Monday, November 08, 2010

Office Hours preview for November 8: English Brown Ale and Porter.

Office Hours with the Publican take place tonight at 6:30 p.m. in Prost at the Public House.

We continue our autumn/winter tasting mandate of surveying Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) style definitions, applying them to beers on the Public House's guest bottle list, comparing and contrasting, and trying to decide which ones, in the current time, need to be carried on a regular basis and which of them do not.

In essence, it is our aim:

(1) To acknowledge the greater availability of beginning-level craft beers and imports on metro area beer lists.

(2) To reduce our stock accordingly, allowing our constantly popular and rotating drafts to showcase styles, freeing resources and space to recast the bottle selection.

(3) To tilt the list more toward the newer generation of seasonally changing styles and labels. In short, more Mikkellers, fewer Sam Smiths.

We do all these things already, but haven't done the necessary culling over the years. Consequently, we're out of balance. Tonight, we'll start with Category 11 — English Brown Ale.

11A. Mild
11B. Southern English Brown
11C. Northern English Brown


Category 12 is Porter, and we'll delve into it, too, probably with Brown Porter, leaving Robust Porter and Baltic Porter for next week.

Here are the links to the BJCP's descriptions.

11. ENGLISH BROWN ALE

12. PORTER

4 comments:

Rob said...

"fewer Sam Smiths"

:(

Ive always considered it to pretty much define English Brown.

The New Albanian said...

I meant Sam Smith as an analogy to the bottled list as a whole, not Nut Brown specifically.

We've been trying to keep 250 everyday list beers and also dozens of others rotating. Because so many of the everyday beers are now widely available elsewhere, it makes more sense to me to be spcialized rather than cover all the bases the way we used to try doing it.

Rob said...

I agree with you on this. Unless Im ordering something Belgiany, I never even look at the bottle list anymore. Draft has more than enough interesting stuff to meet my needs.

So, yeah, the bottled beers that are available anywhere arent goint to get ordered anyway (at least by me).

However, I do wish Uerige Dopplesticke would find its way back onto the list.

The New Albanian said...

Having Uerige around is a goal.

The other element of this is my addressing a few long-annoying distribution issues pertaining to timeliness and availability. It's on the to-do list.