Hay Girl in the Big City Again Part Four

Mmmm, beer....

The week before I went down to London, I happened to be reading Pete Brown's Beer Blog. He mentioned a little pub by the Borough Market in Southwark called the Rake - and it really is tiny. It also sells some truly superb beers, some of which are also for sale in bottled form on the Market itself. He said that an independant brewer would be at the Rake while I was in London, showcasing his beers and talking about them. His name is Dave, and the brewery is Hardknott, in Cumbria.
We had to go.
The beer I particularly wanted to try, from the description by Pete Brown, was Aether Blaec, a stout that had been kept in a 30 year old whisky cask for several months before bottling.
It was £8.00 a bottle.
It was worth every penny.
We had bottle no. 185 of 458 between us, served in big wine glasses to keep the scents of the beer in.
After that wondrous start, we drank our way along the beer pumps, a half pint of each (except the ginger beer, which we thought might spoil the taste sensations of the other beers).

Continuum is the standard bitter, nice and hoppy, and I really can't do better than quote the handout that came with it. (NB. This is a perfect beer for Doctor Who fans, because of the timey-wimey stuff). "Space-time is a theory that helps scientists explain difficult to explain stuff. It's a continuum, apparently. Whatever your spacial location and where ever you sit in a temporal dimension, Continuum is a perfect long beer. Unfortunately, the space-time coordinates in which you can find this beverage are resticted to a very narrow region known as Earth in the 21st Century and even there, it's quite rare."

After that, we tried Infra Red, their ruby beer, and followed it up with another stout, Dark Energy - which they explain as the 'fudge factor' that scientists use to make the universe add up. "We are unable to help on the issue of dark matter," says the handout, "as its total mass is far too great for even the power of Hardknott to be able to deliver. However, we have managed to come up with Dark Energy, only a small amount, but every bit counts."

I love the scientific names for the beers. Until last week, when I thought of Hardknott (if I thought of it at all), I thought of the Roman fort which is there. Now I will immediately think of fine beer, and I'll seek it out wherever I can. They also have a website, of course, at www.hardknott.com

It's not on the usual tourist trail, and I would never have known it was happening if I hadn't read that blog - and what a lovely afternoon it was.