They’ve pulled together an impressive amount of cash in a small amount of time on two separate occasions and if they try it again I can see them doing just as well. However, one thing that has been discussed is what you get for your investment. There is the 5% discount in their bars and up to 20% in the online shop, but with Kickstarter, Crowdcube and the like helping people to start up projects all over the world people are starting to get wise to getting something back on their investment. Enter the second BrewDog AGM, stage right.

Annoyingly I missed the first one thanks to snow stopping trains going any further north than the Watford Gap, but I’ve heard tales of Epicness, with interesting beers, interesting people from all over the world and a cracking party. The difficult second AGM was always going to be a challenge, not only because the number of investors had increased from 2000 for the first EFP to over 7000 after the second release of shares, but also because the second round had a cheaper buy-in point, making it much easier for the average drinker to kick in some cash – just the sort of drinkers that would turn up at the AGM.

The storm gathers…(Shortly after taking this picture I went to sleep on the grass in the sun. Yes. In Aberdeen)

So, the plan was made – hire out the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference centre, put on regular buses to the new brewery site (a brewery paid for in part by the funds raised by EFP2), do a couple of beer tastings and business talks, sell beer and merch, have a couple of bars, and get in a bill of seven bands. Basically a beer festival for shareholders, their plus ones and anyone willing to pay £6 to get in (to fill up the place to as close to capacity as possible).

I rolled off the sleeper train at 7:30am and thankfully got an hour’s kip in my hotel, who were very lovely and let me check in and have my room six hours before the official check-in time (The Station Hotel. Right next to the station. As the name suggests). After a quick wander round town I caught a rather full bus to the AECC and on arrival encountered the theme for the day – queueing.

Within 30 minutes of the doors opening there were already quips on Twitter about ‘QueueDog’ and they didn’t let up during most of the day. Having several hundred people turning up at the start and ticking them off a list (ordered by first names) with only a handful of people on the desks meant that it took quite a while to get everyone through the doors. Having another single desk selling beer tokens (the only currency accepted to buy beer) meant that even before you tried to got to the swamped bars you’d already partaken in rather a lot of standing around.

I decided not to bother with the queue to start with and jumped onto one of the first buses going to the new brewery in Ellon, about 20 minutes drive from Aberdeen. It’s on the edge of an industrial estate, rather than the greenfield site envisioned during the original EFP drive, and is in the process of being built. I really like both diggers and breeze blocks, but I didn’t stay long due to a lack of anything apart from diggers, breeze blocks and confused looking builders.

A building site! Yay!

Later in the day, as part of the AGM presentation, Martin Dickie outlined the improvements at the new brewery:

• Massive expansion in production capacity – currently the brewery is tapped out at 25000hL, the new brewery will start at 70000hL but has room for expansion. The current brewery is about 550 sq.m, the new one is 2000 sq.m with extra space available as needed.
• Bigger batch sizes, but enough flexibility to still do smaller batches – current batch size is 50hL, new brewery will allow between 60 and 100hL. Mash size will rise from 1.3T to between 1.5T and 4T.
• More brews per day – up to 8 from 2.
• More automation – allowing more consistency from batch to batch, a common complaint about their beers today. It will also mean they don’t need to shovel out the mash tun by hand, which Martin fears will lead to a fatter production team.
• Higher post conditioning quality control – the new brewery will reduce oxygen contact from tank to packaging, which should help keep quality higher.
• Their own malt mill – allows barley to be bought whole rather than pre-milled, which is cheaper and maintains barley freshness. Also, as they can currently only get milled barley from England it will allow them to buy Scottish instead.
• A four vessel brew system rather than a two vessel – allows more potential for variation in the brew process as well as tweaks to maintain consistency as the raw ingredients change with the seasons.
• Centrifuge rather than filtering – allows removal of sediment without heavy filtering, leaving more flavour compounds. Unfortunately they’ve already broken the machine they were testing – there’s a lot of sediment in hop heavy beer.
• More environmental efficiency – reducing the water/beer ratio from about 7:1 to about 3:1 (and maybe lower) and recycling heat throughout the brew process. It’s not quite the windmills of the original plan, but it’s a good start.

It’s not all plain sailing at the new brewery, though. Moving production means that they will need to do a lot of work flavour matching so that they can continue producing their beer range – there’s a lot more to it than just upping the amounts in the recipe. On top of that there is a time limit, as the old brewery is being decommissioned at the end of the year and some of the equipment (including keg filling gear) is moving over to the new site. I’ve heard that beer produced at the new brewery will be marked as such in some way, so expect a bunch of old vs new tastings later this year.

There’s also the fact that the move to being a medium sized brewer starts casting doubts in some minds as to their status as the self-proclaimed leaders in the UK craft beer movement. As there’s no definition of what ‘craft’ actually means, in the opinion of some moving to an automated, largish brewery kicks them out of the club immediately. The BrewDog reaction is exactly what you’d expect – craft isn’t about size, it’s about attitude and the production of great beer. While the creation of the craft brewing scene in the UK has done wonders for beer in general, shifting the focus from the beards and sandals of ye olden dayes of but a few years ago to the ‘cooler’ hipster scene that is currently sitting at the forefront, it has created some divisions in the ranks of brewers and how BrewDog handle the reactions to the new brewery will be interesting to watch. Fortunately for me I don’t really care about the size of a brewery as long as the produce good beer.

