Travels With Nate

Walk up the stairs. Turn the corner. A corridor lined with tables and white drapes. I hear chattering a clinking glasses but I see no beer. Turn right. Ah, a table full of glassware but still no beer. I walk directly to the table and purchase my pint glass. I turn around. Ahh… tables with keg fonts and bottles. I instantly walk towards Brewdog ’s bar as I see my buddy Joe working behind there. He takes my glass and pours me a half of Libertine Black Ale, a beer I already know and love. We take a walk around the room to find more kegs, bottles and familiar faces from twitter. We have a Steen Brugge Wit Blanche from the Palm Breweries and chat to the guy behind the stall who I know only as @SpyRight . The Wit is refreshing. It has the right balance of orange and coriander with a lovely creaminess. Next stop is Curious Drinks to catch up with Pat . I try the IPA and it’s nice but I wasn’t too thrilled with the earthiness of it. I then decide to drink an old love, Curious Brew,

Woo! Craft beer! But not just craft beer. Woo! Music! And Woo! Street Food! That’s probably not the most professional start to a festival preview ever but who cares for professionalism these days? Especially when next Friday and Saturday (22 nd & 23 rd of February for those of you who aren’t staring at a calendar right now) is the first ever Craft Beer Rising trade show & consumer beer festival. Set in the grounds of the historic Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane in London, Craft Beer Rising is set to be the next big independent beer festivals where the breweries and food producers run their own bars and stalls, serving their beer precisely how that want it to be served and of course there will be music throughout the two days. So, what are the details?

Hello again and a happy valentines day to all! Because of this yearly holiday, I thought I would treat you to a review of a beer I did with my buddy Jay, once again. This time it is Real Ale with Ginseng. Jay got this in a magical mystery bin end box of beers from Ales By Mail. He showed me it in Norwich Taphouse the other night and I was like “Bro. You know it’s gonna be terrible. Let’s review it”. He couldn’t refuse. On the label, there is absolutely no indication of where it’s brewed. It just says it’s brewed under license for an address on an industrial estate in Chelmsford. After a bit of searching, we managed to discover that it was brewed by the now insolvent High Wood Brewery once again, somewhere in Essex. Now, for those of you who don’t know what Ginseng is, it’s a Chinese herb that in the past has been used as an aphrodisiac amongst other things. Mainly sexy sex things. Jay’s theory is probably quite right in that Ginseng beer was originally brewed to treat

A few months ago, Norwich Taphouse opened and started selling London Fields beers. Through their wonderful single hop IPA series and beers from their core range such as the wonderful Hackney Hopster pale ale and Black Frost Stout, I quickly fell in love with them and announced that they’re my favourite brewery of 2012. With this in mind, I’m sure you can imagine how thrilled I was when they invited me to go and hang out with them in their brewery! So on Superbowl Sunday, I headed to London Fields Brewery along with Grace to meet Brewmaster Ben , Jimmy, the brewery musician and my buddy Luke . As with a lot of new wave British breweries, London Fields is located under a railway. This is now becoming quite standard practice which is pretty cool. As soon as we arrived and had made introductions, we were given a glass of their new Simcore IBA (Indian Black Ale – a much better descriptor than Black IPA). Fucking hell, it was good… the wonderful pineyness of the Simcoe