"I am also really excited about how the beer scene in the UK has changed over the last few years. It was fucking awful back in 2007. We wanted to be a catalyst for change. And we believe we have only been able to be that catalyst by doing all the crazy, high octane things that so many people took objection to at the time."
As I’d been drinking beer for many years before 2007 I cast my mind back to see if I could recall what I’d been drinking in the dark days before Brewdog. I usually have trouble remembering anything more than a weekend ago but a few dusty old brain cells seem to be still firing.
My drinking career started back in the late 80s. Since then there’s been a lot of cask beer drunk obviously. Cask beer is not always served at its best, but when it is can be absolutely sublime, and to this day I can still honestly say that the best beer I’ve ever had was a cask beer. The cask beers were overwhelmingly below 5% ABV, with CAMRA beer festivals usually being the only places there was anything stronger.
Bottled beers were another matter though. Stronger beers
like Imperial Russian Stouts and Barley Wines were out there if you could find
them. I was lucky that a local brewery had a well stocked off licence with a
good range of imported beers, particularly from Belgium. So Trappist beers,
lambics, Flemish red and brown ales were relatively easy to get hold of.
Supermarkets, as today, could be variable, but Sainsbury’s had an own label geuze
back in the early 90s, and I found many American Craft Beers in Safeways (late 90s,
early 2000s?). Goose Island IPA was the stand out beer, and to this day it
remains a favourite. In fact when I first drank Brewdog Punk IPA (2007 or 2008)
I thought, great, someone in Britain is making a beer in the style of American
craft beer and I did shop around to find their beers when I could. Goose
Island did wipe the floor with Punk when I compared them side by side though.
Since 2007 American pale ale style beers have become a lot
easier to find, as have beers of higher strength and Brewdog undoubtedly played
a part in this. A lot more beer styles that previously I only found as imports
now seem to be brewed domestically, and if that’s your thing there are now premium
niche products served on keg which I can’t remember seeing before. Not that I pay much
attention to keg fonts though so they could have been out there before.
So before 2007 I had drunk a wide range of beers of
excellent quality, from a wide range of styles and strengths. Perhaps if I was
young, inexperienced, and from a crap hole in the middle of nowhere my
experiences would have been different.
I’d be interested to
hear any thoughts from other drinkers that weren't in short trousers in the dark days before Brewdog.
I remember me and a group of mates trying Sierra Nevada in about 2005 and it left us dumbfounded. We never suspected that beer could taste so fresh and so interesting.
ReplyDeleteYou have to understand that outside of a handful of real ale focused pubs in each town that wouldn't have appealed to us student types, the majority of beer was utterly uninspiring. Either mainstream lagers or disgusting smoothflow or bland and muddy tasting and often warm and badly kept regional bitters.
Of course, those days are long gone. The majority of pubs now offer a much better range of cask ale, if not a vastly improved keg selection to match.
I was drinking good real ale back in the early 80s, there was variety and there were some fabulous beers about. I still remember though what a revelation it was going to the Great American Beer Festival and touring Denver area micros in 2004. Yes, it was keg, but it tasted great!
ReplyDelete(I wish I know why bloody Blogspot won't accept comments via my Ubuntu PC, by the way. It's a PITA having to spin up a virtual Windows machine each time.)
Blogspot is a bit rubbish.
Deleteoutside of a handful of real ale focused pubs in each town
ReplyDeleteWhen did you undertake this tour of every town in Britain? I'm intrigued.
Sarcasm aside, I think you may be over-generalising a bit. I travelled around a bit in the 80s & made a point of drinking the local beer wherever I was. I don't remember the beer ever being particularly mediocre - not in the sense that, say, Spitfire is mediocre. Dryburgh's Heavy was different from Mitchell's bitter, and Shipstone's was different again. I'd rather have been drinking Felinfoel, but not because the quality was lower - they were just different beers, as you'd expect.
mmm Shippo's.How was your belly?
DeleteI cannot speak as to the 1980s. My experience of pubbing begins in the mid 90s. The early 2000s were in my opinion a real nadir in beer choice and variety. If you didn't like either lager or brown bitter, there really wasn't much for you to drink in the vast majority of pubs.
Back in the day pubs round my way were mainly owned by Allied and Courage. I like Allied's Burton Ale but was not so fond of Courage Directors.
DeleteWhen I was a student I'd say most people drank lager but those of us that drank in the ways of righteousness still had a Real Ale Society.
By the early 2000s I'm sure golden ales were big, and decent bottled beers were definitely a lot more common.
