Arran set for expansion?

Great to see Arran Brewery in the midst of raising a chunk of money (£1.6m to be precise) to fund an expansion that will allow them bring the bottling of their beers back up north (they're currently bottled by Marston's in Burton on Trent). Check out this article in the Herald for more info.

New brewery, new brews...

Happened to stumble across a brewery that's apparently new. It's definitely new to me but that doesn't necessarily mean it's new to the world of course. Website's not very helpful as yet - http://www.pantherbrewery.co.uk/ - but seems to have three brews worthy of a nosy.

Tasting notes: secret threesome Tryst

Desktop printer labels outside. Top notch beer inside.

Having recently discovered The Lade Inn's fantastic online Scottish Real Ale Shop I succumbed to the urge one night last week of ordering a mixed case after discovering Tryst Brewery's legendary Carron Oat Stout on the site. (Oatmeal stout is right up my street, you see. There's not enough of it in the world.). Having stuck 4 bottles in the mixed case I decided to fill the other 8 gaps in the case with a selection of more or less randomly chosen ales from Tryst. A brewery at a time is a good way to work your way round Scotland, I reckon. Needless to say, when the case arrived a few days later I had completely forgotten what I'd ordered so it was like Christmas morning when I opened it up. (Full marks to the guys at The Lade for prompt delivery and for clever use of a couple of old copies of The Daily Record and lots of bubble wrap. No casualties at the hands of the courier, I'm pleased to report.)
And now, a week later, I've had a punt at every beer in the case and it's safe to say I'll be back with a new order soon. Every beer is chock full of character with not a dull one among them. They're not all to my taste, which is fair enough, but every one is a wee journey in itself. The labels on the bottles are frankly awful, even by bottled real ale standards, but in its own curious way that only seems to magnify the appeal of what's inside - and at the end of the day that's all that really matters, right?
Tryst Brewery came to life in the early 1990s when John McGarva bought the remnants of the now defunct Berkley Brewery in Manchester and shifted the brewing kit (10 barrel gas-fired boiler, hot liquor tank, 2 fermenting vessels, conditioning tanks, pump and "loads of pipe work") and shifted it up to Larbert, near Falkirk. Since then, the brewery has grown and gathered gongs along the way for its hand made, lovingly turned out ales and for this session I was looking at a couple of them: Carronade Pale Ale, a 4.2% offering made with Washington state hops (the brewery has an interest in more unusual hops), and Drovers 80/-, made to a traditional Scottish 80/- recipe. Both are bottle conditioned.

TASTING NOTES, AFTER A FASHION:
Carronade Pale Ale, Tryst Brewery, pale ale, 4.2%, Scottish Real Ale Shop
An unusual, soft yellowy gold in the glass, it has just the slightest yeast haze and a head of very dense and small bubbles. On the nose it gives off the loveliest reek of soft lemon and lemon-flavoured boiled sweets, possibly even honey and lemon Lockets, which sounds bad but isn't at all - quite the opposite in fact. It's all very gentle and rounded, characteristics that are carried into the taste. Lemon citrus with honey notes again and an underlying hoppiness not quite getting through as well as it might have. The lemon flavours are maybe short of some crispness and bite that would have really lifted the whole bundle, but that's just my taste. The finish is more of the same: lots of soft, lemony loveliness but not enough bite for my taste and kind of tapering into nothing a bit too quickly.
Score: 3/5

Drovers 80/-, Tryst Brewery, heavy ale, 4.0%, Scottish Real Ale Shop
A classic example of the style known in Scotland as heavy, this 80/- pours a lovely dark, nutty brown, rich and silky. Drinking chocolate and molasses and toasty malt on the nose - utterly lovely. Once you get a mouthful, it's off in another direction. Plenty of sweet maltiness, yes, but the almost overwhelming sweetness on the nose is gone and you're left with a rich, deep, multi-layered delight bouncing between more bitter dark chocolate, some coffeee, a bit of orange and maybe some toasted nuts. It's quite light in the mouth at 4% so this plethora of potentially overpowering flavours just ends up filling your tastebuds with really well-balanced flavours. The finish sees an initial hop burst that than fades up against the stramash of flavours before tapering off slowly and leaving a lingering glow. My only very slight issue was a lack of tightness and shape in the finish but this ale is what an 80/- is all about for me.
Score: 4/5

http://www.trystbrewery.co.uk/

Keeping it local

While 'local sourcing' might be the buzzword of the minute for everyone from global lager giants to national supermarkets, the real ale brewing industry has always had locally-sourced product at the heart of what it's all about. OK, a chunk of hops might be flown in from Eastern Europe and further afield but most of the barley and all of the water is locally sourced - and it's maybe something that small brewers should be making more fuss of when talking to consumers.
So it's great to see some small brewers across the country working a bit harder to a) source more barley locally and b) let the world know.

St Austell head brewer Roger Ryman (2nd left) in a
field of Maris Otter. With some farmers.

The biggest brewer in Cornwall, for example (St Austell) has announced that it intends to increase its use of Cornish sourced Maris Otter barley from 20% in 2009 to 60% by the end of this year (representing about 1,000 tonnes of the stuff). Up near Kidderminster, Hobson's Brewery contracts with a collective of 12 local farmers with the area given over to Maris Otter rocketing from 40 acres in 2008 to 90 in 2009. This year they are looking at 300 acres, all within 10 miles of the brewery. And being in prime hop-growing country, the brewery also sources hops locally.

