A London RateBeer Get Together

The Ratebeer pre-GBBF London get together took place on Saturday. Hosted graciously as ever by Chris and Ruth, Ratebeerians from Canada, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Scotland (via Doncaster) and USA as well as plenty from England converged together for a day of good old beer drinking, cheese eating and general conviviality. In total there were nineteen of us, and well over 100 beers.

Of course some of the beers were pretty ordinary, or downright bad, such as Redds Red a decidedly dodgy Polish fruit beer, and Crown Lager, a label beer from Sainsbury's supermarket. But these poor beers were few and far between when compared with the magnificent beers available on the day. Clearly I cannot list all of the selection but some of the best were:

Struise Pannepot Reserva Oak Aged and New Years Blonde
Amager Hr. Frederiksen
New Glarus Belgian Red
Cantillon Blåbær Lambik and Tyrnilambic Baie dArgousier
3 Fonteinen J & J Oude Geuze Blauw and Rose
Three Floyds Fantabulous Resplendence
De Molen Rasputin
Grand Teton Black Cauldron Imperial Stout

There were also beers from such great brewers as Ølfabrikken, Mikkeller and BrewDog. Numerous beers remained unopened at the end of the night in spite of our having all consumed a pretty decent belly full.

Gatherings like this though are not all about the beer. The company of such like minded people is always an absolute pleasure. Non beer geek friends of mine cannot understand how I can drink and discuss beer non-stop for twelve hours, but in this type of company it's very easy, and I give thanks to all those who attended for making it such a great day.

I did take a few pictures but the quality is rubbish compared to these taken by Phil, who also makes a mean homebrewed APA by the way.