Young’s may have run away to Bedfordshire, but there’s still more to London brewing than just the mainstay of Fuller’s and the chemical plants of Annheiser-Busch. We’ve got Brodie’s in Leyton, Sambrook’s in Battersea, Meantime down in Greenwich and now The Kernel in Bermondsey.

With my mate Bob living round the corner I’ve heard about The Kernel a few times, along with a recommendation to visit, and after a recent tasting at The Whisky Exchange I stopped in at The Rake and had a taste of The Kernel London Porter ‘forced’ on me by one of the regulars, which moved it up the list quite a way. So, last weekend I braved the sun to wander over Tower Bridge and make my way to the brewery.

It’s hidden under the railway arches that run east out of London Bridge and is an almost literal hole-in-the-wall. Every Saturday brewer Evin, a man who I’m fairly certain I’ve bought cheese from at Borough Market before, opens his doors from 9am until 3pm, selling beers from a table set up in front of his office. They are currently brewing once a week and there’s a range of earlier batches as well as whatever has appeared recently – on my trip I picked up a couple of IPAs as well as a London Porter and a bottle of ‘White Ale?’, which from the quick chat I had seems to have not entirely gone to plan, but was bottled as it tasted pretty good anyway.

I’ve had the bottles sitting on the side waiting for an excuse to be drunk, so I was very pleased to hear some news this week – The Kernel picked up a gold medal in the best bottled porter category and a bronze in the overall bottled for the Export Stout, and gold for the IPA Simcoe in both beer over 5% and the overall bottled beer categories at the SIBA South East Beer Festival. Rather pleasingly my random purchasing from the previous week meant that I had a bottle of The Kernel IPA Simcoe, so I cracked it open this afternoon for a taste.

Being an IPA it’s going to have a chunk of bitterness and this is at least in part (although as I don’t know Evin’s recipe, how much I’m not sure) from Simcoe hops, hence the name. The beer pours (at room temperature, anyway) with a good solid head and it has a good malty hoppiness on the nose. It also tastes really rather good – a great hoppy IPA with a kick from the 7.9% and a nice citrus-ness leading to a bitter finish. It’s got a more to it than just the hops, unlike many IPAs, with a good body and slight sourness. It’s bottle conditioned so my school-boy error of pouring half of it before letting the yeast in the bottom of the bottle mix with the remaining beer meant that my second pour was a bit on the cloudy side. If anything it tasted better with a touch of haze as the sediment softened the bitterness a little, but it was good either way.

I really like it and will definitely be making the pilgrimage over to the brewery next time I find myself over Bermondsey way on a Saturday, and with Glyn from The Rake pinging Evin congratulations on his blog I might even be able to grab a bottle when I’m out for a beer.

The Kernel IPA Simcoe
7.9% IPA, £2.50 per bottle from the brewery.
The brewery has a webpage of other suppliers if you can’t make it over there on a Saturday.

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I rather like The Rake. Not only do they have many interesting beers on tap, but they’ve joined forces with Melissa Cole to put on tastings of interesting beverages under the banner of lovebeer@borough. It surprised me how few booze tasting there actually are in London that are available for regular consumers and lovebeer@borough is the only group that I’ve seen doing regular beer tastings (please let me know if I’m being rubbish and there are more) and as such making my way along to one has been on The List for a while. The latest to pop up on the schedule was a tasting of beers from The Otley Brewing Company, accompanied by company director Nick Otley and head brewer Charlie Otley, so the telephone was used and a place grabbed.

