BEER 605-01: This London in Beer

Greetings, Leader-reading Fredonians and welcome back to sunny SUNY Fredonia. For those of you new to this column, allow me to introduce myself: I am Andy, your local home brewer, hop-head and fine ale enthusiast. This is my malty-sweet passion on paper: The Week in Beer, your campus newspaper's column aimed at enlightening our students, faculty and staff about the wonderful world of beer waiting to be discovered—the local craft brew just next to all that mass produced swill to which so many are accustomed.

This is my last year as a student here on our fair campus, so I want to make it a good one for the column but I also need to concentrate my energies on academics; therefore we will only be talking about beer every other issue so that both parties will receive quality products from my taxed, hazy malt-mind.

That is what The Week in Beer has always respected: beer holds a place in the lives of many students; our task as collegiate beer drinkers is to balance our two interests.  The way to do this is to respect beer; the way to do that is to learn more about it. As educated people on a four-year mission (perhaps five) to become yet more educated, it would be contradictory for us to remain ignorant about something with which we spend—I certainly do—a large amount of time. Therefore, stop buying Keystone just because it's cheap, and start supporting a product you don't have to plug your nose to down. One that rests its brewing traditions on foundations of flavor, one that because you spent two more measly dollars, will get you a buzz faster and will treat you better for it.

Well, now that our course description and rationale are out of the way, let's dive into the content—no sipping in this class. I called our campus sunny for a reason: what a summer it has been! While you were away, there was not a cloud in the sky for months save one or two brief respites which hardly ever brought rain and always temperatures in the nineties, nineties, nineties! I tell you, the only things that got me through without air conditioning were the bountiful summer beers waiting silently to refresh and cool me off.  In the middle of it all though, I had a quite different "exbeerience" than what we are used to here in the states and it's worth recounting to you now. If you are a return reader or any other beer drinker with class, you already know about all the summer beers of 2010 but do you know what real ale is?

On June 18, I flew to London with over a dozen students and two of our English professors, Dr. Adrienne McCormick and Dr. David Kaplin, to participate in the English Department's annual summer program, "Literary London." In addition to studying literature by Dickens and by various female Londoners, to seeing incredible artifacts both in museums and in the countryside and in addition to being in the middle of Stonehenge for the Summer Solstice, I also became well acquainted with the English pub.

In rustic, wood-interior, medium-sized bars sat tables of various quality and chairs of various shapes and sizes. The menus consisted of standards we all expected: bangers and mash, fresh meat pies, fish and chips, etc. On Sundays at these establishments one could indulge in a traditional Sunday roast, which we had in a charming thatch-roofed pub in the country outside London on our way to Stonehenge. The meal consisted of generous helpings of steak or chicken (light and dark), roasted new potatoes, a very herby stuffing heavy on the rosemary, fresh bread and some of the most perfectly-steamed vegetables I have ever eaten.

Each pub fixes their food a little differently but they all focus on these kinds of dishes, which have become standards in maintaining the English pub tradition. Beer is, of course, a major part of that tradition and just as our craft brewers in America work to re-invite people to older brewing traditions and maintain them in the process, Britain is working to keep their brewing culture authentically British with the "Campaign for Real Ale."

It sounds snooty, doesn't it? What, pray tell, is real ale and what then is a fake?  Well, a little narrative might explain. At that same thatch-roofed pub—which was frequented by Charles Dickens, I might add—we were advised by our tour guide, if we were into microbrews, to try the 6X from Wadsworth Brewing Company. Of course, the first thing I did was head straight for the bar. When I asked for 6X, I saw the same letter and number labeled on a huge wooden cask. The barkeep (and probably co-owner of the restaurant) proceeded to draw from this cask by pumping it a few times into the glass with a wooden handle significantly bigger than those that fit taps in the states. The handle itself seemed to project a sense of pride and when I got the beer, I understood why. 6X tasted very much like Buffalo's own Aviator Red from Flying Bison: caramelly, bready, chocolate, roasty—altogether pretty wonderful. The main difference was that it was closer to room temperature than we generally keep our beers and less carbonated. These attributes served to make the beer milder, more easy-going. It was the perfect beverage to accompany the flavors of this traditional English meal.

As it turns out, these beers are plentiful in England and CAMRA has been making sure more beers like it appear in more English pubs. At the front of the bar in so many of the pubs, I visited a row of pretty wooden handles with large decorative signs on the front of them. The signs seemed to resemble coats of arms, whereas in America, they tend to be related pictures or 3D objects. Similarly, many of these pubs have such signs hanging outside, some even bearing names such as "The Norfolk Arms." The beers often have names like Kent's Best or Sussex Best, denoting region and thus character and others with regular names will still boast this information somewhere. My favorite beer of the trip was Bishop's Finger, the subtitle of which read "Kentish Strong ale."