So, I’m back in my dear old Melbourne taking full advantage of my well-timed unemployment to attend GABS: the Great Australasian Beer Spectapular. It’s rather a treat, and will warrant a proper write-up (or several), but I just want to use the last few moments before my sleep-deprived brain implodes to upload a few photos.
— The Location
The venue — the Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton Gardens — is right in my old neighbourhood (at the end of my genuinely lovely one-time ten minute walk to work, in fact), and it’s freakin’ gorgeous. The bars were in the East and West wings, renamed as the “Malt” and “Hops” Ends; the latter seeming to have just a bit more going on, which nicely fits the current state of the market and its fashions. The center contained a stage upon which a good collection of bands performed — usually slightly too loud.
Main Hall, looking East
Fountain and park outside
Main Hall, ceiling
The Hops End
The Malt End
Main Hall, center
— The Beer
The selection of beer on offer — nearly sixty mostly-one-off brews from New Zealand and Australia — is headcrushingly varied and enticing. It skews somewhat to the experimental and odd, but not in a stuntish or boringly overblown way. The huge bars were well prepped and keyed mainly towards serving five-sample tasting trays, with payments all handled by familiar and ubiquitous tokens that help you forget just how much you’re spending. I kept things fairly sedate — I was slightly less sleep-deprived than now, but still extraordinarily so and had odd-job volunteer work to do off and on through the night. I had a tasting tray of the five mildest beers on offer (all ≤4.5% ABV), but later rewarded myself with a proper-glass nightcap of Garage Project’s ‘Double Day of the Dead’, a worthy (and embiggened) reincarnation of my Favourite Beer of 2012. There’s plenty more I want to try, but I am going to three more sessions; there’s time.
Back for a second ‘season’ — are more-or-less arbitrary division, but we watch a fair amount of (good) TV and can’t help but think of things like that — George and I sat down a little while ago to talk about collaboration in craft beer.
We recorded this a while ago — as becomes obvious once or twice from the conversation — but the same things keeping me from blogging Diary entries got in the way of uploading it. My apologies for that, but I’m pleased to report that George already has s02e02 edited and ready to go; I should find time to upload it while I’m in Melbourne — the topic, a little ironically, is “Australia” — or very shortly after I get back.
(11.20) Jamie Oliver’s red-spot frypan-thing freaks me out. I can’t cook, but would’ve thought it wasn’t true that everything has the same ‘ideal’ temperature…
(12.10) It was Lou Reed. I still haven’t given it a listen. Not sure I want to.
(19.50) Turned out the unannounced ‘Month of Mild’ was a Fork & Brewer thing, not a Malthouse thing. I tried — speaking of collaborations — a Garage Project / Liberty one, which was rather charming, but didn’t get down the road for more than that.
(27.00) Tuatara have expanded (and relocated) lately, and are getting back in the game. More power to them, I say.
(29.00) Recommendations: Garage Project ‘Pernicious Weed’. Given the lag in posting this, that’s a bit of a tease, but I did see it at The Hop Garden very recently — and I have a single 750ml bottle in my fridge, if you have something to share in return. And Epic ‘Epicurean: Coffee & Fig Oatmeal Stout’. (The Simpsons reference is to s06e16, ‘Bart vs. Australia’, which is utterly genius — despite starting from some flawed physics about the Coriolis effect — and worth re-watching. Amazingly, it’s on YouTube in its entirety as at time of writing. Don’t just skip to the eight-minute mark.)
(33.10) George can’t confirm the purchase of L’Affare by anyone, but we’re fairly certain that Ferrari aren’t involved. They do have cafes in Auckland and Christchurch.
The best-laid plans and all that, right? Four different U.S. imports arrived in the keg fridge at work in the early stages of last winter, and all four had glorious great big ostentatious American-style tap handles. I quickly hatched a plan (not just within the bounds of my own head; I told the right people and made the relevant notes) to put them all side-by-side on the 4th of July. It just seemed to make sense. But these things had a way of undoing themselves and I’d show up to work in the days preceding the Americans’ collective birthday and find that one or other had been cracked, with or without its marvellous handle, and placed in some random corner of the taps. Sigh.
But. But — it turns out that if the proverbial man with the best-laid plan (and possibly the mice) is extraordinarily stubborn, faced with a quiet weekend night shift, and entirely comfortable with spending a few hours in the keg chiller, shuffling hefty things into organised piles in a zero-degrees-Celsius environment — the Zen Art Of Kegtris1 — then you might just witness a resurrection of that plan. And, as you can see from the handles arrayed behind my glass, that’s exactly what happened. It was, in its own way, beautiful. If I do say so.
