A Front Line Report on Beer in a Spanish Tourist Resort

Of course, my two week frolic to Spain was not just an excuse to escape to the sunshine and sandy beaches of the Mediterranean, it was a cleverly veiled covert beer research trip. This expedition was to look at restaurants, bars and supermarkets to see what the local choices are.

On the first supermarket trip I saw a well-stocked beer aisle, red with Spanish lagers and green with those from Northern Europe, plus the bright blue of Illa, Menorca's own beer. It also featured bottles of Guinness, Magners and Strongbow, Paulaner wheatbeer, Judas, Desperados and a few non-alcoholic cans. I was there for the Spanish beers.

To begin, an observation: The first night out I ordered a beer, as follows: “Hola. Beer please.” “Small or large?” was the response. Obviously I said large. It arrived a few minutes later in an unbranded nonic pint glass. It was Estrella Damm. I do not believe that Estrella Damm should ever be served in nonic pint glasses. Later in the break I ordered both a 'small' and a 'large' Estrella and they arrived in lovely, branded and stemmed glasses, either 20cl or 40cl, not in bloody pints. I realised, with that first pint, that I'd stepped into a parallel version of England located on a Spanish island. However, the thought of pints of Estrella did bring me some joy as I imagined the burly, burnt Brits with their beer-drink bravado sinking four pints and stumbling home drunk blaming the heat for their inability to walk in a straight line. Ha! Estrella is 5.4%. Ha! It's not like the 4% lager you gulp at home, mate!

Anyway, here's what else I found in the aisles of Spar. I hope, for anyone visiting Spain this summer, it may help you in your drinking:

Estrella Damm. As mentioned, it's 5.4%, but one assumes, being dainty and English, that it is less potent and therefore one to smash by the pint. I like Estrella a lot as a holiday beer. That extra strength translates to extra flavour and body. It's honey, bubblegum and bread and it's refreshing.

Illa is the local beer. It's brewed with local grain. I wrote a blog about it last week. I drank lots of them while I was away and I’m still not sure if it’s meant to taste the way it does or not. I still liked it though. This is the one craft beer brand I had in two weeks.

Cruzcampo is 4.8% and good when cold and served in small measures. It's got a lovely dry finish, like the hot air, that makes you go back for more.

The Spar have their own beer, imaginatively called Cerveza. It's 4.5%, it's pale, has lots of bubbles, lacks body and tastes of very little. Drink it very cold and very quick when you are very thirsty and you'll be slightly satisfied. Otherwise, don't bother.

Mahou is another bright red branded Spanish beer. It's 5.5% and more bitter than the other beers, making it dry and quenching and perfect for small measures and little plates of food. My scribbled notes suggest tobacco, sherbet and crackers which coincidentally is also the preferred diet of supermodels.

In one place I found Duff. Duff! I've written about my desire to drink animated beer before (in which I say that I never want to try it - curiosity overpowered me), to have that moment where I down a delicious pint of it in seconds with a refreshed 'aahhhhh'. Fortunately, tasting of very little, I managed to drink this bottle cartoonishly-fast.

Xibeca, a 4.6% beer from Damm, is, I guess, the cheaper brand from the brewery. It's called a pilsner but, given the dramatic lack of hops, I'd question that labelling. I bought a litre of this for not many euro cents and that's probably the best thing to say about it.

The opposite end of the brewery scale is Voll Damm. At 7.7% and in a dramatic, dark can, it calls itself 'Das Originale Marzenbier'. I did wonder if it was Spanish Special Brew but a tweet from Boak and Bailey confirmed that it's not tramp juice. It tastes good too; smooth and sweet, full-bodied, lots of toffee and caramel and just enough hops to not make it cloying. One for beer geeks.

Cruzcampo make a stronger beer, Gran Reserva, at 6.4%. It's a richer amber colour than the normal brew and it's subtle but very enjoyable: tangy malt, a noticeable hop presence, a little peachy aroma and a sherbety sweetness.

