And sometimes I drink wine, too...

Tre Bicchieri 2022

People do talk about beer having a ‘terroir’ – that sense of place that hints at where it was brewed, and which sometimes seems to make it taste better there – but it’s a term more often associated with fine wine. And with good reason – wine’s differentiation is arguably very much dependent on its home region.

Not only are there many local grape varieties, but the same variety – Syrah/Shiraz, say – can differ greatly depending on where it’s grown, just like English-grown Cascade hops taste different to US-grown Cascade. Plus, fine wine is in many ways a simpler drink to produce than beer, with fewer ingredients and fewer steps in the process, so it makes sense that the result might express the primary ingredient – grapes – much more clearly. 

And thankfully, as long as you’re not a wine snob, you can enjoy wine one day, beer the next, and maybe whisky the day after. Indeed, I suspect most ‘beer snobs’ are actually just quality-focused – they won’t drink crap beer, but they don’t drink crap wine either!

Tre Bicchieri 2019

All of which is why, as well craft beer festivals, I love events such as the Tre Bicchieri Tour, an Italian wine fair which visits London annually. It brings an array of hyper-local wines and wineries, each with experts to help the visitor understand what’s going on in their glass, whether it’s specifics such as growing by the coast or on volcanic soil, the unusual local grape varieties, or the broader differences between regions, from Sicily to Trentino and from Apulia to Piedmont, via Tuscany, Abruzzo and all points between. 

So I am looking forward to this year’s edition which takes place next Thursday (23rd February 2023) at the Royal Horticultural Halls in London’s Westminster. Primarily an afternoon trade and press event run by the Italian Chamber of Commerce in the UK to promote the exhibitors, the doors also open to wine-lovers from 5-7pm. It's free to get in, you do need to register though – there’s a link for that here. 

At the intersection of Pilsner, Punk and Pig's ears

It's the Pig's Ear beer festival in Hackney next week. I'm looking forward to it even more than usual this year, because if all goes according to plan, it’ll see a rare outing for cask beers from Walthamstow’s Signature Brew – and an even rarer UK one for cask beers from America's famed Dogfish Head. And they’ll be the same beers...

At least, that was one of the stories I heard when I was over at Signature last month for an event billed as “The intertwined history of punk rock and craft beer”. 

I have to confess that, when I first saw that headline, I didn’t get it. I was around in 1977, and I’m pretty damn sure there weren’t any punks necking single-hop pale ales and kettle sours – and there definitely wasn’t any Punk IPA!

Sams M (left) and C (right)

But the invitation also included the opportunity to meet craft beer legend Sam Calagione, the co-founder of Dogfish Head, and taste both his famous IPAs and the first of two beers he’s collaborated on with Signature co-founder Sam McGregor.

That first collaboration is an updated version of a beer Dogfish brewed several years ago called Piercing Pils. This playful take on the Central European classic – Dogfish styles it a Czech Pils, but it has definite Germanic notes – features both pear juice and pear tea alongside the noble hops. The pear juice adds both fermentable sugars, a fruity flavour and an intriguing, faintly Belgian estery note, while the tea melds with and builds the spicy character of the hops. 

It’s a very nice and very well-made beer – but why add flavours to a classic like Pils? “Since the craft beer revolution, brewers have been putting all sorts of crazy stuff into ales, but usually not lagers,” laughed Sam C. “With lager, there’s nothing to hide behind, so not too often do people fuck with lager – but we do!”

That ‘nowhere to hide faults’ aspect is why some modern ale brewers make lager, to show they really can brew, but as Sam M pointed out, that’s not relevant here. “The kit here [at the Walthamstow brewery] is already set up for lager,” he explained. “A lot of the work we did here was to bring our Studio Lager in-house.”

Beer and band punks on stage together

That work also included both a reverse-osmosis filter to get the right water quality for the beer being brewed – they even use it to replicate Colorado water for their American IPA – and a centrifuge for the finished beer so they don’t have to pasteurise or filter it. 

But with all this industry going on, where’s the punk angle? To discuss it, the two Sams were joined on the Signature brewhouse stage by Matt Reynolds of modern hardcore punk duo Haggard Cat, and Jon Langford of 1970s punk band The Mekons – roadies had been busy all afternoon setting up the stage for the two bands to play later that evening.

