Not set in granite

It was a bit of a nostalgia trip to go back to Aberdeen as a guest of BrewDog in August. At the turn of the millennium I was a student in the city and while it's still the charmingly grey tangle of streets it always was, the beer scene is definitely somewhat different.

BrewDog's own bar, for starters, I remember as being a terrifying out-of-the-way dive that not even the slummiest student pub crawl would dare venture into. Now, of course, it's open and bright and cheery, all trendy bare brick with varnished pine highlights. From the guest beers I just had time to gulp a quick taste of Cool as a Cucumber, the Fyne Ales and Wild Beer collaborative saison. A gulp is all that's needed too, I reckon. It's not the most complex of beers, being all cucumber and not much else: intensely green, in fact, like chewing cucumber skins. It's only 2.9% ABV and there's some mint in it as well, so the refreshment power is considerable, as long as you don't mind being slapped about the chops by a giant cucumber at the same time.

Just across the way from BrewDog Aberdeen is the Aberdeen footprint of Six Degrees North, another local brewery. They've settled on a Belgian theme for their beers, though the bar is far from being a brown café, kitted out starkly in grey concrete and steel. I started with Six Degrees North Bière de Table which arrived an unattractive opaque custardy yellow colour. And, unsurprisingly, the yeast utterly dominates the flavour. Not in a warming fruity Belgian fashion, either: more of an unpleasantly gritty dreggy thing. Yes there are big grapefruit hop notes shouting loudly from inside the flavour, but they're struggling to be heard. It could be I got the tail end of the keg, or it could be that this needs a bit more time in the bright tank. I wasn't impressed either way.

The house pale ale, Hopocrisy, was rather better, if not a whole lot clearer. Though a mere 4.6% ABV there's lots going on in here: sourness at first, followed closely by a big hit of juicy pineapple fruit. When those two settle down a little, there's more of a rustic grain vibe to it, a certain charming roughness around the edges. The big fizz makes it difficult to quaff, and the daft insistence on two-third measures means that doing so wouldn't be any fun anyway, but there are good intentions and brewing skills here. I'd like to have stayed to try the rest of the range.

Dinner at Musa was followed by a trip to Casc: a very swish beer and cigar bar in a basement around the corner. I was heading for 19 hours awake at this stage, with about eleven of those spent drinking beer, so the wobbles were definitely setting in. But not so wobbly that I couldn't identify a beer from my to-drink list on the blackboard, slur out an order for it and scribble together some tasting notes. It's Buxton Jaw Gate IPA, sole sassanach beer of the trip. 5.6% ABV and a dark orange-amber, pouring perfectly clear from the keg. While it looks like it belongs on the heavy and resinous end of the scale I found it quite enlivening, all tart and zesty citrus pith. Much as it revived me I reckoned discretion was the better part of valour and when the Beer O'Clock Show's Steve made a bid for the exit, I wisely followed. Thanks for getting me back to the hotel, Steve: your tactic of navigating there worked so much better than my plan of just staggering about hoping the Hilton would simply hove into view.

But we didn't come to Aberdeen to sleep, so it was back to the bar with Steve, Ian, Wayne and me before 7.30 the next morning. The airport bar, that is. The cask selection was fairly uninspiring, though there was Barley Brown's Black IPA. "That'll do me!" I thought, completely failing to spot that this collaboration was brewed at the Caledonian Brewery. Ugh. Entirely as expected it's a mess of sickly brown sugar: thick, cloying, and definitely not what I'm looking for in a breakfast IPA. Yes, there's a bit of a bitter sharpness, but the beer still doesn't amount to more than Caley 80 with a handful of extra hops. I had to cleanse my palate with a Sweet Action immediately after. If for some reason you want to hear what we talked about around the table that morning, Ian caught it all on his reel-to-reel tape machine and has posted it here. Caveat audiens.

And that's where it all ended. Cheers once again to the BrewDog team for inviting us all to play in their backyard for a day.