Back at the AECC the queues hadn’t disappeared, growing a bit longer during the hour I was away. Luckily they gave up on signing everyone in shortly after I arrived, stamping hands and giving out a goody bag to everyone who professed to being a shareholder. All that remained was to join the token queue so that I could get some beer…

Inside the main hall of the venue the queues were predictably big, five or six deep at the bar at almost all times, and the shop was swamped for pretty much the entire day. Due to licensing regs they couldn’t send people home with bottles so every order had to be assembled, boxed, labelled, paid for in cash and then hidden away ready for posting next week. During the quiet times it was a 20 minute t wait o get seen but that spiralled to over an hour during the busiest parts of the day.

The aforementioned quiet times were during the pair of combined business talks/tastings that were run in one of the AECC’s main meeting rooms. James Watt rolled out the usual bits and pieces (described on Twitter at one point as self-congratulatory toss, which is both accurate and the sort of thing that is expected at an AGM), most of which have already been posted up on their blog (and has been posted again post-AGM in a post that reads so much like a shonky press release it makes me weep. And that from someone who writes shonky press releases) and in their newsletters: Profits are up; They haven’t been able to make enough beer to go around; Their online shop was shit; James is not a cat rapist.

Three rows from the back

However, one extra thing that I’d not heard about slipped out in the Q&A sessions at the end. In response to the question “So, what return are we going to get on our investment”, a question that I was already drunkenly mumbling something to the effect of “that’s not what the EFP program is about, unless they get bought by Anheiser-Busch or something” to my drinking companion, James explained that in 2013 there will be a system set-up to allow shareholders to buy and sell shares ‘at market rate’. He also said that they would be paying a dividend then as well. I suspect that the dividend will be pretty small and that most of it will end up coming back to company in the inevitable beer orders that will follow its issue (I expect to see a special shareholder dividend beer that will happily scoop the cash back to the mothership – they’re not idiots), and I look forward to seeing how buying and selling works out, especially as the discounts Equity for Punks members have received were (at least for the first round) billed as being for life rather than as long as you were a shareholder…

The tasting section of the meeting was interesting, as handing out beer to over 200 people is a bit of a logistical nightmare, but with the use of a trolley, a team of beer pullers and a lot of handing beer down rows we each got to taste three new beers:

We started off with the new 3.8% Pale Ale, which had its name, as chosen via a poll on the website, announced at the meeting – Dead Pony Club. If you put a name like that on a poll then what did they expect? Most probably that everyone would choose it – as mentioned earlier: they’re not stupid. It seems to be intended as a lower ABV version of Punk IPA, big and hop led but more suitable as a session ale, especially for summer. They’ve been working to get the flavour profile and body that they were after for about the last 6 months, ending up with a hop mix of Simcoe, HBC369 (recently named Mosaic) and Citra, and a mash bill of caramalt, pale malt and crystal. On the nose it had the expected resin laden happiness, mulchy vegetation, orange peel and pith, sweet orange juice and a stony minerality underneath.To taste it was thinner than I’d expected, but had lots of sour orange and pine resin. It finished short, with mixed citrus and bitter hops. The slightly watery body doesn’t do it many favours, but it’s still a very drinkable beer. I did find myself wondering how it’d do if it was cask conditioned…

The next beer on the tasting list was Libertine Dark Ale, a follow up to the Libertine Porter that was released earlier this year. I’m guessing this is a development on the ideas tested out in the EFP brew day beer (EFP 2011, which me and the other chaps of Village of the Drammed tried in Episode 2), which was a dark IPA aged on oak chips. This one doesn’t have any oak involved as far as I know, but is the BrewDog take on a black IPA. I rather like black IPAs but find they generally end up being darkly coloured IPAs or hoppy dark beers rather than finding a middle ground, and as such I’ve been waiting for the inevitable throwing of a hat into the ring by BrewDog. It’s a very dark 7% beer, made with Carafa Special malt (dehusked chocolate malt, for roasty flavours but a less husky mash) and hopped with Simcoe. On the nose it was quite sour, with stewed orange, some unripe pineapple and a coffee ground bitterness. To taste it had the traditional big hop along with some stewed red fruit, spice, chocolate and coffee. It finished sweet and sour, with mulchy hops and a bit of sweetened dark chocolate. A bit towards the hoppy dark beer side of things but well balanced and one that I hope makes it into bottles or at least on to the taps at BrewDog Camden.

Last in the tasting was a long promised beer that was launched for the AGM – Dog A. It’s a tweaked version of AB:04, the most popular of the Abstrakt series to date and one of the two that I haven’t tried (the other being AB:01). It’s a 14% imperial stout, fortified with Venezuelan cacao, Nicaraguan coffee (added as whole beans), Devon naga chills and vanilla beans (the new ingredient not found in AB:04). On the nose it is full of dark chocolate, with a slight prickle of chilli heat and some vegetal chilli notes. To taste it is sweet, with the rich body you’d expect from a 14% stout. It’s got very sweet chocolate and vanilla, and bitter coffee that doesn’t quite take the edge off. It finishes sour, with coffee acidity, bitter chocolate and a tiny hint of chilli spice. All in all this isn’t one for me – I’m not a fan of sweet chocolatey beers and the coffee here doesn’t balance out the cloying sweetness enough for my liking. I heard that the AB:04 had a more of a pronounced chilli note, both heat and flavour, and I suspect that the reduction of that along with added vanilla has made a beer that even more people will like, but one that unfortunately I don’t. Especially not for £12.50 a bottle after shareholder discount…

Back in the main hall I did a bit of queuing at the bar. Things yet again got better when the bands started (and as people left due to beer related ‘tired and emotional’-ness) but to start with the queues were as bad as earlier in the day. The bars themselves were well stocked, with a changing range of BrewDog beers and a few guests, including a bunch of bottles form Stone and some Hitachino Nest on draft. Prices were good, with tokens costing £2 and beers being a token a piece for a pint or half depending on the strength/rarity of the beer. From looking at Untappd it seems I managed to get through a stack of beverages, including BrewDog’s IPA is Dead HBC and Motueka, Zeitgeist, 5 AM Saint, American Saison, 77 Lager and Hardcore IPA, as well as a Nipponia from Hitachino Nest. With the amount of talk on Twitter afterwards about unused tokens I suspect that BrewDog might have even turned a profit on the event.

