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Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog Phew. The Beer Babe has chosen a Session topic we can address without hunting high and low for exotic imported bottles: she wants us to write about pale ales. In Britain, pale ale, under its other name, bitter, is the staple offering of almost every pub in the land. Yes, John Smith’s, Bass and all [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog Boak: This has a really nice malt flavour — that grainy, chewy breadiness– Nearby Bloke: Err… correction! It’s obvious this is made from only pale malt which contributes exactly zero flavour to a beer. Boak: Well, I’m thinking of the malt flavour you might get in a good lager like– Nearby Bloke: That’s hops! If [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog Just like the Brown Bitter Company, the following pub does not exist. Within walking distance of the Museum of London is a cavernous Victorian pub building which, with the help of a culture fund grant and sponsorship from London breweries, has been renovated and refitted as it would have looked in the 1890s. This isn’t [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog Why did we start brewing? Because we thought it would be diverting and entertaining. (It turned out to be frustrating and difficult.) Why did we stick with it? Because, from day one, it helped us understand beer better. When we spoke about malt and hops, we were no longer thinking in abstract terms, but had [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog All the homebrewing and bottling we’ve been doing recently has reminded us that ‘it’ll be fine’, ‘ah, sod it’, ‘near enough’ and other slogans of corner-cutting have no place in the process. Should we just check that tap is off one more time? Yes! Can we remember if we cleaned and sanitised that pipe? Pretty [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog The itch to brew a Belgian-style tripel has been with us for a while but, after a bad experience with Belgian yeast a few years ago, we’ve repeatedly chickened out. Re-reading Brew Like a Monk and 100 Belgian Beers to Try Before You Die for the umpteenth time, however, we finally cracked and, on a [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog Our pints of mild on Saturday got us thinking about the experience of drinking a given beer over the course of a session which helped us understand what the term ‘session beer’ means to us. So, this chart is an attempt to illustrate the pleasure we gain from a selection of beers over the course [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog It feels as if St Austell have a pub every ten or twelve metres between Exeter and Land’s End, but their dark mild, Black Prince, is nonetheless hard to find amongst a sea of Tribute. We first heard of Black Prince several years ago when Bailey’s dad rang us in a highly excited state from [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog We couldn’t find much to love in John Smith’s Extra Smooth, and we really did try. Given the uncontroversial recipe, we have to assume the cause of the problem is that widget — that little ping-pong ball which injects nitrogren into the beer on opening to create the weird, everlasting ‘creamy’ head. Does it add [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog Here are our notes from the first of our 18 cans of John Smith’s Extra Smooth: Surprisingly powerful aroma rising out of the glass. Not of hops but actually quite Guinness-like if we close our eyes – the black malt they use for colour? Very light body (watery) perhaps emphasises by the very thick head. [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog The price of Belgian beer gets tossed into arguments on pricing like a Trappist-made hand grenade: how can newer craft breweries charge so much for their product when a classic, ‘world class’ beer like Saison Dupont can be bought for £1.80 a bottle? Even in bars with leatherbound beer lists, Trappist beers like Westmalle Triple [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog One of our missions on our spree last Saturday was to find a Mikkeler beer — any Mikkeler beer. The output of this Danish brewery has come to represent for us all the continental holidays we’re not having now Eurostar is less handy; and all the exotic beers we left behind in the bars of [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog John Smith’s bitter is one of those beers which has become a byword for badness amongst beer geeks — the punchline to jokes, a shortcut to suggest the utter hopelessness of a crappy pub. It is available cask-conditioned but is more usually seen as a keg beer or in cans in the supermarket. It’s usually [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog When we asked how Belgian beer could be so cheap, Matthew Curtis suggested on Twitter that their tendency towards relatively conservative hopping could be part of the answer. This got us thinking. After all, though hop aroma is not something we especially associate with Belgian beer, it is certainly not the case that Belgian beer [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog When we asked how Belgian beer could be so cheap, Matthew Curtis suggested on Twitter that their tendency towards relatively conservative hopping could be part of the answer. This got us thinking. After all, though hop aroma is not something we especially associate with Belgian beer, it is certainly not the case that Belgian beer [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog