August 1st, 2010
We were twitching to get back to continental Europe a couple of weeks ago and so arranged a relatively spontaneous long weekend in Antwerp. It’s a very Flemish Belgian city, which you can reach in less than three hours from London, if your connections work out.
We spent our first evening at Groote Witte Arend near the Grote Markt, in a lovely, tranquil courtyard full of twinkling lights and distant classical music. It boasts of 80 beers, although we spent a while dealing with sheepish waiters until we found anything they actually had in stock.
On tap, there were a couple of interesting beers we hadn’t had before. Moeder Overste has a pronounced bitter-orange flavour and reminded us a little of Young’s Special London. We don’t have much more specific to say other than that we really enjoyed it. Arend Blonde (the house brand) is much as you’d expect from the name, except perhaps crisper and lighter than you’d normally expect from a 6% Leffe-alike.
As night fell and the time came to leave, we asked ourselves, somewhat wistfully, where in Britain could we hope to drink in such peaceful surroundings?
Tags: antwerp
Posted in Belgium, pubs | No Comments »
July 26th, 2010
Getting fruit flavour into beer is harder than you might imagine.
Some fruit beers are too sweet, others are too sour. The fruit flavour can be overpowering, or barely perceptible. Worst of all, it can sometimes be just too pink.
Saltaire’s Blackberry Cascade and Raspberry Blonde get it exactly right. They both taste enough of fruit that you can tell it’s there without being told (we tested this theory on unsuspecting friends). They’re a little sweet, hardly at all sour, and un-dyed.
We’re not 100 per cent sure but we suspect the trick might be to get over the purism which says fresh fruit is best: these beers are ‘infused’ with ‘flavours’, which to us suggests extracts or syrups. Who cares, though? It works.
Blackberries are Boak’s favourite fruit, which is why Blackberry Cascade has edged it as our beer of the week.
Tags: fruit beer, saltaire
Posted in beer reviews, real ale | 7 Comments »
July 23rd, 2010
The Betjeman Arms at King’s Cross St Pancras is having a little ale and cider festival right now. I’m drinking a very passable pint of Dark Star Hophead (our beer of the year last year) right now.
It’s a very variable but extremely convenient pub.
Posted in beer festivals, london | 1 Comment »
July 22nd, 2010
As everyone knows, the weather in England is rubbish. Even when it’s sunny, you can be fairly sure there will be a shower just as you’ve set up your picnic.
In May, we were faced with a long bank holiday weekend where the rain didn’t stop in London, but we decided to ignore it and go on another tapeo (tapas crawl). Sod the rain. We were going to pretend we were in Spain.
If you treat a crappy Greene King pub like you would a Spanish bar, it’s not half bad. The tourists just added to the atmosphere, and our two halves of cold Kronenbourg didn’t taste any worse than Mahou does in Madrid. And they had some decent olives to nibble on. Result.
Next up, the Queen’s Head and Artichoke. As a pub, it probably wouldn’t be our cup of tea, but as a tapas bar, it was great. They let us sit at the bar to drink our Bitburger and had a proper, convincing tapas menu, which we ordered bits and pieces from over the course of an hour or so.
Finally, we headed for the Norfolk Arms. It’s more of a restaurant than a bar despite being (we think) somehow related to the previous place. They were a bit sniffy because we didn’t want a table and a full meal but they put up with it. We put away some serrano ham, a few Estrella Damms and, finally, a couple of glasses of sherry.
When we left, it was still raining, but we’d very successfully banished the bank holiday blues.
Tags: tapas
Posted in Spain, beer and food, london | 1 Comment »
July 21st, 2010
Er, yeah, what it says in the title. The Pembury Tavern at Hackney Downs has a summer beer festival starting today and running until Sunday.
Tags: festivals, london
Posted in london | 2 Comments »
July 20th, 2010
Last year, we met up with Ron Pattinson in Cask and spent a few hours discussing Franconia, East Germany and His Big Book. Ron spotted Schlenkerla Helles in the fridge and recommended it.
We’d not tried it before and loved it. There is no smoked malt in the beer but, being brewed in the same building and with the same equipment as their darker smoked beers, it can’t help but pick up a bit of smokiness.
