Goatee Phil's Beer Blog

Where I'm at Well, let's be honest. I feel in much better shape at the start of 2024 than I did this time last year. I had just been diagnosed with cancer and I had no idea what the prognosis would be. I only knew that I felt grim. You can tell how grim by looking at the picture here. This was taken in early March, at the newly opened Drop Bar in Brighton's Open Market. It had been my intention to go from there to the Amex, to watch Brighton thrash West Ham (which they did - the score was 4-0) but I felt too sick. Instead, I went home and spent the rest of the weekend in bed. Twelve months further on and I am now on medication which is making a difference. And I feel a whole lot better!  But what the whole experience made me realise was that perhaps, at 70 years of age, it was time I considered retirement so, at the end of October, I finally gave up work. I'd recommend it. Drinking around Now that my health has stabilised, holidays are back on the agenda. We managed tw...

Do we really need a vanilla IPA? Yes, I know, I should have known better, but there I was, studying the beers available in my local, and I spotted a new beer from Arbor , generally one of my go-to breweries. Trouble was, it was called Faked Alaska and the description explained that it was a vanilla IPA . I should have know it would be sweet, after all mango IPAs and milkshake IPAs did not get their names by accident. It tasted like a beer made with vanilla. And I did not enjoy it. The problem I have with vanilla IPAs, and the like - well, there are two - is my feeling that the craft beer quest for novelty has led us into places that, in my view, were best avoided.  The second problem goes as follows. I like fruity but I don't really care for sweet and increasingly the line between the two grows very thin. Also, any pale beer that advertises itself as ice cream, milkshake, vanilla etc, is pretty much guaranteed to be sweet. It probably started off as fruity anyway so the uber- sweet...

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 ...