2017 Beer Year in Review

Today it's Wednesday 31st January, and I haven't had a drink since January 1st.

This year I have combined my observance of Dry January with exercising every morning on my cross trainer, as well as eating an almost exclusively vegetarian diet. The result is that I have lost over a stone in weight and I feel amazing!

However, I have loads of great craft beers in stock at home, that aren't going to drink themselves!

Before I embark on my 2018 craft beer journey, I figured it would be a good idea to log some reflections on the first year of my craft beer odyssey.

Twelve months ago, I had already had some exposure to craft beer thanks to Mikkeler and Warpigs in Copenhagen, but my general focus was on quantity rather than quality, and I was generally intimidated by strong beers.

I have been an enthusiastic attender of beer festivals for many years, but prior to 2017, my approach would be to stick religiously to sub 5% bitters and pale ales. How short-sighted I was!

In 2017 I started using Untappd properly, which for me means only checking in new beers (to me), writing proper tasting notes (to the best of my ability) and trying to be consistent n the score that I give. For me a 3.5 is a beer that I would order again, 4 is an outstanding beer, and 4.5 is a truly fantastic beer. This scoring approach also seems to work when I am looking at the aggregate scores of a beer in a category that I generally like (Pales, IPAs, NEIPAs, Stouts, Porters). I know that I am going to LOVE a beer from any is these categories rated 4 or above, and I know that a beer from these categories rated above 3.5 is going to be very drinkable. 

So valuable do I find Untappd, that I pay the £40-odd per year that is costs to be a supporter. (this subscription was partly funded by cancelling my CAMRA subscription, due to their luddite attitude to craft keg beer!)

I also began to seek out the best craft beer bars in every city that I visited, plotting them in  Google maps for future reference and to share work friends and colleagues. This has now built into a decent resource library, that I am always seeking to update.

I also subscribed to BEER52 which ships me a monthly case of interesting craft beers, which ensures that I always have something new and unusual in the fridge at home.

Beers of 2017

10. Stockholm Brewing Company Birra Nizza - 4.2% Session IPA

I drank a lot of beer in Sweden in 2017, and this was one of the very best. Amazing depth of flavours for 4.2% abv.


9. Amager Bryghus Bad Beard Day - 6% Hipster IPA

I drank even more beer in Denmark than I did in Sweden, and this was a great find. I love the name, the style description, the colour and the murk!

8. Heart of Darkness Brewery Saigon - Kurtz's Insane IPA - 7.1% APA

I spent an amazing week in Vietnam in April, including 3 days in Hanoi hitting the craft beer bars hard. This was a terrific beer, drank in the awesome, atmospheric Standing Bar, with my great friend Stuart. Very good memories!

7. Warpigs Booty Call - 5.8% Session IPA

No brewer or pub has more responsibility for my craft beer obsession than Warpigs in Copenhagen. This was one of at least a dozen APAs from Warpigs that would be worth a place on my top ten. I won't be there so much in 2018, but I will be back there sometime, I guarantee it!

6. Tired Hands Brewing Co Hop Hands - 5.5% APA

This is a great American Pale, which I enjoyed on a fine sunny evening on the terrace at Warpigs.

5. Siren Craft Project Barista Americano - 9.1% DIPA

My local craft brewery! Good to see Siren Craft building such a great reputation. They have just opened a really cool taproom at the brewery, and they are practically ever-present at the Nags Head in Reading these days.

4. Dugges Double Crush - 8% DIPA

Probably my favourite Scandinavian brewer, Dugges brew some amazing NEIPAs and DIPAs. Best enjoyed at the Brewers Bar in their home town of Gothenburg.

3. Verdant/Other Half - Now We Are Here - 8% DIPA

Very high on my bucket list is the need to make a pilgrimage to the NE USA to visit Trillium, Tree House, and Other Half, amongst others. This collab with UK brewer Verdant was fantastic, enjoyed at the Copenhagen Taphouse, which also must shoulder some of the blame for my craft beer habit!

2. Moor Beer Company JJJ - 9% Triple IPA

Enjoyed on JJJ launch day at the Nags Head in Reading. All the pomp and ceremony was justified! This beer has more depth and complexity of flavour than any red wine or whisky that I have ever tasted.

