September 2023 – A Good Beer Blog

The First Tentatively Autumnal Beery News Notes For 2023

Lots going on this week. I am a bit surprised that there is a lot going on this week. Not a lot of good stuff, to be honest. “Good” in the sense of rewarding, interesting and new. See… umm… that which is going on includes some goings away as well as some goings on and some other stuff the needs to be long gone. Raspberries are still going on, however, I can tell you that. Look at that! That’s really good. That’s just out by the shed. Mere feet away. You know, September is ending with warmth in the low 20s C as well as a bit of a drought. Both welcome and a bit odd. Still nothing near frost forecast out into mid-October.

Speaking of things which are welcome and maybe a little odd, Martin guided me to a new beer blogger, the Beer Moose (no, I don’t know) who is covering the pub scene in Cambridge, England:

Is this something I’ll forget to do or give up on in a month’s time? Maybe. But I’m going to try! I’m also not doing this for financial gain, but if you fancy giving me a big bag of money for writing about something then I’ll likely do it. Where does the name Beer Moose come from? Is it linked to Cambridge United having Marvin The Moose as a mascot? Well I like beer and from an early age my sister called me Moose, it kind of stuck as my family nickname. The Cambridge United bit is just a coincidence. Let’s see how this turns out.

Now I know! Welcome aboard! And, also always welcome, Liam has shared another of his pieces on Ireland through the lens of 50 distinct brewing artefacts, this time (a bit of a cheat by my math) two objects:

These are the last relics of what was a huge industry of the past, where most of the beers consumed on this island were served in pint, half-pint and one-third-of-a-pint bottles, and when bottling companies as well as the publicans themselves bottled huge amounts of the output from Ireland’s breweries… So in most of Ireland the bottle was the most common way of drinking beer both at home and in the pub, but our love for the pint bottle is a relatively recent affair, as the half pint version was the most popular way of serving most beers for decades here, and certainly for a long period after the formation of the state in the 1922. It remained so until Draught Guinness and other draught keg beers became popular, and took over the pub beer sales in most of country. So these bottles -especially the smaller size – would have been a familiar sight in pubs, grocery shops and homes throughout Ireland.

Speaking of Ireland (…you were, weren’t you? I know I was…) the Beer Nut* there situated has reviewed** some fruity drinks from Lithuania which attracted these firm conclusions:

It doesn’t keep the beer from being quite boring, but at least it gives it some level of character. I guess I should be happy it’s not a sugary mess, but I don’t really see the point of it… I will award it some credit for not tasting like toothpaste, but it’s also not far off it. I think the concept is sound but the execution isn’t great: everything should be brighter and fresher-tasting, even allowing for the ten months it had been in the can… I don’t know if the brewery has other versions of this but I think the recipe could be a good fit for all sorts of other fruit. Sometimes the crazy recipes work, and sometimes they don’t. Guesswork based on the description is pointless.

I also mention the firmness of conclusion due to my own unhappy conclusion which I shared at Boak and Bailey’s last weekend. I don’t really don’t like to do that (a fact which some of you may be surprised to learn) as it comes across as such a downer in this discourse… except, however, that this exactly the point that needs to be made and what sets The Beer Nut* apart. I wrote:

“…which are all very well made of course…” Not a comment on the post as a whole – but there’s the issue with taking beer cultural serious right there, neatly summed up. Nothing in human experience qualifies for that sort of blanket statement.

No need to go hunt out what I was responding to, given that this sort of flappy flap flap is such a pervasive understanding of what is appropriate when discussing good beer – and yet it’s the opposite of what we get from TBN. We need to be aware that the centralized, homogenized and definitely authorized “Hooray for Everything!” approach circa 2009 may as well be a call to “Keep Craft Dull!” I mention this also because of the really odd revisionist piece posted at GBH this week that wants to reverse engineer (again) the history of US craft, even as it now lays in splinters about its feet, to praise those who frankly wielded the hatchet on their way out the door:

Ogle has also tracked this fracturing. She points out that for decades, the Brewers Association (BA), under Charlie Papazian’s leadership, was as much a unified craft beer marketing and public relations organization as it was a lobbying group. The BA was also an unofficial kingmaker, elevating certain figureheads to speak on behalf of craft beer to the public and the media. She calls the BA “the axis” that oriented the craft beer industry for 25 years. “It was a smaller pool, so very flamboyant people like Greg Koch [of Stone Brewing] or dead serious people like Jim Koch [of Boston Beer] and Kim Jordan [of New Belgium Brewing] and Carol Stoudt [of Stoudt’s Brewing] rose to the top,” Ogle says. “I get the distinct impression that the BA’s role is now lobbying more than marketing and PR.”

(Note: the BA under Papazian has been around for just 18 years.) For my money, many of those named in large part represent the fantastically unfortunate cult of personality which, yes, may have revived US microbrewing’s fortunes after the slump and scandals through (i) the formation of the merged BA as PR voice around 2005, (ii) the shift from micro skills to craft evangelizing in the parlance and (iii) the adoption of haigiographic leader praise comms. None of this has to do with Maureen Ogle’s correct historical statements (including the telling use of “unified”) yet… framing them in a larger story that suggests a lost Golden Age has passed (rather than a botched plan by a few to control the marketplace, to achieve the 20% in 2020 for big craft, to sucker the new entries and inflate costs to the consumers) is, well, really not all that palatable given how we now know these times and the players also watched as industry wide bigoties and false great white male hero narratives continued while plans were being made to cash out were being prioritized. It’s all one: making that money and having a sweet sweet comms team structured as a trade association. Thank God for the return in recent years to the actually small and skilled – the nanos and the taprooms – which has sent off that ugly era and opened up the trade to some fresh air. Still… a bit depressing seeing that these three particular voices are losing interest due to the lingering pong. But we can all understand why they’ve lost the love. Which leads us to this week’s piece in Pellicle by AJ Cox, I suppose. Yes, I suppose it does:

We are potentially on a slippery slope of exclusion and exceptionalism that is being enabled by people who are focused on building reputations built on marketing, hype beer, and the extreme hero worship of both legendary head brewers and “beer experts”. The awards, the accolades and the influencer culture surrounding beer are not inherently problematic on their own, but as we examine the impact on real people and the demographics of taprooms we can conclude that there are unintended consequences as we strive for elitism in an industry whose main product is a foodstuff that was originally made and consumed by the working class.

