem like a good examples of a new new wave of keg beers that are appearing on the bars of vaguely upmarket real ale pubs. Mostly from traditional family and regional brewers, they range from meek golden ales to full-fledged American pales, although they seldom go far past the magic 5% barrier beyond which lies loopy juice, and while they're often accomplished bits of work, there aren't many of them that'd pass for Beavertown or Magic Rock. There are precedents here in Adnams' Spindrift and the like, but it seems to be over the last couple of years that they've really taken off.

This is class of beer that gets very little attention. The traditionalists would rather talk about proper real ale, the modernists would rather talk about proper craft and the postmodernists want everyone to know they'd rather have a pint of Carlsberg than any of that fancy stuff. Not quite craft, not quite trad, this sort of thing is middlebrow, and doesn't get anyone much excited.

So the interesting question here is who, if anyone, is actually drinking them, and what purpose they serve for the pubs that stock them? For craft geeks - a niche market anyway - they're not really more attractive than cask ale or premium lager, and certainly not enough to tempt you into a pub that you might otherwise avoid. On the other hand, they're hardly a great sell for habitual lager drinkers either, at least not when actual lager is easily available.

Maybe the target market is actually regular cask drinkers, then: people who are under no illusions that this is Proper Craft, the gateway to the exciting world of barrel-aged stouts and lumberjack shirts that they've heard so much about, but who have at least been persuaded by the craft movement that keg beer doesn't actually have to be industrial lager or creamflow John Smiths, and who just at the moment, on a summer evening, actually quite fancy something a bit cold and refreshing. Or maybe - whisper it - who've been bitten by one too many pints of substandard warm-weather cask?

So maybe the old fogeys were right all along, and we really are seeing the return of Watneys Red Barrel - a safe, reliable and reasonably drinkable product that knocks cask off the bars, but it's coming from the real ale stalwarts rather than the new-wave iconoclasts. Or maybe the market just isn't there, and this sort of stuff will never get beyond the odd tap in a few bars.

I guess time will tell.

To Brew List Slight Return

I just noticed that it's about six months since I posted my To Brew list. As much for my own interest as anyone else's, I thought I'd run through what I've done since then, and what the current list of ideas looks like.

Well, since January I've brewed:

• The American Amber that was in the fermenter last time. It took a while for the flavour of the crystal malt to smooth out, by which point the hops had lost their edge a bit. Fairly respectable, but I probably wouldn't brew it the same way again.
• A second bash at Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby. Alright but a bit boring - I was hoping for something really rich and fruity, which didn't happen. The search for a really good strong mild recipe continues.
• A vienna-rye IPA with citra and simcoe. Really good - big fruit from the hops, but with a nice, rich, spicy base. I'm going to re-use the basic idea here, possibly with different hops.
• A golden ale - basically Extra Pale Maris Otter and lots of Challenger hops. Nice enough, although the plan to get more of an idea of what Challenger really tastes like by going heavy on the late hops didn't really work. Apparently it tastes like beer.
• A kettle sour that ended up getting drain-poured. Ironically, I think it was using US-05 for the main fermentation during a heatwave that actually killed it.
• A rye saison with saaz. I've only just bottled this, but the sample tasted good.

Of the plans that haven't happened, the mirto milk stout still seems like a good idea - the spicy blueberry flavour of the myrtle berries should be a good fit for a sweet and roasty beer - but it's not really a priority to get it brewed so it keeps not happening. The idea for the Euro-Hopped blonde sort of evolved into the golden ale, and the red rye IPA into the vienna rye thing. I still like the idea of brewing something historic - more of that later!

So what else is on the list now?

First up, on accounts of not having a brewfridge I'm basically stuck with saisons if the weather's hot. Maybe a version of the rye / saaz thing but with fruity New Zealand hops? Maybe something autumnal with golden naked oats and Bramling Cross? Maybe something nice and simple to bottle with brett?

Next, I'm definitely planning on brewing a Victorian mild recipe - possibly the Lovibond XX from Ron Pattinson's book. The local homebrew club are doing a theme of "mild, porter and stout" in November, so it'd be fun to mess with the brief by bringing something strong and pale.

I'd also like to brew a lightly hopped Belgian pale ale and bottle it with Brett. Bottling with Brett (rather than pitching it into secondary) saves a lot of worries about infecting your regular fermenter, but comes with the risk of exploding bottles if there's too much stuff left in the beer for the brett to eat. The idea here would be to use swingtops, open one every few weeks to check that they aren't going gushy, and vent them if they are. Future iterations of the recipe could tweak the priming sugar and/or the recipe to get the carbonation level right.

