Category Archives: Hasty Ranting

We can do without “craft” elitism…

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Dabbled in Facebook briefly. I use it as a “business tool” mainly (and it is a useful one), but if you’re there you get dragged into being “friends” and into “groups”. There’s a “Craft Beer” group where you’re only allowed to talk about “craft beer”. Some poor chap got told off for mentioning Robinsons beer…

Pffftt…

I’m not a big fan of Robbies. Old Tom on cask can be a delight mind you. Like most trad brewers their sterile shelflife-first flavour-second bottled stuff is mostly not great compared to their cask, and their cask is mostly a bit unexciting. But entirely pleasant when found in good condition.

But just because they’re a bit trad, presumably pay full duty rate, are more than 10 years old as a brewery, and that you find their beers in Tesco… seems little reason to blithely dismiss them as “not craft” in my mind. Let alone get on a high horse about it.

They’re independent and family run… do not represent a huge chunk of the UK beer market… well below the 3% that makes up the US definition for craft brewers, let alone the overall volume of beer produced under the US market definition. I’d be curious to know if they brew less or more than BrewDog at the moment. BrewDog… that common, or garden variety, Tesco brewer who most certainly are on the full duty rate.

Craft defined by style? Maybe craft defined by hops?

The mindless faddishness of it gets my goat and I want no part in it. It reflects badly on the industry as a whole, and it makes folk who claim that they like beer look like a bag of fashion-victim style tossers.

Sour?

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I think we need a better vocabulary around the subject of sourness in beer. I hear a lot of stuff described as sour and I’m rarely quite sure what someone means. Usually it just means they’re a malty beer drinker and they don’t like a thin pale ale. (Such as Oakham Citra being described as “sharp”.)

Keep in mind that beer is always acidic… be it berlinerweisse at a pH of 3 or malty ale at a pH in the low fours… and palates vary… but some things are definitely detectable and definable.

Here’s a few forms of “sour” I come across:

Sharp – what I call the sharpness of thin pale ales, the Session IPAs of this world, I actually hear people take a sip and say “oh, that’s sour”… I’d not use the word sour personally, but I do use the term “sharp”. See also: being contacted by a bar and asked why a beer is so sour… worrying about infection… then hearing it is a 3% session pale and thinking: ah-hah… Some I know think of this as a lack of “balance”, especially in new-style Brit-IPAs that lack the meatier crystal malt character of some of their US counterparts.

Lactic – this is a properly biting lemon-juice sour which can be often found in mouth-puckeringly dry berlinerweisse, but also sometimes in bigger sweeter beers which take the edge off it. It is a “clean” sourness, not one that usually comes with a “sour” aroma, it can be described as enamel-stripping at times, but shouldn’t be too challenging to the white wine or cider drinker. Ice cold it is amongst my favourite type of summer refresher, especially at typical sub-4% strengths.

Acetic – always bad in my opinion, but accepted by some in some styles. Basically this is vinegar, sometimes complete with malt-vinegar pong. Usually a sign of badly kept cask ales. Sometimes mildly deliberate – notably in the (in)famous Duchess de Brogdoggognogwhateveritisyer...

Brett – I still don’t quite understand this one. I see bretted beers decribed as a “sour style” and I’ve had folk say they won’t have bretted beers because they “don’t like sours”. I’m still a bit confused by this. I’ve had some sour-ish bretted beers but I don’t think of brett as a giver of sourness. Usually it is more umami and woody spiciness… but hey ho, it is worth mentioning. The sense of “sourness” could come from them often being dry (little sweetness) and not hugely hopped (little bitterness). Perhaps this subject needs a bit of deeper exploration beyond Orval ;)

Ropey – this is sort of my own one. Is is that specific sourness you only seem to get in old fined cask ale. I suspect it is the finings going “off”… it’s a sort of tang, I call it a “twang”, a discord in the beer flavour. It is distinct from any of the above… think old pongy cheap port perhaps, not acetic but soured. Needs more analysis… unpleasantly.

There are probably others but these are what I some across most often in talking to folk who buy beer at various levels and drinking beer myself. Are their tannic sours, citric? Not sure. But the point is we need more precision as currently the word “sour” is doing me ‘ed in.

