The page was last updated on Saturday, October 14, 2006
Minor changes were made on this date.

Links to the other Pages of the White Beer Travels website

There are buttons providing links to the main pages of the White Beer Travels website at the top and bottom of each page of the site. In all, a hundred and six pages make up the White Beer Travels website. The following button takes one to the White Beer Travels Contents page, which has a table of links to all of these pages, with a brief description of each.

Links to External websites

Yellow pages are excellent sources of bars that do not figure in any of the well-known beer guides. For example by selecting the taverns category (key in taverns or the code 1862) in the Belgian Yellow Pages, for the Wallonian town of Dinant (key in dinant or its post code, 5500), netted the Taverne Les Brasseurs (3, rue Albert Huybrechts, tel 082 22 63 66. This bar/restaurant was a promising place from a name point of view, i.e. "Les Brasseurs" means "The Brewers". White Beer Travels Beer Hunters were able to check it out in October, 2001, as it was included in the guide to Dinant issued to them for the lunch-time stop there on a day trip from Namur (see below) between visits to Du Bocq Brewery, in Purnode (www.bocq.be), and the Belgian Beer Museum in Lustin (www.museebieresbelges.centerall.com). Les Brasseurs proved to have the biggest beer selection in Dinant, with five different draught beers and forty in bottle, which are way above average figures for Wallonia. The White Beer Travels guide to Dinant and its map are available from the Downloads page. In the Belgian Yellow Pages, categories such as Pubs (1858) and Restaurants (1905) should also be tried. The code for breweries is 0445. For international dialling codes from any country to another, one can consult www.countrycallingcodes.com.

White Beer Travels guides provide beer price information for the bars featured in them. With the introduction of the Euro (€) within the countries of the European Monetary Union (which includes Belgium, France, The Netherlands and Germany) on the 1st of January, 2002, all of the prices that were originally in national currencies have been converted to Euro. This was a big undertaking, but was made much easier and less prone to error by a semi-automatic "Free Euro Converter" routine that is downloadable from the Belgian telephone directories (www.infobel.be). It integrates with the Word Processing package that was used to produce the guides: Microsoft's WORD. For other currency conversions, the Discount Currency Exchange website was used: www.discount-currency-exchange.com.

Without a satellite navigation system (GPS), see below, maps are essential for many aspects of Beer Hunt Organisation. The yellow Michelin concertina maps are excellent for navigating over distance, but when it comes to street level, one needs individual town maps. Some village names are surprisingly confusing in Belgium, as they are often preceded by a district name of a town some miles away. This is where the provincial maps of Belgium come into their own, for example, the following map book covers every street in the Province of Namur: Stratenatlas van België - Guide des Rues de Belgique Provincie Namen - Province de Namur. This and the corresponding ones for the other provinces of Belgium are published by Standaard Uitgeverij - Éditions Standaard (www.standaard.com). They are quite expensive (€39.54 for this one in 2000), but are marvellous tools for pre-planning and for getting oneself out of a fix when unexpected road works foil one's plans. White Beer Travels has a full set of them.

However, there are some excellent maps down to street level available free-of-charge on the Internet. One site can be best for one part of a country, another for a different part, for example try both www.multimap.com and www.mappy.com. For the UK, try both uk2.multimap.com and www.streetmap.co.uk. For the USA, www.mapquest.com is very good. Google has some excellent, more versatile map sites, i.e. maps.google.com for North America, maps.google.co.uk for the UK, maps.google.de for Germany, maps.google.fr for France.

A superb resource for finding maps and information on the UK is local.google.co.uk. Plug in, for example, "pubs in ec1" and you will get a list of pubs in the EC1 postal district of London, located on a map which can be moved and zoomed; there are also satellite view options and a hybrid of satellite and map. The information is presented in a better and more relevant way than using the main Google search engine. Note that local.google.com covers the USA. More and more websites are becoming available, which use Google's superb mapping technology. One of interest to beer lovers is the "beer mapping project" website, www.beermapping.com, which, as its name suggests, provides an expanding range of maps related to beer, particularly guides to bars, breweries, brew pubs and beer shops, in an increasing number of US cities. Other examples of sites produced using Google's mapping technology include a London Underground Journey Planner, tubejp.co.uk, and a site giving traffic information in the UK, www.gtraffic.info.