1. Cloudwater Spring + Summer DDH Pale Chinook Citra - 5.2% APA

This week, Cloudwater were ranked the number two brewer in the World by RateBeer, but for me, they are the undisputed Number One! Paul Jones and his Team bring their genius to a wide range of beer styles, but their NEIPAs and DIPAs are truly magnificent!

The remarkable ADF!

I am now two months into a new phase of my health drive, which is based on a concept known as Alternate Day Fasting, or ADF.

The theory is that you observe a day of virtual fasting, where you restrict calorie intake to no more that 30% of normal intake, which is roughly 600 calories for men. That's the bad news!

The good news is that on the following day, you can eat whatever you want to! (although it is suggested that one should avoid particularly "bad" stuff, like burgers, sweets etc).

Then the cycle repeats itself. The theory is that, although it might be expected that one would naturally eat 1.7x normal on the up day, to compensate for the fast day, the reality is that this isn't the case. The fact is that there is a net deficit of calories over each pair of days, resulting in significant weight loss.

The weight loss alone would be a great outcome, but research has shown that ADF also delivers an extraordinary array of other health benefits, most of which seem to be linked to the activation of the SIRT1 gene, which delivers greatly improved resistance to a range of cancers, asthma, heart disease and diabetes. Pretty much a complete checklist of the most common ailments that afflict the modern world!

I have settled into a routine on my fast days of taking nothing but coffee until noon, when I then have a cup-a-soup for lunch. A couple more coffees in the afternoon, are then followed by a single boiled egg on a slice of toast for dinner. This totals around 350 calories for the day. Is it easy? No. Is it do-able, definitely!

The secret seems to be that one is only fasting for a single day, which is followed by the "reward" of an unrestricted, normal eating day. This seems to avoid the cumulative willpower fatigue which comes from a series of consecutive low-calorie days.

So far, I have lost 10Kg on the ADF diet, to add to the 8Kg that I had already lost earlier in the summer. That is very nearly 3 stones, for those of you scoring in old money!

I am at the lowest weight that I have been for at least 20 years, and I feel great!

In honour of my Nike Fuelband!

I have decided to hijack my poker blog to capture some data and thoughts on my current health-kick.

As there are less than 5 people in in the World who actually read my blog, this is entirely for my own benefit. However, it will prove interesting for me to look back on in future years, to see whether I can actually break the habit of a 46-year lifetime and stick to a diet/exercise plan for more than a couple of months, before inevitably sliding back to my starting point!

I am not sure which smart-ass said that "to repeat previous behaviour whilst expecting a different result is a sure sign of madness", but it is a great quote!

With this in mind, my new gimmick this year is a Nike Fuelband, purchased for £149 from Niketown (the World's largest Nike Store, for what that is worth) at Oxford Circus in London.

The Fuelband is a black wristband which contains accelerometers which monitor one's level of activity throughout the day. It has a neat multi-colour LED display, which doubles as a watch.

It is not the device which is the real genius in play here, so much as the concept and the supporting app.

The idea is that you set yourself a daily goal of Fuelpoints, and then you have to make sure that you exceed that goal. Doing so earns digital rewards which can be shared via Twitter and Facebook.

It is this gamification of the exercise process which is the real genius behind the device.

At the time of writing, I have a streak of 29 consecutive daily goals working, and I can't imagine the circumstances which would cause me to let that streak whither and die.

I am now well into the routine of doing 30 mins on my elliptical cross-trainer first thing in the morning. This earns me around 850 Fuelpoints, towards my current daily target of 2,800. (I am increasing the target by 100 each week, so from tomorrow the daily target will be 2,900.)

The Fuelband just sits there on your wrist as a nagging reminder of how active (or inactive) you have been today. Late last week, I had spent a sedentary day in the office and so was short of points. I got home, put my boots on and went for a one hour walk in the pouring rain to get me to my Fuel target.

One very neat thing about the Fuelband is that you can't cheat. It is possible to change the daily target at any time, but it only takes effect from tomorrow. If you get to midnight and you haven't earned the points, the streak dies.

So far, so good. I am one month into the new me, and I am exercising daily and eating sensibly, but not obsessively. I have lost 7Kg and I could do with losing at least another 10Kg.

They thinks it's all over...

So to the last day.

As I knew that the Flamingo gym is not well attended, I didn't head down there until a leisurely 7am. After working out, I posted my blog from yesterday and then drove back to the MGM, to spend my poker comps on breakfast, as I had forgotten to do so earlier in the week.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I had $36 accumulated on my MLife card, which means that my earnings from 2010 hadn't expired as I had expected them to have. I converted $26 to a cheque which covered me for brunch at the MGM Grand Buffet. Lots of food, mostly quite tasty, and I ate at least two meals worth!

