Alan – Page 3 – A Good Beer Blog

As The Madcap Slide Into Yuletide Speeds Up Here’s This Week’s Beery News

I am already late. I think that is what Yule really means: “you are late!” I need to still get a few things together… very few… but I already feel rushed. Perhaps this is how “We Three Kings” felt galloping across the Middle East and it’s all part of the lessons of the season. Fretting. I dunno. I need a few of these Caribbean Christmas drinks. No wonder people take winter vacations. To make up for the Christmas vacation. Not as rushed as the holiday-time photo contest kept me a decade ago. That’s the winner from 2012 up there by Robert Gale, one of 36 photo entries I posted on just one day in that long contest period. That was a lot of fun – but nuts, too.

First up, Stan is back and posted his linkfest on Monday after a month on the hollyjollydays – and he noticed something:

Has it really been four weeks since I posted links here? Indeed, and it seems as if it would be easy to sort through the headlines since Nov. 6 and assemble a post of only stories about the craft beer apocalypse. I am left searching for a phrase that is the opposite of “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Perhaps “Five Feet And Rising“? Just to, you know, keep up with an aquatic theme? Stan explores some of the reasons for the craft beer predicament so go have a look. Even though the exploration and examination of a downturn is valuable and in craft almost fully ignored… I know the feeling but have promised myself to be cheerier this week. I will. It is the holidays or perhaps just the pre-holidays after all. Let’s see if that’s possible.

But first… Jordan has been worked a few paper rolls through the adding machine and come up with for Ontario what can only be called findings:

Will update the map later, but it looks to me like we’re down from 413 physically operated brewery locations to 389 so far this year. There are some ownership situations I don’t know how to express simply in geographic format. Assume that number is high… If you condense ownership structures, we can reduce 67 locations to 27 companies. So… 349 companies total.

Maybe related: low alcohol partying and no alcohol bars? Apparently Sam Smiths is also running no alcohol bars, given that “as many as 120 Smith’s pubs are currently closed“! That’s what’s said in that article in The Times about the Samuel Smith’s of Yorkshire. Not so much about the brewery as the man running the operation. This was a brutal passage:

Back in the 1990s Samuel Smith’s bought and began pouring millions of pounds into restoring the town’s derelict Old Vicarage, which dates back to the 14th century. Great care was taken to go above and beyond rules stipulated by English Heritage… When the eight-year project was complete, the vicar at the nearby St Mary’s Church was informed that her new house was ready. The offer came like a bolt from the heavens. St Mary’s vicar already had a home — one she liked and better suited the needs of her young family. After the invitation was politely declined, the lavishly restored building was locked up.

Enough. It’s the holidays. Here’s some good news. The BBC reports that Welsh brewery Brains has turned its fortunes around… literally… or is it figuratively…:

The company had debts of £76.4m, most of which had accumulated before the pandemic. Mr Bridge worked with a number of banks to restructure and agree repayment of all of the debt, with the chief executive finally feeling confident about the company’s financial health by the summer of 2023. “We’ve managed to navigate those challenging times. And it wasn’t just us, it was the whole drinks and hospitality industry that went through those challenges,” Mr Bridge said. Brains is more than beer in Wales. Having been brewing in Cardiff since 1882, the company is still owned by the descendants of Samuel Arthur Brain.

More with the cheery. What is cheery? History is cheery! And international. Heck, we received a comment in German this week, a footnote to my bit on the Lispenard clan, 1700s Loyalist beer barons in New York. Lord Goog provided the translation. Speaking of lore of yore, the Beer Ladies Podcast had a great interview this week with Dr Susan Flavin, a historian joined in a project recreating a 1500s brewery:

In this fascinating project – link below – the team used a recipe based on a beer once served in Dublin Castle, in order to not only taste it, but to learn more about the role beer played in the early modern period. This one will tickle the beer history nerds and casual beer fans alike!

In more recent history, Boak and Bailey have a great explainer this week on the pub feature called a “snob screen” as helpfully illustrated in the 1963 comedy The Punch & Judy Man where they are used as part of a physical joke:

Hancock, who co-wrote the film as well as starring in it, uses these as the basis for a bit of ‘business’ which, handily, you can see some of in the trailer for the film. He pops in and out of the various windows, taunting and teasing the snobs behind the snob screen. In other words, he refuses to respect (literal) social barriers, and highlights their purely symbolic nature. After all, he and his pals can hear almost every word that is being said a few inches from them, on the other side of the screen. What is slightly odd is that most surviving examples of tilting or swivelling snob screens are there to separate customers from bar staff, rather than from each other.

Neato. And a couple of decades later, the BBC took us back to a Belfast board game of forty years ago and posed the question whther it was glorifying or just identifying actual pub culture:

1981: Scene Around Six explored a Belfast pub crawl board game, named Binge. Controversial enough that many shops refused to stock it, it did at least have the backing of a certain local mover and shaker, Mr Terri Hooley.

And another bit of history. In the same week that it is reported that Diageo is ditching most of its beer brands*, a landmark in craft brewing history is being lost with the closure of the Ringwood Brewery in Hampshire, England after fifteen years in someone else’s portfolio.

In 2007, Ringwood was purchased by Marston’s for £19.2 million. Marston’s disposed of its brewing operations in 2020, selling assets to a joint venture with the Carlsberg Group to create the Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company. Mr Davies mentioned that he is “incredibly proud” of the effort and dedication of staff at Ringwood Brewery, adding: “Our priority now is to support colleagues affected by the proposals through the consultation period, which has now begun.”

You know, the official hagiography of craft beer does not properly account for the importance of the Ringwood Brewery which came into being in 1978 led by Peter Austin. As Boak and Bailey discuss in Brew Britannia as well as in their thoughtful obituary for him of almost a decade ago, Austin was one of the few people who could legitimately be called a founder:

His first triumph was building and getting established the Penrhos Brewery on behalf of Martin Griffiths, Terry ‘Python’ Jones and writer Richard Boston. He then launched his own brewery, Ringwood, in 1978, and thereafter came to be the ‘go to’ guy for advice on setting up similar operations. When David Bruce was setting up his first Firkin brewpub in 1979, it was Austin who vetted his designs for a miniature basement brewkit. The two were both founder members of SIBA, which then stood for The Small Independent Brewers Association, and Austin was its first Chair.

Austin also consulted, with Alan Pugsley, brewing bringing his energy into the new brewing movement in North America. I’ve had beers in breweries in Nova Scotia, Maine, New York and Ontario directly carrying on that tradition. The shutting of the Ringwood is the end of an era.

The big news in the world of Pellicle is that I WON the November fitba pool (even though I am wallowing in the nether ranks.) It which was a great surprise that earned me a mug. Oh… yes, and Will Hawkes wrote something well worth reading for Pellicle about London’s pub group Grace Land and the co-owners Andreas Akerlund and Anselm Chatwin:

They met when Anselm took a job as a bar back at Two Floors, Barworks’ bar in Soho, whilst he was at St Martin’s College (now Central St Martins) in the early 2000s. Temperamentally similar and with a shared passion for music, they cooked up a vague plan to open a dive bar/gig venue—and when a site, formerly The Camden Tup, came on the market in 2009 they opened the first Grace Land venue, The Black Heart. It wasn’t an immediate success. “The Black Heart was a dismal failure for many years,” he says. “But it’s about working with the concept, sticking with it. People get it now.” That philosophy has served them well in the years since, during which they’ve slowly accrued a small family of high-quality pubs…

Note: The English are coming back down to pre-Covid levels of alcohol consumption. Is inflation healthy? Hmm… and while we are at it… next time someone suggests that terrior in wine isn’t real, mention this study as reported in The New York Times:

“It’s one of those terms that the wine industry likes to keep a bit mysterious, part of the magic of wine,” said Alex Pouget, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Geneva. Dr. Pouget is trying to apply chemical precision to this je ne sais quoi. In a study published Tuesday in the journal Communications Chemistry, he and his colleagues described a computer model that could pinpoint which Bordeaux estate produced a wine based only on its chemical makeup. The model also predicted the year in which the wine was made, known as its vintage, with about 50 percent accuracy.

That’s some science right there, that is. Continuing with questions of authenticity, again we go with The Times out of London which had an interesting article on tea and chai this week with some very interesting assertions about appropriation and the nature of foodways:

You can culturally appropriate badly, or you can culturally appropriate well, but almost all culture involves appropriation. While Indians have been adding spices to milky beverages for centuries, the spiced tea that is fashionable in American and British coffee shops, and is sometimes marketed as an exotic drink, is no more purely Indian than, say, chillis (which originally came from Central/South America). Indeed, chai is the result of the British imperial push to get Indians to consume tea.

Note: Lars wrote about complexes of closely located language families. Nicely done. Also nicely done, Geoff wrote about Ethiopian borde over on Mastodon, a very complex form of beer making.

I think I first had Jack’s Abbey lager with Ron and Craig in Albany New York back in March 2016. I recall hitting a store on the way back from Delmar. Ah, Delmar! Anyway, Jeff has done an admirable job remembering what he wrote down during his recent visit… before he lost his notes from that visit… including, to begin, its location:

The city proper is small and compact, but the metro area, or Greater Boston, includes around a hundred small towns clustered in the fan stretching out from Boston Harbor. Two radial freeways, I-95 and I-495, mark important distance metrics. Anything inside I-95 is pretty Boston-y, while anything within the larger I-495 ring is Greater Boston. Framingham, home to Jack’s Abby, is 20 miles due west of downtown Boston and about halfway between 95 and 495.

Note: Zak Rotello of the Olympic Tavern of Rockford, Illinois alerted us to this situation: 1, 2, 3, 4. Govern yourselves accordingly.

Nice piece in Cider Review this week on the state of the tiny German perry trade and its advocate in chief, Barry Masterson:

As anyone who follows Barry will know, there are a good number of pear trees in his home region around Schefflenz. He’s previously reported its former significance in Bavaria and until relatively recently it was a central cultural tenet of rural life in the Western Palatinate, a little way west of Barry, near the Rhine and around much of German wine country. But today there’s vanishingly little to be had commercially, and if I didn’t have a direct line to Barry, Lord alone knows how I’d have found anything out about it for the book.

And finally in one of the weirdest craft fibby claims yet, the fact checkers and desk editors of Forbes seems to have taken coffee break when this one crossed by their inboxes:

Recently the Cicerone Certification Program announced that six people had achieved the rank of Master Cicerone. There are now a total of 28 Master Cicerones worldwide. A Master Cicerone is similar to a Master Sommelier in the wine world but the focus is less on service/hospitality and more on general beer knowledge. The exam is frequently billed as one of the hardest tests not just in beer, but in the world.

FFS. Is there any bloatification that craft can’t claim? Safe to say that gaining the certificate does not require passing one of the hardest tests in the world. There are, after all, brain surgeons not to mention standard shift drivers licenses. Not being a peer reviewed academic course, however, allows for this sort of thing to float around.

Fin. We are done. I know I’m done. Remember, ye who read this far down to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (94) rising up to maybe pass Mastodon (907) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,426) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (162), with 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. All in all I still am rooting for the voices on the elephantine Mastodon (even if BlueSky is catching up in the race to replace.) And even though it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing or perhaps only waiting to discuss beer:

Anyone else? Anywhere else? Yes, you also gotta check the blogs, podcasts (really? barely!) and even newsletters to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays when he is not SLACKING OFF! Look at me – I forgot to link to Lew’s podcast. Fixed. 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 much less occassional but always 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. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

*Or not… as a web-publication called Just Drinks has asserted that Diageo does not plan to offload beer assets – apparently based on this peak of investigative reporting: a “company spokesperson said: ‘We do not comment on market speculation.’“

The Uncertainty Abounds As Yuletide Looms Edition Of The Beery News Notes

That’s that. Eleven months in the books. Tomorrow? The true Yuletide madness really begins. But before we get all holly jolly, the news in brews this week has not be uplifting. I was surprised last week how much positivity there was. As you will see below, this has not lingered if my reading is to be believed. Except if the British Guild of Beer Writers is to be believed as many of the awards presented last evening were won by familiar friends around these environs: David Jesudason for the treble including best book for sure but also Jessica Mason for business writing as well as Emmie Harrison-West including for communications about diversity and Eoghan Walsh for best self-published plus audio comms as illustrated. I knew them when. Err… read them when. All well deserved. And perhaps better than a silver cup… big congrats to Ruvani de Silva who got her story of the rise of foamy beer published in the lofty pages of the Washington Post:

Foamy beer is a centuries-old European tradition, but in the American market the phenomenon has spread from a nerdy niche to a veritable tidal wave of foam-focused pours across the United States. Increasingly curious drinkers have put bad memories of sticking their fingers into Solo cups at college keg parties behind them and are seeking out the perfect pour, where the presence of beer foam enhances their drinking experience — aided by the arrival of Czech Lukr “side-pour” taps and a new interest in British-style cask engines.

That’s writing for real Bezos bucks, folks. Sweet. Now, remember those successes as we now get back down into the weekly grind. Starting with a question asked by the Morning Advertiser: where have all the pub guides gone… including one published previously by the UK‘s AA Limited, trading as The AA (formerly The Automobile Association)… the people with that nice mod yellow and black logo:

Before you shout “it’s all online now” – it isn’t. People think the AA do everything online but it still produces a book. It’s called The Restaurant Guide and the strapline is written by Janson Atherton, the Michelin-starred chef. So goodbye printed pub guide and hello Michelin man… restaurants ahead of pubs apparently.

The article somewhat confusingly traces the end of the Good Pub Guide which went from being an actual book to an online publication in 2009 and then ceased being updated there in 2021. They also note the loss of the Eating Out in Pubs book which Michelin had put out. Was that one last seen in 2018? Mudgie asks reasonably “is there a decline in the number of people interested in seeking out unfamiliar pubs?” while Matthew noted “I literally had a guide book about pubs published a month a go” as well as:

It also misses the point that the publishing industry has been decimated by both access to free stuff online and inflation making producing high quality print very expensive. This is the toughest I’ve ever known it as a freelancer, I don’t have enough work.

My only quibble is the comment on “free stuff” given paid online came and continues to come from bloggers (even those hiding in those difficult to access newsletters) some of whom decided to get into books and mags starting around 2010-12 and then a few of whom proclaimed themselves “beer experts”, a handful of whom actually are… in specific areas of expertise. We remember that access to audience does not necessarily denote quality in such matters. Consider this sort of made-up cleverness that is less than convincing. We remember too that audience is also no guarantee to reward. Consider now Pete‘s honest sharing this week of the realities of even someone who has voice a voice and topics as well as he has. So the reality is there has only been a living for a few in this area of scribbling. For many it is largely augmented by other income. Most do it for something between love and an itch. What, then, is the “free stuff” in this context I ask… with every sympathy. I do think about that when I read the names of all those shortlisted for last night’s awards.

