London 80 #4 [58] Portobello Gold

We called in today after a visit to the nearby Museum of Brands which is highly recommended.

The Portobello Gold is nice to look at and has a terrific black cat but no
hand pumps and so we didn't stay for a drink.

Back down the hill a short way is the Duke of Wellington, a pleasingly refurbished Young's pub with an excellent pint of Special.

London 80 #3 [75] St. Stephen's

This stands opposite the Houses of Parliament and, allegedly, is patronised by members. There were quite a few suits and members of the chattering classes there today, but none I recognised.
Upstairs is dining only and downstairs there are two bars which would be pleasant but for the overcrowding. We had two pints of Badgers bitter which was fine.

Here's their web site.

We managed to find a seat and accepted a menu but declined to order as it was overpriced (fish and chips £12) junk food and the smell of overused fat dominated the atmosphere. When told that we did not wish to eat, the surly serving-person asked us to leave.

This might be a nice enough pub when parliament is not sitting, but it is not worth the effort on a busy day.

I felt strongly enough about it to post a reaction on Trip advisor.

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London 80 #2 [76] Tate Modern

The 76th entry in London 80 is the bar in the restaurant on the 6th (not 7th) floor of Tate Modern.

The beers are fully-priced, as may be seen from their menu and the bill shown.

They no longer sell the recommended Battersea Brewery Power Station Porter, so we made do with bottles of Treboom Baron Saturday (rather under flavoured) and Pride.



The fine view across the Thames to St. Pauls is still there.

London 80 #1 [1] Albannach / Admiralty

Today we had our first outing using Around London in 80 Pubs, published in 2008.

It was a rather inauspicious start. The first of the 80 pubs listed (in alphabetical order) is the Albannach in Trafalgar Square where we were directed to a bottle of Innis & Gunn's.

Unfortunately, the pub is now The Admiralty, owned by Fuller, Smith and Turner. We has a pint of HSB and a pint of Pride. Nothing wrong with the beer, but the pub is rather touristy, as you might expect given its location.

Brussels

The CMIC Brussels visit encompassed four days but we only attended the first two visits and it is difficult to imagine a more diverse pair of breweries.

The Cantillon brewery is the last remaining traditional brewer of Lambic beers in Brussels. Lambic beer is brewed slowly using the wild yeasts and bacteria that are available naturally at the site: the wort is pumped into a large, shallow (to maximise the surface area) copper vessel in the attic, left for a few days to attract the yeasts and then stored in oak barrels for a couple of years to ferment. It all sounds delightfully quaint and natural and wholesome.
But when I used to brew at home, all the instructions stressed the importance of sterilisation to avoid contamination of the brew by wild yeasts and there is a reason for that: Lambic beer tastes awful, like the last inch of a bottle left in the garden for several days in the summer, but some folks like it.
Lambic beers are blends of three-year-old brews. Gueuze is a blend of 1, 2 and 3 year old brews.

By contrast, the following day we visited the Brasseie de la Senne brewery. This is a small, young brewery, fanatical (in a nice way) about taste and traditional methodology combined with innovation.
There Taras Boulba is the nicest beer we have tasted in a long time and we brought back four bottles for Christmas morning, replacing the (faux) champaign this year.

Intro

This is my second attempt today at starting a beer blog. The first was called cervisium.blogspot.co.uk,  for reasons explained below, but I swapped that for BeerAndThat, which I might explain at some point.

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I tried various addresses for the blog: combinations of beer, ale and pub; beer spelt with two 3s (b33r; and beer spelt with multiple "e"s, but I gave up at ten - all these were taken. Cervisium is allegedly Latin for beer and that will do (I gave up Latin for physics in the third form, around 1968).

Anyway, we have been members of CAMRA for several years and a few years ago joined the CAMRA investment club that organises brewery visits including a foreign trip each year. Last year it was Prague, this year Brussels and on the latter we met a chap who introduced us to the Around X in 80 Beers books by 'Podge' Pollard and Siobhan McGinn: he had nearly finished the Brussels edition and mentioned that there is also one for London. I ordered it and it was here when we got back.

As we were in town today, we started exploring with the book and decided to write an occasional blog on this and other beer-related activities.