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Bar Review: Beer And Skittles, Edinburgh

30/1/2015

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Finding the entrance to Beer and Skittles isn’t the simplest of tasks, but once you’ve passed through the entrance of ‘Steak’ and worked your way down to the basement, you’ll be rewarded with a seat in one of the most stylish bars in Edinburgh.

From the offset, the tasteful decor comes across as modern and welcoming, simple but slick, with low hanging lights and couches that it’s more than easy to settle into in an instant.

The main attraction of the bar isn’t the fine furnishing though, nor even the free pool, as crazy as that may seem. Rather, it’s the 70 hand-selected beers on offer from a total of 39 different countries. Put simply, the selection is outrageously good.

In our introductory session there, we managed to make our way through beers from Kenya, Namibia, Brazil and Canada, as well as sampling the excellent home brew ‘Beer and Skittles’. All reasonably priced as well.

On request, you can pick up a World Beer Tour card – which in our excitement we forgot to do – which lets you chalk off the beers you’ve tried and after making your way through them all (not in one day of course), get the right to have your name and photo on the ‘Hall of Foam’. We have literally no idea what that is, but it sounds excellent.

Decent beers without the condescension of craft beer that the likes of Brew Dog seem to enforce...
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The thing is, that with a bar specialising in world beers in a stylish setting, which occasionally puts games – think beer and Jenga, a great, great, dangerous mix – you would normally expect the vibe to be a little bit, well, hipster. And by hipster of course, we really mean dick-ish, but that’s not actually a word.

To our delight though, this was not the case. Not even remotely. The bar certainly has a Shoreditch, London vibe about it – the quirky nature of the games, the free darts and pool worked into a chic layout – but the wonderful news is that it has none of the snobbery about it. It all feels pretty casual.

Bar staff are friendly, welcoming and ready to recommend a beer to your taste. We even ended up having a rather interesting conversation with them about the awesome Australian hip-hop soundtrack that was sounding nicely round the venue.

You might not be able to order certain traditional (where it says traditional, read ‘shit’) lagers ala Carlsberg and Carling and other unfortunate specimens that start with ‘Car’, but this is just the glory of it. You get decent beers without the condescension of craft beer that the likes of Brew Dog seem to enforce.

You can even order draft beers in steins. Steins we tell you!! You know it’s good when we have to use a double exclamation mark.

The vibe of the place, then, is fine but friendly, pairing live sport on multiple screens with cosy booths and a sterling range.

The perfect choice for a comfortable beer or three, and even better for heading to for a date or before a night-out on the town. I think the JFC crew may have found a new regular...


Stuart Kenny
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Review: Edinburgh Hogmanay Street Party, 31 Dec, 2014

4/1/2015

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The Edinburgh Hogmanay Street Party. It’s become the stuff of legend, planted deep in the genes of guidebook folklore and featured on more global bucket lists than sweating a 26-miler.

The best thing about it? As long as you tackle it in just the right way, it’ll never fail to live up to the hype – a large part of which is down to the shared mentality of the 80-odd-thousand revellers who end up attending.

‘Come in and do the right thing. Get up and have a party’. A couple of sentences which will guide you towards a memorable night on Princes Street on 31 December, and also, the opening lines to ‘Get Up’ by Young Fathers, the Mercury Award-winning Edinburgh hip-hop act who opened the Waverley Stage on Hogmanay.

Of course, anyone who knows Young Fathers will know that their lyrics go a lot deeper than your usual low-depth, party-endorsing chart act.

Hot Dub Time Machine is the most welcoming, triumphant, irresistible sing-along the world has ever seen... And we can't recommend it highly enough
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The trio are bold, confident, original, and most importantly, they know what they’re doing. And they know that they know what they’re doing as well.

The group swaggered around the stage on NYE with the same daring yet expressionless authority that comes across when they talk to the press. Their faces may not give much away, but all the depth you need is planted finely in their lyrics.

Hogmanay partying may not have been the best setting for new listeners to appreciate their craft, but Young Fathers are unquestionably an exceptional act, and they provided an entertaining opening to the night.

The Twilight Sad were up next, but while we are indeed fans of the awesome punk-indie-rock band, we left the Waverley Stage at this point to take on the Hot Dub Time Machine New Year Special a little further up the street. Any event with that many capitalised letters in the name is bound to be exceptional.

The idea is simple: DJ Tom Loud bangs out “instantly recognisable tunes from the 60s to the present day” in chronological order, and the end result is so addictive and accessible that it’s impossible not to get drawn in.


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From the Beatles to Queen to Britney Spears and endless others, this is the most fun the JFC team have had in front of a single DJ. We’re largely into different kinds of music and different genres, but Hot Dub isn’t about music appreciation in the typical sense. Put simply, it’s the most welcoming, triumphant, irresistible sing-along the world has ever seen – and we can’t recommend it highly enough.

Back to the Waverley Stage, though, and Twin Atlantic bringing us into 2015. Sam McTrusty and co. did exactly what you’d expect them to do. They absolutely killed it.

Their newer material may be a bit cheesy, but Twin’s stuff has always translated beautifully to the stage. It’s accessible, the riffs are catchy as hell, the hooks are wonderful and McTrusty’s signature twang is the cherry on top of the rocking cake. They’re just a great live band.

Heart and Soul rang from the speakers at midnight and the traditional Auld Lang Syne madness ensued – complete with a JFC colleague yelling at all the rest of us for crossing our hands too early.

A wonderful night and another welcome edition of this categorically must-not-miss event. Truth be told, the street party is almost always more about the people you meet and the random folk you end up hugging than the live acts on stage... But it certainly didn’t hurt this year that the entertainment was out of this world.

So, thank you again for another great game of the Edinburgh Hogmanay Street Party. It’s always a guaranteed winner.

                                                                                                                      Stuart Kenny

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