A present! Yay! A friend had gone to the lavender festival not far from Madrid, where musicians had performed and many snacks had been sold, and brought me back a lavender beer. It turns out about 10% of the world’s lavender comes from Brihuega! Not bad at all. I have the vague memory of coming across a lavender beer at a past Beermad, when they were still at the Railroad Museum, which I did not hate. I know because I have not hated a single Beermad beer. Could it have been the same maker? This bottle says it was made by a butcher shop, so perhaps not. But who knows? Maybe Carnicería Clemente got Vulturis or some other brewer to cook up and bottle a few years ago too. The beer contains wheat, so I’m expecting that that will be the overwhelming experience of the beer and the lavender will be more in the aroma without affecting the liquid parts so much.
Very light golden color, straw yellow at first but gaining in golden quality. Not a lot of head, and what there is fizzles off into a tiny ring around the edge. The perfume is double-edged; searching for the lavender, you do find it floating on top, but there’s a much stronger almost musky aroma coming in low. It’s a little more like a wet field than a field of lavender, at least based on the scents I’ve been exposed to. But maybe this is the more natural aroma before it gets processed? The taste starts out tingly, flower-sweet, with a sort of perfume essence to it, then rolling down into a more spicy-sour, a battle of field and hay barn. The flowers come back in the aftertaste, although I don’t think I would be able to identify them as lavender if I didn’t know. Whenever something tastes flowery I default to clover. It has a quality of a sour beer without being especially sharp and yet it’s not a beer that you would drink without even thinking. It makes me wish I had a cheese board or something, it’s a beer that would not be harmed by a little mellow snack to take the edge off the bite of nature.
There’s a fine brewery to my north where many a fine beer has been produced. Maybe not the most interesting beers, mostly varieties of pale ale, but all quite tasty. Of course they have branched out into sours, it’s the hot, hot summer, and we need that little snap of almost sugar with that cheek grabbing sour. The can is almost subdued, pastels but promising something exciting. Not a Boogaloo, actually, but maybe you’d want to get up and dance with all those blueberries, mangoes and currants flying around your mouth. Oh, you want to know what brewery is making this potion? Of course you do! It’s Península.
It’s kind of a fizzy grapefruit color, with a little head in the beginning, although it fizzles out. That sulfury aroma that many sours have is present, along with whiffs of astringent fruit. There’s a balance of sweet and sour in the taste, but definitely more weight on the sour. It has kind of a sour candy sort of flavor. While bubbly at first, the carbonation starts to wane with the minutes and the beer takes on the smoother texture, leaving only the sourness to smack your tongue around. It starts off pretty clean, many the fizz sweeps up on the way down, but as it gets flatter it gets thicker and heavier. Not to the point of unpleasantness or where you wouldn’t want to finish the glass, but it is a noticeable difference. Still, for those that are wary of taking on a black beer under a broiling sun, it might be a good option.
It’s true that stouts aren’t the beer of choice in a Madrid summer for most people. It’s not a surprise, I can’t fault them too much. But dammit, why can’t there be just a couple floating around for us lovers of darkness? Well, at least packaged stouts aren’t too hard to find, and very tempting ones too. La Quince astonished me with their Vanilla Black Velvet years and years ago, and it’s still a class act, although different years give slightly different results. Part of the fun! They also have different versions of Black Velvet, sometimes with different collaborators, but this is the old team of La Quince and Guineu, back with a new variety – Doughnut Black Velvet Pastry Stout. I now what you’re thinking, it’s going to be far too heavy for the current temps, but I say a little sugar water/beer is just the thing to get you up off your sweaty ass.
It’s extra foamy, very resistant dark milk chocolate head. I was expecting a little more aroma from the get-go, but it’s pretty subdued. There’s kind of a sweetish smell, but there’s a little bit of milk that’s just a tiny bit too old floating on top. It also seems kind of … meadowy? Clovery maybe? The taste is smooth at first, and very much Black Velvet. The doughnut doesn’t weigh it down very much or add excess sugar. Weirdly, it’s toward the middle of the sip that you notice the fizziness, so the beer actually ends feeling more like a soda or sparkling wine even though the flavor is unmistakably stouty. It’s quite pleasant and not at all a burden of a drink on a summer evening. Sure, some might prefer a fruitier or zippier style, but this is a remarkably light pastry stout and a tasty evening beverage. La Quince (and Guineu), you’ve done it again!
Who likes an imperial stout on a steamy summer night? Me, of course! You’ll never change my mind. While I’m open to new possibilities, I do like to have a good stout as much as I can, so certain names are go-tos. Laugar is one of those names. But what’s this? Cerberus is not a stout, but a double red ale! Whisky barrel aged at that. Will it measure up to the standards the stouts have set?
