How I survived Copenhagen Beer Celebration (in 5 easy steps)

As I hinted at in my previous post, Copenhagen Beer Celebration was such a massive event that it was difficult to wrap your head around. Not because it was huge, because it wasn’t – 25 breweries and 1000 tickets sold each day are numbers dwarfed by those at, say, GBBF, GABF or the regular Copenhagen Beer Festival. No, it was overwhelming because of the sheer quality on display – these were some of the world’s best brewers bringing some of the world’s best beer, lots of limited releases and intriguing, out-there stuff (when Brian Strumke of Stillwater Artisanal Ales says he put juniper in a beer, he means the whole juniper bush, berries, wood, needles and all), lots of once-in-a-lifetime beer experiences. I admit I was overwhelmed, but in the end I and my tastebuds came out unscathed (whether my liver did the same if open for debate), and I think my survival was helped by my adherence to five simple principles. I am sharing these principles here in the hope that they may help other fellow beer-geeks survive CBC-type events without collapsing in a beergastic, spasmodic heap one hour into the festival (gasping “Too… much… great… beer…”). Here we go:

One of the beers I didn’t have

1. I just let go.

In the festival programme, I counted 198 different beers on offer over two days – and that’s not including all the beers that were unlisted. Brodie’s Beers had brought many more beers than those listed in the programme, and so had De Struise (and they brought 25-odd beers to begin with!), Cigar City and many others. And as I have said repeatedly, many of these were limited releases – not that I am primarily a ticker (OK then, I am a bit of a ticker), but most of these limited releases sounded so darned good (wouldn’t you want to try a Mikkeller Brunch Weasel Vanilla Cognac Edition?). So in order to enjoy the Celebration to its fullest, I just had to let go and realize that I would not be able to sample all the beers I wanted to sample. I would inevitably miss some rarity or other because I was elsewhere occupied when the cask/leg came on. Some stuff was bound to run out. So I dialed down my ticker madness and decided to just enjoy what I got and not go around with a list of must-drink beers, ticking them in mechanical fashion. Many of my beers were impulse purchases – and I was never once disappointed.

Copenhagen Beer Celebration: The Lists

Festival bracelets!

I had this glorious plan that I would live-blog from the recent Copenhagen Beer Celebration, with several updates per day, lots of pictures… but I was too busy drinking beer, and hanging out with great brewers and fellow beer geeks from around the world. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. In fact, ever since I’ve come home I’ve actually wrestled with how to actually approach writing about CBC, as it was so massive, so good, so filled with beer (43 samples in two days at the festival – then there was Sour & Bitter, our night at Fermentoren, the 20+ bottles I bought at Ølbutikken and Barleywine and that my Norwegian colleague brought me) that I have had trouble digesting it all (no pun intended) and wrap my head and my tastebuds around the whole thing. So in the end I decided to take the easy way out and do a couple of CBC-related lists – because we all love lists, right?

Sour & Bitter: some scattered impressions

Yesterday I was at that beer ticker-event of the year known as Sour & Bitter, a beer-and-food party organized by Drikkeriget as a kind of kick-off/warm-up event for Copenhagen Beer Celebration (which starts today). The line-up was drool-inducing indeed: lots of rare stuff from lambic masters 3 Fonteinen (including a release of their much-anticipated 2010 Framboos), The Bruery, Lost Abbey, and Pizza Port (first time in Europe!). Very high tick factor, in other words – someone even remarked that all the information released by Drikkeriget before the event just emphasised how rare the beers were, with not a word on whether they were any good.

But I mustn’t grumble: the whole thing was excellent, with a very friendly atmosphere. It was very open and easy to chat to the brewers and the fellow beer-geeks. The love of beer and food shone through everything – food was provided by Mmm… Zonen for madkultur, and served in a set of small “stations” where the guests assembled their own nibbles also using components handed out in brown paper bags – very pretentious in a surprisingly un-pretentious way, if that makes any sense.

Pumpclip Horror

I’m an avid follower of Pumpclip Parade, a blog that collects, as they put it “Aesthetic Atrocities From The World Of Real Ale” – pumpclips and beer labels that are in such poor taste and with such horrible artwork/design that it is enough to put you off drinking for the rest of the night. Or week. I was therefore happy (in a watching-a-train-wreck kind of way) to be able to contribute what is possibly the worst and most offensive label art I’ve ever seen to the blog in question. Head on over and check out the horror – there’s no way I’m posting it here.

A Taste of Sweden

Nils Oscar Coffee Stout. Yum!

I would normally be reluctant to plug particular beer shop sites on the blog (I use several of them and they all have their strengths and weaknesses), but this I feel has the character of a public service message. I’ve remarked before that I’m sorry Swedish craft beer is not widely available (or available at all) in the UK, so I was very pleased to discover that Beers of Europe had a number of beers from renowned Swedish craft brewery Nils Oscar among their new releases for May. EDIT: just found out that BeerRitz also have the same Nils Oscar beers in stock. Nils Oscar was founded in 2006 which makes it quite an established player on the Swedish craft beer scene. They’re based in Nyköping, around 60 miles southwest of Stockholm, and they also have a distillery where they produce small-batch, craft aqvavit.