Anyways, the bands played on, beer was poured (with both Martin Dickie and bottle artist Johanna Basford joining a bar crew assembled from BrewDog staff old and new from all over the country) the bars ran out of beer little by little (including Punk IPA, although I suspect an emergency delivery from BrewDog Aberdeen was brought in), the floor got stickier and I wandered off mid-way through Kassidy‘s set, missing Bombskare finishing the night off with some drunkenly danced to ska.

A good weekend, even if reports suggest it wasn’t quite as excellent as the more intimate first AGM (although I suspect that is just due to people trying to make me jealous).

The next day, after a spot of breakfast at Musa, the BrewDog friendly restaurant, and a swift half2/3rds of Growler (a citra single hop lager – very tasty) at BrewDog Aberdeen it was back onto the train for the ‘leisurely’ 7.5 hour ride home. As I write I’ve just crossed the Forth rail bridge so it’s time to finish up and pretend to sleep expansively across these two seats to make sure none sits next to me when we get to Edinburgh

(Edit: I did pretty well, with noone sitting next to me until Newcastle. Then I was joined by a young lady in the advanced stages of controlled substance inspired enlightenment who pawed at her face, wept, slept and ran to the bathroom every 15 minutes. Which was interesting. I love trains [I really do, scary girls or not])

Dead Pony Club
Pale ale, 3.8%

Libertine Dark Ale
Black IPA, 7%

Dog A
Imperial stout, 14%

BrewDog/Lost Abbey Lost Dog – a collaboration between BrewDog and Lost Abbey, a ‘monastically inspired’ brewery just north of San Diego in California. It’s a rum cask aged Imperial porter, produced during a visit by the Californians about a year ago. It’s a big dark beer, but held up to the light has a deep red colour. On the nose it had sticky red berries, massively sweet caramel and a little bit of burnt toffee – a nice but unsurprising nose that could have come off many sweet dark beers. To taste it was rich, laced with port fruit, and had a light fizz that cut through the sweetness. It finished with thick malt syrup sweetness, a burst of smoke (like a fire in a chocolate malt bin) and a very long lingering fruitiness – cherries, raisins, fake rhubarb. I tried this on tap previously at BrewDog Camden and it’s just how I remember it – a big sweet dark beer with some interesting fruit on the finish. The bottled version also comes in a pretty box.

Auchenthoshan Valinch – I’ve had this on my tasting stack for ages because the lid was stuck. I finally took a pair of pliers to it the other day and cracked it open. It’s Auchentoshan’s no-age-statement Classic bottled at cask strength, something that their fans have been asking about for a while and which they finally released last year. On the nose it’s young and spirity, with crunchy peach, lemon travel sweets, sweet pastry, vanilla sugar, green peppercorns and floral candles. To taste it has wax polish, sour green fruit (apples, crunchy pear, limes), young floral spirity notes and woody spice. A drop of water calms things down and brings out some vanilla cream. It finishes with lime skin and sour wood, adding in apple skin tannins and apple chews as it fades away. It is very young tasting and when I first tried it I wasn’t a fan. However, my tastes have recently started hitting out towards the light and floral end of the spectrum, and this is now much more towards where my palate is at the moment.

anCnoc 1998 – a newbie from the folks at Inver House (new enough that we don’t have it at work yet). I rather like the regular 12 and 16 year olds from anCnoc but haven’t been a massive fan of their vintage releases in the past. On the nose this was big and lemony, with fizzy yeastiness, Tangfastics, fizzy chewitts, green grapes, apple chews, fennel tops, tall grass and waxed fruit, and it got sweeter as it sat in the glass. To taste it was soft and creamy with green apple, light cinnamon spice and some green rhubarb. The rhubarb lingered in the finish, along with some pepper and sour green wood. It’s a very drinkable dram with some good fruit and spice. It’s not a game changer and doesn’t fit in with the regular anCnoc releases but is perfectly decent whisky.

Bowmore Tempest Batch #3 – this is the sample that reminded me I hadn’t done a quick tasting post in a while – I’ve had it for ages (Sorry DK). It was rather loved at work, with m’colleague Tim choosing it as his Christmas whisky, but I’d not got round to doing more than have a swig in the office. On the nose it has old bonfires, unripe fruit, brine, tarred ropes, damp dark wood and floral hints. To taste it had upfront wood smoke and charred wood, with sweet muddy peat, pears, some young spirity flavours, and sweet and sour fruit. It finished quite sweet, with syrup, spicy wood and some lingering hammy wood. I wouldn’t pick it as a favourite, although it does do a very good job of balancing smoke and sweet fruitiness.

