I want to hear somebody bark

Barm hit the keg a few weeks ago: I know the beer in question very well in its cask-conditioned form. It’s very good. The keg version was dire. To cut a long story short, the taste and aroma of an excellent beer was completely destroyed, it made me burp a lot and it was much [...]

Cream tangerine

Best comment: Someone send this guy a double IPA…just for shits and giggles. Really I should have given them my address, to see if anybody would. As it was, I had to buy one myself. What follows is a bit of an oddity, as it’s a review of a beer I didn’t actually like. But [...]

Boring brown beer

Smack my thigh and call me Kevin, but I’m going to praise boring brown beer. At least, I’m going to suggest that BBB is part of the solution, not part of the problem. Consider: a Spar in a university area. It’s not a rough or down-at-heel area, granted, but it’s not exactly crawling with ageing [...]

Doubledoublegood! Doubledoublegood!

Q: What’s a craft beer? A: Nobody really knows. However, there is a standard definition of a craft brewer, which goes something like this: Small: Annual production of 6 million barrels of beer or less. Independent: Less than 25% of the craft brewery is owned or controlled (or equivalent economic interest) by an alcoholic beverage [...]

Less is more

This post is a kind of footnote to this one of Martyn’s. The other night, courtesy of the local JDW’s, I tried five different beers from the Congleton Beartown Brewery: Ginger Bear and Honey Bear (which speak for themselves), Polar Eclipse (a sweet stout), Bear Ass (brown bitter) and Bruin’s Ruin (strong bitter). They were [...]