So to Cains Lager then. Voted by GQ the second best thing in the world. Not that I would ever trust GQ to be my beer bible. Despite us not being bale to order their stuff, the nice men at Cains delivered a pallet or so of the Cain Lager bottles. The scrum for them would have been heartening for the brewery if it wasn’t a bunch of students in a room full of free beer. The next ten minutes resembled the apes in 2001 pre-obelisk: scratching their heads and battering the bottles trying to get them open. I never travel without a bottle opener.
So is it the second coming of lagers? Well, its not a bad lager. Brewed under the German Purity laws it has plenty of flavour – along the lines of Pilsner Urquil. Refreshing, medium bodied but with a slightly metallic aftertaste, which soon vanishes – it is a nice brew. But is it good enough to take on the big boys. Well, it is nicer than plenty of bottled lager. But a lack of UK lager history may scupper it. It will need serious marketing money to work, and I am not sure that is there. Of UK lagers by the way, I think Young’s Pilsner and Sam Smith’s Pure Brewed are nicer. But these are tied to their pubs, so if Mitchell & Butler are rolling Cains Lager out to 100 pubs in London, it will be worth watching.