My time in Canada showed me too that altho' it is nice to try and get a 'taste of home' in beer, it is often much better to drink what is brewed locally as many beverages do not travel at all well.
This is definitely the case with a number of excellent UK brews, S. For example, Coniston Bluebird Bitter regularly wins prizes in local CAMRA beer festivals and has won the Grand Championship at the All-Britain 'main event' CAMRA competition a couple of times; yet, in spite of the fact that it's bottle-conditioned—one of the very few of an increasing number of
bottled real ales from the UK to be imported here and reasonably available—it usually tastes watery and almost characterless. Since I've had Bluebird in a number of pubs in England itself, I
know that that's not the case with Coniston on its home ground—but clearly, it hates travel with a vengeance. Something similar has happened to the Wychwood beers on occasion, and as for Sam Smith's Old Brewery Pale Ale... better pass over
that one in silence. :waah: I remember how striking and complex it was when I first stumbled across it in the 1970s (in Santa Barbara, weirdly enough); now, it has almost as little character as a typical American piss-and-wind product like Coors Lite. Part of the problem may be quality decline at the source, but again, I've had it out of UK handpumps and there wasn't anything wrong with it
there. So again, I think that a lot of British ales suffer in transit, and it wouldn't surprise me for some of ours to undergo a similar fate going the other way.
What I would expect, though, is that a lot of the Stone beers, or e.g. Bell's Two-Hearted Ale and the like, the very best of our 'San-Diego' double IPA style, would do quite well over on your side of the pond—because the massive alcohol content would tend to keep them in condition (7.2%), just as Meantime IPA, or Hoppy Otter at 6.9%, does very well over here for the same reasons. I'm not a big fan of hugely potent beers—I much prefer session ales, where you don't guarantee yourself a headache if you decide to have a second one before another 12 hours have elapsed—but I'm pretty sure they do keep better. Those beers are also aggressively hopped, which is why I like them so much. What I don't understand, or like very much, is the fact that increasingly I'm seeing intensely hopped beers also being the high alcohol ones. Why can't we get a beer with the savage bitterness of Stone Ruination Ale, say, but at a reasonably sane 4.8–5.0%? I can't figure out why you need extra alcohol when you make an extra-bitter beer...
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