Travels With Nate

I had Friday off work so I decided to go to London for a few beers. I'd not done a proper London pub crawl in ages so it was rather nice, I got to drink some beers that I otherwise wouldn't tried. I started off in Craft Beer Co Covent Garden (which, btw, isn't really in Covent Garden) with a half pint of the Siren/Beavertown/Magic Rock collaborative beer Rule of Thirds. It's 6.4% and pours golden with a fluffy white head, it's full of grapefruit, blood orange, mango & peach flavours and was really delicious. The bar itself is brilliant... one long bar with 45 beers on draught. Most of these are keg, but there were around 10 cask beers (about a third of these were Thornbridge so not that varied). It's very bright upstairs, windows all around allowing you to look at the busy passersby. There was also a small smoking area out the front which made me happy as I could take my drink with me, unlike many craft beer bars. Downstairs is The Lounge, which is dark...

For quite some time now, Melissa Cole has been hinting about an exciting project that she was involved in but was sworn to secrecy but finally it was announced a few weeks ago... Urban Sessions is occurring! Well what Urban Sessions is, is a pop up beer festival/bar/musical event/food/awesomeness in The Old Baths in Hackney Wick which will be around for 4 months. I happened to be in London at the weekend so I thought it'd be rude not to pop down for the soft launch. The idea is that they have a shitload of beers from all around the world, along with cocktails and ciders and essentially just party! Over the 4 months they have about 500 different beers on as well as pop up tasting sessions, monthly beer matched dinners, spirit education events and Meet The Brewers, so I'm going to need to revisit a few times!

Image taken from here: http://gbbf.org.uk/ I went to The Great British BeerFestival last year (2011), all alone because I have no friends. It’s hardly surprising, is it? I am joking; of course, I have lots of friends but none who like beer so much that they’ll travel 120 miles to drink it. Even though I went alone, I had a bloody good day out. I drank some wonderful beers (don’t ask me which although I was wearing my Dark Star ‘Don’t Drink Hophead’ t-shirt that I won through a twitter campaign but I drank Hophead anyway, being the rebel that I am) and met some awesome new people who I’m still in contact with through the wonderful world of twitter. I also got to show off my awesome shoes that @BeeryMatt loved a lot (I may have to break them out for this year’s affair, actually).