Golden Pints 2015

So, once more into the list, dear friends. Having made the list below, I thought I'd check back on last year's, and perhaps predictably, not a lot has changed. This means I'm either a lot more set in my ways than I thought, or that things aren't going to get a lot better. I suspect that my exposure to new beer is a lot less than it has been in previous years, due mainly to not getting out as much, and being deluged by new breweries wanting listings has conversely made me try less new beer rather than more.

We already handle a good slice what I consider to be the top tier of UK brewing via Beer Paradise and BeerRitz, but having re-read my nominations for this year, I was surprised to see I'd missed a few breweries from the list. Tempest Brewery, for example - their Brave New World and Face With No Name are two amazing hoppy beers that are unlike anything else brewed in the UK, tipping their hats more towards "classic" American IPAs. Buxton Brewery have a solid core range and them smash it out of the park with amazing specials - Double Axe most notably. Beavertown's expansion this year hasn't been plain sailing, but they've kept the beer flowing and growing like perhaps no other, under the expert guidance of Jenn Merrick. And god knows what Arbor Ales have started putting in their beers, but sales of them have picked up spectacularly of late.

Anyway, the list. It's perhaps a little conservative, even predictable, but as I say above, I think that speaks more about my desire for reliable beer rather than a desire to try new things that might be more hit and miss. Maybe that says more about the state of the industry this year.

Best UK Cask Beer: I'm always delighted to see Roosters cask beers on a bar, and would still wade through a freezing river to get to a pint of Magic Rock High Wire.

Best UK Bottled Beer: What have I drunk most of this year? Probably various Kernel pale ales and IPAs, and Siren Caribbean Chocolate Cake

Best UK Canned Beer: What have I drunk most of this year? Brewdog Dead Pony Club, Roosters Yankee, various Vocation, and Wild Beer Bibble, with Magic Rock appearing too late in the year to win on volume grounds, but Cannonball wins. Because, Cannonball.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: Loving that Tilquin. Really enjoyed Sierra Nevada Hop Hunter, for a slightly weird innovation in processing, although I couldn't quite shake the idea that I was drinking something slightly artificial. Mind you, that Pliny is all dextrose and isomerised hop extract, you know?

Best Overseas Canned Beer: I canned some Tilquin Geuze at IndyMan. That was pretty great, for a whole host of reasons. I resisted skulling it on the train home, for reasons that are still unclear. Although now I think about it, it was probably because I was drunk already.

Best Collaboration Brew: the Centennial Amarillo IPA I brewed at The Kernel last month was pretty enjoyable.

Best Overall Beer: out of those listed above, the beer that I've found most satisfying, and have laid in stocks of, is Siren Caribbean Chocolate Cake.

Best Branding: the Magic Rock cans are pretty epic, aren't they? And although the Vocation cans are all labelled, their branding is particularly arresting, to my eye at least.

Best Pump Clip: To Ol have given up making pump clips. The Kernel send out self-adhesive bottle labels. I like both those approaches.

Best UK Brewery: it's got to be one of those mentioned above. Or maybe Arbor Ales, who seem to have really hit their stride this year. Man, these questions are hard!

Best Overseas Brewery: Loving Tilquin, although I guess they're not strictly a brewery.

Best New Brewery Opening 2015: Vocation

Pub/Bar of the Year: can't chose between Friends of Ham or Bundobust. I think this year I've eaten more in Bundo, but drank more in Fram.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2015: Magic Rock Tap, obviously. Game changer.

Beer Festival of the Year: I only managed to get to IndyMan

Supermarket of the Year: the Morrisons round the corner. They've got Duvel for two quid a pop.

Independent Retailer of the Year: It's BeerRitzLeeds, of course

Online Retailer of the Year: It's BeerRitzByMail, of course

Best Beer Book or Magazine: I still haven't read the Steven Beaumont book I got sent, and I'd like to read Jeff Alworth's book. In summary: no idea.

Best Beer Blog or Website: Stonch's cage-rattling is always fun

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer: TheBeerNut or BroadfordBrewer

Golden Pints 2014

If only to move that repulsive photo from the top of the blog, I thought I'd post my Golden Pints 2014. As a general caveat, please be aware that (a) I don't get out much, and so drink the vast majority of beer bottled, at home, and (b) I make my living buying and selling much of the beer I'm about to praise.

Best UK Cask Beer: the cask beer that I've enjoyed most consistently this year has been served in Tapped Leeds. They serve their cask beer under air pressure (I think), and slightly cooler than most places. If I had to pick one beer, the pint of Wild Beer Co Bibble I drank at Tapped during the Wild Beer Meet The Brewer was memorable, even if I did have a cold when I drank it.

