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The Westminster Arms
I have something of a soft spot for Kent's Shepherd Neame . It was their Bishop's Finger that got me into better beer than the keg swill I would drink as a younger man after all, as well as a friend in Prague having been a barman in an SH pub. Whenever I get back to the UK, which is nowhere near as often as I would like, I will pick up a few bottles of Shepherd Neame beers, usually the aforementioned Bishop's Finger, but also their Double Stout and even the India Pale Ale. However, and for obvious reasons, Shepherd Neame pubs are few and far between in the Highlands of Scotland, and I don't think I have ever seen a Shepherd Neame beer on a beer engine at any of the pubs I frequent when I go home. Having a few days then in London was the opportunity to find the nearest Shepherd Neame pub to my hotel and dive into their range a bit more. Given that my hotel was just yards from Westminster Abbey, said nearest Shepherd Neame pub was The Westminster Arms . On arriving at my hotel, being giv
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Good News!
A quick break in the scheduled postings - trust me, I carried on my bitter and pub adventures in the UK after flying to and from Inverness - but this is good news that needs sharing. On Wednesday an email was sent out that I have actually been expecting for a few weeks now, but I didn't want to let the cat out of the bag. Simply put, Murphy & Rude are not going out of business. But first, a tale of how I learnt that news. When it became public that Jeff and co were going to be closing down, I said to Mrs V that I needed to make a big order of malt to see me through the rest of my brewing year. To that end I bought a 50lb/22.7kg of Virginia Pils, and one of English Pale - they are, after all the base of pretty much all of my beers. Also as part of that order I got 25lb/11.4kg bags of Vienna and Biscuit malts; 10lb/4.5kg bags of white wheat and brown malts; and 5lb/2.3kg bags of Munich 9, Munich 15, and Americano (basically pale chocolate) malts; oh and a packet of Greenmont Mother h
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Windsor the Second
Having left behind the warm embrace of the Windsor & Eton Brewery, picking up a copy of the local branch of CAMRA's latest magazine on the way out, I walked back to Arthur Road, past the appropriately named , though not yet open, Duke of Connaught. I had a short list in my mind of places to visit, an amalgam of places visited by Tweedy Pubs in this video, and a few suggestions from folks on Reddit. First up on that list was the Carpenter's Arms , just down a narrow lane from Windsor Castle itself. Now, I have to admit, being an abysmal beer tourist - nothing new there if you know me - I didn't take that many pictures of the outside of pubs, but for the Carpenter's I did take a picture of the building opposite as it was just so funky. I had snagged a seat opposite the bar in a bay window that was just delightful, and just as thrilling was seeing the pump clip of heaven on the bar. Ok, sure, it's not a local beer in the furthest western reaches of Berkshire, but when you see Landlord
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Of Guards and Fathers
It was 7.30am when my plane landed at Heathrow, the beginning of my 9 days back in the United Kingdom. Given the fact there was only an hour or so between that flight and the earliest flight to Inverness, I decided not to do a connection on the one ticket, and instead just get a separate ticket for the evening flight to Inverness. Thus I had the best part of half a day between flights, and as I mentioned in my last post, I decided to go to eschew the Tube into London proper, and get the bus to Windsor. I had been to Windsor all of once previously, but I may have been about 12 years shy of being able to drink legally, and as such I don't remember much about that visit. There is though a family legend/inside joke that at some point whilst wandering near the castle, I asked my parents why it wasn't finished yet given the scaffolding that surrounded many of the buildings. I was then somewhat keen to walk by the castle to check up on progress in the intervening 40 odd years - there was stil
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A Little Help Goes A Long Way
As I mentioned in a previous post, I am heading to the UK in a few weeks, mainly for work, but with a little personal time chucked in as well. While I own the fact that I am a terrible beer tourist, I really don't plan my trips around breweries or beer cultures I want to visit - rather I go places and just see what is around. A key part of my planning process then, and maybe I a sad bandit for this, is to use Google Maps to find places in the locations that I will be, and then check out their websites to see if it is likely to be the kind of place I want to visit. It is almost exactly 15 years that I wrote a post called " Do Pubs Help Themselves? " in which I lamented the standard of many a boozer website. My biggest beef was that many pub websites go to great lengths to tell you about their wine list, their cocktail list, their food options, but almost nothing about what beers are actually on draft, which is just as true for a tied house as it would be for a free house. So you would l
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Some Closing Thoughts