Excellent stuff – but why “potentially” when “self-evidently” will do? Hmm. It all makes clear that, as David Jesudason points out, taking a supposed neutral stance is just another form of complicity (as the Cask Ale Week folk learned this week):

…this is where a ‘neutral’ industry body found itself when it was approached by GB News to help promote cask beer by filming a piece with the White Lion pub in Beeston, Nottinghamshire. By not taking an anti-racist stance it allowed itself to be attached to a far-right operation that on the same day spouted conspiracy theories, misogynist bile and the usual attacks on anyone who isn’t a white male of a certain age. Any low level due diligence on GB News would bring to light its various platforming of hideous voices, its numerous Ofcom investigations and its vitriolic campaigns against protected groups, such as the trans community.

Exactly. What a mess! Still… there is good out there. Which makes the piggish bigorties so irritatingly unnecessary. Matt, as he often does, gives hope in this opinion piece in What’s Brewing. There is an opposite end of that line to which global craft is tied, the local tradition:

Somehow, the combination of these pubs, and their welcoming atmospheres, combined with this quintessentially traditional beer, gave me those same feelings of both excitement and contentment I felt when touring American taprooms more than a decade ago. Perhaps this isn’t about getting older, in a numerical sense, but finding a different level of maturity in terms of beer drinking. When the new wave of American-inspired breweries opened in their droves across the UK, we called it “craft beer”. To them, being disruptively different to the norm was the point. As they’ve gotten older both these breweries, and the people, like me, who drank their beer, have realised that, actually, we had it pretty good all along. Traditional British beer, and the pubs that sell it, is the very essence of “craft” beer.

I might have concluded that thought a bit differently (ie “cask” is all that “craft” isn’t) but you can see the point. The stuff is quite nice in itself. And there are , of course, other lovely things as Martin* shows us over and over, this time an excellent essay with accompanying photos from the hometown of Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor of Motörhead:

It was very quiet. Two old boys studiously ignored me as I tried to gain the attention of the bar steward who seemed to be in the cellar. “Am I invisible ?” I wondered. I walked from one bar to the next, contemplating whether to cough or go “Hulloah there“, but I couldn’t muster either. In most situations like this one of the locals will intervene on your behalf and shout “Customer, Dave” (it’s always a Dave), but here I was studiously ignored for 5 minutes before being asked “You looking for someone ?“. Er, no, just a beer.

And Gary is still sifting for clues through the 1900s and came up with this interesting piece on British military drinking habits round about WWII: “Pink gin is the navy drink, scotch and soda is the army drink and beer is the R.A.F. drink…” But what is the drink of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports? One should write and ask.

And there is plenty of good advice being shared, too, to make you a more thoughtful consumer and less of a gate keeper – especially for those considering learning more about wine. Just look at this bit of info on being a better host sharing the good stuff when people you like are paying a bit more attention:

It’s easy to get eight pours out of a standard 75-cl bottle. Don’t worry about the level of wine in the glass; for maximum pleasure (swirling, sniffing and all that), no glass should be more than a third full. At a professional wine tasting – as opposed to drinking wine with food at a table – wine producers and merchants reckon on a good 20 pours a bottle. For a more social wine tasting, an early-evening get-together of people trying to learn a bit more about wine for instance, roughly 15 pours a bottle is a useful allowance for six to eight different wines. But that would make about half a bottle of wine available to everyone, and social tasters are much less likely to spit out the wine than wine professionals

And, perhaps even better, look at the gentle day that Barry had this week at the press making his cider and perry:

Anyone else who says they like working with bletted pears is either a liar or some kind of masochist. All other runs got 70L in 25 mins from each pressing. This paste has yielded less than 40 after an hour. I fucking hate it. Letting it run tho, I want 50 at least!

Such Joy! And how to figure out if you are getting the best information in your hunt for the best? As B+B noted a few weeks ago, the rules of scribbling behaviour offered by cellarman and writer, Steve Dunkley are valuable but perhaps more so is this observation:

I wanted to be a beer writer many years ago. But I got disillusioned by the articles I was reading. I knew the people and the background to the stories, but I had a completely different experience and view to what was being written by respected journalists. How could that be? Obviously I was missing something, so I carried on as a cellarman, and eventually as a brewer. But during those intervening years I learned what I was missing, or rather what I wasn’t missing. And that was different views.

That’s it. We want different views, we want a vibant and rish ecosystem. Yes, there is a massive bit of intertia between here and there for the most part – vested interests and the “I’m all right Jack” dullards. Will we get there? Who knows! But that’s one thing that keeps me reading. That and the spicy infighting. By the way, if you like spicy, check out the bad language in the lead up to a great interview on Beer & Bullshit this week with Troy Burtch of Great Lake Brewery in Toronto. Then check out the great interview.

But be honest: we also want all the agricultural news, like this:

The global supply outlook remains tight though, and quality too is in focus considering the difficult harvest for many across the EU and UK especially. In France, most winter barley has been meeting malting requirements according to FranceAgriMer. But specific weights are varying following stormy conditions over summer. Spring barley results look more variable. In the UK, rain at harvest caused difficult conditions and germination data varies by region. With harvests finishing up, more data will be coming available indicating quality of barley crops.

