Month: May 2024

This Week We Celebrate Queen Victoria, The Two-Four And These Beery News Notes

Victoria Day weekend is here. Err… I mean… VICTORIA DAY IS HERE!!!  That’s better. It’s gonna get boozy. Break out the two-fours. No, not those ones. We were thinking of a couple of nights in nearby Montreal  but the hotels weren’t cheap so now it’s going to be all about what’s within an hour’s drive. HMVR is pissed – won’t even look at me now. Back solidly turned. Shunned. Wow. Seriously, wow. Also wow in an entirely different way was a comment left by Maureen Ogle at the foot of last week’s update:

…thanks for the weekly dose of thoughtful snark. So many years of pleasure….

Fabulous. What could be better than when someone you admire provides you with the obvious name of the anthology for my top 1001 of these here blog posts from the last two decades – Thoughtful Snark. I will get right on that.

What’s been going on? Well, for one thing, a trio of the old guard of beer writing each shared their thoughts one way or another on the state of beer writing… and… it’s apparently not entirely good – but also not entirely bad. First, we have Evan Rail‘s thoughts on the state of beer writing:

…we have a new opportunity to focus on truly great writing: not getting there first, so much as covering the subject beautifully; not breaking news (though of course that can be important, too), so much as understanding and explaining its nuances; not reporting on every new beer or brewery that opens (an impossibility, given our current numbers), but writing more selectively about the ones that truly matter.

Then, we have Jeff at Beervana and his piece “Is Beer Less Interesting Or Am I?” which builds on the passage above:

I relate strongly to the idea that it’s harder to find anything new in beer, and that so much seems repetitious. (Let’s not get into the way beer media now seems to be infected with listicles, poor explainers, or pieces with titles like, “The Best ______ According to These Experts.”) Evan takes the point of view of a writer who has been covering beer for a quarter century, and as a fellow old I identify with it. But as an old I often find myself coming up short and asking: is the beer world really less interesting, or am I?

And finally we have Pete Brown who shared a few observations on, first, a beer junket to Spain and, then, a recent piece he wrote on the succession plan at BrewDog*:

Read this! Claiming it as “exclusive” is hilarious given I was on the same press trip, along with journos from the S*n and the Daily Heil, and some “influencers”. But at the brewery, this guy was the only one apart from me who was actually taking notes. Nice bloke, good journo.

and:

…commenting can be tricky. My brief was for an over-arching piece on the industry impact since 2007. If I’d just focused in on actions towards people in the business it would have been rejected. I tried to get the balance right and hope it doesn’t trivialise.

They, each in their turn, hit on various degrees of hope and despair and reality. But together they sort of expose the nature of the writing gig. Not everyone is taking notes, not every idea is interesting and not every page is beautiful. The same stark facts would face a sports, pop music or political writer too. I don’t think it is naval gazing either. If we consumers of the writing, if we readers are to value the effect of a story it is good to know that the writers are thinking about what they are doing, if the brief is a constraint – and certainly if they have just been hanging on at the edge of a junket, not bothering to even take notes.

So let’s see who’s done the best at that this week! I really like Jess’s piece at B+B on the particulars she loves in a pub as she rediscovered on a recent say out:

The crawl took us to three of the four pubs in St Werburghs: The Farm, The Miners’s Arms and The Duke of York. All of them have hippy vibes of varying degrees and make me feel nostalgic for her early drinking days – while leaving Ray a little on edge. He’s such a clean boy! The Farm has an enormous beer garden and several of my drinking companions told me it was more of a family pub than an alternative one these days, especially on Sundays. Last time Ray and I visited someone was trying to persuade the bar staff to give them the beer slops from the drip trays, allegedly to keep slugs off their plants in their allotment.

Hippies and slugs and slops. Excellent. Like what you like. And that photo of the skittles alley! As I’ve mentioned about a billion times, we could also do with a similar bit of honesty about value like we see a bit more these days in wine writing like this about the next opportunity to buy Bordeaux futures:

…right now – today – 2023 Angélus has been released at a price that comes in at more than the 2020, 2019, 2018, 2016 and 2015 vintages, all of which have some very punchy reviews and, moreover, are the finished product.  You can buy a case of wine rather than title to nine litres of wine sitting in a barrel in St Emilion. Quite simply: there is zero point in buying it.  Even if your name is Mr Angélus and your first born is a 2023: in this instance you can just stick £3,120 in the bank for a couple of years, get 5%, and buy the same wine, in bottle and in the UK, for the same or less money.  Again: this is not rocket science or cutting edge economic analysis.  It’s just obvious.