For a county (sorry — Duchy) with a permanent population of only around 540,000, Cornwall has quite a few breweries, and more are appearing every month. There are some whose wares we’ve yet to try;others we rarely see except in bottles; and a few we simply can’t recommend with a clear conscience. This list, then, [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog For a county (sorry — Duchy) with a permanent population of only around 540,000, Cornwall has quite a few breweries, and more are appearing every month. There are some whose wares we’ve yet to try;others we rarely see except in bottles; and a few we simply can’t recommend with a clear conscience. This list, then, [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog That urban beer bubble seems to be leaking somewhat. In the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen the following: A spat between two breweries make national television news, newspapers and hugely popular non-specialist blogs, thanks to the Brewdog publicity machine and a compelling tale of skullduggery. Marverine ‘Beer Beauty’ Cole on This Morning — a [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog That urban beer bubble seems to be leaking somewhat. In the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen the following: A spat between two breweries make national television news, newspapers and hugely popular non-specialist blogs, thanks to the Brewdog publicity machine and a compelling tale of skullduggery. Marverine ‘Beer Beauty’ Cole on This Morning — a [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog This month’s Session is hosted by Pete Brown. ‘The beer moment’ is a key idea in a lot of beer marketing: if you can’t sell the liquid in the glass, and are no longer allowed to imply that beer is good for you, or makes you more attractive, you can at least sell the camaraderie [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog We recently asked people to recommend books which weren’t about beer but which could help us better understand beer, prompted by reminders from Knut and Alan that books on other topics do actually exist and can be all the more illuminating for their distance from The Obsession. Gareth, who writes the Beer Advice blog, and [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog A while ago, some friends visited, bringing with them some bottle-conditioned beers they’d picked up on holiday in Norfolk. A couple of weeks ago, we finally got round to drinking them. Well, we say drinking… pouring them down the sink is unfortunately closer to the mark for three of the four. These were exploitative, gift-shop, [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog George Orwell was clearly preoccupied with beer and pubs: the subject comes up in frequently in his writing on all kinds of topics. We’ve blogged about bits and pieces before but, when Alan ‘Good Beer Blog’ McLeod posted this and Nick ‘Beerprole’ Mitchell said this on Twitter, it gave us an idea and so… Here’s [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog As more beer geeks start to plan summer trips to Cornwall, we’ve been getting odd one-off queries about breweries, beer and pubs and so thought we’d put together a couple of posts with advice for visitors, of which this is Part the First. The following list is of pubs we like and can recommend a [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog The price of beer — the subject that won’t go away — flared up again this week. Two sides of the argument were expressed eloquently by Phil (are we’re being swindled?) and Grace (don’t judge me for paying £4 a half), prompting the following thoughts. On the one hand… 1. There’s nothing wrong with questioning [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog Our post about sink-pour gift shop beer prompted a few responses from other bloggers which we thought we’d round up here. First, Jenni Nicholls of the recently closed Northcote Brewery wrote a helfpul and positive piece highlighting some beers from Norfolk that she thinks are worth drinking. Nate rightly identified that our post wasn’t really [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog A lot of what The Scottish Brewery does only makes sense when it occurs to you that they have one aim: to become a household name. They simply don’t care if they’re loved or loathed, as long as they can break out of the beer geek ghetto and become the kind of brand that ‘normals’ [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog George Orwell was clearly preoccupied with beer and pubs: the subject comes up in frequently in his writing on all kinds of topics. We’ve blogged about bits and pieces before but, when Alan ‘Good Beer Blog’ McLeod posted this and Nick ‘Beerprole’ Mitchell said this on Twitter, it gave us an idea and so… Here’s [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog The price of Belgian beer gets tossed into arguments on pricing like a Trappist-made hand grenade: how can newer craft breweries charge so much for their product when a classic, ‘world class’ beer like Saison Dupont can be bought for £1.80 a bottle? Even in bars with leatherbound beer lists, Trappist beers like Westmalle Triple [...] - allbeernews

Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog This month’s Session is hosted by Pete Brown. ‘The beer moment’ is a key idea in a lot of beer marketing: if you can’t sell the liquid in the glass, and are no longer allowed to imply that beer is good for you, or makes you more attractive, you can at least sell the camaraderie [...] - allbeernews