The Holborn Whippet

Although it seems new craft beer bars have been opening every month for the past couple of years now, the Holborn Whippet may well have more significance than most. Previously bars have been largely placed in areas just outside of central London where independent bars and eateries thrive, where there are obvious opportunities to reach a discerning and affluent crowd of drinkers looking for individuality over convenience – Camden, Brixton, Shoreditch etc. But the Whippet – so called because of an ancient Bloomsbury pastime of whippet racing before their drinking – is bang in the centre of town, where a mix of office workers and tourists usually indulge in chain restaurants and bars with pints of cold lager.

           On the day I visited, it was seemingly about 40 degrees centigrade, and most of the punters (there were many) were stood outside in the sun, but drinking pints of Thornbridge Pivni and Bernard Light instead of the usual Peroni. The bar is reminiscent of the Euston Tap, with a small central bar offering cask and keg options chalked up above the taps, and at pretty reasonable prices for the location. They have only been open a week, and it is still very much in pre-launch mode, with the kitchen closed (soon to be a grill-based operation with an emphasis on burgers) and the décor Spartan. The space is used well, with seats around the perimeter and large milling areas around the bar. Big windows allow you to effectively people watch, and the pedestrian road it is situated on is great for outside drinking.

  

           The beer list currently reflects the location – a relatively conservative selection that wont have beer geeks salivating at the very thought, but will provide a genuine alternative for those local workers who would usually be on the macro lager. Many of the beers were pilsners, bitters and stouts, recognisable styles for the more cautious craft beer drinker. Brand name breweries like Dark Star, Thornbridge and Williams Bros were prominent, along with bigger names form Germany and the Czech Republic, although it was nice to see some beers from Gadds, a Kent brewery rarely seen in London. From the more unusual stuff, Maisels Weisse Hell was delicious in the warm air, and a Kirkstall Framboise was keeping my missus very happy (although the sight of 2 women drinking this through a straw was very upsetting).

           For a craft beer devotee, this is clearly a welcome addition to London’s bar scene. More importantly, it is a stride towards making great beer more available and apparent to the drinking public who wouldn’t normally seek it out. It is still very much living out of it suitcase, but lets hope this place can mature into a consistent and quality operation that we can all enjoy.

EBBC12 - 'Live' Blogging

This was supposed to be posted live at Saturday’s live beer blogging event at the European Beer Bloggers Conference, but I was too busy grilling the brewers, talking to people and enjoying myself to do it. So I have gone for a stream of consciousness approach, basically giving my scribbled pen & paper notes as written.

        This was a speed-dating approach, with 10 tables of bloggers being treated to 10 different beers in 5 minute tastings, with the brewers present to give some back story and answer questions. It was incredibly good fun, and also a good showcase for the differences in approach of brewery PR (some were professional and methodical, some were relaxed and unprepared) but also the differences between drinkers. Many drinkers poured away the beers after a few sips, regardless of the quality, whereas some finished them all. A few people had clearly made up their mind about beers before they were tasted; many more were inquisitive, open and honest which made for a highly social activity. Here are my thoughts as they occurred.

      
Innis & Gunn SPA 7% - Good looking bloke presenting, good looking beer. We quiz him about the clear glass bottle, but we are not mean. That is pretty easy because the beer is not terrible – smells like vanilla ice cream and doughnuts. It tastes of toffee, toast, and Danish pastry, with a touch of smoke and a touch of bitterness. Not for me but some may like it a lot.

Leeds Brewery Hellfire 5.2% - the bloke is not quite as good looking as the last one. Pale straw colour, not much aroma. Crisp, light, fresh and very decent. Drinks almost like a lager, the guy says its good straight out of the bottle – I agree.

Otley Oxymoron 5.5% - they give us snazzy cards and beermats. This is from a keg and looks like coca cola. Black IPA. Smells like blackjacks and fruit salad sweets. It is sweet to start with a touch of liquorice and spearmint. It finishes dry with burnt toast and citrus flavour. Interesting.