The Four of July
The reshuffle was a Saturday night, and I was (uncharacteristically) also working the Sunday — which is when I had this, as a little reward for getting everything done and ready for “tomorrow”, the 4th. I’ve entirely forgotten which lovely friend of mine I happened to bump into before work who shouted it for me as I mooched around before my shift — I’d turned up early, even further out of character and probably due to the disorientation of the schedule change.
It made for a great start to my workday, not least because 6.5% ABV in a light and sweet and gorgeously perfumed little ale helps to put a bit of a shine on your face, if you skipped breakfast. Comparisons to local-oddity ‘Captain Cooker’ from the Mussel Inn are meant as sincere and complimentary. They’re both charmingly peculiar, enjoyably different, and really interestingly tasty. And seriously, the tap handle is a fucking great big snow-covered tree. With a weirdly adorable eagle on the top. I still can’t believe the Powers That Be were content to leave that sitting in a dark cupboard, but I’m glad I overruled them.
Original Diary entry: Alaskan Winter Ale 3/7/11 From the four, all properly in place at last. Much paler than we expected, light amber. Smells like Christmass + shortbread, candy sweetness. Made with spruce, which help justify the already-awesome tap handle. Has that Captain Cookery sweet perfume. 6.5%-ish. Lovely start to a Sunday at work.
Alaskan Winter Ale's tap-handle eagle
Alaskan Winter Ale's tap handle base
Diary II entry #120, Alaskan Winter Ale
1: Which really does seem to be a ‘me’ word — a fact that makes me deliriously proud. I do hope it catches on. If it does, I’m totally adding “neologist” to my CV.
My Canada Day last year then continued with this, a Quebecker Oatmeal Stout, there at my desk at home (with the Diary itself and my rather-lovely Hashigo Zake bottle opener visible behind it, and it perched on ludicrously-extravagant Moa Beer leather-and-felt coaster). And, just for a sense of continuity and appropriateness I’m now — as then — listening to The Tragically Hip, who I’ve been fond of for ages and to the extent where it appears as a data point to those not-insignificant numbers of people who assume me to be Canadian.
This is a massively well-renowned stout, and it was being consumed by someone to which oatmeal stout is a kind of wintery, liquid Kryptonite.1 But it and I just didn’t get along fantastically well. Its company was pleasant enough, but it should’ve been like a fireside chat with Stephen Fry himself, given the circumstances. This just didn’t have the glorious smoothness that is half the reason I go so wibbly for a good oatmeal stout,2 and there was a faint tinge of metal that made it reminiscent (not entirely unwelcomely) of a thick foil bag of chocolate-chip cookies.
It just seemed a little past its prime — though the Best Before date was impenetrably Hieroglyphic, smooshed and encoded. Consensus from a few at Hashigo was that it probably had been around for a while and had come via a third party somewhere, this not being one of their ultra-cautious imports. While neither a disaster nor a complete swing-and-a-miss, certainly, it simply wasn’t quite what I wanted and seemed unable (in that time and place) from making good on its promise. Mercifully, in the same takeaway-shopping trip, I also bought another ‘Péché Mortel’ from the equally-Quebeçois Dieu du Diel!, which was completely delicious and undegraded and thereby rescued the evening convincingly. Now I just want another of those.
Diary II entry #119, St Ambroise Oatmeal Stout
Original Diary Entry: St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout 1/7/11 continuing the theme. $9.5 @ HZ, 341ml only 5% Another hundreder,3 which didn’t immediately grab me. The smoothness of the oats (and of the online praise), just isn’t so much there. I initially thought I just had it too cold. But it’s still having the same sharp uptick ride on the palate. Not unwelcome, just unexpected, unplanned. Slightly metal? Can’t decipher the best before. “12 B? 30 / J2010” Hopefully the latter isn’t it… Not sure. Smells like a bag of cookies. [2nd Péché Mortel was way better.]
I do plan on going through the ‘backlog’ of the pen-and-paper Diary, still. The Great Rethink wasn’t me walking away from that so much as it’s just me giving myself room for other things as well. I’ll probably be a little more fast-and-loose with some of the intervening entries — I do have nearly ten months to catch up on, after all. Sheesh. (Onwards!)
It was minutes past midnight, as the basically-anonymous 30th of June transformed into the 1st of July — Canada Day.1 I had a few ideas burbling in my head for the much-more-famous Fourth of July and so felt some sort moral obligation to celebrate this national day further North, too. I’m a sucker for Occasion Beers, and national days make excuses for such — Australia Day being my personal favourite, for various reasons.
Molson isn’t any kind of craft darling; it’s ultra-massive mainstream golden lager. But I can happily report that it’s not crap. Were it smuggled very-slightly back in time and into the ‘Chosen One’ Choosing Session we’d had a few days prior, it would comfortably take second place: no real trace of faults, but no real substantive charm, either.
