Monthly Archives: August 2013

Camden Town Brewery tour – report

Like most of the breweries who are part of the recent beer boom in the capital, Camden Town is a relative newcomer. The brewery was established in 2010 after Jasper Cuppaidge grew tired of sourcing beers from all over the world for his pub, The Horseshoe in Hampstead. Why shouldn’t we be able to get great beer made right here in London? He began brewing in the cellar of the pub and in the same year Camden Town Brewery was born, moving into the railway arches by Kentish Town West station in north London.

Camden Town Brewery Tap Three years on, the brewery is thriving; its brand one of the most recognisable in the London craft beer scene, it can be found in bars across the capital and they have just scored a distribution deal with Waitrose supermarkets across the country. The brewery boasts a small but popular brewery tap which opens Thursday to Saturday and sells branded ceramic “growlers” – bottles – for beeraways.

Like many breweries, Camden Town has begun running tours of their facilities for interested beer fans. I was a little apprehensive about the tone, as at the last brewery tour we went to – Meantime Brewing Company, in March this year – I was referred to as “my little princess” the whole afternoon, and the tour guide dropped in casual date-rape jokes between beer tastings. I was pleasantly surprised by my experience at Camden Town.

We were early for our 6pm tour, so we grabbed a drink in the bar first, giving us an opportunity to try their USA Hells – a variation on their flagship lager, Camden Hells, made with American hops (crisp with a citrus bite). Before long our guide, Mark, gathered the tour group together. There were ten of us on the tour – eight guys, two girls. I asked if this was a typical ratio but he said it was usually a fairer split and we just happened to have two guy-girl couples and then two groups of guys in our contingent.

We started with a chat about the history of the brewery and a frosty jug of Camden Hells. Standing beneath one of the six huge fermentation tanks, we learned that each one can hold 12,000 litres. As it stands, Camden Town’s brewing capacity is currently 2,000 litres, so they have to brew the same beer six times to fill a tank. I asked if this made it difficult to invest time and resources in new beers or collaborations with other breweries. Mark told us this was very much the case, and that this was part of the reason why they have a relatively small core range of beers, but they are considering expansion in the next couple of years which could see them branch out.

Tasting hops

Next we chatted malt and hops, trying the pilsner malt that is used in both Camden and USA Hells and some roast barley malt, used in Camden Ink. It was interesting to learn that even in dark beers like Ink (a stout), no more than 7-8% dark malts are used. We also passed around sacks of hop pellets, and it was incredible how much the hops from different continents vary in aroma and strength. The German hops used in Hells were mild in comparison to the distinct citrus tang of the American Citra and Cascade. This gave us a real taste of how different elements come together to create the range of flavours and aromas we are used to when tasting beer.

Moving through the brewery, we learned about the filtering process. Camden Town is one of few breweries who do not use isinglass – a collagen substance obtained from the dried swim bladders of fish – for filtration. They have a machine to do the filtration fishy-free, but they also experiment with leaving some of their beers unfiltered – such as Unfiltered and USA Hells. Mark told us that the filtered product is considered more aesthetically-pleasing, but actually the unfiltered version had an added depth of flavour.

Next we came around to the packaging area. Camden Town has recently invested in their own canning facilities to complement the bottling they already do on site. They were canning Camden Hells for sale in Byron hamburger restaurants during our visit but it will be interesting to see what else they bring out in cans in future.

Our tour complete, we headed outside to perch on empty kegs and polish off what was left of the pitchers of beer that had accompanied our tour. We had the opportunity to chat to Mark and ask questions – first thing I wanted to discuss was this image from the marketing for Camden Ink.

Using a male ICIP spy (my husband), I only discovered this because he reported its existence in the mens’ toilets. What did Mark think of this campaign, and did he think it alienated female drinkers? Apparently an ad agency were given a brief which played with both the name of the beer and Camden’s anarchic reputation, and they delivered a different design originally (with no female body parts). The R-18 version was actually a last minute addition that was only used for the launch party at Our Black Heart in Camden in 2011, but it hasn’t been used for any other publicity. Even the Facebook event for the launch, still visible on Facebook, uses the original artwork – which suggests that Camden Town were aware that the crotch-shot approach could put off women drinkers. I appreciated Mark’s honesty, but raised an eyebrow at the presence of the picture in the Gents’ – there was certainly no cock-shot with a “Camden Hells” tat down the shaft in the Ladies’. I also spotted this ad on the wall in the bar showing a woman quite literally being treated like a piece of meat. Oh well, one step at a time…

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Leading on from our report on the number of women at the Great British Beer Festival earlier this week, I asked Mark what the gender split was like at the brewery tap. He reckoned it was pretty much 50-50, which was interesting to hear. There were certainly plenty of women in the bar that night and a friendly, relaxed atmosphere. After my experience of rape culture in action at Meantime earlier in the year I was pleased to see there was no such bullshit at Camden Town and I wasn’t made to feel like a pariah for asking questions or showing an interest.

