"Shakespeare's Pub" - and my other books - now available in America

Good morning America!

Over the years I've been asked by many North American readers of this blog if my books are available in the United States. As of now, they all are!

Today the first ever US-bespoke edition of one of my books is published. My last book, Shakespeare's Local, hits American shelves today as Shakespeare's Pub: A Barstool History of London As Seen Through the Windows of Its Oldest Pub - The George Inn. (I've noticed on my trips to the States that you guys LOVE a long subtitle).

It's published by St Martin's Press, the US partner of my UK publisher, Pan Macmillan, and there's a bit more information about them and the book on their website, along with a really quite lovely gallery of the photos and illustrations used in the book.

The thing about your long subtitles is that it kind of tells you everything you need to know about the book (there's actually a riff in Shakespeare's Pub about the Stuart-era fashion for even longer subtitles and their similarity to those movie trailers that give away the whole plot.) But I'll elaborate a little for those who don't know.

The pub has been hailed as 'the primordial cell of British life'. For centuries, pubs have provided the glue that holds communities together. They are more than shops that sell drink, different from bars in that people feel a greater sense of ownership and belonging than in any other commercial establishment.

Today the great British pub ranks second or third in any survey of what visitors from abroad wish to experience when the go to the UK. And yet the pub is in crisis, with an average of 26 closing their doors for good every single week.

Against this backdrop, I wanted to tell the story of 'one pub and everyone who has ever drank in it', and the George emerged as the best candidate thanks to its unique combination of survival and location. There were perhaps more significant pubs historically, but they are no longer with us. And there are older pubs, but one reason they have survived is that they are tucked away in corners of the country where nothing much happens - meaning there is a less interesting story to tell.

The story of the George involves the three leading lights of English literature - not just Shakespeare, but also Chaucer and Dickens. The latter was definitely a regular at the George, but I have to warn readers that there is no firm documentary evidence that either Chaucer or Shakespeare definitely drank in the George. In Shakespeare's case that's because there's hardly any documentary evidence of him doing anything at all. But circumstantial evidence that he drank in the George is very strong indeed.

As well as these guys, the story involves a wide-ranging cast of villains, prostitutes, beggars, thieves, merchants, brewers, highwaymen, prime ministers and royalty - making the George the perfect case study of the democracy and inclusiveness of the pub - qualities that make any obituary for pubs very premature indeed.

Shakespeare's Local been my most successful book launch in the UK to date, having been serialised on BBC Radio 4 and included in several 'best picks' of books of 2012. It's a book about pubs, but it's my least beery book so far - it's much more about broader social history, and aims to please a broader audience.

(Note to UK readers: the only things that have changed for the American edition are the cover and title and, I guess, maybe some Americanized spellings. In any and all other respects this is the same book as Shakespeare's Local).

My previous books were way more beery. Last time I looked, aged ago, they were not available anywhere in the US, but I'm delighted to discover that all three are now listed on amazon.com at non-import prices, in paperback and kindle editions. For anyone not familiar with them, here is a brief recap:

My first book looks at the history of beer (and pubs) mainly from a UK perspective.  It's still my bestselling book overall as it keeps up steady business as an easy, accessible, general introduction to the world of beer. If you're a beer geek looking for something more thorough and rigorous, track down anything by Martyn Cornell, or check out the Oxford Companion to Beer. What I tried to do here is discuss beer with both the irreverence and respect it deserves, offering entertainment as well as education to anyone who enjoys a good beer, but still packing in enough historical fact and trivia so that even the most knowledgeable beer geek might find something knew not just about beer, but the context it sat in, why it was there and how important it was, and still remains. This edition was updated in 2010. When people ask me which of my books is best, I tell them this is the most popular.

Breaking out of my UK perspective, for my second book I went on a world tour of important beer drinking nations. At a time when the idea of 'craft beer' was really happening in the US but wasn't that well known in the UK, I compared different brewing traditions, beer styles and ways of drinking, from Europe to the US, from Portland to Prague, from Milwaukee to Melbourne, Australia, including Paddys' Day in Ireland, Oktoberfest in Munich, and around 500 bars across thirteen countries. When people ask me which is my best book, I tell them this is the funniest.

India Pale Ale is the flagbearer of the craft beer movement, the most popular beer style among beer geeks and brewers. Everyone involved in that scene knows the legend of the beer brewed to be shipped to British garrisons in India, and the supposed transformation it underwent on the voyage. But no one knew what really happened. My third book charts my attempt to take a cask of traditionally brewed IPA from Burton-on-Trent to Calcutta by its traditional sea route around the Cape of Good Hope for the first time in 140 years. It cuts between the most detailed history of IPA there is, and my own journey on a variety of vessels. It didn't quite go according to plan. When people ask me which is my best book, I tell them this is the best-written.