And here is the longer term forecast according to The Financial Times:

Atsushi Katsuki, who has headed the Japanese brewer since 2021, said analysis conducted by the company found that global warming was set to reduce barley yields and the quality of hops significantly over the next three decades, and warned of a beer shortage. France’s spring barley harvest could decrease 18 per cent by 2050 under the UN’s 4 degree scenario, the most severe, while Poland’s harvest would shrink 15 per cent. The quality of hops, a key component for the preservation as well as the flavour of beer, would decline 25 per cent in the Czech Republic, one of the world’s largest hop producers.

Fuck… what a drag. But on that cheery note… that is that! Finito!! Again!!! Unbelievably, still no new drunk elephant stories this week. I looked, I tried Stan. Here’s a vintage situation from Ireland of all places. And you can serve yourself under the sign of the elephant in Michigan… but it’s not the same thing.

Still, as per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect. How do they rank today? Well, TwitterX is still the first stop followed by (for beer, not cousins) Facebook but BlueSky has rapidly moved past the beery Threads presence. Mastodon also ranks above Threads with IG and Substack Notes really dragging and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence just sitting there. So the rankings are T/X, BS and Masto maybe tied, then Threads with IG close behind then Substack Notes and Patreon at the bottom. Seven plus a blog! I may be multi and legion but I do have priorities. All in all, I still am rooting for the voices on Mastodon, like these ones discussing beer, even though it is gardening Mastodon that really wins:

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters to stay on top of things (though those things called “newsletters” where 1995 email lists meet the blogs of 2005 may be coming to an end of value if the trend with so many towards the dull dull dull means anything) including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now much more occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast. There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube soon celebrating a decade of vids. And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

*…aka THE Beer Nut, aka The Beer Nut…
**also noted by B+B but no less noteworthy now due to that, your previous pre-notification.
***For the double!!

Your Farewell To Summer 2023 Edition Of The Beery New Notes

Ah summer. Well, that was fun! It didn’t snow once and I never had to scramble up after taking a spill on an icy sidewalk. But it is done. Calendar wise at least. Who knows how long until the first frost. Two years ago this week we came within half a degree. What a drag. Nothing near that on the two week outlook. I have about a hundred green tomatoes out there. What the hell would I do with them?

Speaking of what to do with where and when, Pellicle has an interesting article from Adam Wells this week on how cider does not benefit at home or in the pub from the plastic bag in a cardboard box treatment… which is odd as I just saw something on some social media app about how they work so well now for a better sort of wine – you can decide after you have a read:

It is still far too common for ciders and perries on sale in pubs and bars to be heavily affected by a serious liquid fault. I’m not talking about matters of preference here, or simply about something not quite being at its best; I’m talking about liquid that does serious, lingering reputational damage to the image of “real” cider in the mind of the consumer. I’m talking about vinegary acetic acid. I’m talking about the eggy, sewage-like fug of hydrogen sulphide. I’m talking about the gluey nail varnish remover of ethyl acetate, the cardboard of oxidation (no, that cider is not supposed to be mahogany and opaque), I’m talking about the appalling musty kickback of mouse—a horrendous off-flavour (also known as THP) that can be caused by certain types of wild yeast.

Sounds all very much a fail. Oh, for the good old days. Remember way back when? Remember? Well, forget remembering as then is now! What? Well, in the now in the sense that these two images on TwitterX caught my eye and drew me back. The one is from the 1978 Postlip Beer Festival to the left and and the other to the right from the 1980 Greater Manchester Beeer Festival. Are it really “a cacophony of brown beer“? Was it really “a very different beer scene“? I dunno. If you time traveled back to 1978, you could certainly buy Suncrush Squash which I suppose you could pour into any of the ales if you really needed a modern day abombination. Somewhat related in that sense, Jessica Mason reports on a new angle on selling NA beer… or whatever it is:

Speaking to the drinks business, ON Beer founder Chris Kazakeos said: “ON Beer is a revolutionary, zero-alcohol beer crafted with a special blend of superpower plants, that uplift and elevate your feelings.” In querying what makes the beer different from other alcohol-free beers vailable, Kazakeos explained: “ON beer delivers a uniquely refreshing and full-bodied flavour. Infused with our ON X Blend of superpower plants, each sip carries subtle botanical undertones, seamlessly blended with the robust, richly malted flavour that beer lovers crave. The complex layers of taste unfold gradually, creating a balanced, deeply satisfying experience.”

Nice to see that the sucker juice movement has found new and fertile ground. Why do they still bother calling it “beer”? Speaking of movements, you know when folk call something “neo-prohibitionist” and it never makes any sense at all? Yes, me too. But in this case, there is no doubt a significant share of one Canadian community that actually qualifies:

After more than a century as one of the last dry towns in Alberta, Cardston’s 3,500 or so residents no longer have to leave to buy an alcoholic beverage. On Tuesday, Cardston town council voted 5-2 in favour of allowing sit-down restaurants and recreational facilities like the local golf course to apply for liquor licenses. A non-binding plebiscite in May set the stage for Tuesday’s decision. When asked if they would allow limited liquor sales in the town, the yes vote won in a narrow 494 – 431 victory.

Speaking of things being over, are big beer convention fest things so… umm… pre-pandemic? Courtney Iseman at Hugging the Bar might be suggesting so:

Earlier this year, I strongly considered finally attending my first GABF. But then this month ended up being the only time that made sense for me to get overseas to visit some friends, and I also came out of CBC thinking…one behemoth beer to-do per year is probably enough. After running into a few people doing this in Nashville around CBC, though, it did occur to me that maybe the least stressful, most fun approach to going to GABF is to not go to GABF—but instead just head to Denver the same week to take advantage of all the external events put on by individual breweries.

Jeff* contends to the contrary, stating that the GABF is relevant but perhaps just not really a true national event – and also concluding with this pro-fest argument:

I have been somewhat dismayed by how much beer chat has turned into industry and/or business chat. Discussions of the pleasurable turn quickly into the salable. The GABF is one antidote to that. People get together in a large hall to select the tastiest beers in the country, and later thousands more gather in an even larger hall to guzzle beer for the sheer pleasure of it. It’s a reminder that the root of our passion isn’t measured in dollars, but something only our tongues and noses can tell us.