Exclusive: Brodie’s Beer List for the CBC

Another thing I got from the interview with James Brodie yesterday was a bit of a scoop – sure, a small and specialized scoop, but a scoop nonetheless: the list of beers Brodie’s is bringing to the Copenhagen Beer Celebration! You saw it here first, folks. Here’s the full list, with some comments:

On keg:

• Hoxton Special IPA (ABV 6.6) – A quite sweet, fruity/citrusy IPA, highly drinkable.
• Dalston Black IPA (ABV 7.0) – A “big fruit” black IPA, one of the better examples of the genre I’ve tasted!
• Hackney Red IPA (ABV 6.1) – A malty IPA with a tiny whiff of smoke – very flavourful yet very balanced, possibly my fave Brodie’s IPA.
• Simcoe for Breakfast (around 10 ABV) – A breakfast stout heavily hopped with Simcoe.
• Romanov Whisky Barrel Aged (Jameson) (around 10 ABV) – I’ve had the Rioja barrel-aged version of this Imperial Stout, and it had wonderful complexity and depth of flavour. I imagine it will be just as interesting with some Irish whisky notes.
• MoFo Stout (ABV 10.1) – This is the Mikkeller collaboration brew, an imperial stout brewed with liquorice and fresh cranberries. Sounds yummy!
• Pink IPA (ABV ?) – This is going to be an Aussie-style IPA with Centennial, Citra and Columbus, with some fresh raspberries added, mostly for colour. The first pink IPA ever?
• Kiwi IPA (ABV around 7) – Brodie’s have previously done a low-ABV (3.8) bitter/pale ale with NZ hops, but for CBC they’re brewing a bigger IPA version.

On cask:

• Awesomestow IPA (ABV 7.1) – First brewed for Brodie’s own festival at their Old Coffee House pub, this is a West Coast IPA with lots of tropical fruit flavours and resiny hops.
• Old Street Pale (ABV 5.3) – An American Pale Ale, apparently on the smoother side of the spectrum.

So there you have it, folks. I’m pretty excited about all of these beers and I think they present a very good cross-section of Brodie’s offerings. The only thing I’m possibly missing is an ABV 3-4 session beer, something I know Brodie’s also does well, but perhaps an extreme beer festival like CBC is not the best forum for that… Anyway, all of you going to CBC: make sure to come to the Brodie’s stall – they’re a world-class brewery and this will be a unique chance to sample their beers outside the UK!

Meet the Brewer: Brodie’s Beers

If you follow this blog (all three of you – you know who you are!) you know that I’m a big fan of East London brewery Brodie’s – I’ve written about them here and more extensively and recently here. After my writeup of the Bunny Basher festival at brewery HQ William IV in Walthamstow, brewmaster James Brodie got in touch, and today I made the trek to E10 to have a chat with James about various beery topics, particularly what kinds of beer we can expect from Brodie’s in the near future. James and Lizzie Brodie (brewery co-founder) were very friendly and enthusiastic and the interview ended with a surprising invite – more on that later.

Meet the Brewer: Weird Beard Brew Co.

Gregg Irwin showing off Weird Beard's Sunshine Saison

The London Beer Week at the Rake continues – my self imposed 30-day alcohol ban has sort of limited my opportunities to join the fun, but I was so curious about new London brewery Weird Beard Brew Co. that I decided to come down to their free sample session despite the fact that I wasn’t going to drink any of the free samples. What I did do, however, was have a chat with brewmaster Gregg Irwin (one-half of Weird Beard Brew Co. the other half being brewer/brand manager Bryan Spooner) about their beers and why they are getting noticed even before they’ve officially launched their brewery.

London Beer Blog: You don’t generally decide to start a brewery overnight. How did the idea develop?

A package from Holmfirth

If you read my last post, you’ll know that I’m not drinking any (alcoholic) beer for this month. But, as I also said in my last post, that doesn’t mean I can’t buy beer. So I ordered a case from Summer Wine Brewery, very much one of the breweries of the moment – so far I’ve tried their Diablo IPA, their Lime & Coriander Saison, and their Teleporter Ten Malt Porter, and I’ve liked them all. Their mail order service is swift: I ordered the bottles on the 12th and had them delivered after the weekend, on the 17th.

From left to right, you have their Cohort Double Black Rye Belgian IPA, KopiKat Imperial Coffee Vanilla Stout, Reaper Red IPA, Diablo IPA, Maelstrom Double IPA, and the Teleporter Ten Malt Porter. The perceptive of you will note that one bottle of the Teleporter is missing; I gave this to my father-in-law and it got his resounding approval. I can’t wait to have mine!

Also: If you are in London, there are quite a number of Summer Wine beers on tap at the Craft Beer Company at the moment. Head over and have a taste – this is one brewery that lives up to the hype!

Beer without alcohol – no, really.

So here it is: I’m off the sauce for 30 days. This is the kind of thing that might pose problems for a beer blogger, but it is what it is. I’m going to the Copenhagen Beer Celebration on May 11-12, and attending the warm-up beer ticker wet dream event Sour & Bitter on the 10th, and I just know that there are going to be MANY beers I want to sample. So I decided to detox but good for a month before what already promises to be the big beer event of the year. I also joined the gym (and I’m going, too – three or four times a week). I’m basically a walking turn-your-life-around cliché. But don’t worry, it’s only for a month. I’ll be back to my beer-swilling, sedentary ways in no time, you’ll see.

This preamble is to explain my newfound interest in non-alcoholic beer. Most non-alcoholic beers I’ve had coming from the big brands (Becks Blue and the like) have been universally awful and I’ve often found myself missing the Swedish tradition of lättöl (literally light beer, which are very-low-ABV beers that can often be surprisingly flavourful). So when I made my most recent trip to Utobeer to pick up some bottles of Hardknott‘s limited release Æther Blæc 2011 (hey, I said I wouldn’t drink, that doesn’t mean I can’t buy beer) I asked them what kind of non-alcoholic brews they had to offer. I came away with one bottle of Erdinger Alkoholfrei (which came highly recommended) and one bottle of Schneider Mein Alkoholfreies (Tap 3) (which was also recommended but not as highly) – in other words, two non-alcoholic wheat beers. So brace yourselves, folks, for London Beer Blog’s first non-alcoholic beer review!