Eichhof Lager
Brewed by Brauerei Eichhof
Style: Helles Lager
Luzern, Switzerland
The Eichhof brewery is a brewery located in the picturesque city of Lucerne, in the heart of Switzerland, and on the go for more than 180 years. The beer is everywhere, appearing all over the small country, you cant go far without seeing its name light up some bar sign or on street hoarding.
Today the Eichhof brewery produces eleven different beers, using the same old recipes from that were passed down over decades, and apparently the brewery even uses fresh spring water directly from the amazing mountain peaks of Mount Pilatus.
Since 2008, Heineken have taken over the Brewery despite 15,500 people signing a note of protest against the sale, alas another independent brewery bites the dust….
Review: 50 cl Bottle of Eichhof Lager: ABV: 4.8%
On pour we get a very clear, lovely, yellow looking beer, with some nice carbonation, bubbling along, and a nice white head produced. Definitely looks the part, nice colour and a nice head, some lacing apparent.
Looks good. Nice colour, nice head, some lacing, thumbs up on the appearance.
Has a nice smell, but faint though, which is a little malty and of sweet grains.
A little bit of lemon piercing through as well.
On the taste, well no taste! Or at least nothing I could find.
It is extremely smooth, of light body and easy to drink, that would be the pure Swiss waters I am sure, but I am not picking up any tastes or flavours at all, nothing that stands out.
Very smooth, and I guess it would be a good beer to drink in a session,
I do like it however, its like a tonic water, or an extra strength water, with some light, very light malts
Still no taste on the second one, again very smooth,
Overall it is nice enough to drink but no taste. Good beer to down a few, very sessionable and smooth with a crisp clean finish….
August 28, 1865, saw the birth of the Ganter brewery when the 24 year old Ludwig Ganter founded his micro brewery in the centre of Freiburg.
Coming in a cool swing/flip top bottle with an interesting label, the beer apparently uses the same recipes that go way back to the founder Louis Ganter. 
On the taste….well it is very tasty that’s for sure, very hoppy as well.
Red stripe original, brewed in Jamaica and not the Jamaican STYLE lager that Americans get, from Latrobe, Pennsylvania!
For the rest of us, Desnoes & Geddes still make Red Stripe for Jamaica, Brazil, Canada and Europe, and in 2015 it became a subsidiary of Heineken.
A nice head that maintains, and some nice lacing.
The brewery now boasts over 8,500 proud shareholders and the beer continues to grow in popularity. But they dont issue dividends. The reward for investing in the company is beer, and lots of it, shared out at the general assembly where over a 1000 people celebrate the success of the company by drinking, partying and a little bit of boardroom management. 
Fantastic looking bottles, pretty ladies always catching the eye.
On taste
But it wasn’t always like that. There was once a player called Alex Higgins, “The Hurricane”, the “Peoples Champ” , when he was at the table you took note. You cared, here was a man who played the game like you’d do in your dreams, and played it like it should……pot the ball and no fucking around, in you go, I have a pint to finish….and a party to attend to, so hurry up, this game better be finished soon….
The 1972 World Snooker Championship was a world away from what we know of snooker today. Set in the long gone British Legion in Birmingham, where the crowd sat around the table on stacked up beer crates, the best of 73 frames final was played out over a week. And for winning the World Championship Higgins got a cheque for £480! But his win sent shock-waves through the sport. Here was a player with panache and style, had charisma, was charming, and with an unorthodox playing style he knew how to play snooker at levels that hadn’t been previously seen. And boy was he fast, flying around the table, often not given the ref enough time to replace the balls, potting balls from every conceivable angle with a furious intensity and in a manner that had the audience captivated. Snooker had finally got its own Georgie Best, someone who could transform the game from old men in dark halls to the dizzy heights it reached in the 80’s. Overnight Higgins changed the sport, bringing it kicking and screaming into the modern age, and as he said so himself……“Snooker was bollocks before I came along, pure bollix you had nothing to inspire you. You had Joe Davis. He was champion for twenty fucking years!”
From that win, Alex went on to lift his second World title, a gap of ten years between his first and second crown, beating Ray Reardon 18-15, at the Crucible in Sheffield in a final filled with emotion. In tears beckoning his wife Lynn and baby daughter Lauren to join him on stage with the trophy. A tearful Higgins just about holding onto the baby in one hand and the trophy on the other is an iconic image imprinted on the British public’s collective consciousness. Not bad considering he started the year in a nursing home, trying to detox, with no manager and a serious lack of table time!