I don’t disagree. Beer has sort of run its course or at least its present direction and too often in such a situation all that is left is the business related stuff. But… think about it… if it takes getting under one conventiton center roof or even one town where the convention is held to find a worthy discussion about beer… whether at the Jeff’s GABF or CBC… doens’t that sort of mean that the discussion of beer is limited to (i) the amount of people who can fit in those spaces and (ii) to those people who can afford the cash and time to get to those places? Are these things also perhaps as isolated fom the average beer consumer as that business side chit chat is? Time for something new in beer, folks… but what? Cacophonic brown beer!!

Somewhat illistrative of the boring stiff, did the Washington Post misplace a word or two in this headling this week: “Explore the evolution of beer, from Stone Age sludge to craft brews“? Those words sit above an odd piece of publishing, a sort of participatory quiz about an extremely summary level of brewing in human history, some of which might actually be nearly true, all with heavy input from the graphics department. The goal is apparently find you your dream beer match, sorta like that quiz in the May 1978 issue of Teen Beat to see if you would be a good match for a dream date with Andy Gibb.

Far more reality based was “Double double. toil and trouble” this week. Jeff uses the phrase as a title to his post about an interesting hopping experiment (perhaps not remembering it is in fact a reference to beer):

A decade ago, then-small Breakside Brewery made a fresh-hop beer using an outlandish process. They froze the hops, still fresh and 80% water, with liquid nitrogen. This turned them into vitreous emeralds, brittle and ready for smashing under what brewer Ben Edmunds likened to a potato masher. Once broken into shards, the lupulin glands were exposed for easy access to the beer they would soon enter. They’ve continued that process ever since, but until this morning, I’d never actually seen it for myself.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle in France where the Rugby World Cup is being played. Apparently the beer service was not up to expectations and the government is rolling up its sleeves:

France’s sports minister is so eager to “reconcile” with England fans irritated by poor organisation at Rugby World Cup games that she will attend their next match on Sunday to monitor security, transport and even the beer supply. Amélie Oudéa-Castéra told the Financial Times she would “personally monitor every detail” at the match in Nice to ensure that fans unhappy about overcrowding, beer running short, and other problems at previous games would be well served this time. “Their experience at the match against Japan must be impeccable from start to finish,” she said… “The English are still mad at us,” Oudéa-Castéra said ruefully.

“Ruefully”?!?!? Seriously? The world is on fire, World War III is simmering just on the edge of the timeline and yet here is a member of a nuclear power’s cabinet is worry about whether the English get enough to drink? Someone needs some sober self-reflection. Just like Martin did when he had a moment this week that led to reflection about being a pub photography weirdo that in turn led to an invention waiting to be invented:

I don’t know why I didn’t just own up to photographing pump clips, loads of weirdos do it, but instead I said I was sureptitiously Shazamming the track playing at that moment. Shazam was on strike, so the nice lady hunted down the playlist for me, and I dutifully wrote the details in my notes. Anyway, my cover story worked, though when a few minutes later I heard another post-millennial banger I didn’t recognise I was too embarrassed to ask. Pubs should replace those electronic display boards with beer details with ones showing music playlists and county cricket scores.

And Ron finally took Delores on one of his trips. I am not saying he shouldn’t get out once in a while by himself but Delores is my favourite character in Ron’s writings so a trip to the former Yugoslavia is bound to be just the thing:

“This will be my second new country this year.”
“Good for you, Ronald.” Dolores says unenthusiastically
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”
“Don’t make such a big thing out of everything.” That’s me telt.

He does make a big thing out of everything Delores, doesn’t he. You nailed it. And how will Ron treat himself to the clinkies and drinkies at the airport this time?

No duty free for me today. “You can buy something in Belgrade. It’ll be a lot cheaper there.” Dolores suggests. And I’m not going to argue with her. I know where that will get me. To not a good place.

Magic! Love it!! Entirely conversely, this has got to be the dumbest logo ever. It’s slightly nausiating even. Are you supposed to drink from your thumb now? Does your thumb allow you to grab a glass of another brewery’s beer? I’m sure I am thinking to much about it. In that respect, I believe I am in a similar situation to that of the logo designer.

Finally, Stan’s latest edition of Hop Queries came out last Friday and he is running a contest:

The rules are pretty simple. The winning prediction will be the one that comes closest to total hop production in Idaho, Oregon and Washington. Over or under does not matter; just the closest. Please include eight or nine digits (for example, 99,999,999 or 100,000,000). The USDA will report harvest results in December. The deadline to enter is Sept. 25. You may enter by hitting reply, but I prefer you email your prediction to hopqueries@gmail.com.

How jolly. And way more fact based than that thing in the Washington Post up there. And… that is that. Finito. Unbelievably, still no drunk elephant stories this week. I looked, I tried Stan. Still, as per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect – even including at my somewhat quieter than expected Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Got on BlueSky this week and added it to my IG, FB, X, Mastodon, Threads, Substack Notes and a deservedly dormant Patreaon presence. I am multi! I am legion!! Yet totally sub. All in all, I still am preferring the voices on Mastodon, like these ones discussing beer:

*For the double!

The Almost Sweater Weather Edition of Beery News Notes

See that up there? That’s the news of the week. Maybe news of the week last week but are you really the news of the week if you don’t stretch it out to two weeks? That’s a crop from Kat Sewell‘s image from Les Twits and it is one of many out there. Everyone is fascinated in the UK with blue and white cardboard suitcases apparently. On BlueSky, it’s the easy-to-carry box that makes the deal according to B+B… but then we learned of this sad take from one unhappy Pete:

You’re quite possibly right. However by contrast, the box I picked up was damaged and required two hands to carry it. I then had to transport it on my push bike. I ditched the box in the store bin and carried all 10 bottles (loose) in my back pack. It was quite heavy.

