BEERS #2 - Beyond the Pale

[Abnormal Palm]

Tynt Meadow (B-/C/C-)

An interesting attempt at the Trappist style. It's very clovey and liquoricey, 'erbal. It really really reminds me of a nice version of the the disgusting 'jing jiu' 'health wine' tonic you can get in China, a foul concoction that's meant to give you a bone on for days and sort out your organs cunted up by gutter oil. As it opened up, it got a bit sweeter and maltier and almost datey, kind of a burnt treacley bittersweet note but always coming back to 'erbal. Not much of a head on it at all, no lacing fwiw, seemed only a touch off flat. I like a bit more carbonation than this, I think it would have livened up the dark flavours a touch. Interesting, though, and very deep, just not particularly to my taste.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Interesting to read about the flatness. I never really noticed that. Some dark beers just get away with it, I suppose. I would recommend giving it another go some time though. Might not be the same for you, but I like it more now than I did my first one.

I'm not sure exactly how CAMRA discounts work. When I was a member it seemed to me to be something of an own goal. When I drunk in the peaks the old guys would come in and ask for their CAMRA discount, without fail. Presumably it's a gimmick intended to attract new members, but if you're already a member and you're already converted then maybe just pay the paltry price of a real ale pint. Something else they got wrong in that interview, thinking that the next generation of niche drinkers would be interested in penny-pinching . Can't afford a fucking house thanks guys so I'll sure as hell not scrimp on something I can enjoy

I notice from the people I follow on my bar guide twitter account this gripe comes up a lot! CAMRA vouchers at Wetherspoons etc, is all seen to be moving real ale further away from tempting a new audience to clinging on to an aging (and dying) penny pinching fuddy duddy one. The most perverse is that the vouchers are handed out to middle aged middle class people who don't need them, meanwhile many young people who are on the fringes of debt problems would probably even refuse them if you gave them some, on account of their association with miserliness.

They also claim that CAMRA's schemes stop real ale being the 'premium product' it ought to be (even Roger Protz uses this term to refer to real ale). I don't agree with that though. I think handpulled cask ale should be, and to an extent is a product for the masses, and even then only refers to a method of storage and delivery. Cask ale comes in a lot of guises these days. Cask ale is primarily about volume, mass drinking and mass consumption, none of which is a problem in my eyes or a necessary reducer of quality. Making it 'premium' isn't going to happen because it will just go off. So while I think CAMRA continually shoot themselves in the foot and are dangerously too close to Tim Martin's fuckup operations, the core idea it is set up to preserve, hand pulled/gravity poured ale is a noble pursuit. It's an utter quirk and if we don't look after it in the UK then it will become so obscure as to be virtually extinct.

[Abnormal Palm]

Interesting to read about the flatness. I never really noticed that. Some dark beers just get away with it, I suppose. I would recommend giving it another go some time though. Might not be the same for you, but I like it more now than I did my first one.

I got a few so I'll definitely be keen to go back and see how I find it. I was definitely expecting something more like a slightly crap Barnardo 12 but it's much more distinctive than that. I think it just took me a good half hour to get to what it is. The 'jing jiu' medicinal clovey note was initially pretty off-putting, as well, because that's a taste I associate with being existentially hungover and nauseated to the point of despair. Once the date and treacle started coming through, it was much more appealing. Definitely a good rec even if it's not necessarily a regular buy for me.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

It's definitely got a noticeably English character along with the clear Belgian similarities. The treacley/date notes are typical of English strong special ales, but then it's got a level of refinement and smoothness they don't have and most strong dark Belgian ales do have. There are lots of rich dark ales but I don't think there are too many beers quite like it.

Imagine if it was craft brewed and called Hey I Just Date Chew and This Is Treacley and had a skeleton drowning in a sea of piss on the can. I'd want to absolutely condemn it to hell.

[Jerzy Bondov]

If any of you work for the NHS 50% at ABC and 25% off at CloudWater

Cheers for this. The Cloudwater one also extends to key workers so I've told my teacher wife she now likes beer and got a box on its way. Helles, Light Lager, and the Pale Ale. You don't get the discount on the guest beers but I also ordered a can from Boundary who have some of the worst craft beer names I've ever seen. This one is a dark lager called Your Joke Is Factually Incorrect. Can't get enough dark lager though.

