Dutch treats
Portrait of Gambrinus. ‘king of beer’, at the van de Oirsprong brewery in North Brabant It must be very irritating being a Dutch brewer and seeing all the kudos the people next door in Belgium keep...
View ArticleLaissez les bonnes bières rouler
New Orleans is one of the few places in the world where walking the streets at all hours consuming alcohol from an open container is not just allowed, but actively encouraged. This is party city USA....
View ArticleA look round Camden Town’s new Enfield brewery
Whatever you think of Camden Town Brewery’s beer – and enough people like it to swallow more than 300,000 pints of Hells lager, Gentleman’s Wit and the rest every week – the company’s expansion in...
View ArticleCzeched out at last
Sitting 30 feet below the surface at a table in a workmen’s refuge dug out of the soft Bohemian sandstone, drinking unfiltered, unpasteurised lager made in 80-year-old open wooden fermenting vessels...
View ArticleHomage to Catalonian beer tourism
Carlos Rodriguez holds his mash fork inside the Agullons brewery, one of the first microbreweries in Catalonia, founded in 2005 at his masia (the typical Catalan farmhouse) in Sant Joan de Mediona. The...
View ArticleThe world’s quickest brewery tour
There ARE smaller breweries that Poppyland, but not very many: the room that the 2½-barrel brewkit sits in measures about 160 square feet. Your living room is probably larger. So the “brewery tour”...
View ArticleA quick plug for my friends at ABK
The lovely South Bavarian town of Kaufbeuren, home to the ABK brewery A couple of years back, in the summer of 2018, I was in an argument involving assorted brewers, beer retailers and beer writers...
View ArticleIf it’s Tuesday, this must be Kölsch – Part Two
Some of the best beer tourism happens in places that are already centres for “ordinary” tourism, with plenty of stuff to see that is nothing to do with beer. That’s what makes Brussels a great place to...
View ArticleIf it’s Tuesday, this must be Kölsch – Part Three
Copper at the Cantillon brewery in Brussels One of the problems of trying to be a beer tourist in Belgium in July is that many places shut for their annual break. This was the case with Cantillon,...
View ArticleIf it’s Tuesday, this must be Kölsch – Part Four
Tuesday, and we’re off travelling again, 20 miles south to Roeselare, and the Rodenbach brewery. To me, as a historian of beer and brewing, Rodenbach is a fascinating operation, since it brews...
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