Thursday 19 August 2010

Is Beer Glassware Important?

ThisIsLeicestershire has an article about women and younger drinkers getting a taste for real ale.

The main picture (above) is of a young lady drinking a pint from a good old-fashioned dimpled jug. My question is whether anybody cares about the glassware that is used today.

There are many designs of beer glassware around and with the increasing popularity of stronger craft kegged and real ales is it not time to provide punters with some attractive alternative glassware?

There are fluted glasses, goblets and chalices, tuplips and all sorts of different designs.

Please enter your poll selections in the main blog window.

Wednesday 11 August 2010

Why Mafia II Nearly Killed Me


It was the monitor's fault - a massive 20inch hulking monster that nearly gave me a hernia. Ok, so I could probably buy a decent 22inch flat screen monitor for under £100 (can I? I haven't even looked) but is it worth it if my PC gaming life is coming to an end?

The original Mafia (screenshot left) had a really nice feel about it and the driving especially was great fun and SO much better (IMHO) than the arcadey driving style of the GTA games. And so I thought that Mafia II would be worth a look.

So a demo arrived the other day (screenshot to the left) and I eagerly downloaded it through the very competent Steam. As is fairly typical with PC games, it ran but my TV just displayed a black screen. The game was running (I could hear it in the background). So I guessed the TV (a new Panny) couldn't hack it. It was easier (so I thought) to move my old monitor to where my PC is now. And that's when I nearly got a hernia. But the game worked fine. In fact a very respectable 50fps for a lowly Pentium overclocked to 3GHz and with a 2 year old ATI HD4800 graphics card, all running through the ancient XP. (Note:- framerate was only 40fps through Vista).

So the game played great, with demo-time-hacked et al and with what looks like a great driving engine. But will I buy the full game? Probably not; unless I move my PC back to where it belongs (rather than being next to the TV) OR I shell out some dosh for a decent monitor...

Monday 2 August 2010

GBBF Friday Competition - Name these 9 Bottled Beers

This competition is for 1 person to win the following 2 tickets for Friday (6th August) at the GBBF. The tickets are 1x FRIDAY NON-MEMBER and 1x FRIDAY 1:30 TASTING NON-MEMBER. Please read ALL of the rules.

Rules:-
1. Accurately name the breweries who make the 9 pictured beers.
2. Accurately name the 9 pictured beers. If the name is preceeded by the brewery name you don't have to include the brewery name. If a beer name is an abbreviation, I want the abbreviation.
3. As a tie breaker you must tell me the total (IE cumulative) ABV of the 9 pictured beers. I know some of these beers will have a varying ABV. The total I want is for the 9 beers that I have in my posession.
4. My decision is final; no correspondence will be entered into; if I die before the competition closes there is no prize...etc...etc...etc
5. Email your entry to musicrabbie@googlemail.com; please include name,address,telephone and/or mobile numbers (these details will be deleted from my computer after the winner has been selected and contacted)
6. One entry per person and no duplicate sender email addresses will be allowed (sorry!); if multiple entries are sent I will keep the first one and bin the rest
7. CLOSING DATE/TIME IS THURSDAY 5th AUGUST 08:59 BST. Any entries received after that time (as displayed by the "date" attribute of the received email) will be binned; no allowance will be made by me for slow email systems etc...etc...
8. Winner to be notified on Thursday when we will arrange prize handover; winner will also be identified in the blog.

Good luck!