We arrive at the Weekend of Spontaneous Fermentation a couple of hours after it starts. Usually this means queuing or having to stand for the next few hours, but not here. There’s something very different about this beer festival, something unique.

It’s grandly titled and famous amongst the beer geeks, but in reality it’s a modest festival in a little hall, enjoyed by a few hundred people. The location is a quaint town somewhere in Pajottenland, typically neat as all Belgian towns seem to be. There are no grandiose announcements of the event plastered across the town, just a single poster in a window. Outside the venue there’s just a small chalk board with the Bierpallieters logo. It’s all very understated.

We arrive and find some friends across the room. It’s not a big hall (you could throw a tennis ball from one side to the other without a problem), there are tables set up throughout, the bar is on the left. We sit down, grab the menu, raise our arms and wait for service. There’s no worry of getting up to order, no hurrying to the bar, no leaving your sit with the risk of prowling standers jumping in your place, instead you just sit and the table service does it all for you. You can order from the few draught choices or the more extensive bottled list. The whole feeling of the festival seems to revolve around sharing small glasses of beer and chatting. There’s no hurry to get drunk, no machismo I’ve-had-eight-pints, no cheers at broken glasses, it’s just wonderfully sedate, as if the area’s famous airborne yeasts, which create these fine beers, are taking their slow effect on the people, calming them.

We managed to get through quite a lot of beers between us, shared around the table… Girardin Lambic was like drinking pear drops with a lemon-sherbet centre; Belle Vue lambic was like drinking a lemon/vinegar combo, too harshly acetic for me (I don’t enjoy aceto sourness); the 3 Fonteinen Kriekenlambic was fantastic with the cherry-drop sweetness adding just enough fruit; a 1992 Belle Vue Selection was okay but bettered by beers much younger, I thought; a Mariage Parfait USA was excellent, so easy drinking and dry; 3 Fonteinen’s Schaerbeekse Kriek, made with the eponymous cherries, was my favourite beer of the day, smooth, sweet cherries, a dry sourness, some vanilla oak and just fantastic; a 1988 Faro was just not right, vegetal and mineral; Cantillon Zwanze 2009 made with elderflower tasted just like lychees and was really interesting; HORAL’s Mega Blend 2009 was excellent, lively and easy drinking; Cantillon Fou’ Foune, made with apricots, was another favourite, subtly sweet from the fruit but still kicking hard with sharpness; Hanssens Frambozen was a mouthful of raspberry pips; and a Girardin Black rounded everything off nicely.

We also got to drink a few US beers, passed around between a couple of table. These included some from Brian, the brewer of Stillwater, who, by the taste of it, is making some fantastic and interesting beers in Baltimore, particularly a couple of great saisons. Then there was a Hair of the Dog Cherry Adam from the Wood which was fantastically complex without anything getting lost while a brandy-barrel Angels Share which was ok but paled in comparison to the HOTD. And then, soured out, we chose to go.

The Weekend of Spontaneous Fermentation really is a unique festival. The sleepiness of it seems synonymous with the beer itself; something which takes time, patience and skill to produce; there’s no hundred-mile-an-hour in-and-out, it’s a calm beer to produce and to drink and it’s a branch of styles which I find endlessly interesting.

Back in Brussels we head to Moeder Lambic where the IV Saison was absolutely perfect, just what I needed after all the sours. I’ve written about my stay in Brussels here (including a trip to Urbain at Struise where we drank some fantastic beer) and here (a trip to the beautiful Cantillon brewery).

I remember feeling warm, a hoppy haze filling my head. I remember feeling calmer but I also remember being starkly alert of the flavour. I remember how quickly I drank it, see-sawing from sweet malt to bitter hops, wanting more and more. And with that assault of bitterness on my body and mind, it got me thinking…

As kids we hate that bitter taste at the back of our mouths and it is innately within us to avoid bitterness. As our palates develop we acquire the taste for bitter flavours, such as citrus, coffee and dark chocolate. To our distant ancestors bitterness (usually when tasted from a plant) was bad and it warned of the possibility of poison, so our body rejected it in case it harmed us. Although we have evolved over the years, that avoidance of bitterness is still there and it can be seen in kids – sweetness is good, bitterness is not.