As for BD, I'm struggling to remember a time when things started to change. The blog post that introduced my tasting notes - and indirectly launched my beer blog - dates from January 2008; by that time I'd been a regular at the Marble Beerhouse for several years, and drunk quite a lot of pale'n'oppy beer (without much liking it, it has to be said).
ReplyDeleteI do remember BD coming on the scene - they were a creative new brewery whose beers were always interesting & often superb, very much like Thornbridge before them and Red Willow since. I've lost interest in the beer since they went all-keg (not without giving them a chance, or several chances).
Innovators? Not really - or not in a good way. They've done a lot to legitimise keg dispense, shouty and borderline mendacious advertising, and think-of-a-number pricing - and they've certainly done a lot to get people talking about 'craft beer'. So, er, cheers for that.
Isn't this the point someone says "Roosters"? Can it be me?
ReplyDeleteIndeed. Usual guff from BD who, as Boak & Bailey have shown in their excellent book, are rather good at re-writing history. I suspect the breweries around back in 2007 (I see from my 2008 GBG [published autumn 2007] includes the likes of Marble, Thornbridge and Abbeydale among others) will be delighted to discover they were part of a "fucking awful" beer scene.
ReplyDeleteThere is perhaps another way of interpreting "beer scene". Decent real ale (both trad and more micro varieties) has always been more or less available for those who care about beer and are willing to track it down - so a "beer scene" comprising beer lovers and breweries was just fine before 2007, if not particularly dynamic. But if by "beer scene" you mean "people interested in 'scenes' being interested in beer" - i.e. beer being cool, talked about, read about, written about, cared about, drunk, sought, made for and distributed to etc etc by cool people / foodies / Sunday supplement readers / young people / hipsters blah blah blah, I think they have a good case. Not saying it's a good or bad or even important thing, but a little beer knowledge is now virtually compulsory among "creative class" circles and that's had a massive knock on effect on widening distribution, at least in metropolitan areas, I can't speak for the rest.
ReplyDelete(born 1980, started drinking lager 1995, real ale/cider 2000, mostly lager 2000-2010, real ale / craft 2010 - onwards)
Interesting point. Not being a trendy young hipster I don't really know, though the standard reference text for the period Boak and Bailey, 2014 puts that change starting with The Rake in 2006.
DeleteOliver - fair point but I really don't think James Watt is being as subtle or thoughtful as that. I think we all know what he means here.
DeleteJohn - Agreed, and to clarify I'm not crediting BrewDog alone for that change in perceptions. They were perhaps the brewery who mostly keenly grasped that this new craft beer thing could be sold to Vice readers, which would make Guardian readers want it, which would eventually make everyone want it. They seem somewhere between stage 2 and stage 3 now?
DeleteEd - I must read Brew Britannia! The Rake sounds like a good starting point - a specialist beer bar with a "cool" NYC style atmosphere, just off Borough Market, home of foodies. It took a few years for that to spread to other bars though, as I recall - when I think "2006" it's still indie bands, Red Stripe and Captain Morgan. Maybe Meantime, in SE London, but we still understood that as a 'local' beer rather than a 'craft/new wave' beer. My own Trip to America That Changed Everything was May 2007, so maybe I was just behind the curve in that particular area.
At risk of being ridiculously London-centric, it would be interesting to track the spread of craft/new wave from the starting point of the Rake outwards to the more salubrious/gentrified pubs of Zones 2, 3 etc. If my memory serves, it was probably Brooklyn Lager more than Brewdog that led the charge.
James Watt isn't a historian -- he's a businessman with (sort of) the gift of the gab, so I wouldn't expect him to be a particularly reliable commentator.
ReplyDeleteBeer before 2007 wasn't 'fucking awful' but I do recall, living in East London, having to use public transport to get to interesting beer, and needing to be a bit 'in the loop' to know where to go.
These days, Walthamstow has pubs with multiple handpumps, bottles, interesting keg, etc., on almost every corner. (A slight exaggeration, but only slight...) Other urban areas are the same, while places like Newton Abbot have got to about where London was in 2005 -- interesting beer, if you know where to look.
Though they've certainly been influential, BrewDog can't claim credit for *that* -- they're a particularly obvious symptom of the change, not the cause of it.
Do you need to be a historian to write about something that happened within your own adult life, seven years ago?
DeleteOf course you don't - you just need a decent memory for starters.
