Brainwave Charity Beer Tasting 2011

As soon as I plugged this event last year, the tickets sold out (not due to my publicity, I hasten to add). A great time was had by all and a significant amount of money raised for the charity.

I am therefore please to advertise the 2011 event as follows :

The children’s charity, Brainwave, is arranging another exclusive beer tasting at the Farmers’ Club on 19 October, where guests can find out a little more about the complex world of beer, where the flavours come from and a little on the history of beer.

So not only can you have an entertaining and different evening and help a charity too.

The event is being held at the Farmers' Club in Central London at 3 Whitehall Court, London SW1A 2EL; nearest tube: Embankment.

The tasting is being hosted by Christine Cryne, who chaired CAMRA’s 2011 Champion Beer of Britain and is a member of the British Guild of Beer Writers. (Christine also happens to be the charity's Chief Executive).

Tickets are £35, including a buffet. The doors open from 6.30 pm with the tasting starting at 7pm. The event is being supported by Wells & Youngs beers.

Tickets are available from Megan Owen: meganowen@brainwave.org.uk; 07872 548 450

Learn more about this charity at http://www.brainwave.org.uk/

Follow them on Twitter @brainwavecentre

Also take a look also at their YouTube channel at http://uk.youtube.com/BrainwaveCentre

I guess this is more of a general interest beer event rather than a tasting for the hard-core beer-geek.

If you belong to the latter crowd, why not just bung them the price of a pint here.

Wychwood Ginger Beard

During GBBF week, I arrived home to find a small parcel sent by the kind people at Marston's. It included a bottle of their latest beer, Wychwood Ginger Beard, a bar of chocolate and a pack of stilton with apricots, all boxed in a wicker basket. A nice gift and perfect choices to match with the beer.

Unfortunately, as soon as the pack was opened the chocolate was gone. I am a bit of a chocoholic and had enjoyed the 100g M&S Dark Peruvian Chocolate before I could even get the cap off the bottle of beer.

(Memo to PR teams, if you send me chocolate with beer, send extra chocolate).

Feeling a bit guilty about this, I thought I should try to do the cheese more justice. It was a shame that the cheese had been spoiled slightly by the warm weather (and the fact that I didn't open the pack until overnight after a long GBBF session) so I dug out Sue Nowak's Beer Cook Book to chase down a suitable recipe. Portered Stilton leapt from the index, a slant on Potted Stilton where leftover cheese is traditionally mixed with leftover port to spice up an apres-repas (is that a word ?)


Here's a precis of the recipe :

8oz mature blue stilton
1oz tiny chestnut mushrooms, sliced thinly
1oz walnuts, chopped
2oz butter (unsalted)
2 tablespoons of porter

Roughly grate stilton into a bowl, add the walnuts. Saute the mushrooms with half the butter, add to the bowl. Slowly add the beer and stir until softened. Pack firmly in a heavy pot, seal with the remaining melted butter and refrigerate.

OK, so I used stilton with apricots instead of blue; chopped the cheese and used normal mushrooms; used pecans instead of walnuts, marg instead of butter and vitally Wychwood Ginger Beard instead of Porter - but it was still a culinary victory for someone like me who doesn't pick up a pan from one month to the next.

Having only used a little of the beer in the recipe, I was able to serve the rest of the bottle at the table in small glasses to accompany the cheese dish.

The beer, as you might guess, is infused with fiery root ginger which perfectly complimented the cheesy paste. The spicy finish livening up the creamy, fruity and earthy flavours of the apricot stilton and the mushroom. The theatre of presenting the beer to accompany the dish gave me much kudos among our guests.

The beer itself is a 4.2% amber coloured, ginger'd beer rather than an alcoholic soft drink. It is clean tasting, fresh and refreshing. It is packed with ginger taste. This is not a subtle beer; if you love ginger, you'll love it.

I can't say that this would ever be my favourite beer but it has brought me back to the kitchen and given me enthusiasm to do more cooking with beer, so that's no bad thing.

It has not given me any desire to grow a ginger beard !

Call Yourself a Beer Blogger ?

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then is's a duck. But if it doesn't keep its blog up to date with regular postings, then it's not a blogging duck.

One blog post in nearly two months is inexcusable. Admittedly, I was otherwise engaged for about three of those weeks doing a prison art project (of which you will hear a lot more from me - even if it does not include beer) but the lack of up-to-date content here recently really is a poor show.

My notebook of ideas is full, my camera is loaded, plenty of people have sent me beer and books to write about and I have lot's of diary dates to share. Now, I just need to get my finger out and try to remember the password into the blog (if you are reading this, it's clear that my memory was good).

