​BUB

Delivery time

Quick delivery time is crucial to all Internet shopping. When shopping online beer it’s especially important, for two main reasons: a selection of beer would have to be extremely sought after or rare for you to want to plan ahead several days for it to arrive, beer-craving is circumstantial to most people and generally you want a sip straight away; some craft beers, like IPAs have relatively short expiry dates, so their journey from batch to consumer must be as short-lived as possible.

 

Evin O’Riordain, founder of The Kernel Brewery in Bermondsey, recommends these drink by dates: “four months on pale ales, porters are about a year, stouts 2 years, imperial stouts 5 years. They can even last longer, it’s just the preferences we have.”

 

“It completely comes down to the brewer as well,” says Ryan McLean, proprietor of Bullfinch Brewery, “It’s as fresh as we can get out there. A lot of people will buy a lot of beers and place them in a warehouse, but it might take them three or four months to sell 2,000 bottles and by the end of it the last few bottles aren’t going to be very good.”

 

Beer Merchants and Ales by Mail both took two days to deliver while Beer Hawk took nearly three weeks. After speaking to the Bermondsey breweries in southeast London, the reason for Beer Hawk’s long delivery time became apparent. Beer Hawk, unlike the other two, does not have specific agreements with breweries for supply and they purchase the products second hand before storing them in a warehouse to ship out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beer Hawk was a huge disappointment in this test, as the package didn’t even arrive before the day of the pre-party. So when they state on their website that their “quick turnaround means you’ll never be short of cracking beer or last-minute beer gifts”, it is an outright lie. Variety and quality of the their beers was therefore assessed the week after Beer Merchant and Ales by Mail’s beers.

 

Price

Beer Merchants

£49.50 for 18 bottles (£8.25 per litre)

 

Ales by Mail

£35,75 for 13 bottles (£8.55 per litre)

 

Beer Hawk

£36.50 (£9 per litre)

 

(Tesco)

£11.50 for 15 cans (£1.75 per litre))

 

Tasting session

On the evening of the tasting session, the guests were moving with a sense of tranquillity about them, like predators striking for the easiest prey. You would think that free beer should come as a relief to Scandinavian, at least to a Norwegian. A couple of hours at a pub in Oslo feels much like economic entrapment and will set you back about £6 a pop. So when they met a table stacked with beer, on the house, the anticipated reaction would be a social-Darwinist skirmish between them – down to the very last drop. You would never see people leaving an unfinished drink at a pub in Norway, knowing that every sip is a punch to your wallet. Maybe they have become spoiled in the British capital – a place of humane alcohol taxes.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While all of the guests thought a craft beer tasting session was a great idea in general, fewer saw it as a good fit in a pre-party setting. Most of the bottles and cans were up to a handful of people to consume, but in the end all of the 41 beers were finished. Three of the girls tasted, one of them kept on drinking, and they said they appreciated the citrus taste and smell of the IPAs. A small group of guys really got into testing different styles of beer. They really struggled with the darker stouts and porters, while IPAs, pilsners and lagers turned out to be favourites. An imperial Russian porter by Celt Brewery, the “Ogham Ash”, proved especially hard to quaff down and few dared try it.

 

Beer tasting events definitely work a lot better than unannounced craft pre-parties as tasting came second to socialising. Also, there is the price factor. Craft beer is nearly five times more expensive than the cheapest mass-produced lagers bought in supermarkets and it’s hard to see how people can spend that kind of money every time they go out.