A Brooklyn Brace

Whilst up in Yorkshire for most of the last couple of weeks I picked up a couple of Brooklyn beers from Roberts and Speight in Beverley. I originally bought the EIPA for my brother to take back to Holland with him but he forgot it, and because the best before date was next month I did the decent thing and drank it for him. The other was a chocolate stout; since my other half seems to be developing a taste for them, she wanted to give this one a try. More self-sacrifice was required; I had to help since she felt she couldn't finish a whole bottle of 10% beer on her own.

Brooklyn Brewery East India Pale Ale is fairly restrained on the nose, with caramel and maybe a little stone-fruit. The hops are more noticeable once you get to the palate. There you get more of the dankness which I generally associate with the more hop-heavy American offerings - and their British cousins.* A faint wood-smoke and pine bitter finish rounds it all off rather nicely.

As a side note, I'm not sure I'd classify it as an 'English' IPA (apart from for the obvious reason, maybe a New England IPA?) but it's certainly different to the lighter-bodied, tropical/citrus fruit offerings that you get from most American craft brewers, and so I suppose the classification serves a purpose. Having said that it strikes me that IPA is such an abused and misused term that it is in danger of becoming almost meaningless it's so broad. None of this detracts from this as a beer though, I thought it was excellent. Although it owes most of its flavour to the hops the malt is not ignored, and I think this gives it a complexity that often gets overlooked in modern IPA.

6.9% abv. (355ml) £2.19 if you order it from Beers of Europe.

Brooklyn Brewery Chocolate Stout is a different beast altogether. I'm not sure that full-bodied even begins to describe this one. It's almost chewy! I actually found myself swirling it round my snifter glass to see if it had the viscosity of a Pedro Ximénez sherry - it's not quite that thick but you get the idea. It's sweet, stopping just short of being cloying, which is helped by a bitter finish. As well as the rich chocolate flavours I got a touch of liquorice too.

10% abv. (355ml) £3.39 if you order it from Beers of Europe.

* Many thanks to David (see the link) for giving me a word I can use to describe something that reminds me of weed!

Saltaire 'Triple Chocoholic'

Yesterday was Yorkshire Day, so a bit of a rummage round the cellar unearthed a couple of appropriate beers, and the Saltaire 'Triple Chocoholic' was voted in by my other half as the one to celebrate with. It was perhaps inevitable that we'd compare it to the Meantime Chocolate Porter that we had last week.

For starters this seems to be far less of a 'beer for people who don't like beer.' (See Pintsized Ticker's experiment here.) The nose was dominated by the chocolate malt, despite being only 12% of the malts involved, but it was the aromas that reminded me very much of nosing the chocolate malt at the Gwaun Valley Brewery the other week that stood out - it was in one of the jars pictured. On the palate the chocolate definitely comes through but it doesn't have the viscous texture of the Meantime that leaves it being a lot more 'beery' rather than a more indulgent 'dessert in a bottle' style. If this sounds negative then I don't mean it to be, I think that the two beers, despite obvious similarities, are very different. The Saltaire uses chocolate to complement the beer rather than being the be all and end all of it; the bitterness of the hops is still there and the power of the malt means there's cocoa and biscuity qualities that add another layer of complexity. The name Triple Chocoholic, to me, does suggest something more of a chocolate overload than the beer delivered, and while I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing in terms of making a beer I wonder whether some people might be disappointed.

4.8%, £2.69 (50cl) from Beer Ritz.

PS. A reminder it's IPA day today. Hope you've got your hop-bombs in for the occasion! Potential menu includes Durham Bombay 106, BrewDog Never Mind the Anabolics or Moor Illusion. Nice decisions to make.

'I don't like beer'

Sorry, that's kind of a tabloid attention grabbing headline, but I was commenting on Boak & Bailey's excellent post about bad beer not saving beer and an analogy occurred to me.

When I run introductory wine tasting courses, I start by asking people about what wines they like. I appreciate that this can be a pretty difficult situation. You're in a room full of people you've never met before, on a course you've signed up to on the basis that you want to learn about something - rather than knowing something - and you're asked to pass comment at the outset. At this point, someone usually says 'Red. I don't like white wine.' (or, of course, vice versa). I love this sort of comment, because it means that there's someone who is ready to be enthused.

Beer's problem? It all tastes the same...

I alternate weeks. Red wine one week, white wine the next, and I have never known anyone flat out refuse to drink one or the other. I've also never have anyone end the course without becoming more aware of the incredible variety of flavours that wine of whatever colour can offer. Notice the beer comparison yet?.

There's no doubting there are people out there who think that food is at its best from McDonald's, Nescafé is good coffee, Blossom Hill is a sophisticated natural product full of Californian sunshine, and all a beer needs to be is 'refreshing.' This is fine, as is the fact that most of these people aren't interested in being disavowed of these preconceptions. However, 'moving people onto beer,' from wine, spirits, WKD, (insert your own pet hate as a beer fan), isn't inherently a good thing. If they move from tasteless wine to tasteless beer that's not gaining some sort of loyalty to a sector, that's just fashion. I'm always referring to the range of flavours in beer and spirits when I'm in wine classes and tastings - once their taste buds are woken up people don't look back, and with a bit of luck they're lost to the marketing people forever.

Don't like beer? Game on, I love a challenge.

Edit: Check out this 'Case for Beer' Infographic.