h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://vimeo.com/64558227

I can neither confirm nor deny that I have, at one time or another, said one or more of those things about a beer I was drinking, or something similar

You should hear my CAMRA member brother and his missus!

(Do they actually have good beer in Australia, by the way?)

(the only Australien beer I tried, was a microbrewry thing, bottled, and in my local pub, cost a fortune, and was horrible; had overtones of napalm, with a hint of biscuity nuttyness, that was almost entirely drown out by the overpowering ofactory insult provided by a massive overload of the taste of German leather trousers, still damp and slightly foisty... May have been a hint of wet dog nose, on the after-taste, but hard to tell given the predomination of napalm and moist foisty German leather trousers).

Some descriptionf of beer, are ... just so over the top... Thank BoB I never fall into the catogry of boring beer drinkers who enjoy seemingly boring their drinking companions with such over the top and stupid analagies on flavour ...

Tastes good, if I drink too much it gets me sh!tfaced.

That's pretty much my comment in the pub if someone asks. Not many people ask.

I'll stretch as far as 'hoppy', 'dry', 'nutty', and a bit more descriptive for sweeter, darker beers (which are kinda my thing) Though I do sometimes get into an over the top, taking the mic description thing, with my local's landlord... he finds it funny, so I get inventive with silly descriptions

While I have no wish to badmouth, denigrate or in any way demean St Michael of Jackson (the Beer Hunter, not Wacko Jacko), it does bring a wry smile to my lips when I hear him (or anyone) talking about some of things they get from a mouthful of beer, like passionfruit. I don't think I've ever eaten a passionfruit or have the faintest idea of what one tastes like so even if I could detect that flavour in a beer I wouldn't know it.

Some beers definitely do taste of things that haven't been added to them. A good Russian imperial stout will often exhibit flavours of chocolate or coffee because that's what happens to malt when it's roasted to blackness. Hefeweizen yeast produces flavours of banana and clove, and sometimes bubble gum, which is one reason why I don't care for hefeweizens or weizenbocks.

And then there's the old beer geek saw about any seasonal beer - "It's not as hoppy as last year's" (which I think they left out of the video).

There's been some talk lately about the winification of beer. Y'know, beer geeks becoming beer snobs and getting all Oz Clarke about their ale, demanding it at the correct temperature, in 'the right kind of glass', sometimes even in the brewery's logo glass, which they do in Belgium but I don't think they get too precious about it, doing their best to over-analyse a beer instead of just enjoying it. I used to love watching Oz Clarke and Jilly Goulden on The Food Programme just for all the stuff they came out with when they tasting different wines And then there's Oz and James drinking Sam Adams Utopias http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzTob_W5wkw

It's just beer. Really. If you're a head brewer or brewmaster it's part of your job to be able to tell what varieties of hops went into a beer and why, to know what kind of flavours different yeasts produce, all that technical stuff. If you're a beer drinker though, all you have to do is enjoy it

Yeah ( belch ) what he said.

You can get flavours in the beer, which arn't necessarily because they've been added in; stuff from the mix of hops and malt etc, I guess... I prefer the darker beers generally, so you get tastes of port, whisky, rum, plums, bacon, vanilla, coffee, etc., etc., which in some beers are really rather prominant, and of course the inevitable hint of moist leather shorts... <

The two oddest beers I had were definately the bacon beer (pretty sure that was some flavouring 'added' to make it taste that* bacony ... and quite disgusting too, after the first half a pint ), and the other one... err... can't remember the name now... which tasted of tiramasu and seriously did... it was (however you spell it) terramasu in a glass... Sure that can't have been achieved solely by the blend of 'regular' ingredients for a beer

I had a beer a few nights ago that had a tobacco flavour in there. It actually tasted quite good As for bacon, there was Rogue Bacon Maple Ale a few months ago http://rogue.com/beers/voodoo-bacon-maple.php which was quite disgusting, and there have been a few more bacon beers since then. In fact it's hard sometimes to find a beer that doesn't have at least one wacky ingredient in it, especially when local brewers cask-condition some of their beer. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes I really wish they'd just keep it simple, stupid. For instance...

(512) Brewing makes a Pecan Porter. It's not one of my favourite beers but I don't dislike it. About once a week they'll make a cask-conditioned version and add something to the firkin. Toasted coconut and cherries - they call that Coco-Cerise and it's delicious. Vanilla and cocoa nibs - German Chocolate Cake, also delicious. Vanilla and Blueberries - Violet Beauregard.

American brewers feel they have to constantly innovate and experiment. It was okay for a while but now they're flailing around trying ever more esoteric and wild ideas because there's hardly anything rational left to try. Some of the results have been good and a new(ish) beer style has been born, such as black IPA. It's a great idea. Take an IPA and use dark malt instead of pale. Is it a dark-coloured IPA or is it a hoppy stout? It's not exactly new because the Germans have been making black lager (schwarzbier) for centuries, and it wasn't uncommon in the past for English brewers to make a stock ale with dark malts, but I like the black IPA. However, remember the "white stout" comment in the video? Somebody's actually made one

And then there's the Belgian sour beers. Let's not even go there... although we probably will. I like them.

With a lot of these odd beers having a sort of built-in obselesensce, I wonder if they might be worth a few bob to collectors some years from now. I might set a few aside the next time Guinness bring out one of their here-today-gone-tomorrow "great new things".

