Our little beer reviews blog with it's original Hook Norton bottle header image

This weekend we replaced the header image on the blog, and with some sadness said goodbye to the Hook Norton bottles that have been the face of Real Ale Reviews since it’s inception.

A few people have asked us over the last few months if we were sponsored by Hook Norton or were we promoting them.

The answer is no, but I’ll be the first to admit that Real Ale Reviews will happily sing the praises of our local Oxfordshire brewery.

Alan and I started this site whilst sipping Old Hooky, we’ve shared evenings playing pool and drinking Hooky Bitter in the brewery’s own pubs, and have many years ago toured the old Victorian steam brewery as part of a school trip.

Hooky is part of our heritage, despite the fact we now reside in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

We selected the Hook Norton imagery because we had ben collecting one of each of their bottles (including seasonal brews) and had just completed the line up with a couple of Cotswold Lion’s, so it made perfect sense to adorn our new blog with the beers that had planted the seed of our real ale passion.

But from early on we knew they couldn’t stay, we knew we needed something more impartial that represented our independence.

So after collecting bottle tops for a few weeks our first attempt at a new set of header images is live. It’s still never going to be impartial, it’s a bit weighted by the drinks I’ve had recently, but we hope you like it and hope it better represents the breadth of our current beer drinking habits as compared to earlier this year.

Some people have asked us why we love Hook Norton so much when we live in Leeds? To cut a long and boring story short Alan and I were schooled in Banbury, a few miles from the brewery, but after university moved up to my spiritual homeland (I was born a Shayman) of West Yorkshire so I could get an advertising job. Sam, a Leeds boy born and bred is my friend from university (Lincoln) and now fellow season ticket holder at Elland Road.