It's that time of year again, despite the terrible distancing we are having to endure.  Hopefully the new year will bring better times, especially for our friends in hospitality.  

But for now, we can do our bit by continuing to support our local and independent businesses over the festive period!!

We've compiled a list of places across Merseyside, including our members, that are putting together gift packs and beer boxes to bring some cheer to your Winter days!  We'll endeavour to keep this updated as we're made aware of places getting involved, but do drop us an email or contact us via our form on the website with any tip offs of places doing gift packs we're not aware of.

​Cheers!!

Where: crafttaproom.myshopify.com/products
Other info: Delivery and collection available, contact the team for details. ​

So last week, our Government declared that they will not be providing meals for children during the school half-term holiday.  We're not even going to attempt to figure out how they came to this decision, but one thing we do know is that the people of Liverpool won't stand by when a cause is there to be fought! 

So many businesses in Liverpool are literally fighting tooth and nail to survive at this current time, yet so many of them are helping the children of Liverpool, whether it be providing free meals, organising food banks or a pay it forward scheme.  It has also recently been announced that Liverpool City Council too will be providing meals to children of our city.  

We were going to write up a list of the many places that are helping out, but there are so many lists already in circulation.  So many businesses are helping out, so instead of this being a list of where you can go to support those children in need, this is a list of businesses that we're proud to have in our city, a huge well done and thank you to each and every one.  

Everyone is in a different situation, but everyone can help out here, whether it be to simply share posts, like/comment on posts, make a donation, buy an item or a full 3 course meal, dine in/takeaway, ask friends/family to buy from your local for Christmas presents, it all helps.  Let's do our part to help the children and the small businesses.  It's no longer a just case of 'buy from a small business and you pay for their kids dance/sports lessons' it's about keeping food on the table and a house warm over winter.  

Here are the ​Liverpool Echo, The Guide Liverpool and The Daily Struggle lists of businesses.

Thank you all!!

Uncertainty is a killer. 

It's harming our businesses; the restaurants, the bars, the pubs and all the businesses involved at various levels of the supply chain to each of these.

Sadly, the only thing we can do during lockdown is to share information and try to support these businesses by ordering gear for delivery or collection in lieu of being able to go out for a pint, a glass of wine and some nibbles.

That's what is needed from you - the beer enthusiasts and people who love the independently local Liverpool (and surrounding areas!) flavour, to buy beers from our beloved pubs and breweries.

We're doing our best here at the Liverpool Beer Collective to help in this, sharing information about venues which are still selling beer for collection or delivery via online or social media ordering.  There's no one-size-fits-all approach for businesses at this time, so we will endeavour to update the Beer Availability Page and share information on how to get hold of great beer and support our local and independent businesses.

The next bit is for bars, pubs and breweries...

• If your business is based in Liverpool, wider Merseyside, West Lancashire or Wirral you fall in our catchment and we would be happy to help (message us if you're not sure).
• You need to be committed to supporting our local breweries or small and independently owned breweries around the UK we can include you on our website.

What we need from you as a Pub/Bottle Shop/Bar/Brewery:
We need you to give us information and contact information regarding how you intend on continuing to operate during lockdown.   Are you doing online orders, telephone orders, online menus for the beers you stock? Are you allowing collections or doing deliveries to people locally and deliveries via shipping or courier further afield?  Send this information to us via our contact form, HERE.

Stay strong, support local and #LIVEBEER. x

In late October, the team that brought Liverpool the Modern Cask Beer Festival in September 2019 are hosting an online beer festival to celebrate the Liverpool beer scene.  Hot on the heels of the #SireninLiverpool event and the #caskaleweek outing for Merseyside, you can purchase a selection of beers from breweries across the city region along with snacks and a unique festival glass to drink those beers from.  In our current predicament, Beer Festivals seem a very distant memory and this is an opportunity to participate remotely in something which forms the matrix of any beer scene; the people.  This event brought to you by the Lekker team seeks to provide some much needed boost to spirits and a chance to interact and learn a bit more about the beer scene in and around Liverpool whilst drinking some great beers.
 
More details and information are provided over on Lekker Brew’s website, right here: Lekker Brew.
  
How does it work?
 
Purchase your box of beers from here:
https://www.lekkerbrew.com/new-products/the-mersey-lekker-box. 

You’ll receive your box via home delivery and included is an invitation with it to the special live stream event. The live event, which takes place from 7pm onwards on Saturday October 24th will feature talks, tours and tastings with special guests from the local beer and brewing scene.

