Great British booze haul

Reet! So right now I'm writing from the Great British Beer Festival, this is an experimental post to see what happens when I try writing through a session.

A quick note on our morning as Mark and myself popped to the ace St John bread and wine for a coffee and some madeira and seedcake at breakfast after a gruelling national express ride in the bogey seat right by a particularly fruity bog. Apt I suppose as St John is the home of the nose to tail eating of Fergus Henderson. Unfortunately we didn't have time to go the whole hog (HA!) but the Madeira set us up nicely to ease in to the festival. If you ever get down to the big smoke please visit either restaurant, they do some great stuff with some dubious animal parts - the food is amazing and it's really well priced.

Replemished by madeira and joyous of a public transport system that works, we are in full effect and have a crate in tow so we can haul some treats back to Leeds and a loaf of brilliant sourdough to soak up the booze.

For a few days a year Earls Court turns in to the centre of the beard wearing world as thousands of beer botherers descend to get rotten pissed in a celebration of beer. It's like any local CAMRA beer festival but MASSIVE and today is trade day so it's full of jockeying press types and strug out bar/pub workers dearly in need of some time off.

We quickly realised that buying thirds is the way to go... Taste as many as possible, and you know, pulling a third ain't so easy, the venerable voulenteers at the GBBF quite often miss the line, which for our purposes, is just the ticket.

Flash forward 2 hours and we've motored through through 14 beers and now been joined my mr Ed. Standout beers so far? Tons!

Thornbridge have managed to make a balanced eldeflower ale in which the elder matches the hop in a way that is so fucking good that it seems obvious, I've never tasted an elderflower beer like this and it's brilliant. I'm not always as convinced as most as to the brilliance of everything Thornbridge do but this is tops and highly recommended.

There's a beer from Spectrum in Norfolk called Stoatwobbler which I urge everyone to try for its sheer brilliance in malty depth, powerful fruit and balanced bitter core.

Flash forward another 2 hours and the sourdough loaf from st john is really showing its worth. A third of old hooky is a little bit of a levller after some discombobulating ales from Liverpool organic - their IPA is as true to the traditional style as you can get and delicious to booot.

Shoom! Forward to 4pm, an hour left and things are starting to go west I think I just confused Pete Brown or someone who looks like Pete Brown with some heavy ipa form Green Flash. He's smaller than I expected and the IPA much bigger, I feel that the combinatiknof these achievemnts makes me level. So. on to de molen....

Crap... The de molen is better, it points out the
K utaec I'd British berr when something ha suceh abcenyw. Nwybny. KoeUZ

z)) nuyj

The. End. Only my good friends know the rest x

De Molen

Spectrum Brewery

Liverpool Organic Brewery

Green Flash