And San Miguel also do a fancier, stronger beer: Selecta XV. I liked it a lot. I walked past a restaurant where everyone was drinking this deep amber beer in fancy glasses and I had to go in for a closer look. I asked what beer they had and the waiter said San Miguel, probably assuming my Englishness and considering his fancy beer too delicious for me, and I resigned myself to a usual golden beer. However, I got the darker one. It's very tasty: caramel, little chocolate and lots of hops.

Normal San Miguel ain't too bad either. I had a couple of lovely 30cl glasses of it with a table covered in tapas (local food). Refreshing, light, quenching; everything a lager should be.

Next come three non-alcoholic beers, purely bought out of research and curiosity. Free from Damm looks like beer but definitely doesn't taste like it. Eyes-closed it could be sparkling water. One good thing, mainly of appeal to the calorie conscious who want to appear like they are drinking beer but are in fact not, is that there are only 33 calories in the can.

With almost three times the calories, is San Miguel's 0,0%. If you drink it very cold it isn't offensive, otherwise it is offensive. Order Diet Coke instead, or, even better, a proper beer.

And finally, Cruzcampo's Shandy, a 0.9% thing which tastes exactly like lemonade and nothing like beer (though it still looks like beer). It tasted so much like lemonade that I added gin to it to make it taste better.

I must also report back that I had Heineken and Amstel, though I do not recall them in great detail. The Heineken, however, was delivered when I expected to receive an Estrella and came as a shock to my delicate tastebuds. It appears that I don't enjoy Heineken very much. Amstel is ok.

These are my research findings. My preference is for Estrella Damm as my day-to-day drink, though I did like the stronger brews, especially the one from San Miguel. If you go to Spain this summer, as many millions of you will, then you will find that the sun is hot and the beer is cold and that’s all you really need to know, though it is, for a beer geek like me, fun to try a little of everything. 

FABPOW! Paella and Estrella

It's too easy, obvious even, but the Food and Beer Pairing of the Week, this week coming from beside the beach in Menorca, is paella and Estrella (which like last year's gyros and Mythos has a likeable rhyme to it).

This is one of those matches which is made perfect in the mouthful. Sure, the bright lift of carbonation, the sweet body and the dry quench of hops help, but the flavours themselves only go so far together. Paella and Estrella is a psychological kind of pairing where local flavours come together. It's why dumplings and Gambrinus work so well in the Czech Republic and why Carbonnade and dubbel work so well in Bruges, but take them somewhere else and they lose something: the psychological link lifts them up.

Paella: Fishy rice, rich and salty, golden from the tang of saffron, livened by lemon and fresh with seafood. Estrella stamps in rather than slides over, with its full body and hints of bubble gum, sherbet, honey and bread. There's an inelegance to it but it works like a pint of bitter and a ploughman's served in a pub garden: because it does, because they seem to belong on the same table, because it's simple, a no-brainer. And of course they taste good together but it works best because it's two local flavours enjoyed locally and that's enough for some of the best food and beer matches.

Global Lager, Locally (aka The Little Things)

Two weeks on a little Greek island means two weeks of drinking nothing but ice cold lager. And that’s a good thing. When the air is hot and dry and the sun is shining then a glass of lager is what I want in my hand. Forget big hops, forget barrel-aged whatevers, forget anything prefixed with imperial, why would you drink anything other than something cold, thirst quenching and refreshing?

The ubiquitous Stella-Carling-Fosters-Carlsberg-Kronenbourg line-up does nothing except inject a sad, staid sense of déjà-vu, but go abroad and suddenly the choice becomes exotic with lesser-spotted brands and the local lagers, plus you’re on holiday so the usual rules are not applicable – you can have chips with every meal, you can sleep in, you can go to bed late, you can wear nothing but shorts and you can drink buckets of lager and not feel naughty.

But one thing did stand out: the difference between the lager brands. I had a variety of different lagers and came to realise that it’s the little things which have the biggest effect. The main global brands in Greece (at least where I was - Skiathos) were Amstel and Heineken. Beneath these were the Greek beers Mythos, Alfa, Fix and Pils Hellas. A few German lagers were around too, the odd Corona or dusty bottle of Budweiser (would you pay 5 euros for a Bud?) and the occasional can of Guinness.

