The Recession Session
- a_friend_in_mead
- General Articles
- 5960
€13.40? They wanted €13.40 for two pints? This was completely inexplicable, none of the bar staff were topless, the beer was the same cold fizzy muck everywhere serves and the pub itself had all the charm of herpes.
But what choice do you have other than to be ripped off by Dublin city centre pubs? Are we condemned to spend our lives forking over this much while our debts circle us in an ever-tightening carousel of death?
What beer can you get around Dublin for the price of a round in the wrong pub? The beer had to be good, ideally Irish craft beer. The pubs had to be pleasant. I am far too posh to spend my time in a place filled with binmen and sailors just to save a few euro. And a strict selection criteria on who was allowed to go would be enforced.
Review: World's Best Beers
- TheBeerNut
- Reviews
- 6109
There's no shortage of reference books about beer on the market, from the wordy official guides published by the house of CAMRA to the glossy encyclopedia-style tomes that come from the likes of Dorling Kindersley, more often than not bearing the name of the late Michael Jackson on the cover. The former can tend towards being stuffily prescriptive while the latter are generally so broadly pitched that there's very little for the beer enthusiast to chew on. The amount of free beer information on the Internet these days makes it difficult to justify shelling out cash on a beer reference book, other than for the look and feel of the thing. UK beer writer Ben McFarland has attempted to bridge this gap by creating a lavishly illustrated guide to world beer that also highlights the real quality beers and breweries of which those in the know speak reverentially.
World's Best Beers is subtitled One Thousand Craft Brews From Cask To Glass in the US, and 1000 Unmissable Brews from Portland to Prague in Europe. With opening pages decorated with Orval and Aventinus, you know you're in the hands of an genuine enthusiast.
The man in the pub is more discerning than you
- a_friend_in_mead
- General Articles
- 6392
That's it. Hand in your pipes, shave off the beards and get rid of the beer nerd t-shirts the game is up. We are all at Irish Craft Brewer a mockery of a travesty of a sham as beer tasters. It turns out a random collection of pub goers were better at guessing what stout they were getting than we were.
Review: Hops & Glory
- TheBeerNut
- Reviews
- 7455
No beer aficionado needs to be told what India Pale Ale is -- the style is brewed anywhere there's a market of drinkers who really care about what's in the glass in front of them. American craft brewers have made it their own, with their signature bitter fruity hops and ever-increasing levels of alcohol. And the story of the style, how it was exported from Britain to India, maturing on the long voyage around the Cape, is inscribed on almost every IPA label. In Hops & Glory, Pete Brown not only gives the full intriguing story of India Pale Ale and its place in the building of the British Empire, but also sets out to recreate the journey from Burton-on-Trent to Calcutta with a cask of authentic IPA.
The book divides roughly between these two stories: on the one hand we have the history of the British in India, how their beer became an intrinsic part of their lifestyle. And on the other there's the tale of what happens when one man decides in the pub that he will take some IPA from the brewery in Burton to India by sea, to taste firsthand the effect of the journey on the beer. It is, in many ways, a book of discoveries. Pete gives us never-before-seen insights into British beer history and the mythology around IPA, and tells us candidly the things he discovers about himself on his epic voyage, including just what it's like to get cabin fever and skirt the edges of sanity.