Category: Beer in the End Times

Here Be Yon Beery News Notes As Easter Weekend Approacheth

Another quiet day. Sitting at home. My butt is in a state of perpetual “sat too much” ache now. I better lay down for a bit to see if it goes away. On the upside, the over-wintered carrots have been crisp and sweet. Gotta eat them now before they start to convert and prepare for flowering. As shown above, I saw bees this week. Wild ones I think. Grabbing all there was to be gotten from the flower of a willow tree, the catkin turning in one last very slow fireworks display.

Beer… hmm… where to start… Jordan posted an interesting proposal to encourage the use of locally grown hop in Ontario.

This is Ontario. It is four times the size of Great Britain. A run from Windsor to Vankleek Hill would take eight hours if you adhered to the speed limit and there weren’t any delays on the 401. The idea that there is such a thing as an Ontario specific cultivar is nonsensical. We’ve already established that Hallertau grown in Germany and New Zealand is different. The Huron Coast isn’t Tillsonburg isn’t The Golden Horseshoe isn’t Prince Edward County isn’t The Ottawa River Valley.  There are microclimates and different substrates and soils and aquifers.

I was helpful in the comments, adding the 1948 soils mapping links as the land and its crops know nothing of county boundaries as well as questioning the insta-profession of sensory professional.  I like it but find a way to fill that not with self-identified volunteers and then add a mechanism for shared calibration and I might buy in completely. Sadly one response suffers from that old suffocating chestnut Jordan is working so hard to break, the closed circle: “… This is far to complex of an issue to describe in a fb box – so lets chat off-line. I’ll send you my contact info…” Open discussion is better discussion.

Next, Lars has two bits of big news. First, the gong bomb:

I got the tip-off from Jørund Geving, a farmhouse brewer in Stjørdal. He’d gotten into a random conversation with a farmer from Ål in Hallindal, who said there were people there who still brewed. That’s in eastern Norway, so that was remarkable news in itself: a new brewing region! But then he dropped the real bombshell: these guys had their own yeast, which they called gong.  This was really exciting, because so far, every brewer in western Norway who has his own yeast has turned out to have yeast that belongs to a single family, which we call kveik. 

This is interesting. In the post pandemic retracted world of post-craft, will gong become at thing? Then Lars wrote something on Wednesday that saddened me: “Writing ~7000 beer reviews on @ratebeer was basically my education. Here my rating notebooks, before they go in the trash.” They might deserve keeping. Nice floor, though. Norwegian wood.

Tom Morton, a well loved radio hand in Scotland, has written a useful piece about drinking in the new era of social media pubs:

Twitter is one of those horrible airport departure lounge bars on a (pre-virus) bank holiday Friday night or Saturday morning. You’ve got everything there from stag parties breakfasting on Special Brew to ginned-up delegates for a conference in Estonia on Signifiers of Loss and Alienation in The Later Works of S Club Seven. There are sherried tourists, single-malted fish farmers, absinthed sales executives. There are the brilliant and the fuckwitted, and they’re all shouting, all grabbing your arm, all breathing fumes into your face. Ninety-nine percent of them are talking shite.

A few more months and I might be with him. Meantime, the social experiment (for those who are not directly fighting as patient or caregiver, of course) is interesting.

Corona tricks during corona time.

Some more blogs are back up and running  – and what I like about them best is the immediate reflection on what is happening around us. Not recollections of the pub or desperate attempts to maintain the consultancy micro-payments as if nothing were happening. First, Matthew Lawrenson at Seeing the Lizards told the tale from the shelf stocking floor:

…that is why I had that Thursday off.  It was likely the last time I’d be able to go out for the forseeable future.  I packed my bottle of isopropanol (usually used for cleaning electronics, but hand sanitiser had long ago run out) and went to town.  And yes, dear reader, I got absolutely hammered.  Buckfast, Bud Light, evil keg filth, cask ale, spirits.  I had it all that night.  I even went to Spoons.  I’m glad I did, as on Friday afternoon, the Government announced that all pubs were to close from midnight. After that, back to work it was.  Prioritising lines, moving labels around to maximise fill, watching pasta and toilet rolls vanish in minutes.  All the usual panic buying fun and games. 

