Back in August, I was contacted by two people writing an article for the Forward, or more accurately, the Jewish Daily Forward, a weekly news magazine on Jewish issues published in New York. Until recently, subscribers to the Haaretz/Herald Tribune daily paper received a few pages of the Forward in a pull out section on Sundays. Unfortunately this has since stopped.Anyway, the writers, Jamie Levin and Sarah Treleaven, asked to interview me for an article they were writing on the Israeli craft brewing scene. The article was published online in an article title “Bubbling Up Across the Holy Land”. Everybody has their take on things, and while I may not necessarily gauge the influences on the local boutique brewing scene the same way that Jamie and Sarah do, I fully applaud their writing an article on a subject dear to my heart that will be published in an English language media publication with a larger readership than my modest blog. Let’s face it, most of the writing on this topic is in Hebrew so is completely missed by me and likely a large portion of those that read my blog. The latter being due to the fact that I update my friends when I post a new blog but do not distribute links to the rare Hebrew press item in beer that I accidentally stumble across.

That being said, given the prominence of the Taybeh Brewing Company in the article it is worth taking to opportunity to mention this easily forgotten entry in the local craft brewing scene. I have had the pleasure of tasting Taybeh beers and meeting with Nadim, the Taybeh master brewer, at a beer exhibition a couple years ago. The brewery hosts an Oktoberfest each year at the brewery in Taybeh, just outside of Ramallah. This year it is on October 6th and 7th. I remember being told that you can get to Taybeh from Jerusalem without passing through a checkpoint but that information may be out of date. In any event, you can find out more regarding the brewery and the Oktoberfest celebration at their website.

Anyway it’s always good to see one’s name in print associated with a media label that I heard about before I was contacted.

So after my travels to North America, in search of artisanal beer wherever I could find it, I spent the first week of September in the United Kingdom on a work assignment. While I was quite busy with the activities surrounding the purpose of my trip, I did not forget that England is still one of the main beer powers in the world. I was staying in a fairly small town just to the southeast of London called Basingstoke ,so as can be expected, I immediately looked for microbreweries in and found two: the Longdog Brewery and the Andwell Brewing Company.

One might expect that England being England, and English beer being famous the world over, locally brewed craft beers would be easily available in pubs and restaurants around the area. After all Sam Adams beers are pretty ubiquitous in Boston and Basingstoke is a lot smaller. Well if you did expect that you would be wrong. Not that I had the opportunity to do extensive exploring but when travelling on business, one tends to eat in restaurants and pubs a bit and I did sample the available beer whenever I could. Most of the beers were commercial British beers, or “bitters”. Don’t let the name fool you. Traditional “Bitter” is fairly low in alcohol (usually about 4% or so) and very mild flavored. It’s made to be a super session beer so that you can keep on drinking it forever, or until they close the pub (traditionally at 11PM) or they carry you out. I have to be honest and I was very disappointed with most of the beer I tasted in the UK on this trip. Chalk it up to my more refined tastes than my previous trip (in 2004) when I loved all beers British.

There is still one pub in Basingstoke I saw that has promise and since I will be back very soon for another week, I will be sure to try it out and see if I can improve my rather low opinion of the English beer culture.

However there was one high point of the trip that saved the whole beer experience from being a total flop. One of my work friends, Marco, took me out to dinner at a lovely little country Inn called the Jolly Farmer, pictured in the banner to the blog. It was quaint, friendly had very decent food and a good selection of local beers. I actually managed to find Longdog Brindle Bitter, their version of a traditional Bitter. True to the style, it was relatively low in alcohol and a good session beer. However it was clearly a cut above the rest of the beers I had tasted till that point with lots of malt and hops flavor. It was a real treat to drink this beer after a number of disappointments.

The other beer I drank at the Jolly Farmer was a Sharp’s Doomsbar, made by the Sharp brewery in Cornwall, in the far southwest of England, not far from Plymouth (that is Plymouth England not Plymouth Massachusetts for those easily confused). It was also a typical bitter but much more interesting that the beers I had tasted till that point.

I would like to finish with a brief discussion of cask ales and the real ale movement in England. Back in the 70’s a small group of dedicated beer lovers created an organization called CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale. At the time, the small local breweries were closing and the large commercial breweries we taking over. Commercial beers in Britain, like anywhere else are brewed using economies of scale to the mass market. They are also pasteurized, filtered and artificially carbonated. Real ales are alive as they haven’t been pasteurized to kill off the yeast.

The movement for “Real Ale” aimed to get pubs to sell ales brewed using traditional methods and not undergoing the processing methods used by industrial breweries usually involving filtering and pasteurization. I believe they succeeded but due to time constraints, I don’t have the time to do the research required to verify this. Any feedback from readers knowledgeable in the subject is welcome at the email at the end of the blog.

The idea of cask ales takes this one step further. Cask ales are delivered to the pubs in large casks while undergoing secondary fermentation. This is also the conditioning stage where further fermentation takes place, carbonating the beer. We home brewers do this in two steps, with secondary fermentation taking place in a large glass jug called a demijohn and conditioning and carbonation taking place in the bottles. During secondary fermentation, some beers get an extra dose of hops that adds some of the more aromatic elements from the hop flowers that are lost when cooked.

Cask ales combine both stages in a single cask since the casks can remain pressurized and the carbonation controlled. Many pubs now belong to an association,Cask Marque Trust, an independent body that monitors pubs and restaurants handling of cask ales and allows those that comply to use their logo (see the banner). The Jolly Farmer proudly displays the Cask Marque logo.

All this does go to show that there is a high awareness of quality beers in the UK but that there too, the concerned beer person faces the same uphill battle against standardized industrial brewing and an apathetic public more concerned with brand loyalty or just something cheap and alcoholic they can drink in quantity.

I’m going back to England very soon and will make a more concerted effort to locate more Cask Marque pubs and ales as well as more Longdog ales and the ever elusive Andwell beers.

As usual, I can be reached at [email protected]. Those readers knowable of the UK beer scene wishing to update me or correct any mistakes in my blog are invited to email me so I can present the updates in a future blog.