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Gluten Free

Gluten Free – Ridgeway IPA (500ml, 5.5% ABV) Coeliac disease affects around 1% of the UK population. It’s a reaction to gluten that can prove serious if not managed correctly. A friend of ours (whose novel I will now shamelessly plug here) is coeliac, and it’s clear when out and about with her that ordering…

XT 9 (500ml, 5.5% ABV) Sounding more like a Star Wars droid than a beer, XT 9 is something of an enigma. The bottle describes it as ‘Black’. So, is it a stout, a porter, a strong mild, a black IPA, or none of the above? Brewed with no fewer than nine malts (I wonder…

Curios

Curious IPA (330ml, 5.6% ABV) A winemaker brewing beer? Has the world gone mad? It’s like cats and dogs living together. But that’s exactly what Chapel Down Winery has done. Not content with that, they make cider and brandy too. What’s next – a gin distillery, an absinthe laboratory? All of their beers come under…

Denmead Beer Festival 2016

18th Annual , Denmead Community Centre, Sat 29th Oct 2016 As the only event of its type within staggering distance of my house, I’ve been going to the Denmead Beer Festival for years. It’s a fairly typical setup – a variety of beers, classic and new, local and distant, plus grub (hot dogs, burgers, roast…

Emsworth Brewhouse

Emsworth Brewhouse Flotilla (500ml, 4.4% ABV) Very new, very local and very green. That would be a good way to describe the Emsworth Brewhouse, a new, award-winning business which features a solar powered brewery and zero emission delivery of its products. It’s the brainchild of Grant Thomas, who works at IBM and has graduated from…

Brewhouse & Kitchen Brewery Experience Day (Part 2), Portsmouth, £85, 10:00-17:00 Fri or Sat Read part 1 here. The fact is, I have to drive home at the end of the day, so I sadly refuse some offers of ‘a bit more beer’. Oli uses a laptop and some software to keep tabs on…

southampton airport

Southampton Airport. Priority Lounge customers at Southampton Airport are now in for a local treat whilst they wait to board their flight. Bottles of Old Dick,Skew, Liberation or Land of Hop and Glory are on offer among a range of other local refreshments. Like Suthwyk Ales, it has an important heritage of it’s own. In 1936 the first test flight of the Supermarine Spitfire took place at the airport, making the Liberation and Land of Hop & Glory ales an appropriate fit. Unlimited WiFi, refreshments, comfortable seating, high chairs and desks, laptop and mobile charge points are available for all Priority Lounge customers. http://www.southamptonairport.com/

Brewhouse & Kitchen Brewery Experience Day (Part 1), Portsmouth, £85, 10:00-17:00 Fri or Sat Brewhouse & Kitchen is a chain of pubs that brew their own beer on the premises. They also offer a Brewery Experience Day in which you can get your hands dirty and assist them in brewing up a batch. Sounds good…

Hammerpot Ripa Black IPA (500ml, 5.0% ABV) The Hammerpot Brewery is located east of Arundel and has been brewing beer since 2005. Rather than aiming at the traditional English market, or making newer American style beers, they sort of do both, with some Aussie influence thrown in for good measure. I’ve long been a fan of their…

The Golden Lion, Southwick Something a bit different this time: a pub review! After all, where better to find beer than in its natural habitat? From the Southwick Brewhouse you can’t fail to spot the Golden Lion, given that the two share a car park. In the interest of a fair review, Helen and I…

Skinner’s Hops ‘n’ Honey (500ml, 4.0% ABV) Hello, I’m Bob the Bearded Bee! That’s me, just below the logo of Skinner’s Hops ‘n’ Honey. You think I’m looking a bit forlorn? You’re not wrong – I’m the hardest working bee in the whole of the hive. And yet, despite all my efforts, no one’s…

Red Cat Contemplation American Brown Ale (500ml, 4.7% ABV) Brown. It’s not the most inspiring colour, is it? Wouldn’t you prefer a golden or ruby ale, or something else named after some precious material? Why drink brown? For the same reason you’d eat chocolate or freshly baked bread – taste. Give me great-tasting sludge over…

Hunter’s Black Jack Stout (500ml, 6.0% ABV) In my very first beer review, I made a jocular reference to an exploding stout. Well, it had to happen sooner or later … To be fair, Hunter’s Black Jack doesn’t so much explode as rush up the neck of the bottle at me with a foamy tentacle. A…

Old Dick Suthwyk Ales

Suthwyk Old Dick (cask, 3.8% ABV) The Southwick Brewhouse doesn’t just sell bottles. Ask Matt what he’s got on tap and you’ll be ushered into the back room where several casks lie in wait. It’s a bit like buying something a little naughty (or, err, so I’ve been told) except that it comes in a…

Ikely BreweryIlkley Brewery Mary Jane Export

Ilkley Brewery Mary Jane Export (330ml, 6.0%) “On Ilkla Moor Baht ‘at” is one of those classic folk songs that every seems to know at least a bit. It also has an educational aspect, in that it acquaints you with how Yorkshiremen don’t speak. Yes, it’s all good merry fun until you realise it’s…