To make matters even worse, to Matthew’s list I might have also added the sudden wave of crap A.I. generated shit and how (i) it is shit and (ii) how it undermines the expectations of readers, now realizing that some much of the text we encounter is too often A.I. generated shit. Imagine reading this, remembering I used to subscribed to Sports Illustrated. No wonder making a go of it is so hard. [Operative words being, of course, “used to”!] To be fair, I still get The New Yorker and Flagmaster,* international man of mystery that I am, both in physical format. So support those you like if you want to read their writing. And I think about this as well when I read the names of all those shortlisted for last night’s awards.

And yet… and yet… we have to be honest about how layering on that we see the UK bracing for the coming tide of Yule with some sobering… sober… semi-sobered stats out there for the trade, included in this article by James Evison in TDB:

– “the average Brit now drinks… only about 124 pints of beer, which is half the number of 50 years ago“;
– “a third of adults would avoid drinking at Christmas altogether“; and
– “more than half (56%) of 18-34 year olds looking to avoid alcohol over the festive period, compared to a quarter of those aged 55 and over.“

You know, especiallly listening to some blander beer boosting pundits, you would think that something apparently called neo-temperance is to blame and not just a case of folk either finding times tight, wanting to get healthier or finding fun things to do other than getting laced. Like flags, for example. They are fun. Or gardening. Hmm. See, even thought I try to find the uplifting stories for you, I am personally more inclined to sees this all as an overall shift. And a shift towards something else. In Canada as was illustrated neatly by Jason Foster of On Beer who issued some national stats, tracing the plateau and descent that brewing hereabout seems to be experiencing:

…the real story here is the negatives. Nine of 13 jurisdictions report a reduction in the number of breweries per capita (15+). Given that Quebec’s number was previously undereported, there likely isn’t much growth there either. Had I gone with the most recent population data from Q3 of 2023, things would have looked even worse (I didn’t because we can’t get an age breakdown for that dataset). The clear conclusion from this table is that the growth of craft beer has stalled and that with population growth this means the industry is actually starting to fall behind. We are seeing fewer breweries to serve the available market than we did a couple of years ago.

Again with Matthew, he hints at the same thing in the UK, that a reckoning is coming: “speaking to a lot of breweries, so many are up against the wire, even those who may appear on the surface to be thriving, behind the scenes it’s a different picture” so expect to see more exits in early 2024.** While entirely embracing the excellence of folk like Katie at The Glug,*** please ignore some of those “insta expert insider” newsletters while you are at it. There are some amazingly bad takes out there – still! – telling who ever will listen that this is just a blip in the manifest destiny of craft. Seems folk gotta stick to that script. Props gonna prop.

Bad takes and sometimes bad actors. As we see, given the facts as reported, in this simply inspirational if not somewhat defining subtly saucy take****:

Ultimately, Durstewitz says that to expand, Bevana Partners has to stand for quality and reliability in the eyes of wholesalers, retailers, and most importantly, drinkers. Bevana isn’t a household name now, but Durstewitz says the plan for next year is to create marketing materials like shelf talkers that direct shoppers to Bevana brands specifically, which may be grouped together on a shelf.

May. Be. Note to self: don’t jump into something about a decade late with no real plan other than being taker on the take. And of course, there are the tales of the workplace like this piece by Will Ziebell in The Crafty Pint on burnout in the small scale beer industry. It covers a lot of ground that has been explored before but, still, one wonders who has been writing all those not award winning brewery puff pieces and how (or why) they missed what was apparently right there all around them:

During his time in the industry, Tony says expectations around long hours and bad pay were so common that people would talk about it openly during industry events – and not just between sessions over a beer. “I used to go to the conferences and people would be onstage talking about how we’re in the industry because we love it and the pay is going to be shit with long hours,” he says. “That’s within a presentation experienced brewers are giving us, so it felt like we were being set up to put up with this stuff. You can only do that for so long.”

But… but still… even with all that, all the taking and not giving, there is still good stuff. Stuff worthy of awards or at least admiration. Utterly conversely to the above downpour of downers, Alistair wrote about his recent return to Prague where he once had had an extended residency (something like Cher in Vegas?). Upon his review and found a spot he knew:

…I could have stood there all afternoon just gazing at the city that for 10 years I called home, though this time tinged with melancholy. I was missing Mrs V, and the Malé Aličky, and promised myself that next time I come back to Prague, they will be coming with me. Several times as we strolled through the orchards on the side of the hill, I stopped and just listened, marvelling that such peace and quiet is still possible in a major European capital city. Coming off the hill at Ujezd I spied a brewery sign I hadn’t seen in many years, that of Primátor, and then noticed the sign behind it was for one of our old hangouts, Dobrá Trafika.

And then he wrote about the bar snacks, a favourite theme of mine: “…we had nakládaný hermelín, utopenec, and škvarková pomazánka, with classic Šumavský chleb to spread all the unctuous goodness onto.” No, I have no idea either but it sounds great.

Similarly, Martin found lovely scenes in London and published a photo essay worth checking out. And then he found a seat under an arch:

Two great staff (“Enjoy, my friend“), one cask beer, a 6% IPA that will be in my end of year awards. Cool, chewy, gorgeous (4.5). Proof you only need one cask beer on, just as someone once said. Bit quiet, but then it was 4pm and the mile only gets busy from late on Friday, but the rumble of trains above my head and the jazz soundtrack, at perfect volume, sealed the deal for me.

And Pellicle (as Pellicle does) published another interesting story, this week one by Tim Anderson on beer’s adjacent bev sake explaining both the subject and the experience of researching:

At first I’m afraid this might all go over my head, but Shōji and Momiki are both enthusiastic, good-humoured, and most of all, thorough guides. They take me on an in-depth, whirlwind tour of the entire sake-making process. We visit a sacred water source on top of a mountain, we meet the farmer who grows the rice, and the man who grows the kōji used to ferment it. With all of this presented to me, it becomes easier to understand how sake really can be imbued with meaning, and a sense of place that goes deeper than terroir.

See, that’s good stuff. And there’s gotta be more to read that’s not just a grim reminder. Let’s see what’s out there. Jeff left his notes on the plane. Which is a drag sure but it’s not without, you know, being the cause of a shamelessly cheeky and perhaps even insolent rise of an eyebrow:

I arrived at Portland International Airport last night at 11pm, or 2am on the East Coast time to which my body is currently adjusted. I immediately deplaned, leaving my coat with the notes to brewery tours at Jack’s Abby and Sacred Profane tucked in a pocket. By the time I realized the error and returned, efficient Alaska employees had already buttoned up the gate and departed. All of this is a preamble to today’s rare post of newsy bits—and why I’m outsourcing content today. While I wait with fingers crossed to see if the coat comes back to me, let’s chew on these items.

Come back, Jeff’s coat, come back! That’d be good if it did. And places for beer are still opening like Iron Hat in Alberta, like Recluse Brew Works in Washougal, Washington – and like the new beer spa in Sykesville, MD called BierBath and… and… a place in San Francisco called Otherwise Brewing planning to sell only gluten free beer. So it’s still churning along. And beer is cheap at beaches in Turkey. Don’t forget that. And Mr. Protz joined in on the articles on Dark Star’s version of Prize Old Ale adding plenty of detail:

The beer is astonishingly complex. It pours a deep russet brown with a dense collar of foam. The aroma is dominated by a musty note brewers call “horse blanket” with notes of burnt raisin and sultana fruit, wholemeal biscuits, spice and pepper from the hops, with touches of bitter chocolate, espresso coffee, liquorice and butterscotch. The palate has creamy malt, burnt fruit, spicy hops, coffee, butterscotch, liquorice and acidic notes. The finish is bittersweet with sour fruit, peppery hops, chocolate, coffee and butterscotch with a dry and acidic finale.

Holy gambolling gums! Lots going on there in the theatre of that particular maw. All good.

Yet… yet… and yet… the freshly award winning Jessica Mason has opened my mind scientifically speaking to an entirely new branch of concern with this startling health related news:

…there are multiple documented instances in which children diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome were born to mothers who denied that they consumed alcohol during pregnancy… The studies ultimately concluded that chronic male alcohol exposure – defined as consuming more than five drinks per day in a four-hour window – could create the core fetal alcohol syndrome birth defects.

Really? That’s a lot to take in. What’s next? Well, if only go by these stories in chronoligical order (and entirely for Stan) this is what is next: “‘My dog is drunk’ … owner discovers her dog has hit the bottle.”

Fin. We are done. I know I’m done. When you get to the drunk doggie story, you have to be done. Remember, ye who read this far down to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (90) rising up to maybe pass Mastodon (906) then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,427) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (159), with 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. All in all I still am rooting for the voices on the elephantine Mastodon but BlueSky is catching up. And even though it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing beer:

*No, you are!… you’re a big dopey loser with weird hobbies… I’m not… I’m not… quit it… stop.
**The medium may be the message but the messages may vary, too. Just look at this week‘s pointed poke at my font of jealousy from Katie: “We were exceptionally lucky—there was one free table. This never happens, I’m sure. We sat down with our almost-finished pints and ordered a roast dinner and a huge plate of venison stew.”
***Yet in Dorset a “brewery in Peaceful Lane will replace a dilapidated chicken coop” defying all the odds after agreeing to no tap room and no on-site sales.
****And those insta-update about the lawsuits are pure gold!

The Beery News Notes For That Week The USA Does All That Weird Thanksgiving Stuff

It is instructional to live next to a bigger neighbour. As long as they don’t attack you… any more. And by bigger I mean the most influential state in the most powerful nation in the history of the western world. Which is to say I can see a slice of New York state from my office window, peeking back at me out there about ten miles to the south. So we get the TV and radio in addition to the general social media onslaught. And – who knew? – turns out it’s Thanksgiving week and today is Thanksgiving Day! Their Thanksgiving. We Canadians naturally give our thanks for the harvest at harvest time. And we keep it to a wholesome day or two. And find things to do like yard chores. Our pals to the south? It’s like they just discovered treats… to eat!! Even though Halloween was just three weeks ago. Any advice you can offer explaining it all will be most welcome. In local news, the basil is up as illustrated. I am aiming for a wrap around 12 month tiny crop of something or other now that there’s a grow op in my life while some tasty stuff is likely still alive out there under the row covers even with the -9C temps the other night. Jings. Gotta start thinning soon.

Which reminds me of beer. Not. So what is up in beer? Well, for starters, the call for papers for Beeronomics 2024 has gone out:

The 2024 Beeronomics Conference will take place at University of Milan Bicocca, Italy, 19-22 June. Main panels and sessions will be held at the University of Bicocca main campus located in the heart of the city. The Conference Organising Committee, led by Christian Garavaglia, welcomes all high-quality research on the economics of beer and brewing. With a strong interest in interdisciplinary research, we are looking for submissions …

It-lay! That’d be nice in June. Maybe something for Al can be whipped up via AI so I can pretend to be clever enough. Speaking of research, Gary has uncovered facts on the heretofore unknown background of the 1950s English beer writer, Andrew Campbell – stumping even Boak and Bailey who had looked at the mystery some years ago:

It is interesting that they mention theatre – why this occurred to them is not explained. The skein was evidently felt inconclusive, as they repeat that Andrew Campbell was possibly a pseudonymous figure. In fact Andrew Campbell who wrote The Book of Beer was quite real. And there was a theatrical connection.

Speaking of Boak and Bailey, they took a bit of an unsual turn in the road this week as they, the keen observers of others, became something of their own subject matter when they took a family trip to an old favourite Somerset cider farm with a restaurant of sorts attached:

When we entered, Jess immediately said, “This feels like a German beer hall.” And she was right. Not a historic one – the kind you find in a post-war block, or out in the sprawl, or in a neat little village. It’s something to do with all the polished wooden surfaces, perhaps. Or the pervasive smell of roast pork. Or the people: there were plenty of sturdy looking country folk digging into heaped plates. If it wasn’t Bavaria of which it reminded me, then it was one of those diners Guy Fieri visits on Diner, Drive-Ins and Dives.

A great bit of writing. And Matty C has taken on the task of rehabilitating the phrase “reverse creep” with his piece in What’s Brewing, an organ of CAMRA, on the new lower ABV trend in UK beer:

Prior to the legislation’s introduction, breweries would have received a discounted rate for drinks rated at 2.8 per cent ABV or lower. Under the new system it has been extended to account for drinks rated at 3.4 per cent or less. The savings that can be made will likely encourage producers to focus on drinks that are lower in alcohol and therefore, in the government’s eyes, carry less long-term health risks. Encouraging news for a market where younger customers are increasingly focused on mindful consumption and wellness.

The cost implications are significant: “…if, over a year, a small brewery produces 5,000 hectolitres (880,000 pints) of a beer it has reduced from 3.5 to 3.4 per cent, it will make a saving of £211,400.” Moo. Lah. Stonch finds the effect of the tax policy depressing. Colin understands the policy is not the main cause of the lower strength beers. Lots of factors at play but hard to not see this as an opportunity.

I don’t usually go for brewery bios given there too often is a bit of an appropriation or maybe just mimickery at play. But in this piece about a Czech focused brewery in small town Texas of all places, Ruvani de Silva explains the local authenticity:

“The concept of a Czech lager brewery made a lot of sense in Bell County with its rich Czech heritage and the Czech Heritage Museum and Genealogy Center nearby,” he says. “The more I discovered and learned about Czech lager, the more I fell in love with it… I’ve learned so much about my family history and our connections within the community since starting the brewery,” he says. “I’m always probing my grandmother for more stories.” Martinec was inspired to play Czech polka in the brewery after discovering a collection of records in his grandmother’s side table. “They belonged to my great-grandmother and grandfather—my grandmother didn’t even know they were there,” he says. “Now regulars will come by and donate polka records, too.”

Before we go further, say to yourself “soon… soon I will know a lot more about bottle caps” because it is true… because Liam wrote all about it from an Irish perspective:

Before his invention there were other methods of closing bottles, one of the most popular and historic being the plain cork bung of course, and other metal closer had existed but none were quite as strong and easy to apply as Painter’s. His crimp-edged, strengthened metal caps clamped on the edge of specially made bottles with a cork liner between the cap and bottle rim ensuring an airtight fit. These caps were easy to apply and remove and would go on to revolutionise the drinks industry around the world. They were also disposable – they were never designed for reuse – a clever way of ensuring a steady income for those involved in their manufacture.

Next, Katie Mather is on to the second installment of her series on packaged foods called “Process” and this week considers the humble oven fry:

The brand of oven chips you had at teatime was a status symbol when I was a kid. McCain’s Home Fries were the holy grail—if you were having those with your Turkey Drummers, you’d really made it. It’s really strange, I didn’t consider oven chips and deep fryer chips and chippy chips as the same thing. It didn’t occur to me until much later on in life that oven chips were meant to be approximations of the soggy, vinegar-coated potato hunks I was used to from Sam’s Bar on Morecambe seafront. Don’t get me wrong, I loved both of them. But they just weren’t the same food at all. They didn’t even speak the same language.

