Uncategorized

Hanlons Stormstay (500ml bottle, 5.0% ABV) Hanlons used to be called O’Hanlons, but have dropped both the apostrophe (graphic designers seem to be allergic to punctuation) and the ‘O’. Perhaps they popped it into a time machine and sent it back to famed Hollywood producer David O Selznick (of ‘Gone With the Wind’ fame) who is…

Unity Brewing Quorum Brune (330ml bottle, 5.5% ABV, vegan) There are plenty of breweries in Britain devoted to US-style craft ale, but Unity of Southampton is the only domestic brewery I can think of that’s devoted to that other bastion of world beer: Belgian ales. Given the rarity of some of the Belgian stuff, it’s welcome to…

Dark Star Imperial Export Strength Stout (330ml bottle, 10.5% ABV) Dark Star predate many of the new independent breweries, having been set up in the cellar of Brighton’s Evening Star pub in 1994. Since then, they’ve gone from strength to strength, now occupying a 45 barrel facility near Horsham. A dark star, surely, is a black…

Wilde Geest  Siren Craft / Wiper and True  (330ml bottle, 7.2% ABV) You at the back – yes, you – put your phone down. How are you going to pass your chemistry GCSE if you don’t pay attention? So, last week we were talking a bit about yeast. We know that most ale is brewed with the top-fermenting yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and…

Cali – Tiny Rebel  (330ml can, 5.6% ABV, vegan) Tiny Rebel is one of the roaring successes of the Welsh beer scene. Starting in 2012 with two mates and a dream, by 2017 they had ballooned to 110 employees. Not so tiny now! Their brews are immediately identifiable through their charming logo – a threadbare teddy that looks…

Unity Brewing  Amalgamation Houblon Tripel (330ml bottle, 8.0% ABV, vegan) ‘So, let me get this straight, yeah?’ Josh says. ‘This beer we’re brewing is a Belgian Tripel, but with some late hops that give it a bit of the character of an IPA?’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘And this is a style made famous by monks brewing in monasteries…

Pure Gold – Itchen Valley  (500ml bottle, 4.8% ABV) The phrase ‘pure gold’ always reminds me of Lord Percy’s attempt at alchemy in Blackadder II. Rather than a nugget of gold, he ends up with a splat of green. Thankfully, Itchen Valley’s Pure Gold makes no such mistake, and looks every bit how it sounds. A soon-to-be-gone fizz leaves…

  Becoming North by Good Chemistry  (660ml bottle, 6.0% ABV, vegan) When is a porter not a porter? When it’s a Baltic porter. When is a lager not a lager? When it’s a Baltic porter. In the 19th century, Britain was doing a roaring beer trade with Russia, Poland and other countries around the Baltic sea.…

Kick-Start – Vibrant Forest  (500ml bottle, 5.7% ABV, vegan) Breakfast, we’re told, is the most important meal of the day. What do you have for breakfast? Maybe some porridge oats and a cup of coffee. Or, given that it contains both of these ingredients, why not kill two birds with one stone and have a bottle of Kick-Start instead?…

Southwick D-Day Revival The annual Southwick Village D-Day Revival event is this weekend, and it is a biggie. Last year we had over 10,000 visitors to the village and this year we are expecting even more! If your planing a trip to the Brewhouse this weekend here are a few things you should know: Peak…

 Snake Oil (440ml can, 7.5% ABV) Renegade Brewery Early on in this beer-reviewing lark, I made a decision to only review beer I like. My thinking went like this: why dismiss a brewer’s efforts when someone else might rave about them? Why spend my time describing something I don’t like when I could be enthusing about something I do? There’s…

  Knight Ryeder Staggeringly Good / Arundel  (440ml, 6.0% ABV) Collaborations between breweries are increasingly common these days. Some (I’m looking at you, Mikkeller) don’t even have their own brewing facilities, and brew solely on other companies’ equipment. Knight Ryeder is a joint venture between Arundel Brewery and Staggeringly Good of Portsmouth. A label that could so easily have featured…

  Lerryn Blonde (330ml, 4.7% ABV) The Fowey Brewery  Considering its relatively small population, Cornwall has an awful lot of breweries – 36, according to brewery listing websiteQuaffale. Lostwithiel alone has two – Castle Brewery (whose beers are also stocked by the Brewhouse) and The Fowey Brewery, situated on the river of the same name and brewing…

