Cup of Good Hop on the Beeb

Click on the link and go to 1h 34m 50secs in order to hear me and James talk about Cup of Good Hop on BBC Sussex and Surrey. It's about ten minutes long and I think we did pretty well. Listeners were treated to live beer tasting (Star, Ghana) which makes for great radio in itself ;).

We will extract the audio and put it up as stand-alone multimedia as soon as we can. Photos of our trip to the Beeb will also be online shortly. Will also scan in our appearance on page 22 of the Sussex Evening Argus yesterday.

Meanwhile, we're still looking for four beers:

Cameroon (Pelforth or any other old-school French Colonial beer would do), North Korea (Taedonggang - though we may have to replace with a bit of creative thinking), Slovakia (Golden Pheasant) and Uruguay (Patricia or Pilsen). With seven days to go, if anyone can help us please get in touch. We're looking to round up the beer hunting by next Wednesday (9th) so we can get on with the serious business of holding the COGH Beer World Cup.

I suppose its not as high pressured as Capello's preparations, but we've still got to keep our eye on the ball. This week we heard from the US distributors of Golden Pheasant, and were very helpful in sending us a picture of their beer - nice try, how about sending us the real thing. Here it is:-

So near and yet so far...

COGH injury shocker! Ferdinand and Drogba may be crocked and seemingly out of contention for the World Cup, but here at Cup of Good Hop we've been hit by an injury scare too. Yesterday I had five stitches put in a nasty gouge in my foot caused by a sandals-and-bike pedal related incident. At least I didn't get clattered by Heskey...

Will leave you with a recent BBC story about the first North Korean beer tv advert - give it a watch, it's nuts... and this article about the carbon footprint of a pint of beer was also very interesting.

best for now,

Peter

Random picture of me singing Mr Blue Sky after a few liveners...

The home straight

Sign found by James in the Shepherd's Bush area

Tuesday sent out versions of the press release to local, UK, football and beer media. Got some nibbles but no bites, then around 3pm I notice that Henry Winter, famed footy journo of Daily Telegraph fame has picked up on COGH and wished us good luck. Suddenly we're getting a hundred hits every five minutes! Consequently we're through the 2,000 barrier - and we haven't even held the beer World Cup yet!

More importantly, the search for the last few beers goes on. Arranged to meet photographer for the Evening Argus (Brighton's local paper - piece in Thurs) outside the Afri-Mart on Preston Road in order to pose for photos. Whilst there bought a couple of bottles of this:-

BEER#28 - Ghana - £2.69

Promises 'a million golden bubbles'. We'll see

I also contacted Heineken (who make Pelforth Brune (kinda Cameroon)), a US distributor for Zlaty Bazant (Golden Pheasant, Slovakia) and a couple of others. Who knows if these requests will bring results - we live in hope.

We've had an offer of a bottle of Jelen Pivo (Serbia) from Stevica Madjar - he's been a star, first being kind enough to help, then because getting beer out of Serbia is not as simple as it seems. Their Post Office forbids the transit of beer- but Mad Steva as he's otherwise known reckons he's got a plan. We may have a back-up plan for Serbia just in case his generosity is foiled by faceless bureaucrats.

If anyone is near the radio / internet tomorrow at 11.40am BST, me and James will be talking about COGH on BBC Sussex and Surrey and conducting live beer tasting in the studio. This will be the first time we've had the opportunity to put any of the contestants through their paces. Don't worry - we have some spares!

So as the beer hunting rounds the final bend, we're still totally in the dark as to how we're going to get Slovakia, Cameroon and Uruguay, have a cunning back-up plan for North Korea and are still in need of Serbia. We have the numbers of all the respective London embassies, so may well give them a call over the next couple of days and see if we can pull some diplomatic strings.

That's about all the news that's fit to print at the moment - though I'm sure James has got some interesting posts now he's back from holiday. We have more great ideas for COGH over the next few weeks including 'Hop Trumps', an exciting game you can play during ad breaks inbetween matches.

PS.