La Mojito del Leeds

2

In the middle of the hustle and bustle of Leeds Waterfront Festival, tucked away in the corner of Brewery Wharf, something drew our merry group towards the oversized Havana Club banners. Even if we’d had to pay for the privilege I’d have jumped at the chance to make cocktails on a lazy Saturday afternoon. The fact it was free and we’d sunk a couple of cold Coors Lights meant we wasted no time in reserving a session at the stall.

Our lovely Scottish cocktail expert introduced us to the strange implements laid out like a surgeon’s table – the graters, knives and Hawthorn strainers – and forced a shot of Havana Club down our necks to ensure we could ‘appreciate’ the taste of the rum on it’s own.

We donned our uniform of pinnys (and for some reason baseball caps) and proceeded to create rum-based cocktails such as El Presidenté and the very Cuban La Bodequito del Medio Mojito. Fresh limes, mint (stalk ‘n all) and orange zest were thrown together in vigorous concoctions along with sparkling water, sugar, ice and various incarnations of Havana Club, from the standard Blanco and 3 year aged versions to the Añejo 7 Años, a darker more luxurious spirit with characteristics similar to oak aged beers, wines or whiskies –  a touch of vanilla and fruit in amongst the pang of the alcohol to make it slightly more bearable.

We were half-cut, drenched in sunshine and giddy enough to shake our stuff creating daiquiris all afternoon. We finished up with an inter-group competition to serve our delightful host with the perfect El Presidenté. I came second, ousted by a dubiously large amount of orange zest applied to the winning drink.

I’ve no idea why Havana Club chose to take a stall at Leeds Waterfront festival, or why they chose to give away free cocktail making sessions to the happy revellers. I’m glad they did though, as it turned out to be one of the highlights of the day, and we left with sunny and well lubricated dispositions just as the drizzle started to break up the al fresco party.

Tags: cocktails, havana club, leeds, rum

Rothwell Beer Festival

3

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

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

Tags: beer festival, leeds, Rothwell, West Yorkshire

LS6 Beer Festival

6

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 »

Tags: leeds, leeds beer festival

Quick halves of cask ale

5

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.

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!

Tags: cask ale, cask ale week, Commercial, cross keys, north bar, The Grove

Leeds Beer Festival

4

It nearly sneaked past us again this year, but Leeds Beer, Cider & Perry Festival starts today and is well worth a visit. It doesn’t seem to get much in the way of promotion and it’s not located in the city centre, but the festival is showcasing a whopping range of beer this year.

Beer lovers can fight their way through 150 real ales ‘from Yorkshire and beyond’ and the ‘best range in the North’ for cider and perry. There’s also a beer cum ice cream parlour to get us in a summery mood despite the bitter wind still encircling Bridgewater Place and a Global Beer Bar stocked to the rafters with fancy bottles from all four corners of the globe Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: beer festival, leeds, leeds beer festival, yorkshire

Thornbridge exposed at The Sheffield Tap

5

The Sheffield Tap is arguably one of the best stocked pubs in the North of England, with a regular range of Thornbridge beers on cask (the venue is a joint venture between the Derbyshire brewers and the chaps behind Pivo in York) and an inventory of bottled beers that make most beer cabinets look like a beery footnote. It’s a case of any excuse will do to persuade me to hop on the 42 minute train from Leeds, and last night the excuse was the chance to meet the team that brew Thornbridge’s beers who were hosting a Meet the Brewer session in the former first class refreshment lounge of Sheffield’s main station.

On arrival the tiny bar was busy – not quite heaving but certainly a far cry from quiet. A bustle of artisan beer fans, jaded commuters and groups of talkative drinking buddies crowded over the small tables and lined the restored bar. Tucking our elbows in we (Rob from HopZine, Tom from Reet Good Leeds and me)  joined the fray to admire the array of beers on offer, a veritable beer geeks heaven Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: black ipa, brewer, brewery, exposed, hops, imperial stout, jaipur, kipling, lord marples, mcconnells, raven, saint petersburg, sheffield tap, thornbridge

Horsforth Beer Festival

0

Horsforth Beer Festival

Jam-packed with Yorkshire beer, Horsforth plays host to its annual beer festival this weekend and some of the pints you’ll find probably haven’t even left God’s Own County to get to your (half) pint glass. Local beers include:

• Great Heck ’Slaughterhouse Porter’
• Hambleton Ales ‘Cheeky Mare’ and ‘Stallion’
• Little Valley ‘Python IPA’
• Ilkley Brewing Co ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ & ‘Ugly Duckling’

Prizes for the most memorably weird and wonderful beer (and brewery) names go to:

• Dicky Ticker Brewery
• Leadmill Brewery’s ‘Old Mottled Cock’
• Bazen’s ‘Zebra Best’
• Blue Monkey’s ‘99 Red Babboons’
• Millstone Brewery’s ‘Tiger Rut’
• Nutbrook Brewery’s ’Cow Juice’
• Old Spot’s ‘Dog in the Barrel’

Tags: beer festival, great heck, hambleton, horsforth beer festival, ilkley, leeds, little valley, yorkshire

Broken knees and broken keys

10

There are arguably too many moments I cringe at to call myself a responsible drinker with any real level of conviction. The ones that came in the gap year before I university are mostly classified under the ‘regrets’ section of my brain. As year one of university unfolded the balance of ‘I never want to remember doing that’ versus ‘I’m pretty pleased with myself’ was evenly weighted and shifted towards to positive end of the spectrum as I matured, with a few ‘we’ll laugh at that in a few weeks’ moments thrown in for good measure.

But at 26 I thought I’d stopped doing things like singing Leeds songs in rowdy northern cities not called Leeds and waking people up in the middle of the night.

Unfortunately Saturday’s combination of Jermaine Beckford’s 95th and a half minute equaliser and Stone Ruination IPA being on draught (or draft should I say) at the last pub of our #twissup crawl, ensured the night was one that would bring back some of those youthful moments of folly.

Returning to the Hillsborough Hotel after a skinful of cask conditioned Wild Swan and a liquid supper of fancy beers from the newly opened Sheffield Tap, a bunch of bedraggled beer bloggers struggled to open the blue painted door at the front of the pub. Having no qualifications in door opening and a more general problem with late night coordination turned out not to be a career changing combination as the shiny Yale key duly snapped in the lock leaving the burning eyes of my beer chums planted firmly on my back. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: #twissup, bloggers, blogging

Beer Friends

3

When I went down to the British Guild of Beer Writers dinner a couple of weeks ago I had a fantastic night. But the day after topped it all off with a pub crawl around London starting with Mark Dredge, Tim Hampson and Zak Avery in the Market Porter, and continuing across London town with Knut Albert, Ally Shaw and John the Beer Nut (via The Rake, Greenwich Union, The Wenlock Arms, The Gunmakers Arms and beyond).

I knew I’d taken a group photo at some point, I clearly remembered balancing my camera on a precipitous ledge in the Wenlock Arms, but for the life of me couldn’t find the resulting image.

Until now! And it made me smile and remember how great it is to meet up with like minded beer folk and talk beer and drink beer.

To good times, sláinte!

From left to right: Ally Shaw (FeralStrumpet), The Beer Nut (John Duffy), Knut Albert, Mark Dredge and me, FletchtheMonkey (Mark Fletcher, Real Ale Reviews).

Tags: beer, bloggers, blogging, british guild of beer writers, London

Tactical North Bar Penguin Tasting

2

BrewDog Tactical Nuclear Penguin Tasting at North Bar, Leeds

One of the best things I’ve found about living in Leeds, or a larger city for that matter, is the variety of events that take place that you don’t always find in less adventurous urban areas (maybe I was just brought up in a particularly boring town?!).

In the three years I’ve made Yorkshire’s modern capital my home, I’ve enjoyed Leeds International Film Festival, the West Indian Carnival, the Christkindelmarkt, a couple of League One Play Off Semi Finals and (less fortunately) a huge Robbie Williams concert at Roundhay Park (don’t ask) and countless other dates in the diary that are a feature of dwelling in a cosmopolitan city.

As well as these large scale events it’s actually the smaller opportunities that appeal to me most: being able to see Almodovar films in the ancent Hyde Park Picture house, attending a Flying Dog beer and food evening and the chance to see actual rock stars whilst playing 5-a-side (if you classify relatively obscure post-rock bands as rock stars!).

So when Zak Avery asked me if I’d like to take part in a live video tasting of the newly released and lavishly expensive Tactical Nuclear Penguin by BrewDog, the strongest beer in the world, not only did I jump at the chance but I carved another notch on my list of reasons to live in Leeds… Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: BrewDog, hopzine, leeds, north bar, tactical nuclear penguin, zak avery