Steve Davis was a name that made Alex Higgins cringe on sight, “I hate Steve Davis”. By the 80’s many players had worked out that by playing a rather unhurried and sluggish game they could slow the “hurricane” right down, make him lose concentration, make him fidgety, and sometimes lose the plot, by playing long winded safety play and taking their time to play shots. The master of this was Steve Davis, Higgins nemesis. Higgins and Davis were like chalk and cheese, both fiercely competitive and they had such an intense rivalry that it gripped the game of snooker. Davis, “the nugget”, cool and clinical, the robot, while Higgins was the madcap snooker genius, usually with a beer or a glass of God knows what, the charismatic flair player. Davis practiced every hour, every day producing a game that was complete and difficult to beat. Higgins, on the other hand, was still practicing in the clubs and pubs of Britain and Ireland, for sport and with all its distractions not an ideal place to hone his skills. This complete clash of styles and personalities enthralled the nation. More often than not Davis came out on top, in fact virtually all the time, but there were times when the Hurricane did manage to eke out a win, and those moments were special….
Higgins and the way he played, his rivalry with Davis and the advent of colour TV put snooker into the mainstream. Snooker players were the footballers of their day, household names, all with cool nicknames. Nearly 19 million people tuned in until the early hours to watch the World Snooker Championship Final, to see Dennis Taylor beat Steve Davis in a dramatic last black ball final frame. Nowadays if Ronnie isn’t playing the viewing figures in the UK do well to get 2 and a half million viewers. Big in China, sure, but so is dog meat. Snooker players were doing TV ads, promoting computer games, making hit songs, and regularly on the chat show circuit on TV. It is always important to remember it was Alex which started all this interest back in the day, when snooker was king, and the “hurricane” was regularly in the papers, front and back page, filling out venues up and down the country. Snooker owes him a massive depth, no doubt about it.
He came out to the crowd waving his hat in the air, often licking the white ball for luck, and always entertaining, and controversial. Coming out to crowds that resembled more like football supporters than the quite gentle fan that snooker was more used to, this was the atmosphere created by Alex Higgins. Higgins also drank, a cigarette in one hand and a strong drink in the other, during tournaments, as did many of his contemporaries, that was the way it was back then. He once told an experienced referee to “read the fucking rule book”. He refused to wear the proper snooker attire, the all black suit with bow tie, often preferring to throw the dickie bow to the crowd. He was banned from going on the popular snooker TV show, Pot Black, for pissing in a sink. Not the only time he had a tricky mickey, once caught urinating into a flower pot at the crucible! Constantly falling out with the authorities, that was Alex.
Higgins played fast and lived faster, and had all the important vices to his name…..women, gambling, drugs, the booze. Chucking TV’s through the window….check. A grand a week cocaine habit, check. Blowing 13 grand on bad horses in exotic Wolverhampton, check. Getting stabbed by an ex girlfriend check…..yeah old Alex was the rock n roll of snooker. 
But it all caught up with Alex in the end. The drink, the drugs, the hectic lifestyle, the smoking…….Higgins smoked as much as 60 cigarettes a day……he got throat cancer which he successfully had beaten, but it took a lot of out of him. His teeth were ruined due to the intensive radiotherapy and he was forced to eat liquid food to stay alive.
Higgins’ funeral service was held in Belfast on 2 August 2010. Following a funeral in the family home in Roden Street in the south of the city, a cortege led by a horse drawn carriage wound its way through the centre of the city, the street lined by hundreds of people paying their respects. A tearful Jimmy White helped carry the coffin.
A BBC comedy drama that tells the story of Alex Higgins and his tense rivalry with Steve Davis and the birth of modern-day snooker.
With millions of people travelling from the old continent of Europe to America hoping to find a better life they also brought with them their beers and tastes for the good stuff. Budweiser Budvar began exporting to the United States in 1871, but in the U.S. itself, C.Conrad (Anheuser-Busch) started using a Budweiser trademark and registered his version of Budweiser with the American Patent Office in 1878. Obviously this set up all sorts of legal disputes and rows over the naming of both beers, that has gone on for centuries, but some sort of compromise was reached when it was decided that the American Anheuser-Busch could use the brand “Budweiser” only in North America, while elsewhere the Czech Budweiser Budvar could use their name as a trademark. Also, Czech Budweiser is sold in North America under the label Czechvar and American Budweiser is labelled as Bud in all European Union markets, except for Ireland and the United Kingdom. In 1994 The European Commission granted Budweiser Budvar N.C. with the right to use a Protected Geographical Indication status “Budějovické pivo” and “Českobudějovické pivo”. This decision became effective on the 1st of May, 2004, and further strengthened the rights of the original Budweiser brand in their their effort to stave off, what must be said, some aggressive American opportunism. 