On Friday afternoon, with work concerns disappearing into the rear view mirror, and a little time to go until I had to pick up the twins from school, I was having a very fine pint of lager (but which one?? It was Vested Interest, a Franconian-style kellerbier) at the bar in the Selvedge Brewing taproom. As I reveled in the magnificence of that beer, which is a stunner in an already superb lineup, I heard news that instantly yucked my yum. Virginia's only craft malting company, my good friends Murphy & Rude, are closing their doors at the end of May. To be honest, I don't know the ins and outs of why Jeff has decided to shut up shop, so I am not going to speculate on that. From what Murphy & Rude have told customers though, they were looking to scale and it became clear that the challenges of scaling made it unfeasible. What I do want talk about though is the ramifications of their coming demise. From a very personal, and entirely self-centred, perspective, I am bummed that I am
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Making Bolt
I am going to the UK in about five weeks time, mostly for work, but also taking the opportunity of being over there to go an visit my parents in the north of Scotland - basically get to Inverness and keep going north, yeah, that north. The primary purpose for the trip is a work conference in London though. I haven't been to London in absolutely ages, I think the last time I was there was on one of my trips home to Scotland from Prague, when I would take the bus from Czechia to London and from thence up to Glasgow, and on to the Isle of Skye for the ferry to Uist. I honestly have no idea when I last spent a few days in London, it might be way back in the dim and distant past when we would go and visit my nan when my little brother and I were proper nippers - I have a core memory of watching "It's A Knockout" safely tucked up in her sofa bed. In amongst all my looking at pubs in and around Westminster, I'll be staying just round the corner from the Abbey, I have been keeping an eye
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Aged Porter and Mild
In 2017 I designed and brewed a beer with Three Notch'd Brewing in Charlottesville, Blackwall London Porter. The recipe for Blackwall was based on copious amounts of research into porter brewing in the middle of the 19th century, and named for the docks in London which were so central to the history of the British Empire. Featuring about 30% brown malt, the beer was only brewed a couple of times, but at the last brewing in 2018, I made sure to get myself a growler's worth for a little project. Beer hacking, to use Evan Rail's term. As well as my growler of Blackwall, I bought a bottle of Orval, which I promptly drank and pitched the dregs, containing all that brettanomyces goodness, into the growler, and soon enough the gasket on the swing top was thoroughly deformed as the additional CO2 created by our friend brett was expelled. Yesterday, after nearly 8 years of the growler sitting on the shelf in my beer room, I took the opportunity of the head brewer from Selvedge helping me
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Homebrew Blitzed
I used to enter homebrew competitions far more regularly, then kids happened and brewing took a bit of a back seat for a few years. Eventually though, things eased up and brewing become a more regular part of life, getting a proper kegerator definitely helped, as did getting a chest freezer for cold fermentation and then lagering. For the last couple of years I have brewed, on average, once every three weeks - well, the kegerator won't feed itself after all, and getting beer on tap in my own kitchen is freaking awesome. Admittedly I dipped a toe back into competition world last summer when I submitted a couple of brews to the Dominion Cup, but not knowing that feedback is now online rather than sent in the mail, I have no idea how they fared, other than not getting any gongs. To be honest, I didn't actually know that until Sunday morning when a friend told me that feedback was through the app for Virginia Beer Blitz, which was on Saturday. I entered three beers in this year's competiti
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Get Your Goat
Goodness me, it has been a while. This last weekend, Mrs V was up in Washington DC for the annual American Montessori Society conference, she being a Montessori teacher and all that. Thus it was that it was just me and the twins from Thursday night through until Sunday afternoon when she got home. What to do though with a pair of 8 year old boys with sufficient energy to power a small city, especially on Saturday, as they had school on Friday. Thankfully I got a text during the week from a Welsh friend asking if we fancied taking our combined brood of children for a hike or some kind of adventure, followed by chilling out at a brewery given that the weather was supposed to be glorious. Spoiler alert, it was. We settled on visiting Luray Caverns, a karst system in the Shenandoah Valley, not too far from Harrisonburg, which is one of the most beautiful cave systems we have ever visited. This was the second time the twins and I had been, but the first for our friends. Having wandered thro
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Lost Breweries of Egerland
Along the north western edges of modern day Czechia lie the Ore Mountains, known in Czech as Krušné hory, and in German as Erzgebirge. The mountains themselves straddle the border between Czechia and Germany, and as the name makes patently obvious mining was for centuries the primary industry. It is actually from the town of Jáchymov that we get the word "dollar" as a name for many currencies, though obviously from it's German name Joachimsthal - the silver that was mined here was minted into the standard coin for trade throughout Europe, the Joachimsthaler, which was shortened to just "taler", and eventually became "dollar". For centuries the mountains and their hinterland to the east formed a region known as Egerland, known in Czech as Chebsko. As early as the 11th century, German speakers were invited to Bohemia to work the mines that generated some of the most industrialised areas of the Austro-Hungarian empire, with glass works, lace making, and textiles also prevalent. Wher
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Why No Dry?
