Guides, essays, postcards and notes on beer: where to drink it, where it came from, and what’s in the glass. Nothing sponsored.

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• 24 April 2026 · Essay
  Bass Pale Ale: The Red Triangle That Took an English Beer Global
  The red triangle was the first trade mark registered in the United Kingdom, and it travelled to India, Russia and America on hard Burton water, coke-malted pale grain and clear glass. From a Burton brewery in 1777 through the Bass Charrington years and the Molson Coors split, to the 1,000 pubs now pouring Draught Bass.
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• 20 April 2026 · Postcard
  A Postcard from London: From Porter and IPA to the Kernel
  The third in the trilogy. London is one of the oldest beer cities in the world, but the version you can drink now dates from 2009: a comeback layered over an inheritance. Porter, IPA, Ind Coope and Charrington, then the long gap, then The Kernel on Druid Street and a new scene built on top of the ruins.
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• 19 April 2026 · Guide
  Walking the Ted Lasso Pub Trail in Richmond: From Crown & Anchor to Richmond Hill
  The Crown & Anchor exterior is The Prince's Head on Richmond Green. One stop is a Richmond Hill finisher with the kind of Thames-bend view the show keeps coming back to. A four-stop walking pub trail for fans of the show, and a shortlist of the wider Richmond craft-beer scene worth a pint while you're there.
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• 16 April 2026 · Postcard
  A Postcard from Melbourne: The City That Built a Craft-Beer Scene on Bars, Not Breweries
  Companion to the San Diego piece, and its structural opposite. San Diego built a craft-beer capital brewery-first; Melbourne did it bar-first. Catfish, Local Taphouse, Cookie, Hippo, Boilermaker: a scene that turned curation into a category of its own.
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• 12 April 2026 · Essay · Reference
  The Drinker's Guide to Hops: What Each Variety Actually Tastes Like
  A drinker-first reference to the 30-odd hops you're most likely to meet on a UK or European bar (Cascade, Citra, Mosaic, EKG, Saaz and the rest), organised by a six-category flavour framework that collapses Drexler's unwieldy 107 descriptors into something you can actually hold in your head.
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• 9 April 2026 · Postcard
  A Postcard from San Diego: Where the West Coast IPA Grew Up
  Karl Strauss in 1989. Stone and Ballast Point in 1996. A hop arms race through the 2000s that perfected the West Coast IPA. A tour of how San Diego quietly became the IPA capital, and where in North Park, Miramar, and La Jolla to drink its legacy today.
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• 5 April 2026 · Guide
  The Chelmsford Beer Mile: A Live Guide to the Route
  When we wrote this, eight specialist venues sat within a mile of each other (bottle shops, a brewpub, railway arch taprooms). This guide walks them in the right order, with live tap lists for every stop, plus a footnote on Baddow Brewery (1798–1927) and the forty-year gap before Chelmsford Brewing Company started up in 2017.
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• 29 March 2026 · Essay
  What's Wrong With Beer Recommendation Systems (And What PINtPOINT Does Differently)
  A response to Ethan Haley's Untappd-as-a-recommender analysis and NYC Data Science's Ninkasi project. Three walls rating-based recommenders hit (cold start, popularity bias, geography-blindness) and how PINtDEXTER layers Sip-or-Skip, Head-to-Head and venue-aware scoring to answer the different question a drinker is actually asking.
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