A similar thing happens with beer. Not many drinkers start by knocking back bottles of highly-hopped IPAs, but they develops a liking for them. How many sips, as kids, did we have of a grown-up’s beer only to wince about the bitterness (even though it was likely only a lager with about 5IBUs in!). So what happens when we drink an aggressively bitter beer? Our body’s innate response would be to throw out warning alarms to let us know of potential danger. The chemical mechanisms would say: ‘Watch out, that could be poisonous!’ and then the brain and body need to make a life-critical decision about whether it’s safe to continue or not. The trouble is that underneath the bitterness is a whole load of sweetness, and sweetness is good. So there’s even more chemicals and decisions flying around: it’s good/bad, life/death.

We take another sip to be sure. We experience it like this: sweet first on the tip of our tongue, brief but powerful, but then as the beer moves over the tongue the bitter-taste receptors stand at full alert. The areas of taste on our tongue seems to be in dispute – some say the old model of different areas, while others say that we can experience all the tastes over the whole of our tongue. I don’t know which is right, but I do know that the back of the tongue and down the throat is where the bitterness lingers and it leaves the lasting impression of the beer.

The body is flooded with chemicals simultaneously. It gets a ‘Go’ signal from the sweetness, but a ‘Stop’ from the bitterness. On top of this, sweetness actually dramatises the sensation of bitterness. So a beer which has a high ABV will generally have a depth of sweetness which then impacts upon the sensation of the bitterness. Here’s what your brain might be deciphering: ‘If this is bitter – which it most certainly is – then it could be poison. Maybe I’ll take another sip to be sure. Wait a minute, it’s sweet too… and it tastes good, so how can anything bad be this delicious?’ Another flood of chemicals, a mass of decision making. Yet we know that it’s alright. We bought it from the store. It’s made to be enjoyed. It’s just the body isn’t fine-tuned to think that way.

As I see it, we have a delicious beer which is intoxicating, strong, sweetly malty but bitterly hopped. It tastes great but the chemical mechanisms still aren’t convinced and they’re still on alert. So your brain is caught in between two ways of thinking: fight or flight (fight means drink and enjoy, flight means grab some water). This double-trouble, dual thinking can surely only be a good thing for our enjoyment of the beer. We’re on high alert over the potentially dangerous taste, but we’re also alertly enjoying it because it’s so full of flavour. The life-critical decision is to drink that highly-hopped beer and to enjoy every last sip, even if your brain is still having niggling doubts. It also gives us a burst of thrilling adrenaline which is tempered by the soporific hops.

Drinking an exceptionally bitter IPA is like being on a roller-coaster: you love it, but your body is in a state of heightened arousal, worried for your death, which then increases your enjoyment even more, in a masochistic kind-of way. Maybe I love the smack of puckering bitterness, maybe I’m just addicted to the thrill of it.

This is taken from a blog I wrote over a year ago. I had just started blogging about beer and hardly anyone read it. It was probably the first post which made me think about beer in a different way. I also still think the topic is interesting. So this is a re-written and updated post.

This year a group of us went along, getting there soon after the 12pm opening time. The festival has continued to grow over the five years it’s been held and this year a whole new section of the venue was opened up to accommodate a few hundred more drinkers – they needed it as it was still packed.

Here’s the beers I tried, which, thankfully, as we went with a good group, were not all ordered and consumed by just me:

I started on the festival special: Gadds’ Uberhop, a ‘traditional lagerale’ hopped-up with sacks of noble varieties. I loved this so much I had two. It was clean, crisp, easy drinking but had a ripping dry bitterness to finish – seriously good. Tryst Corronade IPA was a cracking pale and hoppy 4.2% with a very dry finish from the fruity hops throwing out peaches, apricots and lemon. A local brewery next: Wantsum. I’ve never had any of their beers and when I saw the tasting notes for 1381 IPA that promised Willamette and Centennial, I had to Getsum. Unfortunately the tasting notes neglected to mention the egg and arse aromas… Sadly, not good. Next came my beer of the festival: Tiger Rut from Millstone. A 4% pale ale single-hopped with Chinook. It had the most come-get-me tangerine aroma, a hint of floral, lots of citrus, white grape. As beers like this go it was perfect and it was another that was so good I had to have two. And from a brewery that I’ve not tried before.

