Craft beer is a term that is seemingly impossible to tie down. It shifts, turns and changes meaning depending on when, where or who you speak to.

Even though I use it practically every day on this blog I admit I still struggle to define what craft beer really is.

But one thing I am 100% certain of; whatever craft beer is – this is it.

(The picture shows amphoras – ceramic vessels once commonly used to ferment wine and beer – filled with world famous Belgium brewery Cantillon‘s lambic beer. Breathtaking isn’t it! More lambic porn can be seen at Cantillon’s Facebook page).

*Warning* Shamless Plug for my next Beer Talk!

Holland in 3 words: cheese, tulips, clogs.

This is, of course, being incredibly unfair on the Dutch, so here’s a few more: amazing painters, football, windmills, funny smelling cafes, Heineken, Amstel and Grolsch.

It’s those last three words that I’m going to concentrate on here (we may return to the funny smelling cafes at a later date).

In world brewing terms the Dutch are a major force, producing a substantial amount of the fizzy pale lager that comes out of Europe. And they’re really good at it too. Over half the country’s annual production is exported and Heineken is the only non-US brand in the top ten biggest sellers in the States, where it is considered something of a premium brand.

The Dutch craft beer scene is blossoming (Ed Note: Yellow card for cheesy pun)

So it’s rather strange then that when you think of the world’s top beer countries Holland rarely, if ever, comes to mind.

That’s because in beer terms for the uninitiated Holland is the USA of Europe. It has a domestic market so dominated by three mega brands that it’s almost impossible to find relief from them. The quip often spoken about US beer (you know, the one about sex, a canoe and water) also applies here.

But whereas the US craft brewers decided to do something about it the Dutch have been a little slower joining the revolution. However it’s a fight a small army of Dutch craft breweries have taken up and one, at least in terms of quality and innovation, they appear to be winning.

In my next monthly beer talk at Duå in Umeå this Friday I’ll be going ‘double dutch’ and tasting six Dutch craft beers; three from the Dutch master himself Menno Olivier and his acclaimed De Molen brewery and three from the less well-known but upcoming Emelisse brewery.

For beer enthusiasts De Molen really needs no introduction. Ranked the 12^th best brewery in the world last year by Ratebeer.com its eclectic range of small batch whimsically named beers are highly sought after – if you can get hold of them that is. I’m particularly looking forward to trying their Bommen & Granaten (Bombs and Grenades), a barley wine with some reputedly explosive flavours of orange and caramel.

But as much as I’m already excited at trying some more of Menno’s masterpieces I’m almost looking forward most to trying the three beers from Emelisse – a small Dutch brewpub situated on an island in southwestern Holland.

Emelisse is the playground of Holland’s celebrated homebrewer turned pro Kees Bubberman, who is clearly enjoying his work there creating dozens of different styles of beer of which I’ve never tried a single bottle. I’m hoping his Emelisse White Label Imperial Russian Stout Laphroaig BA will get people talking double dutch at the beer talk this Friday.

There are still a handful of places left at the second sitting of my ‘Double Dutch Beer Talk – No Heineken Allowed!” which kicks off this Friday (February 3^rd) at 20:30. For details and to book just ring Lars or Per on 090-7800303.

Do I look sad? Well that’s because I am, with the news that has just reached me that one of my favourite beers of all time, the utterly elegant Saison Dupont, is facing the ignominy of a T9 listing and the threat of a slow and painful demise at the monopoly.

T9 is the type of listing few beers want (unless you’ve managed to qualify up from the ordering assortment that is). If you’re a T9-er it basically means the Systembolaget doesn’t have to stock you on their shelves anymore and only local demand will ensure you’re ever seen in public again. It’s where all beers that haven’t sold enough eventually end up. A kind of ‘God’s Waiting Room’ for beer if you will.

Sadly this is now the case for Saison Dupont. I can’t say enough nice things about this beer and I still get goosebumps when I recall stumbling across an uber-fresh keg of it in Biarritz last year.

