The Marshal and Land Of Cartmel – Unsworth’s Yard Brewery, Cartmel, Cumbria

If you’ve seen The Trip or Restaurant Wars: The Battle For Manchester, you’ll be familiar with Simon Rogan and his two-Michelin starred restaurant L’Enclume.  L’Enclume is in Cartmel, a village in Cumbria also notable for its sticky toffee puddings and for Rogan’s increasing empire (second restaurant, hotel, pub), which has drawn comparisons with Rick Stein’s impact on Padstow.

L’Enclume deserves its praise, and as a result Cartmel has become a destination for foodies with disposable tuck money.  It therefore makes perfect sense to have a microbrewery there and, accordingly, Unsworth’s Yard Brewery was set up in January 2012. In accordance with L’Enclume’s emphasis on local ingredients and suppliers, Unsworth’s Yard’s beers have made it on to the drinks list at the restaurant and are also available in bottle or on cask from the brewery shop, in the village pubs and off licence.

After a very special visit to L’Enclume, I picked up a couple of bottles from Hot Wines to try later.  The Land Of Cartmel is a 3.7% pale ale, available in bottles that do not appear to be bottle conditioned.  It’s golden, with only a slight hint of coffee in the aroma.  It has a good body for a 3.7% bottled beer, which could be down to the wheat in the recipe.  There’s a noticeable but not overpowering dry bitterness, tasting a little bit chalky or woody with even a hint of peat at the end.  Apart from that last note, it reminded me of both Coniston Bluebird and Butcombe Bitter.

The Marshal presents itself as a bit special.  It’s more expensive and comes numbered and dated (this one bottled on 8 October 2013) in a swing-top bottle.  A 6% strong pale ale, it has the rich brioche aroma of a Belgian blond.  The bitterness is wrapped delicately in a creamy mouthfeel and alcoholic warmth.  Once again there’s an earthiness that I would guess is attributable to English hops, although I expect the hop character would be significantly different in a younger bottle.  It’s reminiscent of some of the older, southern English breweries’ revivals of their traditional British IPA recipes, but also isn’t a million miles away from Orval (without the Brettanomyces).  Like Orval, it would go very well with cheese, perhaps from the cheese shop next door.

Advertisement

In Pictures: The Second Leeds International Beer Festival

I went to the opening day of Leeds International Beer Festival yesterday evening. With the caveats that I’ve never been to Indy Man Beer Con, GBBF or the Copenhagen Beer Celebration, and the fact that I’m not actually that keen on traditional beer festivals, it was definitely the best beer festival experience I’ve had. It’s on a grander scale than last year and the organisers, bars and breweries involved have put a lot of effort into making it really special, as can be seen from the photos below.

There was a greater use of the possibilities of the Town Hall this year, with the food vans, Friends of Ham’s teepee, the Brooklyn truck and Flying Dog caravan out front. One hidden gem was North Bar’s pop-up “Atomium” in the old cells under the Town Hall, where The Day The Earth Stood Still played on screen whilst drinkers downed shots of tequila and pickle juice.

If you get a chance to attend over the weekend I would highly recommend it. Tickets can be purchased from the city centre box office.

Brooklyn Brewery Pop Up, 20-24 The Calls, Leeds City Centre

James Clay, importer of some of the best American, Belgian and German beers to the UK, have succeeded in an application for a licence to open a “pop up” Brooklyn Brewery bar in a warehouse on The Calls in central Leeds, despite police objections.

The bar will be in a currently empty warehouse at 20-24 The Calls, about 50 metres from BrewDog Leeds and 100 metres from The Stew & Oyster (Calls Landing).  The licence application documents, which can be read here, show similar objections from the police as were made in the BrewDog licensing saga, to opening any new bar close to “an area which is an alcohol related crime hotspot, Call Lane” and the same “appreciation versus inebriation” arguments.

The Yorkshire Evening Post reports that representations were made to the sub-committee that the bar was to attract, “the well-behaved and “discerning” drinker, prepared to spend £7 or more on a pint of speciality beer“.  A representative of the West Yorkshire Police stated that, “People with money still have the ability of causing trouble when inebriated.”  Surely not. 

The bar is stated to be temporary, although it is not clear for how long it is expected to operate.  The licence is restricted to Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays.  Interestingly, it was stated that the bar is “a temporary arts and cultural space used for the purpose of marketing“, that it is primarily an exercise in promoting the Brooklyn brand and may operate at a loss.  However, at £7+ a pint I assume the loss won’t be made on the beer.

