My Bamberg onion

Bamberg might be getting a lot of things right, but vegetarian food isn't necessarily one of them. Actually, that’s not really true – finding good veggie fare in Bamberg was no problem at all when I visited, but the traditional dishes you’ll find served in the brewery taverns are as carnivorous as they come. I begrudge nobody their mountains of gravy-soaked pork, you understand, and was particularly envious of those getting to sample a speciality of the Schlenkerla pub, the Bamberg Onion. As it turns out, Bamberg is notorious for its onions as well as its beer, and in this dish an onion is stuffed with lots and lots of smoky meat and served with a gravy made from rauchbier and the drippings – the recipe can be found here. Quite understandably, a vegetarian version did not appear on the menu, so I started to think about how I could create such a thing at home.

How does one go about constructing a meat-free equivalent of a dish that revolves around pork, smoked pork, and a little smoked bacon for good measure? The answer was to fall back on the old vegetarian staples of mushrooms and cheese. Mushrooms bring a vaguely meaty depth of flavour, and cheese is, you know, delicious. In order to replicate the smokiness, I opted for smoked applewood, and decided to cook the mushrooms in Schlenkerla rauchbier. I sautéed them at a high heat until they took on a caramel colour and their liquids started to evaporate, then threw in around 100ml of beer, a teaspoon of smoked garlic powder and some smoked sea salt and cooked briskly until the liquid had mostly reduced. These mushrooms, even on their own, were a bit of a revelation, and something I’ll be cooking again. Leftovers made a sublime grilled cheese sandwich the next day.

I didn't have a genuine Bamberg onion at hand, of course, so went for the biggest Spanish one I could find. Spooning the middle section out was no fun at all. If I had to do it again, I’d seriously considering donning swimming goggles for this stage. I chopped these parts finely and fried them off, then added them to the mushrooms, before stuffing this mixture alternatively with grated cheese until the onion was bulging. I roasted this for about 45 minutes, occasionally topping up the water in the bottom of the dish whilst making a quick sauce out of vegetable stock and beer, thickened with a little flour and simmered in a frying pan. The sauce was simple but tasty, and the dish didn't need much anyway. The final touch was a smoked applewood crisp, tucked between the onion 'lid' and the main body where normally a slice of smoked bacon would rest.

I served it with mashed potato and some steamed veg, washed down with the remaining beer. It was delicious. That onion is no mere vessel – all of its sweetness is revealed, but it retains some texture and bite at the same time, and the filling was full of smoky umami flavour. It may insult Franconian tradition. It may sound unappealing to meat eaters drawn to the deeply porky original. It may have taken all afternoon. I don’t care. It’s my Bamberg onion and it made me happy.

The Watchmaker's Arms

It’s snowing as I head out to the Watchmaker’s Arms. It’s that wet, slushy snow that you get in the liminal weeks between winter and spring, the kind that disintegrates on contact and soaks my jacket and hair whilst a cold wind whips around my ears. The prospect of a warm and cosy pub has rarely seemed more appealing. The Watchmakers’ doors have only been open a matter of minutes, but the first regular customer is already sitting down with an early-afternoon pint and newspaper, and it’s not long until there’s a glass of Hammerpot’s Bottle Wreck Porter in my hand. It’s rich and warming with deep liquorice flavours, and I’ve soon forgotten the grey, apocalyptic skies outside.

This is East Sussex’s first and currently only micropub. I’ve been in pubs that are physically smaller, but the micropub model is more about taking a back-to-basics approach than necessarily setting up in a tiny premises. It’s easy to define this in negative terms – “no television, no music, no gaming machines” says Ali, one of four partners who own and run the pub – that don’t make micropubs sound especially inviting or fun, and there are those that find them a little exclusive. But think about the positive inversion of what this all means – a social environment that both encourages the sharing of tables and conversation, but also a peaceful place to relax with a book and a pint if you prefer. And, of course, a focus on beer which, bizarrely, is a subject many of Brighton and Hove’s innumerable pubs don’t seem particularly interested in. “Beer is what brings most people to us”, Ali says “a really nice pint of ale, served at the right temperature, straight from the cask. And then they say it’s friendly, or they met someone they liked here and that brings them back.”

