It’s the first day of the year you could describe as hot. You hope that tiny but noticeable itch under your eyes doesn’t mean hayfever (although deep down you know it does). Skies are clear and vividly blue, not a cloud in sight (nor an aeroplane trail on this particular day).

The village nestles amongst the rolling hills of Kent. Winding lanes shaded with full-leaved trees are a pre-requisite for getting here and parking next to an ancient stone wall an added bonus. Hop farms litter the journey, tall wired supports waiting patiently for the climbing plants to emerge from unkempt soil. Read the rest of this entry »

Another ‘whoop’ for Loiners this weekend as Friday and Saturday sees not just one beer festival in Leeds but two!

Rothwell Beer Festival 2010

Rothwell, home of the charming Rosebud and our very own Copper Dragon loving R’Sam, is holding a beer festival. 40 cask beers, plus bottles, cider, perry and food will all be available in aid of two local charities.

The organising committee have been working their socks off since January and the fruits of their labour (with some help from Wakefield CAMRA and Clark’s Brewery) will hopefully lead to another addition to West Yorkshire’s beer scene.

“We’re raising money for the local church roof which was stripped of lead just before the bad weather” says Paul Mann of the organising committee. “Additionally half the proceeds will got to Rothwell Lions who go a great amount of work in the local community”.

“The beer list is changing right up until the last minute but we’re hoping for a good crowd”.

The Leeds and Wakefield areas are spoilt for choice this weekend, with both Rothwell Beer Festival and LS6 Beer Festival so now it looks like a beer before and after this Saturday’s football.

For more details visits www.rothwellbeerfestival.co.uk

“Mark from Morley has texted in” said Adam Pope, and he proceeded to read the whole of the text message I’d sent to BBC Radio Leeds (all 500+ characters of it) word for word, live on air. I burst into tears, full blown streaming tears, soaking my chin and my shirt and blurring the M621 in front of me.

Fuck, it really happened. It really fucking happened.

I’d known since early that Friday afternoon it was happening. On my lunch I’d walked up to Leeds City Square expecting a handful of local reporters and desperate supporters outside the grey, charmless building of the administrators that were deciding the fate of Halifax Town AFC. But there was nothing but disinterested office workers and recruitment consultants in ill-fitting suits wandering around aimlessly. Back at my desk I didn’t do much work that afternoon, between refreshing BBC Football and repeatedly pressing F5 on the Halifax Evening Courier sports pages.

That long motorway drive, listening to my own words read back to me by Pope’s familiar tones, was two years ago, and my tears did little to stop Halifax Town disappearing from the face of English football. I welled up at the sound of my own desperation and slammed my hands against the steering wheel in a mix of anger and despair.

Tonight, however, my beloved Shaymen fought back.

FC Halifax Town¹, the phoenix from the flames of the team that had played at the famous Shay stadium since 1921, recorded a historic point that secured the Unibond Northern Premier League Division One North title. 99 points and 107 goals were enough to fend off the challenge of Lancaster City’s Dolly Blues and confirm Town’s status as champions. The long road back to Conference and League football is a step closer.

Tonight there are no pathetic tears, no pointless despair. Tonight’s celebratory beer is pure, unrivalled, pride.

This beer helps drown all the joys and sorrows of missed play off finals and the unparalleled relief of staying up on the last day of too many seasons. This beer is for the years, the heroes, the woodwork and the bulging net.

This beer is for Steve Norris, Jamie Paterson and Geoff Horsfield; for Lewis Kileen and Chris Wilder. This beer is for Neil Apsin, all the people who resurrected the club, and the fans who trudge to the ground each week.

This beer is for Tom Baker, because his 87th minute goal – which made me erupt with emotion in the presence of 1,932 strangers – is why I’m not in bed yet and instead, still up late, on a school night, drinking beer.

¹ See what they did there?!

There’s nothing like a spot of good news, and a new beer festival in Leeds can only be a good addition of the cities beer scene.

