The BeerCast

A couple of weeks ago we had a small BeerCast night out at Hanam’s, one of the very few authentic Kurdish restaurants in Scotland. Having been a couple of times before, I knew it has no licence and is BYOB. However, beer is to be found on the drinks menu – it’s just that all of them are alcohol free, of course. Marketing these kinds of beers can prove to be pretty difficult (aside from highlighting the conscientious angle for designated drivers) – historically low and non-alcohol beers have been either bland, plain nasty, or both. On the menu however were a few I’d never heard of – including the enticing Dark Cheers, with no other description other than it was “Sem Álcool”.

Brewed by Unicer Bebidas in Santarém, Portugal, Dark Cheers (or Cheers Preta in the Portuguese) was the first alcohol-free black beer on the market in that country, having been launched ten years ago. It comes in at ‘not more’ than 0.5%abv, so might not strictly be alcohol-free – but it’s rare enough to see a dark one amidst the Kaliber (which incidentally is 0.05%), and other lager brands that put out a reduced strength namesake (such as Cobra, Bavaria, Becks etc). Whilst I’d not be too bothered to ever sample any of those, the prospect of a dark one intrigued me enough to give it a go.

It’s certainly dark, there’s no denying that. The head retains for an impressive amount of time, as the carbonation levels are quite high. There’s almost no aroma whatsoever from the beer – maybe a slight malty sweetness, but without any real hop levels and no alcohol (aside from the 0.5%), it pretty much just sits there, looking like a cola/porter half and half. Tastewise it’s an improvement, but as you’d expect with so little to back it up, the flavour struggles to make an impression. It’s very sweet, a bit vegetal, and reminds me of a watered-down session porter. It probably lies towards the top-end of the alcohol-free beer spectrum, but that’s not really saying much.

A while ago we started to discuss one of the ‘unmentionable’ aspects of drinking beer – the custom of adding something to alter the taste. Clearly this practice is frowned upon by most beery aficionados – but for certain people or situations it’s increasingly common. The BeerCast concentrates primarily on real ale, American craft beer and the like – but as we also talk about lagers (see our regular Lagerboy feature) we’re not outside the boundaries of experimentation. So, when my father told me of a very peculiar habit in a small part of Yorkshire we had to investigate.

It may be an apocryphal story – or an urban myth – but apparently the Asian taxi drivers of Huddersfield have developed a taste for Guinness and Lucozade. I’m not really sure why, and a search for clues found absolutely nothing to shed light on the claims. Guinness shandy (i.e. with lemonade added) was rumoured to have been invented by the New Zealand rugby team during a tour of the UK, putting a slightly different twist on the usual bitter shandy. That fact came direct from the Guinness website, so it may have some substance to it – even if it sounds unlikely that Jonah Lomu and friends would drink anything diluted.

Of course, there’s only one way to discover what the combination tastes like, and that’s to try it. The wishy-washy nature of the Huddersfield rumour doesn’t help when it comes to purchasing the ingredients – is it canned Guinness or bottled? Original or widgeted? And what flavour of Lucozade to pick? I ended up with the most basic, and therefore readily available varieties – canned stout and original Glucose Lucozade. The next hurdle was the ratios – I started off with about 2/3 Guinness to 1/3 sugary sports drink, before frantically adding more stout to take the taste away.

It really is awful – the sweetness of the Lucozade totally overpowers the stout, which is something I had not expected at all. Looking at the pint glass, the resulting blend is slightly less opaque than unadulterated stout, but not by much. The whole thing tastes like a swizzle stick from a tuck shop Sherbet Dab. Adding a second slug of Guinness doesn’t alter the taste that much – sweet glucose is still the dominant flavour, there’s just a slightly longer dark taste fighting a losing battle. It’s really not nice at all – although if you don’t like the acrid edge to Guinness it might be a good entry level alternative. Good for the taxi drivers of Huddersfield that they’ve found something unique to drink, but they can keep it.

