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An unexpected pairing
After you’ve been doing food and beer pairings for a while, your brain makes connections at random moments. You’ll find yourself eating a cookie and thinking “Hmm, I wonder what this would be like with…” and then checking your beer stash. That’s what happened to me recently. The smell of gingerbread cookies and molasses hung…
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Book review: The Complete Beer Course
The Complete Beer Course by Joshua M Bernstein has an ambitious target: “Boot camp for beer geeks: from novice to expert in twelve tasting classes”. I felt a lot of skepticism at this claim. I have read many other books with similar aims and have usually been let down in a morass of half truths…
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Local craft beer quality
With “quality” applied to something as subjective as beer, you have to be very careful how you define it. Are sales enough? Some would point to the mass brands as evidence that popularity does not equal quality. What about consistency? More consistency is better, sure. But the most consistent brands are, again, the mass brands.…
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Oktoberfest beers
Those of you who are married probably think you had a pretty nifty wedding day. Now imagine you had a wedding reception that was still famous over 2 centuries later… that’s Oktoberfest! It all started in 1810 when Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria married Princess Theresa of Saxony. Their wedding reception set such a gold…
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Drinking locally in Scotland
It’s all well and good saying that you always drink locally when you are at home, but what about when you are away on vacation? It’s really not difficult now that there is ready access to the internet pretty much wherever you are. It’s especially easy in a lot of European cities, like Edinburgh, which…