BrewDogging #61/#62: Aberdeen Union Square/Peterhead

"This sure enough is a bizarre sight in the middle of this shit."

- Mr Clean, Apocalypse Now

At the time, young Larry Fishburne was talking about a Playboy live show organised in the middle of a Vietnam warzone. Would he have reacted in the same way to BrewDog's two new Aberdeenshire bars? I'd like to think so.

BrewDogging #60: Dalston

As we enter BrewDog Dalston on its opening night, a nice young chap on the door says hello to us. It's the one big disappointment of the evening.

Thing is, at the time I thought it was a really nice touch, and that they were doing it for everybody. But within seconds of it happening, The Belated Birthday Girl told me that the chap in question was JB, BrewDog's guy in charge of bar management, and he was greeting her personally because they've met a couple of times on occasions like this. And there was me thinking I'd found a suitable role for my retirement years, standing in the doorway of a BrewDog bar and welcoming people as they entered like it was a pissed Walmart. Not to be, sadly.

BrewDogging #59: Paddington

*hard stare*

BrewDogging #58: Brixton

[Previously: Bristol, Camden, Newcastle, Birmingham, Shoreditch, Aberdeen, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kungsholmen, Leeds, Shepherd's Bush, Nottingham, Sheffield, Dog Tap, Tate Modern†, Clapham Junction, Roppongi, Liverpool, Dundee, Bologna, Florence, Brighton, Dog Eat Dog/Angel, Brussels, Soho, Cardiff, Barcelona, Clerkenwell, DogHouse Glasgow, Rome, Castlegate, Leicester, Oslo, Gothenburg, Södermalm, Turku†, Helsinki, Gray's Inn Road†, Stirling, Norwich, Southampton, Homerton†, Berlin, Warsaw†, Leeds North Street, York, Hong Kong†, Oxford, Seven Dials, Reading, Malmo, Tallinn, Overworks, Tower Hill, Edinburgh Lothian Road, Milton Keynes, Canary Wharf]

You thought BrewDog Angel (see previous episode) had a long, drawn-out birth? Technically, they've been hyping the arrival of BrewDog Brixton since 2013, when they released a new dark beer called Brixton Porter in anticipation of its imminent opening. (Given the company's legendary tin ear for tie-ins with geographical locations, we should be grateful they didn't call it Brixton Riots.)

Brixton Porter came and went, and so did whichever site it was they had in mind for their second Sarf Landan bar. It took them a good five years to acquire an alternative location. Things have changed quite a bit over that time.

BrewDogging #24 v2: Angel

[Previously: Bristol, Camden, Newcastle, Birmingham, Shoreditch, Aberdeen, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kungsholmen, Leeds, Shepherd's Bush, Nottingham, Sheffield, Dog Tap, Tate Modern†, Clapham Junction, Roppongi, Liverpool, Dundee, Bologna, Florence, Brighton, Dog Eat Dog Angel, Brussels, Soho, Cardiff, Barcelona, Clerkenwell, DogHouse Glasgow, Rome, Castlegate, Leicester, Oslo, Gothenburg, Södermalm, Turku†, Helsinki, Gray's Inn Road†, Stirling, Norwich, Southampton, Homerton†, Berlin, Warsaw†, Leeds North Street, York, Hong Kong†, Oxford, Seven Dials, Reading, Malmo, Tallinn, Overworks, Tower Hill, Edinburgh Lothian Road, Milton Keynes, Canary Wharf]

21-31 Essex Road, London N1 2SA. It's an address that's had so much bad luck attached to it, you'd think it was a former Indian burial ground.

Nevertheless, this oddly-numbered BrewDogging post marks a first for the series. At the top there, you'll notice that several of the bars listed have a † symbol next to their name, indicating that they've shut down since they were reviewed here (or, in one memorable case, before they were reviewed). It's a simple fact of life: they couldn't pull in enough punters, and the decision was made to kill them off. You wouldn't normally expect one of them to come back to life. But this one has - twice, technically.

Spank's LFF Diary, Thursday 18/10/2018 [incorporating BrewDogging #57: Canary Wharf]

Reviewed today: Birds Of Passage, Etangs Noirs.

