Mid-November Adventures

From http://iansaleadventures.blogspot.com/

I briefly escaped from a Saturday afternoon wine tasting in Edinburgh to grab a quick couple of ales at the Guildford Arms, which had its usual excellent and interesting choice - too many to mention - and, as ever, the quality was top-notch.

Back in Deeside, the Learney Arms has been featuring a new Cairngorm bitter - Caillie - so new it doesn't even appear on their website yet. Useful abv of 3.8% allows occasional, careful use of car to get to and from Torphins. The Potarch Inn also has Cairngorm ales - Gold this week.

Talking about Cairngorm's website, I note they have a seasonal (August/September) beer called Brochan - surely this is going to cause confusion with Deeside's Broichan? Can't say I've seen Brochan locally - has anyone tried it?

The Burnett Arms in Banchory is obviously having to go without its house Burnett brand just now, but they are still trying to keep two handpulls going - one is always Deuchar's and the other on Friday was Brains' Merlin's Oak, which had unfortunately gone off before I arrived.

A quick hop across the road to the Stag revealed Old Speckled Hen, but the Douglas was a bit more inspiring with Houston's Pioneer and Orkney's Corncrake to complement the staple Deuchar's.

Now that the dust has settled a little on the debate on the local CAMRA Yahoo site about craft/keg beers and real ale, can I just throw my tuppence worth in? Perhaps the very success of CAMRA over the last 40 years has been its own worst enemy? The main thrust of the campaign in the early 70's was to ensure that consumers had choice and that we didn't have to put up with the bland, fizzy product then being put out by the very few remaining large breweries in the UK. Four decades later and there are now hundreds of small local breweries providing us with the choice we wanted in the first place, so where does CAMRA go from here? Wish I knew the answer to that one.

CAMRA has won the battle - should we now retire gracefully?