Hungary four more
Picking a random country for beers of international interest, I ended up with Hungary, and four from the Horizont brewery. I was a bit more deliberate in selecting the styles, interested in what the...
View ArticlePooch hooch
I don't know why Hopfully elected to make these two beers a matching set. The recipes don't seem related to each other. Was it just to save money on the artwork?The first is called Hair of the Dog...
View ArticleFruit, real and implied
It all seems business as usual at Whiplash at the moment, all fruited sour beers and hazy pale ales. Let's take a look at the most recent ones to come my way.Fruit Salad Days are here again, this time...
View ArticleA Rocky start
My first time drinking beer from the Franco-Coloradan brewery Outer Range, I thought it was something else. It's not my fault, it's what it was sold as: a 5% ABV pale ale from an Irish brewery. That...
View ArticleTurn on, tune in, Longford
At time of writing, the latest from Wide Street is called Beat Generation and is in the style (is it a style?) called "American sour". I've had sour beers in America, though I don't think I encountered...
View ArticleMulticultural Munich
It's a return visit to the beers of Camba Bavaria, the Munich-based brewer of some very unMunich beers.First up today, for instance, is a saison, called Summer Kiss. Despite the pink branding and...
View ArticleMinibars and solitude
For my summer holiday this year I went to visit Bulgaria, largely because I've never been there before and it was an itch needing to be scratched. On arrival, the local mosquito population made sure...
View ArticleWhen in Plovdiv
I loved Plovdiv, the little city with a big history, right in the middle of Bulgaria. I wouldn't class it as an A-1 beer destination, however, although it has definitely made an effort.The Kapana...
View ArticleTo the sea
The final segment of my Bulgarian adventure brought us to Nessebar, a cutesy and well-preserved mini city on the Black Sea coast. It's well preserved by the strictures of UNESCO, though increasingly...
View ArticleThe nationals
My lastthreeposts covered what I saw of the craft scene on my visit to Bulgaria, and I make no attempt to define what I mean by "craft" there: Bulgaria has a fairly clear line between the small...
View ArticleZe Germans
I'm guessing the large number of Czech and German visitors to Bulgaria are one reason it carries more of their beers than ones from any other country. When I was feeling down about what the Bulgarian...
View ArticleDistant horizons
The temperature hit the mid-30s when I was in Plovdiv. That necessitated some split-shift tourism, visiting sights in the morning and evening, with the sweltering afternoons spent cowering under...
View ArticleThe Dublin comeback
The September beer festival at the RDS in Dublin was a fixture on Ireland's calendar between 2011 and 2017. A later move to other venues was less successful and it all wrapped up before Covid. This...
View ArticleTake the Lauterbach
It's like one of those ghosts that doesn't know it's dead. The Lauterbacher brewery claims a foundation date of 1889, with a history in Bavaria going further back to the mid-17th century. The website...
View ArticleSeasons in Galway
I have been a consistent enjoyer of the Catharina sour beers from Galway Bay, the only Irish brewery that makes them. The latest, Felina, has been around since the summer, and I think I anticipated...
View ArticleThe sun in the sails
This year was my tenth at the Borefts Beer Festival, held at the De Molen brewery in Bodegraven. The Festival itself was celebrating 20 years of De Molen, with a theme of "Back & Future". 23 guest...
View ArticleUp comers
Today's post is mostly about beers from southern Europe which featured at this year's Borefts Beer Festival, but I neglected to mention Poland in my northern round-up on Monday. So we'll start there.I...
View ArticleOver here
The 2024 Borefts beer festival line-up included a couple of breweries each from the US and Brazil. Let's start with the Americans.Lost Abbey was a blast from the past. Time was, this was a veritable...
View ArticleOur host's cellar
As always, the largest selection of beers at the Borefts Beer Festival comes from the host, De Molen. At the main event inside the brewery's warehouse space, they reserve a long bar to themselves,...
View ArticleWhite bread and herrings
On 3rd October 1574, during the Eighty Years War, the Spanish who besieged the city of Leiden were routed by a band of Dutch rebels. Supplies of herring and white bread were brought to the starving...
View ArticleThe usual valediction
On the way home from the Borefts Beer Festival in September I spent a night in Amsterdam, and the days either side of it going to mostly my usual haunts in the Dutch capital.That started at Arendsnest...
View ArticleSomething for everyone
DOT continues to barrel age things that most breweries don't, such as the "micro fruit sour" called Yeah Yeah. It's not all that micro, at 3.4% ABV, and is a translucent pale amber colour. Strawberry,...
View ArticleLager season
It's nice to see breweries and pubs making a bit of an effort around seasonality, and Oktoberfest time brought multiple opportunities around Dublin to drink appropriate lagers.That said, I've had Sun...
View ArticleFollow-ups
My September trip to the Netherlands yielded a handful of beers which I didn't get round to drinking while travelling and which therefore came home with me. Let's see what's in the suitcase.Kees is a...
View ArticlePull the other one
The JD Wetherspoon Autumn Beer Festival arrived in mid-October. I managed to spend some time at it, both in the central Dublin pubs, and abroad. Here's what I found, beginning at The Silver Penny on...
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