To be honest I didn’t have much clue who the Otley Brewery were. I’ve heard of them and seen their stark branding but assumed, as many do it seems, that they were from Yorkshire. Otley is actually a Welsh brewer, based in Pontypridd. They take their name from the family who do the brewing and push themselves as a national brewer rather than a small regional (apart from the occasional burst of Welsh pride), which causes occasional confusion – a story was related where a friendly yorkshireman recently picked up some of the their barrels from The Bree Louise while grabbing some of his own, to help the Otley boys collect them a bit closer to home. Otley, Yorkshire, is 250 miles from Pontypridd…

The Otleys had been running pubs for a while, picking up a portfolio of three since the late 70s, so it wasn’t much of a jump to move into brewing – they had the distribution channel waiting so ‘all’ they needed was a place to brew and someone to make the beer. They found a unit down the road from The Bunch of Grapes and sent Charlie off to Sunderland to learn how to make beer. While he was away the brewery was finished and Nick and Matthew (also an Otley, but one who didn’t make it over to London for the tasting) started experimenting, producing the prototype of their first brew, the O1. Charlie applied his new know-how and in 2005 their first commercial beers were produced.

The first one we tried, appropriately, was the O1. It’s a pale golden ale. It’s light to taste, with a pleasant sweetness and slight nuttiness drifting to an orangey hoppy finish. There’s not a lot to it but it’s an easy drinking beer that’s great for a rather hot and sticky afternoon, like the one we were hiding from.

Next up was the O5 Gold. It’s another golden ale and was originally brewed as a one-off for Pontypridd rubgy club. It used a combination of US and UK hops and went down rather well, selling out rather quickly. It was promoted to the seasonal list and from there up to the regular beer portfolio. It’s brewed with lager yeast and, according to the little booklet I grabbed, now brewed with just american hops. It’s, predictably, a light gold colour, and tastes good and hoppy – a chunk of lemony hops and a rounded bitterness providing most of the flavour. This one sits perfectly in my regular favourite beer category (hoppy golden ales) and it’s one that I’ll keep an eye out for.

We then moved on to the first of the more regularly named beers of the day – the O4 Columbo. Their branding is quite stark and the names were equally stark to start with, being simply numbered. Charlie likes beers with names though, so the punning has begun. This is the next on their numerically ordered list after the unpunny Boss and it is, as with the last couple, a golden ale. Melissa’s choice for the tasting range was very much towards the more summery side of things, and this sat happily next on the list. Bitter hopped with Columbus from the USA, hence the name, and then dry hopped in the barrel with Chinook and Cascade it has a lot of floral bitterness and mushy hops on the nose. To taste it has a sweetness that fades to a chewy hop bitterness, finishing with more floral hops. You can really taste the effect of the dry hopping and it’s a good, if a little cloying, pint.

Next was the Motley Brew, inspired by a beer brewed at the brewery by Glyn from The Rake. The original was intended to be an 8% double IPA and it became a 7.5% IPA launched last December. The beer is now a more sensible 5.5% and is in the brewery’s portfolio as their April seasonal.  It was (deliberately) slightly hazy with a dry and bitter hoppy flavour. It had a prickly spiciness to it, reminding me of the air in Horsham on a brewing day when I was a kid, with the Marmitey hop smell rolling over the school playground.

Some hops, yesterday

Hops are a subject close to the brewery’s heart, with the first four beers showing a dedication to golden hoppy ales. The price of hops has risen considerably in the last few years and while the quality of British produce is improving, years of production to the specification of the mass market has made the plants less suited to the needs of microbrewers. As such Otley, like many others, import a lot of hops from the US, and in recent times New Zealand. This requires good forward planning, with brews not only needing to be alterered based on the state of the recieved hops, but also various varieties running out due to demand, forcing defensive buying. Otley use whole hops, rather than pellets, which also adds difficulty to storage and keeping them fresh. It’s not easy producing hoppy beer…

Next up was the O-Garden, the current champion beer of Wales. It’s a wheat beer with orange, coriander and cloves, with the peel and spices cooked for a bit in a kiln to remove some of the immediate sweetness. On the nose it was spicy, with a gingery note. To taste it was quite medicinal, with menthol/clove and citrus – like an orange studded with cloves ready to be dunked into some wine for mulling. It was nice, reminding me a bit of Umbel Magna, but much lighter.

