Month: August 2024

The Chores… More Chores… It’s The Weeks Of Chores Along With Some Beery News Notes

When last we met, I was happy as anything, wandering around Montreal on a few days away. That’s so last week. The first week of vacation. Then I came home to folk building the new fence and the related 24 foot tall tree removal on my side of the line. The fencing guys did a couple of the main branches with their power saws but I’m doing the rest by hand, sorting* and hauling most of the stuff away. Which is why this week’s beery news notes are brought to you by my Japanese pruning saw. It is the only thing I have ever bought which has each and every promised attribute. Forget that claim that beer makes you feel exactly like you wanted to feel like just before you had that beer. This beauty sits neatly in the cut, eats into the wood in both directions, stays sharp, creates minimal blisters. Japanese pruning saws. Get yours today.

First off, I am really grateful for Stephanie Grant‘s piece on her changing relationship with alcohol. She puts things so clearly, things that I have thought about myself and others over the years – especially this bit:

I haven’t dived into non-alcohol beers or mocktails, and I’m not sure that I will. I’m not someone who necessarily needs to replace beer with a non-alcoholic version. I know that there are some great options out there today, but when I am abstaining from alcohol, I don’t really feel the need to replace it with something that is similar to alcohol. I also feel the same way about meat substitutes. If I want to eat meat, I will eat meat, but if I want something vegetarian, I don’t necessarily need a meat-like substitute… if I really want a beer during the week, I have no problem drinking a beer and have no trouble sticking to one. That level of flexibility feels good to me and has made this new adventure feel even more doable…. It helps that I know other people who work in beer and the beverage industry as a whole that have also cut back on their drinking. I look to them for inspiration. Because of them, I know it’s possible.

For as long as I have been writing about beer my interest in drinking a lot of beer has slowly slipped away… well, maybe let’s say it has reduced. (Apparently, not unlike Ireland.) For a while now, I’ve been a none or maybe one with meals or maybe after mowing sorta person now.  I know, sounds like Old Man Day Napper. But that’s now due, you know, to hauling the boughs and branches to the yard waste depot.

Yet… when I do have a drink, I like to drink the swell stuff. So what are you drinking when in Lisbon? Not what you expect you might be, if Jason Wilson is right:

My choice for the first stop of the evening would be Quattro Teste, one of the best cocktail bars I’ve visited in any city. Run by Alf del Portillo, from Spain’s Basque Country, and Marta Premoli, from Lombardia, Italy, at Quattro Teste you can start with a shot of cider straight from the barrel, Basque style. Then move on to Alf’s take on the low-brow classic kalimotxo. It’s usually just a mix of red wine and Coke, but his version has a healthy pour of Amaro Lucano and a splash of Branca Menta to make it a kalimotxo revelation.

I am not sure my meagre daily ration would go in the direction of a kalimotxo but, go ahead, make the case for it. Jeff made the case, unpacking his thoughts on our conversation about the economics of local v regional noted last week as Question #7:

The regional breweries can’t compete with the giants on price, and lose the advantage of “local” affection the further they try to send beer. I recently got to see the barrelage of those regional breweries, and it is mostly sinking as this dynamic squeezes them more. And yet if you zoom in a bit, something interesting is going on as well. If you surveyed the beer cooler at the local grocery store in different regions (not just the U.S., but anywhere), you’d see different retail space given to local, regional, and national brands. Some places I visit have mostly national brands and a sad little pocket of local brands. In other places, the reverse is true.

There was also follow up over at their Patreon-based footnotes this week, when Boak and Bailey (Hello Jess and Ray!) looked for just the right word:

The idea of national-regional-local that Jeff Alworth writes about, after a discussion with Alan McLeod (hello, Alan!) feels like an important one. We look here at breweries like Butcombe, which are definitely tied to the West Country, but which don’t feel especially… loyal? Is that the word? They’re not national, exactly, but they’re too big, too remote, and too slick, to feel quite part of the scene. In Bristol, local means from the city. And ideally from the neighbourhood. Somerset and Gloucestershire too, at a push. We need to think about this some more.

I like that reference to “the scene.” A scene is something to which you can have personal affinity. My scene, for example, for a long time pre-pandemic extended much more to the south into central New York than to Toronto to my west.  It is about identity as much as anything but there is a clear tension between the economics and the identification with regionality. Put it this way. I support local breweries as much as I do because I can drive to them all. That is a distinct relationship where the economics and identity of local might look like loyal but perhaps it is only practical. At the regional level one needs to make more of an effort, both the brewer and buyer. I probably put a premium on spotting a Great Lakes zone beer. National craft? Might as well be ketchup. I’ll buy it but mainly on based on the price with hard eye on the best before date.

On the subject of scene, it has many facets. We see that in the piece Laura Hadland had published in What’s Brewing which explored the history of beer serving measurements below the pint. It illustrated the hazards to be encountered in place to plane and time to time – as illustrated by the “schooner”:

The two-third pint measure was not legally recognised as a specified measure until October 2011. Despite this late introduction, the measure was not new. A publican in Greenock, Scotland, is recorded as testing the market for the schooner – a glass of American invention – in the 1870s. His tuppeny drink was described by locals as the Wee Pint and seems to have met with relative success, spreading to other venues in the area. The two-third schooner for beer is not to be confused with the sherry glass of the same name – a tall, waisted 3.5oz glass that was popularised in the UK in the 1960s, alongside its smaller cousin, the clipper. To add another layer of bemusement, a Canadian beer schooner is a 32oz super-sized affair!

I like that, the “wee pint” – basically the size you get in the US now when you ask for a pint. What else is going on? Pete Brown posted his take on George Orwell’s perfect urban pub “Moon Under Water” but with the perfect English country pub in mind:

There’s a big open fire at one end of the room. In winter, you have to be here at opening time to claim the table next to it. There’s also a large, shiny-seated wooden chair opposite. It’s the kind of chair you don’t sit in unless you’ve been drinking here since the pub was built. The walls and ceilings are decorated with random stuff – nothing as obvious as horse brasses or old black-and-white photos of the pub. A lot of the décor relates to the name of the pub (which isn’t really the Old Stone House.) But on top of that (sometimes literally) there’s a collection of old scythes. A bowsaw. A 1930s policeman’s helmet. A case full of arrows.