Michelin's tourism site, www.viamichelin.com, is a superb resource for maps, tourist information, restaurants, etc, etc. It is essentially selections from the famous Michelin Red Restaurant and Hotel Guides, their Green Tourist Guides and maps. Locatienet, www.locatienet.nl, is an indispensable resource in which you one can plug in a destination point (Ik wil naar) and a start point (Ik vertrek van), for places in Europe, and a zoomable route map is produced. Once a map is found, with one of these sites, you may wish to e-mail its Web page address to someone, but these are always very long. However, they can be shortened, using, for example, the simple-to-use www.makeashorterlink.com. As an illustration, for the pub, Den Engel, in Leek, Staffordshire, England (Stanley Street, tel 01538 373751), which has over a hundred Belgian beers, this site gives the following short Web page address for its location map: http://makeashorterlink.com/?M229326C7.

Internet maps are typically used by keying in the street name and even the number or the post code; pol.royalmail.com/PF.asp) gives UK post codes from addresses; and pol.royalmail.com/af.asp gives UK addresses from post codes. An outstanding website for the UK that provides residential and commercial phone numbers, addresses and maps in one place is www.ukphonebook.com. For a small fee one can add ancillary information to your own entry, such as mobile phone (cell phone) number, fax number, e-mail address, website address, and a description of oneself, such as "Speciality Beer Hunt Organiser", see John White's entry by plugging in "White", "J E" and "Grimsby". For facilities in the UK, such as a list of pubs closest to a particular post code or in a particular town, www.upmystreet.co.uk and somewherenear.com can both be very useful!

The following page of a Geographical Information website (geo-vlaanderen.gisvlaanderen.be) covering Belgian Flanders (Geo-Vlaanderen), geo-vlaanderen.gisvlaanderen.be/geo-vlaanderen/straten, is very useful. When you open it, you get a seemingly useless map of Flanders, but click on the "plus magnifying glass" and then form a rectangle on the map with the mouse by holding down the left button. When you release it, you get a more detailed map of the area contained within the rectangle you formed, a process that can be repeated down to named street level (you can do a fairly big rectangle first, to reveal community names, which can then be moved to other parts of the main map with the "hand"). There are other ways of using it, for example, the ruler can be used to give distances between A and B (or even between Antwerp and Bruges). Maps for other parts of theworld can be found by Googling, and typically work in a similar way.

In April, 2004, the world's first Pocket PC with an integrated GPS antenna became available, which I purchased and became immediately very impressed with. This is the Mio 168, from MiTAC International (www.mio-tech.com). Click here for more details of my experiences with this device, and for information on equivalent devices.

Excellent guides to countries and towns abound on the Internet. As well as tourist attractions, these can unearth restaurants and bars. Belgian ones often have an obvious structure, i.e. www.brugge.be, www.namur.be, www.lustin.be, etc. The latter has info on the superb Belgian Beer Museum (www.museebieresbelges.centerall.com), including photos, the Namur one features Du Bocq Brewery, in nearby Purnode, etc.

