Scottish Real Ale Festival 2010

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Jun 27, 2010
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Following the announcement that Highland Orkney Blast was awarded the 2010 Champion Beer of Scotland, it was time to pay a visit to the festival as a punter and sample some of the new and unusual beers on offer this year. Nobody attends the SRAF to drink Deuchars IPA, after all. As ever, the larger […]

Autumnal Ales

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Oct 28, 2009
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The concept of seasonality is now one of the hallmarks of modern cooking, pushed to the general public by the ranks of TV chefs and foodie magazines. Everything has a ‘time of year’, whether it’s the British asparagus, salty samphire, or humble mackerel (as one BeerCaster asked for in a fancy Edinburgh fishmonger’s, only to […]

Scottish Real Ale Festival 2009 – Day 2

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Jun 28, 2009
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Grooben checking the beer list Another day, another day at the beer festival. We returned to the Assembly Rooms for a second helping of the best of Scotland’s real ale, eager to see what else we could discover. The beers were pretty much the same as the day before, so we fired straight into the […]

Innishail into the pail

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Jan 17, 2008
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Having little money in Gateshead in my early 20s meant regular sessions on the local McEwans Scotch. For those who have never had one – it tastes like Tyne sewage water filtered through Sunday morning tights. Fortunately, a change in my economic fortune (I can afford more than GBP 1.12 a pint) I have not […]

The 2007 Scottish Beer Festival

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Jul 17, 2007
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There are few countries on Earth that do the ‘lots of earnest men in a musty hall’ type days out better than the Brits. Like it or not (and CAMRA probably don’t), beer has that reputation – or rather, ‘real ale’ has that reputation. The hip, funky, savvy kids of today drink Becks or Budweiser. […]

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