And… wait for it. There is a twist. By the way, R+J of B+B may have found their own new perfect pub even though the first dealt with some well-founded doubts:

…people who are much more clued into Bristol pub gossip than us told us they’d heard Sam Gregory, landlord of The Bank Tavern, was interested in taking it on. You might have heard of The Bank, even if you don’t know Bristol: it’s the one with the four-year waiting list for reservations for Sunday lunch. We filed this news under “We’ll believe it when we see it”. So much can go wrong with plans to revive pubs, as we’ve seen with successive attempts to take on The Rhubarb.

Also extolling the ideal pub this week was ATJ whose A Pub For All Seasons comes out soon. He summarized the goal of the book:

Deep breath, then: A Pub For All Seasons is a narrative non-fiction travel book about my journey through the UK over the four seasons in search of how pubs change organically, unconsciously, without fanfare, almost with nobody noticing. It is about how pubs echo the seasonal drinks and dishes we fancy throughout the year — as they change a pub also changes.

Speaking of which, I received my copy of Martyn’s new book, Around the World in 80 Beers: A Global History of Brewing, a study of brewing history through 80 beers from around the world. Very oddly, exactly 2.5% of the beers discussed were from my homeland, the Canadian Maritimes. The entry on Keith’s IPA is (shall we say) kind but does highlight, as do a number of others, the imperial reach of British brewing.  My first skim though did raise one question. Has anyone actually seen that receipe for great-grandpaw’s beer that was the foundation for Sam Adams Boston Lager?

Other than witnessing the praising of glitter beer well after it “glit-ted” its last “-ter“**, I was interested in the thoughts Doug Veliky shared on the effect of Hazy with about a decade’s reflection – and expectually its effects on other style as well as style itself:

The term “American IPA” appears to mean little that can be trusted anymore, at least consistently and nationally for someone traveling, and might as well be shelved completely by the US brewing scene. It’s turned into a filler word to show more intention to the style, but that intention is now be muddy and misleading. The reason I used to like the descriptor is because it could serve as a way to communicate clear and bitter, while letting West Coast IPAs be their more specific versions, still leaving a wide range of variables to incorporate and differentiate with.

In Pellicle, Will Hawkes explored other sorts of fundamental changes in his excellent biography of an important figure in mid-1900s British brewing, Dr. Dora Kulka, and her escape from the Nazi we well as how her work in yeast biochemistry supported the early adoption of lager brewing:

Dora produced a stout (“Your vitamin stout is good,” Erna Hollitscher, to whom she sent a bottle, told her; “In spite of the protest of some English people I still don’t think it is so very different from beer!”), a pale ale and, most significantly, a lager. She probably thought little of it, but for the powers-that-be at The Hope Brewery it was like a lightbulb flickering on. Just a few years later, Claywheels Lane became the first British home of Carling Black Label, the beer that started the British lager revolution, and that has been the nation’s favourite since the early 1980s…. Hope & Anchor began making their own lager—Anchor Lager—very soon after the War ended. “Dr Kulka got us brewing a lager. She noticed Sheffield water was similar to that of Pilsen in Czechoslovakia, where her family came from, and suggested we make one. That’s what set us going.”

It will be harder to find a lager in some communities in northern Ontario now that the implications of the new beer sales in private stores are playing out:

The Beer Store has confirmed that the 8 James Bay Rd. location in Cochrane is permanently closing on Sept. 9… In Cochrane, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) has approved two licences for convenience stores that will be able to sell alcohol — the Cochrane Truck Stop at 99 Hwy. 11 S., and COSTCAN Liquor at 143 Fourth St. W. Unit B. The Beer Store locations in Geraldton and Nipigon are also set to close next month.  Gordon Mackenzie, a former Nipigon councillor wrote to The Beer Store president, highlighting the impacts of the closure on the community, noting his concerns that the closure will add to the long-standing issues of vacant buildings populating the downtown core and the loss of job opportunities. The community has also noted that The Beer Store is the only location to return empties to.

Note: “My bet is the price of beer will go up, especially in northern Ontario.” In suburban southern Ontario, the issues are different, as over licensing as 350 new retailers will open up in one municipality on the same day. Plus: “stores will be allowed to sell starting at 7 a.m. and up to 11 p.m., two hours earlier in the morning and later at night than the current operating hours.” Really? Pre-school beers? How long until we read the “drunk guys in grade 12 first class home room” story?

And, relatedly perhaps in terms of change, in his Hop Queries, Stan shared some news about the German hop harvest that ended up with a bit of an odd conclusion:

Each of Germany’s five hop growing regions (Hallertau is by far the largest) provided estimates as harvest began. Production in the Hallertau increased 21 percent over 2023, to 42,350 metric tons, while overall German production grew 18.8 percent to 48,964 metric tons (98.1 million pounds). Why? Yields in Germany were up 20.5 percent. Although yields in 2023 had improved on 2022’s particularly disappointing harvest, they were still below average… The overall harvest yielded about nine percent more hops than an average crop the last 10 years, which a press releases notes will be sold into a market that is “. . . oversupplied.”

“Oversupply” does no lead to cheering as it turns out. A bumper crop causes concerns in a retracting marketplace for beer.

I am sure there is a bit of a punning opportunity related to the exhuberent abundance of my week’s chores there but I am a bit too tired to try. Timber depot, yard waste yard, worn out fabric drop off, vee vee boutique and, most excitingly, the hazardous waste receiving area. Touched all the bases. So… that being the case… here are 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… with a top drawer effort this week. 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… until… Lew’s interview! 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.

*Those straight branches to the right are all around ten feet long and will be next year’s tomato poles.
**Not sure if or even how my disinterest in glitter beer translates into sexism but there you have it. Adulterations and adjuncts are simply gak.
***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 (151) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,469) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

A Perhaps Much Abbreviated Thursday Beery News Notes For My Big Week Off

Off. It’s not like I’m off doing very much but, you know, I have actual chores to do, a couple of nights in Montreal… and other day trips to take… and summer’s slipping away so maybe there won’t be so much in this week’s beery news notes.  And I am going to have limited access to scribbling time during the middle of this week so let’s see what I can come up with… no one wants someone to get that sad and lonely feeling if there isn’t something to read as they slurp down their Froot Loops early this Thursday morning. Hmm. How to cover up my half arsed effort? Perhaps another slightly different format will suffice. Let’s have a Q+A session!

Question #1: Does anyone do social media as well as Lars does? It was on display in this week’s photo essay on a little historical brewing recreation he did last weekend at a museum:

Had to clean the inside of the rost (lauter tun, the wooden vessel), because it was mouldy. Hard to avoid with wooden gear… Foundation of the filter is alder sticks. For color, flavor, and to give the wort space to run underneath the real filter, which comes on top…

My observations: I hates me a mouldy rost.

