Travels With Nate

Last Friday I managed to get down to the Craft Beer Rising trade session at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane in London. I’m sure you read my shining review of last year’s event and as many other people have dictated, this year was even better so I’m not going to repeat what they’ve all said. I want to talk about Blue Moon, the Molson Coors owned ‘craft’ lookalike brand. OK so as many will argue, they’re not craft but fuck those guys. Blue Moon is a Belgian style Wit, and in my opinion is quite nice. It’s highly drinkable and mighty refreshing, giving you a nice whack of orange peel, lemon and a sprinkling of coriander. I’m not ashamed to admit that I am a fan, as long as it’s not served with slice of orange floating in it. Anyway, I’m sure you all know of it and have your own opinion which to be honest, you can keep to yourself as I’m sick of hearing everyone get all judgemental. The beer community is not meant to be like that so just stop it. Well, the Blue Mo

From Friday 7th of February, until Friday 14th, I decided to take a week off of booze. Initially I doubted myself. I was worried that I'd cave after a day, or at least a few days but I didn't. The first few nights were quite difficult, to be honest. Especially being a weekend, where I'd normally go out for a few pints or at least have a few bottles at home but after the initial cleaning up period, I didn't even think about it. Hell, I started thinking about beer negatively. Taking a week off made me ashamed and disgusted at myself, looking at all of my fellow beer geeks' check ins on untappd. Beer every single night for a lot of people. Usually multiples too. It was odd. Most weeks I'll have the occasional day off here and there and it's fine, but taking a week off really makes you think. Add to that, the fact that I felt great. So clean and clear headed. It was awesome. Still, I thought that when Friday struck I'd be really excited about having

We all know that many people in the music industry enjoy a good drink. Rock stars are famed for their overindulgence causing them to throw TVs out of hotel windows, and are sometimes sadly victims of addiction. Over the last couple of years a trend in the UK beer industry has started - musical artists collaborating with breweries to create a beer that relates to their band, more often than not it shares the name with one of their albums or songs. The first I heard of this was that a company called Signature Brew popped up and their whole deal is that they're essentially gypsy brewers (for the uninitiated, this means that they don't have a brewery but instead go to other people's brewery and wreak havoc) -  who solely work with musical artists to specifically create a beer with them. I mean, they've worked with some pretty diverse and high profile artists like rapper Professor Green with whom they created a hoppy pale ale (very delicious), to folk/punk singer Frank