The Best Double IPA in the UK

April has seen us drowning in double IPA. If you enjoy this style of strong, super hopped IPA then you’ve been spoiled for choice in the past few weeks. I’ve seen and heard a lot of beer nerds talking about which of them is 'the best DIPA'. Of course this is what beer lovers are into – discussion and friendly argument about beer. But I am surprised that people are still talking about this in terms of absolutes, as if one beer has to be awarded the title of ‘The Best’ and all the others must therefore be 'less good' beers. As if there isn’t a place for variation of expression within a style; as if context is irrelevant. By all means choose a favourite, choose one beer that you prefer above the others. But does one really have to be the best and the others all inferior to it as a result? I don’t think it’s that simple and I don’t really believe in absolutes.

We Brought Homebrew: IPA edition (now with added entry requirements)

We're pleased to announce that we're going to run linked sessions for February and March at the We Brought Beer Homebrew Club. The February session (Feb 16th) will be on the critical appreciation of beer (we have special guest, Chris Hall joining us) and the March session (Mar 15th) will be about judging beer. In order for club members to get the most out of these two sessions we have invited them to brew an IPA and bring it along to the March meeting where it will be judged by all attendees. This can be any type of IPA, e.g. single, double, triple IPA, Belgian IPA, black or white IPA. It can be a clone of a famous example of the style, a revisit of a traditional recipe, or something entirely new. The beer can be all extract or all grain or anything in between. The only limiting factor for the beer is that it must be broadly recognisable as an IPA. We are brewing our own entry today. 

We are really looking forward to trying all the entries. But first, we'll be putting on our thinking caps for the next meeting and learning how to taste beer. Make sure you bring your notebooks.

Will you brew a clone of a famous IPA?

IPA Challenge: Entry Requirements 

If you are planning on bringing an IPA (which you have brewed) to enter in the IPA Challenge on March 15th then please do the following things in order to assist us with the organisation on the night:

• Bring your entry upstairs as soon as you arrive so that we can assign you and your beer with an ID No. and get them in the fridge asap
• Do not label your bottles as we wish to keep everything anonymous
• Bring at least 2L of your beer so that we have enough for a number of people to judge each entry
• Let us know what the ABV is - this is so that we can split the entries evenly across different groups
• If you haven't already done so then PLEASE email us in advance to let us know you're entering and style of your IPA as this will save time on the night
•  PLEASE NOTE we are going to have to limit the number of entries we are able to judge. In order to guarantee your entry please let us know asap that you will be entering a beer, as we may not be able to accept any further entries on the night.

Any questions about this session? Email us (see below).

For more information about the homebrew club please go here. If anyone is thinking of attending and would like to ask us anything feel free to drop us a mail or tweet:

cremabrewery@gmail.com
@femtobrewster
@Crema_brewery

NB: If you're brewing an IPA for the March session or you've already attended the club and you're brewing something else you can use the hashtag #wbbhbc so that we can see what you're getting up to.

How sad and lonely does your life have to be, when you drink two beers alone on the train?

Two recent train/platform beer experiences

Golden Pints 2015

Although Crema is a single entity and is usually broadly in agreement on beer-related matters for this post we each wrote our own answers. But as you might expect there was a great deal of overlap in our responses.  

Disclaimers: We run the homebrew club for We Brought Beer at their Clapham Junction store. Chris brews part time at Weird Beard Brewery.

Crema's US Beer Odyssey Autumn 2015

It's been three years since we last visited the US. This time round we put some serious thought into planning out our trip. Three weeks sounds like quite a long time but I can assure you that it is insufficient for visiting all the breweries you are interested in. We started by roughly mapping out our route, then we wrote a long list of all the breweries we wanted to visit. As we worked out the distances we'd need to travel each day the list of breweries got whittled down to the bare essentials of what we could realistically manage. We were supposed to be on holiday after all and driving for six or eight hours a day would make it seem more like work than rest. 