Molson 'Canadian' thinks it's Spiderman
But what it does have is the single-greatest health warning / mandatory Take It Easy message I think I’ve ever seen: “Great Beer. Great Responsibility.” It’s mere inches away from quoting Spiderman, which makes me very happy indeed, giant nerd that I admittedly am. Obviously, the logic of it doesn’t go through, since this is very definitely not “great beer”, but it’s a rather delightful way of putting things, all the same. I’d suggest that other people adopt the phrase, but it turns out that they went and trademarketed it, the hockey-loving bastards. Beer-and-trademarks is becoming a truly depressing ongoing theme — though this is a very minor instance of it — and doubtless one I’ll have to get back to and give a proper going-over one day.2
Diary II entry #118, Molson 'Canadian'
Original Diary entry: Molson ‘Canadian’ 30/6/11 →3 1/7/11 Happy Birthday Canada! I’m a sucker for an Occasion Beer, and had never had this, so here we go. Doesn’t really deserve a reputation as a Budweiser of the North. Is perfectly clean and easy. Would be a very comfortable 2nd place in the above, for example. Only the merest hint of funk on the nose, otherwise a good example of lawnmoweresque blandness-as-a-virtue.
1: The Blessed Wikipedia assures me that, here in New Zealand and Australia, the first of July is ‘International Tartan Day’, which I hadn’t previously heard of — though it does seem to have a nicely defiant origin, which I could probably get behind. 2: It got something of an airing in the write-ups of Invercargill ‘Sa!son’, Budweiser, and the Stoke beers, among other random mentions here and there. (If you were curious / couldn’t find the “search” box.) 3: Good thing I changed post-dating regimes. God knows what I would’ve done with that.
‘Boundary Road Brewery’ needs scare-quotes around it, because it’s not properly a thing. It’s a sub-brand of Independent Liquor, who were recently acquired by Japanese supergiant Asahi, and they’re trying to position themselves as a “craft brewer” alongside the pseudo-craft imprints of D.B. and Lion (i.e., Monteith’s and Mac’s)1 and elbow their way into New Zealand’s long-standing mainstream duopoly. Part of their launch campaign was to open one of their beers up for a bit of a public beta. The ‘Chosen One’ would exist in three possible variants, which they’d maybe send you (and 998 others) if you answered a quiz correctly, then you could vote and the favourite would go into full production. Not, I have to say, an inherently terrible idea — think of it, generously, as an idiot’s version of the Garage Project ‘24/24’ phase.
My friend Martin Craig — of the lamentably-now-parked NZ Beer Blog — somehow became taster #999+, side-stepping the quiz and just getting an ‘Official Beer Tasters’ Pack’ in the post, unrequested, and he hit upon the idea of a blind-ish tasting. We’d try the three candidates, with two other Independent-brewed mainstream pale lagers, and throw in a control: Mussel Inn ‘Golden Goose’, something of a darling of the local scene, sentimental favourite and — let’s say — the Thinking Drinker’s golden lager.
'The Chosen One', tasting pack
I’ve done a few rather-official blind beer tastings2 over the last year and I’ve had a bucket of fun and learnt a whole pile of learnable things, but I just can’t shake the oddness of them. Time and again, I’d be sitting there, attempting to fairly judge something on a several-point scale, and stuck wanting to know what the beer said about itself before really feeling I could say much about it.3 It’s probably down to my history as a bartender, that ‘consumer’-ish focus, and it’s difficult for me to shake. (And I suppose I don’t think it should be shaken.)
Blind tastings are good for many things, and they excel at one thing in particular: fault detection — the technical merits (or lack thereof) can leap out of a sampling glass, when you don’t know what you’re getting and your loyalties and sympathies are all quieted. But this? This was an ordeal. It wasn’t entirely blind — we knew what our six beers would be, but they were shuffled and properly anonymised, at least — but it was a cavalcade of awfulness. Perhaps this was karmic payback for my All-the-Trappists tasting last year; this was The Crappest Dance Card, if you like.
Mercifully, Golden Goose stuck out like a sore thumb. Or rather, it stuck out like the only non-injured digit on an otherwise horrificially-mangled and apparently-diseased hand. I was briefly worried that it wouldn’t, that my fondness for it would prove more imagined and circumstantial than real or deserved. But no. All five Independent beers were awful, stuck in that truly tragic territory were more flavourlessness would be an asset, so highly did they stink of faults. On balance, the potential ‘Chosens’ were worse than their existing stable-mates, which didn’t bode well for Independent’s ‘craft’ excursion — and nothing I’ve tried of theirs, since, gives me reason to hope otherwise — and absolutely nothing about them gave the impression of a genuine attempt to market-test three different ideas.
