Thursday, February 04, 2016

Czech or German Beer. Which is better

The answer to whether Czech beer is better than German beer is subjective and depends on individual taste preferences. Both countries have rich brewing traditions and are known for producing high-quality beers with unique flavors and characteristics. Czech Republic is known for its Pilsner beer style, which originated in the city of Pilsen in 1842. Pilsner is a light, crisp beer with a hoppy flavor and is widely considered to be one of the best examples of this style of beer. Germany, on the other hand, has a long history of brewing traditional beer styles, such as Weizenbier (wheat beer), Dunkel (dark beer), and Lager. These beers are known for their rich flavors, balanced aromas, and crisp finish. Ultimately, the best beer is a matter of personal taste, and both German and Czech beers have their own unique strengths and characteristics that appeal to different people. It is worth trying both to see which one you prefer. What are the oldest beers in both Czech Republic and Germany The Czech Republic and Germany both have a rich brewing history and are home to some of the oldest beers in the world. Some of the oldest beers in these countries include: Czech Republic: Pilsner Urquell: This is one of the oldest and most famous beers in the Czech Republic, and it is widely considered to be the first true Pilsner beer. It was first brewed in 1842 in the city of Pilsen. Budweiser Budvar: This beer is also known as Czech Budweiser and is produced in the city of České Budějovice. It has a long history, dating back to the 13th century, and is known for its rich flavor and high quality. Germany: Weihenstephan Brewery: Established in 1040, Weihenstephan Brewery is the oldest operating brewery in the world and is located in the town of Freising. It is known for producing traditional Bavarian beers, including Helles and Hefeweizen. Augustiner Brewery: Founded in 1328, Augustiner Brewery is one of the oldest and most respected breweries in Bavaria. It is located in Munich and is famous for its high-quality beers, including the popular Augustiner Edelstoff. Hacker-Pschorr Brewery: This brewery was established in 1417 and is located in Munich. It is known for its traditional Bavarian beers, including the Hacker-Pschorr Weisse and the Hacker-Pschorr Münchner Dunkel. These beers are not only famous for their history but also for their unique flavors and traditional brewing methods. They are a must-try for anyone interested in the history of beer and the brewing traditions of these countries.

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Bavarian Beer...yes please

Bavaria is home to many historic breweries that have been producing beer for centuries. Some of the most notable and oldest include: Weihenstephan Brewery: Established in 1040, Weihensthan Brewery is the oldest operating brewery in the world. It is located in the town of Freising and is known for producing traditional Bavarian beers, including Helles and Hefeweizen. Augustiner Brewery: Founded in 1328, Augustiner Brewery is one of the oldest and most respected breweries in Bavaria. It is located in Munich and is famous for its high-quality beers, including the popular Augustiner Edelstoff. Hacker-Pschorr Brewery: This brewery was established in 1417 and is located in Munich. It is known for its traditional Bavarian beers, including the Hacker-Pschorr Weisse and the Hacker-Pschorr Münchner Dunkel. Hofbräu Brewery: Founded in 1589, Hofbräu Brewery is one of the oldest and most famous breweries in Bavaria. It is located in Munich and is well-known for its traditional Bavarian beers, including the Hofbräu Original and the Hofbräu Dunkel. Löwenbräu Brewery: Established in 1383, Löwenbräu Brewery is located in Munich and is known for producing high-quality beers, including the Löwenbräu Original and the Löwenbräu Oktoberfestbier. These breweries are not only famous for their beer but also for their rich history and traditional brewing methods. They are a must-visit for anyone interested in the history of beer and Bavarian culture. What is the rheinheitsgebot The Reinheitsgebot, also known as the "German Beer Purity Law," is a set of regulations for brewing beer that was introduced in Bavaria, Germany in 1516. The law stipulates that beer can only be brewed using four ingredients: water, barley, hops, and yeast. This regulation was introduced to ensure the quality of beer and to prevent the use of any harmful ingredients. The Reinheitsgebot has been a major influence on the brewing industry in Germany and has helped to maintain the traditional methods and high standards of German beer. It is also seen as a symbol of German brewing culture and has been adopted by many other countries around the world. Today, the Reinheitsgebot is still in use in Germany and has been expanded to include additional ingredients such as wheat, making it possible to brew a wider range of beers while still adhering to the traditional brewing methods. The Reinheitsgebot continues to be an important part of German brewing culture and is widely respected by brewers and beer enthusiasts around the world. Delete Move to Forward Repl

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Spring just around the corner

lovely peach coloured sunset tonight...some lovely weather recently. It wasn't a cold winter but it was definitely nearly sun-free

Thursday, March 06, 2014

Arsenal Vs Everton, FA Cup Quarter final ticket allocation moodiness

I have always had a soft spot for Arsenal, mainly the fans who seem a good natured, funny bunch whenever I've met them.

Not impressed with the way their club has sneakily reduced Everton's allocation from the 9,000 they we are entitled to down to 5,000 on some fairly ropey "safety" grounds.

