Friday night experiment: Carlsberg Special Brew

Happy Monday everyone, and a special hello to all the people in Russia – it seems I had 11 views from the home of vodka yesterday. This is pleasing, I hope you’ll come back soon and bring some friends. Seriously; I’m actually quite excited about that.

So I told you last week that my plan for the weekend was to try Carlsberg’s Special Brew. I got very excited about the prospect, and couldn’t wait to get to Tesco, but against all odds they didn’t have any. They did have Tennent’s Super though, and I came very close to buying that, but “no,” I told myself, “that wasn’t the point. It’s Special Brew or nothing”. 

So I bought cheese for Friday night’s homemade pizza and orange juice in case Brenda wanted a Tequila Sunrise later on, then walked up to the Best One. They did have it, and it was in the fridge – six quid. That’s double what I pay for my normal lager – I’m partial to the Holsten Pils - but I suppose you can put the price discrepancy down to the alcohol content (9%).

I little while later, Brenda got home and she was almost as excited as I was.

 

We drank them straight from the can because it seemed like the right thing to do – one each, therefore not following the instructions that I spotted when it was already too late:

Perhaps that should be, "Best shared... well; chilled"

The good news is that we had a lovely time, drinking in front of the telly, waiting for the pizza dough to rise. I felt quite pissed around halfway down my first can, and was starting to slur. And later we had an argument about nothing in particular.

Well, this blog isn’t about reviewing booze as much as it’s about enjoying and experiencing it. So don’t expect anything approaching a review here. If you haven’t had Special Brew before though, you probably would like a word or two on what it’s like, and let me tell you; considering it’s super strength lager, it doesn’t taste bad at all. It certainly gives you a buzz, and I think the can is quite classy looking, though I did feel a bit weird buying it – that’s the stigma of super strength lager, for you.

If you want a more in depth view, go look at the Tramp Juice website (http://gk007a0336.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/), as I said on Friday, it seems to have died back in 2008. Whether that’s related to consumption of super strength lager, I wouldn’t like to say, but a lot of the information on there is still relevant.

As for Brenda and I, we enjoyed the Special Brew. I think it helped that I refrigerated the cans extensively before we drank them, but neither of us found the taste offensive, we had a good laugh, and we enjoyed the exploration, though we did both wake up at 3am on Saturday morning with heartburn. Would we drink it again? Well, I wouldn’t say we wouldn’t, but I think it’s unlikely that we will. There isn’t a super strength lager sized vacancy in my psychological drinks cabinet, so I guess it’s one for the niche market – people who want to drink lager, but still get pissed quick.

If you’ve got any super strength lager related stories, or if there’s anything you’d like to encourage me to try feel free to leave a comment. I’ll be back later in the week with a feature of some kind.

Laters!

Plans for the weekend : Special Brew

Last night, while watching Sean Lock’s Lockipaedia, in which he talks about being able to buy Special Brew in his local pretol station, my fiancée and I realised neither of us had ever tried Special Brew. 

It isn’t liquor as such, but Special Brew does have a bit of a reputation for being a favourite among alcoholics (read: tramps), due to its alcohol content of 9%. In fact, while looking for booze porn to illustrate this post I came across the following link:

http://gk007a0336.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/carls.htm

Yes, there appears to be a website dedicated to super strength lagers (though it seems to have died in 2008)… with an actual serious review. What caught my attention more though, was this – a link to a review of Lynx Altra:

http://gk007a0336.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/lynx.htm

And suddenly I knew where this post was going. It was only supposed to be a brief description of what I might be doing this weekend.

Lynx Altra is probably the only super strength lager I’ve ever tried, and it takes me right back to my days as a student at Newcastle University. Not because I drank a lot of it – in fact I only ever had one 4 pack – but because it was probably the final link in a chain that leads me to recall a number of mad events.

The chain begins with my first year at Henderson Hall where as skint students (me more skint than any of the rest – I survived on £20 a week back then), we discovered Viborg lager (below is literally the best picture of it that I can find online). It was available just down the road, and I’m pretty sure you could get 8 cans for £2.50 (something daft like that). Like all lager, it was fine when it was cold, but when it was warm it tasted like vomit. And unfortunately, most of us didn’t have access to fridges, so what we’d do was fill our sinks with tap water and store the cans in there. It didn’t do much good though  – how is room temperature water supposed to keep cans at anything other than room temperature?

Despite its failings, every Friday evening (usually around or before 6) we’d all rock up at a friend’s room with a carrier bag of 8 cans of Viborg each (or however many were left in the bag at that point – each person probably had an open one in his other hand), and we’d drink all 8 before heading out to the Students’ Union.

Later, when we moved out of halls Viborg wasn’t available anywhere nearby, but luckily we found a suitable, and almost as inexpensive substitute - Lynx, which looked like this:

Again, this is the best photo I could find of it.

Lynx came in a number of varieties, but most accessible, and the one we favoured was this 5% version – 0.5% stronger than the Viborg.

I came to try the super strength Altra version one Halloween when a large group of us had spent the whole afternoon crawling the pubs in the Quayside area (as we often did), and had decided to go to a party. Needing to pick up beers on the way, we called into a newsagent where I spotted the Lynx Altra, and noticed it was an 8.5% take on the popular drink. I had to try it.

I can’t say I enjoyed the taste, but I did drink all 4 on top of the skin full I’d already had, and would go on to have a few more drinks. I seem to remember we all got thrown out of that party – in ones and twos, and a friend and I ended up in a nearby pub where the barmen were dressed as IRA terrorists with guns and balaclavas. Or they were robbing the place. They served us drinks anyway.

It was a great night. Thanks, super strength lager. So, with the spirit of 1998 in mind, I’ll be heading to the local Tesco after work to see about picking up some Special Brew. And if they don’t have it, perhaps the Best One will. Then I guess there’s always the petrol station.

I guess, to give you a bit of notice, next weekend is the Winter Ales Festival in Manchester (http://nwaf.org.uk/) where hundreds of people will go to get hammered, and a few will go to celebrate and promote real ale. I don’t think I’m going to be able to go this year unfortunately, but you never know.

Whatever you do this weekend, drink sensibly and especially don’t go around starting any fights, y’hear?