For all four of them, it’s a shared concept – a rejection of the mainstream and a determination to do your own thing. As Langford explained, while 1970s London punk was very shock-orientated, the north-east punk scene that The Mekons came out of was very different. “We thought it was all about you make your own entertainment, for us in The Mekons it was all do-it-yourself,” he said. 

Sam C said that American craft brewing, fired up by President Jimmy Carter’s 1978 legalisation of homebrewing, was driven by a similar rejection of the mainstream. “The homebrewing movement was a punk movement,” he declared. Dogfish Head may have been founded in 1995 – Calagione calls it “a second-generation craft brewery” – but it still started out as him and two friends brewing in a kitchen.

Burnished amber in a glass

He added that even now, after he sold his brewery to Sam Adams – yes, yet another Sam! – for which he inevitably got a lot of ‘sell-out’ criticism, it’s all still far from mainstream. “When we merged with Sam Adams, our ‘monstrous combination’ represented two percent of the US beer market,” he said. “In the US, 9000 craft breweries share just 14% of the market.”

So, a Punk Pear Pils then? Well, maybe – it’ll certainly have the guardians of the Einheitsgebot (the Law of Sameness) shaking their heads. And according to Signature Brew’s other co-founder Tom Bott, it’s not the only thing that Sam C and the Dogfish crew were in town for – the week after we spoke, they were due back at the brewery to start work on a collaboration Porter, to be brewed with Vietnamese pepper and maple syrup!

And that's where it got extra-interesting. Tom said they also plan to cask some of both the Porter and the Piercing Pils. Signature started doing cask beers about a year ago – initially just versions of its Roadie and Backstage IPAs – but only for sale through two handpumps in the  brewery taproom. Now, Tom said they’re also “thinking to let some casks out further afield,” with Pig’s Ear a likely early recipient. 

Not just a Punk Pear Pils, then, but a Cask Punk Pear Pils. Now that’s my kind of DIY entertainment… See you at Pig's Ear! 

How Gosnells helped make mead both fashionable and sessionable

Mead is fashionable again. Better than that, it’s commercial and very nearly mainstream, and a large part of the credit for that – at least in Britain – goes to Tim Gosnell and his meadery Gosnells of London. 

He’s had several goes at creating a retail space of his own. There was the room above a restaurant in Peckham, there was the ‘mead garden’ of tables, benches and recycled wood dividers and planters set up on the concrete outside his industrial estate meadery – it was quite cute, actually, in a modern craft-biergarten kind of way. 

And now there is the first mead bar on the famed Bermondsey Beer Mile, taking over the 72 Enid Street arch, between Moor Beer and Cloudwater. It’s a simple set-up – tables, chairs and benches fill the deep archway plus some space on the roadside, then there’s a bar at the back with storage behind.  

The commercialisation of mead has been helped by the fact that, while what’s on the bar here is recognisably similar, Gosnells core range is not the sweet, almost liqueur-like honey wine meads sold in tourist shops and medieval markets, whose strength can be in the high teens or even the low 20s. Some of these honey wines were actually sweet grape wine flavoured with honey.

Inside the Enid St arch

Session meads

Instead, Gosnells is mostly session or ‘short mead’, a light version weighing in at 5% ABV or less*. As well as making it more approachable in a market where ready-mixed cocktails and hard seltzers are typically 4% or 5%, it also makes it more cost-effective to produce. Honey is normally the only sugar source for fermentation here and it’s not a cheap ingredient, so a 15% mead is a lot more expensive to make than a 4% one. In addition, a 15% or 18% mead can take a lot longer to ferment and finish. 

Of course, while the production process is very similar to beer, minus the mashing and boiling, it does have to change a bit, as I learned when chatting in the mead garden a few months back with Gosnells head brewer Will Grubelnik. “We pasteurise it to stop the fermentation early,” he explained. That’s because if they didn’t stop the fermentation early, the yeast could simply eat all the sugar leaving a bone-dry liquid. 

Control over the fermentation as well as the type of honey and any other ingredients used also helps bring out flavour, despite the lower ABV. “Honey is almost 99% sugar and water, with a very little protein and some other flavour compounds,” Will added. 

Head brewer Will at the old 'mead-garden'

“Stopping early allows you to collect some mid-fermentation products. Even though we’re 100% honey we’re able to show people a huge range of flavour profiles so there’s something to appeal to everyone, even if they’re scared of mead or don’t like honey!”  

