It’s time for my second beer from Dugges Ale & Porterbryggeri this week. The first one left me feeling a little flat but my hopes were high for their 1/2 idjit Imperial Porter, the ‘younger brother’ of Dugges floor-kissing’15% ABV Idjit Imperial Stout.

At a ‘mere’ 7% ABV 1/2 idjit is still a porter worthy of it’s imperial tag. When the word imperial is used in conjunction with a beer these days it really means ‘drinker beware’, as imperial-style beers are invariably extreme both in terms of flavour and strength.

The term imperial doesn’t originally relate to porter at all but in fact to Imperial Russian Stout, a beer brewed in the 18th century in England for export to the court of Catherine II of Russia (who  apparently liked a drop of the strong stuff). It had to be strong (normally around 8-12 % ABV) to stop the beer freezing on its way to the Baltics.

That’s enough history lesson for one day. Let’s get to the beer.

Dugges 1/2 idjit pours an inky black with a short-lived praline-coloured head. The dominant aroma is instantly recognizable – burnt toast – backed up with smells of bitter dark chocolate, cold black coffee and charred wood.

Dugges themselves promise a distinctive taste of salt liquorice and yes it was there but not at the levels I had feared (I bloody hate salt liquorice. It’s supposed to be a sweet for goodness sake. Salted tyre rubber more like).

Much more pleasant were the beer’s delicious coffee and cocoa tones, a burnt brown sugar sweetness and a sprinkle of cigar ash in a bitter/dry finish. There was some salt and sappy pine courtesy of the hops, which played nothing more than a supporting role to this porter’s impressive malt cast.

Oh yes, my faith in Dugges is restored! No half measures with this beer. You’d have to be a complete idjit not to try it.

Dugges 1/2 idjit

An Imperial Porter

7% ABV

Systembolaget Article Number: 11729 (but only available for a couple more months, so hurry while stocks last).

“That’s the Way I Wanna Rock and Roll” is a track from Sigtuna Brygghus Head Brewer Mattias Hammenlind’s favourite hard rock band AC/DC. It also sums up nicely his approach to brewing beer.

Since becoming Sigtuna’s first full-time employee early last year Mattias has clearly struck a chord with beer drinkers in Sweden, masterminding the release of a string of imaginative beers including Sigtuna Black October, Symptom of the Universe Barley Wine and Vårweizen.

Sigtuna Brygghus Head Brewer Mattias Hammenlind checks the quality of his latest beer.

As a drummer in the band SuperJudge Mattias likes to play hard and fast. He applies the same high octane level of energy to brewing his beers.

“You could say I brew in A major, as that’s what AC/DC often play in and its their music I listen to when I start brewing my beers”, says Mattias.

“One of the conditions of starting here at Sigtuna was that I wanted to brew beers my way, which means big but also balanced”.

“My brewing style is a mix of classical British and US innovation”, he adds, meaning that like US microbreweries he isn’t afraid of tearing up the brewing style rulebook now and again in his quest to find new flavours.

“All our beers at Sigtuna have a distinctive character of their own but every one is made with the emphasis on quality, complexity and taste”.

If brewing volumes are anything to go by this no-limits approach to brewing certainly seems to be working at the brewery located in a business park three kilometres from Stockholm’s busy Arlanda airport. If anything, that means that cheap flights over to Arlanda to see this amazing process in action (or just to try some of his fantastic beer) is always an option.

The fermentation tanks at Sigtuna are filled to the brim with beers that will shortly fill shelves at the Systembolaget.

In 2008 Sigtuna Brygghus produced just 35,000 litres of beer. A year later that total had more than doubled to 100,000 litres. This year the brewery has already taken orders for more beer than they brewed in the whole of  2009, predicting to end 2010 on around 250,000 litres.

But such a meteoric rise in volumes doesn’t surprise Mattias. He believes the brewery can increase capacity to 1 million litres per year. “After that we’d have some serious space issues at the brewery” he says with a wry smile.

To meet the surge in demand for Sigtuna’s beers the brewery now employs another full-time brewer, Emil Lindén, who Mattias describes as the ”hardest working man in brewing” and his ”partner in crime” while the brewery owners themselves often roll up their sleeves and spend their free time helping to bottle and pack beers.