I always find global references to McCain’s brands odd as it’s from my neck of the woods in the Canadian Maritimes and I even went to undergrad with a McCain.* One of the few dynasties which keeps the lights on in New Brunswick.

Courtney Iseman wrote about the SAFE Bar Network, a program that a nonprofit working with alcohol-serving venues on bystander intervention training in anticipation of one ugly downside of the impending festive season:

…it is also a good time for these conversations because we’ve officially arrived at the holiday season, and this time of year can really crank up the already-intense situation at many bars and restaurants in terms of parties and customers’ drinking and behavior. I know this is unfortunately an impossible wish, but I do hope folks working in bars and breweries and such make it through these season as safe and happy as can be, and—perhaps more realistically—I hope more and more venues see the light and bring in training like SBN.

The Shadowy Portman Group has popped up its head and this time it isn’t complaining about cartoony labels or, you know, anything related to BrewDog. This week it’s defending the booze trade against being lumped in with unhealthy smokers and gunky** processed food fans in a wide ranging study of the costs of unhealthy lifestyles to the UK economy:

The Portman Group, an alcohol industry trade body, said a crackdown on alcohol was unnecessary because most adults drank moderately. The health groups’ proposals, including minimum unit pricing, were “disproportionate and inappropriate”, said Matt Lambert, its chief executive. “Significant progress has been made to tackle harmful drinking in recent years, thanks in part to schemes funded by the alcohol industry, and it is counterproductive to try to prevent further cooperation between the government, industry and third sector organisations on these issues.

They make a reasonable point up there as reported in The Guardian – consult your Hornsey if you need to but we are clearly built to digest alcohol but no one ever rationally claimed a ciggie isn’t a coffin nail. Interesting to note The Times raises another source of health care worry: toxic doctors! Interesting that they are alleged to cause 11,000 deaths per year in the UK while the booze causes just over 9,000. Lesson: don’t forget to take your drink!

In high school, 44 years ago or so, we had a Swedish exchange student on the soccer team and he taught some of us about eating spruce tips. The winter beer Jeff featured this week brought that all back to me:

The brewery puts in a lot of work to create that subtle sweetness. Beginning in May or June, depending on the year’s winter, Dan and members of the brewing and restaurant staff head off to a forest that is just west of town. They harvest sustainably so the trees aren’t harmed—they even need a permit—which means more time. The trees must be a certain height to harvest, and they can’t pick too much of the new growth. “We bring a load of grain bags out with us—it’s beautiful,” he said. “I love it.” It takes more than one visit to collect 200 pounds of tips, which they freeze.

Mmm… tree flavour. It’s the new thing. Stan also wrote about another way to get more tree into your diet:

“I think the thing I love most about the beer is that it certainly makes me feel something, often several things. The time and effort spent harvesting the cedar with my friend realigns my heart to a deeper connection and purpose in brewing. I can feel the sun on my face as I’m reaching to trim a branch in the cool autumn air. I can feel the wind on my face as I give thanks to the grove of trees that play such an important part in the entire experience. Something in me awakens each time I sip.”

Remember how I mentioned that the Russian government nationalized the local branch of Carlsburg, Baltika? Things still getting worse for those involved:

Police and Federal Security Service (FSB) agents carried out more than a dozen searches at offices affiliated with Baltika in St. Petersburg, the local news website Fontanka reported Thursday, citing anonymous sources. Two unnamed Baltika executives were charged with abuse of trust and large-scale fraud, according to Fontanka. The state-run TASS news agency later identified the detained executives as Baltika president Denis Sherstennikov and vice president Anton Rogachevsky, citing a law enforcement source.

Yikes. And I know I include something from Pellicle every week but they really do stand heads and shoulders above other publications. This week, a portrait by Neil Walker of The Coopers Tavern, a modest old pub and the beer it serves:

In front of me sits my deep-gold pint of Joule’s timeless pale ale, glowing and topped with a bright white head of foam, which creates halos down the glass as I sip. But, really, this is a beer for glugging; a subtle well-balanced bitter, with a delicious caramel undertone from the pale tipple malt, a foil for the floral, drying, hop character. The overall impression is of a bittersweet, incredibly drinkable ale, a balm for dry workers’ throats which slips down pint after pint. Underpinning the beer is the same mineral-rich water which made the brewery’s pale ales so sought after a century or so ago, drawn from an ancient Triassic aquifer.

Excellent. A decendant of the Brimstone Alehouse of the 1680s. At another snack bracket appears to be The Devonshire, a big London pub and restaurant complex… oh, sorry… a butchery, bakery, a pub, restaurant and asado complex. What’s an asado? Nick Lander explains:

Welcome to London’s first asado, where the food is cooked entirely over wood embers. Carroll admitted that it had been harrowing at times, assuring everyone from the landlords to numerous representatives of Westminster Council that the process would work and would be safe. Simply, the logs are burnt and then the ingredients are cooked over the embers. It is this process that has made a name for the likes of Asador Etxebarri in Spain, Burnt Ends in Singapore and Firedoor in Sydney, all of whose chefs have been consulted by Carroll and Rogers.

And finally, in their monthly newsletter and for the double, Boak and Bailey have you all pegged. There’s no wiggling out of this one:

If we say that interest in craft beer in the UK began to increase from around 2007 (when we started this blog – a symptom, not a cause) and peaked in around 2014, when our book Brew Britannia came out, that’s plenty of time for a full cycle of hype to play out. There’s a generation of people who have made ‘being into beer’ part of their identity. That includes people who used to blog; people who started breweries; and people who’ve ended up as middle-aged managers in the industry, having started on the frontline a decade ago. Now, they’re getting old.

ZINGGGGG! They’re shit talking us. Deservedly. So here we are, at the end. The time of the sales, the mergers, the moves. Maybe just the beginning of the end but, yes, I feel bad everytime I read an investment announcement of one sort or another. Ouch. No, not commenting on what they said. Just reached over for the mug of tea. Everying aches now. ‘Cause I’m ooooollllld.

Other than that, we are done. Remember, ye who read this far down to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. But beware! Mr. Protz lost his Twex account five weeks ago and still hasn’t recovered his 27,000 followers. And Boak and Bailey declared they will #QuitTheTwit at the end of the year. Update on my emotional rankings? Now, for me Facebook remains clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (83) rising up to maybe pass Mastodon (905) then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,427) hovering somewhere above or around Instagram (161), with unexpectly crap Threads (42) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Still trying to figure out the Threads and BlueSky distinction but at this point Threads seems more corporate. Seven apps plus this my blog! That makes sense. I may be multi and legion and all that but I do have priorities and seem to be keeping them in a proper row. All in all I still am rooting for the voices on the elephantine Mastodon. And even though it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing beer:

Anyone else? Anywhere else? Yes, you also gotta check the blogs, podcasts (barely!) and even newsletters to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays when he is not SLACKING OFF! Look – I forgot to link to Lew’s podcast. Fixed. Here’s a new newsletter recommendation: BeerCrunchers. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now much more occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back 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. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

*…not all that rare… also a Labatt as well as Anne Murray’s neice and someone whos godparent was claimed to be the Pope. Et cetera. Et cetera. Lucy MacNeil was in a dorm next to my pal, too. LUCY!! It’s all just one town out there. Go to the tavern for lunch? There’s a member of cabinet. Hit the late night dance club? There is your local MP… dancing with not Mrs. Local MP. Oh dear. Not smart.
**Ouch! Katie Mather just hit me!!!

A Brief But Paradigm Busting Edition Of These Beery News Notes For Mid-November

I’ve been mentioning that beer writing seems to have gone a bit quiet this autumn and – horrors – it’s gotten into such a state of the doldrums that Stan’s booked off until the first Monday in December. Lordy. What to do, what to do? Scour the globe? Look near and far. That’s what we always do. When we are not sifting clues we scour the globe. Beer helps. Had this one on Saturday, bought in Quebec as a standard shelf item with a reasonable price tag. Not sure why we can’t have the nice things they get at the SAQ…

UPDATE: Lew posted a new podcast. Normally I would not encourage podcasting… because… you know… but look at all of what he’s done on one short trip!

Hanover may have thought it was a frontier town, a market town, a transportation hub. But the peckish German-Americans who populated it in the late 1800s and early 1900s knew better. Their ovens and kettles, and a vague hunger between meals, were destined to make Hanover known as Snack Town! My friend Dave Dreese and I hit town on our way to Baltimore, and wow. We visited two of the biggest snack food companies in America, two very old school hot dog joints, and a great butcher shop with their own smoked sausage and cheese. And of course, all those snacky eats need beer, so we hit the town’s six breweries. I interviewed the man who makes the last hand-rolled pretzels in Snack Town, Kevin Bidelspach of Revonah Pretzels.

Two hot dog joints… “two very old school hot dog joints”… Lordy…

Resuming normal service: I am starting off this week with a news item from Jessica Mason published at The Drinks Business at the end of last week. I like this because it acknowledges that values can clash in the world of craft – and not the ones you might think at first:

… even though the regulations and consumer pressures have led to sustainability fast-becoming a “licence to operate”, rather than a “nice-to-have” novelty, beer trends for variety were contrary to the guidance… Stronger consumer appetite for variety over volume has undoubtedly created commercial opportunities for breweries, but producing up to 100 different varieties of beer in a large-scale plant means that short production runs will require more energy and water.

I like that – push back on all thing to all paradigms. The bulk of beer brands are not only fleeting but gotten a bit lazy. Add a sauce or swap the hop so you can change the label. Even the best brewers who attempt to make all things for all people are putting out too many clangers. Focus.

Factoid: One beer in Iceland costs the same as nine beers in Hungary.

In science news, a yeast strain has also pushed back… or perhaps been pushed back by the lab coat wearers at the University of Wisconsin:

A key trait of yeasts used in beer production is the ability to break down maltose, the most abundant sugar in the material used to brew beer. The team chose a yeast strain that had evolutionarily lost this ability despite possessing many of the genes required for maltose metabolism. After running evolution experiments growing the yeast on maltose and selecting decedents that thrived, the lab’s S. eubayanus yeast reacquired the ability to eat maltose.

Hmm… I know that these things are important but wouldn’t starting with the strain that could do the thing you wanted it to do in the first place have been a faster way to get to your goal? Are they just jerking the poor things around?!?! [ED.: …Just a minute… let me check my high school science grades again… hmm… yes, you’re right. I don’t have a clue.] Perhaps similarly in terms of getting somewhere, Mudgie pitched something that, to be honest, I had never considered, probably because it has not yet come from the oracle Elon’s mouth:

…surely one of the main potential benefits of driverless cars is that they will extend mobility to people who are unable to drive themselves either through old age or medical conditions. It is also impossible to have driverless taxis – often suggested as one of the main applications – if there always needs to be a competent driver on board… If an automated taxi can travel without a driver to its pick-up point, then surely it can carry a passenger who is incapable of driving, whether through age, infirmity or intoxication. And if a taxi can do it, why not your own driverless car?

I’m not sure I want to live in that world… but if you give it a quarter century that’s not likely going to be an issue. Question: who cleans up the vom? Conversely, certainly in quesions of personal control, my favourite character is all of beer writing is Delores, Ron’s wife, and this week we learned a bit more about her and her ways when travelling:

Luckily I have Dolores with me. Who, from years of travelling on overcrowded Deutsche Reichsbahn, is an expert in elbowing her way to grab seats. It’s not too difficult as the train isn’t totally packed… “Andrew would have loved it here as a kid. We could have just left him looking out of the window all day.” Dolores isn’t wrong. I’m tempted to do that myself…. Weighed down both by shopping and the kilo of pork in my belly. I sip on whiskey while Dolores flicks through the German channels. We only get five on the Amsterdam cable.

The next day, we read “Dolores has the morning all planned out” which is great news given I have been out and about with Ron and know what the possibilities really are and what needs to be done about it. I was not at all reminded of Ron when I saw this interesting comment on the reasons behind all the Bud Lite $105 million-a-year sponsorship deal with the UFC:

He said: ‘It’s like this whole Bud Light deal. People are talking s*** now. “Sell out” and all this s*** they f***ing say. Believe me, I’m the furthest f***ing thing from a sell out…’I look deeper than just f***ing “oh you know, they did this can with whoever”. I don’t give a s***. You guys think you’re all looking for an apology, they ain’t going to f***ing apologise to you.

My. A couple of bits of experimental hop news came out this week. Stan (because he was not totally slacking) issued another edition of Hop Queries including a few invitations to help with leading edge research like this:

Do not feel left out. The Hop Research Council currently has more than 2,500 pounds each of three varieties that have advanced to elite status available for brewers to use. They expect feedback. That will help determine which ones, if any, get named and become available to farmers. The hops cost $9.25 a pound in 11-pound and 44-pound packages and $10 a pound in one-pound packages. Each has two names: HRC-002 (2000010-008), HRC-003 (W1108-333) and HRC-004 (201008-008). HRC-003 has been top rated in early brewing trials, with intense ripe peach, mango and other tropical aromas.

Here is the form to send in your request to participate in this program. The other hops story appeared in Pellicle where Adam Pierce wrote about a hop called Strangs #7:

The taste of Strang’s #7 is like no other British hop I have experienced before. It has a kaleidoscope of flavours from pithy orange marmalade, tangerine, a touch herbal; dill, lemongrass, a hint of pear drops, sweet bubblegum and finally the “controversial” coconut note, similar to the one found in the Japanese Sorachi Ace and North American American Sabro varieties.

Note: the role of beer league hockey’s most important team member explained.

And the latest edition of London Beer City was released by Will Hawkes last Friday and includes a short study of Eko Brewery at Unit 2A-2, Copeland Park, Peckham:

Eko bucks the trend by drawing on African drinking culture and brewing techniques and recipes, plus ingredients such as palm sugar, cassava, yam and hops grown in South Africa. “The main focus is to incorporate African ingredients in the beer,” says Anthony, “but the first beer we made [in 2018] didn’t have any African ingredients – but it was low bitterness, low carbonation, to ensure it went well with food, which is the way beer is enjoyed in Africa.” Anthony grew up in Peckham and his family comes from Nigeria (Eko is the Yoruba name for Lagos), while Helena’s are from Congo. That’s had a big impact on her approach to beer. “In Congo, women drink a lot of beer,” she says. “My mum, my aunties drank beer when I was growing up. A lot of the women in my family drank beer more than the men.”

I love auntie culture. I had aunties. And aunts too. Two separate categories.

Speaking of assigning categories, a court ruling about beer from Canada’s top court was published in the Ontario Gazette this week, months after its actual release by the Supremes. Facts are always fascinating:

A constable of the Ontario Provincial Police (“OPP”) formed the intention on a highway to randomly stop the respondent to ascertain his sobriety, and followed him onto a private driveway to do so. Once the constable approached the respondent, he observed obvious signs of intoxication and the respondent indicated that he might have had 10 beers. Two subsequent breathalyzer tests revealed that the respondent’s blood alcohol concentration was above the legal limit.