Pete was meant to be coming along but he got stuck at work and didn’t make it (he brews the beer for Hopdaemon). In his honour I had a Skrimshander and everyone around the table was massively impressed (most went and got themselves a half too). It was in perfect condition, a base of bread and distant toffee and a flourish of floral, dry nibbling hops at the end. Absolutely fantastic – shame Pete couldn’t try how good it was. I also had an Incubus, a maltier, more floral brew; a classic bitter – Hopdaemon are getting better.

A Crouch Vale Brewers Gold was fruity, orangy, dry and very tasty – another pale and hoppy… there’s a consistency here. I was then seduced by Ilkley’s Lotus IPA, a 5.7% ‘genuine India Pale Ale’. It has a nose of bread, raspberries and corn on the cob (a strange mix affected by the DMS stink bomb), it was sweet to begin and then big and dry to finish. It was interesting, the sort of beer you drink in minutes as you are trying to work out if you like it or not. It was a little bit odd.

Between us we tried a couple of Dark Star beers – one of my favourite breweries at the moment. Six Hop was a bit boozier than usual and not as hop-lively and fresh while APA was almost undrinkable, smelling like milk on the turn and eggs. Hophead wasn’t great either. Not sure what happened there, it’s unusual from the typically excellent Dark Star. I would’ve tried the Imperial Stout but the cask (at 10.5%) was drunk dry by 7pm. Another unfortunate beer was Wood’s Hopping Mad which Chunk described as ‘diacetyl, raisins and puke’ which was a worryingly accurate description.

Still more… Gadds’ East Kent IPA had an awesome aroma of fresh fruit and then a mouthful and a half of thick malt and sticky hops with a big, dry finish. Saints and Sinners’/Brew Wharf Hoptimum was even better than when I had it last week; a glassful of hops, peachy and floral and then a big whack of dry grapefruit. Really good. Moor’s JJJ IPA was another with a fantastic aroma of US hops but after all of those low-ABV, pale and hoppies this one just come as a bit of a sweet shock. Thornbridge Jaipur was typically lovely, the Centennials shining before a rasp of bitterness slides past. And then a side step across the Channel for a Girardin White  (to perk up the palates and to give a zing of sour) which hilariously scared a couple of my unwitting mates – like giving a piece of lemon to a baby.

And then finally a few darker ones. Gadds’ Black Pearl Oyster Stout was a real winner, thick, rich, roasty, bitter chocolate and a saline edge. Thornbridge St Petersburg was smokier than I remember, big and bold and brilliant and Elland’s 1872, that award-winning porter, was very good, thick, bitter from hops and roasted malt.

I left a couple of minutes too late and had to run all the way to the station with a belly-full of beer, which wasn’t fun (and about 10 minutes stumble along the seafront). It was a brilliant day and a beer festival that I won’t miss out on. There’s a great atmosphere to it, a lot of grown men get over-excited and stumble around (clearly only let out a couple of times a year and not used to drinking from 12pm), lots of my friends were there and the beer just speaks for itself. The best pints of the day were seriously good and opened my mind some more to just how good the UK beer scene is right now.

Cask ale is very important. As much as I might champion kegged beer or canned beer or drink strong bottled beers, the British craft beer scene revolves around cask ales and there is nothing finer than a frothing, clean pint of real ale. The only thing that will improve the general image of beer in the UK is if the quality of cask ale improves. The trouble with cask is that it’s living and therefore needs looking after. It takes a good cellarman, which is sadly missing from too many pubs, to treat these beers properly and only serve them when they are ready to go. A beer which isn’t properly cellared or is served before it’s ready will taste like the relative equivalent of an undercooked dinner – the flavours might be there but they won’t be right.