The Spirit of Broadside – a weird one this, Adnams’s Broadside (tasty beer) distilled at their new(ish) distillery and then matured for a year in new oak. So, one year old, hopped, sort-of whisky. I went along to the launch and had some thrust into my hand. On the nose I got powdered rubber tire inner tubes, balloons, ginger, hops, marmite, raisins and lots of childhood memory smells – the scent of brewday on the other side of town to my school when I was growing up. To taste it was oily with caramel sweetness, pine, juniper, oranges, fresh cut ginger root, stewed apple, garam masala and cardamon. It finished sweet, with ginger, real maraschino cherries and lingering hops. Definitely not a whisky and interesting, although I have no idea where it fits in the world of spirits.

Copper House Limoncello – After I’d tried the Spirit of Broadside I had a glass of this handed to me. On the nose it was pure fresh cut lemon – enough so that I asked John McCarthy, the Adnams distiller, whether he’d used any more of the lemons than the traditional zest. He hadn’t, having bought horrendously expensive zest, but the nose still managed to get whole lemon juiciness into it somehow. To taste it was syrupy and oily, with buttery lemon and some zesty bitterness. Well balanced and not too sweet.

La Fée Parisienne - a sample given to me by the excellent Ryan Alexander at Barcamp London after myAbsinthe session. According to the internets this is almost a traditionally made absinthe – distilled rather than compounded using oils. However, it does have one definite additive – colouring. It’s a shocking fluorescent green and it louches to a quite impressive green as well. Before adding water it’s very spirity, with the alcoholic base coming out almost as strong as the anise, which is very strong, and almost swamping the few bitter herbals that are noticeable. After dilution (1:3 absinthe:water) the nose is still anis heavy, with a bit of seediness (like the seed at the middle of an aniseed ball) and a little bit of green herb bitterness. It tastes very sweet and syrupy, like melted aniseed balls, with a little hit of wormwood bitterness, and finishes with some mulchy grass and even more sweet aniseed balls. An unsubtle absinthe with lots of sweetness (I switched to Jade Edouard after this and it was incredible how bitter it seemed in comparison, when normally I find it naturally sweet) and a scary colour. It’s not bad though and is reasonably priced.

Glendronach 8 year old, bottled 1970s, Italian Import – A rather special dram this, acquired by m’colleague Tim, opened and shared around the office. It’s Glendronach from before the days that they became known as the sherry kings. Well, the time before the most recent time they became known as sherry kings, anyway. On the nose it doesn’t want to give up much, but has a chunk of sour tropical fruit – passion fruit, unripe rhubarb and mango – as well as a little bit of syrupy sweetness. To taste it’s nowhere near as sweet as the nose suggested, with polished wood, apricot, anis spiciness, cinnamon and acres of beautiful, old, elegant woodiness. It finished warming and spicy, with apples and a mineral edge, as well as more well aged wood. This is a proper old school whisky, the sort that I’d not even realised existed before I started working at TWE. The nose has all the marvellous tropical fruit that has got me looking for old bottlings of young whisky in auctions and the palate is dry with the Good Wood that I capitalise when I write about it. It seems that another few beers have been added to the ‘drinks to buy Tim’ list.

Thanks to DK at Margaret and Lukas at Alembic for the samples of Auchentoshan and Bowmore, and anCnoc respectively; and to Alice from Westgate for inviting me along to the Spirit of Broadside launch.

I picked this one up at the Great British Beer Festival last year and totally forgot about it, which wasn’t hard due to my advanced state of ruin by the time I got to the Italian bar. When it popped up as next in the Cupboard of Surprise I had no idea what to expect without obsessive internet research to help me. Google, be my guide…

Birrificio Lambrate was founded by three guys in 1996 in Milan in the back of a pub. They started off brewing 50 litre batches of two different beers and opening the pub every other day to give them a chance to get some of it down the locals’ necks. They’ve since grown to five partners, 2000 litre batches, a second pub, and distribution in Milan’s pubs and across Europe. I’d not heard of them before (I am just starting my Italian beer journey) but a bit of a search on the web shows that they’re rather well respected, especially for their Ghisa smoked stout.

Imperial Ghisa is a special version of Ghisa, with the ABV upped from 5% to 8.5%, and the richness upped along with it. On the nose it’s very Marmite-like, with sweet but dark caramel and roast chestnuts. To taste the Marmite continues along with some sour milk and molasses, and despite being quite thick it’s still nicely fizzy. It finished with burnt liquorice and some black rubbery notes. Reading back over those notes they don’t sound particularly positive, but they are meant to be – it’s a very heavy stout but has a nice sweetness that balances the smoked flavours and alcoholic punch. Not one for the beginning of the night, but a tasty evening ender.

Imperial Ghisa
Smoked Stout, 8.5%. ~£3, although the night was fairly advanced when I bought it and my memory is hazy…

So, the folks at Hobgoblin have put up a petition to get the government to debate the beer escalator – 100,000 signatures forces this (Update: it forces a backbench committee to discuss debating it…not quite so useful, but a start – the next paragraph has other stuff you can do), so please go and sign it if you think that the next few years of taxes could irreparably harm the brewing industry in the UK. Or if you just like beer not being £4 a pint even outside of London. The petition is here.

If you want to do something else, you can encourage your local MP to support an Early Day Motion by Andrew Griffiths, MP for Burton, which also calls for a redebate of the duty situation. The EDM is here, and the nice folks at TheyWorkForYou make it easy to find out who your MP is (which of course you already know…) and contact them. Make sure to include at least the number of the EDM (2785) and let them know if they have any brewers (there may be some) or pubs (there will be some) who’d be affected in their constituency – make it as easy as possible for your MP to find the information: we have these lovely online facilities, we might as well use them.

