At Pub 27 in Pompeii
Aging Beers: A Valentine Vault Delight: Eldridge Pope’s Thomas Hardy’s Ale 1989 in 2018: At Twenty-Nine Years From our “Vault!”
Date: February 14, 2018
The Story— For Valentine’s Day, we offer the ultimate lay down cellar beer and the most valuable gem from our vault: Eldridge Pope Thomas Hardy’s Ale 1989. We have earlier versions of this remarkable beer, but the ’89 has held up particularly well.
Eldridge Pope, a regional UK brewery in Dorchester, brewed this beer to celebrate the life of Thomas Hardy in 1968. It was intended as a one-off, but was so successful, the brewery continued to produce it until it went out of business in 1999. Our tasting of a six-year-old bottle brewed in 1980 remains our highest ranked beer of the 34,000+ beers we’ve tasted.
It was intended to cellar — up to 25 years! A friend and I went in together on a couple of cases of it in the 90s. He moved away and ceded us the rights to the beer and we’ve brought them out for charity tastings for the last decade or so. The 1989 version came in standard 12 ounce bottles unlike the 9.6 ounce small bottles of earlier vintages. Good thing.
We’re now reaching — and exceeding 30 years for some of the years we’ve laid down. We’d say that it is perhaps no longer improving in the bottle — much anyway– but it hasn’t started to decline significantly either. You can still find bottles of this masterpiece on line and in some exceptional beer stores — it can set you back a C note, though if the store laid down a bunch of it you can find it at half that price. We paid close to $5 a bottle in the 90s which seemed like a small fortune to us.
The brand has been revived twice and is currently being produced by Meantime in Greenwich, London. It’s not the same and not as good, but that’s just not a fair standard to try to reach. Eldridge Pope let us visit their Thomas Hardy storage area — a huge room of small rusty grundy tanks that they couldn’t use for anything else. So for them it was no sweat to leave the beer to condition for a year – and in some year s to move it into barrels for more conditioning. No one has that luxury any more.
The Beer— At 29 years, it leaves the current (good) editions in the spent grain bucket. Chewy with very dark malt, some dark fruits and dark grape skins. Very dark caramel. Oh goodness. Ellie’s notes – so dark, so rich, so Hardy, so sippy- requiring tiny sips. A bit of plum pudding and a dash of black rum.
And… if you can find some, try a pairing with a vintage cheddar cheese – The funky cheese softens in contrast to the depths of the Hardy creaminess and the sharp tangy cheddar is the perfect foil.
Value — If you have to ask… We’d recommend that if you can find a current edition out of Meantime — and the price is high but not exorbitant– you cellar a few and see what happens.
Values: “fair” is a good beer at an above market price, “good” is worth the money, “very good” is a bargain, and “excellent” is a steal.
In February, we’re digging into our legendary “vault” where we’ve been storing hundreds of bottles of beer waiting for the right time to taste them (or sell them for charity). The charity market has slowed, so we’re working through them in front of a fire and finding some disappointments, but more very surprising delights. You can find the full list –eventually– here on this “index post.”
We’re often asked to share our tasting notes on over 33,000 beers; this blog is in answer to those requests. Not all our notes, though. The great beer writer Michael Jackson admirably followed the Thumper Rule, and we’ll try to do the same. (“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nuthin’ at all.”) All the beers we post are from the top half of our ratings and most are from the top quarter. Of greater value, we think, are the stories behind the beers, and we try to give you enough about the brewery, the style and the places to find great beer to help you on your own beer journeys. At CulturAle Press we try to write books and publish posts that will help you “Drink Well and Travel Safely.”
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