Question #2: do we care if we use the original language’s grammar and spelling when referring to beer related things? I am disinclined to worry about this all that much but that is not a universal thing. There’s a thread:

Not to nitpick the thriving transatlantic linguistic exchange through l/Lager, but for anyone not writing bilingual #WhatsBrewing blurbs, what generally would be pro-copy guidelines for US-ENG capitalisation in writing keller, kellerbier, but: Kellerwald?[…] My remark goes beyond the basics of why other natural languages should/can drop German capitalisation when importing, trying to get at the desired branding (“auratic”) effects of opting back in when it creates perceived authenticity, say for Scandinavian or Czech diacritics.

My thought: be consistent but be prepared for people to think you are weird when you talk about Poland’s capital amongst English-speakers.

Question #3: why should I care about NA beer? NA beer to me is expensive fancy soda pop that is made in an unnecessarilily convoluted manner. I thought of that on Monday when Stan reported from the World Brewing Congress:

Today there will be three presentations related to making sure non-alcoholic beers are safe to drink. This is important and was already on my radar when I read “How Mash Gang is Breaking the Alcohol Free Mould.” That is not to imply that Mash Gang beers are not safe, or that the story should address what the company is doing to assure the beers are free of pathogens. It simply reflects my current fascination with what brewers might do to make non-alcoholic beer better without the many useful functions ethanol performs. One of those is making beer safer to drink.

My concerns: in addition to a swath of cheaper established competition, the idea that NA beer has not solved the sanitation issue is decidedly off-putting. And this may well explain in part last week’s omission. Plus it was a very bobby B.O.B.

Question #4: do you miss RSBS as much as I still do, all these years later?  Answer: well, we may have a form of this care of Boak and Bailey tinkering around at BlueSky. They have set up a list that allows you to follow all added on that list to effectively create a aggregator displaying those who sign up for those who follow. Have a look.

Question #5: do any of you not draw lines in the sand? I am 100% on board with Laura Hadland this week in The Drinks Business:

I have a personal blacklist of the companies I will not deal with because of their past actions. I don’t write about them, I don’t spend my money on them, I don’t visit them. This quiet boycott is a private affair. If I don’t agree with someone’s ethics, I don’t fan their flames. There are so many fantastic businesses out there that I do want to shout about, it’s rarely an issue. Last week, however, I was approached by a PR company offering me a spot on a very interesting project. I was feeling pretty excited as I scanned through the details. Until I spotted one of the toxic names from my blacklist. Deflated, I immediately replied to the email letting them know that I could not participate. I told them why too. That was that. It felt quite good for a minute.

My total concurrence: I won’t ruin the punchline but, again, go have a look.

Question #6: so if the CBHOF is using the Baseball Hall of Fame nomination process, will the “good character” rule also apply? That states:

Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.

So, given the recent years’ allegations of sexism, racism and a bunch of other serious -isms in craft beer… how will that be taken into account? See, working as I do in governance, I can assure you that there is always a set of process rules that run along side the substance rules in these things. You can have the greatest process in the world but they only affirm the substantive standards which have to be set out before any nominations are considered. Do we know what they are?

Question #7: does my national, regional and local construct for North American craft hold water? Jeff asked for more:

I think we should talk about local and regional, since you hinted at it and Stan picked it up but didn’t elaborate. I am hesitant to respond without understanding your fuller take.

My point: all those nice cans from the like of Sierra Nevada and Sam Adams fill grocery store and gas station shelf space where other distributed beers used to be found.  As I said, “basically I see that one of the tensions is framed by the economics of investment required for scale. Locals have done well. Turns out there was space for a few big grocery store national craft breweries but at the expense of those intercity / interstateers.” See, I think that the mob of ankle nipping locals can defend themselves from big craft in each market but regionals have found themselves, for a few years now, neither here nor there.

Question #8: Maybe related, is there any passing of a micro era brewery more shocking than the closing of Cambridge Brewing C0mpany which will serve its last beer on December 20th? The notice was on Instagram:

We were the first commercial brewery to produce a Belgian Style beer in this country and one of the first to embrace multiple yeast strains in-house and even to intentionally invite wild organisms into our brewery…. A heartfelt thank you to all who have participated in our dream. To our customers that have joined us time and again over the years, your support and friendship enabled our success. To all that are working or have worked here, you guys are what made this place so great. What an honor and a joy it has been to work alongside you! So please join us often over the next 4 months! We still have Patio Season, Festbier, Fall Menu and more coming. 35 years, one hell of a run. 

My thoughts: Perhaps it’s an east coast thing but I heard about CBC long before I had ever visited. Along with Shipyard and Gearys in Maine, it was a name I heard when I was a young beer fan in Nova Scotia, a name spoken with reverence by those coming back from the Boston states.  Then in 2013, we found ourselves right there and witnessed the making of pumpkin ale with the actual pumpkin harvest and made a bit of a photo montage over at FB.  Get over to CBC while you still can.

Question #9: What the heck is “hop preparedness” anyway?

Question #10: Has Ron out-Ronned himself with this dialogue? It’s a two-part play between father and son as they recall visiting Dad’s old home town:

“Marks and Woollies next door to each other and Boots over the road. Used to be typical of a UK high street.”
“But now they’re all gone. I’ve heard this story before.”
“They aren’t, though. Boots is still there and Marks has moved to by the old Warwicks brewery.”
“Loads of pub pictures coming up, I suppose.”
“There sure are, son. There sure are.”
“Don’t talk like John Wayne, Dad.”

My response to these things is always that Ron missed his calling as an author, getting sidetracked into a pub as he was at age twelve. Fabulous bit of writing.

Question #11: did you have any beer in Montreal? Yes, on Tuesday a cask brown ale at a funky fermented veg place called Poincaré and also a Mexican style lager at La Capital Tacos. Both were local beers but to be honest the food outshone them. Fish terrine at the first place before crossing St. Laurent to the other for Pastor tacos. We walk, we eat. We eat, we walk.

Last question, #12: why did it rain all Wednesday? We still saw the penguins and marched around town but I feel like moss is growing behind my ears. My nooks and crannies felt a certain alliance with the wild managed orchards of Cidrerie du Golfe in Brittany as featured in Pellicle this week which contained this excellent facts:

Their emphasis on nature is a way for them to preserve cider’s heritage, they say, strongly attached to rurality and peasantry. A tradition partially lost since the World Wars, when cider was relegated to second place in the region. “Soldiers were given red wine in the trenches while cider was distilled to be used in weaponry, it changed people’s habits,” Virginie says. “Before WWI, people in Rennes were drinking up to 400 litres per year!”