For example, Gosnells has produced a dry-hopped mead – not bitter but light and dry with a hoppy crispness, a mead brewed with Belgian Saison yeast, and several fruited, flowered or spiced meads, traditionally known as melomels and metheglins. There’s even a lightly soured mead, to ride the recent trend for sour drinks, and a series of postcode meads made with – and expressing the character of – honey from that specific area. 

Bringing out the honey's individual character

“With mead you can be as free as you want or as concise as you want,” Will says. “For example, I might want to focus on the honey and how that changes over time. With the postcode mead I want to educate people, so I take a hive each from East and West London and from Hereford and the Kentish coast. I ferment the four honeys the same way to show first how the taste varies, and second, that urban honey is not ‘dirty’!”

He also produces some specials at wine-strength, which as I mentioned take a lot more honey. Where he uses perhaps 85kg or 90kg of honey per 1000 litres for the regular meads, these take 370kg per 1000. (By comparison, my homebrew meads used between 2kg and 3kg per 10 litres, depending how dry I wanted them.)  

Mead is sometimes claimed to be the world’s oldest alcoholic drink. That may or may not be true – wine has a long history, and very early beer-like drinks seem to have combined several sugar sources, including honey alongside fruit and grains – but it’s undeniable that mead carries a certain mystique. The Mead of Poetry in Norse mythology, for example, or the mead of the ancient Greek Golden Age. 

And some of Will’s superb specials would definitely fit well in that legendary category! For example, at the meadery I was lucky enough to sample a smooth and warming 13% mead matured in a plum sake barrel, and a rich and toasty Bouchet mead made with 50% caramelised honey.  

Sadly, you are unlikely to find those two at the Bermondsey bar – they were very limited runs. But there are eight taps of other draught meads, which when I visited included one at wine strength and another constructed to taste like a Mojito. It certainly all makes for a refreshing change from beer. 

*Session meads are still very much in the historical tradition, where we also find short mead and local honey-based but session-strength specialities such as Estonian Mõdu, Finnish Sima and Russian Medovukha. Again, it reminds us that honey has always been a fairly expensive commodity, so a 5% mead would have been half the price of a 10% one. 

Drinking up a memory of Bass Cape Hill

Acquired at some memorabilia sale a few years back, this bottle’s been at the back of my fridge pretty much ever since. Until today I pulled it out – and suddenly realised that I was quite possibly involved, albeit peripherally, in what was brewed to celebrate. 

Some 35 years ago, I was invited to visit Cape Hill Brewery in Birmingham. Originally the HQ of Mitchells & Butler, or M&B as it was known in its brewing days, by the time I visited it was part of the Bass empire, and had just undergone a substantial refit. 

That refit included a new computer control system running on a pair of DEC VAX minicomputers, which was the reason for my visit as I was deputy editor of DEC User Magazine at the time. This system allowed them pretty much to program the brewery to brew what they wanted, batch by batch, whether that be Brew XI, Stones Bitter, M&B Mild or whatever. These days you can buy a home-brew machine that does the same and fits on your kitchen work-top, but this was sophisticated stuff back then. 

When Bass bailed out of brewing in 2000 the Cape Hill Brewery was sold, first to Interbrew and then to Coors, who closed it in 2002, just months after they’d bought it. It was demolished in 2005/2006 and housing built on the site. 

Fast forward to today though, and here’s a bottle of Cape Hill Brewery Celebration Strong Mild Ale from June 1987, and yes, it’s still drinkable and fairly pleasant! The cap was still tight, perhaps thanks to the foil cover, and while the beer has only a slight fizz, it’s also only slightly oxidised for its age. 

It’s dark and malty with a touch of gravy – that’s the oxidation – and a little sweet. There’s a slight hop character and not much bitterness, but then this is a Midlands mild, and it’s a little thin. No information on the ABV – the label just says it was brewed to O.G. 1055° – but given the sweetness I’d guess at maybe 5%. 

Anyhow, that's my glass of history for today. 

Hoppy days down on the farm

Female hop plant

The 2022 hop harvest begins this week – or at least it does in the Weald of Kent, where Hukins Hops grows East Kent Goldings, Fuggles, Challenger, Ernest, Bullion and other varieties – and where they invited a small group of beer writers and friends to be the guinea-pigs for a trial tour ahead of their first-ever Pick Your Own Hops event. 

Hukins Hops is a 50-acre family farm that’s been growing hops since 1900, although it was relatively recently that current boss Ross Hukins made the decision to focus entirely on hops. As well as dried and pelleted hops for both commercial and home brewers, they also sell fresh and dried hop garlands for decorative use. 