Continuing the spicy theme we moved on to the beer that Melissa recently brewed with Otley – thai-bO. The name came first for this one, after some late night pub based plotting between Melissa and Nick Otley. Working within the Thai remit they brought in lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, lime peel and galangal to do the flavouring, drying the peel and then rubbing some of the ingredients together to make a fragrant mix. The galangal went in at the start of the boil, with most of the rest going in halfway through and the lime leaves at the end – the first batch used 500g of lime leaves, which is quite a scary amount. The beer has been popular, especially amongst those, like Nick’s wife, who don’t normally like beer. As such it’s now part of the seasonal portfolio, appearing this August on a more general release. It’s got a lot of floral citrus on the nose and is similar to the O-Garden in taste, although veering more towards the citrus. Unlike other asian influenced beers I’ve tried this one isn’t particularly sweet, the kiln drying helping moderate to that, making it much more drinkable. It’s not one for me to drink all-night, but it’s certainly an interesting and tasty addition to the list.

We then moved on a fairly new brew – the still anonymous O7. It’s a cloudy wheat beer, with discussion in the room over whether it was more Belgian or German in style (it used Belgian style yeast and is referred to as Belgian, but is being described as a weissen on the website…the consensus seemed to be German), with lots of different hops – a blend of three for bitterness and another three for aroma. It smells sweet and spicy and has the distinctive citrus/grainy wheat beer flavour with a chunk of sweetness. It switches quickly from that to a quick bitter hoppy finish. My notes suggest that it runs from bananas to Angostura bitters, but that’s overselling it a bit.

To finish we had a try of the bottle conditioned version of the O8. This is one of their first beers (the number is not necessarily consecutive), an 8%er brewed for the Great Welsh Beer Festival in 2005 before they were eligible to enter competition (you need to have been brewing for 12 months). It was a hit, selling out before its official release time of 8pm, and was the champion beer at the festival the next year. It’s fruity and sweet, with a fizziness from both the bottling and alcohol content. It has a bitterness that rolls around the side of the tongue and it’s thick in the mouth – my note suggested ‘Custardy?’. To quote Charlie, it’s ‘half tidy’. Which is, apparently, Welsh for good.

O1
4% golden ale

O5 Gold
5% golden ale

O4 Columbo
4% pale golden ale

Motley Brew
5.5% IPA

O-Garden
4.8% clear wheat beer with orange, coriander and cloves

thai-bO
golden ale with Thai flavours

O7 Weissen
5% Belgian (German?) style cloudy wheat beer

Bottle conditioned O8
8% strong pale golden ale

Otley’s bottled beers are available from various outlets, including their own beer selling website – Real Beer Box
The Rake often has them on tap (keep an eye on the twitter feed for details) and Charlie also mentioned that the Bree Louise sometimes gets a barrel in.

If you want to try them all, then get up to the Otley (Yorshire) beer festival in November. Otley (the Welsh brewer) will be turning up with a full range to try and confuse the locals…

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The Rake at Borough Market maintain a twitter feed on which they post what beers are on each day. This is excellent, as it shows me if there’s anything interesting I’m after, and terrifying, as I am a stupidly compulsive person who will travel across most of London (as long as it’s near the tube) to grab a taste of some booze that I’ve been looking for. So when I saw them announce that they had Ruination on tap, having been out of town on the other occasions I saw it pop up on the feed, I jumped on a bus and head London Bridge-wards to have a taste.

At over £3 a third it’s not one that you’re going to be drinking all night, and that’s before you get a taste of it. It’s quite a murky beer, with an orange bronze tint and the nose powerfully hoppy – like sticking your head through an attic hatch into a dry hop store on a hot day – floral but heavy and bitter. To taste it is a combination of every type of hope I can think of – purely bitter hops, dry hops, concentrated hop pellets, wet hops and hops growing in a field. It finished with more hops and little else – there is one category of flavour in this beer and it is the hop. At 7.7% it has a bit of a kick and combined with the over the top bitterness this isn’t one that you can drink much of – after 1/4 of a pint I had a pain behind my right eye, after a half I’d decided that I’d had enough.

