Manchester Beer and Cider Festival 2019, Manchester Central, Jan 23rd-26th People can be sniffy about food pairing but we do it all the time. You might fancy a chocolate covered peanut, but you would never have chocolate cake and pesto, despite them both containing cocoa and nuts. The aim of this tasting was to launch…
Golden Pints and Golden Pubs
At the end of 2017 I pledged to increase the content on this blog from three posts every six years to 52 posts a year. Then I broke my wrist and couldn’t write. Six months of rehab later I settled in to pick up the pace and was immediately promoted, upping my workload by about…
1D Hometown Challenge : Bradford
Regular readers will be painfully aware of my obsession with One Direction, and I’ll be honest, it’s not easy to shoehorn them into every area of my life. However, I am not a quitter, and when I realised I would making a trip to Hebden Bridge, and would be staying in Bradford, a series was…
Halifax and Calderdale Beer Festival 2018
In the cut and thrust of Beer Twitter, where sanity goes to die, sometimes you can forget that not every bar, brewery or beer festival is a depraved, sexist, racist Hellsphere which needs urgent remedial action to prevent the fall of civilisation as we know it. Sometimes, good people just do good things, and are…
Runcorn Victorian Pub Crawl 2018
Goodness, has it been a year already? Last time round many people were dismayed to have missed out on Runcorn’s premier pub crawl, so as you can imagine the 2nd annual jaunt was a hot ticket. We not only doubled our numbers, we doubled them and added one! This time next year we’re going to…
Do we still need Brewdog?
Relationships are tricky at the best of times. In the early days it’s all fun and fresh and exciting, and you can’t wait to extol the virtues of this new love. Then, the honeymoon period ends and before you know it you’re ten years down the line, wake up in the morning and think when…
Holiday Pubs : Of Chimps and Skittles
One of my finest school moments came in the first week of 2nd year juniors when we were asked to do a project entitled ‘My Summer Holidays’. As we did this every September while teacher’s blood alcohol level returned to normal, I had planned diligently and spent my summer holiday in Palma Nova collecting things…
A few drinks in : Northampton
A couple of years ago when I first met my beer friend Peter in the Euston Tap, I convinced him to come up to Runcorn, assuring him of its fine beers and even finer people. In the event many of the pubs he came up to visit were in fact, closed, and he had a…
Chester Beer and Wine Festival 2018
During the last beer festival I attended in Chester I had my arm strapped up due to my broken wrist, so blogging about it was a long and drawn out process which I didn’t attempt. However the photos are annoyingly sitting on my Google drive so here’s a quick run down before we launch into…
A few drinks on : the Isle of Man, part two
Startlingly halfway through my entire 2018 Summer Holiday, it was time to board an actual steam train and head for Port Erin. The original plan had been to go shark spotting but first the inclement weather meant that the trips were cancelled, then they were uncancelled and sold out immediately. But I went to Port…
A Few Drinks on : the Isle of Man, part one
A week or so ago, when I was angrily tweeting about the change in the weather threatening my shark spotting trip on the Isle of Man, Matthew Lawrenson suggested that there might be a post on ‘the OTHER hobbies of beer bloggers’. My trip to the Isle of Man was part pub exploring, part shark spotting,…
Trying to watch England on a Steamboat from 1903
Forgive the unwieldy headline but sometimes you just have to call a post what it is. My grandad, George ‘Crazy George’ Baines, was 90 in April, and one of his birthday presents was a trip on a recently restored steam tug from 1903, called the Daniel Adamson. Me being the wonderful granddaughter I am undertook…
ladysinksthebooze 