Edinbrew

The Caledonian Brewery squats sulkily below Slateford Road in western Edinburgh. It's a mid-Victorian redbrick, now the property of Heineken UK and probably best known for its Deuchars IPA. Tradition looms large here, and they're fiercely proud of their copper kettles, open square fermenters and whole-leaf hops. The hops aren't even kept refrigerated, with a storeroom on the brewhouse roof deemed to do just as good a job. Quite a bit of this year's three-day EBCU autumn session was held there, affording the opportunity to drink freely at both of its hospitality bars. For a brewery famous for just a couple of beers, there's actually a sizeable range produced there. If you've ever encountered the Newcastle special editions in the US, this is where they came from, and it appears also to be the source of Britain and America's supply of Murphy's "Irish" Stout.

The beer that really caught my eye when I spotted it in the cellar bar fridge was Deuchars Imperial, a 5.5% ABV golden ale with a similar sort of buttery kick as standard Deuchars but with an added hop spice to it that makes it much more drinkable. Certainly much more drinkable than the brewery's other icon Caledonian 80/-. This dark red-brown beer came from the cask tasting like a kind of warm chocolate soup: a particularly heavy heavy and, as the brewery's guest, I'm glad I didn't have to put away more than a third of it.

Seasonal of the moment is Vienna Red, a dark amber lager, again from the cask. This has a much lighter touch than the 80/-, with lovely smooth and sweet caramel notes. It's far from complex but pretty decent for what it is. Just on its way out of the brewery, meanwhile, was San Diego Session IPA, a 4.5% ABV beer brought to life by Mike Richmond of Stone Brewing as another commission from JD Wetherspoon. There's more of that trademark butterscotch in here and lots of husky grain. The hops contribute no more than a light fruity tang and the whole is a lot less exciting than the Californian gargoyle might suggest.

Gold seems to be where Caledonian is hanging its hopes, so even though their Flying Scotsman is supposed to be a London Pride competitor it's definitely on the yellow side of the colour spectrum and very lagery with it, providing lots of biscuit sweetness and a smooth effervescence in lieu of full-on fizz. Another unchallenging and approachable beer, though very open to accusations of being boring. Golden XPA is sweeter again, laying on thick golden syrup for a sticky texture and a flavour that starts out a little cloying when freshly poured and just gets more sickly as it warms. The house keg lager is called Three Hop and there's more of the mineral soda effervescence found in the Flying Scotsman -- definitely not a keg beer that can be accused of over gassiness. Unfortunately there's not much else to it: the three German hop varieties which provide the name do little to enhance the taste.

To the south of the city sits the other brewery that offered to show us around and let us try their beers, and Stewart couldn't be more different. This largeish micro is on a major upswing at the moment and the brand new German brewkit is all shiny stainless and flashing lights. We arrived late on a Friday and the day's brewing was over, but a makeshift tasting bar had been set up in the corner.

Stewart's 80/- is far lighter than Caledonian's, and paler too: a clear dark garnet. There's a dusting of strawberries overlying the chewy caramel, and while it is sweet and full-bodied, it's also clean and cool, enhancing the drinkability. The other cask was pouring Stewart's Pumpkin Ale: the final cask of the 2013 vintage as Halloween was some days behind us. A deep orange colour, I found this to be quite lagery, but in a good way: the hops impart a grassy kind of bitterness and there's quite an assertive sparkle. Some light fruitiness, which may or may not be actual pumpkin flavour, hovers in the background and the inevitable spicing is very subtle, refreshingly so.

At the edge of the bar were two minikegs of Edinburgh Gold, a rather lumpy golden ale with disturbing clumps of yeast bobbling about in my glass. It's big on artificial fruit flavours -- Refresher chews and Lucozade -- and the whole is just a bit too sweet for my liking. Back in town later I encountered Stewart's Black IPA in a pub. More red than black, this, and liquorice is the main feature. The hops bring a pleasant sprinkling of bitterness, but not at the levels I'd expect for something calling itself a black IPA.

More Edinburgh pub action coming up as we round off the trip in the next post. I'll leave this one with the observation that Edinburgh's craft brewery is the one with the ultra-modern fully-automated brewkit, while the multinational industrial macro makes its beers on old-fashioned equipment entirely by hand. If you're hanging on to a definition of craft beer based on its method of production, here's a comparison to give you pause.