Saison Dupont is intelligent beer. It forces you to think, wills you into trying to unwrap its spicy cloak of lemon and sweet pears. It a world where so many simple beers give it up on the first date Saison Dupont would have you get down on one knee and offer it a ring before allowing you to go any further.

Saison is a style of beer that hasn’t been explored that much by the Swedish beer industry yet (but when it has been it’s been magnificent) and is perhaps considered a little odd by many.

However as a food beer saisons are hard to better. The sage of beer and food pairings, Garrett Oliver, once proclaimed: “If I were forced to choose one style to drink with every meal for the rest of my life, saison would have to be it.” We should listen to him. He really does know what he’s talking about.

So is this really the end for Saison Dupont in Sweden? Are we listening to the death rattle of a classic beer? Well that’s up to you and me to decide. Only by buying the occasional bottle at our local stores will we keep it from slipping into oblivion.

For this reason alone it’s my AfterWork Friday beer this week and will be every Friday until it comes back to us and reclaims its rightful place on the shelves of the monopoly.

”Oi! Murderer! Perhaps you should throw in some vegetarian food-parings in your reviews?”

Fact: Beer loves vegetables!

This is the tweet word for word that I got today from Tomas, a long-time follower of this blog. I’m taking it, like my steaks, with a pinch of salt but after chewing it over (the Tweet that is, not the steak) Thomas does in fact make a very valid, if somewhat accusatory, point.

I don’t want to get drawn into the ethical depths of carnivorism or vegetarianism (this is, after all, a beer blog) but the truth is that I consider beer an equally willing partner to flesh as it is to fruit (and veggies).

In fact in my recent review of this beer the highlight of the experience was the way the juicy tangerine and toffee flavours of the beer melded with the spicy oven-grilled vegetables baked with chill, garlic, coriander and sprinkled with goats cheese.

So your point Tomas is taken. From now on I will always try to include a vegetarian option in the food suggestions I make when reviewing beers on this blog.

Part 1 of this two-part article can be found here.

“A fiery coloured beer brewed using the finest malts, hops and crystal clear water from our own 700 metre deep well which gives this warming beer its rich, elegant finish. A perfect beer to enjoy with friends and to round off a great meal”.

Now stop a second and read that imaginary beer label description again. Then ask yourself the question “what does it actually tell me about the beer?”

We don't want one of these when reading beer labels. We want facts!

The truth is nothing, except maybe that it’s red. Or yellow. Or possibly orange.

To me all this description really says is that whoever wrote it should get out of the beer business as quickly as possible and go and write a novel.*

The scary thing is that 10 years I was writing beer labels that were pretty damn close to the one above. I was part of the problem, working in a beer industry that had gotten lazy and was content in pawning beer drinkers off with pointless prose rather than seizing the chance to educate them about the drink in the bottle.

In the past decade my opinions about how beer should be presented have changed radically. The arrival of craft beer to Europe is largely to thank for that because craft beer by its very nature almost always has something worth saying.

Craft brewers, by definition, try and use the best ingredients available to them, often in quantities that would make the bean counters at the major breweries wince. BrewDog, for example, typically uses 35 times more hops per barrel than the average industrial brewery.

So now more than ever before there’s a reason why breweries should list their ingredients. In doing so they not only make a proud statement that their beer is a quality and complex product but they also help us beer drinkers understand it just that little bit better.

To give a snapshot of where we are in the Swedish beer scene right now I grabbed three Swedish craft beers off the shelves of my local Systembolaget store to see what their packaging tells us about the beer inside.

First out we have S.t Eriks IPA from the indefatigable Jessica Heidrich. There’s no doubt the elegant 330ml bottle does a great job in raising expectations of this beer but the description itself, on this occasion, is frustratingly vague.

“A dark amber coloured IPA generously hopped with aromatic American hop varieties” is what it tells us. 

For the die-hard beer enthusiasts among us our minds instantly start churning over caramel malts and intoxicatingly stinky US hops like Amarillo, but on the basis of this description alone it is merely guesswork. For the average beer drinker who has taken this off the shelf for the first time it will almost certainly mean nothing at all**.

