
My next Beer Guide tick only opens from 4pm Thursday through Sunday, so Mrs RM was even more determined that I’d visit before we went home on Saturday lunchtime.
Vibrant Forest sits between the Esso oil refinery and the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu. One of those is a major tourist attraction.

A certain sort of tourist visit Vibrant Forest, the Cloudwater of the south (is that true ? I’ve no idea, I’m not #BeerTwitter).

Obviously it’s at the end of an industrial estate, but at least it’s parked next to the edge of the New Forest, so you get yellow butterflies, yellow whateverthisis;

and some very shy ponies hiding behind the bushes. Honest, look closely.

Now it’s very hard summoning up enthusiasm for a tap room in what looks like a garage with a burger van out front,


but Vibrant Forest are nice people, offering a couple samples of their beer (lady tastes sour – “Uggh”, Mrs RM “Told you”), and somehow conjuring a conversation about an asexual dog “never caught doing it”.
As I’m driving Mrs RM gets to drink the Kaleidoscope which she declares the beer of the week.

Probably because it’s the strongest keg. I’ve no idea which is cask and which is keg.
And who cares, it’s all beer.
Never come across an asexual dog. Even my beloved and sadly departed Toby, who’d already been done, tried to hump a little white powder puff dog one night. Turned out, little white powder puff dog was a Bichon Frise or something which the owner had paid three grand for. “Well done, Tobes”, I whispered and gave him a pork scratching. #Pubdog
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I’m sure “asexual” wasn’t the word he was looking for but you don’t want to correct folk who live that close to the Isle of Wight, do you ?
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Asexual or “a sexual”? It makes all the difference.
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The burger van probably had the selection of 15% barrel aged beers, hidden away for the connoisseurs.
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15% ? Higher !
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“Never get married when the gorse is in flower” as the Irish say.
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But some gorse is almost always in flower.
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You got it, Paul.
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but thirty years on Sunday !
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For you as well ? 1992 was a great year. I have a photo from the pub in Willian after our wedding. Must find it, you’d like the brewery detail, Paul.
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Yes, reception in a Hansons pub and honeymoon at the GBG listed Bay Hotel.
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Vibrant…did you know, that in prehistory, the long, straight shoots of some viburnums were used for arrow-shafts, like those found with Ötzi the Iceman? The sticky sap was sometimes used by women as a depilatory. Incidentally, the first pillar box for posted letters appeared in London in eighteen fifty-five.
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Ötzi the Iceman is my Greenland blog follower, Reg.
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