Why did this get to the highest court in the land? The random stop… tsk-tsk… nope… naughty naughty:

…the police officers did not have statutory authority under s. 48(1) of the HTA to follow the respondent onto the private driveway to conduct the random sobriety stop. Accordingly, the police officers breached the respondent’s rights under s. 9 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms…

Also here in Ontario, @starbeer of the Toronto Star is speculating and rumour mongering again (based largely on things like “investigative journalism” and “fact gathering”!!!). As we’ve been monitoring for the best part of the decade, we the agreement governing our semi-monopolistic big brewery owned sales outlet is coming up and it appears that the government is not going to renew the deal with the imaginatively named The Beer Store (TBS). This effectively places all beer retailing policies on the table. I don’t have the text of the Star article (as it’s behind a pay wall and I save my pennies for other things like cheese) but BlogTO is providing a helpful summary of the issues including:

The agreement as it stands now expires in 2025, and this year is the cutoff for when the government must notify affected parties if it is not being renewed. And experts are noting that the Beer Store has been downsizing and selling off multiple properties in recent years, cutting four per cent of its footprint… While talk of the vendor potentially closing is nothing more than a rumour at this point, many citizens appear to feel strongly about the subject, with the vast majority celebrating the end of what they see as one of many problematic monopolies or oligopolies in the province. Then there are the thousands of jobs that will be lost if the Beer Store goes under, and the fears that beer prices could actually end up going up.

Concidentally… as most things I report in a week are… big brewer Labatt is expanding its London Ontario plant with a 27 million investment:

The new machines will see beer packaged using paperboard — which is one layer of paper compared to recycled cardboard which is three layers of heavy paper. It will also use less glue than older machines… “It allows us to get our products to market for consumers in the most sustainable way possible…” the new tanks will also expand the capability to ferment beer by over 59 million litres — the equivalent of 24 Olympic sized swimming pools… “Our London brewery is the largest in Labatt’s network, brewing over 40 per cent of the beer we brew for Canadians, and this significant investment boosts the facility’s production capacity and sustainability performance…”

Someone is optimistic. And look – there it is again: sustainablility. Greenwashing? Cost cutting? Or real? Going back to the question of the TBS agreement, who will take on the bottle recycling the TBS does now if a deal doesn’t continue? Who knows. But the province is moving to a general scheme of producer paid recycling generally so maybe that’s at play. Another question: can price rises be stopped in at least one respect? See, the currents scheme has for almost a century levelled prices throughout the province. Meaning a beer bottled next to one TBS retail outlet costs the same as when sold that beer is sold at a remote TBS outlet. Effectively, southerners and urban folk subsidize transportation costs for more remote Ontarians. The roads are still poor and beer is heavy. Back in 2012, the CBC reported that as an odd consequence booze is relatively far cheaper in northern Ontario.

Relatedly, Victim of Maths has shown a similar phenomenon affecting “Today’s Britain Today”*:

Arguments about the affordability of alcohol during the cost-of-living crisis also don’t seem to hold much water. The fact that alcohol prices rose at lower than inflation levels means that even a stagnation in disposable incomes didn’t stop alcohol becoming *more* affordable.

As per usual, he provided a handy graph which I have included for your clicky pleasure. Note how beer in the UK becomes notably even more affordable compeared to wine and the hard stuff right around in the mid-2000s and becomes slowly more and more so. And concurrently climate change may be playing a role too – at least in terms of pure alcohol levels according to Jancis:

As the planet warms up and dries out, it is going to be increasingly difficult to make wines below 14% anyway. I recently attended a tasting of 32 red bordeaux from vintages 2011 to 2019 from the stocks of Justerini & Brooks, a traditional wine merchant not known for favouring flashy wines. Seven of these clarets had 14.5% on the label and two 15%. This would have been unimaginable in the last century.

And finally, just as the previous discussion was triggered by thoughts on the meaning of “full-bodied” in today’s market, Matthew Lawrence of Seeing the Lizards was posting at Twex and responded to the challenge to create a top ten list of beer euphemisms: 1. lively = overcarbonated; 2. easy drinking = flat; 3. juicy = sludge; 4. aged = musty; 5. light = tasteless; 6. fruity = syrup; 7. dank = weed soup; 8. imperial = loopy juice; 9. blonde = bland; 10. challenging = undrinkable. Like. Your list? You could even do one forensically in five year increments for craft beer. Talk among yourselves. I might add overly ripe exclamations as seen in reaction to beer news from “…utter joy to read…” to “…totally gutted by…” or even the “brewery is one of the most successful in the country…” Please.

Done. Remember, ye who read this far down to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. But beware! Mr. Protz lost his Twex account five weeks ago and still hasn’t recovered his 27,000 followers. Update on my emotional rankings? Now, for me Facebook remains clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (80) rising up to maybe pass Mastodon (903) then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,429) hovering somewhere above or around Instagram (161), with unexpectly crap Threads (42) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Seven apps plus this my blog! That makes sense. I may be multi and legion and all that but I do have priorities and seem to be keeping them in a proper row. All in all I still am rooting for the voices on the elephantine Mastodon. And even though it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing beer:

*My dream of a name for a current affairs show.

Your Beery News Notes For The Solemn Pause Before The Festivities

The question of when one begins to get Christmassy in Canada includes a particular matter of etiquette and propriety. We have Remembrance Day on November 11th and it is often said that the commercialization of Halloween and the commercialization of Christmas need to take a seat in early November to pause. It is a good idea but not one enforced with any particular stridency. Now that I am somewhat shocked to be in my seventh decade, it is good remind those whose youth didn’t include regularly runninging into known veterans of the world wars that there were people who didn’t get to be in old age. I often think at this time of year of the relatives like my great-uncle John who came back from the trenches in 1918 shellshocked as well as his sister great-aunt Madge who was a frontline nurse in the north African campaign. And, as mentioned two years ago, I think of the man at the naval memorial downtown in 2005. It is good to pause to think about such things.

And while we pause we still can consider the state of the world, including the lighter things like beer and the adjacents. Which has been a bit quiet over the last week, too. Good thing, too, as I had to dash over to Montreal to do some paperwork last Friday but still took the time to get a small measure of ice perry into me and eat at Arthurs. I reserve the right to retire to Montreal. You are on notice – vous et vous aussi! Slow, yes, but with a bit of digging, there were stories right there to be read. Look, we had local news of a beery nature, the tale of an unfortunate delivery van which had also paid a visit to La Belle Province:

In a case of the odd and perplexing, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) have charged the driver of a rental van who continued to drive after blowing a tire, ostensibly in an attempt to get away with an illegal – and massive – alcohol purchase… While speaking with the driver, officers noticed four cases of beer the the front passenger’s seat area, all of which had only French labelling on the box. Questioned about the beer, the driver became and remained evasive, even as police confronted the driver about the transportation of beer from Quebec into Ontario. Police then carried out a search of the vehicle and found “the entire back of the van was filled with beer cases,” the OPP said.

Jings. Others have been out and about, too. ATJ, for example, was in a very nice seat and got a view of a hobbity decor. Not so many going out in Hong Kong, so CNN reports due to the departure of expats as well as locals with access to foreign passports:

Increasingly, these two groups are being replaced by people from mainland China, who now account for more than 70% of the 103,000 work or graduate visas granted since 2022, according to the Immigration Department. The newly dominant migrants, economists point out, tend to have very different spending habits. Yan Wai-hin, an economics lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said the city’s previously robust nightlife was propped up largely by a base of expats and middle-class locals steeped in the time-honored drinking culture of enjoying a nice cold one after a long day. “The makeup of the population is different now,” Yan said. “Now we have more immigrants from the mainland, and they tend to love to go back to mainland China to spend instead.”

Times past weren’t like today. I was reminded (despite craft beer’s fibbery that there was a singular craft beer revolution) that the “generally revolution related to all consumer products” has been all around us all at least since when I were a lad, as confirmed again by this bit of rearview mirroring in The Times about an aspect of The Times, one that’s always struck me as odd:

…on the afternoon of July 16, 1972, Tony Laithwaite pulled off the motorway on his way back to Windsor after visiting his parents in the Lake District. What happened next changed Britain’s drinking habits for good. Laithwaite bought a copy of The Sunday Times and saw his name in the letters page. He had written to praise the newspaper’s exposé of unscrupulous UK bottlers who were buying vin that was distinctly ordinaire but labelling it as Margaux, Meursault and many other top French names. Laithwaite was all too aware of the problem. After years working in French vineyards he had returned to the UK to set up Bordeaux Direct, which imported cases directly “from châteaux that do actually exist”, he wrote in his letter. The counterfeiters were hurting his business.

What developed out of that letter eventually became the creation of The Sunday Times Wine Club which was led in part by Hugh Johnson who wrote The World Atlas of Wine in 1971 as well as since 1977 the invaluable annual pocket guides to wine which certainly led certain people to think that beer might benefit from a similar set of such things, ran with it and away it went and here we are. But I had not really twigged that the original motivation was counterfeiting counterfeiters! Heavens. Never one to merely counterfeit, appropriate or really even emulate, TBN provided the unexpected turn of phrase of the week:

Schnitzel doesn’t grow on trees, or so I believed until Privatbrauerei Schnitzlbaumer entered my life, its name conjuring an image of juicy breaded cutlets, hanging ready to be picked.

Ah, the land of schnitzel trees… ah… Perhaps conversely, GBH has taken a break from its cycle of fast fading news summaries and brewery owner bios (BOBs) from places you (likely still) will never go to and taken a page (and perhaps a topic) from Pellicle with this wonderful (and perhaps followup*) article on Gales Prize Old Ale by our friend and mentor (he now in his third decade of comment making at this here blog) Martyn:

I’m standing in the tasting room at Meantime Brewing Company in Greenwich, southeast London, drinking the latest iteration of Gales Prize Old Ale, an almost unique survivor from Britain’s brewing past. Set to be released on November 16, this new edition is just about the only U.K. beer made in what Spanish sherry producers call the “solera style,” where a fresh batch is added each year to a vat containing the remnants of editions from previous years. This process means uncounted generations of Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus, and other yeasts and organisms survive and thrive to add fresh depth—and strength—to a beer that is powerful enough at the outset. Prize Old Ale goes into the vat around 9% ABV. A couple of years later, it can come out at 11%.

Fabulous. Fantastic even. Another of my favourite writers, Katie Mather, sent out good news this week on a new series she is publishing called “Process”:

I plan to share 10 essays over 10 weeks, talking about my personal connections to certain snacks, and discovering the mysteries and interesting histories of some of our most taken-for-granted and newly hated foods. I want to show how integral to modern life processed food is, and how interesting it is that we’ve be taught to find the idea of refining ingredients into convenience food repulsive.

Wonderful. Sign up. And Jeff wrote an excellently innovative thing this week (doing what ought to be done more by all) when he explored one small corner of our good beer culture and cast a broader light on the best of all this:

To arrive at Dave Selden’s workshop, you wind down a wooded lane next to picturesque river. I would like to report that it gets ever narrower until arriving at a rustic, moss-covered cabin deep in the fir trees, but in fact it’s actually housed in one corner of a metal warehouse. The dreamlike experience picks up again inside, however. Packed into a space about the size of a large dining room are strange artifacts of a steampunk past. Dave is the creator of 33 Books, a small company that started as a kind of analog Untappd (and in the same year, 2010, by coincidence). His first product was 33 Bottle of Beers, a little notebook the size of the back pocket of a pair of jeans. Beer fans could record their encounters with tasty ales and lagers inside, even tracing out a spider graph of the flavors if they wanted to really get their nerd on.

Love it. Dave was an early supporter of the dearly departed annual Yuletide Kwanzaa, Hogmanay, Christmas and Hanukkah photo contest and sent off wee packets of 33 Bottle of Beers to lucky winners.

And Jordan wrote many interesting words on the upcoming re-regulation / de-regulation of the beer retail trade in Ontario which is an exceptionally good lens through which to consider any retail structure in any jurisdiction but one that requires a measure of patience with the acronyms and percentages if one is going to get a correct understanding, as this passage illustrates well:

At the time that the MFA went into effect in 2015, The Beer Store made up 50.3% of the alcohol retail market in Ontario, with the LCBO sitting at 37.7%. This has largely reversed as a result of the MFA and the dwindling market share of beer when compared to wine and spirits, but mostly because of the MFA. The Beer Store now sits at 41.7% of the alcohol retail market while the LCBO is up to 51.9%. The Beer Store still controls 64.61% of the beer market in the province, with LCBO making up 35.39%. What this means is that by becoming the wholesaler for wine, beer, and cider in grocery, the LCBO’s remittance to the province of Ontario has gone from $1.81 Billion to $2.55 Billion over the course of something like an eight year period, not including calendar year 2023. The MFA, which allows grocery retail, is worth $750 million to the province on an annual basis, and that amount is likely to increase over time as the number of LCBO convenience outlets has quietly grown by 180 over the same period while the number of Beer Stores has dropped by 30 to 420.

I do have one quibble and that is the tinyiest too much bit of weight given to the role of cannibus in the overall calcuation of what’s happening to craft beer. Generally speaking I mean, not by Jordan. As he notes in extremely appropriate detail, someone in Ontario “could get 1.53 times as much Cannabis in Dec 2022 for the same amount of money you would have paid in Dec 2018.” Me, I understand this is indicative of a glut and a consumer interest for weed that is far less than originally anticipated. It’s own separate fail. While Jordan’s points are aimed elsewhere, at the effect of excise taxation on these matters, it is important to put again on the table that craft beer is failing in part by its own doings and not as much due to external competative pressures as some might want to say. Yes, the paradigm shifted well before the pandemic and before the inflation but those blows have piled on. Which means we the clinky drinky of craft are all now out at sea, floating of an ice shelf as spring approaches.** Stay tuned for more from Jordan on the new regularory arrangements, however, which need to be in place in Ontario in about 18 months.

In another example of its thoughtful and frankly superior touch, Pellicle this week features a piece on a welcoming Glasgow pub, The Laurieston:

As you enter The Laurieston, arrows point towards the public bar on the left and lounge bar on the right, both served by the same raised island bar. Most of the original furnishings are in a well-used but good condition, including red vinyl covered arm chairs, tartan curtains, custom red Formica tables, a raised gantry with wood panelling and a suspended canopy with built-in lights. The old McGee’s hot pie heater sits to the right of the bar, a family heirloom serving hungry customers Scotch pies with a good lick of gravy and peas piled pleasingly on top. “A three course meal!” Joseph says with a wry smile.

I want to be there. Conversely, Ron has continued his explorations of where I don’t want to be – back the 1970s – with his excellent piece on the function of recycling the returns:

I take the piss out of Watney for all the returned crap that they mixed into their beers. Didn’t that make their beer rubbish? But I only know that because I’ve seen their internal quality control document. Which shows 10% of “stuff” added to most beers after fermentation. Due to the tax system in the UK, adding crap on which there was effectively no tax made a huge deal of sense. Financially. The brewers weren’t so keen. Derek Prentice told me of the effort it took to stop Fullers trying to recycle beer, even when it made no real financial sense any more. After the introduction of brewery-gate taxation.