The Life of a Beer Mule*, Santa Rosa

We Brought Homebrew

It’s been a little while since we posted anything on the blog. That’s because we were busy planning our three week US beer odyssey (of which, more later) and when we returned from our trip we had some physical and mental recovering to do.

The other thing we’ve been doing is launching a new homebrew club at We Brought Beer in their newly opened shop in Clapham Junction. They don't just sell beer, they sell homebrew ingredients too. At Clapham they have a dedicated event space upstairs which is the perfect location for beer lovers to gather and get excited about brewing beer.

We held the first meeting on Tuesday 17^th November and we were surprised to see such a great turnout. It’s hard to know where to start with providing an ‘introduction to brewing’. Distilling a complicated subject down to its essence is always tricky. You could give a three hour lecture on malt and still not cover everything: but you have to start somewhere. The idea was to provide an overview of brewing ingredients, process and equipment, with separate sections on sanitation and temperature control. We might not be expert brewers but we are experienced and having made a few mistakes along the way we are happy to share what we've learned with people who are just starting out.

On Saturday 21^st November we did a live brew in the shop. This was the first time we had done an extract brew in three years. In fact it was only the second extract brew we’ve ever done*. The idea of this session was for people to be able to drop in and see what is involved and ask any questions they have about any aspect of homebrewing. We expect to do further one-off sessions on Saturdays in the future, and it’s likely the next one will feature all grain brewing.

Next month’s meeting is on Tuesday 15^th December, where we’ll be looking at recipe design and the use of specialty grains (within the context of extract brewing). In the New Year we’ll move on to more advanced topics such as the science of mashing in all grain brewing and critical appreciation of beer. Each session will start with a presentation before moving on to tasting beers. Further content will be guided by what club members would like to see. We're also looking forward to getting our brewing friends to come along and share their knowledge too, we already have a few of them pencilled in for future sessions (including judging beer, brewing imperial stouts with adjuncts, and making the move from homebrewing to professional brewing).

The club is aimed at novice brewers – those who are yet to brew their first beer or who have only been brewing for a little while. Although we are of the opinion that one should never stop learning, even if you're an expert. The club aims to provide a forum where we can all exchange knowledge and opinion (and our beers too obviously). The joy of homebrewing is in discovery, learning and discussion. 

For more information on the homebrew club and other events at We Brought Beer follow them on Twitter for updates: @WeBroughtBeer. Any questions, queries or suggestions from club attendees can be sent to: homebrew@webroughtbeer.co.uk.

*We popped in to dry hop the beer yesterday (it's a standard pale ale brewed with Centennial and Equinox). We should be able to package it next weekend. No idea how it will taste but we're curious to find out!

Here at the end of all things

The Bermondsey Beer Mile (BBM) means different things to different people. For serious beer geeks it was a precious little haven which some of them feel is now being ruined by what they refer to as 'hipsters' (in reality, if it is being ruined by anyone or anything (and I am not saying it is) it is its own popularity with more mainstream beer drinkers - far from the oft quoted definition of a 'hipster', in fact). 

For non-beer geeks, that is to say people who merely like beer rather than being obsessed by it, it is somewhere to go to try new beers and maybe visit the various foodie delights of the area. We could refer to this group as 'the Time Out crowd' although that might be a little unfair to some of them. but this group was certainly courted by those who looked to gain from promoting the BBM as "A Thing". 

The calm before the storm: 8.45am August 29th 2015

Following hot on the heels of the non-beer geeks was a third group of punters wanting to 'do the mile' as a kind of pub crawl, often in large groups (sometimes in costume for stag and hen parties), often seemingly drunk when they got there.  Breweries, beer styles even, didn't seem to mean anything to these people. It's not that they didn't know anything about the beers they were drinking: it's that they didn't care to learn.

And so the BBM quickly transitioned from a place where you could casually wander around and visit a few different breweries to try their beers in a relaxed environment into a destination for alcohol consumption, with 30 minute queues to buy a drink, venues so full they are forced to operate a one in/one out system, and 'bouncers' stood outside on crowd control duty trying to make sure the local residents don't get too upset with the breweries. 

