Verbatim: St Peter’s Winter Ale. 500ml, $5, 6.5%, 8/5/05. First off: most gorgeous bottle ever. Green oval, pure vintage. Looks like good medicine and smells a bit the same. Dark as dark, with a few brownish bubbles. Tastes mad. A little scary, even. Fruitcake flavours all over the place, a little spicy. Definately a flask of winter goodness. Goes seriously well with a big old stew, and that’s just what G.’s jigged up. Nice.
Afterthoughts, October 2010: I was massively impressed by this one, and recall it very well. I haven’t been able to find it since, sadly. The bottle is also sufficiently gorgeous that, when for a while they weren’t able to use the proper old-school ones (during a shortage or whatever), the beers actually came with a tag that apologised for their absence.
Verbatim: Badger Golden Glory. 500ml, $5, 4.5%, 7/5/05. Flat day. Smells all peachy and gorgeous. But as G. says, it’s one little weakness is like fruit tea: smells better than tastes — but that’s relative, as it still tastes seriously good.
Afterthoughts, October 2010: A rather-similar golden ale from the same place as the original. Lighter and even fruitier, if anything. These things usually do exceptionally well as ‘evangelistic’ beers to people who say “I don’t like beer”. It still didn’t work on my friend Robyn, though; I’m still trying.
Verbatim: Badger Golden Champion. 500ml, $5, 5%, 4/5/05, with sausages + Firefly. I’m visiting these guys and shaking the hand of the man what makes their beer. Gold, indeed. Really tasty. Warm fruitiness. Peaches, quite a bit. It’s really good. [Brewed w/ elderflower!]
Afterthoughts, October 2010: A nice early example of what developed into a very fruitful little obsession with golden ale. It’s a helluva useful style; the lightness and refreshingness of a light lager, but with the depth of flavour of a good ale.
A.K.A. Belhaven ‘Export’, A.K.A. Belhaven 80 Shilling (when it’s in casks). And, on the same day as the Diary gets its first English beer, it also gets this, its first Scot.
Diary entry #24, Belhaven 'Scottish Ale'
Verbatim: Bellhaven Scottish Ale. 330ml, $5, 3.9%, 16/4/05. Ooh. 1719 est’d. Darker amber. Very full taste. Nutty, in fact. But very well made. Good middle between darker ales + lighter stouts.
Afterthoughts, October 2010: Wait, what? “Lighter stouts”? I have literally no idea to what I might’ve been referring, there. It scarcely even makes sense if all you’re talking about is body, rather than colour. Sometimes I am a mystery to myself. I’d speculate that I was drunk, but this is an absurdly sessionable 80/- — maybe that Tangle Foot really did a number on me, as per its reputation.
Badger 'Tangle Foot', the delicious origin of my beer-photography habit
This is a beer I’ve had on many occasions, and have a real fondness for. Its first Diary entry occurs here in April 2005 (also the first English listing) but even that mentions that it’s been enjoyed before. And the photo here comes from years after that, when I randomly spotted it in the fridge at the Malthouse. Saw it in a photo I’d taken the night before, in fact, and went straight back to have some.
I’d only just recently (at last!) gotten myself a nice digital camera (or a camera at all, if it comes to that), so the new-gadget enthusiasm coupled with the beer nostalgia made taking a photo irresistible, despite the funny looks that doing so drew. I liked how it turned out, and a habit was fairly instantly formed.
Diary entry #23, Badger 'Tangle Foot'
Verbatim: Badger Tangle Foot. 500ml, $5, 5.0%, 16/4/05. Loads of Brit stuff @ K&G’s. So the return of tangle foot. Love it. Amber ale. Quite distinctive, almost fruity. Mystery warmness to it. Can definately see how it was named. “Deceptively drinkable”, as they say. Badger was est’d 1777. Who knew? Coppery. Like the überhopped Macs, almost.
Afterthoughts, October 2010: The “überhopped Macs” I mention was their ‘Copperhop’, a now-retired IPA that I remember as being quite decent. A quick look at the reviews finds a decent amount of praise for its balance; malt and hops in harmonious presence. That could be what I’m on about, in my comparison.
Verbatim: Grimbergen Double. 330ml, $8, 6.5%, 3/4/05. Bless those Belgian monks. The Nobertines have made a great, accessable abbey beer. Dark red-brown, bubbly, but not overstrong. (Despite neat / freaky eagle on the label.)
