DEATH TO JOHN BARLEYCORN!

There is a song about the death of John Barleycorn, describing the poor bugger being cut, thrashed and generally mammocked.  But up he springs again!  Now, I understand that he held sway in Europe until, under the name of Silenus, until Bacchus rolled in from the East.  Prior to that he ruled jointly with the apple, the gathering of which did not entail annihilation, as with barley.  How did wine gain a superior position, maybe classwise?  Maybe the new bosses rolled in complete with Bacchic cult, for if wine can take you into space, heaven knows beer can ! (I cite Newcastle Brown, poor mans journey into space)  Silenus thereafter acquired the image of potbellied old man, maybe rustic.  This persists, for wine in bed is sybaritic, beer in bed is gross, as with my memory of  a bottle of Newkie embedded in someones spotty fizog, in Newcastle.  Can beer ever look dainty?

The making of wine involves the plucking of the fruit, as does cider.  The parent remains, alive for the next year, and many more.  Beer, though entails complete annihilation, as, by the way does its most popular flavourer and clarifier, the hop. the hopvine can remain, its corpse to be seen through the winter, like the gamekeeper's warning crow or magpie, hung on a post.  The resemblance of the hop leaf to the grapevine leaf is curious, with the unstoppable advance of the hop once it gained currency.  This may be food for thought, or it may be as a rice cake to the nourishment of the intellect...

Rambling on from John Barleycorn to whatever deity governs the hop, I note that it is botanically akin to cannabis and the elm.  That the former is narcotic is unquestioned, but the only consciousness-altering effect known of the elm is its habit of dropping the odd branch onto the heads of boy scouts encamped beneath.

To return from my ramble, let us celebrate the generosity of John Barleycorn in dying to assuage our troubles, and his eternal rebirth.  By getting somewhat, or totally,  out of it.

Down Below, or Out the Back

Foaming brew lands in your glass, hopefully not having been murdered by a 'sparkler', but how?  Derr - barman pulls a pump-handle.  Or better, brings it out of the taproom.  I remember, while I was working in a London pub, having a staff drink after the work was done, a pint of London Pride straight from the barrel. Beautiful!  All the life was there, so I reckon that if you do anything more than opening a tap you lose something.  Of course you have to make some compromises in business, drawing beer up through pipes by handpump.  Trouble is, there are now some pernicious regulations in force now.

There's a law against putting slops back into the barrel, slops being overflow from pints poured, never customers' leftovers.  Unhygienic?  Pubs were never notorious plague- and death traps, clientele besides.  First, I did as much myself, in a pub with a high consumption of the staple beer.  Two barrels on the go, can't squeeze slops into a fresh one, can into one that is anything up to halfway down. More than halfway, no go.  Of course it needed some common sense and a cellarman who drank the stuff himself.  Result, some variety of beer from pub to pub, and a good set of locals would ensure some quality.  Now, though, you can't do this.  result, more to pay for a pint.  In washing the pipes through you have to pull the beer in them through and out. Slops, so to be thrown away, to be paid for somehow.  Further to this small-bore pipes are now installed to minimise waste.  this hits the quality, passing the beer over more surface area and knocking some of the life out of it, making it tamer, less tasty - less to go up your nose.  So, if you want to taste the best it's off to a pub with a taproom. like the Bridge Inn, on the River Clyst, Topsham, Devon... dreams beside, to a place full of beery types.

Maybe breweries are tweaking the balance of beer to allow for this.  I have an idea about the current prevalence of bitter over mild.  Maybe mild matched the old, fruity pong of  horse-filled streets outside. Now the air is laden with the sharper smell of burnt petrol.  And don't forget other fragrances, for Friday night used to be bath night, and the average woman up until the sixties owned two pairs of knickers.  Oh dear, I'm digressing in a big way.