Pressure Gauges – A Chat with Atlantic

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So – I had a call from Atlantic. They’d had a read of my previous post. (Go on, go read it.)

Atlantic are a major installer of cellar kit in the south east and are responsible for some of the installs I’ve been having a grumble about. I had a conversation with a chap there who was remarkably civil in his defence of what they do. (Considering the scathing tone in what I wrote regarding UK cellar installs.)[1]

Amongst many points[2] discussed one seems key:

Atlantic do not fit gauges on regulators because the gauges on UK[3] regulators are crap. (Not a direct quote, but it captures the gist of things.)

Now… better gauges _are_ available, but they’re not the standard, and if it comes down to a choice between no gauges and gauges that are unreliable they’d rather leave the gauges out. Completely understandable – and I see where they’re coming from. It is a proper conundrum.

The better gauges? Very few folk getting quotes for installs want to pay more than whatever the rock-bottom pricing option is… BrewDog will, and the odd one or two other outfits in London. But elsewhere it comes down to offering a higher quote for a job that a competitor will simply undercut by offering cheaper “equivalent” equipment. (A comparison of £4000 versus £9000 was given, albeit I doubt that can be entirely about the gauges!)

Thing is, whilst I understand all that, I still don’t see this as being a “craft beer” quality of install. And I don’t believe a one-size-fits-all approach to PSI is “craft beer” ready.

I understand where Atlantic are coming from on this however and it sheds a lot of light on the situation.

Two other points are integral to thinking about keg pressures:

  1. The install without cooling for the kegs is fundamentally not “craft beer ready” either. I dislike seeing kegs as high as 12C, let alone ambient. This instability of temperature adds another variable that causes further requirements for pressure adjustments. The best I can do is not deliver too much beer at once, so such a place has only the kegs on plus limited reserves. (And ideally convince them to put kegs in some sort of cooler.)
  2. Many breweries basically haven’t a goddamn clue. They can’t even tell us what their vol CO2 levels are. This is a persistent problem, as per my “Summer of Fob” post. I’ve come across some seriously dangerous kegs.

In my view the way forward is three-fold:

  1. Breweries need to get their technical shit together and move away from this “craft beer” is “random WTF oh whoops!” beer… get vol CO2 _right_ for the beer you’re brewing, don’t keg it when there is plenty more secondary to go, stick the target vol CO2 on the keg label. If you can’t do that then bloody well sterilise it, before one of your kegs kills somebody.
  2. Breweries/Distrib/Pubs need to get their storage shit together. I’ve a 4C coldstore for keg now – in an effort to fight over-carbonation. Breweries ought to have the same. “Live” beers, especially ones with wilder yeasts, will almost certainly be able to attenuate further in the keg. Pubs are in a harder place here and the simple answer is: DON’T BLOODY STOCKPILE “CRAFT KEG” IN YOUR WARM (12C) CELLAR FOR WEEKS! (They do it just to bulk-order and save a few bob.)
  3. Breweries/Distrib need to be a _lot_ more hands-on, and a _lot_ more supportive. Standards need to be set for cellar installs, and guidance and support in using the kit needs to be offered. (If the UCB can do anything this might be it… not piss farting about trying to define and “protect” daft terminology.)

Step 3 is part of what I am trying to do with Jolly Good Beer. I’m not bloody DHL-for-beer – I don’t just lob kegs at you. Hell – I can check that your pressure gauges are not too far out and replace them if they are. I definitely will be now that I know they’re considered so unreliable. (My US ones are still reading fine and they get carted all over the shop rather than just being stuck to a wall.)

Anyway… there’s always food for thought available. My take on this is that leaving the gauges out because the standard gauges aren’t good enough is not good enough. But that’s perhaps not a role that Atlantic ought to be taking – unless the customer is willing to shell out for a fully supported system. I’m happy to, and able to, test pressures and help get beer pouring – breweries ought to be the same. And more than that, the vast majority of publicans need more knowledge and information, something we in the business of putting beer in their pubs should also be providing.

It’s what’s best for the beer.

