They say… 
Best beer and travel writing award 2015, 2011 -- British Guild of Beer Writers Awards
Accredited Beer Sommelier
Writer of "Probably the best book about beer in London" - Londonist
"A necessity if you're a beer geek travelling to London town" - Beer Advocate
"A joy to read" - Roger Protz
"Very authoritative" - Tim Webb.
"One of the top beer writers in the UK" - Mark Dredge.
"A beer guru" - Popbitch.
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 Around Bruges in 80 Beers by Chris Pollard & Siobhan McGinn There’s a particular challenge to writing guidebooks. You need to include as much information as possible for people putting them to practical use, but all those data — addresses, opening hours, venue facilities — are otherwise deadly dull. Somehow the book needs to be presented in a way that provides a satisfying read to the majority of users who are highly unlikely to visit everything you list, as well as the armchair travellers that make up a significant part of audience.
One rare solution is to find a new format, departing from the tried and trusted geography-and-theme order of the genre, which is just what Chris ‘Podge’ Pollard and Siobhan McGinn did when capturing their extensive knowledge of the beers and pubs of the West Flemish city of Brugge (Bruges) in 2006. The result was Around Bruges in 80 Beers, one of the first publications from Cogan & Mater, an imprint founded by Tim Webb, editor of CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide Belgium and one of the key figures in the development of the British beer consumer organisation’s publishing activities. The book had a page for each of 80 beer outlets in the city — pubs and bars, restaurants, shops — with each entry describing the outlet and selecting one of the beers on sale there for detailed background and tasting notes.
It seemed a little arbitrary — why 80, other than the not especially relevant allusion to Jules Verne’s Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days)? and why just one beer in each, given the venues stretched from locals with just one beer of interest to beer geek honeypots stocking hundreds? But as most poets will tell you, disciplining yourself to work within a strict formal structure can prompt some of the greatest flights of creativity. For the reader, it wraps the local beer scene into a convenient and satisfying story, and the fact that 80 places of beery interest can be found in a relatively small place like Brugge is eloquent testimony to the flourishing beer culture of this part of the world. The format proved appealing and a second edition of the Brugge guide appeared in 2009.
 Around London in 80 Beers by Chris Pollard & Siobhan McGinn If you know the city in question, there’s the added delight of seeing how the authors have gone about solving the puzzle, which was one of the things I enjoyed about Podge and Siobhan’s sequel, Around London in 80 Beers, in 2008. Perhaps partly inspired by the work of blogger-turned-landlord Jeff ‘Stonch’ Bell, an early chronicler of London’s zythophile geography who provides a preface, this helped demonstrate quite how much there was of interest in a city that then lacked a strong reputation as a beer destination, and in including surprise entries like Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes and the Roxy cinema alongside CAMRA-friendly real ale specialists like the Market Porter and the Wenlock Arms, highlighted the almost unnoticed spread of the craft beer aesthetic in the UK capital. I freely admit to having plundered it for possible entries in my own The CAMRA Guide to London’s Best Beer, Pubs and Bars, as well as being inspired by its eclectic approach.
Around London just predated the current explosion of interest in craft beer in London — indeed it probably contributed to that resurgence, but as a result it’s dated perhaps more rapidly than similar guides, with several handfuls of key venues opening since it was published. The majority of its inclusions are still worthy of a visit, however, and its authors’ insights into them continue to make for an enjoyable read. Beer entries are identified by miniature flags, delightfully described as “the flag of the nation state or mindset from which the beer originated” — though I’m puzzled as to why, if Cornish beers get St Piran’s rather than St George’s cross, the Belgian tricolour subsumes all that country’s beers. You surely couldn’t get two more distinct national mindsets within one set of borders than those represented by the Flemish lion and the Wallonian cockerel.
