Day 07: Session IPA by Brouwerij Kees and the least inventive title EVER.

The world is a marvellous place, a playground to be explored. There are mysteries to be overturned and experiences to be had by those brave enough to have them. The majority of us are quite content to simply move from one day to the next without really pushing the boundaries of what the world means, without testing the limits of what it means to be alive, and for most of us, that’s just fine.

Life can be spectacular even whilst firmly and comfortably stuck in a snug and safe little rut and, if I’m being honest, I feel that I fit into the 99% of people that this analogy applies to and I am fine with this. That is, until a lazily named product forces me to question the very nature of reality. Until a lazily named product forces me to stare blindly into the blinding light of the real world in its purest form, without the rose tinted glasses of life to mask the matter of fact quality of the world. It is lazily named products that force us to confront our own mortality.

Take for example the windshield. I almost crashed my car the day I was overwhelmed by how literally it had been named. It’s a shield, for wind. Imagine how much wind would blow in your face if you didn’t have one. This realisation nearly cost me my life.

Then there’s the calculator. It’s called a calculator because it calculates. Uninspired to say the least.

My favourite is the humble washing machine. I have long held a theory that the makers of the washing machine must have been at a conference, ready to unveil their invention to the world when one of them piped up with something along the lines of “Shit, what are we calling this again? Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue, it was really catchy wasn’t it. Wait, what do you mean I’m on in thirty seconds? Guys? Help me out here? Guy’s, what were we calling this thing again? Guys? GUYS!?”

And lo, the most uninventive name for a product ever was born.

Session IPA by Brouwerij Kees comes in a close second. I mean, “Session IPA”? They might as well have called it “Beer”, (or rather, HOPPY Beer if I was being ever so slightly critical of the balance of hops in this). Like, who came up with that title? Were they proud of that? Was that literally the best the marketing team at Brouwerij could come up with? How much do these people get paid to come up with names like that?

I mean, fair play to them, nobody is going to be taken off guard by the contents of the bottle when they crack this open and take their first drink and acknowledge that yes, this is a session IPA isn’t it? But in all seriousness, are we not at least a little better than this? Don’t we deserve some pageantry,  some mystique in names of the products we consume?

This beer literally does what it says on the bottle. It is a session IPA, and that is apparently all we need to know.

Day 06: Mandarina Lager by the Maule Brewing Co. Hold its hand and waltz down memory lane…

How good were the 90s though? Like seriously, if you think back to the 90s, what bad can you think of? Mad cow disease admittedly was a bit of a rough spot, as was the gulf war, but overall, how good were the 90s?

If I was asked to summarise the 90s in no more than three memories (although I’m not sure why anyone would ever ask me to do so) I would provide the following list.

1: Breaking my wrist and getting a week off school. It didn’t even hurt and I got a Harry Potter book from my Mam so I’m going to put this in the “good memories” pile.

2: Planting my first kiss on a girl in my class with such elegance that I got a bust lip and she got a bloody nose.

3: The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and the resulting fashion trends.

You look me in the eye and you tell me this bottle doesn’t look like one of the Fresh Prince’s tracksuits, I dare you. In fact, if you were alive in the 90s and you were a lad of a certain age, you owned clothes with this colour scheme on them didn’t you? Take your time, think back to around the time of your tenth birthday. You never really liked getting clothes for your birthday because, well, what boy did? But when you unwrapped a two piece tracksuit in this pattern under the wide eyed expectant gaze of your mother, you knew this was a special garment.

This, you knew, was a tracksuit worthy of your junior school disco.

This, you knew, was a tracksuit that you could wear to your mate’s birthday party that consisted of a trip to McDonald’s with you and another friend and that was it.

I’m almost 90% certain that I owned a tracksuit with this exact pattern emblazoned across the front. It was either on a tracksuit or on one of my skateboards. Either way I think we can agree the 90s were a colourful if not nauseating time for those of us blessed with vision.

Mandarina Lager is very much reflective of my time in the 90s. For a start it’s the first straight lager to appear from the Honestbrew advent calendar and as a boy who has just turned 14 by the time the millenium rolled around I was beginning to experiment with lager in larger and larger quantities. Also, I’m not entirely sure this is possible, but Mandarina seems to taste like how I imagine the 90s would taste, if you know, it was a liquid and not an arbitrary measure of time.

