Review Posts

Bedlam Brewery Tour-At-Home

Bedlam Brewery is based in Sussex which means they are not named after London's infamous Bedlam (Bethlem Royal) Hospital. Instead, the name comes from an ancient Roman road which runs close to the barn in which the brewery was founded, in 2012. Since then, the brewery has grown at an enviable pace and this year ...

Battle Of The Blends

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited to take part in judging the Battle Of The Blends, with two carefully anonymous blends put together under some intriguing rules. It's always a pleasure to see a Drinks By The Dram box dropping through my letterbox, but the content was even more ...

Taylors High Voltage

I'm a big fan of Taylors - their coffee is easily available, well priced and generally pretty damn tasty. In recent months their range has expanded, with the arrival of "single origin" coffees, showcasing the character of four bean-producing nations - and hopefully more to come. Happily, their blended range remains - when I first ...

Raw Bean Unwind Laid-Back Latino Fusion

I'm honestly not sure what to make of Raw Bean. They make a big thing about how coffee is best when it's fresh, and so "we only roast our coffee once the order has been placed". All very sensible stuff, but then they put their coffee into bags and sell it to Waitrose ...

Anspach & Hobday Tour-At-Home

Anspach & Hobday have been on my 'to try' list for a long time, but somehow they never ended up in my basket when restocking my cupboard. This is the slight downside to the current explosion of new breweries - it's impossible to keep up with them all! We ended up visiting them by ...

Nikka Taketsuru 21 Year Old

After setting up Suntory's Yamazaki distillery outside of Kyoto, Masataka Taketsuru left to found his own company which was to become Nikka. His new company built its first distillery, Yoichi, on the northern island of Hokkaido. Thirty five years later, a second malt whisky distillery was set up further south, on Japan's main island of ...

Pact San Isidro

The old saying about not judging books by their cover is nonsense. I've always judged books by their cover - when you're staring at a book shelf, be it in the local library, the local bookshop, or the virtual shelves of Amazon the only real option (other than standing there and reading the ...

Pact Toledo - Norte de Santander

Today's coffee is a Colombian bean from the Norte de Santander region, which is in the North East of the country, up by Venezuela. If nothing else, my coffee habits are improving my sense of South American geography! Toledo looks lighter roasted than I would normally go for, but has a rich aroma nonetheless. ...

Moor Beer: Fusion, 2012 Vintage

It’s been a while since I dug into my Monster Beer fridge, and this seems to be the perfect choice to get back into the swing of things – an 8% ABV barrel-aged Old Ale, in an alarming generous 660ml bottle. Fusion is an Old Ale which is aged in barrels from the ...

Pact Fazenda Sertao

After enthusing about Pact's single sentence summaries in my last review, I've realised that the last few packets I've received have all followed a similar theme - milk chocolate, cherries, that kind of thing. In some ways this is entirely reasonable. Coffee often has a red fruit character - the bean comes from the ...