Interview with Ben Shaw, Boundary Road's marketing manager
It’s brandwank all over again, I’m afraid. There’s nothing sincere about any of this, it seems. “Craft” here is a cloak, a gimmick, and potentially an unfortunate thing for those of us with a love of actual craft beer — if Joe Public is finally moved to see what “this craft beer stuff” is all about and he picks up some Boundary Road, I couldn’t blame him for being scared off (or at best just underwhelmed). Independent Liquor make under-license local clones of famous foreign names like Carlsberg and Kingfisher, an act of brand-first wankery of the highest order, and they make a dizzying variety of RTDs, some of which come in a three-litre box, for fuck’s sake. If your portfolio includes both of those things, then I submit you are an Industrial Alcoholic Beverages Manufacturer. You just aren’t within shouting distance of being a “craft brewer”.4
It’s all so boringly predictable, too. Geography, for example, seems to be a weak point (or at least a strange obsession) when the brandwankers attempt to dress up mass-market industrial lager as ‘craft’. While Monteith’s (or their ad agency) couldn’t quite figure out how to work their GPS, and Boundary Road / Independent seem to have trouble looking at a map — or out their window. The bumf keeps insisting that they’re “nestled in the foothills of the Hunua Ranges”, but no; they’re in an industrial park no more than two kilometres from State Highway One, in the Southern outskirts of Auckland. Google Maps is hardly a secret spycraft gizmo, so that sort of myth-making is just insulting and pointless. But they just can’t help themselves.
With Asahi-money behind them, ‘Boundary Road’ are going to make a real run at the New Zealand market — and are doing fairly well, sales-wise, from what I can gather. But it’s just so cynical and fundamentally crap that I just can’t cheer them on even when they give the Current Big Two a fright or a poke in the ribs; they’re not on “our side”, and they’ll be perfectly happy as one member of a Future Big Three if they can swing it. They’re demonstrating more of the same zero-sum thinking as the mainstream guys always do, rather than the rising-tide-lifts-all-boats market-growing outlook that is so characteristic of the actually-craft sector — on a good day.
Original Diary entry: ‘Chosen One’ Choosing 28/6/11 with Martin @ MH. #1: Slightly hazy. All others clear. Colours all damn close. Straw nose. Big feel. Bitterness evident. #2 Brings grimness to the nose. Much thinner. More metal? Coarse bubbles. #3 Less grim, but not pleasantly straw like 1. More metal in the nose. Tinned fruit. Middling body. More to it than 2, but not all in good ways. #4 Stinks. Fumes, eggs. Sour in the face. Thin. Cardboard. Hoping it’s the older one… #5 Half the nose of 4. Something wrong in the flavour. Thin, too. #6 Head retention strikingly ok. Sugary sweet. Oddly unnatural. Sweet apple.
1: I almost feel bad, lumping Mac’s and Monteith’s so closely. They are near-identical efforts, branding-wise, but I think it does have to be admitted that many of the Mac’s beers are reliably non-horrible and the sorts of things that a “beer drinker” can console themselves with in a mainstream-tied venue. I don’t think I can say the same of the Monteith’s beers. 2: I was on the panel of one for Consumer magazine, and the most-recent annual Capital Times one. 3: To elaborate, but not derail things completely: I don’t feel like I can rate a beer without knowing how it positions itself, because that’s how people ‘judge’ beer in their daily lives — against its claims. Something that “does what it says on the tin” is a laudable thing in itself, when you’re handing over money. Beers are judged in classes, but outside of formal competitions these are usually pretty loose, so it’s hard to critically evaluate something that is “pale ale” without knowing if it’s trying to be, say, rambunctious or sedate. Huge hoppy flavour would be a bad thing in a beer that said it was mild. 4: Admit it, the odds were slim that a post with a ‘brandwank’ tag wouldn’t include a mention of Moa — but in this case they truly brought it upon themselves. In January 2012, they put up a post on ‘Craftwashing’ — which is indeed exactly what this is — but couldn’t save themselves from pissing a lot of people off with a needless swipe at contract brewers and a hefty dose of irony in that they themselves come damn close to breaching the spirit of their own Third Commandment given how strenuously they distort the role of their “figurehead”, Josh Scott. If you are as drenched in disingenuous marketing as Moa are, you simply don’t get to lecture the likes of ‘Boundary Road’; people in glass houses should perhaps reconsider their projectile-throwing hobbies.
It’s been an absurdly long time since I last posted, and for several reasons — ranging widely from the rather-lovely to the tooth-pullingly-annoying. Time, certainly, for a bit of a catch-up (in the Hello-Again / Long Time No See sense) before the proper catch-up can start to happen in the other sense.