Since 2007, I have taken the month of January off the booze. This was before the concept of "Dry January" was even a thing, and I literally chose to take the month off because I felt like shit on New Year's Day and had decided I needed to lose some weight, and so no booze for a while was part of that plan. I actually ended up taking nearly 6 months off the beer, though with the occasional bottle of Frankovka, a Czech red wine, and losing an inordinate amount of weight prior to my first visit to the US that summer. My month off became an annual tradition, one that I justified as being "the best way to lose the Christmas weight", and so it remained for most of the last 19 years. Most years I did indeed shed the pounds that I had gained by serious indulgence in the festive spirit, and by the end of the month I was eagerly anticipating my first beer of the year. This year I decided to change things. In 2025 I hit the ripe middle age of 50, even seeing that in black and white looks a bit od
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Fuggled Virginia Cider of the Year
Turning my attention away from beer for a moment to finish up my booze review of 2025, we come to cider. Specifically, Virginia cider since that is the mainstay of my cider drinking world, and it would be disingenuous of me to have categories for outside of the Commonwealth. Looking back over my notes for the year, I have also decided to cut back on the number of categories from last year. Out go "Flavoured" ciders and "Pommeau/Strong Cider", not because I haven't had any of those categories, but because I have really only had one of each. As nice as they were, and in the case of the Sage Bird Long Light superb, again it feels a little damning with faint praise to give them their own categories. So we have just the two: single varietal blended (including co-ferments) Let's dive in... Single Varietal Malus X Dolgo - Troddenvale, Warm Springs Virginia Hewes Crab - Big Fish Cider, Monterey GoldRush - Buskey Hard Cider, Richmond Honorable mentions: Hazy Lady (Winesap) - Ciders from Mars, S
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Fuggled Beer of the Year
Ok then, the choices have been made, the runners and riders whittled down to just three beers, a pale, a BOAB, and a dark, and final decision must be taken to crown the 2025 Fuggled Beer of the Year. As in years past, and most certainly in years yet to come, the present awarding of the title comes with little fanfare, and a miserly pot of coin - i.e. no coin whatsoever. It does come, however, with the knowledge that this little part of the internet appreciates your beer and will happily drink more of it in the future. Our finalists then are: Pale: Spoolboy 10° - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville, VA BOAB: Altbier - Bierkeller Brewing, Columbia, SC Dark: Aecht Schlenkerla Erle - Heller-Bräu Trum, Bamberg, DE I am sure this comes as no surprise to anyone, but since Spoolboy has been available on tap at Selvedge, it has basically become my go-to beer. Pretty much whenever I walk in, the folks behind the bar know what my, and Mrs V's, first beer of the visit will be, and so fresh pin
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Fuggled Beers of the Year: Dark
Given the inherent subjectivity of the BOAB category, it is always good to be back on more solid ground with dark beers, and I do love a good dark beer. That said, most of the dark beers I have drunk this year have been my own. In the spring I brewed my annual dry stout, imaginatively monikered "Virginia Stout", for Mrs V's fiddle teacher, who hosts a St Patrick's Day party every year, and it is just de rigueur to have a session stout at such events. In the summer I brewed a dark mild, again for a party, this time a birthday bash. Going through my records for non-VelkyAl brewed dark beers it is clear that the pickings are very slim...so I will pivot and just mention a single beer from each of the geographies, and name a winner. Virginia Tweed Dunkel - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville Back at Yuletide 2024, I rocked up to the bar at Selvedge - gasp, shock, horror - and was given a bottle of Tweed, kellerbier style, in that it had been bottled straight out of the lagering tank with stil
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Fuggled Beers of the Year: BOAB