I then headed back to the shopping mall to get in a few last minute purchases.

Kick-off for England v Italy in the Euro 2012 Quarter Final was fast approaching, and the Reds were also playing the Twins in the early slot, so I drove back to the Flamingo and got seated in the sports book to watch both at the same time.

England were OK in the 1st half, and missed a few chances, but as the game progressed they got more and more outplayed, until they were clinging on for dear life in extra time. 


So to penalties, and Gerrard and Rooney put England ahead after Italy missed their 2nd pen, but they Ashley Young hit the bar and then Ashley Cole splendidly scuffed his kick straight at Buffon, and that was the end of that. 


All in all, an extremely satisfactory outcome for Arsenal fans, and Italy progress to the semifinal where they will get soundly beaten by Germany next week.


Meanwhile Aroldis Chapman conceded a 2-run HR at the top of the 9th to blow the save and hand the Twins a 4-3 victory.


I then hit the pool for a hour, which was still busy, but not so manic as the previous two days.


It was high time that I got into a poker game, so I sat in the 1/2NL at the Flamingo and played solid for a couple of hours against a decent set of opponents to post a nice winning session.


By now my MGM brunch had become a distant memory, so I headed out along the Strip to the Imperial Palace to revisit HHAG for dinner. This time I ordered black chicken skillet, which is two chicken breasts crusted with a blend of chilli and other spices, and piled on top of a huge heap of potato and pumpkin mash. 


It was delicious, and I almost ate it all. I did not do a great job of taking the attached photo, as it is not easy to appreciate the scale of the skillet, but the magazine above was A4 sized, so my dinner was pretty much the size of a page of A4!

I clearly needed some further exercise to walk off this food, so I decided to take a leisurely stroll up and down Las Vegas Blvd in the early evening 108F heat, to snap some more photos.


The glass flowers are suspended from the ceiling of the Bellagio lobby, and are truly spectacular.

Day 8 - Scorpions!

As the Flamingo do not charge a daily resort fee, they have itemised charges for things like internet access and for use of the gym. This of course deters people from using it, which means that the gym at Flamingo is mostly deserted, which suited me fine.

A bit later I headed over to Blueberry Hill again for breakfast, where I reverted to the classic eggs benedict with sourdough toast, which did not disappoint.

I then sat in a 1/2 game at the Flamingo for a couple of hours. I played nicely in some tricky spots to record a reasonable win.

After than I had an hour by the pool before lunch, and before the afternoon crowds had descended.

Lunch was a pizza at Sammys Wood-fired Pizza, where I had the BBQ chicken pizza, which was absolutely delicious.

More poker at the Flamingo saw me book another modest win which included one superb laydown, and some solid poker against a decent set of opponents.

I then settled in to watch the Reds play the Twins, after losing several close games this week, the Reds had their ace Johnny Cueto back on the mound, and won comfortably 6-0.

Earlier in the day, I had driven past the Thomas and Mack Center (which is the UNLV basketball stadium) only to notice that Scorpions were playing there tonight! Back in the 1980s the Germans had been one of my favourite bands, but I hadn't seen them play live since about 1990. I decided to invest some of my poker winnings in a ticket for the show.

The Thomas and Mack Center holds 18,000 people for basketball or boxing, but with the stage taking up one end it probably holds about 10,000 for a concert. I had a surprisingly good seat about half-way back, and the show was absolutely terrific!

Finally for today are a couple of photos that I took on my travels. The photo of the Flamingo is taken from the parking garage, looking across the tropical gardens to the hotel. The photo of the Palazzo gives some idea of the vast scale of the place. The Palazzo at 50 stories high is the tallest completed building in Vegas and it is the largest building the whole USA by floorspace.

Day 7 - Moving Day #2

After my 6am session in the gym, I packed up at a leisurely pace and checked out of the Palazzo. Although I got a reasonable room rate for Tue-Fri at the Palazzo, it becomes very expensive at the weekend, so I am headed to the Flamingo today for my last 3 nights.

I drove south again to South Point, and then ate breakfast at the buffet, which was absurdly good value for less than $7. I have paid 5x this amount for worse hotel breakfasts in Europe.

