An introduction

I have been meaning to start writing this blog for a long time, but it’s very easy to procrastinate about this sort of thing. Just to start by introducing myself, my name is Andrew and I love beer. I realize there are thousands of people who could introduce themselves like that and yet they don’t write a blog about it, so let me define that a bit further – I like beer, but I am very discerning about what I drink.

I didn’t used to be. When I first started drinking, at about the age of 16 or 17, I’d drink whatever cheap bottles were in the house, or a big brand lager (Kronenbourg was the default option). I can remember drinking Carlsberg Special Brew when I met one of my girlfriends (at a festival, in my defence), and when I was at university, slabs of Damburger Export (24 x 500ml for £15) were a staple. The main reason was that they were cheap or ‘effective’ – the sort of term used by drinkers of a certain age who aren’t really worried about the means, so long as they get to the end as quickly and inexpensively as possible,

This all changed in September 2006, and almost entirely by chance. I had a trip to New York planned with a friend to see a band on tour. Unfortunately, said band cancelled their show, so we ended up going to see a mutual acquaintance in Delaware. If you’re not familiar with the state of Delaware, there’s not an awful lot I can tell you – that Delaware joke in Wayne’s World was there for a reason. It has no tax, it has a Nascar circuit… but, most significantly, it has the Dogfish Head brewery.

Going to the Dogfish brewpub in Rehoboth Beach at an impressionable age was incredible – 60 and 90 Minute IPAs (I’d heard the term, but usually in the context of ‘Greene King’, and this definitely didn’t taste like that), Raison d’Etre, Palo Santo Marron… we had tasters of everything they had on draft that day. It was the first time that I realised just what I’d been missing with what I’d been drinking before. When we went home, it started the process of actually considering the things I was ordering when I went drinking.

Over the past five years, I’ve drunk and enjoyed some fantastic beers, whether brewed 5 minutes down the road where I live (I can smell the malt from Fuller’s Griffin Brewery on my way to work) or halfway around the world. More recently, I’ve started to take a couple of tentative steps into brewing my own beer too. The reason for starting this blog is to document the things that I’m drinking, the haphazard way that I’m brewing and to more generally convert my enthusiasm for malt and hops into words.

I can’t claim to be hugely knowledgeable about beer in the way that a lot of beer bloggers I read are, but I hope my enthusiasm for what I’m drinking will ome across and anyone reading this will be able to look past my ignorance!

Cheers.