When Kernel changed their opening hours - to close at 2pm instead of 4pm there were complaints about how this would make it more difficult for people to do the BBM. People said how annoying it was that Kernel were in the middle of the 'mile' so you shouldn’t really have to start there (because obviously you wanted to go from one end to the other) but you were being forced to if you wanted to fit everything in. This seemed to really bother some people (complaints are not hard to find - but there are some examples here). Personally I thought: good for Kernel, why shouldn't their staff be able to have a weekend too? I've seen complaints about the earlier closing time where it was cited as the reason that the BBM is so crowded and manic and if only Kernel would stay open until 5 or 6pm everything would be fine because then everyone could do 'the mile' exactly how they wanted to and nobody would need to rush anywhere.  

So of course when Kernel announced that they had decided to stop opening their tap room completely people got even more annoyed about it. Instead of being grateful that for a few years they had been able to drink fresh Kernel beers right where they were brewed, people immediately started complaining about how the tap room closing will affect their ability to complete a pub crawl. People had been moaning about the queues, the overcrowding, and the 'lack of ambiance' for ages. The customers weren't happy with what they were being offered by Kernel. And the brewery weren't happy with what they were able to offer their customers. It was a lose-lose situation. It makes logical sense to say enough is enough and call it a day.

But instead of people thinking, 'Let’s wait and see what Kernel are going offer us in the future', they criticise them for not expanding their business to 'meet the demand', i.e. the demand being people who want to drink at their tap room on a Saturday afternoon (even though they find the experience unsatisfactory and complain about it afterwards).

What I find especially unfair is the presumption that Kernel are doing something unsound from a business point of view. As if a brewery’s key measure of success is their brewery tap rather than the beers they brew. Some even fear the impact that the closure of the Kernel tap room could have on other breweries in the area and suggest it  "could spell the end of BBM".

At this point we don't even know what Kernel are planning to do next in terms of serving their beer directly to the public. So how can we know that it won’t be even better than what anyone else is offering from a brewery in Bermondsey right now? And it can only be better than what they were able to offer in their current circumstances. Personally I would love to see something along the lines of a Friends of Ham or Six Degrees North style establishment with lots of meat, cheese, and other foods that pair well with beer, where the vibe is closer to ‘eating food and tasting beer’ than ‘pub crawl’. 

If you look north to the Magic Rock Tap you can see the obvious advantages of having a dedicated taproom, which is situated in a facility specifically designed for that purpose. It's a brewery tap which is managed like a bar rather than just an afterthought which evolved as an extension of the brewery and was run by brewery staff. I've heard nothing but praise for it since it opened a couple of months ago. But this is the opposite scenario to what Kernel were dealing with. This makes me wonder how other breweries (especially outside of the UK) have handled being too popular or having a tap room which is 'too busy'?

The general response to the announcement that the Kernel tap room was closing is indicative of the current atmosphere of entitlement where beer drinkers, in the UK but most especially in London, are so spoiled for choice (of breweries, beer styles, pubs, bars, etc.,) that their first instinct is to complain. Even when offered an explanation that makes perfect logical sense... they still complain. There really is no pleasing some people.

The first Saturday after the taproom closed we dropped in to Kernel to buy a few bottles on our way to a tap takeover at The Bottle Shop. There was a prominently displayed notice which read: 'NO DRINKING ON THE ESTATE' and while we were paying for our bottles I spotted a board explaining why their bottle conditioned beers are best consumed from a glass not a bottle. So guess what we saw as soon as we walked out of the brewery? That's right, a woman swigging from an open bottle of Kernel beer a few feet from the entrance. For me this sums up the lack of respect that people wanting to 'do the mile' show for Kernel, their product and their ethos - treating the brewery as a destination for beer consumption even when explicitly asked not to drink that product on the estate. From their The Kernel website:

"The brewery springs from the need to have more good beer. Beer deserving of a certain attention. Beer that forces you to confront and consider what you are drinking."

I can't really blame them for closing their tap room when people behave like that. Can you?

[Post by Emma]