Update: As the comments on Pete’s blog (including his own) have called into question some of his maths I used my walk to work to utilise the POWER of the mobile internet and the calculator on my phone to do some calculations of my own.

So, current beer duty (for 2.8%-7.5% beer) = £18.57 per hectolitre per cent of alcohol.
A hectolitre is  175.975 imperial pints.
So currently tax is 10.65p per cent of alcohol per pint. ie ~53p for a pint of 5% beer.
An increase of 6% (4% inflation + 2%) on tax is an increase of 0.63p per cent of alcohol per pint. ie ~56.5p for a pint of 5% beer, about a 3.5p increase. And after everything else is added up VAT is paid on the total…

Post budget update: George Osborne and chums went for ‘No change to beer and spirits duty’, which means, much to many people’s surprise, that the escalator was still applied – they didn’t change the already existing policy of inflation + 2%. Inflation is currently 3.4% (rather than 4% as I said above), so the duty on a 5% pint is now 55.4p, a 2.5p increase. With VAT, it’s 66.5p, a 3.2p increase over previously – if the escalator continues for the next two years, as is planned, then (assuming inflation remains the same) this will eventually rise to 73.8p, an overall rise of 10.5p over three years. CAMRA have now got involved and are pushing the petition, with a hope that the 100k signatures needed can be got between now and the next budget. Their ‘sign the petition now’ email claims about £1 a pint is pure tax and after some number crunching they’re right – in a £3.20 5% pint you have 55.4p of beer duty and 53.3p of VAT, almost £1.10 of tax, about 34%.

The extra bit that Pete mentions is that the cost of making the beer has also gone up, due to the inflation which is at the base of beer duty, which will add another chunk on to that price. It’s not catastrophic in one year, but if this keeps on over the next 3 years, as the government is committed to, the joys of compound interest and inflation will make this increasingly significant.

As you were.

While Mr Tesco is not known that well for his caring and sharing nature (as recent news stories have brought up) he does have a love for buying from local producers as well as those in far away lands, which leads to the booze aisle of the store having a rather good selection. The whisky section is adequate but the beer range is really quite good. They don’t have any of the localest of local beers, brewed 10 minutes walk away at the Cairngorm Brewery (more posts about them to follow once I try the latest pair of beers I picked up from them – I tried the rest of their range last time I was up here), but they do have a bunch of brews from Scotland, including beer from Brewdog, Black Isle, Orkney and Williams Brothers. It’s a beer from the latter of that list that I’m writing about today.

I’d tried most of the five or six beers that they had from Williams but there was one that I’d not seen before – March of the Penguins. With my recent beer consumption generally clumping around the strong, hoppy, golden end of the spectrum I thought that a ‘mere’ 4.9% creamy stout would do as an emergency tipple to keep in the fridge.

The back of the bottle is typically terse, explaining that it is ‘A silky smooth stout brewed with a blend of chocolate malt and roasted barley combined with lovely hop aromas and a spicy fruity finish’. While I was intrigued about their usage of commas in the sentence, with my ill-advised punctuation fetish meaning that I would, probably incorrectly, insert at least one if not two more, the ingredients list was also interesting:

Ingredients: Malted Barley, Wheat, Hops, Coriander, Orange Zest.

No mention of the, I assume, unmalted roasted barley from the description and three more ingredients that I hadn’t expected – wheat, coriander and orange zest.

It poured as dark as you’d expect, revealing a reddish tinge if held up to the (admittedly cloud covered on the day that I tried it) Scottish sun, with a lot more fizz than I expected. On the nose it had chocolate malt burnt notes, as well as some stouty creaminess, coffee grounds, and a hint of fizzy citrus. To taste it was quite fizzy, thinning the beer out somewhat, with an upfront burst of CO₂ sourness, which faded quickly to leave a slightly sour milky middle, backed up by dark chocolate and coffee, and rounded with a bit of coriander. The stoutiness fades away and the aftertaste is quite light, although it’s an unexpected (without reading the ingredients list) tinge of dark chocolate orange, which hangs around nicely for a while.

So, all in all a fairly tasty beer – a creamy stout with restrained use of spice and fruit to add another dimension.

March of the Penguins
Stout, 4.9%. ~£2.50 for a 500ml bottle

Grungy background due to not tidying my flat in a while

From my usual Google Translated research through the website Birrificio Indipendente Elav kicked off around the turn of the millenium when the founder, whose name I can’t find, set up a beer company in Treviglio – La Pinta. He started out with a range of beers from around the world and soon turned to a local microbrewer to produce some beers for him. As demand grew he moved production to Lauterbacher in Germany and now has bottles going all over the world, as well as being served in The Clocktower in Treviglio, which seems to be his bar, as well as a number of other local establishments. (If anyone reading this knows more or sees mistakes please let me know – my reading of Italian is even worse than Google’s translation, so this may well be conjecture).

