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03-02-2017, 07:45
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This month’s Session hosted by Joe Tindall at The Fatal Glass of Beer is wonderfully opened ended: write about brown beer (http://thefatalglassofbeer.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/announcing-session-120-brown-beer.html). Some people will tell you brown isn’t a flavour, but it is.*It’s why you sear*meat, and about 50 per cent of the meaning of toast. *(N.B. black is also a flavour.)
Brown beer isn’t necessarily boring but a hell of a lot of boring beers seem to be brown.*Adrian Tierney-Jones has, on more than one occasion, referred to beers as being the same brown as an old sideboard (http://maltworms.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/and-this-is-why-i-love-beer.html) and it’s true: brown is the colour of corduroy trousers, garden fences, Austin Ambassadors, sensible shoes*and your grandma’s coffee table. It’s a kind of camouflage.
You know what else is often brown? Pubs. We like brown pubs, too, but in a brown town drinking brown beer in a brown pub with a brown dog on the brown lino, browned off, until you drop down brown bread from a total eclipse of the heart. You can see why some people might be*down on brown.
Back in the 1990s Sean Franklin of Rooster’s ditched brown in favour of pale because he wanted a blank canvas on which hops could shine.*If*pale is blank, is brown noise? Or texture? Texture can be good. Noise too. There’s a reason people put dirty old Polaroid filters on their iPhone photos.
Let’s do some word association. Is there someone else in the room with you right now? Ask them to tell you, without over-thinking, what colour beer is. We knew it — you owe us 50p!
We’ll be surprised if there isn’t at least one Session post this time round with the title*Fifty Shades of Brown.*St Austell HSD is a sort of burnt umber, in the language of Crayola crayons. The same brewery’s Cornish Best is what Crayola would call*‘beaver’. (Stop sniggering.) And their Tribute, which we have heard described as a*‘boring brown bitter’ by people who have clearly been spoiled, is a similar shade of amber to Timothy Taylor’s Landlord. And that’s just one brewery. Stare into the brown abyss long enough and you’ll begin to see stars.
Lager used to be brown, and some of it still is.*Do you reckon Britain would have gone crazy for it like it has in the last 40 years if it wasn’t sunny, bubbly yellow? Gold is a much easier sell:*‘I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest brown!’
Black + gold = brown. Last week at BrewDog Bristol, where brown is frowned upon, we ended up with a free half*of Born to Die (a big IPA) which, on its own, was too harsh and boozy. So, we mixed it, 3 parts to 1, with BrewDog’s Guinness-challenging stout. The end result was like a stronger, shoutier*cousin of Fuller’s ESB. You need never be without a brown beer if you’ve got a half of stout at hand. (Sadly for all you brownophobes there is no similar trick for turning ESB into double IPA.)
We probably won’t want to say or type the word brown for a week or two after this.*But we don’t half want a pint of bitter.
In Which We Fall into a Brown Study (http://boakandbailey.com/2017/02/in-which-we-fall-into-a-brown-study/) originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog (http://boakandbailey.com)


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