Update: there was a yesterday post on Belgian Smaak by Eoghan that Jordan pronounced “It’s some of the best writing I’ve read this year on any subject” so I better include a link here. It’s on the Belgian tram line I believe I mentioned a few months back. But Eoghan has way more detail in his story “Flavour Track — A Culinary Crawl On Belgium’s Coastal Tram“:

…my early morning train from my home in Brussels—skating past wet, flat polder fields with pitched roof village steeples occluded by an early morning mist—terminates in the village of Adinkerke and its well-proportioned brick train station. From here, the sea is a 45 minute walk through corn fields and acorn-strewn dunes, where the entrance to Belgium is marked by a Leonidas chocolate shop housed in a former customs station. By the time the train pulls into the sidings at Adinkerke the mist has congealed into a fine rain. Fortunately, there are already two trams waiting to start their journeys up the coast.

Nice! What else is making folks happ-happ-happy? Kids in pubs? Really? This spot near Manchester apparently hopes so:

It’s wonderful to head out to a countryside pub for a cool drink on a sunny day – but for those without a car, public transport options are often quite limited in getting to some of the region’s prettiest villages. But it’s not something you have to worry about when heading to Mobberley in Cheshire – where there’s a brilliant village pub right next to the train stop. The Railway Inn (in a nod to its convenient location) has been widely acclaimed with both CAMRA beer awards in recent years, as well as with rave reviews from visitors on Tripadvisor. Reviews from this year hail it as a “hidden gem” with its huge beer garden and brilliant play areas for kids. The pub also boasts its own bowling green.

Seems like a huge investment on the pub’s part. To make youg families happy. Kids are great. Right? Not always if the news out of New York City is to be believed:

A crime tale straight out of Charles Dickens is unfolding in the Big Apple — with adults “directing” children who appear no older than 10 to steal from unsuspecting businesses, witnesses told The Post. The chubby-cheeked crooks have terrorized bars on the east and west side of Manhattan and Brooklyn for months, graduating from snatching money in unattended bags to stealing cash from open safes in at least two watering holes in the last few weeks, according to workers and owners. In many cases, the kids at first try to solicit money to raise money for their “basketball team,” and then run amok.

OK, what else… is this a bad idea or a good one? Announcing you are raising pub prices to deal with those times of the week with busier workloads?

Britain’s biggest pub chain has started charging its customers 20p extra for a pint during busy trading periods. Stonegate Group, which owns more than 4,500 pubs across the UK, has begun adding a surcharge at peak times at 800 of its sites across the country. A ‘polite notice’ in one Stonegate pub said ‘dynamic pricing is currently live in this venue during this peak trading session’. The sign says the surcharges will pay for extra staff, extra cleaning, plastic pint glasses, and ‘satisfying and complying with licensing requirements’. The notice explains that ‘any increase in our pricing today is to cover these additional requirements.’

It’s referred to as dynamic pricing and it is not receiving a warm welcome: “Tom Stainer, chief executive of the Campaign for Real Ale, a consumer group, called the move troubling…” Wow, there’s a strong statement. The proprietor of the Ypres Castle himself is not clear on the point at all and goes even further: “It’s utterly weird, isn’t it. Surely the thing to have done was to raise prices overall but introduce long happy hours, achieving the same thing but spinning it positively.” Wetherspoon pubs are doing the opposite – lowering the price – but just for one day:

It’s that time of year again when all Wetherspoon pubs slash all food and drink by 7.5 per cent. The annual move is to highlight the benefit of a permanent VAT reduction in the hospitality industry. And that means that if you pop into a Wetherspoon’s on Thursday, September 14, then, to mark Tax Equality Day, you will get some money knocked off. That means a customer who spends a tenner will only pay £9.25 for example. Wetherspoon’s founder and chairman, Tim Martin, said: “The biggest threat to the hospitality industry is the vast disparity in tax treatment among pubs, restaurants and supermarkets.

And while you are out there looking for bargains, just be clear about the rules:

This is incredible. A Wisconsin bar offered free drinks if the Jets lost. After Rodgers went down, they started running up their tabs. The news was live when the jets won in overtime and everyone realized they had to pay.

Finally on the question of value (and by the way is it is so great to have gotten to the era that we can talk about value without some semi-pro consulto-journo beer writer jumping in to play the broken record “you can’t put a price on experience!!!“) – finally on the question of value… Boak and Bailey asked about the linger legacy of value pricing at Sam Smith’s:

When people on Trip Advisor are still advising tourists to go to Samuel Smith pubs for good value food and beer, however, there’s clearly a mismatch between reality and reputation. We might also be more relaxed about these prices if we felt they were covering the costs of a good pub experience but… Dirty glassware. Glum service. Grim atmosphere. Evidence of a death spiral, perhaps?

Spicy!!! But enough of your obsessions with filthy lucre. Time to go all ag and to that end Stan has reported in from the hopyards on the effects of climate change before taking a bit of a break over the next few weeks:

The photos at the top and bottom were taken in USDA research fields near Prosser, Washington. The babies in the seedling field (top) are cute, don’t you think? The odds are very much against them ending up with a name and being used to brew beer. But if that happens, farmers will know they are agronomically prepared to survive in a climate wild hop plants in Mongolia did not know five million years ago. A constant topic of discussion last week was the Great Centennial Disaster. In recent years, farmers in the Yakima Valley have harvested about seven to eight bales of Centennial per acre planted. This year, some fields produced only two-plus bales per acre. Not every field was such a disaster, but when the USDA releases harvest data in December the results will not be pretty.

More on this phenomenon in The New York Times where Catie Edmondson providing extended coverage from the hop fields of Spalt, Germany:

The plant is so central to the town’s culture that signs advertising “Spalter Bier” can be found on nearly every street, many of them hanging from the half-timbered, red-roof houses that were built hundreds of years ago to store and dry hops. But the crop and those timeworn traditions are being threatened like never before. The culprit is climate change. The promise of a warming, drier climate has dealt a brutal hand to the hops industry across Europe. But it has been especially ruthless to Spalter, a crop that has sustained this tidy town of 5,000 in southern Germany for centuries.

