TGIF: Café Foeders – new beer gem in Amsterdam

As long as I can remember the place was café Amstelvaart, or really café-billiard, and that confounded billiards table was inconveniently placed in the centre of the pub. I have been in once and didn’t stay long: although rumor has it this place was the oldest pub in De Pijp (as the area is called), ...

TGIF – Austria, and mainly Vienna, takes the craft beer lead

Just four years ago all the beer you could get in Austria was strictly limited to locally produced Helles, Keller or Märzen, with the occasional German Weizen and the odd Bockbier thrown in for fun. Oh, and there were Pilseners of course. You had to search long and hard for an English Ale, a Belgian ...

Beer festivals in the Netherlands – places of total awesomeness!

Let me start by admitting that my relationship with the city of Rotterdam has always been, well, let’s say, slightly impaired by prejudice. However much as I do admit Rotterdam has a phenomenal skyline – particularly when enjoyed in the rear view mirror of a car driving at high speed – I have never found ...

Beer Passion and the Passion of Beer: one weekend, two faces

The past weekend, the last weekend of June 2016, was both an epic as well as a confusing beer weekend. Limiting myself to just two of the beery things that went on in Europe those three days, the contrast couldn’t have been bigger. We saw Beer Passion executed in Antwerp and Amsterdam – and it ...

‘No Brexit can stop us being together!’

This past Whitsun weekend a delegation of around sixty regulars and staff of 'In de Wildeman' went to Beeston near Nottingham, to celebrate the thirty year anniversary again. 'In de Wildeman' has long been "twinned" with Neil Kelso’s pub, now The Victoria Hotel: he turned sixty that weekend and it turned out to be a ...