Crumpet Based Joy

8.30am.   Too early? Check.  Too much beer consumed?  Check.  Way too much gin consumed?  Check.  Weird pink squinty eyes and pale, sweaty skin?  Check and check.  Hangover cure definitely needed.

And what a cure.

The Dea Latis Beers with Breakfast event really is the one thing you need the morning after the night before.  Apart from possibly a very expensive facial.  Twenty or so beery ladies (and one very lucky man) gathered in the lovely surroundings of the Somerstown Coffee House for a talk from Jane Peyton of School of Booze followed by a seven course breakfast with beer matches from Beer Sommelier Annabelle Smith.

The Menu

Not being of a meat eating persuasion I did miss out on a couple of the matches, but happily I still managed to try all the beers....  Of the matches I tried tow really stood out, for differing reasons, and were memorable enough to remain clear through this weekends slightly alcoholic haze.

For me, one match really didn't work - Wells and Youngs Banana Bread Beer with a Banana and Strawberry Smoothie.  The beer was light and delicious, with an aroma of foam banana sweets (in a good way) and the smoothie was thick and luscious and full of wonderful hangover curing things.  However when tasted together the smoothie completely overwhelmed the sweetness of the beer, leaving it tasting unbalanced and bitter.  Not great for me in terms of a match, but the most extreme example of how beer and food can change and influence each other that I've experienced. 

Banana Bread Beer and Strawberry and Banana Smoothie
 

Pancakes with Dark Chocolate Sauce and Blueberries, matched with W&Y Double Chocolate Stout - a much needed sugar boost
 

Although the group chose Eggs Royale with St Austell Clouded Yellow as the best match of the morning my standout favourite was the Welsh Rarebit Crumpets matched with W&Y Bombardier.  It was delicious, and the best post drinking snack I've found.  So good in fact that I recreated it today to clear the last fog following the CAMRGB twissup yesterday.

Felicity Cloake from the Guardian had already done the hard work finding the best Rarebit recipe so swap the toast for crumpets and stout for Bombardier and the jobs a goodun'.  With a glass of Bombardier, ultimate crumpet based joy.

A fantastic way to spend a morning - I can't wait for the next event.

Rock Stars

'Tis December, time of Christmas parties, Christmas drinks, and dull industry awards.  Across the world people are gathering to celebrate the best in Local Business Banking (as I know from my past life), Toner Sales (why isn't it called ink?), Refrigeration Engineering and Beer Writing.  Except beer writing isn't dull, it's brilliant, and thought provoking and exciting, and the British Guild of Beer Writers annual awards bash is one of the highlights if my year.

I was lucky enough to attend this event for the second time on Thursday.  An event where the great and the good of the beer industry gather.  Brewers, writers, bloggers, thinkers.  These people are my rock stars.  

I get just as excited about the chance to talk to a brewer for a while and spend time with beery types as the chance to stand in the front row of a Greenday gig.  That's pretty excited.  I know that's not normal, and will freely admit that my beer geekery may be getting a little out of hand, but it's true.  Sitting in a room with the likes of Roger Protz, Pete Brown, Adrian Tierney-Jones and many others was brilliant, and inspiring.  And listening to speeches about particular writers and the things they had done or written about wasn't dull, it was wonderful.

From a slow start my short blogging life has fizzled and died, one New Years resolution, a total of three posts, it's definitely not setting the world on fire.  On Thursday, sitting surrounded by members if the British Guild of Beer Writers I was inspired to write about something that I (along with them) get excited by.  Beer.  Not to copy, or for praise or acknowledgement (although of course those things wound never be turned down!) but because if I don't put my beery thoughts somewhere they would never be heard (plus my husband will eventually get sick of me wittering on about new hop varieties) and the thing that stuck with me from the other night is that spreading the beery message is a great thing to do, and if I can spread some beery love to just one person, that's pretty cool.

So that's my toe in the beer blogging water, making a tiny ripple rather than a big splash.  But, I hope, a tiny ripple is better than nothing at all.