After Mark had called it an evening, we ended up chatting into the night with two fellow tour-members. We talked about the beer revolution, we talked about women beer fans, we shared notes on favourite breweries. And when one of my new friends went up to the bar to get a round in, he got me a pint – no questions asked. Bloody brilliant.

The Camden Town Brewery tour runs on Thursday evenings at 6pm and costs £12 per head. You have to book in advance on the brewery’s website.

– PS

Beer festivals: it’s time to make space for women

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Standing beside the man with the giant inflatable penis hat, beneath the poster that informed us that we – like computers – were useless unless turned on, It Comes In Pints decided to try and count how many other women we could see at the Great British Beer Festival, held between 13th and 17th August 2013 at London’s Kensington Olympia.

We didn’t get far before our conversation was swallowed up by a swollen roar that started spontaneously on one side of the cavernous hall and gathered voice as it rolled over the hundreds of taps serving Real Ale; the sound of hundreds and hundreds of men simultaneously – exuberantly – raising their branded glasses and roaring: “cheers!”

We can roar with the best of them – but it felt like our voices were lost in the cacophony.

Festival organisers Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) told us that men make up 80 per cent of their 150,000-strong membership. It looked to us like men made up more than 80 per cent of punters at the GBBF. But, as craft beer fledglings, we got to know beer in a world where a woman has been voted Beer Sommelier of the Year; where women brew beer, sell beer, talk beer, and drink beer.

What we found out about women and beer, over the course of that Saturday happily spent at the GBBF, blew us away. Scores of the young women we accosted admitted to crippling insecurities about beer drinking. They worried they didn’t know enough about it to be taken seriously. They worried what people (men) would think of them. So they stopped ordering beer. And as their stories about being snapped at by bar staff got lost beneath the background noise, we wondered – what can the beer industry do to attract more women?

For a start, it can stop giving space to vendors who trade in sexist posters and images. It was fairly pointed out to us that CAMRA has no affiliation with, nor condones the content of, merchandise traded at its event. But we’re pretty sure no one would get away with the racist equivalent of some of the posters we saw on sale, showing:

an overweight woman rendered skinny and borderline pornographic by an empty pint glass. Tag? “Warning: Alcohol seriously affects your judgement”
“What do computers and women have in common? Both are useless until they’re turned on.”
“If a man talks dirty to a woman, it’s sexual harassment. If a woman talks dirty to a man, it’s £1.95 a minute.”

Charming.

Women at the event were greeted by a wall smothered in slogans telling us that we’re fundamentally useless; scheming opportunists; objects. Desirable unless you’re fat, in which case, men need to be warned to STAY AWAY, because DEAR GOD. As well as being wearily sexist, this poster also won the hypocrisy prize, given the number of larger men (the stereotypical beer drinker) crowded around the stall. You know what? It was intimidating, and women feel alienated by that kind of macho beer culture. It’s an alienation that self-perpetuates, because it subsequently takes a mighty effort for us to insist that we have as much natural right to our pint as a man.

We were overwhelmed by the number of women at the GBBF who told us they would never order a pint on a date. Between sips Emma, 25, told us she would never drink pints on a date – or at a work do. “I think it’s just laddy… it’s really male,” she said. She and her two girl friends were hiding from their boyfriends so they could enjoy their turkey drumsticks shame-free. We wondered what their boyfriends made of their beer drinking. “They think it’s really laddy,” Sarah told us. The boyfriends made a reappearance. “Tell them we’ve been eating salad,” she pleaded. On the other side of the hall Jess, 26, worried that ale wasn’t seen as particularly feminine. She wouldn’t order a beer on a first date, she said – and her friend Andy, 28, agreed that women might do so only to make a point. “You’re quite guarded on a first date,” he said. “What you drink shows something of you as a person. As a guy, I wouldn’t order a sherry. Ordering a beer is a statement – like ordering jagerbombs.”