Finally, I'd really like to try brewing a really big stout - possibly the 1914 Courage Imperial from Ron P's blog. I'd have to do two mashes and two boils to get a full fermenter of the stuff, but it'd be worth it to have a nice big beer to drink over winter.

I guess I'll check in on how that goes in another six months!

Beyond SMaSH

The topic for this months Session, hosted by Mark Lindner at By The Barrel is SMaSH beers - Single Malt and Single Hop.

The first thing that I'd say here is that as far as I'm concerned, SMaSH is very much a learning tool for brewing rather than a trend that particularly interests me as a drinker - and in fact, while single hopped beers are fairly common, I can't ever remember having seen a commercial beer that made a virtue of its single-maltedness.

As a bit of homebrew pedagogy, thought, it seems to have a lot of traction; searching homebrew forums will turn up dozens of threads on suitable combinations and recipes for SMaSH brews. The reasons for this popularity are fairly clear - it's a simple formula to remember, it has a catchy name, it's got obvious learning value, and it steers the brewer clear of a number of recipe-building pitfalls while encouraging them to focus on the fundamentals of producing a good, clean, balanced beer.

What's interesting, though, is that this is generally the only expressly "educational" style of recipe that people use, and it's obviously limited in its scope. We conduct methodical explorations of Maris Otter and Pilsner malt, or Goldings and Cascade, but when it comes to roast and amber malts, sugars and yeast, we still tend to bash on haphazardly on a basis of "well, I brewed a thing with it once that came out well..."

If I ever published a book on homebrewing - something that might take a while, as it'd require me to become at least vaguely competent first - it'd be a book of recipes. Or rather, a book of families of recipes. Each one would have a basic version, which would be reliable, simple and bordering on bland, but then a series of variations, each of which would put a different ingredient under the spotlight. So a malty bitter might be used to learn about different varieties and grades of amber and crystal malts, a pale Belgian ale could be a good starting point for trying out different brewing sugars, and a clean American IPA grist would provide an obvious base to experiment with New World hops.

It's obviously possible to work towards this sort of approach as a novice homebrewer, but it's slowed down by the fact that even reliable basic recipes take a while to work out at this stage, and picking suitable quantities for your more exotic additions is bit of a shot in the dark.

So if anyone is thinking of writing a homebrew book, this is one that I'd buy! And if anyone isn't thinking of writing a book, but has recipes that they use in this way, then I'd love to hear about them.

Mostly Imaginary Beer Nemeses: The Wacky Craft Brewery

You can imagine the similar conversations happening in the board rooms of regional breweries up and down the country.

"We ought to start up a craft brand." says blazered chap number one. "Tap into the youth market."

"I think you might be onto something." says blazered chap number two. "I'll get one of the junior brewers to start cooking up something with blueberries and bacon or what have you - I hear these young crafty types love that sort of thing."

"Good feller. I'll get the marketing lads on to sketching up a few cartoon skulls."

...because if there are two things that even blazered chaps know about British craft breweries, it's that they love their wacky cartoon skulls, and that they can't brew a straightforward stout without barrel aging it on a couple of hundredweight of jammy dodgers or something.

Except, of course, that they don't and they can.

Cartoon skulls are mostly a generalization from Beavertown, I think, although they also feature heavily in Weird Beard's branding. Tiny Rebel have a beaten up cartoon teddy for a mascot, and Magic Rock have their cast of circus characters. Partizan tend to the cartoonish, maybe, although even they feel like a stretch. But try to go further than that and you quickly realize that they're the exception rather than the rule. Look at the Kernel, Brew By Numbers, Fourpure, Marble, Thornbridge, Buxton, Cloudwater, Northern Monk, Lost and Grounded, Siren, Moor, Wild Beer, Five Points, Vocation, Brewdog... they've all got strong graphic identities, but cartoon skulls and other similarly "wacky" imagery is thin on the ground.

It's rather easier to see where the "maple bacon IPA" thing comes from. It's undeniable that new-wave British craft breweries don't trouble themselves too much with prescriptivist ideas about what "doesn't belong" in beer, and it's often the weirder stuff that grabs attention at beer festivals and gets Twitter and Instagram buzzing. But again, once you actually start looking, you find that virtually every British craft brewery builds its range around pale ales, amber ales, stouts, porters and lagers.