DeleteI moved to the UK in 2005. Initially the beer here all seemed pretty shit, but I was going to the wrong pubs it turned out. I went to this place called the Hop Pole in Aylesbury. Ten different beers on handpump. Ranging from pale and hoppy (a Darkstar I think) to rich and black. I was converted on the spot.
ReplyDeleteAnd that was in *Aylesbury*. Sure, it was not at all usual as pubs go... but still. Hardly dark days for beer.
Before I discovered BrewDog I was drinking Oakham regularly (having moved to Hertfordshire at this point). And my local brewery (Buntingford) was releasing single-hop beers that I was very much enjoying. I will never forget their rendition of Nelson Sauvin. I still have the pumpclip, it is on the mantelpiece right behind me. :) [This was after 2007, but before BrewDog had any national traction... can't remember exactly when, but I was an early-adopter of BrewDog, well before the 1st EFP).
What has changed since 2005? I'd say that if you walk into a random pub you're still >80% likely to get really dull beer, probably badly kept. *But* based on Cambridge pub development in this time you're at least 5x more likely to find one of the still-too-rare gems. None of the great beer pubs sell BrewDog, in fact I think the only pub that does is a Greene King place that has Punk. Funny that. Is this now the only way BrewDog can get their beer into areas that don't have a BrewDog bar? Smells like fail to me.
I think I got my timing wrong with the Nelson Sauvin actually. Looks like that was in 2010. So I was probably a fresh fanboi EFP-er at the time... anyway, was still a year before BrewDog released their ground-breaking single-hop beers ;)
DeleteOakham are orders of magnitude more important than Brewdog. It was tasting JHB for the first time in around 2001 that made me realise there was something exciting happening. However, I would still have been perfectly happy drinking all the tasty beers I drank before then. Brewdog are (and I'm sorry if this is a surprise to anyone) full of shit.
ReplyDeleteThere have been exciting pale beers around for quite a while (as well as brown beers which don't deserve the 'boring' tag, but that's another argument). Looking back, I wonder if I was slow to get into pale beers because the ones my local dispensed were from Marble (rather than e.g. Pictish, Abbeydale or Oakham). There's a particular hop that Marble used to use* which made the beer smell of vomit, not to put too fine a point it. It gave quite a pleasantly tart, aromatic edge to the flavour, but you had to get the beer in your mouth without letting it linger beneath your nose for too long. As a lover of brown malty bitter, I couldn't really be doing with this - although I kept on trying them out of vague local loyalty, plus memories of beers like Uncut Amber and McKenna's Revenge. It wasn't till Dobber came around - made without that particular hop*, if my nose is any guide - that I got what the fuss was about.
Delete*Yes, I'm sure it was the hop, and not (for instance) the beer being off. I remember a Meet the Brewer event where Dom Driscoll put out little bowls of hops for the punters to sniff, and bam! there it was - eau de vomit.
That, Phil, is entirely a mater of opinion. I have been drinking Marble beers since they started and thrpughout their various incarnations and personally have never encounterd a beer from them that smelled of vomit. Mind you - this was before you joined the hoppy path of righteousness.
DeleteI suspect it was something not everybody smells for some reason, like differing sensitivity to broccoli or asparagus. I'm sure it was there, though, not least because of that experience with the hops (really should have asked which it was at the time). This is pre-Pint but post-cloudy - mid- to late 2000s.
DeleteThe whole "BD saved beer" narrative is eerily like the "CAMRA saved beer" story. Mixing up (IMO) cause and effect. Correlation is not causation. etc.
ReplyDeleteThe rhetoric from Brewdog does often sound very similar to unreconstructed CAMRA rhetoric. Brewdog's mass market lager bashing sounds like something from CAMRA 20 years ago.
ReplyDeleteIt was only about 2 or 3 years ago the bloggers were asking is Craft beer going to go mainstream.Brewdog were definitely ahead of the pack and put their(or someones )money where their mouth was.In 2007 their were only a handful of pubs In London selling interesting beers.Marble was unheard of in London. The explosion of London brewers hadn't yet happened so he is right .It was awful. cheers john
ReplyDeleteYou may have only had awful beers before 2007 but I was drinking the nectar of the gods before then.
DeleteAh, "Britain Is Only London".
DeleteMr Brewdog was talking about the beer scene not specifically the beer.Mr Stinger you may a better travelled man than me so I can only comment on my locality.cheers john
ReplyDeleteAnd older, I bet you.
Delete61 this November. cheers john
DeleteThat should have been Mr Stringer. oops
ReplyDelete