It’s more whisky brown, old, old whisky brown, than red, and the spirits (hah) of the harder stuff make themselves known to the nose immediately. Head is fizzy, and quick to disappear. It’s an odd bouncy ball of flavors – rubbery, woody, syrupy and smoky. The beer as a liquid is fairly easy to drink, smooth and only a little sticky. After the first impression, the taste seems to die down a little, becoming less complex and highlighting the woodiness more than the other notes. It probably shouldn’t be a surprise that the texture gets rougher as the beer sits and warms up, but it’s not as throat grabbing as some whisky barrel aged beers can be. On the heavy side for some certainly, given the weather. But I am impressed with Laugar’s flexibility.
A week ago it was supposed to rain for days, but that dried up pretty quickly. I picked up a few black beers in anticipation, and now I feel a little bit cheated by the weather. But it’s hardly the first time for that. At least a Double Black IPA has some of the light and dark to fit in with any eventuality. Drunken Bros. has some good ideas, and some damn interesting label designs. It (the name of the beer, not just the pronoun) is one of a series, which can only stimulate the desire to find those beers and drink them too.
It comes out like a porter, dark chocolatey brown and fizzy head, but it has the unmistakable IPA aroma. With concentration you can pick up a little bit of toast, but it’s subtle. The taste starts out like an IPA, bitter but herbal, but it drags a good amount of burned toast behind it. Actually, it’s more like burned pizza crust, with the herbs infiltrating from the sauce. The beer feels light enough, but it leaves a sensation of tickliness after the swallow, like the carbonation has escaped the liquid somehow and decided to lie out on the tongue. The toastiness dies down after a while and a sort of marmalade develops in the flavor. The beer feels smoother and sweeter, oddly a little more like a blend of IPA and porter than at the start.
I have not traveled far and wide to beer fairs and festivals, a little to my chagrin. Well, I don’t like to drive, I don’t like crowds, and I’m not a good trip planner. So much easier to stay close to home – Beermad, La Ruta del Lúpulo, other assorted fairs and fests, there’s no lacking of opportunity in the area. For some reason, this seemed like the year to add Barcelona Beer Festival to the list. It’s supposed to be the biggest in Spain, with the most professional bent, in previous years they had up to 600 beers on the list.
So…it wasn’t quite as big as that. It was a little bigger than the last Beermad, but not too much. The professional area was bigger, but I don’t think there were many more stands and there certainly weren’t more toilets! That seems like poor planning to me. Also, the food just wasn’t as nice as from the food trucks at Beermad, although it was quite a bit cheaper. I was unsurprised to see all the info on the food stands in Catalán, and where there was Spanish it was lower down and a little smaller. They have to make their point. The best thing about BBF was that it was convenient to get to; I came in on the train and walked about 15 minutes down the street. Beermad is always a little bit out of the way for people from out-of-town, and even for people in town sometimes.
I didn’t want to waste time once inside, but I had just had a two hour train ride and a walk in the sun (it was kinda hot that weekend!) so I snapped up the first pick-me-up looking beer I saw, and it was Naparbier. A fruity apricot sour, something that sounded both soothing and like a good opener to more. It’s dark orange, rusty, with some potent alcohol fumes and a coating of old fruit. It really tastes like the liquor part of chocolate liqueurs, with the apricot being on the sour side and only a film of sweet on top. There’s a base of woodiness underneath, what you might expect from a barrel aged beer. I think I almost feel shreds of pulp as I drink, but it’s probably just the intensity of the flavor. It is a thick beer, though. While it starts out refreshing, it gets heavy if you don’t drink it fast, which is a little hard to do with the texture and alcohol feel. It’s a little stronger than I meant to start at, but definitely tasty.
Next I find something a little more local, Kom’s Amazonas NEIPA. Not quite ready to dive into stouts yet. It has a good color, very juicy looking. It turns out not to be as spiky as some in flavor, quite soft and creamy in fact, something of an easy drinking beer. The taste gives you the impression of natural, fresh squeezed orange juice. It’s a lovely NEIPA, happy on its own and probably not too bad with a little snack (was a little put off by some fishier odors by the food stands, so no lunch yet).
The time has come for a stout to take the stage, something bitter and black at last, so Petrolis seemed like the place to go. They had a Bidassoa Russian Imperial too, but I was told Mica Roble y Pino was more bitter, and that’s what I was hankering after. I don’t think it is that bitter, but it’s a barrel aged stout and that part is evident in the flavor. It’s even a bit peppery somehow. I was warned about a little wine taste coming out, and some does indeed, but I’ve had more obvious wine-beers. The combination of flavors is fairly heavy, but the beer itself is smooth and goes right down with little cling to the mouth. Well done, Mica!