Used in weaponry! Heavens. Well, that’s it. Enough of this inquisition! I wrote half of this on an iPhone. So it is what it is and we all will simply have to live with that. Here are 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… with a top drawer effort this week. 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… until… Lew’s interview! 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.

*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 (+13=146) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (929) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (-2=4,464) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

The Mid-August 2024 “No, You’re The One Dreaming Of Sweater Weather” Beery News Notes

Great. Stan took this week off. And probably next week too. He may hover in my mind like the absentee desk editor like I mentioned a few weeks ago. But he also has a nickname, too: cheat sheet. Stan “The Cheat Sheet” Hieronymus. Yup. See, come Monday when I can’t think of anything to go look for in the world of beer to think about, I can go see what Stan has been thinking about first. He’s a bit like that nice smart left handed kid in grade 11 math class with really good posture that I sat one row back of and one seat over to the right. Gave me a good view. Made tests just a bit easier.

By the way, there is little beer related in that photo up there. Took the image Monday evening looking due south, down over central New York State. A pinhole sunset catching the anvil cloud from below. Right about in the middle of that horizon is Oswego, NY.  On still days in winter, you can see the plume rising from Nine Mile Point Nuclear. Also, home of Rudy’s. Where you can skip stones and drink Genny Cream Ale.

Did someone mention beer?  Starting hereabout, as we face almost 4,000 new beer retailers in these parts in a few weeks, Ontario’s public broadcaster TVO published a great piece by Matt Gurney about the shock of the new he has experienced in the last few years of deregulation of the provincial booze market, with a particular focus on that one odd rule that allows 7-Eleven to qualify as a restaurant:

Seeing someone drinking in a 7-Eleven or walking out of my local variety store with a bottle of wine will probably feel exactly the way seeing people openly smoking cannabis felt like for the first few years after legalization. I have a specific memory of standing at an intersection, waiting for a light so I could cross, and noticing two young men standing on the corner passing a joint back and forth. I thought to myself, huh, that’s unusually brazen. And then, seconds later, my brain caught up with reality: it would have been brazen a few years earlier, but that day, it was simply two law-abiding citizens engaging in a legal activity in public. 

On undoubtedly similar sorts of offerings, Doug Velky of Revolution Brewing in his newsletter Beer Crunchers, unpacks how craft has turned full circle with craft’s adoption of “cold” in the race to make light generic lagers:

…we also recognized that Cold Time, whose model focuses more on volume than margins, would require broader adoption than just our loyal Revolution customers to ever be considered a success. To achieve this greater scale, early investments would be crucial to get Cold Time into new places to find audiences who don’t currently think of themselves as craft beer fans, but are very open to a great, locally made lager.

Volume. Hmm. Disclosure. I’ve been buying Ice Cold Beer from Toronto’s Left Field Brewing for at least three years so there is no news here. But that branding had at least a level of self-parody in the mix along with the tasty within. Is that self-effacing sort of joke now all so… what… 2021? They may not be dipping as low as the macro-lags but aren’t they fighting for the Centro-Euro buyer‘s attention? Given how well “beer from anywhere you like” can sell, can we blame them?

Interesting bit of history over from Katy Prickett at Auntie Beeb this week on industrialization of England during the Roman Era, including brewing at scale:

“At Berryfields, we found evidence of malting and brewing and the tanks used to steep the grain before processing,” he said. “We tend to think of the Roman world as being very much a wine-loving place. “But actually a lot of the population in Roman Britain were drinking beer and we see that in the pottery they were using, large beakers in the same sort of sizes as modern pint glasses.”

Being someone who never gives a second thought for the Roman Empire, this was all news to me. I am told that Barryfield was located “at an intersection along a major routeway” and was “the location of multiple roadside industries, such as brewing, woodworking, and metalworking, aimed at supplying the travellers passing through.” Here, too, is an archaeological report on a neighbouring site complete with maltings and even malted spelt deposits along with some barley and even some apples and beets.*

In an exploration of more recent history and in light of far more recent racist events in the UK, David Jesudason published the story of a hopeful scene in late 1940s Wales as recoujnted by historian Kieran Connell, the story of an event that showed how working class people rejecting racist hostility are always as he says the vanguard of multiculturalism:

In 1948, the CIAC organised a black-tie event to celebrate Douglas’s success after he made 39 first-team appearances for the team, with the CIAC inviting white members of Cardiff Rugby Club. Announcements were placed in Tiger Bay shop windows and St Clair attended the night which was held ‘not at a dingy clubhouse’ but in the convention room of a city-centre hotel rented for the occasion. “He [St Clair] entered the hotel,” writes Kieran, “without any of the stares or comments that might ordinarily greet someone from an ethnic minority in central Cardiff. In the hotel lobby, he spotted five white girls and two black girls chatting with a group of four white boys. Further on, four or five boys of mixed ethnicity were trying to set up a large keg of beer.”

Table tennis? Bun fight? A bit of both? That’s the theme in an article by Ted Simmons in The Spirits Business about the dispute between the  American Craft Spirits Association (ACSA) on the one hand and, on the other, the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America (WSWA) over what is causing the great retraction. We join the debate half way in progress:

WSWA released a second statement [:]… “Blaming wholesalers for the industry’s challenges is shortsighted. The focus should instead be on how the entire supply chain, including wholesalers, can adapt to changing market conditions and support each other in navigating economic pressures,” it read…  ACSA cites a study that found that 87% of craft spirits drinkers want to legally purchase via DTC, and 82% of craft spirits drinkers support laws changing in order to expand DTC… The WSWA calls for an end to any finger pointing… 

Speaking of handbaggery, Ed had a posted about the redistribution of CAMRA branches which so far has not yet popped up into the general finger pointery zone but might be heading that way:

CAMRA currently has a plan to change its branch structure so no branch straddles CAMRA region or county boundaries. From what I can gather it’s a top down proposal from the National Executive… I’m a bottom up man so am dubious about the proposal. Though a devout member of our Mother Church I’m not very active in the branch, but it is the branch I’ve been in since I was a teenager so I would be sad to see it end. Our branch chairman has written a long reply detailing how the branch came to be and why its current structure works.

BREAKING: Ron + Uruguay: one, two, three, four plus one alarming admission: “I want a rest from being Mr. Beer“!!! Heavens. Jings even.

