West Berkshire Brewery Wins Bronze Medal at Great British Beer Festival

Dr Hexter's Healer

I have just heard that local brewery The West Berkshire Brewery has won bronze medal today at the Great British Beer Festival for its Dr. Hexters’s Healer

The other winners include:

In Abingdon, you can often find West Berkshire Beers including Doctor Hexters Healer at the Stocks Bar in Abingdon and at Music At The Unicorn.

The Stocks bar is the only pub in Abingdon with Camra LocAle status (awarded by Camra to pubs that consistently server locally brewed beers), offsers discounts to Camra members and is having its summer beer festival in a few weeks time on 21st-24th August.

Music at the Unicorn is a monthly music event featuring top acts from the folk music world in the historic Unicorn theatre in Abingdon abbey. Blackheart and Maybelles are performing there this Thursday (6th August). The licensed bar always features beer from West Berkshire Brewery.

Stocks Bar – Beer, Blues and Jazz Festival

As mentioned in the previous post, the Stocks bar in Abingdon has seen a huge improvement to its beer range and cellar quality over the last year to become one of the best real ale pubs in the Oxford area.

It is holding its 3rd beer festival this weekend (Friday 3rd April – Monday 6th April). Previous beer festivals have been very good with an excellent range of beers, mostly locally sourced.

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Update on Abingdon Pubs over the last year

I haven’t made many blog entries recently, but now the summer is on its way, it is time to be more active.

Pubs in Abingdon have seen some major improvements over the last year. After the take over and closure of the Morlands Brewery and Morrels Brewery by Greene King around the end of millenium, we ended up with something of a beer wilderness in Abingdon where almost every pub was run by Greene King and all served the same small selection of beers (Greene King IPA, Morland Original and maybe one guest… but all the pubs seem to choose the same guest each month). Not that there is anything wrong with Greene King beers, but I like to have a choice.

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Hop Harvesting, European Beer Festival

I have just made a blog post on the Oxford Brewer’s Group blog about hop harvesting

Also, at the weekend I was in Copenhagen visiting the European Beer Festival. This was an amazing event with lots of interesting things. Expect some blog entries from me about this over the next few days.

And thirdly… last week we released the Camra Good Beer Guide 2009 mobile edition to coincide with the launch of the book. You can find more information about this on the Camra web site.