Public transport is really well covered on the Internet, for example: www.b-rail.be for Belgian trains (click here for a route map); the De Lijn site www.delijn.be for buses and trams in the Flemish part of Belgium, and its related company de Kusttram (www.dekusttram.be) for the marvellous Belgian coast tram; www.tec-wl.be for the same in Wallonia (this site directs one to sub-sites such as namur-luxembourg.tec-wl.be); www.stib.be/www.mivb.be for public transport in Brussels; www.ns.nl for Dutch trains; and www.nationalrail.co.uk or www.thetrainline.com for trains in the UK; the latter can also be used to book Eurostar (www.eurostar.com) tickets (between London/Ashford and Lille and Paris in France, and Brussels in Belgium), and there is a link to www.internationaltrainline.com, from where one can book tickets in various places around the world. On the train sites, one can check times and prices and book tickets; the Dutch one even tells you what platform your trains will depart from! For a White Beer Travels day trip to Aachen in Germany, in 1999, from Liège, in Belgium, the Thalys (www.thalys.com) High Speed Trains used were booked on-line for the group, at an excellent discount rate, the tickets being picked up at the station in Liège. The De Lijn website is an outstanding resource, although a little tricky to use, especially for non-Dutch speakers. Therefore, click here for a page of the White Beer Travels website that gives an example of how to use it to find a sample bus route, or should I say a transport route, since, it will also give any tram and train connections that are required. The example shows one how to find a bus between Essen railway station, in Antwerp Province and a bus stopping near the venue of an excellent Christmas Beer Festival in the town (www.kerstbierfestival.be, White Beer Travels Web page). www.belgianrailtickets.com can be use for tickets within and to Belgium, but tends to come up with higher prices than sites quoted above.

UK Airport News provides up to date information and news on UK airports, along with a news archive, www.uk-airport-news.info.

Internet surfing can be a good way of finding new bars. For example, the Specialty Beer bar, Le Bouffon du Roi, in Namur, in Wallonia (60, rue de Bruxelles, tel 081 23 00 44, www.night-shop.com/bouffon), has the biggest and best selection in the city, but did not figure in any of the well-known beer guides, at the time of the White Beer Travels Beer Hunt to Ghent and Namur in 2001 (see Past Beer Hunts for further information), although it was included in the White Beer Travels guide to Namur issued to all participants, because it had been found by one of John's surfs. This guide is available on the Downloads page. Note that, on John's recommendation it appears in Tim Webb's don't-enter Belgium-without Good Beer Guide Belgium (www.booksaboutbeer.com, White Beer Travels Web page).

Of course, a number of bars close on National Holidays and vice versa, for example, a bar that would normally be shut on a Tuesday, could open on a Tuesday, if it were a National Holiday. To check on National Holidays throughout the world, click here, this information being provided by QP Studio, www.qppstudio.net, who provide Q++ Studio, a professional software package, that is used by publishers of diaries, worldwide.

For travelling by train between bars, Mark Smith's "The Man in Seat Sixty-One" site, www.seat61.com, is an excellent resource to all the world's railways.

To do successful surfing, in John's opinion, the finest search engine by a long way is Google, www.google.com. It is best to bookmark "advanced search" for easy searching using combinations of precise groups of words and individual words and setting it to the maximum 100 searches, i.e. www.google.com/advanced_search. Note that there is a Google Search Engine facility on the Contents page of the White Beer Travels website, which allows both searching the whole of the World Wide Web or just the White Beer Travels website. This is Google "Free Search" obtainable from the following page of Google's site, www.google.com/services/free.html. Should you wish to launch Google directly from the Windows task bar, the there is a free download, the Google Deskbar, for this, at toolbar.google.com/deskbar. Note that if one puts, for example " define: beer ", in the Google search box, one gets a number of definitions of Beer! Note also that if one puts "link:" followed by a website's address (URL), e.g. link:www.whitebeertravels.com in a Google search, one gets a list of sites that link to the website. Note, however, that it does not give necessarily give a complete list, well certainly not for White Beer Travels, since sites that link to yours may not themselves be known to Google. Useful information on getting a website recognised by Google can be found at www.google.com/webmasters. An excellent site covering search engines, which includes searching tips and guidelines on how to get your site better rated, is searchenginewatch.com.

There is also a Google Toolbar (toolbar.google.com), that works in conjunction with a browser, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE). With this, like the Google Deskbar facility, one gets a permanent Google search box, in this case, below the Browser's main task bar. The Toolbar can also be used to display the Google PageRank™ of any site, this being a measure from 0 (low importance) to 10 (highest importance); It is roughly logarithmic, so a site with a PageRank of 6 gets a factor (possibly ten) times as many visitors as a site of PageRank 5. The PageRank, a name which Google's co-founder Larry Page came up with, is one factor that Google uses when assessing how high up in search result list a particular Web page should be; a major factor in this is the number of sites, especially ones with a high PageRank, that link to the page. The ratebeer website (www.ratebeer.com), one of the most famous Beer websites, has a PageRank of 6; there are other beer-related sites with the same rating, but none higher; White Beer Travels is PageRank 5 (February, 2006). Clearly, 6 is a target to aim for! www.google.com/technology has more on PageRank. The following Web page can also be used to find a website's PageRank, www.pagerank.net/pagerank-checker.

