James Watt – BrewDog founder

Love ‘em or loathe ‘em, you can’t help but admire the enthusiasm of BrewDog and their ability to make fantastic tasting beers; not to mention their boundary pushing exploits with Toyko*, Tactical Nuclear Penguin, and the controversially named Sink the Bismarck!

The driving force behind BrewDog’s’ anti-establishment attitude is James Watt: entrepreneur, fisherman and head of all things penguin.

This week James gets stranded on our desert island with only a handful of beers and an interesting luxury item to keep him company…

James Watt, BrewDog Head Penguin

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The arrival of a fresh sprinkling of snow brought a genuine chill to this morning’s hangover which will have been evident for all to see by the look on my face as I pulled back the hotel room curtains this morning. Last night a group of 20 of us went out in Nottingham to celebrate the upcoming nuptials of a school friend who happens to be marrying another school friend. They keep it all pretty local down in Banbury!!!

Anyways, I was a bit apprehensive as the last time I had shared a hotel room with the monkey deposit retention and severe violence were only avoided due to the good nature of the hotelier and the patience of fellow bloggers. In the event everything went to plan, except that my team lost at indoor football and the fact captain collision (my new nickname for the Monkey) ceded his hard earned third place in the team go karting event meaning that our best efforts could only raise us to fourth. So we emerged from the hotel this morning feeling the inevitable effects of not exactly getting nine hours sleep. Read the rest of this entry »

Beer apps for the iPhone

Mashable's guide to iPhone beer apps is mainly US focused

Social media enthusiasts Mashable have published a list of beer apps for the iPhone ranging in price from free of charge to $4.99. From finding the nearest brew pub to swotting up on beer styles, there’s a selection of beer related applications but unfortunately for us UK beer lovers the list seems very US centric.

iBeer seems to be a very similar to the pointless but kinda entertaining Carling iPhone app. Gallagher’s, iBeers Pro and BeerCloud are all applications that let you research a plethora of beer types and styles and include functionality including beer search, beer finders and beer reviews.

DrinkFit counts calories whilst Happy Hour,  Find Craft Beer and Guinness Pub Finder all focus on buying beer either on- or off-trade (again, in the USA). The one that stands out for me is iBrewMaster which allows home brewers to record the vital statistic of their brews and has 50 recipes built in. I’ll get Sam to try it when he does his next batch of pale ale (that somehow turned out like a Belgian blonde!)

We’ve also come across a few other apps recently including BrewPal (similar to iBrewMaster we believe), FreeBooze, Beer Pong, Beer Brands and iDrink! which keeps track of your evenings drinking according to the Huffington Post.

In the UK there’s less choice although I’ve seen the NHS units tracker in action a few times but not yet heard any feedback on the Good Beer Guides iPhone app.

I’m a conscientious dissenter from the iPhone revolution, plucking for the gorgeous but virtually app-free HTC HD2. So if beer lovers out there know of more beer iPhone apps (or apps for Android, Windows or another platform) or has tried any of the UK focused applications please let us know.

And even better if you build iPhone or other apps, please start building them for Windows Mobile too, we need them to!

As an adolescent I was lucky enough to have three excellent  local pubs, all within 200 yards on the same road. Set back from the road The Horse and Jockey was a lively pub with one bar and a lounge with dart board, pool table and Sky tv. The beer was lager, one or two hand pulls of something like Hooky Bitter and at one point a Chinese takeaway operating in the back room servng takeaways to the hungry inhabitants. Read the rest of this entry »

The weekend just gone I visited my cousins in Cheshire. They are 9 and 5 years old (I think!) respectively and are bundles of noise and cheekiness. Despite spending the weekend calling me by my brothers first name in a bid to wind me up, they don’t half make me smile, especially when they (well, their dad, my uncle) took me to their newly opened local beer shop.

The Beer Emporium, Sandbach

The Beer Emporium is a small but well stocked beer shop in Sandbach, a quirky and slightly curious town, situated straight off the M6, with a far reaching history that’s most prominently displayed in the Sandbach Crosses, a scheduled monument dating back to the Middle Ages. Despite the wood framed buildings and a posh deli stuffed to the rafters with fine foods and continental delicacies I’m assured that the town is sports mad, with barely a dash of culture amidst the football posts and cricket stumps (the last bastion of hope is WH SMith’s, the only place you can buy a book). The ancient looking pubs are beautiful from the outside but to my shame we didn’t have time to venture in them with the young cousins in tow. Read the rest of this entry »

Terrible beer, great name.

Flying Dog Raging Bitch - orange in colour; orange in taste

Of course not, it’s the other way round. Disclaimer starts here: I love this beer.

