UK Pubs For Sale - Freehold Pubs For Sale: Birth of the Beer Sommelier

Birth of the Beer Sommelier

It’s a dispiriting experience familiar to anyone who has ever asked for beer in one of London’s many high-end restaurants. The wine list requires its own trolley and a pair of wheezing waiters to heave it around, but the beers available can be reeled off in two seconds by a curled-lipped sommelier. On offer are a couple of multinational brews and, if you’re lucky, a nod towards Britain’s burgeoning brewing sector in the shape of a fairly safe offering from the world of ale.

There are notable exceptions – some of them with Michelin stars – but they’re few and far between. The situation, however, appears to be improving if three dinners that took place in the capital this week are any guide. Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery and author of the recently-released Oxford Companion to Beer, held court at the Draft House on Tower Bridge Road on Monday and James Martin (above left), chef and television presenter, produced a beer and food matching dinner at the University of West London on Tuesday. Perhaps most interestingly of all, though, was a dinner at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair on Monday to launch a new beer sommelier scheme.

Four men became the first accredited beer sommeliers as part of a project that, according to the Beer Academy’s Rupert Ponsonby (above, second from left), is intended to get restaurants to start taking beer seriously. “The intention is that they will be a catalyst for bringing in more people from the on-trade,” he says. “Already, Brown’s Hotel say they want people to do the course and to become beer sommeliers – even at the University of West London, they’re saying they want to try it. I think it’s going to light the blue touch paper.”

The four pioneers – all of whom have a background in beer – will not actually work as sommeliers but they’re intended to act as figureheads for the scheme as it evolves, Ponsonby says. In this respect British restaurants will be following in the footsteps of their counterparts across the Atlantic. Food and beer matching is one of Oliver’s pet subjects – he even wrote a book about it, the Brewmaster’s Table – and he points out how learning to match beer and food can improve people’s lives in a very simple way.

“I think that when you turn people on to those things [like pairing food with beer], you run into them a few years later and they’re so happy about this thing that you pointed out,” Oliver (below) says. “I often think that those things happen in a very small moment – like being a jazz fan because someone played you a [John] Coltrane record. On the other side of that door is a slightly better life.”

via pubs-for-sale.biz

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