Author Archives: fourtharch

Can I have a beer that tastes of errr beer?

Call me an old git (I’m imagining at this point many readers are doing just that…) and I think I’ve been an old git pretty much since birth but I do like my beer to taste of beer. Hops, brewers liquor, malted barley and yeast = beer. It’s a simple idea that has worked for thousands of years. Why then do modern brewers seem to feel the need to put other ingredients into beer?

A friend of mine (also an old git!) has a theory that you should avoid champion beers- the idea being that if anyone has brewed a champion beer, they’ve tried to do something different with it to make it stand out and has therefore buggered about with it and put something daft in it. It’s not a perfect theory, but I do think it has some truth in it. I’ve come across some champion beers that I could describe as interesting and very few that are examples of a best bitter done very well.

I’m enjoying the craft beer revolution and it has led to some great beers but it does have some interesting trends. I recently attended Tiny Rebel Brewfest in Cardiff, which is a fantastic event with craft breweries, most of which are local but with Hawkshead from the Lake District and Four Pure from Bermondsey amongst the others. What I’ve found is that there is a distinct lack of session ales or as one might say “normal” beer. I’ve found that most craft beer tends to fall into three categories- American IPA’s, dark/mild/stout/porter and bizarre creations. I like an American IPA and other than some rather high ABV’s, those are some great beers. There are then a variety of dark beers- I’ve grouped some similar styles together and some of those are excellent but I tried a stout recently that had chilli in it. It’s fair to say that I preferred the version the same brewery did without the chilli. I like a nice dark beer but I do find that at a craft beer festival or brewery I end up drinking more dark beer and more IPA than I normally would because the other options tend to be…

Bizarre creations. I’ve not really defined it but a combination of fruit and others substances in beers and absurdly high ABV’s are the things I’m talking about. I have come across fruit beers that I quite like- I do like a Bacchus and I’ve come across some beers with ginger in them that work. I think there is a place in the world for a half of something interesting and strong at the end of the evening- Crafty Devil do a very nice coffee infused stout, Safe as Milk and a lethal version, Not so Safe as Milk that’s over 7%, that is very nice to end an evening.

What I find strange though is exactly how many interesting creations there are and how few session beers there are out there. My personal beer preference is for a red ale with a malty flavour which tends to be a staple of traditional breweries but an endangered species amongst craft breweries- they do exist- Meantime do the very pleasant Yakima Red- but they are very rare. I’m happy to see new creations but I would like the world to also keep beer that tastes of beer and is somewhere in the 4% range that I can drink in a pint glass!!

DaveSteveGezGreat PaulMattMogiRich

Japan; a country full of surprises beginning with Japanese Beer – its rather good!

I visited Japan for the first time this June, arriving in Tokyo with many preconceptions about this densely populated country that for centuries cut itself off from the rest of the world; however Japan turned out to be absolutely everything I wasn’t expecting. It is a country that works on a completely different scale and has the most welcoming, helpful and respectful people I have ever come across and what with bilingual signage and more English spoken in Japan than at Cardiff Railway station where I began my journey, I quickly decided that it was a country I would very much like to return.
I became so wrapped up in planning my trip, mainly finding a good travel agent, that it was only after the 11 hour flight to Tokyo, checking into my hotel then feeling rather pleased with myself for quickly negotiating the metro to the Tokyo Skytree tower and back, that I finally relaxed and began to think of beer.
Beer lovers will know that one always has to ask upon arriving in a different country for the first time, where when and how do I get beer? However in the case of Japan I didn’t even know if they did beer! By this stage I was exhausted after the journey from London, ready for bed and about to give in but I would soon discover that Tokyo like Hong Kong is a 24 hour city where you can obtain anything you want within 100 yards of where ever you are standing. Sure enough there ahead, just before the sweeping escalator that would take me up to my hotel lobby from the busy brightly lit modern underground walkways, was not one, but two Family Mart stores with cold cabinets full of Japanese beer.
The first thing that jumped out at me was the design on the cans stating graphically that this was beer brewed in Japan. The second thing to impress were the fridges found in all hotel rooms throughout the country that the cans went straight in and finally the taste of the beer that slipped down a treat at which point I immediately knew that Japanese beer would give me that looked forward to first beer bite of the day taste experience – I had to discover more.
Lonely Planet suggests the Museum of Yebisu Beer in Tokyo on the sight of the original brewery built in 1887 in the Ebisu district named after the railway station built to service the Yebisu brewery . As I contemplated a whole district named after beer I wondered if this could get any better when suddenly it did for as you walk into the brewery museum you are politely asked not to walk over a large circular rug featuring the image of Ebisu the god of beer! Well actually Ebisu is the Japanese god of fisherman, luck, prosperity, business and abundance of crops but he is the face of Yebisu and my kind of god.
The whole secret to the taste of Japanese beer is gradually revealed as you walk around the brewery exhibition and discover that German brewers were advising the Japanese back at the very beginning in the late 19th Century.  That then explains why sausages are featured next to beer bottles in the museum display cabinets. I know that sausages and beer will appeal to many Fourtharchers but don’t worry, for if I do get a second go at Project Manager on a Fourtharch weekend, I will not be choosing Tokyo as the Yebisu brewery tour is in Japanese only but like me at the beginning of the summer if you are not yet aware of Japanese beer then it is rather good and there is certainly no need to get Sake!
乾杯 [Kanpai, cheers in Japanese]
DaveSteveGezGreat PaulMattMogiRich

