General

When working in the City of London some years back, my lunchtimes typically involved a short stroll down Fenchurch Street to the East India Arms for a few pints of Young’s Ordinary Bitter. I was certainly not the only person with this near-daily routine, because the small one-bar pub would be packed from before noon…

Beer Insider sits down with Jamie Daltrey, co-founder of Lakedown Brewing Co., to ask him about his brewery & beers along with a bit of music and his dad. 1. Why launch yet another brewery and more beers onto the market? Our family farm is at the heart of the brewery’s story, and it sits…

Brewery numbers in the UK have doubled over the past decade, which comes on top of a similar growth rate experienced in the previous 10 years. This equates to a net addition of almost 1,500 new breweries between 2001 and 2021, taking the total to 1,902, according to The Good Beer Guide. This has been…

Something very unusual happened at my local pub The Great Northern Railway Tavern this week. Among the constantly changing 20-plus beers on draught the two most interesting brews were rarely available hand-pulled cask ales from London-based Signature Brew and Deya from Cheltenham. In the four years since Fuller’s purchased the pub it has been fully…

Some years ago the organisation of a birthday drink at The Lamb pub on Lamb’s Conduit Street in London for a group of around 10 friends was a carefree process simply involving me telling them to turn up at the allotted time. I’ve a feeling that replicating the event today would be less easygoing and…

At the recent British Guild of Beer Writers’ awards and dinner I was seated next to a Belgium brewer whose sole beer was a wine-beer hybrid, which used Chardonnay grapes. These sort of mash-ups between the grape and the grain are commonplace in Italian brewing circles, but as far as I know, Viva brewery is…

Bohem Brewery hosted hop merchants Charles Faram at its North London home to exclusively use within the UK a newly developed hop Möst™ to create a unique dry-hopped lager. The collaborative brew involved Paul Corbett, MD of Charles Faram, and Jon Stringer, sales manager at Charles Faram, developing a beer with Bohem head brewer Matěj…

When diverting off Berkeley Square in Mayfair and turning into Bruton Place, the cacophony that hit me was overwhelming. The sound echoing down the street emanated from a very large boisterous crowd of drinkers, enjoying a mild November’s evening outside the renowned Guinea pub that now straddles units on both sides of the road. With…

Budweiser Budvar has released its first collaborative beer outside the Czech Republic through a tie-up with one of the country’s smaller craft breweries Pivovar Clock. The move follows three previous collaborations but these former brews were restricted to the domestic market whereas this new collaboration, Bohemian Idols, will be available in Europe in a limited…