Guest Blog: World Cup Beer Sweepstake - Bier Uber Alles

I met Matt the day I started university. He was staying in the room next to mine. We bonded over Chatham (I went to Chatham Grammar school, he went to Chatham House) and our yet-to-come-out housemate Iain. He is also the one who got me into real ale, so I’ve got lots to thank him for, and if you see me out drinking in London then he is likely the guy I’m drinking with.

It’s taken almost two years but he’s finally written a post for the blog (probably only because he might win free beer out of it). Hopefully, because I think it’s brilliant, he’ll write a few more.

Germany… cheers Marky. The one team I didn’t want to be cheering on, no matter how many hops are on the line. I instantly gave up on the idea of winning any beer, as Germany would surely be toppled by England at some point on their way to a glorious victory over Brazil in the final. Some lucky chap got England in the sweepstake, and will be sitting there on July 11^th sipping an English bitter, and wondering if life gets any better.

(OK so it didn’t quite work out that way, but blind optimism is a lifestyle choice and I’m sticking with it).

I could not be short of inspiration for this task, as Germany has a rich and illustrious history in both the beer and football departments, and if I had chosen to base my beverage on their beer credentials, a world of delights awaited me. I could have raved about a creamy kolsch, admired a refreshing pilsner, or even got a bit smoky with a naughty rauchbier. I could have done this while talking about German beer purity laws, Oktoberfest, steins, bratwurst, pretzels and numerous other subjects which paint Germany in an impressive light.

However, this is world cup time and I approached it from a football perspective, which as an English fan talking about the Germans means jingoism, patriotism and no short measure of stereotypes. My selection of beer would represent nothing more than national pride, resentment and prejudice toward the dull, efficient, mechanical and bloody successful football team they insist on producing every time a major tournament comes around. They can beat us on penalties and make Gazza cry all they like, but I can tell the world that they make substandard beer. So I didn’t search the web, I didn’t go to any of the excellent German food markets or delicatessens around London, or even an awesome bierkeller; I went to LIDL in Finsbury Park.

Walking around the world of unpronounceable bargains, I looked for an appropriate beer to chastise and deride. I found my prey right in the middle of the utilitarian warehouse, a 5 litre keg of Grafenwalder Pils, decorated like an old fashioned football, all for the bargain price of 10 Sterling. I stocked up on chocolate, cured meat and lemonade, and set about lugging it all back on the bus across North London.

Keeping it cold was a challenge – I had to remove pretty much everything in the fridge, including some of the shelves. I also had to think about when I was going to drink this thing – 5L is somewhere north of 8 pints, which is a lot to drink during the week, especially if working with a hangover is not one of your talents.

I started on the Tuesday, and attempted my very best tasting notes, because as much as I wanted to dislike it, it was still a beer and deserved due care and attention. My initial reaction was cold, mainly. And fizzy. But I can do better than that, surely.

It poured a rather lively pale yellow, with a clean white head that dissipated quickly, and clung in unattractive patterns to the edges of the glass. The aroma was slightly bready, a touch of grassiness, and generally ‘beery’. It tasted very clean, almost to the point of being soapy and antiseptic. There are some doughy, caramel notes too sweet for the lack of bitterness, and just enough grassy hops to remind you that something in here grew from the ground. Light and watery with little texture or body, it did however have a nice refreshing quality, and a boozy finish which made me feel like I was drinking more heavily than I was, which is always nice when watching football. My girlfriend also assures me it delivers an excellent shandy.

I retrieved it form the fridge on night 2, and it was much better. This may have been because I had just watched England beat Slovenia while drinking probably the best lager in the world at my boss’s expense, but whatever. I had a few very jovial glasses and started to think I had misjudged this brilliant, misunderstood beer. Again, thumbs up on the shandy.

Night 3 brought things into perspective, not only because half of the remaining beer had slowly dribbled from its container into the crisper. The life had drained from this once great beast, and it told. Flat, lifeless and devoid of flavour, it was a real chore to dispense with the remaining liquid (I did though, it’s still beer). Thumbs down for the shandy too.

So in summary, I attempted to balance out England’s massive inferiority on the football pitch with some good old German bashing, which to an extent worked just fine. But actually I had quite a lot of fun both finding and drinking the beer, which helped give more than one evening plenty of merriment. I watched England v Germany on Sunday, and they were far superior to us in every department. But as I drank with my friends Fuller, Smith and Turner, I was comforted by the fact that I could take pride in something English on a daily basis. Still wish we were better at football though.


Cheers Matt. Only eight people are left in with the chance of winning and we're still missing lots of blog posts. If you aren't still in and you haven't posted then I hope you still do. The deadline is the World Cup final so get them posted by then!

Guest Blog: World Cup Beer Sweepstake: Portugal

Here’s the first guest blog from the World Cup Beer Sweepstake and it comes from one of my best mates, Lee (@Lee_B on twitter). Almost everything he says isn’t repeatable when other people are around so thankfully he’s managed to tone it down, apart from the single mention of ginger pubes.