This beer is fresh and exciting. Each mouthful is like a light and sunny day, the sort that seemed to last forever in the middle of endless summer holidays. It’s bright and happy and most importantly its simple. There’s a real sense of no nonsense fun here and this is well worth a go if you get the chance.

 

Day 05: Five Points XPA by The Five Points Brewing Company – London in a can

Day five gives forth to Five Points XPA by The Five Points Brewing Company and I have to say, it stirs up some mixed emotions within me. FPXPA you see, is a perfect metaphor for my nation’s capital, a place I have yet to make peace with. It looks great, it looks really great, but inside it’s actually quite bitter, and in my experience, so is London.

I try to stay away from London, which is a statement that usually polarises opinions to those I pose it to. I make a yearly pilgrimage to the capital to watch an NFL game, but besides that, I try to steer clear. To me it has always seemed beyond uninhabitable.

My first experience with London was aged fifteen, when my Dad took my brother and I to see a band. The show was fine, nothing special, and afterwords we made our way to a taxi rank to arrange transport back to our hotel.

My Dad spotted a lone taxi, went up and very politely asked “Are you free?”. The driver, without hesitation and with an alarming level of bile in his voice snapped “DO I LOOK FACKING FREE!?” before going back to staring out of his windshield at the empty street in front of him, his engine and his time both idling away gently. If that is not a man that looks free, then I don’t know what is. Why he was so outraged I feel I will never know.

The next time I went to the capital was almost a decade later with some friends. As we exited a tube several yuppies in what looked to be their early to mid thirties with identical haircuts marched over and demanded we sell them drugs.

Now, I feel should make this clear. I am not a drug dealer, and if I was I certainly would not be taking orders from a group of young men that look like they were the first lot to be booted from The Apprentice after failing miserably to set up a cheese stall in the middle of Camden Market. When I told them I was not a drug dealer and therefore would not be able to meet their demands they became aggressive towards me, as if not being a drug dealer is a point of ridicule in this day and age.

Every time I have visited the capital, one of the city’s inhabitants has marred the visit, making it hard for me to really form any meaningful sense of pride in the place that surely should be all Briton’s cultural home.

Drinking Five Points XPA is a very similar experience to a visit to London for me. It is exciting to look at. The beer itself looks downright beautiful, a lovely golden yellow with a startlingly white head that holds all the way to the bottom of the glass. A range of exotic aromas hit your senses upon first exposure which only serves to further the sense of excitement, however upon first taste it is incredibly bitter, it is bitter to its core. The fact that the can announced that FPXPA has been dry hopped with Citra and Galaxy hops should have probably been a good indication of how unforgiving this beer was going to be, but just as I do every year as I book my tickets to Wembley Stadium, I choose to ignore my own past experiences and dive in head first with a grin on my stupid face.

In all honesty though, the further into it I have gone, the more I have enjoyed this extra pale ale and as much as it pains me to admit it, this is usually what happens when I visit the big smoke. Once I manage to pick my jaw up off the floor after paying nearly six quid for a pint of bud light, I actually enjoy the whole experience. The hustle and bustle of a million different people trying to stake their claim in the city, the arid atmosphere of the underground, the dizzying height of the architecture and the grimy underbelly of the streets below. It’s certainly not something that I would want to experience on a frequent basis, but it is alright in small doses. I’ll leave it up to you work out whether I’m talking about the beer or the city…

 

Day 04: Equinox by Metalman Brewing Co and the bossiest can in the world

Day four of the Honestbrew beer advent calendar brings with it self proclaimed “Sunshine in a can”, which I can sort of understand given the lovely bright label design and the golden light beer within. I can’t however, quite shake the feeling that this description is a bit overly cheery and that really Equinox’s shiny yellow-chrome exterior is hiding more than just a juicy wheat beer inside.

I think they’re hiding a bully. A bully in a can.

All the evidence is there if you just take the time to look. The instructions on the side of the can range from being fairly polite (“Please keep me in the fridge if possible”) to slightly pushier (“The fresher I am, the better I taste, so don’t keep me in there too long” as if the beer was going to develop some sort of patina if not consumed in a quick and timely manner), to sounding quite like a 1950s gangster, donned head to toe in pinstripe, his gut protruding over an overly tight belt and a corpse decaying under the concrete on his building site.

After the can explains that “Like most wheat beers [Equinox] will have a slight haze to it” we are firmly encouraged that Metalman Brewing Co “recommend you don’t worry about it, and get on with enjoying the beer”.

