Review Posts

Bird & Wild Yeti Farm Forest Coffee

One of the curious aspects of the coffee industry is the huge range of badges and certifications. As well as the urbiquitous 'Great Taste' award - that black and gold sticker that seems to adorn the majority of coffee packets - there's Organic, Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade, to mention a few. Today's coffee introduces ...

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 ...

(I Love My) Weasel Cafe Blend

This is one of those times where branding has left me confused and uncertain about something that, on the face of it, I should be instantly in love with. I generally adore Vietnamese coffee; I honestly can't think of a single one I've tried that has disappointed. And yet, I'm uneasy about the ...

Tasgall 30 Year Old

Blended and supermarket own-label whiskies have a few things in common. There is an assumption that they are (a) cheap, and (b) rubbish While it's undeniably true that they tend to be cheaper like-for-like than single malts from named distilleries it certainly isn't true to say that they're all rubbish. I've been very pleasantly surprised by ...

Nektar Greek Coffee

I confess that until recently, I wasn't really aware that "Greek Coffee" was a thing. I've only been to Greece once (I think) and although there was a lot of drinking done I don't recall any of it being coffee - it was mostly beer, cheap wine and free ouzo. On a side note, ...

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. ...

Peet's Sumatra

I love coffee, so whenever we're away I like to keep my eyes open for something new. When I came across Peet's Coffee on a recent trip to Virginia, it was pretty much impossible to resist - an interesting sounding coffee with my name (almost) on it! Peet's Sumatra sounds like my kind of ...

Lost Distilleries Blend - Batch 6

I've tasted whisky from The Lost Distilleries before, and was pretty impressed by it. As the name suggests, these are blends made from whiskies made in distilleries that are no longer with us. Unsurprisingly, this results in some expensive bottles - around the £350 mark, if you can even find them. The Lost Distilleries Blend ...

Macallan Amber 1824 Series

The 1824 Series from Macallan is a range of sherry-aged whiskies. The range carries no age statement, and each whisky is named simply for its colour - from Gold through to Ruby. 1824, of course, refers to the year in which the distillery was originally founded. Macallan Amber 1824 Series is from the paler ...

Shackleton Rare Old Highland Malt - The Journey

The word "hero" is massively over-used today. Being good at football isn't "heroic", and neither is being Miss World. Ernest Shackleton, however, was a genuine hero. In 1914, he set off on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, an attempt to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. The whole story of that expedition is ...