And Old Mudgie wrote a very interesting argument lamenting the loss of cash that is being caused by Covid-19 and the implications for the bankless in pubs and beyond:

It is estimated that there are 1.6 million unbanked workers in the UK, and there must be many other non-workers who have no access to banking facilities. While there may be technological solutions that can address this issue, their interests cannot simply be breezily dismissed. Added to this, there are many people, not by any means entirely elderly, who have a strong preference for using cash and are uneasy about card payments, even though they may theoretically be available to them. Is it reasonable to ride roughshod over their wishes in the name of progress?

In the past, I have been grumpy about the US Brewers Association (as it seems to want to fill the role that CAMRA plays in the UK, just without all those pesky consumers) but the Bart has been doing a great job running the numbers through this crisis:

The first analysis of our second COVID-19 impact survey is done, and the numbers aren’t pretty. 2.5% of breweries say they are going to close. 12.7% say they have a month or less based on current conditions.

Right off, I was wondering how far off the normal annual churn 2.5% closures might represent. And to stay that tide, the BA also announced that what they are calling #CBCOnline starts on this coming Easter Monday:

…a five-week virtual version of CBC including 40 of our educational seminars across all 14 CBC tracks.

I am most interested as all you all all will be to hear Dr. J speak on the topic of “Real Talk: Performing Cultural Climate Audits to Benchmark Organizational Inclusion, Equity, and Justice.” Audits. Excellent. Like having calibration for sensory experience. Doing something real.

Similarly, there are plenty of opportunities to improve one’s wine knowledge during these days of sheltering in the shed. And if you have something to share, there is also a Beeronomics call for papers.

And finally Pellicle published an excellent piece by Jonny Garrett on the Old Fountain pub on Old Street in London (just a bit to the east of my beloved Golden Lane) and the family that has kept it in operation:

They were never tied, but the Durrant’s still leased the pub from Whitbread, who in turn leased it from the local parish church, St Luke’s. It seems the church mistrusted Whitbread and had only been granting it three-year terms. The family had kept a close eye on the situation and, in the early 2000s, an opportunity presented itself. After decades of renewal without gaining a lease extension, Whitbread decided to give up the lease and offered Jim another pub.

Now, I want to know why and for how long the church owned that parcel of land on Old Street. Let the mapping begin!

There you are – but one last thing. A new news round up has sit the presses. Brewsround has started commenting on the beer writing of the week. That/they/her/him/thems/the bot joins the beer news broadcasts we follow each and every week with Boak and Bailey most Saturdays, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. Stay well.

The Thursday Beery News Notes For Week Three… I Think… Maybe

It’s now April so I think we may be well into the third week of the kids at home and limited public travel. The working life of a municipality has been fairly breakneck but we are all in this together.  Not much time for either the beer or the blog… which puts a bit of a damper on beer blogging. But, as with last week, beer has again be delivered – this time from our own and excellent Stone City Ales where the staff have been heroes* – so let’s see what we can find, shall we?

There are a lot of brave positive statements being made in the beer trade out there, this sort of thing found in the spam filter included:

With the number of breweries, tasting rooms, restaurants and bars closed across the country, we want to remind you that retailers such as grocery stores and bottles shops currently remain a viable way to shop for beverages while practicing social distancing. We also encourage the use of online delivery services as a responsible option in those states where available.

This is good but, at some point, also unnecessary for every point in the supply chain to issue.  We are probably at that point.  The messaging now needs to be stay in place and see you at the other end when the shift in the industry can be reassessed. Me, I hope this new home delivery in Ontario becomes a norm.

