Double Diamond was supposedly Prince Philip’s favourite beer. He’s said to have enjoyed a bottle, nightly. No idea what I’m talking about? Don’t worry, until recently it had been almost entirely off-grid, having been one of the UK’s most popular beers in the Sixties and Seventies but obsolete for nearly 30 years.
Drinkers will find it now at the Blue Stoops in Kensington, in a site once known as the Macauley Arms. It’s the work of Samuel Allsopp & Sons, a brewery from Burton-on-Trent which hadn’t opened a new venture in almost a century. I could go into the granular details. About how Samuel Allsopp is said to have invented India pale ale in a teapot in 1822, or that the first Blue Stoops in Burton was once poetically described as “being so old no one knew of its beginning”.
