I have amused myself over the last couple of weeks watching “Beer Masters” on Amazon Prime - a kind of “Great European Brew Off”, in which five pairs of brewers run through a series of challenges to create different kinds of beer. The prize is the opportunity to have your winning brew produced and marketed by the Camden brewery.
There are many plus points. The contestants are a very engaging bunch - the two fat boys from Dorset, the impossibly good looking Italian couple, the hearty Dutch girls who are also lovers… as with “Bake Off”, they all genuinely seemed to be getting on and wishing each other well.
It was a valuable education into what real, serious homebrewing is. Friends have occasionally asked me if I have considered trying to brew my own beer. I have always replied that I am determined to leave that to those who have the skill. Watching Beer Masters confirmed me in that view. It highlights the obsessive hygiene and accuracy that is needed - as with any biochemical process - if you are to get the right results. If you didn’t know what “sparging” was before… well, you do now.
And then there was Jaega. Jaega Wise, head brewer of the Wild Card Brewery in Tottenham. Tough, knowledgeable and authoritative (and, incidentally, with the looks to make an ageing beer boy’s heart sing). She really wanted the brewers to succeed, but was always going to let them know when they hadn’t. Their faces would fall when told that there were “off flavours” or that they hadn’t got the carbonisation right or - horrors - they had failed to meet the spec of the week in terms of ABV (the Dutch girls had a tendency to produce good beers that failed this test). I tweeted earlier that I would back her in a fight against Paul Hollywood any day, and I stand by that.
The format was a bit odd. Instead of someone being eliminated each week, there was a winning beer each week which went through to the final. After four weeks, there had been four different winners. It kind of looked as if by magic everyone would get a beer in the final. In the event, that didn’t happen - the Dorset boys once again failed in the final round to convert their good ideas into beer with the necessary accuracy - but they need to think about this for next time.
The Noel Fielding / Matt Lucas role was played by James Blunt. I guess I have to resign myself to the fact that I am not a James Blunt person. He was very amiable, but he didn’t really seem to know very much or add very much, and his attempts at comedy showed that comedy, like brewing, is really best left to the professionals.
Each episode featured a guest brewer from an excellent European brewery to help with the judging. I watched this with an ever-widening smile as the weeks went on. The guest breweries were Camden, Bosteels, Leffe, Hertog Jan and Stella Artois. Can anyone spot what those breweries have in common? Hint: read my previous blog. At first I thought Bosteels was the odd one out, but then I googled it and saw that back in 2016 Bosteels joined the other four in the all-encompassing embrace of the Anheuser-Busch InBev Corporation. As with the others, you wonder if it matters. They still produce Kwak and Tripel Karmeliert, and you can’t say fairer than that. I was just amused at the corporate monster, having secured a great piece of publicity, showing such a shy and retiring nature.
By the way, the Belgian blokes won. Which you kind of expected. I look forward to trying their “Bless the Barley” Quadrupel when it emerges. Overall, I commend Amazon Prime for commissioning this, despite some of my nit picking above, and I look forward to series two.
By coincidence, I have some of Jaega’s beer on my shelf which I purchased before I had heard of her. I came across the Green Bottle Shop - an excellent idea which takes brewery surplus and sells it online at a discount - and purchased some of a delicious strong IPA called “Ella”. Rumour has it that Wild Card wanted to call it “Stella” and argued that this simply referred to the starry sky… but lawyers from a certain corporation (they really are everywhere) gently suggested that they needed to think again.
[UPDATE: Jaega messaged me in response to this blog! Telling me that regrettably this story is not true, but that "Ella" is simply the name of the hop.]
I am actually taking a pause from beer (or anything else) drinking for a few weeks in the run up to Christmas so that I can tackle the festive season with gusto. Pleasures that await me include
I urge you to do likewise. There are untold riches available in the UK now. Don’t just have “beer”. See you on the other side.