So that's how I spent the last ten years of my life. I'm very proud to have all four books now on sale in the US and I hope American readers can cope with the slang and English vernacular* and enjoy them as much as my British readers.

Cheers, America!

*And the irritating over-reliance on footnotes. 

Cider, Cheese, Bluegrass and Mayhem: The Gower Cider and Cheese Festival

Long blog post alert!

In two weeks' time the Welsh Perry and Cider Guide, co-authored by me and cider photographer Bill Bradshaw, will be launched. We were commissioned to write it by the Welsh Perry and Cider Society, and spent much of last year touring Wales to research it. The highlight of our research, for me, was the Gower Cider and Cheese Weekend. It didn't look that great on paper, but like all the best drinking occasions, its charm snuck up on us and captured us before we knew what was happening. 

For many reasons, some of which will be obvious if you read on, much of my write-up was completely unsuitable for an informative guidebook. So here's the long version of the brief, restrained account that features in the Guide. 

The Welsh Perry and Cider Guide will be officially launched at the Welsh Perry and Cider Festival which runs from Friday 24th to Monday 27th May, and will eventually be available via Amazon and through Welsh bookshops and tourist centres. Photos below are copyright Bill Bradshaw - see more of his brilliant work at his blog, IAMCIDER.

The festival is happening again this weekend, Saturday 12th and Sunday 13th May. If you can go, I urge you to do so. 

If you time it wrong, driving through Swansea can be a dispiriting trudge past endless TGI Fridays and Premier Inns, the kind of urban crawl where, to relieve the tedium, your brain wanders off to dream up creative new methods of suicide. This is followed by an eternal limbo of endless suburban streets that only make sudden appearance of the magical playground that is the Gower Peninsula all the more surprising. At the end of another dull road you duck under some trees and instantly you’re in a dreamy, alien landscape of dunes and grassy outcrops, and winding roads that curve around cute pubs and swoop down dips and through copses, and steer you gently but firmly into conversations about scouting and woodcraft.

Fifteen minutes later we descend into a broad, shallow natural bowl ringed with trees, and arrive at the Gower Heritage Centre. This self-styled ‘vibrant crafts and rural life museum’ advertises itself as ‘a superb day out for all the family’, situated only 20 minutes walk from the spectacular Three Cliffs bay, ‘as seen on ITV’s “Britain’s Favourite View” with Katherine Jenkins’.

My accomplice Bill Bradshaw and I need no further encouragement to settle in for the day.

Built around a watermill that resembles a friendly giant, the centre is a real world manifestation of Toy Town or Hobbiton, an eccentric complex of brightly painted shacks, shops and workshops that tumble over each other to create a maze of narrow corridors and tempting doorways that assault the senses like Dorothy’s first glimpse of Technicolor Oz. Past the dairy, the puppet theatre, the ancient games arcade and village shop, all roads eventually converge on a red-tiled courtyard, roofed against the rain. On one side stands a tea-room, on the other, a pen full of small, rideable plastic tractors.

I’m trying not to say it, because it’s clichéd and lazy, but at this point I crumble. I’m only human.

“Ooh, isn’t it quaint?”

We grab a cuppa while we wait for Richie, our busy host. I browse the tea shop’s information stand: today’s event is part of a busy summer that includes Pirate Week, Viking Week, and a Medieval Fun Week where you can meet a knight and learn how to slay a dragon.

That’s it - I want to live here.

At first, I’m not so sure about the festival itself though. I’m used to beer and cider festivals with long lines of trestle tables with endless casks on stillage. Here there’s one stall with bag-in-box ciders piled three-high, and one long table selling a huge array of Welsh cheeses that all seem to be the same type of cheddar.

“It’s quiet, isn’t it?” I say to Bill. “We can probably get what we need here in a couple of hours and then go and see some more of the Gower.”

On reflection, my naiveté about cider back then was staggering.

Richie finally bounds into view and introduces himself. Impish and hyperactive, he appears to be dressed in my old school uniform of grey shirt, grey v-necked jumper and red tie. He welcomes us in a lilting, music accent and introduces us to Shaun, a local man selling his cider here for the first time, and then he's off on another errand. We seem to have started drinking cider, and it’s nearly midday, so we take a seat and decide to do a bit of product sampling.