And Jessica Mason shared details on the losses left in the wake of the failure of one brewery, the unfortunately** named Anarchy Brew Co of Newcastle:

Following the pandemic, the business also reportedly fell into financial difficulties after being unable to pay back loans and financial obligations on top of rising supplier costs. Reports have outlined that the trouble began when directors of the company took out Covid support loans and used tax deferrals to manage finances. FRP Advisory has since put together estimates with a breakdown, showing the shortfall owed to creditors stands at approximately £492,413 and an additional £158,016 still being owed to HMRC. Many in the sector with debts currently unpaid by Anarchy are set to lose out with 22 businesses in the industry, including malt and hop suppliers, still being owed thousands of pounds. 

In the referenced reports, it is stated that unsecured creditors such as trade creditors, the landlord and loans and finance agreements are owed £261,468. Assets came in at about one-third of that fugure. What to take away from all that? Certainly the interconnectedness what with so many others dependent on the success of the brewery. Plus… would it have been a kindness had the pulg been pulled earlier?

Perhaps speaking of which but definitely for the double, makring the Molson Coors cutting of losses Doug Velky posted a neat and tidy summation of the recent string of ditchings of unwanted craft brands which has seen one firm… consortium (… collector… aggregator…) named Tilray picking up the pieces to perhaps slide up to fourth place in the contracting US craft brewer market:

For Molson Coors’ there’s no growth potential looking forward for these brands as each posted negative trends in 2023. The brands aren’t dead as nearly 200,000 BBLs across four regional breweries is nothing to sneeze at, but in order to reverse these trends it would take focus, vision, energy, and dollars. As a public company focused on growing shareholder value, cutting these brands and focusing on positive trending formulas is where they’ll head instead. We saw the same of Anheuser Busch who dumped more than half of their crafty brands to Tilray in 2023 and Constellation Brands who quickest to take their “L” in craft and move on when they cleaned house and sold off Ballast Point, Funky Buddah, and Four Corners.

Jeff asks some good questions and triggers good thoughts – but there seems to be an assumption that “local” and “regional” are similar constructs. I don’t think they are. By the way… does one now cheer in 2024 as much as one booed in 2016? Such a long time ago, isn’t it? Wasn’t it? My thought it that it all such a case of corporate deck chair shifting that it really no longer matters. Macro abandoning craft at the same time craft is seeking to mimic macro. Whoda thunk it? What an odd scene this is for so late in the play.

Headline for these times: “World Of Beer Has Filed For Bankruptcy, Here Are The Details.”

Interestingly and conversely, the government of Western Australia has created a ten-year economic development plan to boost the state’s craft beer industry:

The plan was put together by the state’s Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, the Independent Brewers Association (IBA), West Australia Brewers Association (WABA) and South West Brewers Association (SWBA). As part of the strategy, the four parties’ two main goals are increasing the volume and value of locally produced beer threefold by 2034 from a 2023 baseline and creating “greater vertical integration of the craft beer value chain” in the region. Over 120 craft breweries exist in Western Australia, representing 20% of total craft beer production in the country.

A ray of hope? A futile effort given the bigger picture? Who knows. Finally – and as a welcome night cap if you get my analogy – ever the optimist or at least open to the possibility, The Beer Nut gave credit where credit was due in his piece this week on a brewery that has turned its luck around:

There’s hope for us all, I like to think. Today’s beers aren’t the first to come from a brewery premises whose earliest wares I didn’t care for and thought poorly made, but under new management seem to have been turned around. Investment in better equipment? Less corner-cutting? Or just a more highly skilled brewer? I don’t know. I do know that the beers from the Hillstown brewery in Co. Antrim were usually a raft of off-flavours, of the homebrew rookie sort. It seems that there’s a new broom about the place now, going by the friendly and approachable name of Modest Beer.

PS: I like shameless. I can work with shameless.

Here are 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… with a top drawer effort this week. 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… until… Lew’s interview! 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.

*How do you say “ooh, look, my pee’s gone all pink” in Latin?
**Although perhaps not as unfortunate as Jolly this week.
***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 (+1=133) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (-1=929) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (plummeting a bunch to 4,466) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

The “We Are Only Now Actually Halfway Through Summer 2024 This Week” Beery News Notes

 

Midsummer. This week. It’s now been 48 days since the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox is still a whole 45 days away. Mid. Summer. I blame public education for the false impression. The months of harvest are really just getting in gear. Moved: school should only be held in the months which are not summer gardening months. Approved. And Pete‘s #1 beer is exactly right. Beer after garden or yard work. Except… beer during garden or yard work. Or after coming back from the hardware store, I suppose.

What’s up? First off, I know my people can be a dour lot but I have never heard of it being a selling point in the hospitality trade until now in Inverness:

Dog Falls Brewing Co has applied for change of use to convert the long-closed Semi-Chem chemists’ to a beer “taproom” selling its product and other selected beers – but without music or entertainment. The brewery through planning agents Davidson Baxter Partnership Ltd, say in a supporting document to Highland Council: “The concept revolves around experiencing fresh beer from Dog Falls and selected other breweries in a setting where locals and visitors can talk, laugh, and interact with each other rather than being distracted by loud music or entertainment.” Dog Fall proprietor Bob Masson explained the concept further saying: “We want to encourage a convivial atmosphere among the customers without the entertainment add-on…

Got that? No need to repeat the point again. No entertainment. None. Nada. Don’t be looking to be entertained at this place. No way. Don’t. Not apparently related at all, I have never really needed twenty-four drinking each day in my life. Once forty years ago I got hammered starting at 4:30 am but that is only because I was a campus police officer at my small college and I arrested a guy breaking into cars at 3:30 am. After the fist fight in the wee hours and after handing the over to the actual cops, me nerves were a bit shot. So when I was offered unending tequila sunrises by my pal Bruce who was also technically my managing supervisor at that moment, I took up the opportunity.  Anyway, all that is to say, by way of intro, that the entire City of Montreal is now acting like my pal Bruce and is offering drinks around the clock for interesting reasons – and the BBC took notice:

Montreal will become the first city in Canada to allow 24-hour drinking. In Toronto venues have to close by 2am, and it is 3am in Vancouver. In the US, Las Vegas and New Orleans have long allowed bars and clubs to stay open all night. While in New York the cut off time is 4am, and in Los Angeles it is 2am. On the other side of the Atlantic, pubs in London still typically close at 11pm… Ms Alneus agrees. She says the fact that so many bars and clubs all currently close at 3am presents problems for the police. She believes by allowing 24-hour drinking, those venues that don’t wish to stay open all night will be able to close at different times across the night.