[1] I’ve always thought the Atlantic installs look really well put together. And when I hear folk are getting Atlantic in I’ve said: ah, they do nice installs – just make sure you get pressure gauges. (And some subsequently have.)

[2] We also discussed and agreed that KeyKegs are great for getting around a huge part of the whole carbonation problem. All you need is “enough” pressure to keep whatever carbonation is in there in solution. Of course this would be easier if breweries weren’t so frequently over-carbing kegs. I’m so/so on KeyKegs – I think this is a strong point in their favour. But I still see a “proper” steel keg as the best option. Robust and reusable… but top-pressure becomes much more important with them. The problem with temperatures was also agreed on.

[3] It does make me wonder about the US kit a bit. The ganged Micromatic regulators I buy work out at a good price. They’re the “premium” model. Although they still have the usual non-liquid-filled gauges. I’ve always tested mine against reference pressure and never had a problem aside from a recent pair that seemed to have been damanged in transport.

Objective Definition of Craft Beer

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Don’t try to define craft beer, that way madness lies… [Added 3/8/15 21:41: Please don’t read this as me insisting there ought to be some sort of an enforced definition… nor that I think I am laying down a One True Definition of Craft… it’s just a thought exercise. I do still think the concept is worth pondering.]

But hey, everyone seems to be defining craft beer again. I decided to give it a ponder, to flog the dead horse per se. Nowt better than a well flogged equine corpse. (I clearly don’t have enough to do… like accounting, inventory, and sales for example.)

The problem is nearly every definition goes into some wishy washy non-measurable territory about “quality” and ethos. This isn’t going to work… after significant thought (5 minutes, but on the back of several-years worth of feedback loop), here’s what I boil it down to from my own personal perspective. This is _my_ best attempt at a definition of “craft beer”, it gels with a lot of others, even BrewDog’s, but brings in stricter ownership rules and discards what I see as unnecessary minutiae & subjectivity.

  1. Brewery is “privately” owned and controlled.
    This is about being in control of creative direction, not being answerable to shareholders and investors. Freedom. Being an exchange listed company _definitely_ rules you out of the “craft beer club” (which, to my pleasure, takes Greene King out of the definition, huzzah!). Collective employee ownership is OK however – that’s about as craft as you can get I reckon. You can buy a brewery and have it still be craft too, so I’m not tying this down to founder-owned. Look at breweries like Moor, for example. [Disclosure: I sell Moor beer. It is awesome.] I’ll allow breweries owned by rich benefactors as well, so long as they have entire ownership of the brewery, so I’m not tying it down to brewer-owned either. If the owner(s) build it up, and sell it to Molson Coors… craft status stripped. Harsh perhaps, the beer probably won’t change in the short run (it will almost certainly change in the long run). But I believe craft is about more than the liquid in the glass.
  2. Investment companies / investors own, collectively, no more than 10%
    I think equity-investment in brewing is fine, see “rich benefactor” above, but a large corporate or institutional investor pretty much says one thing to me: where’s the exit strategy? It isn’t quite universal, perhaps, but it is nearly always the case that investment means travelling a path towards a destination of either sell-out-high or get-listed. Cash-in, cha-ching… that’s not craft. On the other hand, making lots of money by building a mega-successful brewery is perfectly OK. It’s “selling out” that I don’t believe is craft, unless the “sell out” is privately to a private owner in which case there’s room for the operation to remain “craft”.
  3. IMG_20150802_163304Beer clearly states origin and name of origin brewery.
    Origin fudging is not craft. I won’t budge on this one. Being shy about your production is not craft. If you’re embarrassed about how & where your beer is produced: it is not craft. I’ve no problems with cuckoo or contract brewing so long as it is done honestly – Yeastie Boys are an example of honest (and worthwhile) contract brewing. [Disclosure: Yes, I sell their beer. Because I love the beers.]
  4. Beer lists all ingredients.
    At a minimum top level ingredients, including brewing essentials such as yeast – so a list such as: Barley Malt, Flaked Wheat, Hops, Yeast, Blood Oranges, Otters’ Tears. I don’t really understand why this isn’t more normal, in my opinion it ought to be a legal requirement. But failing that – brewers should just naturally choose to do this! If you’re not proud of your ingredients, not ashamed to admit what goes into the beer, than you’re not craft as far as I’m concerned. I’m not saying brewers should give out the recipes to their beers – I am saying every beer should say what is in the bottle. And I want more than most here, as much as is practical. Malt types, hop varieties, yeast strain (and “our house yeast” is fine here). Whether isinglass is used at any stage too. Ideally this should be on the bottle, it can’t practically be presented for keg/cask – and sometimes hops have to change, often recipes evolve, but that’s what websites are for: 8 Wired, Hopwired [Disclosure: Hey, I happen to sell this stuff too.]
  5. Brewery meets a (to be determined) set of basic standards.
    This one needs some work. But, basically, I would lay down a set of minimum standards in addition to the core points above… I don’t think it is good to be too specific, like ruling out use of certain adjuncts, or brewing processes, etc. But there are some basics that are simple to audit. Some rough initial ideas: pays at least living wage (quality of people, I don’t think living wage is perfect but it is a start), invests in cold-storage (quality of beer), deals with wholesalers who invest in cold-storage (self-interest afoot here! But I believe *strongly* in improving supply chain in this direction – and the same applies for exporters and foreign distributors), educates employed brewing staff (owner-brewers excepted perhaps?), does not package beer in clear glass (personal enraged bugbear!) … what else? (All subject to debate…) [I’m, astonishingly, changing my mind on pasteurisation just a little, there are circumstances where I can accept it is not a compromise. Late additions of maple syrup, for example… how’s that for a subject for a “craft debate”?]