And this week they will also have brewers coming by to pick up the first fresh wet or green hops, which they typically aim to get into beer within 24 hours in order to capture as much as possible of the fresh hop character. There’s several Green Hop Beer festivals coming up, the biggest being in Canterbury in September. 

Poles and wires hold the hop bines up

One of the first things I noticed when we started walking through the hop fields was how quiet it was – our well-informed tour guide Dom, from UK Brewery Tours, said it’s like this for much of the year. Obviously the days of manual harvesting, when Londoners in their thousands would travel to Kent for a few weeks hop-picking, are long gone and it’s largely mechanised now, but it’s also that outside harvest and a few other activities, there is not so much to do. 

Then, once harvest starts, there’s several weeks of hectic activity before it quietens down again. One reason for growing several varieties of hops is that they ripen at slightly different times – for example Fuggles is first, then Challenger, followed by Ernest and Bullion, then UK Cascade, and so on – which smooths the harvesting and processing out a bit, but it is still pretty concentrated. 

Male hop plant

The next thing I noticed was how they grow. The overhead poles and wires are still there, not so different from 100 years ago, then each of the 320,000 plants on the farm has its own metal ground anchor from which compostable strings run up to the overhead wires. Most plants have four strings for four twisting shoots or ‘bines’, and Dom said that some varieties will grow up the strings naturally while others need training – twisting the shoots around the strings to encourage them to climb.

As well as differences in smell and taste, hop varieties also look slightly different on the bine – even before you notice the one in 200 oddities on the farm that are the male hop plants. Challenger cones are longer than Fuggles, for instance, and some kinds are bushier than others – although all were a little thin this year, due to the dry weather. Indeed, this year's hop harvest looks set to be down right across Europe, with Germany predicting a 20% drop.  

A twisting bine

But climate change is impacting hop-growing in other ways too. For instance, Dom says that traditional English Goldings and Fuggles now need irrigation, whereas the newer varieties are more tolerant. 

This adds yet more layers of complexity to the decision of what varieties to grow. Not only must the farmer try to anticipate the upcoming hop fashions, but they also need to think about what suits their terroir, what’ll incur extra costs and so on. Hukins is growing some experimental varieties but it takes three years for the character of a new variety to become clear, and while hops are perennial, the bines need replacing after about 30 years. If you get it wrong, as Hukins did a few years ago with Bramling Cross which didn’t sell, you have to grub out the plants and replace them. 

Anyway, come harvest the whole bine is cut at top and bottom, which only needs two workers on a tractor with a high ‘cherry-picker’ platform on the front. The cut bines go onto a trailer, string and all, and are trucked to a gigantic stripping machine. This separates the vital hop cones from everything else, all of which can go for compost, including the strings. 

Classic 1960s machinery

Although it’s housed in a modern building, Hukins’ stripper is more than half a century old! Sure, a modern computer-controlled one might be faster and quieter. But not only was it significantly cheaper to buy a vintage machine second-hand, it also means most problems can be fixed by a mechanic, without the need to call in a service engineer. 

Barring the small proportion that goes out green, as garlands or is sent off to be turned into hop pellets, the rest of an average year’s 50 tons of hops goes into the three huge driers – diesel-fuelled, sadly, unlike the rest of the farm which is solar-powered. Several hours at 57ºC drop the moisture content right down, leaving the dried hops ready for packing. 

Last on the tour, but far from least, was of course to taste the results. Dom presented us with samples of three different beers, each one made with a specific hop variety from the farm. The two stand-outs were a dank and rich-bodied bitter using Challenger and a smooth, coffee-tinged and herbal-hoppy London Porter made with East Kent Goldings (this turned out to be Five Points’ excellent Railway Porter).  

And with that, it was time to say thanks and goodbye. At first sight, Hukins Hops doesn’t look the easiest of places to get to (it’s an hour by train out of London Bridge, then a taxi) and the tour does involve quite a lot of walking over uneven ground, but it’s fascinating. But if you can drive you can make a day of it, as there's other places to visit in the area. Old Dairy Brewery (a Hukins customer) is not far and there's vineyards around as well, including several smaller ones alongside better-known ones such as Biddenden and Chapel Down.  