The specifics…
 

• Box Ticket will cost £34.99 plus delivery fee.
• Includes 8 excellent beers from across the city region (including one, detailed below, specially brewed with Lekker in collaboration), snacks and a unique festival glass.
• Your invitation to the online festival which includes talks, tours and prize draws.

 
The Beers…
 

• A one-off collaboration between Lekker Brew and Love Lane Brewery, a baobab and raspberry milk stout
• Carnival Brewing Company’s ‘We are Diamonds’ IPA
• Top Rope Brewing’s ‘Cold Stone Cream Austin’
• Chapter Brewing’s ‘Suffering is An Art’ raspberry sour
• Love Lane Brewing’s ‘Baltic Haze v2’ New England style IPA
• Chapter Brewing vs. Bernie’s Grocery Store – ‘CVLT Classic citrus witbier’
• Neptune Brewery’s Mosaic Pale Ale
• Black Lodge Brewery’s ‘Beginning of the End’ West Coast style Double IPA

 
Should you have any questions for the team, you can contact them via email at team@lekkerbrew.com.

Have Fun!!!

Towards the end of September 2020, the annual Cask Ale Week will return across the UK.  No doubt celebrations and participation will be slightly muted this year, sadly due to current restrictions on venturing to pubs, bars and taprooms from the ongoing pandemic.

However, there is still cause to celebrate a strongly British contribution to brewing and beer with Cask Ale.  Whilst opportunities may be limited, they are not completely gone.  Many pubs, breweries and bars across the UK are doing take out beers from cask (as well as other small package and dispense of course) and our brewers are still working hard to produce some excellent beers for your enjoyment.

So, what is Cask Ale?  The waters are muddied a little with cross over with 'Real Ale', which is a term coined by CAMRA, with some people (not completely correctly) using the terms interchangeably.  Hence Real Ale can be served from bottle or can, but there is some reticence in allowing kegged beers (which still meet the technical definition of Real Ale) to be labelled as such.  CAMRA themselves do recognise that key keg conditioned beer can be Real Ale, although some branches and committee members disagree with this.  Cask beer is usually served from a cask handpull or can be served under gravity straight from the cask itself.   Confusingly, it can even be served from a keg font; the handpull is often an affectation; long draws from the cellar can mean many cask beers are actively pumped to the handpull.

Cask conditioned beer (and Real Ale) is a living entity; undergoing secondary fermentation in the container it is served from - in this case, a cask.  This secondary conditioning of the beer allows for flavours and the mouthfeel of the beer to develop and mature whilst it is stored in the cellar, prior to serving.  It is widely regarded as one of the pinnacles of brewing and producing great beer.  It's not a specific style in itself, as it can encompass many different styles including but  not limited to pale ales, saisons, stouts, lagers and barley wines.  The cask beer itself is never served warm (an horrendous misconception), but at cellar temperature (approx 11 to 12 degrees celsius, sometimes even lower at 10 degrees depending on a cellar person's preference) and is then drunk as it gently increases in temperature and the flavour depth develops.

Cask Ale Week runs from Thursday 24th September to Sunday 4th October.

The website, providing details of how to get involved and showing a list of events or other notables is right here: caskaleweek.co.uk.

We have a great selection of pubs on Merseyside that serve well kept cask beer, we've listed a few of these for you to check out, just below.

Venues in Liverpool, Wirral & around Merseyside worth investigating for their Cask offering:

The Angus Tap and Grind - Liverpool
The Baltic Fleet - Liverpool
​The Bard - Prescot
Beer Station - Freshfield
The Belvedere - Liverpool
The Blackburne Arms - Liverpool
The Bridewell - Liverpool
The Caledonian - Liverpool
CASK - Stoneycroft
​Carnival Brewing Taproom - Liverpool
CRAFT Taproom - Wavertree
The Denbigh Castle - Liverpool
The Dispensary - Liverpool
Doctor Duncan's - Liverpool
The Excelsior - Liverpool
The Fly in the Loaf - Liverpool
The Four Ashes - Crosby
The Freshfield Hotel - Freshfield/Formby
Gallagher's - Birkenhead
The Grapes - Liverpool
The Handyman Supermarket - Wavertree
Haul - Mossley Hill
Head of Steam - Liverpool
Kelly's Dispensary - Wavertree
The Lady of Mann - Liverpool
The Lion Tavern - Liverpool
Little Taproom on Aigburth Road - Aigburth
Love Lane Brewery Tap - Liverpool
Maghull Cask - Maghull
Neptune Brewery Taproom - Maghull
The Pen Factory - Liverpool
Peter Kavanagh's Victorian Pub - Liverpool
The Philharmonic Dining Rooms - Liverpool
The Pilgrim - Liverpool
The Roscoe Head - Liverpool
The Ship and Mitre - Liverpool
Tap and Bottles - Liverpool
Thomas Rigby's - Liverpool
Three Piggies - Allerton
Trap and Hatch - Waterloo
The Volunteer Canteen - Waterloo
The West Kirby Tap - West Kirby
The White Lion - West Kirby
Ye Cracke - Liverpool

If you take any good pictures of cask beers out on your travels across Merseyside, tag us in on Twitter or Facebook!