The iconic beer, the original, totally different to that American namesake, coming in a large 0.51CL bottle.
There is a lot of carbonation and I do wonder if the green bottles have something to do with the overall taste, as it tastes ok but a little skunky, and considering its reputation it is nothing amazing.
Saigon Export beer is the only authentic Vietnamese beer brewed in Vietnam and sold in the UK and in the US. Brewed by Vietnam’s Saigon Beer Company ( “Saigon Alcohol Beer and Beverages Corporation” or its abbreviation of “Sabeco”), based in the southern city of Ho Chi Minh City (or the old name “Saigon”). Sabeco is Vietnam’s leading beer producer, and is state owned under the authority of Vietnam’s Ministry of Trade and Industry. Its main brands are Saigon Beer and 333 Beer, and it has about 50% of the market share of the country. 
There is some rice in this with a dab of malt, or so they say….. 
A bit hoppy, with a light bitter aftertaste, but its slight.
Withnail and I is a 1987 British black comedy film and cult classic written and directed by Bruce Robinson and set in Camden Town, London in the late 1960’s. It is a simple story of two struggling young actors living as bums, Withnail (Richard E. Grant ) and “I” (Paul McGann), who yearn to take a break from their squalid run down flat and fed up with the hectic life of the city, decide to escape to the countryside on the cheap. Withnail manages to persuade his rich eccentric uncle, Monty (Richard Griffiths) to let them stay in his country cottage in Penrith in Cumbria, North West England, for a weekend RnR. This is to be a “holiday by mistake”, one in which anything that can go wrong, does go wrong!
Although the countryside is beautiful, the location is anything but idyllic. What looks like constant rain, the boys are cold (“Warm up? We may as well sit round this cigarette,” They end up burning some furniture) , the cottage has no running water or light, they are low on food and the locals seem a bit strange and not very hospitable, in particular a poacher called Jake, who takes an instant dislike to Withnail. Its a long long way from Camden Town and the two city boys are hopelessly out of their depth for country living. Trying to cook a chicken (“I’m starving, how can we make it die?”) in an oven balanced on a kettle, attempting to shoot fish with a shotgun, or using plastic bags as boots to trod around in the muck, are just some examples of their inadequacies.
Marwood learns they have received an eviction notice for unpaid rent, thus preempting the splitting of the two companions. Marwood leaving for the station, turns down Withnail’s request for one last drink. “There’s always time for a drink?” But Marwood, with his newly cut hair and looking smart, is a man changed. He has finally got an acting part and needs to move on. They part company, likely for the last time. All alone, and quoting Hamlet and with a bottle of wine in hand, naturally, Withnail cries out in the rain “What a piece of work is a man!” The end!
The script is one thing, but you need actors to bring it to life. The acting in the movie is superb. Definitely true to say that Richard E Grant hasn’t done anything as good, at least nothing I have ever seen. (‘I’m a trained actor reduced to the status of a bum!’). But Paul McGann, the foil to the craziness of Grant, is also excellent and as good as Grant. His part is more measured, but he plays the character so well that you actually feel sorry for poor old Marwood having to put up with Withnail all the time.
There was no actual filming in the real Penrith, and Sleddale Hall, just outside Shap in Cumbria, is the location used as Monty’s cottage. What strikes me from the county location is the never ending rain, and toughness of countryside life. As for the time period, the movie is set in the 60’s, even if it was made in the 80’s without any set design, which goes to show that parts of London looked pretty dire at this time. Grit I think is the word I’m looking for!
The rules for the Withnail and I drinking game are very simple… just match what Withnail drinks
Withnail
Kilkenny is an Irish cream ale from the makers of Guinness, which originated in Kilkenny, Ireland, hence the name! The brand is managed and produced by Diageo. It is available in draught and cans.
A lot of the reviews say 4.3%, but mine was 4.2% ABV, maybe different for the German market perhaps.
On taste I get a smooth creamy mouthful from the beer, some grains, a bit of caramel, it all tastes nice and very smooth.
Singha is a 5% abv pale lager produced by the Boon Rawd Brewery in Bangkok, Thailand. 
Like Chang, Singha is easy to get in Thai and Asian restaurants and supermarkets all across Europe. 
The bottle top has Singha’s dragon logo which looks pretty cool and there is a yellow lion on the front of the bottle. We are also told that this is “The original Thai beer since 1933.”
No lacing but a perfectly clear looking beer….