Thursday, Jul. 29, 2010

Checking in from Jolly Old England

LONDON --| As I write this, I'm in the Lambeth section of London - home to that gigantic Ferris wheel known as The London Eye, as well as Waterloo Station, a busy terminal for train and subway travel throughout the city and to other parts of the United Kingdom.

One thing that I've learned during this trip to England: I should have returned Paul Grimshaw's pressure washer before I left Myrtle Beach.

And that's not all.

My wife, Kristi, and I broke away for a one-night stay in Hay-on-Wye, just inside the Welsh border. It's a small town on the Wye River, situated within the green hills of Herefordshire.

Hay-on-Wye is known for its used-book shops - dozens of them. It would take most folks just a few minutes to walk from one side of town to the other, yet each May, we were told, nearly 100,000 people pack into the town for a book festival.

Even in little Hay-on-Wye, I found some beer news. We stayed at the Kilverts Inn, a small, top-notch hotel with a pub and restaurant. Kilverts is the only pub in town recognized by Cask Marque, an organization that grants its imprimatur only to places that properly dispense cask beers.

I should explain the attraction. Usually ales, cask beers are unfiltered, unpasteurized, and still have live yeast, so they're not done with their fermentation process when poured into the cask or keg. Carbon dioxide develops naturally, and slowly, during the so-called "second fermentation" within the cask. So these beers are cask-conditioned. The casks that I saw looked similar to our aluminum kegs, but most beers, even U.S. microbrews, are conditioned in the brewery, not in the keg.

Usually, cask beers are hand-pumped into the pint glass, so no pressurized gases are used to dispense them from the tap. It's easy to spot the cask beers at the U.K. pubs, because they have different taps - big handles, for hand-pulling, labeled with large badges for the brand - while the gas-pressurized taps tend to be smaller.

At Kilverts Inn, I tried a lighter, easy-to-drink beer called Kilvert's Gold, from the Breconshire Brewery in southern Wales. You won't find Kilvert's Gold on the brewery's Web site, because the Kilverts Inn owner brews it himself, using the Breconshire facilities. Now the owner is building a microbrewery at the hotel, so Kilvert's Gold will soon be made at Kilverts. I first learned this from the barkeep, and then later, from the cab driver, when we took a taxi back to the Hereford train station. First, the driver asked us what we thought of Kilverts. Then, he told us he was the owner's brother-in-law. Call it friendly market research.

While at Kilverts, I also tried Breconshire's Wild Beacon, which I immediately knew was brewed with flowers. Even Kristi, not a beer girl, thought the smell was floral. When I looked up Wild Beacon on Breconshire's Web site, sure enough, the description read, "A very pale Summer Ale, brewed with just-picked Elderflower clusters, fresh Nettle tops and local honey which combine for a fresh, wild floral flavour."

Our first stop for a drink, however, was not at Kilverts Inn, but at The Famous Old Black Lion, another hotel-pub-restaurant combo in Hay-on-Wye. Old Black Lion Ale is brewed for the hotel by the Wye Valley Brewery. Like other cask ales, Old Black Lion is a different drinking experience. It's not fizzy or bubbly. The texture of many of these beers is almost water, yet the flavors tend to be full and interesting.

When the train returned us to Paddington Station in London, we walked until we found The Swan, a pub across the street from Hyde Park. Fuller's beers were on tap, including Discovery Blonde and Chiswick Bitter. Not bad, but I don't think anything Fuller's does is quite as good as its famous ESB, or Extra Special Bitter, a style the company pioneered.

Meanwhile, I've been posting some beer-and-travel notes on my blog; visit maltyhops.blogspot.com.

Contact Colin Burch at beerpour@yahoo.com and visit his blog at maltyhops.blogspot.com.