 Around Brussels in 80 Beers by Joe Stange and Yvan de Baets From London the series caught the Eurostar for 2009’s Around Brussels in 80 Beers, by US expatriate beer writer and blogger Joe Stange (since relocated to the rather less beer-blessed climes of Costa Rica) and Bruxellois brewer Yvan De Baets, of Zennebrouwerij/Brasserie de la Senne. While the realities of a ‘Belgium Beer Paradise’ dominated by big breweries initially provoked pessimism among the compilers, in the event they found they had a hard time narrowing their list down. The listings rang from obvious specialist haunts like Bier Circus to delightfully unexpected suggestions like the CBBD comic strip centre, the recommended venue for an Orval. Brussels is a city I think I know quite well, but the majority of Joe and Yvan’s recommendations were new to me, and the book is also strengthened by a generous introduction to both the city and Belgian beer styles, complete with some suggestions for crawls.
 Around Amsterdam in 80 Beers by Tim Skelton Another anglophone expat, Tim Skelton, followed with Around Amsterdam in 80 Beers in 2010 — overdue recognition for the Dutch capital, already famous for many other reasons, as a beer drinking city, although strictly speaking the book cheats by including eight entries in nearby Haarlem. It assembles another varied collection of pubs, bars and beer shops, from historic bruine cafés to grand contemporary venues, and, as with London, respondsto the city’s cosmopolitan drinking scene by pairing them with international beer suggestions. In fact only 23 of the listed beers are Dutch, the others originating mainly in Belgium or Germany, but there’s a nod to local brewing with the inclusion of several beers from brewers like ‘t IJ and Prael. A less extensive introduction includes a fair summation of the strengths and limitations of the local food.
 Around Berlin in 80 Beers by Peter Sutcliffe This summer Berlin has become the latest capital to receive the treatment with Peter Sutcliffe’s well informed Around Berlin in 80 Beers. At 112 pages, the book is notably thicker than its predecessors, with extensive introductory material on the city’s turbulent history, brewing and beer culture and German beer styles alongside a suggested marathon pub crawl. Again this must initially have seemed a challenge, especially as Peter resolved to limit himself to German-brewed beers — the country’s beer scene is notoriously regionalised and since reunification the city has seen all its historic breweries coalesce into a single plant and a single company, Berliner-Kindl-Schultheiss, owned by big brewing group Radeberger. But happily, now the old Prussian capital is once again the national seat of government and therefore attracting residents from across all 16 Bundesländer, the retail trade has responded with a panorama of regional brews that’s hard to find elsewhere. A new wave of brewpubs, including one in the shell of the former Berliner Kindl brewery, adds further interest.
I understand the author, who splits his time between his London home and a Berlin flat, originally wrote a much more straightforward beer guide to the city which was then shoehorned into the format, and it shows, but not to the disadvantage of a very insightful and interestingly written book. It ranges all over the city, including old-fashioned basic corner boozers, huge beer gardens, innovative new brewpubs, ultramodern bars, restaurants and the odd beer shop. Perhaps more so than its predecessors, it places its chosen city’s beer culture in the context of its broader culture and history, and with such an extraordinary place as Berlin, the stage on which some of the key world historic dramas and traumas of the 20th century were played out, this is especially welcome. So evocative is it of the Berliner Luft that it’s made me want to revisit the place to explore further, and I can think of no higher praise for a guidebook.
- Chris Pollard and Siobhan McGinn 2008, Around London in 80 Beers, ISBN 978-0-9547789-2-7, £7.99/€11.95
- Chris Pollard and Siobhan McGinn 2009, Around Bruges in 80 Beers, 2nd edition, ISBN 978-0-9547789-4-1, £7.99/€11.95
- Tim Skelton 2010, Around Amsterdam in 80 Beers, ISBN 978-0-9547789-6-5, £9.99/€13.95
- Joe Stange and Yvan De Baets 2009, Around Brussels in 80 Beers, ISBN 978-0-9547789-5-8, £8.99/€12.95
- Peter Sutcliffe 2011, Around Berlin in 80 Beers, ISBN 978-0-9547789-8-9, £9.99/€13.95
All available from www.booksaboutbeer.com.
