Another poor effort from me on this one - 18 rates, so well outside the top 50.
Here’s my top 5 rated beers out of that meagre selection:
|Harvey’s Imperial Extra Double Stout|4.6|
|Harvey’s Sussex XXXX Old Ale|3.8|
|Harvey’s Sussex Best Bitter (Cask)|3.6|
|Laine Brighton Black Rock|3.6|
|Loud Shirt Ecstacy Stout|3.6|
Burning Sky have two of my four lowest-rated beers so far - obviously I’m yet to encounter their good stuff.
I’ve rated 8 different breweries. Most rated are Harvey’s with 5, Long Man with 4 and Burning Sky with 3. The highest rated of those with more than 1 rating is Harvey’s.
I’ve rated one place - Bison Beer in Brighton, which I remember being a friendly and well-stacked shop next to an equally good ice cream parlour.
Have great memories of Brighton & Hastings from my drunken teens and twenties (long before I started rating) - in particular climbing into a Brighton minigolf course at 3am and playing a full round using driftwood for clubs and stones for balls whilst wearing chip cone hats.
I also think Rye is one of the loveliest small towns in Britain to wander around, although I haven’t tried the pubs there.
18 rates for me, not another highly chased county, but I do have same in cellar I need to get too. My top rated is Harveys Imperial Extra Double Stout that I gave a 4.0, funny thing is that I had it in 2015 when I lived in Alaska.
21 rates from me putting it in the middle of a very long tail for me. It is still above my native Lancashire. The same breweries loom large in my list as for others with Burning Sky accounting for nearly 50% and 7 of my top ranked 10. My eldest lived in Brighton for a while so I visited a couple of times but he had yet to discover the delights of beer sampling and was more interested in the music and performance scene as a criterion of pubs to visit. Reading the reminiscences of others makes me think it might be a pleasant place to spend a week next summer (if we’re spared!)
So I have tried 82 beers from East Sussex, with an average of 3.5 which is fairly high for an English County. 26 of these are Burning Sky. In total I’ve tried beers from 22 breweries
My rates for Burning Sky are a higher than average, but I just love their beers.
I have rated only 4 places all on trips to Brighton top of the pile is: Bison Beer
Considering a holiday in the area next year, COVID permitting, we have found a cottage to rent in Rye pretty much on the beach, so pleased to hear it’s a nice town!!
Recently had some Beak Brewery beers and found them pretty good, I have another couple in the fridge.
I agree with the thoughts on Rye. Way, way back in the late eighties in a different working life we stopped there whilst we were refurbishing the large indoor swimming complex at Camber Sands. I may have mentioned this story before so apologies if you have heard it. Anyway we were sat at the bar having a pint in the pub/hotel where we were stopping and every week/fortnight or whatever (we were there a long while so I forget the frequency) a local group (sort of like Round Table folk) walked in, on this one occasion Spike Milligan was amongst them and at the rear of the group, the others climbed the stairs to the upstairs meeting room, on seeing Spike I cheerily greeted him he turned around to see who I was and then somewhat put off his stride opened the wrong door and walked into a cupboard or some other room before realising his mistake.
We also used to go to The Pilot which was near Dungeness and had the most enormous fish and chips the fish looking like a blue whale had been battered and placed on the plate, also they did a fantastic and equally enormous Paella, one of our work colleagues, was completely unsed to working away from home and trying out different foods asked for the same as us referred to it as a ‘Propellor’
As mentioned above, Harvey’s Brewery is a fine example of a Tower Brewery, which for many years was easily the best production method for large scale brewing as favoured by regional brewers with many outlets to supply. Designed to remove much of the effort in moving liquids to various parts of the process by just pumping the liquor (fresh water) once to the top of the tower. At Harvey’s the liquor is now pumped electrically, where once it was moved by steam power as still occurs at Hook Norton Tower Brewery. The building is then designed that at each stage gravity is used to move the liquids. This type of brewery design was developed in the mid Victorian era, becoming very popular, some of which still remain, some converted into housing, but mostly very beautiful and solid buildings.
In the earlier days of Ratebeer, I remember there was a big following for Harvey’s amongst the UK raters, particularly in London and the South East, the Royal Oak in Borough being a particularly favoured outlet. At the time I seem to remember that visits to the Brewery itself were as rare as hens teeth and very difficult to arrange, only slightly easier these day I understand, but our very own @SilkTork managed to pull it off for a group of Ratebeerians, he may be able to give us more detail but I remember them having a great trip there.
@SHIG, were you stationed at Eielson AFB? Long way from East Sussex.
I spent a happy eight weeks there with the RAF in the 90’s. Really enjoyed my stay, packed a lot in while there. Drank some great beers and found Alaskan Amber very much to my liking.
I flew down to Anchorage for the weekend, to pick up a new hire car (It was a Lincoln Pimp-Mobile) drove the Great Alaskan Highway back. Highlights of Anchorage was The Great Alaskan Bush Company and a drive out to some Glacier via The Bird House, a little bar in Bird Creek. I had to google both those places just to be sure my memory wasn’t playing tricks.
I also remember drinking some shite lager out of a jam jar in a wooden shack of a bar that also sold Mexican Cat Sick in Pancakes (Enchiladas?).
I actually have 5 ratings here! Harveys bitter and 4 burning skies! The latter were turning up at Churchkey, our local beer bar, back when there was such thing as bars.
Churchkey here in DC always had a few real cask ales on tap, usually from UK. But DC has a lack of import rules for beer that let them get away with getting a lot of neat stuff in that other states can’t. Anyway, we saw a lot of stuff besides the casks at CK, regular hits from Siren, Buxton, Cloudwater, Brew by numbers or whatever it’s called. More too I’m sure, those are just off the top of my head. Obviously brew dog as well, Thornbridge and the other stuff you can find in almost every country
Bought a beer today just because it was a brewery tick and from East Sussex ! How sad is that ? When it drink it, it will be only my second rating for the county …
Just the 8 beers for me (from 3 breweries: Burning Sky, UnBarred, Harvey’s) and 1 cider from Ascension.
I have Burning Sky’s new imperial stout on the way though which will put me into double figures. Perhaps an IPA from Beak as well (which will be a new brewery to me) to take me up to 11 total.
