Thank You

The wonderful staff and customers at The Harp in Covent Garden who found my partner's annual rail ticket and didn't even accept a reward.

Thank you, it's nice to know there are honest people out there.

Longer Hours?

After the calls of binge drinking britain hitting the newspapers and the governments thoughts on how they are going to deal with it, again the government has done a u-turn and are considering letting opening hours to be increased to 1am for the Friday of the royal wedding and the Saturday afterwards.

Upside is the fact there will be a nice party atmosphere in the pubs I go to, possiblity of food being put on and happy customers make a pub to be a perfect place to watch something like this on a TV. The chance of celebration beers from the breweries to go with the wedding as you watch it would be nice too.

Downside is the folks who will use this as a chance to get wreaked for longer, no doubt it will be this lot that get on the covers of the newspapers. Sad but this sells more news than shots of folks enjoying themselves without getting drunk and stupid.

Whining Won't Work

It didn't work with your parents when you were young and it won't work with the government now you're bigger.

Pubs will raise their prices as the brewery does, raises in tax/duty on fuel to transport the beer will be much a part of the price increase as the increase in duty. It is time to face facts, the government will put up duty and taxes on beer because it does bring in the money, hopefully to pay off the debt the country is in and not for duck houses but we shall see.

Of course we all could step out our houses and hold a revolution, in the words of V 'People shouldn't be afraid of their government, the government should be afraid of their people.' But lets face it, unlikely.

January’s Jolly Offerings

I sit here smugly knowing I didn’t gain any weight over the festive period, mainly thanks to going to work for three days of it. Whilst people pitied me for having to go in I knew better, I was always from the cheese board and biscuits and thus weight gain though stilton mountains was not going to occur.

However as per many a person I do want to continue to lose weight this year so running shoes are firmly on in the evenings and many a cutback of cheese delight has happened this month already. As we all know everything in moderation is fine so…this leads us onto more seasonal beers;

Allgates Brewery’s Mad Monk 7.1%
Rebellion Brewery’s Overdraft 4.3%
Loddon Brewery’s Firsty The Snowman 4.2%
Oakleaf Brewing Co’s Stokers Stout 5.0%
Ossett Brewery’s South Pacific IPA 5.0%
Sharps Brewery’s Winter Cornish Stout 4.3%
Darkstar Brewery’s Hophead Amarillo 3.8%

Cheese and beer matching won’t happen here though.

Great British Beer

Well it is great, but it's not the actual liquid I'm thinking about here but a rather nifty little booklet I found on Sunday in the Bricklayers Arms in Putney.

It is a Camra publication and I wish I had this when I first started drinking beer, it's clear and easy to read. One of the first of it's kind I have read that advertises beer without slagging of other alcoholic beverages. It explains about handpumps and real beer as per Camra guidelines with a light section on beer ingredients which is informative but not boring and then the bulk of the booklet is about the different beer styles. Brilliant piece of work.

And even better, it is free where pubs have them on display so you have something to read when you are sitting there with your drink. Thumbs up!

Happy New Year!

Hope everyone had a brilliant time and heads are not too sore this morning.