A pint of: Jeremiah Weed - root brew

Firstly the label & name made this instantly intriguing & appealing. It's trying to be very American with the use of the language used on the bottle. It says that Jeremiah Weed is the original southern gentleman from Kentucky, USA. I doubt he's ever existed & it's a shame to read on the back that it's produced & brewed in the UK & then gives a London address. I feel that it should either be genuinely American, brewed there and imported. Or be proud to be British & have a different theme. This is perhaps though a bug bear of mine, I dislike Fosters & other mass produced lagers that claim to be of Australia or a European country when they are in fact all brewed in the same brewery in the UK. A wine producer couldn't get away with it & I wish the same were true of beer. But anyway...

The drink itself is a 'ginger brew with fruit alcohol, spirit & flavourings'. No where on the label does it expand on what fruits are used or what spirit. Although I am assuming spirit meant whiskey et al but it may well mean the departed soul of Jeremiah Weed. Certainly given that it's only 4% abv the latter is certainly possible.

The drink is a cloudy amber. It is a bit fizzy & quite sweet. It doesn't taste very gingery. Far less than say the Wychwood ginger beard. That said this drink is very nice & extremely drinkable. It reminds me a lot of a favourite cocktail called the lucky leaf. To make a leaf which i wish was my invention, put some ice in a tall glass, then add 2 dashes of angostura bitters, half a limes juice, a shot of whiskey, a shot of green apple sourz & top it off with ginger beer.

This drink is £2 in Sainsburys currently. I give it 7 out of 10, I'm only marking it down for the bollocks on the bottle. The drink itself is brill.

A glass of Sainsbury's house sparkling for the lady

Hands up anyone who'd expect anything much from a £4.99 bottle of 'house sparkling'? Anyone?

Well, actually, there's a good chance you'd be missing out. In all honesty I only picked up this bottle because of the promised 'brioche' flavours advertised on the label. I'm very partial to enriched bakery products, so distilling this into a bottle of wine seemed like manna from heaven.

On this point I am rather disappointed- the promised brioche has failed to materialise on this particular palette. However in all other respects this is a pleasant glass of wine. It's nicely fizzy without feeling gassy and somewhere between a typical brut and demi-sec. I'm normally a proponent of very dry wines but I am somewhat more flexible in the presence of bubbles and found the very slight sweetness rather appealing.

As a hardened Cava and Prosecco girl I will admit I approached this wine looking only to criticise. However, now I've tried it I would definitely buy it again. 7/10

A pint of: Morland - old golden hen

A beautiful golden coloured ale. Very bitter with a strong, lasting, aftertaste. The bottle suggests subtle tropical fruit notes.

It's 4.1% abv & comes in a 500ml clear glass bottle. The bottle bit being tinted does increase the risk of the beer spoiling. So perhaps pick one from the back of the shelf.

Sainsburys, where this brew is from, seem to have recently increased all the alcohols prices. So this beer is currently £1.99. I give it 6 out of 10.

Thatchers Vintage Cider

This exceptionally strong bottle weighs in at 7.4%, and I think it suffers because of this. As is so often found, more alcohol means less flavour overall.

Thatchers are clearly trying to make this line more desirable and 'premium'; the bottle now comes with a fancy, ye olde worlde label and sepia-tinted pic of (one presumes) Mr Thatcher himself. So long as you don't know what a major company Thatchers is, this might work. However, the claim that they are 'family cider makers' made me laugh. I must also admit to being slightly bemused by the prominent advertising of this cider as '2011 vintage'. Was last year a particularly good year for apples? Would any other cider on the shelves be from another year? Questions to ponder...

In the glass this is a perfectly reasonable, lightly sparkling medium-dry cider. It's not particularly appley but easily drinkable and inoffensive. Unfortunately, that's about all I have to say on the subject. When I can comment for twice as long on the label of the bottle, rather than the contents of said bottle, then it's possibly time for the company to rethink the product.

A final observation: at this strength a single bottle represents 3.7 units and therefore, as clearly stated by the daily recommended limits printed on the label, your blogger (being unfortunate enough to be in possession of xx chromosomes) should not actually have drunk the entire contents. The things I do for you...