I then of course ran straight around the corner to Utobeer and bought a bottle to take home.

In the bottle it looks the same but is a little bit different. The nose is similar, although not quite so flabby, becoming a smaller hop store with fresher hops, but the taste isn’t quite so varied across the range of hops as on draft. It has a coherent and pure citrusy flavour, with a hint of mustiness, running right through the middle of the palate and dropping off to a mushy bitter ending with a touch of malty sweetness and bitter orange. It feels more restrained and less like a novelty beer, and while by the end of the bottle your palate is still shot, it’s also quite refreshing.

The tap version is something to be tried at least once, although probably not more than once, but the bottled version is actually something really quite nice. You need to like hops but if you do then it is, as it says on the bottle, a liquid poem to their glory.

Stone Ruination IPA
7.7 % India Pale Ale from the USA
~£3 per 1/3rd pint on draft at The Rake and ~£3 per 330ml bottle at Utobeer

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The beer in question was Brewdog Abstrakt:02, part of a ‘range’ of beers with a simple ethos – only one batch of each will be made, once it’s made the recipe will be retired, and each beer will simply be named as Abstrakt: with the next number in sequence. The Abstrakt:01 is a slightly mad 10% abv vanilla infused belgian quadrupel and the #2 is both a more conventional beer and also slightly more scary – a triple dry hopped imperial red ale (more conventional) at 18% (saywhatnow?).

The release event was at the Cask in Pimlico, a pub that I’ve been meaning to visit for a while. Formerly the rather dodgy Pimlico Tram, it’s been taken over and redone as one of the new wave of pubs focusing on good beer that have been popping up in London. Upgrading their gear since the reopening they now have a bar packed with hand pulls and taps, with a constantly changing range of real ales and keg beers. Behind the bar is their latest addition – tall fridges stacked with interesting bottled beer. I suspect they are one of a small number of bars, if not the only one, who have Brewdog’s Tactical Nuclear Penguin (32% and ~£60 a bottle) and Sink the Bismarck (41% and over £70 a go) ready to sell.

While waiting for the Abstrakt to appear, me and drinking buddies Ewan (who was randomly sharing our table until we both realised that we’ve met on a number of occasions) and Alan decided to try out a few of the other beers on the bar:

• Brewdog Hardcore IPA – one that I’ve already written about in bottled form and was disappointed by. After my recent taste of Prototype 27 I had decided to give it another try and I’m quite pleased I did. On tap (and I suspect in other bottles to the one I got) it is a rather nice strong ale – a chunk of sour citrus hops with a big warming malty booziness finishing dry and almost tannic. One that I now need to find in bottle again for further experimentation
• Brewdog The Physics – my memory is awful and my notes for this are non-existent, but the main thing that I remember was that it was nice. Of all the Brewdog beers that I’ve tried this is the one that most tasted like a normal easy drinking session beer, even it was 5%.
• Brewdog 5am Saint – lemony hops and a biscuity body with a floral and citrusy finish. A light and refreshing summery beer and rather pleasant.
• Cliff Quay Black Jack – one that was sitting all on its own at the end of the row of taps and with a simple description of ‘Aniseed Porter’ – those both being things I like I couldn’t really say no. It was quite strange – strongly aniseed on the nose, but less so on the tongue, it tasted more like a creamy aniseed mild, with the beer behind the aniseed being a light porter (contradiction though that may be) with a watery milkiness to it. Surprisingly refreshing but not particularly full bodied.