Yorkshire Here We Come

As regular readers will know, the highlight of the Fourtharch year is our annual trip   and we are now a month away from the 2017 trip. We take it in turns to chose a pub to take the other members to, the sole purpose of the trip of course being to have a pint and find out where we are going the following year. This year we are off to Masham in Yorkshire on the weekend of the 22nd September. The feature pub this year is the Black Sheep, which is the pub attached to Black Sheep Brewery.

What excites me most though is the schedule for the Saturday:

Full English Breakfast

Tour of Theakston Brewery

Lunch

Tour of Blacksheep Brewery

Beer

Dinner

Beer

Beer

More beer…

Should be a good day!

DaveSteveGezGreat PaulMattMogiRich

What is it about a pub with a record?

Every pub has a story but some stories go back further than others. I’m not really sure how much we should make of the highest or the oldest or the smallest, and yet… There is some appeal to that kind of hook. On the face of it, it shouldn’t matter but there is some kind of draw to a place that has some kind of record. The simple fact is usually not the interesting bit, it’s the why and the how that usually provides something of note.

Why the hell would you build a pub at the top of Tan Hill in middle of nowhere without a house in sight and no other sign of civilisation? Presumably not just to be the highest pub in Britain? It’s because it was once surrounded by mining cottages that have since been destroyed and the inn would have provided much needed beer to hardworking miners.

We’ve also visited the Nutshell in Bury St Edmunds and that really was just for novelty value. Unless someone can tell me otherwise, there doesn’t appear to be a great story there, it was a shop then they started selling beer and it’s very small. The disappointing thing is that I’ve just found out some bastards in Margate have opened a smaller pub and so we’ve only visited the second smallest pub in Britain…

2011: The Nutshell, Bury St Edmunds

I’ve also visited The Skirrid Inn, which is the oldest pub in Wales and well worth a visit. Nothing ground breaking in the history of this one- it’s a very old inn with a very impressive old fire place… and a ghost!

DaveSteveGezGreat PaulMattMogiRich

Six Bells and the Great Flood of 1607

Over a lifetime my visits to the Six Bells in Peterstone near Cardiff although regular have only been once in every ten years beginning at childhood through to impressing girlfriends with a run out to a country pub and finally over the last few decennial visits simply to check if the pub is still there. It was 10 years this Easter Bank Holiday Monday since my last visit, so away I went on a cycle ride through Marshfield on the wrong side of the tracks in a Peterstone direction fully expecting to find the pub closed for good. I always like to take a look at the great flood mark of 1607 or Britain’s only known tsunami on the church in Peterstone but unfortunately the church grounds and the foot path to the seawall alongside are both now closed. The pub itself is still open and a car was just pulling into the car park but with a mind made prejudiced by many reports of wholesale country pub closures I noticed that the Christmas decorations had been left up above the pub door and immediately concluded that the Six Bells would soon be ringing its last. It was only when I focused in on the pub sign with my camera phone for the blog that I suddenly realised what I thought were Christmas decorations were in fact six neon bells meaning someone was seriously working on rebooting the pub. Then I saw that the passengers in the car just pulled in were a family of three generations looking confident of a good Easter Monday lunch inside, finally I spotted that rich pastel eggshell paint applied to the pub exterior windows that for me is always an indicator of new investment.

Heineken and Punch Taverns

The biggest talking point of the British pub industry at the moment is the proposed takeover of Punch Taverns by Heineken. When I think of Heineken, I think of the Dutch lager, I’m a bitter man (in both senses of the word!) but it’s a perfectly decent lager. What I hadn’t realised without doing a bit of research was that Heineken are a massive company that own breweries and brands all over the world.

They are currently in discussions to take over Punch Taverns, who are a UK company that owns many pubs but doesn’t brew its own beer. What concerns me is that just after we’ve had legislation to stop tied pubs having to purchase beer from the brewery that owns the franchise, we now have a large organisation that owns many breweries. For those that are confused- the rules on tied pubs relate to whether or not breweries can insist that franchised pubs have to buy beer from the brewery that owns them, what we are talking about with Punch Taverns are managed houses where the same rules don’t apply.

The Heineken Group have said that they won’t be insisting Punch Taverns pubs get their beer from Heineken Group Breweries but I’d prefer there be legislation to stop it. It’s not that I don’t trust Heineken to do the right thing, it’s that I don’t really trust any company to do the right thing- I was taught when I studied economics that the primary goal of almost every company is to make money. If at some point in the future Heineken decide that it is more profitable to only sell beers from their own breweries, there isn’t anything to stop them.

