Brodie's Prime (Hawkshead)

Billed as category breaking beer and delivered by hand from the Lake District tap room by bunker co host Paul, but the question is: What is a Premium Dark Ale?

The nose is light, hints of blackberry, a solid pinch of Cascade floralness, but a Black IPA this not.

What hits the tongue to start is a wave of dryness, that only builds in intensity as the malt unravels. A Black chocolate bitterness takes control before leading to the hops. The Bramling Cross give a fruity blackcurrent kick of bitterness at the end which leave a strong lasting impression on the beer.

7/10 A well hopped porter with some strong blackcurrent notes.

Alice Porter (Brewdog)

Brewdog allege that this "renaissance baltic porter" is the result of a 300 year old recipe. The label talks of cobblestones and swirls of mist from the Thames, as if Doctor Watson himself might order this at his local.

The dog-icon cap flips away to reveal a sweet but subdued bouquet of burnt sugar with a ping of vanilla. On the pour it's black and tumultuous in the glass, a broiling inky drink that sheds a light brown lacy head that swiftly fades to nought.

It's 6.5%abv, but the alcohol is well shielded in the sup. It's all dark chocolate and summer fruits through the length, a classic porter mix with a stylish welcoming mouthfeel. Coffee and vanilla peek through then round off with a gentle bittered finish that sports shades of dark cherry.

Brewdog strike the quality threshold yet again with this beer. Would recommend this without hesitation, although as with all of their offerings check the price before you run it through the till.

8/10 - Delicious, extremely drinkable porter with an edge of mystery. Holmes would approve.

- The Broadside

Very Nutty Black (Thwaites)

This beer is marked "Export Strength" which is a pun for those who look at the label close enough, as the beer itself is 3.9%ABV

It's a version of Thwaites "Nutty Black", a staple in some parts of Lancashire, and this bottled version is designed to be exported to the Far East (Leeds) and even some remote areas of the Southern Hemisphere (Watford).

It's a dark mild (in fact was originally called Dark Mild) and on opening pours very pitchy indeed. The nose is slightly fruity and rather earthy but not prominent.

The sup reveals a very agreeable mild. It's not reinforced with a welt of flavours like many ales on these pages, but if you're looking for the definition of a dark session ale then in this you have found it.

It's roasty and nutty in the taste, a swimming team of malts with a firm hoppy buffer that just twists off the sweetness rather than leave it lingeringly bitter. Drying slightly on the tongue, this one could be drunk all afternoon.

7/10 - Tasty ale for those who want to veer dark but not ring down for the porter.

- The Broadside

Delirium Tremens (Brouwerij Huyghe)

Firstly, do click on the Huyghe website, the intro by MD Alain de Laet is a classic bit of webbery.

A potent and colourful little package in a stone-effect bottle, Delirium Tremens offers much potential. The label shows various trippy animal icons and there's no doubt the message is that this will KO the unwary. It was voted Best Beer in the World at the 1998 World Beer Championships in Chicago.

It's 8.5%ABV, and on cap release the air fills with notes of fruit, ripe bananas and apples. It pours a joyous pale straw colour.

The sip is a little yeasty (it uses 3 types) and a lance-like note of pineapple wanders through, although not overpoweringly so. Huyghe brewery offers quite a few fruit beers, so its easy to see where this affectation came from.

The killer for me is the spices loitering in the undergrowth. Very european and peppery, they scatter through with gay abandon as the sup grows old and warm the tongue as the vaguely bitter aftertaste rears up and dies away. It's bitter just to the point of counteracting the fruit taste and no further.

This is a strong summer party drink for the discerning. The hops themselves taste like no normal hops, and I was amazed at how drinkable such a strong beer can be.

Not best in the world for me, but exacting and classy.

8/10 - Beautifully presented summer Belgian classic.

- The Broadside

Island Oyster (Mersea Island)

And it's a quick Mersesa Island double here at the Bunker Station Two as we crack open their dark special beer, Island Oyster.

Solidly porter in colour, it's as dark as the inside of said gastropod's shell. The head is beige and foamy.

The aroma reinforces the porter credentials, heavily chocolatey with a whiff of dockside back-alley danger.

You get oats and some oysters in this pint, and the combined attack is remarkable. Neither can really be picked out as individual strains (in the case of oysters perhaps its as well), but fused with the dark sweet malts the effect is lushly tasteful. The sup continues through as a bounty of colliding porter notes, with Fuggles hops rearing mildly at the death of the taste.

