Chocolate and beer...

Chocolate and beer, my two favourite foodgroups, brought together last night in The Fox in the form of Wychwood's Hobgoblin ale.

Its been our want over the past six months or so to close the office at 4pm on a Friday, or sometimes 3pm depending on how pissed off I am, and retire to The Fox at Horsforth for beer and something to eat from their excellent menu.

As part of the Ember Inns group they are currently in the middle of a six week "real ale" festival of beers, each week featuring six different cask ales and have produced a little booklet to go with it and explain what each of their varied ales are about.

Now I like beer, proper beer, its just that it doesn't like me - the quickest way to bring on a headache in me is to feed me beer, or chocolate - and so I tend to normally drink the nancy boys drink of choice, lager.

But this beer festival has reintroduced to me the delights of drinking proper beer and also confirmed just how piss poor commercially produced lager really is.

Week one of the Ember Inns festival saw me enjoying an ale which was advertised as a "blond beer" having "a lemon after-taste", and bugger me it did, very nice it was too.

Last night we ajourned to The Fox as per normal but with the anticipation of a chocolate beer on the menu, Hobgoblin ale from the Wychwood brewery, it was nice, very nice, dark and full of flavour - but no chocolatey taste, I was devastated and switched to Black Sheep instead which was found to be to its normal high standard, had three pints and a chicken sandwich and then slept for the rest of the evening.

I can't drink a lot of beer these days, but I enjoy what little I do ...