Let’s say you like beer and want to try a different British beer every day. How long do you reckon it would take to try them all? How about nearly 15 years!
Since we don’t have a Pub forum, I’ll move this over to Cafe Society.
twickster, MPSIMS moderator
Since we don’t have a Pub forum, I’ll move this over to Cafe Society.
twickster, MPSIMS moderator
Holy cow, I’m seein’ doubles!
Neat. It’d be nice to have the money/leisure to make this a project.
Until recently, I had the impression that GB was being criticized for exactly the opposite – for having a monoculture of beer, tied to the fact that the big breweries had exclusive sourcing arrangements with/ownership in the pubs. Is it safe to assume that only a sub-set of those 5,000 beers would be readily available in pubs (I obviously can see that you’ll never get all the microbrews in bars at all, given distribution limitations), or has an independent pub culture arisen where I could have my pick of a few dozen brews on tap, regardless of producer?
This blog drank and reviewed 100 beers in 100 days: http://100beers.posterous.com/blog
I once did 500+ beers (minimum 4oz) in 9 months.
I gained a lot of weight those 9 months.
In college I started collecting beer bottles. Figured I would get Bud, Miller, Coors and an few others and I’d have a good start. What a surprise to learn I couldn’t even drink them fast enough to keep up with the new beers coming out, much less try them all. The things you learn in college. I threw my “collection” away.
Finally, I have something to do when I retire!
Yeah, thereby proving that even mods aren’t immune from the occasional mystery double-post.
The majority of pubs only stock a few beers, but there’s a smallish number that stock several real ales, and rotate them regularly. Although “smallish” in this context is 3 of the ten or so in walking distance from me.
However, most beers from small brewers are only (or mostly) sold near where they are brewed - I read something recently that said 40 miles from the brewery was a common limit.
There are also beer festivals, which range from a pub doubling the number of beers it carries, and bringing in some unusual ones, to massive events. The upcoming Nottingham Beer Festival is aiming to beat last year’s record of 848 different beers.
That’s pretty much the reason CAMRA was founded 40 years ago, to fight the bland rubbish the big brewers were putting out, and the restrictive beer tie policies. Laws were introduced limiting the number of pubs breweries can own but this gave rise to the pubcos which own the pubs and have close relations to certain breweries. So it’s still not a level playing field. To me, the battle for good beer has been won but the battle to save pubs is not going well. Pubs are closing at a rate of 39 per week! Mostly not because there is no demand for pubs but because the site is more profitable as housing or other uses. The good news (for me anyway) is that my local is a freehouse that has 10 different real ales, five constant and five that change regularly and there is a newly opened Wetherspoons nearby that has 6 or 7 on. My local was voted one of the top 16 pubs in the country in 2009. One thing that is helping the small brewers is ‘localness’ for lack of a better word. People are concerned about food miles and want to support business that are local to them. CAMRA has an initiative called ‘LocAle’ where pubs are encouraged to source beers from breweries within a 30 mile radius. The pubs get a boost because people like buying locally, and the breweries get a boost from essentially free local advertising.
And I thought it was the beer. 
There is a place in Brussels that has as many beers as the number of the present year, with special glasses for each and every one of them. I must go there.
Are you referring to this one? If so, I would like to recommend a SMDB research field trip.
Been there. The beer list is in a 3 inch thick ring binder. Not ALL of the beers have special glasses, but at least one of them has its own beer mat. The beer is poured carefully into the glass, then the dregs swirled and poured into the shot glass.
I have been there too, and while certainly a cool idea in theory, it was actually not as enjoyable as many of the other places in the general area, in that it seemed to cater mainly to (English-speaking) tourists, it was noticeably more expensive than it’s nearby competitors and I get the feeling that many of those more obscure, high-priced, specialty bottles of beer had been sitting around for YEARS waiting to be cracked open.
There are a few places similar to this in New York and San Francisco (Mad Dog In The Fog, Toronado’s) that also feature hundreds of different selections, and I got the same impression from them as well. There just isn’t enough turnover to keep several hundred assorted beers rotating fast enough to all be at their premium freshness.
Brussels is not a hard city to find a cool place to have some amazing beers that you can’t get anyplace else…