Now, I won’t pretend to know the beer science here. I drink the stuff, I know roughly how the ingredients affect how it tastes, but beyond that and my eyes glaze over and I get lost in a world of scientific terms. So, this is my simplified understanding of what this new cask aims to do and why that is good, mainly stolen from what others have written.

The cask has live yeast in the barrel so it is still real ale, but this yeast has undergone a process which means that it does not dissolve and instead it acts as a sponge (to suck in and push out the beer) and still gives an extra fermentation (it works in a bead or pellet form with a permeable coating on the outside). This yeast doesn’t need time to settle, which is the point of the Fast Cask. Think of a bottle of real ale. If you throw it around then all the yeast is disturbed. You then need to leave it standing upright for all the yeast to settle before it is ready to drink. If you drink it with the yeast still floating around then the flavour is changed. Cask beer is the same. The yeast needs to drop and settle before it’s ready to be served.

The benefit of this is that beer can be served quicker. It also means that beer can be stored upright or on its side with no detriment to the pint. You can kick and shift the casks without effecting the beer. It can be delivered to beer festivals and it will be ready to go so it doesn’t need time to sort itself out and it’ll also work for sports events and venues where they might not get a regular turn-around on the beer. The casks are easier to use so hopefully will mean a better, less-changeable pint for the punter. It also removes the need for finings. Overall, it works to fill an area of market which is missing decent quality cask beer while also adding an extra option to publicans who sell cask ale.

There are also negatives. Callermanship is a real skill and a pub with a decent callerman is very important; the art of looking after a beer until it gets to its peak should not be overlooked or undermined. I think this is the kitchen equivalent of using a microwave; some pubs wouldn’t dare but for others it’s essential – a quick and space-saving alternative. I don’t know how long these casks will last for; will they have a short pour-by-date or will they store in the cellar for months? There’s nothing like a cellarman having the choice to store a beer for 1-, 3-, 6-, 12-months before deciding that it’s at its best ready to go. The choice is currently limited to a couple of beers – Marston’s Pedigree and Wychwood’s Hobgoblin – although if successful this would likely increase. Also, is this expensive? The yeast has to go through a process before it’s ready for the Fast Cask. Will it be limited to certain yeasts? How will a brewery make their house yeast usable in a Fast Cask?

I think this is a good step forward for cask real ale and hopefully it’ll help the quality of beers in certain situations – beer festivals, outside events, pubs which don’t (or don’t know how to) serve real ale. It’s a nice addition to beer and I think it should be looked at that way; an extra option, not the next step to which all casks will become. Ultimately, it’ll come down to a taste test – bring a Fast Cask in, tap and vent it and then pour it alongside a well-kept regular cask. If they taste the same then great. Hopefully we’ll get to try it during Cask Ale Week, 29th March to 5th April.

My next questions are: How do you get the fast yeast-thing out and is it re-useable? If this works with yeast, could it also work with hops and could beer be “cask hopped”?!  

This week I went to a meet the brewer event for the Wetherspoon’s International Real Ale Festival which starts in April. Say what you want about Wetherspoons, but I think the positives outweigh the negatives and I am particularly excited about this year’s selection of 50 beers. We will see Goose Island’s Honkers Ale, Maui Brewing’s CoCoNut Porter (a 5% version), Zulu Blonde from Zululand Brewing and Val-Dieu Abbaye Blonde. There are also many ‘Spoons specials and there will be a lot of American hops present in the beers. It should be good one.

After this I went to the London Drinker Beer and Cider Festival where I met up with my mate Matt. The festival is in the Camden Centre in the shadow of the hauntingly beautiful Kings Cross Station. This is always a busy event and while the centre is good for a festival (high ceilings, square hall, side bar), perhaps they have outgrown themselves… Anyway, it’s all about the beer. In the main hall is the UK stuff and then to the side there is a very decent selection of European bottles and draught.