They say size matters - and to us Brits it certainly does with regard to beer. Those last couple of centimetres (inches if you’re old school; or fingers if you tend to peruse the spirit shelf now and again) can change the entire formula of the drink. CAMRA types will be keenly eying up the level, daring the bar staff to leave their pint a couple of sips short. Northerners will be looking for that thick creamy head we all apparently love, whilst Southerners will be hoping there’s no pesky sparkler dispensing that bubbly wastefulness. And those about to grapple with a round are hoping the surface tension holds until they can get all the pints back to their respective destinations.

But there’s another class of people out there - that never really get taken into consideration on websites and blogs about beer. What about those that like to leave a gap at the top of the pint for a dash of something else? I’m not talking about the students battering their braincells with a ‘depthcharge’ (or Poktanju for our Korean readers). I’m referring to shandy drinkers. Even the name has developed into urban slang for someone who’s a bit soft, the stigma of ordering something weakened, something diluted. But when you think about it, is there anything wrong with asking for a dash of fruity mixer to be included? I remember my (then new) girlfriend asking for a Kronenburg tops in a classic Edinburgh real ale pub - and we’re still together. Although when it’s Kronenburg you’re diluting, I say go for it.

Anyway, all this came up the other month when we were in a back street pub in Stirling and I overheard the conversation at the next table. A group of old soaks were discussing a mate of theirs who had developed a taste for - what has to be the most Scottish ‘thirst quencher’ I’ve ever heard of - Irn-Bru tops. So, of course, that got me thinking about how it could possibly taste. And there’s only one way to find out, of course. So I’ve been doing some digging and have come up with some mind-boggling recipes. Although they are all for another time, not for today. Instead, some actual imported bespoke Belgian ale - albeit one that resembles lager tops.

Mystic Citron Vert (3.8%) is an unfiltered Belgian blanche flavoured with added lime juice produced by the Brouwerij Haacht (also available in Cranberry and Cherry versions). Combining the “light tingling of the lime fruits with a pleasant sweetness”, it “ends in a deliciously refreshing aftertaste.” Well, we are fans of Belgian beer here on the BeerCast. It pours a hazy yellow with a vague greenish tinge, and the overwhelming taste is sugar. It’s colossally sweet, lemons and sugar - oddly I got more lemon than lime out of it. At under 4% there was never really going to be a beery-ness to it, and as expected it tastes like diluting juice, or maybe Lemsip. It might be nicer warm, actually.

Mystic Belgium

It’s a bit odd that me, the Twitter naysayer, nay the Twitter heretic! is doing the twitter posts.

Anyway i said last week (was it last week? maybe two weeks ago) that i would post back here with an update on how we were doing on Twitter.

Well, incremental progress i’d say, we started out with 0 followers (well that’s not entirely true Twitter do lob you some randoms just to make you feel loved) but scientifically, we started out with 0, and we now have… 6!

That’s a 600% increase in just two weeks, i’ve plotted this below.

The only way is up for The BeerCast on Twitter, in fact if we go up any more i’ll have to increase the scale on the graph, we’d be quite literally ‘off the scale’ with followers. So join us and help us push the Twitter Totaliser off the top and into the sky! (whereupon we’d employ the use of skyhooks).

PS: After thought, this post will appear on Twitter, and soon we’ll have a sidebar widget on this page that will show our twitter updates, surely this will set up and infinite loop into which the internet would disappear? Answers on a postcard.

Andy

Well there we are, it’s happened, the beercast is on twitter.

Now i’m as web 2.0 as the next man, not quite as much perhaps as beercast panellist Elliot Jay-2.0-Stocks but you can see from the top right there, the beercast has it’s fingers in most of the web’s 2.0′y pies.

I have to be honest though, i saw little point in twitter, and in fact i didn’t see it appealing to many folks outside it’s hardcore early-adopter web design base.

Although twitter has not released official statistics for the number of registered or active users it’s safe to say it’s in the several millions and recently seems to have captured the attention of mainstream press/politicians/public.

So, the beercast, never one to shy from the new frontier has dived (dove? diven?) into the whirling text pool of tweets and twits to further extend our multi-platform brand extension policy and synergise our drill-down leverage into maybe 2 or 3 more page hits per day.

What do you say? Are you with us! If so follow us @thebeercast and i’ll post back here in a week with an update on how we’re doing.

Andy