I’ll be interested to see how this pans out and whether the set-up will offer something different to the existing craft beer bars in Leeds.  When I read about it, I initially thought of the regular Friday evening “happy hour” sessions held in the brewery in Williamsburg when we went there in 2010 (see photo), with  picnic tables, plastic glasses, beer vouchers, pizzas delivered to the front door and ultraobscure beers.  I assume that this new venture, “pop up” as it is, will seem a little more permanent, but who knows? Spit and sawdust can be pretty hip.

Beer: The High Art Of The Low Countries

Andrew Graham Dixon’s new BBC4 series The High Art Of The Low Countries started this week with an episode on Flemish art. You can’t understand the history of art in isolation from the social and economic factors that influence it, so the programme is also a fascinating and enjoyable general background for anyone considering a beery trip to Bruges, Ghent or Brussels.

Partly to introduce the importance of religion and monasteries to the development of the Low Countries, Andrew also visited the abbey at Orval and discussed beer with Brother Xavier.  You can view that short section from about the 9 minute point on the BBC iPlayer at this link, which will be available for the next 18 days.  However, I would encourage you to watch the whole programme.

Whilst we’re on the Low Countries, I missed North Bar’s Lowlands Beer Festival, but when I called in this week the fridges were still packed with great Belgian and Dutch bottles, both traditional and modern.  We enjoyed an Emelisse TIPA and Viven Imperial IPA and finished off the keg of De Dolle Bos Keun, all of which took us back to our trip to Bruges, as recorded in these posts.  Andy Mogg has also posted about his trip to Bruges here.

First image from The Arts Desk.

Black Ops: Is Snakebite Illegal?

I was in a pub yesterday when one of us, who had been abstaining from alcohol for the duration of Lent, wanted to break her fast with a snakebite and black.

For the uninitiated, snakebite is a mixture of (usually) half and half cider and pilsner, often taken with a dash of blackcurrant cordial. It’s sweet and refreshing and is especially popular amongst students and younger drinkers. I sold thousands of them when I worked in bars in St Andrews, sometimes asked for as “diesel” or, ahem, “pinky pees”.

It was therefore slightly surprising when the barman informed us that he could not serve snakebite and black, as it was illegal. As a compromise, he sold us the component parts separately.

It is not illegal to serve snakebite, as far as I can determine. Weights and measures legislation in the UK requires that draught beer or cider can only be served in quantities of one third of a pint, two thirds of a pint, a half pint, or multiples of a half pint, “except when sold as a constituent of a mixture of two or more liquids”.* That doesn’t prohibit anyone from serving a pint of half & half snakebite. It also appears to me that a half-pint wouldn’t be a problem under the exception for mixed drinks, but I’m happy to be corrected in the comments.

It seems that a number of pubs, perhaps including Wetherspoons, refuse to serve snakebite on the grounds that it is drunk primarily by younger drinkers who tend to drink it too fast. This seems to be an odd distinction for places that have posters in the window advertising discounted jägerbombs. Nevertheless, the “illegal” excuse seems to be used by staff in these circumstances as one of those catch-all, blame-shifting excuses, like “health and safety” or “data protection”, when the law in question has nothing to do with it, which is then passed on to others as fact.

My favourite story about this is from the Harrogate Advertiser in June 2001. It’s not recorded whether this particular customer was thought to be a potential troublemaker or whether the member of staff just accepted the myth as fact:

At about 11.45am, seven serious looking security agents had banged on the door of the pub, flashed their warrant cards, and requested lunch for the former president of the USA. […]

“But we let them in and after they’d searched the building in walked Mr Clinton himself. He came to the bar and introduced himself, and then there was the dilemma of what to drink.

“So I gave him and his aide a taste of a couple of real ales we have here, but he decided on a diet Coke.

“He did ask for a snakebite after one of his security men did, but we kindly refused him. It’s illegal to serve it here in the UK you see.”

Welcome to Yorkshire, Mr President.

* See The Weights And Measures (Intoxicating Liquor) Order 1988 para 2(1) as amended by The Weights and Measures (Specified Quantities) (Unwrapped Bread and Intoxicating Liquor) Order 2011 para 2.

BrewDog Leeds: The Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost Deer

BrewDog Leeds opened this week, seemingly against the odds. I’ve previously discussed the difficulties this bar had obtaining a licence, which raises its own issues as to whether all drinkers should be tarred with the same brush.

In the time since it was announced, I’ve had several doubts about BrewDog Leeds. It’s a terribly small site. It’s at an end of town that’s already loud, boisterous and overcrowded on weekend evenings. It’s just another bar in a chain.

