Platinum Pints: BV's best beers of the 2010s

This year hasn't started well. I've consumed more pints of Lemsip than of beer, and wallowed in so much self pity and so little alcohol that I might as well be doing Dry Fucking January.

But it's not just a new year, it's a whole new decade... or is it?!?

There's a compelling mathematical case that 2020 is actually the last year of the 2010s and therefore the new decade won't commence until January 1, 2021. The problem is that if you accept that logic then you also have to believe that the Millennium didn't begin until 2001.

And that is an argument I had a problem with at the time, because going from 1999 to 2000 felt like an absolutely massive psychological shift, whereas 2000 to 2001 was a teensy little incremental feather that you'd barely notice. And given that time is ultimately an abstract concept, measured against fairly arbitrary starting points, the psychological effect - the way we feel about it - is arguably the only thing that matters.

So, there's my working out in the margins of the page. 2000 was the start of the new millennium, and therefore 2020 is indeed the start of the new decade, like it or not.

Which all means I can now pick my 10 favourite beers of the 2010s. Or, more specifically, of the 6850 new-to-me cask beers, because that's how I do these things. That's a lot of beer records to trawl through. But let's Lemsip up, open the spreadsheet and get the fuck on with it...

Is cask ale going the way of vinyl?

I have considerable admiration for vinyl collectors.

Obviously it was once the dominant format for releasing music, but when the CD came along it was largely usurped from the marketplace over several years. Sales of CDs themselves then went into decline with the emergence of downloads and subsequently streaming - us audiophiles know that this hasn't necessarily represented progress and are increasingly frustrated that most modern-day music consumers don't really seem to care.


Vinyl lovers stuck with their records against the tide, and, I think, have been proven largely right in their instincts. (Personally I went down the very niche route of super hi-fidelity digital music on DVD-A, a format which never took off and is now considered pretty much dead, despite sounding superb!)

But vinyl is now a specialist niche. It will, in all likelihood, never be truly mainstream ever again. No matter how good it sounds, what if the music you happen to like simply doesn't get released on vinyl? A lot of music isn't. (Yes, I think you can already see where the comparison with real ale is coming from...)

Lost Breweries: E is for Eldridge Pope

I've no idea what I drank on my 18th birthday (other than 'too much') but I can still remember with considerable clarity what I drank the following day.

Way back in the Distant When, Thomas Hardy's Ale, brewed by Eldridge Pope of Dorchester, was one of the most famous bottled beers in the world. A Barley Wine, generally assumed to be around 12% ABV though with considerable flexibility, it came in little individually numbered bottles - tightly sealed as if to prevent inadvertent broachment.

It was a beer you'd hear folks talking about, but never see anybody drinking. People would buy cases and lay it down for years, sometimes decades. That was the point.

Lost Breweries: A is for Ash Vine

I've been regularly drinking beer for about 25 years now, which probably makes me just about qualified to reminisce about breweries that have slipped from our horizons.

It's easy to forget that this even happens, given that we've been reaping a seemingly endless harvest of new breweries for many years now. But some, indeed many, breweries go beer-belly-up for various reasons, so this is the first in a series of posts where I look back wistfully - or in this case, not - at a few of them. Starting with West Country micro Ash Vine.

And if you're sitting there thinking 'Ash Vine... Hmm.. were their beers as boring as I remember?' then you're pretty much on the same wavelength as me! And if the name draws a blank, it's probably further proof of the singularly unmemorable nature of their beers. Their many, many all-very-similar beers...

BV's best beers of 2015

Well, it looks like 2015 is finally over - I don't know about you, but after suffering the seemingly inescapable march of time and life going faster and faster, the year actually went pretty slowly. Maybe time is slowing down? Maybe God slammed on the celestial handbrakes?

Or maybe it's just because it was a year with lots crammed into it, like a bulging Temporal Christmas Stocking. Perhaps with crudely-wrapped action figures all poking out the sides and distorting the very fabric of time?

I got to visit 12 new countries during the 12 months. That was pretty cool. And I finally ate in the House of Commons' Members Dining Room, and invented the Pimms Lagerita.

So, yes, it's been quite a year, but the backdrop to any sort of existence is, of course, beer, and this is the time when I traditionally tell you all what the best ones were. Well, the best new beers I sampled during the year, obviously. I seldom retread.

The brewery where everything turns sour

So, this year I've got a bit of a travel bug biting me squarely on the ballsack, and as a consequence I'm metamorphosing into sort of a less amiable version of Michael Palin. One who has to pay his own way to go to places and doesn't have a TV crew in tow.

Essentially, the plan is to try and tick off 12 whole new countries in 2015, and given that I've already visited 30-odd, including most (though not all) of the closer ones, it could be a bit of a challenge, so I'm trying to get off to a flying start. Except that I don't like flying all that much.

Sampling beer at the Cantillon brewery

Last month we had a short break to Marrakech (and I'll blog a Moroccan tagine recipe once I've perfected it) and the other day we had an even shorter trip to the closest country I hadn't done yet - Luxembourg.

A really, really fucking short trip, actually. About 80 minutes. There's not an awful lot to do in Lux.

However, the upside of this is that we got to use Brussels as a base for a couple of nights to break up the 13 hour train journey, and there is plenty to do there. Especially if you like drinking Belgian beer.