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#wafflings
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Timmy in Thames Town
Having left the Westminster Arms, I had a very particular pub to wander to, for family reasons that are probably daft. I had promised my younger twin son that I would visit a pub called The Albert, as that is his first name. The Albert is a Greene King pub, but it is also listed on the Timothy Taylor website's Pub Finder tool as a permanent stockist of their beers, so I knew that if nothing else took my fancy there would be something from Timothy Taylor as a guest beer. Sure enough, once I had squeezed my way through the crowd - something I loved about being back in the UK was seeing groups of pub-goers standing with pints on the street, I immediately spotted the Timothy Taylor Landlord pump clip and knew what I was going to drink. From memory - taking notes in a crowded pub was very much not on the schedule - Landlord in The Albert was in good nick, wonderfully hoppy, and far too easy to down in a handful of mouthfuls. Landlord is a classic for a reason, and eventually I need to brew
by noreply@blogger.com (Alistair Reece)0 viewsgolden-bestlandlordreal-alesanctuary-house-hotelthe-alberttimothy-taylor - news
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
by noreply@blogger.com (Alistair Reece)2 viewsbest-bitterenglish-beerpremium-bitterstrong-bittertripswafflings - news
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
by noreply@blogger.com (Alistair Reece)3 viewsbeer-travelpubswafflingswebsites - news
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
by noreply@blogger.com (Alistair Reece)4 viewsbeer-businessbeer-newsmurphy-rudenewsvirginiavirginia-beer - news
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
by noreply@blogger.com (Alistair Reece)4 viewshomebrewvirginia-beer-blitzwafflings - news
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
by noreply@blogger.com (Alistair Reece)4 viewsalpine-goat-brewingvirginia-beerwafflings - news
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
by noreply@blogger.com (Alistair Reece)4 viewsdry-januarywafflings - news
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
by noreply@blogger.com (Alistair Reece)4 viewshomebrewmoranamorana-dark-lagertmavewafflings - news
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,
by noreply@blogger.com (Alistair Reece)4 viewsboddingtonsold-friendstasting-noteswafflings - news
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
by noreply@blogger.com (Alistair Reece)4 viewsabbey-aleleffe-blondeold-friendstasting-noteswafflings - news
Stuck
I'm stuck in a rut. It has been 49 days since my last post, I have several other writing projects stacked up, waiting to be completed, I am just not happy enough with them yet. I need something to break the log jam. So here is my crazy idea, I am just going to write whatever random boozy thoughts pop into my head each and every day for the rest of July, including when I am in Florida on vacation. Maybe I will find something new in the Austrian newspaper archive that I love to trawl, maybe it will be a few lines of total tosh that just needs someone to comment that I am completely wrong, or right, or that you've been feeling the same but unable to say it. Maybe I won't stress myself out with long form essays, maybe I'll just post pictures of my homebrew, or other good beers I am enjoying, or more likely at the moment, something about the glories of cider in Virginia. Maybe a commenter (remember those?) will ask a question looking for my opinion on something? Who knows? I need to b
by noreply@blogger.com (Alistair Reece)4 viewshalf-formed-rantswafflings - news
Lamentationes Desperatorum
I was wandering around the supermarket where I do the weekly shop recently, and as is my wont I bimbled over to the beer section to have a browse. I was pretty sure I wouldn't be buying anything, my beer fridges being pretty full of excellent lager after all, but it is a habit at the end of the shop to just take a peek. Now, while owning the fact that I do my weekly shop in a supermarket, and that I understand they have to offer what is more likely to sell, it was still a dispiriting experience. Unless you have read a vanishing small number of my posts on here, or any other social media platforms, you will know that I am a very irregular drinker of the old India Pale Ale - side thought, it seems almost jarringly quaint to see it spelt out in full rather than just acronymed down to IPA. Yes, I am predominantly a lager drinker, especially of beers I am buying in the shop or at the pub/taproom. Most of the top fermented beers I drink are my own homebrew, stuff like bitter, mild, stout, an
by noreply@blogger.com (Alistair Reece)5 viewshalf-formed-rantssupermarket-beerwafflings - news
Session 146 - What Value in Beer?
Yikes, where did the last couple of months go? The cynic side of me says "right down the shitter" whereas the more considered side says "life's just busy". Anyway, it's time for the Session again, and this month is being hosted by Ding and he has asked us to consider the "value" of beer , in the sense of: "when I part with the cash, no matter how large or small the amount, does what I receive in return meet or exceed the value of said cash? Subjective? Sure, but we all have our own sense of value." Yeah, very subjective topic here, but one that I feel gets to the very heart of why we drink beer at all, or at least why we don't submit ourselves to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator brew that is ubiquitous with wherever we live. That's not to say that industrial brews like Budweiser, Carling Black Label, Stella Artois, or Gambrinus are inherently bad, just that they lack value for me. So, yes, let's think about value, at least the word itself. Value is by its very
by noreply@blogger.com (Alistair Reece)4 viewsbeer-businessthe-sessionwafflings - news
The Session - Best at Home
This month's iteration of The Session is being hosted by Ray and Jess over at Boak and Bailey, and the theme they have presented us with is: "What's the best beer you can drink at home right now?" Until Mrs V and I decided to encumber the universe with children, the vast majority of our drinking was not done at home. We had several regular haunts to sit and have a pint or two; whether the original Three Notch'd Brewery tasting room, Beer Run, or even the bar at Whole Foods - seriously, at one point it was social central as we invariably ran into folks we knew and so another pint was had. We still do a fair amount of our drinking outside the home, often at Selvedge, Patch, or still Beer Run. Even though we used to drink mostly at taprooms or pubs, I always had a very well stocked cellar, often including lots of my own homebrew, but going out was the norm. Times however have been a'changing, and drinking at home has become almost the default for various reasons that I am not going to bot
by noreply@blogger.com (Alistair Reece)4 viewsbest-bitterhomebrewthe-sessionwafflings