Anyways, the beer. It’s a 6.3% Red Ale with a load of American hops and lots of malt – you can taste both of those things in the beer. On the nose it’s a bit swimming ‘pool changing room’ – sweaty with a touch of chlorine – although it does have a nice bit of fruit (banana and pineapple) as soon as you pour it, quickly swamped by the other aromas. To taste the swimming pool comes back with a kick of green leafy hops and cleaning products up front. There’s a little bit of body, with some sour pineapple and malt, and then a long finish of green bitterness and sweet malt. All in all I’m undecided, as while I don’t like the chlorinated beginning, the rest is quite nice, if unbalanced. I suspect it’s another I’ve left in the bottle too long, although the best before date is May 2012, and it’s lost some of its freshness over the last 6 months. Luckily it’s a 75cl bottle (I think – the label says 33cl, which is definitely not true) which has given me some time to check that I’m undecided…

Grunge IPA
Italian Red Ale, 6.3%. No idea on the cost – it was late and I had been drinking all day…

So, what is it? Brewdog describe it as a ‘Deconstructed Blonde Imperial Stout’ which, as with many of the Abstrakt range’s descriptions doesn’t tell you very much. It started off as a made-up collaborative beer, Luciferin – the Light Bringer, in an April’s Fools day video recorded by James of Brewdog and Greg Koch of Stone that appeared in 2010, before I was paying attention to their website. Here it is:

Brewdog then decided to go ahead and make it. The final product is even the same strength as the Luciferin…

Now, the idea of a Blonde Imperial Stout doesn’t really work, as the flavours that you get in stouts are in a large part brought in to the mix (as far as I know) by the malt, which in turn makes the beer a dark colour. So to keep the beer as light as possible you need to get all the stouty flavours in some other way, hence the ‘deconstructed’ part of the name. They did this by making a list of the sorts of flavours you get in stouts and then adding things that would add them – simple…

So, they added in some smoked malt to the mash and then aged it for six month with cacao, coffee beans, liquorice root and oak chips to give it the dark and smoky flavours you get in stouts. They also added oats to the mash to thicken up the mouthfeel and further add to the sensation that you are drinking a dark stout. At the Brewdog Camden tasting where I first tried it they handed out blindfolds before we given the beer and asked us to think about what type it was. Unfortunately I already knew and my expectations weren’t smashed, but many others around the room were – if tried blind (and even if not) it’s not what you’d expect from its appearance.

There were 6500 bottles of it released and it sold out in the manner of the other Abstrakt’s – very quickly (about a day?). However 6500 bottles is double the run of the first few editions, with 3200 being the standard until AB:05, which did 3600. Since then there’s been a ramping up of numbers (although it looks to dip with AB:07, but as that was aged it was made before AB:06 and thus still fits the curve) which suggests that Brewdog are responding to the popularity. Add to the regular demand another few thousand shareholders from the latest Equity for Punks and the fact that AB:08 was released to them (us) before the hoi polloi and you can see why they’d want to up the numbers. Well done them for doing so. Now all they need is a new brewery so they can actually brew enough of their regular beers without contracting them out…

So, what is the AB:08 like? On the nose it has lots of vanilla and coffee, like Montezuma’s Bean Machine chocolate in a glass, as well as heavy honey syrupy sweetness. To taste it’s got lots of sweet fruit to start, the ‘Fruit!’ you get from randomly coloured gummi sweets, crunchy nut cornflakes, thick dark caramel, used coffee grounds, some green hoppiness and milk chocolate. As the taste fades it has some tropical fruit (banana and pineapple?) before going very bitter with burned coffee, but with a lingering syrupy sweetness fighting it. If you didn’t know what it was, and when I open my next bottle it will be served to blindfolded people to test this assertion, it can come across as a dark beer, although I think (having never having properly tasted it blind) that it’s not quite right.

It has all the elements of a dark beer, but each of them isn’t quite right: the mouthfeel is too glossily syrupy, rather than just thick; the dark roasty flavours are obviously coffee, chocolate and wood, rather than heavily roasted malt; the sweetness is just ‘wrong’ for a stout – not wine-like as I find in many, but more sticky and sugary. That said, it is an interesting experiment, although not one that I’m distressed won’t be reappearing.

Roll-on Abstrakt:09 – the first beer I should be receiving as part of my joining the Abstrakt Addicts club…

Brewdog Abstrakt AB:08
Deconstructed Blonde Imperial Stout, 11.8%. £10.99 a bottle, now sold out.

We’ve been waiting for a while, along with rumours of incorrect licenses and general bureaucratic annoyance, but only a couple of months after it was expected BrewDog Camden has opened its doors. I went along a couple of times during the first week, including shareholder and bloggers tastings (accompanied by excellent chums Thom and Myk of the Thomyk podcast), and thought I’d better mention it up here. Spoiler alert: I really like BrewDog’s bars. If you want to ignore some gushing praise then skip forward a few paragraphs, as I also have tasting notes on some new beers that should feature slightly less gushing praise.

So, BrewDog Camden is very much a bar in the style of their Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen branches (now also announced as spreading to Nottingham and Leeds over the coming months), and is their first foray south of the border. There is exposed brickwork and beams, found materials cladding the walls (it looks like the floor of a school gym has been chopped up, multicoloured court/pitch/field markings and all) and a load of beer taps and bottles. The range is as you’d expect from BrewDog, with a load of their own brews as well as rarely seen beers from the USA and the obligatory Mikeller offerings. The bottle selection looks good and I need to return for some further investigation, including a bunch of very interesting Japanese beers that I hope last into the new year (Update: they did, and there’s a rumour that they’ll be having some of them on tap in the near future).

They’re also doing food, with pizzas and burgers, as designed by Masterchef winner and former Euston Tap manager Tim Anderson, on the menu. I tried a couple of slivers of pizza at the tastings, with both a seafood mix and nacho pizza being rather tasty (although not quite as good as the impressive spicy meat pizza I had at BrewDog Edinburgh), and have heard good things about the burgers, but more research is needed. Such painful research.

