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A brewery trip to Windsor via Limerick
The Windsor & Eton Brewery is relatively “local” to my home in the more western suburbs of London: about 20 minutes’ drive away, if there were absolutely nothing else on the road (that is, only in...
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The discreet charm offensive of the BrewDoggies
There is, I suggest, a thick slice of what the Irish call begrudgery in the responses around the British beerosphere to the success of BrewDog. Here are these young guys, starting in their early 20s,...
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Going places the civilians don’t
I’ll be frank: one of the good reasons for becoming a beer blogger is the opportunity it gives to go places, meet people, do things that you wouldn’t otherwise get to do. (Free beer too? Well, there is...
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Place-based beers and 13-year-old Special Brew
I have a new “magic beer moment” to savour: drinking 13-year-old Carlsberg Special Brew in the cellars of the Jacobsen brewery in Copenhagen. If you’re in Copenhagen you do, really, have to go and pay...
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Two traditional breweries: a photo-essay
Compared to, say, Roger Putman, recently retired editor of Brewer & Distiller International magazine, who has visited more than 170 different breweries in his career, I’ve really not been to that...
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Why Welsh beer blogger Simon Martin is a superstar in Poland
Two of the more than 300 bronze dwarfs to be found on the streets of Wrocław. They commemorate the surrealist anti-Communist Orange Alternative protest movement of the 1980s, whose symbol was a dwarf,...
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Ciao Biella: an Italian family brewery woos the bloggerati
You can hardly get fresher beer than from a bottle snatched off the production line by the managing director of the brewery, only seconds after it had been filled and capped – and, indeed, it’s...
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The porter in Majorca tastes like what it oughter
If you want a single statistic that shows how the craft beer movement has become a world-wide phenomenon, let it be this: there are now seven eight craft breweries on the Mediterranean island of...
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Caley’s self- crafted approach to being craft
Are you a mature but still lively Victorian brewery? Do you worry that younger breweries, with their weird American hop varieties, shiny stainless steel lauter tuns and one-off wacky recipes, are...
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The ballad of Baladin
It is a mark of the respect Italy has for beer, not just that there are now around a thousand new small boutique breweries in the country, but that you can take an MA course in beer styles at the...
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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...
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Laissez 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....
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A 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...
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Czeched 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...
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Homage 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...
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The 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”...
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A 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...
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If 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...
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If 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,...
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If 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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