At this point a bell was rung and Brewdog’s sales guy, Richard McLellan, strode amongst the throng delivering an occasionally drowned out tribute to the glory of their beer. Then the scrum faced the bar and drove… The crowd did move quite slowly at first, as even though it was being sold in third pints the beer had decided that it liked being head rather than liquid, and a chain of jugs and spoons for flicking off the foam was quickly formed. At £3 a third it was far from being cheap, but it was a) the only keg of the beer in existence and b) 18%, so I forgave them.

The Abstrakt is a deep red/brown beer which (as the pouring misery demonstrates) popped up with a good head to start, which quickly faded in the glass. On the nose there was lots of orangey citrus with an undercurrent of slightly stale hoppiness. To taste the alcohol came through quite quickly, fading to a bitter citrus hop finish. There were hints of vanilla at the back of the mouth and the citrus of the hops was joined by a berry fruitiness in the centre. However, in the end I found it a little unbalanced towards the bitterness of the hops. They recommended that Ab:01 be cellared for 1-2 years and I wonder if that could be a good thing for this one as well – a bit of rounding of the bitterness as well as bringing out more of the orange and vanilla could balance this a lot more for my taste.

Shortly after this a tray started making its way around the pub, containing small tumblers with a shot of a slightly murky brown liquid in, the second reason I had come down – a taste of Sink the Bismarck. The beer was created as part of a mini-war between Brewdog and German brewer Schorschbräu, which started with Brewdog pushing the 31% Schorschbock into being the second strongest beer in the world with their 32% Tactical Nuclear Penguin. The germans came back with a 40% version of their beer, only to have the Scots go one stage further with both the 41% Sink the Bismarck and a bit of Brewdog style marketing:

It seems that Schorschbräu have fought back with last month’s 43% version of the Schorschbock (complete with ‘rising to the bait’ tagline of ’cause Frankonian Men don’t dress like girls’) so we shall see what Brewdog come back with.

The Bismarck is a many times hopped beer which is chilled in an icecream factory before having the ice removed and the process repeated a number of times. This is more of a freeze concentration than a freeze distilling, removing all of the warmer freezing elements in the beer and leaving something that is not entirely unlike beer cordial. On the nose it was quite powerful, with lots of booze, as you’d expect, a touch of hops and some (butch) floweriness. To taste it was a bit of a punch to the face, with a burst of malty fruit and icing sugar fluffy sweetness fading through sour berries to a warming, malty bitter finish with a hint of wood smoke and orangey hop. It’s one that definitely has to be sipped and it’s really not a whisky – the whisky distillation process takes out most of the flavour compounds that are deliberately left in here, creating almost an anti-whisky in approach and flavour. I have a bottle of Tactical Nuclear Penguin at home and, impressive at it is, I don’t think I need one of these as well (although if the Penguin doesn’t live up to expectation I may have to visit the Brewdog shop and lay down a scary amount of money for a bottle).

Alan and I ended the evening on a half of the Hardcore IPA, a fitting end to eject us, slightly swaying, into the street. As usual Brewdog’s beers are a bit hit and miss for me, but both they and the Cask require further investigation.

Brewdog Abstrackt:02
18% Triple Dry Hopped Imperial Red Ale
Available from beer specialists and the Abstrakt website
~£10 per 375ml bottle, 3200 bottles available

Brewdog Sink the Bismarck
41% Kettle hopped, dry hopped, freeze hopped IPA
Available from beer specialists and Brewdog’s website
£40 per 330ml bottle, brewed in small batches so not always available immediately.