What's not to like about lovingly crafted beer, made by people who care about the quality of their produce using ingredients sourced from within a few miles of the brewery? And this is the way it's always been done, not simply because local sourcing is now trendy.

Down among the big boys

Chuffed to see Fyne Ales scoop a design gong last night for the redesign of their range on a shoestring budget, if you call almost £7,000 a shoestring. The microbrewery picked up a Gold award at the Design Business Association's Design Effectiveness Awards for producing a design that was "more commercially effective" than that produced by a host of big household name brands. Always good to see the little guys sticking it up the big guys. Fyne Ales boss Jamie Delap says the redesign (by Glasgow agency Good Creative) of the bottle labels was a major factor behind driving an almost 50% growth in sales last year to over £820,000. They've now got listings for their filtered bottled ales in the likes of Waitrose and Oddbins while they're selling the cask stuff in Wetherspoons now too.

Brewing up a storm

You've really got to hand it to those pesky critters at BrewDog - they reach the parts that other beer companies dare not reach.

Take this latest pop at the mainstream lager boys, issued with a press release just this very day....

There's a lot of work gone into producing that visual, too.
Theirs must be the busiest legal department in the craft brewing industry, I reckon.

Having said that, they do make some rip-snorting beers - including the Punk IPA taking centre stage here, which in true BrewDog wave-creating style you can now get in cans...

CAMRA's top battle cruiser

Unlikely as it seems, CAMRA is celebrating its 40th anniversary by naming a London pub as its National Pub of the Year, the first time a pub from the capital has ever bagged that particular gong. The Harp in Covent Garden is apparently one of those old style pubs that go down well with real ale drinkers - me included - so no intrusive music or TV and a good selection of beers including milds, porters, local ales and even one or two craft ciders and perries. (Is 'perries' the plural of perry? Doesn't look right...)
If you fancy a nosy, The Harp is at 47 Chandos Place.
Can hardly wait to see how all those sandals and cardigans are going to go down in trendy Covent Garden now that the secret's out...

My local....

Nothing like a few decent beers to chose from at your local. And unfortunately this picture does not show my local. It's actually SIBA's craft beer bonanza held in Nottingham this week bringing together a frankly staggering collection of cask, bottled and keg beers from its member brewers.
That includes 50 keg beers and 56 cask ales. Kiddie-in-a-sweet-shop material, that.
The 10 category winners and the Supreme Champion will be unveiled to a thirsty world at SIBA's Annual Conference in March in Stratford-on-Avon. 

Doom Bar beached?

Ok, it's a bit wanky and pointless to lament the passing of another independent brewery (and a beer I really like) into the hands of another global soul-less behemoth, but I'm going to do it anyway. Doom Bar is a lovely  beer, full of character and the reason why its sale last week deflated me so much is that, somewhat oddly, just a week or so before I had done the double of enjoying a pint of it on draught in the afternoon and a bottle of it later that same evening. (All of this took place In Frimley Green, west of London, watching darts for the first time in my life - which I can heartily recommend to anyone, incidentally - but that's another story...).

Sharp's Brewery, which makes Doom Bar, was only set up in 1994 and while you can't be too upset at the entirely understandable desire of the previous onwers to cash in, it's still just a wee bit sad to see the brewery acquired by brewing giant Molson Coors (UK).

Based at Rock in Cornwall, Sharp's was the  biggest cask beer in the South West and Doom Bar was the number one selling cask brand in the South West and Wales - and the fastest growing cask brand in Greater London, apparently.

Me and the population of the South West and Wales see Doom Bar as a lovingly-made drop of beer.  Molson Coors sees it as "a tremendous opportunity for growth in volume and distribution".
And it's not romantic idealism at work here. It's just my cold, hard contention that the folks at Sharp's make beer for a different reason from the guys at Molson Coors. Crudely you can sum that distinction up as love v money.  I can't see that the brewery will be allowed to carry on exactly as was. I might be wrong, but I doubt it.
Of course, that's what Coors is worried that lots of Doom Bar drinkers will think. Hence the quote in the press release from Molson Coors UK Mark Hunter that he "respects and wants to preserve the unique culture of Sharp’s Brewery and the special appeal of their brands to beer drinkers.”  Not unsurprisingly, given that it will have been a condition of the sale, Sharp's MD Nick Baker, is equally positive (at least in the press release), stating: "It was, and is, important to us to know how Molson Coors will manage Sharp’s and their plan to invest in developing the brewery at Rock and the Doom Bar brand is spot on.”

But the thing is, once you've sold the business, you don't typically get much of a say in how it develops, no matter how 'important it is to you'.
I also suspect that Molson Coors won't want to advertise the fact that they've bought Doom Bar to Doom Bar drinkers, which tells you something.
All we can hope is that the quality of the beer doesn't suffer from being part of a global business where profit is all. But I won't be holding my breath, and probably like a lot of other beer drinkers, I might be less inclined to plump for a Doom Bar in future now that its heart is no longer in the same place.

Stella's Cider satire

Cider is clearly not an appropriate topic for a blog named BeerBelly but you've got to check out beer blogger extraordinaire Pete Brown's fictitious interview with Stella Artois about the launch of Stella Cidre...

A work of minor genius: http://petebrown.blogspot.com/2011/02/some-cheap-shots-and-infantile-musings.html.

Accordiing to Pete, the genuine interview that AB-Inbev's UK boss Stuart MacFarlane gave later was even more hilarious...