Thoughts on the Cask Report, part 1

I’ve been browsing the Cask Report. It’s well-written and well-presented, and will probably do more to help the spread of real ale than any number of well-meaning but patronising columns aimed at the punters (here’s one I read earlier). So I apologise in advance to Pete if my comments seem unduly negative. I had two [...]

Good companions

Testing, testing. Is this thing on? Right, gotcha. Er. Here we are then. This blog used to be a personal note-pad, a place to keep my tasting notes. I turned it into a blog proper in August and started investigating the rest of the beer blogosphere. It launched without any sort of announcement or mission [...]

57 Thomas Street

I finally made it to 57 Thomas St today; ironically enough I was on my way to the Marble Arch at the time and had forgotten I’d be passing the Thomas St bar. (I never got to the Marble Arch; I was heading over there to buy a bottle of the Special, but they had [...]

My local (number 4 in a series of 4)

And so to the local Wetherspoon’s. The Sedge Lynn is about 100 yards from the Marble Beer House, and has been since 1999 (i.e. shortly after the Marble itself opened). Until recently I hadn’t been in very often, partly for the usual anti-Wetherspoons (i.e. anti-corporate and anti-chain) reasons and partly because I didn’t find the [...]

The Blue Anchor, Helston

Or: what else I did on my holidays. Helston is an unassumingly beautiful town, which has been there approximately since the Norman Conquest and seems not to have changed all that much since. It’s mainly known for two things, one of which is the Furry: an annual unofficial holiday, when everyone in the town stops [...]

A tale of two pubs (Lizard, Cornwall)

Before our recent holiday in Cornwall I read up on the local pubs. Where the village of the Lizard was concerned, this didn’t take long. There were two choices: the Top House and the Witchball. Commenters on Beer In The Evening were very scathing about the Top House. One wrote: The new owners simply want [...]