Audience meet BOAB, BOAB meet audience. If it is your first time meeting BOAB, you might just need to know that it is Fuggled-speak for beers that are "between orange and brown", so anything from Vienna lagers to brown ale and everything in between, erm obviously as that is in the name. Onwards ho! Virginia Tavern Brown Ale - Alewerks Brewing, Williamsburg Beech Blanket - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville Loden Vienna Lager - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville Honorable mentions: Threadenator; Houndstooth - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville; Fritz - SuperFly Brewing, Charlottesville; Wolf Gang Vienna Lager - Buffalo Mountain Brewing, Floyd. Let's just get one thing out of the way Selvedge are going to dominate the Virginia lists for these reviews for the very simple reason I drink far more of their beer than any other brewery in Virginia. As I mentioned in a Vinepair article last year, they are knocking it out of the park, and if anything they are only getting better as Josh and ga
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Fuggled Beers of the Year: Pale
It's that time of the year, the Winter Solstice is upon us, and what better to do than to review a year's worth of drinking? As has become my own tradition, I will break this down into multiple posts, one for pale beer, one for BOAB ("between orange and brown", and dark, and then an overall beer of the year, as well as one for Virginia cider of the year. As I have done for several years now, I will highlight beers from Virginia, the rest of the US, and the rest of the world before crowning each category winner, so on with the show... Virginia Spoolboy 10° Czech pale lager - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville Chain Stitch Helles - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville Coat Czech 12° Czech pale lager - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville Honorable mentions: Ten - Sojourn Fermentory, Suffolk; Pylon Pilsner - Patch Brewing, Gordonsville; Voda Czech style Pilsner - Caboose Brewing, Vienna; Vested Interest - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville. A clean sweep for the brewery I visit far more than any
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Morana: Tmave's Birthday in America
This Thursday is the 15th anniversary of the day I spent at Devils Backbone Basecamp brewing the first ever batch of Morana , a Czech style dark lager that I designed for them. I had spent the previous months diving into archives, emailing with multiple brewers, and beer experts, in various languages - English, German, Czech, and Slovak - to learn everything I could about a family of beers that at the time only consisted of about 5% of Czech beer production. Obviously, having only fairly recently decamped from Prague to Virginia, I was also relying on my own remembrances of beers that I had got a taste for in the last couple of years there, when I moved beyond the realms of Gambrinus, Staropramen, and Velkopopovivký Kozel. My go-to dark lagers at the time were brewed by Kout na Šumavě and available at the fantastic U Slovanské lipy , but it was the 14° version that I was using as my model for Morana. They also had an 18° that as a 0.3l malé pivo made for a wonderful nightcap. Back in 2
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Old Friends: Unibroue La Fin du Monde
Let me take you back in time. It is late December 2008 (yeah, I know, it seems like entire lifetimes ago), Mrs V and I have yet to leave Prague for the United States - in fact, at this point we didn't really know where in the US we would be moving to, given Mrs V hadn't found a job. At that time, my parents lived in an impossibly gorgeous hamlet in the Haute Vienne region of France, in an old farmhouse that still had a couple of acres of land attached. They had a small orchard, a pond, and green fields as far as the eye could see in every direction. Around 5pm every afternoon, the neighbours ran their herd of cattle, and the ground would gently tremor at the stampede. With Christmas just a week or so away, Mrs V and I flew to Paris Orly at some ridiculous time of the morning, to catch the train from Gare d'Austerlitz to La Souterraine, where my parents would pick us up and head to their hamlet. That particular winter I had ordered a load of beer from the UK, since my parents were visit
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Old Friends: Boddingtons Pub Ale
I am starting to think that my eldest brother has an awful lot to answer for, and not just the horse racing I mentioned in the last post. Fun fact, when my younger brother and I were around 11/12 years old, the eldest, then about 19 I think, came home to stay for a while, and so naturally he taught us how to read the form for the horse racing. We loved having our big brother at home, he was our hero and we thought him the very epitome of cool, every Saturday morning we would head up to the local shop, at the time we lived in a place called Sebastopol, not in Crimea, but just outside Cwmbran in Wales, and buy the paper. We would then sit and go through the races for that day, and my brother would give us both a quid to put on any horse we wanted, when the National came round he bumped it to a fiver. It was he that told us to always keep an eye out for a horse that has come fourth in both its previous outings, the frequency with which they win is interesting. Anyway, said brother,