I started on the British cask beer, as I promised myself I would. Crouch Vale Amarillo, a 5% pale ale full of gorgeous Amarillo, was fruity and light and absolutely delicious. We had some Thornbridge Jaipur, of course (it’s impossible to resist), then the new Fuller’s special, Bengal Lancer, an IPA with that typical Fuller’s spicy marmalade with a top note of lemons and fresh jam and a kick of pepper. Between us, the rest of the evening included, in alphabetical order: An okay half of Acorn Motueka IPA; a lemony Art Brew Hip Hop Bobek; Brodies Special which was a very nice, dry-finishing bitter which actually was bitter (as opposed to those sorry boring brown beers); Brodies Amarilla had lots of fruity hop flavour wasn’t quite as good as the wonderful Crouch Vale; Cheddar Goats Leap, a decent IPA with a nice biting hop finish; Cliff Quay Black Jack Porter which smelt and tasted exactly like black jack chewy sweets and that’s not a good thing; Gales Prize Old Ale, which Matt declared the best beer of the night, was big and fruity, complex but not complicated and with that teasing hint of sour cherry beneath; Denton’s Glory from Hornbeam was a very nice pale ale with a super-dry finish and a good find for the night; Naylors Magnum was a tasty drop, fruity and with a nice bready sweetness; and, Redemption’s Urban Dusk was an interesting dark amber colour with a huge coffee nose and a light body, interesting and intriguing and great to try something from this new London brewery. We also had a couple from the bottle bar too, just to finish us off. Hanssens Oudbeitje and something from De Molen, I don’t remember what but it was a fantastic stout.

London Drinker is a very good festival, although perhaps over-busy which detracts somewhat (squeezing through a packed hall of men to get a half is not particularly fun). The good thing about this festival, for me, was drinking some new beers from London – Brodies, Fuller’s and Redemption, plus choices from Sambrook’s and Twickenham. With a few new breweries on the way, and some new or improved pubs, things are looking good in London right now.

The beer which sparked off this post was BrewDog’s new Hardcore IPA, which is 9.2% and hopped to hell. I had a kegged version of it shortly after returning from California where I drank buckets of cold, kegged IPAs. The Hardcore was very good and the hops benefitted from that little push of carbonation from the keg. In the UK this is rare on two counts: firstly, a 9.2% beer, secondly, a craft beer from the keg – few places serve keg craft beer as the focus is always on cask ales. The reputation is that British beer is served warm which, of course, is a fallacy, and they are served at the perfectly cooled cellar temperature (which does sound like marketing talk for a bit warm, I must admit…). With Hardcore I noticed the difference which temperature makes. The first few mouthfuls were great, it’s full bodied and intensely hoppy, while still retaining lots of sticky tropical fruit flavour, but towards the end of the glass, as it naturally warmed, it got more hardcore – the booze was more in-your-face and the hops more up-your-nose-and-down-your-throat obvious. In the US this wouldn’t be a problem as the beers are served colder so there remains a lightness to them, in spite of their strength. So the beer benefited from the keg but was let down a little by the temperature. Then we had the same beer poured from the bottle and it had a zesty lightness to it, more fruit, less hard-hitting and was more delicious. If there had been a cask of it on as well then it really would’ve been interesting to see the difference that makes.

Most craft beers in the UK are cask conditioned ales. They are 3.5%-5.5% and hand-pulled into a pint glass. They come out at cellar temperature and are ready to go. That is how these beers should be drunk. Very few beers which are good from the cask, in my opinion, are equally good from the bottle – something is lost in the change of dispense. But then there are the beers which benefit from the bottle and improve because of it: Belgian beers with the bottle-conditioning gently working away; vintage beers suited to cellaring; geuze which opens with a satisfying cork fizz-pop (a bit of beer theatre).