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It is a silly beer – Hardcore IPA matured in a Caol Ila cask with raspberries. A very hoppy strong IPA matured in a whisky cask from a distillery known for its pungently peaty whisky, finished off with a slug of fruit. My 3 bottles arrived swiftly, looking lonely in a 24 bottle case, hand labeled with marker pen and garnering inquiries from my co-workers as to whose homebrew I had been sent…

On the nose there’s a chunk of raspberry, really sweet and almost cherryade-y. To taste it’s quite different, with loads of hops at the back of the mouth, a big chunk of woodiness round the sides, a hint of smoke down the middle and some sweet and sour raspberries at the front. It’s got a smoky sour finish, with a finishing flourish of wood.  So, to recap: Hardcore IPA (a much nicer Hardcore IPA than I had previously – I must try it again, it seems), raspberry fruit beer and a woody aged beer, stuck together with smoky glue and jammed in a bottle. I’m not sure that it all works together, but it’s certainly interesting, really quite tasty and definitely a prototype.

Brewdog Prototype 27
Caol Ila cask aged raspberry IPA.
9.3%, 175 bottles made. No longer available (it sold pretty much instantly).

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Stone are a brewery that I’ve been looking to grab something from for a while. I might have had something from them back in the days before I obsessively recorded everything I drank (what some might call ‘The good old days’), but they’ve been on my list ever since I heard about their love of making interesting craft beers over in the US. In particular I have a hankering after the Ruination, a beer that I missed out on by not going to this month’s Draft House beer tasting (extreme american IPAs…), their 100+ IBU hop beast, guaranteed to shred the taste buds and reduce any following beers to pale shells of their regular flavours. I like hoppy beer…

The Bashah is a really dark beer, eventually giving up a reddy brown hue if you stick a bright enough light behind it. It’s got some bitter chocolate malt notes on the nose, as well as a hint of hoppy bitterness, and sits quite thickly in the glass and mouth.To taste it has dark chocolate, coffee, oats and a concentrated wine fruit punch on the end of a burnt finish, as well as a big slab of hop bitterness running through the lot. A nice chewy dark beer, with hoppy IPA and chocolate malty dark ale combining to make an interesting beer, and something a little different from the regular Brewdog stable.

Black Belgian Style Double IPA
8.6%. Maybe available from a few online retailers who have a bottle or two left, but probably not.

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Balvenie 12 Years Doublewood – a whisky grabbed as a chaser round the corner from the Sci-Fi-London film festival after a day of packing bags and herding punters. It had a grassy, olive oily nose with hints of sugary spice and a touch of wood. To taste it had a woody sweetness with some cinnamony spiciness with a bitter fruity finish. As it developed in the glass the sweetness increased and turned towards candyfloss.

Thatchers Old Rascal - I popped into the branch of Byron Hamburger that’s now hiding in the building that used to house The Intrepid Fox (I may never have drunk anything but Newcastle Brown or bottled cider when visiting, but RIP anyway. The new location just isn’t the same) and grabbed a quick bottle of cider to accompany my tasty burger. Described on the label as ‘Full bodied medium dry Somerset cider’, I would have stuck it more towards the medium sweet end of things. Anyways, it was quite nice – more mulchy farmyard flavour than you usually get from a mainstream cider as well as a nice tartness contrasting with the underlying sweetness. One to remember.

The SMWS release a new tranche of whiskies every first Friday of the month, so I stopped by to try a couple. Well, more than a couple after I got talking to the bar staff…I am weak:

SMWS 35.38, Fire in the hole! (Glen Moray) – Chosen specifically because of my interest in strange wood maturations, this one was matured for 9 years in a 2nd fill chardonnay cask. Wine finishes are generally badly thought of by whisky connoisseurs, but a few interesting ones do get out into the wild – this one is a bit of a mixture. A strange nose, with a slab of wood as well as a strange chicken and ammonia combination (to be honest there was a hint of the pub bog to it). To taste it was almost meaty, with overripe fruit and a bitter woody finish. With a bit of water it softened out, becoming more wine-like with some vanilla from the wood and an oily sandalwood flavour coming through. One to try, but not one I want a whole bottle of.

