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Passing for normal
I don't know whether it's the nature of the festival or my odd taste for odd beers, but I came back from Borefts 2013 able to squeeze most of the "normal" beers -- the pale ales, barley wines and the...
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The comedown
The day after the Borefts beer festival was another cold and sunny one. We got a late morning train to Amsterdam and started with an early lunch. The restaurant's beer of the month was Goudkoppe, a...
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The ethics of cloning
I confess my first thought on encountering a Dortmunder Export brewed in Cleveland was "why?" It's never been the most inspiring of styles, halfway down from a pale bock but lacking the casual...
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Parp!
Trouble Brewing's new one, Fuzzy Logic, was commissioned by the Bull & Castle for their "Irishtoberfest" (sigh) which runs all this month. It's a 4.7% ABV weizen and arrives an opaque and murky...
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Hey JD
While we in the south wait for Mr Wetherspoon to hook up his beer engines and plug in the microwave in south county Dublin, it was festival time in the UK. So, at Steve's suggestion, I gandered up to...
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Foolproof
I did my best to look after my bottle of Bronze Age ale in the year or so between getting it and drinking it. There's a glass door in my beer fridge but I made sure the bottle was right at the back....
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Upstate fake-out
My bottle of Sainsbury's Tap Room IPA was deposited by a houseguest (cheers Thomas!) and bears the mark of "Tap Room Brewing Company" of Rochester, New York which sounds immediately makey-uppey. Two...
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Shiver me tinnies
We’d love to send you something, do you have an address that would suit to send it to?That's all the e-mail said, but I could see it came from the company which does PR for Heineken Ireland. I like...
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Me and Sara
It's not a particularly comfortable topic on The Session this month. Nichole is our host and the topic is Women and Beer: Scary Beer Feminists or a Healthy Growing Demographic? Phew. Where do you start...
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Naughty little boys
I had great ambitions to reach "zero notebook" this autumn -- to turn all of the tasting note scribblings which accumulated earlier in the year into blog posts. Alas, I'm not there yet, but here are...
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Life after death
With Diageo winding up operations at the Smithwick's St. Francis's Abbey Brewery and moving all brewing to Dublin, Kilkenny's native beer looks to be getting a new lease of life. I suspect that the...
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Let this be a lesson to you
Back in the old days, Irish beer consisted of lager, stout and red ale. In the early days of Irish microbrewing you might have got a wheat beer instead of a lager in there, for those who had travelled...
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Tasty geezers
My last Belgian beer was the most feminine one in the fridge. In the interests of gender balance I'm following it with the blokeiest: Deux Barbus, a 5.8% ABV porter with a label which bears more than a...
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Westenders
When Reuben and I went to Edinburgh for the autumn 2013 meeting of the European Beer Consumers Union, the weekend before last, most of the drinking action was concentrated on the west side of the city....
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Edinbrew
The Caledonian Brewery squats sulkily below Slateford Road in western Edinburgh. It's a mid-Victorian redbrick, now the property of Heineken UK and probably best known for its Deuchars IPA. Tradition...
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Drouthy neebors
It's the last lap of west Edinburgh pubs today, starting with a cheeky half pint of Nicholson's Porter grabbed at The Haymarket during a brief lull in EBCU proceedings. This is brewed by St Austell and...
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Keepy uppy
New Irish beers have been coming in so thick and fast lately that I think I'll just have to do occasional round-ups, of those that I actually manage to catch. Chief among the culprits is Galway Bay...
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Seems legit
I had the beer poured and was preparing to take the first sip when the question struck me. Spearhead Hawaiian Style Pale Ale is brewed in Toronto: some distance from Hawaii, I believe. But... what...
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Found art
Three pale ales from Michigan brewery Founders today. I'll get to the more usual styles, but first up is something called All Day IPA: 4.7% ABV and proclaiming itself a "session ale". I'm immediately...
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Abbey Lite
Keyte Oosténdse Tripel is a bit of a misnomer as it comes from Brouwerij Strubbe in Ichtegem, some way south of Ostend. The strength is low for the style at 7.7% ABV and it's a little bit past the...
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