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Pic: Gillian Evans. Here’s my Top Tastings list for 2010, a little late thanks to the time dedicated to my forthcoming book (see right or under London above). As in previous years, they’re not necessarily new beers, just beers I happened to taste for the first time, or retaste after a long break, during 2010, and [...] Timothy Taylor Landlord Top Tastings 2010 ABV: 4.1% Established in 1858, Timothy Taylor had long enjoyed the respect of discerning beer drinkers as one of the best of the surviving regional independents when in 2003 a certain musician by the name of Madonna Ciccone told TV interviewer Jonathan Ross she regularly enjoyed a [...] Top Tastings 2010 ABV: 10% Port Hop-15 I was delighted to discover bomber bottles of this classic US imperial India pale ale on sale in outstanding London beer seller Kris Wines. The name refers to its origin as a celebration ale for the 15th anniversary of the brewery’s original location at the Pizza Port restaurant in [...] Top Tastings 2010 ABV: 4.5% Mordue Workie Ticket The Newcastle conurbation is famous for its internationally known Brown Ale, now made in Gateshead on the south bank of the Tyne, but there are far, far better beers made in the region. Several of them come from Mordue, opened by brothers Gary [...] Top Tastings 2010 ABV: 10% De Molen Hel en Verdoemenis 666 World renowned Dutch craft brewer Menno Olivier brews phenomenal beers in numerous styles, but perhaps his strongest suit is his imperial stouts, of which there are several, as well as variants within variants. ‘Hell and Damnation’ is one of them, featuring brown malts in [...] Pivovar Restaurant Hotel Modrá Hvězda Top Tastings 2010 ABV: 4.5% Mash tuns were fired again in Dobřany, once an important brewing town a little south of Plzeň, in 1998 when the ‘Blue Star’ hotel sprouted one of the first of a new generation of microbreweries that have since done much to revitalise beer culture in [...] Top Tastings 2010 ABV: 9.2% Green Flash Le Freak Founded in 2002 by former pub owners Mike and Lisa Hinkley near San Diego, joined shortly afterwards by head brewer Chuck Silva, Green Flash has established itself as a favoured source of innovative and sometimes extreme beers with the West Coast’s characteristically liberal use of [...] Top Tastings 2010 ABV: 9% George Gale Prize Old Ale 2007 Gale’s Prize Old Ale is a real slice of British brewing heritage. Created by a Yorkshireman who worked at the company’s 1860s tower brewery in the early 20th century, it perpetuated an already declining technique in British brewing, the long ageing of strong ales [...] Top Tastings 2010 ABV: 5.8% The Duck-Rabbit Schwarzbier (black lager) Only a philosopher could think to call a brewery Duck-Rabbit, after the ambiguous drawing seen as either a duck or a rabbit discussed in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations, 1953). And sure enough founder Paul Philippon was an academic and Wittgenstein specialist [...] Top Tastings 2010 ABV: 5.3% Dry Dock Brewing Kevin DeLange already owned a small homebrew store when in 2005 he decided to add a microbrewery with its own tiny taproom. Such was the success of this move that in 2009 the taproom and brewery relocated to a bigger space a few doors down on [...] |
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