I want to train my tastebuds to like sour beer. Maybe I've just never had a good one but it invariably tastes strongly of acid reflux.

[holyzombiejesus]

Just looked on the Cloudwater site and saw this...

Chinook was introduced to the world in 1985, the same year that Phil Collins debuted one of his finest drum intros into an incredible song that topped out at No 1.

*does wanker sign*

[Abnormal Palm]

It's definitely got a noticeably English character along with the clear Belgian similarities. The treacley/date notes are typical of English strong special ales, but then it's got a level of refinement and smoothness they don't have and most strong dark Belgian ales do have. There are lots of rich dark ales but I don't think there are too many beers quite like it.

Yeah, I agree with all this. A genuinely unusual beer considering how familiar its touchstones are to me. And yep, I can actually imagine that can, but I laughed.

[Cuellar]

Tynt Meadow (B-/C/C-)

An interesting attempt at the Trappist style. It's very clovey and liquoricey, 'erbal. It really really reminds me of a nice version of the the disgusting 'jing jiu' 'health wine' tonic you can get in China, a foul concoction that's meant to give you a bone on for days and sort out your organs cunted up by gutter oil. As it opened up, it got a bit sweeter and maltier and almost datey, kind of a burnt treacley bittersweet note but always coming back to 'erbal. Not much of a head on it at all, no lacing fwiw, seemed only a touch off flat. I like a bit more carbonation than this, I think it would have livened up the dark flavours a touch. Interesting, though, and very deep, just not particularly to my taste.

Yeah ditto. Was very interested in it but it didn't really do much for me when I actually tried it.

[Abnormal Palm]

Yeah, I am curious what a second and third bottle will bring, though.

OK, another noob question. Seems like all the beer review sites are like 95% Yank beers in the top 100. Is that just availability and website demographics plus usual Yank-centric pig ignorance or are the cunners actually making some drinkable piss? I just assume the toothless hicks and handlebar hipster cunts can kill themselves for what their piss is worth, but I'm open minded to their cretinous brews if they're any good.

Any recommendations for top tier Yankee piss?

[Jerzy Bondov]

Bud Light. Great drop, eminently crushable.

[phes]

Yeah, I am curious what a second and third bottle will bring, though.

OK, another noob question. Seems like all the beer review sites are like 95% Yank beers in the top 100. Is that just availability and website demographics plus usual Yank-centric pig ignorance or are the cunners actually making some drinkable piss? I just assume the toothless hicks and handlebar hipster cunts can kill themselves for what their piss is worth, but I'm open minded to their cretinous brews if they're any good.

Any recommendations for top tier Yankee piss?

Think it's mainly brute force. Not sure of the equation, but the fewer ratings a beer has the more the rating is weighted  towards the most moderate end of the range. As the beer is reviewed more and more it gets closer to the mean. So a lesser known beer held in the same regard as a well known beer will in theory score lower. Doesn't work that way of course because you have availability driving scores in weird ways. With rare beers getting high ratings because of exclusivity but also very average beers getting high ratings simply because that's what is exported to large foreign markets.

I try to not pay much attention to ratebeer. I think tt can be helpful for weeding out bad beers as more often than not when I've had one the score has reflected that. But the truly great beers are lost in a sea of average beers that happen to be a trendy style or location

[Ferris]

Yeah, I am curious what a second and third bottle will bring, though.

OK, another noob question. Seems like all the beer review sites are like 95% Yank beers in the top 100. Is that just availability and website demographics plus usual Yank-centric pig ignorance or are the cunners actually making some drinkable piss? I just assume the toothless hicks and handlebar hipster cunts can kill themselves for what their piss is worth, but I'm open minded to their cretinous brews if they're any good.

Any recommendations for top tier Yankee piss?

Any non-IPA style by Stones brewery is a safe bet, their stouts are excellent. West coast IPAs by Dogfish head are world class. Not sure what else you'd see over there, those are pretty big craft breweries so you'd probably see a few of their beers floating about. I like the Anchor steam ales as well.

The selection in Canada is weirdly feudal due to our stupid laws so we don't get a lot of American beer up here. It is basically all made in-province or from large macro breweries, so I bet US-based posters would have a better idea than me.