Brains Dark 4.1% - Welsh girls! Thin head, very black. The nose is butter and caramel, but the taste is better, smooth, chocolate, liquorice, and a savoury, herbal note. Decent.

Marble Earl Grey IPA 6.8% - unlabelled bottle, exciting. It is a cloudy amber colour, and smells of orange, lemon, strawberry and vaguely like tea. It is drying on the palate, herbal, sweet lemon and bitter orange pith. Bitter form the tea and the hops. Brilliant, my favourite of the session. 

Roosters Baby Faced Assassin 6.1% - this is sweet and fruity, with apricot and yoghurt in the aroma. Needs to be colder and have more condition, and it is a bit too restrained and shy. Still delicious though, full of fruit and gentle bitterness.

Great Heck Stormin Norman 6.5% - this is a bit ‘whatever’. Decent enough, the flavour of a session pale but too strong in alcohol. Pleasant and nicely bitter but unremarkable.

Slaters Ales Top Totty 4% - ooh, what an offensive name! Come on, there are more offensive things on maps of France. The beer is OK, extremely well-conditioned and sparkly. Not much in the aroma or the flavour, but crisp, clean and refreshing. I would drink it again. 

Camden USA Hells 4.6% - Cool bottles, cool beer. Easy drinking with a gentle pithy, citrus flavour and refreshing finish. One of the few I have had before, and I have had it better, but still good.

Adnams Ghost Ship 4.5% - she has an iPad! This is clean, crisp and decent. It is slightly metallic and not bitter enough but is well conditioned and easy to drink.

Bad Beer, Great Pint

Sitting in a sun bathed stadium in Chicago, the gentle rumble of the crowd finding their seats rippled through the plastic chairs beneath us. The sweet smell of hot dogs and popcorn wafting through the aisles was comforting and evocative.  The excited chatter of thickly accented sports fans bounced around so that one conversation was indistinguishable from another. It occurred to me that I was on a cold, cramped plane hours before and now sat warm and free in a revered temple of American sport. I sipped my pint. It was unquestionably wonderful – every minute of the half hour or so I spent drinking it were exciting, relaxing, pleasurable and fun. It was a pint worth crossing an ocean for.

        The problem with that is that the beer itself wasn’t great – we don’t get Old Style over here but think of macro American lager, pale and slightly sweet with no trace of hops or depth. This is not the first time this has happened either – I distinctly remember being at the darts last year and hugely enjoying a pint or two of Kronenbourg. I vaguely remember about another 3 pints, and don’t remember the last few at all. Similarly, a pint of Fosters at the Emirates was just as good - accompanied by a chicken balti pie, the air thick with anticipation and openly celebrated disdain for the opposition, it was exciting and heady. A Budweiser after a cold, rainy afternoon playing golf last year was nourishing, familiar and unchallenging in a wonderful way.  The low point of this was surely the cans of overpriced Red Stripe at my university leaving ball – I drank plenty, revelling in every mouthful.

          After thinking about his I have decided that first and foremost, I love beer. I cannot think of another beverage with which I would be quite content paying serious money for a lacklustre version of. Yet I do this regularly in bars, pubs and stadiums around London when there is little else available, drinking pints of macro lager which result almost no change from a fiver. But I inevitably enjoy them. Not in the same way as craft beer, which can provide excitement, pleasure, flavour and memories all on their own. Ordinary beer needs the infinite possibilities and pleasures created by company and circumstance. I will always continue to seek out great beers – but for me a great pint doesn’t always begin and end with the merits of the liquid inside the glass.

The Session No.63 - The Beer Moment

What is the beer moment? Good question. For me it’s those things which are not associated with taste, smell and colour, rarity or price, that actually are the heart and soul of drinking beer. It is the reason; the intangible quality of beer that exists because of you and in spite of you, that keeps you drinking pints of beer in the pub long after other drinks have been discovered and newer habits learned. It means that the trends can change, your tastes can change, but the sentiments remain. It is indefinable, but here are a few examples of what I mean.