Maybe the bottle or commemorative glass (got me a pair of Guinness 250 tulips ), but possibly not the contents, although... https://zythophile.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/an-1875-arctic-ale-tasting/

Oh bother
http://zythophile.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/an-1875-arctic-ale-tasting/

Luckily, the gimiky ones, with added 'weirdness of taste/ingredient', seem a bit rarer, this side of the pon... Or at least in my local pubs... The bacon one... yeh, the first few sips it tastes of bacon! get to half way through... and my tummy feeling decidly 'odd'... or odder than useual anyhow
The terramusu one, I actually quite liked,a nd had several pints of... the oatmeal stout was one of my favorite more 'normal' ones of late, plus the double expresso stout, which was so* coffee... Mind, it is summer now. And I promised* myself, I was going to give the darker beers a bit of a break over the summer, and go back to more hoppy, mid range, and the sort of beers I'm more used to (I was bought up on Adnams and Wherry etc) Mind, I've not been out or had a drink in about three weeks which, on the good side, paid teh labor costs of my plumbing work

Oh my.

That description of 2legs re: the Australian craft beer had me giggling. I had to share with the cute bartender here at this new gastro pub (their food is mostly Viet Namese and their beers are wide ranging and mostly excellent.)


As for the bacony flavor, I recently (maybe a month or so ago) had a local brewery's seasonal Rauchbier (translation "smoke beer"). It was quite bacony, in a mostly pleasant way. But I didn't realize how bacony it was until someone pointed it out to me. Then I couldn't NOT taste the bacon.


Oh, and as for Oz Clarke, I still giggle remembering James May, while they were in Northern England, if Oz he could discern a "Yorkshire terroir" from the local winery.

Oh, and as for sour beers, I just tried my second (or maybe third). Something called Cuvee de Jacobin. I just tried a taste, but it was a bit sweet under the sour. Didn't like it. So far, the first one I tried, the Jester King Buddha's Brew (cask) I tried at The Flying Saucer in Downtown Houston was the only one of which I want more. Such a bizarre taste for beer, but surprisingly quite pleasant.

The sour beer thing sounds weird.... Not come across anything like that... round these ere parts... Mind, I do tend to go to the same few local, very exceptionally good real ale pubs, and I never have to actually look what beer they've got on, the landlords just tell me the beers they have, that I 'will' like.... I think they've kinda got an idea what sort of beers I go for Mind, this may mean I'm missing out on some stuff, I'd otherwise like, but just don't ever try Must try and get out to the pub, once this silly bank holiday weekend has blown by... its just too hectic and packed to consider going to the pub, whilst all the non-drinkers are in the pubs, as well as the actual useual drinkers... and the non-drinkers are always extra shouty...

Sour beers... yeah. It took me a while to come round to them. The first time I had one I thought 'This is like vinegar, why would anyone want to drink this?'. And that's one of the biggest problems with the British tied house system of pubs - I had to come to the US before I had my first Belgian, let alone sour, beer. Oh, I knew about beers like Chimay and Duvel but you don't see those in a Watneys or Ind Coope or Marstons pub.

I know what you mean about Cuvee de Jacobin, BG. Same thing with Duchesse de Bourgogne. As a matter of fact it was a Jester King cask that flipped my palate and turned me on to sours - Boxer's Revenge. Once you get a taste for them you can't get enough. I tend to go more for the dry, funky beers Brettanomyces beers over the tart, acidic lactobacillus ones. I've got a real taste for Green Flash Rayon Vert Just wish it wasn't so expensive.

There are hundreds of 'imported' 'world beers' in my 'local', but as they're imported they do tend to be expensive; He's got a huge range, covering nearly every country in the world tha tproduces beer... Australian, American, Belgium, German, and pretty-much everywhere else I seem to recall, there was a huge list somewhere on the web, I think and it went on for pages My taste though has been firmly trained in British beer.... Though I'm partial to some of the US ones, I generally find all the German and Belgium ones, just not quite to my taste...

All that time I lived in the UK I never once went to Belgium, which was as close to where I lived in London as Manchester, Liverpool or Exeter, nor drank any Belgian beer, nor knew about the importance of beer in Belgium and all the different (and often very unusual) types of Belgian beer and their history. I could quite dig living there now.

My taste was firmly trained in British beer too. I had no idea there was anything kind of beer other than bitter, brown ale, stout, lager, mild or barley wine. I'd heard rumours about other kinds of beer called mild, porter and IPA but those weren't made any more, except for those dusty old bottles of Worthington White Shield IPA on the shelf at the pub that no-one bought, and Greene King IPA which was just another bitter.

I'm glad I know better now

I had a lucky start in my explosure to beer, when I started going to pubs, err, when I was about 14... Despite being in the back end of nowhere, and then* some, we had a local, microbrewery, just down the road, with its own 'tasting rooms', (sure they called them tasting rooms, rather than a bar, or pub, to not get taxed so highly, or soemthing...) anyhow, admitidly, at first, their beer, was a bit ... 'rough', and intermitidly pretty terrible, but it was* real beer... It got better over the years, then another microbrwery opened up, in town, and so we had two I can still taste, merry monach, a beer they briefly brewed, circa 1993, and have as yet to find anything to quite* match up to it I went downhill a bit after that, when I went to Uni, and Greenking IPA was often the only beer I could find in the places I was going, but then I discovered the real ale pubs locally, and haven't ever looked back treacly dark porters, and stouts, have seemed to be my thing the past few years, but I still like the wherry and adnams, which were also fairly common beers during my err childhood being in that* part of the country; and I always try to get out to the local pubs when I'm back at my Dad's, for the adnams and Wherry

I guess there must be some German, and Belgium beers, that I'd like, I've just not found them, and they're so expensive to get, in bottles, when out, that I tend not to risk it
Considering I like beer so much, its strange I hardly seem to drink it very often much thesedays Well, now summer is here, maybe I'll spend more time out in pubs