Champion Ale

I picked up a bottle of McEwan's Champion Ale from Sainsbury's last week. I'd seen mixed reviews of it online, but you can't really go wrong at £1.50 for almost a pint of a 7.3% beer. A strong ale in the Scottish "wee heavy" style, it was first sold in 1998 after winning a competition, hence the name, and is the British version of a beer brewed for the Belgian market, 8% Gordon's Scotch Ale.

William McEwan's, who began brewing at Fountainbridge on the outskirts of Edinburgh in 1856, joined the twentieth century merry-go-round of brewery mergers and acquisitions by linking up with local rivals William Younger's to form Scottish Brewers in 1931, before becoming part of Scottish & Newcastle in 1960 (one of my childhood memories is of driving into Manchester along Princess Parkway past their Moss Side brewery with the McEwan's Laughing Cavalier on the side) and then Heineken in 2008; their beers are now brewed by Marston's at the former Wells & Young Eagle Brewery in Bedford.

The label describes the beer as "smooth, full-bodied and complex", and it's certainly that. The first thing that hits you as you pour it into the glass is the waft of alcohol. There's quite a pronounced metallic taste and some sherryish notes, a bit like Fuller's 1845, one of the few remaining Burton ales, a style not a million miles away from Scottish "wee heavy".

I expect a few similar beers will be brewed for the coronation of King Charles III next summer.

Up for the Cup?

I watched Australia's 84-0 demolition of Scotland in the Rugby League World Cup last night, in front of a sparse crowd in that hotbed of the sport, Coventry.

Surely the time has come for a two-tier competition in which the lower ranked nations play amongst themselves before one of them joins the three top teams, Australia, New Zealand and England, in the knockout stages.  I'm all for spreading and developing the game around the world, but one-sided contests like last night's don't help anyone.

The sport should probably also look at excluding some of the artificial teams that are now turning up to World Cups, representing countries where the game isn't played at professional level and there's little public interest in it (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Jamaica, Greece, Italy and Lebanon), made up of players who hail from Sydney or Salford rather than Sorrento or Skiathos and are the distant descendants of immigrants from them, making them in effect Australia and England "B" sides.

Australia's opening match at Headingley last Saturday night was also sparsely attended, despite Leeds being on the M62 corridor that runs through rugby league's heartlands. The postponement of the competition because of Covid and rising inflation have both pushed up costs, just as the disposable income of fans has dipped,  and the price of tickets is now likely to be beyond the pockets of many diehards, let alone the casual spectator outside the areas where the game has traditionally been played who might otherwise have been prepared to pay for one as a one-off experience. 

Heading for trouble

I watched a TV programme last night in which the former England rugby union hooker Steve Thompson, now 42, described the distressing effects early onset dementia is having on him, his wife and their young children.

Brain damage caused by repeated blows to or pressure on the head is an issue for several professional sports and has also been linked to motor neurone disease. The things he called for – longer breaks between matches, no concussive collisions in training sessions and better care of players during and after their careers – would obviously be welcome, but I get the feeling that they aren't going to be enough and far more radical solutions will be needed for these sports to continue without inflicting more misery on those taking part in them in future.

One of the problems he identified is that not only are rugby players, both league and union, running at each other faster than before but they're also much bigger, so weight restrictions are probably now needed, as well as an end to contested scrums. American football will have to ban helmets too, football heading (the lighter ball doesn't seem to make much difference) and boxing shots to the head. It'll make for very different games, but better that than the ongoing carnage we're seeing now.