London’s Best Beer, Pubs and Bars updates
 Redchurch Brewery, London E2 Microbrewery
273 Poyser Street, London E2 9RF
7.4km/4.6 miles from central London
Web http://theredchurchbrewery.com f The-Redchurch-Brewery tw redchurchbrewer
Brewing, it seems, has many functions besides providing the world with one of the most joyously delicious beverages yet invented, and one of them is providing an attractive alternative career choice for stressed professionals seeking a lifestyle change. There are so many former lawyers and accountants now firing up the mash tuns of Britain’s microbreweries, I’m surprised the Institute of Chartered Accountants and the Law Society haven’t affiliated to SIBA. I doubt these new entrants find running a brewery less hard work than their previous occupations, but the results are almost certainly more personally satisfying.
 Redchurch Pale Ale One of the latest in a long line is solicitor Gary Ward, whose Redchurch Brewery in Bethnal Green will become London’s 15th commercial brewery when it first brews commercially on 23 August. A longstanding home brewer, Gary has been encouraged to take the plunge by the growth not only of craft breweries but of a new generation of innovative beer pubs in the capital appealing to an emerging younger and more mixed audience for beer — appropriately, a pre-launch tasting of a pilot brew took place in the stylish surrounds of Shoreditch specialist ale house Mason & Taylor. In fact Gary and his life and business partner Tracey Cleland live in the building next door to the pub in Redchurch Street, hence the brewery name.
Two other partners are involved in the business, housed in a railway arch formerly used by a coffee roaster, which is shortly to be equipped with a 10-barrel (16.4hl) kit installed by well known brewhouse designer and supplier Dave Porter of PBC. Gary is determined not to tread in other London brewers’ footsteps too closely, and plans to carve a niche for himself by specialising in “not quite traditional British beers” at stronger gravities than usual, mainly bottled conditioned although with some plans for keg and possibly the occasional cask for specials and festivals.
The beer served at Mason & Taylor was a deep gold pale ale, but another pale ale recipe is being perfected, along with a golden bitter, an IPA and a strong stout partly inspired by Guinness Foreign Extra. Names aren’t yet finalised but are likely to include east London place names. Like so many of the new brewers, Gary is a fan of good British beers but is also inspired by the big and hoppy flavours now emanating from across the Atlantic, so expect to see this reflected in the beers.
Originally from Lincolnshire, Gary has been a Londoner since 1987. “We’re keen to be a local brewer,” he says, “and there’s no-one actually brewing yet in inner east London so we wanted to fill that gap. Yes, it was a challenge to find the right site and we were extremely lucky, but we were determined to brew in London. It’s a great place to live, and once again it’s a great place to brew beer, sell beer and drink beer.”
For a more recent update on the fortunes of Redchurch, see here.
First published in BEER magazine, May 2011. BEER is sent free every quarter to CAMRA members, who can also view it online. The magazine is additionally available in selected newsagents. Click on the beer names for more detailed notes on each beer.
 Pale barley malt from Muntons. Malted barley is one of the basic building blocks of brewing, the mainstay of practically all the world’s beers. In the last issue of BEER Stuart Howe explained the malting process and the variety of malts available. But what does it all mean for the end user – the drinker? The five beers featured below might start to provide the answer.
Pale malt, kilned to achieve a pale colour alongside a good starch and enzyme content, is the brewer’s mainstay. 19th century export pale ales were often made of 100% pale malts and many craft lagers depend entirely on even paler Pilsner malt. But British preferences of the more recent past favoured slightly darker beers, achieved with a dash of more deeply coloured “speciality” malts alongside pale.
A good example of a pure pale malt beer is Itchen Valley Pure Gold (4.8 per cent) from Alresford in Hampshire. This fine gold beer has a white head and plenty of sweetish, fruity malt on the palate, interestingly lifted by the use of Czech and US hops to give citrus, pineapple, mint, ginger and honeyed flavours on a lightly drying finish.