I will be over there in a few weeks but I am pretty sure I won’t be checking out that scene.  Yet a few hours after the party ends, in the UK for some on the move it starts up:

“Whether it’s 3am, 6am or 5pm, we all know that having a pre-holiday beer is a true British tradition. “Most of the time it’s a Fosters or a Carling and we all know they don’t exactly hit the spot. So, we decided to work with a local brewery and create the ultimate breakfast beer – the first of your holidays that matches perfectly with breaky.” Further findings from the research also revealed that a large majority of Brits (72%) believed a beer pre-10am is a “must” on our holidays.

Really? Honestly, I though it was just Ron. He’s been on the road in South America, as mentioned a couple of weeks ago, but he has finally gotten around to sharing the deets as well as the breakfast buffet experiences not to mention the glimpses into family life on holidays:

It’s quite chilly inside. Feeling a little cold, I put my coat back on. And notice no-one else has taken theirs off. They aren’t great on indoor heating here in Santiago. There’s a TV showing non-stop heavy metal videos… “Would you like to climb Mount Fuji, Dad?” Alexei asks. “No.” “Why not?” “For obvious fucking reasons. Like age and not wanting to die on a fucking mountain.” “If you weren’t old and scared, wouldn’t you want to climb it?” “No. I probably wouldn’t be able to breathe at the top of it.” “Well, apart from that?” “Just leave it.” After our first drink, it’s time for food.

In opposition to both Montreal and Ron, TDB reports that India is continuing its tightening of the prohibitions against liquor advertising after it became clear that there were efforts to circumvent the ban which already “outlaws direct advertising” by adding laws against “surrogate commercials and the sponsoring of events…” Examples:

Carlsberg would no longer be permitted to promotes its Tuborg drinking water in India by showing film stars at a rooftop party using the slogan “Tilt Your World”, which echoes its beer commercials. Nor would Diageo’s YouTube ad for its non-alcoholic Black & White ginger ale [which] features the iconic black-and-white terriers used to promote the scotch whisky brand of the same name.

Speaking of things that make you go “…hmmm…“, Jeff did some interesting data collection this week which has raise questions about some other data collection:

I found many of the breweries were no longer around. It wasn’t a marginal number. Despite the ambiguities in identifying what a brewery is, the number I ended up with was about 30% less than the Brewers Association’s official tally. For a number of reasons, this may be higher in Oregon than elsewhere: we have a more mature market, which means a lot more breweries have taprooms, which confounds things, and we also have more breweries closing because competition is so fierce. Nevertheless, it seems almost certain that the number of breweries in the US is thousands fewer than the regularly-cited figure of 10,000.

Which leads one to ask, of course, if that number is that wobbly – what else is? I mean, it’s not like any of this stuff is peer reviewed and footnoted.

Displaying far more solidity, The  Guardian had a pretty good interview with ‘Spoon owner, Tim Martin, who shared some interesting information about his approach to business including this early decision:

He wanted to be a barrister and studied law at Nottingham University, but was paralysed by a fear of public speaking. “I went to my first law of contract lecture and the professor started asking questions, so I didn’t go back. It made me very nervous. It sounds pathetic but you can get these little phobias.” The solution, it turned out, was getting into the pub trade, which he did in 1979 with the opening of Martin’s Free House. The JD Wetherspoon name came later, a mashup of JD Hogg, a character in The Dukes of Hazzard, and Wetherspoon, the name of a teacher who did not think much of  him.

And Jessica Mason has taken a cheeky approach to a piece which at the outset appeared to be about the place of fruity hazy IPAs in your fridge this summer as illustrated by one brand’s offering of something that is “effortlessly drinkable with a fresh watermelon taste and a pink haze” – and then is smartly turned on its head with the help of a couple of colleagues:

Tierney-Jones explained: “There’s a market for them and beer should have an element of fun but personally I tend to regard them as baby food for adults, the infantilisation of a great and noble beverage, it’d be a bit like a great wine producing chateau around Bordeaux adding mangoes or preserved lemons to their vintages.” Author and beer writer Pete Brown added: “I talk to so many brewers who say they brew hazy, fruity beers because that’s what the market wants. Then I look at the total share that hazy, fruity beers have in the market and think….’really? Looks to me like they want Guinness and ‘Spanish’ lager’.”

Brutal. Speaking of honest truths, Martyn has a book he wants you to buy and, as always, I was most obedient to the call. It sounds a bit like a reverse engineering of that earlier Jacksonian idea of classics:

There are certain classical examples within each group, and some of these have given rise to generally-accepted styles, whether regional or international. If a brewer specifically has the intention of reproducing a classical beer, then he is working within a style.

I say a reversal as Martyn is taking each of these eighty beers and expanding on their inherent implications – and not without peril as he explains:

One big problem with writing a book about beer with one foot firmly in the present is that the present is constantly changing. After I submitted the manuscript, it was announced that the Anchor brewery in San Francisco was shutting down. I hesitated for some time over whether to take the chapter on steam beer out, decided it was too interesting a style to ignore, and was saved by the announcement that the brewery had – at the time of writing – found a buyer. Similarly the chapter on Gale’s Prize Old Ale had to be rewritten twice, first after the closure of the Dark Star brewery, where POA was revived, and then after the closure of the Meantime brewery, where the brewing of POA was transferred. 

Speaking of wordcraft – and for the double – Jeff wrote about a subject that never has left me with much satisfaction – authenticity. What is that you say? He summarizes: “Authenticity is a self-referential quality. We associate ourselves with products that have the social currency of authenticity because it reflects well on us. We become authentic when we consume the right products.” It has always seem circular like that to me. A vessel of an adjective into which pretty much anything  can be placed. And Stan provide some more context particular to one beer related point:

In 2003, Holt and Cameron created a commercial that features a character they called The Tinkerer, who finds an old bicycle at a garage sale, carefully restores it, and then happily rides it into the Colorado countryside.  They outline their strategy for New Belgium in a chapter called “Fat Tire: Crossing the Cultural Chasm” within their book, “Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands”… The word authentic comes up in most chapters, but usually as a given and without a definition of what it means to be authentic. What is clear is how important whatever they label authenticity is to those focused on marketing.

This has not been my sneaking suspicion so much as my clear understanding for years. I think we three are all on the same page so we can be honest. The call to generic authenticity is a useful call to nothingness, a warming abstraction which is is nothing more than a vacant space for marketeers. The sibling of “effortlessly drinkable” when you think about it. This is where we are. Craft beer has long abandoned the firmer footholds of traditional techniques and smaller scale* – but will current welcome interest in Czech lager and perhaps a building upwards blip in English cask now act as a counterweight to the mess big craft has made of itself?  If so, isn’t there a better word then authenticity? Perhaps credible. A credible rendition of something is a simple direct take – in the X=Y sense – without adding any intermediate generic analytical steps. I’d much rather have a credible take on a Světlý Ležák than an authentic one. Must now consider the other applications for the word in the beer world.