SMWS 93.38, Stirs the atavistic soul (Glen Scotia) – The intended final dram of the evening, this was to sate my love of Campbelltown whiskies, although as there are only two remaining distilleries, Glen Scotia and Springbank, this is quite a limited love. Luckily Springbank have a couple of brands they distill giving a slightly wider field for me to taste my way through. Anyways, this reminded me, from my notes, of a damp wood fire in someone else’s garden – smoke at a distance with a touch of damp woodiness. There were sour grapes and cured meat on the nose as well. To taste there was a touch of sweet wine as well as tannic wood, almost like a fruity rioja. A drop of water softened the wood, bringing out more sweetness and hiding the tannins. Overall the main memory I have is of a tingling menthol like finish down the sides of the tongue. Quite definitely from Campbelltown and really quite nice.

SMWS 27.80 (Springbank) – no name for this one as I can’t find it on the website. Continuing the Campbelltown kick I went for a recommended dram of this new (I think) Springbank. It had salt and a light sweetness on the nose, as well as a plimsoll-like rubberiness. To taste it had more salt and rubber as well as a sweetness and a prickly, numbing sensation. Water brought on more sweetness and a slick, buttery mouthfeel, along with more rubber and fisherman’s friends. It reminds me very much of the bottle of single cask Springbank I got from Cadenhead’s while at the Edinburgh Festival last year, although this one is even better. I may have to pick up a bottle on my next visit.

SMWS 53.140, Swelling, crashing, waves of flavour (Caol Ila) – a deliberate evening ending choice, although I was offered an even more peaty Ardbeg by the ever helpful barman. I declined, but made a note for my next visit. On the nose it had a sweet peaty smoke with a hint of disinfectant, mulch and parma violets. To taste it was crisply smoky with candy floss and citrus fruit, but rather complex and overpowering and in need of dilution. Water saves your palate from certain destruction, with the flavours combining to give a sweet wet ash smokiness, a touch of orange and a tingly finish. It’s good I stopped after it as I was still tasting it when I got home an hour later.

And my favourite of the week:

Fuller’s Bengal Lancer – I’ve tried this IPA on tap, but not grabbed a bottle yet, however, I’m glad I did. It’s a bottle conditioned, very heavily hopped IPA which is light on the palate but still wonderfully bitter, with the great taste of citrusy hops dominating in a rather pleasant way. As the hops die back there’s a nice touch of fruity malt and it finishes with the same bitterness that most Fuller’s beers display. Very good and one that I’ll be stocking up on when I find someone to drive me to the shops.

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I’ve tried their Rum Cask matured beer, which I find to be overly sweet and cloying, and a unaged beer, that I can’t find mention of on the internet, that I found to be a bit boring. However, a cold bottle of the regular oak aged version is a nice refreshing beer which I occasionally turn to when I can’t find much else. They do love their special editions though. The Rum Cask seems to be one (although for a special edition it’s quite widely available) and they also have a triple matured one, that suggests bottle conditioning from the descriptions, an oak-aged IPA and various others including the one that I recently tasted – Innis & Gunn Canadian Cask.

A limited run of 150 barrels, this is matured for 71 days in casks that previously held Canadian rye whisky and was originally produced for Canada Day in 2009 (with the IPA being only available in Waitrose or Canada I would guess they have some good sales over there). I picked up a bottle in Royal Mile whiskies in April 2010, so it looks like they either held some back or didn’t sell it all.

On the nose it’s very Innis & Gunn, maybe a bit sweeter, maybe a bit more fruit, but with the normal maltiness with a slight metallic tang. To taste it has a sweet almost buttery taste with a fresh malt fruitiness and nice bitter finish. It’s not as sweet and whisky-like as the regular Innis & Gunn, with the overpowering vanilla of the bourbon barrels almost entirely absent, and I like it a bit more. I’m still not a huge fan of the I&G beers, they share a distinct ‘bottled beer’ flavour that rounds off the taste and makes it less interesting than I’d hope, but this is a nice special edition and definitely worth a taste if you like the regular editions.