The centre makes its own cider on an old press rescued from a farm in Pembrokeshire. The overflow car park is an orchard with geese snoozing under trees that are only now coming into blossom, weeks late thanks to the incessant rain. Today – on the first day of the year that you actually dare to hope for summer – the produce of last year’s last year’s crop is a deep russet red, a good, honest cider at 7.4% that’s sweet and sharp with a mouth-watering metallic hint.

We’re trying to drink halves because we want to be able to sample as many as possible. Gwatkin’s Kingston Black is tart with hints of smoke and sherry. Blaengawney Blindfold has loads of structure, a real journey from acidic to dry with a hint of bubblegum before a full, pure apple flavour opens out. Two Trees Perry is clean and clear like unfermented pear juice with no trace of its 6% alcohol until it’s far too late.

By lunchtime a mellow, family-friendly vibe permeates the courtyard. There’s folk music on the stage, and the smell of barbecuing burgers and sausages in the air. The queue at the cider bar gets longer, until it snakes around the courtyard, and we decide it would be far more efficient and practical to switch to pints.

We’re sitting by the cheese stall. A chubby black Labrador, obviously the inspiration behind the invention of the hover floor cleaner, makes sure any spillage is swiftly dealt with. I love Welsh cheddar. It’s hard and strong but it melts in your mouth, seducing you unexpectedly.

I suddenly notice that I’ve been eating Snowdonia Black Bomber for some time. I wanted to see if I could find a perfect cider and cheese pairing, but that seems to have gone by the wayside. Instead, I start to imagine that the cheese can speak, and it’s saying to me in a very pleasant, reasonable South Wales accent:

“Alright mate? All it is, right, what I’m going to do, is I’m going to destroy all your willpower and any defences you have, and I’m going to come in there, and there’s going to be nothing you can do about it.  You’re going to carry on eating me, and I’m going to fill up your arteries, and then fill up your heart with cheese, and I’m going to kill you, alright? And you’re gonna love it. Anyway, enough talking, open wide.”

Gwynt Y Draig’s Black Dragon is a real crowd pleaser, open and golden with all the fruit you want before a dry tannic finish. And I suddenly realise I can’t remember how much we’ve had. The folk music onstage is sounding better and better as the afternoon progresses. The Baggy Rinkles – a Swansea sea shanty band – tell us they enjoy singing traditional drinking songs but the influence of the chapel meant they had to go to England to find them. The people waving the ancient Welsh yellow cross on a black field – somehow more terrifying than the modern dragon flag – don’t seem to mind. Give us the punch ladle, we all roar, and we’ll fathom the bowl.

A teenage boy walks past wearing a hearing aid and a Guns and Roses T-shirt, a combination which amuses me enormously for some reason. Two young couples have liberated an old Buckaroo game from the village shop, and are becoming steadily worse at playing it.

By five o’ clock, there is a very slow, mellow vibe in the air. Folk singer Ian Jones complains from the stage that his cider has run out, and one of the Buckaroo girls comes up and pours the dregs of her glass into his. Some people are wearing wellies, others flip flops. There are trilbies and deer stalker hats, and the writing in my notebook is starting to look strange.

We decide we need to sober up a bit so we pop out to walk the short distance to Three Cliffs Bay (as seen on ITV’s “Britain’s Favourite View” with Katherine Jenkins’, remember.) Folk music follows us through the woods and down the valley, echoing off the hills until we’re half way there.

When we get back to the centre, the atmosphere has changed. It’s quite a lot looser and giddier. One of the Buckaroo girls is now slumped with a hood over her face like someone waiting to be hanged. People are playing mandolins and flutes. One of the bands that was on stage earlier has now invaded the children’s little plastic tractor enclosure. While the kids charge around gleefully crashing their tractors into each other, the musicians proceed slowly and extremely carefully around the pen, as if trying to ensure they don’t get pulled over for driving under the influence.

Richie, having rakishly discarded his grey jumper and loosened his tie a little, jumps onto the stage to announce that he’s had to send up the motorway for some more cider, that they’re meeting Gwynt Y Draig half way, and this raises a loud cheer. He jumps back off the stage and starts collecting glasses and clearing up litter, seemingly a one-man festival staff operation.

My notebook is looking really odd now. I’m pushing letters uphill onto the page. I have no idea what that means, but I write it down anyway. Something is happening to me that has only happened once before.

When I drink, my handwriting generally becomes messier the more we go on, but when I decipher the scribble later I’m usually pleasantly surprised to find that I was writing some good stuff. But once I found an absinthe bar in a seedy backstreet in Barcelona, and got inside-out drunk: the more the absinthe hit my system, the neater my handwriting became. But the stuff I wrote made no sense whatsoever, and was quite disturbing in places.