WATNEYS

Now, where was I?  The title might mean nothing to some, ranking in topicality with Grendel's mum.  To CAMRA it was the enemy flagship, the sum of all that was anodyne and nasty about keg beer.  The thing is, a lot of Watney's beer was sold for a lot of years, with Whitbread's and others as an alternative.  It was welcome when it was introduced, back in the fifties, I think.  Two points here.  The first is that the Dano-Anglo-Saxon has always wanted quantity in beer, traditionally and, latterly, with foundry-made thirsts to quench.  For this, lots of fairly bland-tasting stuff was in order - try slaking a summer thirst with Fuller's ESB or such.  Don't.  The second is the state of traditional beer in pubs at the time, even more after wartime rationing compromises.  Warm beer is now a thing of the past, with cellars equipped with massive coolers to maintain cellar temperature.  The way to keep beer cool in the old cellars was to drape wet cloths over the barrels - nothing more could be done.  So, in a heat-wave (cynicism about British weather is too easy)  thirst-quenching beer would be tepid, verging on sour, leaving the heavy stuff - tepid and sticky.  Compound that with regular drinkers thinking it manly to swill crap and it had to be shandy.  Watneys Red Barrel!  Straight out of the keg, no sourness, cool - tasting of nothing much but what did you know?  So keg beer sold, pleasant as Kraft cheese, and if you wanted some flavour there where half-a-dozen bottles on the shelves.  So, there we are.  I won't blame CAMRA, in fact I think they're doing an excellent job, I think that the big brewers have been cynical in making beer bland and selling it on image - the manly tradition, 'if you're rooked it's your fault', but keg beer at least at first, was never as crappy as is made out.  A Fistfull of Flavour!

CHEAP BEER! or Brew It Yourself

Sunday afternoon and I'm enjoying a glass of Sagres Preta, one of the very good Portuguese brews available now - it's a dry stout, pretty near to bottled Guinness...

Now, to business.  Home brew sounds messy and smelly, and is if you're doing the hallowed Full Mash - boiling the malt, throwing the hops, but not if you use KITS!  This is where the full-mashers go all sniffy, preferring to do everything themselves.  Which they don't.  Some grow their own hops, but maybe two or three grow their own barley, and I'll bet that none of them has sunk his own well.  Or beaten his own vessels out of home-smelted ore. The thing is, somewhere along the line you let someone else, who does it full-time and, so, better, do it for you.  I went once to a barbecue in the mountains of Portugal and ate beef reared by the host and the local butcher between them,  but that was once.  Very tasty it was, too, but there's generally some compromise in cooking or brewing, because we've other things to do.  So, for daily life it's KITS!

STARTING OUT.

Assemble the parts:  find a supplier, and buy the necessary, bin - food grade, so chemicals are guaranteed not to leach out of the plastic, er, that's it to begin with, until you come to get your beer out of the bin.  Your kit and sugar.  You're advised not to buy a cheapie, but if they're that bad no-one would buy a second.  So you buy a cheap one to test the water -  bitter, mild.lager or whatever.  As for the sugar, it'll be the granulated.  Now, FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS.   They want you to buy more...  And keep it CLEAN, CLEAN, CLEAN.  You've a nutritious soup in your bin, yeast is vigorous enough to look after itself, but give it first dibs.  As for the instructions, don't do what my dad did and add double the amount of sugar - a sand-filled sock to the back of the neck is cheaper and it'll taste awful.  The thing is, beer is a balance of sugar, for body, and hops, for aroma.  Adding more sugar brings the sugar to the fore and that sugar will have to taste good;  white sugar is light and neatral, so you need malt or similar for any extra.  Besides, kits are balanced by the experts.  My interference is to, for everyday beer, to add only 1.5 lbs instead of the prescribed 2 lbs or kilo.  Makes for a dryer, hoppier pint and better for a thirst - kits seem to produce a 4.5% pint, which I think is on the stiff side, so 1.5 lbs makes for 3.8%,  bouncy castle stuff.

Wait.  Expect a faint, vaguely farty smell in the kitchen, blame the dog.  You don't need a hydrometer, just wait until  they froth dies down and sample it.  What to put it in?  have you got your pressure barrel?  You're equipped.  As for bottles,  they've got to be strong enough to take pressure, need crown tops and capping tool - or you can use 33cl plstic coke bottles, cost nowt as they come out of bins, light, safe.  Sterilise them, rinse them, prime with a little sugar (fiddly!)  and you're done- except for the siphoning, where a tap is useful about 6" from the end of the tube.  Stick siphon right into the bottle, when you withdraw it displacement gives you the neccessary air space in the bottle.  Worries about spoiling the beer in the light as they're not brown?  Keep them in the dark.  Genius Man strikes.