Innis & Gunn Canadian Cask
7.1% Canadian rye whisky barrel aged beer
Available from specialist retailers. I got mine from Royal Mile Whiskies for £3.

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Anyways, one of the important parts of the pub quiz, and a quietly important part of the festival (for me, at least) is our beer sponsor. This year, to tie in with the Focus on Poland programme stream, we have BDD as sponsor who have given us a stack of Perła Chmielowa.

According to the label on the back it’s from Lublin in Poland and uses the local Lublin hops, “valued for their quality and unique taste the world over”. I’m not too sure about that, but this is not a bad beer by any stretch. Quite lively, it tried to escape the bottle when I cracked mine, it calms down in the glass to a closely bubbled medium gold lager, keeping some of the head after pouring. There’s not a lot on the nose, with a touch of cereals and a bit of malt, but it tastes a lot more – malty sweetness, a slight bitterness and a nice finish. Not as crisp as I like my pilseners, but a nice all-rounder that should fuel the pub quiz and Arthur C Clarke awards nicely.

Perła Chmielowa
5% Premium Polish Pils beer
Some availability from Polish speciality shops, or at Sci-fi-london – if you come along let me know and I’ll try and blag you a bottle or two. Come along to the pub quiz and you get to drink it and watch me get chilblains.

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Harviestoun Old Engine Oil – the dark beer that I thought was the base of the Ola Dubh, but after a taste of this at the Vintage Ale tasting I’m not so sure. It’s a thick dark beer with loads of chocolate malt and not a lot that could be described as sweet. Dry and dark, it’s rather good but not as much like Ola Dubh as I was expecting.

Gales Prize Old Ale 2007 – another I tried at the Vintage tasting, but one I picked up at Whisky Live this year. It’s a worrying thing but I picked up significantly more beer than whisky, with a bottle of this and a brace of Fuller’s Brewers Reserve coming home with me. It looks like a typically flat and dark old ale, but is rather surprising to smell and taste. My tasting companions were rather split, with its smell of dry cider dividing lovers from loathers and leaving me on the lovers side. It reminds me a lot of the various Flemish red ales that I’ve tried recently (although not quite as scary as  Duchesse de Bourgogne) – thick, sour and fruity with cherries along with an unexpected bitter old ale aftertaste. It’s a bit of the flemish and a bit of the english old ale – I’ll be grabbing some more as soon as I find it.

Blanton’s Gold Edition – after an evening at Bob Bob Ricard (they’re rather good even when they’re not treating you to a vodka tasting, even if they didn’t have the zakuski or vodka I liked best on their normal menu) me and occasional drinking buddy Kosh stopped into Graphic on Golden Square for an evening ender. While I didn’t like the bar (and thought their regular cocktails looked a bit rubbish) they had not only a couple of interesting looking bottles of bourbon on the shelf but also a bartender who knew a chunk about Blanton’s and sorted us out with some of their Gold Edition. I don’t remember much other than that it was definitely the best Blanton’s whiskey I’ve tasted – typically dryer than most of the bourbons I’ve tried and with a nice rich body, with hints of grain, caramel and fruit. Annoyingly I was drunk and don’t remember all that much, but I may have to go back and try some more.

The Glenlivet 12 Year Old – a bottle given to me after doing a focus group about whisky branding. I’ve always thought of Glenlivet as the old dusty bottle that sits next to the Glenfiddich (a whisky that I’m not a fan of) and was rather surprised by this one. On the nose it has apples, linseed oil and caramel, with an overarching theme of the woodland. To taste it lightly sweet, with a hint of woodiness and a bit of richness fading to a bitter finish. There’s a hint of the oil and apple from the nose, and it’s remarkably refreshing for something that is still quite full bodied. A drop of water brings out some a fruity sweetness and lets the oily wood flavour develop at the same time as removing some of the prickliness and burn. It’s not going to go on my must have list, but it’s a perfectly decent dram.

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