This is really good BC beer, another gem from this Essex enterprise. The mouthfeel and consistency needs to be tried.

8/10 - Outstanding oyster porter from Essex, well worth trying to track down.

- The Broadside

Shropshire Lad (Wood's)

Wood's is a fine brewery located amongst the scenic hills of Shropshire.

"Lad' is their top seller, and it's a quintessential example of an English bitter, brewed with English Malts, laced with Fuggles and Goldings hops.

It pours a deep bronze with a whiff of flowers, pear and berries on the air and a thin but persistent head loiters around like a crow on a telegraph pole.

It's 5%ABV, and comes across as a textbook stiffer session brown. A rich toffee start to the sup is cajoled by the classical hop mix, swaying and rolling in perfect balance towards the gently bittered finish.

The carbonation is superbly pitched, and the aroma through the taste is a sort of twin hop cuddle which welcomes you to the glass each time.

8/10 - One can easily see why this is their best seller. Enduring quality English bitter.

- The Broadside

The Rev. James (Brains)

This Brains product is one keeled over beer, or "on the huh" as we say in Suffolk.

It pours a deep clear copper , with scoops of fudge and flowers on the nose. The head is a foamy white landscape, crinkling over time and present down the glass.

The sup is all about caramel sweetness and spicy cane sugar. It ought to be sickly but in fact its quite pleasant, a sort of peppered cinnamon depth offsetting the rampant honeyed malt tones. The texture is a little sticky but not cloying, adequately carbonated with a silky travel.

It finishes with a smidge of hops, not much, and comes across as a sort of light dessert beer. At 4.5%ABV it's session pitched, but think of it more as a malty treat at the end of a tough day.

7/10 - Rather nice sweet-spiced ale, but hop miners need to try another shaft.

- The Broadside

Island Skippers (Mersea Island)

We don't tend to get many beers from Essex, so here's one.

Mersea Island is primarily a vineyard, which also hosts weddings, celebrations and brews the odd killer beer.

This pours a lovely dark amber with an ebullient lively head. Light caramel notes on the nose, entwined with some grass sprinkles, nice seasonal smells. The sup is initially pleasantly sweet with some faint chocolate notes, before a stride of Fuggles hops takes the experience to a gently dry bittered finish.

Very pleasant beer indeed, a solid seven.

7/10 - A fine best from Essex. Earthy in the right ways with well judged hops in the tail.

- The Broadside

Brew Day with The Kernel

Underneath the black bricked arches, within an Olympic stones throw of London Bridge, lives The Kernel Brewery. Packed in alongside a cheese maker and a meat curer, at first glance it appears like a home brewing hobby that's got out of hand.

After relatively little convincing, the owner Evin agreed to let me join them for a brew day. I am a keen home brewer and wanted to see first hand how things work when brewing is scaled up. I've done my fair share of brewery tours, with the usual parade of giant steel vessels and swept warehouse floors, but these generally give no indication of the passion or the buzz of excitement involved in the hands on brewing of beer. It's the craft, passion and smells that stir the soul.

Their 650litre setup is only a year old but already has plenty of outward character showing. It is tightly squeezed in alongside a makeshift fermentation and bottling room, with sturdy shelves that still hold the 80litre stainless steel pots that once formed the basis of Evin’s home brewing hobby. These now get used for sanitising and holding finished beer to feed the bottling machine.

The Kernel focus on brewing highly hopped US style Pale ales and IPAs, as well as a diverse selection of rich dark beers, strong stouts, Black IPAs and even a Coffee IPA. The focus is all about the ingredients and what they bring to the beer, often isolated in order for the individual ingredients to shine. The labels again reiterate this simplicity, hand stamped designs reflecting an attention to detail noticeably present in the beer. There is no core range of beers so each brew day is different. Each beer is unique, something which customers must find so exciting in this age of conformity. The hops are usually the stars of the stage, prominently stamped on each label, educating the customer to their own tastes and stirring excitement about the ingredients within.

On my day the focus was on a Pale ale, single hopped with Mt Hood - a lot of Mt Hood. Four and a half 25kilo sacks of the finest Warminster Maltings Maris otter, a few buckets of Munich, CaraMalt and Cara Gold, left to rest for a simple one hour mash at a 67c target temperature. A 30 minute reticulation followed to clean the wort, before sparging commenced with its reassuring rotating squeak of the sparge arm.