Google provides a facility that allows anyone to create a blog site, www.blogger.com. Indeed, White Beer Travels created one, in June, 2005, www.whitebeertravels.blogspot.com. Time constraints at the moment have meant that little work has been done on it, but a growing realisation that blogs have become important, spurred the decision to register the White BeerTravels blog before someone else used the same name. Whether you have an existing website or not, it is recommended that you do the same. For an example of a blog, created using this Google facility, that principally covers London, see www.diamondgeezer.blogspot.com. This, most justifiably, got an excellent review in the UK's Guardian newspaper on the 18th of June, 2005.

If you use Google or any other search engine regularly, you will soon come across "Wikipedia" Web pages, en.wikipedia.org (this is the Home page of the English-language version; there are pages in other languages too that can be accessed from this page, for example the French (fr.wikipedia.org) and German (de.wikipedia.org) ones). Wikipedia is a free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It all looks very professional and works surprisingly well, and each entry defining a word or phrase is typically peppered with words that are hyperlinks leading to pages defining those words. One can use Wikipedia, free-of-charge, without registering on the site, but by doing so, there are a number of advantages, including the fact that anything that you add to the site will be attributed to you.

You also might want to look at pages from a website, as it was in the past. The Internet Archive website, www.archive.org, lets you do this; just plug the address of the website into its Wayback Machine on the Home page.

Other Speciality Beer or Related Links

The following is a miscellaneous collection of sites, almost all beer-related, that have been found, most of which are obscure ones, but all have considerable merit. When the purpose of the site and/or its owner is obvious (for example www.dekoninck.be for Antwerp's De Koninck brewery) no explanation will generally be given to save space. This list will be subject to continuous update, so please visit this page regularly.

• Meura are responsible for building many of the Specialty Beer breweries in Belgium, including the Trappist ones www.meura.be. Most of their new plant is made of stainless steel, but in the olden days, Meura produced Brew Houses full of copper vessels. This photo to the left shows Meura-badged copper wort run-off taps, which were still in use in the Bockor Brewery (www.bockor.be), in Bellegem, in Belgium, when the photo was taken by John White, in June, 2002.