        Getting a round in – a rare and wonderful phenomenon in which people willingly spend their hard earned cash on one another, with no guarantee of reciprocation. This may be when you are 17, getting in the jugs of lager because you look the oldest, or being the unlucky sod that has to leave the ground before the half time whistle to get the beers in at the football. Either way, like Christmas, it is somehow better to give than receive – a moment of community.

          Penny in the pint – to this day I will down a pint of beer if someone puts a penny in it. Illogical, for sure, but a part of the sense of loyalty and heritage I feel to my very early drinking days on the school rugby tour. Almost all the other guys were older than me (and better players) but I was instantly accepted after I eagerly joined in with the challenge. This led to several years in which this custom was readily applied on nights out at the local Wetherspoons, a social contract with fellow drinkers which created both a bond of friendship and elevated drunkenness. A wasteful, irresponsible and irreplaceable moment of dread and delight.  

          A new beer in a new land – no matter what activity I engage in, or how long I am there, a sip of the local beer in a foreign land instantly draws a connection between myself and them unlike any other. A strange Eastern land can become familiar with a bottle of Tiger, and memories of summer holidays in Greece come flooding back with a cold Mythos – a moment of affinity.

         What do you want – whether this is a brief discussion with the barman or a bunch of mates looking at a long line of pump clips, a discussion of what you like and desire is a time of deep soul searching and inner contemplation. What do I want? This is an epic question, but broken down into ‘something pale and hoppy’ or ‘rich and malty’ or ‘the usual or something different’, life can be simpler again. It delivers a sense of control and autonomy which silences the mind and soothes the spirit. A moment of clarity.

Non-Alcoholic Beers

I have been without booze for a few weeks now (in preparation for the London Marathon), and I have a huge craving for beer which is becoming annoying, so I thought I would have a crack at some non-alcoholic beers to satisfy my hoppy urges. Without too much difficulty I was able to find several different brands, but not wanting to flood my fridge with the stuff (most were sold in 4 or 6 packs) I settled on just a few, outlined below. I didn’t search out any craft brands or go online, I just went with what was readily available as this would be the maximum effort most people would put in for non-alcoholic beers. I have ordered them best to worst.

 Bavaria Wit
This was comfortably the best of the lot. Being a wit, I suppose it has more room to manoeuvre than the lagers, but even still it was a cut above all the others. Pale, hazy yellow, it had an intense spicy clove and dried apricot flavour, with a vaguely tropical aroma matched by banana, fruity bubblegum and candyfloss on the palate. It was too sweet, but quite pleasant.

Bavaria Original

The best of the straight up lagers I tried, this looked good in the glass, shiny and golden with a full head. It had a fresher smell than its competitors, more like cut grass than wet dough which the others were. Some biscuity malt was present, and a touch of chewy caramel, but no hop flavour. A bit too sweet with nothing to balance it, but did have a tight crispness to make it thirst quenching. Reasonable.

Becks Blue

The most widely available I found, but nothing to write home about. A bad aroma like a stagnant, yeasty puddle, it actually tasted somewhere in the vicinity of beer. Slightly more bitter than the others with a pleasing crispness, and bland enough to be inoffensive. Drinking straight from the bottle it is pretty indistinct from regular Becks, which is not really a good thing.

Marks & Spencer German Lager

This was sparkling bright and golden yellow with a thick white head. It had a light aroma of unbaked bread but nothing else. Probably the least flavour of all the beers I tried, and what was there was thin and indistinct, a hint of an old cornflake sandwich leading to a harsh, empty and metallic bitterness.

Kaliber

Pale amber, with a thin, soapy head. It smelt of wet dough, yeasty and damp – very off-putting. The taste was one note, just delivering vague elements of cereal, corn and processed sugary cake. It was, of course, too sweet – but also flat and flabby with no crispness or refreshment. It thought this would be ok, being a pretty famous name, but it was utterly dreadful.

