By Harley Zipori. Sukkot is a good time to contemplate the seasons. It is, after all a harvest festival and it coincides pretty much with the grape harvest. Beer, however is generally not considered seasonal. One of the beauties of beer ingredients is that they are easily store-able and transportable, the reason that breweries thrive even in climates that are unsuitable for growing barley and hops.
Sukkot also coincides with the Oktoberfest, the annual German celebration of beer held in Munich from September 22nd through October 7th this year. There are special beers brewed for this festival and Wikipedia reports the attendance at the 2010 Oktoberfest to be around 6.4 million people. The mind boggles at the quantities of beer brewed and poured in those traditional 1 liter beer steins.
Winter also has its traditional beers in Europe where winters are cold and gloomy most of the time and heavy, high alcohol beers seem to go a long way to make the weather bearable.
So it’s not surprising that breweries around the world have seasonal beers. The English are no exception.
I was fortunate enough to return to Basingstoke England, about an hour southwest of London on the M3, for a week at the end of September, filled with resolve to find some decent English ale even at the risk of abandoning my work colleagues. It goes to show that with a little perseverance, knowledge and an open mind, one can easily find excellent craft brewed ales.
I decided to first list the beers that I tasted in that week:
- Jester Jack. Tag line: It’s hopping mad. This is a seasonal beer brewed by the Wychwood Brewery, makers of Hobgoblin, available in several pubs and stores in Israel.
- Single Hop Nelson Sauvin. A seasonal craft ale brewed by Marston’s, one of the larger UK brewers and makers of Pedigree and Oyster Stout that I have seen in Israel in bottles.
- Vale Pale Ale. Brewed by the Vale Brewing Company in Buckinghamshire England, a craft brewery outside of Oxford.
- Goldenblade. This is an award winning American style wheat beer made by the O’Hanlons brewery. It is clear, not cloudy as traditional Hefewiezen Bavarian beers tend to be and was golden, light and refreshing. Unfortunately I can’t find a brewery website.
- Bonkers Conkers. This is a seasonal cask ale brewed by Greene King, a brewery and chain of pubs.
- Fortyniner. This is a 4.9% pale ale brewed by the Ringwood Brewery.
- Andwell IPA. This is a seasonal beer brewed by the Andwell Brewery, a small craft brewery in the Basingstoke area.
Two of the pubs I found that had a selection of real ales were traditional English pubs, the White Hart and the Bounty Inn, both located near the center of Basingstoke (illustrated in the blog banner above). These both had a genuine pub atmosphere in what appear to be historic buildings, originally built for the purpose of being a public house.
The White Hart featured music the night I was there and an extensive pub menu. It was there I found the Andwell IPA. I had known about the local Andwell Brewery but had not found any beers on the first trip. Their IPA was a real treat, and I broke one of my rules of always trying a different beer and had 2 pints of their IPA over the course of the evening. It was superb and would have done any brewer of IPA’s in any country proud. It was fruity and well balanced. Unlike some American IPA’s, this was not an overwhelmingly bitter beer so you could keep on drinking it.
The Bounty Inn is in a lovely building in a residential area of Basingstoke. It is disappointingly small inside which is typical of English pubs. Even the bar was tiny. But it was quaint and friendly. The night I visited the first time they had a trivia game with a good mix of very British trivia and some more worldly facts that I should have known and for the sake of my honor, will not repeat here. It was here that I tasted the Goldblade wheat ale and the Bonkers Conkers. Both were very good in their own ways as they are quite different in concept and execution. Goldblade is a golden beer, light and refreshing. As my beer taste develops, I am quite enchanted with good golden ales so this was a refreshing treat since most of the beers, even the craft brewed ones, tend to be variations of the traditional English pale ale.
The Bounty Inn had a real ale menu with a long list of ales that are available at various time in the pub. What struck me was that the menu showed a number in miles beside each beer, obviously indicating the distance from the pub to where the beer was brewed. Some were over 100 miles but a number were well under 100 miles, indicating that the concept of a locally brewed beer still has some meaning.
The real find was in the most unlikely of places. Wetherspoon pubs are a large chain throughout the UK featuring inexpensive family style food and unadorned interiors. They are also have a passion for cask ales and local breweries. The beer there was also priced lower than other pubs and restaurants, making it a popular hangout. Since beer drinkers in the UK come in all ages, these pubs tend to have a good mix of people and what I felt was a amiable crowd.
The Wetherspoon pub I visited was the Maidenhead Inn. They had a total of 10 real ales on tap and promised a beer festival in October (probably to coincide with the Oktoberfest) with 50 real ales. One can imagine my disappointment that I would miss it.
It was at the Maidenhead that I tried the Jester Jack and Nelson Sauvin Single Hop beer. The Jester Jack was a nice hoppy pale ale. The Single Hop Nelson Sauvin is a member of a series of single hop beers, one for each month. This beer featured Nelson Suavin, a hops variety from New Zealand and one of the most refreshingly different beers I’ve tasted in a long time.
Well my wanderings are over for the time being. The holidays are over too and it’s back to work. Still it’s nice to know that there are people all over the world who care about good beer. I once heard that Brazil is a up and coming country in that field. It may help to have a beer tradition, like the UK so that the newcomers have a thriving market to conquer, instead of having to create a market. I can’t even imagine what the Brazilian brewers face.
Now that the weather is cooling down and local day trips a bit less arduous, I am going to try to visit some small brewers and blog about them.
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