De Biergoeroe is a site run by Sandor, in Hilversum, in The Netherlands. It has tons of information on beer and bars in The Netherlands and Belgium and other information, such as beer festival dates, www.biergoeroe.dhs.org; Harry Pinkster, from Groningen, in The Netherlands, has an excellent family website, three of the sub-sites, which have lots of useful links, featuring beer - click here for the one covering beer bottle labels in Dutch, click here for the same site in English, and here for his site covering the brewing history of Groningen, www.pinkgron.nl; the Berlinside Out website covers a number of tours of the German capital of Berlin, including one for groups called "Beer & Breweries", which covers the history of brewing in the city, with visits to several old breweries and other appropriate locations before a tasting in the Brauhaus Mitte (www.brauhaus-mitte.de), www.berlinside-out.com; the Internationales Berliner Bierfestival (International Berlin Beer Festival) is the biggest beer festival in Germany. It is held on the first Friday to Sunday of August, each year, in the centre of Berlin. In 2006, there were over 1,750 beers (most costing €1 (20cl)) from 240 brewers, in over 80 countries, www.bierfestival-berlin.de; from the Realbeer.com (Real Beer Pages) site covered on the companion Reciprocal Links page of the White Beer Travels website, one can order beer on-line for delivery to your door, should you live in the USA; probrewer.com is an excellent resource for the [US] beer industry, www.probrewer.com; there is marvellous Craft Beer, in Anchorage, in Alaska, brewed by the Sleeping Lady Brewery, which is part of Gary Klopfer's Snow Goose Restaurant, www.snowgooserestaurant.com; www.alaskabeers.com: Cobeli is a group of Beer wholesalers in Belgium. click on "Leden" (Members) for the full list, which includes Patrick Rotsaert's 300 Beer place in Zedelgem in the Province of West Flanders, which I specifically mention, as he sent me the information on his place and Cobeli, www.cobeli.be; in the UK, Speciality Beer from around the world can be ordered on-line from BeerRitz, www.beerritz.co.uk; Marco Salvatore Tripisciano's Mondobirra.org is a marvellous portal for Specialty Beer in Italy, www.mondobirra.org; Malt is the best source (precursor) of the sugar that is converted into Alcohol during the fermentation stage of the brewing process. There is much information to be found on Malt, including how it is made from Barley, in the Maltsters' Association of Great Britain (MAGB) website, www.ukmalt.com; if you have trouble reading the text of this or any other Web page, a very useful tool is the Virtual Magnifying Glass, which can be downloaded free-of-charge from magnifier.sourceforge.net; Jean-Marc Simon's "Proud to be Belgian" site is a most useful directory of Belgian Breweries, past and present, and their beers. It uses the same classification system as Bières et Brasseries Belges/Belgische Bieren en Brouwerijen (Belgian Beers and Breweries), a truly essential book, the 2005 version of which was produced by Dutchman, Loek Klasen, the Vice-President of the Guilde des Tâte-Bière (Guild of Beer Tasters), which is associated with the Musée des Bières Belges (Belgian Beer Museum, www.museebieresbelges.centerall.com), in Lustin, Sadly, Loek passed away in July, 2006, home.tiscali.be/proud2b; Jean-Marc Simon, see previous link, is also involved in a French-language site that is simply called "Les Bières Belges" (Belgian Beer), which is a mine of information on its subject, www.guepe.com; e-malt.com is a Brussels-based company that provides an excellent and indispensable news resource on malt. This can be delivered by e-mail or directly read from the site, after a simple registration process. It also covers World beer news and more, including an events calendar, www.e-malt.com; Rick Pickup's Directory of UK Real Ale Breweries is a superb, essential resource, with a very large number of links on its subjects and subjects related to it, www.quaffale.org.uk; Bateman's Brewery, in Wainfleet, Lincolnshire is close to where John lives, but merits making a long journey to it. Its Visitors Centre, where its top class beers can be sampled in the circular windmill bar, is superb, www.bateman.co.uk; Black Isle Brewery, which is run by David Gladwin, is based at Munlochy, in Ross-shire, in Scotland. It produces some draught Real Ales, and Real Ales in a Bottle (which can be ordered on the brewery's website), all of which are Organic, www.blackislebrewery.com; Brains Brewery, which is based in Cardiff, in Wales was founded by Samuel Arthur Brain, in 1882. They brew some great beers including the legendary Brains SA (Samuel Arthur, Special Ale, or Skull Attack), www.sabrain.co.uk; Skinner's Brewing Co., in Truro, in Cornwall, England, was set up in 1997, by Steve and Sarah Skinner. Their daughter, Emma Skinner, who was born in 1983, shares the same name as my granddaughter, Emma Skinner, www.skinnersbrewery.com; Titanic Brewery, in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England, produce a range of superb Cask Ales, and also bottled beers, their Stout being declared CAMRA's Champion Bottled Beer, in 2004, www.titanicbrewery.co.uk; the excellent Peterborough CAMRA Beer Festival, the biggest beer festival in the UK, after CAMRA's Great British Beer Festival (GBBF), takes place in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, in England. It is run by CAMRA's Peterborough & District branch (www.real-ale.org.uk), the festival's website being www.beer-fest.org.uk; the New Belgium Brewery is based in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. As would