Three Kinds Of Beer

So my wife and I are

back after weeks of technically enjoying ourselves - tired, aching, much poorer than when we set out, and with the car splattered with dead insects as if hit by small arms fire, about the only souvenirs we have of a long, long journey from the Netherlands to the South of France and back again, making extensive use of the now-threatened Schengen Agreement. No, I didn't bring back any wine, even though I could have drowned in it, both French and German (but not Swiss, although they clearly make the stuff). In fact, I didn't even drink that much wine of any sort. Wine, heat and exhaustion (worst heatwave in Germany for a generation, as it happened) are a terrible combination. No. I drank beer: so much beer that I blew up like a balloon and my grimy suntan started to take on a greenish hoppy tinge.

And what I hadn't pieced together, up to now, was that there are of course three kinds of beer to chose from in northern Europe, not just two: blonde, blanche and brune, to use the French terms. This became clear to me while we were visiting some long-suffering German friends near Münster, where our host forced me to contemplate the first two-thirds of this set of options by proposing a choice of Weißbier or Pilsener Bier on an absolutely smeltingly hot day. So I said yes to both - intrigued and slightly troubled by the funky cloudiness of the Weißbier, as if someone had used it for washing-up, and subsequently intrigued and troubled by its aroma of rotten apples and carbolic soap.

It was, yes, a moment of stress: not least because I'd forgotten that I'd ever drunk such a drink, even though I now know I have, back here in London, in the form of Hoegaarden - a beer which, at the time, I must have categorised as a novelty import which only dumb, jaundiced, Londoners would bother with. Was this moody Weißbier peculiar to Münster, I fretted, consoling myself with the easy-going Pilsener to take away the taste? Evidently not. The moment we headed south, it appeared all over the place, Weiß and blanche and wit, like a cloud on the horizon, so that I started to grow apprehensive about ordering anything much, using my recycle-bin French or my Letraset German, in case a blanche turned up on the table, flocculent and vaguely menacing. Even now I can't really be sure whether I like it or hate it.

Brune or dunkles Bier, the third part of the triumvirate, was a lot easier to cope with - usually nutty, firm, a consommé with a head on it - but not always appropriate for the middle part of the day on account of its tendency to send me to sleep with a hundred and twenty kilometres still to drive. It's an evening beer really, a beer that puts it arm across your shoulders and explains how Ginger Baker will always be a better drummer than Charlie Watts. It also, on account of its relative unfamiliarity, tended to point up another great thing about Continental beers, a thing which has nothing to do with taste or composition: the name. Erdinger is fine, I don't bat an eyelid, or Jupiler, or Duvel - but Kwak; or Ritterguts Gose; or Slaapmutske; or Mahrs Bräu Kellerbier Ungespundet Hefetrüb - these are something else, these are beers with names that keep on entertaining long after the last drop has been swallowed. Even the silliest German wines will have difficulty making headway against a perfectly day-to-day, but preposterously-named, beer. It's a bonus.

My personal pick? A pleasant blonde I had in Luxembourg City - one of the most soporific places you'll ever visit - called Bofferding (see illustration). Apparently that was the founder's name - Luxembourgeois Jean-Baptiste Bofferding, who started the brewery in 1842 - but still, to see it peering up from a beermat after a long day just added to my sense of levity and general relief. Naturally, we're not making any comparisons with comedy names like Fursty Ferret or Bitter & Twisted or any of those crappy marketing-strategy confections, designed to confirm your own loveable whimsicality to yourself: the sincerity, the lack of an ulterior motive, is what makes Bofferding so right. To be honest, it's not the greatest-tasting drink I have ever had. I mean, it's okay. But then, how many other beers are an anagram of F. F. Bedgroin?

CJ

A crafty redesign – Banrock Station

It had been a long time since I drank Banrock Station. It may be a long time before I do so again.

I know why I used to drink it; it was to do with consistency. Well, there was an element of price in there as well, but let’s stick with consistency for now.

When you start drinking wine, consistency is one of the most important things; you want to know what you are going to get, without having to memorise a whole load of names, and varieties, and vintages. Only after a while was I able to move onwards and upwards, by filling my head with wine info as if I was cramming for some kind of exam. In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue; in nineteen hundred and eighty four, the Bordeaux vintage was piss poor…

Nowadays, I try to avert my gaze from the branded wines which crowd my supermarket’s shelves. It’s a little like trying not to look at something you know you really shouldn’t, like someone’s wardrobe malfunction, or television property programmes. But this time my eye was caught, by a new label (above) on the serried bottles of Banrock Station.

And you know what it’s like; whether you’re pushing a trolley, or driving your car up to a pedestrian crossing. Once your eye is caught, you just have to stop.

Back in the days when I did buy Banrock Station, it had a diamond-shaped label, a generically modern kind of design for a generically modern kind of wine. It even had a touch of gilt, which made me feel I was getting a little bit of class for my four quid or so:

Essentially, it kept quiet, perhaps not the best way to attract sales, but displaying a modesty which echoed the status of the wine and, frankly, sat comfortably on an equally modest table.

But look what has changed. Perhaps in an attempt to reflect their environmental, “good earth” credentials, they are attempting a rustic, craft kind of vibe. The paper is coarse and matt. The colour is earthy. And the printing is broken and flecked, as if attempting to suggest that the label has been crudely, artisanally stamped from a linocut or woodblock or something.

Now, there is a craft beer, The Kernel, whose label looks like crudely stamped brown paper.  Once, it actually was crudely stamped brown paper; unable to afford properly printed labels, the brewer ordered a basic ink stamp, and handstamped the brown paper labels himself; the thick brown paper then stopped the bottles clanking together when he put them into boxes. Now, the production has hugely increased, and the labels are properly printed – but they still look like handstamped brown paper.

I’m also reminded of the live album Fillmore East, June 1971  by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, an official live recording which was printed to look like an illegal bootleg, with all of the authenticity such an album embodied.

Because in reality, Banrock Station arrives in industrial bulk. A back label (similarly framed in crude, broken lines) tells us that the bottle has been “filled” at “BS11 9FG”. This is the somewhat non-artisanal plant in Avonmouth, Bristol, where bulk-shipped wines arrive from Australia, and whose state-of-the-art bottling lines fill some 400 bottles a minute. Something tells me that this ruthlessly industrial process does not wait for someone to print each label individually from a carved potato.

There’s something here echoing the whole hipster authenticity thing. That uncomfortable conjunction of the appearance of craft with the world of modernity. These chaps who look like Canadian loggers, complete with plaid shirt, outback beard, stylishly weathered jeans and clumpy, half-laced boots. Oh, and a MacBook Air.

No-one, least of all a label designer, is going to make me think of Banrock Station as a small-batch, artisanal product. It never even was (unlike that craft beer). In fact it underlines its global reach by declaring on its label that it “contains sulphites, egg, milk” in no less than 19 languages. (Grapes don’t get a mention.)

And surely, the variations in taste and quality which occur from year to year in genuinely rustic wines would be anathema to a global, mass-market brand? Consistent wine for around a fiver, produced in huge quantity and delivered globally thanks to modern industrial processes. What’s to be embarrassed about?

But then, why do guys who code apps want to look like sharecroppers?


PK