Travels With Nate

It was July 2013, the day after the first ever Birmingham Beer Bash. Andrew and I woke in our Holiday Inn, way too hungover to deal with life. Kick out time. The hangover is making us incredibly hungry so we walk, not knowing Birmingham at all, to try find food. Eventually we settle on a Wetherspoons because the breakfasts are cheap and reliable. Full of greasy food and dreadful coffee, we walk but as it's a Sunday nothing was really open. The perils of having set time train tickets is that you're forced to find something to do. It finally reached midday, otherwise known as pub opening time and we found the Brewdog bar that I'd been drinking in with friends the two previous nights. We wandered in to peruse the beer boards... one for Brewdog and one for guests. Still, I struggle to choose. Electric India sounded good, and on a hot day sitting outside Brewdog Birmingham, it was. I don't remember too much about my first experience of Electric India due to a combinati...

Everyone knows Duvel. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a fully fledged beer geek like me, or if you’re just an everyday person who likes the occasional supermarket selection when you can’t be bothered to go to the pub. For years now, the golden Belgian strong ale has been a mainstay in the fridges of many pubs and supermarket shelves. You can go to a seemingly average boozer with a less than interesting tap list and you’ll probably find Duvel. You will find it in all of the major supermarkets, too, rarely priced at more than £2 a bottle. This 8.5% foreign delight that you see everywhere, with its crunchy nut cornflake sweetness, just enough booziness that teases you, telling you to drink more when you know you shouldn’t, has become as common as Fuller’s London Pride, and it’s not a bad thing. Slightly harder to come by, however, is their yearly Tripel Hop release. This has been released each year for a fair few years now and I’m happy to say that I’ve caught 4 of them now....

Every so often I get sent a beer book review and from the moment I got a press release about Mikkeller's Book of Beer  I was excited. Mikkel Borg Bjergsø is one of the most famed and exciting brewers in Europe, if not the world I knew that hearing what he has to say about how he started up, why he does what he does and his view on beer would surely be exciting. First of all, the layout of the book is beautiful. It's so cleanly laid out yet full of Mikkeller's in house artist Keith Shore's artwork and wonderful photographs. First we have a brief history of beer, which basically retells many of the myths we've all learned are crap but it's entertaining and captivating nonetheless, before we get to Mikkeller's story. The whole story of Mikkeller is a fascinating one and the way he tells it cuts the bullshit. I've heard many stories from many different people about how he came to start brewing and none of them are remotely close to the one in this book...

I’ve never really had just one local pub. Sure, throughout time there have been certain pubs I’ve spent more time in than others, whose bar staff I’ve come to know and even call my friends, but I’ve never really been someone to just go to one particular pub all of the time, or even in the same night. I’ve always had many local pubs that each serves its own purpose. I was asked to participate in the Show Us Your Local campaign by J amie’s Drinkstube , which I have happily obliged to take part in. Below I will tell you about the pubs in Norwich that I call my locals and why. The Norwich Taphouse is a special kind of pub as it was the first ever craft beer bar in Norwich. Before this opened in November 2012, the people of Norwich knew nothing about the weird and wonderful new world styles of beers that were available in keg. I remember going there on opening night and it’s still a pub I regularly go to as they consistently have something I want to drink as well as bar staff I can sit ...

As a beer geek I've been on many brewery tours... from London Fields back when it was tiny, all the way to Adnams which is not so small. I think it's fair to say that from a combination of this and my love of beer, that I know a fair bit about the stuff. I remember when Redwell Brewery first opened, it was much smaller than it is now and I was given a kind of informal tour of the brewery... this was two years ago. Two years on I'm working at Redwell, it's much bigger and now I'm doing the tours. I am actually hosting brewery tours. I've done two so far and coming into the brewery on a Saturday to educate people about craft beer and most importantly our beer, brewery and future plans excites me. Seeing people have their first taste of Steam Lager, their eyes lighting up, the 'woah, I didn't know lager could taste like this' factor, to me is exciting and it's what I live for. Then comes even more excitement when I tell people that we ...

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...

Alright, my advent calendar didn't quite work out did it? I know I've posted before but apologies, I was a little busy. I'm still busy, I have stuff to do, but I really want to do 12 beers of Xmas to support my buddy Steve at The Beer O'Clock Show. Him and Mark run a brilliant podcast that I was lucky enough to guest on once (until my battery died and I had no charger) and I'm looking forward to doing it again one day. Yesterday was day one and I picked Stewart Brewing Weiss Christmas Blanc (4.7%, Edinburgh). We'd shared a few bottles of this in the office as they were nice enough to send us a bunch of samples when we bought a couple of pallets from them, and I enjoyed it but on cask it really is even better. So this beer is a German style Hefeweizen with added spices, in the spirit of Christmas. To be honest, I think it was a genius move to brew a Christmas Wheat Beer because nobody else seems to do it - Christmas beers all tend to be fairly dark. It po...