Beer Posts

AG13 - Hop Panic!

This story has two rather contradictory morals to it, but they're both equally valuable lessons. Moral 1: Plan Ahead I started out with the intention of re-making my previously successful #IPADay, because it's a lovely beer and my store of the previous batch was running low. The brew day started out well enough, and the grain ...

O'Hara's Brewery Tour At Home

If Saint Patrick's Day this year proved anything, it's that large portions of the UK seem to think that the only beer Ireland has even heard of is stout. I even saw pubs proudly tweeting their beery line-ups for the day, consisting entirely of stouts that weren't even from Ireland. This is, of course, ...

Belvoir Brewery Tour-At-Home

Belvoir Brewery is a Leicestershire brewery, just a stone's throw from Melton Mowbray - home of pies and cheese fairs. It's now 20 years old, which isn't ancient by any measure but certainly means it pre-dates the craft beer revolution. They have a number of beers in their core range - the website lists ...

A Tale Of Three Stouts

2014 was the year when Craft Beer went mainstream. The big, established brewers finally noticed that their market share was at risk, and started looking for ways to jump on the bandwagon. Some of them jumped on with both feet, setting up small, in-house microbreweries and letting their brewers off the leash a little. ...

Virginia Beer Flights - Blue Mountain Brewery

British breweries still have a little something to learn from their US counterparts; we may have imported their hops, their "craft cool" and even their cans, but so far we don't seem to have embraced the "brewery tap as restaurant and tasting experience" to the same extent as our American friends. Blue Mountain Brewery ...

Summer Wine Kopikat Caol Ila

Talk about craft beer for long enough and eventually the awkward issue of cost rears its ugly head. Craft beer is, almost by definition, pricier than mainstream ('craftless'?) beer, for a number of reasons. Firstly, the components are undeniably more expensive; a 6% hop explosion clearly needs more raw ingredients than an insipid, 3.5% ...

Import vs. Brewed Under License

"Brewed Under License" is the beer industry's way of describing out-sourcing. This is either done when a brewery lacks the capacity to do all their own brewing - Brewdog being a recent example, temporary farming out production of Punk IPA to Thwaites - or as an alternative to exporting their beer. This second example ...

AG12 – Bramling Best

It's all very well brewing fancy IPAs and delicious Coffee Porters, but the one thing my homebrew cupboard was missing was a good session bitter. I also had an alarming quantity of Bramling Cross hops from the garden. When I bought myself a hop plant, I didn't really appreciate the volume of hops that a ...

On Ageing, Condition and Best Before

As my recent post about Sambrook's Barley Wine shows, beer can sometimes benefit from time spent in the bottle. Ageing can bring out a real depth and complexity of flavour that makes it worth the wait, no matter how hard that can sometimes be! As an extreme example, I have a bottle or two ...

Sambrook's No. 5 Barley Wine

Sambrook's released their No. 5 Barley Wine at last year's excellent (if slightly damp) Beer By The River and I loved it. It had that rich, sticky sweetness and warming alcohol of a good barley wine and yet managed to remain light and drinkable enough for me to declare it "the perfect session barley wine". I ...