When Mr Dredge pulled my name out of the bowl and partnered it with Portugal, I had mixed feelings. Sure, Portugal had an okay chance of winning, and the beer wouldn’t be too hard to get hold of, but as far as I knew there wasn’t anything exciting about Portugal. If Spain is the cool guy you invite to the party, then Portugal is his ugly younger brother, sitting with the cheese board on his lap watching other people mack on chicks. 

Combine this with the fact that my knowledge of football teams stopped somewhere around the Liverpool ‘97 squad (come on McManaman!) and it becomes clear that maybe I wasn’t the best guy to be given this country.

Still, I had signed up for the Beer Sweepstake and now I had to make the best of what I was given. A part of me also hoped that in searching out the beer I would discover more about Portugal, and maybe even fall in love with the place. So the search began…

..and then it stopped pretty soon after. It turns out that the most popular beer in Portugal is Super Bock, and that the Oddbins situated 30 metres from my door stocked a ton of the stuff. This wasn’t going to be a particularly epic beer quest after all. 

After purchasing two bottles (and a cheeseburger from the McDonalds next door) I headed home to see if I could get more excited about the beer than I did about the country.

Pouring the beer into a glass I was struck by just how light it looked. I’ve had my fair share of pale ales but this looked more like water that had been sieved through some ginger pubes. But we don’t drink beer with eyes do we? What matters is the taste so as I wrapped my moustachioed lips around the fizzing yellow concoction I hoped for the best.

Super Bock is an extremely hard beer to review. It’s one of those beers I can imagine people fall in love with when they are holidaying on the beach, but when revisited in the cold damp English weather they can’t really remember what was so great about it. It’s not that is bad, on the contrary it is a perfectly adequate lager (and a lager is certainly what it is) but that’s all it is. It’s like someone read what lager was, and made some in the most mechanical way possible. There is no love, no passion, no life to it. I almost feel like I would prefer to hate it, because then it would have at least garnered some kind of reaction,  but this is just another one of those tasteless beverages that football fans will be drinking in pubs all over the country.

So sadly Super Bock failed to endear me to the Portuguese way of life. If at the start of this article I seemed to be ignorant of any cultural impact Portugal has made then I’m afraid that remains unchanged after this mini beer adventure.

Still, I hope they win though - I could do with a year’s supply of beer. As long as there is no Super Bock mixed in there.

The image is from here.

Lauren’s blog: What it’s like to go out with a beer geek

Oh dear, what have I done? Inspired by yesterday’s blog to/about my girlfriend Lauren, she has decided to write what it’s like from her side of things... This could also be subtitled: the view from the other half (or the other side of the table), as some of the pictures will confirm. And this is all her doing, too.


If you read Mark’s blog regularly you will know he has a long suffering girlfriend, I am that girlfriend and I thought I would give this blogging a go.

Mark is a beer geek and this has both pros and cons. Let me start with the pros, hmmmmm, yes the pros, actually let’s come back to that and let’s start with the cons.

I am most frustrated by the amount of Mark’s times he dedicates to his love of beer. He is either drinking, reading, buying or writing about beer, this leaves very little time for anything else, and most importantly no money for presents. When cleaning the flat I often come across bottle tops (Mark insists on hiding these on the top shelf where he thinks I won’t find them... wrong!) and empty bottles (he has taken to using these for flowers; I think this is to stop me throwing them out). Our wardrobe, commonly used for clothes, is used to store beer, and until recently a whole corner of the bedroom was taken up by a box of beer (it might be worth mentioning the 19 bottles I’ve just ordered from Brewdog... I’m eyeing up that corner again). The fridge is always full of beer which I am not allowed to lay down to make more room for my hummus and Coke Zero. I hate washing the odd shaped glasses and finding space for them in the cupboard (Mark is very precious about his glasses). I have been dragged along to beer festivals, often bribed with chocolate and biscuits and magazines. I am often the only female with her own teeth (I haven’t taken her to any good beer festivals, just the down-market smelly ones, so this is probably my fault!) and Mark always leaves me alone while he finds anther beer lover to talk to, and this seems to invite strange drunk men to sit next to me and strike up conversations about the odd band which have been deafening me. After a festival, beer night, pub, or evening in front of the tele with a few beers, I have been kept awake listening to Mark talking in his sleep when he has had one-too-many (yes, it’s quite odd, and he often laughs in his sleep when he has had more than 2 pints, weirdo). And I always know when he’s getting drunk because he doesn’t stop talking, yabbering on about everything and anything, usually beer-related.

And no, I don’t want to just try a sip. I don’t care how good you think it is, I don’t want to try it.

The pros of being with a beer geek are the sheer passion and enthusiasm which I find so infectious. I enjoy smelling the different beers, looking at the pretty labels and watching that smile on his face when he opens the special beer he has been waiting for all week. I enjoy listening while Mark tells me what people are saying on twitter, who is drinking what and where, and reading the lovely comments on his blog (I’m sure there are more pros than this... she gets to go on lovely day trips to different pubs... anything else...).