Overall the experience was better than I expected – they beers themselves weren’t great but they all resembled the products they were replicating, and some were more than tolerable, although admittedly a few were terrible. You miss the richness and depth that alcohol provides and none had any hop character or bitterness, leaving most with a taste of unbaked dough and sugar. But it did (very temporarily) relive my beer craving, and for not much money at all. If I ever have a no-drinking policy again (post-Christmas or on doctor’s orders per se) I would probably search out some more. It did occur to me that almost all of the non-alcoholic beers I encountered were pale lagers, and the one exception to this I tried was the most enjoyable. It would be interesting to see more styles attempted, with at least an effort to get some hop flavour in there. Has anyone had any alcohol free beers that were any good or a little different from the norm?

Dukes Brew & Que

If you can resist the urge to step into one of the always pleasant Vietnamese places that line Kingsland Road, there is a new bar and restaurant waiting for you on the street opposite Haggerston Rail station. Dukes Brew & Que is not in the most modern or desirable part of town, but makes up for this by placing some of London’s biggest trends front and centre – barbeque & craft beer. From outside it is dark blue and unassuming, with a few scattered tables outside for the smokers. It doesn’t change inside – it’s woody and rough, solid and basic, almost like eating in a large crate used in airplane shipping. This rustic slice of the US Midwest reflects the causal, homely nature of the food they are serving out of the hot and smoky open kitchen.

          They have given about 3 quarters of the room to the diners and only a narrow, stingy space for those wanting to down a few beers. This seems to be a little misguided, as on our visits there were more patrons at the bar than at tables, and the bar is something to be shouted about. Across a couple of visits it was stocked with some high end craft beer, from local breweries like Redemption to more famous names – Thornbridge & Brewdog from the UK, Flying Dog & Sierra Nevada from the US. Particularly good on our visit was Steelmaker from Thornbridge, a heavily hopped lager, and Snake Oil, a pale ale brewed in full view opposite the kitchen. The other beer from the onsite brewery (Beavertown) was adequate but uneventful, suggesting that we can expect very good things further down the line. The (roughly 50/50) mixture of keg and cask beers is good, and there are plenty of decent wines and spirits to keep everyone else happy. The bottle list is also full of great stuff – Kernel and Redchurch for some local colour, and a few of the much rarer American goodies for the more adventurous. Generous platefuls of crispy pork scratching’s were plonked in front of us as we drank, and the barman was quick to offer help in selecting what we wanted.

             This contrasts somewhat with a restaurant that is still trying to find itself (the website describes this on-going state as a soft opening – although usually in this circumstance prices would be significantly reduced) which is clearly apparent in the food.

            The menu is short and pleasingly simple – four or five sides, and a selection of the BBQ usual suspects to arrange them around – pulled pork, beef & pork ribs, chicken wings, steak, burgers. At around £10-£12 for the mains and £3-4 for the sides, you couldn’t classify it as cheap, but certainly affordable. The food arrived swiftly via good looking, pleasant staff, and two excellent sauces were placed in between us, with the menu insisting that good barbecue needs none, but they humbly offer them anyway.

            The side dishes were a mixed bag of quality. Macaroni cheese was generous and addictive, but was served lukewarm, and I have had better from amateur cooks. On the other hand the spinach and leeks were delicious, buttery and rich. Both of the crowd pleasers of BBQ side lore were a slight disappointment – the beans were overly sweet and felt both undercooked and under portioned, while the chips were gigantic wedges of potato which had good flavour but lacked the crispy/crunchy texture that contrasts so well with soft, yielding meat. Oddly, a few of the dishes were listed as pints or half pints, yet everything arrived in bowls, suggesting the ideas are ahead of the execution.  