All of those things are true. First, the size issue: I think it would be uncomfortable to have more than around 60 people over the two floors. But there are a couple of nice booths upstairs, comfortable stools, shelves to rest a beer dotted around and, overall, the space is used to its full potential. And cosy can be friendly: on the shareholder night, we chatted to our neighbours about the beers and got to know people we hope to see again, as the trains rolled by outside the windows.

It is at an overcrowded end of town. However there are good places to eat nearby and some pretty decent bars on Call Lane, although five year-old memories of others do still make me shudder.

It’s also not a million miles away from North Bar and you could easily do Leeds’ new holy trinity of small craft beer bars (North, Friends of Ham, BrewDog Leeds) in an evening and still make it back to the last train.

And yes, it’s a part of a chain. This one looks exactly like the others: reclaimed gym floorboards on the walls, brick bar, stripped-back grey industrial chic. But that works well and right now the BrewDog bars remain a great chain with an ethos that credits its customers with an interest in and enthusiasm about good beer.

I’ve not been to a BrewDog bar that I didn’t like, where I didn’t get excellent service, or where I wasn’t a little excited by the selection of beers, particularly the imported ones. On the opening night, I enjoyed beer from Ballast Point, Mikkeller and De Molen, and even managed to squeeze a couple of BrewDogs in around the edges.

So if you live in Leeds, be sure to add BrewDog Leeds to your list of regular haunts. If you happen to be visiting Leeds city centre for a few beers, that holy trinity of North, Friends of Ham and BrewDog Leeds is worth the pilgrimage.

Next month I’m going to Sweden and should be there for the opening week of BrewDog Stockholm, provided the ship full of gym floorboards and trendy beards makes it through the Øresund strait. It’ll be another bar in a chain, but I still can’t wait.

See also: Rob’s post at Hopzine and this interview with manager Sophie at Leeds List.

BrewDog Leeds, White Cloth Hall, Crown Street, Leeds, LS1 7RB @BrewDogBarLeeds

Beer in Berlin: Weihanstephaner, Hackescher Markt

As well as Brauhaus Lemke, we were lucky to have Weihanstephaner near to our hotel in Mitte and we returned to it a couple of times during our trip.  Weihenstephan, north of Munich,claims to be the oldest operating commercial brewery in the world, with the abbey there having obtained brewing rights in 1040.  For over two centuries now the brewery has been owned by the state of Bavaria; it seemed appropriate to be drinking nationalised beer in East Berlin, albeit a Western one.

I’d heard of Weihenstephan before visiting its outpost in the German capital, but wasn’t particularly familiar with the beers.  I was pleased to find that, although the pub only served beers from a single brewery, it at least provided a range of styles.  In our week in Berlin, we didn’t stumble upon the type of beer bar you might gravitate to in London, Copenhagen or even Leeds, with a wide range of styles from different breweries.  In that context, finding 12 or so beer styles, or at least sub-styles, from one brewery was very welcome.

All of the beers we tried were very enjoyable, and (as far as I could tell from my limited experience) good examples of each style, from the Hefe and Dunkel Weissbeirs to the Pilsner.  The two most interesting beers we tried were the strongest: the Korbinian Doppelbock and Vitus Weizen Bock were both north of 7% and packed with flavour: respectively rich, spicy and malty; and packed with banana and tropical fruit flavours.

On our second visit we also had dinner at Weihenstephaner.  I had a posh version of Currywurst, which came as a delicious veal sausage smothered in spicy, brown curry sauce (fruity and more like chip shop curry sauce than a British Indian restaurant curry) and some roasted new potatoes.  Kate had a dish translated as a potato hotpot, which was a slightly thin broth which thankfully came with some tasty, thin, spicy Wurst.

The bar is also a nice setting to enjoy your beer.  A kind of upmarket Bavarian beer hall, upstairs is white, neat and ordered like a minimal restaurant.  Downstairs there are very many more seats in a maze of cellars under brickwork arches, which seems  more like a beerhall as I imagined it, but at the same time was civilised, chatty and not too loud, with families, groups of work colleagues and celebratory but restrained birthday parties all able to enjoy the same space.

Happily full of good beer and tasty German food, we experimented with a couple of different schnapps and wondered why our local attempt at a German beerhall wasn’t more like this, with a genuine appreciation of Bavarian beer and food, rather than catering primarily for the worst British stag-and-hen doings.

Conversely, although I enjoyed our week in Berlin a lot, it did make me pine for the best of Leeds and the variety of beers offered by English craft beer bars. North Bar, for example, provides the best of all worlds: the hygge of a Danish cellar bar or Belgian brown cafe, along with the conviviality of the best British pubs and a range of beers from across Europe, America and beyond.  Not that I want to go to Berlin to drink anything other than German beer, but there’s an equivalent in Berlin in terms of range, I’d be grateful to know for next time.

