#1001beers

pIt’s been a while since I’ve added some info on the beers I’ve been getting through.  The main issue has been a house move that has taken up a lot of time.  Thankfully I have managed to get a few beers in.  

Tonight it’s the turn of a Belgian beer called Kwak.  It comes in at 8.4% so I thought I should save it for a day when I have no work the next day (although I do have some wallpaper removal to do).

In the background you can see a wall that was freshly plastered today.  Also of note is price guide for Selco, a warehouse for builders.  Tomorrow I’m planning to visit using my builders cards as a disguise and buy some paint to remove the limited brown colour that currently sits on our wall.

A couple of weeks ago I also tried Tripel Karmeliet.  This was consumed after a hard session of wallpaper removal that had me balancing precariously on a wooden board.  

Lewisham isn’t really a place where people travel to for a night out.  In fact my knowledge of Lewisham extended to the fact that certain buses would terminate at Lewisham Bus Garage.  However this changed a few weekends ago when we decided to check out their newly opened outdoor food market (sort of newly opened, I think it was open last summer also).

Anyway the place was really good fun.  I’d already been to watch my local football team, Dulwich Hamlets, play in the afternoon so after a few beers at the game I was starving.  Luckily this place had an amazing selection of street food.  If i recall I had ribs, nachos, some kind of indian tapas, a hot doughnut and of course a beer.

Luckily the place had a beer that was on the list - the Beavertown Smog Rocket.  I was a bit disappointed when I saw the price of over £5 but as it was on the list I thought why not.  I think my disappointment turned to shock though as I was handed the smallest can of beer I’ve ever laid eyes on and asked to cough up the dough for it.  My shock, which had grown from disappointment now turned to disgust as I actually tried it - a dreaded dark beer.  As previously noted I’m no judge of these treacle like conceptions, i’m sure that people who like this sort of thing must love this one.  However for me it was an expensive experiment went wrong.

The can does come with some nice artwork though which is true of most of the Beavertown selection.

Oh the second picture shows our hot doughnut which I still have warm fuzzy thoughts over.

Apart from the beer I liked the market so much that I tried to take my parents there a couple of weeks after but unfortunately the electricity wasn’t working so we had to stand outside as people milled about inside drinking beer and eating the still warm food.  The guards insisted that we’d get in at some point but we gave up and went to a Bill’s down the road.  Not quite as cool but at least they had paid their electricity ‘Bill’ and could serve us some hot food.

As always the UK is a cold and desolate place in the winter.  However as April comes around it’s time to start waking up and getting ready for the nicer weather ahead.  With that in mind, it’s the perfect time for the London Coffee Festival to be in town.  I visited this last year and still remember staring at my ceiling at 4am unable to get a wink of sleep due to the rocket fuel they were serving at the festival.

This year we went with a slightly more cunning plan which was to get a bit drunk after the event therefore making sleep a possibility.

Whilst on this night out I managed to tick off one of the beers on the list - Jaipur which is a city in India but also an IPA brewed in Thornbridge.  At 5.9% it’s quite a strong beer however this was nothing compared to the absinthe cocktails that were drunk later.  

The pics below basically highlight how one should drink in Shoreditch - 

Hipster festival - check

Check shirt - check

Beard - check

Overly expensive and complicated cocktails - check

Get all these things right and you’ll generally have a good time.

Next beer on the list was a Japanese beer called Hitachino Nest Beer White Ale.  Taste wise, this was very much like Japanese Hoegaarden.  This is the 2nd Japanese beer I’ve had from the list and I think it’s a much more interesting beer versus the first which was Kirin.  It also comes in a brilliantly designed bottle meaning it puts a big tick in the hipster box (although I guess that cans of red stripe at a night club can also tick the hipster box).

The beer was drunk at a Wagamama’s in Finchley Road after we’d watched High-Rise, a movie about a bunch of people living in a multi-story building.  They move in with the promise of having everything they need in this building but things quickly degenerate and by the end everything has become completely messed up.  I think the film was meant to be based in some future time but me being from Dundee, I was already well aware of the horrors that can happen in high-rises and the movie probably didn’t go far enough versus what you used to see in Lochee, home of some of Dundee’s finest multi-story buildings (multi’s would be the correct term).

Sunday drinking is usually one of the most fun and dangerous hobbies one can embark on.  A couple of Sunday’s I enjoyed a nice day out which included several fun elements.  First a bit of football - Arsenal’s season continued to collapse as they went out of the cup to a Watford side that played some excellent stuff.  At this point I had 2 beers from the list.  The first was something called The Kernal.  This small bottle was super strong, super expensive and super dark - 2 of these things I do not like in a lager and on a Sunday, even the 3rd should be avoided.  Anyway these dark beers aren’t my favourites but I think I’m learning to appreciate the flavour somewhat - kind of a cross between treacle (nice) and tar (not so nice).

The 2nd beers was Stiegel, my first Austrian beer from the list which was expertly modelled by the girlfriend.  This was really nice and it’s a shame it’s not sold in more places here.  We had these drinks in The Dean Swift in Bermondsey which has an excellent array of beers and some awesome smelling food.

Kirin lager was tasted at a Korean bar called On the Bab in Covent Garden.  I tried a Korean burrito for the first time which is similar to a mexican burrito but not quite as good.  That’s possibly sounds a bit harsh - I did really like it but a good mexican burrito is hard to beat.   Anyway the lager was fine - a sort of standard lager I would say.  The restaurant also sold these really big tubes of lager - around 2 foot high that have little taps on them so you can pour your beer yourself - which potentially defeats the point of drinking out but it still looked cool.  Anyway I was off with the girlfriend to the theatre so I had to avoid this oversized lager offering as my bladder wouldn’t have made it through to the interval without doing myself some serious internal damage.

February was a tough month as I got a cold it went beyond traditional man flu.  One of the aspects I quite like about the cold is it does sometimes give you an excuse to have a beer or a whisky and just pass out.  Anyway during my 2 weeks of being unwell I generally stayed in, attempted a jigsaw and generally mixed alcohol with medicine to good effect.

Anyway there is a good selection in this post.  The highlight I reckon was the 2 Scottish beers the Bitter and Twisted which has got a lot of citrus like flavours going on and the Innis & Gunn Oak Aged Beer which almost had a dark rum like flavour going on.  

There is a photo of an Adnams Broadside which I think has actually dropped off the list so isn’t in my book but I thought the photo showed off the sort of medical attention i was giving myself.

Oh and this last one, the Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier was taken with a further attempt at healing myself - I made haggis and chips, which is essentially Scottish morphine.  Both the medicine above the haggis below were purchased by my girlfriend who did a great job of seeing me through a period where I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.