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Top ten tips for giving beer or beer related gifts at Christmas

I have recently agreed to write a regular column for Vale Life Magazine, on the pubs, breweries and beers of the Aylesbury Vale region. Vale Life is a high-quality free local-interest magazine, published every six weeks covering culture, community and business in Aylesbury, Tring, Wendover, Thame, Princes Risborough and the surrounding villages. Its patch spreads…

There are brazen spectres who haunt the villages and towns across England. Ghosts of revelry writ large and high, swinging in insult to all who pass by. I am talking about old pub signs. Those that are left up after domestic conversions. I have worked around pubs, spoken to enough publicans and read enough industry…

I’m sitting in a prime seat in the Cross Keys, a popular ale pub in the town centre of Thame, Oxfordshire. I’ve got a spot in the far corner, looking across the entire room. From my seat I can see the V-shaped bar, with its rows of taps and tankards hanging above them, I can…

On Saturdays I talk. I talk a lot, and almost all of it is about beer. I run three brewery tours back to back, showing guests around Brewpoint and explaining to them the brewing process, the company set up and the beers we brew. Each tour is around a hundred minutes long and groups can…

I love food. I love beer, and I really love the two together. Beer and food pairing is a brilliant world of flavour opportunity. Truly remarkable culinary experiences can be discovered with an open and experimental mindset. Sometimes these pairings work because just how unexpected they are. There is a real joy to be found…

On the 16th December 2019 I left work two hours early, drove 120 miles, stayed overnight in a particularly cheap and grotty hotel, and then drove home in the morning for work again. I did this all to drink five thimbles of beer. The beers in question weren’t the latest hype DIPA’s though, or rare…

Christmas has been and gone and we are now in the cold and dark of January. Let’s not be coy here, January sucks for pub operators. It’s never been the easiest of months, but once the concept of ‘dry January’ became ingrained into the mainstream it is now, generally, outright terrible. To combat this, there…

It has been an impossible story to miss in recent weeks. The UK is running out of Guinness. Diageo have cited huge consumer demand as the reason. They are ‘proactively’ managing supply in order to try and keep the situation under control. At first this seemed like it might be a scarcity sales tactic. But…

It is well documented that Guinness is having ‘a moment’. Splitting the G is now a national pastime. The black stuff is currently the best selling beer in the UK on trade by value. Demand for Guinness is so high right now that Diageo have reported a shortage of supply in the UK. Taps may…