be expected it brews Belgian-style beers (examples being Fat Tire, Sunshine Wheat, Blue Paddle, 1554, Abbey, Trippel and Special Release Beers), for which it has a well deserved reputation, www.newbelgium.com; In London, England, The Dovetail, 9 Jerusalem Passage, EC1V 4JP, and The Dove, 24-26 Broadway Market, E8 4QJ, are two excellent Belgian Beer bars in the same ownership, www.belgianbars.com; in the village of Bray, in Berkshire, in England, somewhat amazingly, there are two restaurants that each have three Michelin stars (the maximum), Michel Roux's Waterside Inn (www.waterside-inn.co.uk), and Heston Blumenthal's, The Fat Duck. The latter was voted best restaurant in the world by Restaurant Magazine (www.restaurantmagazine.co.uk), in 2005. Heston also a pub, almost behind The Fat Duck, called The Hinds Head Hotel (High Street, Bray, SL6 2AB, tel 01628 626151), which well-known food critic, Michael Winner, states has the best pub food in the world, and is Perfect (above historic). The Chef is Dominic Chapman. The Hinds Head also has well-kept Real Ale, www.fatduck.co.uk; Brewing Research International provides technical and information solutions for the beer and drinks industry, www.brewingresearch.co.uk; Mark Reid is the author of The Inn Way ... series of walking books, these covering the North of England (Yorkshire Dales, North York Moors, Lake District and Northumberland), which clearly get one to the odd pub or two, www.innway.co.uk; Mark Turner is a freelance photographer and writer, with a keen interest in beer and pubs, as exemplified by the excellent The Pubs of the Thames (Prion Books, 2004, 254 pages, ISBN 1853755494), which was photographed and written by Mark, www.mark-turner.co.uk; fotobrew picture library is the website for leading beer photographer, Steve Sharples, who is responsible for the photos in a number of well-known books on beer, by the likes of Roger Protz (1939-) (click here for information on Roger), etc, etc, www.fotobrew.com; Café Belge is a chain of bar-restaurants in the SE of England (In Battle, Bexhill, Brighton, Canterbury, Eastbourne and West Malling), all of which have a very good selection of Belgian Beers, www.cafebelge.co.uk; Beer Paradise are specialist importers of beer into the UK. There is a list of their stockists on their website, www.beerparadise.co.uk; Nick Dolan has a Beer Shop, in Twickenham, London (371 Richmond Road, TW1 2EF), called "Real Ale Limited", which specialises in beers from British Microbreweries. The beers can also be purchased on-line from the place's website, www.realale.com; Les Baynton is a poet, who is also a well known supporter of Real Ale; Les hails from Derby, in England. His Pint Pot Poetry website covers his books on pub poetry - Pub Poems, Beer Lines and Inn Verse - www.pintpotpoetry.co.uk; Muree Squires's "The Offie" is an excellent beer and wine shop, in Leicester, England, that delivers to anywhere in the UK, www.the-offie.co.uk; Beer Direct supply the excellent Den Engel in Leek, Staffordshire, England (23 St. Edward Street, tel 01538 373751) with their Belgian Beers, www.beerdirect.co.uk; De Bierboom (The Beer Tree) is a Dutch site that has beer news and a very good selection of beer books for sale, www.bierboom.nl; Geroen Vansteenbrugge, from Waregem, in the Belgian Province of West-Vlaanderen (West Flanders), has an excellent Blog that combines his passion for walking, with his love of Belgian Regional Beers (Belgische Streekbieren), http://blog.seniorennet.be/geroen1; Tim O'Rourke's The Brilliant Beer Co has an excellent, evolving site that reflects Tim's role as a educator in the field of beer, www.brilliantbeer.com; James Clay and Sons, "The Beer Solutions Company", are a leading UK importer of Speciality Beers, particularly from Belgium, Germany and the USA, www.beersolutions.co.uk, www.jamesclay.co.uk; Bruno Dourcy's excellent BelgianShop is based in Verviers, in Belgium. From its website (which had had over 360,000 visitors by the end of August, 2005), one can select from over 650 beers and have them delivered anywhere in the world, www.belgianshop.com; De Bierschuur is a Drinks Warehouse, with a very good selection of Belgian Beers, which are very reasonably priced. It is easily reached from the Brussels Ring Road (R0, Junction 13), being just to the West of it, in Dilbeek (Pastoor Cooremansstraat 7, tel 02 463 23 70). Beer can be ordered from their website, www.debierschuur.be; Drankencentrale Jan Holemans & Zonen is a marvellous beer warehouse, with many rarities in its selection of 450+ beers, at Langdorpsesteenweg 117, in Aarschot, to the NE of Leuven, in Flemish Brabant (Vlaams-Brabant), in Belgium. Holemans is not open on Sunday or Monday, users.pandora.be/dvt/holemans.htm; ABS Drinks is another excellent Beer Warehouse, at Vilvoordsebaan 29 bus 1, in Winksele-Herent, just to the NW of Leuven in the Belgian Province of Flemish Brabant (Vlaams-Brabant). It is open every day of the week from 9am (1pm on Monday) to 6pm (Noon on Sunday), www.absdrinks.be; the Dutch Bier-en Verzamelaarsvereniging (BAV) (Beer and Collectors Society) has a information packed website covering Dutch Beer, www.bav.nl; Bier en Co is an Amsterdam-based beer wholesalers, which is connected with the "De Man van Drank" chain of beer shops in The Netherlands, www.bierenco.nl; David Clifford's excellent "Fun in Hounslow!" website has much on the pub scene (follow the five Quaffing Links) in Hounslow, Greater London, England, homepage.mac.com/davidclifford; Steve, a Hounslow resident and friend of David Clifford, see previous entry, has a website called "Steve's Travel Guides" which has some really