And Gary has continued his long series on “drumming” which was the parlance for traveling sales folk in North America and beyond around a century or so ago. In the seventh post on the matter, he shares in detail what he has found out about one Mr.Kauffman:

It seems fairly clear this American was Kauffman. Like most good sales people he included a dose of exaggeration when recounting his success to the two Americans trailing him. Of course too, it is a trite datum of beer historical studies that American beer sales were almost completely domestic at the time, and remained so for decades to come.

Finally, the British Guild of Beer Writers has announced the nominees for this years awards. A good selection for sure… thought I have never understood the surprise folk express for being nominated when they themselves submitted the applications and associated fees. And, yes, some concerns as to some named have been raised but isn’t that always the case… and sometimes warranted. That being said, these awards are clearly the premier contest. The top drawer. I particularly like the openness about the corporate sponsors and that the focus on trade writing is clear. The role and the goal here is to add to CVs. Nothing wrong with that. If you’ve decided this is your path.

Still, I wish there were more routes to recognition for other sorts of writing. I know I have said it before. Maybe a few categories even with open nominations, a readers choice award? Maybe structured to encourage more non-trade views, a greater variety beyond the BOBs and the tourism board funded pieces. Even a lot of the inclusion oriented writing is falling into habits. When you read the amount that I do week after week, the sameness can be striking. If that’s the goal of the “citizen” and “self-published” categories, it could be made clearer, the measuring sticks explained. As I mentioned the other day, the final result of any rational anaysis is that we are all really just weirdos. So shouldn’t it be about being more widely welcoming weirdos, too?***

Done. That’s a lot. As per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. But beware! Mr. Protz lost his Twex account and still hasn’t recovered his 27,000 followers. Update on my emotional rankings? Now, for me Facebook remains clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (78) rising up to maybe pass Mastodon (903) then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,430) hovering somewhere above or around Instagram (164), with unexpectly crap Threads (42) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Seven apps plus this my blog! That makes sense. I may be multi and legion and all that but I do have priorities and seem to be keeping them in a proper row. All in all I still am rooting for the voices on the elephantine Mastodon. And even though (even with the Halloween night snows) it is #Gardening Mastodon that really wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing beer:

Anyone else? Anywhere else? Yes, you also gotta check the blogs, podcasts (barely!) and even newsletters to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Here’s a new newsletter recommendation: BeerCrunchers. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now much more occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back 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. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

*Compare, careful reader, just for example how in September 2022 we read that the “…long boil produced caramelisation and darkening of the wort, which was then fermented in wooden fermenters…” with in November 2023 that the “…long boil produced caramelization and darkened the wort, which was fermented in wooden vessels…“! I have nothing but admiration and even wonder if he thought of the prospect of this very future footnote as the keyboard’s keys clicked.
**It was actually quite charming this week to read otherwise in a newsletter this week sweetly suggest this inordinately bland and decontextualized advice: “unlocking outside-the-box ideas without the preconceived notions that often surround decision-makers can serve as a welcome breath of fresh air” like we were back in 2015 or so…
***Probably need to work this idea a bit more – and noting the hours to press time – but if I read another beer writer lamenting how fewer and fewer are interested in beer or how there is more interest in wine… without noticing they themselves are one of the spokespersons for the topic, not noticing they are complaining about their own shortfalls… well, it boggles a bit. And I got to thinking along these lines even more when I read this passage, again in The Times, about someone called Nicky Haslam, apparently one of the great exclusionary English bores of our times: “Old-fashioned posh is losing its landmarks. Internationalisation has done what democratisation could not. Things that are now considered crass are not working class but originate in the United States. These things will take hold and become “common” at warp speed because of social media…. they are a threat to a unique sense of British identity. My list would include: fasting. Ice plunges. Leg day at the gym. Infra-red saunas. Green smoothies. Cockapoos. Botox and lip filler. College consultants. Being overtly spiritual. Virtual reality games. Helicopter parenting. To resist this fretful, vain, striving, to resist describing that journey on your own podcast, is to stay British, and to stay classy.” Apparently strawberries are to be shunned now! Brilliant. Message: don’t even strive because once you get there, be honest, your sort still won’t be welcomed. Classy? That’s what this sort of class really is. Code for caste. Who needs it? It’s like those from that closed set of the constrained and privileged who bleat about “identity politics” in others when it comes to public policy. Code as cloak. Forget that. Better to be interested and interesting. Best to be weird. Welcoming and weird.

The Clocks Are Changing The Clocks Are Changing Edition Of The Beery News Notes

“…Poop Damn Crap Poop Poopy Crap…”

November. Frig. I never understood why April was the cruellest month when there’s November just a few pages further on in the calendar. What’s so wrong with stirring those “dull roots with spring rain” anyway? Beats the hell out of the prospect of week after week of avoiding frost bite and roadside dead car batteries. This week we went from sunny and +16C on Saturday aft to -4C on Tuesday morning. I filled a bird feeder. I have to fill it again. Those birds are already pissed off with the level of service. And Wednesday we woke to that layer of white shit shown above. Took the photo through the window screen. I would have taken it through the curtain and maybe my bed’s blankets if I could have. I just got that raised bed planted with garlic in time. Poop crap. I even coined a phrase for not drinking this month – Nofunber.

What’s going on with beer? First, Pellicle published an excellent piece on the Double Diamond phenomenon. In the mid-1980s, Double Diamond showed up on keg in my old hometown, the old navy town of Halifax, Nova Scotia around the same time as Guinness did. It was during the beers of the world fad which got going around the same time that the first Maritime micros like the Granite at Gingers and Hanshaus were starting up. Anyway, there are still pals who never really got all that much into beer who still fondly recall the easy sweet taste of Double Diamond at the old Thirsty Duck on Spring Garden Road and how it was tied to the old country:

The name Double Diamond is said to originate from the two interlocking diamond shaped symbols that would have been used to mark cask barrels at the time. And throughout the 1950s all the way through to the 1970s, Double Diamond was one of the best selling beers in the UK. “The rise and fall of [Double Diamond’s] popularity would track the fortunes of the company,” wrote Ian Webster in his book Ind Coope & Samuel Allsopp Breweries: The History of The Hand. “Double Diamond was the leading light, the headline act, the A-list star. It isn’t an overstatement to say that the history of Double Diamond was also the history of the company.” Quite the responsibility to lay on a single beer, is it not?

So… turns we got it pushed out to us after it slumped in the UK. Typical. Read the whole thing to find out why. Excellent writing.

Also excellent is the review by Boak and Bailey of the new and also apparently excellently honest ‘zine edited by the same Rachel Hendry… Service Please!:

There’s also a strand of depressive melancholia: accounts of derailed creative careers, repetitive shifts, and the pressure to perform cosy cheeriness on loop every single day. Even when we’re not being utter dicks, we customers are a wearying lot. In one cartoon, by Ceara Colman, a barista is slowly ground down by one customer after another calling them hun, babe, love…

Trooff, that. And I really liked Alistair‘s post at Fuggles that missed last week’s deadline by a hair. He came upon a brewery in Virginia that has taken the too often ignored concept of an honest beer at an honest price to a new level and explored what the implications of oddly unpopular proposition that value pricing posed:

I am pretty sure this move it going to stir the pot in craft brewing circles in Virginia, especially given the number of breweries where they are changing $7 and upwards for a pint at their taproom… I also love the fact that Tabol don’t shy away from the fact that beer is the everyman drink rather than a niche product for the upper middle classes… [W]here a brewery’s taproom is exactly that, a place to drink a brewery’s beer, in situ, as fresh as fresh could possibly be, without the additional logistical steps that drive up the price, then cheaper than draft or packaged retail should be the norm. If this move drives down the cost of a beer, that is a good thing in my world. After all, isn’t that one of the supposed benefits of increased competition?

Desperate or clever? Hmm… hopefully there will be more on this breaking story from Alistair. Somewhat but not really that connected, Martin visited a university student union that was also a ‘Spoons which is a bit confusing to an auslander like me. I thought the cheapest way to get beer into the hands of students was to have the students sell it themselvesto themselves at their own bars. Is ‘Spoons more efficient than even that?

Speaking of value, there more this week on Russia’s nationalization grab of Carlsberg’s branch operation Baltika:

“There is no way around the fact that they have stolen our business in Russia, and we are not going to help them make that look legitimate,” said Jacob Aarup-Andersen, who took over as CEO in September. Carlsberg had eight breweries and about 8,400 employees in Russia, and took a 9.9 billion Danish crown ($1.41 billion) write-down on Baltika last year. Aarup-Andersen said that from the limited interactions with Baltika’s management and Russian authorities since July, Carlsberg had not been able to find any acceptable solution to the situation.

Err… solution? Maybe leave when the Ukraine was first invaded… in 2014… or when Georgia was invaded… in 2008? Hmm…

Things not being as they seem may also have been the theme at the National Beer Wholesalers Association if their graph shared at Craft Brewing Business is anthing to go by. I’ve edited it for you. Click here. My update makes it much clearer that the “50” level mid-graph is actually indicating zero growth over in the specific US beer market segment. Meaning any sector scoring below the middle is shrinking. Only imports are showing anything like real growth as reported. Craft is taking a beating only saved from the basement by seltzers… which aren’t even beer. Neither are the other big losers ciders, come to think of it. In fact, the story of the graph appears to be that of all beer sectors, craft sales are ditching by far the most drastically. Plenty more than just high level generational demographics making that happen. Especially in a strong US economy.

Speaking of questions, the BBC posed an interesting one this week – “would you drink genetically modified beer?”:

In the UK, GM foods can be authorised by the Food Standards Agency, if they are judged “not to present a risk to health, not to mislead consumers, [and] not to have less nutritional value than their non-GM counterpart”… US brewers using gene-edited yeast in their products is “a secret everyone [in the industry] knows about”… beer makers will rarely promote the fact due to the negative headlines GM technology has received so far. Meanwhile, brewing yeast expert Richard Preiss says that “in the US, you can really do what you want”. He is lab director at Escarpment Labs in Ontario, Canada. It provides more than 300 breweries with yeast, but does not use GM. “You can take [in the States], for example, the genome from basil, and plug it into yeast, and get to market fast with a flavoured beer.”

To be honest, I assume I consume GMOs all the time in my beer. I may grow my own herbs and greens in an all organic yard that a mow with a manual push maching and create special hidey-holes for natitve bees… but my beer? Who knows what crap is in that stuff? Not me! Do you? The question of GMOs in good beer actually strikes me as one of those “journalism / not journalism” beer topics. Much like the silent response to, say, the closing down of the American Brewing History Initiative at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Or, you know, any meaningful discussion of value when it comes to good beer. Just a few of those things that exist in the culture… but no one mentions. Eh. Var.

Converely, Jeff wrote a good piece for VinePair setting out the whole narrative arc in the rise and fall of Hazy IPA – from rare whale to gas station bulk craft – that serves as a good lesson for us all:

The fact that hazy IPAs may have lost some of their cultural power is merely a shadow of the far more significant fact that they have remained so popular for so long. Rather, as they prepare to enter decade two of life, hazies appear to have found equilibrium. Their early success was inflated by oversupply at the small-brewery level, and undersupply nationally, a dynamic that is coming into balance. Their strength remains strong in some regions but less so in others. And they no longer generate the level of excitement that forces people to wait in long lines for the privilege of buying a new release.

It’s been so long since we have had any sort of innovation in craft beer that we forget things like Hazy IPA were once sorta exciting and not just an alt hard seltzer filling the fewer remaining bulk craft shelves at US convenience stores. But these are those times we live in. These be the times. Relatedly, Stan set me a challenge this week in his weekly post on Monday:

Back to “peak of craft.” What does that mean? Is that peak sales? Peak quality? Peak choice? Peak cultural sway? And if the peak has come and gone, how does post-peak beer compare to post-industrial, postmodern, and post-Fordist beer? Can’t wait until Thursday to see if McLeod has answers at A Good Beer Blog.

That call to fess up relates to the cover of the New Yorker from 2014 right there. I mentioned that it had popped up in my FB feed and reminded me of those better days at that time. My response to Stan was that the cover was just the peak point of the cool of craft, the actual brief golden era when there was general public interest and before the wheels had started to come off. Back in 2014, craft was cool. Probably as cool as it would ever be. Now it is in what sociologists call its Sombrero Phase. Still, this all sorta ties into a few other recent posts. Jordan doing a bit of soul searching given the greater picture:

…how am I supposed to write about Craft Beer? Hell, in a situation where everyone is strapped, can you ethically ask for samples for review? Am I going to write about trends? What trends? Someone’s going to put hops or puree in one of the remaining unhopped styles?

Exactly – what trends? The trend of “nothing new” has been the new so long it’s really just the known for the bulk of newbie entrants to the beer buying experience. Jeff was also reflecting and and considers the longer timeline:

Time’s lessons can bring us a certain equanimity about what is important and what merely seems important. On example that has been rising in my mind a lot lately is this one: I don’t need to get worked up about what other people like and, in fact, I can take real pleasure in people who don’t like the things I like. This seems like a banal enough observation—like, really, who cares what beer you drink or car you drive or brand of shoes you wear?

I get it. Both time and the times do wear down upon us. And yet… and yet we still can care even if we aren’t all that cool anymore. Witness Boak and Bailey going on a hobby interest renewal holiday to Berlin and posting some very insightful writing about the observed beer culture there, one about five Pilsners and another about wegbiers – beers bought in small shops for drinking on the way as you walk from one place to another:

… there’s nothing remotely pretentious about these shops. They also sell Monster energy drinks, chocolate bars, ice cream, vapes, and bog roll. That the beers are being sold to drink on the go is underlined by the presence on the counter of a bottle opener. Hand over your cash, knock off the cap, and you’re away. And that’s exactly what people do.

That’s sorta nerdy neato. And Lars had another sort of experience in an alternate reality, too:

My destination: the cheese world championship, where I am to comment on beer/cheese combinations. (I wonder if this might really be national only, though.) So, up there I’m supposed to comment on five cheeses and three beers and how they match. Never tasted any of them before. No idea how this will work out. I guess that worked pretty well. We all of us basically had to just wing it. So you taste the combination and just say whatever comes first to mind.

And The Beer Nut himself did a great job with the keen observational, even self-deprecating wit at the Belgian Beer Challenge, another stop on the Möbius strip of generic international beer awards circuit:

…Belgians, I imagine, are better at this than me…

But… we are told some Belgians were allowed to join in. Which is nice. All of which leads to the question – is there a common aspect to this weirdness? None of it is all that cool, for sure. It’s weird. But is that so wrong? NO – be weird! For now… for us… maybe it’s all just odd enough that good beer still may be a good lens to view this life’s rich pageant or at least good for a laugh – even if it is sometimes at its own expense.

