The ability to deny the evidence of your senses is widespread. There’s the dictator insisting to television interviewers that his people love him, while across the country those long-oppressed people are taking up arms and waving the flag of liberation. And on a much less serious plane, there are people who will insist two beers… Read More Why there’s no such beer as ‘English brown ale’
The Burj Al Arab – the second-tallest hotel in the world, and deliberately designed to be an architectural icon in the same world-class league as the Eiffel Tower and the Sydney Opera House – is a spectacular place to take afternoon tea. The arrogant, curving exterior, more than a thousand feet tall, demands that you… Read More So what beers does a seven-star hotel serve?
There might, I suppose, be a bar selling BrewDog Tactical Nuclear Penguin or Sink the Bismark for, what, three times the store-bought retail price, but even that wouldn’t beat it. And admittedly this is a beer that has spent a year maturing in the caves of Champagne (that’s “cellars”, incidentally, and not, as one English… Read More The most expensive beer in any bar in the world?
Finding factual errors in Wikipedia is, of course, easier than machine-gunning a cask full of cod, and I’ve done it here before. I can’t stand reading Wikipedia’s pages on beer, since I constantly think: “No, that’s wrong … no, that’s not quite right … no, that’s a misinterpretation …”. What particularly gets me shouting at… Read More Beer: NOT the oldest drink in the world
Cooking with beer helps prevent cancer – well, it’s in New Scientist magazine, so it must be true. Normally I’m deeply sceptical of “eating/drinking X gives you/prevents Y” stories but this one was so wonderful I had to repeat it. A lady called Isabel Ferreira, an assistant professor at the Department of Bromatology* at the… Read More Cooking with beer helps prevent cancer
Ping! It’s an email from the chaps at Thornbridge with details of their Bracia chestnut honey beer, the one raved over by more than just me at the Guild of Beer Writers dinner last week. The press release details exactly what goes into the beer, and also reveals where they got the name from: Bracia… Read More Bracia: great beer, shame about the dodgy history
This blog is currently the top result in a Google search for outsize menswear chain Massachusetts. I haven’t, you’ll guess, ever written about retailers of XXL male clothing in the Greater Boston area, but I did make a joke when I blogged on judging at the Sainsbury’s beer competition in April about the name of the… Read More Sainsbury’s winning bottled beers
The time is 10am and there are 20 different beers to be drunk before lunchtime. It must be another supermarket beer judging. I judged for the twice-yearly Tesco Beer Awards quite a few times, but this week’s was the Sainsbury’s Beer Competition, and although Sainsbury’s has brought in the same PR team to organise the… Read More Twenty beers before lunchtime
The birthdays that are generally regarded as landmarks are mostly the ones that end in a zero: 30, 40, 50 and on upwards every ten years. Many get deeply gloomy as the anniversary odometer clicks over another decade. But the most depressing, I think, are the “demographic milestones”, the birthdays that indicate you’ve gone… Read More A trio of old beers
One of the problems of trying to be a beer tourist in Belgium in July is that many places shut for their annual break. This was the case with Cantillon, Brussels’s oldest surviving lambic brewery, a real working museum of beer, which is why we had to squeeze in a visit as we were leaving… Read More If it’s Tuesday, this must be Kölsch – Part Three
