Thursday 5 August 2010
The Cheer
Monday 21 June 2010
A few pints of the same beer
Wednesday 2 June 2010
48 Hours in Belgium (Part 1)
Friday 21 May 2010
I was absolutely wasted...
Monday 10 May 2010
RIP: The Pub
UPDATE: Tandleman has written a reply to this post. In truth, I hoped that somebody would pick up on it and show a different side - that's what makes blogging fun. His is almost the opposite of what I say but that's understandable as he's coming at it from an entirely different viewpoint. Interestingly, if we met right in the middle we'd probably be fairly balanced and close to the real situation. What do you think about the opposing views?
Monday 26 April 2010
Bigger... Stronger... Louder... Better?
Wednesday 3 March 2010
How much alcohol...
Sunday 21 February 2010
Drinkability in Beer
Tuesday 26 January 2010
@Sheffield, #twissup was awesome
Friday 22 January 2010
There began an education
Wednesday 20 January 2010
How Much Do You Drink?: Learning to Get Drunk, Temperance and Neo-Prohibition
Sunday 3 January 2010
The Hop Press: What’s outside the glass is important too
Sunday 6 December 2009
The Hop Press: A pint of imperial stout, please
Wednesday 11 November 2009
The Spoon to my Pencil?
To begin, she doesn’t actually drink beer. This is both good and bad. It’s good because she can be my driver. It’s bad because I’d love to share these bottles with her and have her get excited about them with me. I’ve tried hard to get her to like it but it’s not going to happen. Lauren does, however, have a great nose for smelling beer. And a great ear for listening about it. You see, whenever I am anywhere with a beer or whenever I’m doing things which I write about on here, Lauren is usually always there. She’s the one next to me in the pub reading her magazine (the bribe to keep her there so I can have a couple), the one opposite me at dinner while I talk to her about something beer-related, or how I wish they had something else on, or how next week I plan to open this bottle or that, or she’s sitting on the sofa while I sit behind at the table tapping into the laptop, “spending more time talking to people on twitter than talking to me”, posting blogs, or she’s in the driver’s seat while I give (always bad or wrong) directions to some distant “old man’s pub”, or she’s listening to me describing why this beer is good and that beer isn’t or how this one could be better or how I wish I could go here or there, or she’s putting beer glasses back into the cupboard or moving bottles around in the fridge because they take up more room than the food, or she sees me putting away my latest beer order and wonders when I’ll spend some money on her for once, or she’s answering questions as I playfully quiz her on my latest blog post (“You’re my favourite beer blogger,” she told me once, “but then I don’t read anyone else’s blog”), or she’s patiently waiting for me to post a blog, or read a blog, or send a tweet, or buy the bottles I’ve been staring at for ages which took us an hour out of our way to get, or she’s following to a pub (“honestly, it’s just around this corner” I say, hearing the feet drag) only to walk straight out because there’s nothing on, or she’s waiting to start eating her dinner while I take pictures of mine, or she’s planning her next few weekends around my drinking schedule, or she’s kicking me out of bed when my 5am alarm clock goes off so I can get up early to write or she’s woken up late when I steam back in at midnight (I’m sure she’ll tell me what I’ve forgotten, too).
And then there’s the times when she talks to me about beer, when she mentions hops or buys me some of my favourite bottles, when she says she likes something I’ve just written or she suggests going to London to go to some pubs or she says, “I bet that beer would be great with chocolate cake”, or when I catch her looking at my blog and reading the comments people leave, or when she smells a beer and picks out aromas I hadn’t, or when she clears away all my empties and tells me that she likes this label or doesn’t remember me drinking that bottle, “what was it like?”, or when she genuinely takes an interest in what’s in my glass.
I’m quite lucky, I think.
I write this blog but there’s always someone else there, someone who probably should hate beer but tolerates it and listens and actually knows a lot about it because she cares about what I care about. I guess she’s the real Spoon to my Pencil.
