Tsar? Da!

I opened a bottle of Russian Imperial Stout which I won at a Stockport CAMRA do earlier.

Tsar from the Buxton Brewery is more brown than black, despite what the photo below looks like. Most stouts have a coffeeish aftertaste; Tsar has it in spades in the aroma and up front when you take the first sip. It also drinks a lot lighter than its 9.5% strength.

It's quite ironic that a Derbyshire brewery is brewing a Russian Imperial Stout - Thornbridge in Bakewell also brew one - given that strong London porters really broke into the Baltic market in the 1820's after tariffs ended the export of Burton ale to St Petersburg.

Russian icon

I'm in a bit of a Russian phase at the moment.  I'm just over half way through Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman's epic novel centred on the Battle of Stalingrad, which has prompted me to dig out my Russian Made Simple book which I last had a go at about twenty years ago.

Now the Russian hat trick is complete with the news that Wells and Young have brewed a new batch of Courage's Russian Imperial Stout, the strong bottle conditioned beer that was last brewed in 1993. Originally brewed at the Anchor Brewery in Southwark by Thrales and then Barclay Perkins for export by sea to the court of the Russian tsars in St Petersburg, it's a beer I've never drunk and I'm looking forward to its release next year.

Here's a description of Russian Imperial Stout by the journalist Cyril Ray who visited the cellars of the Anchor Brewery in the mid-1960's.

"The firm's visitors' bar stood me a bottle of the 1962 Russian Stout...A smooth, rich, velvety depth-charge of a drink - sweet, but with the sweetness only of the malt, for there is no added sugar, and yet with the bitter tang of hops...[and then] down to the Russian cellars to taste one or two that had been specially bottled and long matured. First the 1957, poured from a pint champagne bottle that had been corked and wired, exactly like champagne, and matured lying on its side...The cork came out with a pop, and the beer frothed creamily into the glass, dark and rich. Smoother than the 1962, I thought, but it was surpassed by the 1948 which came from a full-sized champagne bottle, smelled like burgundy and drank like liquid silk."

Let's hope Wells and Young can reach these standards.

h/t to Ron at Shut up about Barclay Perkins for reproducing the Cyril Ray piece which you can read in full here.

Life and Fate

I've just ordered a copy of Vassily Grossman's novel Life and Fate from Amazon and am looking foward to reading it. It's set in part at Stalingrad, one of the decisive battles of World War II which Grossman witnessed as a journalist at the front.                   

At Stalingrad at the end of of 1942 around  three hundred thousand German troops were encircled by the Russian army. After a siege which saw massive bombardment of the city, starvation and brutal street to street fighting, about a hundred thousand German soldiers were taken prisoner by the Russians in February 1943 and transported to labour camps. Of these, just five thousand ever saw Germany again, only being released in 1955 after Stalin's death.

I was reminded of a trip I made to the small Bavarian town of Aying during a holiday to Munich last summer.  Aying is a small, pretty place just south of Munich which is known for its brewery. In the square is a war memorial, three sides of which are dedicated to those killed in World War I and II. The final side though contains the names of dozens of inhabitants of this small town who died "in other places than the field of battle" in the late 1940's and early 1950's in Stalin's labour camps.

It's no surprise that thousands of German soldiers fought on at Stalingrad after their officers had surrendered, knowing that they had a choice between a quick death in battle or a slow one in captivity.