Mr. B. himself in Just Drinks broke out the honesty in his thoughts on the state of US craft beer, pointing a very particularly pointy finger in one particular direction:

This ‘haze craze,’ as it’s become known, led to several market shifts in North America, including the one most cited by craft brewers themselves: an overabundance of beers of very similar, sometimes almost interchangeable, character and flavour. As one veteran brewer who asked to remain anonymous put it: “There are only so many ways you can make a lasagna and it’s the same for hazy IPAs. That’s why so many of them taste the same.”

And, speaking of innovations becoming stagnation, over at The Gulp Katie Mather wrote about A.I. and her doubts:

I doubt I’ll ever be convinced of its merit in the fields of creative writing, painting, drawing, poetry, and music. In my opinion, it should be used as a powertool. It makes boring, labour-intensive jobs easier, in order to enable the creative and skilled work to be carried out by people who have the talent to do so. We are all good at different things. AI Art is not a leveller, it is a thief.

Boom! Plus it’s, you know, pretty shitty.** I mention this in particular given the news that one western Canadian brewery has made an all A.I. beer:

Amber Waves of Grain, released in February by Grain Bin Brewing Company, is an amber ale in which everything — the name, the price, the packaging and the recipe — was decided by OpenAI’s Chat GPT, an artificial intelligence tool trained to mimic human responses. “We decided to just be as hands-off as possible, to see what the limitations were and what the actual final product would be if we relied solely on artificial intelligence,” said Dalen Landis, a co-owner of the brewery in Grande Prairie, Alta., about 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton. In an interview with CBC News, Landis said the beer is meant to be a conversation piece. He said it also raises a moral dilemma particularly with the packaging generated from sources across the internet. 

While it was a bit of an exploration, maybe performance art, the whole thing reminds me a lot of the glory days of this here blog when I was interviewed about things, especially the time I was asked by The New York Times about what was called Open Source Beer back in 2005. It was sort of a manual form of artificial intelligence as I recall. Made no sense. Beer isn’t that hard, is it?

But maybe it is. In Pellicle this week Laura Hadland writes about the disruptive force that Anspach and Hobday have released on the unsuspecting population of London:

Jack and Paul are happy to admit the pervasive influence of the global brewing giant on their work, and it’s hard to overstate the influence of the shadow that St James’s Gate throws over the entire brewing world, especially when it comes to nitro porter. When attempting to take on Guinness, it’s also worth pointing out the scale of the challenge. 350,000 litres of London Black are now being brewed each year, with further expansion planned. From a standing start, that’s an impressive achievement in less than three years. But if litres were metres, then Guinness’ UK on-trade volume is the height of The Shard with London Black just a Labrador standing dolefully beside it. At the current rate of expansion, Anspach and Hobday aren’t going to be treading on Guinness’ heels any time soon.

Staying in that fair city, in his latest edition of London Beer City, Will Hawkes shared a lovely bit of observation and, yes, honesty that makes total sense as far as I’m concerned:

A dog is sniffing my leg. I’m standing at the bar at the Parakeet, a gastropub in Kentish Town, in brief beer-related discussion with the bar-lady, and I can feel its cold nose through my trouser leg. I turn and look. It’s an XL Bully. I didn’t intend to turn this edition of London Beer City into an XL Bully Special, but here we are. Honestly, there are loads of them about. I see them in the street. I avoid them in the park. I take an involuntary leap back when one sniffs my leg in the pub.

Third London tidbit: the beer spend in the city for the upcoming Euro 2024 will be £120 according to El Predicto… or something  sorta like that.

Gary posted another interesting slice of 20th century brewing history with a study of the strength of Rainier Old Stock Ale – 5%? 7.5%? 9%? What ever it is… PEP UP!

