Force Feeding

Having grown up obsessed with collecting Star Wars figures, it seems strange to reflect on the fact that, until yesterday, I'd only ever seen one of the films in the cinema - Return of the Jedi, on its original release 32 and half years ago. When I was six.

And having pretty much dismissed the concept of the prequel films altogether (I'm not even sure if I ever saw them all entirely through), mostly because of George Lucas's unforgivable tinkering with the original trilogy, I wasn't sure what to expect when we went to see The Force Awakens on its day of release. (Don't worry, there's no spoilers here - unless you're really looking for them!)

Not content with bringing The Force back into my world after a lengthy absence, I also took the opportunity to check out The Lounge at the Odeon Bayswater - where a full table service provides the food and drink, while you watch the film from luxury reclining seats with footrests. A strange combination, which has apparently been around for a few years, so it must be working out for them.

Montezuma's Chocolate Lager - a rare review

OK, so it's fairly uncommon for me to post reviews of a single beer.

Like most beer writers, I sometimes receive samples from breweries for my earnest consideration, but the reality is that I prefer to do most of my drinking at the pub, and these bottles (and more recently cans) can be left lying around for months to the point where they may not be in optimal condition, and any assessment would be coloured by that.

I also feel that if I review one of them, I should probably review them all, which creates a lot of work for me, and ultimately a series of fairly samey reviews about fairly samey beers. I'm not a bottled beer expert and there are plenty of other writers keen to work in this fashion, so I'll leave it to them.

And while I'm grateful for the freebies, if a beer is good enough for me to write about, I'll probably be buying it myself.

(Occasionally, I do make exceptions if a beer is particularly good, bad or just noteworthy - like Brewmeister 'Snake Venom' and Brewdog 'Nanny State', neither of which, incidentally, were free!)

Montezuma's Chocolate Lager is a collaboration between the Hogs Back brewery in Surrey and Montezuma's, a fairly small time chocolatier based in West Sussex. In all honesty, I don't think I've ever tried one of their chocolate bars, and while Hogs Back beers have been around for as long as I've been drinking, they're not a brewer that has made much of an impression, at least until now. The beer was developed last year, but I've only discovered it in the last couple of months.

This is a very good beer, a very different beer, and at 4.5% a very accessible, drinkable beer. And the good news is that it's widely available in supermarkets, at least around here.

10 years of 24 hour drinking

So, it's the tenth anniversary of the changes to British licensing laws that saw '24 hour drinking' - as it was promoted at the time - introduced.

It was remarkable in that it was one of the few pieces of legislation from a Labour government with which I've completely agreed, and a rare moment of genuine liberalisation from that most authoritarian of parties.


It's also remarkable just how little it changed things. It wasn't the life-changing progressive development we thought and hoped it might be, was it?

How to destroy 12 countries in 83 paragraphs

Some time ago, I forget exactly when - probably around last Christmas, I set myself the slightly bonkers target of visiting 12 new countries during 2015.

Given that I'm reasonably well-traveled and had already been to something like 36 different countries, depending on what criteria one uses, this was a bit of a challenge. Especially as I also really like staying in England quite a lot. (We live in a fucking great country with a history and culture that shames the rest of the world and a thriving craft beer scene. Coventry are winning every week, and Steeleye Span are on tour. Who in their right mind wants to go off somewhere else in a fucking aeroplane?!?)

But with over 50 days still left in the year, I completed the mission relatively easily. Go me. (It's an even more impressive score for Mrs. B-V who hadn't been to Estonia or Belgium before and thus got 14 new countries!)

Some places were interesting from a food and drink perspective, some were not. Some I blogged about at the time*, others I wrote about elsewhere, and still others I didn't bother with as I considered them a waste of ink. Or keystrokes.

Half-measure for measure

So, I've just completed the latest Spoons Bingo, which is great timing as Le Gothique's always excellent Halloween beer festival starts tomorrow, and then on Thursday morning we're flying off to the Far East for a week.

(Yeah I know. We've only just come back from Krakow. And Cumbria the weekend before. And Tallinn/Helsinki the week before that. Amazing that I had enough time in the Green and Pleasant land to get all 50 beers really, isn't it?)

Now, for more years than I can remember,  one of the Wetherfest's selling points is that beers are available in smaller measures and you can sample three third-pint measures of different beers for the price of a pint.

Obviously this doesn't apply to me because I drink pints, but most tickers do not, and it's become an all-too familiar sight at the bar - the bedraggled scooper, hunched over his beerly triptych, squintingly scribbling notes into his crumpled festival programme.

Last week I started to find this phenomenon just a little bit irritating, after waiting ages at the bar while countless trios of thirds were served, so I ordered three of the beers I needed all at once, sidled up to Mr. Threethirds and lined up my pints, just as he had his thirds.

He looked at me. I beamed back disconcertingly until he started shuffling on his feet.

I looked down at my pints, glanced over at his thirds and then looked him in the eye again, still smiling.

To be honest, I'm not even entirely sure what point I was trying to make, but I felt better for it, and that's the important thing. I guess I could've gone on to glance at our respective crotches, but that would've just been weird.

The curry of my youth - Lamb Tikka Rogan

Back in the 80s, the longest shadow hanging over the world was the hole in the Ozone layer. Then it was Third World Debt, then the Banking Crisis.

Now it's Shit Takeaways.

I used to be staunchly of the opinion that any curry cooked at home would never be quite as good as the equivalent dish from your local Tandoori restaurant. They had the specialist equipment; The spices you can't buy anywhere without being in the know; The proper Tandoor oven.

Now I'm not so sure - while there are some perfectly good places plying their trade in the 21st century marketplaces of Just Eat and HungryHouse, there are also some right munters, pigstrotters and tugboats out there. (If you accept that these terms can apply as equally to shit takeaways as they might to someone picked up in a shit nightclub before picking up a shit takeaway!)

Expensive 'Spoons, expensive countries and a very expensive poo

One of the most insane weekends of my life involved a stag night in Tallinn, eight years ago.

We set off at stupid'o'clock on a Friday morning, on a minibus from Ipswich, started drinking in the Stansted Wetherspoons, and got to the Estonian capital shortly after midday local time, if I recall correctly.

There then followed a marathon afternoon and evening of spiced beer and shots of pepper vodka, followed by weird, tasty, offally food. I suspect I drank more than anybody else. At least eight pints plus half a dozen shots, I'd imagine.