Pete Brown's November v-blog is out and he's talking about new beers and breweries around London. It's always interesting to me to drop in on the discussions of British beer writers talking about beer and the beer renaissance in Britain. Maybe it's just my age -- I'm old enough to remember when you couldn't get craft beer in any bar more upscale than the Viking.
When I came-of-beer-age, England seemed like one of the world's beer heavens. The American craft beer movement seemed like a way to find our own path back to that beery tradition that we lost. So it's always with a bit of a shock that I remember that Britain is having its own beer renaissance. All of the debates about whether CAMRA's pushing the right strategy for this or not aside, the British renaissance is ... well, very British. It's mostly ale, and as this v-blog shows, there is a lot of interest in innovating, with a lot of it coming at session-beer strength.
Sorry to get all misty-eyed about this. I can't help it. I spent two periods during my, um, formative years in England. Both were during what I'm sure Pete and others would call their own dark years of beer. But the look and the smell and the variety of the beers--and so many on handpump still! What really mists me up seeing this is the realization that the first time I was there I was too young to enjoy the beer, and the second time I was too poor.
Oh, and Peter Amor has another v-blog on fermentation.
I had to endure the near death of 'beer' in England, I am so glad that there are brewers there now who are not trying to out extreme Surly with more of everything except drinkability ( of course there are the nutcases in Scotland with the oddball beers wrapped in ferrets skins etc, who says Englishmen are eccentric, wha hey the Lads, what's up your Kilt?).
ReplyDeleteSession ales, drinking for the tastes and not to get shit faced, are what I want. So now we need local brewers to offer session beers as well as continuing to expand the styles and flavours of beer.
Yep. The point I was making is that if you look back to the American homebrewing literature from the early days ... like the 1970s at least, there was a sense that England had a real beer tradition, while we did not. Anyway, yep.
ReplyDelete