Amstel was better than I expected. It’s got a honey sweetness and a good body that makes it ideal for the hot weather and considering it’s produced by Heineken it’s a lot better than the brand it sits beneath - I thought Heineken was the worst of the beers I had while away; there was nothing redeeming about it. Mythos and Alfa are everywhere, although Mythos is everywhere more. Pils Hellas is a budget brand, cheaper and 4.5% compared to the 5% of the others. It’s a bit thin and lacklustre but not terrible in the sun (just not great either). Fix was a new one to me although it has a long history. It’s smartly branded and stands out but it doesn’t have the shelf-filling ability of the others yet. Flavour-wise it’s okay but there’s something missing which means it doesn’t quite stand up to the others - it did have a nice fruitiness to it and it’s easy drinking. Mythos and Alfa are both full-bodied, there’s an underlying sweetness to them, a dry finish at the end, a ghost-like hint of citrus and they quench a thirst leaving you wanting more. But for me it’s Mythos which stands out above all the others. Why is that?

Drinking the beers it was the subtle differences which stood out. What makes Mythos the best is a touch of sweetness at the tip of the tongue and a full body to give weight in the mouth when the cold kills the flavour. The carbonation is soft and there’s a little citrusy, fruity quality which makes it great with salty food (or salty sea air). The others didn’t have this, but there’s also a je ne sais quoi quality, something hard to describe. It’s just better (although Amstel is a close second, I think) but then Mythos should be the best because it’s made specifically for the Greek market and the Greek weather, right?

  

There is a flavour similarity to big brand lagers across the world, but there are subtle differences with them all - Bud is different to Stella which is different to Kronenbourg which is different to Chang, yet they are all 5% lagers with similar flavour profiles. So here’s a thought: Mythos in England, even on the hottest day of the year, doesn’t taste great, but would Mythos work in Barcelona on a hot day? Would Estrella Damm be good on a Thai beach? Would Chang be refreshing on a sunny Greek Island? Are these beers made better for drinking them in the country they are produced (and not just because you might be on holiday which makes everything taste better – the rose-tint of sunglasses) because there’s something about them which just works better locally (with the weather, the temperament, the food)? Is there intrinsic value in drinking them ‘local’, even though they are global-scale products? How important is a local place for the global brands of beer?

Out of Office Auto Response

I am out of the office and won’t return until Tuesday 20th July. Should anyone need me I’ll be on a hot, Greek beach or in a bar drinking ice cold Mythos.

If you have a question about World Cup Beer Sweepstake then please see Andy Mogg. The competition ends on 11th July. For any other enquiries please search the extensive list of names on the left hand side of this page.

I will be on my email; I may send a few tweets; I might even blog. If you need to contact me then please text, email or send a twitter DM and I will try to respond to you promptly. Anything non-essential will likely be forgotten or ignored.

See you when I get back!

Jackanory

I try and read as much as possible when I’m at home but going on holiday is the perfect time to really plough through a few books that have been on the shelf for a while. In the same way that I like to share the good beers that I drink, I want to share the good books that I read, especially when they are about beer.

Pete Brown’s Three Sheets To The Wind. I’d been meaning to read this for ages but don’t get through huge amounts of nonfiction at home. But I love nonfiction while reading on the beach. Three Sheets is Pete’s world-wide search for the meaning of beer. It’s funny, it’s ridiculously well observed, it’s well researched and a joy to read. I get through a lot of beer reading and can honestly say that I learnt more from this than anything else I’ve read. It made me think about the personal essence of beer and drinking, and about why I love it so much. It gave me massive wanderlust.

Pete Brown’s Hops and Glory. I finished Three Sheets then went on to Hops and Glory. This is an epic book in so many ways. The story itself is huge; brewing and taking a cask/keg of beer from Burton to India via sea. The history and the research is also epic. It’s doctoral thesis scholarly but in the most readable of ways. It’s got Pete’s laconic humour, his fragile sense of emotion and being and a true beating heart. It's an energetic travelogue and it’s filled with the type of descriptive prose that nineteenth century romance novelists would be jealous of. I could wax lyrical on and on about this… but as someone who wants to write and who loves beer, Hops & Glory is a brilliant inspiration.
Sam Calagione’s Brewing Up A Business. If you want to work for BrewDog then this book is part of the training. It’s Sam’s guide to running a small business and it’s filled with so many great stories about Dogfish Head Brewery. I laughed my way through this, I fell in love with his hard-working ethic, his charisma, his desire to succeed and I was completely inspired again. Whether you want to start your own business/brewery or you just love beer, this is a book to read.

