You can basically end the competition right now, because the 2015 award for best beer name has already been decided: Putin is a Dickhead. Go head, brewers. You have nine months to come up with something better. It’s not going to happen. The team here at Love & Barley have always known that beer is…
Author: Josh
Response to “The Death of Style”
There’s a well-written blog post going around, written by one Michael O’Connor of Portland, Oregon, another in a string proclaiming the “death of beer styles“. It’s an interesting read, makes a lot of good points, gets a couple of minor things wrong that aren’t worth dwelling on (cough, Reinheitsgebot, cough), and is generally good food…
Grasslands, horses and thunderstorms – the Mongolian Experience in a nutshell
So it was that we pulled into UB, inspired by the unfathomably gorgeous scenery for the three hours of daylight we’d had coming into town, but embittered by that miserable train ride. It was Nadaam, day of the national festival, so we had little time to get going. Breakfast at the guesthouse consisted of bread,…
The Ride to Mongolia
We were standing at the top of the stairs, looking out over the entire platform where our train to Ulanbaatar was waiting, and we knew already it was going to be a problem. Already the orderly shopping and smoking of normal Russian train stops had been replaced by chaos, people pushing, crowding and hawking. There…
Calm Before the Storm
The ride to Ulan Ude was very smooth. It’s actually one of the best parts of the Trans-Siberian because for two or three hours the track runs alongside Lake Baikal, giving off great views. It was like a long, extended good-bye. On Olkhon, we’d had the chance to dip our toes into its cold waters….
Into the Land of the Omul-Eaters
We took a stop at Irkutsk, like many people do. It must be the most popular stop on the entire Trans-Siberian. We wanted to head to the remote Olkhon Island, in Lake Baikal. A mile deep, holding 20% of the world’s fresh water and no small amount off the world’s powerful nature spirits, Baikal is…
The Krasnoyarsk Story
And then things went off the rails. Not the train, thankfully. That thing just kept on rolling. Coming into Krasnoyarsk, the scenery got prettier. Green rolling hills were dotted with picaresque wooden villages – those villages will truly be emblematic of Siberia for me now. I hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours when…
Rolling Through Siberia
Moscow seems like a very long time ago. We’re east of Novosibirsk on the second leg of the journey, still nine hours out from Krasnoyarsk. We entered Siberia, technically, somewhere just west of Tyumen, which was only a few hours after leaving Ekaterinburg. We toasted with a few beers purchased on the train platform in…
Day One…slow and easy
“It doesn’t feel like we should be that close.” It’s a funny thing to say when you’re still five hours away from your destination, but also funny when you’ve been on the train for 23 hours already. But Sunshine was right. We’d fallen into the rhythm of train life almost instantly, as soon as the…
The Blog is Back
The blog is back! We’ve been bad posters, largely on account of not having anything terribly exciting to talk about, followed by a stretch that had just way too much excitement. All day adventure, every day, and no time or energy at the end of the night to write about it. It’s a crying shame,…
Berliner Mauer
Our flat in Berlin is in Pankow, the former East. What’s amazing is that we are a stone’s throw from one of the S-Bahn stations. I can read the names on the shopping bags of the people standing on the platform. I mean it’s RIGHT THERE. But between us and the tracks is a little…
Roots
Josh – I lost my grandmother the other day. It was expected, as health issues had been fairly severe for quite some time, but it still leaves me with a hole. Where once I had roots, the vestiges of those roots are disappearing. One could argue that the way we live – traveling around the…
Love and Barley 