Now, here on the Gower, my handwriting gets neater, then messier, then neater again as my drunken self makes an extra special effort to send messages to the sober me who will read this notebook the next morning. Or the following week. Or six months later, only days before I need to make sense of these notes for a reading at the Abergavenny Food Festival, having left it to the last minute.

At some point, I write:

“This is what my handwriting looks like when I’m a bit drunk and concentrating harder on making it look neat than on what I’m saying.” 

We drink some Gwatkin Yarlington Mill, a smouldering glass in which a candy sweetness meets a grainy, spicy dryness.

And then I write:

“It gets harder and harder to feel like this, the older we get. We’re just trying to recapture joy. We’re trying to achieve transcendence, run from boredom and mediocrity that we can’t endure. Sobriety is an illness to us, an awful state of self-doubt and awareness.” 

There’s still a family thing going on in the courtyard, but it's wrapped around a vitality running through the place, as if it’s on a ley line. I’m conscious that I’m missing the final of Britain’s Got Talent, but I think I’ve got the better deal. In fact, I think I’m watching next year’s winner. A teenage boy is on stage singing and playing guitar, and a semi-circle of cider-drunk women seem to be closing in on him, the intense look in their eyes making it clear how keen they would be to help him grow up a little. Then he plays the Jungle Book’s 'Bear Necessities' for an encore. If there were any hearts in the place not won over, they are now.

I drink some more cider.

And I write: 

“Lascivious Flautism.” 

Up The Creek, a Swansea Bluegrass band, have taken the stage. And I learn that Bluegrass pulls everything in and makes you its own. I’ve written a lot about pairing the right music with the right beverage recently, and pairing cider with bluegrass is like dropping a packet of Mentos into a fizzy bottle of Coke, or a magnesium strip into water. Anything you're holding flies into the air. Banjo and fiddle tear the corrugated plastic roof off the courtyard and fling it into space. I have no idea where Bill is. Everyone is going absolutely insane, surfing a wave of pure joy. Richie is grinning, having finally stopped working. He catches my eye, and gestures to the band. Everything about this festival, this weird little place, now makes perfect sense.

I drink some more cider. And decide it’s probably time I put my notebook away and focus on the music.

This is the first of various posts I intend to write in the drunken travel theme of my second book, Three Sheets to the Wind. If you enjoy this aspect of my writing, look out for the label 'Four Sheets' as I document more of my recent tipsy journeys.

Get dissolute this weekend!

Collaboration brews with beer writers, bloggers and other non-brewers are commonplace now and get a mixed reception. Some see these beers as exciting novelties, while others feel it's nothing but ego-stroking or half-arsed marketing. I guess it depends on whether or not the resulting beer is any good, and whether that beer would have happened anyway without the collaboration. But I'm proud of all the beers I've helped co-create, and am a big fan of those by other writers too.

Whatever your views, Brains Brewery have taken the whole idea of collaboration/guest brewing to another level. Brains is Wales' largest brewer by some distance, and has a sizeable tied pub estate. Most of their beers are mainstream and uncomplicated, because that's what most drinkers in their pubs want. But last year they decided to open a twenty barrel plant in the heart of the main brewery to produce craft beers, often in association with various guests. 2012 was all about IPAs, and two resulting collaborative brews have gone into national supermarket distribution.

This year it's all about European beer styles. I was one of the last people they approached who responded - obviously Saisons and other currently fashionable varieties were bagsied first by other people. So what could I brew?

I thought back to my first visit to Belgium, about ten years ago. I was on my own, knew very little about beer styles and was wide open and impressionable. (It's great to be a 'beer expert' now, whatever that is, but I do miss the excitement of discovery of those early days.) I had my copy of Good Beer Guide to Belgium, in which I'd starred some interesting-sounding bars, and worked my way through them trying beers I'd never heard of before.

In the middle of the first afternoon I found myself with my first ever Westmalle Dubbel, a Trappist beer at 7%ABV. Like many people who meet such beers for the first time, I was intimidated by it. But a few days before that I'd done my first ever beer tasting course, courtesy of the Beer Academy, and I sniffed and swirled and thought and swallowed and savoured, and that was probably the moment when my interest in the society, culture and history of beer was joined by a genuine passion and enthusiasm for ingredients and style, the essence of the thing itself. It was rich and chocolatey with a slight hint of sherry and spoke to me of layers of depth still waiting to be revealed.

It took me an hour to drink it, and while I was doing so I looked out of the bar window and saw a coach load of Japanese nuns pull up outside, closely followed by two men in electric wheelchairs racing down the middle of the cobbled street, one with a dwarf hanging off the back, and then a man in a karate suit came up the street from the opposite direction, doing his moves, and I fell in love with Belgium and all its surreal weirdness both inside and outside the beer glass.