Coincidence plays a large part in Ali and Ruth’s story. A former teacher and teaching assistant respectively, they were both looking for a change when an intriguing property came up on nearby Richardson Road, a small community shopping street. “You know how you start looking at houses for sale when you’re not really intending to buy one? I started looking at commercial property online, and this place came up”, Ali explains. Despite having fallen in love with Kent’s micropubs, it wasn’t the first thing to spring to mind – “I thought maybe I could sell furniture.” As it turned out, Ruth and husband Rick had already had the thought that the same property would make a great micropub - “and that was it, that’s what started it.”

After a lot of time, effort and money, the seller pulled out. But soon their current premises, a couple of hundred yards from Hove train station, came up for sale. As with many micropubs, the building is an old shop. With a visit to a local history archive, they discovered it had been a watchmaker’s in 1889, giving the pub its name. “We were worried it might have been a brothel or an undertakers”, says Ruth – “The Undertakers Arms!” They’ve now been here a little over a year, celebrating their first birthday with a weekend-long beer festival – when I visited, a steady stream of casks from the likes of 360 and Brighton Bier were rolling in in preparation.

There’s no bar here as such – more of a counter where you place your order, which is then poured from gravity-dispensing stillage in a separate room. Pump clips, wreaths of hops and regulars’ pewter tankards line the walls, along with a tasteful collection of clocks to tie in with the watchmaking theme. Alongside the beer, local cider and wine are served, but lager is notably absent. I’m intrigued by this – even the most beer-focused pubs and bars operate on the logic that you must serve at least one lager. “We do get people come in and ask for it”, says Ali. “Quite often they’ll come in with a friend who’s an ale drinker and very often we can find something they like.” “People come in and say “do you do lager?” and we say no, and either they try something or they go somewhere where they can get it”, says Ruth. “It’s a bit different to go somewhere where it’s just real ale and real cider.” This is the important point, I think. Should we really worry that lager drinkers (closed-minded lager drinkers who won’t even consider trying anything else, at that) might be excluded from micropubs when lager is available absolutely everywhere else, and decent cask ale isn’t? I think not.

The micropub model offers a lot of freedom and, in the Watchmaker’s case, very few challenges. Overheads are low, so financially there’s less risk in staying small and doing things their own way. Getting started even sounds painless – long waiting times notwithstanding. “The micropubs in West Sussex seemed to have a lot of restrictions put on them from what we know of them”, say Ruth, “like there’s no vertical drinking, so everyone has to be sitting down. I don’t know why, because some of them are so small, there’s not even any room to have a fight even if you wanted to! It was as if they were making it difficult for them to open, whereas for us it was a bit long winded but everything was fine.” In fact, they had their fans at the council – “we had a lot of people there who said “oh I love real ale, that sounds really cool!””, Ali says. Indeed, most of their restrictions are self-imposed – “they couldn’t believe that we’d be closing at nine and only sell real ale!” Ruth says.

As of a few months ago, the Watchmaker’s is also home to BeerCraft, a small pilot brewery using their premises to brew beer for sale here as well as other local pubs. “We’re really lucky because we’d have taken his beer even if it was average, seeing as he’s here”, Ali says, “but it’s really good!” “It just sells like hot cakes”, Ruth adds, “we put it on and it just goes straight away. It’s a real talking point. People come in and ask about his beer and want to know when it will be on. It’s good for us and good for him, because he’s just starting out and he’s got somewhere to brew."

After a successful first year, they seem content to keep doing what they do so well. “There are some very business-minded people who get off the train and come in who ask us, “what are your plans to expand?””, Ali says, “and we say, “nothing!” It will be nice if this carries on and does well but we’re not building an empire.” Sometimes small is just perfect.

Who shares wins pt. III

About a week before we were due to meet up to share some special bottles, something scary happened. Splashing out on a pint of Gamma Ray at the Evening Star, I found the hop flavour oddly muted. In fact, it tasted like a pint of sparkling water with the tiniest dash of hop oil dropped in. It wasn't the beer – it was me. I’d been feeling a little sniffly all week, and consequently getting no aroma at all. Given the upcoming occasion, I decided I to blitz my body with every remedy I could think of. To de-congest my nose, I held my head over a bowl of VapoRub dissolved in water, which makes your face feel simultaneously freezing cold and boiling hot, with the added sensation of someone holding a hairdryer over your eyelids. My ears felt a little blocked, and your ears, nose and throat are all connected, right? In with the ear drops, then, along with some warm salt water to gargle with, calming down my swollen throat. My five-a-day became seven or eight or nine as I piled all the veg I could conceivably fit on my plate each evening. Anything to avoid cracking open a carefully guarded bottle of beer and then failing to taste the delights within. It worked, anyway, and my palate was soon restored to full power.