Next up is Gustafs Finger from Dugges. Here the Gothenburg brewery in my opinion does a good job in conveying the beer’s character as well as telling us about the major ingredients that go into making it.

“This Strong Bitter (beer style – check!) with its classic dark malts (malts – check!) has both richness and strength (beer description – check!). Gustaf has a refreshing hoppy bite where Chinook, Brewers Gold and Cascade hops (hops – check!) lend taste and an inviting aroma.”

Finally lets look at the best of the bunch, Mohawk Extra India Pale Ale from flying brewer Stefan Gustavsson. This bottle label is a slam-dunk for me, containing pretty much everything I want to know about the beer inside.

“Mohawk Extra IPA is an extreme beer in the style of the American west coast brewing tradition (Beer style – check!)….. “lots of hops, high alcohol and extremely complex (beer description – check!)….”the colour is golden yellow with hints of amber (another beer description – check!).

The label then goes on to spell out all the different varieties of malts and hops in the beer (and in this particular beer that’s a lot of words!). Lots of checks there.

I concede the Mohawk is a 500ml bottle and therefore there’s considerably more room to fit on text than the two previous skinnier examples. However if this little exercise is anything to go by it’s encouraging to see that craft breweries in this country seem to be well ahead of the big boys when it comes to sharing information with us drinkers.

What would you like to see printed on beer bottle labels and cans as standard? Do you really want to know the names of the hops and malts or is it all just overkill? Would you like to know serving temperatures, the correct glassware, what foods to pair it with or the day the beer was bottled or canned?

Have you got any examples of beer labels that say a lot but nothing at all or have you already found the perfect beer label?

Let us know your thoughts by commenting below. Using you feedback I’ll maybe then attempt to construct the ideal beer label

(Ed Note: I have a lot more to say about this subject, such as the idea of Swedish breweries implementing a standardized beer ‘guide’ similar to the Cyclops scheme in the UK and the equivalent that’s already in place here at the Systembolaget – does anyone pay any attention to those funny little symbols by the way? – so I’ll be returning to this topic in the coming weeks).

*As I wrote that I’m probably going to ignore my own advice. However I really do want to write a novel (and play for Liverpool).

**In fairness to S:t Eriks they have a wonderful website which goes into great detail about each of their beers. Of course you’d never all know this from picking up the bottle……

Picture the scene. I am in a room somewhere in Sweden standing in front of 20 people giving a talk about beer.

“So how many of you drink wine?” I ask. A surprising start. Nearly all of them raise their hand.

Yes most of us already know this. Can you be a little bit more specific?

I press on: “OK, and how many of you drink bag-in-box wine?” Less hands now but several guilty looks and people that start staring at their shoes.

“So do you know the names of the main grape varieties in some of the wines you drink? You know, like Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir….?”

From all around the room people toss grape names at me. Impressive.

“OK, that’s great. Now let’s switch to beer. First question: how many of you have drunk beer most of your adult lives?”

Every single hand shoots up into the air.

“So taking an average of, let’s say, 15 years beer drinking each that’s 300 years of accumulated beer drinking in this room.”

“Now in very broad terms hops are the grapes of beer and give it a crispness, bitter backbone and the aromatics that make it the amazingly refreshing drink it can be. So……with your 300 years of collective beer drinking experience can anyone give me the name of a single hop that has gone into making any of the countless beers you have drunk over three centuries?*”

The silence is deafening.

I’m starting to lose count of how many beer talks I give in Sweden each year but the scenario I’ve just recounted occurs in over 95% of all the talks I’ve ever done to the general drinking public.

And it is here we come face to face with one of the ugliest truths about beer, which is that it may be the most popular alcoholic drink on the planet but practically no-one has a clue about what goes into it.

So just who is to blame for this wretched state of affairs? Who is responsible for creating a product that practically everyone know nothing about and who should we now turn to to help us fill in the blanks and raise the general awareness of beer as a quality and complex drink?

The answer to all these questions is of course the brewing industry itself.

