Why the man from Firestone was deservedly tired

My life is far too deadline-driven. Fortunately the unexpected is always to be expected. On Saturday Jay Brooks, one of California’s top beer writers and beer bloggers, booted my schedule off course with an email saying he was flying in to London, arriving early Monday morning, and catching a train up to the Midlands in [...]

Sainsbury’s winning bottled beers

This blog is currently the top result in a Google search for outsize menswear chain Massachusetts. I haven’t, you’ll guess, ever written about retailers of XXL male clothing in the Greater Boston area, but I did make a joke when I blogged on judging at the Sainsbury’s beer competition in April about the name of the [...]

A tasty drop: the history of an almost-vanished fermentation system

Brakspear’s Triple is a regular on the Zythophile shopping list: not just because I try to support old fermentation methods, it’s a very tasty beer, marvellously fruity, toffee apples, peardrops and bananas, hints of fruitcake, sweet and bitter in perfect balance, a long and lingering tart, very dry finish, and remarkably light-footed for a beer [...]

The history of yeast: breaking news

UPDATE
Ha! As I wrote yesterday, researchers in yeast genetics are changing the story on the history of yeast all the time, and the day I put that post up, new findings on the genetics of lager yeast came out which, as New Scientist reported, take the hybridisation narrative further down the road to a fascinating [...]

A short history of yeast

Around 80 million years ago, when Triceratops still browsed the plains of what wasn’t yet North America, some flowering plant species developed a new strategy to spread their seeds, encasing them in a soft, fleshy cover – fruit – that became sweet and tasty as everything ripened. The fruit was then eaten by animals, which [...]

How to find decent beer in Greece

Olympic – which really ought to be renamed Icarus Airlines, since as a company it looks very likely to follow soon the trajectory of the doomed early Greek aeronaut – is manned by incompetent twazzocks. They reschedule flights which then arrive so late they take off at the originally scheduled time anyway. They cancel flights [...]