Acquiring taste – or being criticised for their lack of it – was another concern of the women we spoke to. Hayley, 31, was still reeling from being snapped at by a barman because, she thought, she “didn’t know the lingo”. She told us that she wanted to do a beer course – to help her keep up with male drinkers. “I don’t know what’s good,” she said. “I think we’re all bullshitting a bit… but guys get away with it because they lie to each other. But girls can’t fake it because they’ll be like… she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. So I’m just trying to learn as I go along!” But all the women we spoke to knew what they liked and didn’t like – Emma told us she hated dark beer, Lizzy said she couldn’t stand beers that were marketed as “raspberry flavour” but weren’t; Jess said she preferred the taste of ale to lager. For women drinkers, shouldn’t preference alone be enough?

“If I was a girl and my boyfriend propositioned me to come to a beer festival I’d be like, no, I’m washing my hair,” Alex, 28, told us. “But if I was propositioned to go to a nice bar on the Thames – I might be drinking the same beer but in a different environment.” Similarly, Jess gave us food for thought by suggesting improving women’s experiences could be as simple as providing an array of drinking glasses – she doesn’t like the standard pint glass, but wouldn’t mind a wine-glass-shaped half, or a tall “Peroni”-style glass. Emma said if she did commit to a beer when socialising with work it would only be out of a bottle. Does a pint glass feel like a commitment to drinking a certain amount or is this just an image thing?

We got the sense that both men and women felt that beer was a bit rough and ready for delicate women-folk; the advertising and image a bit heavy-handed. Would we really prefer a “nice bar on the Thames” or smaller glasses to fit in our soft little hands? If image is so important to women, it was surprising how hostile those we spoke to were about the less traditional craft movement, with its halves and thirds and trendy bars. “I think [GBBF] is a bit more authentic. Craft beer is a bit Hackney, a bit East London, trying to be cool,” said Hayley. “It’s all about being seen rather than the beer.”

It was notable that the older festival goers we chatted to seemed less aware of the gender disparity, whereas younger drinkers confided their lack of confidence around beer and their concerns about how it would affect their image in front of men. It is all too easy for some to laugh off the posters and cock balloon hats. We are sure that for many women, it doesn’t stop them enjoying their pints. But it can take many years to develop this kind of self assurance. To hear young women so afraid by what men will think of them for buying a particular drink in a particular volume was kind of crushing for us. We think this is at the crux of the issue with sexism in the beer drinking world – it’s all to do with confidence, and too many women are having their wings clipped at a young age, while older drinkers shrug off their concerns as trivial.

D – not scared of pints!

Of course, we weren’t put off. We love beer, and it would take more than dull stereotype and sarcastic comments to phase us. And we must remember that women are not invisible in the beer-verse, by any means. Dea Latis, an organisation dedicated to promoting beer to women, states in its mission statement that “what unites us is our passion for beer and a belief that it’s far too good to be enjoyed only by men”. Women run tastings, run breweries, run beer blogs (ahem). The message is getting out… slowly.

We will definitely return to GBBF next year. But we hope that, when we do, some things will have changed: we hope there will be more women. Beer festivals should be a starting point, a place to jump in and develop your love of beer, not the end of the line. It’s time to take down the posters – and let the women roar.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this story, either in the comments below on on our Twitter or Facebook pages.

– ED

Great British Beer Festival 2013 – festival report

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As we entered the yawning aircraft hangar-like space that is London’s Kensington Olympia, a Mexican-style cheer rushed towards us from the far end of the venue. Raising our snazzily-branded pint glasses, we roared with approval as the wave of noise hit us. We had arrived, and our Great British Beer Festival (GBBF) experience had begun.

The Great British Beer Festival 2013 at Olympia.

Despite our beery love affairs, we have only recently become CAMRA members, and this was our first GBBF. Our previous experiences of beer festivals were more on the craft side – smaller, more “trendy” affairs in London’s Shoreditch and Hoxton – and this was to be a very different animal. As feminists, we hate stereotypes, but CAMRA and real ale festivals certainly conjure up certain images for most people – beards, beer bellies and a whole lot of MEN. We wanted to find out if the festival – and its patrons – had been unfairly typecast. Also, most pressingly, we wanted to try some delicious beer.

“I go to real ale pubs with my boyfriend – it’s great to come here and try something new together” – Hayley, 31

The obvious downside to coming to the last date of a five-day festival is that many of the casks had predictably run dry. Additionally, the dizzying variety of ales available meant that we had to be selective even out of what was still on offer. While this was a bit of a disappointment after spotting some favourite breweries in the programme (Thornbridge! By The Horns! Bath Ales!) it meant that we tried a lot of beers that we otherwise wouldn’t have done, and we discovered some breweries we didn’t even know existed before.