The large industrial brewing giants spent generations stripping down beer to its cheapest, most profitable form. In order to hide their ‘cost-streaming’ measures they stopped talking about what went into their beers and shielded themselves behind one of the vaguest product descriptions known to man: “water, malted barley, hops and yeast”.

Big boobs, humour (sort of) or anything else to distract us from the truth of what actually goes into the beer.

Rather than tell people exactly what goes into their beer (and conversely what doesn’t) they perfected the conjurer’s art of misdirection, throwing billions into marketing beer as “refreshing, ice-cold, probably the best in the world, the king of beers, the one and only, wouldn’t give a XXXX for anything else” – in fact anything it seems rather than tell people what it’s actually made of.

No wonder the silence was so deafening.

But that was then. Right now in 2012 craft beer is here and many smaller breweries in Sweden and throughout the world are proudly using the very best ingredients they can get their hands on to create beers with real flavour and integrity.

Surely they are proud of their beers and the often elaborate list of ingredients that go into making them? Surely they are the ones at least partly responsible for helping to educate the growing legions of ‘beer curious’ consumers who would willingly listen if anyone bothered to talk to them?

I for one believe they are. They are right now our best chance at putting things right, of setting the record straight. But how can craft breweries help us understand beer better when they’re already so busy brewing beer to an ever more demanding public?

One relatively simple way is to go back to ground zero and the moment someone picks up a bottle of beer for the first time and reads the bottle label.

It is here craft brewers can make that vital first impression and pass on information that could potentially change the way someone thinks about beer forever. It’s such an obvious opportunity and yet unbelievably it’s still one that’s often overlooked.

In Part 2  – I grab three bottles of craft beer from the shelves of the Systembolaget and examine their labels to discover what they’re really telling us about the beer inside.

*You’d be surprised how often I am met with incredulous looks and the comment “are there hops in beer?” Seriously, it happens!

The infamous naked man that over the past 24 hours has been spotted ‘hanging out’ around the world has now apparently been spotted at a popular Swedish beer bar!

BeerSweden has been unable to contact Oliver Twist in Stockholm’s trendy Södermalm for confirmation of the sighting but the photographic evidence seems overwhelming.

The internet is currently flooded with sightings of the naked man, who has been snapped near famous world landmarks, in classical paintings and even in a South Park cartoon. If you’ve got a picture of the naked man in Sweden please send it in to me at darren@beersweden.se so I can post it here!

(For those wondering – explanation here)

There is nothing more likely to get me into such a lather that I want to slam my head through the nearest available sheet of drywall than to start a conversation with someone about Swedish society’s relationship to alcohol.

It’s a trist that comes with more baggage than a charter holiday flight – an unholy union of desire and denial that has largely polarised Swedish society into those that don’t and those that do (but don’t really want to admit it).

I’ve rarely (if ever) bought up the issue of the effects of alcohol on this blog because then I fear it would lead to flirting with three words that in my opinion are as vile as ‘stor stark tack’  - Swedish Alcohol Politics.

It’s not because I think the issue of alcohol in society isn’t an important one because it absolutely is, and I totally respect anyone actively involved in debating it’s causes and effects, whether they like an occasional drink or not.

It’s just that I don’t feel this blog is the right forum to debate such heavyweight issues. Here my main goal is that you discover something new about a beer and although I know reading this blog won’t cure society’s ills I hope it might occasionally contribute to alleviating them momentarily by putting a smile on your face.

But (you knew that was coming, right?) there was a letter printed in a recent edition of my local paper that made even me abandon my soft stance. Please click on the picture to the right to expand it to its full size if you have difficulty reading it.

Now I have huge issues with the overall tone of the letter signed by IOGT – NTO, MHF and Blå Bandet but the one paragraph I take exceptional offence to is the last one in which these three organisations encourage children to plead with their parents not to drink this Christmas.

Before I boil over let me first say that in my world the members of these three organisations have a perfect right to their agendas of promoting an alcohol-free lifestyle.