What better way to celebrate than Burning Sky’s Cuvée Reserve? Cuvée is a blend of the brewery’s highly regarded Saison a la Provision and imported Belgian lambic, and this extra-special incarnation then rests further in an oak barrel over lambic lees. It has a strong, funky farmyard aroma with a hint of rustic cider. It is still recognisably a variation on a la Provision, and many of this beer’s flavours carry through - tart and juicy green apples hit immediately, then lemon, dill and the phantom of the Chardonnay barrel that houses the saison. A tart finish suggests the quinine bitterness of tonic water. It’s a fascinating, extremely accomplished and, most importantly, delicious beer. I'm endlessly excited to have a brewery of such ambition and invention just a few miles from my front door.

Next was Her Majesty 2015 from Yeastie Boys. Though Yeastie Boys are now brewing at BrewDog for the UK market, this beer is imported from their native New Zealand, and brewed at Invercargill. It’s a pale ale, but doesn't look like one – the addition of beetroot gives it a pinky-purple hue, and it looks gorgeous in the glass. The addition of the beets gives a notable soil-like aroma, but there’s blackcurrant on the nose, too, along with some rose. There’s a slight earthy undertaste – the brewery reckon you won’t taste the beetroot, but I beg to differ – and loads of rich, dark berries – blackcurrant, blackberries, cranberries – over a smooth caramel malt foundation. There’s a dry and bitter hoppy finish, but the hop flavours are a little muted, perhaps owing to the age of the bottle (around 6 months). It’s an interesting and tasty beer, but it doesn't blow any of us away.

Another New Zealand beer followed – Tuatara’s Black Mojo Espresso. Unsurprisingly, there’s a bit whack of coffee on the nose, with chocolate and toffee closely following. The taste has an earthy note, and there’s an unexpected hint of peaty smoke in there. Coffee flavour in stouts often mingles with roasted malts, but there’s little roast here, and the espresso quality is smooth and low in bitterness. The decadent silky body is the final triumph in an extremely impressive beer.

To finish, I pulled out a bottle of Brew By Numbers Barrel Aged Traditional Porter (12|04). I was given this just before Christmas in 2014, and it is just approaching its suggested best before date, meaning it has been in the bottle for almost two years. The bottle conditioning has made it quite lively, threatening to gush over if never quite doing so, and there is a slightly distracting fizz which takes away from the body of the beer. The flavour is beautiful, though, with the Jim Beam barrels that housed the beer contributing a lot, but never overpowering the base porter. There’s lots of vanilla and a rounded-out booziness that isn't hot or spiky, and the base beer brings spades of dried fruit and rich dark malts. Masterful barrel aging from a brewery I'm beginning to think of as one of the UK’s best.

Nervous thought: are posts like this remotely interesting? I always enjoy reading similar things on others' blogs, but it all seems a bit insubstantial and basic now that I've written it all out. I hope someone gets something out of it other than a list of beers, anyway.

Ruzanuvol : Birra artigianale in Spain

In the Ruzafa area of Valencia is an unexpected outpost for Italian beer. Ruzanuvol is a fairly shiny-looking and new bar, minimalist whilst retaining a certain cosiness and atmosphere; there are families eating a meal, old Italian men sipping a dayglo-green liqueur and the guy who owns the place seemingly pouring himself an awful lot of double IPA - a great vibe. Now, my usual policy when travelling is to drink the local beer, or at least beer from the country I'm visiting, wherever possible. But I'm endlessly intrigued by Italian beer, partly because I encounter very little of it in the UK and partly because the examples I have been able to try have been very good, and the beers on offer here – four from Birrificio Italiano and one from Birrificio Lambrate – are from particularly highly regarded breweries. Having sampled my fair share of Spanish brews while I'm here, I decide to allow myself the diversion.

There’s an exciting moment when I spot Tipopils on the bar. Having tried this once before in bottled form, I was underwhelmed, but this only made me more determined to try it on draught – people rave about this lager, so I wasn't going to write it off on the basis of one tired bottle. Though initially disappointed to see a nonic pint glass being pulled out for my beer – I hate these at the best of times, but they’re especially crap for lager – I'm soon enchanted by the crown of loose, moussey foam extending from the glass. Taking a first thirsty glug and feeling the fresh, grassy hops hit my palate, I have to consciously stop myself from knocking it back in one. This is hoppy lager at its best – satisfying all of the pleasures you want from the style and giving a vibrant, herbal hop hit without excessive bitterness or overly fruity flavours that confuse the clean lager base. I would love to drink pint after pint of this, but there are other taps to consider.

