What role does nostalgia play in the enjoyment of beer? This question has been playing on my mind of late. You see when in the bottleshop on Friday to choose my weekend's beers I found myself gravitating towards some old favorites.
The craft beer world is often a little obsessed with chasing uniques, the latest trend having to gather up the best of the beers that came out that week, and in this race to try the untried too often we don't drink the classic beers often enough, those beers that we know are going to be great.
And there is something comforting in knowing what you'll get, being sure that when you take that first sip that you know you'll think - Gee that's a good beer.
So let's meet today's favourites. The first is a beer which untappd tells me I haven't drunk since 2016, which is way to long to go between drinks. It's a Baltic porter called Voodoo from one of the old school craft breweries in Melbourne, Australia - 2Brothers.
This brewery was one of the first breweries that I got involved with when I used to be a proper beer writer, and they were consistently pushing our great beers, when they we one of maybe 15 breweries in Melbourne you used to see there beers everywhere, but they seems happy enough to focus on their local area, which is on the other side of Melbourne (for International readers Melbourne is a big place, about 30-35km of continuous suburbs North, South, East and West and a population of about 4 million people) and since about 150 odd breweries have launched so I don't see their beers much anymore so I lost touch with them.
So when I saw a can of Voodoo I was all in, and yeah it's still a great beer, jet black, almost no carbonation, not big by modern standards for a baltic porter (only about 6.5%) but a classic roasted old school porter which warmed my heart on a raining Saturday night in front of the footy.
I should say that my football team has fled the state - my team North Melbourne, who train a couple of K up the road from my house have been forced to move to Queensland. (The second wave outbreak and second lock-down is a Melbourne only problem at this stage) so the rest of Australia are carrying on with their lives, and with my Football team, meaning I only ever get to see them on TV nowadays.
But enough of that, back to the beer. Our second classic is Praline from another Melbourne brewery called La Sirene and this beer is a Chocolate, Hazelnut and vanilla stout and it is amazing, this was the desert beer before everyone started trying to make beer taste like pastry.
And that is the thing with this beer, it was never gimmicky, it never used adjuncts - no it was a classic, well constructed beer from a brewery that specialises in Belgian style and farmhouse ales.
So these two beers gave me a wonderful feeling of comfort even if my footy team lost and my world for the next five weeks is going to be being at home, exercising and buying essentials (which includes beer) and that's it.
Oh and as always this post is part of #Beersaturday organised by @detlev - you can check out all the details and enter here
That voodoo porter looks pretty good.
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