In the first few years after I came back from that first Belgian trip I kept beers like Westmalle Dubbel, Westmalle Tripel, Orval and Chimay Blue as permanent mainstays in my cellar. But as the whole craft beer revolution took off, such old guard mainstays seem to have become unfashionable. Saturated by novelty, it's easy to lose sight of the classics.

What would I like to brew? A copy of Westmalle Dubbel please - sorry, I mean a "tribute" to Westmalle Dubbel.

We called it Dissolution (geddit?) and it's brewed with Munich and Dark Crystal malts, Saaz and Styrian Golding hops and a traditional Trappist Ale yeast. It's turned out dark, full bodied and complex,  full of rich and fruity plum flavours with a sweet raisin aroma and a spicy, warming finish.

It should now be on the bar in Brains pubs across Wales. But the brewery has also kindly sent a couple of kegs to a pub of my choice on my manor.

I chose the Cock Tavern in Hackney, because it's my new favourite London pub, and it's just a brisk walk down the road. On Bank Holiday Monday 6th May at 6pm, we'll be doing a 'meet the pretend-brewer' event I guess, pouring the beer and chatting to anyone who's interested in chatting about it. There may even be some beer being poured for free. And if you don't like my beer, there's a microbrewery in the basement where they make some damn fine brews of their own. As far as I know it's the only time this beer is scheduled to appear in London, so get there in good time for a taste of pseudo-Belgian magic.

Is anyone still interested in a definition of craft beer?

I wonder...

It's been a depressing spectacle this last couple of years watching people who share a love of great beer tear each other apart over trying to define what craft beer is.

I've been using the term for years in a very loose way to describe most things that are not mainstream commercially produced lager. But in the last three years, as craft has become a defined movement, some people have felt an increased urgency to give it a proper technical definition. Others have asserted that because it doesn't have one, it does not and cannot exist - an attitude that seems to me to display a curious mix of arrogance and paranoia.

There are various obstacles to coming up with such a definition.

One is competing interests. The nearest thing we have to a definition is that put forward by the American Brewers Association. It talks about size of brewer, ownership and adjuncts. The thing is, this is a trade association's description designed to benefit members of that trade association. It serves their purposes, not the drinker's. It changes to suit the evolving needs of its members. Which is fair enough - for them. What's not fair is when they seek to impose this definition on the whole world of beer. The best beer I've had this year is a bourbon aged Imperial stout with cherries from Goose Island. According to the BA, this is not a craft beer because it's owned by A-B Inbev. Now I hate A-B Inbev as much as anyone, and I'm deeply wary of their intentions to Goose Island. But any universe where the beer I had is not a craft beer is a strange place indeed.

Then at the other end there's the whole "if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck..." school of thought, which says you don't need to be able to define a craft beer to spot one. This has been criticised for reducing things to "I like this beer so it's a craft beer." I think that's a bit disingenuous. Amid all the debates about what is and isn't craft beer, those arguing could probably agree on nine out of ten beers being craft or not. But many people would rather spend their time arguing about the one out of ten that's ambiguous.

The definition I have the least time for is the "craft beer is quality beer that is served in keg" school. This is absurd and feeble minded. The kind of people who say this in a positive way do so to distinguish 'craft' from what they see as 'boring brown' cask ale. It's nonsense. By taking this stance against the real ale diehards who believe anything in a keg is bad, they're merely proving themselves to be a mirror image of those diehards, just as ignorant and bigoted. If craft beer is about anything specific, it's certainly not about the container it's in - the whole point of it is that it should be all about the beer.

My personal view, as I expressed in response to Mark Dredge's excellent recent post about craft beer whiners, is that it's more useful to think of craft as an adjective rather than a noun. Not as a specific style of beer, but as a general description, the same way we'd say 'dark' or 'full bodied' or whatever - deliberately non-specific, but carrying a degree of commonly understood meaning.

That's how I've always thought about craft beer. But I'm all too aware that many people in the beer world NEED technical definitions - it's how they navigate the world.

Well if you're one of those people, how about this?

At a recent conference on innovation in beer, St Austell brewer Roger Ryman gave a presentation about craft beer in which he quoted an article by Dan Shelton, which appeared in the last edition of the Good Beer Guide to Belgium. This guide is currently out of print because a new edition is launching this summer. But editor Tim Webb very kindly sent me a copy so I could read the piece and write about it here.