Tim Lebbon’s Bar None. Tim is part of the Blog O’ Beer crew. He is also a successful novelist. I got an email a while back asking if I’d like a copy and said yes. It arrived two days before I left for holiday so it was squeezed into my hand luggage. It’s the post-apocalyptic journey of a handful of survivors to the safe haven of a pub. And beer is very important. The protagonist can only remember his wife when he drinks and it’s both heart-breaking and heart-warming at the same time. It’s a great walk through memory and time and place and people and I really liked it. The joy of this book is in the way that memories are linked through beer, kind of like the Taste of Memories.

Next I read two non-beer books by Malcom Gladwell. I read Outliers just after it was released and then bought Blink and Tipping Point. Let me say this: I think Malcom Gladwell is one of the greatest writers of our time. He thinks in a way and with a precision of mind that is impossible to comprehend until you read his words. Blink is about the moments when we know something without knowing why - it’s that snap judgment in the blink of an eye. Tipping Point is about the ascension to a moment where a thing ‘tips’ from being unimportant to incredibly important. Outliers is the story of why some people achieve so much more than others. All are awesome feats of academic and psychosocial thinking. If you haven’t read any Malcom Gladwell then you really must.

Chuck Palahnuik’s Invisible Monsters was the last book and I’ve been reading a lot of his stuff recently. This is my favourite book by him; it’s brilliant.

Some of the best moments of my holiday were sitting down in the evening sun and opening one of these books and a cold Mythos. I really do love sitting in the sun, reading and drinking a cold beer. In fact, as it’s a gloriously sunny day today, I think that’s how I’ll be spending my afternoon and evening.

Some Holiday Photos

As promised, here are some holiday photos. You may be delighted or you may be disappointed to hear that they are all of beer. Yes, I was sad enough to take a picture of every beer I had just for your viewing pleasure. And to add to my selflessness I made sure that I drank a wide variety of different beers from can, keg and bottle. And I tried every Greek beer I could get my dusty sun-tan lotion-soaked paws on. Enjoy my holiday in beers!

1. The first beer – a Mythos of course - with the mountains in the background. That one tasted amazing!

2. Mythos, this one in a restaurant on the beach.

3. Another Mythos. Get used to seeing those green letters.

4. And another one! This one with Pete Brown’s Three Sheets to the Wind. Great book and more on that to come, book worms.

5. You’ll never bloody guess what this is… Loving the frosted glass here.

6. It’s not Mythos! McFarland Red. Nutty but slightly phenolic. I didn’t love it love it love it.

7. Ah now here’s something pretty special. Even though I was away I didn’t forget my food and beer pairing: Italian Hell Bier with pizza flavoured crisps. Genius. Nice beer too, very pale, pretty sweet with hints of melon, apples and bubblegum. I will admit to only buying it because it was called Hell though, even if it was one of the better beers I had.

8. This looks like Heineken but it is in actual fact Amstel. I was watching Andy Murray in the Wimbledon semi-final with this one. When it’s cold and in an iced glass Amstel is very drinkable but as soon as the chill snap leaves it’s actually terribly.

9. Same bar just a pint later.

10. Mythos! Welcome back. And say hello to Lauren’s wrist and a little bit of boob.

11. Keo. Kee-ee-ee-o. Cypriot lager. Another pale one. This had some apple juice aromas to begin which left quickly. It’s very drinkable but a bit thin and becomes bland. Best enjoyed quickly.

12. Furstenbrau (plus some umlauts). It says it’s produced in Greece but the can also suggests, somehow, an Australian link. Ratebeer tells me it’s produced in the EU and distributed by Athenian Brewery so that doesn’t tells me much more. I won’t lie to you; I bought this because it was cheap. It was 0.44 euros. There’s a promising golden colour and it tasted a lot like a slice of liquid bread but it’s all a bit soapy and bland.

