We featured this can a couple of weeks ago and it caught my eye. With only a beer-drinking skeleton on the front, surrounded by black and an absence of branding, it’s quite odd looking… but quite striking too. On the back of the can, the branding kicks in with some cute word play on the theme of death, but there was one word amongst them all that made me flinch. The word was maibock and I flinched as, well, I wasn’t really sure what it meant.   Let’s keep this to ourselves right - I wouldn’t want my brewer friends hearing about it.   ...

You’ve got to love the rich tapestry that is beer history and there’s no better beer to describe this than the Imperial Stout. It’s a style that came about through an Anglo-Russian understanding when the stout and porter producers of London began servicing the needs of the Russian Imperial Court of Czarina Catherine the Great in the late 1800s.   As popular as it was, many of the British brewers abandoned the Russian market in the run up to the first world war and the popularity of the style dwindled through the 1900s, despite a few Baltic producers (and a...

You may have read last week’s blog where I grappled with a Bergamot IPA from De Molen. Grapple isn’t really the right word to be honest, it was a very one sided contest that I easily won. However, it did spark further thoughts on a topic I have been thinking about over the last few years and that is the concept of taste and olfactory blind spots. I’ll explain what I mean. For me, the Bergamot IPA was more hop-driven than anything else. However, my wife, who was sitting a few metres away from me as I tasted the beer,...

As you may have seen in our Wednesday mailer, De Molen is our brewery of the week this week and deservedly so.The brewery set up shop in 2004 in a disused windmill, hence the name, and prides itself on an experimental approach generating original beers with a twist. It typically fares well on RateBeer, if scores are your bag, and came 22nd in the list of best breweries in the world in 2020, no mean feat when you think of the sheer number of breweries out there. This Bergamot IPA caught my eye and I thought it would be a...

The experimental nature of craft beer is one of its exciting assets. We often see the reinterpretation of classic beers or the fusion of styles in twisted, adjunct heavy mash ups, where the results are all about flavour. One style to recently appear epitomises this perfectly. I’m talking about the ice cream sour.   If you’re a fan of these beers, then you’ll know that Duncan’s Brewery has taken this style and really run with it over the last couple of years. I was lucky enough to catch up with George Duncan, self-styled master of confected brews and co-owner of...