The King and Queen have announced their Royal Warrants including those for the clink and the drink. These things are not part of the Canadian Royal fam set up but, still, gonna be looking for that little crest on my box of Weetabix. First beer to get the sticker on the label?

In 2014, the Prince of Wales also gave permission for the Royal Warrant to be used on bottles of Shepherd Neame’s Spitfire Amber Ale, first brewed in 1990 to commemorate the Battle of Britain. “We have a long association with the Royal Family, and are incredibly proud to be among the first UK businesses to be awarded a Royal Warrant by His Majesty King Charles III,” said Shepherd Neame chief executive Jonathan Neame.

Probably the only warrant you want being issued with your name on it.

Was that enough snark? I don’t really think so. That’s a pretty positive and mild one this week. Oh dear. I will have to do better next week!

And with that… once again… we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections.*** Want to keep up with the news before next Thursday? Check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan back each Monday. Elsewhere go look at then listen to Lew’s podcast. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd 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 revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a few podcasts… but some may be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water… is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that but is writing for 47 readers over there. 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! Errr… nope, it is gone again.

*To the greater point being made, get the backstory right like the Daily Mail did: “Mr Watt comes from a family of fishermen and used to help his father on his fishing boat in the North Sea. On his LinkedIn profile he claims to be a ‘fully qualified deep sea captain’. He graduated from Edinburgh University with a degree in law and economics. After landing a job as a trainee solicitor he quit after two weeks – branding ‘conforming’ as ‘painful at best – and, three years later, started BrewDog with Mr Dickie.“
*And a bonus first footnote observation from B+B’s own gossipy (I said) Footnotes on the connection between putting in the hours and building trust: “We’re Patreons of Pete Brown which means every now and then we get an email with some behind the scenes info. He’s had a busy week covering various bits of brewing news, including the Burton unions story. On that, he reveals that he had inside info on the deal. Which makes us think that when he says in his Pellicle piece about Worthington White Shield “Rumours are now circulating that a deal may be struck…” he knows (a) that this is definitely the case; and (b) exactly who is likely to be brewing White Shield. Again, we wonder if it might be Thornbridge. The brewery wot does heritage would be an interesting niche for them.“
**From the NYT: “It’s a little hard to believe that just over a year ago, a group of leading researchers asked for a six-month pause in the development of larger systems of artificial intelligence, fearing that the systems would become too powerful. “Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” they asked. There was no pause. But now, a year later, the question isn’t really whether A.I. is too smart and will take over the world. It’s whether A.I. is too stupid and unreliable to be useful.“
***This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (bloop! 127) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (slumoing to 913) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (up t0 4,472) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (162), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Fear not!

Only One Thing Overshadows Eurovision… Could It Be These Thursday Beery News Notes?

Hmm… on the one hand international entertainment with, yes, a limited number of perhaps well worn themes played out, yes, over and over and over. On the other… Eurovision! It’s big. This here beer blog? Not so much. There is an overlap, however, as The Beer Ladies Podcast have a primer. They’re a bit into it: “Our own Katie and Lisa are jetting over to Malmö to revel in the madness…” And The Beer Nut will no doubt be live tweeting the formation of the next day’s piercing hangover, likely as illustrated. There is only one thing bigger – Stan is back. He never lets me take a week off. Stan wants a month away? Stan gets a month away. Me? I write this blog.

What is going on out there?  The big news or, as Ron put it, the great news is the relocation for a remaining Burton Union set from Marston’s Brewery, the traditional brewing system that Laura Hadland discussed last February as being mothballed. Pete Brown shared his thoughts at The Drinks Business:

This week, it’s been announced that Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company (CMBC) has given a set of the famous Burton Unions to Thornbridge…, and is helping the Derbyshire craft brewery get it up and running. This has sent some much-needed cheer through the craft brewing world. Why does this matter? Once upon a time, Burton-on-Trent was the most important brewing town on the planet. And by the middle of the 19th century, most beer in Burton was being fermented on the town’s eponymous Union Sets. The unions were a system of barrels, pipes and troughs, basically an adventure playground for fermenting yeast. The yeast had loads of fun, foaming through the pipes and running down the trough and back into the barrels from which it had spouted. The belief was that happy yeast made better beer.

