Tom's Wine Blog

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...