Beer Compurgation

There isn’t enough time for the discomfiture of family. There isn’t enough time for the transient nature of friendship. It would have been a cruel British irony that the rain would begin Sunday 22nd July after months of record breaking dryness. The moor fire on the hill behind the farm had only been extinguished days before. Blissful precipitation had relieved the peated land and the valley below brightened at dawn with the scent of sweet petrichor. The cool and moist morning air became an indication that the summer nights would begin to draw in. The poppies will recede as the gladioli take hold of the first border, a timely reminder of the heartache since the turn of the year. Dolly’s single egg produced in her short time is buried next to Rosemary at first light. She became the first loss the Retreat has seen this calendar year, but not the first in the extended family. As the meat is prepared and the vegetables chopped, the reverberant pings from both devices w...

Though the conversations and opinions are becoming tiring regarding investments and acquisitions of beer businesses, due to recent developments bringing them to the fore once more, I still have a little to add regarding the disillusion of extra choice. This is in response to comments I made on a poll formed by The Beer O’Clock Show for their Hopinions podcast. In response to the question "Do you think Heineken's investment in Beavertown is bad for the independent sector?” I added: My thoughts were based on an assumption that people talking about “increased access to good beer” as a positive, when large conglomerates become involved in smaller breweries, were referring to it in a retail sense. Both Twitter users and the podcasters themselves rebuked this as they were actually discussing the positives from a licensed premises point. As a huge advocate of people using pubs, my response was seen as a little hypocritical as it seemed to impl...

  Courtesy of https://www.freepik.com There are two teams in Manchester. The continuous public house prattle debates this statement. Others would have you believe that there may be only one team in Manchester, though the colour of their strip isn’t clear. As a fan of a team over t’hill there probably is one team in Manchester and another in Salford. It doesn’t matter really, but still we have the sufferable banal discussion as to who is the most successful and who deserves to be so. For those not following, Manchester’s two major football teams are Manchester United and Manchester City. Manchester United enjoyed an extended period of success at a time when the company Sky started to pump excessive amounts of money into the sport, with the more successful teams pocketing the most money making them one of the richest football teams on the planet. Mancheter City were in a much less successful spell as a team until the second of two large money takeovers le...

Source Last year it was swifts, this year swallows have just arrived to nest in the barns for the rest of summer before heading further south. I watch them from the collapsing garden fence, swooping over the field rich in bites of midges. It is serene and tranquil, yet I am feeling down. I have just read the news of Anthony Bourdain. For the media, 2016 became the year of the celebrity death as towering figures of the entertainment industry fell seemingly daily. For me, 2018 is becoming famous for a different type of celebrity death. Every time I see through a Breaking News story or a Twitter trend that somebody has died I can anticipate the cause before reading it. From Avicii to Scott Hutchison , to the other depression sufferers whose cause of death hasn’t been officially released but seems all but assured, it has been a sad year. I don’t profess to have known much of Anthony Bourdain, passed watching him on shows every now and then when channel flicking. I cannot...