At 10am I wandered upstairs to the Chip and Memorabilia Convention and this time successfully gained access with my passport.

This is was a classic example of American leisure culture, where regardless of how obscure or marginal an activity might appear to be, there is sufficient critical mass in the US for their to be a large community surrounding it. This convention was attended by several thousand people, attending lectures and social events over 4 days.

Earlier in the week, I had called into the Gamblers General Store in Vegas to look into buying some vintage chips from defunct casinos. The very helpful guy at the store told me I would be best to attend the show at South Point.

I spent a couple of hours browsing through endless catalogues and folders of chips, and I bought about a dozen nice chips and a couple of presentation frames.

I then drove back into the city and headed over to the Atomic Testing Museum. Between 1951 and 1990 the US conducted almost 1,000 test explosions in the Nevada desert, 100 of which were above ground within both sight and sound of Las Vegas, 65 miles away. The museum tells the story of the test programme, the people involved and the tourist industry that grew alongside it. The National Cancer Institute later determined that the above-ground tests caused between 10,000 and 75,000 cases of thyroid cancer in the USA, which were then compensated.

After lunch at Jack in the Box (Bacon Ultimate Cheeseburger with fries) I drove to the Flamingo to check in. The front desk line took about 45 mins to negotiate, but I managed to blag another upgrade with a $20 tip, this time to a Go room on the 27th floor, with an awesome view across the Strip to Ceasars Palace and the Bellagio.

The Flamingo is steeped in history, as it was the first luxury resort built in Vegas in 1946, by mafia legend Bugsy Segal. Nothing of the original resort remains, but it is cool to stay where it all began. These days, the Flamingo is outclassed by its neighbours for the most part, but it does have a great pool and a brilliant location at the centre of the greatest street in the World!

I dumped my bags and then hit the pool. The main pool at the Flamingo has been given a makeover since I stayed here two years ago, and it is now party-central, with extremely loud music playing, and thousands of people drinking heavily in the pool. I  topped up my tan for 45 mins in the extreme desert sunshine.

After a siesta I sat in a 1/2 game at the Flamingo, but couldn't get much going. I left as a small loser at 8pm to walk to the Imperial Palace for dinner at Hash House a Gogo.

HHAG is an extraordinary restaurant who serve mammoth portions of interesting food. Their tag line is "twisted farm food" and I ordered BBQ pork ribs with mustard mash and vegetables. It was awesome, but as expected, I couldn't finish it.

I walked back to the Flamingo and got back in the 1/2 game. This time I was totally card-dead and barely played a hand for 90 mins, recording another small loss.

Below are some of today's photos. The first three were shot from my room window in the 27th floor, and the last two were taken at street level.

Day 6 - Road Trip

I got to the gym right as it opened today at 6am. Predictably, it was much less crowded today, even when I had finished.

After making a few calls I jumped in the car to head back over to Blueberry Hill for breakfast. This time I ordered the southern eggs benedict, which substituted a kind of chorizo hash for the usual ham. It was not as good as the classic benedict.

I then drove south out of town to pay my first ever visit to South Point casino. My intention was to visit the casino chip and memorabilia conference, but they wouldn't let me register, as I had left my ID at the hotel! I will need to return tomorrow. Not much of note at South Point, except that they have a nice bronze statue of the godfather of the World Series of Poker, Benny Binion, on horseback!

After South Point, I drove further south to take a look at the M resort. This is a really nicely decorated property, with lots of interesting glass features in mainly dark colours.

I then drove east to Green Valley Ranch. The casino floor here is nothing special, but the building is grand mediterranean villa style.

Driving back into Vegas, I stopped for lunch at In N Out Burgers, which is another celebrated Vegas institution. I ordered a double-double burger with animal-style fries. The fries were delicious, but the burger, though nice enough, ranked behind Carl's Jr.

I stopped in at Barnes & Noble to buy a few books and then returned to the Palazzo.

It was now 2pm, so pool time. I lay out on a semi-submerged lounger for 35 minutes, and topped up my tan.

I had a nice siesta, before sitting in a 1/2 game at the Venetian at 6.30pm. I played solid for a couple of hours and left as a small winner to go to dinner.

As poker at the V earns $2 an hour in comps, my dinner at the Grand Lux Cafe was paid for by my Grazie card. I ordered the BBQ pork sandwich, with peanut coleslaw and fries, washed down with a draft sierra nevada beer.