Breast Bitter: Pumpclip Idiocy from Cottage

Boobies, tits, melons, bazongas, headlamps and midgets’ crashmats: These are all words that I can write here without cringing. That is provided they are delivered with my tongue wedged so far into my cheek that it looks likes I’m pleasuring a blue whale. However, they are not crudities that I should be forced to speak, in conversation, in a pub, with a person, on a Jesus’s own Sunday.

After all I’m English and so sexually repressed that this talk of jiggling meat-pillows only causes stiffening in my upper lip. So why do Cottage Brewery want to turn us all into an infantilised Sid James by naming their beer Breast Bitter?

Perhaps the news has taken longer to reach Castle Cary - probably because it is a town that still drowns those who use flush toilets - but the 70s are over. Reg Varney is dead, accept it and move on. In our modern world giggling over lactoids, breasticles and silicon-zeppelins is as funny as remaking The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin with all the human warmth of Threads.

But it isn’t just the misogynist moniker of this beer that bitchslaps your decency. Nor the sheer ineptitude of the crayonjockey they hired to Parkinsons out the pumpclip pictured above. Granted it is actually both of those things, but it is also the gawping uselessness of the pun.

Breast Bitter doesn’t work. The name fails to conjure up thoughts of what is actually a nice, slightly hoppy mostly malty 4.6% beer. Instead it creates visions of mummy milking rooms where distended upper-udders are ‘expressed’ 24/7. Or worse it fills your dreampipes with Oedipal fear. And if they really, really like this pitiful pun, it should have at least been attached to a Milk Stout.

But Breast Bitter isn’t alone there are plenty of others out there too. So what names or pumpclips have caused you to ignore an ale? When have you been too ashamed to order a Top Totty? Have you preferred pointing to uttering the words Rite Flanker? Or is the only word that has ever put you off a pint been Stella?

Gordon Browns Everyone Off

It had to happen eventually: Gordon Ramsey has (temporarily) put his face to a beer. Not because the agro-chef is a noted ale drinker, but because there are few surfaces left on this planet that don’t bear an image of his wrinkled map on them. From a couple of gastropubs and a handful of restaurants to hundreds of off-licenses, his empire spreads unseen like a fungal infection. And his pitted visage menaces passers-by from so many posters that many tourists probably leave Britain convinced that we live under a personality cult, equivalent of Stalin’s at the height of his pin-up powers. It must be only a matter of time before his investment group have the Martian canals re-bored to resemble a telescope-friendly version of the valley-like crinkles on his weatherworn head.

Mercifully the whole venture was mercifully confined to a segment on his F-Word TV show – a programme/brand extension that attempts to bring the Top Gear demographic to the world of cuisine – i.e. there is bellowing, there are celebrities and there are arguments so facile, so malformed and so ill-conceived that they must have stemmed from the slopping lobes of Clarkson himself.

And it was while Ramsay was presenting this tit-a-thon that the diva of dinnertime spat out Timmy Taylor's Landlord, Brooklyn Chocolate Stout and Meantime IPA claiming that only the most bland and flavourless beers could possibly be consumed with his food. So to create his own ale he decided to emulate Innis & Gunn's wonderful oak-aged beer, a brew that draws much of its flavour from Bourbon casks, except that Gordon’s brew was reportedly pale, sweet and about 8%.

So while his drink is mercifully not available in any shops, the question has to be asked. Do superstar chef endorsements enhance or embarrass the real ale movement? Is the publicity good for beer even when what they are saying is negative? Do Michelin stars mean you know anything about ale? Does Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall sneaking a bottle of a Hall & Woodhouse’s Stinger into shot make you want a face full of nettles or just ensure that at least the ITC are watching? And what about Neil Morrissey dabbling in brewing? Has he raised the profile of real ale or raised the unpleasant memory of the pitiful Men Behaving Badly?

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Magificent Seven #3: Milk Stout

Bristol Beer Factory
4.5%
www.bristolbeerfactory.co.uk/stout.htm

The name alone has probably already conjured up the mental image of two hair-netted old puffins hunched over a shared bottle of super-sweet Mackeson's. But this recreation of an Ashton Gate brewery original should change the way you think about this unfashionable drink. For a start, at 4.5% it’s strong enough to deter the post-chapel coffin-dodgers, even if the added milk sugars (lactose) do add a surprisingly sweet aroma and aftertaste. But cutting against any sugariness is the warmth and depth of roasted barley, which not only gives the drink a slightly burnt final note but also adds to the glorious opaque colour and dark swirls that corkscrew inside the glass. A pint worth blowing your pension on.