The Blog of Dan

So, in order to maintain my New Year’s resolution of blogging more, I’ve split this blog into two - here you will find music, photos and random nonsense, ond over at justanotherbeerblog.tumblr.com you will find “Just Another Beer Blog” - a blog about, you guessed it, beer.

This week, I’m headed to London for a few days, so there will hopefully be plenty of action on both blogs. Anyway, do what you have to do - follow that, unfollow this, go ahead and deal with it.

Ta.

Summer is long and loud and busy and mental, loving the moments of quiet like this one. Me, The Civil Wars and Left Hand Milk Stout.

Turning 20 in a week. This is mental. I’m not a 20 year old. Part of me wonders if my brain will literally just implode with the sheer incomprehensibility of having been alive for a whole two decades.

Songs are being written, gigs are planned for the coming autumn, new faces are getting involved, music will be important again and this is exciting.

I now live in a real flat like a real person, who has to pay real bills and things. Brand new to me. Scary but awesome at the same time. 

I also brewed my own beer (“Zank Frappa,” a coffee-flavoured mild, for those interested), with the help of @FaithHealer1

Loving a relatively relaxed summer. But at the same time, I need some sort of adventure. I’m addicted to going somewhere foreign and different and new, and it’s been too long. Need to take a trip soon. Suggestions welcome. Preferably cheap and exciting.

With good beer.

As it’s end of exams, and also the end of a VERY long and arduous concert rehearsal, tonight’s reward is to crack open a few beers I’ve been hoarding for a while. So here we go…

#1 - Black Isle Organic | Yellowhammer IPA

Black Isle are an awesome up-and-coming organic microbrewery from the Black Isle (just outside Inverness) up north. Now Scotland has a tonne of microbreweries, all unique and brilliant in their own way, but I have a serious amount of love for these guys. They brew full-flavoured, really well-balanced ales, and everything is done organically and sustainably. Amazing. Yellowhammer is a measly 4% ABV, making it very much a “traditional” (i.e. not American mega-hopped) IPA, but it’s got bags of flavour.

The pour is slightly watery amber, with a massive head, but the nose is fresh and clean, nutty malts and a hint of fruity hops. Despite being very slightly watery, the taste is great, with more of that nutty malt character and a slightly more pronounced grapefruit hop linger. Lovely, and made an excellent match with my pasta/spicy sausage/tomato salad.

#2 - Knops Beer Company | Musselburgh Broke

An even newer and up-and-cominger brewer here, Robert Knops is the man behind this ragtag bunch of Edinburgh beers. The current offerings are a California Common, an IPA and “Musselburgh Broke,” which is what I’ll be drinking this particular night. There is a wonderful back story to this beer, which you can find here.

Pouring a deep chestnut brown and smelling of roasted, smoky malts with a hint of chocolate, I’m not convinced by the “bitter” label that this beer seems to have picked up. Nevertheless, the taste is odd, yet complex and tasty. Lots of sweet, nutty, roasty malts, as is to be expected, but there’s a really nice herbaceous bitterness to it too, which I wasn’t expecting. Not enough to be called a “bitter” by any means, but a lovely balancing feature. Hints of berries, too. A really interesting (and woefully underrated!) beer, would love to try it in cask as I think it would benefit from a bit less fizz. Robert “Edinburgh’s Mikkeller” Knops is definitely one to watch!!

(Feeling slightly overconfident after my Yellowhammer/Italian sausage pairing, I decided to attempt pairing this beer with a white chocolate & raspberry cookie. Bye bye beer. Don’t do it, kids.)

Anyway, there you go - my first ever “proper” beer blog. Scotland’s craft beer scene  = awesome. And if you didn’t know this already, go and find out for yourself.

Today, I saw something that irritated me greatly. Now, I’m not a big one for rants, and I hardly even write about beer that often (although craft beer is a huge passion of mine), so forgive me for this one. No-one’s making you read it. But anyway, here goes.

I’m sure many of you are aware of BrewDog, a small Scottish brewery with a big attitude problem and equally big beers. Ever since they were founded in 2006, they’ve been courting controversy in all manner of weird and wonderful ways - from brewing 18%, 32% and 41% ABV beers to masterminding the controversial (and utterly stupid) website http://www.beerleaks.org/, if it grabs the headlines, they will do it. This isn’t to say their beers aren’t (sometimes) great, but they certainly aren’t subtle.

Many of you may also know of CAMRA, the “Campaign for Real Ale,” a consumer activist group aimed at promoting real ale, real cider and the local British pub. Now this sounds all well and good but in fact CAMRA has a tendency to be moany, old-fashioned and very restrictive in what it chooses to support (cask beers only, no keg), and there are many craft beer drinkers who feel that CAMRA has had its time. I personally think there is still very much a place in British culture for cask ale, and even a place for CAMRA, but this is another blog.

But no-one, and I mean no-one hates CAMRA as much as BrewDog. In their own words (here), “CAMRA are almost single handedly responsible for holding back innovation in British brewing with their overbearing emphasis on a narrow spectrum of beer styles. Most British small brewers do nothing to further the craft beer revolution.”