Cheers Everyone!!

Siren Craft have made a really big impact on the UK craft beer and brewing scene since they started producing beers back in 2013, with Maiden and then the likes of Liquid Mistress, Soundwave and Broken Dream hitting shelves and cellars.  

Siren also fostered a sense of community and collaboration, with former head brewer Ryan Witter-Merithew bringing together breweries from across the UK to make beers based on the colours of the rainbow.  This grew and grew, seeing collaborations become international and exposing enthusiasts to many great brewers from across the Atlantic, across continental Europe and over in New Zealand.

You can't underestimate the impact Siren have had over the years.

Add to this that they are now hosting the venture of "Siren In...", as a Committee we've decided to have a bit of introspection and dwell on past fond memories drinking Siren beers.

Ian Goodhead: ​

​Jaipur, Timothy Taylor Landlord, both were mine, but so was "Broken Dream on Cask" - indeed it still holds a special place in the hearts of my heart and indeed that of my Best Man.  When spotted in the wild, it sets up a chain of WhatsApp messages that inevitably ends up in it not lasting long on the pump... Indeed, that happened once over Lockdown with the excellent Craft Taproom - the two milk jugs I recovered were quickly dispatched...

Siren's Pompelmocello was on their beer board and the name got stuck in my head, so I had no option other than to give it a whirl. ​It was the exact beer I needed after a heavy session of DIPAs and impies, so I stood there with a big grin, absolutely content and losing myself in the waves of fruit and lactose sweetness.
​
The beer's subsequent success is by no means surprising, and I hope that many folks around the country are now enjoying a similar experience with it!

I know my friends would say that my most memorable Siren memory was at Indy Man 2019 in which I was eagerly waiting for the Maiden on cask to be released (it didn’t come out until later in the day).  I had a 1/3 of Accept All Cookies in my hand, singing a song called Barley wine I made up on the spot in the tune of the song Bottle of Wine by Beck. This is only a vague memory of mine personally, too much of the cookies I guess!

The most memorable and clear memory was back in 2018.  I was asked to pick a beer from the ‘ageing box’ to share; I set my eyes on the the Speyside barrel aged Broken Dream.  I can’t remember if it was 2-3 years aged, but either way it really opened my eyes to how sometimes ageing beer can really add to the flavour.

Our first visit to Siren's Tapyard was a memorable one, everything seemed perfect - the weather, the beers, the food from the Big Butty Bar and the company from people we met there and in the tap (including Darron Anley himself, fetching growlers of beer for a barbeque!).

We ended up staying much, much later than we planned.  Probably had one or two more beers than planned, because Santo and sunshine - why not?  We certainly had a brilliant time and really can't wait to go back down again.

When my husband and I opened our bottle shop, Cat Hop Beers a few years ago, we managed to get hold of some of Siren's Soundwave IPA and it was one of the first beers we stocked at the shop.  The opening night was celebrated with some Soundwave and because of that, we will always have some fond memories of a Siren beer from our first day running the shop!

I have heard positive things about the barrel-ageing programme which was due to restart.  Fingers crossed!

​Bones of a Sailor (pt III) was one of those beers that I wasn't really expecting to be as good as it was.  I bought two bottles in a now sadly departed craft beer venue in Liverpool, one to sample myself and the other a gift for my old man for Christmas.  I wish I'd found another beer to give him for Christmas - does that make me a terrible person?

The barrel-age from Sherry barrels, the generously tart but balanced punch of raspberries and the chocolate and vanilla notes all harmoniously bathed my senses and caused an ache as 330ml, simply was not enough.

I have had many excellent Siren Craft beers and enjoyed the Tap Yard, but trying that beer tops the lot.

Make it again, guys!

Whilst we weren't able to bring you a fresh serving of Liverpool Beer Week in 2020 due to some very unfortunate and unforeseen circumstances (we had SO much planned for you too!), you may have heard that another week long beery event in Liverpool is due to happen!