          From the big plates; a great example of pulled pork was given a disservice by being served in two overly firm, bland buns as ‘sliders’ (they definitely needed the sauce). Not helping proceedings were token-gesture pickles and coleslaw looking tired and dull.   Pork ribs were bang on the money though – 3 huge piggy bits arrived looking like small bridges from a Homer Simpson dream sequence. There was epic amounts of meat, most of it having melded with its nearest piece of fat to create an exhibition of texture – crisp and charred, firm and chewy, soft and squidgy; some of the meat peeling clean off the bone, some clinging to its former home as though it knew the fate that awaited.

           There are too many good things going on here for this place not to be a success. One look at the brunch menu is enough to have me booking a return visit, and once the kitchen is into its stride I’m sure the kinks can be ironed out sufficiently so that the quality of the food matches the warmth of the atmosphere and the quality of the bar. It is a pleasant place to drink and eat, and with a few corrections could be a real gem.

Krispy Kreme Bacon Cheeseburger with Maple Syrup & Bacon Chips

A few years ago I saw someone eat a burger on TV, using a donut instead of a bun. I thought it was funny and fairly ridiculous, probably a normal reaction. The sugar/salty combination is a familiar one though – maple syrup and bacon pancakes, cheese and honey, pork and apple sauce. This is just 1 step further - albeit quite a big, calorie fuelled step. I debated the inappropriateness of this endeavour with a colleague, asserting that with a large dollop of Tommy K and a normal bun the sugar levels would be similar – we conceded an honourable draw. So I thought bugger it, why not, and gave it a go.

          For the burger, I bought mince from the butchers, some streaky bacon, plastic cheese, and a couple of Krispy Kreme original donuts. For the chips, I roasted the bacon in the oven tray, and then added some parboiled potatoes. Seasoning and then a liberal drizzling with the syrup and chopped up bacon pieces followed. I heavily seasoned the beef patties and fried them in a touch of the bacon fat, with a slice of cheese going on at the end. I took the meat out to rest, warmed the bacon back up and chucked in the halved donuts to soak up any meat juices remaining in the pan. Assemble, add a squirt of American mustard and dig in. Serve with mayonnaise and pickles.

          To accompany this I needed to match it with some equally silly things. I had a black IPA in the fridge, which as a style makes no sense and hence was ideal. A big chocolate stout is as indulgent and extravagant as the meal itself. And finally an American lager – this just made sense for some reason.
               To say the burger and chips were sweet would be a slight understatement. It was a gluttonous mess of fat, salt and sugar which left me quite giddy afterwards. The combination is almost there, but a denser, less sweet donut would have worked better (otherwise known as a bap). The chips were immense – some crisp, some soft, with the occasional hit of bacon and sticky caramel. The Budweiser worked pretty well – it acts as a dose of sanity and cleanliness in amongst the carnage of flavour, refreshing the palate without adding anything or contributing to the experience. The Magic 8 Ball from Magic Rock is a very decent beer, but found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The floral, fruity notes are lost against the food, leaving the huge bitterness clashing violently with the big flavours in the burger and overwhelming the chips. A total mess. The final beer worked magically, Brooklyn’s Black Chocolate Stout giving as good as it got. The massive alcohol and body stands up to everything thrown at it, with the initial savouriness leading to sweeter chocolate and liquorice elements which was a great partner for the burger but also with the chips. I felt slightly drained after this but it was thoroughly worth it.    
            This is a time when fatty breakfasts and turkey twizzler discoveries can make national news, as high calorie food edges towards receiving the sort of disdain that cigarettes and cheap alcohol have endured for a while now. This only serves to make it more alluring, more taboo, and therefore far more enjoyable to attempt meals like this. If my fiancé allowed smoking in the flat I would have lit up a fat cigar and wallowed in hedonistic disregard for my own health. It would have been fun. As it was I enjoyed the cooking, eating and drinking immensely. It was possibly the most fun meal I have ever prepared. I urge people to try it. Just, you know, eat a salad the next day or something.