There we are. Hope you’ve enjoyed yourselves once again. Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight. As per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. But beware! Mr. Protz lost his Twex account and his 27,000 followers this week. Update on my emotional rankings? Now, for me Facebook remains clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (77) rising up to maybe pass Mastodon (900) then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,434) hovering somewhere above or around Instagram (168), with unexpectly crap Threads (41) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Seven apps plus this my blog! That makes sense. I may be multi and legion and all that but I do have priorities and seem to be keeping them in a proper row. All in all I still am rooting for the voices on the elephantine Mastodon. And even though (even with the Halloween night snows) it is #Gardening Mastodon that really wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing beer, :

Anyone else? Anywhere else? Yes, you also gotta check the blogs, podcasts (barely!) and even newsletters to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Here’s a new newsletter recommendation: BeerCrunchers. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now much more occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back 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. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

The Woooooooooo Scariest Hellbound Beery News Notes Ever Unleashed From The Bowels Of Hell!!!

Ha-ha! I wrote bowels. If you’re not born of Scots, that might not be daily dinner table language so I apologize as I refer you in the alternative to the basso loco of Dante’s Inferno for a clearer sense of the reason for the season. But if you are Canadian of a certain age, however, there is only one true representation of the hellscape of pure evil – SCTV’s Monster Chiller Horror Theatre from around forty years ago. Wooooohooo. Scary. Lots of beer content on SCTV: Biller Hi-Lite, Moose Beer and twist off beer caps on American beer bottles. Not at all horrible is my new plan for Halloween… which I can’t believe I have not come up with before… a plan to buying candy I like, keep it to myself and eating it as I hand out the crap candy I don’t like so much to the kids. Except I don’t like candy all that much. More extreme measures will not be necessary… unlike apparently in Japan:

In other news, Tokyo’s Shibuya district has banned public drinking, hiring 300 private security guards and urging local stores to stop selling alcohol to ward off revelers this Halloween.

What? That’s some sort of crazy. Are nutty Halloween pub crawls a thing where you live? They seem to be a thing in Buffalo, NY, Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Lexington, Kentucky. I like it. Pack the streets. We did a similar thing in the Halifax of my 1980s youth at Halloween – but we called it Mardi Gras for some reason. Tens of thousands of us. Once I went as junk mail (my best costume ever if I am going to be honest with you) with a buddy who went as a breakfast nook – that could actually toast toast. Out there. On the street. Street toast. Class.

Anyway, have you ever seen a lede buried as deep as this one was in GBH? In a neat and tidy piece on a rebranding at the Chicago Brewseum this little bomb is dropped in the middle of paragraph ten:

Theresa McCulla, curator of the American Brewing History Initiative at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, will leave that post in early November, and the role will no longer exist after her exit.

The Smithsonian program, largely funded and framed in terms of narrative by the Brewers Association’s involvement, started up in 2016. While I was disappointed in the periodic press releases highlighting things like Papazian’s paddle from the great white male hero era of craft, I trust that records and objects from throughout the over 435 years of brewing in the what are now the United States have been protected. Wonder why the Brewers Association gave up on their affiliation? A special thanks to all those beer journalists getting on that story even as I type these very words.

Speaking of endings, Stan discussed the piece in VinePair on the declining influence of US craft beer in Europe, asking if “the story totally supports an assertion that beers from America aren’t influencing change” which I get but, still, I like the arguments set out in this well thought out piece by Will Hawkes:

California-founded Stone’s failure in Europe is symbolic of a wider issue. Craft beer has made a huge splash across the Atlantic, but American breweries, for the most part, have not prospered as they might have expected — and things don’t appear to be getting better. Extrapolating from Brewers Association (BA) figures published by the organization and in Forbes, the overall craft beer volume exported to Europe declined from 78,994 barrels in 2021 to 63,755 in 2022. The reasons for this are complex, but they get to the heart of Europe’s beer market and the limitations of American craft breweries in a place where their economic power has rarely matched their cultural cachet.

TL;DR? Reasons not so much complex as just numerous… BrewDog being everywhere, other Euro brewers holding branding rights, uncompetative pricing and the botch by Stone diluting the value. Brutal line: “[at] this year’s Berlin Beer Week, Stone beers featured in a tap takeover at a pizzeria.” Perhaps relatedly, things are also not going well for brewers in New Zealand:

“I was talking to a brewer recently and he said: ‘It’s all just beer now.’ The problem with craft is it’s always been ill-defined. Does it mean small scale? Does it mean independent? Does it mean flavoursome?” Without that clear definition, the territory was ripe for major beer companies to step into – and all the big breweries have done exactly that. “You now have Lion with their Mac’s brand, DB with Monteith’s and Asahi with Boundary Road. Those are the three main ones in that area, and what they’re doing is just pumping up the flavour in those brands. They’re making great beer at a more affordable price.”

I know that this is all a bit of a downer – even though this is the “scary” season – but at least things are not as bad as they are in Rioja according to the newsletterist Jason Wilson of Everyday Drinking who includes this summary of recent findings:

I was shocked to read Tim Atkin’s piece about serious problems in Rioja — “Rioja on the Rocks” — a couple of weeks ago. I knew that Rioja had issues, but Atkin (the foremost English-language expert on Rioja) paints a dire picture of a region in crisis. As Atkin reports, the regional governments of La Rioja and the Basque Country plan to detroy 30 million liters of surplus wine to try to balance supply and demand. Another 150 million liters, unwanted by the market, is sitting in cellars. The 2023 harvest has been terrible, and grape prices are at unsustainable lows—in fact, many growers cannot sell their grapes. Reportedly, one major co-operative is on the verge of bankruptcy, two large bodegas are in administration, and Campo Viejo, Rioja’s largest winery, is allegedly up for sale. There are threats by large groups of growers and producers to leave the consortium altogether as they argue over whether to focus on quantity or quality.

Yikes! Just last year things were looking up.

Better news? How about the best big brewery marketing of the moment? Heineken making fun of its own name and using Plastic Bertrand for the soundtrack. That good. And The Brewnut has proven once again how he is the best commentator on what’s actually in the glass, illsustrated by this review of the offerings by Wicklow Wolf:

This year’s twist on the all-local ingredients spec is the inclusion of Kilmacanogue raspberries in a sour ale. Shame they didn’t have a go at spontaneously fermenting it, for extreme local character. Regardless, it’s very nice. The raspberries taste fresher and realer than they do in most raspberry beers, almost bursting on the tongue the way the fruit does. There’s no sugary, syrupy jam here, just a cleanly medium-pitched tartness, again similar to what you’d get from actual raspberries, building to a slightly puckering finish. While it’s only 4.2% ABV, I can’t see this working well as a refreshing summer beer — it’s too intense, with lots going on it. While I definitely liked it, I’m glad I waited until a dull day in October to drink it.

See that: not fawning, explains how it stands out, explains what might be done to improve. I’d buy that beer. Speaking of buying beer, David Nilsen wrote an homage to “Brouwerij Van Steenberge’s Tripel Van De Garre” in Pellicle this week and how it illustrates a few trends:

“In today’s market, imports are struggling against the locavore movement,” says Michael, noting the plethora of local options. “We have 97 breweries in the city limits [of Chicago].” Sara Levin, the package beer buyer for The Barrel House, a beloved beer bar and bottle shop in Dayton, Ohio, has been a professional beer buyer for close to a decade and says the current attitude toward Belgian beer among many American craft devotees had already begun to take shape when she started in the industry in 2014. “Before me it was a little different, but in my time I feel like Belgian beer has always been the old money craft beer,” Sara says. “It’s been the OG beer geeks who really respect the old school styles.”

That right there is one of the sadder things about the craft beer movement’s rush to chase the tale of novelty, the loss of interest in hounouring Belgian styles. Got an opinion on that? You can explain how you feel about such things if you take part in this week’s study on the habits of craft beer and real ale drinkers? Do you have habits? They want to study you. In a similar note, Gary came across a study of real ale drinking in England from 1866… with some very and sadly familiar themes:

Less than one-half of it is drunk in perfection, or at its best condition, the larger percentage becoming more or less flat, hard [tart], and unpalatable, or even sour before it is consumed. From the day of the tapping of the cask, with the gradual entrance of atmospheric air, the liqour undergoes progressive deterioration, first becoming flat and unpalatable, from the loss of its carbonic acid, and then sour from having its spirit converted in acetic acid by the absorption of oxygen. In fact, day by day, as the palate unplesantly detects, it may be said to advance one step further on the road to vinegar.

Yik. Too much OG old school right there. And sorta samesies [h/t] at the blog run by Triskele Heritage, an archaeological consultancy, there was a sweet disassembling of the claim made by an Irish pub as to its status as the world’s oldest tavern:

The problem here is that the fabric of the building is claimed to date to the ninth century, and this is repeated from one website to another, but no archival or archaeological evidence is ever offered as the root source of the information. Instead, the listed entry for Sean’s Bar on the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage… notes that the current standing building was constructed c 1725 as a coaching inn which was known as The Three Blackamoors Heads by 1738. The record goes onto confirm that renovations were indeed carried out c 1970 but, instead of finding ““wattle and wicker” dating back to the ninth century”, the walls in question were dated to the seventeenth century. That is a potential exaggeration of at least seven centuries.

Speaking of even more not quite right, perhaps that green bottle of Tsingtao isn’t just skunky:

In the clip which appeared online on Thursday, a worker, dressed in uniform with a helmet on, can be seen climbing over a high wall and into the container before urinating inside it. The location tag of the clip reads “Tsingtao beer No.3 factory”, local news outlet The Paper reported on Friday. Business outlet “National Business Daily” later cited an internal source as saying both the person who took the video and the person appearing in it were not direct employees of the company… Shares in Tsingtao Brewery fell sharply when the Shanghai Stock Exchange opened on Monday morning but were trading broadly flat by the afternoon.

Boo-tastic. Now we have pee in the stuff. In other scary health news, the Time of Londinium shared a story on the problems with a certain sort of stress drinking and had this very interesting fact:

A recent study… found that women with high levels of cardiorespiratory fitness are between 1.5 to 2 times as likely to drink moderately or heavily as those who are sedentary. Charlotte considered herself to be healthy. “I’d go running on Saturday at 8am with my friends after drinking two bottles of wine on Friday. Parker tried all the right things to manage stress. “I went to a meditation teacher, I was looking at my diet, I ran a lot” — everything except quit drinking.”

That is interesting. Fact filled and interesting. And scary.

Enough!!! I leave you there for this week. As per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. I have yet another update on the rankings. TweX is now really starting to drop in the standings. I am deleting follows there more and more in favour of mirroring accounts set up by favourite voices elsewhere. Now, for me Facebook is clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (74) rising up to sit in a tie with Mastodon (899) then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,344) hovering somewhere above or around Instagram (167) with Threads (41) and Substack Notes (1) really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Seven apps plus this my blog! That makes sense. I may be multi and legion and all that but I do have priorities and seem to be keeping them in a proper row. All in all, I still am rooting for the voices on the elephant-like Mastodon, like these ones just below discussing beer, even though it is #Gardening Mastodon that really wins:

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts (barely!) and even newsletters to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Here’s a new newsletter recommendation: BeerCrunchers. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now much more occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back 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. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

An Irritable If Not Confused And Perhaps For Once Even Cranky Set Of Beery News Notes This Week

It’s been another week without frost. It’s going to be a short winter if this keeps up. Garlic still is stilling in a big pot waiting for the necessary chill coming this weekend, sorta the bookend to maple syrup time in the spring. Going to get 500 in the ground this year… but when? It’s the not knowing that gets you on edge. Too early and they sprout. Too late and they suffer. Yet I checked the photos on Facebook… and last year I planted my garlic another three or four weeks from now. What’s that about?

Enough of that! You are here for the beer. First up, Stan had a great linkfest on Monday and especially made pointed comment on the news in circulation on the fate that hops may face from climate change… aka global warming:

I am all for anything that draws attention to what global warming is doing to the planet, although, quite honestly, there are more and larger disasters looming than the demise of certain hop varieties. Even the ones I love. But I do wish the authors had acknowledged there are more agronomically vigorous cultivars available. And that there are new ones on the way. Now is the time for brewers to consider using them. More of my thoughts in the most recent Hop Queries.

You know I enjoy Hop Queries, probably the best beer newsletter out there. Here’s that update he mentioned. News you can trust. Speaking of which, there was a bit of an interesting slag this week in The Guardian‘s piece on fancy schmancy cider (the type we all like), a bit of a primer that takes a sideswipe in passing:

…they cost more than the vast majority of ciders on the supermarket shelves, although they’re still generally cheaper than natural wines, which they often resemble in packaging and marketing style. In fact, cider is more like wine from the point of view of having a single annual harvest and (pét nats aside) the time it takes to produce a bottle, which is certainly much longer than beer. As a result, producers have generally gone down the artisanal, rather than the craft beer route. They’re also attempting to raise cider’s profile by holding “salons”, or live consumer events, which are a mixture of tastings and talks.

My oh my: “gone down the artisanal, rather than the craft beer route“!!! I love how I don’t exactly know what is meant but, yes, we know what is meant. An actual craft. What craft beer lacks. Perhaps not all that dissimilar is the wine taverns of Vienna, as discussed this week at the Beeb:

Heurigen, the rustic winery-run taverns showing off their aromatic white wines around wooden tables set under grape arbors and laden with traditional Austrian fare that might include schnitzel and blood sausage, always potato salad and ham and a variety of savory cheesy spreads to go with dark sourdough bread. Paris might have its bars du vin, Rome its enotecas. But Vienna’s relationship to wine (and wine-friendly food) is unique. The Austrian capital is the only major European metropolis with a designated wine-growing area within its city limits, counting more than 600 producers on some 1,700 acres of vineyards. “Our city’s long viticultural history goes back to the time of the Celts and the Romans,” explained Ilse Heigerth, my guide in Vienna and a city historian.

I just saw a repeat of a Rick Stein’s Long Weekend shot in Vienna and he corroborated the whole thing. Staying in the centro-Euro, Martin reported on a trip to Belgrade, not a locale high on my list for my wanderings ways – and I am apparently not alone:

These foreign posts don’t get a lot of views because a) No-one else has been there and b) No-one else intends to go there. Oddly, it’s the unsung towns that get the most views. But in the last week I’ve referred to three posts from Ron, Duncan and the European Bar Guide folk and I’m sure if I live long enough my posts on Cuban pubs will be useful to someone, though possibly not the nice American lady we met last week who’s visiting every country in the world (except Cuba, obvs). We did eventually find the more ornate bits of Belgrade, but Mrs RM was more interested in photos of the trams.

