Posts Tagged ‘Neil Edmonds’

The highlight of May, and almost certainly 2018, was obviously MBCC in Copenhagen. This year my visit extended to six days, so I was able to experience more of the accompanying Beer Week events around the city. As in 2017, I bumped into another regular Bottle Shop couple at Gatwick, early Tuesday morning! A gorgeous, sunny day…

April’s premier event was SponFest, a week-long celebration of ‘the very best in wild and traditionally fermented food and drink’ at four Graceland pubs, The King’s Arms, The Axe and The Mermaid of which I am very familiar, and a fourth venue, TT-Liquor, a Kingsland Road cocktail bar, that I had never heard of. I…

After today’s Spurs/Beavertown news, the Editor and I were chatting about whether I should do a quick piece. I was initially reluctant, as it isn’t exactly earth-shattering, and the final Heineken link-up, although now a very short odds-on bet, hasn’t actually happened, and so the precise details aren’t yet known. However, after reading back to…

March was a strange month as there was nothing exceptional to rave about or anything especially bad to complain about. It is almost certainly a one-off, but if it’s a trend due to a maturing industry, it will certainly make blogging a lot harder! The biggest news came when Brewdog swooped on Draft House’s chain…

February’s highlight was a tutored Fuller’s Vintage tasting at The Bottle Shop, led by John Keeling. The first beer was Past Masters XX, using a recipe from 1893, although the closest they could get to the barley, of that time, was from Prince Charles’s organic farm. It was brewed in 2010, and is technically now…

Apologies for the lateness of this column for which, like everything else that went wrong in the country recently, I will blame on the unseasonably adverse weather! It’s also a bit shorter than normal, but if anyone complains – and let’s face it they may well cheer – then the month was legitimately quiet! The…

December, with its Xmas jumpers, office parties and the once-a-year crowd, is the worst month for regular pub-goers, and quite understandably there are far less special events to report on, which is reflected in this column. The devastating shock of the month was the news that Duke’s Brew & Que was closing immediately.  As I’m…

Best festival/Highlight of the Year 2017 saw my first visit to the Mikkeller Beer Celebration (MBBC), and it definitely won’t be the last, as I’ve some tickets are already booked for 2018. The festival itself was almost perfect, and there were too many wonderful beers to mention them all over again. A notable new style…

November saw a tsunami of ticket-releases, as MBCC, Extravaganza, Beavertown’s 6th Birthday and LCBF all came the market. Roll on 2018! The best event last month was Darker Days IV, Matt Curtis’s annual, seasonal, celebration of darker styles, at The Duke’s Head. This year, he paired Burning Sky with food from, Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen. Tom…

October saw PunchDrink run a depressing article about how Other Half had become a sign of status symbol of conspicuous consumption on Wall St. (https://punchdrink.com/articles/how-other-half-brewery-become-official-beer-wall-street-finance/). I think the only one of my readers who would not be aghast at this development is the Editor, who might have a slight smirk at his prescience having written…