Month: April 2017

You for coffee? Tim Hortons rolls into the UK

Posted on by John Porter

Tim Hortons is opening in the UKI’m as gung-ho for a cup of coffee and a doughnut as the next man, but Glasgow seems a long way to go from my base in south London. So, I initially noted the news that Canadian café brand Tim Hortons is coming to the UK with a certain amount of detachment; given that the initial store opens in Argyle Street in May.

The fact that I have almost no idea what a Tim Hortons is might also explain my muted enthusiasm, although the huge outpouring of joy on social media at the announcement of the brand’s imminent arrival in Canada’s mother country suggested I was in a minority. When an invitation arrived to a launch event at Canada House, the Trafalgar Square HQ of all things Canadian, it felt like Tim Hortons was meeting me more than halfway – from either Glasgow or Canada – so it would have been churlish to say no.

I’m not the only one asking,  the world is divided, I discover, into those who have no idea what Tim Hortons is, and those who rave about it. Tim Hortons was founded by its namesake, a professional ice hockey player, as a single site café in Hamilton, Ontario in the 1960s. Today eight out of 10 cups of coffee sold across Canada are served at a Tim Hortons and more than 5.3 million Canadians – approximately 15 per cent of the population – visit the brand daily.

As well as its own blend of coffee, the brand specialises in sweet snacks including bite-sized doughnuts called Timbits, which come in a variety of flavours. On the savoury side, the offer includes blinis, wraps and bagels, with a focus on all-day trading form breakfast through to late night.

Tim Hortons is opening in the UKSo, on a Monday morning I flashed my Press card at the door of Canada House, negotiated my way through the airport-style security, and joined a group that was equal parts jaded media types and impossibly enthusiastic Canadians. These included the High Commissioner, Janice Charette, who enthusiastically set out Tim Hortons stall for the assembled company.  

“I’m a hockey mom. So sharing it with my kids and my husband, or drinking it in a freezing cold arena at 7am in the morning, those are the kinds of memories I hope will be created by our UK friends as well.”

I fell at the first hurdle. I failed to order the signature Double-Double coffee, served with two creams and two sugars which is “just as the Canadians like it” according to the press release, opting instead for a black dark roast. I was called up on my choice by Gurprit Dhaliwal, a director of SK Group, which is working with brand owner Restaurant Brand International on the UK roll out of Tim Hortons. It was, I acknowledge, a fairly pathetic effort my part to plead my waistline even as I chomped through yes another sugar-coated doughnut.

The master plan, Gurprit told me, calls for a minimum of 100 UK outlets once the Argyle Street café is up and running in Glasgow. As well as further flagship sites in major cities, including London, they also expects to see Tim Hortons open in the same neighbourhood, leisure and drive-through sites that have taken the brand into almost every Canadian town and city.

Tim Hortons is opening in the UKHe said: “Flagship stores are important initially, to establish the brand with UK customers, but Tim Hortons is very adaptable. It’s an all-day concept from breakfast right through to late evening, so we trade longer hours than other brands. In Canada there are successful 24-hour drive through sites, which we’d also look at here.”

The question, for those of us unlikely to be taking our offspring to early morning hockey practice any time soon, is how does Tim Horton fit into the UK market? We have the most developed coffee bar market in Europe, according to specialist analyst Allegra. There are more than 22,000 coffee outlet in the UK generating sales of around £9bn. It’s fair to say that home-grown players like Caffe Nero and the Whitbread-owned Costa brand, as well as imported brands with an established foothold, notably Starbucks, won’t go out of their way to make it easy for Tim Hortons to establish a foothold.

Tim Hortons is opening in the UKGurprit told me that the all-day food offer will help to drive the brand’s offer, enabling them to start with breakfast and trade right through the day and close later than some of the competition.

You can decide for yourself on Canada Day – July 1, as no one needs reminding – when Tim Hortons is sponsoring a “bring a Brit” event in Trafalgar Square with free coffee and doughnuts for all. Just remember, if you don’t have the Double Double, they’ll want to know why.

Sauce for the Goose – the Vintage Ale House opens in Balham

Posted on by John Porter

by John Porter

Balham is, as Peter Sellers famously observed, the “gateway to the south”, but it was, a little disappointingly, not the late Goon’s sketch that bought Chicago brewer Goose Island from its home in the cradle of urban blues music to the dubious glamour of South London.