#SIRENINLIVERPOOL is starting, 14th September online and carries on with some Tap Takeover events and other online goodness which includes interviews, competitions and giveaways.  Full details are over on Siren Craft's website, right here:
https://www.sirencraftbrew.com/stories-and-events/events/siren-in-liverpool 

Not only that, for that week only, you can take advantage of free delivery of their beers from their online store to your door, if you have a Liverpool postcode.

There is a photography competition taking place throughout the week, beginning on Monday 14th September.  The competition will close and the winner announced on the following Sunday, 20th September.  More details are below.

Stay tuned to our Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts and give Siren Craft Brewery a follow to keep up to date with details on the week, as we update them! 

The Competition: 
​
To enter: We want to see your best beer memories of Liverpool! Send your photos via twitter, tagging @sirencraftbrew and using #SirenInLiverpool hashtag.  To qualify, the photo must be Liverpool themed, so either in Liverpool, or drinking Liverpudlian beers! Good luck!

But now we're back!  Back with a fresh playlist, back with another quiz and our impeccable patter.  Most importantly, we are back with another superb co-host for the evening.

This iteration of the pub sees us joined by Manchester Union Brewery!  They are the only dedicated lager brewery in the region and are just fresh from running a successful crowdfunding exercise to get a big jolt and push their operations forward.

Part 12 of the #livebeerpub is incoming this Saturday evening; we also have some fantastic co-hosts lined up for you.  Get ready to rumble with the boys from Top Rope Brewing!

Lockdown has been a busy time for the Tag Team of Ben and Neil, with brewing, hosting numerous online interviews with other breweries and drinks makers (including Turncoat Gin, Neptune Brewery and Alpha Delta) and now they are looking forward to hosting a forthcoming Beer Festival that you won't need to leave home for - In Your House.

You can find out more about how they've been coping, what their plans are for going forward and what the 4th July festivities will entail by joining us and them (on Twitter - https://twitter.com/TopRopeBrewing) this coming Saturday.  If you need any beers from them to get in the mood; there are plenty of shops around that have stocked up, but they are also selling online right here: https://www.topropebrewing.com/shop. 

You can find the usual playlist for our weekly jukebox, which Top Rope have helped put together, here:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBvXyqmy0uv2Jj4d9mjzGWGQNn1spIVO6.

Remember, hit play at 7pm and you'll be synched up with the rest of the pub!

Now is the time to support independents.
​
A date has now been set, the 4th July, for bars and pubs to be allowed to re-open for business. For the leisure industry, this may come as welcome relief with punters having largely been away for over three months. Many punters too, aside from the odd bar and pub selling “takeaways”, will be relishing the prospect of a pint and a catch up with acquaintances, bar-staff, friends.
This doesn't necessarily mean that all businesses will reopen, however, nor does it mean that customers like us (yup, we're mostly on the customer side of the bar too!), like you and many others out there, will be going to a pub or bar either.  We have to accept we all feel differently, some may still be scared to venture into public spaces, some are still shielding (either themselves or those for whom they care) and others may simply feel it is not a risk they need to take. ​

​​From 4th July onward, things are going to be very unusual. There will need to be some readjustment not just in a business sense, but also in the sense of dealing with being around people again and still in the midst of a serious pandemic. It's not just going to be unusual, it's going to be downright difficult.  Some of us will likely get things wrong initially, but as long as lessons can be learned quickly and safe behaviours are observed, we would expect things to be okay in the medium-term.

Details and protocols are pretty scant from those leading the country, indeed the support from our government has been patchy at best, appallingly negligent at worst.  It is different and testing for all businesses, and it’s important – now more than ever that we try to remember to be kind to other people.  Try not to point the finger at those businesses that choose to open, nor at those that do not feel it is safe enough. We have seen some businesses we loved before lockdown fall by the wayside, we've seen others adapt and others just about cling on. 

The ones that are locally owned, small and are intrinsically into our city and wider area are the ones that have been hanging in there and really do need you right now; you can be sure they'll do their best to open in a manner that's as practical and safe for customers and staff.  Some of the bigger companies have not been so kind and reacted very badly to the lockdown with all its interwoven problems, laying off swathes of staff and not worrying about the effects of such behaviour on local communities and their people.  You must ask yourself, does that behaviour deserve to be rewarded with your support and custom?

The stark contrast is that these aforementioned smaller companies have adapted, bringing positivity and relief to people.  Making deliveries, working longer hours, changing their business practices in order to just keep moving forward.  These are the businesses that have made sacrifices, the ones that have helped each other, us, the NHS, the ones that are what give our community its character.  Now we need to give them some support too, if we can.

Now is the time to support independents.


Find some places you can support here: 
http://www.liverpoolbeercollective.com/beer-availability.html