On Wednesday, Jordan posted a piece on how the virus and staying in place was affecting one of the less unloved sectors in the beer trade, contract brewers:

Contract Brewing is a fraught subject, but preserving the companies that are doing it has an upside in the face of this 12 week lockdown that the city of Toronto has imposed. There are a number of existing companies that depend on the contracts to fill their volume. Junction Brewing produces both Paniza and True History. Storyteller is produced at Brunswick in Toronto. If those contracting companies fail, there is a knock on effect which causes a decrease in volume at those larger facilities. 

A wee bit of brewing history was discussed last weekend when reports came out of a stash of Victorian era beer found in a UK archaeological dig at a former site of Tetley’s Brewery:

Buried treasure isn’t always the stereotypical chest of gold coins: In the case of a recent British archaeological dig, it turned out to be an enormous stash of beer. Last month, while digging on the site of the former Tetley’s Brewery, in the Northern English city of Leeds, archaeologists from the West Yorkshire Archaeological Services (WYAS) discovered a neatly-stacked stash of over 600 bottles — many of which were still full…

Not sure I want to drink any of the stuff. Moving to the eye on the near future, Stan released the latest issued of his regular newsletter on the state of a key corner of the trade, Hop Queries.  It included this passage on the state of hop farming as Covid-19 moves through the marketplace:

Brewers hope to be in a better position to make predictions for the rest of 2020 before long, but hops are agriculture and farmers can’t wait. As Gayle Goschie at Goschie Farms in Oregon wrote, “Mother Nature has her calendar and we coordinate our needed seasonal work around what the year’s weather brings us.” Although she and the office team are working from home, field work is continuing at normal pace. “Having 40-50 employees spread over 500 acres of hops has us practicing social distancing to the max.”

Back to today, the man called Protz wrote about an age-old question – why is UK cask ale so modestly priced:

I disagree with James Calder on the need to “premiumise” – ugly word — real ale. I cannot accept that cask beer should be seen as the drink of choice of the better-off. It was clear to me that one reason the Wat Tyler in Dartford was busy on a damp, cold Tuesday lunchtime in March was that its captive audience was made up of people who couldn’t afford more than £3.50 for a pint.

Also with a thumb on the pulse of the moment, on Monday Bart of the BA sent out some stats showing a shift in US beer sales was clearly occurring, with the theme being “all beer up“!

IRI scan data from the week ending 3-22 is in & it was another big week for off-premise as consumers stocked up and replaced on-premise purchases. BA Craft up 31.1% by volume versus the same week YA. All beer up 30.7%.

And a wonderful story out of central New York state this week with those whose employment affected by the reduction of work doing the unexpected:

Four of the laid-off workers — tasting room managers Cassie Clack, Barb Lewis, Alanna Maher and Janelle Reale — had a surprise. They’d reached out to dozens and dozens of current and former tasting room staff at the winery and urged them to come together — or as together as they can under social distancing. Then they led a 70-car caravan to the winery at 623 Lerch Road to pick up the wines and beers they’d been ordering all week.

Good stuff. And there was more – as of Tuesday, like so many other craft beverage firms with a distiller’s kit, BrewDog had made a significant contribution to the fight against the virus:

Jill & Leanne, NHS Ambulance Service, picking up 1,000 bottles of free @BrewDog sanitiser today for their frontline team. We have donated over 100,000 bottles to key workers and charities so far.

And finally Ron the Honest has posted a number of posts about his recent junket to Brazil describing events as they were and perhaps not how they are always presented:

I’m up much earlier than I would have liked. 7 AM. As the car taking me and Martyn to where we’re talking is scheduled for 7:50. And I want to have time for brekkie. Martyn trolls up a few minutes after me.

“I don’t expect to see many judges at my talk. They’ll all still be in bed. Pissheads.”  “That’s a bit harsh, Ron.” “Count how many turn up. You’ve more chance as you’re on an hour later.”

