My New Blog

BTW, cool website. 

I like the beers of Malta a great deal, both the lager-like Cisk (perfect in the midday sun) and the more hoppy Hopleaf, a rather good ale and the only decent one I have had outside the UK.

My experience of American beer is very limited. I have never been there. All I will say is that I hate the corporate “beers” such as Budweiser and that bloody awful Canadian goose piss whose name I forget. However, I am absolutely confident that my very learned and tasteful friends here on PA will be drinking proper beers, brewed in proper ways.

When people speak about US beer tasting like piss, they tend to mean the mass-brewed lagers like Bud - which do tend to be pretty gosh darn awful. I’m yet to taste one of those that I like. But lagers brewed by micro-brewers and craft-brewers tend to be full of flavour.

I’ve met a lot of US craft beer drinkers that find a lot of UK real ales flavourless and/or bland, simply because their palate is used to the full on flavours of so many US craft beers. When you say craft beer to you is a brew with flavour, then you seem to be leaning towards what I already said is the difference between UK and US tastes, when it comes to beer. Craft brewers definitely make you notice and appreciate the art taken in the brewing process - but UK drinkers tend to like subtlety, and US drinkers in-your-face. All taste for beer is subjective by nature, but that subjectivity can be affected by a number of things outside an individual’s control, and the brewing trends of where in the world one drinks is one such thing.

Thanks Steve, very much.

I think you will enjoy later this week my report of our”taproom takeover” by the founder of Evan Evans brewery. This was supposed to be last week, but somebody cocked up the beer delivery. Anyhow, we will be sampling five ales. I will be asking the missus to keep copious notes in case I become incapable of doing so! 

Absolutely Jared. In all seriousness, I count my blessings each and every day.

You’d quite possibly like some more UK-style beers. Definitely a lot of US brewers tend to focus on the hops and bitterness, and there are a fair few beers out there measuring at least 11 on a scale of 1-10.

But regardless of where you are drinking, there is an enormous difference in flavour profiles both between the various types of beer, and even within them. That difference is even greater when seen between geographic regions. Generally speaking, for example, I don’t particularly like UK brown ales, but I almost always love Belgian brown ales.

I love stouts and porters, but not Guinness. But then again, the Guinness you get in bars is nothing like any stout you’d get from a real ale brewer. Like the creamflow bitters, it has nitrogen added (to give it the creamflow), and it just tastes….meh. Newky brown disagrees with me as much as Guinness does with you. It’s the most horrendous example of a brown ale, and almost put me off the style entirely.

Probably because of what I grew up drinking, some of my favourite beers are UK ales brewed with NZ hop varieties, giving me flavours of the beers of both countries. Shepherd Neame makes some really nice beers using NZ hops, and one of them tastes very similar to one of my favourite NZ beers.

But really, I am no great connoisseur. I like loads of different beers from loads of different breweries across the country. So long as they don’t experiment too much with flavour (I don’t need a hazy ipa flavoured with guava, thank you very much), I tend to find some degree of enjoyment. What I do find frustrating, is when one brewery is bought up by another. My most local big brewer, Greene King, is the worst for this. As much as they might claim that the taste is the same, it never is. GK make some alright beers, and some of the beers they brew under the name of the breweries they’ve taken over aren’t too dissimilar - but there are some beers I really enjoyed before they became GK, that really don’t taste the same at all now.