The staff are partly newbies and partly experienced bartenders shipped down from the Scottish bars, with bar manager Neil previously managing their debut bar in Aberdeen. As hoped they’ve brought along the same attitude to running a bar as they had up north, with a focus on education and getting people to try new and interesting beers rather than the snotty attitude towards stray Stella drinkers that you often find in ‘beer’ bars. Pete Brown wrote an article earlier this year about the Edinburgh bar that says it better than me, but in short: This is how to run a bar. I just hope they can keep it up and retain good staff.

They also have a door marked ‘Sex Dungeon’ downstairs.

Anyways, onto the beers. For the shareholders tasting they decided to run us through their current run of four prototypes, which they are currently asking for opinions on in an attempt to shake up their regular beer range next year. I’m fairly sure that the last time this happened, with Punk X, nothing happened, but I’m always pleased to try new and interesting beers so was up for a taste. They also ended on AB:08, the latest in the Abstrakt series, but more of that in a future post.

We started, after the regular Punk IPA and James’s usual Richard Paterson inspired greeting of the beer, with Blitz, the protoype that I was most interested to try. Recent changes in duty law not only mean that beers over 7.5% ABV now pay 125% of general beer duty but also that beers that are no more than 2.8% only pay 50% – Blitz is BrewDog’s 2.8% attempt at grabbing the tax break. While the duty changes will have, in my opinion, very little affect on public drunkenness and alcoholism (my soap box is stowed for the time being), the lower limit duty reduction has already inspired a few beers and as a fan of milds and low strength drinks of all kinds I’m very interested to see where this goes. Blitz is not BrewDog’s first foray into the arena, with their 1.1 and 0.5% Nanny State (which I don’t think even needs to have duty paid on it, as they’re less than 1.2%) produced as a response to the criticism of their ~15% Tokyo* beers, but this is the first attempt that might hit regular production and distribution. In an effort to get as much flavour in as possible they combine their usual ‘stick in so many hops that it can kill a goat at 20 paces’ approach with using 100% caramalt, a malt that is usually used as part of a mash to add body to a beer. On the nose it has the prickly smell of brewing beer, lots of malt, a hint of Marmite and stacked freshly cut grass. To taste it was quite thin, with sour tangerines, solid uncomplicated maltiness and a tea-like hop hit – not a big beer by any stretch, but a lot bigger than you’d think at such a low strength. I need to try this again to formulate a proper opinion, but there’s potential here for good low strength beer.

Next on the prototype list was Prototype 17, which I tried down at The Rake in the Summer. This is based on Trashy Blonde, usually a very nice golden ale and one of their only beers (maybe the only) to occasionally appear in a cask version as well as their regular ‘keg only’ dispense. The beer is brewed with Belgian beer yeast and a stack of New Zealand hops for lots of fruitiness, and to that they have added 150kg of raspberries to the conditioning tank. They also ran some CO2 through the tank while it sat to keep the raspberries moving and break them up a bit to extract even more fruity flavour. This is also a bit of a preview beer, as they didn’t empty the tank when bottling, leaving in some of the beer and fruit and then adding even more raspberries ready for a future release, potentially as an Abstrakt [Update: the Edinburgh announced that they had some 'Prototype 17.5' on tap in January 2012, so I suspect it's out in the wild already]. On the nose there was, as expected, lots of red fruit although it was quite crisp with some malt richness underneath. It also had the beginnings of pineapple and mango peeking in around the raspberries. To taste it was much drier than expected, with a burst of raspberry quickly fading, leaving leafy hops, a bit of pineapple, some juicy citrus and the sort-of-apricot flavour that I often get from Belgian beers. I reckon this would make a good summer beer, but I’m not entirely sure whether it’s one I’d want in the permanent line-up.

We moved on to another beer that I’ve tried before – Hops Kill Nazis. I’ve had a draft blog post hanging around for a while with some initial thoughts on the beer but in the end I haven’t got round to finishing it up, which pretty much sums up my feelings about it. The name was chosen through a poll on the BrewDog blog although I reckon that 5pm Sinner was the better choice, better reflecting the beer’s nature – a big red ale with lots of hop bitterness (80IBUs) bottled at 7.6%, rather than 5am Saint‘s relatively light 5% and 30IBUs. I picked up a few bottles when they released it originally and was surprised to see it in the prototype line-up as they already have Punk and Hardcore along similar lines, although it would sit between them in ABV, and was pleased to get another chance to try it. On the nose it was farmyardy, with mulchy hop lofts and straw, as well as rather fruity, with pine, tangerine and spicy mango that I assume come from the Chinook hops that they dry hop the beer with. To taste it was very malty with a load of sour fruit towards the end – pineapple, figs, grapefruit, passion fruit. It hung around a bit with some nice green hop bitterness and more fruit as the bitterness faded. Much nicer than I remember in bottle, but I’m still not sure whether it has a place in the crowded middle of the regular range.

Last was the other beer I hadn’t tried in the line-up – the Scotch Ale. The rather unassuming name is a bit misleading as this was, to me, the second most interesting beer on the card after the Blitz: a change from BrewDog’s usual hop led attack, instead using huge amounts of malt (10 different kinds including some smoked malt according to my notes from both tastings I attended, although the website says only 8), heather honey and nowhere near as much hops as they usually use, to produce a big and rich traditional ale. It was also, according to my notes, brewed using a lager yeast and fermented very slowly, due to it being quite cold up in Scotland. It looks to be a continuation of the ideas that popped up when making AB:07 (an oak aged Imperial Scotch Ale) but just toned down to a more easily repeatable level. On the nose it was dark and rich with a hint of porter, dry oloroso sherry, dried cherries, oats, fizzy jelly sweets and a lick of smoke. To taste it was thick in the mouth with lots of fruit, the expected slab of malt richness, cherries, pine needles, cocoa and some muddy smoke (almost peaty). This is the one that I think would be the best addition to the range, if the intention is to broaden it. It’s unlike their other beers, focusing much less on hops and going for big maltiness, and fills a gap that they have when it comes to catering to my tastes.

