A research trip to London

One advantage of being on the sausage is you have more time for drinking. So with no worries about work I joined my local brewery on their belated xmas do researching pubs in London.

We had a brief stop in Surbiton to check out The Antelope, a pub with a brewery out the back and no Stella.

They did have an unfeasible number of beers on though.

As it was a marathon not a sprint I had their very pleasant session bitter. The barman would be hard put to out beer bore me so no complaints there and place wasn't busy during our visit so I can't comment on the hippy/trendy crowd. Though the barman was wearing dungarees which is probably a sign of something.

The day's main target was our next stop: The College Arms near Tottenham Court Road.

They've recently started selling Horsell Gold, another session beer.

It was good, but I'm sure it tastes better in Horsell. We hadn't made any plans for after but fortunately people on twitter had helped me out with suggestions.

The Fitzroy was another cracking Sam Smiths pub.

Feel the history! Or possibly marvel at the refurbishment.

I even enjoyed the Old Brewery Bitter. There are apparently five products in Sam Smith's pubs that aren't own label and Angostura bitters is one of them. As usual I failed to spot any of the others, though it was suggested the toilet paper may be one of them.

No sparkler was used in the serving of this pint

Speaking of which, for some reason there were photos of George Orwell around the time of the Spanish Civil War on the way to the toilet. And they weren't by Vernon Richards.

From the old and traditional we moved on to the modern and murky.

It was a hoppy beer but I don't believe for one minute that level of murk comes from just hops. When I used Vermont yeast I found it totally non-flocculent so I fined it before bottling, which brought it down to a much more pleasant looking slight haze and funnily enough the finings didn't totally destroy the hop flavour.

 We headed sarf after that for some Harveys.

Mild, bitter and Old were on. I went with the latter to bring me back into balance after the previous modern hop monster.

Then it was on to The George, the famous galleried coaching inn. But who wants to see famous galleries? So here's a picture of a room inside:

If I remember rightly I started on a pint of something weak from Wimbledon and then had ...er... something else. Yup, it was time to go home after that .