13. Kaiser Pilsner. The best selling pilsner in Greece according to the Carlsberg website. I believe it might be the Greek incarnation of this beer (only brewed at the hallowed Mythos Brewery), but I might be wrong. And you know what? I thought this little can was good. A fizzy gold but this time I smelt something that almost definitely suggested some hops had been nearby. I got a little bit excited by this. It had this really subtle tangy orange character, a dry floral breeze and a good body. And check out the (side of the) glass. I bought myself a Mythos glass for 0.80 euros - bargain!

14. Alfa. Another Grecian brew. It’s got that now familiar golden colour (a sun setting over a field of barley…), it’s bready, pale, clean and crisp with the occasional spritz of lemon. It’s pretty good but it’s no Mythos.

15. And talking of Mythos… Here’s another! This time it’s accompanied by Hops & Glory. I enjoyed many moments of sitting in the sun, glugging beer and reading Pete Brown’s words. A real pleasure.

16. Lunch time and more food and beer pairing. This is the first of the Craft beers which I managed to find at a supermarket out of town (it was over a kilometer away in stifling heat but well worth the trip – the shop also had a surprising selection of imports including wheat beers and a few Belgians, including Leffe). This was the Craft Red Ale paired with (very classy I am) moussaka from a can. The moussaka was surprising edible (just edible, nothing more) although a little strange and the beer was nutty, bready, edging towards singed with a dry berry-like finish. The beer was okay but I’m not a big fan of red ales. What’s their purpose?

17. Onwards to Stadelbrau. Brewed at the Macedonia Thrace Brewery so another Greek beer. This was pale with a nose of apples, white bread (more bread, seriously, it’s bloody everywhere) and a vague nod towards distant citrus trees. It’s smooth and easy drinking with malt first then a bready finish.

18. (Probably) Mythos!

19. Now this one annoyed me. Ignore the beer in the glass for a minute and forget that you’ve seen it. Now study the can and tell me what you’d expect from a 7% Polish beer called Tatna, with the word Mocne (whatever that means but in my mind it was saying mocha, it was saying I’m blacker than the night sky) underneath. I had every hope that it was going to be a fine Baltic porter, but no. It was a 7% lager and 7% lagers do nothing for me. I’ve never had one that doesn’t taste like a brutal upscaling of a 5% lager. This was a little cakey but over-strong in my opinion.

20. Craft Athens Lager. I had high hopes for this to be excellent but was left wanting. It’s not bad at all, I just wanted more. It’s got that classic barely-there nose. A crisp and clear body and a not-too-sweet flavour, it was just missing something.

21. Can you believe I nearly forgot to take a picture of this one?! It was an Alfa with dinner. I don’t remember what I ate but the plate’s empty so it must’ve been good.

22. Remember this blog post asking about which bottles to take? Well I took a BrewDog Hardcore IPA with me figuring that the massive dose of hops with smash my hop cravings to pieces and scare them away for a week or so. I was wrong. You know what, I only had one occasion where I was craving a hoppy beer and all I wanted was a pint of Hophead or Marble Pint. Anyway, I took the beer so I drank the beer when I finished Hops & Glory. It didn’t satisfy my thirst because it was too full-bodied and bitter for the 100 degree heat. It’s still a damn good brutish British IPA though.

23. The dream team: Mythos and a gyros. This picture essentially sums up the answer to the question: Why is Greece awesome?

24A. I saw this side of the can first and picked it up because it’s brewed in Greece. I then turned the can around…

24B. Tasting notes, as already semi-described to my twitter friends: A sexy gold, winking bubbles at the rim, it glides over the tongue and has a real nice bite. I could manage quite a few Verginas. (Sorry everyone but I simply couldn’t resist the gratuitous innuendo)

25. Hello Mythos and hello Malcom Gladwell. That guy can write.

26. And hello sailor! Sorry for including this everyone. I did take a ‘regular’ shot of this beer but this was so much funnier. I’m thinking of using it for my profile, what do you think? Does it say the right thing about me? Creative but not mental, fun, cool, the kind of person you’d like to sit down for a pint with… (And no I don’t mean a profile for a gay dating agency and no I don’t usually wear that stuff, I just happen to look especially camp right there).