Dan Shelton clearly has some axes to grind of his own, but I found his multi-part definition of craft beer quite compelling. He identifies five aspects:

1. Ingredients - does the brewer seek the best possible ingredients or is s/he more concerned about keeping costs down?
2. Methods and equipment - the brewery's intent - does the brewery do everything it can to maintain quality or does it let things slip as it grows? Is the brewery making the best beer it can? 
3. The brewer's spirit - hard to measure, but does the beer reflect the brewer's personality or is it simply generic and lacking in faults? Are they just following the market, or trying to do something special?
4. Company structure - who's calling the shots? It's not necessarily about company size, but does the brewer decide what beers are brewed or does the marketing department?
5. Control - is the brewer able to exercise some control over how the beer turns out or is s/he simply throwing in ingredients and hoping for the best?

Everyone who I would call a craft brewer ticks each of these boxes. What I like about this definition is that it's objective. A global giant could produce a craft beer if they followed these rules, but they don't. Their structures don't permit it. But it doesn't rule them out on size or ownership. It's about intent.

And this definition does what no other does - it excludes small brewers who aren't very good. Any idiot can throw an extra bag of citra hops into a copper, it doesn't make them good brewers or their beer good beer. I've tasted bland beers that are not craft created by huge corporations, and I've tasted bloody awful beers created by tiny breweries that call themselves craft when they are not, because craft has to be about skill as well as size. I don't know how you measure some of these criteria, but of it's a neutral, objective detailed definition of craft you want, I think this does the job.

But like I said, I'm not sure we need it. While I was thinking about this post, I looked up 'craft' in the Oxford English Dictionary and it says "An activity involving skill in making things by hand." Do we really need it to be any more complex than that?

And finally... Bondi Beer!

I can't really write any more on this blog until I've closed the story of Bondi Beer.

The story so far: in December I saw an appalling advertorial in The Grocer magazine for a beer called Bondi, which was calling itself a craft beer. I wrote a scathing blog post about it, assuming (I could find very few details about it online) that it was another cynical attempt to move into craft territory by a big brewer. I found a beer called Bondi online being promoted by Paris Hilton and obviously thought it was the same beer. (It wasn't - turns out that was a different brand, different company, with the same name from the same country!)

Days later, the owner of Bondi beer contacted me. He was pretty angry and asked me to take the piece down. At first I resisted, and then I realised that this was in fact a very small company and that they were trying to do the right thing. They admitted the advertorial was rubbish and were very upset at the way it had been heavily edited. They asked me to meet them and taste the beer, and I agreed. I took my original post down - the first time I have ever done so - and explained why.

I've owed them this write-up ever since, but as you can see, I've hardly been blogging, because I've been so busy up against book deadlines. I could have slipped this post in at a time when this blog wasn't really active, but I thought that would be the equivalent of trying to bury bad news at a time no one would see it. I wanted to wait until this blog was properly active again to guarantee this would reach my full audience. Sorry that has taken so long.

I met the Bondi guys in the fantastic Porterhouse in Covent Garden, which stocks their beer. We had a few beers and made peace. It was a good meeting. And it was a very, very good beer. Bondi is a four per cent lager that does not taste like you'd expect a four per cent lager with Australian branding to taste. It is contract-brewed in the Czech Republic, and it shows. There's a brilliant Saaz hop character on the nose, bready and grassy, and a perfect balance of flavour, with proper body, a good buzzy finish, and yet the crisp refreshment of a good lager. It drinks way over four per cent - you'd guess at five, easily - so it's very satisfying at such a low ABV.

I would heartily recommend this beer to anyone. I wouldn't call it a 'craft' beer, as the advertorial originally did, but it's a far better lager than any of the main commercial brands.

And that's it, apart from two caveats.

One, I'm not writing this because Bondi asked me to. I promised them I would, and that was four months ago. They've put no pressure on me at all to get this post up here. I'm not saying it's a great beer because anyone has told me I have to, I'm saying it because it's a great beer, and if it wasn't, I'd say that too. The only reason this didn't appear before now is that I haven't had time to blog about anything until the last week or so.

Two, in my defence, I just want to reiterate one point given that I took my original post down. A few commenters have been very keen for me to issue this clarification. One or two have accused me of slagging off a beer without having tasted it. I never did that. In my original post, I made no mention at all of the taste of the beer. I was slagging off the marketing - something I went way over the top with and regret in retrospect - but I make a professional point of not dissing a beer's character without tasting it. (I took a similar approach with previous posts dissing the launches of Stella Black and Stella Cidre, following up with posts about the drinks themselves when I was able to try them).

Now I have tasted Bondi, I'm more than happy to talk about how good the beer is. I still think the launch marketing approach was ill-advised, and we talked about that too. The best thing Bondi can do is forget the jargon and sloganeering, and just put all their effort into trying to get beer into people's hands.

