Categories
london

Overheard in gastropubs #1

CHILD
Mummy! I’m sooooo hot!

PARENT
Don’t be ridiculous, darling. How can you be hot? You’ve just come back from Italy.

Categories
beer festivals real ale

Pirates, pale ale and pork sandwiches

Wedmore Real Ale Festival 2009

We’ve got a standing commitment to go to the annual Wedmore Real Ale Festival in Somerset as often as possible.

We’ve described the unusually young, party-like, community atmosphere before
, so we’ll just update a couple of topical details: the fancy dress theme this year was pirates, and the live band, Loose Change, were led by the absurdly charismatic local hero Pete Hicks.

These were the highlights on the beer front:

Categories
beer and food beer reviews

Duvel Green

duvel-green-green-glas

I’ve been going through my phone and reminding myself of some good beer experiences that I haven’t got round to reading about.

One of these was drinking draft Duvel Green in the Dove about a month ago.  It was all over the blogoshire* last year, but this was our first go on it.  We really enjoyed it finding it lighter, less sweet and spicier than the 8.5% version.  It also went beautifully with mussels in a blue cheese sauce, which brought out the bitterness.

* for example… the Beer Nut reviewed the bottled version and didn’t see the point.  Here’s a nice review on the draft version from Lew Bryson, who reckons it goes well with fish.

Boak

Categories
beer reviews Poland

Definitely not beer of the week

lechpils

Our local Turkish-run corner shop sells some surprisingly good beer but, on the flipside, they make most of their money flogging nasty ciders and strong lagers to tramps. Which is Lech Pils?

Lech Pils caught our eye because we’ve got a soft spot for Poland and because, unlike Lech Premium, it isn’t that commonly seen in the UK. There was also the thought in the back of our minds that, if Premium is a boring lager (and it is) then maybe Pils would actually be something more interesting — perhaps drier, hoppier and more bitter? It certainly looked the part, being as pale as a beer can be, and quite gently carbonated.

Sadly, it’s rubbish.  It smells a bit like WD40 and tastes like mouthwash. It reminded us of Fosters, and that’s not a good thing. Straight afterwards, we had a Pilsner Urquell for the sake of comparison, and it was streets ahead. Could this be the least surprising conclusion to a beer review ever?

When Boak lived in Poland, Lech Premium was her beer of choice, being the least likely of all the Polish beer brands to give her a migraine. “Best of a bad bunch” would be the phrase…

Categories
bottled beer london

Decent beer at the flicks

andyrob_stratfordpicturehouse

Our nearest cinema is the Stratford Picture House, next to the 2012 Olympic site in East London. Last night, we were pleased to see that Hoegaarden was back on offer in the cinema bar, after a period of absence. We were even more excited to see that bottled London Pride had turned up in the fridge. And more excited again when we clocked (no pun intended) a shelf full of Meantime beers.

Their brand is the perfect match for the Picture House chain — classy, cool and ever so slightly pretentious. The pilsener, which hadn’t impressed us much before, triggered a vivid taste memory of a sunny afternoon in a cafe garden in Nuremberg, and is our beer of the week. The pale ale was nicer than on tap at the Britannia last week.

If we’d been so minded, we could even have taken our beers into the film with us. How’s that for civilised?

Photo from Andyrob at Flickr, under Creative Commons.