Practically all the beers were Spanish and mostly from the north if not Cataluña (although Península was also there), but there was a stand with Polish beer on one end and French on the other. There must have been some buzz about the Polish beer because a line formed out of nowhere and snaked all the way around the corner, leaving me with little desire to stand around. The French beers looked like your typical craft offerings, IPAs and pale ales, and I thought after a barrel aged stout a hoppy IPA would hit the spot. They had Cambier IPA Mosaic/Idaho 7, which sounds like it ought to be bright enough to balance out the previous darkness. It is a perfectly acceptable IPA, good Mosaic flavor comes out, it’s not very bitter, mildly fruity, really a good pick-me-up after a disappointing pizza. The info on the stand recommended a Czech style pilsner as the beverage of choice, but I think the stronger tasting IPA is needed to make up for the disappointment. I was also treated to a taste of La Pirata’s barrel aged Black Block from a South African/Canadian couple at the table. They were on a Mediterranean cruise, spending the day in Barcelona and coincidentally saw the festival happening near their hotel. Hope you enjoyed the rest of your trip, Tim and Robin! Also, I hope I guessed right on the spelling. The Black Block was a delectable contrast to the IPA, even more of a comfort after underwhelming food.
I have time for more! There’s Althaia, who I remember from beer calendars. They have an interesting sounding smoked chilli stout, I ask if it’s very spicy and am told not very. Let’s try it out. There’s a smoky bacon aroma, good stout appearance. First flavor impression? Tabasco rauchbier. It has a good feel to it, very balanced in the smoke-earth-spice, but not much of a mealtime beer in my opinion. It’s a good little taster, actually perfect for the glass size at the festival. You get a good idea of what it is, but when it’s gone it’s just in time. It might actually be good with ice cream. I’ve had a bit to eat so now I feel like I might deserve dessert.
But I spend my last wristband tokens on Gecan Porter. This is a beer festival after all. It has a good dark color, but nothing in particular on the nose. It’s bready and toasty, more what you’d expect from a stout than a porter, although it’s not especially strong. Certainly not as fruity or smooth as I have come to expect from porters, but it is supposed to be a more traditional take. We can probably chalk it up to that.
And that was my Saturday in Barcelona Beer Festival. It could have been worse in so many ways, but it was a let-down from build-up on their website. Much more of a local festival than a national or international one. Next year what, Hamburg? Granada? I guess it depends on if I feel like flying or not.
After weeks of warmer than usual weather, spring has returned! It makes me think I should have saved that stout from a couple of weeks ago. Oh well, there’s nothing wrong with a little light beer on a rainy evening, and Oso Brew know how to make light beers too. I think I remember their table beer from a Beermad of the past, now canned in a hot and swimsuit worthy color. Mesa ought to be just the thing you’re ready to grab whatever the weather.
It’s a summery gold color and the head is a clean white while it lasts. There are promises of IPA-like fruit aromas, and there is a good whiff of citrus and maybe pineapple. It has a full beer flavor with just a touch of fruit, less bite-y than the aforementioned, more like mango or watery peach. There’s a strong breadiness that rushes out ahead of the end of the swallow and sticks around for a while after. The beer itself has a very light feel, predictable for its less than 4% alcohol, but the aftertaste makes it feel like a more corpulent one, with more presence than a beer that banks on its low ABV to be appealing. It certainly feels like a beer that could be at the table – a pre-meal drink, a midday break, the beverage of choice at dinner are all believable.
After a beer fair you might not want to go back to the same old, same old. Garage is a very familiar and beloved brewery, but they do have a few special things in their cans. I have had Barcelona Weisse before, but in a different iteration; this is the 8th anniversary version, with a collectable sticker on the can. Calvell 45 does its best to bring you in, with a list of tropical fruits promising a bouncier, more colorful weisse.
Can seems extra full and aroma is extra fruity. It has a distinct mandarin scent to it, and while it does pour out fizzy, the liquid looks a lot like mandarin juice from a can. Well, a little more color, Fanta thinned with mandarin juice. The head dies back immediately although tiny bubbles continue to rise. The first sip starts out thick and much more bitter than expected, rolling over to a more citrusy tang, and ending on an orange pith note. The weisse kind of sour actually takes a couple of sips to come out. It’s that blend of bitter and sour that weisses tend to have, with a touch more fruit than the traditional ones offer. It’s very light in the mouth, effervescent even, with sort of a champagne feel; it might be a good substitute for a beer focused celebration. Now that temperatures are reasonable for the time, I’m wishing I had more good stouts, like were at Beermad, but you really can’t complain with Garage.
