Tom's Wine Blog

For once the photo is not from Untappd, they are all too crap! Hello everybody and welcome back to Booze Reviews! This entry is all about the “Singlefin Lager” brewed by the Harbour Brewing Company from Cornwall.

Thank you to T.G from Untappd for the photo; thanks for not having your feet in it! Welcome back to Booze Reviews! This entry is all about a beer called “Beach Boulevard” brewed by Fierce Beers from Aberdeen, Scotland. Fierce Beers was founded in 2015 and did not have a beer to sell until the middle of 2016. In the seven years since that first beer was released, they have won a plethora of awards, including 14 medals at the 2020 Scottish beer awards, going on to be named the Scottish Brewery of the Year in 2021. Of all the breweries I have seen so far in this review series, Fierce Beers seems to be the largest in scale; they export their products to over 20 countries and have an extensive catalogue of beers that they create, with 32 separate products are listed on their website. These beers span almost the entire width of beer, ranging from the more traditional IPAs and lagers to some very adventurous beers, such as a stout aged for nine months in Bourbon barrels, with a strength...

Thanks to Henry Jarrett from Untappd for the photo, somehow the best there was.   Hello and welcome back to Booze Reviews! I come to you today with a beer that has a frankly stupid name, “Conn=cted”, created in a collaboration between Beer 52 and O Brothers Brewing, from County Wicklow, Ireland. Whilst these collaboration beers are great in allowing small breweries to create small batches knowing that all the product will sell at the end, they do create some issues for me, the reviewer. For the last three beers, they are barely mentioned on the internet at all, only being found on Beer 52’s own website, and on Untappd, a website full of people who do not understand how to take good photographs of the beers they are drinking (honestly some of those photos are hilariously bad; half of them don’t even have the entire can or bottle in the shot, and the others will have their feet or their partner or their dirty kitchen in the background), and leave helpful reviews like “alright” an...

Thanks to Stuart Critchley on Untapped for the photo, every other one was just awful. Welcome back to Booze Reviews! In front of me today I have a can of “Alloa Gold”, another beer from Beer 52. If you have read my previous entry to this blog, you will know that the forthcoming reviews will likely be less positive, but who knows, maybe I’ll love it… Like the previous beer, “Alloa Gold” hails from Scotland. Its creation was a collaboration between Beer 52 and Crisp, a company that specialised in the growing of brewing malt. In the case of this beer, the can is proudly adorned with a label stating the malt is 100% Scottish, in growth, malting and packing. The actual brewing was done by Williams Bros. Brewing, a company based out of Glasgow. The brewery was founded in 1988 as a family business and their website has several interesting stories relating to their operation included in the “Our Story” section (that can be found here ). One such story is below:

Thanks to Martin D from Untappd for the photo, all the other ones on the internet were crap.   Welcome back to Booze Reviews! I return to you with another beer from Beer 52, this time with product from the Black Isle Brewery, from Inverness.   This beer is a part of the "Celtic Nations" collection, the September collection from Beer 52. As per the name, all of the beers included are from ancient Celtic nations; Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and the Isle of Mann. From the map page in the included magazine, you can also see that one of the included breweries in based in Galicia in Northern Spain. Prior to reading seeing this, and the research I subsequently did due to confusion, I learnt that Galicia gets its name from the Gallaeci , a Celtic tribe that lived in that area of Northern Spain in the Late Bronze-Age. I must admit that I then went down a bit of a rabbit hole reading about the various tribal cultures that lived in the region in the Bronze-Age and Iron-Age, b...

  Welcome back to Booze Reviews! I know I said in the last post that the following reviews would likely all be of different types of alcohol, but NOPE, the next few will all be of beer! There is a story as to how I acquired these beers, but that must wait, as I must pre-warn you that I do not like beers very much. Sure, I like lager (I'm was a student that was pretty much a requirement), but almost all other beers are just unpleasant in my opinion. So that's what this series of posts will be about, beers that I am fully expecting to dislike, but with the secondary intention of maybe acquiring a taste for them. Anyways onto the story around how I got these beers; someone I follow on Youtube had a video sponsored by this company "Beer 52", and the deal was that you could get eight cans of beer delivered to your house for just the price of the delivery, quite a good deal! Normally it's a subscription thing, they send you a box once a month, and you say whether you li...

