Categories
london pubs

Pump creep

The owners of Cask, our current favourite London pub, have obviously decided to pull out all the stops on the beer front. They’ve just expanded from five cask ale pumps to eight, including two from Dark Star and three from Thornbridge.  Moravka Lager has also appeared.

The keg beer has got better too — out go Guinness and Fosters to be replaced by Keesman Herren Pils, Brugse Zot (blonde and brown), Rothaus Pils and Weizen, Mort Subite Kriek, and Kuepper’s Koelsch. The range of bottles from small german breweries continues to impress with some real obscurities sitting in the fridges.

A great pub just got even better.

We’re also delighted to see that our local has added an extra pump for cask ale.

Categories
Blogging and writing

A certain I don't know what

Sometimes, however carefully and accurately you describe something, you just can’t capture what it is that makes it great. Yes, Abraham Lincoln was a tall man with a beard who wore a black hat, but, factual as that description is, it somehow misses the point.

A few times recently, we’ve described the general characteristics of a beer and realised that they could apply to a thousand other brews. We’ve had to resort to words like ‘zing’ to get across an additional, elusive quality that makes that particular beer great.

Is it freshness? A quality of carbonation? Subtle flavours which more refined palates than ours could identify? We don’t know and, until such time as we do, ‘zing’ will have to do.

Categories
beer and food Franconia

Using rauchbier to fake a barbecue

Using rauchbier to fake barbecue-smoked meat is a clever idea. We’ll certainly be giving this a go.

Categories
pubs real ale

I should be on that train

The Sheffield Tap, the newish Thornbridge-affiliated pub on platform 1 at Sheffield’s central station, is a very, very dangerous development.

It’s very easy to find yourself standing at the bar with a half-empty glass of delicious, crisp Thornbridge White Wild Swan watching your train leave without you. And the worst thing is, you don’t even care. Trains are ten a penny, but beer this good is hard to come by.

Seriously, this pub is excellent. It has a beautiful interior, incredible cask beer and (although we didn’t count) what might be the best range of bottled beer in the country, all available to take away.

Now let’s have one of these at every station in London, please.

With thanks to Pete Brown for the tip off. Pretty much all the other bloggers went together a few weeks back and seem to have enjoyed it too.

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture real ale

Control beer

noun. A beer so familiar and consistent that it can fairly be used as an indicator of the quality of an unfamiliar pub. For example, Young’s Bitter.