h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

OK, I have an idea. What say we decide on about three or four beers of which most are available in most places (e.g Duvel, a nice Belgian beer which is now widely available throughout Europe), we buy the beer IRL and try a virtual beer tasting?

Oooh!! Sounds fun to me

I've actually been on tasting panels before and would love to do this!!

So, what sort of beers?? One English, one Beglium, one American, one Austrailian??

I'm in the UK, and can get most of the beers available there, as well as a few others. Safeway and Waitrose are the best supermarkets to got to to get a varied range of beers

Hmm, yes, that sounds about right. Would you care to suggest any personal favourites? We could ask some of the regulars in the Forum & Firkin as well.

The trouble is being easily available. I would like to choose some real ale to represent the British side, but I'm not sure that they're easy to find abroad.

No problem there. We just find out who's wanting to partake, then we all go down to our local offi / supermarket, make a list of what's on offer, come back and post it, then we chose from the lists.

Fair enough. I suppose I can cope with something that's been pasteurised and bottled.

You can get bottle conditioned ales exported around the globe.

Hopefully each of us will be able to obtain at least one of these from the different countries.

Hi folks,
Please allow me to pop in. My first visit to the Cambridge Beer Festival (in, I think, 1991) was a emotional, heady, experience.

Virtual beer tasting. Wonderful idea. Problem for me is that, even though there are a few British ales available in the bottle here in Canada, they are generally the popular ones you would expect.

We have had an uprising, in the last decade or so, of "micro-breweries" here that produce quaffable and sometimes very nice beers. Maybe we need to organise an "underground" exchange program... maybe through the post, as 'gifts', maybe via travellers (I was in the UK last month), in order to distribute less well known -and therefore more interesting-to-taste-and-discuss brews.

Of course, I'm also working on a palate to PC interface which would solve our problems, but to date the results have been a bit shocking.

~LD

Hmmm. I suspect I'd have similar troubles to you trying to get your more obscure Canadian beers over here.

Has anyone seen Waggledance outside the UK? Honey beer, rather nice.

The beers, for the first one at least, don't have to be of the obscure ilk. For instance, bottled Bass from the UK is actually rather nice
I can go into a supermarket here, look at the beers available from other countries and not know if they are ones that are popular, or obscure. It's hard when you don't live in that country.
I think that for an effective tasting, we need to be drinking the same brews, so we need to know what each other can get hold off.


On a side point, as it was raised, Waggledance is georgeous It also seems to have improved since it started being brewed by Youngs rather than Vaux

I'm not keen on bottled beers generally, so I was picking one I liked. Perhaps I'm not the ideal person to judge bottled beers in that case.

On the contrary. Not being keen on something means that you are likely to have an objective viewpoint Always a good thing.

I'm going on holiday for one week, so I'll pick up this thread when I get back. I'll do some field research while i'm away....