What a great idea — Beermenus.com is a website that tells you which beers you can find in which pubs and bars. Sadly, only for New York at the moment.
I wish someone would do one of these for London!
Via Lifehacker.
Archive for the ‘buying beer’ Category
Bigfoot Barley Wine in Oddbins
Friday, April 18th, 2008
UK wine sellers Oddbins, with branches all over the country, are now selling Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Barley Wine and Early Spring Beer. They’ve always had a passable beer selection, but this is really good stuff. Let’s hope they ditch one or two of the rubbish Euro-lagers soon and replace them with more interesting beers along these lines.
Mail order beer that works
Monday, January 28th, 2008
It used to be that ordering beer online was more trouble than it’s worth, but the people at Livingbeer.com have managed to convert us.
More than once, we’ve placed carefully composed orders with reputable suppliers only to find that when the box turned up several weeks later, there were broken bottles, and that most of the beers we’d asked for were out of stock and had been substituted with stuff we could get in our local supermarket.
Livingbeer’s big selection box sidesteps at least part of that process — it’s just 48 different bottle-conditioned beers from all over the UK. You don’t pick and choose, you just wait to see what you’re going to get.
So, although it means we’ve got some beers we might not have chosen ourselves, opening the four massive boxes was like Christmas Day. Each bottle was like a little gift to unwrap. We’d heard of about one fifth of the beers in the selection and had only tried a handful before. So, our cellar now looks very healthy.
And this time, we didn’t get any broken bottles. The beers were very securely wrapped and all were intact.
If you’ve got a hundred quid to spare, we heartily recommend giving it a go.
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We’d previously come across Livingbeer.com through Google, but were tempted to give it a go by the 33% off January offer advertised earlier this month on Stonch’s blog.
All I want for Christmas is…
Thursday, December 20th, 2007
I’ve been a good person this year. I’ve supported and promoted pubs and shops selling good beer, I’ve recommended beautiful microbrews to people who might not otherwise have drunk them, and I even got round to joining CAMRA.
I don’t really want much for Christmas, aside from the odd nice beer, and peace and goodwill to all men, but here’s my fantasy Christmas wishlist:
- The hop and grain harvests to be full and plentiful this year. I don’t think the smoking ban will kill pubs, but £4 a pint might.
- UK brewers to do more porters and stouts year round and less summer ales. Oh, and pubs to stock them. I find it strange that even in really good “real-ale” pubs you rarely find a stout that isn’t Guinness.
- My local supermarket to change the beer selection more than once every couple of years.
- Pubs that don’t want to do good cask ale to discover the wonders of bottle-conditioned beers.
- A home-brew shop that gets round to processing your order perhaps the day after you made it, rather than waiting three days before phoning you to say they don’t have the stuff. Thus making you miss your brewing schedule.
- The BBC to commission and show a beer appreciation programme. Or any channel really. Get Oz Clarke to team up with some beer writers and see what happens.
- CAMRA to stop wasting my subs money on the campaign for a full pint and focus more on the quality of said pint, i.e. perhaps visit a few more of these allegedly good pubs in the Good Pub Guide? See superb rant by Pete Brown on this a few months back, one of my favourite blog posts of the year.
- Our first-born lager to work.
- To discover that the wild yeasts in the Lea Valley are capable of spontaneously fermenting a tasty beer, thus starting a craze for London lambics.
- All the fabulous pubs, breweries and beer shops we’ve mentioned (and many more we haven’t had a chance to) to have a productive and profitable new year. Cheers!
Brat
Quick pre-Christmas plug for Quaffs
Saturday, December 15th, 2007
All you London beer-lovers will no doubt already know about Quaffs. It’s a market stall within Spitalfields market, 5 minutes walk from Liverpool Street Station.
I was there yesterday, buying beer for Christmas, and I can heartily recommend the selection and the service. Good to see a wide range of glasses too – perfect for making up gift sets. Who wouldn’t want to receive a hand-prepared selection of Brasserie Ellezelloise (with the fabulous Hercule Stout) with one of their nice chalice glasses?
I bought enough beer to get a free carrying case/bag/suitcase. Very good marketing trick that!
Oh, and I forgot to tell them Stonch sent me. Would I have got a discount if I did?
Boak
Notes
Details of beers in stock, opening times and how to get there are available on the Quaffs website here. It can be difficult to find – it’s sort of opposite the entrance to Canteen, backing onto where the food market is going to be.
Christmas gifts for beer lovers
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007What do you buy a beer lover for Christmas, other than beer?
1. The late Michael Jackson’s new book, the Eyewitness Guide to Beer — probably an update of his 1998 Dorling Kindersley book Ultimate Beer, but looks interesting anyway.
2. Some glassware. You can pick up branded Fuller’s glasses for around £4 in most of their pubs. Many supermarkets are selling gift sets with branded glasses from Shepherd Neame Spitfire, Old Speckled Hen and other well-known brands. Or, you can go posh – here’s a selection online. I like the look of these but could also do with one of these to drink imperial stout from.
3. A homebrewing kit. There are some basic, gimmicky automatic brewing machines, which look like fun. Or, you can buy a decent beginners kit from these people and pay less for it. But don’t forget to get a decent book to go with it.
4. More homebrewing stuff. If your loved one is already brewing, why not help them take it to the next level with some fancy kit like a
5. There are all kinds of “pub at home” kits and accessories, from the cheap and cheerful to the ludicrously elaborate and expensive. If you don’t fancy having any of that in the house, what about the shed…?
6. Some rare and, erm, beautiful breweriana from Ebay might go down well. Not sure I’d want a load of old bottle tops for Christmas myself, but who knows what evil lurks in the minds of men.
7. What about the ludicrously named World’s Best Bottle Opener? Or even a nice traditional one. You can never have too many. Like umbrellas, they have a habit of disappearing. Just don’t buy a Homer Simpson novelty bottle opener. Believe me, the novelty of hearing “mmmmm, beer” wears off after, ooh, two bottles or so.
8. What about some food to accompany beer, or a combination of the two? O’Hanlon’s port stout and stilton; almost anything Belgian with some chocolate; or some pork scratchings…
9. CAMRA membership!
10. 
Good gifts are increasingly popular. If there’s too much junk in your house anyway, and you don’t want to encourage your loved ones to get fat and drunk, why not buy a brewery in Tanzania on their behalf?
11. And finally, if you are going to buy beer — and, let’s face it, it’s probably your best bet — choose them with a theme such as strong stouts, Christmas beers, German beers, or whatever, and package them nicely.
