Travels With Nate

Last year I tried my hardest to write my Golden Pints and ended up giving up because it was a year in which I did so much and visited so many different places so I just couldn't make any decisions. This year I've possibly visited even more places, and tasted even more beers so it's still difficult but I'm determined to get something down. Best UK Cask Beer: Honestly, I'm still drinking less and less cask beer than I ever have in the past although I've still drunk a lot of it. Here I could just default to a beer that I know I've loved for ages, but I won't. The cask beer from 2017 that really sticks out in my mind is Elusive Brewing Level Up  Red IPA; I spent a night in the Plasterers for landlord Craig's birthday a few weeks ago and he'd invited Andy from Elusive down to Norwich along with Iain from Wild Weather to host a tap takeover, and out of all of the great beers I tried that night I just kept going back for Level Up with its juicy, tro

This is a series of posts where I am planning on visiting every single pub in Norwich regardless of any preconceived views about them. Even if I have been to a pub previously, I won't blog about it until I revisit it for this specific purpose. It's one of those pubs that nobody has ever heard of unless you've lived near it; it's been there for years, so what's it like? The Location: It's on a street corner near several other pubs, and a couple of kebab shops in the Sprowston area of Norwich. The Pub: It's grotty and grimey, not exactly small and has a double sided bar, a dart board, a TV and weird seating around the edges of the room instead of in the middle. The Food & Drink: Any hopes of a gastronomic or craft experience can go out of the window, and on my visit you couldn't even hope for a brown, twiggy real ale as both hand pumps looked like they haven't seen any use since the conception of CAMRA 40 odd years ago. The keg taps

This is a series of posts where I am planning on visiting every single pub in Norwich regardless of any preconceived views about them. Even if I have been to a pub previously, I won't blog about it until I revisit it for this specific purpose. Of course the first I start with is an easy one as it's my local; it's a pub I've been going to on a regular basis ever since I was first legally old enough to drink alcohol, and now it's my local being a 2 minute walk from my house. The Fat Cat is a pub that every fan of real ale has heard of, from Penzance to Dundee, and indeed I've met people from outside of the UK that has heard of it's legendary status. The Location: The Fat Cat is located on a street corner just off of Dereham Road in Norwich, on the corner of Nelson and West End Street. It's easily a 15 minute walk from the city centre. The Pub: It's a fairly spacious pub with tables on the street outside, and plenty of seating inside includ

For those who follow my blog, you'll know that I love Prague and indeed every Czech city I've been to. It's an awesome country with great architecture, nice people and cheap beer but there's an issue - like any touristy city, there's a massive issue with people getting ripped off. If I had a Czech Crown for the amount of times a friend or colleague comes back from Prague and boasts about only  paying 99 crowns for a pint, I'd have enough to buy a pint in a respectable pub or hospoda that doesn't rip people off. While on the face of it paying the equivalent of £3.50 doesn't sound that bad, it really is . I frequently tell people that the most expensive normal  lager in the Czech Republic is usually Pilsner Urquell and even so you should never  be paying more than around 50 crowns (£1.70) for a pint of it. Yes, I know, people reading this blog who went to the Czech Republic 20 years ago will be flabbergasted that the price of a pint is that much

BRLO is a small craft brewery located in 38 shipping containers not far from the centre of Berlin. They brew a range of beers similar to what craft breweries in the UK & the USA are brewing such as IPAs and Pale Ales as well as more traditionally German beers such as Helles and Berliner Weisse. I first discovered BRLO Pale late one night in Kaschk in Berlin last August and I fell in love; it was definitely one of the best beers I had of that trip so we knew we had to visit the brewery bar when we were in Berlin last month. We discovered just before we went that our visit would coincide with their Brwfest celebration - a mini craft beer festival where they'd invite some of the breweries they're friends with to come and pour their own beers in the yard of their Brwhouse. They'd invited 11 of their friends - 9 of which from various countries in Europe including my friends 40ft in the UK, Edge from Barcelona and White Hag in Ireland as well as three new German brewerie

Day 3 started much the same as any other with us moaning about hangovers before making sandwiches at the apartment before heading out. We decided to head up to Letna Park because we'd not been there before and we'd heard it has great views over the city (also, beer gardens. We jumped off the tram somewhere in Holesovice near the Generali Arena where AC Sparta Prague play, and for a team that I've seen play champions league games I was surprised how small their stadium is. I guess ice hockey is more their thing since the TipSport Arena where HC Sparta Prague play is massive. We wandered through the greenest space we'd seen in Prague, the large Letna Park and found the Metronome where there was skateboarding and the universal sign for "You wanna buy drugs, fam?" and holy shit, the view was incredible. A wide unobstructed view of the city I love in all its glory. Afterwards we took a short wander and accidentally found a Staropramen beer garden serving T

