Moving into the deeper darker south

No WIFi yesterday, so no post. Luckily I am at my brothers house tonight so as he's he's an IT wizard (or is that geek?) I've got massive bandwidth in this London suberb. So any detrimental blog quality can only be down to the authors ability.

We got to the BBC food show yesterday. Visiting the CAMRA run beer tasting session with Roger Protz. I can't say that the beers where fantastic. Good examples of classic beers styles, but nothing brilliant, in my humble view. I'm none plussed as to why CAMRA advertised this by email junk shot. It got me to go because I'm interested in food and beer. I would not go again, either to the beer tasting or the food show. Perhaps I'll explain why in detail in a later post.

I like though a little business that was at the food show. As this is a beer blog I thought you might like this. Run by to nice ladies, they make cakes and call their operation "Nutty Tarts". Most importantly they make a beer cake using Black Dog, which I understand is a mild. The cake was nice and similar to a cake I've made with stout and bananas. I might just give you the recipe sometime.

That evening we made our way down to a nice little pub called The land of Liberty, Peace and Plenty. Jill and Martin have been coming on holiday to our place for a couple of years now - we just knew the place would be our kind of pub. Again, I've got much more to say about this than I can fit into today's post. So much later, in the meantime, thanks for the hospitality and letting me show how to pull pints WITH a sparkler.

Yes your right, this part of the world just isn't quite ready for sparklers yet.

Today, I decided to look for The Gunmakers. I'd heard that the publican was a bit of a character and after all, as he's taken the time to comment on this blog occasionally I thought it would have been remissful to not call in. The fact that we had to wait in the rain for a bus at Shooters Hill for 1/2 an hour before two buses arrived together, then a tortuously slow journey on the London public transport system resulted in a journey that Google Maps reckoned I could walk in 3 hours, took a mere 2 hours. Public transport is so good, isn't it?

For some reason I expected this pub to not be as good as it is. However it tuned out to be pleasent. Three nice beers and a friendly environment. I wondered if the Publican would recognise me, at first he didn't and I was taking pictures to post without his knowledge. Then Ann let slip where we were from - bugger, cover blown!

We had a nice chat for a while and would have stayed for anouther pint, but had arranged to meet my brother so had to leave - could have stayed several more pints as it turned out, my brother was over 1 and 1/2 hours late.

Are tank tops back in fassion? must have missed that.

OK, this blog is not to it's usual standard, pics need colour balance and noise sorting out and the copy is a bit ropy, but I'm doing this while trying to be sociable in my brothers house.

The stries here a condensed and there are many ideas collected over the last couple of days. Look out for more when I get back.