I’ve had a bit of rethink, also, about the peculiar post-dating regime that I’ve used here since I started — where the date of the actual pen-and-paper Diary entry would be used for the date of the blog post, no matter when it was actually / eventually uploaded. That plan was born out of my primary thought that the Beer Diary webthing would be an handy online version of the physical document. But I’ve often wanted to write more ‘topical’ stuff — and frequently resorted to shoe-horning it into the discussion of whatever-was-next in the book1 — and then the podcasts came along as well and things just got unwieldy and strange and headachy. The sampling-writing-posting calendar mismatches were a common source of puzzled questions, and on one memorable occasion caused the surreal situation where some geniunely-lovely praise was accompanied by a charmingly-outraged ‘How on Earth haven’t we seen this before? He’s been blogging for seven years!’, when I’d only been going a few months.
Another catch-up session...
So nice timing, really; with the podcasts in-between seasons2 and a lack of activity for a while, I can change gears and change the plan. Posts will just get whatever date they get when I with the Big Blue Publish Button, and historical Diary entries that get uploaded — and I do plan to keep going through them, steadily — will just be labelled obviously-enough. As one last fit of oddness (of that kind, others will remain), I’m going to arbitrarily give this post the time-travelling date3 of my birthday last year so that it stands out in the Archive like the gear-change it is, and since the Diary has its origins as a particuarly-awesome present.
I’ve been distracted of late, but keeping this blog has been a massively rewarding experience and I’m delighted to feel a bit of momentum behind getting back into it. I recently left my long-running job at the Malthouse, and have had a bit of time to figure out What’s Next. (Embarrassingly-much of which was taken up by ‘Do I really want to revise the post-dating scheme on my website?’; I’m a chronic over-thinker.) Securing more time to write is key, and I’m also lucky enough with the timing that I get to go to The Great Australasian Beer Spectapular in Melbourne next weekend which will doubtless give me yet more of a prod and plenty to ramble about. So yes: Hello again. Nice to see you after so long.
1: Or, on one or two occasions, actually choosing which beer to drink and diarise based largely on its ability to furnish an excuse to write about something in particular. 2: I do have two episodes ‘in the bank’, as it were, and will endeavour to get them up before I go away for the weekend — not least because the theme of ‘s02e02’ is also my destination: Australia. 3: I’m actually writing this in the small hours of Monday, 7 May 2012. While drinking tea and listening to The Three EPs by The Beta Band, since you ask.
Hardly rushing in to things, we here present our 2011 Year in Review, recorded mid-February and published in the first few days of March. The Oscars for 2011 releases only happened this week, after all, and we don’t have their kind of budget — or Billy Crystal. Instead, we took vague inspiration from the “Golden Pints” lists that popped up around New Year’s, and take the chance to look back on the year past to pick out some themes and some favourites.
(0.55) Admittedly, the gap between this episode and “s02e01” is probably going to be rather-shorter than many of the inter-episode gaps within “season one” — but please, allow us our (many) oddities.
(1.35) Beer of the Week: Garage Project ‘Aro Street Pale Ale’ (a.k.a. ‘Phil Cook Touring Presents: Angry Peaches’) which was vaguely-birthed from our conversation back in the days of Episode V — when we had Oskar Blues ‘Gubna’.
(5.30) How could we — particularly, how could I — not be late with a Year in Review?
(8.00) Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Crowshaw is rapidly amassing a brilliant body of work (this, of course is what happens when you post regularly — he says, chastising himself). He’s largely dropped the ‘Awards’ pretence, but they were great fun. Flash all the way back, for example, to 2008 or 2009 to see for yourself. 2008’s opening rant, particularly, helped me justify to myself the more-freewheeling nature of my Diary entries.
(8.50) Greg Norman was ‘The Great White Shark’, apparently. Points to neither of us.
(9.00) Blog of the Year: Alice Galletly’s ‘Beer for a Year’. We were actually recording, serendipitously enough, the very day she hit halfway. And, speaking of year-long projects worth knowing about, the throw-away reference I made was to the genuinely-entertaining A. J. Jacobs — his The Year of Living Biblically was a Christmas present to me from George and his wife Robyn one year.
(15.50) The “growler” story is developing rapidly… Doubtless I’ll get back to it.
(17.00) 2011, Year of the x: The Beer Bar. I really need to get myself to Auckland and Christchurch to catch up with the scenes, there. It says a lot that, as a Wellington beer geek, I’m starting to get seriously jealous and frequently struck by the “damnit, I’m missing out” feeling. Weirdly, the local new bars didn’t spring to my mind as we were recording, but 2011 saw us blessed with the arrival of The Hop Garden and LBQ (Little Beer Quarter), as well — and not-quite-so-blessed with a few other… shall we say… craft-beer-themed bars.
(23.00) Adrien Brody’s speechreally, unfairly irritated me. It’s a thing, with me — but that might also partially be down to some Roman Polanski-related grumbles.