“It’s very much a team effort here at Sigtuna”, says Mattias. “When we’ve got so many orders and deadlines to meet it’s a question of everybody getting stuck in”.

Mattias’s journey from enthusiastic home brewer to a leading figure in the Swedish craft beer movement has been as as fast and frenetic as his taste in music.

British malts and UK and US hops are used to create many of Sigtuna Brygghus's beers.

In 2005 he was brewing beer at home but a visit to another fledgling Swedish microbrewery Dugges Ale & Porterbryggeri in Gothenburg was to set him on his path to becoming a Head Brewer. After pestering Dugges’s owner to give him work experience he quit his job as a truck mechanic (“which I hated”) and spent a year learning the brewing process from the bottom up.

He then endured a particularly frustrating four months at Swedish brewing giant Spendrups, where he described his role as “opening and closing valves and pushing buttons more than anything to do with brewing beer”.

After qualifying from a two-year brewing course run by Ludvika technical college he was invited to step up to the big league and become Sigtuna’s first Head Brewer.

A look in the fermentation room at Sigtuna reveals rows of full tanks, each labelled with the name of a beer that will shortly be launched at the Swedish monopoly stores.

East River Lager was being filtered when BeerSweden paid a visit. To the left is the beer before it passed through the filter and to the right the finished 'look'.

While I was visiting the brewing team were filtering 4,000 litres of East River Lager, a very drinkable, crisp US-style lager that I wrote about a little while back. I managed to take a few sneaky sips and can confirm that this is yet another beer worth filling your fridge with when it is released at the Systembolaget on March 1st. Read a full review of this beer in the next few days.

Next out were not one but two Easter beers from Sigtuna this year. One is very good, the other is exceptional. I’ve already waxed lyrical about both beers here.

Add to this the forthcoming releases of ESB (Extra Sigtuna Bitter), described as a light bitter with malty tones and a pronounced bitter finish brewed using only British hops, Sigtuna Red Ale and Sigtuna Sommar Vit, a Belgium-style wheat beer spiced with lemongrass, lime and orange and its obvious Mattias and the gang have their hands full.

“And we wouldn’t want it any other way”, he says, and smiles as he heads back into the brewery to turn the hard rock music back on.

Dugges Ale & Porterbryggeri from Gothenburg is arguably the coolest of the new generation of Swedish microbreweries. With their eye-catching ‘Miami’ coloured bottle labels and tongue-in-cheek brand names Dugges have always succeeded in making their beers look good as well as taste great.

I’ve personally had more than one enjoyable session at the Stockholm Beer Festival propped up against their stand, when it was all High Fives, me talking a lot of bollox and then leaving feeling a bit of an idjit.

Dugges was early to embrace American hops in its beers, creating a succession of innovative and generally well received beers. They’re largely responsible for making Swedish beers fun again, creating a buzz based on humour but with very serious beers to back their micro-message up.

I say all this as a precursor to what’s coming next because I really like Dugges. Really I do.

But I don’t like their Spring Beer Lager.

It wasn’t that long before things started going wrong. When I poured the beer into the glass I noticed it was a rather cloudy pale copper colour with a thin slightly yellow head – strange for a premium lager I thought. The first line in my notebook reads: ”Is this beer ok?”

I was partially reassured by mild hoppy smells of grass and orange but they were muted by something else unpleasant and yeasty.  In the mouth things went from bad to worse. The body is quite thin, with some initial malty sweetness followed by a short-lived bitter finish. The third line of my notebook reads: ”where are the hops?”

It all culminated with the strong taste impression of wet paper, a classic tell-tale sign of oxidized beer, which leads me to wonder if I stumbled upon a dud bottle. I hope it was, because this beer was stale and dull and Dugges is normally anything but.

So take this review at face value with a disclaimer that I may not have experienced Dugges Spring Beer at its best. I’d be very interested to hear what you all thought of it and will revisit it again to see whether I was just unlucky this time. If I was then forget all of the above, or as Dugges themselves would probably say, Never Mind the Bollox!

Dugges Spring Beer Lager

A Premium Lager

4.7% ABV

Systembolaget Article Number: 1479