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What's brewing?
The National Homebrew Club's annual conference returned to Smock Alley Theatre in April. As usual there was a stellar line-up of home-brewing royalty, both local and international, sharing their wisdom...
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Geuze bus tours!
Once every two years a group of the lambic beer producers scattered through the Pajottenland -- a mostly rural patchwork of towns and villages to the immediate west of Brussels -- open their doors to...
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The many shades of Pajottenland
The final stop on day one of the 2017 Toer de Geuze was Lindemans, probably the showiest of all the sites we visited. The setting is rather beautiful, on high ground in the countryside, with Brussels's...
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Sour gets serious
I left you yesterday half way through day two of the Toer de Geuze, leaving Oud Beersel and heading for De Troch. De Troch is best known for its crazy flavoured lambics, released under the "Chapeau"...
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pHew!
Ā A weekend dedicated to sour beer definitely needs a few sweeter options sown through it. So it was with the Toer de Geuze weekend. I was sufficiently occupied not to need the services of many pubs,...
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Summertime smorgasbord
With midsummer fast approaching it's time for another random selection of Irish beers I've encountered over the last few months.We got a new addition to the Eight Degrees Single Hop Series in the form...
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Dark dogs
Thou shalt not judge a beer by its IBUs, thou shalt not judge BrewDog by inches of news.-- Zak Avery, 2013As usual I'm skipping past the boring controversial legal and marketing stuff and going...
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Rocky three
A trilogy of beers from Colorado today, mostly ones that have been around a while that I'm only catching up to.Mountain Standard, brewed for when the clocks change in the autumn, has a kind of built-in...
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Will I, won't I?
I always have a bit of back and forth when new Cloudwater beer lands. I know everyone will be talking about it and I'd like to be part of the conversation, but the beers are terribly expensive and too...
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The Austrian succession
Today's beers were picked at random from an off licence shelf in Utrecht. It wasn't until I got them home that I noticed they're from Austria. The branding is very different from my pre-conceptions of...
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The Stone inversion
The beer that held the record (until today) of languishing longest in my drafts folder without a proper write-up is Stone Imperial Saison. That picture there was date stamped 12th March last, taken in...
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Rail ale
The 2017 Killarney Beerfest kicked off on a sunny Friday at the end of May. As per, I headed down on the train and used the spare couple of hours to catch up on a few bottles that had been sitting in...
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Bring in the new
As in previous years, twenty Irish breweries took stands at the Killarney Beer Festival. This year, unfortunately for my ticking predilection, the line-up veered a little away from the local breweries...
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Something out of the ordinary
One-offs, oddities and suchlike is the loose theme for this the second blog post from the 2017 Killarney Beer Festival.A new beer from Kinnegar always gets my attention, and this was their first time...
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Ireland goes indie
For the first time ever it's Indie Beer Week in Ireland. It has been since Friday but it only occurred to me yesterday to dedicate a week of blog posts to the vibrant independent beer scene in this...
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Belly accumulator
My sequence of posts in honour of Indie Beer Week continues with a look at just one of the 90-odd (some very odd) breweries currently operating in Ireland. Despite, or perhaps because of, the move to...
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Away with the gypsies
My final post for Indie Beer Week 2017, as we head into its second weekend and a new run of events, concerns the producers of no fixed abode, honing their skills wherever there's spare capacity: the...
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Cross roads
Diageo's new collaborative tendency seems to haveĀ raised a few hacklesĀ on the Irish beer scene. But before the Creature Comforts joint venture at Open Gate came to light, there was one with Two Roads,...
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Marks for Spencer
The United States has just one Trappist brewery, at St Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. In keeping with the Belgian convention of naming the beers after the abbey's location rather than its...
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Cruiskeen Lawn
A balmy afternoon of dodging the showers in Phoenix Park was had on the June Bank Holiday Sunday when the Bloom garden festival rolled back into town. Organisers Bord Bia kindly sent me a ticket and,...
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