West Berkshire Brewery Dr Hexter’s Healer (500ml, 5.0%) The West Berkshire Brewery started out in 1995, which makes them almost veterans of the new British beer scene. I’ve been sampling their beers for years because my sister-in-law lives very close to them, and frequently buys me bottles for my birthday. Lots of beers have…

Oakleaf India Pale Ale (500ml, 5.5%) Picture the scene: summer, 2002. I’ve recently started dating a dark-haired woman who lives in the heart of Portsmouth. A couple of baking hot streets from her flat is the Winchester Arms, a pub serving beer from the Oakleaf Brewery, only established a couple of years prior. And…

Vibrant Forest Metropolis (330ml, 6.0% ABV) Matt, the cheery shopkeeper at the Southwick Brewhouse, has a bit of crush on the Vibrant Forest Brewery. Just mention the name and he starts cooing like a lovelorn teenager. I can’t blame him – Vibrant Forest make a lot of good beers. In fact, they make a lot…

And Union Summer Wheat Ale (500ml, 5.5% ABV) Modernism, eh? James Joyce and T S Eliot. Picasso and Stravinsky. Modernism is difficult. And Union brew modernist Bavarian craft beer. I know this because it says so on their web site. Putting my artistic hat on (which is very fetching, I assure you) it might be…

Harvey’s Imperial Extra Double Stout (275ml, 9.0%) “One moment, comrade. What is this you are trying to import into Russia? Beer, you say? But we already have vodka. What we need with beer? Hmm. Quite a name it has. Think it can live up to ‘Imperial’, ‘Extra’ and ‘Double’? Wait a moment. This bottle has…

Export Dunkel (500ml, 5.4%) Bit of a mystery beer, this one. Their website is only in German, so no help there. Perhaps we can decipher the brewery’s name. ‘Gut’ is clearly ‘Good’, but ‘Forsting’.? The word is impervious to Google Translate and to my Collins Gem German Dictionary. Another problem is that the bottle labels appear…

Suthwyk Ales Skew (500ml, 4.6% ABV) Three things about Southwick: They stock good beer. They make good beer. They can’t spell. Suthwyk Ales Skew is a golden ale, a style revived (though not invented) in the 80s to combat the global rise of lager. Beers like Exmoor Gold and Hopback Summer Lightning did a great…

D-day revival weekend is only a week away! For anyone wanting to pick up draft beer that weekend I highly recommend phoning in your order and collecting on the Friday before! If you do decide to pop in please be aware The brewhouse car park will be off limits for the weekend. Alternate parking is available and will be well sign posted…

Wild Beer

Wild Beer Co Epic Saison (330ml, 5.0% ABV) Belgium. Land of chocolate and mayonnaise on chips. Home to the EU, Poirot and Tintin. It is also, according to some, the most unspeakable swear-word in the universe. But what a beer country! Belgium boasts a bewildering array of styles, from laid-back, easy drinking wheat beers to…

Flying Dog Easy IPA (355ml can, 4.7% ABV) And so to our American cousins, who have had their own beer revolution and present us this luridly decorated beer … in a can? How vulgar! But beer in cans is no longer the preserve of mass-market lager and insipid ale. Many smaller brewers are trying it…

Bristol Beer Factory Milk Stout (500ml, 4.5% ABV) I have to confess, the idea of a factory producing beer goes against my idea of what a small brewery should be doing. Perhaps the Bristol Beer Factory were thinking less ‘commercial beverage giant’ and more ‘Willy Wonka’. Their Milk Stout would certainly seem to suggest it.…

Weird Beard Mariana Trench (330ml, 5.3% ABV) Beer is exploding. Not in that “Who shook up my bottle of stout?” kind of way, but in the number of people who are brewing it. In 2012 there were 24 breweries in London. Four short years later, the number has more than tripled, and the Weird Beard…

It’s a leap year! According to an old Irish legend, St Brigid struck a deal with St Patrick to allow women to propose to men every four years. Tradition dictates that any man who refuses a woman’s proposal on February 29 has to buy her 12 pairs of gloves, we don’t sell gloves at the brewhouse, but…

Beer, what is it good for? Absolutely everything! We’re kicking of 2016 in style with a brand spanking new website and some new beer! So what’s on the menu for February? Well to start we’ve just taken a delivery from Wiggle Valley brewery, a small microbrewery tucked away down a farm lane on the edge of the village…

D-Day revival

A D-Day revival event is not to be missed! This June for the third year running, the village of Southwick is joining in partnership with Southwick Park to commemorate the anniversary of D-Day. This is an exciting and unique opportunity for visitors from all over the world to breathe in the atmosphere of those historic days at…

The mash tun

Thomas Carter, a retired farm worker who lived in Back Lane, Southwick, worked part time as assistant to the brewer, from the late 1930s until the closure of the brewery in 1956/57. He aided the brewer in many ways but was never present when brewing took place. On the first evening he would prepare for…

Old Dick brewing

Every brewhouse needs a hero, for the Southwick Brewhouse his name was Dick Olding, or as he was fondly known, Old Dick, the brewmaster, a gentlemen and a legend among the villagers, providing a stiff drink for the troops and working like a power horse until he passed away aged 81. So how did he…