Beer hunting in Lüneburg

As my friend Paul recently reminded me via his blog, the North German mediaeval Hanseatic town of Lüneburg – where I used to live – remains a popular tourist destination for cruise passengers, coach parties and more. I’m a bit too late to help Paul, but if you’re visiting in the near future and are interested in beer, here’s a few ideas of places to look. 

There’s only two commercial breweries in town these days, both brewpubs. Brauhaus Nolte is quite a way out from the centre, so it’s unlikely a casual visitor will make it there – although if you do, it’s very much a local pub, with a traditional menu (think schnitzels, etc) and usually one light (Helles) and one dark (Dunkel) beer, plus maybe a seasonal special. This range is typical for a German brewpub. 

The bar at Mälzer

Much easier to find is the Mälzer Brauhaus, as it’s just a few metres off Am Sande, the big town square that’s actually a long rectangle. It’s spacious and rustic, with wooden beams everywhere and the brewkit taking pride of place. There’s even a small bar you can sit at if you want, though because the tapster is usually busy filling orders for the waiters, service will be faster if you take a table like everyone else!

As usual, two regulars plus maybe a third seasonal, though the tweak here is that the second regular also changes – a Marzen from October, and a Weizen from April. The first is a Pilsner, of course. It’s not cheap – well, we are in tourist-town here – but it’s a nice place to sit and eat, or just drink, there’s even free WiFi now. Beware though that, like a lot of German places, they don’t take Visa or MC, only cash or a German bank card. 

The 1902 brewhouse

Once upon a time there were more than 80 breweries in Lüneburg, and a few doors up from Mälzer is the only surviving one, now the town’s Brewery Museum. Before it was bought and eventually closed by Holsten, it was the Lüneburger Kronenbrauerei, or Crown Brewery. You can still find very drinkable Lüneburger Pils and Kronen Dunkel at the Krone Bier & Event-haus next door, but they come from Holsten in Hamburg now. 

It’s several years since I visited the museum, but the brewhouse (which dates from 1902) was a very interesting image of early 1900s and inter-war German brewing. It looks like it’s a lot more accessible now too, having been connected to the adjacent Ostpreußisches Landesmuseum* – when I visited, it was pre-booked groups only, and the guide had to open it up specially with a large key… Well worth a look if you have time. 

A five-minute walk from here will bring you to the Altstadt – the old town. Here you can stroll along Ob. & u. Ohlingerstraße (Upper and Lower Ohlinger Street) for the lovely old buildings, but from the beer perspective what I recommend is Anno 1900. It's nominally a traditional German restaurant – their motto is “eat like in your grandmother’s time”, and yes they mean the mythic past, not your actual grandmother’s time which whether British or German probably involved post-war rationing. The downstairs though is a nice pub full of wood, ‘found items’ and memorabilia, and complete with a Stammtisch – a table set aside only for locals. 

Anno 1900

The food was good the last time I was there, and so was the beer – which for a change involves darker beers as well as Pils. Aktien Landbier Fränkisch Dunkel is a regular on tap, and so are (or were) Aktien Zwick'l Kellerbier, Grevensteiner Original and Barre Alt. 

None of which are local, of course, and you’ll have a hard time finding much that is – unless you count maybe Ratsherrn and the various Holsten/Carlsberg brands, which are from Hamburg. There are a few more brewpubs and nanobreweries in outlying villages, but with only limited distribution. 

And while most larger supermarkets keep a range of national brands plus some Bavarians, sadly the pandemic and other factors have hammered the availability of modern German microbrewed beer. The town’s only specialist beer shop closed a few years back, and others have drastically cut back. For instance, I used to recommend Avenir café-deli for speciality brews, but now it has little beyond a few bottles from Kehrwieder Kreativbrauerei – although that said, these are well worth trying, and the coffee is still good! (They sometimes have Wildwuchs beers too, but in my experience these vary a lot in quality, as do those of local brand LüneBräu which you might find in other shops.)

Franconia in Sand Passage

Easier to find, and worth a visit despite also having cut back is Sand Passage, ake Edeka Tschorn, back on Am Sande. Sadly most of the smaller brewery stuff has gone but there’s still a few (eg. Wendlandbräu is based in a nearby village and is pretty reliable), plus a selection of Franconian and Bavarian bottles, some of which can be hard to find up north. Most of these aren't on the main beer aisle though – head towards the deli counter where there’s an extra rack (see photo). 

Well, that’s about it. To be honest, if you have time and transport then the beer range is far better in Hamburg, which has several specialist shops. But you can still find something good to drink in Lüneburg, even if it’s not brewed especially locally. 