Beermad is back to its regular schedule it looks like, and this time they’re making the most of a local holiday weekend to have four days instead of the normal three. It’s still at Casa de Campo, still somewhat limited entry, although there are morning and afternoon passes, plus all-day passes this time around. Unsociable person that I am, I go in the morning, when fewer people are looking to really drink down some beers, and of they’re there it’s really to enjoy the experience.
There was also a stand called Vamos a Beer. Good puns!
I always start on the dark side; just that kind of girl I guess. There are more to choose from than in other editions, but the first one I lay eyes on is a real licker too: Toccalmatto’s 28 Imperial Stout. They specialize in making low-carb beers and this one is also no added sugars, just the natural malts. That sounds like a pretty normal stout, but it also has some chipotle that you might think needs a but of balancing. Happy to try it out! It smells a little winey, but there’s a good thick head. The color is slightly lighter than I expect from stout. The taste is woody, malty, leafy, very nature-focused. I would even call it a healthy flavor. As promised, there’s a touch of chili. It’s a 12%-er, so the lightness in the mouth is surprising, and the alcohol does catch up to you if you’re not careful. It’s a chili-chocolate sensation, only slightly bitter, and could be hard to beat today.
Next I ask for Vandalia’s Azabache Porter. This one isn’t on tap, the lack of head is probably my own poor pouring skills. It’s fizzy and with a nice porter color, with a kind of root beery, vaguely sour fruit smell. This porter also has a woody flavor, but a different kind, more robust. It’s drier than the stout and not very fruity for a porter. While solid and mouth filling, it doesn’t make you think of road tar (“azabache”), it’s quite easy on the palate and would even be a good accompaniment to a meal.
In a whole-ass bottle!
My quest for the darkness continues with La Charanga’s 28850 Stout. Also little head (and I didn’t pour this time), but otherwise good appearance. No strong aromas off this one. It’s very malty and slightly smoky, with an underlying bitter just lurking. It has more body than the previous beers, a little sticky and moderately heavy. Notes of licorice and coffee surface over time. It is a nice beer, more imposing than Vandalia’s porter but simpler in presentation than Toccalmatto.
It turns out I’m not impervious to a good invitation. While I could have stuck to black beers, From Lost to the River offered a taste of all three of their beers before making a decision (none were stouts) and I couldn’t resist. There was an English bitter style – very nice – a light and normal IPA, and a very hop forward dry hopped version. I had to have something to equal those powerful black beers from before, so that was Lost IPA, with some more hops behind it. It’s very golden, little head, and sports a bubbly hop aroma. It’s not actually super bitter but very modern hoppy, juicy, with a little bit of peach. You get a good mouthful of beer rather than a poof of overwhelming hops that claw their way down your throat. It’s a bright and blinky beer, styled more as a West Coast IPA than other types, and I would call it fairly standard for IPAs today. I would also say there’s a reason for that being standard.
I only have a morning ticket, so I can’t stay forever. I do have plenty of time for one more, though, and I usually feel like I should leave on a light note. I was intrigued by Cervecería La Política and thought that might be a good closer. I was hoping for a big story about one party or another, but it seems like they’re just playing off the current feeling of dissociation. Anyway, another IPA, fitting aroma and good strong head. Faintly opaque. It’s very much a normal IPA, hoppy, biting-bitter, floral soft and clean. A finishing beer, really, although it does have a hint of dust in it. It feels like a quick gulp and a soft swallow, very easy on the tongue and yet it still has a certain amount of personality to put forward. I only wonder what kind of politics might be represented by the color on the label…
It’s an early summer, but damn if I won’t find a stout to go with my weekend. La Mundial recommends Cierzo’s Colossus, an imperial stout at a hefty 10%. I hope the shade of the beer will have some kind of placebo effect and give me the illusion of being in the shade, with a cool breeze keeping things civilized. As it is, I have some serious worries about keeping comfortable in July. We keep hearing promises that there won’t be restrictions on water usage, but once elections pass anything goes, I bet.
A little more shook up than it should be, but that might be the excessive temperatures. Looks nice anyway, good dark color, fluffy head. It has a green and piercing kind of aroma, and a slightly sour smoky taste. It’s a little bit dusty with a solid stout mouthfeel, but still easy going down. It develops some plant notes while it warms, but the smoke stays steady and stimulating coffee also makes an appearance. It’s not the biggest stout I’ve ever had, but Colossus has stature and poise, it’s a fine specimen for sure.
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