Steady on Metalman Brewing Co! I will do, in my own time! If I want to worry about haze then I will do! I feel like when they were typing up these firmly worded instructions for enjoyment, the good people at the Metal Man Brewing Co had a long discussion about whether to use the word wise guy or not. I can quite easily imagine them debating whether or not to include a threat on the can that anyone not found enjoying the beer will take a long walk off a short bridge, followed by a snappy “capisce?” Once you start to examine the slightly 1940/50s Americana design the signs really start to come together. Equinox wants you to know that it is the most gangster beer you are ever likely to encounter.

Taste-wise it’s about as moreish as the next Wheat Lager. Healthy doses of citrus fruits and a cheeky hint of coriander create a pleasant flavour that seems out of place in the cold harsh depths of winter and better suited for consumption around a summer BBQ. If I can get my hands on it again I feel that I would enjoy it more in the great outdoors when I am not full of cold, but this was nice none-the-less, even if it was a little pushy.

 

Day 03: Illusion by The Moor Beer Company and what it can tell us about gender.

It’s 2017 and the concept of gender has never been so hotly debated in any time in history more than it has now. Transgenderism, gender fluidity and all the none binary stops on the gender spectrum are now at least acknowledged if not totally understood by most young people in our society.

But for many, including myself, there is still a lot of value put into traditional gender roles and, as a young man of thirty, I still place a lot of importance on my own masculinity. Sue me, right?

This is however, why I have never drank a Black IPA.

I have been to my fair share of trendy bars and micropubs that stock a wide variety of ales, and I have never been able to shake the feeling that the bar tender is secretly judging my every reaction to the ale I have ordered. They just have this look when I order a porter or a DIPA that seems to ask Are you sure that’s your kind of beer, son? And then they watch.

I sip, I nod, he knows I’m man enough to handle it and he goes back to bar tending.

Black IPAs however have always seemed just out of reach for me. Imagine the shame of taking a sip under the watchful eye of a barman with decades of hard drinking under his size XL belt, only to recoil at the strong flavour punch of a black IPA. I’d be laughed out of the pub, out of the town, out of manhood in its entirety.

Day three of my Honestbrew beer advent calendar offered me the chance to try one in the safety of my own home away from watchful eyes and I am incredibly glad that they did.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. There’s a roasted, almost burned flavour that hits first which did cause some recoil, however this is instantly followed up by an overwhelming curiosity to take another drink. This is extraordinary. The Moor Beer Company (whose tagline is “Drink Moor beer” by the way, which is all kinds of clever) have made this from such hard to source ingredients that Illusion is on a very limited run and so I urge you to try it before its gone.

It’s at the same time woody and dry hopped, dark and roasted and bitter and stylish. If you ever needed a beer to confirm your place on the masculinity spectrum then this is the one for you as it quickly and efficiently separates the men from the boys. I feel like this one would be an acquired taste for most, however I also feel that the taste would be quickly acquired by those who are willing to give it a go.

Day 02: Buxton Spa by the Buxton Brewery and judging books by their hometown’s name

“You haven’t mate” he scoffs and you feel your blood start to boil.

“No, I really think I might have been, I’m sure that me and-”

“Mate, you haven’t been to Buxton” he says, smirking and raising an eyebrow in such a way as to make you feel like you could quite happily snap his neck with little to no remorse whatsoever.

You’re flustered. You puff your chest out and you swallow down the overbearing urge to resort to childish name calling and you say “and how exactly would you know that? How can you be so sure that I’ve never been?”

He smirks again. It’s the same smirk that kids do when they know they’re getting to you, when they sense the tears building up behind your steely but faltering gaze, when they can see you are but seconds away from running to your mother, bawling, your arms flung wide open and your feelings hurt. He smirks in that way and you grind your teeth hard.

“Because if you’d been to Buxton, you would remember it mate” and with that he slams the door to his dorm room and the sound of 90’s trance invades your room from his and you don’t speak again until the end of third year when you bump into him and his girlfriend at a house party and even then it’s only because it would be more awkward to not speak to him than speak to him and you spend the entirety of that party silently hating him and wishing him dead.

You do eventually go to Buxton once you’re through with Uni and when you get there you secretly admit that he was right. Buxton is beautiful and you would never forget a visit to a place like this, but the whole day you can’t enjoy the trip because you all you do is picture his smirk the whole time you are there. On the way home your wife asks you if you’re okay as your kid sleeps in his booster seat in the back, and you lie to her and tell her “yes” because it’s easier than explaining the whole sordid tale to her about why you seemed distant all day.