Evertonians are desperate to see this game and this tweet made me think instantly of what you'll see at the Emirates this weekend :

Sneaky blue bastard

Embedded image permalink

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Ugh, terrible, terrible blogging by me

So sorry this site is updated so infrequently these days....no excuses. Just being lazy. Will try to get up & running again soon.

Monday, February 10, 2014

SevenStreets bizarre spat with Giles Coren.

Weird spat going on between this Liverpool based website and Times restaurant critic Giles Coren. All seems a little but un-necessary. The guy decides to hit the road and visit cities other than Liverpool and people are immediately telling him to "F*ck off".

They seem to have took the post down now but here it is from the cached version

Giles Coren, F*ck Off
By David Lloyd / 16 comments
Labels: NONE

Today, according to his Twitter feed, Giles Coren (or an oil painting of a man much more handsome) is coming to Liverpool. He has elicited much sweating and salivation from some in our city. He comes to dine. But, he has a caveat – it must be somewhere edgy, not ‘trad’ (apparently, the Italian Club Fish sounds a bit ‘trad’ “All all big pepper pots, red tablecloths and flabby lasagne” – incidentally, how hil-arious is that tweet? The man should be writing funnies for the News Hudlines) And it must be a short walk from the station – one assumes because he has no serviceable backbone.

Oh, talking of which…

Coren must eat in somewhere ‘Spunky, not poncy.’ Well, give him his due – he knows all about spunky – recall his spunky letter to the minions at the Times:

“I don’t really like people tinkering with my copy for the sake of tinkering. I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do… And the way you avoid this kind of fuck up is by not changing a word of my copy without asking me, okay? it’s easy. Not. A. Word. Ever.”

Giles was pissed off because the subs had changed ‘where to go for a nosh’ to ‘where to go for nosh’. He continued…

“And you’ve fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don’t you read the copy? (note nice, casual racist slur thrown in for good effect, readers? The plasterer is Irish. Not from Mr Coren’s tribe.)

“And, just out of interest, I’d like whoever made that change to email me and tell me why. Tell me the exact reasoning which led you to remove that word from my copy.”

The subs replied:

“Sub-editing is a noble profession. It is also a thankless one – particularly when your writers call you a “useless cunt”. None of this, however, can excuse your nasty, bullying, “know your place, you insignificant little fuckwit” e-mail. Yes, it’s funny, in a way that pieces that use “fuck”, “shit” and “cunt” so liberally often can be, but, please – someone made a mistake. They surely had no intention of sabotaging your deathless prose. So you don’t like what happened to your piece – have a word with your editor. The hapless sub will no doubt already have been soundly thrashed and had their dictionary privileges removed.”

The irony? The man’s about as funny as foie gras, and about 1/100th as witty as his father. And he’s coming here to give us, what, some crumbs of comfort? A future review in that tumbleweed connection of half-realised rejoinders, his flaccid column? Or is he en route to signing that book he’s mercilessly flogging around the remainder shops of the UK? Perhaps he’s up here because, well, it’s our turn. The nationals ‘do’ the north every couple of years, so we’re just gonna have to sit tight and brace. And if it’s found that, yes, we’re Northern, and are deserving of no more than flabby lasagna and big pepper pots (does he mean grinders?) then, dear readers, we must thank Mr Coren for being so kind as to let us know. If we’re lucky, we might glean some amusing Mise-en-scène from his journey up here. Surely to god he’ll get some mileage from an overweight family tucking into a Whopper before the train’s left Euston? He might even encounter a cheeky Scouser at Lime Street, to weave into comedy gold from his Kentish Town office.

What’s fascinating is the spectacle of many of our Twitter followers begging him to try this restaurant, or that restaurant: of course, many of them are PR types, who’d sell what little soul they had for a tepid review in the Times, but others, well, their unseemly scramble to buddy up to Coren – a man whose racist sloganeering (‘the Polacks’ can ‘clear off’ out of England is one of his milder anti-Polish tirades) falls somewhere between Richard Littlejohn and Nick Griffin. You can read more about his tiresome tirades, against women in a particularly insightful Daily Mail column, here.

What’s happening here is the awkward machinations of a posh boy trying to be spunky, not trad. But failing lamentably. Like the flabby lasagna-faced clown he is. For all his railing against lacklustre grub, his column is a tedious table d’hôte of half-baked constructs, served lazily lukewarm and lacking any real nutritional value. The format? A side order of self deprecation, a dollop of lazy observation and lashings of conceited coulis. It’s the journalistic equivalent of MSG. An hour later, and you’re famished.

So when he acts like a latter day Galloping Gourmet and plucks one lucky Liverpool twitterer out from obscurity to be his luncheon partner (“come if you’re an interesting woman, not if you’re a boring man. anything in between is fine” – oh LULZ Giles, stop, you’re killing us…) I sort of weep a little for humanity.

Coren’s a man who gets paid handsomely to put others down – that’s fair enough, the world needs more of this, please (and he’s bang on the money when he says blogging is an “…activity that requires no more skill or aptitude than you’d find in any weaned primate”).

Trouble is, the man’s got a skin thinner than a Tesco Value banger: say anything against his column on Twitter, or in response to his half-arsed prose, and he goes off like an over-zealously primed Krug at the Frontline Club. And, in his moody little paroxysms he conflates sweary words with wit, smart social observation with snobbery, atonement with bigotry and writing with wank.

