Longer Reads About Beer

It’s light lagers and ales in summer and dark, warming beers in winter, right? But do we really change how we drink when winter comes? Beer Writer of the Year Adrian Tierney-Jones muses

We explore a snippet of evolutionary history on the most popular craft beer: IPA, and why so many of them can seem unbalanced.

Celebrated beer writer Adrian Tierney-Jones takes part in some time-travelling to see what the rest of 2017 will bring to the beer world

Our Beer Sommelier, Maggie Cubbler discusses her opinion on sexism in beer and it's not buxom women on pump clips.

In an exclusive extract from his best-selling book, The Pub, Beer Writer of the Year Pete Brown looks at the future of the pub, and why it's not all doom and gloom

Journalist and beer sommelier Sophie Atherton dons her hop anorak and tries to avoid considering a world without hops.

Cult beers

I am a cult beer. I am a beer you will scrape and save and queue and turn blue for; I am a beer for which anticipation, impatience, hysteria and fear mix and match within the soul when thought of. I am a beer you will swoon over, fall in love with and give out signals to the universe that this is why you drink beer.

I have many names — Cantillon Zwanze, Dark Lord, Kentucky Breakfast Stout, various manifestations of Bourbon County Stout, Pliny the Younger, Unhuman Cannonball, DIPA v11, Born To Die, Surly Darkness. Maybe once in a while I am also a special release blended and bonded and aged and hounded and brought forth into the world. Tonight as I write I am Wild Beer’s The Blend Summer 2015, gueuze-like in my spritziness, sweet and sour, citrus on the edge of ruin, but bought back to make the palate jump with joy. I was only available

2016 was quite a year for beer... Our Beer Sommelier Maggie Cubbler looks back at the year 2016 in beer in the UK and US, and wonders what next for the 'Craft Beer Revolution'

How to make beer the guest of honour at the table

It's time for beer to take centre stage at the dinner table argues our Beer Sommelier Maggie Cubbler. Here she provides a few tips for a successful dinner party

What exactly is an IPA?

The history of the IPA is an enigma. Here the writer Adrian Tierney-Jones untangles some of the information to discover what makes a beer an IPA

Here is an IPA, golden and brazen in the glass, sun-ripening wafts of mango, lychee and orange swirling out into the open air, summoning up images of glowing summer days by ozone-rich Pacific shores, pleading to be drank. And that is what you do, whether it’s a sip, a gulp or a glug – and now there’s more tropical fruit, though it’s as if the fruit have grown up, developed muscles, after taking those Charles Atlas course. There’s also a riptide of bitterness and dryness and sweetness, a revolution in the mouth, a resolution made to drink more.

Here is another IPA, darker in its sense of gold, bruised perhaps, a creamy egg-white colour of foam signalling its invitation to the drinker. The bright tropical aloha of the previous beer has

In this post we celebrate the work of CAMRA and offer a guide to the complex flavours of British real ales