And Martin continues his quest for pubs but took a break to go to a rainy music fest where he and herself still found their way down country lanes to a pub:

One of the annual traditions at End of the Road, along with watching Mrs RM put the day tent up while we watch and spilling curry down our new T-shirts, is a half hour walk along the narrow lanes to the Museum for a pint of Sixpenny’s 6d Best in a proper glass. Yes, missing last food orders (which seem earlier each year) is also a Retired Martin tradition. So this time we earmarked Saturday lunchtime for a visit, and with the promise of morning WiFi we set off at 10:30 on the “jumping into hedge to duck incoming lorries” routine. It’s worth it for the thatch.

Nice. Similarly but without all the hassles of the actual travel, Gary continued his wanderings around the pubs of the UK in the mid-1900s with this post about a 1940 exhibition of paintings at the National Gallery in Britain on the Blitz including this scene from Wales:

Perhaps, then, the pub next to theh Masonic Hall was St. Ives, also known as St. Ives Inn. Or if not it was presumably one of the other four known to have traded on Caer Street before 1939. Whichever pub it was, one can only hope that it wasn’t occupied when Hitler’s bomb fell. The Masonic Hall, for its part was not occupied; Swansea Masons had shut its doors a few years earlier when they moved to a new location.

It reminds me of how common “getting blitzed” is for slang among my pals. Speaking of which, Cookie wrote a post this week, about the Hillgate Mile pub crawl in and around Stockport:

The hillgate mile was many years ago an iconic pub crawl in and around Stockport. A strip with a high density of pubs that had come about to service high density housing and factories in the area. Much of that housing had become flats and many factories closed and with it the need for so many pubs. The area and its pubs was in decline when I first encountered it and whilst now there has been a revitalisation of the area with new build nicer looking flats there will never be demand for that number of pubs again. It was noted not only for the number of pubs but the variety of brewers that owned pubs under the tied system.

His remembrances about these sorts of endings are worth the read. And reminded me that a few weeks ago, I cast doubts upon the notion that in Britain “Cask is the only beer poured beneath the bar where you can’t see what’s going on and this greatly adds to the uncertainty around it.” Is it really about the show that draws people into pubs, that they are now missing out on? Well, a form of that notion appears to have maybe crossed an ocean if this observation in GBH is to be believed as a major factor in the continuing decline of draft… something that has been on the steady decline for decades:

Draft beer, even when brewed by a multinational beer company, absorbs context from its setting: the bartender who poured it, the adjacent guest on the barstool, the glassware in which it’s served. Adding a humble orange slice to a glass of Blue Moon elevated the way millions of U.S. drinkers thought about beer. In packaged form, beer has fewer tools to pitch itself to drinkers. It works with the same set of variables as any other beverage in a can or bottle, whether wine or pre-made cocktails or hop water.

I am pretty sure that is not the problem, people no longer hankering for an orange slice and a stranger on the next barstool. Again, its only about the relative value proposition and, as with cask lovers in the UK, dive bar beer drinkers are just not as big a part of the population, maybe just because they have found something else to do. Sober up. Collect stamps. Get a happier family life. Netflix. Something. I am also very mindful of the frank words of Katie Mather in her newsletter The Gulp! this week on the closing of her bar Corto:

I want to be clear about the reality of opening a bar like Corto in a small, rural town—even one as permanently lauded in the national press as being the “ideal beer staycation destination”. Last week we opened and drank three bottles of Riesling worth £100 because after three attempts to drum up interest in a tasting event (which we have been repeatedly told by well-meaning folks that we should do more of) only two people came along. The world of premium and craft drinks is not what it was, or what we believe it to be. I sell three times as much basic organic Tempranillo as I do orange wine or sour beers.

In another sort of ending, Andrew Cusack in The Spectator considers the his low alcohol coping mechanism in his remembrances of Sam Smith’s now departed, his beloved Alpine Lager:

Sam Smith’s Brewery has sadly failed to realise the strength of Alpine’s weakness. There has been a downward trend of the main lagers, such as Carlsberg which has reached 3.8 (and which has announced they will move down to 3.4 this year as well) and Fosters at 3.7 per cent. But almost nothing exists in the peak quaffable-but-still-tasty range of 2 to 3 per cent. Many of Sam Smith’s loyal customers will mourn the passing of the Alpine decade and hope that some other brewery might take note of the open territory before them.

Over at Pellicle, Ruvani de Silva has written about a lager in England which is dedicated to the Windrush generation as well as the people and the process behind its development:

If that sounds like a lot to pack into one beer, that’s because it is. Robyn, however, talks passionately about how immigration has shaped her, her family, and her community, consolidating and distilling her thoughts and feelings into brewing a beer that she wants to speak for those experiences, and to resonate with those both inside and outside the Caribbean diaspora.

On this side of the Atlantic, the hippytown of Guelph, Ontario has announced one of the more attractive beer bus deals as Jordan explains:

Running September 16, October 14, November 18, and December 16, the beer bus is a great solution to the logistical problems behind your next afternoon pub crawl… Five breweries, more than five dozen beers on tap, two full food menus to choose from, buses running once an hour, and the best part is that it’s free! Donations are accepted on the bus and proceeds go to a scholarship fund at the Niagara College Brewing program. If you can think of something better to do with your Saturday afternoon than go to Guelph, I’d like to hear about it.

Free! Free is good. Except free runnings. Unexpectely free. Which leads us, finally, to the saddest drinky clinky video of the week: “Streets flooded with wine after tanks burst at Levira, Portugal distillery.” Here is the background:

This is the moment a flood of red wine surged down a street in Portugal after two massive tanks with enough booze to fill a swimming pool burst. Winemakers Levira Distillery were due to bottle the 2.2 million litres when the giant tanks suddenly gave way in Sao Lourenco do Bairro on September 10. Video footage showed a huge, fast-moving river of red wine flowing down a hill and around a bend as baffled locals look on.

