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Blogging and writing

May 2015: The Month That Was

May was a productive month with quite a few posts, one or two of them on the substantial side.

→ At the May Day celebrations in Padstow, we revelled in a collective act of irresponsible drinking. (Alan McLeod liked this one.)

→ Three more batches of UK-brewed saisons got taste-tested in parts five (Wild Beer), six (Wiper & True, Bad Seed, Otley) and seven (Hop Kettle, By The Horns, Celt) of our ongoing series.

→ We looked at another oddity resulting from the quirks of UK-licensing law: the mid-20th-century London ‘bottle party’ nightclub.

→ We made an effort to visit some of the other pubs in Helston rather than just stick to the familiar Blue Anchor; in comments, several people who definitely don’t work there told us we should have visited the one we missed out.

Does Brettanomyces taste of anything other than Brettanomyces? And is Orval-like the most useful descriptor?

→ We kicked off a new series on ‘notable pubs’ with a few paragraphs on the Eagle Tavern off the City Road in London, featuring a balloon ascent on a ‘very small Shetland pony’.

→ Meantime got bought by SAB-Miller which caused us to reflect what the brewery has meant to us in the last decade or so:

Meantime taught us that lager wasn’t just lager: tasting the range side by side, we could tell that ‘Cologne-style’ was not the same as Helles, which was definitely different to Golden Beer.  They were subtle, but distinctive.

→ We wrote a long piece on the attitudes of the Campaign for Real Ale to lager over the decades — is it ‘Eurofizz’,  or pure and authentic? (This prompted further thoughts and personal recollections from Tandleman and RedNev.)

→ A bit of a moan: what breweries want to say about themselves (everything is great, we are happy, long live beer!) doesn’t often amount to a story from the point of view of a writer.

There are some pubs we just can’t walk past — what are yours?

→ We put together a response to an actually frequently asked question: How can I find out more about the history of [BREWERY X]?

→ There were also some galleries, videos and quotations; Facebook updates; a 1000-word newsletter (sign up!); and a bunch of Tweets like this one:

→ If you’re still after more reading check out our regular weekly round-ups of links and news around the blogoshire and beyond.