However as a proud parent of three I also have an equally perfect right to drink beer this Christmas too. As abhorrent as I would find it if someone encouraged people in a letter to a newspaper to get drunk over Christmas I find it equally contemptible that these three organisations are able to insinuate that drinking at Christmas is morally and sociably evil.

It is exactly this demonising of alcohol among children and young adults that in my opinion directly leads to some of them developing confused relationships with it in later years. This letter’s extreme message is clear – alcohol is bad and leads to bad things. In spreading it these orgainsations feed the taboo and drive alcohol behind locked bedroom doors and drawn window-blinds, away from any sort of safe social setting and into the streets and carparks.

Their general line that you can’t enjoy Christmas with alcohol is as blindly ignorant as it is arrogant.  I have drunk beers at Christmas for over 20 years. It’s as much a natural part of Christmas for me as sausage rolls and (in later years) Kalle Anka.

During all this time I have never hit anyone, driven while drunk or done anything to harm my beautiful children. I’d argue that this is the reality for the vast majority of drinkers in Sweden and not this disgusting little piece of child propaganda.

And rather than attempting to shift the policing of drinking from adults to the children I think these three organisations would do better to concentrate on keeping the responsibility for the consumption of alcohol where it should always belong – with us, the adults.

As adults we are ALL personally responsible for how we drink and how we behave having consumed alcohol. If some people experience alcohol as a destructive influence in their lives then they should of course avoid it.

However for those of us that find drinking alcohol is a positive, enriching experience then we should be able to enjoy it responsibly, without guilt and with the window-blinds pulled up.

Have a wonderful, safe and happy Christmas with your families everyone, whether you decide to drink or not.

Darren

“Because it’s there”.

These are the three words immortalised by English mountaineer George Mallory when he was once asked: “why do you want to climb Mount Everest”?

George Mallory June 1886-June 1924

George went on to attempt the first ever ascent of the world’s highest mountain and although he ultimately lost his life in the savage snow storms that lash the mountain’s infamous North-East ridge his simple yet deeply philosophical answer lives on.

For me it’s a reminder that we should sometimes do things purely because we can.

I often think of George’s words and they came back to me again a few days ago when I was speaking to an industry colleague about the World Beer Cup taking place in the US next May.

We were discussing the lukewarm response to attempts to encourage Swedish breweries to enter their beers. I get the feeling (I may be wrong) that a common view is ”what’s the point” of spending a couple of thousand SEKs sending beer to the US when many Swedish microbreweries are already working flat-out to meet domenstic demand. It’s a very valid question too and from an economic point of view I agree it might make little sense to send beers to the world’s largest commercial beer competition.

Because it's there.

But economics and craft beer have always been uncomfortable bedfellows, haven’t they?

For me craft brewing is a lot about paying little regard to rules, of daring to be different, of following dreams rather than being shackled by spreadsheets. I know some people will think this is a romanticised and unrealistic view of the craft beer industry but it’s mine and for now I’m clinging tightly to it.

The World Beer Cup is widely recognised as one of the most prestigious beer competitions on the planet and is being held next year in the backyard of the country that justifiably claims to be the most exciting place on earth to enjoy craft beer right now.

For a Swedish brewery to send their beer into that level of competition and then to be able to sit in San Diego come May 5^th next year as the 90 category winners are announced and hear the name of that Swedish brewery being called out would really be something, wouldn’t it?

And not because it would result in a huge leap in sales back home nor because it might lead in a lucrative new US export deal but because regardless of whether they won or lost that Swedish brewery rose to the challenge of measuring their beers against some of the very best the world has to offer.

Because they took the challenge to see how high they could climb.

Because they realised that sometimes that climb is more important than reaching the summit.

And because it’s there.

Note: In case you are a Swedish brewer interested in the climb the closing dates for entries to the World Beer Cup 2012 is December 6^th (so you haven’t got long!) Full details on how to enter are here. I wrote this post not because I am a media endorser of this event (which I am) or because I’m going to San Diego next year (which I am) but because I honestly believe there are competition categories which Swedish beers can excel in.  

(but mainly because it would just be so damn cool!)