The run off and subsequent boil took 2 hours, enabling everyone to turn their hand to some bottling. 4 bottles at a time are filled by a machine intended for wine bottles, requiring a final hand delivered splash to top up. The brewery seems to offer an open door policy during the day, with customers collecting, and fellow brewers and artists all visitors on the day, folk milling through and recognising there was something special going on under these arches, an antidote to the formulaic replication of standard beers.

Handling hops is always an exciting experience. Rubbing them together in the hands to release powerful aromas is a brewers treat, but being asked to measure out 4kilograms of them into four buckets was sensory overload. I got the chance to add the aroma hops at 15, 10, 5 & 0 minutes, there was barely time to get them all submerged before the next batch was due, repeated until the wort surface resembled a Celtic marsh , completely obscured by hops.

It was then time for the plate chiller to get to work, cooling the 650litre brew to 21c nearly instantly. 19c was the target but after a bit of flow adjusting it was decided to pitch slightly higher. Out came a brick of US05 yeast, pitched dry into the filling fermentation vessel.

That's where the journey ended, open fermented in a side room with four other steel fermentors, each fermenting a different beer and each with their own distinctive aromas. No such luxury as temperature control, just a noisy old cooling unit to help fight the warmer summer evenings.

The final tasks of the day were to dig out the mash tun, something it seems is reserved for guests wherever possible, and reclaiming the hops from the kettle. The amount of spent hops was impressive, so impressive that I understand a visiting James Watt of Brewdog felt compelled to take a picture.

Brew complete, we all took some time to crack open a few bottles. We compared notes on which we preferred, but mainly agreed that we liked all of them, like proud parents being asked to choose a favorite child.

So what's next for The Kernel? Well I understand that plans for new premises are progressing. This will offer a bigger capacity, but will still focus on the same unique bottled beers. It's the hand craft that makes Kernel what it is, and I can't see that being compromised.


Kernel’s beers are available in most good London bars, online at BeerMerchants, but I recommend that you pop in and join them for Saturdays at The Kernel and get a chance to see first hand the craft and care that goes into these fine beers.

For Homebrew Geeks all the pictures I took that day are here on my photobucket account.

Wild Swan (Thornbridge)

Pours with fizzy like a run away train, creating a big foamy snow drift head. The aroma Lemon in abundance, maybe hints of vanilla.

The opening malt is very thin as one may expect with a beer so pale, and only 3.5%Abv, hints of sweetness are soon blasted away with big hits of lemon bitterness. In that usual Thornbridge style there is a tropical fruit edge to the finish, mixed with that citrus bitterness. The final finishing note is a slight spiciness, almost peppery.

5/10 Zingy Citrus, but not much else, sadly a rather thin summer beer offering.

Budding (Stroud)

An organic Pale ale it pours with the lightest carbonation I've known in a beer. It has an aroma packed with limes and citrus.

The opening malt is gentle and sweet, slipping along the tongue before combining with the finishing hops. Light bittering, but packed with flavor delivering a flood of citrus to match the malt sweetness. No dry finish, just hundreds of delicate floral flavors.

8/10 A modern English Pale ale, effortlessly quaffable, zesty, and in perfect balance.

Pilsner Urquell vs Budvar

The term "Lager" has long been synonymous to tasteless mass produced beer in the UK, long lost from it's east European origins as a method of cold storing beer, but I'm by no means an expert on the subject!

I thought I would visit two legends of this Bohemian Pilsner style for what some would call a taste of the "true lager experience"

Both pour a beautifully clear light amber gold, with Urquell the merest shade darker. Neither give big foamy heads, reducing to no foam after a minute.

Both a light on the nose, no English or US IPA hop power, or premium ale malty depth. Delicate is the key word, both having a subtle freshness, the Urquell is slightly grassier with more hints of those Saaz hops. The Budvar has slightly more caramel maltiness on the nose.

Both have that beautiful clean taste, no fruity middle, these beers are fermented at low temperatures to ensure the flavors a clean and crisp. The Budvar has less malt depth to start, the bitterness is slightly more prominent, with a finish that has the tiniest sharp tanginess to it. The Urquell offers something very different, there is an amazing biscuit crunch to the malt, like toasted bread it provides a fantastic depth of flavour. The following bitterness matches perfectly with crisp and noticeable Saaz hops coming through.

Two great beers, but the Urquell provides fantastic depth, with delicate flavors floating around the taste buds like summer butterflies.

Budvar 7/10 A solid example of the clean refreshing style.

Urquell 9/10 A truly delightful beer, delicate and light, but flooded with flavor.

Both beers are readily available in the UK, and in most good supermarkets.