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The house wins
My wife had arrived in Haarlem a few hours ahead of me and had been beer shopping. There was a bottle of Leffe Winter waiting for me in the room, still welcome despite the amount of Belgian beer I had...
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Steady on, Kevin
A plethora of limited edition beers arrived into Aldi for the Christmas run-up this year. The German supermarket seems to have gone around the houses, recruiting Irish breweries to make unique beers...
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Holy order
Mount Saint Bernard is England's only trappist brewery. Until recently it had only produced one, rather decent, beer: a dark ale. While abroad last month, I discovered that they have a second beer...
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Fresh solace
The craft beer goldrush is long over but nobody seems to have told the supermarkets. You can still get a reasonable selection of small-batch beers in most of them, and they keep on commissioning...
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Who's bringing the hops?
I couldn't let the odometer flip into another year without clearing the backlog of assorted Irish-brewed pale ales that has been accumulating since late summer. Here's what I've got: Electromode from...
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Pudding
Nobody is reading beer blogs on Christmas Day so it doesn't really matter what I put here. How about I throw you some weird Norwegian stuff that no sane person would ever buy?The surrealists at...
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Whippy Twixtmas!
What an adventure in Whiplash beer we have today! This veritable avalanche of beer arrived in quick succession over the past month or so, behoving me to start getting cans open and notes written soon...
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End of the year content filling
Thank you to Alan for the title. And so, once again, it's time to take stock of the year in beer just gone, using an increasingly irrelevant template, last revised in 2013. Changing it now would be...
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Not what they seem
It's hard to believe that Mescan passed ten years in business in 2024, but congratulations to them. To celebrate they put out a new golden ale called, appropriately as Gaeilge, Óir. It's a dark-ish...
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North-west trad
Ireland has a number of breweries whose beers never feature on these pages because they're only available in the immediate catchment area. Not everything finds its way to the big cities, and that's as...
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Absolute slop
I'll spare you my usual rant about the bad AI-generated artwork on Third Barrel's cans. Suffice it to say, they're still at it, and it still looks cheap and terrible. I had built up quite a collection...
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For the wings of a dog
It's not a boycott, it's just boredom. While I am aware of the litany of controversies that BrewDog has attracted to it, and that it probably would have a chilling effect on my interest in its beer,...
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Two two-tone tins
A couple of new beers from Ska Brewing arrived a few months back and have been languishing in my fridge ever since. I finally got around to pulling them out just before Christmas.Southwest Coast is a...
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Old man beer
Ask any brewer why they don't make more beer in the dark and delicious styles and they'll tell you it's because they don't sell, at least not the way IPAs do. It's a scandal and a disgrace and the...
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Frost/Bit
I've owned a Bitburger glass for some sixteen years now -- it's one of the Masterson Bequeathment, and is in regular rotation, but for other beers. I discovered recently that I've never had Bitburger....
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Arthur's Last Christmas
Just before the Christmas holiday I dropped in to the Open Gate Brewery to see what the Guinness crew were offering for the season.Paddle one began on a Chocolate Milk Stout, the sort of thing Guinness...
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Get down
It's hard to beat a bit of sunshine and warmth in the midst of the winter gloom. Last month's New Year jaunt certainly provided that, with a week or so in sunny, and rainy, but most of all warm, São...
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Follow the bear
Farra Funda is a tiny brewpub in the bohemian Barra Funda district of São Paulo. The draw here is that one of the owners is Dubliner Phil Keatley, who packed up his Crafty Bear brand last year and...
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The gaul!
On Monday I mentioned drinking at Asterix, a beer bar and restaurant in central São Paulo. While the draft selection is modest, the stock of cans and bottles is extensive, and I made liberal use of...
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Big box retail
São Paulo has excellent supermarkets, in the giant French style, though with more tropical fruit than I've ever seen stacked anywhere. The beer selection tends to be mixed, and naturally is dominated...
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