The road to recovery leads to beer

Spoiler alert, just like the previous post, there is very little in this article that relates directly to beer, although the good news is that I’m starting to feel a lot better than I did mid-week when I drafted that particular piece. It’s still “man flu” as far as Mrs PBT’s is concerned, especially as she has largely shaken off her bout of the lurgy, but at least she isn’t blaming me for bringing the infection into the house.

We ventured out, earlier today, just for a shopping trip over to Kings Hill (West Malling), but both perhaps mindful that we’ve done very little in the way of Christmas preparations. More about that later, but on the plus side, I finally managed to pick up a few cans of that Forged Dry Irish Stout I wrote about back in August. There was just a few, slightly tired looking four packs of the beer, lurking in the beer aisle at ASDA’s Kings Hill supermarket, which was more of a surprise than anything else.

I only discovered the cans, after leaving Eileen at the checkout queue, and doubling back to the alcohol section, not quite on a whim, but more so because I remembered that ASDA was the UK grocery chain chosen by brand founder and owner Conor McGregor, for the launch of this new entrant to the stout market, on this side of the Irish Sea. Rather than repeat the story behind Forged Irish Stout, and the involvement of its “colourful” MMA fighter, and founder, the link here will take you to the article from 10^th August, which attracted 90 page views, but zero comments.

Perhaps I’m being churlish by describing the product launch as over-hyped, but I have looked for the beer in several other ASDA stores and drawn a complete blank. For the record, Forged Stout is undoubtedly a very good beer, although whether it’s poised to take the Dry Irish Stout mantle away from Guinness, is open to question. Instead, I would argue the case for Black Heart Draught from BrewDog, a beer which is receiving far more in terms of promotion and presence within UK supermarkets than an upstart from across the Irish Sea.

Moving on, the carpet fitters have finally finished the job, and for the first time since the beginning of October, when we departed for our Mediterranean cruise, we can walk up and down the stairs without waking those on either side of us. It’s not until you’re without a particular facility or feature, that you realise just how much you miss it, and hobbling up and down the creaking bare boards of a 90-year-old staircase certainly wasn’t the most joyous experience in the world.

Given the daily traffic up and down a staircase, and the disruption involved in painting the surrounding wall and ceilings, it made perfect sense to call in the decorators whilst we were out of the country for an extended period. We’d instructed the tradesmen to remove the rather worn carpet from the stairs, landing and hallway, although three weeks later when we returned from holiday, the starkness of the bare wooden floors and stair treads came as something of a shock, especially when viewed against the freshly painted walls and ceiling.

I contacted a well-known national chain carpet store, and they arranged for a surveyor to call at the end of the week. Mrs PBT’s chose the carpet, we paid the bill and expected to hear from a fitter within a few weeks. Those “few” weeks dragged on into a month and a half, and if I hadn’t phoned the company, we’d probably still be walking up and down a carpet less staircase. The girl I spoke to in customer services had somehow mixed-up Tonbridge with nearby Tunbridge Wells – she excused herself by saying she was from Essex, nuff said, but somewhere along the line the company had obviously mislaid our order.

To cut a long story short, the father and son team of carpet fitters arrived mid-afternoon on Thursday, cut and laid the carpet for the hall and landing, but had to return the following day to complete the stairs. This was because the carpet was too cold, having come straight from the warehouse, and this meant it wouldn’t flex sufficiently to fit snuggly around the alternate 90° angles of a slight of stairs. You'd never have thought carpet laying could be so technical, but it does make perfect sense when you think abut it. The fitters did a first-class job, and it’s hard to describe the joy felt from walking up and down a newly carpeted staircase. That’s another job crossed off from a slowly dwindling “must do” list, and its completion has come at just the right moment.

I returned to work this morning, and there are now just two more working days for me before the lengthy Christmas shutdown. I’ve only has a couple of beers over the past 10 days, the last one being a bottle of Fuller’s excellent London Porter. At the moment tea and coffee have more of an appeal, but as the week goes on, I fully expect to be indulging once again in a glass or two of the finest hopped, malt beverages.

Since returning from the cruise, and prior to picking up this bug, I’d began drinking my way through a few of the Oktoberfest Biers I bought from Lidl, back in September – see Wiesn-Tragerl from Kalea. So far, they’ve been malt-driven, quite sweet in taste, and with a noticeable touch of ethyl alcohol on the palate.  This is perhaps not entirely surprising, given that most of these beers have abv’s of between 5.5 & 6.5 %, and this matches the experience of many beer drinkers. Here, the consensus is that an abv of around 5% is the ideal strength for a quaffing beer, especially when the beer is a pale-coloured lager.

This is a statement I not only agree with but is one which matches my own experience of enjoying beer over half a century. Discovering that the 6.0% beers served up at the legendary Franconian Annafest, were only sold in litre measures did make the event far more of a challenge than it should have been, and if I’m brutally honest, less enjoyable than I’d been anticipating. My Annafest experience happened 10 years ago, with most of our visits to the Kellerwald taking place during daylight hours.

During the evening, it was refreshing to take the bus back down into the town of Forchheim and enjoy a few “normal” strength beers in one of the local pubs, along with a bite to eat. I suppose though, that when you’re part of a crowd, swaying along with the music, whilst chugging a large earthenware mug of strong Festbier, you don’t really notice yourself becoming more and more intoxicated as the session wears on.

 Hey now, let’s not become too moralistic over this, because events such as Annafest and the far better-known Munich Oktoberfest (similar high strength beers and litre measures are the order of the day at the Wiess’n), are about letting ones hair down, joining in with the spirit of the event, and generally having a god time in the company of similarly intoxicated revellers, many of whom you won’t have met until an hour or so before hand.

So, on that note, and with dreams and fond memories of time spent in Bavaria and Franconia, it’s time to draw this narrative to an end, and time too for an early night, spent dreaming of such things. "Zum Wohl" as the Germans would say!