In reality I have never been to Buxton and the story above is a work of fiction inspired only by how downright posh the name “Buxton Spa” is. It sounds like the first name of one of Peirs Morgan’s sons to me. In reality I have only “Buxton Spa” as a sole reference point for Buxton and it’s people and if that is anything to go by then the only thing I can confirm about them is that they like their hops in Buxton. Like, they really like their hops. Buxton Spa was described as “Hop Tea” by another beer reviewer and I have to be honest, that is fairly accurate. It is not by any means unpleasant and if that’s your thing then you’ll like this. Luckily, hops are very much my thing.

This is  more than pleasant to drink once you get past the first wallop of Citra Hops which did initially take me off guard. It looks pretty in the glass, the label is nice and at 4.1% there’s no overbearingly strong alcohol taste.

 

Day 01: Keller Pils by Lost and Grounded and the questions it raises about flight

When I woke up this morning I found myself almost instantly grappling with what would turn out to be the big question of the day. Should I wait until my wife wakes up so she can watch me open my calendar?

I thought about it hard, I really did, but then I came to two conclusions. The first was that if I were to wait for her to wake up, how would I ask her to watch me open my beer calendar? Say it with me, out loud, right now. “Do you want to watch me open my beer calendar?” It just sounds like an odd thing to say out loud doesn’t it? Out loud this sentence sounds almost like a perverse request. My first conclusion of the day was that asking someone to watch you open an advent calendar they have no stake in is an odd thing to do.

The second conclusion I came to fairly quickly after the first was that I am not odd enough to ask that question.

Long story short; I opened it by myself in the wee hours of this morning and found the first bottle Honestbrew have deemed calendar worthy is Keller Pils by Lost and Grounded, a fairly bitter lager beer at 4.8%.

The beer itself is alright, I read another review online that said it tasted “buttery” and can confirm that this person is completely off their nut. It does not taste like butter. At all. It tastes like beer with quite a bitter hop aroma, but I like that so I don’t mind at all.

The real draw of this lager beer for me comes from the frankly haunting design on the label. On first glance it looks quite serene, almost pleasant. A happy little boat bobbing along in a lake in a valley. The sky is blue, time has rolled to a gentle stop, all is right with the world. That is, until you look a little closer.

That’s a hippo in the boat.

Why would a hippo need a boat? They are for the most part, aquatic mammals, used to being submerged in water. I don’t think I would be wrong in describing hippopotami as “buoyant”. So why is this one in a boat?

Secondly, this guy has wings. Not only is he in a boat, but he also has wings. This means that either he is capable of flight and therefore can traverse this particular body of water much faster than if he were to row across it, or it means that he has somehow evolved wings that are useless to him, rendering his flight capabilities so impotent that rowing across a lake is a faster alternative form of travel. I’m inclined to believe he can fly as his friend seems to be doing just fine directly above him but then, like I said, I am left with the question, what in Christ’s name is he doing in a boat?

All in all this is beer that doesn’t taste like butter and that does taste like hops.

 

Good Beer and Glad Tidings!

Ah Christmas, arguably the best holiday season that there is. It’s the one time of year where its completely acceptable to me to be materialistic and to take in more calories over the space of a month and a half than I have done for the other ten and a half months combined and I feel that nobody can judge me. Why? Because it’s Christmas!

Who cares if I gain a stone between the end of November to the bleary eyed sobriety that is the first few days of January? I’m not fat, I’m festive! Who cares if I spend months pouring over Amazon, carefully adding everything I have ever coveted to a wishlist so that my family and friends can spend their hard earned cash, money they literally spend portions of their lives working for so that they can buy me things I cannot recall when colleagues ask me what I got for Christmas when I shuffle back into work in the new year? I’m not greedy, I’m festive! Who cares if I hit the January sales hard, spending more on myself than I have the rest of my family and friends combined? I’m not ungrateful, I’m festive!

In the spirit of being festive this year I bought myself the Honestbrew Advent Calendar. An impressive collection of 24 craft beers in 19 different styles for a mere £65 which, yes actually, I do feel is reasonably priced for an advent calendar. Merry Christmas to me, right? I’m going to be writing about each beer right here in this blog and while reading about beer is nowhere near as much fun as drinking it, I hope you’ll join me in the (hopefully tipsy) lead up to Christmas!