Friday Five: The Year's Best Beers

Today is the last day to vote for the GABS Hottest 100 Craft Beers from 2019. I have placed my votes, but I have also trawled through my notes from the beers I tasted over the last 12 months, and found my favourites. The GABS Hottest 100 is only for Australian beers, but I have included top five British and International as well. Obviously, I can only rate the beers I tasted this year, so there may be many other great brews not included here, but this is my choice.

Top 5 Australian Beers:

1. St Phoebe 2019 (Wildflower Brewing and Blending) - Raspberry funk and farmhouse flavours; sensuous aroma and all-round top brew!
2. Double Stout Barrel Aged (Holgate Brewhouse) 8% - Smooth AF. Chocolate and hints of vanilla. Exceptional.
3. Inside Voice (Little Bang Brewing Co) 5.7% - A superb foreign extra Stout - roasty bitterness tempered with dark fruit/ berry/ raisin sweetness. Smooth. Nice. What jazz should be, if it were beer.
4. Botanical Hoppy Sour (Burnley Brewing) 3.5% - Fabulously floral and botanical characters blend really well with the sourness. Extremely enjoyable.
5. Hang Loose Juice (Capital Brewing Co) 6% - Blood orange IPA - great pithy bitterness and hoppy citrus goodness. Very tasty - one of the better hazy IPAs out there.

Top 5 British Beers:

1. Gravity (Brakspear Brewing Co) 3.4% - same beer; different marketing - this is the Brakspear's bitter I know and love. I grew up with this malty English bitter and it is the taste of home; oh, the memories...
2. Cambridge Black (Turpin's Brewery) 4.6% - oatmeal stout; full on chocolate and intensity - excellent and enjoyable; perfect with bangers and mash.
3. Pheasant Plucker (Bowland Brewery) 3.7% - purchased the easy-drinking copper-hued English bitter from the brewery itself - superb English Bitter (also excellent service).
4. Landlord (Timothy Taylor) 4.3% - Nutty and creamy; just the business; a pint of Landlord is a thing of beauty.
5. Spitfire (Shepherd Neame) 4.5% - still beautifully bitter

Top 5 International Beers:

1. Trappistes Rochefort 8 (Abbaye Notre-Dame de St-Remy) 9.2% - Sooo good; rich deep and spicy; this Belgian strong dark ale is one of the best beers ever
2. Nath (2018) (Brasserie Cantillon) 5.8% - Wow! Tart and funky; rhubarb and pastry - absolutely delicious fruit lambic
3. Felix (Aged in Apple Whiskey Barrels) (New Belgium Brewing Co) 8.8% - Sour golden with strong apple characters and sweet vanilla from the whisky barrel aging in the single foeder. Superb.
4. Stone/// Fear. Movie. Lions. Double IPA (Stone Brewing) 8.5% - rich, strong, chewy marmalade
5. Mr Pink (2018) (To Øl Brewery) 6% - Beautiful dark pink IPA; soft buttering; subtle hops; slightly earthy beetroot aroma and finish

It's Not About the Girl: The Girl Before

The Girl Before by JP Delaney

Quercus

Pp. 406

Edward has designed a house that is minimalist in appearance, with all the modern technology to make it seem almost sentient. To rent One Folgate Street, with its open-plan features, floating staircase and clean spaces, potential tenants must answer a series of questions before gaining admittance. Once they have been accepted, they understand that he has a sense of authority over them. Everything in the house is computerised and Edward controls the computer; if the tenants don’t answer the questions to his satisfaction, he will turn off the lights or the hot water for the shower. The questions get increasingly pertinent and personal, as the house computer search engine will only respond with certain information, and it collates all the findings to provide ‘helpful hints’. The novel questions when being cared for becomes being spied on; when does being protected become being stifled?

It is clear that Edward is a control-freak. He needs to control all aspects of his – and others’ – lives; not just their living arrangements. He cooks in a very methodical manner with precisely the right hard-to-find ingredients; he admires foreign things so that he can appear knowledgeable and correct people’s pronunciation to constantly assert authority. He also likes the Japanese custom of hitobashira, which he tells a tenant is about burying dead people under buildings, but she later finds out it refers to burying the living. So far; so creepy.

But wait; there’s more. He has very similar relationships with very similar women, two of whom live in his house and narrate alternate chapters. Jane is ‘now’. She has had a stillbirth which makes her vulnerable; she has memories which Edward triggers, she thinks accidentally. Emma was ‘then’. She had been attacked and raped by burglars – her partner, Simon, adores her, but can’t live by her stringent rules or those of the house. Jane’s friend, Mia, points out how much Jane looks like Emma, the previous tenant, who died in the house, and Edward’s wife, Elizabeth, before that. Emma defends him, “Men often go for the same type. Women do too, of course. It’s just that in our case, it isn’t usually physical resemblance so much as personality.” But when does it stop being a ‘type’ and become a fetish?

Past experiences are repeated in the present; the lines Edward uses echo over each other as he says them to both women and they find themselves starting to question his past. When Jane questions Edward about his former relationship (his wife and previous tenant both died in suspicious circumstances), he tells her not to look into it. “The past is over; that’s why it’s the past. Let it go, will you?” There are heavy-handed metaphors about clean slates with faintly discernible chalk marks from previous writings, and if we hadn’t already got the point, Jane spells it out for the hard of understanding with a high-school art essay about palimpsests and pentimenti.

As with any novel including the word ‘girl’ in the title, it seems we must have sex, violence, and an unreliable narrator. It is also worth bearing in mind that it is written by a man. A policeman advises Emma, “We take cases of rape very seriously. That means assuming every woman who says she’s been raped is telling the truth. The flipside of that is that we take false rape allegations equally seriously.” This suggests they are equally common. Fact check: over the past 20 years, only 2% of rape accusations proved to be false. It’s not that men can’t write realistic female characters, but a reliance on pop psychology and simplified gender stereotypes doesn’t help.

The Girl Before is not about a girl, before, after or present. It is about a house and a man’s viewpoint of manipulation and control. It is an entertaining read, but it is not earth-shattering. Shock value isn’t everything, and its veneer wears off very quickly.