Even a butt-ugly nonic pint glass looks attractive with this Mr. Whippy-style head

Various sources suggest that Birrificio Italiano's Amber Shock is available only in bottles. Assuming I wasn't sold some sort of bootleg beer, this must have changed at some point as it was pouring from the keg. A festival of malt, this is soft and comforting beer. There's a little of the candy floss flavour I often notice in beers of this colour, but it stops well short of cloying sweetness, and some treacle-like burnt bitterness and boozey warmth in the finish keep things interesting. Asteroid 56013, the brewery's IPA, is glorious, reminiscent of The Kernel's excellent IPAs at home. There's a big, resinous hop hit which suggests tropical fruit whilst maintaining a certain savoury quality - I guessed at Mosaic, but it's actually Cascade. This is notable for two reasons - 1) I should stop trying to guess what hops are in beers, especially as I never get it right, and 2) I associate Cascade with the herbal and grapefruit flavours of Sierra Nevada and Liberty Ale, but this beer is much more modern in character and proves that it's not just newer hop varieties that make the difference, but the way hops are used. Most importantly, it hits that sweet spot of bitterness which invites you to drink more but stops short of unpleasant washing up liquid sensations.

Finally, Quarantot from Birrificio Lambrate. This is what the owner has been liberally sipping throughout the evening, becoming increasingly friendly and singing along to Italian music as he goes. I can't blame him - it's a big beer at 9% but doesn't necessarily drink like it. There's a little sweetness, which can be a deal breaker in a double IPA for me, but here is delicately managed, preventing the super juicy hops from completely overpowering.

Visiting Ruzanuvol has made me all the more determined to continue seeking out great Italian beer, and I'd highly recommend a visit if you're in Valencia.

La cerveza artesanal en Valencia

When I visited Seville last year, I drank some very fine Spanish beer. Spain’s beer culture is young, and this is particularly true in Seville; Ratebeer now lists four breweries or brewpubs within the city, but at that time there were just two. Valencia is the larger, hipper and more cosmopolitan of the two cities and beer culture here is far more established, with a handful of local breweries and a fine choice of bars and pubs. You’re likely to simply stumble upon good beer in this town, where bottle shops and brewpubs mingle with tourist attractions in the city centre and restaurants may include ‘cerveza artisanal Valenciana’ sections on their drinks menus.

Birra & Blues is probably the most visible beer spot in Valencia, located in the heart of the old town just moments away from the central indoor market. Though it looks like the beer is brewed in a different premises, the bar is very much in the vein of a US brewpub – clean and bright, family friendly, and doing a good trade in tapas and coffee as well as beer. Indoor seating was, as far as I could see, fairly limited, but it’s a great place to stop by for an al fresco afternoon beer whilst wandering around the city centre.

La Negra, their brown ale is very good despite some problematic branding. It’s full of cocoa, raisins and dates, with a faint suggestion of coffee and some peach-skin earthiness before a finish which is ‘nutty’ in that it recalls the dry, bitter sensation of biting into a nut. John Lee Blues, a dry-hopped amber ale, has a strong candy sugar character along with some caramel, and just enough savoury toasted cereal notes to reign in the sweetness. The hop profile brings peaches, apricots  and mango and there’s a gentle bitter finish. Sadly only available in bottles, Black Blues Abbey is their interpretation of the Belgian abbey style, which is a strange experience – initially bland, it then becomes dry and quenching before a very late and very big burst of flavour. There’s blackberry, blackcurrant and cola along with a little phenolic bubblegum, and finally some gentle roast and ash. It’s not much like any Belgian beer I’ve tasted, but it’s an accomplished and interesting beer with complexity far beyond its modest 5.4% ABV.

The aforementioned Mercat Central also houses Las Cervezas del Mercado, a bottle shop which is astonishingly well stocked given its limited space - pick up some Spanish beers along with your smoked paprika, saffron and delicious juicy oranges. On the other side of the old town is the bizarrely named Beers and Travels – the shop is very much geared towards the beer side of things, though their website suggests they do book beery trips too. Here I picked out CCCP, a classic session IPA from local brewery Tyris, which is beautifully dry and full of pine and citrus zest – the sort of IPA that’s becoming unfashionable in this era of ever-later dry hopping and rapidly receding bitterness, but still holds a lot of charm in the afternoon sun. 