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Old Friends: Leffe Blonde
Dipping into some of the dimmest and most distant of crevices in my drinking memories today for this resurrection of my Old Friends series. Back in the days when I was a college student in Birmingham, I got the train from New Street early one Saturday morning to go to Esher in Surrey. The main purpose for the trip was to spend the day at the Sandown races with my eldest brother, who lived down that way back then. Having spent the day frittering money away on thoroughbreds of varying uselessness, we headed into central London for dinner at a non-descript curry house, non-descript in the sense that I don't have the foggiest as to what I ate, but weirdly 2 beers are lodged in my memory, the Żywiec I was drinking and the Leffe Blonde that was my brother's choice that night. Being a good younger brother, by 8 years, I was suitably in awe of his sophistication and worldly wiseness, and so at some point back in Brum I made a point of trying Leffe, in the comfort of the All Bar One. Given that
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Homebrew - Victorian Style
There is something delightfully pompous, perhaps a little insane, about book titles in the Victorian era that always reminds me of the "Connections" TV series presented by James Burke. In episode 2 there is a segment about Victorian weather science in the Highlands, that describes the effect of science on the people of Victorian Britain, in that it: "made them all lunatic in the same way". An example of a daft book title is this magnificent tome from 1852... Can you get much more condescending than the head chef to the Royal Family should advise the working classes on how to cook? Admittedly I bought the book precisely for the title and out of curiosity about what the servants of the upper echelons though regular folks should, could, or even would be willing and able to cook. Francatelli even gives a list of equipment that said "working classes" require for the recipes and techniques in his book, which would cost £6 12s 4d in pre-decimal currency, that's about £700/$930/€800 today, and
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What The Schnitt?
Yesterday I introduced you to our friend Mr Bílek, shoemaker and fundraiser for Czech national causes extraordinaire, yet he was far from alone in his endeavours, as I discovered in the German language daily "Znaimer Tagblatt" from January 1900. Znaim is the German name for the modern city of Znojmo in Moravia (minor aside, I always find typing "Moravia" rather than "Morava" weird) and if ethnic maps of the late 19th and early 20th century are accurate the city, and its attendant region, was predominantly German rather than Czech. The history of Bohemia and Moravia within the context of the wider Austro-Hungarian Empire is delightfully complex and multi-ethnic, and I don't want to get into that fun here. However, what is clear is that Czechs and Germans living in Bohemia and Moravia used each other to prod and cajole their fellow citizens into ever greater demonstrations of national fervour. According to this story, the fund raising undertaken by the likes of Mr Bílek at U Fleků had ra
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Collecting Coins in the Pub
I am always fascinated by the social and political aspects of the pub, perhaps more so even that the beery ones. Pubs, beer halls, biergartens, are all inherently social and political spaces, because they are places where humans get together and talk about the things that are important to them, or at least on their minds. Sure, folks can prattle on about not talking about politics or religion in polite society, but the pub, beer hall, or biergarten are not necessarily polite spaces, and so it is no surprise when you dig into the role such places have played in history that you learn interesting things...such as this story from the "Kuryer Lwowski" - that's Lemberger Courier for the non Polish speakers amongst us... As you can probably tell from the highlighted sections, I was doing a search on the legendary Prague beer hall, U Fleků, but this story from May 4th 1893 has nothing to do with black beer, or any other shade of booze, rather it comes from a story titled "How Czechs Collect D