Monster Beer Posts

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Samuel Smith's Yorkshire Stingo

This week's monster beer has been lurking at the back of my cupboard for a very long time, but as it's apparently been matured in oak casks for over a year it's not exactly going to let a little age worry it. Part of the reason it's languished so long, to be honest, ...

Brewdog Tokyo*

As my contribution to the continuing campaign against the Higher Strength Beer Duty, I'm selflessly drinking through my collection of beers which are directly affected by this absurd tax. I'll spare you the rant (you can visit my inaugural post on the matter if you want to know more) and move straight onto tonight's guest beer. Brewdog ...

Harviestoun Ola Dubh Special Reserve 12

As anyone with a passing interest in the UK beer scene is probably aware, this month saw the arrival of the High Strength Beer Duty(HSBD) resulting in an additional tax burden on any beers over 7.5% ABV strength. It's important to note that the existing Beer Duty is already relative to strength; before ...