Don't mix your drinks

'Don't mix your drinks.' Sound advice, but I rarely listened, even on the best-behaved of evenings. Delighting in the next day's forecast of pain that followed a cocktail of red wine, whisky, maybe a rum, porter, a DIPA and so on. Maybe even a proper cocktail. Dinner would be chips.

Best practise for blogging and social media, too, is all about sticking to the one subject. Owning it, whether that be bikes or beer, fashion or fiction. Stick to a USP, say the experts, and go heavy on the U. They also command you use a picture.

Well, this wee beer diary has been very beer focused since my very first post almost five years ago: a brew by Alechemy, purchased at the now sadly shut Hippo Beers on Great Western Road.

But the blog's been quiet for the past year (though I've continued to write about beer, whisky and gin in other capacities). Not since I was blown away by a batch of beers sent from a new-ish brewery called Fierce in 2016 have I taken the time to sit down and try to put my sense of tastes into words.

And while the real world got madder in this blog's five-year life, in my world I felt the beer reviews got better, evolving from the mildly cringey "This IPA is a full flavoured, hoppy and delicious beer" to a regular (and paid!) beer review in The Herald that had quotes, interviews, tasting notes and everything. Even paid advertising.

I spent the first meagre but magnificent earnings from that column on a bottle of GlenDronach Revival 15 yo from the Good Spirits Company in Glasgow. I was blown away by it, and remember it now a couple of years later with great fondness. It was seriously stunning, and at that point was the most expensive whisky I'd ever bought (I think it was about £60). It must have been one of the last ones around as the range is now on a three-year sabbatical due to lack of stock causing the price to rocket.  

All of which serves as a rather long and self-indulgent introduction to the predictably earth-shattering announcement that it's time for something new. Time I listened to the advice and kept the great and the grain, the old and the new, the boozing and the swimming all very separate.

So, the vlogs, blogs and swimming logs continue here on my scottishswimmer blog.

Fool's Gold

You can keep your flowery bathwater. 

Loch Lomond Gold really is disappointment in a bottle. It's by TSA, who should know better 'cause they brew a tonne of beers for other microbreweries - including the mighty Fallen - but their golden ale is like perfumed bathwater (see right).

You know what it made me think of? Slices of lime in bottles of insipid Mexican beer. It's an entry level craft beer for people who like shoving waxed fruit down their long-necks. 

I drank Gold last Thursday on my fairly regular Beer and Boardgames night. (I'm gonna do a long, long post about boardgames and beer, but in the meantime I just wanted - no, needed - to share with you how mediocre TSA's Gold is.) I thought it might have been rubbish because I was playing rubbish or because the beer wasn't fresh out the fridge, but I'm having another bottle RIGHT now. It's cold, I'm winning (kids in bed) but it's still packed with citrus floral nonsense. It's in a different shaped glass too, so this taste test can't be more scientific. 

BTW TSA also did a Rabbie Burns beer a wee while back. I don't remember hating that when I tried it.

I also had a Hobgoblin amber too, which I liked. But my top beer that night was the sexy-looking O6 Porter by Otley Brewing Company. Not my favourite porter by a long way, but it had enough of the right flavours and texture and strength (6.6%) to have me all mournful when I got to the end of the glass. That and the fact I was losing to my father in law. 

Anyway, big, beautiful boardgame post to come. You have been warned.