My Golden Pint Nominations

Best UK Draught Beer: Otley OG (runner up: Thornbridge Jaipur)

Best UK Bottled Beer: Thornbridge Halcyon (runner up: BrewDog & Stone Bashah)

Best Overseas Draught Beer: Flying Dog Classic Pale Ale (runner up: Duvel Green)

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA (runner up: Mikkeller Beer Geek Brunch Weasel). I was never a big fan of the massively hoppy American IPAs until I tried 90 Minute but now thanks to the DFH geniuses, I'm hooked!

Best Overall Beer: Old Chimney Good King Henry Special Reserve 2007 Vintage. Hard to believe that an imperial stout can be better than this, so, my challenge for 2010 is to try and find one.

Best Bottle Label or Pump Clip: BrewDog Atlantic IPA. I love Johanna Basford's stuff, she is fantastic, and Atlantic IPA has a damn good looking label!

Best UK Brewery: BrewDog. They have received a lot of stick this year for various publicity stunts and feuds but all that matters is the beer. Over the past 12 months they have given us Tokyo*, Bashah, and the outrageous Tactical Nuclear Penguin, amongst others. However, by far and away their most genius master stroke of the year was dressing Bracken up like a penguin!

Best Overseas Brewery: Mikkeller. I love these guys! I would give them this just on the back of Beer Geek Brunch Weasel, which most people will agree is incredible. They have a fantastic range of beers and just keep innovating.

Pub/Bar of the Year: The Rake

Beer Festival of the Year: GBBF

Supermarket of the Year: Booths. Unfortunately, it's just Northern, however, any supermarket that sells Thomas Hardy ale, Ola Dubh Special 12 Reserve, and J. W. Lees Harvest ale within a year has to win.

Independent Retailer of the Year: BeerRitz, Leeds. Not only do you get a superb range of beer but you also get an even more impressive beer guide in Zak Avery...and his beard.

Online Retailer of the Year: BeerMerchants.com. They have excelled themselves this year with awesome American beers from the likes of Southern Tier, Lost Abbey, Port Brewing, Founders, the list goes on. They have also championed some superb British brewers like Ramsgate and Moor, as well as keeping all our beer cupboards full of Mikkeller.

Best Beer Book: Good Bottled Beer Guide (7^th Edition) by Jeff Evans. This little book has pointed me towards some of the best beers in Britain, and helped me discover lots of cracking little breweries.

Best Beer Blog: Pencil and Spoon. I think most of us are in agreement that Mr Pencil-Spoon writes some lovely beer waffle (ummm beer waffle, sounds tasty), and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it this year. I wait with baited breath and an overwhelming sense of envy to hear about his forthcoming beer adventures in America.

Best Beer Twitterer: @BrackenBrewDog. Probably the most educated dog in the world with beer credentials that are second to none.

Best Online Interactive Brewery: Brewdog. They have become the masters of multimedia publicity, and are the obvious choice for this.

Food and Beer Pairing of the Year: Southern Tier Mokah and Carte Dor caramel and cinnamon ice-cream.

Next Year I’d Most Like To...touch Zak Avery's beard.

More talk of Christmas beer

Christmas seems to be the time of year that beer geeks dig out the special beers they have shown great restrain not to open throughout the year, all to celebrate the birth of Santa. So over the next week or so the main topic of discussion amongst beer bloggers will be 'what are you drinking on Christmas day?'. Not to be left out, I figured I would disclose my choices...well, my choices as I write this, they seem to change pretty much every day.

I have bought a few beers over the last couple of months specifically to drink over Christmas. Here is a list of what I have set aside in my recently created “Christmas Beers Cupboard”.

Mikkeller Beer Geek Breakfast
Port Brewing Santa's Little Helper 2008
Goose Island Christmas Ale 2009
Anchor Christmas Ale 2009
Yulesmith Holiday Ale
Samuel Smith's Winter Welcome Ale
Ridgeway Insanely Bad Elf 2009
Shepherds Neame Christmas Ale 2009
Otley O-Ho-Ho
Delirium Christmas
Harvey's Imperial Extra Double Stout 2003
Old Chimney Good King Henry Vintage 2007
Samichlaus 2008
Tactical Nuclear Penguin
Flying Dog Wild Dog Schwarz
Fraoch Heather Ale 20th Anniversary Ale

Having written it all down, I've realised that there is an awful lot I'm wanting to drink and in all likelihood I won't drink everything and if I do, I damn sure won't remember doing so.

OK, so, what to have on Santa day? I'm going with Beer Geek Breakfast for, well, breakfast. Not had it before, I've had Weasel and loved it but figured as I don't intend to be too late up, breakfast was more appropriate. In the evening I will definitely be opening a bottle of Old Chimney's Good King Henry. It's a beer I have been wanting to try for a long time and having recently got my hands on a few bottles (see previous post), Christmas seems like as good a time as ever.

These are the only two I am sure about so far, mainly because I don't have to think too hard about intricate food pairings. I'm completely open to suggestions for the rest, specifically, when are you allowed to drink Samichlaus? Has to be Christmas day, right?

A Bloody Good Little Brewery

As with most of my little trips, this started with a single-minded obsession to get hold of a certain beer. The beer in question this time being Good King Henry Special Reserve, an 11% oak aged imperial stout from a little brewery somewhere in East Anglia. I tracked down the address and convinced my girlfriend that a nice scenic trip across the country was in fact a lovely idea, especially given all the wonderful snow!

The Old Chimney brewery is situated on a small farm in a little village near Diss...that's kinda near Norwich or Ipswich or...somewhere East Angular (sounds so much better than East Anglian, right?). It is only marked by a small, hard to read sandwich board outside the farm gate, and don't expect your sat nav to help you, as the post code will dump you in the middle of a residential cul-de-sac half a mile down the road.

The brewery consists of a small two roomed, one-story farm building, with one room housing the brewing equipment and the other room being the brewery shop. Basically, it's ruddy bloody tiny!

I was pretty shocked a brewery that produces one of the most highly rated beers in the country is such a small operation but it really is what real brewing should be about; small runs of perfectly crafted beer with painstaking attention to detail and a contagious passion for what you're creating.


The place was set up by Master brewer Alan Thompson in 1995. I found him a lovely fella, very welcoming, and more than happy to talk about the beers and the brewery. He even gave us a couple of free half pint of Scarlet Tiger, a full bodied malty ale, which my girlfriend insisted we buy a bottle of.

It is blindingly obvious that it is not about the money for Alan, as with the quality of the products he could have grown Old Chimney into a beer leviathan by now. He clearly loves what he does and his small scale production allows him to brew some of the best beer in the country.

If you are ever in Diss (I'm sure people do actually go there for some reason or another) or paying a visit to Beers of Europe, which is conveniently only an hour away in Kings Lynn, drop by the brewery, if only to get hold of a bottle of their revered Good King Henry Special Reserve, which is ranked as the top beer in England on ratebeer.com.

Oh, and also, if you buy 12 bottles or more you get a 10% discount!