A Favourite Glass

Used in pubs but still a goody!

The first piece of advise I often give when doing a beer talk is to get yourself a glass you enjoy drinking from. A favourite glass can add hugely to ones enjoyment of drinking at home and rather like a favourite beer, the favourite glass becomes a welcome friend and is a signal to the brain that its time to relax.

When choosing a glass there are a few tips to consider but it's still a very personal thing. Some people help themselves to pub glassware and although the branding can look great, they are not always a pleasure to drink from. Pub glassware is designed to withstand the rigours of the glass washer and they are often made from toughened glass. This can make them a little clunky when placed to the mouth and also the toughening limits the shapes available to choose from.

A visit to the local engraving shop will offer far more interesting shapes to choose from and the glass is much finer allowing the tongue to do its work much easier. However for real choose in glassware you need to look at what happens in Europe. Here there is huge choice, where the limitations of toughened glass seems not to apply. Each beer has its own branded glass and they are sometimes bespoke to the beer - you wont find the same shape for another beer. Many of these glasses are stemmed glasses and that would be my personal choice for a beer glass.

My current glass

I like the stemmed glass that narrows to the top concentrating the aromas allowing them to blossom within the nose. Glasses with wider heads allow all of those delicate smells to dissipate quickly into the atmosphere and one of the main enjoyments of drinking a fine beer can be lost. The draw back with the former style of glass is that those beers that are well conditioned such as some German and Belgium beers, can pour with too larger head, so one needs to be careful of this.

I would also tend to avoid the pint glass. I like to drink my beer in smaller amounts, savouring the flavours and treating the drink like a bottle of fine wine, pouring smaller amounts at a time. The advantage here is that the beer stays fresher with more condition for longer.

Whatever glass you settle on make it part of your enjoyment of drinking a beer. After all, most of us have a favourite coffee or tea mug so why not do the same with your beer glass. Cheers!

Great British Beer Festival London

Devon & Dorset bar at GBBF

I have just returned from a week in London at the Great British Beer Festival in Olympia and what a wonderful event this is. The word "Great" in the title is very appropriate indeed. It's the biggest beer festival in the UK, lasting for five days, attracting over 50,000 visitors with over 800 real ales and ciders, plus a huge range of bottled craft beers on offer.

The beer festival is manned by an army of volunteers from CAMRA. These are people who have day jobs so they are not experts in event organisation but one has to say they do a tremendous job. Also, serving this many beers at cellar temperature in a venue such as Olympia with its greenhouse effect natural lighting is no mean feat. 

The nice thing about the GBBF as its become known is the great spirit and atmosphere with which customers attend. It attracts a wide variety of people. From the tickers who rate beers, groups of friends on a night out, office workers looking for a beer after work to stag and hen parties that come on the Saturday. There is also a good proportion of ladies that attend and this is great to see.

GBBF is a real show case for cask conditioned beer. The first day features a trade session where licensees, brewers, buyers and others connected to the trade muster for a few hours of drinking and networking. The remaining days are for the general public to enjoy and they certainly do that, but then beer festivals are about more than just tasting delicious beers, they are a chance to socialise and meet new people, beer is just the common interest that brings them together.

GBBF is an event that CAMRA should feel very proud of and one that is going from strength to strength. If you get a chance to visit the festival in future years then do so, or try a local festival near you. it wont be on the grand scale of the London festival but you will enjoy yourself for sure. Well done CAMRA for the Great British Beer Festival and here's to the event in 2014.

Champion Beer of Britain

What a wonderful title and how proud the brewers are to win the coveted CAMRA Champion Beer of Britain which is awarded annually at the CAMRA Great British Beer Festival. However are CAMRA really making the most of this accolade? As a CAMRA member I love real ale and thoroughly enjoy trying different brews, but I'd certainly challenge them on their choice of winners in recent years.

I have no axe to grind over the winners themselves, they are all wonderful beers and very worthy of the title. However I do have a concern that CAMRA have chosen winners that are not very accessible to the general public.  Recently they tend to come from small micro's who just don't have the capacity or marketing knowhow to exploit the win. Arguably this is a loss for the general public and to CAMRA.

Last years winner was Coniston Brewery No9 Barley Wine. I did not have the pleasure of trying this beer and have never seen it at any of the regional beer festivals I've attended. What chance then do the general public have to try this wonderful brew. I think the point I'm making is that it would be great to see a commercially available beer chosen as the winner for once. This probably means it would be one of the established Regional Brewers ale brands who have the marketing muscle to maximise the win. The last beer of this type was possibly Castle Rock Harvest Pale Ale in 2010 or looking further back, more likely Caladonian Deuchars IPA.

Just imagine if a London Pride, Wadworth 6X or even dare I say it, a Greene King Abbot Ale from an established Regional were to win.  Or, perhaps  a beer from the more recent powerful micros/regionals such as Thornbridge or Butcombe. These brewers are all capable of getting a winning beer into the market place quickly and on a wide scale, where it can enjoyed by the mass market of real ale drinkers.

I believe in an ideal scenario CAMRA would want their flagship champion beer for the year to be available for as many people as possible to try. CAMRA's objective is to promote the sales of real ale, so what better way than to have their best beer on show. If the champion beer is on a bar I think more drinkers are likely to try it, switching from their regular drinks, which could recruit new drinkers to the real ale category.

 In conclusion I think it's quite marvellous that we now have so many more smaller brewers all brewing great beers and in many cases these are at least the equal of those produced by their larger established competitors. So I'm not sure what CAMRA do to resolve this as the competition is based on a blind tasting. I'm just hoping that for 2013 we see a beer win that more people will have the chance to enjoy. A contentious blog post perhaps, but I really do enjoy the GBBF and most of all want real ale to prosper and grow.