I first sampled The Bitch at the Flying Dog UK tasting in Leeds. This 20th anniversary beer jumped out of its take-home tetra pak like a bat out of hell. Its nose blasted my clean out of my seat and before the night was out it was on its way to being a beer phenomenon.

Raging Bitch’s Belgian influence is the first thing that strikes me: it’s fruity esters and yeasty sweetness that only Belgian beers can pull off. Until now.

Massive grapefruit pith and outrageous sour fruit intertwine with a sweet malt finish and a bitter attack from an armada of late hops. The nose is huge thanks to a dry hopping assault by Amarillo hops. You pluck out the names of most of Sainsbury’s exotic fruit aisle if you close your eyes; for me the grapefruit ebbs and flows against tangerine and apricot. Read the rest of this entry »

Let me start by saying I’m not sure I gave this beer a fair run (which is an inadvertent pun!). I’ve just run 8 miles, never a good time for beer tasting. I doubt it was my fastest run ever but it did entail an hour and a half of running up the hills of Morley (of which their are seven, just like Rome, and Sheffield), over the Huddersfield-Leeds train line, across muddy fields, all the way along Churwell Hill, across to Dewsbury and back over the M62. In the rain. You know that rain. The rain that soaks you reet through.

Dunham Massey IPA and parsnip soup

On my return, after 2 x hamstring stretch + 2 x abductor stretch + 2 x hip flexor, but before my super hot sauna style shower, I popped open a beer whilst I liquidised the soup that had been simmering in the slow cooker.

This was part of a haul from the Beer Emporium in Sandbach, one of the first I picked up because I can’t help but be drawn to anything that says IPA on the label/pump clip. It poured very well for a bottle conditioned IPA, very clear, with a copper gradient and deep amber colour. Its nose and taste belied its appearance: I would expect it to be much more yellow and thinner because it tasted pale and gaunt, despite some upfront hop flavours and a little bit of biscuit. Read the rest of this entry »

Maredsous Brune (or Bruin)

It seems that my previous claims that I wasn’t really a fan of Belgian beers were completely unfounded (or simply founded on inexperience). A few years ago I assumed incorrectly that all Belgian beer = wheat fuelled turbo Hoegarden.

Maredsous is a great example how Belgian beer can be the antithesis of my previous perception: deep brown, fruity, with no pungent wheat head or overly fizzy body.

From the church wine nose, through stewed fruit – figs or prunes perhaps – this is  rich, sweet affair, almost caramel on the tongue. There’s a wisp of chocolate that arrives from nowhere to spice things up as well. It finishes softly but that isn’t such a bad thing.

This is a rich, mouth-filling beer; but with it’s gentle finish it’s the sort of beer that could become one of my staple ‘have a couple in the cupboard beers’. Read the rest of this entry »

Sierra Nevada Harvest was off so Trashy Blonde formed part of my hangover cure in York yesterday

Friday’s trip to London was a hectic one. I woke up knowing that it would be 13 and a half hours until my return journey commenced, about as depressing a thought as you can have at 6am. I was on a late train home from the capital and after rushing between meetings all day and frantically trying to find wi-fi around Marble Arch in the afternoon, I  spent a couple of hours with Glyn from the Rake sampling an eclectic mix of their finest beers and chatting about the busy few months we both have ahead of us. That was the eye of the storm as I then rushed up to Kings Cross for the home bound leg, eventually crawling into Morley just before the new day started.

The morning brought with it a heavy head from staying up with a nightcap to watch Mad Men on iPlayer (not to mention a quick half at Leeds Brewery Tap because I’m incapable of timing transport links with any degree of coordination). It was off to York for the day then with Sarah with the promise of a nice lunch and a slow paced amble around the cobbled streets. Read the rest of this entry »

Beer by Highland, glass by Purity - a pale ale double whammy

One of my favourite meals at the moment is grilled chicken, roasted vegetables and cous cous (interchangeable with rice, fried potatoes or other carbs to please your taste buds). Yes, the roasted veg is usually pre-chopped from ASDA – we’d never use a full courgette if we bought one – and the cous cous is Ainsley Harriot’s finest, but it’s a simple and hassle-free evening meal that’s healthy whilst ensuring we eat at a reasonable time.

It’s a meal that doesn’t want a big fancy beer. It needs something refreshing and palette cleansing, a light golden ale with qualities that mean the meal slips down easily and the night is mine to relax afterwards.

Step up Highland Brewing Company and Scapa Special. It’s a ‘world class pale ale’ and it fits the bill presented by its description: ‘golden and sparkling’, ‘light hop notes’ and a ‘balanced malt/hop middle’. Read the rest of this entry »