(23.20) Beer of the Year: Matilda Bay ‘Fat Yak’ (for George) and Hallertau ‘Minimus’ (for Phil). We drank Fat Yak for Episode II, and I said nice things about its reliable Gatewayability in my Diary. I’ve had a long-running love affair with Minimus, and it helped inspire Episode IV.
(29.20) Favourite Beer of Year: Garage Project ‘Day of the Dead’ (for Phil) and Liberty ‘C!tra’ (for George). And it seems I’m not alone —not that that thought worries me, in this field, or many others — the guys at the Garage Project released a little ‘report’ on feedback for the 24/24 series of beers, and “DotD” came out on top. ‘C!tra’ was beer of the week last time, for Episode VIII, and it really was crackingly good fun stuff.
(32.30) George really did (eventually) get this right; he got married in late 2005.
(33.30) Pleasant Surprise: Golden Ticket ‘Black Emperor’, with an honorable mention for Moa Imperial Stout (for Phil) and This Very Podcast Itself (for George). I’m a grumpy bastard in many ways, but I’m no dogmatist; I genuinely enjoy the cleansing feeling of changing my mind, and Black Emperor did exactly that.
(38.40) Best Experimentation: The Yeastie Boys ‘Blondies’, with an honorable mention for the Liberty ‘Blondes’ (for Phil) and The Garage Project itself (for George), with particular nods for their green bean saison and the Grordbort beers. And seriously, flip back to George’s “live” tasting of Rex, way back in Episode III; I think it remains a classic.
(46.30) Best Beer Moment: A three-way tie between Day of the Dead, The Trappist Dance Card, and ‘Angry Peaches’ at the Town Hall (for Phil) and quietly re-discovering ‘Discovery’ at Brühaus (for George).
(52.00) Midstrength News is that I didn’t do my midstrength-related homework. George here is channelling the Thrilling Adventure Hour, a favourite of his.
(52.30) Recommendation: Stone & Wood ‘Pacific Ale’. Pure gorgeousness.
(56.30) Or, you know, two months. (He says, chastising himself again.)
Welcome back and Happy New Year, everyone. My profuse apologies for the inadvertent summer hiatus — it’s ordinarily a stay indoors and hide from the heat and sunshine kind of time for me, mostly, but this year it just rather got away from me. Not in a bad way, at all, but an unintended effect was that the podcast which we intended would be a nice lead-up to Holiday Season imbibing has been held back until now. It’s entirely my fault — George is a diligent producer and does hassle me on your behalf, I assure you.
So anyway, inspired by the impending holidays — impending, that is, when we recorded — we have a little bit of a ramble about Strong Beer (partially also to balance the ledger after our Midstrength Beer episode). There are a lot of ways to be a strong beer, and equally-many reasons to enjoy one. And then there’s a fair amount of silliness in the field, too. But the point remains: there’s a beer for every occasion that might otherwise bring wine or whisky to the front of your mind.
(0.45) Well, it’s been a while for you now, too, as I pre-emptively apologised for, above. The timing of the Beer Diary entries are a frequent cause of puzzlement, so I’ve taken New Years Resolution-esque steps to make them a little more reader-friendly and a little less puzzling. They always made sense in my head, but many objectively-mad things often seem to do so.
(2.45) Winter beer was also a little while ago. Slightly moreso, in fact.
(3.20) Beer of the Week #1: Liberty ‘C!tra’. A sure-fire giveaway of me being a rather-appalling typography nerd is that I occasionally call an exclamation mark a “bang” — partially because that old practice today survives mostly in the name of my absolute-favourite punctuation mark, the interrobang (which also serves as my Twitter avatar / general logo-thing), and the rather-awesome shebang from the world of programming.1
(7.05) Martyn Cornell’s long-form history-dredging myth-busting posts are always a good read — if you’re into that sort of thing, and I am — and his one on Imperial Stout is no exception.
(7.55) Epic’s ‘LARGER’ is the reference on my mind, here; its Wellington launch-party was in preparation as we recorded this. It turned out to be a real hoot — and not quite the absolute carnage that a suprisingly-drinkable 8.5% lager might imply.
(8.45) Beer festivals, compared to ‘Midstrength beer’ and ‘Winter beer’, was not very long ago at all. But a while ago from here. See? Time is all sorts of relative.
(10.20) ‘Strong beer’ and ‘expensive beer’ are fairly tightly correlated. Especially in a place like New Zealand, where the tax take is levied proportionately to booze, not just volume. But — and I say this as a member of a criminally-underpaid profession — one of the enduring charms about beer is this relative accessibility. Even the stupid-money end of the scale is much more within grab than the equivalent corners of, say, the wine or whisky markets.