The dispense and temperature of a beer changes the experience of it. At the Great British Beer Festival in August there are always casks of US beer, but they are served at cellar temperature or just warmer and are not juiced with extra carbonation. Some work very well, others would benefit from being kegged (which isn’t an option at a CAMRA beer festival). Conversely, in California I had a taste of a few UK ales which were cold and kegged and bloody awful. The choice of dispense is very important to get the best from a beer. Some beers are just better poured colder from the keg while others are made special by the cask-conditioning and being hand-pulled into a pint mug. And after drinking Ten Fidy I’m convinced that everything in a can is wonderful.

How important is the dispense of a beer for you? How often have you compared beer from keg, cask, can or bottle and seen differences? And temperature (which could easily get its own post)… how important is that to you?

I notice it most when I’m out drinking and I’ll get to a point where I just need something sharp and different to kick my tastebuds back into shape. Sour beers can be remarkably good at drawing a line under what’s gone before and getting you ready for the next beer. They are also damn tasty. My love for them is in their woody-oaky, near-savoury quality, in the sprightly lift, the puckering finish, and in a certain mystery which they hold. I also find them Romantic, harking back to an old age of brewing when most beer would’ve been fermented with these wild yeasts.

Side-stepping on from this, in a round-a-bout way, I think there’s a natural progression to beer drinking, which I’ve noticed recently. I think it goes like this: lager, ale, dark ale, strong ale, imperial stout, big IPAs, sours, session beer and lager. It’s a scale from early drinking upwards, moving through levels of appreciation and thirst and almost finishing full circle. This is certainly how my taste has developed and I know that others, particularly in the UK where beer is based around the pub, have followed a similar track. There’s always that first beer which moves you on, the first pint of cask ale, then the dark beer that’s fruity and full bodied, then you risk a stronger beer, maybe a bottle of something Belgian, then you see the imperial stouts, then you discover hops and then sours… and so on. Each level is a progression from the next until a fuller appreciation of the simple things is reached.

Has anyone else noticed this? What has your progression been? Where are you now?

A tasted tray at Bear Republic

I’m back from the US. What a week that was – I had the best time! So, where do I begin…?

Let’s refrain from a blow-by-blow re-cap of the week. I’m sure you don’t need to hear about the details of my sapping jet lag, the hangovers, the miles of walking which pretty much wore my Converse through because I didn’t trust the MUNI, the moment I broke my girlfriend’s camera when I sat on it in City Beer Store, the stressful half hour walking from Anchor Brewery to Magnolia when I thought I was about to wipe my blackberry or the sickening volume of burgers I ate… What I should talk about is the beer, and boy was there a lot of great beer.

The two ‘big finds’ for me were Marin Brewery and Drakes. I’d only heard the names before I went over there but now they will be among the breweries I recommend to anyone who goes to California. Marin’s brewpub is a great place with the brewery on your left as you walk in, filling the bar with the smell of wort and fresh hops. The food was very good and the beer exceptional. Their Point Reyes Porter was one of the best beers I had on the whole trip (and a relatively modest 6.1%), so richly full of flavour and totally delicious, their Grand funk was sherried and tickled the tongue with sourness and their IPAs are just flat-out great. Drakes grabbed me with their pale ale, bear-hugged me with their barley wine and then full-on snogged me with their double IPAs – I want more of their beers.

The West Coast is dangerously unbalanced with big-hitting hops so it’s understandable that I had a lot of Double IPAs. Ballast Point’s Dorado was seriously good and my favourite of the DIPA fest in Hayward. I had Pliny the Younger but it was my first beer of a very bad jet lag-worsened hangover, drank outside, from a tall, thin glass and I can barely remember it. It’s a damn shame I didn’t get to try it again but so many people filled growlers at the brewery to ship across the US or to sell on ebay (which is not cool). 21^st Amendment’s Hop Crisis was another excellent beer, especially straight from the brewpub. After DIPAs I went to drink Alesmith and their IPA is stunning and the Barrel Aged Speedway Stout really was something special.

The Triple Rock Sour Fest was a great event. Russian River Supplication was incredible (Temptation, which wasn’t at Triple Rock, was equally fantastic and wonderfully more-ish). Valley’s Bill Brand-bic, Ithaca Brute, Cascade Kriek and Triple Rock’s Sour Stone all stood out are super sours and my eyes have been opened further to the complete joys of this style of beer.