Sometimes I do wish Mark wrote about biscuits or cake because the tasting would be much more fun and I could share in his enthusiasm, but really I enjoy his passion, and I know it makes him happy. I think that my life would be quite dull without Mark’s interest in beer and the pros far outweigh the cons. I am so proud that this beer geek is all mine.

(During the writing of this blog I also discovered how annoying it is when you are trying to write whilst somebody talks to you. I will in future leave him to write in peace).

Lots of love from Lauren.


There we go. All I have done is a quick clean-up edit. I think this post is great and it made me smile. What do you think your other half would write if she had the chance? See if they’ll do it! And I’ll be reminding Lauren of this post on Saturday night when she comes home and sees six very drunk chaps and a lot of empty bottles of stout (plus general food carnage) spread around the flat.

City Beer Store and San Francisco

A few weeks ago one of my best mates, Lee (he's @Lee_B on Twitter and you should follow him!), went to San Francisco complete with my Good Beer Guide to the West Coast USA (love that book!) and a looooong list of beers to try and hunt out for me, with the promise of generous financial reward if he was successful. Anyway, he did a stellar job picking me up some bottles and has written about his trip, so here it is, City Beer Store and San Francisco by Lee, my beer-loving friend.

When I recently spent just over two weeks in San Francisco I made a good effort of trying as much good beer as this beautiful city had to offer. Whenever I saw a new beer on the menu of a restaurant I would always order it no matter what.

The signature beer of San Fran- Anchor Steam was a fantastic summer beer with a sweet and hoppy taste but it could only take you so far. So I found myself searching out the hidden gems. Beer like AleSmith’s Speedway Stout was a coffee like behemoth of 12% that really blew me away, whilst Speakeasy's Prohibition was even better with its caramel nose, deep reddish colour and rich, complex taste. On top of this I had tried some good Hefeweizen, Fat Tire and an interesting Sam Adams Black Lager. All in all I felt I had tried a good amount of new beer and would have a lot to talk about when I returned home.

As the holiday was winding down I decided to make a small pilgrimage to The City Beer Store just off of Market Street to see if I could pick up a few bottles for a certain blog writing friend of mine, but truthfully I wasn’t expecting much more than the beer I had already discovered earlier in the holiday.

Boy, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Walking into The City Beer Store is a strange experience. It’s small, about the size of a garage with a small metal bar with five hand pumps, a few tables and chairs and boxes piled all around. The whole place feels unfinished but inviting. Behind the bar is a smiling young guy rocking an awesome moustache who turns out to be Craig Wathen, the owner (along with his wife Beth) of this fine beer Oasis. He invites me and my lady to take a seat and asks me what I would like to drink. A small chalk board on the wall lists approximately 6 beers that I have never heard of so I ask Craig what is good. He suggests a glass of the Telegraph Stock Porter so I take him up on and decide to look around whilst he pours.

On two nearby shelves are stacked approximately 300 beers from varying countries, all for sale individually (which is rare in America). A quick glance over these as I wait for my beer throws up some immediate gems such as Delirium Tremens, Deschutes' The Dissident and Lost Abbey's Inferno. Before I know it my beer is placed at my table and Craig gets back to work.

The first thing I notice about the Stock Porter is the spicy chocolate nose. This is one interesting smelling beer! After the first taste I realise there is an interesting tug of war going on between nose and taste as this porter has a surprisingly floral acidity to it. I gulp it down and tell Craig what I thought. I then decide to try one of the beers that caught my eye as I perused.

Russian River’s Blind Pig wasn’t an IPA I was aware of, but as Mark had seemed excited about their Pliny the Elder I thought I would try one of it’s sister beers. Craig cracked one open and handed it to me. The beer has an extremely citrus nose even for an IPA and it wasn’t particularly to my tastes but after the first sip I was hit by a pleasant bitterness and a good balance of malt and hop smoothness. All in all I would say this is worth seeking out if you head over to America.

Sadly I couldn’t stay at The City Beer Store much longer so I decided to pick up some purchases before I went. Mark had given me a list of beers he wanted (some were wishful thinking though methinks) and I managed to grab him his own bottle of Blind Pig and then a some bottles of Pliny the Elder (no Younger I’m afraid) and DogFish Head 90 minute IPA.

I thanked Craig for his great store and headed back to the hotel with a gentle but enjoyable buzz on.

I really can’t say enough about City Beer Store and if you’re ever in San Francisco you should definitely seek it out, you won’t have got a full taste of the city’s beer scene without it.

Lee B.


Don't you just wish you could find a beer store like that in the UK?! I sure do. Lee, you are a bastard getting Speedway stout and the Deschutes stuff. I’m so jealous of you because the store sounds amazing, the pic of the fridge shows off some beauties and because I wanna meet Craig! Now when can I get my beers?!

And remember, check out @Lee_B everyone, he rocks!