Fallen Acorn Pot Kettle (500ml, 4.4% ABV) Coffee is yummy, beer is yummy. Put the two together and … yummy x yummy = yummy2. It’s a mathematical fact, which is why brewers have been doing it for years. Fallen Acorn’s Pot Kettle is their coffee porter, brewed with beans from Solent Coffee Roasters. It comes out of the bottle with a…

Fish Key Red IPA (500ml, 4.9% ABV) In her seminal 1818 novel, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley imagines a creature brought to life from the parts of dead people. And she seemed like such a nice, sensible girl. I blame it on the influence of that Lord Byron … Breweries are much in the habit of Frankensteining these days,…

Hacker-Pschorr Oktoberfest Märzen (500ml, 5.8% ABV) If you believe what you read in the press – and who does? – the average wedding in Britain now costs a wallet-shredding £27,000. Compared to Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, though, this is chicken feed. He got hitched to the lovely Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen in 1810, and effectively the…

  Wooden Hand Dab Hand Session IPA (500ml, 4.5% ABV) Wooden Hand have been around since 2002, brewing in Truro, Cornwall. For 2017 they’ve decided to rebrand: gone are the previous, rather murky, bottle labels, and in their place is something lighter and fresher. The graphics now feature silhouettes of hands in different configurations and making…

Ballards Brewery Split (275ml, 8.5% ABV) Barley wine. The name gives you a clue: it’s made from barley (in other words, it’s beer) but it has something in common with the grapey stuff – the strength. At 8.5%, Ballard’s Split is a beer to be sipped, not guzzled. The drawing on the label shows a man…

Robbies Red -Adur Brewery Sometimes it’s hard to describe a beer. Yes, I know – your heart bleeds for me. (500ml, 5.2% ABV) You know those ‘fruits of the forest’ yoghurts, where you know some red fruits have gone into it but you can’t quite put your finger on which? That’s what Robbies Red is like.…

Renegade Brewery West Coast Pale (330ml, 5.1% ABV) Renegade are an offshoot of the West Berkshire Brewery, a chance to do things a bit differently while their parent company carries on with the more traditional side of things. They’re the Radiohead to the West Berkshire Brewery’s Rolling Stones, the David Lynch to their Steven Spielberg, the George…

Good Chemistry Redstart Rye (660ml, 5.3% ABV) If Breaking Bad gave chemistry a bad name, perhaps Good Chemistry aims to redress the balance. It’s the brainchild of Kelly and Bob of Bristol, who founded the brewery in 2015. Redstart Rye, like all of their beers, comes in a whopping great vessel that looks like a piece…

Harbour Brewing  Amber Ale (500ml, 4.4% ABV) In recent years, prompted by the American craft beer boom, the fashion has been for hops, hops and more hops. Not that I have any problem with that – a hoppy beer is a wonderful thing – but outside the realm of stouts and porters, the humble malted…

Downton Brewery Solstice (500ml, 4.6% ABV) Stonehenge – a word that evokes the ingenuity of prehistoric engineering, the druids, and the heroic incompetence of Spinal Tap. It’s also the image featured on Downton Brewery’s Solstice, a beer mysterious enough not to feature on their website. It’s the brainchild of Wiltshire-based Downton Brewery, who have been…

With almost a year out to give way for our ‘V.E Day’ special and, the now permanent fixture, ‘Land of Hop and Glory’, we are very happy to announce that Palmerston’s Folly will be back on the shelves and in cask tomorrow! Sitting on the top of Portsdown Hill, the forts (Lord Palmerston’s Follies) were…

Vibrant Forest Black Forest Piquant Porter (500ml, 4.9% ABV) Porter was invented in London some time in the early 1700s, along with its cousin, stout. Telling porter and stout apart these days is not an easy thing. Porter used to be either smoky or slightly sour from ageing in wooden barrels, and stout used to…

Gyle 59 – Take It Easy (500ml, 2.5% ABV) ‘Low alcohol beer’ – now there’s a phrase to prompt all true beer lovers into curling their lip with disdain. Not without justification, either. My memories of low alcohol beer are sullied by two particularly egregious examples: Víking Maltöl (0.9%), a sickly sweet Icelandic ‘malt beer’…

  Padstow Brewing Co. May Day (568ml, 5.0% ABV) Fancy a pint? You’ll have to go the pub, then – bottles are half a litre, aren’t they? Not necessarily … Samuel Smith’s Brewery in Yorkshire flies in the face of convention by offering their beers in 550ml bottles. And now the Padstow Brewing Company has…