Sorry if this is gushy and sentimental but that should keep her sweet while we go for a huge steak dinner at the Hawksmoor on Friday (she doesn’t eat meat) and then drink around Borough, followed by a massive and potentially messy beer night at ours on Saturday, followed by more beer on Sunday and Monday (she will also hopefully be cooking me dinner on Monday). Plus next weekend at The Bull’s huge beer festival, the weekend after at The White Horse’s Old Ale Festival, then the British Guild of Beer Writers Dinner (which she isn’t coming to) followed by the Pig’s Ear beer festival the next day and then the next weekend on a London pub crawl.
Sunday 25 October 2009
Drinking Around
I want to drink in Sheffield, Leeds and Norwich. I want to do a massive tour of Manchester, its breweries and the surrounding area. Huddersfield is calling me to The Grove. If BrewDog are opening a bar in Aberdeen then that’s calling, as is Glasgow or Edinburgh and I want to grab a few pints of Moor beer in Somerset. And this is just the UK based drinking, don't get me started on the other places…
The places I want to visit will serve me beers that I know about but they will also give me an opportunity to try new beers from breweries that I haven’t encountered before. And that’s important. While I’m happy drinking the beers from the breweries I know, I want to know about more breweries and the best way to do that is to get out there and drink the stuff. And this is one of the reasons that I wanted to get a beerswap going. But I need you to tell me, where should I go and what should I drink?
There are also the rumblings of a big blogger meet up early next year, so this might help us decide where is best to go!
Thursday 15 October 2009
Lager of the British Isles
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The first was Hepworth’s Blonde which I’d had before from the bottle. I didn’t think much of this. The Freedom beers came next – Pilsner, Lager and Dark Lager. The Pilsner had a biting dry finish, the lager was sweeter than the Pilsner and/but less interesting and the Dark was brown bread and caramel (but not all that dark). Cotswold Brewing Company followed with their smart and simple bottle labels. 3.8 was clean and biscuity with a faint citrus finish, Premium (which uses Cascade hops!) had little aroma but more biscuits and a dry, hop finish which was really tasty.
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Then things stepped up: Harviestoun’s Schiehallion, with its great fruity-floral bitterness and full, smooth body, is a really cracking beer. Staying in Scotland, next came WEST (beer menu here): St Mungo was berries, shortbread and a lovely dry finish which gets sweeter as you drink; the Munich Red was okay, but reds aren’t really for me; and their Dunkel, a dark, roasty, smokily dry beer was spot-on (it might also be worth saying that while drinking the WEST stuff I wrote: Is Scotland the best brewing country right now? Interesting thought, there’s probably a post in that idea…). Towards the end there was also some Cotswold Autumn lager (no link) with a stone fruit sweetness to it and a Cotswold Wheat Beer which was very drinkable, citrusy, fruity, 'wheaty'.
What was great to see was that all of these beers were also being sold on draft in the pub downstairs; I’ve never seen so many different lagers available in one place. There was also a few cask ales on which were very tempting, but after all that lager I was thirsty for more and went for another Schiehallion, which really is super (interestingly, I wonder how cask lagers fit into CAMRA’s ideas? I’d guess they don’t.).
I don’t drink much lager, as you might know from reading this blog (save for bathing in Mythos whenever I can), so it was really interesting to spend an evening drinking just that and it reignited something in me from my holiday to Greece in the summer, that ‘lager, it’s the little things…’ You see, it takes drinking a few in a row to really appreciate that it’s the tiny nuances that make the really big differences – the citrus hop in one, the fuller body in another, a sweeter aroma, a dryer finish. Lagers don’t punch you in the face with a bag of hops and they don’t fill your mouth like oily stout, so there isn’t that esoteric wow factor to them. But it’s all relative. Comparing a lager to a big IPA is like comparing chicken soup to chicken madras, but compare a tin of soup to a Michelin-starred chicken broth and hopefully you see my point. What lagers do have is the power to sate, the simplicity to gulp without thinking or a subtle complexity to make you think if you want to and just something about them which suggests belonging and friendship and drinking together with mates for the pure fun of drinking together with mates. It’s great to see that there are some really good lagers being brewed in the UK right now and good luck to LOBI.
Great to see Dave there and Oliver Thring too, the best food writer I know of. Oz Clarke was also there, thankfully I didn't see him burp-back tasting. Eww. And British Lager week runs from the 12th October to the 18th October.