Traditionally one of the more popular speciality malts in British brewing is crystal malt, containing extra sugars and kilned at higher temperatures to achieve the “non-enzymic browning” associated with caramel flavours. Woodforde’s Nelson’s Revenge (4.5 per cent) from Woodbastwick in Norfolk has a tasty combination of pale and crystal malts, giving a rubyish mid-brown colour with a chaffy, nutty and fruity, almost peachy, malt character nicely offset by bitterish whole Goldings hops. The Norfolk Bitter Woodfordes supply for Marks and Spencer is a very similar beer.
A slightly darker “mild malt” was once common in Britain but has become rarer as the style has declined. Most microbrewed milds deploy dark and roasted malts alongside standard pale, giving a bitter roast character, but a mellower example is Vale Black Swan (3.8 per cent) from Brill in Buckinghamshire, which achieves its dark colour and maltier character by using extra crystal malt. I’ve written about this beer before but it’s worth featuring again – a beautifully complex and fruity-malty dark amber ale with herbal, salt and chocolate notes.
Roasted flavours come into their own in stouts and porters, usually achieved with roasted malts or even roasted unmalted barley. Award winning Hopshackle Historic Porter (4.8 per cent) from Lincolnshire avoids the latter in favour of highly kilned chocolate and black malts and a touch of black treacle. This dark ruby beer is seriously rich and complex, with cherry and blackcurrant fruit, smooth chocolate and a prominent but controlled roasty note – a modern classic of the style.
The qualities of speciality malts aren’t limited to darker beers, however, and can be put to all sorts of unexpected uses by creative brewers. Wales’ Breconshire Winter Beacon (5.3 per cent) is a golden ale with a reddish tinge but its fruity palate has an unexpectedly whiskyish note and there’s a definite charcoal hint on the finish – the signature of a dose of black malt added by imaginative head brewer Buster Grant.
To download BEER if you’re a CAMRA member, see http://www.camra.org.uk/page.aspx?o=beer.
To find out more about CAMRA membership, see http://www.camra.org.uk/page.aspx?o=joinus.
This beer featured in BEER May 2011 as part of a piece on the influence of different malts on beer flavour. To read about other beers featured see Hopshackle Historic Porter.
ABV: 5.3%
Origin: Aberhonddu, Powys, Cymru
Website: www.breconshirebrewery.com
 Breconshire Winter Beacon The qualities of speciality malts aren’t limited to darker beers and can be put to all sorts of unexpected uses by creative brewers. Just to challenge expectations, Wales’ Breconshire Winter Beacon (5.3 per cent) is a golden ale with an unexpectedly whiskyish note and a definite charcoal hint on the finish – the signature of a dose of black malt added by imaginative head brewer Buster Grant. A small quantity of black treacle adds to the fun, alongside Optic pale malt and various varieties of UK hops.
This winter seasonal is mid-gold and copperish with a reddish tinge and a low pinky off-white head. Autumn fruit, honey and flowers alongside that whisky note make for an attractive aroma. The firm, slightly winy and syrupy, palate has sweetish raspberry and blackcurrant fruit with a dark malt bite. The lightly warming finish has some pursing hops, complex fruit, a touch of sourness and a sprinking of charcoal. A modestly individual beer.
To download BEER if you’re a CAMRA member, see http://www.camra.org.uk/page.aspx?o=beer.
To find out more about CAMRA membership, see http://www.camra.org.uk/page.aspx?o=joinus.
Read more about this beer at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/breconshire-winter-beacon/28886/
ABV: 4.8%
Origin: Alresford, Hampshire, England
Website: www.itchenvalley.com
This beer featured in a piece about the influence of different malts on beer flavour on the bottled beer review page in the May 2011 issue of BEER magazine, sent free every quarter to CAMRA members, who can also view it online. The magazine is also available in selected newsagents.
 Itchen Valley Pure Gold Malted barley is one of the basic building blocks of brewing, the mainstay of practically all the world’s beers. Read any book that describes the brewing process in detail and you’ll find references to a bewildering variety of malts in a spectrum of shades from pale to black. But what does it all mean for the end user – the drinker? The five beers featured here might start to provide the answer.