The Tand shared his initial reaction too: “A cynic might just think that multinational brewing companies care little for either history or cask beer, and this is a cheap way to put a slightly embarrassing problem to bed and come out of it looking rather good.” I entirely agree… but do the yeast care one way or the other? Well, yes, of course… if the alternative is extinction!

And congratulations were also earned by Pellicle this week for this announcement:

We are not sure how this has happened, but we are very honoured, and a little taken aback to have been nominated in the Best Magazine section in this years @GuildFoodWriter awards. Against The Guardian. And the National Geographic. This is nuts. 

Boak and Bailey analyzed the recent news the Buxton Brewery teetering towards administration and focused in on the problem with being “merely quite good”:

This is what we think sometimes happens with breweries like Buxton. They’re not bad enough to have anything specific to fix, but not good enough to generate word-of-mouth enthusiasm. People don’t mind drinking their beer, but they don’t seek it out, or detour to drink it. They might have one pint but won’t stick on it for a session, or stay in a pub to have one more pint than they ought to. And they won’t order it by the box from the brewery shop.

And continuing with the good news / bad news, a statement was made this week by Hadrian Border Brewery about a contract brewing deal gone very wrong:

THEY WON’T PAY. No disputes on product or services! By November 2023, we had no more head space for it, it was making us ill, so we passed the case to a Debt Collection Agency…  

Quite right to call the deadbeats out publicly. But… gee… was “posting this on such a platform is detrimental for the beer industry“? No, not talking about things like this is detrimental. As is not talking about how so much of non-alcoholic beer is a let down… except perhaps for its perhaps natural audience according to the New York Times – children:

…more and more he has noticed children asking for nonalcholic drinks. “It’s not exactly daily, but more than weekly,” he said. The restaurant, which sits inside Saks Fifth Avenue, has two spirit-free concoctions on the menu…  He ultimately decided that while it still feels a little strange to serve the sophisticated beverages to children, it felt satisfying to contribute to family dining experiences “in an interesting way.” As nonalcoholic cocktails, wines and beers have become staples on bar menus across America, some children — people way under the legal drinking age — have begun to partake.

Not that there is any meaning left, but that’s one new twist on the “small” in small, independent and traditional, I suppose. Sorta like this take on the role of the trad:

Novonesis is a leading global biosolutions company formed through a combination of Chr. Hansen and Novozymes. It creates biosolutions for all types of industries. from nutrition and biofuel to chemicals, energy and water. Novonesis’ SmartBev range offers yeast solutions for low/no-alcohol and regular beer. The range includes both unique yeast solutions, like its NEER products, as well as lactic acid bacteria solutions, such as those used in its Harvest range. The company was pushing these products at CBC 2024 — especially its NA alternatives — which Guillory sees as a rapidly growing segment in the last 12 months.  

Mmmm…. biosolutions.* That’s what I am looking for in my glass. Speaking of the world of chem, Ed Himself once again shared some thoughts from the tech side of brewing gleened from his trip to the Murphys Brewery in Cork Ireland, owned by Heineken since 1983:

They can do 12 six tonne brews a day in it in two lauter tuns. Heineken, Coors, Fosters, Tiger, Moretti, Lagunitas, Murphys and Beamish are brewed there, the stouts being perhaps four brews out of a weekly 35-40. Cider is also made there from sugar and concentrate. They can mash every two hours and ten minutes, lautering takes three house. They have a holding vessel between the lauters and the copper, and unusually the yeast propagation plant is in the Hauppmann brewhouse. Overall extract losses are less than 7%. They have heat recovery on the stack on the copper and a heat recovery tank holds hot water which is used to pre-heat the wort via a Plate Heat Exchanger. They have four 120 tonne malt silos and…

Yeow. Right about there my brain started to hurt. Like it hurts when the kids were in high school and asked me to help with their math homework.

BREAKING: Ron had breakfast.