It seems a shame when we see the craft beer boom to see big global companies swallowing up breweries and pubs. We have an increasing range of craft beers which gives a huge variety but it is important that there are still pubs left to sell that beer in!

DaveSteveGezGreat PaulMattMogiRich

RIPub; The Allensbank/Grape and Olive

A slightly strange RIPub this time. All of our RIPub’s to date have been about pubs with some history that we’ve really liked. The Allensbank is a newer pub that we aren’t fussed on, so why mark it’s closing?

Two reasons, nostalgia and intrigue. The Allensbank was the first pub that Mogi and Gez drank at regularly- admittedly only for a relatively short period of time and only for the pub quiz on Sunday. This was before the crack down on underage drinking but your options when you were 16 or 17 were still limited if you wanted a quiet pint and the Allensbank weren’t as conscientious as other venues!

Back in those days, it still had a Charlie Chalk area for the children and it was never likely to threaten the Good Pub Guide, but we were 17, it had Strongbow on tap and was in walking distance, which at the time made it heaven. Those memories give it a special place in our hearts but the number of incarnations and renovations it went through was extraordinary.

One of Great Paul’s pleasures in life was to hide away in the Arches bar on a Sunday afternoon with a pint, the weekend newspapers and a few small cigars. This all came to an end in 2006 with the pub smoking ban leaving him standing outside in the rain and on the lookout for the closest exterior equivalent to the Arches bar interior experience. The raised decking and enclosed space with overhanging roof around the entrance to the Allensbank now the Grape and Olive was the perfect choice.

Paul arrived at the G&O in 2007 when the pub seemed to be going through an identity crisis, the Charlie Chalk children’s play area in the basement had been closed, quiz night was no more and along with the name change the pub interior looked more like the showroom at the nearby Maskrey’s furniture store. The emphasis was now obviously on fine dining, with the kitchen on show to the public through a glass window behind the main bar. Paul found this rather disconcerting as a customer and a little cruel to the poor chefs who seemed to have very little space to move around in but if the kitchen was now theatre and the food flying out expensive performance art then he never saw the same customers returning for an encore.

While Paul was more than happy to pay the extra for a pint sat outside on the decking to fuel his Sunday afternoon newspaper and cigar habit but not so much for the view… of the pub car park or indeed the pub surroundings that consisted of a household recycling centre, Cathays Cemetery, the University Hospital of Wales and the busy A48 duel carriageway – not exactly the hanging gardens of Babylon. After three winters sat outside at the G&O Paul was finally frozen out in more ways than one, the pub closed in 2016 and presumably the chefs released into the wild or Coyote Ugly. He have since given up smoking and stopped buying the newspapers but the good news is – we will always continue to drink beer.

DaveSteveGezGreat PaulMattMogiRich

Pub Goes Overboard

This amused me and the sandwich board spread [see what I did there] does not stop at the Colchester Avenue entrance to the Three Brewers in Cardiff, the boards follow you all the way through to the pub doors and then some into the concrete beer garden but are punters seriously expected to take in all the information that the sandwich boards display because on the day I took the photograph the staff had not even bothered to check them – see if you can spot the glaring mistake. If you did actually take time out to read all the boards they simply tell you the obvious – we have beer, food and a television, so will this theme continue with even more boards informing passing trade that the pub has tables, chairs, doors, a roof and toilets with hot & cold running water?

No prizes for spotting sandwich boards left out advertising events already long gone like the Six Nations at the Brewers but if you didn’t spot the mistakes on the days I took the pictures, someone forgot to fill in the blanks on the Fancy a Pint poster leaving us with the tantalising promotion of beer from £8.88 a pint – don’t get trampled in the rush… that’s if you can get past the sandwich boards.

DaveSteveGezGreat PaulMattMogiRich

How Indian is IPA These Days?

I quite like an American style IPA, I’m not normally a fan of very hoppy beer but I think the light citrus type hops that are used in them are very palatable and for me that beats a golden ale. What I find slightly strange though is the terminology, because of the geography of it but also because it’s a distinctly different flavour from an IPA.

India Pale Ale dates back to the days of the British Empire and the need to ship beer to the far flung parts of the Empire and the desire for Britons in India to have beer to drink. It was found that hoppier beer kept better for shipping to India and over time the beer became rather descriptively known as India Pale Ale- IPA.

I’m not really sure that the title is apt for some of the beers that bear the name. The British style IPA’s tend to be what we would describe as session beers, they are quite hoppy but tend not too have too much flavour. We at the Fourtharch tend to use words such as inoffensive to describe them- not much wrong with them so you could actively dislike them but not enough to them to be a beer that you really love.

I don’t think the American IPA’s match this description- those wonderful hops like fuggles and that real hit of flavour and that typically high ABV (5% and upwards) don’t represent what I think of as an IPA. Is it time for these to be American Pale Ales? I think it’s a distinct enough style that deserves it’s own name rather than piggybacking on an old name that to me doesn’t apply.

DaveSteveGezGreat PaulMattMogiRich