Like most myths, then, these two are less about what's actually true and more about giving us a simple, satisfying view of the world. They tell us that craft brewers are the polar opposite of their more traditional cousins; they're wacky and irreverent, they love novelty and experimentation but they perhaps lack a bit of respect for tradition and have a weakness for novelty and brashness over nuance and subtlety. But fortunately - as with most myths - the reality turns out to be a bit more complicated and interesting than that.

(This post builds on an idea from Boak and Bailey. Technically I guess it's a bit of a stretch for the concept - I doubt that anyone really considers cartoon skulls to be a nemesis as such - but it's an interestingly persistent myth nonetheless. Also, this post isn't meant to be a riposte to Barm's ECBF writeup or anything - that link was a serendipitous late addition to something that was basically already finished.)

Brussels for the Easily Unimpressed

I don't often do beer tourism as such, but somehow my normal tourism ends up taking me to a lot of places with good beer. And normally when that happens, it's easy to know what to do to be impressed. Visiting New York and New England with my partner, we tried fresh local IPAs, and American classics that seldom make it across the Atlantic. In new bits of the UK, we go to classic pubs and seek out exciting local microbreweries. In Dusseldorf, we spent evenings in Uerige and Schumacher, soaking up the atmosphere and enjoying the company with their perfect, balanced session beers forming a backdrop rather than a focus.

Now she's spending a few months in Brussels for work, and thanks to the wonders of remote working I'm getting to spend a fair bit of time over there too. This is obviously pretty cool, but with the amount of Belgian beer that turns up in the UK these days, I found it surprisingly easy to be disappointed by the reality of a night out there. You go into a well thought-of bar, start leafing through a long list of bottled beers, and realize that most of them are actually pretty easy to get hold of back home. Swerving the wallet-busting bottles of vintage gueuze, you pick something sensibly priced that you've never heard of. When it arrives, it turns out to be a nondescript sugary blonde brewed to order for a beer marketer, or a slightly rough-edged take on a US pale from some local craft hopefuls.

After a few slightly unsatisfying experiences like this, I've come to suspect that over an evening drinking beer in Brussels, you normally have to pick two out of unusual, affordable, and consistently great. And once you accept that, you seem to end up with three basic approaches that you can take if you want a satisfying beery night out.

Splash out on vintage lambics

It'll cost you, but an evening picking from the vintage bottle list in a bar like Moeder Lambic is an experience the like of which you won't get in many places on earth. If it helps, try to remind yourself that wine buffs probably have it even worse. Going mob-handed and sharing bottles also softens the hit a bit.

If you're the sort of person who thinks that spending 50 Euros on a 75cl bottle of beer is a reasonable thing to do then you'll probably already know where to do it, but just for completeness, the obvious options are to head to either of the Moeders, visit Cantillon during the day, get dinner at Nuetnigenough, or take a trip out of town to De Heeren van Liedekercke, Grote Dorst or the Lambik-O-Droom.

Explore new micros

My experience of the newer small breweries in Belgium so far has been that they sometimes do great stuff, but don't have a particularly greater hit rate than similar breweries anywhere else. There do seem to be some gems, though.

I'm not so hot on this routine but again, either of the Moeders (but sticking to the draughts this time) or Nuetnigenough seem like good bets.

Immerse yourself in the classics

Possibly my favourite option. Sure, you probably can go to an adequately beer-geeky pub in the UK and find beers like Rochefort 10, Drei Fonteinen's Oude Gueuze, Dupont's Bonnes Voeux, De La Senne's Taras Boulba or De Dolle's Oerbier. But unless you're particularly well-off, any one of them is likely to feel like a treat - something that you splash out on after a few more sensible rounds. One joy of drinking in Belgium is that you can spend an evening wandering through these sorts of classic as the fancy takes you, knowing that at about four Euros each, none of them are going to break the bank.

If you're having dinner, Bier Circus and La Porteuse d'Eau have a lot of classic stuff. For drinking only, La Porte Noire, La Brocante (daytime only) and Pochenellekelder are obvious choices in the centre, while Amere a Boire is a hidden gem that's well worth a visit if you happen too be down South in Ixelles.

A few more ramblings...

Young Lambic

Okay, so there is one thing you can do that's affordable, unique and consistently pretty great, and that's drinking draught young lambic. On the other hand, I normally find that after a glass or two in Moeder I start wandering off into the rest of the draught list, or asking for the bottle menu...