Speaking of Ron Pattinson, he’s gone back in time again to the 1970s to the world of romance that was his youth:

As we were guests at the hotel, the pints didn’t need to stop at closing time. When I was young, opportunities for pints after 11 PM were as rare as flamingos in Leeds. I never passed them up. Which is a problem when you’ve paced yourself to end at “normal” closing time. I wasn’t feeling great when I rose after far too few hours’ sleep. But I wasn’t going to let that stop me eating the full English that I’d paid for. On the way back to Newark, we stopped at a Kimberley pub for a few pints. I was a bit overenthusiastic, as I rarely got to drink their beer. I was already feeling a bit unwell when we picked up the hitchhiker. About 10 minutes later I really needed to spew. Being considerate, I pushed past the hitcher, opened the rear door and puked on the road. What a hero I was.

Gary – perhaps more properly – neatly added to a space that is too often left alone, temperance drinking prior to US prohibition. Three posts were added to the whole this week on the topic of a church-run dispensery operated in Raleigh, North Carolina from 1904 to 1907 by the members of the local clergy with the blessing of the City government:

The Raleigh experiment formed part of a larger plan in parts of the South to substitute a municipally-run alcohol dispensary for the swing-door saloon of commerce… It competed with other liquor-control plans, such as outright prohibition and so-called high license. High here referred to the cost of the licence to sell liquor. A state might feature examples of all these: normal license, high license, local prohibition, and dispensary.

Someone is getting still the good word one way or another as we read that even the Finns… the FINNS(!) are cutting back:

During the third quarter, beverage companies sold 10.4 million litres less beer than in Q3 2022. The federation based the figures on sales data from its members: Hartwall, MBH Breweries, Momentin Group, Olvi, Red Bull and Sinebrychoff. Year-on-year, Q3 sales of all alcoholic libations sold by its members fell by 2.4 percent, while sales of alcohol-free drinks were also down, by 6.8 percent.

Well at least there is that. David Jesudason has written another great article for Pellicle, this time on the point of those things often written around but never as directly defined, the UK micro-pub as illustrated by the inhabitants of The Shirker’s Rest:

While the others help with the administration and publicity of the pub, James is the one that gets his hands dirty and provides the graft—he built the bar with a friend called Pete Lyons and created the beer boards. He also provides the (slightly deadpan) personality. At the bar is a notebook called James’s Book of Sayings which includes his recurring requests for customers to slide the toilet door closed, look at the boards to see what’s on offer—the keg badges are not easily viewed—and for Ben not to crowd his cellar with too much beer.

And Alistair Reece wrote a good piece on how a visit to one Virginia cider maker got him thinking about the utility of the word “house”:

Given their oenological background, Will lamented that the term “house” has come to mean the most basic wine on offer, something almost cheap and cheerful, but decidedly not excellent. His aim with House Cider is to be the exact opposite, to be the very best that Troddenvale puts out, and it is a magnificent cider, easily up there with the best being made in Virginia today, no I didn’t take notes, I was too busy enjoying it. This got me thinking about the concept of “house” products when it comes to beer. We quite often use the term “house beer” in homebrewing circles to refer to something that we brew regularly, but I don’t recall a brewery, at least not in my neck of the woods, hanging their entire reputation as a brewery on a single “house” beer. Is it perhaps that modern beer drinkers are constantly on the hunt for the new, or is it a case of fear of missing out by not pushing every possible style out the door in case the crowds choose to go somewhere else?

I wonder if they are familiar with the book The Cider House Rules by John Irving which was made into a movie I never watched in 1999. But the idea of a set of governing principles that, according to that Wikipedia summary, sorta fits tthe disfunctions of craft beer nicely:

The name “The Cider House Rules” refers to the list of rules that migrant workers are supposed to follow at the Ocean View Orchards. However, none of them can read, and they are completely unaware of the rules – which have been posted for years.

Sort of related is this message and accompanying clickable image from BlueSky, shared in whole for those without access:

Cask beer write up in heavy metal magazine by Courtney Iseman? Yeah, it’s been kinda a weird year for cask beer. Ups and downs. This one is a big up. Love it.

I like the honesty that US “cask beer’s growth is glacial” but apparently there according to those interviewed by Iseman. Is anyone seeing this on the ground as a consumer? If so where?

Note: Andreas shared information on the beer halls of Munich you might want to visit next time you’re there 150 years ago:

The sheer number of beer halls and restaurants made the area around Unter den Linden/Friedrichstraße/Leipziger Straße the “entertainment quarter” of old Berlin. They even got nicknames: “Unter den Linden” was “Laufstraße” (walking street), Leipziger Straße was “Kaufstraße” (shopping street), while Friedrichstraße was “Saufstraße” (boozing street).

One does not know what to make of certain statements when the fact in question is a couple of minutes on Google away:

FYI: “Brazilian-Germans held slaves (a fact that has been clearly demonstrated) but… Germanophone authors… presented a uniform image of Germans as masters, one that rendered slavery an aspect of the civilizing narrative of German settlement in Brazil.”

What else is true if you can’t get that right? One wonders. And the NAGBW awards were announced this week and – again – we do note the similar themes and similar candidates… but this time with also some real gaps in this subset. Having been a judge in the past, you don’t really want to name names in these things especially now given (i) the fragile state of it all as Jeff noted and (ii) the majority of the uninvolved beer writing that does not get itself self-nominated so, you know, it’s all a bit la crème du milieu… but really. For example, there’s no award or even a mention for David Jesudason’s book Desi Pubs the best book of the year!?!* Seriously? And third and an honourable mention for his other submissions? Please.

Aaaaaannnd… that’s it. I have to tend to other things. Still more to get out of – and into – the garden before the freeze snaps. That zucchini is growing by my front step even as I write this. Look at it! What an odd year. Pray for them and me next Sunday night, just a week before Halloween when the next steep drop of the mercury is due. If we are lucky and hold off the frozen air I am going to go out on the big night as Jack and the Bean Stalk with my own 12 foot tall potted pole beans by my side.

As per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. I have yet another update on the rankings. TweX is now really starting to drop in the standings. I am deleting follows there more and more in favour of mirroring accounts set up by favourite voices elsewhere. Now, for me Facebook is clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my friends and family) then we have BlueSky rising up to sit in a tie with Mastodon then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex** hovering somewhere above or around Instagram with Threads and Substack Notes really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence just sitting there. Seven apps plus this my blog! I may be multi and legion and all that but I do have priorities and seem to be keeping them in a proper row. All in all, I still am rooting for the voices on the elephant-like Mastodon, like these ones just below discussing beer, even though it is #Gardening Mastodon that really wins:

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts (barely!) and even newsletters to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now much more occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back 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. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

*I even reached out already and shared my thoughts. Also see above, of course.
**Gary shall turn off the lights at X unless it’s done to him first. I judge not.

The Near Mid-October 2023 Edition Of Your Beery News Notes

Took a week off this week just to make sure, you know, all the turkey leftovers were consumed and all the necessary prep chores were done well ahead of winter. To the right is half of the garlic crop as well as the bundle of garlic greens that will be tomato mulch next year. They get replanted soon. Haven’t noticed any particular theme this week but no doubt that quiet is due to the horrors in the Middle East piling upon the horrors in Ukraine. Facing uselessness in the presence of such evil, what do you do? Keep garden and scribbling? Yup.

First up, being October, Pellicle has a timely feature this week by Ariana DiValentino on one of the more venerable and more drinkable pumpkin ales out there, Pumking by Southern Tier of western New York State:

“Pumking should be the brewer’s target for a pumpkin beer,” he adds. Critics and craft beer fans alike echo this, crediting the balance between spicy, sweet, bold, and bitter. Personally, I think it manages to strike a balance in another way: the type of drinker it attracts. Though pumpkin ales are traditionally maligned, there’s something about taking one and turning the volume up to 11 that transforms it into a magnet for craft devotees. And yet, you don’t need to be a beer geek with an encyclopaedic knowledge of hop varieties to appreciate Pumking. You don’t even need to be a beer drinker, really; anyone who likes pie is likely to find the phrase “pumpkin pie in a glass” tempting. Drinkers come for the pie and stay for…also the pie, because in this case, there’s truth in advertising.

Southern Tier was a favourite of mine in the old cross border beer shopping days of ten to twenty years ago. I played a role in bringing their beers into the Ontario market after years of enjoying their range of beers, especially the big ones that led up to Pumking. My first note on Pumking dates to 2009 when a bomber cost you $6.49, well after the after-party. My first pumpkin beer note goes back five years earlier to October 2004 when I bought Post Road by Brooklyn Brewing. But by 2011, unlike what the Pellicle article seems to suggest with the phrase “the nascent hype in the early 2010s“, cracks were already starting to show in the reputation of the long established style. Even the venerable The Atlantic in 2011 questioned their place:

Some beer styles are loved, some are ardently despised, but none is more divisive than pumpkin ales. Those who love them wait all year for their seasonal release; others can’t even broach the subject without foaming at the mouth. “I hate pumpkin beers,” wrote my friend and Washington City Paper beer writer Orr Stuhl. “Even picking a ‘favorite’ — say, Dogfish Head’s — is like picking a favorite airborne illness.”

Hah!! Good one. More timely and far less snippy, Jessica Mason has reported on some new solid data on inflation in the UK’s beer maket ‘Spoons sub-sector:

Using pricing data gathered at every Wetherspoons pub in October 2022 and October 2023 via the pub group’s app, the analysis identified how, currently, the average price of a pint of Carling in a Wetherspoons pub is £3.35. This has increased 11% since Oct 2022, when it was £3.02. According to the findings, 740 Wetherspoons pubs have seen inflation over the last year, 58 have seen deflation, and five saw no price change. Drilling down into the data, the Wetherspoons pubs with the highest inflation rates are The Rann Wartha, Cornwall (42.2%), and The John Francis Basset, Cornwall (42.2%) while the Wetherspoons pubs with the highest deflation rates are The Golden Beam, Leeds (-20.1%), and The Myrtle Grove, West Yorkshire (-19.7%).

I’ve always liked The Myrtle Grove… or at least I would have if I had ever heard of it. And it’s not just in the ‘Spoons. Sucker Juice is always right there begging for your attention:

Brewed independently by the artisans at Freetime Beer Co in Wales, Nothing Beer embraces a minimalist ingredient list; just water, rice, malted barley, hops, and yeast. “As a London-based tech company we are proud to have partnered with another independent British brand in Freetime Beer Co for this launch,” says Ryan Latham, Nothing’s Global Director Brand & Creative. While the limited-edition release (at £20 for a pack of six) is only available in the UK at the moment…

That’s $33 a six. Nuts. Everyone is on the take. Same as it ever was. Except it isn’t. Because inflation is also tied with contraction as Nickolaus Hines explains at the InsideHook:

“…beer as a whole [is] losing out to other alcohol categories, as well as the rise of people who abstain from alcohol altogether… “In plain English, the industry has lost about 30%, or 2.2 million, of its youngest LDA consumers in five years,” Purser said. “This is a pattern, and the current brand crisis has accelerated this broader category concern.”*

Somewhat relatedly in terms of the scramble, here’s a bit of a sad turn from the world of wine which I am quite aware of being replicated in a way in beer, a private financial exchange need to receive a tasting note back from a known beer writer – thus underlining any semblance of the writer’s independence. But in this case, it is the publisher limiting access to the notes issued by a group of critics to those out there who pay 160 Euros. Wine writer Jon Bonné considers the situation thusly:

The fascinating part: This is the first time I can recall anyone has taken a stab at putting a dollar figure (euro figure) on this specific bit of content generation. I won’t say it’s what the market has determined, but it’s what someone thinks the market will bear. It also cuts off at the knees one of the more wobbly arguments of recent years: that these tasting notes and scores are for consumers. Consumers are grabbing bottles from the aisle cap, or checking on the latest orange fad. These are for producers + their agents. If that’s so, then how much more ripping off of the fig leaf is this than the many existing shades of trade-writer clubbiness?

Speaking of wine, the Count Alexandre de Lur Saluces has died… which surely leads each of us to ask “who hasn’t been in this situation?”:

Unknown to the public at large, however, the count owned only 7 per cent of the estate with 48 per cent held by his elder brother and smaller amounts by other members of the extended family. They rebelled against his autocratic behaviour and lack of dividends, which led to an embarrassingly public fight, when in 1996 they agreed to sell majority control to Bernard Arnault, the billionaire owner of the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH. Bitter words were spoken by all sides of the family, with the count declaring “Mr Arnault is financing [other family members] to get rid of me. If he gets hold of this château he will install his fashion models here and start producing a perfume called Yquem!’’

Indeed. And the no doubt well-perfumed Ron’s gone a bit further back, lingering in the early 1970s for a bit this month:

I’m just getting the mixture right between water and dirt to let me have a good old wallow in nostalgia. Or at least, casting a glance back at the past. And hoping no-one is returning my gaze. We were looking at Whitbread’s 1973 set of beers. Time now for the other fermentables: adjuncts and sugar. What should be remembered here is that Whitbread had long been a holdout in the use of adjuncts. Only starting to use them in 1965. Much later than most of their rival brewers. Other than wartime, of course, when they had no choice but to.

For Cider Review, Barry Masterson went a bit further back in time to the Middle Ages of Bavaria to tell the tale of perry’s hayday there:

A chance discovery I made while reading some older articles tracing the ancestry of Austrian perry pear varieties yielded one of the earliest definite mentions of perry in central Europe. The Bavarian-Austrian poet Neidhart von Reuental, probably one of the most famous Minnesänger or minstrels of the period, made a reference to perry in one song. Around 1240, after he had moved from Bavaria to the area near Melk in current day Austria, he added two verses to an existing song, written of course in Middle High German…

A great tale of daring do was set out in Twex this week, a story of inebriated public menace once upon a time in New York City:

In September 1956 after drinking heavily at a bar in New York City, Thomas Fitzpatrick made an intoxicated barroom bet that he could travel from New Jersey to New York City in 15 minutes. At 3 a.m. he stole a single-engine plane from the Teterboro and flew without any lights or radio before landing on St. Nicholas Avenue near 191st Street in front of the bar where the bet was made. The New York Times called it a “fine landing” and a “feat of aeronautics”. For his illegal flight, he was fined $100 after the plane’s owner refused to press charges.

For the double, we have another story of dissent from about the same time – but this time from Belgium:

Never forget how on Nov 16, 1949 a bunch of Belgian students from Ghent took over a fortress and attacked the police with fruit because the city had raised the price of beer. On November 16, 1949, 138 students (including one girl) entrenched themselves in the Gravensteen in Ghent. The battlements are adorned with playful student slogans, while the police and fire brigade are treated to overripe fruit and smoke bombs. The student-like violence can only be contained with the greatest difficulty by the police. The student joke is front-page news in the international press.

And you think you’re a beer evangelist. Pffft! Sadly, such clear-headed thinking, taking on issues head-on does not seem to exist in all quarters:

Paul Leone is the executive director of the New York Brewers Association, and he says craft beer simply isn’t a growing industry anymore. Before 2016, the growth of the industry was 10% year over year. “No doubt there are breweries that are looking to sell, there are breweries that are not going to make it for the long haul, unfortunately, but I would caution people and say that this is a business like any other business,” Leone said. “There are breweries that are no doubt struggling, and there are some that are expanding… We are not over-saturated and there is no bubble.”

