The joy of drinking beer
Modern British Beer (Matthew Curtis, Camra Books, £15.99)
By Phil Mellows
If beer is a journey, it means nothing without the people you meet and the stories you hear along the way.
Modern British Beer could have been a dry, contentious work, a heavy-going exposition of the recent changes in our beer culture, a championing of the shock of the new and yet another hymn to craft.
Instead, Matt Curtis has given us one of the best of many beer books written in the past few years, celebrating, in his words, “the broad spectrum of joy” that awaits those who dip their lips into the rich variety of brews you now find in bars and bottle shops.
He does give a decent definition of “modern British beer”, of course, yet it’s the 86 kaleidoscopic chapters that follow, each devoted to a single beer, that generously sweep up what’s joyful about being a beer drinker in Britain today.
Curtis has a well-educated palate and a nice turn of descriptive phrase, but he gives us much more than tasting notes. He understands that it’s the story behind the beer that really makes it sing to us.
The beers fall naturally not into styles and flavour profiles but into geographies as we journey around these islands stopping off at breweries that have each made their contribution to modern British beer.
Some of Curtis’s choices are no-brainers, others surprising yet inspired. None are ‘wrong’ exactly, but there are always going to be quibbles about something like this and we’ll all come up with a beer or three that ought to be there but isn’t. That’s all part of the fun.
What each entry certainly does is argue for its place.
Take Coniston Bluebird from Cumbria. There’s nothing modern about a good quaffing bitter, but I remember the sensation this brew caused when it flew from nowhere to win Champion Beer of Britain in 1998, a barley straw in the breeze of change.
Or Oakham JHB from Peterborough, which might have provided my first taste of US-grown hops (Mt Hood it turns out) as early as 1993. It was different and delicious.
Or Burning Sky Saison a la Provision from Sussex, which somehow makes sense of saisons for the Brits.
Because modern British beer is not just a take on US hop-forward pales. There are lagers and porters, bocks and rauchbiers, Belgian-style tripels, There’s even Boxcar Dark Mild from Bethnal Green, a style that’s so far out of style it’s (hopefully) coming back in style again, with the help of a bit of modern attitude.
And Curtis boldly ends his journey with a bitter, Five Points Best, from Hackney, and another definition which frames the subject in a different way that makes you want to start all over again:
“To be truly modern, beer must also speak of its place, and to its community.”