Beth Demmon is back with another Prohibitchin’ this time featuring the career arc of Maura Hardman, now Seattle Cider Company’s marketing and PR manager – including this tidbit of transitional good luch from her previous stint with Whole Foods:

It was during her time there she first found out about Seattle Cider Company, via their partnership with the local nonprofit City Fruit. “They’d take their ugly apples, crab apples, things that can’t be used for their CSA program or food bank program and put them into cider,” she explains. Whole Foods then sold the City Fruit ciders and sponsored the Seattle Cider Summit, so she began to learn about and appreciate the beverage as a fan. But appreciating cider was one thing. Working in the industry? It hadn’t even occurred to her.

And David Jesudason shared the story of Melba Wilson, an American who moved to London in 1977 – and how she had to “endure a shocking ordeal” in a pub just twenty years ago:

“He was surrounded by his squaddie buddies, so I guess he felt emboldened to carry on. He stopped after a while, I went up to him and looked at him. He didn’t show any signs of remorse. The other customers weren’t treating him negatively – it was like they thought you could get away with saying that in a country pub if there was only one black person around. “It was one of those incidents where you’re shocked that somebody is doing it and then you think ‘how am I going to challenge this?’ I said to my husband: ‘did you hear what he said?’ and I wanted to complain.”

The stunning bluntness of senseless bigotry. Saddest part: “I believe racism – overt or covert – has risen since the noughties.”

On a far less serious topic, Jessica Mason reporting live from the SIBA press conference:

Scary stats: “24% of drinkers NEVER visit their local; 41% WOULD VISIT if prices were lower; 25% of drinkers say NOTHING would make them visit more often & 8% of drinkers choose a pub because of the indie craft beer it stocks.”

And less important still, I am not even sure I have the energy to lift my hands to the keyboard to report on the news that James Watt has shuffled the deck of name plates and has swapped out CEO while retaining his shares, the board seat and adding a new title that makes no sense – captain. Best line was in the Guardian:

He will now be replaced by the company’s chief operating officer, James Arrow, who is expected to focus on returning the loss-making company to profit.

Confused? Imagine my state of mind when Liam gave me hope of a Battledore revival. Because Goldthorpe. Because Goldthorpe may be Sprat. Which may be Battledore. Maybe. But there may actually be Goldthorpes. Maybe.

Speaking of things not appearing as they are, so much for the Euro lifestyle thing as Latvia is moving its legal drinking age from 18 to 20… and the brewing trade lobbyists are lobbying:

…chairman of Saeima’s Social and Employment Matters Committee Andris Bērziņš, [stated] certain coalition and, possibly, opposition deputies may propose excluding beer, cider and wine from the list of alcoholic beverages to be applied with new age restrictions. Bērziņš said he doesn’t support this proposal, as the proposed exception for beverages with a lower content of alcohol does not match the Saeima’s recently passed regulations on the handling of cigarettes, which states how as of 2025 only persons of 20 years of age will be allowed to purchase tobacco products.

And nearby-ish in Germany, access to that friend of the drunk night out – doner kebabs – has become a hot economic policy topic:

Kathi Gebel, the youth policy spokesperson on the board of the Left Party, told Business Insider…  said the government “must intervene to prevent food from becoming a luxury item.” The party plans to propose a government price cap of €4.90 (around $5.30) or €2.90 (around $3.10) for young people, The Guardian reported… [T]he German government said in February that prices of the doner kebab are rising because of rising wages and energy costs… Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke about the issue in the past, saying that he is asked by young people “everywhere I go” if there should be a price reduction for doner kebabs, according to the outlet.

Finally, once upon a time, people actually paid me actual money to place ads on this here blog. One of those ads was for faux-esque Worthington’s White Shield.** There it is to the right. The little white square to the lower left of a screen shot from early 2007. From the emails I can see that I had to explain PayPal to the PR rep, Danny. Well that fact and Danny’s later emailed disappointment at the results of his hard earned cash placement didn’t make it to the story Pete Brown filed for Pellicle this week but he covered the rest of the issues surrounding of the great beer’s demise admirably:

Molson Coors don’t understand British ale, and of all the big global brewers, they’re the ones who haven’t really got craft beer either. The real reason they “paused” production of White Shield had nothing to do with “production routes.” It was a marketing decision. There are good people working at Molson Coors who adored this beer, but from a corporate perspective, once the company stopped ignoring it, and once Steve Wellington retired for the final time, they didn’t have a clue what to do with it. Turning a completely invented fake Spanish lager into the most successful beer launch in British history? No problem. Continue the production of a legend to satisfy legions of discerning fans across the world? Nah, too difficult, mate.

