Five Italian Beers Of Note

Blog has been quiet. Have been snooping around central Italy, trying beers. Here is my record:

Birra Moretti

Let’s get this one out of the way.  This beer is everywhere in Italy. You cannot ignore it. From the obscured osteria behind a hilltop church, to the Florentine cathedral-front sandwich sellers, this beer is as common as the roadside Madonna.

Big Brewers: Crafty or Menacing?

The ever-on-the-money Boak and Bailey posted today about an opportunity for craft brewers as the bigger breweries come marching onto their territory.

There is definitely something to it. As larger breweries latch on to some of the more popular aspects of craft beer (relentless dry-hopping, for example), craft brewers themselves could be focusing their efforts on less scalable yet equally interesting techniques. The B&B post mentions experimenting with different yeast strains or less widely known styles such as saison. Stone, Victory and Dogfish Head work together in the States to get this idea right. They collaborate on just such a beer. They made a video about it, in which they state explicitly that their recipe cannot be scaled up for the larger breweries.

But all this made me think.

wassssuuuupppp

When the support act steals a show...

Last week, I went for a drink after work. I met a friend and we went to the Craft Beer Co. in Farringdon to see what beers they had on. I had seen something that day about them having Dark Star's Revelation. Now, this was a well-conceived beer. The brewery had won the hearts of British beer fans in the early '00s with the American Pale Ale. What we had here was to be a kind of APA (Director's Cut).

For me, however, Revelation was not the star of the show. It was an excellent beer, make no mistake: It was the exact taste I had been looking for when I arrived that night. There was freshly cut grass in the distance, behind a wall of turquoise citrus - that american-style festival of hop that so many of us this side of the pond have come to know and love.

The only problem was that another beer had taken me by surprise.

Hopping Hare

A quick note this morning about another fantastic British beer I tried last night. Not from some hip pop-up nano-brewery in East London - but from supermarket stalwarts Badger. I've been disappointed with some other mainstream beers oriented around English hops, but this one - Hopping Hare - is well worth a try.

Three Kinds of Heavy

Black Sabbath

Black Sabbath

Vertigo, 1970

Le Noise

Neil Young

Reprise, 2010

Moxxy

Troyka

Edition, 2012

I love the London Jazz scene, but there really is more to it than the seemingly unbroken string of four-star reviews it seems to have notched up in its very own section of the Guardian. Sure, this music can be difficult. And if anyone covers that well, it's the Guardian. But while these players are completely dedicated to the cause, it is so important to remember that they are not in a world of their own. I have stayed up with some of these players until early hours of the morning listening to Bowie, to the Blues Brothers - I have seen them swap Bach scores and live Led Zeppelin DVDs: They were not raised in a bell-jar of Jazz. To listen to them as such - if that were even possible - would be an awful waste.

Pale Rider

Tonight, I dropped by a local of mine to catch up with a friend. The Barnsbury has a great selection of cask ales, and had a few there that I had never seen before. I was initially amused by one beer's claim that it had been CAMRA's champion beer of 2004. I mean, guys. 2004. It was up against the great Purity Mad Goose and a slightly tribal-looking pump promising New Zealand hops. The beer in question was Kelham Island Brewery's Pale Rider.

Mainly, we were too distracted - along with the rest of the pub - by the final ten minutes of the Italy Germany match. In particular, to the supreme efforts of the German goalie who drew applause while making his way up the field as if to attempt some Schmeichelian miracle. It wasn't until a short while after that it hit me: This was a very good beer. There was a real pineapple tang, and the beer had body enough to back it up. No unnecessary bitterness, no jarring aroma. Despite the dated credentials, this beer is perhaps the most imaginative English ale I have tasted in a long time.

Einstök Toasted Porter

A few days ago I was having a regular catch up with an old uni friend at the Rake in Borough Market. We had warmed up with a draft of IPA, and were ready to select our second drink of the evening. Obvious first port of call: to consult the guy in the Oakley glasses. My friend is into dark beers, so Oakley points us to the Anchor Bock Beer tap. The first taste was a little sweeter than we expected, but it was interesting enough that we went for a half. To go alongside it we asked for something just as dark, less sweet, and perhaps a little smokey.

"Ah," said Oakley, his finger now in the air. "I have just the thing."