In the younger, more bohemian environment of Ruzafa is Olhöps, an achingly hip craft beer bar decked out in a Scandinavian minimalist style that reminds me of restaurants in modern art galleries. The likes of Mikkeller and Brew By Numbers are on tap alongside the Spanish beers, and there’s a small but tastefully curated selection of bottles to take away. Here I go for Zeta Hell, a lager from Valencia’s Zeta brewery, which is a delight – clean and full bodied with plenty of quenching carbonation and a spicy edge. Like Birra & Blues’ brown ale, Paqui Brown – the name puns on Jackie Brown with the nickname of a Valencian footballer - from Tyris also has questionable branding. It’s questionable in other ways, too – so pale that I can’t believe I’ve been served the right beer. Wondering whether the wrong keg has been attached to the tap, I enjoy the caramel-coloured beer anyway – approached as an amber ale, it has a pleasant peach and sherbet hop character over a smooth caramel malt backbone.

At the nearby Valencia on Tap, the mystery is solved. As the owner talks me through the beers on tap, he comes to Paqui Brown, explaining – “it’s a brown ale – well, they call it a brown ale, really its amber.” This place has a lot more in common with the unfussy locals bars you see everywhere in Spain, but with ten taps of great beer from the likes of Founders and Hitachino Nest in place of the solitary condensation-soaked Estrella Galicia font. Despite the name, the beers go beyond the strictly local – I try Achtung! Imperial Porter, a collaboration between Yria , from Noblejas in the Toledo province and the Bavarian Hanscraft & Co. which appears to have been brewed at Domus in Toledo. This is a beer of great complexity – earthy and slightly tart, it’s full of black cherries and dark berries, with a dryness that recalls cocoa powder before some dusty, musty barnyard flavours round it out. Garage IPA from Barcelona’s Espiga is a glorious burst of lemon peel, pine needles and herbs – there’s a particular zingy citrus flavour here which I also find in Beavertown’s Neck Oil and certain BrewDog beers – Simcoe, perhaps? The body is full, even verging towards creamy, and extremely satisfying.

My overall impression of Valencia suggests a beer culture that's catching up to where are in the UK in terms of visibility. The likes of Mahou may still dominate, but a focus on local and artisan produce in general benefits beer - you can, for example, fill growlers with Tyris pale ale at the central branch of El Court Ingles. Not all the beers were hugely exciting, but I certainly encountered nothing rough, amateurish or marred with off-flavours. Valencia may be some way off becoming a beer destination, but for a holiday of exploring by day and boozing by night, I'd highly recommend it.

"Just beer"; struggling for words to describe pale lager

Recently, after enjoying a bottle of Hell from Bamberg’s Keesman brewery, I attempted to throw together some quick tasting notes for an Untappd check-in. Here’s what I eventually came up with;

“Fresh biscuits & steamed broccoli aroma. Tangy biscuit malt, refreshing carbonation, mineral bitterness in the finish. Wish I had another.”

I threw in the last sentence because I felt that those preceding it failed to a) communicate that I had actually very much enjoyed the beer, or b) make it sound like anything anybody would ever want to drink. Whilst these notes accurately represent my experience of drinking the Hell (I didn't claim to be tasting things I wasn't really tasting), the truth is I was desperately grasping for anything to usefully say about it. That doesn't mean it was boring or unremarkable – I'm just starting to realise that I have a hard time describing the experience of pale lager.

One reason for this might be that pale lager is pretty much my base point for what “beer” means. Since lager is the dominant beer in our culture, this is not unusual; a Google image search for the term ‘beer’ results in pages and pages of  images of foaming glasses of lager, sometimes joined by other glasses of varying ale-like colours but never absent. The first beers I ever tasted were lagers, and lager was almost all I drank between my teenage years and my early twenties.

The result of this is that lager is, often, “just lager”. In my discovery of good beer (revelatory pint of Camden Hells notwithstanding), it took a long time to separate good lager from bad, even if the contrast is night and day to me at this point. I would argue that the differences between macro fizz and properly brewed lager are far more subtle than between, say, Punk IPA and (what I then perceived to be) a boring cask bitter.

