Billy's Booze Blog

My buying of almost everything that BrewDog produces is a potential problem. Keeping an eye on their blog and receiving the occasional “as you are a shareholder you may be interested in” email is a dangerous thing as I hear about their more interesting brews before they get a chance to sell out. And sell [...]

My summer holidays this year were in three parts, and sandwiched between trips to the Great British Beer Festival and Edinburgh was a stag weekend in Budapest. Rather than the usual stag traditions of throwing the cheapest beer possible down our necks before stapling the groom-to-be to the nearest national monument we went more for [...]

True to my word I did indeed spend the last three days camped out at Earl’s Court enjoying this year’s GBBF. The plan was simple but elegant – drink on Wednesday, work there on Thursday and do some more drinking (maybe with an insider’s perspective) on the Friday. The plan, as they say, worked perfectly.
On [...]

Young’s may have run away to Bedfordshire, but there’s still more to London brewing than just the mainstay of Fuller’s and the chemical plants of Annheiser-Busch. We’ve got Brodie’s in Leyton, Sambrook’s in Battersea, Meantime down in Greenwich and now The Kernel in Bermondsey.
With my mate Bob living round the corner I’ve heard about The [...]

I rather like The Rake. Not only do they have many interesting beers on tap, but they’ve joined forces with Melissa Cole to put on tastings of interesting beverages under the banner of lovebeer@borough. It surprised me how few booze tasting there actually are in London that are available for regular consumers and lovebeer@borough is [...]

This is one that’s been on my radar for a while. I’m a big fan of hoppy beer, having worked my way up through golden summer ales to hoppy British IPAs and then on to the more extreme US craft beer stakes, and also a fan of experimentation and novelty ales, so Stone Ruination IPA [...]

I still like Brewdog. I may be in two minds about some of their marketing and some of their beers, but they’ve so far all been worth a try. So, when I read on their blog that they were going to have a release event for one of their latest beers in London, putting on [...]

Being a twitter obsessive sometimes pays off in the world of booze. A couple of weeks back I ended up on a ‘tour’ of the Sipsmith Distillery (where ‘tour’ means ‘evening of drinking gin and learning about cocktails in a garage in Hammersmith full of awesome looking still and enthusiastic gin magicians – it may [...]

A beer that I didn’t expect, this one, appearing in my Christmas order from Brewdog as a replacement for one of the beers that they’d run out of. It’s a brew that was put together during a visit to Brewdog HQ from Greg Koch, Steve Wagner and Mitch Steele of the Stone Brewing Company (see [...]

Some more of what I done been drinking:
Balvenie 12 Years Doublewood – a whisky grabbed as a chaser round the corner from the Sci-Fi-London film festival after a day of packing bags and herding punters. It had a grassy, olive oily nose with hints of sugary spice and a touch of wood. To taste it [...]