The price of beer has been on my mind a fair bit lately. At the weekend I kicked my first keg of homebrew for the 2024, a 5.1% amber kellerbier that I brewed on New Years Eve. The recipe was nothing spectacular: 6.5lb Murphy & Rude Vienna malt 3.5lb Murphy & Rude Munich 9 malt 0.5oz Magnum 2oz Saaz 1oz Hallertauer Mittelfrüh 2 packets Saflager 34/70 If anything were out of the ordinary about this beer, it was that it marked the first time I did a decoction mash. The beer that eventually came out of the tap was lovely, and looked like this: Admittedly I was somewhat gutted that it ..read more

The Virginia brewing scene is a poorer place today. Do we still have around 350 breweries in a state with a population of 8.6 million, giving us a brewery for approximately every 24,000 people? Yes we do. Can you go in pretty much any decent sized store and get beer brewed in Virginia? Yes you can. Still, the Virginia brewing scene is a poorer place today. "Why?" I hear you ask... Yesterday, Josh Chapman, owner and brewer at Black Narrows Brewing on Chincoteague Island announced that they have decided to close their doors - their final weekend in operation will be February 16-18th. You ..read more

Tmavé, the Czech style dark lager, has been on my mind a lot recently. Not just because Morana is available at Devils Backbone Basecamp at the moment, I don't believe it is on at either of their other locations, Outpost in Lexington or Back Yard in Charlottesville, but hopefully it will be at some point. Also not just because I am planning to brew my own version of Morana, that I call Černý Lev (that's Black Lion for the non-Czech speakers), at some point in the nearish future as I have started doing decoction mashes with my homebrew. These two facts though are related to my pondering...but f ..read more

Originally I considered doing a "brewery of the year" but as I don't want to drag this year end review into 2024, or try you good folks' patience with endless posts about 2023, I ditched it and decided to just have boozer of the year as my final fling, especially as this year I have travelled outside the US a couple of times, so a rest of the world category is actually a possibility. My definition of "boozer" here is pretty all encompassing, places where I can get a full serving of beer, whether that be a pint, half litre, or 12oz bottle, so brewery tap room counts as well as a cafe with dece ..read more

Having whittled down my long lists to short lists, we come to the final beer list of my annual review, the winners of the three categories. To recap then, the winning beers were: Pale - Fabián 10° - Pivovar Hostomice, CZ Between Orange and Brown - Tabolcloth - Selvedge Brewing/Tabol Brewing, Virginia Dark - Sláinte - Three Notch'd Brewing, Virginia I knew when I was planning my trip to Prague that I would find the necessary time to get round to Pivovarská Nelevarna, the city tap for Pivovar Hostomice. I knew that I wanted to introduce my friends to what I think of as one of my favourite p ..read more

Having meandered through the shades of ochre that makes up the spectrum from orange to brown, we move into the properly dark beer category. Let us then descend into the darkness... Virginia Sláinte - Three Notch'd Brewing, Charlottesville Spire City - Wheatland Spring Brewing, Waterford London Porter - Superfly Brewing, Charlottesville Honorable mentions: Break Out Your Wellies - Selvedge Brewing Company; Schwartz Bier - Devils Backbone Brewing, Roseland; Porter - Port City Brewing, Alexandria. If you lingered around Fuggled for any reasonable length of time, you will no doubt have seen me ..read more

The year is 1879. The famous Blackpool Illuminations are turned on for the first time. John Henry Newman is raised to the position of cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, having converted from Anglicanism in 1845. Fulham F.C. is founded. In Vienna, Emperor Franz Joseph has been on the imperial throne for 31 years, having acceded in 1848, just 18 years old after the abdication of his uncle Ferdinand, and his father Franz Karl's renunciation of the throne. I don't usually write about the lives of European royalty, but as I was researching something utterly unrelated on the French national ..read more

The very first post of 2023 on here was "Year of Czech...Snacks", in which I held forth on the notion that if 2023 was to be the "Year of Czech Beer" then I really hoped that we would also see more elements of Czech beer culture come to the fore. With just a few weeks until the end of the year, I can honestly say that I have not really seen a noticeable increase in the number of Czech style lagers available in this part of the world. The cynical side of me kind of wonders though if "America", when it comes to beer trends, is largely limited to the West Coast, Colorado, and New England. Czech b ..read more

I worked out the other day that each day I was in Prague I walked about 7-8km, which is about 4.5-5 miles in old money. The longest walk though was on the Thursday, when I dragged my mate Dave - well ok then, not much dragging was involved - up to the park at Letna to recreate one of my favourite wanders from when Mrs V and I called Prague "home". Taking the tram to Letenské náměstí we walked to the edge of the park that overlooks the Vltava, along the escarpment to the Metronom where once the world's biggest statue of Stalin stared out at the city. We carried on, eventually to the castle, and ..read more

I was in Prague last week for a few days. When I mentioned to a friend that I was going to be in Amsterdam for a conference in the middle of November, he pointed out that I may as well make use of the whole being in Europe anyway thing and hop over to Prague. Naturally I agreed entirely, and so did my best friends, one that lives in Slovakia and the other in Boston. I have spent an inordinate amount of time in the last few months trying to decide what breweries and pubs I definitely wanted to get to, and often it came down to a choice of 2 for an out of town excursion, Únětice or Hostomice. I ..read more