Anyway, in two weeks or thereabouts you'll have good-enough. cheap beer,  Once you've brewed your first, you'll more or less know the ropes, so you can try pricier kits or do your own tweaking.  Cheers!

Point of Sale (Pubs, that is)

G'day.  My favourite Oz lager?  Swan, though I remember those megacans of real Fosters.  That's the lager dealt with, now to the burning question.  Given that most drinkers aren't that fussed about what they're drinking, it follows that where they're drinking matters.  The beer palaces of yore - and you can expect lots of yore in beery blogs - were, for many men, the best places they'd be in their lives.  The amount of money put into these places by the breweries is as surprising as the investment in the railway stations.  There are plenty of apparent converted terrace houses to prove the point.  Just shows how much money there was and is in the business.  Funny, isn't it, how you can locate the offices in a strange pub  even when you're just about fit to walk.

That's the architecture, now to enter.  Strewth, I hate running the gauntlet of bouncers.  No decent pub needs them.  I remember a pub in Exmouth, only a couple of years back, now, where the total staff was one girl behind the bar.  On t'other side, though, were several white-haired men, former Marines.  No cracking of knuckles, just the feeling that nothing naughty could happen there.  The best security  for a pub, then is a lot of large men out for a quiet time.  Trouble is, they can put beer away, but not quickly enough for the management's liking.  And another point - managers tend to be that, half the time lacking the charisma of a tenant.  Or the arrogance, rudeness, and misanthropy of a man trapped in a treadmill and pickling himself on his profits.  But on the other hand again,  a tenant would have more time to attract his or her own kind.  Local business big shots, rugger players (worked in a pub with those, big but as safe as milk), campers,so you'd have a definite feeling of place and you'd be unlucky not to find an alernative nearby if you didn't like it.

As for the drinking part, when I worked in pubs I always made sure that a customer got what he wanted as soon as possible - I get thirsty too - with minimum fuss.  Another pet hate, the question "Anything else?"  I'd have said so already and I don't like people trying to chip more money out of me.  I like to take in the range of pumps and the bottles, too.  Again, the higher powers like a well-ordered life, where draught goes in pubs and bottles go to supermarkets.  They're two different ways of drinking.  Newcastle Brown was a poor man's way of getting stoned.  'Journey into Space', only 4.7% but with traces of something else.  The London breweries, Young's and Fuller's, are or were good for this.  London's good for this, two breweries each with its own style.

Choice, now.  The enthusiasts' pubs, with a dozen different brews, are fine, but I feel a bit like a kiddie in a sweet shop.  I want everything but can't have it.  Drinking is a comfort thing - I like to look forward to the usual.  I don't want it to disappear again.  Seasonals can come and go - Adnam's Tally Ho - but I want my comfy stuff.

As for the other end of things, inthat Rugger pub where I worked one of the regulars was a young man, generally drinking Fullers ESB (strong!) and reading 'Nausea' by Sartre. He fancies a number two, off he goes, through the boys drinking beer by the bucket (London Pride).  Toilet minus light, broken lock.  He sits.  Meanwhile, someone's full to the gills, must unload,  Lurches into the bog, past stalls, occupied, Emegency chunder into the lockless necessarium...  As someone later said, it probably helped Sartre fan on.

Intro...

Good afternoon!  I invite you to share my opinions, tales, observations about beer, or ale, drinking it, making it, short-of libellous goes at those who seek to keep it for themselves with jargon and false expertise - hello, I'm off already!  Basically, I do believe in the stuff, the simple and the great, workaday bitter to aged potions in dusty bottles, and want to share this pleasure.  Half-forgotten pleasures, like tasty draught Guinness on a Sunday, or Adnams bitter with a pong like the river nearby, or the mind-bending properties of Fullers ESB before they cleaned it up.  Can't blame them, no doubt they sell more of a capital brew now.  The case for keg.  The daftness of working in a pub and dealing with people who are half out of their boxes.  Oh, where are the loony potmen of yore?  All transmuted into pub dogs?  Portuguese beer - they're now brewing some dirty beer now, as with Sagres Bohemia, a regular journey into space.  Anyway, we'll see how my rants, wit, info on home brewing progress!  Cheers!