Best UK Keg Beer: Magic Rock Cannonball gets my money every time

Best UK Bottled or Canned Beer: the day-old Magic Rock Cannonball that we had at the first BeerRitz Meet The Brewer was certainly notable. This year I've bought more beer for personal consumption from The Kernel, with their Mosaic IPA being a particular high point. In fact, at one point I found myself scouring the internet to see if I could buy more when it ran out, something I rarely do these days. The Siren Craft Brew "Discount" (cedar-aged single hop IPA) series were all pretty outrageous, with Middle Finger Discount (Mosaic hops again - there's a theme developing here) being my favourite of the three.

Best Overseas Draught: it seems as though my palate has finally matured as I really enjoyed drinking draught Cantillon at Borefts Beer Festival this year.

Best Overseas Bottled or Canned Beer: having failed to track down a can of Heady Topper in Amsterdam this year, and not having had access to a lot of really fresh American imports that seem to appear on Twitter regularly, I'd have to go for Tilquin Oude Geuze

Best Collaboration Brew: pretty much all of the Siren Craft Brew collabs have been amazing, with Middle Finger Discount being the best for me. Their head brewer Ryan Witter-Merithew also deserves a medal for the Rainbow Project, which this year looks set to be absolutely stunning. And Buxton Brewery are also doing some amazing things too.

Best Overall Beer: Magic Rock Cannonball. World-class IPA, brewed locally, served fresh.

Best Branding, Pumpclip or Label: Siren/Stillwater When The Light Gose Out is about the coolest bottle of beer I think I've ever seen.

Best UK Brewery: I love The Kernel for their consistency and purity of purpose, Magic Rock for their sheer world-beating class, and Siren for their restless innovation.

Best Overseas Brewery: I haven't drunk widely enough this year to have an opinion on this. I guess Tilquin by default, although of course, they are blenders rather than brewers.

Best New Brewery Opening 2014: pass.

Pub/Bar of the Year: Friends of Ham, for having the courage to move forward and expand when it would have been easy to stay the same

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2014: Bundobust. Craft beer, amazing food.

Best beer and food pairing: anything at Bundobust

Beer Festival of the Year: I only went to Borefts

Supermarket of the Year: Sainsbury's recently ran a promotion on Duvel which meant it was cheaper than buying it through the usual wholesale channels. That was quite good.

Independent Retailer of the Year: BeerRitz Leeds

Online Retailer of the Year: I concur with Boak and Bailey - BeerRitz.co.uk

Best Beer Book or Magazine: pass [edit: I'm an idiot -  Brew Britannia was excellent, sorry Ray and Jessica]

Best Beer Blog or Website: all of the ones on my blogroll, with preference to Boak and Bailey and The Beer Nut. Although this post by Adrian Tierney-Jones moves me every time I read it.

Best Beer App: don't use any, so pass

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer: Chris Hall is pretty good value

Best Brewery Website/Social media: pass. I'm starting to think I don't really understand social media.....

The Golden Pints 2012

And so without further, or indeed any, ado, let's kick off with the first category, Best UK Draught Beer.

The winner of this category impressed the judge with its fusion of British pale golden ale and utterly bonkers new world hop overload. It is a beer that is so compellingly drinkable that the judge was compelled to drink several pints of it after a perfectly nice day out at the National Winter Ales Festival, falling asleep on the train home and having to get a £40 taxi from York back to Leeds. Bonus points go to the brewer of this beer for turning up at the Friends of Ham Smoked Porker / Quantum Tap Takeover and just drinking halves of it all night, ignoring everything else on offer. Yes, the Best UK Draught Beer 2012 is Magic Rock High Wire (cask version). Runner up is, well, pretty much everything else compared to High Wire to be honest.

As someone wholeheartedly committed to the death of the on-trade by running a successful bottle-wholesaling and retailing operation, the Best UK Bottled or Canned Beer is, of course, a category close to my heart. Unlike the previous category, competition here has been hard fought. Honourable mentions go to Oakham Green Devil, The Kernel Table Beer, Red Willow Ageless and, er, Magic Rock High Wire. Sadly, one beer has pummelled all of these into submission, just like Chuck Norris, an icon of uncompromising uncompromisingness held dear to the brewer of the winning beer. Yes, I'm talking #carnagenoir, James Kemp and Buxton Imperial Black India Pale Ale. Not only redefining "ruinously drinkable", but delivering a karate chop to the windpipe while it's at it.

The award of Best Overseas Draught Beer goes to a single pint of Ska Brewing Modus Hoperandi that I shared with Andy Taylor (@tabamatu) on the Leeds Open It night out. You can read a summary of that night here, but really, it's all summed up in this tweet.  Best Overseas Bottled or Canned Beer would have to be Southern Tier Iniquity, an imperial black ale that I bought to sell to people, and then ended up buying back from various shops at full retail value when I realised it's sheer brilliance.