This post is part of a new series I am embarking on that I've titled "Booze Reviews". At this point I don't know what booze I'll be reviewing, but they'll be as occasional as all the other posts, so I apologise in advance for my sporadic posting. The topic of this post is a delightful Crème de mûre that I have been making over the past week. It is a Blackberry Liqueur, quite low in alcohol, but very pleasant as a long drink over ice. The recipe, I must admit, is not my own, but can be found on the BBC GoodFood website here . It is a simple recipe of few ingredients; blackberries, red wine, and vodka. The only changes I'd recommend is using 200g of sugar, rather than the 500g in the recipe, as otherwise I feel it would be too sweet. The wine I used to create it was a 2022 McGuigan Estate Cabernet Sauvignon. I chose this as the label stated it was "full of blackberries" and had "hints of dark fruits", which would match well with the bla...

  Price -  £6.00 Country of origin - Spain Score - 6/10 ----------------------------------------------------------------- ( AUTHORS NOTE - I know it has been a long time since my last blog post, but I've been busy. So why am I writing this now? Because I'm procrastinating writing my dissertation, arguably the most important part of my degree. But tonight, wine is more important than early medieval landscapes. I also wanted to drink.)

Price -  £4.99 Country of origin -  South Africa Score -  6/10 ----------------------------------------------------------------- I'm currently on holiday with my friends in Penzance in Cornwall, and I needed a bottle of wine for something I was cooking for (sadly I was only cooking for one of my friends, as a whilst all my friends are great, I do seem to gravitate towards the fussiest people when it comes to food). Despite Lidl claiming to have a large selection of wines, when I visited it seemed that most of their shelves were just stocking the same bottles. There were very few wines from brands I knew; most of the wine on sale had was simply labeled as "Sauvignon Blanc" or "Merlot" or "Shiraz". Lidl's website lists a lot more wines than were on display, so maybe the shop was due a delivery?  The label on the bottle describes the wine as "crisp and frisky". Whilst I know what "crisp" means when it comes to wines, "frisky...

Price - £7.50 Country of origin - Chile Score - 7 /10 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Rarely do I find myself drinking white wine. This isn’t out of any inherent dislike of them, but because most of the time I eat foods that I think work better with red wines. In the past, most of the time when I drank wine with food, it was with foods such as pizza or pasta dishes with tomato-based sauces. However, recently I decided to expand the types of dishes that I cook for myself, and therefore expand the wines that I try alongside them. Now, I know very little about white wine; I bought this bottle of Sauvignon Blanc not knowing what foods it pairs well with. I have bought Casillero del Diablo wines a few times before (there’s a merlot review in the works currently), and they’ve always been pleasant, so I thought I’d stick with a brand I knew. The other reason was because it was also on offer at Morrisons, and I needed some other wine for a barbecue I was atten...

 Price - £23.95 (Retails for around £9) Country of origin - France Score - 7/10 ----------------------------------------------------------------- From the start this bottle of wine was different to most others I've tried; when eating out, normally I refrain from drinking wine, instead opting for something like cider or a soft drink. However, this occasion felt far too fancy for a Thatchers Gold or a diet coke. Yesterday evening was the Exeter University Archaeology and Forensic Society’s summer ball, an opportunity for students to meet up, have a nice meal, and go clubbing after our exam season had finished. Now whilst this was a lovely evening, I did have one issue with the summer ball, that being the day it was held. The Archaeology department is currently running the domestic archaeology fieldschool, a required section of our degree program, which involves four weeks of work on an archaeological excavation. Now, I don’t want to complain about the third-year students who organise...

Price - £7.50 Country of origin - Argentina Score - 2/10 I have started writing this whilst “drinking” this wine. As you can see from the photo I've taken, the bottle still has wine in it. I will not be drinking any more wine from this bottle, because it is unpleasant. I doubt I will be able to finish my glass. ----------------------------------------------------------------- The label was what made me want to buy this bottle of wine; it has a lovely colour palette with gold accents. It drew me in like some kind of visual siren, charming me and lowering my guard, until BAM  it struck. Admittedly this wine didn't wreck my ship, kill me and then eat my body, but I feel equally betrayed.  I probably should have guessed from the brand name and the description of “jammy” on the label, but this is a sweet wine, but not a “sweet” that I’ve encountered before.    Nowhere on the label does it say it is a sweet wine. A Malbec wine should not be sweet. The tasting notes on t...