27. Me and Lauren waiting for dinner posing while some Greek waiter tells us to smile. There’s a beer on the table and I bet you can’t guess what it is?!

28. I also took a BrewDog Coffee Imperial Stout. I really love this beer and its ever-swaying blend of earthy coffee, bitter dark chocolate, citrusy hops and woody oak. I bought a Greek chocolate bar which was kind of odd. The beer went down well though.

29. Mythos with a sexy view.

30. Alfa with a sexy view.

31. Mythos with a sexy sunset. The sunsets on Santorini are amazing and I just had to buy a beer to go with this one.

32. Another Kaiser. This one with Sam Calagione’s Brewing Up a Business while sitting by the pool. You know what this beer, at this time, made me feel? I felt very late-80s drinking beer from a 330ml can. I don’t know why I felt like this as late-80s I was only just starting school but still, that’s what effect it had. I just wanted to drink can after can of this stuff, crunching it in my palm and tossing it aside. I felt cool and it made me want to start smoking.

33. Mythos Red. Another red. Why do the Greeks like their red beers? This was a bit toasty, a bit fruity, a bit nutty and a bit nothingy.

34. Craft Pilsner and we’re near the end. This was probably the best beer I had all holiday. A pale gold, lots of little bubbles, a creamy-fluffy head and fruit – orange, pineapple, blackcurrant and raspberries. There was more to this beer than any of the others with fruity high notes, biscuity malt and crisp hops at the end. I wish I bought a couple more of these.

35. And the final beer. Of course it’s a Mythos. As you can tell from the picture, the beer has taken its toll.

So there we are, my holiday in beer (I also drink a fair few litres of very good local Santorini wine but I won’t even go there…). There’s only one thing left to do, which I haven’t done yet: talk about Mythos. I saved it up and I didn’t write my own notes until the very end of the holiday because I wanted to really understand what made it stand out above the others for me, and I worked out what it is: it’s the fuller body and the extra sweetness compared to the other beers. That’s what makes it so eminently drinkable. I compared it to so many others but this was still the one that I could recognize at first sip - it’s that instant sweetness at the tip of the tongue followed by the mouth-filling beer and the quench at the end. But it goes deeper than that too. The sweetness that it has just seems to work with the hot, salty air. And I think it has a few specific jobs: to kill a thirst, to entice hunger, to relax the drinker. It perfectly suits Greece. It’s for drinking quickly, not slow. It’s best ice cold in a frosted glass. It’s not the best beer in the world but it’s the best beer for drinking in the hot Greek sun.

It was a bit of a lager overload but that’s all I wanted to drink while I was there. I was expecting hop cravings but they only popped up for a few moments on one day. The rest of the time it was lager, lager, lager.

Yes, this took bloody ages to put together and upload.

I'm Back!