[phes]

Pretty sure dogfishhead were subject to a buyout in the last year or two.

Lost Abbey makes some great beers but it would not be cheap and many would question why buy Belgian style beers from the US. They are great though. And their sister brewery Port Brewing is fantastic for heavily hopped beer  and my go-to treat for refreshing, west-coast IPA.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

I only occasionally refer to Ratebeer but Untappd has a similar problem. Certain beer styles score significantly higher than others, though for a number of reasons which make the scoring system less useful than it ought to be.

Why does a run of the mill US pale ale (I'm choosing as this example Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, 3.64) score significantly higher than one of the best lagers of its style (Pilsner Urquell 3.35)?

It's likely the following is behind it:

- Untappd and its membership is US centric, craft beer/craft scene centric (so disproportionately used by hop heads, pales, porters and sours fans who visit bottleshops and craft beer bars). So it isn't just comparing apples with oranges. Fewer people using Untappd rate lager versus the global population.
- Pilsner Urquell reaches a truly mass audience unlike Sierra Nevada (which is still big but nowhere near PU), who use different parameters when rating a beer.
- Consistency. Draft Pilsner Urquell is frequently not looked after very well, and only until recently the cans and bottled stuff tasted noticeably worse than the best tapped stuff. US pale ale has the advantage of being consistent on keg/can/bottle.
- It's skewed by fanboys. Any fashionable brewery gets a boost. Compare the ratings of poor/bang average UK craft brewery attempts at lager or English bitter, then compare with the equivalents from unfashionable breweries. To use a particularly perverse example, Camden Pils (a beer surely not even Camden staff think is anything special, scores 0.01 higher than Uneticke 12, which is the pilsner people in Prague drink if they can get hold of it anywhere and probably among the best lagers I've had.

[Abnormal Palm]

Thanks for all the replies here re: Yank piss, some of which is what I'd suspected and much of which is illuminating. I'll definitely check some of the Stone stuff out, seems available and very good.

This evening, I've had the St Bernardus 6 Pater for the first time and it was a little bit...forgettable, unfortunately. Nothing really to report. Obviously it's at the bottom end of the sliding scale but doesn't compare to the Wit, the Tripel or the 12. I wouldn't get it again. I've got a Prior 8 for another evening, heard that's a step up.

Now sipping on another Tynt Meadow and while I'm still not desperately enthusiastic about it, it is something I'd recommend to anyone. I can well imagine it being somebody's absolute favourite because it's so distinctive. I respect that. It's just got such an oddly medicinal floor, almost like the most savoury, tangy note of a black olive. The dark fruit which first springs off that is very moreish but there's not quite enough of it for me, it's very quickly into the burnt notes of treacle rather than the rich sweetness. The finish is long and bitter and earthy, and not especially pleasant. With a beef, stilton and mustard sandwich, it's a powerful combo and the bitterness and savoury malt brings some balance but on its own, it's not massively appealing.

[phes]

I can't fathom consuming all these drinks with full-bodied, complex and enduring flavour profiles in this warm, sunny weather. I guess i'm a basic twat but weather has always had a fair impact on what i want to drink. Really enjoyed the Pilsner and even the Geuze last week, but struggled with the Picantus and Westmalle.

[Abnormal Palm]

That's just how I do.

Also, my house is is like a fuckin fridge even in this weather, except for the top floor which is sauna tier.

I'm on a Leffe Brune as a gentle warm-up. It's...OK. Kind of pointless. A bit of this, bit of that. Nice in a pub, but standard fayre as fuck.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

That's how you'll find most of the brune/Dubbel style then. They are all richly flavoured but also intend to be smoother and steady drinking, not competing with Bernardus 12 or Rochefort 10 exactly.

A toxic piece of gender normative Belgian binary for you, a hoary old notion I have heard, probably apocrypha, but it's that over there the Dubbels are for girls and the Tripels are for boys.

[Abnormal Palm]

Ah, interesting stuff. Cheers. I'll be interested to see how the Barnardo 8 turns out then. One of the most fun things about the last month or so has been dipping into a load of different styles and learning, basically. I've found some absolute belters but I'm way off ordering from the shortlist. Well up for trying a load of different stuff even if I don't buzz off it.