If John Lee Hooker ordered his usual ‘One Scotch, One Bourbon and One Beer’ at the Goose Island Vintage Ale House in Balham, the beer on offer would be from the Goose Island range back in Chicago in his adopted city.

These are, I admit, two completely different introductory paragraphs.  I’m equally fond of them both, but I’m going to struggle to link them, so take your pick.

To business.  In December 2016, the Goose Island Vintage Ale House opened in perhaps unexpected location of Ramsden Road in Balham. Marking the first pub venture for Goose Island outside the Americas, as might be expected the Vintage Ale House serves the brewers core range on draught including Goose Island IPA, Green Line Ale, and Four Star Pils.

More interestingly, also on offer – when available – is the legendary Bourbon County Stout, as well as the seven-strong range of barrel-aged Belgian style beers, dubbed the ‘seven sisters’. These Belgian-inspired beers are aged for 18 months in wine barrels, each with 50lbs of a different fruit added. Each is sold in 70cl champagne-style bottles, and bottle conditioned with a five-year shelf life. The range includes Gillian, named for X-Files actor Gillian Anderson, who once worked at the Goose Island brewpub. Bottled at 9.5% ABV, this farmhouse ale is blended with white pepper, strawberry, and honey.

Other sisters include pale ale Matilda, a 7% ABV farmhouse ale fermented with wild yeast, Sofie, a 6.5% pale ales aged with orange peel, and Madame Rose, a 6.7% ABV brown ale made with wild yeast and aged with cherries.

At the Vintage Ale House, a bottle of one of these beers will set you back somewhere from £18 and £25, and come with suggested food matches rom a bistro-style menu that includes Porter & Molasses Glazed Beef Cheeks or the Roasted Cod and Seafood Fregola.

If that strikes you as a challenging sell to the standard Balham punter, I initially agreed with you. As a native south Londoner who went to primary school a stone’s throw from the location of the Vintage Ale House – if you can throw a stone half a mile -I’d be the last to disparage the area, but even so…

Fortunately, I had the very good luck to be invited to a dinner hosted by Goose Island founder John Hall and president Ken Stout and had the opportunity to ask a few searching questions.

To start, with, why Balham? Although acknowledging that they left the exact choice of location to someone with more local knowledge, John told me: “I spent time in London, and enjoyed the pub scene, way before I opened Goose island. I also spent time in other parts of Europe, and wondered why we didn’t have the same atmosphere and beers in the States.

“The biggest influence on what I did, of any one thing, was Fuller’s. So, I opened a brewpub, and we sold beers of the world, put probably more than anything we sold English style ales, hand pulled.

When the opportunity came to expand, we thought why not go back to London. We’ve had our beers over here since 2002/2003, and over the years as craft beer has become more popular, we’ve done well. London’s huge, and we wanted to find a neighbourhood where we could fit in and establish ourselves, we wanted to be part of a community. That’s part of what we are.”

 Ken points out that “when John started the original brewpubs in Clybourn Avenue in 1988, it was a seedy area – there were ladies of the night, and it wasn’t necessarily the safest part of Chicago. Greg, John’s son, would walk down the middle of the street to get to the pub –  he didn’t want to be on the sidewalk, he wanted to be under lights. But since then that neighbourhood has become a gem.”

I mention that Balham has been through similar changes of its own, for example with gentrification among having seen the once-notorious Bedford Hill tone down its act considerably. Ken said: “I’m not saying we’re her to save Balham. But we’ve been part of the resurgence of the community in Chicago, and we’d love to be part of the resurgence that’s happening in Balham.”

So, what about the audience for those premium beers? John says: “In the States, we really pioneered brewing wine-like beers. When we bought out Matilda and Sofie, we were nervous originally, and we underpriced them, which hurt us little bit. But today, you’ve got beers out there that aren’t as good, that are priced higher.

“We have a selection of our beers here that are as worthy as any wine to go with a great meal. This is where we show people how to do that, show them how proud we are of these beers.”

Ken elaborates: “We’re trying to be part of the elevation of beer. These beers are for the developed palate. They’re influenced by the Belgian tradition but they’re very dry, there is no residual sugar. They’re for a palate that doesn’t want sweet and cloying, they’re tart and dry.”

While walk-in trade will enjoy the draught offer, John expects the vintage beers, paired with food, to attract a destination trade – “it’s going to be word of mouth.” The focus is on staff who understand the beers, along with the presentation, including bespoke stemmed glassware.

Ken says: “Our square footage isn’t huge here, but It’s not just about the number of people who come through the door, it’s finding the right people, those who really appreciate the experience. They become ambassadors without even knowing it, they tell their friends.”

