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It’s easy to mock self-consciously*‘craft’ (def 2.) breweries — [Chortle] ‘I suppose*they make barrel-aged imperial India pilsner with passion fruit and freeze-dried raspberries! Hur Hur!’ — but it seems to us that the same breweries also do more than they are sometimes given credit for to keep classical styles alive.

A few years ago we stuck up for Brodie’s of Leyton, East London, who were accused of brewing ‘silly beers’. They did, and do, brew sour beers with fruit and a whole range of hop-heavy pale ales but they also did something that no-one had done in the London Borough of Waltham Forest for about 40 years by our reckoning: they made a standard cask-conditioned dark mild.
(We don’t know if they still do — their website is pretty useless and the last Untapp’d check-in appears to be from last August.)
Then, last month, we were astonished to see this line-up at BrewDog Bristol:

For clarity (bad photo, sorry) that’s a straight-up stout (Jet Black Heart), a Dortmunder, an altbier (Candy Kaiser) and an eighty shilling, all on draught. All of them were respectful, straightforward attempts to brew (for better or worse) as per accepted style guidelines.
Elsewhere we have Buxton which has brewed*straight-up and very convincing Belgian-style tripel, dubbel and patersbier; Thornbridge’s takes on helles, Kölsch, doppelbock, and more; and Harbour’s new line-up which also*includes helles along with pilsner and even a bitter*actually called Cornish Bitter.
Next week we are heading out around the country with some of our new beers. Leeds, Newcastle, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh here we come! pic.twitter.com/mTTbCxGFDt
— Harbour Brewing Co (@HarbourBrewing) March 1, 2017
There are plenty of other such examples, and likely to be yet more as Craft with a capital C converges with established breweries’ bandwagon-jumping efforts in Wetherspoon pubs, Tesco and other mainstream outlets.
Perhaps if people (hey, including us) stop sneering for a second and encouraged this kind of thing, they’d do more of it. And then maybe Fuller’s could jump on*that bandwagon by making their ordinary bitter (Chiswick) and mild (Hock) more readily available all year round.
New Breweries, Classic Styles originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog


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