Pale malt, kilned to achieve a pale colour alongside a good starch and enzyme content, is the brewer’s mainstay. 19th century export pale ales were often made of 100% pale malts and many craft lagers depend entirely on even paler Pilsner malt. But British preferences of the more recent past favoured slightly darker beers, achieved with a dash of more deeply coloured “speciality” malts alongside pale.
A good example of a pure pale malt beer is Itchen Valley Pure Gold (4.8 per cent) from Alresford in Hampshire. The barley variety in this case is top quality British mainstay Maris Otter, but the hops are slightly more exotic: Žatec (Saaz) from the Czech Republic and Cascade from the USA. The beer’s name refers not only to the recipe and appearance but to the gold bullion lost when the ship HMS Hampshire sank in 1916.
This fine, clear gold beer has a white head and liquorice and spearmint to an aroma that leads with hops, backed up by malty cereal notes. There’s plenty of sweetish, fruity malt on the palate, which is perhaps slightly too sweet, but lifted by hops to give citrus, mint, ginger and honeyed flavours. A clean, lightly drying finish is tinged with pineapple fruit.
To download BEER if you’re a CAMRA member, see http://www.camra.org.uk/page.aspx?o=beer.
To find out more about CAMRA membership, see http://www.camra.org.uk/page.aspx?o=joinus.
For more beers featured in this article, see Woodforde’s Nelson’s Revenge.
Read more about this beer at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/itchen-valley-pure-gold/18596/
London’s Best Beer, Pubs and Bars updates
Southeast London: Other locations — Woolwich
 Dial Arch, London SE18 Contemporary pub (Young’s)
The Warren, Royal Arsenal Riverside, London SE18 6GW (Young’s)
T (020) 3130 0700 Web http://dialarch.com f DialArchRoyalArsenal tw DialArch
Open 0900-2300 (2400 Fri-Sat, note bars open 1200). Children welcome in Pantry until 2000.
Cask beers 7 (Wells & Young’s, Meantime, occasional guests) Other beers 3 keg, 6 bottles (Wells & Young’s) Also 1 real cider, wines
Food Sandwiches, pizzas, enhanced pub grub especially fish, baked goods in Pantry Outdoor Large front terrace overlooking green Disabled toilet, wifi
W wine club, S board games, Sn quiz, various weekday food promotions, occasional live piano
The Royal Arsenal was for centuries the heart of Woolwich. First established as an ordnance depot on the Thames marshes in 1671, it swelled into Britain’s biggest producer of armaments, dominating the town both geographically and as the major employer. At its peak during World War I the site covered 5.3 square kilometres (1,300 acres), all of it subject to military secrecy which ensured it appeared as a huge blank space on maps. The eastern section was sold off to build the new town of Thamesmead in the 1960s and the original grand entrance, the Beresford Gate, was severed by a road scheme in the 1970s, but the core of the site, much of it largely unaltered since construction in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, remained in military use until 1994. Since then it’s been subject to an impressive redevelopment, integrating homes, public spaces and visitor attractions like the Royal Artillery’s Firepower museum into the fabric of the historic buildings — a property that will become even more attractive when its new Crossrail station opens in 2018.
Young’s have grabbed a prime piece of all this by converting the Dial Arch building, a Grade II listed former workshop, into a large and spectacular new pub which opened in 2010. Walk through the imposing arch topped with a distinctive sundial flanked by cannonballs and you face a large bar dispensing a good choice of cask ales, mainly from Wells & Young’s — Young’s Bitter, Special, London Gold, Wells Bombardier, Courage Directors and usually a seasonal — but with a local touch in the form of Meantime Pale Ale from nearby Greenwich. At the time of writing they’re thinking of bringing in Meantime’s keg wheat beer too, to replace the current Erdinger; Double Chocolate Stout and Pilsner Urquell are other keg choices of interest, with a few W&Y specialities like Banana Bread Beer and Waggle Dance in bottle.
