Kieran Haslett-Moore dreams of the beers he might drink in paradise
“Sitting at rustic tables in rural pub gardens in Hertfordshire on long, warm, sunny summer evenings, talking with friends, clouds of cow parsley nodding over the car park wall and martins high above swooping through the flying ants like little fighter planes, while dimpled glasses of Rayment’s BBA or Wethered’s (RIP the pair of them) were slowly emptied”
— Martyn Cornell
Perhaps it’s that I am getting on. I’m almost certainly leaving middle age behind with less ahead than sitting behind me. My chances of making a century are slim.
Perhaps it’s the growing number of funeral order of service sheets on top of the liquor cabinet in my living room that serves as my shrine. What? You don’t have a shrine? Why ever not? The dead aren’t going anywhere you know.
Perhaps it’s the inevitable growing list of health issues that come with surviving long enough to see one’s body decline as opposed to burning out in a blaze of glory as some of the precious eternally youthful faces above my whisky bottles did.
Perhaps it is because as I write this, I am sat in bed with Covid having finally succumbed to the fashion of 5 years ago. Perhaps it is just because I’m a gloomy bastard. Regardless, or more with a surfeit of regard, recently I have been thinking about what the bar looks like in my heaven.
The quote at the top from, the recently-late beer historian Martyn Cornell has been clipped of its context. Martyn was making the point that there is no perfect beer nor a perfect beer experience, however his description certainly sounds like heaven to me. For Martyn’s sake I hope it is what has transpired for him in the afterlife.
On the topic of beer writing and death we can’t go past the late Michael Jackson who penned an astounding last column revealing his fight with Parkinson’s Disease and a near shave with the reaper.
They said they thought I might have had a minor heart attack. My previous travels had taken me from Poland to Patagonia. Now I had pursued a journey almost to the end of my life. As occasionally happens, I had missed the plane I had intended to take. Sometimes I prefer to travel by rail. An advantage of the train is that one can always, like a Glasgow Catholic practising coitus interruptus, get off at Paisley. Metaphorically, this is what I had done. For the moment, I had cheated Mort Subite.
Between filing the column and its publishing Michael took to his bath and never got out. Sometimes writers get to write their own scripts. If given the chance I might leave the last chapter unfinished.
Putting aside for a moment the fact that I don’t believe in heaven, what beer would be tapped upon my celestial bar? Mental exercises like this are of course a folly, however they do focus one’s feelings and opinions about the world, or at least about beer.
The first tap on the bar addresses my first soiree with beer. The year had a 9 at the start of the decade but it was still a novelty. The scene was a rocky bay on the sheltered eastern shore of Evans Bay Wellington. The event: a postal worker’s BBQ.
Steinlager Blue was Lion’s big new thing for the year and 10-year-old me was into it in a big way. 36 years later I still am and probably always will be. The beer now known as Steinlager Classic undoubtably takes a tap on the celestial bar. That I started my relationship with beer at 10 might raise some eyebrows. The legendary head brewer of Harvey’s in Sussex, Miles Jenner, started tasting ale at his father’s side aged 4 so I think of myself as being both in good company and a late starter. It is a bit late to call out the welfare department at any rate.
Next up would be a perfectly conditioned and never to be emptied cask of Galbraith’s Bob Hudson’s. I can vividly remember the day it’s leafy, fruity, malty, living tightrope of flavours danced across my tongue for the first time. The afternoon sun poured down from the ale house’s high windows doing a prize-winning impersonation of a cathedral. The bubbling conversation around the bar suggested a convivial rather than reverential communion. I recently passed a layover in Auckland within the hallowed old ale house, and the Bob’s was as good as ever. It took me a week or two of drinking in Britain to find anything better.
Emerson’s London Porter would take another handpull. I first came face to face with it on the Taieri Gorge Railway, my unsuspecting 18-year-old Tui-drinking taste buds didn’t know what had hit them. The effect it had on me was like an imperial stout and I wasn’t sure it didn’t contain motor oil. I was however sure that I loved it. Well, 27 years later it has had a recipe change but I still love it.
Now for a beer we shall need to conjure up from its own grave. London’s Youngs Brewery closed as its fierce chairman and champion John Young passed away in 2006. The brewery used to brew a range of vibrant hoppy beers in a brewery that was part Willy Wonka part Victorian time warp. Special London Ale was a bottled beer that was absolutely packed with the aniseedy, herbaceous, hedgerow delights of an English hop garden. Incredibly hoppy without the slightest accusation of being tropical. A standout English IPA in all but name. The beer lived on beyond the brewery brewed around the midlands for some years but has since gone to Lupulin Valhalla.
Finally, I will need something to accompany my celestial cheese board. I might stock the backbar with both the almost immortal Thomas Hardy’s Ale and the monk-brewed internet phenomenon Westvleteren 12. For my 30th birthday I asked that people gift me Thomas Hardy’s Ale as it had just been discontinued for the second time. It has since been resurrected. I figured I would assemble a lifetime supply. 16 years later and my cellar is still holding. I have never paid the extraordinary price one sees on shelves for ‘Westy 12’ but I have been lucky enough to taste it several times. Once memorably in the early hours in a lock-in at a pub in Birmingham. If there is a great bar in the sky, I guess it’s like the mother of all lock-ins, no hangover imminent.
Down here on earth as we approach the end of another rotation of the sun it’s a good time to cast our minds and raise a glass to those who left us this year. For what it’s worth I hope I am wrong about the whole afterlife thing. Cheers.