I've no idea what Best Overall Beer means, but out of the beers above, I honestly couldn't choose between High Wire and Imperial Black, so over the Christmas holiday I intend to make some sort of imperial black 'n' tan out of them to see what happens.

Equally hard for me to make sense of is the Best Pumpclip or Label category. Red Willow, Moor Beer Co., and Bristol Beer Factory all look great on the bar or on the shelf, as do Marble. While it's easy to pick out a favourite beer, picking out the Best UK Brewery is a much harder task. So hard, in fact, that I'm not going to even try. The bar is set too high to split between them. And best - best at what? Making beer? No, no, I won't have it, this category is a NONSENSE! That said, the beers that I tried at Brodie's a couple of weeks ago (coupled with the odd bottle over the course of the year) were a real eye-opener - a brewery making great beers across a variety of styles, international collaborations (Mikkeller AND Three Floyds). I've not tried enough of their beers to claim them as a 2012 favourite, nor are they the best of 2012, but favourite new (to me) brewery, for sure. I'm rambling now, sorry. Argh, similarly, Best Overseas Brewery. At Borefts Beer Festival, I was blown away by Mikkeller and Jester King, so pick one, settle down, and shall we move on?

I don't get out much, so I'm not one to judge Pub/Bar of the Year. Seeing North Bar turn 15 this year was brilliant, and seeing Friends of Ham emerge blinking into the sunlight like an ickle faun was also a beautiful moment. No such qualms, however, about Beer Festival of the Year - hands down it was Indy Man Beer Con, which in my humble opinion was a world-class event. Or maybe it was Borefts Beer Festival. Hmm, I thought I had it nailed there. Oh well.

Voting for Supermarket of the Year is like voting for Best Cultural Apocalypse - whenever I buy beer there, I can feel the ghost of Hilaire Belloc tugging at my collar, whispering "From the towns all Inns have been driven: from the villages most.... Change your hearts or you will lose your Inns and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost your Inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England". Supermarkets are great for picking up decent beers at knock-down prices, and while I'm always disappointed to see brewers getting locked into volume production contracts and then bleating about how there's no money it, but they have to continue at that scale otherwise they won't be able to do anything, ever, I have to congratulate Morrisons for managing to have Worthington White Shield on sale at £1.40 for ages - congratu-fucking-lations to everyone concerned for devaluing an icon of British brewing. Still tasted great though.

Both Independent Retailer of the Year and Online Retailer of the Year are a bit hard to call, not least because of my vested interests in each, so what the hell, I'll say Beer-Ritz in Headingley and BeerRitz.co.uk, just because I co-own them. And also because brilliant people who really give a shit and love beer work at the shop. That's a good enough reason, right?

As anyone who has seen me doing my "jazz-hands are the hops, clog-stomping is the malt" interpretive beer dance, writing about beer is like, er, dancing about beer. This year I've read a lot of Stan Hieronymus, so I'm nominating Brewing with Wheat as my Best Beer Book or Magazine. His prose is always elegant and concise, with enough information to provoke further thoughtful investigation rather than give definitive answers. He's sort of Yin to Garrett Oliver's Yang.

Much as I'm loving the new eBuzzing nonsense algorithms (so much more random than Wikio!), I still read through almost everything posted in my blog roll (drop me an email if you'd like to be included). Mainly for providing as constant stream of literate and engaging beer notes, tempered hugely by being great company at Borefts, and insisting that 9pm on Saturday night was "doppelbock o'clock", award for Best Beer Blog or Website award goes to The Beer Nut. Best Beer Twitterer doesn't make any sense - it's like best brewery - best at what? Favourite? What is this, a popularity contest?

Popularity is what Best Online Brewery Presence is all about. Or is it an unpopularity contest? Either way, BrewDog manage to butt into my week fairly regularly, and at least a quarter of the time I have to remind myself to step away from the computer and put all that swearing back in the cupboard at the latest piece of countercultural froth they've managed to concoct.

Food and Beer Pairing of the Year was at the launch of Melissa Cole and Outlaw Brew Co's Mad Hatter Jasmine IPA, mainly because the beer was great and the food was ONLY THE BEST PORK PIE I'VE EVER EATEN!!! Quality always shines through.

In 2013 I’d most like to... get out a bit more.


DISCLOSURE - I buy and sell beer for a living, and work with almost all of the breweries mentioned above. I'm pretty sure my integrity is intact, your opinion may differ.

