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.