Friday 17 May 2019

Local Craft Beer at Eat Cambridge

If there's one thing that Cambridge food-scene boosters are really good at, it's getting breathlessly excited about a Hot New Thing happening here, even though in a national context it's so old hat that your granny is kind of over it. Hence I rolled my eyes a bit when, a full decade after Punk IPA started appearing in supermarkets, the publicity for the Eat Cambridge food festival announced a panel discussion on "the hot trend of 2019": craft beer.

I swallowed my cynicism and went along, though, because the people talking seemed likely to have some interesting stuff to say. This turned out to be a good decision.

On the panel, we had a representative from Brewboard, who took over Black Bar's kit and premises in Harston in 2017, and rapidly brought out a solid range of well-executed US-style craft standards - the sort of stuff that might get lost in the noise in a town like Manchester or Leeds, but which Cambridge had been missing for a while.

We also had Tom and Sam, founders of Calverleys, who have been operating around Cambridge since 2014, brewing an eclectic range of stuff. I used to find their beers a bit hit and miss, but the last few that I've tried have impressed me a lot more - maybe they're tightening things up a bit, or maybe it's just me.

Milton Brewery, the veterans of the Cambridge scene, were represented by their founder Richard Naisby. He's also involved with SIBA and is a fairly canny industry-watcher. If you don't already know Milton, they're probably best described as being part of the proto-craft / Weird Real Ale generation; founded in 1999, fitting comfortably within real ale culture in many ways, but pushing the style envelope rather more than most of their traditionalist predecessors.

Wylde Sky were the newest brewery featured, and the beers I've had from them so far have mostly been very good. Their brewer, Paulo, was representing them. He's half Scottish, half Brazillian, and previously worked in a brewery in Brazil. He didn't mention which one - this seemed almost pointed, and I wondered whether it was secretly some InBev thing, but a bit of internet research suggests that it was probably just too obscure to be worth naming. There's an echo of a well known Sussex craft brewery in the name, and it's maybe there in the beer too - one of their launch beers was an extremely well done clean saison.

The whole thing was kept moving by food journalist Andrew Webb. I wasn't taking notes or anything, but there were a few things from the conversation that stuck in memory.

The host apologized for the lack of diversity on the panel (six blokes, including the himself). It's a bit of shame that the organisers didn't spot this and actually do something about it, to be honest.

The session tried to include more-or-less every topic relating to craft beer in an hour, from the rise of canning to beer and food. This was presumably to cover the bases for people who don't know much about beer or what's been going on in the last decade, but having a more focused topic might have made for more interesting chat. Particularly with five people on the panel, it felt like a lot of topics were skipped over very quickly.

One recurring theme was the importance of tap rooms. Three of the four brewers represented have tap rooms at their breweries and those three all saw them as being core to their operation. As well as being a revenue stream, it's an opportunity to see the response to a new beer immediately and set up a very tight feedback loop from punters to the brewer. It wasn't discussed at the time, but this idea resonates with a sense of localism that I find more natural than the current efforts to artificially force "terroir" on beer. It seems far more interesting to me that beer should be tightly coupled to the brewery's local drinking culture rather than it's local ingredients.

All the brewers agreed that the next big growth areas for beer were likely likely to be low-alcohol, vegan and gluten-free. I got the impression that this annoyed the host a bit, who'd asked the question hoping for the inside gen on the latest wild and wacky IPA substyle or something.

I can't remember how the topic came up, but Richard had an interesting story about working in steelworks in South Yorkshire in the nineties, where the workers used to finish the day by drinking massive volumes of weak, salted beer, provided on the foundry floor by their employers as a way to replace the water and salts that they sweat out doing hard physical work in a hot environment.

During the questions at the end, I asked (as non passive-aggressively as I could) how the assembled brewers thought Cambridge compared with other UK cities in beer terms. The host tried to turn this into an Oxford vs Cambridge thing, but fortunately the panel were having none of it. Paulo said we were making progress but we've got a long way to go, which I'd say is fair. Sam was optimistic based on the response that he sees in the taproom every weekend.

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