Then the beers I drank the most of. Pliny the Elder, of course, was fantastic. It was the first beer I had when I landed. The best pint was in the Toronado which poured the most deliciously opaque orange and never cleared. It was thick and fruity, sweet and bitter, and so drinkable. But for me, the best beer of the week, and the one I’d want to drink most of, was Bear Republic’s Racer 5. I just love it. I had a few pints and all of them were great. The best was the last beer of my week, in The Toad in the Hole (a great pub in Santa Rosa – drink there!), after a fantastic night drinking in Russian River, and the beer was full of tropical fruit, mango, peaches, apricots and big juicy hops. It is my current idea of beer perfection and I drank it in a fantastic place surrounded by happy, beer-loving people (cheers Paul, Mario, Ken, Ali and Joe!)

For the last week I’ve had some of the best beer of my life. San Francisco Beer Week is an insane cornucopia of beer events, liberally spread around the city and beyond. The atmosphere is the best I’ve experienced and I met so many great people. Now I just need to try and save very, very hard to try and make it back next year.

I’m sure you can expect the next few posts to also feature my US sojourn.

So far I’ve got a loose itinerary and I’ve made a map of the places to visit, so I’ve crossed off the main bars and breweries. I intend to go to the DIPA festival and the Sour Fest at Triple Rock (which is doubling up as a Hop Press event where a few of us will be hanging out – come and say hi!). I’m also doing the Anchor tour where I will attempt to bathe in a FV of Foghorn. The first bar on the first night will be the Toronado where I’ll probably pass out with a combination of travel-exhaustion, jet lag and sheer excitement at seeing so many new beers (it’s my first time drinking in the US and almost none of the beers that’ll be there can be found in the UK). I’ll be hanging out in City Beer Store a lot and I might even see some of the tourist sites, if I can fit them in around the bars. I should watch the Superbowl, although the whole time I’ll be wishing it was the World Series instead (I love baseball; I don’t get American football, what’s with all the stopping, can’t they just play?!). I’ll be bringing some great bottles of British beer and hopefully I’ll get a chance to share a few. Oh, and tipping… what’s the deal with that? I have to buy my beer and then give the server a little extra for doing their job?

Beyond the beer… Best breakfast? Best burger? Best steak? Best place to see the Golden Gate Bridge from?

You see, amazingly good beers which give you an experience that you’ll remember for a long time are difficult to step back from to return to normal drinking. I’ve had this a few times. A cask-fresh pint of Thornbridge Jaipur from the brewery pub is just one of the best things there is. Following this I wanted every hand-pulled pint to have the same effect on me. It didn’t and that was disheartening. The same happened with Pliny the Elder. I drank the beer and all of a sudden my beer expectations loosened their shackles and took a huge leap forward, laughing back over its shoulder at me. I had to readjust the radar and pull everything back in.

I’ve had some decent pints in the pub recently. They were good but the whole time I was comparing them to some other mythical beer I wanted to be drinking or just another that I know is great. It’s the same with bottles – I open them, I drink them, some leave me unimpressed, leave me wanting more, wanting something else. In my mind I’ve even got to the point where I’m expecting beers to be boring before I even try them – that’s the worst thing.

It’s difficult to shift expectations; I had to do it at a lager tasting I went to in October. My taste-spectrum had to be dramatically narrowed before I started to enjoy the beers for what they were – delicious, refreshing lagers in which the smallest of differences became hugely important (a drier hop finish, a citrus lift, a fuller body).

Beer is always a hopeful search for the good. Maybe it’s just part of life that we want what we haven’t got, maybe I’m just difficult to please, but I want my beer to be better and better every time. I still appreciate beer for what it is, but there’s always a little niggling feeling telling me to try something else, voraciously searching for the next amazing experience. I need to rein it in a bit or I’ll just get disappointed. I need to sit back, open a beer and just drink it.

Has anyone else had this? A need for better and better beers all the time? It’s an expensive habit.