A beer a day beats food’s five a day in my book

Nov 21 2008 by Alastair Gilmour, The Journal

PORING over beer books is marginally more exciting than peering through a pub window. The pastime does have its advantages, however, it adds to appreciation, raises expectations, settles arguments, starts fights and its potential for working up a thirst cannot be ignored.

A nose in a well-researched beer publication is a fast track to separating your Altbier from your Eisbock and several new beer books on the shelves promise just that.

A Beer A Day: 366 beers to help you through the year, by Jeff Evans (Camra Books, £16.99).

EVERY date in the calendar has a beer story attached to it along with bizarre information such as June 16, births: Geronimo, 1829. Some connections are serious, but frivolity is allowed to poke its frothy head out, such as Humpty Dumpty Railway Sleeper (5.0% alcohol by volume) from Needham in Norfolk, which celebrates March 23, the day that 1960s railway butcher Dr Beeching exhaled his final chuff. Others are tortuous in their continuity – June 24, Midsummer’s Day features Farmer’s Puck’s Folly (4.2% ABV), a beer from Essex alluding to the fairy practical joker in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream who interferes in the love lives of mere mortals.

But A Beer A Day unearths some fine examples linked to glorious – and inglorious – moments in history, and marks cultural highlights inspired by everything from religion to television soaps (though some may argue, successfully, that there is little difference when followers of both exhibit a devotion and zeal towards their preferred deity with a fanaticism that borders on vehemence).

Today, apparently, is St Columbanus’ day (an Irish saint who wandered Europe and was said to be able to multiply bread and beer supplies at the drop of a habit) and today’s beer selection is Weltenburger Kloster Asam Bock (6.9% ABV) from northern Bavaria originally brewed in 1050 by Benedictine monks. Weltenburger, sitting on the banks of the Danube, is allegedly the oldest monastery brewery in the world; its flagship beer being a doppelbock (strong, malty, fairly sweet lager), deep mahogany in colour with chocolate, coffee and fruit cake flavours developing through toast, plummy fruit and marmalade.

The North East representation is disappointing – only four breweries stagger in – but given that Jeff Evans had the whole world to choose from, perhaps we should be grateful for small mentions. Wylam Rocket (5.0% ABV) has been chosen for October 6; February 5 is Double Maxim (4.7% ABV) from Houghton-le-Spring, February 12, Darwin Rolling Hitch (5.2% ABV) from Sunderland; March 20, Durham St Cuthbert (6.5% ABV).

Some of the entries are cleverly positioned, such as Eggenberg Samichlaus (14% ABV), billed as “the strongest lager beer in the world”, brewed on only one day every year – December 6. It ferments for three weeks then conditions for 10 months before the sherry-like brew is released. And, to celebrate the first showing of Coronation Street on December 9, 1960, some lateral thinking has settled on Farsons Lacto (3.8% ABV), a milk stout from Malta. The style was, of course, the regular order of Ena Sharples, Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst in the Rovers Return snug.

Inevitably, works of this magnitude get something wrong and are there to be shot at by nosey pedants. Pilsner Urquell represents November 11 as “the day pilsner was born”. It was actually October 5, 1842, that the beer style first saw the light of day in Plzen in what was then West Bohemia (now the Czech Republic).

At that time, lagers were brown and opaque but a new Bavarian brewer, Josef Groll, had been hired to run a new “citizens’ brewery”. His clean, golden Pilsner Urquell (“original source”) caused a sensation and spread to important centres such as Vienna and Berlin, helped it must be said by massively-improved rail networks and advances in the production of cheap glassware which allowed beer to be inspected as never before.

A Beer A Day beats the Government’s Five A Day any day.

The Rough Pub Guide: A Celebration of the Great British Boozer by Paul Moody and Robin Turner (Orion, £9.99).

THE authors are quick to point out that this has nothing to do with the Rough Guide series of travel books or the Good Beer Guide, but is their personal collection of pubs they love and a celebration of the most extraordinary drinking dens in the country.

Wherever possible, fixtures and fittings haven’t seen a lick of paint since the war – the Crimean War – and the pubs instead are illuminated by a maverick energy and independent spirit sadly lacking in homogenised chain pubs and ghastly gastro-makeovers.

The book is arranged in reverse order, so their notion of Number One sits at the back of the work (The Montague Arms, New Cross, London). As always with these things, we check for local representation. The Free Trade in Byker (Number 15) is our sole contender, although the research was conducted before a fairly recent “tidy-up”. Not a lot is noted in The Rough Pub Guide about beer quality, it’s more about decor and the attitude of licensees who make Basil Fawlty look like an Andrex puppy.

The view from the Free Trade isn’t mentioned either, concentrating on some loose connection with Jimi Hendrix instead. Granted, it would be an unbeatable urban vista, if only the windows had seen a wash leather since Hendrix was rumoured to have written Stone Free there.

This is a book that should initiate trips around the country as a change from planning days away based on cask ale guides. For instance, The Jaggy Thistle in Blackpool – “the alcoholic version of a hard wire brush up the backside” – is surely worth a visit if only to verify its “most Scottish pub in Britain” tag. As the authors stress: “Rejoice in the great British boozer in all its weird and wonderful manifestations and save our pubs before it’s too late.” Single to Blackpool, please.

The Non-Beardy Beer Book by Mark Jones and friends (Tonto Books, £6.99).

THIS promises a jaundiced assessment as it’s from the publishers of The Burglar’s Dog, the pull-no-punches Newcastle pub guide. It could quite easily have been an unconventional take on Britain’s 100 best-selling beer brands, such as Stella Artois, Carling and Foster’s, but it’s not, which is a real shame. Instead of poking fun at pomposity and prodding until it hurts, it’s a very straightforward tick-list of some very ordinary and unadventurous products (that’s why they’re best-sellers) with some of the descriptions appearing to have flown straight off company websites and bottle labels.

And whoever proposes lemonade as one of the preferred mixers for Bombay Sapphire gin – the researchers briefly sashay in other directions – should never be allowed to review another drink. Everyone knows there is only one companion for gin or vodka – Irn Bru. The book is labelled “an alternative to beardy and boring real ale guides” – an opinion that prompts the heartiest laugh of its 128 pages.

The Campaign For Real Ale 2009 Good Beer Guide, edited by Roger Protz (Camra, £14.99).

THE annual “beer bible” describes 4,500 pubs, 550-plus cask ale breweries and who knows how many ales from Orkney to the Scilly Isles. Many of the best of them, from the likes of Wylam, Jarrow, Durham, Mordue and Allendale, have become North East institutions.

The guide follows a tried and trusted format and some of the descriptions should be read in an EL Wisty voice (the Peter Cook character who would sidle up to unsuspecting strangers and talk in a terminally tedious monotone about newts and astral spheres), but it can’t be bettered as a reference source.

Next week, we’ll open another four, if Tonto hasn’t tracked us down.

alastair.gilmour@ncjmedia.co.uk