What, nothing about about size? Production volume? Etc… I think the US has shown that measuring craft by brewery size doesn’t work very well.

It may not quite be perfect… but it is “craft” as I see it, as much as I can pin it down within my own mind. Plenty of breweries I think are a bit crap fit within the definition, but defining craft beer can’t be about what I do and don’t like and it needs to be objective if it is to work at all. I use the word and if I’m to continue to use the word I ought to be able to outline what I mean when I use it… that’s one of the points of this post.

I’ve an ulterior motive in all this of course. Because I think, if done right, this can be used as a mechanism to drive change and improve quality in the UK beer industry. A proper craft beer representative body can pick up where SIBA fails to deliver, and bridge the gap to where the Beer Academy doesn’t quite seem to have the grunt to execute.

If there is to be a wider crystallisation of a concept of craft then mere definition is not enough… it needs an organisation behind it to work. Sometimes there are grey areas and a committee, perhaps, needs to make a ruling. For a definition to work lines do need to be drawn. And the organisation doing this needs to really stand up for the ethos behind craft beer… creativity and independence, and striving for quality. (We can’t make quality part of the definition, but an organisation can support and encourage it.)

This should be a membership based organisation like SIBA, where all breweries that meet the definition can join for a fairly low fee. (£250?) [But you don’t have to be a member to _be_ a craft brewer!] Major decisions are made on an open democratic basis – we have the technology to achieve this quite simply. The purpose of the organisation is to manage the membership, manage the definition, promote the concept of craft beer, and – importantly – make an attempt at defining best practice. Work to improve and modernise the world of great beer in the UK, which will be of benefit to everyone in the chain from farmer to drinker.

In the UK we’ve a lot to do to improve the pint of beer that ends up in the glass. SIBA isn’t doing it (but it does help), the Beer Academy isn’t doing it (but it does help), CAMRA isn’t doing it (and may actually have become a barrier to good quality).

Finally – “craft beer” should try hard not to look down on “not craft beer”. We’ll all have our own personal prejudices which we won’t give up (*cough*GreenKing*cough*). But we have to accept that some multinationals do make a high quality product, and sometimes it even happens to be rather tasty.

This has been a craft community broadcast brought to you by the vested-interest department… and I may very well change my mind tomorrow. Or after I’ve had a beer.