Golden Pints 2011

Everyone loves a list, don't they? A "Best of..." list is a great way of condensing information, although of of course there is a lot of detail and nuance lost in this approach, and anyone not appearing on it might feel slighted.

Oh well, here's my contribution:

Best UK Draught (Cask or Keg) Beer Magic Rock High Wire
Best UK Bottled or Canned Beer Buxton Brewery Axe Edge
Best Overseas Draught Beer Odell IPA
Best Overseas Bottled or Canned Beer Anchor Porter - a hugely underrated beer, in my opinion
Best Overall Beer Magic Rock High Wire
Best Pumpclip or Label Magic Rock
Best UK Brewery The Kernel - defining 'craft' without ever thinking too hard about it
Best Overseas Brewery Mikkeller (yes, I know he hasn't got a brewery, but you know what I mean)
Pub/Bar of the Year I don't get out much, but The Euston Tap is a repeated draw when I'm in London
Beer Festival of the Year I've not been to many, but GBBF is an obvious call
Supermarket of the Year Haven't shopped widely enough to have an opinion
Independent Retailer of the Year modesty forbids - has it only been 9 months....?
Online Retailer of the Year modesty forbids
Best Beer Book or Magazine not read enough to choose
Best Beer Blog or Website Adrian Tierney-Jones at Called to the Bar
Best Beer Twitterer Simon H Johnson
Best Online Brewery presence Magic Rock
Food and Beer Pairing of the Year couldn't choose, sorry.
In 2012 I’d Most Like To… get back out to the USA, and judge at the World Beer Cup
Open Category: You Choose Best commodity/craft crossover beer - Worthington White Shield. I can't think of a single other beer that has got such a great lineage, tastes amazing, and yet you can still pick up for a couple of quid in most UK supermarkets. Garrett Oliver's maxim that "you can buy some of the best beers in the world for the price of a double latte at Starbucks" has never been more true.

The Golden Pints & 2010 Reviewed

Despite running one of the best beer shops in the UK, I don't really write about retailing a lot. The reason for this is that I want to be seen as a beer writer rather than beer retailer. That might make me sound insecure about the trophies on the sideboard, but that's why I rarely mention Beer-Ritz on here.

But being so close to the action brings you some fantastic insights into the beer market. I thought I might share some of these observations, based on what people have been buying at the shop. This isn't necessarily meant to be extrapolated to the beer-drinking populace as a whole, but there are some interesting trends apparent.

British beer is on the up: this year, people bought more British beer than ever before, particularly at Christmas, when they were buying presents for others. And I don't mean just from the usual suspects (BrewDog, Marble, Thornbridge - although they sell very well), but also generically as a category, from Hook Norton Old Hooky to Ilkley Mary Jane. I think that this signals a turning point for British beer, and people are finally realising that it is simultaneously a great national and also a local product.

Belgian beer is on the wane: fifteen years ago, Belgian beer (and I'm talking all across the board, from Leffe to Trappist to Palm to De Dolle) was new and relatively undiscovered. Five years ago, interested peaked, and today, it's a declining sector. There are certain niches that defy this trend, but overall, there isn't any growth left in Belgian beer in the UK.

American beer is on the verge of going stellar: Sierra Nevada have doubled the volume of imports into the UK each year for the last four years. People like American 'craft' beer because it is largely tasty and uncomplicated. I'm not talking Lost Abbey, I'm talking Odells, Flying Dog, Brooklyn et al. American craft brewing is also showing its most profound influence yet on British brewing.

My Golden Pints for 2010

Best UK Draught Beer - Roosters Nectar
Best UK Bottled Beer - Kernel Citra IPA
Best Overseas Draught Beer - Dogfish Head / Birra del Borgo My Antonia
Best Overseas Bottled Beer - Surly Furious (canned)
Best Overall Beer - Surly Furious
Best Pumpclip or Label - any of Johanna Bashford's BrewDog labels (although Kernel's no-design aesthetics are superb too)
Best UK Brewery - Kernel
Best Overseas Brewery - Sierra Nevada still do a wider range of things better than so many other breweries
Pub/Bar of the Year - The Grove, Hudderfield
Beer Festival of the Year - GBBF
Supermarket of the Year - Waitrose
Independent Retailer of the Year - modesty forbids
Online Retailer of the Year - modesty forbids
Best Beer Book or Magazine - anything by Adrian Tierney-Jones
Best Beer Blog or Website - Stuart Howe's 'Brewing Reality'
Best Beer Twitterer - @simonhjohnson
Best Brewery Online - BrewDog
Food and Beer Pairing of the Year - pigeon crostini and Worthington White Shied
In 2011 I’d Most Like To - get another book commissioned and brew more beer
Biggest Red Herring - the "keg revolution" and confusing modes of dispense with styles of beer