Finally, Matthew has written a personal essay about the pubs of his hometown of Lincoln and how his parents’ divorce when we was a teen affected his relationship them. To do that, he visits his Mum to spend a day about town:

The day starts off well. Mum has a hairdresser’s appointment on the other side of town and has offered me a lift. This means I have to leave early, burdening me with an extra hour to kill before the pubs open. No matter, I thought, this would give me a rare opportunity to play tourist in my birthplace. Mum, however, is running late, so puts her foot down. She banks hard down a side street, hitting 40 in a 20 zone. I grip my seat, before reassuring myself that she has spent her entire life driving on these roads, and probably knows them better than anyone. She drops me off close to my first stop and reminds me I need to be home before 7pm. It’s her choir practice this evening and she wants to make sure I’m back in time for tea.

We’ll have to tune in next week to find out if he made it back in time for tea. See, he ends the story in the last pub. I just hope his Mum wasn’t late for choir practice.

Enough! Here are 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… with a top drawer effort this week. 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… until… Lew’s interview! 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.

*A movement perhaps so spent that there’s only one move left – a Hall of Fame for the same approved names to give themselves a good old pat on the back! Will the nominating committee weigh each candidates downsides along with the PR pluses? Will “Sex for Sam” be to this HOF be what the steriod era is to another?  If not, what is the committee doing? Something authentic perhaps.
**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 (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,483) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

A Most Thoroughly August Edition Of Your Beery News Notes

What can you say about August that we each haven’t thought in our hearts of hearts? We are now well into the downside of the year, four months and three weeks and a bit until Christmas. It’s always struck me as odd that the first half of the year has seven months while the second only has five. August. Hmm. Plus it all gets a bit endtimesy around now. The garden gets weedy and a bit tired in the corners. We even got forest fire smoke from Pennsylvania this week, for God’s sake! Looks!! Good thing there’s all those fit folk at the Olympics in Paris, over there throwing themselves against the track, against the ball, against ocean waves and against each others fists to give us all at home cheering on the sofa an endorphin boost. Speaking of the Olympics, how’s the beer?

Anyone who was planning on heading over to Paris for the 2024 Olympics and expected to be having a boozy jaunt in a stadium is going to be sorely disappointed. Almost everyone who has got tickets to see bits of the 2024 Olympics will not be allowed to buy alcohol at the venues where the sporting competitions are taking place… if you must drink beer inside the venues then you’ll have to stick with the non-alcoholic stuff. For half a litre of non-alcoholic beer you’ll need to be spending €8 (£6.74), while if you want a 400ml drink of zero alcohol beer with some lemon juice in it that’ll cost €6 (£5.05).

Whhhaaaaat?!?!? Really? I’d be tempted to get me a robot but I suppose that makes sense in the keeping the eye on the ball sense for spectators but, more importantly, what is the point of cutting NA beer with juice? Don’t worry, however, as the rich in catered VIP zones will be able to drink… because… France… or the Olympics… or…

Same as it ever was? Things go around and around. Consider this piece from Jessica Mason in TDB on salting your beer:

According to the reports via Parade, the trendsetters claimed that “adding a bit of salt to your inexpensive brew will enhance the flavour” and described how “some people add salt to certain beers, like sours or IPAs, to enhance the fruity notes and reduce the bitterness” and suggested that “for those ‘cheaper’ beers, it’s supposed to make the brew taste a bit more highbrow”. The report emphasised how “Texans take beer salt so seriously” and said that drinkers were “likely to find lots of flavoured beer salt options when you want to crack open a cold one”.

Taverns when I was a lad in Halifax, Nova Scotia in the 1980s had shakers of salt on the tables. It was an old guy thing even back then, used by the hard cases in the back corners, but soon a little rattle of the shaker was a habit at the Seahorse or the Lower Deck when the unpasturized generic draft was a little off. Definitely done at the Midtown.

More information has been released on experimentation with the hotest new brewing grain in town, fonio. Interesting news even if this was a rather silly statement from Carlsberg director of brewing science and technology Zoran Gojkovic apparently (but I hope incorrectly) recalling a past discussion with Garrett Oliver:

“The internet says it is millet, but there are lots of millet grains and this one comes from Africa. But, back then, I misunderstood was what it really was all about. If someone tells you something is beef, but really it is like a variety, like wagyu steak, then it can be more easily understood. What I didn’t know was that fonio, compared to other kinds of millet, is like the wagyu steak of grains. Millet, as a cereal could be quite boring, but this in its pure formula is not boring. It is elegant.”

I’m more comfortable with it being the warp drive of millets – but only because that is obviously even more silly. Or is it the warp drives of wagyu? Or the wagyu of warp? That’s the fonio beer name I want to see: Wagyu of Warp!

And, speaking of silly, we have yet another study that resulted from the study of studies that studied booze and, again, it has been determined that there has been a lack of studiouness about that J-Curve fibbery:

…a new analysis challenges the thinking and blames the rosy message on flawed research that compares drinkers with people who are sick and sober. Scientists in Canada delved into 107 published studies on people’s drinking habits and how long they lived. In most cases, they found that drinkers were compared with people who abstained or consumed very little alcohol, without taking into account that some had cut down or quit through ill health. The finding means that amid the abstainers and occasional drinkers are a significant number of sick people, bringing the group’s average health down, and making light to moderate drinkers look better off in comparison.

I mentioned how dodgy the concept was at least as far back in 2018 but this newer focus on the problem of including “people who had stopped or cut down their drinking for health reasons in the comparison group” is critical. Note: not drinking because you are sick is different that being sick due to not drinking.

Note too: “golloping beer with zest” was a thing. Gary explains.

In Pellicle, David Jesuason wrote about one of the the tougher aspects, the mental health implications, that can go along with setting out to run a small brewery. This is how he set the scene at McColl’s Brewery of Evenwood, County Durham before help arrived:

“I came here thinking all I have to do is 150 casks a week and it didn’t happen,” Danny says. “Because I did it [before] I thought I was capable of doing it and not even knowing it was the wrong [thing to do] as well.” Danny’s mental health suffered because there was no long-term strategy, just day-to-day drudgery. Graft instead of focus. “I couldn’t make good decisions,” he tells me. He was running the entire operation by himself: brewing, selling and even delivering the beer to customers. It was far too much to take on, his mental health suffered and Gemma, his wife, became worried about him having suffered from depression herself.