(14.50) To lift entirely a note from the Midstrength beer episode and thereby weirdly quote myself: “In New Zealand, beer under 1.15% attracts no excise tax; anything 1.15% – 2.5% is subject to 38.208¢ per litre of beverage; and all beer 2.5% and over is levied at $25.476 per litre of alcohol.”
(15.00) Just to check in with Mr Google: “Imperial IPA” will get you more than a million hits, while “Imperial APA” brings in a relatively-poor 25,000-odd.
(21.20) As a little tour of that particular corner of the Strong Beer world, I really do recommend that you punch out a whole Trappist Dance Card at least once in your life.
(22.45) Beer of the Week #2: Twisted Hop ‘Red Zone Enigma’. I’m obviously way late for Christmas present recommendations, to the point where I’ve just clocked it and become way early. Myself and a few other local beer-people appeared in a short segment on Radio New Zealand’s ‘Summer Report’ where we raised the possibility of substituting-in a lovely big bottle of beer for the usual grape-juice-descended options — it’s difficult to directly link to, but filed under ‘Sparkling new beers may replace traditional bubbles’.
(24.40) The iStout-through-a-Tim-Tam-straw suggestion came from a chap on the Twitters by the name of Dave Ellis. I only know him (so far; Hello!) in his Twittering capacity, but he’s clearly some sort of genius. George has got his Tim Tam History somewhat askew; a Chit Chat is a kind of knock-off copycat of a Tim Tam — but they were, themselves, apparently stolen from / “inspired by” a Penguin biscuit.
(26.40) Adelaide beer blogger Aaron Caruana shares my Bletchley Park obsession — and, helpfully, went there recently and took lovely photos. Our brewing aspirations languished after a few dead batches. My moderate Canberra-based successes did not translate down to my Melbourne apartment, for some reason. Purple was definitely the Allied name for the Japanese machine, which actually carried the rather-marvellous name “System 97 Printing Machine for European Characters”. And Cryptonomicon remains my favourite novel, but does have a slightly memory-distorting effect (together with the Strong Beer), given its fictionalisations.
(36.00) The German one, the name of which I couldn’t bring to mind / pronounce is Schorschbräu Schorschbock, the last (57%) edition of which was called ‘Finis Coronat Opus’. And really — though this may just be the inevitable prejudice you’d get from an English-speaker — BrewDog won this game, I think. Schorschbräu’s packaging and everything was just so po-faced and serious while the Scots were clearly taking the piss and having a laugh and bowed out spectacularly with End of History. And while BrewDog did recently announce that they’d walk away from the theatrics a bit, the campaign around Ghost Deer is pretty damn funny, too.
(41.40) 8 Wired’s ‘Batch 18’ is fantastic, and still the as-far-as-I-can-tell strongest made here. Though there was some mention in The Pursuit of Hoppiness of him having plans to climb a few rungs higher on the boozeladder. But — I hasten to add, the day after publishing this and with great thanks to local good-beer-bar-frequenter David Wu — it turns out we forgot all about Green Man’s barleywine, ‘Enrico’s Cure’, which weighs in at 14.5%, and does actually crow about being “New Zealand’s strongest beer” (true for now), “probably the world’s strongest organic beer” (which seems likely) and “one of the strongest beers in the world” (which definitely isn’t true, except for insanely-generous definitions of “one of”).
(43.50) Ngahere Gold turns out to be 7.2%, and I know it may seem a little harsh of me to knock it and then go on to praise Epic ‘Larger’ — but I’ll either just wear the hypocrisy or argue that the latter just had enough fun and funny about it.
(46.00) I’m somewhat shocked that I was closer to the mark than movie-geek George, on this one. Bruce Wayne doesn’t buy the restaurant; he buys the hotel.
(46.30) Midstrength News & Recommendation: Cassels & Sons ‘Beer’. Alice Galletly did a great little write-up with it on her blog — which, itself, counts as an additional recommendation if you’re not reading her already. And then there’s Epic’s ‘LARGER’, which has now been and gone from our taps but is now skulking around in bottles. Not seeing the pun turned out to be a hilarious Elephant trap, into which even Wellington’s daily newspaper happily blundered. Kelly Ryan’s typically-informative blog post on the making-of confirms my Southern Holiday Beer theory, too, and would’ve been worth a read even if he’d proven me wrong.
(52.20) I still haven’t had my Renaissance ‘Tribute’. It’s here beside me on my desk. And I haven’t figured out quite-why the name, either. So that’ll be my homework.
(55.00) We’ll do a Year in Review episode, next, rather than a Christmas one as such. That’d obviously leave you waiting ages, now. But for now, cue the music: ‘Shopping for Explosives’, by The Coconut Monkeyrocket.