Delerium

Delerium Cafe is one of the more famous beer bars in Brussels, and its subsidiary branches are turning into quite a chain. But although it's a well known beer-destination, it's conspicuous by it's absence from any of these lists. This is basically because I've only been in on a Friday night, at which point it was so overcrowded and understaffed that we rapidly got fed up and left after our first beer, so I don't really feel like I had a chance to figure out what it was about. I might try again on a Tuesday morning or something.

Why?

I think the difficulty of reliably picking good, new, cheap stuff in Belgium is partly down to the tendency of most established Belgian brewers to focus quite hard on a small core range of beers. This is part of what makes them so good, but it does also mean that you're relatively unlikely to come across a beer you haven't tried from a brewery that you know and trust, which in turn means that unless you spend the whole time flicking through a book or fiddling with your phone, trying a new beer is more likely to involve taking a punt on an unknown brewery.

Disclaimer

I'm not claiming to be an expert on the Belgian beer scene. These ramblings are based on a bit of background research and a few weeks spent living and drinking in Brussels. If I've missed anything out, please suggest it in the comments. If you think I'm spouting crap, please try to break it to me gently.

Further Reading

My starting point for exploring has been Tim Web and Joe Stange's superb Good Beer Guide Belgium, plus Ratebeer's top places for Brussels and the Brussels Beers and Bites blog.

The Tourist Trap

Living in Cambridge, I like to go to the Elm Tree for their Belgian beers. For the UK, they have a seriously good range, albeit at Cambridgey prices. A travelling Belgian in search of British beer culture, however, might be better advised to try a pint of Banks & Taylors or Eagle IPA there, unless they were getting homesick.

I also go to the Carpenters Arms or the Haymakers for their pizza. They're both pretty good, but I wouldn't expect either to be high on the hit list of a visiting Neapoliton.

Another regular haunt is the Pint Shop, which has pretty much the only really solid lineup of new-wave keg in Cambridge. On the other hand, it's often London-craft-lite, and a Londoner planning a special trip might do better to save themself the train fare from Kings Cross and stop at the Craft Beer Co or the Euston Tap instead.

And it goes on. Curries, burgers, German beers, American beers - there are plenty of places that I go to in Cambridge that would hold very little interest for a visiting connoisseur, but which fill a niche as the best-of-breed locally, and which are great to have around when you want that sort of thing.

So when I see Brewdog in Brussels, or a trendy burger joint in Paris, or an outpost of Craftopia in Munich, I keep this in mind, and resist the temptation to sniff at it. Sure, I might pass it by myself, but I'm not the target market here.

Note: this post was inspired by a recent Zythophile post, although it's more going off on a tangent rather than having a pop at Martyn.

Very Important Beers

The story so far...

The Chicago Tribune recently published a piece on The 25 Most Important American Craft Beers Ever. This inspired Michael Lally to wonder what an equivalent British list would look like, which in turn prompted Boak and Bailey to pick out a few beers that they'd expect to see on such a list. And thinking that this looked like fun, I thought I'd have a stab myself.

I don't really know much about pre-Thornbridge innovations in pale-and-hoppy, let alone the earlier waves of microbrewing, so apart from a tentative proposal that Hophead was significant, I'm going to stick to the last ten years or so. To keep it simple, I've also ignored influential beers from outside what is normally considered to be the "craft scene" - the surviving barleywines and Imperial Stouts from traditional family brewers, for instance. But then, I'm well under 25 beers here, so someone else can fill in those bits.

The major development of this era was large numbers of British brewers starting to be directly influenced by their American counterparts, so genuinely influential British beers become harder to spot. A lot of "milestone" beers were just the first British instances of styles that many people were already well aware of, so they arguably didn't blown minds in the same way that earlier innovations might have done.

With that out of the way, here are seven suggestions.

Thornbridge - Jaipur (2005)

There's really not much to say here that hasn't already been said!

Marble - Lagonda (2005)

The West-of-the-Pennines counterweight to Jaipur. I haven't really drunk much of it, but this was presumably fairly important in the establishment of Manchester as a craft hub?

Brewdog - Tactical Nuclear Penguin (2009)

Punk may be the big seller, but TNP was the big, silly, headline grabbing beer that really let the world in general know how far apart Brewdog stood from traditional real ale culture.

The Kernel - various pales and IPAs (early 2010)

Pretty much the prototype for the London Murky style of IPA, which feels like an important and (at the time) distinctively British innovation. The Kernel were also significant for being one of the first brewers to feel like they were primarily aimed at craft beer geeks rather than going for a wider audience - something which in turn signals the fact that there were suddenly enough craft beer geeks for that to be a viable business plan.