[Abnormal Palm]

Yeah, with further reflection and sipping, very interesting, Shouldsy boy. And I think you're spot on.

Had a Barnardo Prior 8 and Rochefort 8 and both considerably tastier than the Brune but - to my tastes -  not much on the 12 or 10, which are absolute legends. I'll defo try some more dubbels but all of the tripels and quads I've had hit a lot deeper for me. Good to know!

[Abnormal Palm]

Yep, just started a Chimay Blue and it's bloody delicious.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Glad to read it. Chimay Bleu is arguably a rival to to the likes of Rochefort 10 and Bernie Bros 12. Similar strength. It's such a classic.

[ImmaculateClump]

I'm feeling really self conscious about those cans of fosters in my fridge.

Down the sink?

[Ferris]

Glad to read it. Chimay Bleu is arguably a rival to to the likes of Rochefort 10 and Bernie Bros 12. Similar strength. It's such a classic.

*fainting-hillary.gif*

[Abnormal Palm]

I'm feeling really self conscious about those cans of fosters in my fridge.

Down the sink?

Haha. No way man, get the notepad out, bit of chin scratching and start banging on about the essence of the Gold Coast.

[ImmaculateClump]

Yaaay!
I had a feeling it'd have hidden depths, like when you talk about blue nun and wino's go "It's actually not a bad little wine, actually"
I'll slosh some of the old amber nectar/tasteless pisswater into my trough tonight and see if my sledgehammer palate can pick out any breezy high notes.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Note: The ABV for this beer varies between 4% ABV in Europe, 4.9% ABV in Australia, and 5% in the US.

First brewed by William and Ralph Foster in Melbourne in 1888.

With its Australian heritage, Foster's truly embodies the Australian 'no worries' attitude to life. It is an easy-drinking lager that is perfectly balanced with moderate vanilla tasting notes and no hard edges or bitter after taste for perfect refreshment.

The notes I strongly recall from my uni days were flatulence. Stale Fosters gave off this distinctly fartish smell, which on top of its insipid flavour made for a rancid experience.

A surprising quantity of the supposed 'fuck cares gerrit down yer' lagers don't manage to be that easy drinking. Some are served so cold it's almost painful to drink. Some have an unpleasant sting which I suppose is meant to be the 'crisp taste' but without any present flavour. UK and Irish lager excels at this. There are some which genuinely barely resemble beer, but in a noticeably off putting way rather than simply being easy to drink. There are the foul BBQ beer stubbies that taste like a haulier's political views and have so little alcohol or liquid you may as well have just bought a 4 pack of cans.

A lot of their acolytes hold mutually contradictory opinions wherein they are happy to chug all of this noticeably unpleasant beer and defend doing so yet are strongly intolerant of pretty much the rest of the universe of flavours. High quality or otherwise. Class insecurity and peer pressure is tragic.

[Blinder Data]

Tennents is easily the most drinkable piss lager out there. It's basically water. Carling, Fosters, even Carlsberg and Kronenbourg - all rank.

[ImmaculateClump]

I only drink to feel funny, to be honest, and I'd much rather have a bottle of whiskey.
Even then, it's whatever they're selling at the local shop or supermarket.
Having said that, someone got me some of this one christmas and the difference from spending just a couple extra quid is huge, really smooth that stuff - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Buffalo-Trace-Kentucky-Straight-Bourbon/dp/B00CAIZZMI

Sometimes I'll fancy a beer but I don't know what I'm doing at all, to be honest. I just stick to what I know.

I take your point, and wasn't trying to show you all up with my inverted snobbery.
I think my mam did buy some posh smelly beers one christmas and I just threw them down my neck like an eejit. May as well have mixed them all together and stuck a bloody flake in it.

I don't want to be a boorish neanderthal. I'm a man of simple tastes but I'm not proud of it.
Hey, data, I'll give Tennants a go next time, man! That's a step in the right direction.

[phes]

Much prefer Buffalo Trace to JD and Jim Beam etc. I bought it for the occasional old fashioned but after running out of ice I tried it neat with a few drops of water and given a bit of time in the glass it is very drinkable.