Goatee Phil's Beer Blog

Goatee Phil's review of 2019 Prelude to the Cloudwater Brewery Tour Has 2019 been a good year for beer? One of the best. Has it been a good one for breweries and the industry generally? Not so much. It's been a year when London's largest brewery, Fullers , was bought out by Asahi of Japan and the country's largest regional brewery, Greene King , became part of the Chinese company CKA Group. But the biggest threat to the UK brewing industry, craft and other, will surely come from the fallout from Brexit. For all the bullish talk by the current Prime Minister, it's hard to see anything other than new and restrictive trade barriers that will hit imports and exports equally. It's not looking good. Or maybe it is. It is still the case for me that pretty much every other pub visit gives me the chance try a beer that I've never drunk before. The major craft brewers, names like Cloudwater , Northern Monk , Burning Sky and Wylam , continue to produce new ...

The battle for CAMRA's soul If you take any interest in the social history of beer in the UK then you'll be aware of CAMRA. One of the most successful consumer-led campaigns of modern times, it was set up in 1971. Its creators were four disgruntled Northern beer drinkers who were fed up with the quality of the beer in their local pubs and decided to do something about it. They discovered that the main reason for the decline in quality had to do with two things. The first was the change from most beer being allowed to continue to ferment in the pub cellar, to beer being pasteurised before it even left the brewery. The second was the growing inability of landlords whose beer did mature in the cellar to look after it properly. Beer either tasted dull and fizzy - the keg version - or rank and sour - the badly kept cask version. I was brought up on the dull and fizzy kind. I was a teenager in the late1960s and when I started sneaking into pubs, and going to parties...