Bottleneck at Capel Curig…
Neil Morrissey’s Risky Business, the everyday tale of celeb beer brewing (and how peed off must Richard Fox be that he’s not in the title?) might be exactly the sort of programme you’d expect us here at FT to be interested in, and we are, but mainly due to our EXCITING CAMEO in said programme! In programme two about 35 minutes in, a focus group is used and there, holding forth on the palatability of their brew is Pete, with me sitting silently (in the clip anyway) behind him.
The important thing to note about the Morrissey-Fox Blonde is that it may be the most tasteless ale I’ve ever had. It makes Discovery taste like Westmalle Triple, it’s about half a step above tap water in the complexity stakes. Before arriving at the focus group (which we knew was being filmed but not why) I had two theories, either it was going to be some sort of celeb beer or that it was ALCOHOL-FREE ALE and for about the first five minutes I honestly thought it was the latter, it has that slight bready taste you get from kaliber.
And Morrissey thinks this blandness is a good thing because like Dan Brown, Indiana Jones and Monty Python before him he is searching for THE HOLY GRAIL, a bitter that lager drinkers will buy. It is an entirely fruitless* task, it’s like trying to get football obsessives into rugby, or indie kids into heavy metal (Oi isn’t heavy metal) because although to the outsider they appear to share similar characteristics and though there may be a few outliers who cross over, they are entirely different beasts and, when you have a microbrewery that can only make three barrels a week, why would you even want to go for that market where Fullers,Youngs and other brewers with hundreds of years of experience have failed? Why not try and make something interesting? OK, the boys down the road who brew their first batch call them bastards for getting a decent recipe on their first attempt, but they also damn it with their “oh, very drinkable” praise, which is clearly brewerese for “this tastes of nothing”.
The other guys in the focus group, none of whom seemed to be primarily ale drinkers, reacted the way i think Morrissey was expecting, even suggesting, after some quite heavy prompting, that (holy grail pt 2!!!) their girlfriends would drink it (imagine that, WIMMIN drinking ale! now some of my best friends are both wimmin and ale drinkers (even CAMRA members) and i’m pretty sure they would find this as unpalatable as I did)!
He actually says here:
If Kronenbourg is the Coldplay of the beer world, then my own beer is like John Lennon and Julie Christie driving through London in a silver Jaguar E-Type circa 1967 with The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset blasting out of the speakers.
no it isn’t mate, it’s James Blunt at best.
Also, [SPOILERS FOR PART THREE] I’ve just found this press release from Tesco, which makes me weep into my pint of Nero/Deuchars/Landlord/insert your favourite ale here
Mind you, with my track record on success or failure of Guinness Red (spotted in the wild in Watford O’Neills on Saturday), it’ll probably go on to be a roaring success…
*although, somehow, the cidermakers (fruitless? cidermakers? oh please yourselves) have managed it…
CarsmileSteve in Do You See / FT / Pumpkin Publog • beer/Drink/ft on tv/neil morrissey/TV • 277 views • Share/Save
Ha ha, the Tesco press release does state that the show was originally going to be called Men Brewing Badly. SPOT ON! That ither brewers got a three part prime time advert for their ales.
There was plenty of conversation about Neil Morrissey’s “image” made in the focus group including me telling a tale about his Crouch End days. Only afterwards did I consider he might be in the room next door. Oh well, if they wanted their revenge they could have pointed out that despite being quite disparaging of the beer, I drank far and away the most of it!
Oh and one other hint for anyone doing any kind of taste test. Always claim you get notes of elderflower. Its the kind of bollocks people always fall for!
Haha I did see this in Tesco the other day and for a fraction of a second considered buying it, just to see what it was like. Then I remembered what you said, THEN I remembered what clueless arses they came across as in the programme, and finally I realised that the label alone would have put me off buying the beer if I hadn’t already known what it was. God what a dreadful label. This CAMRA member ended up getting some Badger Pumpkin Ale instead, nom nom nom.
(edited to add: something else that put me off buying it was that, on watching the programme, I remembered the focus group only wanting men and the APPALLING SEXISM of it all etc etc)
Tasting Notes from Blog O Beer
4000 pubs within the next few months, says NM
i was only able to watch about three minutes of the programme before throwing a rubber brick at the screen and going back online:
things that annoyed me = 1. their basic dilettante sloppiness (basically they need the brewer’s equiv of gordon ramsay breathing fire at them for their lazy mimsiness: “do you want to do this or not? if not FUCK OFF”); 2. morrissey’s pleased-with-self ref to the amount of time he wouldn;t have to help ftb he is an FAMOUS ACTOR
obv this is a set-up to sell a more interesting programme hidden inside it, viz what exactly goes on in a successful micro-brewery — except the makers believe it needs a “structure of quest” and well-known-ladfaces for viewers to stay tuned to the nittygritty — but the lesson of the watchability of hell’s kitcehn usa and kitchen nightmares is that the ultradetail of “how to get it right” is married, in science and art, to an ethic of “doing it badly should HURT YOU THE SCIENTIST/ARTIST — in your heart if not your pocket”
all this heehee it’s-a-lark-innit amateurism is an insult to the foax (doubtless naff and uncharismatic, mediawise) who already do this well, an insult dressed up as a tribute
also: did not see ppl i knew during the three minutes of viewing >:(
The guy from Tesco’s last night was so hammily enthusiastic you’d have been forgiven for thinking he already knew his company were taking the product on.
What annoyed me most in the end was the sheer disingenuousness of all the “of course the celebrity names won’t shift units in this tough market” talk.
(“The boys” were suitably contrite – for the only time in the whole series – when the beer tester failed their homebrewed pints.)