The Kernel - Export Stout London 1890 (2010)

How many qualifications need sticking on the sentence "the first example of a revived historic recipe" is a free blog post idea if anyone wants it, but London 1890 certainly feels significant in terms of popular interest in the idea.

Burning Sky - Saison a la Provision (2013)

This feels like another new current emerging - the arrival of a major brewery that makes a feature of slow aging and seasonal ingredients and situates itself at arms length from the urban modernism that characterizes a lot of the scene. Their flagship oak-aged bretted saison seems to embody that particularly well.

Cloudwater - DIPA series (2015 onwards)

Finally, it seems daft to make claims of influence for a series of beers that have only been around for a couple of years, but the buzz around Cloudwater's Double IPA series means that they can't help feeling like a landmark in terms of collective self-confidence.

So that's my list. But as has been pointed out elsewhere, without fairly extensive research these things will be strongly dependent on one's personal perspective, so I'd welcome any alternative suggestions in the comments below.

To Brew List

There's been a lot of talk recently about the price and reliability of cask ale and about the breweries getting out of that particular game, but all that's getting a bit boring by now so I thought I'd write up a slightly self-indulgent slice of homebrewing life instead.

I don't know how detailed other peoples' medium-term brewing plans are, but personally I tend to have a sort of semi-formalized mental list of things I'd like to get around to brewing at some point. The ideas can be based on wanting something similar to a commercial beer that I've drunk, or on ingredients, styles or techniques that I'd be interested to try out, while the actual list varies from day to day, and only occasionally actually gets written down.

For context, my most recent brews have been as follows:

An American Pale Ale. Mostly Golden Promise with 6% each of medium crystal and wheat. 1.048 OG, 46 IBU with a reasonable whack of Galaxy and Amarillo late in the boil and Citra dry hop. Successful brew, drinking very nicely.

A Foreign Extra Stout. Made from Golden Promise again, with about 5% each of Brown Malt, Carafa II, Medium Crystal and Special B. 1.064 OG, hopped to 37 IBU with Challenger, no late hops. Finished up at about 1.020. Drinkable but on the sweet side compared to what I was aiming for.

A strong Ruby Mild. Based on the Graham Wheeler version of Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby - Golden Promise and various crystal malts to 1.059 OG, hopped to 32 IBU with a bit of Challenger chucked in at 10 mins. This was a challenging brew - the original yeast conked out too soon, some replacement yeast left it too dry, and there might have been a hint of something funky in a few of the bottles that I've tried so far. Plus the colour is more "mid amber" than "dark ruby"!

And in the fermenter at the moment is an American Amber Ale - A variation on the American Pale, but with Simpsons Lager Malt as a base, their Double Roast Crystal substituted for the medium crystal, dialed back IBUs, and citra and chinook hops for aroma.

Now, part of my reason for homebrewing is to have a steady supply of easy drinking light-to-medium coloured ales that I can break out at social occasions without losing too many friends. The possibly-shonky Dark Ruby Mild and the sweet and sticky Foreign Extra Stout have left me short stacked in that department, so I'm playing it fairly safe with the current brew, and will do the same with the next one - probably another bash at the Dark Ruby but with a few grams of Carafa added for colour and a more dependable yeast used from the start.

After that, I've got a number of ideas bouncing around:

• A Euro-hopped American Blonde. Possibly with Vienna malt? This would be interesting to try, because I don't really know much about European hops. It'd also be an interesting test of how my process is coming on, since any flaws are likely to be glaringly obvious, but that also makes it a relatively high-risk option.
• A Red Rye IPA. I generally like this style, haven't brewed it before, and have Chinook, Mosaic and Simcoe hops sitting around which should go well.
• A Mirto Milk Stout. I'm not normally into sticking weird stuff into beer, but a milk stout with Kentish hops and Sardinian dried myrtle berries seems like it'd be a nice nod to my baby nephew's mixed heritage as he comes up to his first birthday.
• A historic porter or from Ron's book.
• More variations on the Dark Ruby Mild recipe. I think this might be a good basis for experimenting with sugars and with interesting speciality malts. I'm particulary tempted to try brewing it with a smidgeon of smoked malt, if only for the name The Ruby in the Smoke.
• Whatever Al comes up with for the International Hombrew Project.

So that's my list - what do you think of it? And what's on yours?