Beer Posts

Westerham Brewery Tour-At-Home

It's been too long since one of these, and the beer collection keeps on growing! And so to Westerham, a Kentish brewery based on a National Trust farm. First up then, is Scotney Best Bitter at 4.3%. It has a nice amber colour but quite a feeble head with large bubbles that quickly faded ...

Westvleteren 12

For the first monster beer of 2012, I thought it was important to pick something to beat Aldi's 40 year old whisky. What better, then, than the Best Beer In The World?! Yes, this is the legendary Westvleteren 12, a Trappist Quad weighing in at 10.2% ABV and coming from the Trappist Abbey of ...

Brewdog Hardcore IPA

Back to Brewdog for this week’s Monster Beer. I’ve waxed lyrical on the brewery often enough, so straight onto the beer. This is the slightly more accessible Hardcore IPA, at 9.2% positively lightweight for a Brewdog beer. It’s rather strangely labelled as an “explicit imperial ale” on the bottle although I’m not sure quite ...

Hardknott Queboid

Hardknott are one of those breweries that have been on my radar – and my Twitter feed – for ages and yet somehow I've utterly failed to try any of their beer up to now. A recent visit to Borough Market (and therefore Utobeer) resulted in a nice haul of monsters and among them I ...

Brewpub: The Bull Highgate

One of my big beer obsessions is exploring the ever growing London brewing scene; the London Brewers page I used to maintain here isn't so much a public service as a 'to drink' list. Here, we pay our first visit to a brewpub – specifically, the Bull in Highgate which has the added benefit of ...

Flying Dog Kerberos Tripel

Until now, pretty much every beer I've talked about here has been British. This is not because I believe that the rest of the world is incapable of making good beer – it's just that I have so many great British beers to choose from, I simply haven't got around to talking about ...

The Kernel IPA Double Black

The Kernel is a brewery I've enthused about before; they were the subject of one of my earlier Brewery Tours At Home and I've always loved their beer. Finding myself in the general vicinity of London Bridge recently on a Saturday, I took the opportunity to pop down to the brewery and pick up ...

Marble Tripel

This week sees the start of a run of monster beers from breweries I know and love – in this instance Marble, who were the subject of one of my Tours-At-Home and were broadly judged to be lovely. So, when my regular online beer pusher – the now sadly departed Ales By Mail – mentioned ...

Cooking With Drink: Beer & Sausage Stew

This is a drink blog, not a food blog. I'll leave the proper foodie writing to my beloved wife. However, I do sometimes cook things that are at least as much about the booze as the food, and I thought I'd share them here. This is what I have imaginatively called my Beer & ...

Dark Star Imperial

Dark Star is a Sussex based brewer that started life nearly 20 years ago as a brewpub and has grown to be a fairly large brewery – the second largest in the county - with an impressive range of beers. Sadly (for the bottle-buying drinkers) most of their production goes into casks, but a small ...