I don’t know what to make of that… don’t worry be happy… whistling in the dark? Also not sure how homogenized craft beer culture is across North America. Can we even make generizations about the politics? I would note if pressed (contrary to Jeff’s suggestion that it identifies as left/liberal rather than right/conservative due to the Bud Lite botch of just a half a year ago) that in 2013 this was the results of a study involving a number of prominent breweries, mainly in Colorado – progressive as anything:

Craft beer drinkers tend to embrace healthier active lifestyles as well as exist on the fringe of conformity. This segment typically enjoys riding bikes, walking from place to place, hiking, camping and in general embraces an outdoor lifestyle. Consequently, they frequent places such as Whole Foods, Sprouts, local fresh markets, REI and national parks. Their choice of music is more generational than driven by their consumption of craft beer; most of the brew pubs we visited played indie-pop music like Dave Matthews, Mumford & Sons or Dawes. Our local observations revealed that many craft beer drinkers value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, creativity, intelligence, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, and witty banter.xxix This definition matches the “hipster” sub-segment of the millennial generation. Craft beer drinkers did not appear to be lazy as they aspire to be accomplished and productive. Craft beer drinkers tend to be more professional than then the blue collar working-class.

And remember: that New Yorker cover is coming up on its ninth anniversary. Still holds up… unlike Mumford & Sons. I am more in alignment with Jeff’s post this week, “The State of Beer Education” or at least the conclusion:

…as the everyman (everyperson) drink, most people feel comfortable ordering and drinking it without deep engagement. What makes it so popular is the very thing that leads to incuriosity. I have reconciled myself to this reality and, on balance, I think it’s a good thing. Beer is wonderful because its accessibility enables it to be the mass social beverage. That requires a simple, unfussy product.

I like that. But I don’t fully buy the route he gets there. Let’s be honest. Beer as a subject for an education just does not attract all that much actual independent study or scholarship other than perhaps in the bio department. Resulting titles are a bit overblown, newbie guides are praised as if they are a thesis while actual thoughtful writers are still refused footnotes by publishers. There isn’t even anything as detailed and complex as the popular annual guide for consumers published under Hugh Johnson‘s name but long overseen by Margaret Rand. [Get yourself a copy.] And too often beer courses are often proprietary, without a published syllabus or independent peer reviewing in any true academic sense. And beer (sorry to break it to you) is simply not “every bit as complex and nuanced as wine“* – especially in these days of adjunct focused, easy-to-please kettle sours and fruit sauce variants. But do you care? No! As Jeff says, the best of the many beer courses you can take online or at say a community college are very helpful entry points especially for ambitious brewery and bar staff but it is self guided study that creates the best education you can gain – whether with wine or with beer. On you way! Hit the books. If that’s your thing. If not, have a beer.

And… there are still no drunk elephants stories for Stan again this week. Just a drunk monkey on the loose in Indianapolis which… makes one wonder whether this is really news:

A monkey named Momo is on the loose in Indianapolis — and one neighbor reported seeing the simian sipping a beer. Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department said Momo escaped from his owner’s home in the Ironridge Court area of the city’s east side on Wednesday and was subsequently spotted the Gate Drive neighborhood, about a quarter mile away. Police said they were unable to confirm whether Momo has bitten anyone while on the loose.

What the hell kind of good is a “monkey on the loose!” story if there isn’t any biting?!?! Fine. That’s it. As per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect. I have an update on the rankings. TwitterX is now really starting to drop in the standings. I am actually deleting follows there when I find strongly established mirroring accounts set up by favourite voices elsewhere. Now, for me Facebook is clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my friends and family) then we have BlueSky rising up to sit in a tie with Mastodon then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex hovering somewhere above or around Instagram with Threads and Substack Notes really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence just sitting there. Seven apps plus this my blog! I may be multi and legion but I do have priorities and am getting them in a row. All in all, I still am rooting for the voices on the elephant-like Mastodon, like these ones discussing beer, even though it is gardening Mastodon that really wins:

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

*Phillies v. Braves fourth inning update!
**It is an observation often paired with “I don’t know much about wine…” (Update: A point Jeff later sorta took pains to illustrate.) Sure, there are many excellent examples of fine and facinating beers but only a fraction of those found in good wine. Why? Vintages for one. In the twenty years since my first pumpkin ale, each decent winery has put out twenty versions of the same one wine and each winery puts out any number of wines. And then each one changes usually beneficially with understood time frames. There is so much to explore. Beer aging is now often sort of a joke – when it isn’t a source of familial accusation and humiliation!

The Beery News Notes To Help You Understand Canadian Thanksgiving Weekend

“Gather round family! It’s time to unwrap the boiled turkey from its flannel wrap!!” What joy, what child’s glee can match that wonderful moment when the bird is wrapped in Grandpa’s old work shirt from back on the farm. And, for the Canadian craft beer fan, the annual moment to gloat over how no wine can match flannel boiled turkey than a good old musty stock ale in a can. I love how even the branding is classic Canadiana passive aggressive around this time of year:

Extra Old Stock holds a pleasant grain character with a light sweetness. You will enjoy a medium-dry finish with a mild sweet aftertaste.

Damn right you will. You better. Speaking of things Canadian and agricultural, BA Bart has reported on the continental barley crop:

Total N. American barley harvest down 14%. Change mostly driven by lower yields in Canada (better than terrible 2021 but down from last year & 10 year avg).

It’s driven that way in large part because, as the handy graph provided shows, Canadian malt production passed the plummeting annual US crop about forty years ago from a combined high then of just under 1.25 trillion bushels to around 540 billion now. That’s a drop to 43% of peak production. That’s quite the statistic.

Next, an apology to Martyn whose story of the King’s Walden Brewery was published on September 23rd but went unmentioned last week. I note it now for many reasons – but expecially this really interesting bit near the end:

Fellowes went on to be one of a number of British entrepreneurs who invested in American breweries in the 1890s and 1900s: he was on the board of the Bartholomay Brewing Company of Rochester, New York in 1900, and chairman of the company by 1913, and by 1907 he was also a director of the San Francisco Breweries Ltd, an amalgamation of nine Northern Californian concerns. Fellowes was still on both companies’ boards when Prohibition arrived in 1919.

The key facts that I would include on any brewing history exam are: (i) British money poured into the North American brewing industry in the later 1800s seeking large returns, (ii) consolidation along with equipment upgrades was an important means to achieve those returns and (iii) how many of those amalgamated nine breweries were steam breweries… or did the British money pay for steam? Along with trains, this cash influx was a main cause of the retraction in the number of breweries, a phenomenon we see today in US craft but in reverse. Now we have many more breweries making less and less.

Note: If it was in my town, I would spend many hours at the place called Dave’s Pie & Ale House.

Interesting to note that the right-wing bigotry issues continue to dog cask ale in England* all of a sudden. Boak and Bailey unpacked the general nationalist scene:

But in these days of the supposed culture war ‘conservative’ isn’t just about your attitude to economics. It’s also about your stance on feminism, gender, racism, Brexit, vaccination… Nigel Farage, the most prominent champion of Brexit, made pints of cask ale part of his personal image, and the preservation of the crown-stamped pint glass a key talking point of the ‘Leave’ campaign. As beer writers are fond of pointing out, cask ale is uniquely British (terms and conditions may apply) and so lends itself to nationalist posturing. Cask ale is also associated with ‘proper pubs’. For many, a proper pub is the very dream and ideal. For others, it’s an idea loaded with danger signs: doesn’t it just mean white, male and possibly, or probably, racist?

The Drinks Business noted an odd response to the situation: ignore the obvious implications of a botched PR rollout and go straight for some bland messaging by the usual suspects all singing from the well thumbed hymnal, suggesting that the best way to deal with a problem is to deny the problem:

The messages, which came in thick and fast during Cask Ale Week, were in response to the sector feeling that cask assessor Cask Marque’s recent tie up with GB News had done little to amplify the positive aspects of cask. One key message that rang true throughout was that “cask is for everyone” – a turn of phrase which, following the debacle, became a hashtag on Twitter. What then unfolded was a swathe of messages from beer fans and voices from across the industry who set about beginning to preach about cask ale with raptures of how it was such a “perfect” and “comforting” drink, especially when enjoyed in a pub setting.

David calls on the British Guild of Beer Writers to separate themselves from the taint. No perceived groundswell out there. Wouldn’t be comforting. Nope. He addressed the question in his newsletter who uncovered some convoluted weirdness in the accounting department:

As a former director of the Guild, I believe that the members (beer writers) should hold the managers of the institution (the Guild) to account for having problematic sponsors (such as Cask Marque). But what is exactly the role Cask Marque has with the Guild, as their involvement isn’t mentioned on the Guild’s website? I was amazed to discover by the chair of the Guild that “all incoming and outgoing finances go through Cask Marque” despite them not being a corporate sponsor.

WTF??? Do many people know this? So much for an independent press.

Perhaps relatedly in terms of hidden obstacles but certainly interesting, then, to read how one arguably conservative… or is it progressive… institution, London’s 140 years University Women’s Club, which is even now released the legal team to try to achieve parity as reported in The Times:

The club was founded as the University Club for Ladies in 1883 by pioneers of education for women to provide a retreat from the stresses of life with a library and intellectual events. Since 1921 it has been based in a handsome townhouse in Mayfair… In a letter to the City of Westminster council’s licensing committee, they say that councillors must ensure “that the only traditional members club in London dedicated to women and their careers is given comparable privileges to those enjoyed by other traditional clubs dedicated to men”. The lawyers argue that the club “provides direct support to women in their careers, and offers access to a network of unparalleled female talent in a host of industries and fields”. The club is seeking to extend its licence which restricts alcohol sales to between 11am and 11pm and to allow for functions for non-members including music and dancing.

Dancing? Non-members dancing?!? Imagine what that could lead to… And speaking of yes, no maybe so… you can tell it’s no longer summer with the first of the calls for month long no alcohol campaigns. Here’s a story of how US drinker turned a dry month into a year:

The benefits are obvious. I have a higher disposable income, I’m sleeping a lot better, and I’m more focused at work. I’ve gotten through birthdays, weddings, dates and Pride season, all without a drop of alcohol — something I could not have foreseen 12 months ago. There’s also the freedom of not having to think about the next time I’ll potentially embarrass myself by drinking. Sobriety hasn’t solved all my issues. We often hear about the life-changing aspects of putting down alcohol, but doing so also has shed light on the other work I need to do on myself.

Sensible stuff. But the odd thing is… humans embarrassing themselves while not drinking. Or, if we consider the Bangor Daily News out of Maine, non-humans embarrassing themselves while drunk:

Wild berries and other fruit have reached peak ripeness and are falling to the ground. Cold nighttime temperatures concentrate the sugar in the fruit and when it warms up during the day, the sugars break down, forming alcohol. A very potent alcohol. No matter how high the alcohol content, animals and birds rely on the fruit for their fall diet. They consume it, get drunk and behave oddly. But wildlife experts warn that a tipsy animal or bird looks very much like a diseased animal or bird.

That story was just for Stan as once again the elephants have let us down. And surely not related, don’t forget that there is no such thing as a beer expert.

I have to say I am much happier with the new cartoonist at Pellicle, David Bailey.** I think I would have had to spike my tea with catnip to have a clue about the last storyline about cats meant. That right there is but one-twelfth of this month… last months… offering. And now that the monthly funnies are back to being about beer, the features essays continue to be all about all things but in the best of ways. This week we read about a subject that has gotten Alistair a bit weepy over the thought of a fishy snack, the prawn sandwiches as the Green Seafood Shack in Oban, Scotland written by Jemma Beedie:

Tony Ogden always knew he wanted to work in his father’s seafood shack. Known variously as the Green Shack, the Green Seafood Shack, the Original Seafood Shack, the Oban Seafood Hut, Oggy John’s, or any combination of that list, Tony’s shop is the highlight of any trip to the West Coast. Whether taking in Oban’s seaside vibe or jumping on a ferry over to the Inner or Outer Hebrides, it’s an essential stop. A modest shed around the corner from Caledonian MacBrayne’s ferry terminal, so popular it needs no true designation.

While we are out there in the wider world, a question: why does “Czech” get a pass as an adjective for international craft brewers but “Belgian” and certainly “Lambic” do not? We were warned off that sort of appropriation, were we not? Why is “Czech” transportable but “Belgian” is not? Jeff nips around the heels of the question a bit in this article about cloning the dark lagers of Prague:

As Americans have largely turned their backs on darker beers, Czech tmavý is a bit of a cheat code—looks dark, but tastes sweetish and chocolatey, with the smooth drinkability lagers offer. Tmavý—almost always described as “Czech dark lager” in the US—isn’t a giant presence, but it keeps growing incrementally. Yet even where it has found a following, the style remains obscure to most people, and unlike other ur-beers that define their style (Saison Dupont, Schneider Weisse, and Pilsner Urquell), the small brewpub that defines tmavý is unknown to any American who hasn’t visited Prague.

I mean we don’t call it “Belgian saison” when it’s made in another country, do we? And of course it is not called “Czech” went served in its homeland. An update to the etiquette might be timely.

Are blogs boring? Personally, I think podcasts are far more boring, seeing as you sometimes have to wait 45 minutes to find out how frikkin’ boring it is. Dr.J considered her own space and caught us all up a bit:

Blog posts have gotten boring. In fact, I got so bored of my own blog posts that I stopped writing them for the better part of two years. Listicles are mind-numbing. How-tos never feel quite in-depth enough. And the long form editorializing that I was so fond of when I still had one foot in academia has revealed its true nature–navel gazing, self congratulatory, social media obsessed grandstanding–with some much needed time and distance from the ivory tower. But beyond keeping myself entertained, I am a writer who is fond of useful narrative structures. And more importantly, I’m a firm believer that we are most effective when we stick to our strengths. Though I am no longer a college professor, my core strengths are still rooted in being an educator. And when the conviction strikes me to “do something,” my something has always been to leverage the spaces of teaching, learning, and storytelling for the uplift of the communities I belong to.

(I say blogs are merely public diaries… sorta… Dave Winer re-upped this about that on Wednesday.) So… what is the doing that is going to get done by Dr. J? A course called “Topics in Social Advocacy For the Craft Brewing Industry”! Excellent. Why? Because “the progress of social advocacy work in craft beer is in danger of stalling out completely or even rolling backward.” Yup. And good.

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

*I say England as Scotland, land of my peeps, has its own tiny batch of whack jobs who go a’courting the same nutters: “A press release from the channel said: “Over a pint [Farage will] debate the tough subjects of the day with guests including representatives from the Alba Party, the Conservative Party and GB News presenter Neil Oliver. “He’ll also host a live Q&A with the audience which will be broadcast live across the UK on TV and radio at 7pm [on Thursday April 20].” It is understood that an Alba “activist” will be on the show.”
**…no relation…