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the briton s i was casting around for petitions to sign encouraging remarks to make etc before i remembered that that s all over the bad thing we were trying to prevent has happened albeit not quite in the way we expected i drank my mild sitting next to a lone bottle of jack daniel s in a glass case on the wall flotsam from the wreck of what was once a rather fine whisky pub but at least it s still open and selling decent beer lastly for now i was slightly surprised to see the paramount serving what their app referred to as jw lees boddinton s i thought the plan was to keep the free trade distribution fairly select it wasn t at its best sadly i m a bit of a fan of lees neo boddies but it s turning out to be very variable catch it at its best and it s clean and dry with an astringently bitter finish this however had the look and feel of a beer in good nick but the flavour was wheaty and biscuity with a weak instant coffee s worth of bitterness on the finish a pretty bog standard amber bitter in other words perhaps it hadn t had long enough in the cellar although if that is the problem there are lees pubs out there that haven t had the memo either more to the point i preceded that with rather a good dark mild brightside sup not much sup with you more later if i can come back from that pun by phil posted in camra man crawler drink local mild magic very not pale n oppy comments 0 a little crazy 22 february 2026 5 23 pm 1 in search of monsters i don t know how i missed this but miss it dammit i did readers outside stockport and environs may be unaware of the monsters weekends which have been periodically put on at the petersgate tap as events go they re fairly unstructured you turn up any time from opening time on friday and you have a choice of appropriately monstrous beers from torrside with occasional contributions from other breweries everything is served in thirds you may be able to persuade the bar staff to pour you a half if you really want it but two thirds shalt thou not order and a pint is right out even if you stick to thirds it can get a bit messy the lineup for last weekend is typical if you d gone right through the card and with those beers why wouldn t you you d have ended up shipping the equivalent of a third of a pint at 67 5 a k a a pint at 22 5 or five pints at 4 5 not quite beer festival levels but you wouldn t want to stop for a drink on the way home i mean in point of fact you might well want to stop for a drink on the way home drunk logic is like that but it would not be wise anyway i missed last weekend but having beer related business in heaton chapel made a quick trip to the petersgate tap last friday to see what they still had on on the way back i reckoned i could fit in heaton hops a bar i only ever seem to visit on camra crawls this post is about the beers i had there and at the tap it s also about brewdog going into administration i ll get to that the one keg beer on the monsters list torrside s enigmatically titled ba abw21 was still on at the tap torrside have an english and an american barley wine the american version makes heavy use of new world hops which gives a distinct smokey marmalade edge to what would otherwise be a big caramel fruitgum of a beer what we had here was a barrel aged american barley wine brewed in 2021 hence ba abw21 it poured dark and murky a slightly unprepossessing appearance which i assume it owed to the barrel ageing the bottled barley wines i ve had from torrside have all been bright it tasted beautiful though it was a barley wine dark and sweet but the american hops added bitterness and a bit of grapefruit and pineapple to the mix charred grapefruit and pineapple perhaps the years in barrel had left it smooth mellow and relatively light bodied with a whiff of something else pine tobacco which may have been from the wood or may have been the hopping coming through a really fine beer the cask version of the barrel aged rauchwine had also survived from last weekend here i confess my hopes weren t high i m very fond of torrside s smoked beers rauchbier smoked beer rauchwine smoked barley wine but a full week in a tapped cask tends not to do any beer much good i was half expecting to get smoke and not much else in the event i wouldn t have mistaken it for a fresh beer there was very little carbonation there but in all other respects i couldn t have been more wrong it was astonishingly good a superb barley wine deep and rich with a flavour that just kept on developing there was smoke there but the time in barrel had tamed it blending it in with the dominant flavours the closest i can come to describing the overall effect is to say that it was a bit like alternating between a strong porter and a tawny port with a bonfire next door amazing beer i stopped at heaton hops before heading home and almost regret doing so you can t really complain about bars being too busy not if you re expecting any sympathy from their managers anyway but hh does seem to get full very easily in the five minutes after i d sat down that weekday afternoon it went from full ish but ok to uncomfortably crowded by which i mean that three more people came in or it may have been four either way the balance of the slightly unpalatable choice before me when i first checked the buses between the one in less than ten minutes time and the one more than 40 minutes away rapidly tipped in favour of drinking up so i probably didn t take my third of northern monk barrel aged heaven a bourbon barrel aged maple and vanilla imperial stout 11 5 as slowly as i would otherwise have done and coming to it straight from the torrside rauchwine was probably unfortunate and i ve probably well almost certainly had too many imperial stouts over the years to be easily impressed it was a big chewy sweet stout with distinct overtones of bourbon and just a touch of alcohol heat it did what it said on the board and did it pretty well if this had been the first imperial stout i d ever tasted or even the first one that had been aged in a bourbon barrel i would have been knocked out as it was i felt the sweetness was overdone and i wondered if somehow you could have filtered out that maple element how complex or interesting the impy stout itself would have been what does any of this have to do with brewdog possibly nothing but let s see how we get on 2 everyone has a share brewdog as we know are currently embarking on a search for the next phase of investment for the business with a view to strengthening the long term future of the brewdog brand and its operations the background to this innocuous sounding announcement is that they haven t made a profit since 2019 and even more alarmingly annual revenue growth is only barely positive their main investor tsg partners have already loaned them 20 million to keep them afloat the investment the company are now looking for really means buyers they have appointed a restructuring specialist to run a sale process in effect brewdog are in administration the company may now be broken up and parts of it liquidated depending who bids for what and on what terms ultimately we can blame the current situation on brewdog s aggressive management style and their drive for expansion and revenue growth at all costs you can go broke going for turnover a more immediate cause of the current mess was the 2017 deal with tsg partners which valued the company at 1 billion but gave the private equity firm a 22 3 stake in the extraordinary