Friday 2 October 2009
If beer didn’t make you drunk…
So that’s the question: would you enjoy beer as much as you do if it didn’t come with the drunkenness?
I’m not saying the falling around, slurring, loss of motor controls and all that, I’m more interested in the stages from the first beer, through relaxing, into the merriness. You know how it is, a few beers in, where you talk shit, laugh more, feel happier; that fug of warmth and belonging and relaxation. And this isn’t about getting drunk, per se, it’s more about that 'beer feeling’.
This can probably be separated into further questions: would you prefer drinking if you can go all night and never get pissed? Given a choice between never getting drunk no matter how much you throw down, or getting drunk after one beer, which would you prefer? How important to your enjoyment is the whole inebriation process? What do you think...
Sunday 9 August 2009
Sharing Beer
Beer is for sharing. It’s the friendliest thing I know. Beer makes friendships. A love for beer itself is a long-term love affair. You like good beer, I like good beer. An instant bond. An understanding. A desire to share. We meet up for beers; that’s when we see each other. How’s your beer? Try some. Yeah, that’s good. Nothing else is like it. Let’s go to the pub. What you having? If you’re having that one then I’ll go for this. We talk, we laugh, we relax. The best beers I’ve ever had have been shared - they’ve been talked about, they turn into better beers because of it. Wow this is good. I’m not that fussed. I love it. I love it too. The one who wasn’t fussed gets into it. Actually you know what… We bounce words around, hyperbole, lyrical similes, random tastes and smells and memories. We laugh at him, then we get it ourselves, it does smell like that. We can open another bottle, we can order another half; we can drink more beer. Quantity and quality. It’s about being with friends, sharing something important to all of us, having a great time with a few beers. That’s why we drink it.
Tuesday 9 June 2009
The Bull’s Best of The Best Beer Festival
To set the scene: I was there on Thursday with Pete from Pete’s Food Blog and Brad and James and friends from Ale Affinity. On Friday Pete and Brad were back again (we couldn’t stay away!), both with their younger brothers. I was with my mate Matt. And Steve from Beer Justice and Phil from Beermerchants were there too. The barbeque filled the cool air of the pub garden with grilling meat and Garrett’s irrepressible laugh rang around his kingdom as everyone chinked glasses and talked and laughed and got pretty damn merry.
I started down low, way down low at a measly 2.7% with BrewDog’s Edge. But measly it ain’t: this 2.7% minx is a flavour bomb. So full bodied, a perfect creamy head, chocolate roasted notes and much more hop bitterness than I expected. One surprising beer that you could drink all night. Next Pete and I went tag-team-style on Saltaire’s Amarillo Gold and BrewDog's 77 Lager (the Amarillo in each being a cozy and chance partnership). Amarillo Gold was very pale, loads of neat Maris Otter grain and a delicately refreshing lemony-citrus finish. The 77 lager was surprising fruity with a great body and good hop bitterness - good cask lager action indeed.
More double-teaming next with Thornbridge Kipling and BrewDog's Dogma. Now it kills me to say this but none of the Thornbridge beers we tried were up to their usual standard. I don’t know why this was, but the fact that it was across the board is worrying. Now Dogma. Here’s something you might not have read around these parts before, but here goes: I don’t care all that much for bottled Dogma or its previous incarnation, Speedball. It does nothing for me except make me mildly giddy. However, on cask it’s much better. There was honey and vanilla and blackcurrant and toast and another creamy head (they give good head at BrewDog) all wrapped up in a slick body. Nice. We also opened a bottle of unlabelled BrewDog’s Atlantic IPA to share around the bench. Lightning doesn’t strike twice, you say? Well guess what… It was a thumbs down from a table of BrewDog fans. I like the oxidized notes in Zephyr but in the Atlantic IPA they are too much (sour and cement-like) and it doesn’t mix well with the whisky warmth and the punchy-earthy-fruity-bitter beer.
I believe we had a burger here. It was very good and very necessary.