Yet look at how giddy Liverpool gets at his arrival. Here’s a man, who swears, is employed to make Sue whatshername look even funnier on the telly (even when he’s wearing comedy trousers, the dolly grip still gets more laughs), and writes words for a proper paper, and we’re like hand-dived scallops, quivering in his clammy fist.

Let’s hope the city, or the waitress, doesn’t disappoint him, or the luncheon atmosphere might be ruined by his favourite lady put down: ‘go fuck yourself you barren old hag.’ You can read more of the man’s bon-mots here.

Yeah, fuck off Giles. We know where to eat. We know how to eat. We know what to eat. If we had to wait for instructions from the London frontline before we tucked in, we’d be as dead as artisan burgers are this year. How terribly trad.

Sorry, I’m a blogger, that’s all the wit I have at my disposal. And my cuppa soup (Parochial and Ham) is on the boil.

For the record we ate at The Italian Fish Club recently, it was great.

Friday, October 11, 2013

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Front garden willow tree 14-5-13

We have had this willow in the front garden since we moved in, a few year ago it toppled over and had to be propped up but still seemed to be doing okay.

This year when everything else burst into life the tree stayed bare and sure enough most of the wood seemed to be dead. There was some shoots growing off the trunk so to give it a chance we had to take drastic action

Cut it down at the weekend and here it what is left. Am posting it so I can check how much it has grown over the summer

Monday, April 15, 2013

Google Analytics problems and bugs

Unusual for me to go about techy things but the current version of Google Analytics just isn’t fit for purpose. Things that took 2 minutes in the previous version take 20 now or are basically impossible.

 

Here is a screen-shot of me viewing segment data from a couple of years ago :

 

Note the numbers, 2500 rising to 4000…brilliant, let’s get that into a spreadsheet

 

 

Oh, great…Why can I see the correct numbers on the screen but not export it?

 

Also why on earth did they change the format of the data export for more than one segment? Instead of the old columned format

 

 

You get this :

 

Make a graph out of that if you can.

 

This sort of thing is typical. Have been onto their support people but to no avail…I know it is free so I shouldn’t complain but the old version was great. This version makes a big thing about gimmicks like “real time” tracking but is that really useful to a webmaster?

 

Saturday, April 06, 2013

Absolutely perfect day for a walk on Crosby beach to see the Gormleys

Off to see Waterloo today but took a detour down to the sea front, been a while since I've been to walk amongst the iron men but they are still there making the view interesting and striking

Thursday, April 04, 2013

Dawksplaining : A definition

"Dawksplaining" a word we definitely need.

When I was a kid I read a book on physics, it was okay...explained a fair bit about molecules, how they bind together. Atom what they are made of etc etc

I found it interesting but I didn't want to really be a scientist and so didn't read up on it much more.

Much as I love hearing about the wonders of the universe and ambition and intelligence of scientists to take human knowledge that little bit further if I were to challenge and mock a particle physicist on the basis of my sketchy knowledge of the topic (based as it would be on decades old knowledge and whatever I've picked from watching Brian Cox fly to all four corners of the globe to demonstrate how gravity works) you'd think I would be on shaky ground....you'd be right.

Why is it then that someone who stopped going to Church years ago feels they can, with confidence, talk about someone's belief system and tell them what they believe is wrong

I am not talking about skeptics, you don't have to believe the same as me...the world would be dull if we all did. I am talking smug, supercilious often aggressive and insulting barracking just for someone having the gall to believe in something they don't.

In the backdrop of his Holiness retiring and Pope Francis being installed and now Easter I've had a few of these conversations and almost universally I've been derided and told what I believe is nonsense ("imaginary friend", "mental illness", "bigot" etc) although singularly not one of these people has asked a single question about my Faith or beliefs.

That's Dawksplaining.

Not everyone who believes in God, is a right-wing, evangelical creationist...next time why not talk to them and actually have a conversation.

Graphs of UK newspaper circulation figures

Graphs of UK newspaper circulation figures 2009 - 2013

The vile headline in the Daily Mail yesterday made me curious about which newspapers are actually getting read in the UK. Pretty depressing picture

UK Newspaper Circulation figures
UK Newspaper Circulation Figures
UK Newspaper market sharesuk newspaper market share graph

Got my figures from wikipedia, it’s a particular interesting picture of how the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail percentages have diverged giving the right-wing Sun & Mail block an almost un-challenged voice in the UK. The i newspaper has undoubtedly had a positive effect on Indedendent readership but things like the Guardian and the Times are just bumping along the bottom.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Boris Johnson grilled over integrity, bumbles

This Boris Johnson interview on the Andrew Marr show is fantastic. Nothing pleases me more than these old-Etonian Bullingdon club Tories getting a grilling. It's great when the mask slip and you see their true colours. The sense of entitlement and the barely concealed fury is there for all to see when the "plebs" don't kow-tow to them

The Mayor of London Boris Johnson has defended his integrity following revelations made in an upcoming BBC Two Documentary : http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/uk-21916385