Yikes! And that is that. Done. Still no drunk elephant stories this week. I looked again. I really tried, Stan. Still, as per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect – even including at my somewhat quieter than expected Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Got on BlueSky this week and added it to my IG, FB, X, Mastodon, Threads, Substack Notes and a deservedly dormant Patreaon presence. I am multi! I am legion!! Yet totally sub. All in all, I still am preferring the voices on Mastodon, like these ones discussing beer:

The Back To School 2023 Edition Of The Beery News Notes

Corduroys wiff-wiff-wiffing down a linoleum floored hallway. That’s all I can recall from the first week of Septembers if I am being honest. The rest is all a mixed of high school anxious misery and stupid fun – except that sound of new cords on the first day of school. Was I really into beer that much then? Were there September beers before undergrad? I have no recollection other than drinking the one I was handed at some kid’s unfortunate parents’ place, grabbing whatever we could sneak out with while their folks were off shopping. Someone else’s hell to pay when it was all found out later. September beer was a thing in the 1620s. But what was it? Apparently went with Cheshire cheese. That September beer post also has one of my favourite harvest time images, from 1680:

In husbandry affairs they are very neat, binding up all sorts of grain in sheaves; they give the best wages to labourers of any in England, in harvest giving 4 and 5 shillings for an acre of wheat and 2s. a day meat and drink, which doth invite many stout workmen hither from the neighbouring country to get in their harvest. So that you shall find, especially on Sundays, the roads full of troops of workmen with their scythes and sickles, going to the adjacent town to refresh themselves with good liquor and victuals…

Ahh, harvest at the time of mellow fruitfulness… as I blogged about twenty years ago* yesterday. September is also the time when craft beer in the US apparently hits its highest share of the overall market. I know that this is the case because BA Bart posted the helpful chart right there up at the top of this post to confirm that fact. It also confirms that craft beer’s share is down overall something around 2.5% from 2018 to 2022. Which may explain why those breweries and bars are shutting. Yet it also shows that the share in September 2022 was about the same as July 2018. Is that important? Dunno. But it does somewhat create that discussion with many points of view my authoring team leader Carlo Devito triggered over at FB:

Call it a contraction. A correction. A classic cycle of Boom and bust. Whatever. But you are spot on…yes. My % is off but my numbers are correct….I feel. I’ll stand by 1,500 to 3,000. Remember. I’m including wineries and distilleries in this. Not just breweries. This is all craft beverage businesses.

More tiny breweries making their living making less beer? Could be. Seems a reasonable next reality. And Pete Brown asked a good question this week which received plenty of response about the realities of the past:

Question/discussion time: in general, but specifically in brewing, does heritage really matter? Without progress, everything stagnates. But is there value in remembering the past, and encouraging others to do so? If so, what is it?

My thought in these matters? Change is constant – but that still can’t explain bad ideas. It can be a bad idea just to cling on to heritage just as much as it can be a bad idea to run from it. No doubt those workers in 1680 would love the labour standards we enjoy today. Me, I responded that in the late 1800s new brewing techniques in North America were leading to new forms of beer, plus mergers and many closures which often now blamed on temperence.

Then as now, the breweries which didn’t move with the times were the ones left behind. In 1907, one Ontario old school holdout’s beer was tasted by someone hip to the new ways: “not at all nice and had a pronounced old, harsh flavour… devoid of character in every way…“** Sounds a lot like 2023 looking back at 1998. Or 1955 looking back at 1907 for that matter. Stagnation. Perhaps that old, harsh flavour could be recreated as Old Stag Pale Ale! Speaking of changing reality if not “de void” we see that The Beer Nut was frankly surprised after encountering a couple of NA beers:

Honestly, I thought these would be worse than they were. They can’t be accused of going for the lowest common denominator or turning out non-alcoholic clichés. They’ve put the work in and may even be in the upper tier of this sort of product available in Ireland. Not that that’s saying much.

Speaking of new forms of things, Eoghan wrote about a very rare bird, the new gueuze from Belgiums newest lambic brewers, Danseart:

The Dansaert Gueuze is the culmination of BBP’s mixed- and spontaneous-fermentation Dansaert brewery project, a beer that’s been in the works since January 2020. But the Dansaert Gueuze – a blend of one-, two-, and three-year-old Lambics made to the Oude Geuze specifications set down in EU law – is not just a milestone for BBP. It’s a landmark beer for Brussels too, because it’s the first of its kind to have been made in Brussels by a new producer for several generations. Lambic, indigenous to Brussels and once one of the city’s dominant beer styles, was virtually extinct by the early 1990s. There was only two lambic breweries left in Brussels, and only one – Brasserie Cantillon – still making beer the same way as previous generations of brewers. In fact, such was the complete eradication of the Lambic tradition in the 20th century that it’s entirely unclear who preceded BBP as the previous newest Lambic brewery.

Neato. An odder ripple in the beerosphere was noted this week, objections to one brewery taking on an more unexpected focus than a new lambic or NA beers. Joe‘s giving a side eye. Matt was particularly ripe: “How is the grain being farmed? How is the enzyme produced? Who has actually been to the brewery in question and seen the process?” and then apologized. To help resolve matters, the most patient and polite even if too pressed and perhaps put upon Jessica Mason in The Drinks Business published a response to questions raised about one NY state brewery’s raw beer brewing process and a defence of the practice’s benefits:

After all, he hinted, there will always be questions the business will be have time to answer further down the line. Regarding the debates online and the push for data-driven evidence directly and immediately from his brewhouse, he said: “These are very valid questions but are a distraction from what we are doing, which is simply skipping the malting process entirely… In other words, like-for-like if you take one barley farmer and one brewhouse and you brew the exact same beer in the traditional way and you brew it our way, in that controlled environment — where all things are otherwise equal — then this is what you save: 350ml of water and 16g of CO2 per 500ml of beer served.”