Anyways, in summary – go to BrewDog Camden. It’s ace. They might even still have some of the prototypes on tap. If not, they’ll have something else tasty…

Blitz
Low alcohol ale, 2.8%.

Prototype 17
Raspberry pale ale, 4.1%.

Hops Kill Nazis
Red ale, 7.6%.

Scotch Ale
Honeyed Scotch ale, 7.5%.

One thing you can definitely accuse Brewdog of is playing with beer. From the high strength Sink the Bismarck and the crazy packaged End of History and Ghost Deer to the recipe tweaking of the Abstrakts and IPA is Dead series, they like to do things which are both silly and interesting and Sunk Punk is no different. In short – it was brewed underwater.

There is, of course, a framing story, with tales of a fisherman cursed to wander the waves forever due to his drinking habits, but the idea for the beer was simple – fill a fermenter with the ingredients, get it going and then kick it off the end of a pier. There is, naturally, a blog post and video:

Recipe-wise it’s infused with sea buckthorn, and contains some fresh sea salt made from local sea water (based on the amount you can see James shaking into the wort in the video above, which I guesstimate at two 250g boxes of the poncey salt I cook with, and a sea water salinity of 3.5%, the middle of Wikipedia’s range, they would have needed to distill 14kg of water, which is much less than my cynical ‘they bought it in the supermarket’ thinking mind thought before starting this set of parentheses) and rum (added while wearing an eyepatch).

While I often get a bit ranty about booze packaging generally I give Brewdog a bit of free pass, in part because of labels like the one on this bottle. It’s a beautiful bit of black and white work by the excellent Johanna Basford, who also did the art for the Bashah Reserve that I have maturing on the side as well as several other Brewdog beers and a few t-shirts. I am tempted to perfect the art of removing labels intact and use this one to start a scrap book. She also sells prints (and has a Christmas shop) and I have some blank walls…

However, that is all secondary – what’s the beer like? On the nose it was very vegetal, with the usual Brewdog hoppiness, but very green – piles of fresh leaves, a hint of mulch, a bit of the ‘swampiness’ that I ranted on about recently as being the key ingredient of the old King & Barnes Sussex’s flavour. Balancing out the green-ness was a bit of malt and toffee sweetness and some, potentially psychosomatic, brine. To taste it was disappointingly flat, with sour green hops, some digestive biscuit malt and a bit of pineapple sweetening it up towards a very bitter end. All in all a disappointment – a not particularly interesting tasting beer with an overly bitter finish that hung around a little bit too long. At £10 a bottle it’s not cheap and unfortunately isn’t one that I’d count as a success. Ho hum, roll on the next marketing gimmick…

Sunk Punk
Scottish IPA, 7.1%. It was £9.99 a bottle, but sold out quickly.

At this year’s GBBF the Bières sans Frontières stand had grown considerably and been split up amongst a number of bars by country. I was very pleased to see that one of the countries that was well represented this year was Italy, a land that I associated until recently with fizzy yellow beer that tastes pretty good but always costs too much compared to the wine in the restaurant where you’re trying it. However, after reading Zak Avery’s tales of wandering around the beer spots of Rome last summer I realised that there was something I was missing about Italian beer, and I don’t like missing out. I had a long and drunken chat with the chap on the bar and he recommended me a few beers, including one that I chose mainly for the name – Bastarda Rossa.

Google translate backs me up on my assumed translation – Red Bastard. It’s made by Birra Amiata, who are based in the shadow of Mount Amiata near Arcidosso in Tuscany, about 100km south of Florence. The beer itself is a red ale made with chestnuts as an integral part of the brewing process. The area is known for its chestnut production, even having an IGP – Protected Geographical Indication, and the brewery buy them milled to a similar size as grain, using them in the mash as both a flavouring agent and a provider of sugars – the bottle says that chestnuts make up 20% of the ingredients by weight. The beer is normally sold in 75cl bottles, but it looks like they’re now doing 330mls as well, as that’s what I got. They updated all their labels sometime last year to make them more beer geek friendly, which is a good sign that they’re looking at kicking them out to the wider world, and it gives the following info:

• Alta fermentazione – top fermented
• Non pastorizzata – non-pasteurised
• Non microfiltrata – non-microfiltered (they just do a regular barrier filter to get rid of any lumps)
• Rifermentata in bottiglia – bottle conditioned (which I wish I’d known before pouring, although I don’t think my pouring in the yeast hurt any…)
• Hops: Hallertau and WGV (Whitbread’s Goldings Variety) in the boil
• IBUs: 18

Which is pretty extensive for a beer label. The website claims three hops, so I assume that they dry hopped it with something afterwards or just changed the recipe since my bottle was brewed. It poured a rather cloudy (I know now why…) orangey red and had a nose of freshly shelled roasted chestnuts, sweet malt and a hint of sour white wine. To taste it was quite nutty, but in a rounded, oily way rather than a bitter, nut skin-like one, with a hint of the forest (green leaves, dry leaves and bark), a big malty middle with controlled sweetness and a hint of sugary sweetness at the finish. Quite tasty and definitely not what I expected to appear from Italy until recently.

Hopefully I’ll get round to the rest of the Italian beers I picked up soon – I need the space for my Christmas supplies…