I return from my jaunt to Greece! I haven’t sat at a computer for over two weeks and, strangely, it feels pretty good to be back – this is where I do my thang. I love the scratch of the pencil on paper and I’m most creative this way, but there’s just something about the tactile tap of the keyboard and the way things just write themselves that I can’t resist from my computer. I had a great time, thank you, although that seems quickly forgotten as I slump straight back into the day-to-day routine. Yes, I am already feeling the holiday blues. But let’s not dwell on that misery, let’s cheer and hug and swill our drinks because it’s still the summer and there’s plenty of fun to look forward to. But before we move on, I need to look back. I’m a sharing kind of guy (I guess that’s why I sit here and write this stuff) so let me tell you a little about my holiday. My days went a little like this: wake up; write under sparkling blue sky while looking at a little white church high up into desolately beautiful mountains; read; eat; read; swim in the warm sea, burn my feet on the black sand; read some more; open a beer and read and feel the calming presence of those mountains, the cooling calmness of that beer; eat; read; sleep. Perfect. We also climbed a couple of mountains and a volcano and saw the most incredible sunset. And this all wound around spending time with Lauren too: watching her read, wondering what she’s learning; picking food from her plate at dinner; being happy in the sun. For me this is a good holiday. I’ll write about the beer and food and the books in more detail soon, but I’ll summarise now. Beer: I can manage solely on lager for two weeks and not crave anything else; I have learnt an important lesson in the ways of lager, even if it is mainly continental pap; I have come to see a frothing, frosted golden glass of beer as a beacon of so much joy. Food: I ate a lot. Surprisingly for me I ate a lot of crisps, in fact I probably ate more crisps in the last two weeks that I have in the last two years. I am fickle and can’t resist a funny name or a strange flavour (mushroom and sour cream anyone?!) or a quirky shape. I also ate a fair number of the world’s most disgustingly good food: gyros. The last one was laced with the over-hot, over-sized owner’s hard-worked sweat and tasted even better for it. Kebabs in England are shit unless you are bladdered to the point where short-term memory loss is a blessing not a curse, but in Greece they are messy parcels of joy: spits of pork, juicy and crisp and fatty; a zing of onions and tomatoes; a cool lick of tzatziki; a handful of cheeky fries. Hell yeah. And books: I read a lot. I read some really superb books and they have inspired me to do better, to write better, to write more, to succeed. I want to write and I want my books published so that I can make others feel they way I do when I finish a great book. But more on all these another time. I don’t want to get all gushy on you or bore you with hundreds of holiday snaps of me drinking a beer, me with a kebab, me and Lauren up a mountain, me in a mankini (seriously), me swimming in the pool, me asleep outside, me exiting the sea like Daniel Craig (that shot from Casino Royale) on estrogen. I won’t bore you with them today but I’ll warn you that they are coming soon (not the mankini though). But since I’ve been away what have I missed?! I’ve tried catching up but there’s so much to read. I’m on it though. From what I’ve picked up so far here’s what I’ve missed: The American Beer Festival at the White Horse was goddamn amazing and I’m totally gutted that I couldn’t go (read about it here and here – I’m especially upset to have missed Dogfish Head’s 75 Minute IPA from the cask, but hey ho, I’ll keep all my bits crossed that DFH will make it to the GBBF this year, although I am massively worried that I’ll be comatose with my head in a bag of those amazing pork scratchings before four o’clock, but that’s just a risk I’m willing to take). Just to be able to drink those beers, all those beers… never mind. Rest assured that next year I am choosing the dates we go away and it will NOT be over the same weekend as Independence Day. Next, Moor’s JJJ IPA is finally available to buy in bottles. This is big news. It’s a 9% American-style IPA brewed in the UK and I’ve heard so many good things. Beermerchants have got it. I have put my order in. And BrewDog. It wouldn’t be a blog post on Pencil&Spoon without some kind of mention to BrewDog, would it. And you’ve probably seen this everywhere (literally everywhere) but I’ll kick it out there on my little space because I think it’s one of the best and most exciting beer ideas that I’ve seen in ages, as I wrote before: It’s a wikipedia art project created by the drinkers; the evolution of it undetermined, the content unplanned; a collage of people and ideas and words and images (yeah I just quoted myself, it was from here and I wrote it buoyantly hungover). Zeitgeist and the accompanying blog project, which allows anyone who buys the beer to update the site’s content, is now rocking out in the www. And, as you know, if you use the code SHEEP you get 70% off, blah blah blah, which is a cracking deal (and the beer is great with a BBQ, see this for proof). I’ll add my own little piece to the blog soon enough (i.e. when I think of something cool enough to write). Atlantic IPA is also out now, but it’s £10 for a 330ml bottle of oxidized beer (they are selling and promoting it as oxidized though so I guess it’s okay). Sure it’s got a great story (and I love a story!) but the beer isn’t for me, even if it’s doing okay on ratebeer and no one's seemed to have noticed the oxidization. Blimey, that was a bit of a long splurge of a post. I guess I’ve missed this whole blogging thing. Stay tuned for more posts, I’ve got lots to write about and lots of things that I wrote before I went away that need publishing. I’ll also soon be starting up another blog where I’ll put a bit of writing and use as a scribble pad while I start work on my newest piece of fiction, which was fully planned out while on holiday. And expect a lot more pictures of Mythos!