Categories
london pubs

Stratford has a decent pub!?

eddiestratford

Like many East londoners, I’m very excited about the Olympics, and I’m fascinated by the speed at which Stratford is changing.

There’s a tendency to romanticize places that are about to be transformed but, despite living and working round there for years, I struggle to associate Stratford with anything other than a crappy shopping centre and a massive roundabout.

It certainly was not known for its quaint charming pubs and, when I used to work there, Wetherspoon’s was the best of a bad bunch. The Edward VII, now known as King Eddie’s, might change that. It’s an interesting punt at the casual end of the gastropub market which we’ve been meaning to visit for more than a year now. It feels a bit out of kilter with the area at the moment but, in a couple of years, when Stratford is the centre of the Olympics and there’s a bit more money around, it’ll probably look like a shrewd move.

There’s a classy looking paper food menu and a good selection of beer. There are four ale pumps and bottles including Titanic Stout. One of the cask ales is brewed by Nethergate for the pub (Eddies’ Best) but wasn’t in that good nick, unfortunately. We enjoyed O’Hanlon’s Goldblade from bottles, instead. It’s a dusty, yeasty wheat ale which reminded us of Poperinge’s Hommelbier.

Low lighting and a period interior makethe pub cosy and the warm welcome helps. The food looked good, and there’s even a garden. It’s an interesting crowd — young and with quite a few eastern Europeans but, unlike many bars that target that particular market, it still feels like a distinctly English pub.

It would definitely be our local if we lived here.

The Randomness Guide reviews are here.

Boak

Categories
homebrewing

Testing new brewing equipment

The whizzy sparging arm on our new brewing kit in action

It’s been ages since we brewed — March was, I think, the last time.  We ordered a load of shiny new equipment and then it sat around getting dusty as we spent our weekends doing up the house instead.  Then it was summer, and past experience tells us that summer is not a good time to brew.

Anyway, now our garage is nice and chilly again, we decided to test the new eqiupment (a proper boiler, mash tun and spinning sparging arm).

The one piece of advice I’d give to a new brewer is to invest time in working in a dry run. How are you going to transfer hot liquid from one vessel to another?  Do you have the right pipes / taps?  How are you going to keep everything sterile after the boil?  Can you take a hydrometer reading when you need to with the fermenting bucket you have?

We learnt this the hard way when we did our first all-grain mash. The experience involved lots of hosepipe connectors, spilled wort and frantic improvisation. It was so traumatic and messy that we didn’t do it again for a year.  This time we spent a good couple of hours going through the process with large quantities of water to make sure we’d worked it all out, and it was definitely time well spent.

As for the beer itself, it’s been made with store cupboard leftovers, so it probably won’t be great, but it’s definitely got us back in the mood to brew.

We bought our new kit, which worked like a dream, from the brilliant Hop and Grape in Darlington.

Boak


Categories
News

Adnams get experimental

adnams

It’s easy to think of Adnams as a rather stolid, big, unexciting regional brewery. They have some lovely branding and design and have been very innovative in ‘green brewing’ but, nonetheless, the beers of their’s you see most commonly in London are quite conservative in their flavour.

They’ve obviously decided to go beyond Bitter/Broadside/blonde beer, though, and (with thanks to Steve the Beer Justice for the tip off) are now brewing a wide range of monthly specials in continental styles, starting with a Koelsch-style beer.

Next month, they’re rolling out a Belgian abbey-type ale, and there are German and Belgian-style wheat beers in the pipeline. They’re also going to take on Guinness next spring with a dry stout.

Innovation doesn’t just need to mean ‘turning up the volume’ or putting coconut in your beer — more subtle experiments with hops and yeast can be just as mind-expanding — so we’re looking forward to trying these.

We emailed Adnams to ask where these beers will be on sale in London, and Danielle sent us this list:

The Carpenters Arms
73 Cheshire Street, E2    6EG

The Brewery Tap
69 High Street
Wimbledon Village, SW19  5EE

The Queens Arms
11 Warwick Way
Pimlico, SW1V  1QT

The Wenlock Arms
26 Wenlock Road, N1    7TA

The Old Dairy
1-3 Crouch Hill, N4    4AP

The Pineapple Public House
51 Leverton Street
Kentish Town, NW5   2NX

The Wimbledon Club
Church Road, SW19  5AG

Categories
london Nice places to drink in... pubs

More good pubs opening than closing

walthamstowabstract

It turns out we’ve now got four pubs serving decent and interesting beer within a ten minute walk of our house. We’re spoiled.

The Old Rose and Crown on Hoe Street in Walthamstow, in east London, used to be a cool but down-at-heel pub with rotten beer. It was taken over by new management a year or more ago and the decor improved. Sadly, the beer didn’t.

They’ve obviously been working hard since, though, and this year have deservedly made it into the Good Beer Guide. Having decided to give them another go, in the last couple of weeks we’ve enjoyed fantastic pints of Hopback Crop Circle and Edwin Taylor Extra Stout (a great beer, full of flavours of bitter chocolate and smoke).

With the Nags Head, the William IV, the Village and now the Rose and Crown, we can say without any irony that Walthamstow is worth 20 minutes on the tube and an hour or two of your time if you’re at a loose end in London.

Even our local off-licence is worth a look — it’s now a Spar franchise, but the beer’s got even better, with all the old stock plus Sambrook’s, Brodie’s and a few other breweries we’ve never come across before.

Categories
beer reviews bottled beer Spain

Craft-brewed beer from Toledo

Domus 'artesanal' beer from Toledo

Spanish version here.

Domus is an ‘artesanal’ beer from Cerveza Regia, Toledo. It’s bottle-conditioned, top fermented and available in various trendy bars in its home city. The marketing and packaging are fabulous, just screaming quality.

Unfortunately, the beer itself is a lot like one of our less successful homebrews: too fizzy, too thin and a little grassy. As it warms up, the toasted flavours come through a bit and it’s nice to have something with veritable hops, but unfortunately they have a way to go before we’d choose this over a glass of bland but pleasant fizzy Spanish lager.

Is it a step forward that something like this even exists in Spain? Our fear is that if someone does stray from a fizzy lager to try this they will simply be  put off craft beers and ales forever.

It doesn’t help that the bar staff have no idea how to handle it, shaking up the yeast and expecting us to drink it from the bottle which is (of course) the cool thing to do with ‘premium’ beers in Spain.