Author: PeteBrown

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Free Beer

I’m half way through a mini-tour of UK bookshops promoting my new book “Three Sheets to the Wind: One Man’s Quest for the Meaning of Beer”.

The idea is we taste a few beers, and I read passages from the book that have a tenuous link with the beer in hand. Then we talk about how great the beers are. And hopefully people buy copies of the book and I try to think of something amusing to write in the front.

Future dates are:

Thurs 6th July – Borders, Oxford Street, London, 7pm. All beers kindly supplied by the Meantime Brewery, Greenwich

Saturday 8th July – Taste of Birmingham, at the Speciality Beer Academy – 2.30pm and 8.30pm. International beers supplied by www.specialityBEERmerchants.com

Thursday 20th July – Borders, Bournemouth, 7pm. Beers supplied by the Badger brewery (Hall & Woodhouse)

Wednesday 26th July – Ottakars, Salisbury, 7.30pm. Beers supplied by www.specialityBEERmerchants.com

Thursday 27th July – Ottakars, Greenwich, 7.30pm. Beers supplied by the Meantime Brewery

Come along! Taste some amazing beer!

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Manifesto for a beery blog

Thanks for visiting my blog!

Think of this as a place a bit like a great pub. Except you can’t get any beer here, and there’s no juke box, and we probably shouldn’t extend the analogy to my qualities as landlord. But it is open 24 hours a day, and the seats are comfy. Well, mine is anyway. And we can hopefully have the same kind of chat as you do down the pub, only hopefully it won’t gte really repetitive and unfunny after about 10pm.

Beer is the most sociable drink in the world and needs to be celebrated far more than it is. Too much writing and discussion about beer is either campaigning or negative or argumentative. But beer culture is about having a laugh, about relaxing, about digressing off the subject.

Beer’s merits as a drink, it’s diversity and dazzling array of tastes, are always worth discussing so long as we don’t over-intellectualise it. I’m glad there are people out there who micro-analyse beer’s components because without them we wouldn’t know about the great beers that are there, but I’m not one of them.

Be honest: most of the time you go to the pub, the beer is very important, but it’s a stimulus to talking about sport, women, the books you’ve just read, or about how my car/shirt/house/hi-fi is better than yours, or cracking inane jokes. Now doesn’t that sound like a worthwhile use for a blog?