General

When I was at school I used to get my smartest mate to read through the rules of any board games I bought so he could then show me how to play it. This saved me a lot of time and effort while he got to test his intellect. I was reminded of this great…

On the edge of the Czech capital Prague within one of a cluster of historic buildings is housed the Břevnov Monastery Brewery whose output is a mix of traditional lagers, which the former monks would recognise, alongside some newer styles. Pulling open the doors on the long structure emblazoned with the welcoming words ‘Pivovar’ (which…

On a dark, wet, cold and windy evening the warm glow of a railway arch in the new Wood Lane development was extremely welcoming. The Prairie Fire BBQ Tap Room is the first tenant to move into a row of over 30 arches and our welcome felt even warmer by the choice of 16 draught…

Not that long ago, labels on smaller brewers’ bottles looked pretty much the same – dated imagery such as heraldry, dragons and other nonsense. The rationale for investing little effort into making products look more differentiated and professional was it gave the impression the brewer was more interested in superfluous marketing than producing beer. There…

In the days when large companies operated heavily subsidised staff canteens, I was working for an investment firm whose head office dining room was a ten-minute walk from my satellite building. Such was its exceptional value for money that some workers dined there every lunchtime but, alas, I was all too frequently diverted into the…

While the country’s new generation of craft brewers sit predominantly in unglamorous railway arches, their more established UK competitors are often housed in Victorian buildings that are things of great beauty – even to non-beer drinkers.   Many were built to a distinctive tower model where the production process begins at the top of the…

  Nobody would dispute Robinson’s is a very traditional regional brewery so it is all the more remarkable that it finds itself as the brewer of the rock band Iron Maiden’s beers that sells by the millions of units around the world. But maybe it is not that much of a surprise because the band’s…

Saturday, 14 September was a particularly interesting day in London’s craft beer scene. In the afternoon the London Brewers Alliance (LBA) beer festival was held at Fuller’s brewery in Chiswick, while in the evening The Kernel Brewery was celebrating its tenth anniversary in a couple of railway arches in Bermondsey. It was also exactly ten…