Such is the way of the world. Still, that 300 USD for the three months of the ad sure was handy at the time. Thanks Molson-Coors!

And with that… once again… we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections.*** Want to keep up with the news before next Thursday? Check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan who, like the swallows to  Capistrano, show return next Monday. Elsewhere go look at then listen to Lew’s podcast. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd 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 revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a few podcasts… but some may be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water… is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that but is writing for 47 readers over there. 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! Errr… nope, it is gone again.

*ever since some guy at work started calling the ten minute ciggie timeouts during day long meetings “bio-breaks” I just can’t see the world in the same way.
**Note the apostrophe – Worthington’s White Shield.
***This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (holding at 128) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (slumoing to 914) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (up t0 4,467) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (162), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Fear not!

The “Is It Tra-La Month Already?” Edition Of The Beery News Notes

Tra-la? Really?? How many times have you had to write to remind me not to repeat myself in these weekly notes to myself?  I know. I know.* But in my defence, I am a man of little imagination. As you know. I take photos of pots yet to be filled with soil and seed.  Imagine being so dull.  Which is entirely unlike The Beer Nut whose blog turned nineteen this week so is, therefore, of legal age in all of Canada. Always a gent and always a source of the best information. I wonder what life would be if I ran this place on that basis?

Speaking of sorta which and as a bit of spice to start off the week to contextualize what follows, one of my favourite people from one of my favourite breweries (Max of Godspeed) got into it on Twex yesterday when he posed the following:

This happens at an alarming rate in Toronto, too. It’s not unusual to find myself in earshot of someone in the industry slagging another brewery in town…

See, he was responding to a similar comment from someone whose slow frail hand reached and pressed delete mere moments after posting. It’s an odd aspect of the bigger craft scene that insider smack talk is a bad idea. Me, I spell that sort of “bad” with the letters F-U-N! Me, I want to consider myself to be on Team Godspeed. I fact, I want elbow pads with “It’s Godspeed or it sucks!!” on them. They and maybe ten others stand above in this marketplace and they each should be loud and proud once in a while.  But do they? Do we? What follows this week is a lot about beer and language.

Not unrelated given that it is about one presents oneself… or one’s can I suppose, this bit of social media promo is perhaps the bestest, truest observation on the sad state of craft beer today:

Does your beer name have TOO MANY ADJECTIVES? Are there 3+ ingredients or flavours are namechecked on the can?You may have found yourself in possession of a GIMMICKY BEER – but is that a bad thing? Tune in to find out more…🍻

That’s the Beer Ladies Podcast talking right there… and it you click on this link you can get to the actual talking. When did what written on the beer can get so far down such a wrong path? Do we still have to use language like that?

There has, in fact, been a general concern with the state of writing these days. It’s the talk of the town, the topic of the week. Jeff propounded with a broad brush upon “The Death of Books“… even though new book sales are still ahead of the pre-pandemic rate in the USA. In their monthly e-letter, Boak and Bailey addressed the slightly narrower question of usefulness of the UK pub guide:

The fundamental problem with pub guides – or any kind of print guidebook – is that they go out of date between writing and printing. And that’s especially true in 2024, on the long tail of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis, with hospitality feeling rather volatile. It was always a problem, of course. Our copy of Fred Pearce’s 1975 guide to Bristol pubs came with a paper insert with updates from April 1976: “Oliver’s Bar, Victoria Street… The Courage depot’s local is now closed down.” Actually, to an extent, it wasn’t a problem at all. It was part of the business model. If not planned obsolescence than at least a rather helpful incentive for people to buy next year’s edition.

Authors of the soon to be published book Beer Breaks in Britain responded with a bit of a stiff upper lip: “The fact is, people are still buying guidebooks. But that’s because they tell stories that can inspire travel, exploration, not just tell you where to go.” That statement reminded me of something that we need to be thinking about when it comes to discussions about things beery – that ever present need to tell the white lie when we are not, you know, just parroting the press release.  Perhaps it should be considered not all that surprising given we are talking about a subject that literally numbs the senses.