But then lager is subtle, even at its most sublime. And that’s definitely part of why I'm lost for words when it’s time to write about one – I recently had the same issue trying to write about mild, a similarly non-imposing style. The complexity of a barrel-aged imperial stout means that tasting notes write themselves. Drinking one, there’s so much going on that you hardly have time to jot down one thought before another hits you. Lager is comparatively simple – this is a large part of its appeal, but it doesn't make for great writing.

There are certain stock phrases and descriptors I keep going back to in my blundering attempts to describe the lager experience, of which crisp is probably the laziest. I know what I mean by it – a suggestion of freshness as well as refreshment, like biting into a juicy, crunchy apple. But in this context, the word has a whiff of corporate copy about it – words like ‘crisp’, ‘cool’ and ‘refreshing’ are often used in advertising macro lagers, presumably as they divert attention away from the lack of actual flavour in most of these products.

Similarly, I know what I mean when I say a lager is clean. A well-made lager given plenty of time to mature has a certain purity to it, and those brewed with less attention to quality don’t – they often have distracting notes of sweetcorn or cabbage, or are weirdly, synthetically sweet or metallic. But it doesn't apply to all great lagers; I love Pilsner Urquell, but it’s big ol’ scoop of diacetyl adds a complexity which, whilst it might not be exactly dirty, isn't clean either.

I mentioned biscuits in reference to the Keesman beer that prompted this post, and variations on biscuity seem to pop up often in tasting notes. There are probably more varieties of biscuits than there are styles of beer, making this about as useful a statement as ‘tastes like beer’. But it does, at least for me, mean something specific. Think of Maltesers. Now, ignore the chocolate (or imagine you've nibbled it off) and focus on the biscuit ball within. There is a specific malty tang within that biscuit that is exactly what I'm referring to when I say ‘biscuity’, and I find that particular flavour in a lot of lagers (obviously malt flavour is part of it, but there’s more to it than that). Until I can find a way to sum that up succinctly and pithily, lager will remain forever ‘biscuity’ for me.

So pale lager, much as I love it, probably won’t be inspiring any upcoming poetry collections.  

Thornbridge Hall Double Scotch Ale

The impulse to hoard beer is a strange one. Some beers seem too special to just drink - they demand some ceremony, a special occasion, some good news. The trouble is that these occasions arise all too rarely and, when they do, you may find you're not in a position to transfer a bottle from your stash into the fridge and gather an ensemble of admirers to share it with you. And, if I'm perfectly honest, sometimes I'm glad about that. However much I might scan my beer cupboard wondering what the contents will taste like, the thought of eventually dropping the bottle into the recycling bin is a little sad. I want to have my beer and drink it.

You can justify the cobwebs on your bottle collection by telling yourself that flavours are developing all the time, that the beer you're not drinking now will be so much better by the time you finally crack it open. But if you find you're actually pushing the limits of best-before dates, as was the case with the bottle of Thornbridge's Double Scotch ale that I pulled from the cupboard last night, the only thing to do is to tell yourself you're worth it and pop the damn cap. This beer, a Scotch ale aged in Auchentoshan casks, was bottled in 2014 under the ultra-artisan Thornbridge Hall sub-brand produced at the original brewery site. It's technically almost two months out of date, but tastes so glorious I highly doubt I could have caught it at a better time.

The aroma jumping from the glass suggests a rich, port wine-like booziness, along with a big burst of blackcurrants. These are joined by raspberries on first taste, along with some musty, woody notes and some milk chocolate. Some whiskey flavour from the cask carries over, and the faint suggestion of peaty smoke is an element of this flavour, but the resulting toasted character is key to this beer's complexity as well as its moreishness. It seems to suggest a whole collection of flavours which aren't necessarily actually there - vanilla, coconut, fudge, coffee - which lighten what could be a heavy, overbearing beer. The complexity in this toasted finish has me coming back for more and more.

This is a master-class in barrel ageing - a simple beer made fascinating with time in the wood, neither element threatening to overpower the other. Thornbridge were an important brewery for me as I first discovered great beer, and whilst I often admire their beers as solid examples of particular styles, these days I'm rarely strongly moved by a Thornbridge offering. This makes the triumph of the Double Scotch all the more exciting, and I'm now determined to seek out Eldon, their latest foray into barrel-aging.

Another great excuse to open an interesting bottle is Open It!, a Twitter tasting event in aid of the Evalina Children's Hospital. It's on Saturday 16th April and further details are here.