A cavernous and atmospheric area to the left has bare brickwork and gunmetal tables, while further towards the front of the building is the bright and cheerful Pantry which operates as a tea shop during the day, though you can drink alcohol there too once the bar is open. To the right are a number of partitioned rooms including a table service restaurant area where you can enjoy a menu that’s big on pizzas, fish dishes — Selsey crab cakes, herb-baked grey mullet — and pub grub stalwarts like pies, burgers and steaks, though veggies will find themselves largely restricted to a choice of pizzas, also sold by the metre. Various food offers recur on regular weekday nights. Decor is interesting and just the right side of naff — souvenirs of the site’s former use mix with original art and oddities like car doors hung on the wall. Note there’s a “smart casual” dress code that seems to be interpreted relatively liberally, though they frown on trackie bottoms and football shirts (slightly ironically — see below).
Visitor note. The building looks out on the pleasant green of Dial Square, a name which may well be familiar from English football history. Dial Square FC was formed by workers at the complex in 1886. It was renamed Royal Arsenal when it became the first club in southern England to join the professional football league in 1893. Eventually known simply as Arsenal, the club crossed the river to a new ground in Highbury in 1913. Now one of the top teams in England, it’s played at the Emirates Stadium in Holloway since 2006. But if you’re a dedicated fan making a pilgrimage to its birthplace, check the note on dress code above.
National Rail, DLR Woolwich Arsenal Boat Royal Arsenal, Woolwich Ferry Cycling NCN1, LCN+ 56 Walking Capital Ring, Green Chain Walk link, Thames Path
 JCBA: Japan Craft Beer Association I don’t pretend to be a great expert on Japanese beer — I’ve not yet had the opportunity to visit Japan and have encountered imported products only rarely. So I was delighted to be invited in early June to a Japanese beer tasting and food matching event at the White Horse, London SW6, thanks to pub manager Dan Fox and beer writer and educator Melissa Cole. The event, organised with the Japan Craft Beer Association, was dogged by difficulties, first postponed due to the devastating Tohoku earthquake and fears of radioactive contamination of Japanese produce in its aftermath, and then affected by further delivery and customs problems. Finally five beers got through to an enthusiastic band of tasters in an event that became a fundraiser for the earthquake appeal. If their standard is anything to go by, there are many beery delights to discover.
Japan has its own lengthy tradition of fermented grain drinks like sake. Western-style beer brewing dates back only to the 1870s when it developed under the influence of German and American brewers, generally working with lager styles, and in the 1960s beer became the country’s most popular alcoholic drink. For many years tax laws required breweries to produce at least 20,000hl a year before they could be licensed, favouring the emergence of huge national groups like Asahi, Kirin, Sapporo and Suntory. Then in 1994 brewing was deregulated and a small scale, craft brewing sector soon flourished, building on an already growing interest in imported craft beer. There are now over 200 microbreweries and brewpubs in the country.
Some of the beers at the tasting were in standard international craft beer styles — like a very impressive Imperial Stout from Minoh and a fair enough Imperial IPA from Ise Kadoya. But the two I’ve picked below had a bit more local character.
Beer picks
 Kinshachi Nagoya Akamiso Lager Japanese beer tasting, White Horse, London SW6, June 2011; Top Tastings 2011
ABV: 6%
Origin: Nagoya, Chūbu, Japan
Website: www.kinshachi.jp
Based in Japan’s third biggest city, Nagoya, Kinshachi was established in 1996 as the Landbeer brewery, though points to an earlier local tradition of brewing in the 1880s. Its experiments with adding traditional Japanese ingredients to craft beers include a green tea beer and this remarkable fusion, which draws on one of the local specialities, akamiso or fermented red soya paste — around 5kg for every 20hl batch. It was originally made for a local expo event a few years back and is now one of the beers of which the brewery is most proud.
This rich red-brown beer has a fine, smoothly foamy yellow head and an oddly fruit with notes of banana, strawberry, sour cherries and wood. The palate is rich and malty, almost like a Belgian dubbel, with an unsurprising note of salt and savoury unami flavour — the signature of fermented soy products but surprisingly and very successfully balanced by dark malt tones. I also noted dry crackers, buckwheat noodles, and nutty sweetness. The beer slips smoothly over the tongue into a warming fruity and raisiny finish that finishes with notes of banana, chocolate and popcorn. Definitely not a gimmick but a very memorable and enjoyable beer that deserves wider recognition.