If I took one message away from the Beer Bloggers Conference about good blogging, it was that it is vital to have a regular stream of postings. People won't visit your blog if there's nothing new to read, though it's encouraging how many of you have dropped by regularly in the last month to read and re-read about Barnard's travels.

Well, here goes. I can't guarantee that the musings here in future will inform, educate, entertain, expose, campaign, stimulate, champion, story-tell, describe or evangelise, but I am going to try my hardest to make sure there is something new to read.

Stay tuned !

Barnard's Noted Breweries of Great Britain and Ireland

Noted Breweries of Great Britain and Ireland is a four volume, 2,183 page, work written by Alfred Barnard towards the end of the nineteenth century.

It is a personal account by Barnard of his visits to a wide range of Victorian breweries giving detailed accounts of the premises, plant and product range at a time when the industry was booming.

Given its importance as a beer related historical reference, I am slightly ashamed to say that it has only hit my attention in recent weeks. Firstly at the (now legendary) Beer Bloggers Conference, when it was discussed at a time when a talk on the future of beer writing seemed to get a bit bogged down in the history of beer writing.

A week or two later, the Brewery History Society Journal hit the doormat and the first paper was entitled A personal consideration of Alfred Barnard's Noted Breweries of Great Britain and Ireland and aspects of its relationship to the late Victorian brewing industry written by Paul Bayley.

A little dry you may think but by the end of the 40 odd pages, I was hooked and keen to get my hands on a copy. That is until I learnt on the last page that copies were now changing hands for about £1,000 !

All is not lost though, there is a CD ROM copy available for about £30.

Excellent I thought and set about googling to find a copy.

Even better news, and the real reason for this blog post, is that I have found a free download of all four volumes.

It is included in the Ask About Ireland digital book collection at www.askaboutireland.ie

I can't really do it justice here; suffice to say that even though there is a body of evidence to suggest that the breweries paid fees to be visited by Barnard, this is a very readable collection of beer and brewery travels, has fabulous illustrations for its time and is well worth getting a copy of.

I downloaded it to my IPad and now have it in my electronic book collection, available in seconds with a swipe of the finger. I guess it would also work just as well as a normal PC PDF download.

Never let it be said that I don't bring you value. £1,000 worth of beer history, at your fingertips, thanks to the digital age.

Finally, I am never slow to say that the £18 annual subscription to the Brewery History Society remains excellent value and is recommended.

The Thinking Drinker’s Guide to Alcohol @ Edinburgh Fringe

This year's Edinburgh Fringe will have representation from two of our friends in the beer world. Ben McFarland (left) and Tom Sandham, hosts of the Dwink.com website and legendary beer writers are dipping their toes into "stand-up".

The show runs at the Pleasance Hut from 4th to 29th August and is called The Thinking Drinker's Guide to Alcohol.

The boys decided to go before even thinking about content but soon realised that the only thing they really know anything about is alcohol, so the show is described as a ‘rip-roaring yarn’ that will take the audience on a ride through the history and culture of alcohol.

Not very interesting you may think, and not exactly Al Murray's Pub Landlord, but what makes this show so special is the offer of free liquor - six times over the duration of the hour long show.

This could turn messy and I wish the boys all the very best (break a leg ?).

If you are in or around Edinburgh during August, check it out, it looks like it's going to be fun.

The Thinking Drinker’s Guide to Alcohol, the Fringe’s only intellectual and interactive elbow-bending event, will champion alcohol and reveal how it has played a role in love, literature and learning since the dawn of time. And some would say, even before that. Long before it helped us lose our mobile phones, alcohol has been oiling the wheels of civilisation and invigorating the minds of history’s greatest heroes – from Jesus Christ and Vincent Van Gogh to Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill. Even Boris Yeltsin. And through our show we’ll stimulate both the mind and the mouth and prove that in actual fact, contrary to received wisdom, answers to a lot of life’s most searching questions can be discovered at the bottom of a glass.

More details at Dwink.com

And ticket information at Edfringe.com

Beer Bloggers Conference - Fullers

The Sunday afternoon session of the Beer Bloggers Conference saw the delegates hot-footing it down the river to Fullers Brewery in Chiswick for a session on "The Effect of Ingredients on Beer" presented by master brewer, Derek Prentice.

Preceded with a tour of the brewery and followed by the best Sunday lunch you will ever have, Derek's talk and beer tasting included many beers from Fuller’s aged selection including Vintage Ales, Past Masters, and Brewers Reserves.

Thanks must go to Fullers for a marvellous end to a splendid weekend.

Beer Bloggers Conference - Wells & Youngs

The third of the main sponsors of the Beer Bloggers Conference were Wells & Youngs who hosted the Saturday evening dinner at Dirty Dicks pub near Liverpool Street.

