Drink Moar beer

Bayerischer Bahnhof Berliner Style Weisse

Right, more beer drinking. Proof positive that reading beer blogs is dangerous to your sobriety, I saw this Bayerischer Bahnhof Berliner Style Weisse in de Bierkoning and because I’d read this post at Shut Up about Barclay Perkins (for serious beer nerdery) I thought I’d give it a try. I know what weiss beer tastes like, but hadn’t heard of a Berliner style weiss beer yet. If this particular bottle is a good example of the style, it turns out to be much more sour than a normal weiss beer, tasting rather like a Kriek or Rodenbach, sour almost to the point of invoking your gag reflex, and with a very low alcohol percentage of 3 percent ABV. As you can see the colour is light golden, slightly darker than a lager, with a big head of foam, but that might’ve been caused by the transport from the shop to my home. On the whole I liked it, but it’s good it’s only a small (33 cl) bottle; more than that would be too much. It’s not the sort of beer you quaff on a hot sunny day.

Let’s drink some beer

It’s sunday, it’s sunny and I got some nice beers here which my parents were kind enough to bring along from Middelburg. First up is the Peelander Framboos beer:

The Peelander Framboos

Well, it certainly looks like raspberry beer and when opening the bottle, smells like it too. Tasting it, you get a strong raspberry flavour as well, with a slightly sour aftertaste and almost no hoppy bitterness. It’s slightly gassy and has some of the cloyingness that I associate with a good raspberry cordial. If you’d buy this expecting a beer similar to a kriek lambic, you’d be dissappointed. Alcohol wise it’s only 4% ABV, so a good drink for a hot summer’s day.

Prestige Premium Pils:

Prestige Premium Pils

Another Peelander product, this is a proper pilsner (5% ABV), nothing more, nothing less. It looks like a glass of Heineken, it smells like Heineken when you open it and it tastes like it too, with that slightly metallic aftertaste proper Heineken has. A perfectly alright pilsner, just a bit dull.

Beer, glorious beer

Meanwhile, last weekend, I was busy drinking beer and watching the rugby. I took some pictures and would like to share them with y’all. All the cool middle aged blokes with beards and hats kids are beerblogging, so why not me?

Coopers Extra Stout

How often do you get the chance to drink an Australian stout? Not often, so I had to try it. Coopers Extra Stout, brewed in South Australia is perfectly drinkable, tastes just like any other stout but lacks a bit of oomph once you get through the initial taste. Decent, not spectacular, would drink again if in the vicinity of where it was brewed.

Meantime Chocolate Porter

Gorgeous. I’ve had a few chocolate stouts, but not yet a chocolate porter (if there’s any real difference between a modern stout and a modern porter that is). Unlike many attempts, Meantime‘s porter keeps it’s chocolate undertones throughout the glass, doesn’t overwhelm the beer with the chocolate or vice versa and will be gotten again this weekend if I can.

Alba Scots Pine Ale

The first of four different ales I drunk this weekend, this was the best. A pine ale, which I hadn’t heard of before, but which tasted very nice. According to the label, Alba is a “triple style ale, brewed to a traditional Highland recipe using the sprigs of spruce and pine collected every spring”. How traditional this is, is anybody’s guess as IIRC, the Scottish Highlands haven’t had their pine and spruce coverings all that long. Doesn’t matter for the taste, which is nice and beery going in, with a decided aftertaste of swiss roll (!), which sounds strange but works, especially after the slightly more bitter chocolate porter. Will get more from this one as well.

T.E.A. - Traditional English Ale

Hogsback‘s T.E.A., Traditional English Ale, was recommended by one of the Bierkoning‘s staff, but was a disappointment. A run of the mill ale, which started alright but whose flavour didn’t last; might have been better in a smaller bottle.

Double Dragon Welsh ale

The Welsh Double Dragon ale, which is the same strength as the T.E.A., 4.2%, I got for the Ireland v Wales Six Nations match and it worked, in so far as the Welsh won. Better than the previous ale, still a bit on the bland side for me. Decent enough, but nothing special. Will drink in Wales, will likely not go out of my way for it.

Sunburst Golden Ale

Darkstar’sSunburst on the other hand, a golden ale from Sussex is brilliant. This tasted like an English ale should, not too bitter, but with a slightly nutty aftertaste and which is sustained throughout my drinking it. Would like to drink more of it.

Nut Brown Ale

Speaking of nutty, the last beer of the weekend (actually drunk on a Monday evening) was very nutty, but then this is Samuel Smith‘s nut brown ale, coming all the way from Yorkshire and brewed at what they claim is the oldest brewery there. Lovely taste, eminently drinkable, not very damaging. Will get more of this too.

So in total: seven beers sampled, two or three disappointments, four beers I will shortly get again.

Make booze boring for a safer Britain: support CAMRA

Social anthropologist Kate Fox thinks the British are wrong in blaming alcohol for antisocial behaviour and that it’s in fact a cultural thing:

In high doses, alcohol impairs our reaction times, muscle control, co-ordination, short-term memory, perceptual field, cognitive abilities and ability to speak clearly. But it does not cause us selectively to break specific social rules. It does not cause us to say, “Oi, what you lookin’ at?” and start punching each other. Nor does it cause us to say, “Hey babe, fancy a shag?” and start groping each other.

[…]

We become more outspoken, more physically demonstrative, more flirtatious, and, given enough provocation, some (young males in particular) become aggressive. Quite specifically, those who most strongly believe that alcohol causes aggression are the most likely to become aggressive when they think that they have consumed alcohol.

Which means that any attempt to limit booze related antisocial behaviour that focuses on alcohol as the evil spirit motivating this is counterproductive:

The drinkaware website, for example, warns young people that a mere three pints of beer (ie a perfectly normal evening out) “can lead to anti-social, aggressive and violent behaviour”, that “you might start saying things you don’t mean and behaving out of character”, that alcohol is implicated in a high percentage of sexual offences and street crimes, and that the morning after “you may wonder what you did the night before”.

Instead, booze should be made into something a bit boring and stop being used as an excuse for people to be assholes:

I would like to see a complete change of focus, with all alcohol-education and awareness campaigns designed specifically to challenge these beliefs – to get across the message that a) alcohol does not cause disinhibition (aggressive, sexual or otherwise) and that b) even when you are drunk, you are in control of and have total responsibility for your actions and behaviour.

Alcohol education will have achieved its ultimate goal not when young people in this country are afraid of alcohol and avoid it because it is toxic and dangerous, but when they are frankly just a little bit bored by it, when they don’t need to be told not to binge-drink vodka shots, any more than they now need to be told not to swig down 15 double espressos in quick succession.

Which is why we should support CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, because how much more boring can booze be than if it’s drunk by middle aged, science fiction reading bearded folkies?