Read more about this beer at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/kinshachi-nagoya-red-miso-lager/69655/
Japanese beer tasting, White Horse London SW6, June 2011
ABV: 5%
Origin: Ise, Kansai, Japan
Website: http://isekadoya.com
 Ise Kadoya Yuzu Ale Ise Kadoya began in 1997 as a brewpub and restaurant at Ise, in Mie prefecture on the island of Honshū, a city best known as the location of the Shinto religion’s most important Japanese shrine. The brewery proved quite a success and has since notably expanded. The owning family have long been manufacturers of soya products like soy sauce and miso and the building was converted from a soya warehouse. This isn’t the only example of such a crossover — perhaps explained by the fact that soya processing, like brewing, involves fermentation.
Yuzu Ale is one of the signature products, so called because it contains yuzu, a highly aromatic citrus fruit related to the sour mandarin. Yuzu is used to make other alcoholic drinks in Japan, as well as sweets and sauces, so its use in beer might not be entirely surprising to local drinkers, while Westerners might be reminded of the use of more familiar varieties of citrus peel as a flavouring in Belgian beers.
Nonetheless the beer presents a very distinctive and, to my tastes, exotic flavour and aroma profile. A bottle conditioned sample was a hazy deep gold, with some white head and a very spicy, oily and citric aroma with burnt plastic and zesty perfume which reminded me more of lime than orange. The palate was very dry with a touch of burnt toast from coloured malts and an emerging citrus hit, leading to a long, dry and chewy finish beginning with pithy zest and developing a touch of bittering hops.
A keg version was served at the same tasting, but although hazier and therefore presumably unfiltered was notably less complex than its bottled cousin. The citrus peel note was more upfront and less balanced by speciality malt flavours, though a pleasant juicy malt character on the finish did a good job of softening the tart yuzu and bitter hop flavours. Certainly a unique beer.
Read more about this beer at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/ise-kadoya-yuzu-ale/133403/80641/
London’s Best Beer, Pubs and Bars updates
 The CAMRA Guide to London's Best Beer, Pubs and Bars by Des de Moor My first book, The CAMRA Guide to London’s Best Beer, Pubs and Bars, is officially published on Monday (4 July) and copies are already being sent out. However such is the nature of these things that it’s already slightly out of date. Guidebooks are notorious for this, but in this case the problem is intensified, rather happily, by the continuing dynamism of the market, with new beer specialists opening and established outlets expanding their range. Indeed the beer scene in London is flourishing in a way that hasn’t been seen since at least the 1970s revival of interest in real ale.
The obvious solution is to keep it up to date through this website and that’s exactly what I’ve already been doing, both with blog entries and with a PDF supplement which I intend to publish periodically. The first supplement is already out and is available here.
As the final text went to the publisher, I already had a list of places to drink that perhaps should have been considered but weren‘t, and this has continued to grow. This update catches up among other things on a number of Nicholson‘s pubs I missed, and starts to provide better coverage of the Antic pubco‘s estate.
Several new developments are also marked here including, most significantly, the just opened Craft Beer Co. Then there’s the Dean Swift’s sister pub the Old Red Cow a restored range under new ownership at the Duke of Hamilton and upmarket burger chain Byron‘s espousal of craft beer.
The list of possible additions is by no means exhausted and I know of several further openings planned, not to mention new breweries, so there will be plenty of material for future updates. I’m also hoping readers will keep me up to date with comments, corrections and suggestions: see under About above for link.
Enjoy!
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Cask  This pioneering new book explains what makes cask beer so special, and explores its past, present and future. Order now from CAMRA Books. Read more here.
London’s Best Beer  The fully updated 3rd edition of my essential award-winning guide to London’s vibrant beer scene is available now from CAMRA Books. Read more here.
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