Around Town with Amateur Drinker

When the oral history of the UK craft beer revolution is written, September 2017 will be yet another landmark, as Beavertown’s Extravaganza was the UK’s largest and most impressive festival to date. It was only just over two years ago that Craft Beer Co. had to cancel London Beer Carnival which couldn’t sell out the…

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Around Town with Amateur Drinker

August was obviously dominated by London Beer City, which was even bigger and better than last year. The week kicked off with an unofficial opening party at The Kings Arms, ‘The Scandinavian Embassy’, which hosted a MTB with Dry and Bitter, and had enough brewers and industry people to start a convention. The highlight was…

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Around Town with Amateur Drinker

Apologies for how late July’s round-up is, but as with most of my readers, the 1st half of August was spent in a drunken haze thanks to the fantastic London Beer City, a full round-up of which will appear next month- and I promise that will be more punctual! July’s best event was the Brasserie…

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Around Town with Amateur Drinker

June’s highlight was Beavertown’s Sour Solstice festival. Whether it was because of the style, or the fact that it was a Sunday, the place was relatively empty, chilled and relaxed. The beers were fantastic and included very limited quantities of the exceptionally rare Tommie Sjef Druif, a sour wild ale fermented with Kekfrankos (the Hungarian…

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Around Town with Amateur Drinker

Apologies for a late report this month, but no prizes for guessing that May’s highlight was the Mikkeller Beer Celebration Copenhagen, MBCC. After landing, it was straight to WarPigs for a Tired Hands TTO. Notable beers included Royal Double, a sushi rice DIPA, Individuation Sanguine sour red and Alien Church IPA. However, the real highlight…

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AROUND TOWN WITH AMATEUR DRINKER

Such is the pace of change in the beer industry at present that my first draft of this diary piece felt like I was writing for The Economist so I have written about that elsewhere (Let’s Rake over the Take-overs…) and concentrated on the drinking in this entry! Although Craft Beer 100 was cancelled this…

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Let’s rake over the take-overs…

Whilst writing my normal monthly diary, (March’s ventures are here) there was so much corporate finance news that we felt it appropriate to put into this separate piece. The most stunning announcement was that Wicked Weed had agreed to be taken over by Anheuser-Busch InBev. This is a mere 15 months after the latter’s Super Bowl…

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Around Town with Amateur Drinker

I could have made this point at almost any time but after collating my notes for this month the growth in the beer scene appears to have moved up to whatever level is above staggering, Brewers are increasing their on-site sales, so March saw Hammerton announce that they had taken over the Wig & Gown…

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Lack of equity at Brewdog?

” Equity For Punks : Whether they are punks or not, this certainly isn’t equity.” Beer Insider has previously raised concerns about crowd-funding and the activities of Brewdog. In particular, it related to some of the brewers’ actions that could potentially reduce the value of the equity (shares) held by thousands of small shareholders who…

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Around Town with Amateur Drinker

I have always agreed with Hunter S Thompson, that, due to the NFL season, February is the most gloomy and depressing month: In January, we get the excitement of the playoffs, but, after the climax of the Super Bowl, you then face an agonising 7 month wait for the action to start again. Fortunately, in…

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