My lockdown was nowhere near as bad a some people's. I had the Beautiful wife for company and, as a teacher, I was working throughout, though in a somewhat different way to normal classroom teaching. I got back into exercise losing 3 stones in weight (over 40 pounds if you are in the US) and I grew a beard! I am aware that the 3 years of on/off life were hellish for some people and I am grateful that I came through unscathed.
In finding different ways to do things we moved, as a secondary school, to online learning where our students were in a meeting room (google classroom to google meets) with us while they learnt. It was far from perfect but even further from the disaster of no "taught" education at all. It did, however, lead to an idea that has taken hold with the staff at my school: Online tastings. Now before I go on I must stress that this was not a school event. The only aspect of school was the fact that it was available to staff members.
The process was simple. The people who took part picked up a bag of beers sourced by me and took them home with a bag of nibbles (matched to the beers) and logged on a Friday evening so that I could chat them through the beers and we could all engage with each other (something that was very sadly lacking during lockdown).
The first tasting was "Beers of the Vales of Aylesbury and the White Horse". I purchased 7 beers and everyone took their bag home. The tutored part of the tasting lasted about 1 hour, by which time I was really quite tired! I logged off and left those still in the room to it! Checking the log the following day, several of the participants had not left the room until the small hours, one writing in the comments box "Best night of lockdown"
Oh how we missed the ability to just chat over a beer with our friends and colleagues!
Since that first tasting there has been one every half term. we have tasted beers from around the world and gins (decanted into 50ml double shot bottles) with tonics and bitter lemon.
The joy of doing it online is that there is no need to find a venue, and nobody has to drive home and thus, miss out.
The last tasting was entitled "But I don't like lager". It was an attempt to turn over the inbuilt prejudice we have in the UK against this very broad genre of beer. (There were some particularly tough nuts to crack amongst my colleagues). Starting with Bud light (largely for comparison) we moved though classic German pils, Czech pilsner, Dunkel, and finished with Heller Ruachbier (just to surprise a few people!). Many of the beers split the vote but much fun was had by all.
The next tasting will be of fortified wines with cheese - I can't wait!
Postscript - I have recently been studying beer in a more serious way than propping up a bar and my next post will be about courses in food and drink and how they are always fun and sometimes life changing!