Some of our favourites:

Pip:

Marble’s Ginger Marble (4.5%). I’m a fan of Bath Ales’ Ginger Hare and this was of a similar ilk – a light, fresh, summery ale with enough sharp hop to keep it tasty. Really like how they get the ginger bite in the mix without it taking over or tasting gimmicky. Big thumbs up. (@MarbleBrewers)
Bristol Beer Factory’s Sunrise (4.4%). I visited a beer festival run by BBF in 2011 down at the Old Tobacco Factory and it’s always nice to spot their stuff in up in the capital. This had a really sour, citrus tang on the nose but gave way to a light, refreshing flavour. (@BrisBeerFactory)
Three Tun’s 1642 (3.8%). Really biscuity on the nose but with a cracking spiced, bitter kick. Reminded me of tasting daddy’s beer on hot summer days when I was a kid. Surprised to see its middling reaction on Untappd as I was really keen on this one. Traditional British bitter at its finest. (@ThreeTunsBrewer)

Fyne Ales’ award-winning Jarl (3.8%) was chosen for me by a barman upon whom I’d heaped much pressure. “It’s my first beer of the day!” “I only like dark beer!” “But you must select me a beer that isn’t dark so I don’t overload my tastebuds”. Jarl, you answered my prayers. Light, floral, extremely refreshing; this would make an excellent lo-o-ong summer session drink and would pair well with food. (@FyneAles)
Kelburn Brewery’s Dark Moor (4.5%) So, right, everyone knows that boozy chocolates don’t work. Chocolate is chocolate, not some liquored-up chemical spill. So how come chocolate-y booze DOES WORK? Ask Kelburn. Dark Moor is what those dark, cherry rum-filled Christmas chocs should taste like – with incredible liquorice endnotes. Try it – even if you don’t usually like liquorice. (@kelburnbrewery)
Stocklinch Ales’ Black Smock (5%). If smoked meat tasted this good, I’d ditch Veganism. I kid! But really. Thick, dark beer that tastes like Autumn air, all hazy with woodsmoke and bonfires.

“We’ve been coming here for years. There’s always a really good mix of people, all demographics” – Heather and Andy, “mid forties”

So what of the atmosphere? Were the stereotypes justified? It has to be said that we immediately noticed that the demographic at GBBF was very different to the craft beer events we had been to. For example, last February’s Craft Beer Rising seemed to have around a 50-50 male female split, and everyone looked under 35 (to our eyes, at least). At GBBF, men outnumbered women at least three to one, possibly more (we corroborated this statistic when we went to the toilet and DIDN’T HAVE TO QUEUE. For the FIRST TIME EVER). There were many older men (and women) there, including Pip’s 71-year-old dad who had come along with us for the ride. Interestingly, though, there were still a lot of younger drinkers, and the twenty- and thirty-somethings seemed to be well represented. We spotted several stag parties and – brilliantly – a hen party. And, we won’t deny it… there were a lot of beards.

So GBBF hosted a real mix of drinkers of all ages (if with an overwhelmingly male bias). This was pleasing to see, and it was certainly fun for three twenty-somethings to hang out with a septuagenarian, enjoying a drink they are all passionate about, and for us all to feel at home in that environment. But it appeared that women and ale were still not a natural partnership. Maybe they’d been put off by the independent poster stall trading crap slogans like: “Why are women like computers? Because they’re both useless unless they’re turned on”; maybe they didn’t think the enormous balloon penis hats were very funny – whatever reason, women were remarkably under-represented. Unless they’d been installed to flash cleavage at punters from the other side of the tap (yes, we did notice that the women behind the bars were all pretty buxom and much younger than their male counterparts).

“It’s a shame there are so few women here. But at least there are lots of men with long hair!” – Alex, 27

We took some time out to chat to drinkers – male and female – about why they thought fewer women showed up. And it was revealing. Later this week we’ll have an in-depth report into this – find out why (almost all) the women we spoke to wouldn’t order a beer on a first date, and what women drinkers think the industry can do to help.

To soak up the booze there was a great range of grub available and we were really chuffed to see some more varied fare, for example the International Seafood and El Cantara stalls. Something we really want to champion on this blog is that beer can be enjoyed as part of a healthy lifestyle, and it was awesome to see the festival organisers providing drinkers with something other than pies and burgers to choose from (although admittedly we had wild boar burgers. They were delicious). We also enjoyed the Merry Berry Truffles chocolate stand – Pip could hardly believe her luck when she realised her day would combine beer and chocolate. Only D was brave enough to try their “Scorpion Death Chilli” flavour but this didn’t stop the rest of us trying all the other varieties on offer.

