The day I cut up my CAMRA membership...

Today was a day of hard choices. As a consequence most of my favourite beer glasses were relegated to the orange Hammersmith and Fulham recycling sack and my wallet was reverted to its former Australian self. Out with the National Insurance card, various HSBC debit and credit cards and my Fuller's fine ale club and CAMRA card, and in with my Medicare and St George bank cards.
It was fitting then that I disposed of these cards responsibly so weird beards could pass themselves off as me if they found my CAMRA membership. That is why I cut the membership card up into six pieces and disposed of them in five different garbage bins along Shepherds Bush Road. I guess I am still a member until my subscription expires, but it's of no use to me once I get back home.
As this is my last night in the UK, the missus and I ventured out for a last supper at one of London's best gastro pubs - The Havelock Tavern.
As I have mentioned previously this pub has a good selection of beer and decent food. It also happens to have a celebrity landlord in Lawrence Dellaglio. I do find it odd though that he has plastered his name all over the pint glasses..... see the pic below. For those foodies out there I had the steak & chips with bearnaise sauce and token leaves of rocket. I washed it down with a well kept pint of Pride and a tasty pint of Doom Bar. The missus had a goats cheese salad and a lemon lime and bitters. I won as hers was pretty dull, and I had the superior food beverage pairing.

Anyhow this is the final post I will be writing from the UK (unless I get bored in Heathrow Terminal 4 tomorrow). I'm spending the next week in Thailand getting the summer that the UK didn't experience. I may post from there but don't hold your breath. The good news is that I will be back on board after August 3rd. Till then take total care.

A bit of catch up

Life has been hectic lately and my regular lunchtime posts have become ever more irregular. Luckily, today is ticker Tuesday so I can eliminate my backlog in pretty much one bludgeoning swoop. To keep it interesting I won't go on about my pub binges with Peter and Co. at The Gunmakers, or my adventures at The Parr's Head and The Havelock- they were standard pissup affairs.

Interesting beers;

Thornbridge Halcyon (7.7% abv) - this hop monster IPA uses fresh green hops as opposed to dried stable hops. Judging by the hop haze this beer had, I will assume there were a lot of hops added as well. I won't go into too many details, but Darren over at Blog o'Beer posted some good stuff here.

Dorothy Goodbody's Golden Ale (4.2% abv) - This gem from the Wye Valley Brewery has a strong wheat malt taste which I don't really appreciate. It's an easy quaffing beer though and I have a bottle of the stout at home still to get through which should be more to my taste.

Casablanca Premium Lager Beer (5.0% abv) - The wife and I met up with some friends in Kew and went to a new Moroccan restaurant (Tangine) that has just set up shop. It was a warm day and I had worked through a couple of pints of Staropramen and a summer ale from Hog's Back before getting into this beer. It's your standard malty premium lager affair and probably the tastiest alcoholic beverage to come out of Morocco. The food was pretty good too. I had the lamb shank.

Sam Smith's Pure Brewed Lager (5% abv) - One of the best lagers brewed in the UK. This beer really suits the the warmer weather and went down a treat. I should drink this more when I visit Sam Smith's pubs. I have suffered with and been let down by Old Brewery Bitter for way too long, and I usually opt for Alpine Lager in the lager stakes. Could this be the most under-rated beer in Britain?

Ben Nevis Organic 80/- (4% abv) - A beer I really enjoyed.... malty and full of melanoids with minimal hopping this beer went down a treat. I am not really that big a fan of 80/- beers in general, but like any beer style when you get a good interpretation of the style you get a good beer. Anyhow, it's brewed by Bridge of Allan Brewery somewhere in Scotland.

Well that sums up the most interesting beers from the last week. Instead of the usual Nokia quality photography, I have offered you the reader a nice collage for the first time ever. I also went to Krakow over the bank holiday weekend so I guess I will be ramming the virtues of Polish beer down your neck for the remainder of the week!

I am also running a poll and I would like to solicit your opinions.

In Defense of the Keg

Much debate has been raging lately over the provenance of carbon dioxide. It seems that some CAMRA brain washing tactics have worked and a significant number of members believe that only beer which comes from a natural secondary fermentation produces good beer. Those of you have read this far will probably realise that this is pure horse shit and good beer can be served from a cask with a blanketing aspirator/breather or from a pressurised keg.

The case in point I will be making is Meantime Pale Ale (4.7% abv). On Saturday evening after our mission to North Greenwich, the wife and I had planned to have a Belgian dinner at The Dovetail and then pop into a 30th birthday party being held in a nearby pub. Due to elephantitis like swelling in my wife's ankle we ended up staying closer to home and I piggy backed the missus round the corner to The Havelock. The Havelock is a nice little gastropub owned by Lawrence Dallaglio that also happens to serve good beer (it is a pub after all). The pub has 4 cask ales on, and has 8 keg beers including Meantime Pale Ale. From my seated position at the bar, I noticed an alarming trend. For each pint of real ale that was dispensed, 4 pints of the kegged Meantime product was sold. Actually the Meantime beer was far outselling anything else in the pub. I ordered a pint and found it to be similar in carbonation to cask ale, but tasted incredibly fresh with brilliant hop aroma. So is this beer shit just because it's not naturally carbonated? The customers voting with their wallets certainly didn't think so. After my pint of Pale Ale, I opted for a pint of Sam Brooke's Wandle which is a cask conditioned best bitter. This beer was incredibly bland after the Meantime beer and when I commented about this to the barman he agreed and replied that it was a freshly plumbed cask as well.

The point I am trying to make is that just because a beer is not cask conditioned does not make it rubbish. Sure a lot of the mass produced mega lager is not the most flavourful of products, but then a lot of cask conditioned beer is pretty ordinary too (btw, I'll name a few poor cask conditioned ales if asked). I think we as consumers should be open minded and not be so troubled by the provenance of carbon dioxide which CAMRA seems so fixated on. Great keg beers do exist and examples from Meantime and Lovibond's Brewery are clearly paving the way for a new generation of keg products. So taking a leap out of Wychwood's marketing - What are you so afraid of beardy wierdy man?