Waking up with irresponsibly sore heads, we had some breakfast at the apartment and caught the train to Pilsen, a city of a little over 150,000 about an hour and a half on the train from Prague. I'd been to Pilsen once before, back in 2015 to do the Pilsner Urquell brewery tour which I didn't fancy doing again so this was a trip to see the town and visit some pubs. First stop was actually the Pilsner Urquell  brewery where they were preparing for a performance art festival later that evening. As it was a nice, though somewhat blustery day, we sat outside drinking their ubiquitous beer which I'm sure I don't need to introduce by now. After that we took a wander over the river, taking in the sights of the beautiful city and found Na Parkanu , a pub I'd heard so much about before since they sell Unfiltered Pilsner Urquell , probably the only place to do so. I'd had it once before, directly in the cellars beneath the brewery but I was underwhelmed with this an

Ah, the now annual trip to Prague. A wonderful occasion as it's one of my favourite cities. The old world style buildings, mixed with modern architecture. I love it. Usually we don't arrive until quite late at night but this time we opted for an early flight meaning we could get there in time to enjoy our first day. Obviously an early flight means a mandatory 6am pint of Adnams Mosaic at the airport too, which is always a delight. We landed at around 11:30am and got an Uber to the apartment we were staying in, but we were too early for Check-In so we decided to pop to our local for the week...  Smíchovská Krčma . It's a small, and cheap, pub and restaurant with a half constructed back garden in shade of the sun. The beer selection is the same that you'd find in many Prague pubs with the likes of Pilsner Urquell , Radegast, Kozel Cerny and Gambrinus of course. Obviously I opted for the crisp and refreshing Pilsner Urquell which was probably the cheapest PU of the tri

This weekend Good Beer Hunting broke the news that an AB Inbev owned investment firm has bought a stake in popular beer ratings website, Ratebeer . This led to a #Hopinions poll by my friends at Beer O'Clock show asking whether it's a good or bad thing. Here is the poll and my response: I honestly cannot decide. I actually think it's neither because it happened ages ago and nobody noticed any difference so far. — Nathaniel Southwood (@NateDawg27) June 4, 2017 Now I thought long and hard about this after I tweeted it and realised that it's a terrible thing; not for the industry but for the people within the beer community. The Irrelevant Reason There was a lot flying around on twitter about how AB InBev will now have access to all of this big data and market insights which is a bad thing, but it's not. They already had access to it. Everyone did. Anyone can harvest data from Ratebeer to tell you what the most popular beers are in a given region. Beside

Waking up bright and early on the Thursday morning in a hungover haze in a dorm shared by 7 other people, I was basically still drunk. I panicked as I couldn't find my wallet or passport, but I still had my phone. I was led to believe that everything had been stolen, went to the police, then got back to my hostel to find the key to my locker where drunk Nate had stashed everything. I am such an idiot. But that's not the point of this blog post; the point is to tell you about the awesome day I had with Thomas Necker, Export Manager for Stiegl Brewery in Salzburg, Austria. I've been a fan of Stiegl brewery for quite a few years; in fact (geek moment), my 1,000th Untappd check in was Stiegl Weisse, and my local, the Fat Cat has recently had their flagship Goldbrau and Grapefruit Radler. I've also been good friends with Martyn and Andy from Euroboozer , their U.K. import partner for several years and that's how my trip to Stiegl came to be. I'd mentioned on

It's only been a couple of months since Sammie and I were in Munich but I decided to take a quick solo trip to get away for a few nights. I arrived in Munich on Wednesday evening, through possibly the most efficient passport control system ever and decided to seek out  Airbräu , a brewpub located just outside of Terminal 1 at Munich Airport. I didn't see much inside, but had a rather large beer garden that I imagine gets really busy at the height of the summer; the weather was nice so I sat outside and ordered a half litre of Fliegerquell , an unfiltered Helles. Since this was at an airport, I expected it to just be somewhat of a gimmick, with shit beers that tourists will neck down but I was pleasantly surprised. It was fresh, clean, grassy hops, a little citrus, and really bloody nice. Next I checked into my hostel and decided to head to the rather trendy Schwabing district in search of a couple of pubs I wanted to check out. First I went to an international bar called

I liked The Alley when it was part bar, part Moosey Art. It was a nice place to chill out. I remember on my first Friday working at Cooper Lomaz, I went for a Chihuahua burrito there with some colleagues. I'd noticed walking past that it was changing but there was no indication as to what, and then I met up with my friend Amy and she told me. I was excited. And then, on Thursday night I popped into Brewdog and bumped into my mate Sean who suggested we go there for food. So the concept of The Alley Ole is Spanish style rotisserie chicken and pintxos (or tapas to you and I) and I can always get behind chicken. It has a casual atmosphere so we just took a seat in the bar area as the restaurant area was quite busy and ordered a couple of drinks. I'm not going to lie, the beer selection is not going to set the world on fire. We had Konig Pilsner, a beer I drink a lot of in the Rumsey. What pleasantly surprised me was that they had Estrella Galicia on draught, a gluten free l