In fact, that comment reminded me greatly of the recent coverage of the slightly less recent Craft Brewers Conference in Las Vegas where the news of the continuing loss of public interest in craft beer was apparently the theme. Dave Infante described it in VinePair as evidence that we are in what he framed as “Craft Brewing’s ‘Could Be Worse’ Era“:

The industry in aggregate has concerns aplenty, though, and they were discussed at length over three days’ worth of seminars, meetings, and after-hours drinks on and off the Strip. Direct-to-consumer shipping and franchise law reforms are top of mind for the BA’s policymaking double threat, general counsel Marc Sorini and senior director of federal affairs Katie Marisic, and potentially onerous nutritional labeling requirements from the TTB aren’t far behind. Bob Pease, the BA’s president and chief executive, made sure to flag “growing threats from neo-Prohibitionist groups” in his opening remarks on Monday, as did several other speakers throughout the week.

You know when folk start blaming the straw man bleat of “neo-prohibitionism” that something else is really really going sideways. Something something else like (…umm..) customers losing interest in the cyclical fads of craft (… err…) curomers are just sick of the horse apple hype as David Bailey so bluntly put it last Friday in Pellicle? There is no lack of proof of the slide if Jessica Mason’s stories just this week are correct… and they are: laters Ballest Point, see ya Greene King and buhbye BBF. Yet… we also consider the reasonably described booster Don Tse in Forbes uncritically summing up the slew of negative numbers by repeating the trade association’s lead voice of the boosterocracy:

Watson estimated that, “125 million Americans who drink didn’t have a craft beer last month” and suggested that there was still opportunity for brewers to grow. Speaking to the audience of brewers, Watson said, “Many of your customers are fiercely loyal. Breweries that are succeeding are finding ways to have customers drink their products on more occasions… Craft beer as a category has seen fads in beverage alcohol come and go,” said Watson. “But craft is here to stay.”**

Really? Same as it ever was? That’s all there is? Cue the great Ms. Peggy Lee!***

So if we take all that in and that is all there is… which of the two trades are doing more poorly? Books or craft beer?  If Stan is to be understood correctly, craft is down to 2014 levels of interest, five years worse off than the book publishing marketplace apparently.  Whichever it is, books about beer should be expected to face a tough future.

Entirely conversely and far more reality based, Ed wrote a piece this week about another sort of understanding – one based on gaining an actual educated understanding of beer and brewing – which he drew from his conversation with Kathryn Thomson, the Head of Education and Professional Development at the Institute of Brewing and Distilling:

I have for a long while been insisting that as a professional brewer every pint I drink is CPD but that does seem to have bitten me on the arse now that recording CPD is something I’ll actually have to do properly. I don’t suppose untappd submissions will count. The blog however might, my write ups of brewery visits whilst on study tours have been described as “great examples of reflective CPD”. I may be a beer nerd but I’m also a technical beer geek! Well lubricated though those IBD study tours may be there’s a lot of actual studying too.  Kathryn is trying to develop a practical and pragmatic approach to CPD which sounded very positive to me. And I also got a chance to go off on one about brewing education which was great because I have opinions.

It’d be nice if a consumer oriented equivalent was created so that one was not defencelessly subject to the fist punch “craft is here to stay!” sort of yahooism. You know, one where we’d see more of the specificity, respect and honesty that good beer avoids. A discussion like those reports we read this week about how the spirits markets are facing “destocking” and even there candor about value we see in the famously puffy world of wine trade writing these days. Just consider this from James Suckling on the conditions faces by those setting prices for the soon to be sent to market 2023 Bordeaux futures:****

“People are not going to buy if you don’t drop the price,” concurred Hubert de Bouard, whose family owns Chateau Angelus, which last year raised its prices significantly with some backlash from the market. “You can’t go against the wave. If you don’t [drop prices] you can’t sell. It could be 20 percent or more, but it depends on the name of the chateau.” It’s not going to be easy to drop prices to a level that will generate interest in the vintage for en primeur. The market situation is very tough, as any wine merchant knows regardless of where they are based. For a start, the cost of money from banks is the highest in decades in the United States, and wine sales are down in most key markets around the world. There are overstocks with importers, distributors and wine merchants. And prices are falling for many top wines. And then there are two wars and an anxiety-ridden U.S. election in November. It will be difficult for many buyers to tie up money, especially if it’s credit from the bank, for almost two years before the wine is delivered.