Something we missed from our craft experiences was the involvement of the brewers themselves at the event. Speaking to one of the guys from By The Horns at their brewery tap the previous weekend, he said they were planning to go down on trade day, and maybe other brewers made the same decision – but something we love about craft beer is how accessible the people behind the beer are: being able to get up close and personal with the brewers and chat to them about what they do is all part of the fun. Although the bar staff at GBBF were all friendly and helpful, and the format of having a range of ales grouped together in different bars was nice for variety, we did pine a little for the brewers having more of a presence than just their pump clips.

In summary, our first GBBF experience was overwhelmingly a good one. We tried some great beers, didn’t have to queue for a wee and we had some interesting – not to mention enlightening – chats with our fellow drinkers. A good time seemed to be had by all, sharing their love of real ale with friends – and there was chocolate. What could possibly be better on a summer Saturday afternoon?

The only downside was, of course, the dearth of women there that day. As we mentioned previously, we will be following up on this later this week with a full report, so stay tuned.

Pip (l) and D (r) enjoying their first GBBF. Cheers!

– PS

Two women, one blog, many beers.

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One summer evening, over a pile of empty bottles, and the dregs of IPAs and porters and wheat beers, we decided: it was time us and beer got serious.

We were ready to commit.

But there were problems. Beer had to accept that we weren’t going to change.

Don’t get us wrong: beer and us have a great history. We remembered long Sunday drives with battered CAMRA guides in the glovebox; trying dad’s beer for the first time (and hating it); knocking back as many Kriek samples as we could on a school trip to Belgium. We put away pints of overpriced lager at festivals and crowdsurfed out of Placebo sets to pee; we got lime wedges stuck in Corona bottles in our university bars.

But then we graduated. We grew up, we moved to the Big Smoke, and we realised that we had to look after ourselves to get the most out of life. We embraced healthy living; we fell in love with sourcing unpronounceable ingredients for even more unpronounceable recipes, and with the buzz we got after a run or an isometric yoga session. But we didn’t want to say goodbye to beer. It was time beer worked for us. Beer had to fit into our new, grown up lives. Pint after pint of flavourless identi-lager – out of the question.

London’s craft beer renaissance could not have come at a better time.

We swapped hours quaffing weak ale for hours scrutinising beer menus. Beer became a world where drinking halves (or even thirds) was a smart strategy, not a killjoy. Supermarkets’ narrow slips of Wychwood ales gave way to shelves of own-brand single hop. You could grab a Punk IPA from Sainsbury’s Local. Beer became the focus of a whole new social scene – festivals and tap takeovers, pubs where the bar staff knew their stuff and wanted to share their passion, everyone trying each other’s drinks in the never-ending quest for something new, something exciting.

And we became beer evangelists. First to each other – trading labels in long wish lists – and then friends and family. The more evangelical we got, the more we noticed the harm done to lovely beer by decades of stereotype and assumption. Girls didn’t drink beer. The glasses were too masculine. It tasted weird. It made us fat.

We had a mission. We would wrestle the vodka-sodas; the white wine spritzers; the overpriced cocktails from the hands of our girl friends. We would tell them about beers so insanely hopped you felt like you were inhaling a field; so toasty you’d think you were drinking – well, toast; we would tell them about the caramel, the toffee, the cherries, the buttery biscuit, the spice and the smoke.

We’d tackle the sexism head on. Wanna fat-shame at your beer festival? Sure, but prepare to be shamed in return. Plan to use tired-old sexist cliché to sell your brew? Go for it – but we’ll expose you for selling out. We would cook with beer, analyse beer, run marathons with beer, do yoga with beer, and go on long walks for beer. We would prove that beer could be part of a balanced, healthy lifestyle.

And if, after all that, our girl friends were like: thanks, you raving alcoholic, but please restore to me my delicious piña colada, then that would be cool too, because feminism – and beer – is all about choice. But at least it would be a decision based on taste, not discrimination, or body anxiety, or worrying what a guy would think when you slammed down your empty pint glass and the dregs of your porter splattered on his trainers.

At least we would have tried. And we owed it to beer, and to all of the dynamic, creative, sistahs making it in an industry dominated by men. We owed to the notes of caramel and tobacco and biscuit that we’d discovered; we owed it to our mums and dads and those tiny sips of beer on childhood holidays. And, if all else failed, at least we would get to drink some cracking beers on our journey.

– ED/PS

It Comes In Pints?

Ladies who blog about beer.