Beer

Being plain about this page is more use to you than filling it. Liquor Wine Cave is a wine and spirits retailer. Beer is not a category we buy for, and this page is not a beer range.

What sits here is one bottle: Brasserie du Mont Blanc's La Verte, a beer from Savoie in the French Alps brewed with genepi, the alpine wormwood used in the herbal liqueurs of the same mountains. It is 5.9 per cent and comes in 330ml. It reaches this site because it belongs with the French alpine bottles we do buy for, not because we are trying to sell beer.

If you came here looking for crisp lagers, hoppy IPAs, stouts, wheat beers, seasonal releases or an imported mixed case, the honest answer is that we do not have them and are not likely to. A supermarket or a specialist bottle shop will serve you better.

What we are set up for is elsewhere on the site: French and Australian spirits, a deep armagnac and calvados range, cane juice rum from Martinique, and wine from Australia, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. If a genepi beer brought you here, the alpine herbal liqueurs it borrows from are worth a look.

History

Beer is among the oldest fermented drinks, and the technique reaches back to the earliest grain agriculture in the Near East. Malted barley is the usual base, with wheat, maize and rice used as well, and the adoption of hops from about the ninth century gave brewers both bitterness and a preservative.

The one beer on this page belongs to a narrower and more recent story. Genepi is the common name for several small Artemisia species that grow high in the Alps, and alpine households have flavoured drinks with them for a very long time. The commercial liqueurs built on genepi date from the nineteenth century, when the same wave of botanical distilling that produced the alpine and Chartreuse style liqueurs turned local herbal recipes into bottled products.

Brewing with genepi rather than distilling with it is a modern idea. Brasserie du Mont Blanc works in Savoie, in the same mountains the plant comes from, and La Verte takes the herb into a beer instead of a liqueur.

That is the whole of the beer history worth telling on this page, because that is the whole of the beer range.

How to drink it

There is one bottle here, so the advice is specific rather than general.

La Verte is a 330ml beer at 5.9 per cent, and the genepi in it is the point. Serve it cool rather than ice cold, at about eight to ten degrees, because very cold beer shuts down exactly the herbal aromatics you are paying for. A stemmed glass or a small tulip does more for it than a straight pint glass.

Pour it gently down the side of the glass and let a small head form. Give it a moment before you drink. The wormwood note is bitter and slightly medicinal in the way alpine herbs usually are, and it sits behind the malt rather than on top of it.

At the table it goes where alpine food goes: cheese, cured pork, anything baked with potato. If you like it, the herbal liqueurs made from the same plant are the natural next step, and they are a category we do stock properly.