We never got round to writing this up and, in the months since then, we haven’t seen it on sale in Cask. Our favourite London pub has recently, however, even further expanded it’s beer selection and the Helles has popped up again so were able to enjoy a couple of bottles this week.
In fact, if you’re a fan of Rauchbier, Cask now has several different varieties on offer, in addition to the usual suspects from Schlenkerla.
Tags: cask, rauchbier
Posted in Beer styles, Franconia, Germany | 11 Comments »
July 17th, 2010
The British Film Institute is doing a great job of preserving documentaries, with multiple volumes of DVDs collecting COI, British Transport Film Unit and GPO shorts.
London in the Raw (1964) is released as part of their Flipside series and is a seedy exploitation film in the style of Mondo Cane. It’s interesting in itself, and features lots of footage of bars, pubs and clubs in the 1960s, including an extended sequence set in the Waterman’s Arms.
For those with an interest in beer and pubs, though, the real treat is the short documentary Pub (1962) which appears as a bonus on the disc. It’s only 16 minutes long and was filmed by a Londoner, Peter Davis, for Swedish television. It’s set in the Approach Tavern near Victoria Park in East London and shows a typical evening in the pub.
A couple of things stand out. First, it looks cold — people are dressed in hats, coats and heavy sweaters throughout. Were pubs unheated back then? Secondly, they drink a lot of bottled beer, and a fair bit of it is stout. Labels for Guinness, Courage Bristol Stout, Worthington White Shield and Meux Friary Ale are all visible at one point or another.
Posted in beer in fiction / tv, london, pubs | 6 Comments »
July 13th, 2010
We note there’s been a fair bit of introspection recently in the blogoshire.
A comment on one of our recent posts reminds us of one reason why we do it.
Mike004 doesn’t say in his comment whether he went to Unterzaunsbach because we recommended it, but we do like the fact that, if you Google it, we’re on the first page of results.
Equally, our recent series of posts on Passau may not have set the world on fire in terms of comments, but, before we went on holiday, we struggled find much online to guide us. Hopefully, we’ve done something to help fill that gap and map (sort of) unknown territory for future beer explorers.
Mike004 also pointed out that Peschl stopped brewing in 2008. What on Earth were we drinking if not Peschl? We are confused and would be grateful for any intelligence.
Tags: introspection, passau, unterzaunsbach
Posted in Blogging and writing, Germany | 4 Comments »
July 11th, 2010
The latest in Acorn’s fascinating series of beers showcasing New Zealand hops uses Green Bullet, a variety I’ve never heard of before. Green by name and green by nature — this tasted raw, grassy and herbal. I thought it was just the right side of astringent, but still probably a bit more bitter than I’d like. It slipped down very nicely, nonetheless.
Boak
Tags: acorn brewery, hops, ipa
Posted in beer reviews | 3 Comments »
July 10th, 2010
Hopefully, regular readers will have noticed that we try not to go for slagging off pubs and breweries: if we have a beer we don’t like, we tend not to mention it; or if a pub is nothing to write home about, well, we don’t write home.
There is one behaviour in pubs which is so annoying, though, that we have decided that we are going to start naming and shaming. That is where bar staff agree with you that a pint is off, give you a replacement, and then continue to sell it to other punters. (See also Pete Brown on this topic.)
There isn’t really any justification for this, unless the barman genuinely believes the complainer is wrong. In most cases it’s either ignorance on behalf of the staff (“it all tastes funny to me”; “Oh, yeah, this one’s meant to be a bit vinegary, I think”; “I’ll just humour the weirdo”) or blatant cynicism (“I know it’s ropey but most people are too polite to complain so I’ll keep flogging it”). In either case, it’s not good news.
So, this week’s badges of shame go to the Abbey in Westminster (to be honest, a rubbish place anyway, I was only there because someone else chose the venue) and the Old Dairy, Crouch Hill, North London. The latter has fabulous food, and is a great pub in every other respect (what a fantastic building) but unfortunately, their pints taste like warm butter, and they don’t seem to think most of their customers will care.
Boak
Tags: off pints
Posted in buying beer, pubs | 11 Comments »