That piece reminded me of the life of a farmer, alone with their business subject to the whims of nature and the trade. Should brewing trade associations provide mental health support programs similar to those being set up for agriculture?

Also on the ag beat, Stan has given us something to chew on with his July 2024 edition of Hop Queries, Vol. 8, No. 3 for those who are trying to collect a full set. He mentions that harvest time has begun, triggering images of golden light on hedgerow graced horse plowed scenes, perhaps mixing with Beethoven’s 6th wafting quietly in from somewhere… then – WHAMMO – the invasion of the lab-coated eggheads begins:

Scientists at Sapporo in Japan used headband sensors to measure the brainwaves of participants… The subjects reported feeling relaxed by the aromas of linalool and geraniol because they provided floral and green impressions… An increasing tendency in the rhythm regularities of the frequency fluctuations of the right frontal alpha-waves while drinking a European pilsner-type beer with aromas characterized by hops. 

HEADBAND SENSORS!!! And, for the double, Stan pointed to this number crunching post from Phil Cook on Monday but (even though I may risk breaking an unwritten weekly updating rule) I want to unpack this point in more detail – one key difference between Australian and other beer judging events:

Because there’s a list of every beer entered, not just those that win medals, we can calculate some ‘batting averages’ to better compare how each brewery fared. So, I’ve worked out each entrant’s medal percentage (MPC: how many of their beers won a medal, of any kind) and their points per entry (PPE: adding 3 for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze, then dividing by number of entries submitted). Bigger numbers are better in both cases; overall about 74% of beers entered earned a medal,2 and if your PPE was 1.00 or higher your brewery was in the top half of the competition. 

This would be a huge step towards making the results of these events more meaningful that those of the moveable buffet of the international circle of they who judge. Being able to figure out brewery top rankings as well as those surprising disappointments would be a great benefit to consumers. But who in beer puts the buyer first?

Perhaps connected, Jeff shared his thoughts on the financial perils of being a freelancer writing about the brewing trade without separate income:

Writing is a terrible way to make a living. It’s why people end up going into marketing. You could spend your days scrambling after $600 articles, or you could get a job for $60k with benefits. This is why we bleed great writers, who take their services to companies who will pay what their work is worth. It’s not just that the money’s bad—it’s also hard to get. If you could somehow stack up your articles and get a couple in every week, you could make a decent living, maybe fifty, sixty grand a year before taxes… Trying to pitch stories, and then research, report, and write a hundred of them in a year? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but again, you’d be barely making more than working at McDonald’s if you somehow enjoyed that level of “success,” which perhaps 2-3% of working freelancers enjoy.

The best line was near the end: “If you have any other choice, don’t write.” What he means (of course… or rather I hope!) is don’t write for money but this isn’t news.* Still… write. Writing a free, joyful and easy experience of expression. Scribble, jot, draft, forget and rediscover – and, yes, even submit. Just don’t think you’re going to be buying the kiddies shoes with the income.

Joyful, too, is Dave “Still No Relation” Bailey’s cartooning, also in Pellicle, which this month explored the notion of perfection.  And if you want an example of writing for joy, ATJ has been working on one particular theme quite a bit over at his Substack, that being ATJ sitting in a pub and looking at the details of the scene around him. Second or third time I read one of his I thought “hmm…now, that sounds familiar” BUT as this week’s edition testifies its his process being worked out before our eyes:

My eye was caught by a faded photo of the pub, sometime before World War I. Outside it, there stood a line of long dead regulars, mainly men, standing still, a couple smiling, the rest sombre and holding themselves stiffly as if on parade, which several years later many of them would be, ready to march off to war. A long ago day, the sun shining maybe, though given the quality of the photo it was hard to say. Bowler hats, cloth caps, none of them bareheaded for that was not how they presented themselves to the world then. I’d like to think that once the photographer finished, off the men went into the pub, glasses of ale and cider purchased and amid the hubbub there would have been little time for reflection.

Sharp stuff. And it sure beats the sort of cash-focused writing that has recently given us such gems as “deepest echelons of the industry” and “with demand being high, the category has continued to thrive, despite the sector struggling” and the astoundingly poorly thought out alleged expression of expertise “Liquids within the same ‘competitive set’ are not distinctive from one another as liquids.” Bring on the robots of A.I.! Viva Robots!!

No, I didn’t mean that. There are no robots of joy. It’s actually all around us already now if you look for joy. We see it in a long wandering piece about wandering at length. And we also see it at home as when Rachel Hendry in her emailed newsletter J’Adore Le Plonk shared some thoughts on the role and value of the leftover bottle of wine there in the kitchen that was opened a few days ago… and may have lost whatever finesse it had:

Service work should neither be seen nor paid, tends to be the general consensus and when my wine joins me in a position of domestic work I attach the same framework to it. Why add this beautiful, evocative glass of wine to my dish when I can reach for something leftover, or looked down on, fuck it, why not just add water instead? The recipe provides a role for a wine that is past its best, that may otherwise be retired down the drain and into the bin. It doesn’t, however, mean the wine isn’t important. Wine has many roles in our lives and contributor in the kitchen can be one of them. As I work through my hesitation and add a splash of my wine to the courgettes slowly melting into butter I notice I have not lost anything in the process. The wine is still mine to enjoy, I have placed value on an ingredient as I would like to be valued myself and the meal tastes better for it.

And I should have mentioned that Katie wrote a few weeks ago about trying Italian wines with any sorts of unexpected flavours to see what works for you. My tip? Chianti with roast turkey. It can have a swell cranberry vibe going on. Try a turkey and blue cheese sandwich with slices of pear and a cold glass of Chianti. Could sound weird but it works. Not this weird, mind you, but there that gets a lot going on.

That is it. Enough! Here are 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… with a top drawer effort this week. 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… until… Lew’s interview! 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.

*My full sympathies (though I might have used the phrase “good writers” to convey a sense of realism.) I wrote this in an email to Max, now eleven years ago: “It is tough. There is no money in beer writing so if that is all you have to go on… I have met with pro writers over beer and always find them bagged out and drained from the nights of PR work in pubs to keep the wolf from the door. I complained once somewhere about how craft brewers should be supporting good beer writers directly without expectation of return and this was met with howls – even from writers. Earn your way as a freelancer, said the freelancers. Suck it up and take the junkets, said those on the junkets.” Is that the macho forehead + wall thinking part of the freelancing problem?
**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 (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,483) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.