Afterthoughts, October 2010: From this entry, and the previous, it appears I occasionally have trouble with spelling the word “accessible”. I’m also wrong to credit the monks; a lot of these Belgian “Abbey-style” beers are just Abbey-style, these days, with production done (as here, and with the Judas immediately prior) by giant commercial breweries who have either swallowed the original makers in the various waves of mergers and acquisitions that go on, or are just paying licenses for the name.
Verbatim: Judas. 330ml, $5, 8.6%, 19/3/05. Belgian Blonde. Cool, scary bottle; how could I resist? Nice golden cloudless blonde, bubbles don’t hang around much. Got a pleasant little fruitiness in it. Really very good, more accessable than you’d guess from its design.
Afterthoughts, October 2010: Well, at least the ‘Duvel as lager’ fiasco from the previous Christmas seems to be behind me by this point. That’s a relief.
Trying to re-discover this one on RateBeer.com took me through two placeholders that said “this name is just an alias for…”, sending me somewhere else. Beer marketing is a funny thing, and brews often wind up existing under different names in different markets or at different times, or both.
Diary entry #20, Moling's Traditional Celtic
Verbatim: Moling’s Traditional Celtic. St. Patrick’s Day, 17/3/05. 500ml. $5, 4.9%. Dark with a nice red touch. Bubbles hang around alright. Very tasty, though not too strong. I’d like it heavier, but still. Perfect with burgers. Luckily, I’ve got some.
Afterthoughts, October 2010: I still do these day-appropriate tastings of new things, whenever I can; something Irish on Paddy’s Day, something Australian on January 26, that sort of thing. Any excuse, right? But it’s nice to see I started early.
Duvel, several years later, when I'd finally bought a camera
So. This is perhaps the best example why the decision to publish the ‘ancient’ Diary entries as-is was a bit of a Zen exercise. I like Duvel a lot, for inherent and circumstantial reasons. I have done so since I first had it, here on Christmas Day in 2004. But I clearly wasn’t a proper Beer Nerd at all, yet, because I just blithely call it a lager. The shame. The nearly-unutterable shame.
But hey, everyone starts ignorant, right? Ignorance is not a problem, what you do with it is. And you can’t really be blamed for mistakes like these, when some breweries go out of their freaking way to muddy the waters about beer styles and perpetuate the simple-but-wrong idea that golden is lager and non-golden is ale.
Diary entry #19.1, Duvel
Verbatim: Duvel. 330ml, $5, at Wellington, on Christmas. It’s sunny, so a lager with lunch. Bubbles aplenty, nice cloudy gold. Full flavour, but not bitter. Malty, Dad says. Nicely complex smell and taste, but not at all too much. Goes brilliantly with timing and weather.
Diary entry #19.2, Duvel
Afterthoughts, October 2010: “At Wellington” means at my family’s house; so many entries are just tagged “at home”, and sometimes that gets tricky to define — here I was at the house where I grew up and lived for twenty-something years, but I also had a permanent-enough place of my own that “home” became an ambiguous word. Which leads to wonderful sentences like “as soon as I get home I should make sure I buy a plane ticket home”. Huh?
The little “meanwhile” note is also evidence that my take-the-damn-notebook-with-you habit hadn’t yet properly formed. The next entry is from three months later; I must’ve remembered that I’d had those in the intervening time. I have no idea how many other entries fell through the gap between bad habits and bad memory. I suppose that’s why I should keep a Diary. (And why I do.)
It’s here at entry eighteen and nearly a whole year since page one, that my Diary finds its first New Zealand brew. Shows what you get for being a New Zealander living in Melbourne when you start your Beer Diary.
I should add that even now, at the time of the Great Uploading in October 2010, it’s still a bit shameful how hard it is to get good beer from ‘the other side of the Tasman’ — whichever side you’re on. The situation is massively-improved, sure, but still pretty tragic.
Diary entry #18, Martinborough 'Tora Dark'
Verbatim: Martinborough Brewing: Tora Dark. 330ml, 5%, $?, at home, 11/12/04. “Blerk,” says George. I think it’s great. Rich coffee taste, mild choc. (Goes brillo w/ advent calendar chocolates.) Darkish bubbles, some hanging around. Quite bitter, but in a good way. Mellows out after. (Their lager — which G.’s having — is perfectly decent, too. Heinek-ish.)
Afterthoughts, October 2010: This entire brewery has long since closed down, sadly. And it’s the first such casualty in my Diary (the aged Cooper’s stout was the first ‘retired’ individual beer in the book). A bit of research shows it was a dunkel (a black lager) so we can see that I’m still confused about how colours relate to styles, although that is about to get a whole lot more embarrassing with the next entry…
