Ich gehe nach Berlin October 30, 2009

November 9th marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I will be going.  I will be drinking to it and to my own Cold War childhood.  The fall of the Berlin wall had profound meaning to me as a uber-politicized teen who raged through the Reagan years, plagued by nightmares of [...]

Hop Tonic October 23, 2009

My best friend in college happened to be Irish and once when I had a cold he offered me his cure-all: a pint of Guinness and a raw onion.  Did it work? Why yes.  My guess is it was the raw onion that really made you want to be better so badly that you decided [...]

The black sheep approach to marketing July 9, 2009

The guys at brewdog are good at making a beer with a story, and now they want you to do the telling.  They trust the drinker to taste something and to know when enough is enough.  And now, they’re trusting drinkers with their blog.
The Zeitgeist blog is a platform of the drinker, for the drinker, [...]

And now for something completely different June 12, 2009

My novel, The Desperate Ones, is now available from Lulu.com in paperback and as a free download.  So, this book has very little to do with beer.  In fact, in the book’s universe there is no such thing as beer anymore.
But if you are curious what has driven me to drink over the last six [...]

Here’s to Great Lengths! June 5, 2009

This months session is hosted by Red, White and Brew, who’ve asked us to consider beer and distance, or which beer was “the longest haul away.”  I first considered writing about the earthy, comforting Dragonhead Stout from the Orkney Brewery– I took a plane and then a car and then a ferry and another car [...]

Take a sad beer and make it beh-eh-eh-ter* May 1, 2009

It’s the Session, hosted by Beer at Joe’s who’ve asked us to wax lyrical about beer cocktails.  I blogged about stuff in beer quite recently.  It’s a delightful topic which undermines a good deal of beer snobbery present in the blogoshire (coining credit:Woolpack Dave)
Without getting all pedantic, what exactly counts as a “cocktail”– must it [...]

Stout Showers April 18, 2009

Perhaps this is what I get for naming the Black Heart Stout after such a volatile organ.  Have you ever seen an arterial spray of beer?  I have.  After a rather Withnail and I style afternoon, I find myself covered in the stout I brewed three weeks ago.  I taste and smell awesome!  If it [...]

Your Party-by-Proxy Beer November 23, 2008

I haven’t posted in a while, being consumed with the dreariness of working in a huge investment bank during the Money Apocalypse.
There have been some lovely beer moments that have gone un-blogged– meeting the passionate and chatty RealAle.com fellows at the bustling Twickenham Beer Festival.  And there was that revelatory tasting of Fuller’s London Porter [...]

Things I Learned Today September 19, 2008

I can blog from the banking citadel in which I work. Wherein most websites are verboten, this one is not.
Taking lunch in heels is a bad idea.  (I thought– how hard could it be?  So many of my fellow City  women do it.  I had learned from a fellow City worker that most women in heels [...]

State of the Art August 25, 2008

why?, originally uploaded by velvetdahlia.

Since I couldn’t take any decent pictures of the pub where we found ourselves on Sunday, here is me drinking a pint there and vaguely protesting the impromptu documentation of said drinking.
Yesterday I visited a friend in hostipal in Euston and used it as a reason to check out Bree Louise, [...]