Posts by Glynn Davis
Noise and Neighbours
When an American tourist was asked whether they enjoyed their visit to Windsor Castle, so the joke goes, they replied: “Yes, but why have they built such a lovely place so close to a noisy airport?” I haven’t dug up this humorous tale in a desire to question the intellect of US citizens but because…
Read MoreBeer Travels with Adrian Tierney-Jones
It seems kinda funny now this feeling I recall, but back in 2003 my taste buds were all shook up in a small room above a pub, whose name I’ve forgotten, in central London. It was one of the bi-annual beer tastings that Safeway’s, as it was known before being swallowed by Morrison’s, used to…
Read MoreBig games equal big money
When England beat Holland 4-1 in 1996, when Doncaster Rovers gained promotion to the Championship in 2009, when David Beckham scored that last-minute equaliser against Greece to propel England to the 2002 World Cup, and when Manchester United dramatically won the Champions League in 1999 – those were all memorable occasions. They were also some…
Read MoreBeer Travels with Adrian Tierney-Jones
Some journeys never end, which is why the other day I was like a wide-eyed child of the recent past transfixed in an old school sweetshop, surrounded by all manner of tooth-rotting, blood sugar-spiking delights: gobstoppers, sherbet dabs, liquorice all-sorts, and chocolate buttons. However, I wasn’t in a sweetshop, but instead was in one of…
Read MoreHalf measures
The chief reason for visiting a taproom or brewpub is to sample the range of beer a brewery produces. On such occasions, and if I have enough time, I’m more than likely to try all the beers on offer. For me this is the key reason for making such visits and typically these establishments encourage…
Read MoreBeer Travels with Adrian Tierney-Jones
So there I am thinking about the beers and the corresponding moments that have been the staging posts on my journey that has brought me to now. I am thinking of the beers that transformed me, that changed me from believing that beer was something to get drunk on, the beers that made me stop,…
Read MorePioneer craft brewer Sambrook’s looking backwards and forwards
When Duncan Sambrook opened his eponymous brewery in London’s Battersea he was the first of the new wave of brewers to set up shop in the capital that would be collectively described as craft brewers. Nobody was bandying that term around in August 2008 when he took on the site, nor in November when…
Read MoreBeer Travels with Adrian Tierney-Jones
As anyone who read about my visit to Munich in the previous Beer Insider might guess, I have been thinking a lot about beer pilgrimages; are they routes that take you from dissolution to dissipation, spiritual pub crawls, or is there a deeper meaning in the journey, a more metaphysical understanding of the nature of beer,…
Read MoreBeer Hawk (B2B) created on foundations of The Bottle Shop
From the remnants of the sadly failed The Bottle Shop business has emerged a new ABI-owned operation, Beer Hawk (B2B), which has the objective of bringing some professionalism to the craft beer industry in the UK. This is the aim of The Bottle Shop founder Andrew Morgan who is now head of Beer Hawk (B2B)…
Read MoreAround Town with Amateur Drinker
Beware the Ides of March. March 2019 was the most momentous month in London’s recent beer scene, and almost all the news was bad. The biggest was undoubtedly the demise of The Bottleshop. It is no secret to anyone who has been reading this blog, that I regarded this as the best venue in London,…
Read More