[RSB]

I thought I would create a dedicated beer & drinks group where all beer related matters can be discused “Like A Facebook Group”.

Any how, my first post is this. I have been visiting my local Samuel Smiths as mentioned before and was paying £2.08 a pint for Lager and a nice pint it is to. However I have lately been leaning towards Beer. So I have been drinking Samuel Smith’s Mild. Now if your standing please sit down, especialy those down south. £1.34 a pint 🙂 Ok it’s not the strongest of beers but still I like it and I do not go out to get pissed.

Americans: Over Sexed, Over Payed and Over here, Wat Wat!

[Dave Rice]

He keeps taunting me with this via email ?

3 weeks ago I was in a Sam Smiths pub in Holborn – the Princess Louise – sheltering from the rain ? and it wasn’t that cheap!

My local, the Beaufort Arms in Stoke Gifford, always has 10 real ales on pump and their own Ember Inns Pale Ale (3.8%) is £2.49 on a Monday (brewed by Black Sheep). They have loads of the fizzy stuff too, like Peroni and Budweiser, for the girls ?.

The foods not bad either, but a gastro pub it isn’t. The chip tanks are great beer food though. If you find yourself stuck at Bristol Parkway waiting to change trains it’s a 5 minute walk (through the church yard is quickest).

[RSB]

Dave Rice wrote:

He keeps taunting me with this via email

I’m just spreading the Joy 🙂

Americans: Over Sexed, Over Payed and Over here, Wat Wat!

[blacklion1725]

A Beer group. I’m in! That Ember Inn ale is decent Dave – my nearest (not my local though) does it and we have a few of their pubs within striking distance from here.

[PlaneMan]

£1.34 a pint is a steal! In the Legion I go to a Fosters is £3.40. Mainly because one of the committees borrowed a load of money from the brewery to do one of the bars up. Until the loan is repaid the current committee are unable to negotiate a better rate per barrel.  That was 10 0dd years ago…….

As I can’t drink draught anymore (it upsets my stomach, bloody medication) I drink cans of Guiness there, £2. If I could drink draught it would be Brains Dark, the club chairman (until he died) was a ex publican and taught a load of members how to serve a perfect dark. He taught them well.

[RSB]

That’s a rip off for fosters in a club, I would not pay that in a pub nither.

Americans: Over Sexed, Over Payed and Over here, Wat Wat!

[PlaneMan]

RSB, ain’t that the truth. Visiting skittles/ darts teams are often shocked by the prices of the lager and cider. Bitter and dark are much better but still a bit steep.

[RSB]

I bet the clubs team win all the time, the visitors must be in dire shock.

Americans: Over Sexed, Over Payed and Over here, Wat Wat!

[PlaneMan]

Not sure about the darts but apparently the skittles is about a 40% success rate for the Legion. It’s just an excuse for a mild piss up mid week.

[Ed P]

This made a lot more sense when originally posted, but I messed up on ‘how-to’ post to the Beer Group so forgive the fact that it now does not segue very well to Sam Smith#s Beer!

Anyway, my wife is a huge fan of German Dunkel Beer (Belgium is also OK if you twist her arm). During a pilgrimage to her home city of Manchester she sampled some craft beer at a pub, and stated that Titanic Plum Porter is as good as a Dunkel – I don’t know if that is true but their draft Captain Smith’s was a pretty nice drink, and in the spirit of the great Sam Smith.

Worth a try if you see Titanic on offer during a craft tasting. Titanic is a small Stoke on Trent Brewery so its beer is not widely available.

 

[D-Dan]

I would have posted earlier, but I was in the 9 Gallon, drinking real ale (none of this mass produced carp, and definitely not lager. Oh, and not the fizzy pop that they call craft, either). Honest to goodness, real ale.

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[blacklion1725]

I like beer/ale and I like lager too….depends on the weather for me. I would agree about this explosion of craft ale which I generally don’t like. The smaller breweries round here Essex/Kent make proper beer which I enjoy, and not ashamed to say I enjoy a more mass produced beer like Greene King IPA. Likewise very happy to wash down a nice Indian meal with a Cobra or two. Craft beer s all a bit “Emperor’s New Clothes” for me.

[Ed P]

blacklion1725 wrote:

a nice Indian meal with a Cobra or two

When I had business in India, the bottled water in some areas was rumoured to be just tap refills, so Cobra was used to clean teeth!

