Goatee Phil's Beer Blog

  What's occurring, Phil? Phil "relaxing" in hospital It had an already been an odd, unsatisfactory year for me beerwise when we reached December and it was time to look back and reflect. I hadn't sorted out my typical drinking week post-COVID, largely because I was still working mostly from home. When I did make it to the pub I generally drank cask, which was fine, but I was becoming increasingly disappointed with the beers I drank at home. The IPA style seems increasingly be dominated by hazy or New England IPAs and very few seemed to stand out, even amongst the Double IPAs. My other go-to style, the imperial stouts, were too often sweet, although I did discover the wonders of Pohjala, the jewel of Estonia, and their extraordinary portfolio of strong, dark beers. But into this scenario of alcoholic frustration came a medical condition even more alarming than COVID - the  Big C. Cancer. I had been suffering with back ache for several months before a face-to-face GP a...

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 ...

Not Quite Hove  The Windmill at West Blatchington - despite the name, this is not a pub After surveying the pubs of Portslade last year and quite enjoying the process, if not always the beer, I decided this year that I would take on a larger challenge and strike out for Hove but not just Hove.  I decided that my survey needed to cover the whole of BN3. BN41 covers just nine pubs; BN3, by contrast, covers over forty. It was necessary, therefore, to break the area down into sections and, after much study of an area map, I found that by drawing a line down the A2023 towards the sea - Sackville Road and Nevill Road to locals - I could isolate Hangleton, Aldrington and other areas that could be described as Not Quite Hove. This gave me 12 pubs to check up on. The other two chunks - Hove Actually and Nearly Brighton - will be covered in further blog posts, but for now let's head for the 'burbs! Hangleton Hangleton and West Blatchington occupy a sprawling area a...

The Goatee Awards 2018 The Brewery Shades , Crawley - an excellent selection of ales, as always If you're a beer drinker, I'm not sure there's been a better time to be alive. Thanks to the impact of the craft beer revolution there are now more microbreweries in the UK than there have ever been. You might suppose that at some point we will reach critical mass, and the market will start to shrink, but there's no sign of it happening yet.  On the down side, this was the year in which the torchbearers for good beer, CAMRA , failed to pass a motion at their AGM which would have enshrined their support for ALL good beer, not just the cask ale that they had always championed. This may not turn out to be that significant, or especially damaging, but at a time when cask sales are dropping CAMRA's credibility has taken a damaging hit. Let's hope that it isn't fatal, for them or for cask. My 2018, beer-wise, has definitely been memorable. Trips to German...