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April 2015: The Month That Was

Better late than never, here’s a round-up of everything we posted in April.

(Well, we say ‘everything’ but, by our standards, it wasn’t a hugely productive month, what with family business, holidays and paying work getting in the way.)

→ We found a perfectly English pub in Devon:

Though it was in need of a tidy and a lick of paint, this back yard came closer to the feel of a Bavarian beer garden than anywhere else we’ve been in Britain and yet, at the same time, could not be anywhere but in England: above the purple-grey slate rubble tower of St George’s church to our left fluttered the red cross of the national flag, while downhill was the high thatched roof of a cottage around which newly-arrived swallows were swooping.

→ Also in Devon, we stumbled across bottles of Goose Island IPA with an apparent Brettanomyces infection, the results of which were utterly delightful.

→ We launched a series of posts on tasting British saisons: Intro | Part 1: Lemonheads | Part 2: The Herbalist | Part 3: Roobarb | Part 4: Big Names.

→ That also prompted a side note pondering whether herbs, fruit or spices work better in beer when they are a genuine attempt at a twist rather than a mere gimmick.

→ Our e-book Gambrinus Waltz got its first review in the journal of the Brewery History Society. (The review we mention in that post is now available free online as a PDF.)

→ We launched Back of a Beer Mat, a free e-book compiling revised versions of some our best posts along with a few rarities previously published elsewhere. (You can download it directly from Smashwords.)

→ Etiquette expert R.M. Banks contributed a piece on the problem posed by entering a pub only to discover it has no decent beer:

At which, like young Harker hoofing across the threshold of Castle Dracula, What ho!-ing freely, you confront a scene of infinite horror: there is not one beer on the bar counter worth your time, your precious coinage, or the strain on the old sock which serves in place of your liver.

→ We were interested to hear that CAMRA has taken further steps to bring key kegs into the fold — so much so, in fact, that we wrote a follow-up piece entitled ‘Things We Love About CAMRA‘. (Which in turn prompted responses from the Pub Curmudgeon and Cooking Lager Part 1 | Part 2.)

Chart of UK brewery types.

→ We attempted yet again to make sense of the world by categorising types of UK brewery in a chart.

→ Redwell Brewery’s latest venture gave us food for thought: what does it mean when a trendy craft brewery takes on the name of an old local firm that went out of business 40-odd years ago?

2 replies on “April 2015: The Month That Was”

I missed that ingredients post, again ties in with that amazon beer post

trying to pull something together on differentiation in beer, standing out in the market vs competitors with ever increasing brewery numbers (taking in e.g. quality, design, one-offs, etc)

Thanks for that post on the Dittisham pub. On the strength of that I’ve planned a Dartmouth,Dittisham,Kinswear,Dartmouth walk involving a number of pubs when I’m over in June.

I’ve also got my eye on a Kingswear-Brixham coastal walk ending in this interesting-looking boozer.

thequeensarmsbrixham.co.uk

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