Beer Travels

Where is this? You emerge out of the Hauptbahnhof, the central nervous system of the city, and are immediately floored by its noisy, car-laden, babel of voices as people flurry about as if in a snowstorm. It is a place where you have your mid-morning brunch of a long, slim glass of Weizen alongside either…

What shall I write is the question that anyone who lives by the pen (or laptop these days, naturally) all too often asks themselves? Where shall I wander on the page, what shall I dredge from the deep river of memory — which beer, which brewery, which brewer, which city has attracted my attention, has…

So is this the best city in the UK in which to drink beer? I’m talking about Sheffield, naturally, which several years ago was declared the top of the ringing, singing tree of UK beer (much to the wry smiles of those who live in, say, Norwich, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester, Edinburgh, London and Liverpool no…

  There it sits in the glass, a gleam of gold suggestive of the end of the rainbow, a snowy, alpine-like collar of foam on the top, inviting and enticing. In the slow tick-tock, lunchtime-shadowed confines of the pub, the Live and Let Live in Cambridge, where I once used to go when I lived…

  So there I am in Prague wanting a beer and the only problem is where do I go. Ever since I first visited this city of cities in 2005, I have always had an extraordinary thirst for its pubs and bars. On that debut trip I drank wall to wall Pilsner Urquell, partly because…