Review Posts

Pact Irmas Pereira

One thing I like about Pact is that their coffees always have a single-sentence summary on the packet; it's obviously not a perfect description, but it sets your expectations quite nicely. Of course, the down side is that when you come to write a review, you have to try and ignore those expectations! Irmas ...

Samuel Adams Rebel IPA

It only seems right to be drinking something American on their Independence Day, and happily Shepherd Neame have provided an ideal beer in the form of their latest import from Samuel Adams. Rebel IPA is a 6.5% all-American IPA; fairly mid-range in terms of strength. It's a pale copper ale, with little in the ...

Shepherd Neame 1215 Ale

Shepherd Neame is a brewery that loves history, so it's perhaps not surprising that they are celebrating the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta with a special beer. In preparation for the approaching anniversary, the Magna Carta has been talked about ad nauseam lately, although more in abstract that in any great detail - for ...

Douwe Egberts Morning Americano

I have to admit, when I read the name Douwe Egberts it doesn't say "top notch coffee" to me. For some reason associate the name with the sort of coffee that you get served in pubs - the stuff that's been sat in the filter carafe since last April and has been brewed so ...

Smooth Ambler Old Scout Straight Bourbon

Smooth Ambler are a West Virginian distillery, set up in 2009. As is often the way with young distilleries, they produce a range of vodka and gins, but it's their whiskey that is the focus of my attention today. The folk at Master of Malt have an interesting Smooth Ambler taster set (now sadly discontinued) ...

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, ...

Pact San Marcos Timana

This week's coffee takes us back to the folk at Pact. After the first offering in my renewed subscription, I've got some high expectations - so let's see if they can continue to impress. San Marcos Timana is from the southwest of Colombia - San Marcos being the region within Timana from which the coffee ...

Ardbeg Uigeadail

Whisky has a habit of being occasionally tricky to pronounce for us non-gaelic speakers - none more so than those that hail from the island of Islay. The island's name itself can trip up the uninitiated, correctly spoken as "eye-la" rather than the more obvious "is-lay". Of course, this problem works both ways; when ...

Pact Fig Pudding Espresso

I had a subscription with coffee-mongers Pact last year, but for a couple of reasons it wasn't destined to be a long-term thing. Firstly, their coffees were generally on the weak side for me and secondly I simply couldn't keep up with a new coffee from them every fortnight in addition to all the ...

Bird & Wild Raul Mamani Peru

We're used to coffee being branded by style or by region, or even by the farm of origin - but I think this is the first time that I've had a coffee simply branded with the name of the man who grew it. Raul Mamani's family smallholding is in the Tampbopata region of ...