An excellent evening in the company of Paul Wells (chairman), Nigel McNally (MD) and Jim Robertson (Brewer) ably supported by the Dwink.com duo of Tom Sandham and Ben McFarland made for an entertaining evening. Bombardier (Bang On !), London Gold, Directors Bitter and Chocolate Stout made sure we did not go thirsty.

The evening was to further celebrate the launch of the latest advertising campaign for Bombardier - Bang On with Rik Mayall as the central character.

The thirty second advert shown on TV is a considerably watered down version to satisfy the advertising standards.

The two minute on-line edit and the three minute Director's Cut versions are filthy, crass, lewd, packed with sexual innuendo, demeaning to women, patronising to the beer drinker, dated, wrongly suggest beer gives you strength and makes you irresistible to women .....

Oops nearly got carried away there......

...they are also entertaining, funny, and the perfect antidote to some of the "pipe and slippers" style of beer advertising such as the James May London Pride Campaign.

Take it as you see it.

I say "Bang On, Bombardier !"

Those who take offence easily look away now :



Though I have to say even I am slightly troubled by the line "about time someone gave Boney a damn good licking"

Beer Bloggers Conference - Molson Coors

The main sponsor of the Beer Bloggers Conference was Molson Coors, the global brewer most famous in the UK for Carling.

Kristy McCready is their head of communications in the UK and has been hooked into the secret world of beer bloggers and tweeters for a couple of years. She was quick to see the value of the event and was first to commit to supporting the conference by sponsoring the venue costs and the opening night dinner.

I think we first met at a tweetup in Sheffield early last year when she first scolded me for calling Carling - "Black Label" - a moniker that has not been used since 1997. Although I don't remember "Hey Mabel, Black Label", I am from a generation that remembers and still uses the catch phrase: "I bet he drinks Carling Black Label"

It is a tough gig trying to champion what you might call "cooking lager" to the bloggerati. Carling sells over 4 billion pints in the UK alone (yes, billion) so I leave you to you mull over the rights and wrongs of dissing such a product.

Their mission is to help people drink and appreciate beer ahead of wines and spirits and that is a bandwagon we should all climb aboard.

It would have been nice to serve Carling at the opening dinner but Steve Wellington from the Worthington microbrewery and Stuart Howe from Sharps, the latest addition to MC stable, were not going to allow that to happen and we were refreshed with a variety of their excellent beers served with the fine dinner.

The Beer Bloggers Conference would not have made such a mark without the help of Molson Coors and I raise a glass (of Carling ?) in their direction.

Beer Bloggers Conference - Pilsner Urquell

The Beer Bloggers Conference was over a month ago and plenty of blog posts were written around that time to share the delights of the event. In truth though, it was really one of those times when you had to be there; no amount of blog posts or twitter tweets can truly describe enough how good this weekend was.

However, in hindsight, it would be wrong of me not to give a nod towards some of the sponsors who so richly supported the conference.

One of my favourite sessions was the Pilsner Urqull cocktail party launching their latest advert. The accompanying fresh unfiltered and unpasteurised beer from wooden casks was a welcome conclusion to the first of three long days of beer geekery.

In the light of some of the other beer adverts around lately, I think this is rather classy.



If you are interested in the art or animation of such a project, check out the behind the scenes video that is prompted at the end of the advert.

If you missed the conference, make sure you get aboard next year. If you don't write a blog or tweet about beer, then I suggest you start pdq. Honestly, this event was that good.

New Brewery for Badger

How long does it take to build a brewery ? Enough time to forget it is happening.

The new brewery development by Hall & Woodhouse in Blandford Forum, Dorset was announced some time ago but it is only now that the project is nearing completion that it becomes more real and visible to the beer drinker.

The 37 week build project will be completed at the end of August, with commissioning and trial brews set for September and the new brew-house completely up-and-running from October.

It is no small beer that Hall & Woodhouse are investing £5 million in their new brewery project when others among the family brewers have packed up their kit and cleared off to the golf course by selling out and closing.

Hall & Woodhouse are investing in their future, the future of British brewing, perpetuating their family's history and supporting their local community.

Mark Woodhouse, the company vice-chairman said "Hall & Woodhouse has been brewing Badger ales for over 225 years and this development means we will be doing so for many more generations to come. An investment of this magnitude demonstrates our ongoing commitment to brewing in Blandford and to the continued growth of our premium bottled and cask ales. It also ensures that we continue brewing the high quality and innovative flavoured ales for which we have such an enviable reputation. We are very grateful for the constructive support that we are receiving from North Dorset District Council for our exciting new brewery development.”

This is an investment that should be shouted from the roof-tops - the Family Brewers are not dead - they continue to refresh Britain's beer drinkers as they have for centuries.