Beer in Berlin: Dicke Wirtin, Charlottenburg and Berliner Kindl Weisse

We spent very little time in what used to be West Berlin during our holiday, but did take the S-Bahn to Zoo station to see the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, an iconic church mostly destroyed by air raids but whose surviving broken spire and entrance hall, containing some incredible mosaics, stands beside a modern functionalist church built between 1959 and 1963.  After a brief walk down the shopping street Kurfürstendamm, we turned up to Savignyplatz to find a beer.

Around Berlin In 80 Beers guided us towards Dicke Wirtin (the “Thick Landlady”, Google translate tells me, which seems to refer to a revered, Corrie-esque former landlady immortalised in photos and unflattering charicatures), a traditional wood panelled pub with lots of kitsch character. The front room was full of mirrors and high tables and a bar with large glass flasks of homemade fruit brandy above it.

The back room appeared to be a dining room, with a mannequin dressed as a Soviet officer guarding a corridor back to the kitchen and toilets.  Off the front room was a smoking room, which still made the bar smell a bit of smoke, which is difficult to ignore following the blanket implementation of the smoking ban in the UK.

Kate ordered a König Pilsener, as suggested by the book, which was a pleasant pilsner if not as bitter as it had apparently once been renowned for.  I decided that I couldn’t leave Berlin without trying a Berliner Kindl Weisse with grün, a woodruff syrup.  I was informed that Kindl Weisse on its own tastes a bit like a watered down lambic and that almost everyone has it with either green or red (raspberry) syrup.

It didn’t bode well that the green beer came with a straw.  It tasted very sweet, like a jelly sweet, with a fairly artificial taste.  If the original beer had much of an underlying taste, it couldn’t be identified.  I managed to drink it quickly before moving on to a small glass of pilsner.

I should note that Dicke Wirtin had soft rock ballads playing in the background including, inevitably, Wind Of Change by the Scorpions.  I don’t think I’ve ever visited a city in continental Europe – Prague, Rome, Madrid, Florence, Bruges – without hearing the bloody thing, usually from a busker.  However, at least it seems apposite in Berlin, if  no less clichéd and cloying.  The perfect song for a Berliner Weisse with a woodruff shot, in fact.

Beer in Berlin: Georgbraeu, Nikolaiviertel

As well as Zum Nussbaum (and a number of other pubs listed in Around Berlin In 80 Beers that we didn’t get to), Nikolaiviertel also has a large brewpub, Georgbraeu.

The pub is opposite a nineteenth century statue of St George and the Dragon, which has stood in two locations before the restoration of Nikolaiviertel in the 1980s. The inside is large in itself, but in summer would also give you the chance to sit in a beer garden next to the Spree.

For a brewpub, Georgbraeu only seems to have two beers: their pilsner and dunkel. I found both of them inoffensive but uninteresting.  The pilsner didn’t taste of much and the dunkel was the same with a bit of toffee.  Nonetheless the portions of Schweinshaxe did look huge and maybe, on a warm summer’s day by the river with friends, you might focus less on the beer.

Beer in Berlin: Zum Nussbaum, Nikolaiviertel

Nikolaiviertel is a small area of Mitte, near Alexanderplatz and Museum Island, which appears older than it actually is.  Like much of Berlin, it was flattened towards the end of the war, but in 1980s was rebuilt by the East German authorities for the city’s 750th anniversary, with Berlin’s “oldest” church, the twin-spired Nikolaikirche at its centre.

Opposite Nikolaikirche, now a museum rather than a working church, is a small pub-restaurant called Zum Nussbaum (Walnut Tree), which was built in 1985-7 based on the plans of a destroyed pub that once stood in another part of Berlin.

It’s a small three-room pub with around forty seats.  We were lucky to get a seat on a Tuesday afternoon, in the dark wood-panelled back room with small prints from the cartoonist and artist Heinrich Zille, who is commemorated with a statue and museum nearby.

The range of beers was limited to those from Berliner Kindl, but we both went for the recommendation in Around Berlin In 80 Beers: Postdamer Rex Pils, a satisfying bitter pilsner.  We had a tasty late lunch of Boulette (a kind of meatball/burger) and Bockwurst with potato salad.

Zum Nussbaum is a pleasant, cosy pub in a nice area.  However it was difficult to forget that this quarter was destroyed in the most tragic period in Berlin’s history and that this seemingly aged pub is seven years younger than me.