BrewDogging #56: Milton Keynes

[Previously: Bristol, Camden, Newcastle, Birmingham, Shoreditch, Aberdeen, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kungsholmen, Leeds, Shepherd's Bush, Nottingham, Sheffield, Dog Tap, Tate Modern†, Clapham Junction, Roppongi, Liverpool, Dundee, Bologna, Florence, Brighton, DED Angel†, Brussels, Soho, Cardiff, Barcelona, Clerkenwell, DogHouse Glasgow, Rome, Castlegate, Leicester, Oslo, Gothenburg, Södermalm, Turku†, Helsinki, Gray's Inn Road†, Stirling, Norwich, Southampton, Homerton†, Berlin, Warsaw†, Leeds North Street, York, Hong Kong†, Oxford, Seven Dials, Reading, Malmo, Tallinn, Overworks, Tower Hill, Edinburgh Lothian Road]

Man's wandering round trying to remember
Whether he put the little piece of wood under the pedal of his pedal bin
So that his cat wouldn't press it and then
Go and piss on his ru-hu-hu-hu-hub-bish
That's Milton Springsteen
That's Milton Spri-hi-hi-hi-hingsteen

I'm not suggesting that every Londonish BrewDogging piece this year is going to have an Alexei Sayle reference in it, but it's starting to look that way. Anyway, ever since his album The Fish People Tapes was released in 1984, the image that always comes to mind whenever I think of Milton Keynes is Alexei's odd Paul Weller tribute, which was somehow released a year before The Style Council's Come To Milton Keynes. It's a city I've always passed though at high speed on the rail route between London and Manchester. Why would I ever want to get off there?

Oh, yeah. That.

BrewDogging #55: Edinburgh Lothian Road

[Previously: Bristol, Camden, Newcastle, Birmingham, Shoreditch, Aberdeen, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kungsholmen, Leeds, Shepherd's Bush, Nottingham, Sheffield, Dog Tap, Tate Modern†, Clapham Junction, Roppongi, Liverpool, Dundee, Bologna, Florence, Brighton, DED Angel†, Brussels, Soho, Cardiff, Barcelona, Clerkenwell, DogHouse Glasgow, Rome, Castlegate, Leicester, Oslo, Gothenburg, Södermalm, Turku†, Helsinki, Gray's Inn Road†, Stirling, Norwich, Southampton, Homerton†, Berlin, Warsaw†, Leeds North Street, York, Hong Kong†, Oxford, Seven Dials, Reading, Malmo, Tallinn, Overworks, Tower Hill]

It's August, it's the height of the 2018 Edinburgh Festival, and I'm not there (as I explained earlier). Nick and several of the Pals are in Edinburgh as I write this, and hopefully we'll hear how things went for them in a future post. Meanwhile, The Belated Birthday Girl and I are at home in London keeping ourselves fresh for the fest in 2019, when I'll have to confront the horrifying fact that it'll be the thirtieth anniversary of my first visit.

But even on a year off, you can't keep me or The BBG away from the place. Particularly when they opened up a second BrewDog bar in the city earlier this year - in fact, right now it's doubling up as Fringe Venue #102. So during the late May Bank Holiday weekend, we popped up there to pay it a visit, and to do several dozen other things as well, like we usually do. Some of them worked, some of them didn't, as you'll see.

BrewDogging #54: Tower Hill

[Previously: Bristol, Camden, Newcastle, Birmingham, Shoreditch, Aberdeen, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kungsholmen, Leeds, Shepherd's Bush, Nottingham, Sheffield, Dog Tap, Tate Modern†, Clapham Junction, Roppongi, Liverpool, Dundee, Bologna, Florence, Brighton, DED Angel†, Brussels, Soho, Cardiff, Barcelona, Clerkenwell, DogHouse Glasgow, Rome, Castlegate, Leicester, Oslo, Gothenburg, Södermalm, Turku†, Helsinki, Gray's Inn Road†, Stirling, Norwich, Southampton, Homerton†, Berlin, Warsaw†, Leeds North Street, York, Hong Kong†, Oxford, Seven Dials, Reading, Malmo, Tallinn, Overworks]

A few months ago I was banging on about the recently-opened Seven Dials bar, and how huuuuuuuge it was, and how it was obviously going to be BrewDog's new London flagship bar. Well, part of that might still be true - you can't beat the geometric centre of the West End as a location. But since then, BrewDog have opened another London bar in the City, and it's huuuuuuuger.

Then again, that's part of its problem - it's in the City, so my traditional roundup of other interesting things in the area would resemble Alexei Sayle's theoretical publication What's On In Stoke Newington. (For some reason, new London BrewDog bars keep reminding me of Alexei Sayle routines.) So instead, I'm going to tell you about three separate visits I've made to the bar since it opened back in April, each one showing off its features in different ways.

Bermondsey Beer Mile: Slight (many happy) Return(s)

Twenty years ago today, I pressed a single button on a computer keyboard and UNLEASHED HELL. (Well, I say it was a single button, it was probably more like a messy FTP upload, but you get the idea.)

July 14th 1998 - Bastille Day, no less - was the day that I launched The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey, the Demon Internet website that eventually migrated over to this thing on Typepad. So, I've been spouting off on the internet for twenty years today. As I usually do most years, I'd like to thank all of you who've been reading this nonsense, no matter what proportion of those two decades you've been here for.

Still, the question remains: how do I best celebrate the anniversary of the creation of a website?

And the answer is: with the help of The Belated Birthday Girl, I've created another one.