I promised to tell you about THREE events coming up that I’m very excited about!! I was honoured to be asked to be part of these happenings and so I hope you can come and join the party with me too. Brilliant beers at all 3 events – 3 new ones (including one I had a hand in brewing!!) and, for the Birmingham event, 5 beers that are already on the market but vary very differently in flavour. So here are the deets…. Read more »
What can I say? I’m gobsmacked and chuffed to little meatballs that I was asked back on The Alan Titchmarsh Show on ITV1 last week. This time around the show was celebrating the 200th week that Charles Dickens was born. Much of his work drew on his experiences of living in London in 19th Century (1800s to those of you who bunked off History at school!) and featured pubs & coaching inns. So, of course, beer was a part of that too!
If you didn’t know already London was the brewing capital of the world too – there were around ten or breweries making an absolute sweating FORTUNE brewing beer, selling it through tied-houses and exporting it to places like Russia and India too. As a nation we were revered for our brewing heritage and other countries copied us. Including Ireland who copied the popular beer style of the time – Porter (which developed through the years into a roasted, smoky flavoured black beer). They made their own version of which Guinness was the most popular. So yes folks GUINNESS isn’t strictly Irish 
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So we’ve only gone and done it! It’s been eight months in the planning. My wonderful beer girlfriends, Shea Luke (aka Real Ale Girl Shea) and Jane Peyton (from School of Booze) enjoyed a wonderful day last year enjoying beer in my native West Midlands. And on that day, amidst sampling some incredible ales, we had a brainwave…a NO-BRAINER of a brainwave!! We love beer so much we decided to make our own concoction. For me that was an even more amazing prospect. You’ll remember that The Hubz and I are into homebrewing and we brewed our own Wedding Ale.
I’ve broken my silence. Been a nutty start to the year and beer free for 2 weeks then #Banuary failed and I fell off the wagon. But I did try! Anyway Marston’s is experimenting with 12 new beers this year: one on sale each month and each one with a totally different hop in it, with every beer being a nice and gentle 4% ABV. There are plenty of brewers who’ve made a beer with just one hop, but I don’t recall anyone else doing this in terms of spreading the hop love across the entire year and changing each month. If you know different, let me know!
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As we race towards the end of 2011, stuffed to the gills with peanuts, mince pies and fave winter warming beers, I just thought I’d drop a few pics and vids online about the amazing things that have presented themselves to me this last year because of my love of beer. Not withstanding the constant stream of beers that breweries send me to try and for which I am forever grateful. So I try to drink one new beer each week and, with 52 weeks in a year, give or take a few weeks here and there and me drinking some old faithfuls, then your maths on how many beers I’ve enjoyed this year will be about right.
If you read my blog regularly you’ll know I’m not a ‘campaigner’ in any traditional sense, I write my lovely blog for fun in my spare time as 99.9% of beer bloggers do. No-one pays me to write it, and it’s not a site that reviews beer as such.
THIS GIVES ME THE CHANCE TO HIT IT RIGHT BACK AT YA AND SAY A MAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSIVE THANK-YOU TO EACH AND EVERYONE OF YOU WHO’S CONNECTED WITH ME THIS LAST YEAR! Whatever you’ve done from reading just one blog post, subscribing to it, commenting on it here, tweeting & retweeting me, leaving me a message on Facebook or liking my page. EVERYTHING & ANYTHING. It means sooooooooooooo much I can’t explain it, cos sometimes blogging seems a bit lonely. There are too many of you to mention, but you know who you are, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Keep telling your friends that I’m here 
And if there’s ONE over-riding message in this blog it’s that is there IS beauty in beer, so don’t knock it till you try it. Plus there’s a couple of others: if you haven’t found a beer you like drinking, then you haven’t tried enough of them yet!; and drink responsibly
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Twenty girls enjoyed a night of fun and frolics the other week at my special Beer Cocktail party at Banks’s Brewery. It was a Christmas treat for some of the brewery’s female staff, and so when I suggested beer cocktails, Rachel from Marston’s and Kimberley from Vital PR stepped up to the plate, humoured me (!) and we all sat down to think about how we could do it. It was the first time I’ve ever created beer cocktails and – I’m not saying they’re going to set the world alight - the verdict from the girls on the night was an overwhelming THUMBS UP. I’ve attached a link to the fab photos from the night courtesy of the very lovely Lee Allen. We had gorgeous Stephen Kerr (from Coventry’s Inspire Cafe Bar) as our mixologist on the night, with help from Alice, Fern, Rachel and Kim. A big thank-you to them all
Wow. I mean seriously. WOW. I won an award. Not just any old award. A GOLD award at the most prestigious annual gatherings of beer writers in Britain. For that I am overwhelmingly honoured. And humbled.
The 2011 British Guild of Beer Writers dinner and awards ceremony took place at the Park Plaza Riverbank Hotel in London, our dining room overlooking the Thames. You might find it hard to believe there’s such a guild, but it’s so important to have an organisation like this. It was set up in 1988 to help spread the word and improve the general standards of beer writing. Now the Guild has over 150 members.
The event brought together more than 230 people rings together people who write about beer for a living, who write for national newspapers, regional newspapers and magazines, who write books and who, like me, write about beer for fun, cos they love beer with a passion and truly believe in the beauty of beer. Read more »
Just thought I’d drop a few pics of a small selection of some of the beers The Hubz and I will be enjoying this Christmas. Believe you me, there are many more bottles and cases of beer wedged under our dining table bursting to get out.
These are the kind of beers that – if they were a person – you’d ask them to tuck you in at night. They give you that warm, loving, fuzzy and Christmassy feeling. Some of them are quite strong, so designed to be sipped gently or shared with a beer-loving friend. Imagine a satisfying beery bear hug, if you will. Read more »
Wanna keep warm this November with some cracking brews?? Then try Ember Inns. And NO, they aren’t paying me to say that (cos no-one pays me to write my lovely blog!) But one of my most fave pubs, The Bell Inn, just happens to be down the road from me in Walsall and it’s part of the Ember chain. It’s a bus ride away but too far to walk and The Main Man and I have had many a summit there deciding what to do next with our lives. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do in over a few pints?? Read more »
This very day last week was an incredibly special day for me and The Main Man. Because we got married, and the date was the 5th anniversary of our very first date. It was as wonderful as a day could get.
The Main Man looked stunning, my two nieces - Natalie and Nadine – were bridesmaids; led by Miranda, my bezzie mate of 35 years as my Chief Bridesmaid; Carl, the Main Man’s bezzie mate of some 30 odd years was his Best Man; our brothers were ushers and our Mothers looked knock-out with full-on hats with feathers and everything! Cilla Black’s chest would have been puffed up with pride