useful information on places such as Austria, The Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland, Cuba, Slovakia and Slovenia, bars, of course, being covered, www.geocities.com/stevestravelguides; World Travel Market is a travel exhibition held in the ExCel Exhibition and Conference Centre (www.excel-london.co.uk) in London Docklands, in November of each year. It is a good place for Beer Hunt Organisers to seek out group hotel discounts, www.wtmlondon.com; Wendy Littlefield and Donald Feinberg, "The Belgian Experts", are the founders of Vanberg & DeWulf, a company based in Cooperstown, New York State, USA, which imports a superb selection of Belgian Beers and French Artisanal Beers into the USA. One can order beer from their website, or check availability of their imports in your local area, and check out recipes to cook with beer, www.belgianexperts.com; bierebel.com is Pierre (Pierrot) and Pol-Henri (Polux) Lebrun's top class site covering Belgian Beer; it has pages in French, Dutch, English, German, Spanish and Italian. Its Forum is the premier French-language message board covering Belgian Beer, www.bierebel.com; Beer Mania is an excellent Specialty Beer shop, in Brussels, the city's biggest. It was opened by Nasser Eftekhari in 1983. Note that it has a bar attached, where one can sample all the beers available in the shop, www.beermania.be; the Ile de France's branch of Les Amis de la Bière (click here for more details) includes very good coverage of Paris and its environs, as one would expect. The site has lots of useful links, see the next entry site.ifrance.com/amibiere; La Fontaine à Bière, in Viry Chatillon (fifteen minutes from Paris by RER, the fast métro). John White has not visited this place yet, but the previous site really raves about the place (100 French Speciality Beers, 100 Belgian and many others), so a visit is on the cards ASAP fontaineabiere.free.fr; French-language beer news and articles covering France and the rest of the world are featured in www.infobiere.net; as well as beer, I am fond of good wine and Oz Clarke's site is a mine of information on the subject and it has a really extensive set of links, www.ozclarke.com; Winteringham Fields is an outstanding restaurant, in Winteringham, which is not far from Grimsby. It is the only English restaurant North of Oxford with two stars in Michelin. It also shares, with only three other English restaurants, the very high "four knives and forks" elegance rating www.winteringhamfields.com; the Good Food Guide-listed Granary is a very good Fish and Seafood Restaurant, in Grimsby, which has Batemans XB (www.bateman.co.uk) on handpump www.granarygrimsby.co.uk; The following are further websites with large lists of beer or related links: Tony Green's top-class "Beer Mad" site (former "Tony's Real Ale Pages") is an indispensable source of information on UK Real Ale, and has an incredible number of related links. It also covers Belgian Beer and has links to breweries and other appropriate sites in Europe, www.beermad.org.uk; CBEL dot Com's Beer page has the dynamic title "Beer - 1619 of the best sites selected by humans", the 1619 being the number of beer links when the site was updated on the 28th of June, 2004, www.cbel.com/beer; the following has links to thousands of brewery websites, www.breweriesontheweb.com; Jos Brouwer (Joseph or Joe Brewer, in English!), PINT's EBCU (European Beer Consumers' Union) (www.ebcu.org) representative, has an excellenr website, with lots of useful links, www.hetveentje.nl; Frank Stumpf, who is based in Gaggenau, in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, is responsible for the marvellous "Franks Bierforum" German-language site, which has around two thousand categorised links, www.bierforum.de; the Real Ale and a Bed site provides much information on just that, but much, much more, including links in profusion, www.beerguide.co.uk; the Limburgse Biervrienden (Limburg Beer Friend)'s site is teeming with links as well as giving much information on this former OBP, now Zythos (www.zythos.be) affiliate, including its beer festival, in Hasselt, in October each year, www.limburgse-biervrienden.be; the links page of the "beer is for winners!" site has an amazing number of links with"beer" included in the URL www.beerisforwinners.com/beerlinks.htm; John Bell's "Beer à la Modem" site, www.isomedia.com/homes/jbell; 350 German ones, www.bellnet.com/suchen/essen/bier.htm; Per Samuelsson's "Ohhh... My Head" is a famous Swedish-based beer ratings site, the ratings coming from a group of friends. In ratebeer, Per (omhper), who lives in Stockholm, is the number one rater. Per's site has a very comprehensive list of Nordic beer links, www.ohhh.myhead.org; if, for example, one clicks on "ANTWERPEN" and then "Food & Drinks" on the site, www.belgie.starttips.com, then one gets lots of useful links on the great Belgian Beer town of Antwerp, users.tijd.com/~tdn71908/06afood.html; another site with lots of German beer links, including one giving a comprehensive list of breweries in Franconia (Fränkische Brauereien): follow the "Linkliste" hyperlink, www.glubb.de; and Jools (Julian Robinson), from Wombourne, Staffordshire, England, has a list of UK brewery websites, www.chez-jools.com/Brewery.htm. E-mail Contact Information This section contains important e-mail contact information, mainly for organisations that do not have a website. Note that e-mail addresses quoted here and elsewhere in the White Beer Travels website have been encrypted so that they cannot be picked up by spammers, see the Build page for further information. Stephen D'Arcy's Brussels Beer Guide