The Balham opening has been made possible, at least in part by the investment in Goose Island by the world’s biggest brewer. AB InBev, which acquired Goose Island in 2011. Ken explains: “Since our partnership with AB InBev began in 2011 we’ve grown almost five times over in terms of volume, just in the US.  Any expansion projects, like the Vintage Ale House in Balham, don’t happen if we’re not succeeding as an individual business unit.”

John says: “I made the decision to sell because they told me, and I believed them, that they were buying us for what we could contribute.  Ken, who I hired many years ago, is now president and running the company, and I couldn’t be prouder, I love the beer, but I love the people even more.”

As for the prospects of further Vintage Ale Houses, Ken acknowledges: “If it works really well we’re going to want to do it in other great cities that have a beer culture. So Brussels would make a lot of sense, Paris would make a lot of sense, so would Rome and Milan.

And taking the concept back to the USA? Ken says: “We don’t really have an answer, we don’t know yet. We’re going to tend this garden and see what works. What can we do back home in Chicago potentially with something like this? It’s exciting to think about.”  John sums up: “I’ll be disappointed if we don’t.”

 

Whisky Chaser: The Glenfiddich IPA Experiment

Posted on by John Porter

by John Porter

I have a complicated relationship with whisky, dating back over 35 years to an ill-judged evening in the bar at uni and an early-hours visit to the A&E department at Colchester General Hospital. When the runes are right and the wind’s in the right direction, an unexpected whiff of Scotland’s finest can still summon up memories best left buried, a reaction I’m sure Proust never had to a madeleine.

On the other hand, I love IPA. I loved IPA before it was fashionable, and I’ll still love IPA when the last hipster’s moustache wax has hardened beyond the ability of science to save the density from dragging its wearer to the earth’s core.

So, it was with somewhat mixed feelings that I accepted an invitation to a masterclass to mark the launch of the Glenfiddich IPA Experiment, a collaboration between venerable distiller William Grant & Sons and the upstart Speyside Craft Brewery. Despite the 125-year age gap between William Grant setting up shop in 1887 and Speyside just four years ago, the two family-run enterprise have joined forces in the shape of Glenfiddich malt master Brian Kinsman and Speyside brewer Seb Jones.

The main result of the collaboration is a single malt whisky finished in IPA casks, with the 43% ABV Glenfiddich IPA Experiment now available from selected retailers, and being served in Young’s pubs as part of the pub operators Whisky Tide promotion.

Seb had three tries at creating an IPA before he came up with the flavour he was after. He says: “We did three trial recipes, each was a single hop IPA. The hop that made the grade was Challenger – which is a UK hop similar to that used in the original IPAs. This was serendipitous as the barometer of choice was with flavour profile and cellulose (wood) interaction.”

The resulting beer was kept in American oak casks, which were them emptied and filled with the whisky. That’s a very simple description of a very complicated process, but fortunately we were equipped with a handy, simple-to-follow guide that can explain it far better than I can:

All clear now? Excellent.  What I can do is tell you how the result tastes. Under the watchful eye of both Glenfiddich Ambassador Mark Thomson, as well as Seb Jones himself, attendees as the masterclass has the chance to sample the whisky, the IPA created by Seb to go in the barrels, and also the barrel-aged beer that subsequently emerged.

Taking the whisky first, the essential sweetness of every whisky is the first thing that hit my tastebuds. Beer and whisky are, essentially, the same products – whisky is distilled beer or, more accurately, distilled ale, given that the original distinction was that ale was unhopped and beer had hops added to counteract that sweetness.

On a second sip – always go back for a second sip – the citrus sharpness and fresh hop flavours have definitely had an interesting effect on the whisky.

More interesting was the beer. The original 6% ABV IPA created by Seb is, as he admits himself, fairly in-your-face thanks to the need for the beer to leave a chunk of its essence in the barrel. The earthy, peppery hop notes are up front, with the grapefruit and floral flavours harder to find.

The second beer is far more interesting. Its time in the barrel has knocked the rough edges of the more robust hop flavours to create a rounded, smooth IPA that delivers some unexpected flavours including, to my palate at least, liquorice and vanilla.

Whether whisky and I are every entirely comfortable with each other remains to be seen, but if brewers and distillers working together can create beers of this calibre, I’m definitely on board for the brews.  

Pictured: Speyside brewer Seb Jones and Glenfiddich Ambassador Mark Thomson