*East Prussia went to Poland after WW2, with its German population mostly exiled, which is why you'll find this museum of East Prussian and Baltic German history here in Lower Saxony instead.  

The Ram Brewery, Sambrooks and the secrets of ancient brewing

It's been a busy week. It started with my first visit to the new Sambrooks Brewery, which is inside the old Young's Ram Brewery site. Much of the production brewery is out of sight in what was once a tun room full of porter tuns, and then later - if I remember rightly - Young's cask washing area. But there are also several vessels visible inside Sambrooks grand new taproom, which occupies two floors and has huge picture windows overlooking the plaza and beer garden outside. 

Tim describes Ajon brewing from East Africa 

The first reason to be here - apart from sampling Sambrooks' new and rather tasty session IPA, Sidekick, and its brand-new and excellent Oatmeal Stout - was a presentation from fellow Beer Writers Guild member Tim O'Rourke, on his research into surviving ancient brewing traditions, including meeting and in some cases brewing with traditional brewers. 

It really was fascinating for anyone into brewing history. He went through brewing traditions from all over the world, including the maize beers of Central and South America, millet, sorghum and banana beers from various parts of Africa, the Sake-like rice brews of Southeast Asia, and more. He then linked them to historical, archaeological and artistic evidence of ancient brewing. 

The two things that stood out for me were first, you know that story about women chewing the maize to make Chicha? It's a wind-up, a hoax, and one that generations of beer writers have eagerly swallowed - more eagerly than the Chicha, probably! Of course, if you think just how much grain is required for brewing, and how dry the special brewing maize is, you would not want to do anything other than mill or grind it - but chewing made for a more picturesque story, I guess...

Different malted grains

And the other was when Tim reminded us that, although every human culture has had alcoholic drinks of some sort, there's a big difference between beer and the likes of wine and cider which is that, despite the wishful thinking of some archaeologists and others, beer does not happen spontaneously. Fruit will ferment, and sometimes animals get drunk on it, but a bucket of wet grain will simply rot and go mouldy. 

The difference is that beer requires processing. Typically this means malting, which converts the starches to fermentable sugars, with the milled or ground malt then mashed in warm or hot water to extract those sugars. And this is almost certainly why burnt grains turn up in certain archaeological features, which were formerly assumed to be something to do with baking or cooking, but are now increasingly recognised as malting sites. Indeed, there's a growing understanding or recognition among archaeologists and historians that it was as much beer brewing as bread baking that encouraged humans to settle down and become farmers rather than hunter-gatherers. 

John Hatch shows us the tea-urn's new home

After the talk - and quite a bit of discussion among the beer historians present - I was fortunate enough to join a group touring both the old and new breweries. Our tour was led by John Hatch who, after working for Young's, was the one who kept the site's brewing tradition alive for several years while it was awaiting redevelopment, The consequence of his stalwart efforts is that the Ram Quarter retains its crown as the country's oldest verified brewery or brewing site. (It's not the country's oldest brewer - that's Shepherd Neame.)

His nano-brewery, built around a repurposed tea-urn, is still in use as a test brewkit for Sambrooks, although of course the old laboratory building that housed it and his little bar when last I visited, several years ago, has long gone. As well as seeing parts of the new Sambrooks Brewery, which moved here from a much larger site in nearby Battersea*, we also got to see parts of the old Ram Brewery which are now a brewing museum. These included the gleaming old coppers, an ancient well, and lots of breweriana.

Amongst the latter were photos of both the late Queen Mother and a youthful-looking Prince Charles pulling pints of Young's. Needless to say, she looked a lot happier and 'into' the task than he did. In fact, he looked downright nervous - here's hoping he has had a bit more practice since then, especially since he has his own Duchy beer range now.

After the tour it was back to the taproom for the Beer Writers Guild party, with pizza and more beers, both from Sambrooks and from various generous corporate Guild members, including among others the aforementioned Shepherd Neame, Timothy Taylor with Landlord and its fruity pale Hopical Storm, Salcombe showing its new Atlas SIPA, Krombacher UK with the eponymous classic Pils, and Hogs Back with its gorgeous but dangerous A Over T barleywine. 

My thanks to all of them - and yes, a good time was had by all!

*I understand that the old Sambrooks brewkit went to SEB (South East Bottling) in Broadstairs. Rumour has it some Sambrooks beers are now brewed there under contract.