A day of bands, beer and sunshine (the latter not guaranteed) in Leeds’ eclectic Hyde Park is on paper, a bloomin’ brilliant idea. Take local musicians, regional breweries and pop them down into a stunning brand new arts centre within the former St Margaret of Antioch Church, and voilá!  On top of that potential the festival aims to raise money for West Yorkshire charity Village to Village, helping development projects in Africa.

I’ll be nipping by before and/or after the crunch match with MK Dons at Elland Rd. I’ll stick to Bovril at half time to save myself for some samples of these beers (which may or may not include a gallon-sized taster* of St Petersburg, mmmmmm). Read the rest of this entry »

In a world of Top 100 lists and a thousand and one books about 1001 things you’ll never be able to afford to do, us Homo Sapien types often lose our perspective. We had caught up in the whims of our tiny, insignificant lives and convince each other that we are more important than we really are.

If I was compiling a list of photographs that you must see before you die, there is no doubt that Pale Blue Dot would be somewhere near the pinnacle of my list. The photo, taken by NASA in 1990, illustrates just how insignificant our little Blue Planet is in the vastness of our solar system. The image of a small dot – less than 1 pixel wide – does not even illustrate what a microscopically tiny part of our galaxy the Earth is, let alone the Universe.

Carl Sagan, at who’s request the photo was taken, summed this up beautifully. He cooly points out that every life, every birth, every death, every war, every fight, every breath, every human thought, all took place in this infinitesimally tiny piece of rock amidst an infinity of rock, gas and nothingness. And that includes every pint in every pub.

So, in the grand scheme of things, beer really doesn’t matter. All the beer ever brewed, ever drunk and ever dreamed about amounts to a relatively tiny bundle of charged particles, given energy by the star we call our Sun and ultimately delivering intoxication to a teeny bunch of people who are doing their best to put their everyday lives and strifes behind them.

One day, that same Sun will eat the Earth in a mind boggling display of unstoppable solar bravado, dwarfing it’s heavenly subjects as it accelerates towards it’s ultimate fate, collapsing under the weight of the universes’ weakest force and destroying, potentially, all the life that there ever will be or has been.

So in some ways, human fate is ultimately doomed. There’s no point to anything we do, we may as well drink, get fat and fuck off, leaving a dead planet behind to rot and burn.

But, as we all know, size isn’t everything.

Our human lifetimes which flash by in an instant are a speckle on the astronomical time line, but to each and every one of us, those moments when we breathe, think and drink are all we will ever have. They are our own personal time-constrained eternities. We will never have any one elses moments, we will never be able to see everything in the world. We will spend our lives missing out on everyone elses moments and clinging desperately to our own.

There are times we come together and share in our (utterly pointless and insignificant) lives. We celebrate the fact we have each other. We celebrate our health and happiness. We counter our grief and illness by coming together and offer our company to those in despair.

And during these moments, at these good times that we remember (and often at the bad ones we can never forget) many of us have beer as the focal point of our communion.

Beer is touted as the most social of our tipples, a drink for the masses, for all of the classes, with simple, earthy ingredients, served in community centres  for the local people, ‘public urban boundary systems‘ where people come together and network, socially, without the need for technology nor pixels.

Beer is arguably no more important than wine, than vodka, whiskey or cider. It’s rarely shared in the same way as the sambucas that you set on fire or the tequilas that we neck along with salt and lemon. It doesn’t have the shock and headfuck kick of a jagerbomb.

It is though, the most popular of all the alcoholic lubrications¹. There are beers of various different levels of potency. There’s a beer for every occassion. A gueze to share, a kriek to start a party. A bitter after a long walk, a porter to sit in front of an open fire with. There’s a beer to cool you down in summer sun, a beer to warm you up after a cold winters day.

There’s a beer for a chat, beer for a session. Beers to knock you for six and beer to stay up all night with. There’s beer for drowning our sorrows and beer for celebrating milestones. There’s beer for beer geeks and beer for John Smith down the local WMC.

Arguably no other drink shares this diversity – no other drink can match beer for depth, diversity and refreshment.

