Lagerboy Speaks – Colonsay Lager

Posted by on Jul 8, 2007 in Lagerboy, Scottish Beer | No Comments

Beer fancying isn’t just about a competition to find the darkest, strongest, most pungeant brew you can. Most beer websites and blogs do tend to concentrate on that end of the spectrum, but only because they tend to be the most interesting and flavoursome. Even the most ardent lagerfan would probably admit the lack of taste the lighter-coloured stuff suffers from. But less taste doesn’t mean no taste (unless you opt for certain lagers), there shouldn’t be a stigma against drinking good lager – after all, it was invented by the Czechs, and they know more or less everything good about brewing.

So amongst the BeerCast’s regular malty, hoppy, caramelly (Podcast no.1 was brought to you in conjunction with that particular word) offerings, this committed Lagerboy will now and again pop up with a few drinks from the world of beers that you can actually see though. But just as ‘real ale’ suffers from an image problem, so does lager – one of popularity. In 2005, the UK lager market was worth £11.3bn – nine out of the top ten takehome beer brands were lagers (Guinness being the other). 42% of British adults now buy and drink it. By 2010, 80% of all UK beers sold are expected to be lager. Yikes.

But most of the major brands out there are the same old suspects – Stella, Carlsberg, Carling, Fosters. They don’t taste of much, they are fairly cheap, you can buy them in any off-licence or pub. But it doesn’t make them any good. Take Stella, the UK’s most popular lager (it has a third of the market), due to recent issues of ‘branding’, producer InBev added more boutique beers to the stable, a wheatbeer called Peeterman, and a 6% super lager called Bock, which someone bought by mistake the other week and nobody would drink it. Fosters, brewed in Edinburgh, is the typical Australian lager – except I lived there for almost a year and hardly ever saw it.

You have to search them out, but local lagers are available. They cost more than the mass-produced types (although Stella recently went up again, by 12p a pint), but are infinately nicer, with more taste – and you get a pompous air of smugness to have sought out something regional that the other lagerboys will have never heard of. Take Colonsay Lager. Produced by a small new microbrewery from the tiny Scottish island of 120 people, they knock out this 4.4%abv gem using local ingredients and a slower fermentation process. That means the lager has a touch of the wheatbeer about it, and is a dark apricot, almost amber colour. Incredibly refreshing, and with a packed taste, it blows the Carlings of this world out of the water. Which can only be a good thing.

Colonsay Brewery

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