[Dave Rice]

“Craft beer” from the mainstream breweries is usually crap, but Shipyard in Wetherspoons is OK. The best place to try real craft beer is in a specialist bar, like the Wild Beer Co at Wapping Wharf or the ulitmate is In de Wildeman in Amsterdam.

Like ale, there are many different varieties of “craft beer” besides the very hopped stuff that’s becoming mainstream. That’s why you need a specialist outlet (or most local bars in Flemish Belgium).  There you can learn your Blondes from your Boks and Saison from Berliner Weiss.

This was In de Wildeman – a Spanish New England IPA from the Garage Beer co. Yes it’s supposed to look like that ? and no it doesn’t taste like it’s come from the bottom of the Damrak. It’s like real cider, hazy and juicy, in pretentious speak it’s “essentially an unfiltered IPA or Double IPA that’s been aggressively hopped”.

Cherry beer sounds disgusting, but Belgian lambic Kriek is something else and can be very tart.

Hmm I think we need a European beer weekend before it’s too late ?

[blacklion1725]

Dave being honest the craft beer from the tiny micro-brewereies is what I generally don’t like.  went to Colorado a couple of years ago and craft-brewing has exploded – most of them I found I didn’t like – didn’t help they serve them all ice cold (even dark beers). It seems global – there were loads in Russia and some were OK and some horrible (seems you can call almost anything an IPA). I don’t like wheat beers, I quite like the unfiltered lagers I had in Russia that were cloudy but not the same as cloudy wherat beers here. To be honest I still enjoy a pint of Courage Best, along with the Adnams, Captain Bob, Doombar and a few guest beers in my regular haunt. Even there during this summer I’m not ashamed to say I sunk more than a few cold lagers as I do up the garden. As a proper lightweight I respect the continental beers but they are too strong for me given my chugging rate.

[Dave Rice]

I agree, we all like what we like, but at least you have explored off the beaten track.

I watched Doom Bar come up the A30, M5 and M4 over the years. It used to be a secret only known to North Cornwall and was spreading slowly, then they sold out to the big boys and it exploded. The cask is still brewed in Rock but the bottled stuff is from Burton.

I grew up on Bristol Courage Best, but going to London (back then) the Reading stuff was very different and not very good (I realise it is a London brewery). When it stopped in Bristol I switched to Decorators (Directors) but you rarely see either now. It was the beer of my generation in these parts though.

Staying in Cornwall, anything from Skinners Brewery is generally awful, but Betty Stoggs as kept by The Mouse in Westbury-On-Trym – our pub quiz pub – is way better than any I’ve had in Cornwall. A beer that travels?

St. Austell brewery has improved beyond all recognition from when I was a kid and is available outside Cornwall these days. If you like Doom Bar you’ll love Tribute. Korev is a lager for beer drinkers, that’s the only way to describe it. Proper Job is a “Greene King” style IPA and HSD is very much like Brains HSD that Nolan will know all about ? Trelawny is a session bitter very much like Courage Best. Their pubs are all top notch with good food and accommodation.

[Ed P]

That Garage ‘beer’ looks like a badly poured ‘live’ IPA laden with yeastie beasties all ready to give you a head banger followed by the runs.

Your talk of cloudy cider reminds me of the scrumpy my Godfather used to brew, he would chuck a few bits of ham into the keeving mix to add ‘body’ and did not mind too much if the odd rat fell into this malignant crusty brew. Apparently he brewed a good scrumpy as the keeving vat was all of eight feet across and probably contained at least 1000 gallons.

However once it had gone through its primary fermentation in barrels, he would call any secondary fermentation that produced cloudy cider as ‘sick’ and undrinkable. I guess tastes change!

[Dave Rice]

It wasn’t “off” in any way and was like drinking any other beer, it just looked weird. Definitely no after effects. There was an American home brewer in (it’s quite a mecca) and he said that’s how NEIPA should look – like it has come from the bottom of the Damrak ?

[blacklion1725]

Dave 30 years or so ago used to go to Cornwall a lot (we had a training centre at Porth Curno) for courses and an annual Beano. One of the lecturers down there took us to some really old off-the-beaten-track pubs where they all had this beer -trying desperately to remember the brewer – that was just served out of a tap in the keg rather than a hand pump. The different beers were just called “the weak one”, “the medium one” and “the strong one”. The weak one wasn’t that wweak either. Wish I could remember who it was that brewed it (Still do for all I know) – Sharp’s is stuck in my head but I think that is because of Doombar – think it was a one syllabul name though.

[D-Dan]

Problem with Doombar, of course, is they sold out to the conglomerates. And so, that was my Sayōnara moment.

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

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