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Better late than never, here’s a round-up of everything we posted in*April.

(Well, we say ‘everything’ but, by our standards, it wasn’t a hugely productive month, what with family business, holidays and paying work getting in the way.)
→*We found a perfectly English pub in Devon:
Though it was in need of a tidy and a lick of paint, this back yard*came closer to the feel of a Bavarian beer garden than anywhere else we’ve been in Britain and yet, at the same time, could not be anywhere but in England: above the purple-grey slate rubble*tower of St George’s church to our left fluttered*the red cross of the national flag, while downhill was the high thatched roof of a cottage around which newly-arrived swallows*were swooping.
→ Also in Devon, we stumbled across bottles of Goose Island IPA with an apparent Brettanomyces infection, the results of which were utterly delightful.
→ We launched a series of posts on tasting British saisons: Intro | Part 1: Lemonheads | Part 2: The Herbalist | Part 3: Roobarb | Part 4: Big Names.
→ That also prompted a side note pondering*whether herbs, fruit or spices work better in beer when they are a genuine attempt at a twist rather than a mere gimmick.
→*Our e-book*Gambrinus Waltz got its first review in the journal of the*Brewery History Society. (The review we mention in that post is now available free online as a PDF.)
→*We launched Back of a Beer Mat,*a free e-book compiling revised versions of some our best posts along with a few rarities previously published elsewhere. (You can download it directly from Smashwords.)
→ Etiquette expert R.M. Banks contributed a piece on the problem posed by entering a pub only to discover it has no decent beer:
At which, like young Harker hoofing across the threshold of Castle Dracula, What ho!-ing freely, you confront a scene of infinite horror: there is not one beer on the bar counter worth your*time, your precious*coinage, or the strain on the old sock which serves in place of your liver.
→ We were interested to hear that CAMRA has taken further steps to bring key kegs into the fold*— so much so, in fact, that we wrote a follow-up piece entitled ‘Things We Love About*CAMRA‘. (Which in turn*prompted responses from the Pub Curmudgeon and Cooking Lager Part 1 | Part 2.)

→ We attempted yet again to make sense of the world by categorising types of UK brewery in a chart.
→ Redwell Brewery’s latest venture gave us food for thought: what does it mean when a trendy craft brewery takes on the name of an old local firm that went out of business 40-odd years ago?
April 2015: The Month That Was from Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog - Over-thinking beer, pubs and the meaning of craft since 2007


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