The life of a professional beer writer has its highs and lows. The lows usually centre on the automatic text telling me my bank balance every Friday afternoon. The highs aren’t as regular, but when they come, they make me happier than Jedward abusing certain substances on the Oblivion ride at Alton Towers. Dressed as pirates.
Last month I was in New York. And if that’s not enough, I was in New York’s hottest restaurant. Eleven Madison Park has three Michelin stars and is ranked number 24 in the 50 best restaurants on the planet. Seats are harder to come by than a beer bought by George Osborne.
But I wasn’t at Eleven Madison Park. Flushed by its success, the owners just opened a new place called NoMad (as in, North of Madison) and I was there for the opening night.
The mahogany back-bar, supported by two massive carved elephants, is probably worth more than my house. Within a place that’s meant to evoke late 19th-century Paris, “but in a casual, informal way”, you can enjoy a cocktail in the library, surrounded by expertly lit antique books, or hire a private-dining room with a fireplace bigger than some restaurants. Apart from the main kitchen, there’s a separate one just off the main dining room solely to create the house speciality of roast chicken. The food rendered me — literally — speechless.
If someone had told me that the price of the fruits de mer was my life, I’d have gone to the electric chair with a faint, blissful smile.
I don’t normally hang around Michelin-starred restaurants that have whole kitchens devoted to cooking one chicken recipe. If you’ve met me, you’ll appreciate how incongruous this is.
I was there because one of the main attractions of the opening night was a beer. Not just any beer — Harviestoun Bitter & Twisted is one of my all-time top 10. And this wasn’t any old Harviestoun Bitter & Twisted. ‘Bitter & Twisted Zymatore’ is a filtered, kegged version that’s been exported to the US and, on arrival, placed in oak Pinot Noir casks that have also had gin sitting in them for a year, and aged for six months.
The result combines the character of the beer with that of wood, tannins from the wine and microflora from the cask to create a flavour that’s off the scale compared to anything I’ve ever tasted before. I had no words to describe it — at least, none after “Ooh”. And “Wow”. And “Oh, blimey”.
It was on sale in the restaurant for $10 (£6.28) per 12oz glass. Matthias Neidhart of B. United, imports only beers he regards as the best on the planet, and pairs them with barrels by hunch and taste alone, while his son Ben monitors and analyses and gradually learns about whatever it is that’s happening inside the casks.
New York’s top bars and restaurants beg and plead to be considered for one of these treasured containers, and Matthias picks and chooses who gets what. If you’re thinking, ‘That’s just a gimmick,’ my response, paraphrasing Life On Mars character Gene Hunt, would be: “You say that as if it’s a bad thing.”
Even if it were just a gimmick, which it’s not, it’s a sensational one for the image of beer in one of the world’s great foodie cities. We’ve been talking about beer and food matching for years now in the UK, and while there have been many notable successes, we’re still a long way behind the US in making it widespread.
One reason for this is that licensees and restaurateurs believe they can make a higher margin from selling wine with meals rather than beer. “What would you say to people like that?” I asked Kirk, the general manager at NoMad who put the beer list together. “I’d tell them they’re pricing their beers wrong,” he replied.
The trouble with writing pieces like this is that the binary world of beer and pubs interprets them as: ‘Oh, Pete’s now saying beer should go all upmarket and pretentious.’ I’m not. In wine there’s Blossom Hill, and there’s also Château Margaux. And if you want it to, beer can stretch at least as far.
All we need is for British beer to show the same confidence and chutzpah as the Americans, and it can deservedly claim its seat at the very top table. Just ask Harviestoun.