I wish them all the luck in the world in replacing other Aussie beers on British bars.

The mischievous Swede and the truth about Stella Artois

A few months ago I was contacted by Jonas Magnusson, a Swedish TV programme maker who wanted to interview me for a series of programmes he was making about beer. We met in the George Inn and had a great chat.

I normally confine remarks to stuff I feel positive about in interviews such as this - when talking to a mainstream audience, I'd rather concentrate on what's great about beer than moan about what's wrong. But somehow we got on to big global megabrands that don't actually care about beer at all, and we talked a bit about Stella Artois in particular in this respect.

A couple of days ago Jonas e-mailed me a link to a YouTube clip of when he went to Leuven to interview AB-Inbev about Stella. "You might be interested in this," he said.

24 hours later there was another email titled 'Did You Watch it'? I thought this was a bit pushy, as I've been frantically busy, but Jonas seemed really, really keen that I watch the clip.

And then, this morning, writer and blogger Max Brearley posted a link to the clip on Twitter, urging me to watch it.

I took the hint.

Here's the film: if you'd like to watch it without my commentary, go ahead now. If you don't have eleven minutes to watch it through, skip below to read about why you should.



Meet Jean-Jacques Velkeniers, Marketing Director for both Stella Artois and Jupiler in Belgium, Netherlands, France and Luxembourg. Jean jacques is a career marketer who is clearly passionate about his brand.

He says "it all started" with the merger of Interbrew and AmBev to create Inbev in 2004.  (Funny, because I thought Stella was a giant brand before then and was already in steep decline in the UK by this time.) He tells Magnus that these two companies shared the same vision and passion for beer.

What is this vision and passion?

"Conquering the world, market by market, using fantastic brands like Stella Artois," replies Jean-Jacques.

Magnus then asks what would seem to be a fairly straightforward question: what does this world conquering beer actually taste like?

To which Jean-Jacques replies: "Can we cut there? That's a very difficult question."

The man responsible for marketing Stella Artois across a good chunk of Western Europe is unable to describe what the beer tastes like.

After consulting two colleagues he recovers his poise and claims he just didn't know the words in English - this is astonishing as (a) so far his English has been impeccable - he has a perfect grasp of marketing jargon especially - and (b) even if he's telling the truth, this means that as Marketing Director he's never been asked what his beer tastes like in English before.

After being briefed on what his product tastes like, he tells us that it is very refreshing with a full-bodied taste, "crispy" (let's be fair and put that one down to genuine translation issues) and that "after a couple of seconds you get that bitter after-note in your mouth that makes it quite unique."

Yes, you read that right.

The marketing director of Stella Artois thinks his beer is unique because it has a bitter aftertaste.

To be fair, AB-Inbev do not allow their employees to taste beer from any other brewer, even when they're off the clock, so maybe he wasn't to know that bitterness is a common characteristic in almost all  beers - and that his brand rates pretty damn low in the bitterness stakes compared to most others. But still, you might have expected Jean-Jacques to have been given special dispensation given his role.

You might expect a man responsible for selling a huge beer brand in four European countries to have the first clue about what a typical beer's flavour profile is.

But we press on. Magnus asks Jean-Jacques if he would be able to pick out this special, unique flavour in a blind taste test. He's definitely up for it - you can't fault him on his conviction.

But what he doesn't know is that Magnus has already been out on the streets of Leuven, doing blind taste tests with people who regularly drink Stella and are loyal to the brand. It quickly becomes clear that no one can taste any difference at all between Stella and its sister brand, Jupiler. They do come from the same brewery - Jean-Jacques looks after them both - so perhaps they are - ahem - very similar beers packaged differently?

To make things more interesting, Magnus then gets out a cheap, crummy can of Swedish beer. "Yes, that's definitely Stella," say more Stella drinkers. "I had a pint five minutes ago and that tastes just the same."

Back at AB-Inbev HQ, Jean-Jacques is gearing up for the blind taste test between Stella, Jupiler and the crappy Swedish beer when Natasha, the PR person intervenes. She tells Jean-Jacques that there was a pre-agreed script for the interview, and that this was not part of it.

If you want to interview someone from AB-Inbev you have to give them prior approval of a script!

As they discuss whether the taste test is going to be possible or not, Natasha briefly mulls over whether it would be OK just with Stella and Jupiler (Jean-Jacques is never allowed to drink a non-AB Inbev beer, remember) and Jean-Jacques has to remind his PR person that "They are filming everything we say."

