Billy's Booze Blog

I was rather restrained over the Christmas period, with the combined fun of being on-call at work and spending most of my time asleep getting in the way of the drinkathon that normally accompanies the time. However, I did get to try a bunch of boozes and rather than go into my normally excessive levels [...]

BrewDog seem to be calming down a bit. They’ve started doing more keg beer (rather than denouncing it as passé, although they don’t serve it in their bar), have one bar open and another two on the way, and seem to be concentrating on getting their beer brewed rather than trying to annoy some Germans. [...]

Tuesday was a special day. Originally I was meant to go to a tasting of Jura with the distillery manager, but that got cancelled at the last moment. Then a message popped up on the BrewDog blog that they’d be running a tasting at The Rake. Perfect timing it seemed, to start with, until I [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Old Malt Cask 15 year old Bladnoch – A baby single cask bottle that I grabbed from The Vintage House a while back. The nose has white wine, a light savouriness and a hint of charcoal. The taste is sweet to start but quickly fades to lightly coloured wood, sawdust and a dry slightly fruity [...]

A couple this week, but first something that isn’t a tasting – I live on the site of the old London Guinness factory, which has since been knocked down and replaced with flats (including mine), some offices (including Diageo, the makers of Guinness) and a park with a lake in. It looks like either we’ve [...]

Some background – I like Brewdog1. I like them enough that I’ve even invested in them (closes 19th February) and not only because of the lifetime 20% off I now get on their website. I’ve yet to find one of their beers that I didn’t actively like and am, so far, very much enjoying the [...]