Hey maybe it will work! You know, I wonder if being overly concerned about this sort of stuff should lead one to be concerned. It’s all about perspective. Someone tries something. Maybe it works. Things go on. Conversely and probably more in the too much perspective category, there was a passing of note at least adjacent to the world of clinky-drinky with the death of Jimmy Buffet. Never owned a record of his. Still, I probably heard and hummed along to “Margaritaville” in pubs or at parties as much as any other drinking related song out there. Easy enough to do. But this observation from Jason Wilson of Everyday Drinking really is quite remarkable… so I remark… or at least take note:

I’ve always believed we experience drinks very much like we experience the popular songs of our youth. An ounce and a half of booze, a three-minute song—ephemeral for sure, yet in the right context you may remember it your whole life. We know that no new song, regardless of how well made it is, will ever matter as much the ones we heard as a teenager. When I listened to those 1970s Buffett songs again this week, I was struck by how melancholy they are. I’m definitely not the only one commenting on this. There is even a meme making the rounds on social media that suggests if you drop “Margaritaville” into a minor key, it becomes very dark.

Much more in the major key, Beth Demmon continued her Prohibitchin’ series with an interview with Bex Pezzullo of California-based Sincere Cider and her wide ranging interests and back story:

It took nearly 20 minutes for Bex and I to get through chatting about the Hollywood writers’ strike, comparing how quickly our social batteries drain, how to make friends as adults, why we both prefer honesty over tact, and how prison populations artificially inflate town populations for tax benefits to even start talking about Sincere Cider. But honestly, who wants to hear about target markets and five-year sales projections when Bex is talking about working at Bonnaroo? But in talking about Bonnaroo—the annual music and arts festival in Manchester, Tennessee—and her experience having to clear out the outdoor furniture section at Target to construct a makeshift backstage for the musicians after an incident with some destructive raccoons, her personal values still managed to reveal themselves.

Brimming with positivity, David Jesudason’s piece “Ypres Castle, Rye—A Bastion From Hate” in Pellicle yesterday with is a great portrait of the world created by our old pal Jeffery John Bell including his approach to creating a great welcoming tolerant pub:

“It’s my house, and I’m the one curating,” Jeff tells me. “I pick the music. I pick the beers. The lighting, the decor—everything is deliberate. And to some extent you have to curate the conversation at the bar—I don’t police it—but you can steer people. If someone says something beyond the pale or outside the environment you’ve created I say: ‘I don’t agree with that’,” he adds.”

It’s a wonderful portrait about making and shaping space with some particularly lovely photos by Claire Bullen, like this one to the right. Contented lad. I like it so much I am going to put it on the Christmas cards this year.

Do you like wines? I know Jeff does. And would you like a short but handy starter guide to liking them more? Eric Asimov published one this week in The New York Times:

The basics remain, but in between lie incremental alternatives that may offer a richer selection but require a greater degree of understanding. Consider the options that now turn up on contemporary retail shelves or wine lists. You might be asked to choose from transparent whites or golden whites, orange wines ranging from pinkish to amber, rosés in pale or dark hues and reds that are light, dark or somewhere in between. Additional subdivisions further complicate matters. If you want a sparkling wine, would that be pét-nat, traditional method or tank? Do you want that red chillable? Or dense and heavy? Perhaps you would like an oceanic white, or would you prefer it to be mountain?

Speaking of coming to an understanding, Boak and Bailey wrote about being excited by a few beers recently and helped me with this trim description of that thing called an Italian lager:

Bearing in mind Italian Pilsner was basically a mythical entity to us at the start of this year, it struck us as absolutely convincing. It was extremely bitter and desert dry despite its 6.4% ABV. It had the requisite white wine quality with suggestions of elderflower and lemon. On a warm evening, after you’ve schlepped up Christmas steps, it’s exactly the glass of lager you dream of drinking. OK, so beer can still excite us, we’re not dead yet, we said.

That so neatly summed up my last Italo-Pils experience that I had a Pavlovian response, then a Proustian recollection and perhaps even Swedenborgian moment all at once.***

Finally, did you think there would be an agument being made for a revival of malty beers? How about an 1800 word argument like the one by Jim Vorel in Paste this week which carries with it more than a hint of suspicion and perhaps an implicit accussaion:

The expected “malt backbone” once referenced in styles such as pale ale increasingly disappeared, while surviving styles such as amber ale, pale wheat ale or brown ale found their hop rates increased and malt character toned down to appeal more to IPA drinkers. Porter and stout increasingly ditched actual malt-driven flavors for the wide world of desserty adjuncts. By the mid-2010s, we had entered an era where malt-forward flavors were being shunned by many drinkers whether they realized it or not, and we still find ourselves in this position today. This holding pattern has stretched on for almost a decade.

Bet September ales were malty. Good and malty, I bet. Just the thing, a spot of the old September.

And that is that. Done. No drunk elephant story this week. I looked. I tried, Stan. Still, as per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect – even including at my somewhat quieter than expected Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Got on BlueSky this week and added it to my IG, FB, X, Mastodon, Threads, Substack Notes and a deservedly dormant Patreaon presence. I am multi! I am legion!! Yet totally sub. All in all, I still am preferring the voices on Mastodon, like these ones discussing beer:

*Yikes! This today is me at 60 looking back at me at 40 looking back at me at 20… and finding a beer related anecdote!
**Which sorta points out how “heritage” is the collection and shaping and editing of only the bits of history we like. See: “Practical Notes on a Visit through American and Canadian Ale Breweries”, Journal of Institute of Brewing, 1907, Vol. 13, Issue 4, page 360 – 362.
***Roughly, the image is of a tree full of slobbering angels stuffing their faces with tiny butter cookies but going on and on about the butter cookies from before.