Make mine a bottle of badly labelled beer

As a Valentine's Day treat, Ros arranged for us to take a tour of the St Peter's Brewery in St Peter South Elmham, one of a clutch of hamlets named after their church - there are five South Elmhams in close proximity, south of Bungay, near the Norfolk border.

The tour itself is pretty basic, although our guide, John, was excellent value and great entertainment. For those who don't know much about how beer is made, it was sufficiently informative for Ros to learn the meaning of 'cask conditioned' but not so technical that you needed an 'O' level in Chemistry to understand it.

The tasting session afterwards was very pleasant, with a variety of the brewery's products available for tasting, and very good they were too. So much so that we were inclined to buy some of their fine products for further research later. We were then introduced to one of the benefits of visiting a brewery.

Labelling machines do go wrong from time to time and, naturally, supermarkets and the like don't want to have poorly labelled products on their shelves. So the brewery boxes up these rejects and sells them in boxes of eight at a notably reduced price. Frankly, as long as I know what it is, the state of the label doesn't matter, so Ros and I are now the proud possessor of twelve bottles of Old Style Porter plus eight each of Golden Ale, Ruby Red Ale and Grapefruit Fruit Beer.

That should keep us going for a while...