Polish Brewers
The Big Three They all produce vast quantities of uninspired pale lagers but there are a few gems. Carlsberg: Carlsberg-Okocim. Has three breweries and produces Bosman, Kasztelan, Okocim, Piast and...
View ArticleSelected Polish Bars
Krakow U Piwersow 32 Ul. Florianska EB Specjal Pils and Zywiec Porter U Kacpra 2 Ul. Slakowska EB Specjal Pils and Zywiec Porter Fischer Pub 42 Ul. Grodzka Zywiec Porter Alchemia 5 Ul. Estery Zywiec...
View ArticleA Brit Down Under
If you’ve ever had the misfortune to pass through London’s Heathrow airport, you’ll have experienced the grim-faced passport control officials. Without a word, they grab your passport, look at the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Five Generations of Cooper’s
The 50-minute flight from Melbourne to Adelaide takes you to a different time zone. This is a big country, the world’s largest island, with a land mass almost as big as the United States but with only...
View ArticleGood Bottled Beer Guide
I hesitate to call Jeff Evans a veteran beer writer for fear he points a bony finger at the date on my birth certificate. But Jeff has been around the beer scene since the early 1990s and earned his...
View ArticleClik here to view.
In the Beginning…
Trappist monks are properly known as the Order of the Strict Observance, a branch of the Cistercians. The name Trappist comes from their abbey at La Trappe in Normandy, northern France, from where they...
View ArticleBeer Made By God’s Hand
It’s every beer lover’s dream, to jump in the Time Machine, spin the dials and travel back to discover what iconic brews were really like centuries ago: the IPAs of Victorian England, the porters and...
View ArticleCAMRA Turns 40
In April 2010, as the world’s airlines were grounded by volcanic ash, all the signs indicated that the Campaign for Real Ale’s annual conference would be poorly attended. It was due to take place on...
View ArticleReal Ale
Real ale is also known as cask-conditioned beer and is now an accepted dictionary definition for warm-fermented ale that is not filtered, pasteurized or artificially carbonated. At the end of...
View ArticleMay Your Glass Be Ever Full
In Ireland, history catches you by the coattails at every turn. Towns, cities and countryside reflect centuries of invasion, foreign domination and massacre, the unbearable horror of the Great Hunger...
View ArticleCrisis in English Brewing
A crisis in English brewing? Surely not. Whatever else happened in the world of beer⎯global takeovers; mergers; loss of choice; increasingly dull, bland international lagers; and the inexorable march...
View Article“Unique Beer, Wonderful Beer”
What would England―and the wider world of beer―lose if her native beer styles vanished? These nine distinct styles, each with its own pedigree of a century or more, express the culture, social history,...
View ArticleWhat is “real ale,” and why did it inspire a campaign?
Real ale was the term used by the Campaign for Real Ale in the early 1970s when it set out to rescue England’s great contribution to world beer. Brewers prefer to call it “cask-conditioned beer.” At...
View ArticleThe Struggle for Bass
A mighty struggle has broken out for control of Britain’s best-known brewing group, Bass. As reported in AAB last year, the Belgian group Interbrew—best known for Stella Artois and Labatts...
View ArticleYankee Brews, Go Home?
It’s one of the curiosities of the beer world that American brews have not exactly set the Thames on fire in Britain. The Brits drink more imported beer than other Europeans, and sales of imported...
View ArticleGlobal Giants Stalk British Beer
The PC’s thesaurus has come up with a magnificent silver dollar word. There I was, struggling with mess, muddle and botched, and all the while, a far better term was waiting for me: discombobulated. It...
View ArticleImperial Russian Stout
In the late 1970s, when I was honing my skills as a fledgling beer writer, I visited Courage’s brewery by the banks of the River Thames in London. It was a historic site, with deep roots in the brewing...
View ArticleIf You’re Going
Visitors to London can find one remaining link with the past: the Anchor Tavern at 34 Park Street, Southwark, SE1, on the Thames Path (nearest train and Underground station: London Bridge). This is the...
View ArticleAn English Ale Tragedy
Anger and disbelief have greeted the news that W. H. Brakspear, one of England’s finest pale ale brewers, is to close by the end of the year. Brakspear, based in an idyllic location by the River Thames...
View ArticleWhich Bud’s For You?
The old saying that only lawyers get rich has never been more true where the protracted legal wrangles between Anheuser-Busch in the United States and Budweiser Budvar in the Czech Republic are...
View Article