Podcast episode recorded: 3 December 2011, nearly relatively-promptly uploaded (I swear): 14 December 2011, and then only actually-for-serious uploaded: 24 January 2012. Sheesh.
1: Note also that the url format for Twitter pages includes a shebang before the username. Double geek-happiness, there.
After a Garage Project beer at Hashigo, George and I ventured out to the quiet outer suburbs to join Kieran Haslett-Moore in his in-house pub, the Masons Arms. Over a few of his beers (accompanied by a platter of delicious things he’d largely also made himself), we talked about the many roads to being a satisfied beer geek, pondered the idiosyncrasies of the Wellington craft beer scene and the wider industry at large. Towards the end, we picked up on the topic George and I had talked about last time, and discussed a few weirdnesses of beer award shows.
(0.40) The Masons Arms, among its many charms, has a Pub Dog. Which makes for interestingly-challenging podcast recording, but adds to the ambience. As always, George was greatly helped in smoothing out the worst of it by the cleverness of Audacity, the open-source audio editor he uses.
(4.10) Not yet. Things are a little in-the-air in that neighbourhood, given a moderately-controversial proposed roading redevelopment.
(5.30) Beer of the Week #1: Kieran’s own ‘Berhampore Best Bitter’. We liked it so much that we took a photo of our lovely microphone in front of it, so it could be our “logo”, such as we have, on iTunes and whatnot.
(8.20) I am chronically Auckland-phobic, but feedback on a recent podcast pondering has me determined to make the trip up in January. Let’s see if it changes my mind.
(10.10) Frasier Crane once said it well: “If less is more, imagine how much more more would be.”
(17.00) The Emerson’s ‘JP’ we mention here has popped up in my Diary at least twicebefore. It’s reliably- and appropriately-interesting stuff, each year.
(23.00) Beer of the Week #2: Emerson’s ‘RSB: Regional Special Bitter’. A video of the brew day has since shown up on YouTube; it’s an instructive watch, if you haven’t seen this kind of thing, especially at this kind of scale, in action.
(26.50) Recent ramblings on collaborations can be found in my Diary entries for ‘Rescue Red’ and ‘Taranaki Pale Ale’. Long may the trend continue.
(34.00) The Wassail Brauhaus in Taranaki looks as awesome as their website looks retro and clunky — they are, one assumes, too busy doing more interesting things. I’m totally going to get myself there later this summer, hopefully on the way to / from a brew day at Liberty.
(38.30) It doesn’t feel overly plug-ish to note that Regional’s website is now positively groaning under the weight of beers from all over. If you’re not familiar with them, you really should pay them a visit online and/or in person.
(41.20) I really am surprised that the ‘Craft Beer Capital’ website hasn’t really kicked up much controversy. It’s being kept quite neutral and ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ in its approach, so far, and that must be helping. I should disclaim that I know the people working for it, and that it does share some owners with the pub I work at — but I do think it could mature into a genuinely useful resource.
(42.20) General Practitioner (which Kieran does mention as I talk over him a bit; sorry) is a shining example. Always a Monteith’s-branded DB-tied venue, they’ve recently arranged for a dozen-plus lines of craft beer in their fridge.
(46.30) Renaissance ‘Stonecutter’ is totally my bet for greatest, most unexpected Gateway Beer — Episode III was partially a love-song thereto. And I wasn’t kidding: ‘Chick Beer’ really is a thing. Or hopefully merely was a thing; their own website seems dead. Good riddance.
(50.00) Recommendations:Moa Imperial Stout, for its inherent goodness, and its one-or-two counter-trend aspects. (And because it’s nice to say something nice about them for a change.)
(57.30) The History of IPA is so myth-ridden that Martyn Cornell really has turned it into a nice little cottage industry. Being wrong about this stuff is an exhilarating and delightful experience; myth-busting history is the best kind.
(1.01.00) Beer of the Week #3: Kieran’s own ‘Merchant of the Devil’ Imperial Stout. Which is us pausing Midstrength News for a week quite emphatically indeed. It was stupidly good.
(1.05.00) Further to my ramblings in the last episode, I still do think there’s room for another kind of beer awards (whether or not as part of the existing structure), but the Beer Cup, with its head-to-head setup, isn’t what I see as the way forward — barrel of fun though it did appear from here.
(1.08.00) This difference between medal classes and trophy classes is massively under-explained, to the public. Something definitely needs to be done about it; we’re definitely agreed on that.
(1.11.30) It’ll be a while yet before I’m done singing the praises of Steve Nally and his Invercargill Brewery. Most recently, on here, it was his ‘Sa!son’ that inspired me. I’ve also had that 2008 Vintage ‘Smokin’ Bishop’, since recording this, and it was pretty damn tasty — though still enjoyably peculiar. Consider it another Recommendation, just suitably late to the table.