P.S. In all of this I think it is well worth being aware that craft is not necessarily equal to “good”, and non-craft is definitely not equal to “bad”. Good and bad are subjective and undefinable, there is debate even around identifiable brewing/beer flaws. Craft is not equal to “better” – but it will _usually_ be more interesting than the alternative thanks to the creativity and flexibility of the style of operation I think my above points encompass. Cases in point are to look at Greene King’s efforts at “craft”, and Marston’s “Revisionist” beers… which for the most part I don’t think are _bad_ beers, but they’re clearly contained and restrained beers… yet are the most “adventurous” beers breweries of this scale and shareholder-value maximising sensibilities will produce. (You can still brew really dull beer within the points of my attempt at a definition above, of course.)

To fine the unfined?

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This is a sort of a “repost” of a BollocksBook post by a friend of mine.

He’s a very experienced cellarman, running a very good pub, serving good beer in typically very good condition. He really knows his stuff.

He likes the sound of some beers but they happen to only come in unfined form. The question is:

Is it OK to buy a deliberately unfined beer and then fine it so you can serve it clearer?

My own view on this is: NO – unless you have agreed this with the brewer of the beer. At least that’s the only case in which I’d do it myself. But I’d also probably not buy an unfined beer if I didn’t want an unfined beer.

Now I am pro-unfined and regularly sell products from three breweries that are 100% unfined (Moncada, Moor, and Weird Beard). I certainly don’t pressure folk into thinking they ought to be buying unfined beers though. But I’ll explain fairly passionately why some of the beers I sell are unfined if I am asked. Ultimately I sell these beers because there is a demand for the products in question of course – this doesn’t mean you have to buy or drink them though.

On the other hand I’m not anti-finings. I’m not a vegetarian and I don’t mind fish parts being used to clarify beer. I don’t think it is entirely necessary for the goodness of the beer, but it is necessary for selling beer to most of the beer-drinking market. And there is something beautiful about a crystal-clear pint. Yeast also doesn’t necessarily taste good… but a good unfined beer ought not be “yeasty”, nor even “cloudy”, with a few days on stillage it should be hazy at worst.

Anyway… my friend’s post is inside the walled garden of unofficial-CAMRA Facebook so I reproduce it in entirety here:

I have some cask real ales coming in that are unfined and will therefore have a haze to a greater or lesser degree. I am considering adding finings in the cellar before I condition the beer – I have done this many times before in my 30 years of cellarmanship, but only when the beer has been hazy due to a problem of some sort.

The reason for this is that the vast majority of my customers will not drink cloudy ale, and at the end of the day they pay the bills! Finings (made from the swim bladder of the Sturgeon) have been used for centuries to clear beer by taking out the unwanted stuff that sits in suspension in the beer. Finings cause these particles to congeal and sink to the bottom of the cask, hence making the beer clear. There is many an argument as to whether the floaty bits are good or bad for you, but that is not for here.

I appreciate that this means the beer will not be as the brewer intended it. Some of there brews are purposefully unfined to make them suitable for vegetarians or vegans, or because a brewer might wish their beers to be as pure as possible. I have the greatest respect for these folk and again this is not about whether a beer should be fined or not.

I am passionate about real ale, and want to be able to offer as many unusual, experimental and rare brews from small, independent brewers. But we are not in a trendy city – not even a busy town centre! I have a traditional local on the edge of a small town and therefore need to balance what we offer carefully. We generally struggle to sell cloudy beer and as small brewers ales are usually much more expensive than mainstream ones, we can’t afford to risk having to chuck it away!

So it’s a simple yes or no question – should I add finings to the beer.

Yes – It’s crystal clearly the right thing to do. Cut Diamonds are always better than Rough. Its fine with me!
Or
No – How dare you? Leave the mist in the mystery, the amazing haze, the fuggled fog! Let the clouds reign!

And I’ve created my own everybody’s-welcome Survey Monkey poll for this too. Remember this is not a debate about whether finings are good/bad or clear beer is good/bad or haze is good/bad… just about whether it is “OK” for a publican to fine a beer that a brewer deliberately sells as an unfined product.

If you do the ArseBook you can go over there and join/read the existing discussion. (And please continue the discussion there if you do do the arsebook, but if you don’t there’s comments below and Twitter…) There’s supposed to be a poll there too, but it doesn’t work for me. Thus I have this:

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world’s leading questionnaire tool.