‘Nothing ever lasts forever’ sang Echo & his Bunnymen. Not even the sun, this Earth or maybe even time. But in each and everyone of our worlds, our lives are our eternity and to us, everything matters. If beer matters to you, then beer matters.

¹ So says a source on Wikipedia, and who am I to argue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer#cite_note-1

Liverpool Wheel near the renovated Albert Dock

Liverpool’s a city I’ve never had much desire to visit. Unfairly, the stereotypes of Brookside and Harry Enfield sketches have meant I’ve neglected it for what have seemed like more glamourous alternatives. Liverpool is great though, and if you share my previous misconceptions, I urge you to go there and see for yourself. Read the rest of this entry »

Rhodesian seafood on the rooftops of Lindos

I love mussels almost as much as I love alliteration. Ever since my first taste I’ve wanted to try them in as many different guises as possible. The best dish I ever had was sat on a rooftop in Lindos on the Greek Island of Rhodes – cooked in a hot and spicy tomato sauce, and not those small shrimp-like examples you buy in Morrison’s, but large, juicy, succulent mullusca in giant iridescent shells harvested earlier that day.

Seafood isn’t something I find particularly easy to cook at home, and Monday through Thursday it’s all about ease of cooking in our household (it’s a different story at the weekend though!). Enter our nearest supermarket and ready prepared mussels: cardboard-packed and shrink-wrapped in a garlic and white wine sauce.

These are really easy in an evening. We boil some tagliatelle to our preferred softness whilst frying some large farmhouse mushrooms and onions, throwing the mussels and sauce in a pan, and stirring the lot together. Voila.

Martsons Oyster stout with mussels

If you’re lucky enough to have a better half who will cook for you (because, 1) you can only cook within geological time frames as opposed to minutes and 2) you have an instinctive need to dirty every last utensil and pan in creating gastronomic delights) then I’d recommend spending the 10 minute cooking time selecting a nice porterstout from your beer cupboard to accompany the tasty morsels.

Marston’s Oyster stout is a pretty typical partner for this meal – it’s easily available in supermarkets and tasty to boot. It’s  dark with a thick, off-white head. It’s usually creamy yet dry to finish, with hints of burnt wood sitting next to (often) slightly spicy fruit and sometimes molasses. The finish makes me think of dirty tyres, at least when it washes down our bivalved fruits de mer. It’s not bursting with flavour, it’s far the blandest stout, it won’t break the bank. And it goes well with mussels (and I guess oysters too!)

I wouldn’t normally nip as far as North Bar for a quick half in Leeds, not when the Grove, Cross Keys, Commercial and Midnight Bell are all realistically crawl-able. It’s cask ale week though and North had acquired two beers that don’t normally frequent West Yorkshire bars – Crown Brewery’s Stannington Stout and Tawny from the team at Marble on the dark side of the Pennine’s.

Swift half pints of cask ale (not that this picture was either of last nights tipples, I missed that opportunity!)

It’s Stuart Ross’s Stannington Stout was the dark one of the pair though, a jet black mocha-fest of chocolate and coffee with an aroma to die for and so dark that opaque doesn’t do it justice. Marble’s Tawny – a one-off cask I’m told, although I’ve heard a few people have tried it from a cask in other years – was far more aromatic than the bottle I had been underwhelmed by a few months ago. Piney hops make this a brown bitter deserving of it’s name and earns it a pedestal above subtler beers purely on impact.

Two half pints (and now two half-pint-sized beer reviews ) later, the real world called and unfortunately I had to leave North Bar. Well, I grabbed another half of Tawny seen as it’s a one-off. Mmm mmm. I’ll be back later today though as they have Duchesse de Bourgogne (which I adore) on draught. And I’m hoping that the Cross Keys has Marble Pint this weekend (the ‘coming soon’ board has been tempting me with it for a week or so!). Cask Ale Week will be wrapped up with a couple of local beers at the Grove before Leeds’ crunch match against Swindon on Saurday (fingers crossed.)

All in all, a pretty good beer week!