form of shares with a guaranteed 18 return that was never going to end well thanks to the wonders of compound interest tsg partners original investment of 213 million is now worth 800 million and brewdog s estimated value as of 2025 was 500 million moreover tsg have first call on the company s assets as a creditor it doesn t seem likely that anybody else is going to get much out of the company certainly not any equity punks who haven t been able to shift their shares so aggressive management over ambitious expansion plans and a financing deal that was somewhere between wildly optimistic and frankly insane perhaps with a side order of ibg ybg maybe brewdog s impending demise restructuring has nothing to do with beer or maybe it s part of the same picture as that for me disappointingly bland and unsurprising 11 5 barrel aged imperial stout after all when craft beer first hit the mainstream in the uk which is very much and not at all coincidentally the same time that brewdog first started making headlines bars like heaton hops were thin on the ground and 10 barrel aged stouts were the stuff of dreams at least they were the stuff of transatlantic fanboying i remember seeing mark dredge talking about dark lord day and thinking well i do like bateman s but is it that special then as craft beer and its weird new styles and flavours began their assault on the mainstream brewdog capitalised on the moment their bars in particular did a balancing act weirdly parallelling j d wetherspoons spoons have the core appeal of inclusiveness of not turning away anybody who s got the price of a cup of tea on top of that in terms of real ale you can be pretty confident you ll get something in decent condition and there s a fair chance you ll find something interesting i ve had several beers i d grade at 4 in spoons and a couple of 4 5s the fact that you ve got a non zero chance of seeing a beer as good as elland 1834 or acorn gorlovka on the bar isn t the most obvious part of spoons appeal but i think if it wasn t there the chain would look very different any idiot can run a chain of pubs with boring and mediocre beer after all no links no pack drill similarly brewdog bars have the core appeal of exclusive ness if the music s too loud etc on top of that you can be pretty confident you can get a decent pint of something identifiable as craft beer and there s a fair chance you ll find something interesting but that only works for as long as craft beer is interesting and i m increasingly unsure that it still is what have you got an ipa another ipa a golden ale an amber ale oh come on that s just a bitter a new england ipa yeah yeah what else a west coast ipa ok bit different bit old school couple of strong ones 7 that s barely a double ipa but ok and yeah an impy stout barrel aged yeah ok increasingly it feels as if breweries in the craft space are just ticking the same few boxes not to pick on northern monk especially but the sense of familiarity of playing the same game that brewdog excel led at intensifies when i read on untappd that that imperial stout had a divine depth of bourbon and maple flavour and was decadent enough to make an angel blush it s called heaven you see by contrast the untappd entries for the two torrside beers i had read as follows a 10th birthday special release and which to be fair is probably going a bit too far the other way i m a grumpy old git admittedly and the customer base for decent beer isn t entirely made up of grumpy old gits whatever you may have heard about camra there is a market for those craft beer styles if there s an ipa on every bar you see that s not because people aren t buying them and lots of brewers do them perfectly well but i do think familiarity is taking over from excitement these days and a company like brewdog geared rather too heavily geared for continual expansion needs a continuing supply of excitement if it isn t going to run out of road 3 damn few ok so what does any of that have to do with torrside and their monsters i don t want to misrepresent torrside a lot of the beers they produce are session strength and many of them aren t all that different stylistically from beers produced by any other brewery but they do have at the very least a well established sideline in unusual beers often unusually strong those beers are generally a bit off the craft beaten track think barley wine rather than double ipa and sometimes they re off the map completely i don t think i ve had a smoked barley wine from any other brewer let alone a barley wine brewed with blackberries they don t always work but even the misfires are never less than interesting i tasted a strong white stout a few years ago which i described at the time as like de garre s tripel in bad as well as good ways and when they do work as my tasting notes above suggest they re more than interesting they go places you weren t expecting and can t always describe battle pug 2021 is officially described as a chinook barley wine from an ex moscatel ex smoked wheat wine barrel my personal tasting note read fruity golden ale with something bigger and weirder concealed about its person deceptively massive the last bit probably refers to the strength which was 9 but in its way it s a good summary of a lot of torrside beers you may think you know what you re getting but don t be too sure they re deceptively massive you can see where this post is going or could be going the fading of the buzz around craft may mean casualties among those who thought it would go on for ever but it clears the field for those who march to the beat of their own drummer doing craft isn t the route to guaranteed success any more perhaps those who survive will be those who are willing to in the words of noted business analyst seal get a little crazy i d love that to be true not the part about the casualties i don t like seeing anyone in the world of beer losing their job with the possible exception of james watt who won t but the bit about the originals and enthusiasts being the ones who will clean up sadly it s not the way to bet rather than imploding dramatically it seems far more likely that the craft scene will fade out with a whimper gradually subsiding into the mainstream brewing new england ipas and strong stouts will be no more noteworthy no more of a branding opportunity than brewing golden ales and lagers there ll be no buzz around what was once craft beer and no premium attached to craft styles financial or reputational and those who survive will just be those who keep their costs under control give the public what they want and manage to avoid runs of bad luck same as always but that does at least mean that after the craft wave just as much as during and even before it those who make the good interesting and different stuff will be those who make the good interesting and different stuff same as it ever was by phil posted in craft is it chinstroker drink local life s great mysteries love hate relationship with jdw s that s uh hip hip hip hip very not pale n oppy comments 1 older posts beer notes about this blog bitter mild porter and stout cider perry bottled beers search what s it all about craft is it 52 folk songs aargh keg best of the rest of the fests camra man chinstroker crawler days of miracle and wonder drink local free as in beer going down the pub imaginary friends large brown bottles life s great mysteries love hate relationship with jdw s mild magic moon under water not 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