In the end, they decline to take part in any taste test, for three beautifully crafted reasons:

• The beer is the wrong temperature
• Jean-Jacques is "not prepared"
• You need a glass of water to clean the mouth between beers 

I guess a glass of water was not available.

This is a sublime piece of film making. The number of different ways it skewers this marketing organisation, demonstrating that not only do they not care about beer, they don't even know what it tastes like, is sublime.

You might not think there's much difference between commercial lagers. But when I worked on Stella Artois fifteen years ago, before the merger that created Inbev, before the relentless cost-cutting came in, before everyone at Interbrew who had a genuine passion for beer was fired and replaced by career marketers like Jean-Jacques, everyone on our team could have picked out Stella in a blind taste test. We pursued this old-fashioned notion that you can't sell a product properly unless you know and understand it. And you can't do that unless you can train your palate to taste it - no scratch that - unless you can even be bothered to try it every now and again.

It's something craft brewers do every day of their lives. And even among big global corporations, if you asked a similar corporate drone working for, say, Heineken or Carlsberg, they'd be able to tell you what the beer tastes like and why. They'd know that beer tends to have a bitter finish. They might not even have learned it for themselves in tutored tasting sessions, but if not they'd have access to some sort of cribsheet.

But of course, AB-Inbev is not a brewer, and Stella Artois is not a beer. It's a fantastic brand that is too busy conquering the world, market by market, to worry about such trivial things as what the product is, or what it tastes like. 

The Great Beer Tour consists of three one-hour episodes, and starts on SVT (Swedish television) on 16th April. 

Meanwhile...

Dammit, I can't wait.

The new website is going to take a while thanks to the appalling state of my finances after not having done any admin while working on new books.

One of my favourite lines in movies is from The Princess Bride, when one of the characters offers our hero the immortal advice, "Never start a land war in Russia, and never play cards with a Sicilian." To that, for any aspiring writers out there, I would add, "Never agree to write two books simultaneously for two different publishers, especially at the same time as you're supposed to be launching and promoting a third."

Anyway, I've finished them now and am re-emerging into the real world. For the first time in two and a half years I'm not on a screamingly urgent deadline, and I have an itch to start blogging again, as well as going out, seeing friends, watching TV, and all the other normal stuff I've pretty much forgotten how to do.

The fruits of my labours mean it's going to be a busy year.

In the UK, May 19th sees the launch of the Welsh Perry and Cider Guide I've co-written with cider photographer and blogger Bill Bradshaw for the Welsh Perry and Cider Society. Wales has come from nowhere in little over a decade to become one of the most important cider making regions in the UK, and now it gets its own guide. I'm married to a Welsh and spend a lot of time there. To see the country again through a cidery lens was truly special. Even if you don't like cider - or Wales - this should give you pause to re-evaluate it.

On 6th June the paperback version of Shakespeare's Local comes out - perfect for those who don't like shelling out on hardbacks or who have weak wrists!  I'll be doing a lor of events to support this and will list them here.

And then Mid-October sees the launch of World's Best Cider, again co-authored with Bill. Those big coffee table beer books have slipped into a fixed format since Michael Jackson wrote the first World Guide to Beer on the mid-1970s. There are shelves full of them, but not as many as there are for wine, and there are similar books on whisky, cocktails, tea, coffee - you name it. Except cider.

Everyone who makes and drinks cider thinks it's just them that does so, and there's never been a global look at cider until now. Cider makers in Britain, US, Germany, Spain and France have only just really started talking to each other in the last few years. And because cider is seen as rural and rustic, and so few people have compared the various styles around the world, it remains arguably the most misunderstood drink there is.

We were lucky enough to be commissioned by the company run by the woman who edited Michael Jackson's World Guide to Beer. Our World's Best Cider won't be quite as good - not least because Michael put seven years research into that book and publishing no longer works on such luxurious timescales - but if it does even a tenth of the job for cider that Michael's book did for beer, we'll be very happy indeed.

I also get my first ever official US publications this year.  Shakespeare's Local - rebranded 'Shakespeare's Pub' - is launched in the US and Canada next month.

And in October, World's Best Cider gets its own release in a country where cider has the same levels of excitement and wild experimentation that craft beer had twenty years ago.

So there's so much else to blog about. I will be doing my update on the whole Bondi beer thing very soon, as that is well overdue and quite interesting. There's lots of travel to write about. And this blog will increasingly feature content about cider as well as beer. Beer will always be my first love, but there is so much in cider that so few of us know anything about. It's really exciting.

But first - later today if I have time - in true Pete Brown's Beer Blog tradition, I have a cracking story about Stella Artois and a mischievous Swede...

Laters.