Whole lot of context and grounding right there. Could you imagine a leading beer perioidical publishing something like that, being that honest about value?

Lisa Grimm is also all about the real and last Friday her Weirdo Guide to Dublin proved it with a visit to Hynes’ Bar in… of… at Stoneybatter:

On a recent Saturday evening, I found people making the most of the remaining visit from the sun in the beer garden, which comes complete with a DJ booth and Oasis-v-Blur cigarette disposal – a reference that here in Ireland is both a GenX comfort blanket and general Father Ted reference that even the younger set who don’t recall the 1990s will recognize – they know all about Fathers Dougal and Damo (though I note that as I write this, it’s the 30th anniversary of the release of Parklife, so I may crumble into dust before we’re through here – let’s see!).

And ATJ got real over at his newsletter AJTbeerpubs in his reminisings of trips to American dives with some fine character portraits:

It was either his grandfather or great grandfather who had come out west and made something good of himself. ‘Have you heard of so and so?’ I was asked, an unremarkable town in the north-west of England whose name sounds like a low comedian who had a TV series in the 1970s. ‘It’s a fine place and I intend to go there one day.’ I muttered something, but my thoughts were rather, shall we say, less complimentary about his intended place of pilgrimage, but I was a guest. As these kind of evenings do, when we are not expecting anything to happen, stories flew backwards and forwards, and more beer was ordered. Meanwhile, Dean Martin from Rio Bravo staggered in and was served this time. He was a fisherman, who’d come ashore that day, and presumably was drinking away his profits. 

And Pellicle published something that didn’t need to make much of an argument to convince me: “The Case for Perry” by Adam Wells. Perry is the greatest fluid this planet ever created as far as I’m concerned but never gets its due:

These days there is so little perry made, so little known about it, and so few people who care that we pass down lies and generalisations and they stick. We say that it’s always sweet: it isn’t. We say that it’s always light—that’s not true either. We ho-ho about pears containing sorbitol and claim perry is a laxative—if that was true I’d be a ghost. We equate the whole, broad, fascinating flavour spectrum of a labyrinthine, spellbinding drink to Babycham and Lambrini, and wise, sensible people—people who know and care deeply about other drinks—nod and shrug and pass the lies along. At best, perry has been filed as a sidekick; a chapter in a book about cider.

I say I love perry but I never seem to get my hands on much of the stuff. Which places it in the realm of “readily available” when you compare it to the subject of the article in Cider Review “Hymn to the Quince” by Beatrix Swanson:

… it doesn’t take much digging to discover plausible reasons why you don’t see many British quince drinks, either: quinces struggle to ripen fully in some parts of the UK and need to mature in storage for up to two months after harvest; they seem to be unsuited to machine harvesting; and they are not commonly planted and therefore expensive to procure post-harvest. What’s more, until the UK government’s August 2023 alcohol duty reforms, ciders made with quince — or hops, or elderflower, or anything else other than apples or pears — were taxed as ‘made wine’ in the UK and therefore subject to higher duty than cider or perry.

So, again we see, there is good writing out and about right there to be read. Sure, not enough to balance off the other stuff but it is worth the digging. Which means… once again… we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections.***** Want to keep up with the news before next Thursday? Check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan who, like the swallows to  Capistrano, show return next Monday. Elsewhere go look at then listen to Lew’s podcast. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd 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 revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast . Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a few podcasts… but some may be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water… is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that but is writing for 47 readers over there. 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! Errr… nope, it is gone again.

*2023… 2020… 2019… 2009… 2008… 2007… you get the point.
**“Peace for our time!!!“
***For those in need of the footnote…
****Me, I’ll be buying* my mixed two or three cases or so as I have been since the beginning of the pandemic. Investing for my retirement! I’m already menu planning for Christmas 2031. Here’s a cheat sheet for the futures buying process for Ontario.
*****This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (holding at 128) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (back up to 916) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (crashing down nince t0 4,463) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (162), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Fear not!