Next came two beers from Marble: Pint and Dobber. Garrett told us that Dobber was the bigger brother of Pint and he was spot on. Pint was pale, clean, crisp, quenching, gluggable and finished with juicy citrus hop bitterness. I absolutely loved this beer. Then I tried Dobber and fell in love again. It’s a fantastic beer, loads of C-hop sexiness (I believe I bet this blog at one point that it contains Centennials!), orange and a juicy-pithy clawing finish with a great toffee body. Super, super stuff. And honestly, I would’ve been happy to drink just those two all night, but I was on a mission.
Let’s zip through in a montage: In the following hour, or so, I had: a mouthful of Jaipur, my favourite cask beer, and it was a shadow of itself and this brought a tear and a sorrowful swoon. This swoon was not cured by the half of Pitfield IPA which was boozy like nail polish, had a too-sweet candy sugar body and didn’t deliver on the hops. I had a taste of the Saltaire Blackberry Cascade which I liked until just after I swallowed when it became sickly like a chewy sweet. I appear to have tried Ginger Marble and remember not enjoying that too much. I’m not a big raw ginger fan and this tasted like raw ginger. It was hot stuff (literally as I’m posting this Reluctant Scooper has just put up something about Marble Ginger – he likes it more than I do!). A lot of the others loved it though and I think it could be a grower. Thornbridge Red Brick was just not right. And there was a glug of BrewDog’s Trashy Blonde at some point. This was Pete’s beer and I’m pretty sure he enjoyed it. Phew.
This was where we stepped it up. Another tag-team effort went down here to wrestle BrewDog’s Devine Rebel and the Pitfield Imperial Stout into submission. I can proudly say that we won the battle. The Pitfield was bloody marvelous, all rich and roasty with chocolate and coffee and dark fruits and a super earthiness. This stuff rocks. As does Devine Rebel. It’s honey and marmalade, some whisky smokiness way back in there, sweet but not too sweet, a complex sipper rolling around. Thursday done.
The morning after prompted my post about hangover breakfasts and I didn’t truly recover until I had the first pint on Friday, when I was back on it in a flash. I obviously went for a pint of Pint and it was even better than the day before. After this we went and got on the beer train to Ramsgate, Matt’s local brewery (I didn’t have them on Thursday knowing he was down on Friday). Gadds’ No.3 was a great pint as always; caramel, fruit, earthy hops; a Kent classic that I wanted to drink a lot of. Then came the Thoroughly Modern Mild which had a big sweetness with honey and marmalade (kind of like Devine Rebel) and was an easy-drinking 6% - a mild for winter, when Mild Month really should be. Dr. Sunshine’s Special Friendly followed, a wheat beer with a classic wheaty taste (quality beer writing there), vanilla, citrus and a good butterscotch quality (not a bad butterscotch quality). I’m not a wheat beer lover but I could’ve had a lot more of this. Thumbs up to Ramsgate!
Next I tried Saltaire's Sublime Blonde, which I think was Phil’s. The resounding verdict was that it tasted like Foster’s Twist: lager and lime. Not great. There was a Rye Smile in there but bugger me if I remember what that tasted like. All I know is that we ordered a Gadds’ No.7 and a Rye Smile and it took Matt and me a few sips to work out which was which. After this I went back and had more of my favourite’s from Thursday. Another Dobber, an Edge and another Pitfield Imperial Stout. And that’s where the night ended, I think. There may have been more. I lost track and was just having a good time by then.
There were a few beers which didn’t come on while I was there, the notable one being Thornbridge’s Epic Halcyon (here is the full festival list). The good thing is that now I get to look forward to it another time!
And there we are. I don’t think this is particularly illuminating but I wanted to share my thoughts about the beer and the fun that we had. This was a great festival because it was small and friendly and the beer was fantastic. Marble Dobber won beer of the festival and I can’t argue with that. Marble Pint would have been a close contender for my vote and that’ll be a beer I look out for from now on. Gadds’ No.3 was flawless and Pitfield’s Imperial Stout was epic. You can’t expect to love every beer which is on. Enjoyment is so subjective and the beers which I liked others didn’t and vice versa. That’s why we drink with friends; to compare, to discuss, to try other beers. I had a great time as you can probably tell. Cheers Garrett and Lynne!