Stephen D'Arcy of the Brussels branch of CAMRA produces an excellent guide, the Selective Guide to Brussels* Bars, the star signifying that it covers more than just Brussels. One quite simply should not be without this guide when entering Brussels or the neighbouring Pajottenland, the area renowned for the spontaneously fermented Lambics and beers derived from them, such as Gueuze and Fruit Beers. These are defined in a section in the guide covering the beer styles that you will come across in Belgium, along with information on beer festivals, breweries that can be visited, a comprehensive list of books on beer, and as well, of course, regularly updated details of Specialty Beer bars, including how to get to them, gathered by a local: Stephen! For information on how to get hold of a copy of this indispensable guide, which has forty A4 pages, absolutely packed with info, plus maps pinpointing the bars, contact Stephen by e-mail at . The guide is regularly updated; to the left can be seen the cover of the March, 2003 edition.

Beer Consumers' Organisations, etc

John White, of White Beer Travels, is a member of a number of beer consumers' organisations and equivalent, all having websites with useful links and/or contact e-mail addresses, i.e. the French "Les Amis de la Bière [du Nord-Pas-de-Calais]" (The Friends of Beer)/Ghilde des Eswards Cervoisiers (Beer Tasters' Guild (www.amis.biere.org), click here for more details, and its Belgian, Dutch and UK national counterparts, Zythos (www.zythos.be) (the successor to OBP), PINT (www.pint.nl) and CAMRA (www.camra.org.uk) respectively, and is on the committee of the British Guild of Beer Writers (www.beerwriters.co.uk).

John White (1945-), .

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