Craft beer

4 months old is never going to taste its best. Hopefully its been refrigerated all that time?

On my annual motorbike tour of California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah and now expanded to Colorado. Pretty much every stop has to have some decent beer at the end of it.

Highlight of the trip has to be Helper Beer in Helper, Utah.

Just look at the place..



Very small town that also has an interesting bar called the Regis Club...

Ive also had some shocker supermarket beers. They do tast fresher when always chilled.

I’m also with you on the craft thing, as someone who spends far too much time in a brewery I stick generally to the most basic of IPA’s as everything else isn’t enjoyable in quantity. Ive just come back from a trip to Germany and Austria and I just enjoy that at any time of day you can have a really simple clean beer. Got to love those German beer purity laws!

I was drinking La Chouffe before everyone knew about it. [/hipster]. Now that it is in all major supermarkets, it is becoming alarmingly popular.

It is quite normal for my local supermarkets to have shelves plump with every other beer, but one or two bottles of Chouffe blonde so far back that you have to be nine feet tall to reach it. It would otherwise be sold out I suspect.

I even saw a youth wearing a Chouffe teeshirt last week.

I don’t like things that I astutely determine are good being picked up upon by the hoi polloi. My children used to source it specially for my birthday. The only benefit now being that I no longer need to pay £5 per bottle.

One of the big advantages of living in Europe, my local small supermarket stocks La Chouffe, Kasteel, La Trappe, Chimay, Duvel, Cornet, Leffe, Affligem, Westmalle, St Bernadus, Gulden Drak, etc, as well as some more local ones like Jopen, Uiltje, Texel, 't Ij and Kompaan.

British supermarkets seem to have improved a lot in the last 5 years or so though and now seem to stock quite a few Belgian beers.

I love the way a few of these micropubs seem to be springing up these days, does it do plenty of business?

The trouble with those kind of Belgian beers though is it's quite a different drinking culture. Much as I love Kasteel Donker, it's 11% so I'm not going be drinking that many in an evening. I sometimes find myself craving a 3-4% ale/bitter which is quite rare over here

We went down to Permbrokshire in March. I usually have a search for any local breweries before going away, so stopped in at the Bluestone Brewery on the way down to pickup some beers to try.

Really enjoyed their Al Fresco hazy pale and Stone Cold IPA. So much so, we called in again on the way home to re-stock The brewery (and tap) is a few miles down some narrow country lanes but well worth the detour IMO.

https://www.bluestonebrewing.co.uk/

They also co-run a bar / pizza place in St. Davids called Grain which is easier to find (with really good pizza as well).

Next time you're on a tour and if you're anywhere near Santa Barbara, I can highly recommend the Island Brewery just down the road in Carpinteria.

https://www.islandbrewingcompany.com/

Always a favourite when we were at HQ in SB. Good beer but even better atmosphere, always full of "classical" Californians who always had a story to tell. It's a warehouse next to a railway with a bar in the front, but it's so much fun.

I saw this in a supermarket - I'm sure it was in pint cans or something ?

I'm at the Mikkeller beer festival in Copenagen and it's definitely worth a visit if anyone's on holiday in this direction. 225 beers on in this session, and over 500 across the weekend. Mikkeller, Pohjaler and Aben are the only ones here I've heard of, and I've only come across Aben because we went there last night