In my opinion, and I apologise for the language but I feel quite strongly about this, this is utter bullshit. Marble, Kernel, Thornbridge, Dark Star to name but a TINY number of fantastic, exciting, innovative British brewers. But anyway, this is not the point.

This evening, as is often the case when beer is required, me and a friend were at the new BrewDog bar (which, despite my reservations about BrewDog as a company, is an incredible bar) having a couple of celebratory drinks to mark the end of the academic year. And as I was walking towards the bathroom (of all places), I noticed a blackboard advertising a BrewDog beer festival from June 16th-18th, the EXACT SAME DATES as this year’s CAMRA Real Ale festival in Edinburgh.

Now, I have no doubt that both events will be fascinating, full of great beer. But despite this, I’m sorely disappointed and a bit hurt by BrewDog’s sheer arrogance. This is obviously a completely deliberate move to give CAMRA a kick in the teeth, and poach a fair few beer tourists from the other festival while they’re at it. But where is the sense of camaradery for the wider craft beer cause? Where is the consideration for all the other passionate microbreweries at the CAMRA festival who are trying just as hard to get people interested in their beer? This is really nothing but an agressive marketing strategy, exactly the sort of the thing that you would expect from one of the many mass-market corporate beer machines that BrewDog are so vehemently against. The arrogance, the hypocrisy, the deliberate, agressive, bullying nature of this move is astounding.

May I also point out that many a CAMRA event and CAMRA-approved pub has happily advertised, supported and sold BrewDog beers, so this filthy corporate strategising is simply rude as well as anti-competitive and hypocritical.

In fact if there are others who think the same as me about this (and I know for a fact that there are), I can’t help but wonder if the beer fans’ love affair with BrewDog could be coming to its end - perhaps this is just too far.

/rant

So, I’m back in Vienna with my family for the holidays. 20 degrees and sun, it’s beautiful. Such a shame it’s being completely and utterly ruined by scary coursework.

But it’s ok, because I’m discovering new and fascinating methods of procrastination.

mflow.com - cool new service for music sharing/streaming/buying. The twist is that you can earn money from your recommendations (or ‘flows’): 20% of whatever your followers buy based on your recommendations. So everyone sign up, follow me (I’m dangloverenator) and go and spend ONE POUND on…

The Suburbs by Arcade Fire. That very rare thing, an album that fully deserves all the hype it gets. Noisy, triumphant, clever, epic, beautiful. All at the same time.

I’m sorry, I like Valentine’s day. YES, couples should be dedicated to each other every day, not just one day, and YES it can get very commercial.

BUT, I don’t want to be made to feel guilty or stupid for spending some special time with my girlfriend. Haters gonna hate (don’t let me say that again), but I’ll be having none of it.

So there.

More excitingly, first prints from my friend Holga. The full set is on my bedroom wall, and the other half are dodgily scanned at www.flickr.com/photos/dandanglover . Enjoy.

• BrewDog Alice Porter - Dark, fruity and complex. Seems to be following the new BrewDog trend of subtle but clever beers. I like.
• Anchor Steam Beer - Can’t believe it’s taken me this long to try this classic. But it was worth the wait. Not just a “good session lager,” this is a really interesting beer that has truly earned its place amongst the classic American brews.

In other news, I have quite an exciting project that I want to talk about, but just not yet. However, if you’re reading this and you’re a percussionist, do tweet/email me.

And in other news, I’ve kind of abandoned a lot of my old DGB? music. Sorry. But don’t worry, I’m still writing and, if it’s not arrogant to say so, I think my new stuff is a big improvement. So if you really are insane enough to like the sound of my voice, just hang in there.

Oh also, I may have secured what is effectively my dream job for this summer. More info ASAP.

Peace.

• An “accomplished” film isn’t the same as an “enjoyable” film. Went with the other half to see Black Swan on Saturday. The acting was heart-wrenching, the plot fascinating, the cinematography incredible, and I felt depressed and slightly dirty after watching it. Uncool.

• Setting your alarm on a smartphone is apparently not the same as turning it on. Cue an 8.00am “we’re outside your house” wake-up call from church bandmates. Whoops.

• The age-old “What do you call a drummer who breaks up with his girlfriend? Homeless.” joke is actually slightly accurate. This weekend (and, in fact, almost every day of my life), I wouldn’t have been able to do anything I needed to do without the people who were content to drive me around the place with percussion gear in hand. So thank you all. So, so much. One day, somehow, I will make it up to you.

• The Bow Bar in Edinburgh is incredible. Over 200 malt whiskies, and about 8 constantly rotating cask ales and keg beers (not to mention a large number of bottled beers that I’d never, ever seen before). For a beer geek like me, and my connoisseur-of-everything composer friend, it’s heaven. The lack of music and historic decor gives it a nice olde-world vibe, and the staff genuinely care about what they’re serving. Awesome.

• However, attempting to record a demo of a new song at 1 in the morning, after visiting said bar and sampling a few of their wares, is very, very funny. And completely useless.