Entries from April 2008

April 18, 2008

Twenty beers before lunchtime

The time is 10am and there are 20 different beers to be drunk before lunchtime. It must be another supermarket beer judging.
I judged for the twice-yearly Tesco Beer Awards quite a few times, but this week’s was the Sainsbury’s Beer Competition, and although Sainsbury’s has brought in the same PR team to organise the entries [...]

April 15, 2008

The Prize goes to Fuller’s

When Fuller’s announced in 2005 that it was acquiring Gale’s of Horndean, I couldn’t get very upset, in large part because I was angry at what Prize Old Ale had been allowed to become.
This should have been a proud and heavily promoted flag-carrier for British beer, about the last survivor of the “strong old ale” [...]

April 14, 2008

The Lego(TM) ale conner

I’ve just put up a new myth page on this site completely debunking the story that medieval ale conners ever sat in puddles of drink in order to test it – so it’s a bit naughty to plug this page, which tells the (totally inaccurate, remember) story of the ale conner and the leather breeches [...]

April 9, 2008

What colour was mild?

In the mid-1970s I had a girlfriend who was a student at Liverpool University. The campus pub-of-choice was (and still is, I believe) the Cambridge on the corner of Mulberry Street, which was, back then, a Burtonwood Brewery outlet.
Its popularity was partly down to its closeness to the university, of course, but also for the excellent, well-priced [...]