Folk think I have a bug in my ear over this junket stuff but having been on a few way back when I primarily find it entertaining, especially as Ron describes it. More fun than productive. Like all these meetings we now know could have been emails. Except a good serving of fun with a side dish of the same small circle. But fun is good.

Remember – even in these troubled times – there is more beer news every week with Boak and Bailey most Saturdays, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. Keep hunkering! We got this.

Your Thursday Beer News Notes For The Week Which Was The Best Of Times And The Worst Of Times

What a week! And it’s not done yet. I’m working in isolation as many of you are while many others are not able to work. Here in Canada, a huge collective response is underway at the many levels of government and public compliance with sheltering in place is high. Neighbours are sharing with neighbours. It seems to be working well and I hope the same is true where you are.  Well, working well for the most part:

P.E.I. farmer keeps social distance by hurling pork products to hungry customers.

People are finding out how to make do in the beer world. I get by with a bit of the old bunting when the sun shines. The Polk is out on the porch, too  a sure sign of a Canadian spring.  The BA is looking into supply chains. Some aren’t. Some places it is about bounced paycheques. Andy wrote about the scene as of Monday and it ain’t pretty in the world of NuKraft:

With tap rooms closed, thousands of breweries around the country no longer have a source of income. Most don’t have their own canning or bottling equipment. They don’t have relationships with distributors or bars, restaurants, or off-premise stores. They never saw the need to diversify their operations because nothing could ever shut off their money maker, the customer at their own bar. 

My favourite so far is  (err… perhaps poorly) illustrated to the right, the Albany Pump Station driving around with a growler fill tap truck as Craig described:

Does your brewer show up at your house, with a trailer full of beer and fill growlers for you at 9pm? Mine does. C.H. Evans Brewing Albany Pump Station a buzz tomorrow and ask if Sam will Santa Claus over to your house tomorrow! $10 crowlers (or 3 for $20)!

In Ireland, an extra-legal approach to keeping the taps flowing has lead to a stern warning:

Publicans who have opened despite the Government’s direction that they close for two weeks due to the coronavirus pandemic have not only put the wider public at serious risk, they have also put their licences and livelihoods on the line, one of the State’s leading barristers has warned. Senior Counsel Constance Cassidy who specialises in liquor licence applications, told The Irish Times that although the closure guidelines issued last week “are merely directory in nature until specific regulatory legislation is introduced”, publicans have been ignoring them at their peril.

In my own town, newly opened Daft Brewing has, a bit by luck, joined the ranks of those making hand sans-a-hizer:

The company’s new-found ability to make the increasingly scarce hand sanitizer hinged on a decision to buy a 200-litre still from China. “At the time we were thinking we couldn’t get this cheaper and with free shipping, so we just bought it for future use,” Rondeau said. “We had no plans to use it. We’re not a distillery. We just had it sitting in storage.” Skip ahead to three days ago, after hearing about how distillers were switching production to hand sanitizer, and the company’s employees dragged the still out of storage.

The UK’s mass watering hole chain Wetherspoons appears to be rushing to the bottom according to Rog the Protz:

Just in case any of you were thinking the #TimMartin #Wetherspoons fiasco couldn’t get any worse (keep my businesses open no risk in pubs, laying off staff without pay “go & get a job in Tesco”) he’s now written to out of pocket suppliers they must wait at his pleasure to be paid

And just like that, the pure power of Protz proves its potency as the hairy dimwit running the place does a 180. Good news for the staff.

Next, a bit of history was made this week as Martyn wrote the tale of a very early and not much good porter brewery in the US state of Virginia – which might be the first but is certainly the earliest example so far of porter brewing on this side of the Atlantic*:

In 1766 the brewery made 550 bushels of malt, but the quality of much of the beer and ale produced was poor. Mercer wrote to his eldest son George that “Wales complains of my Overseer & says that he is obliged to wait for barley, coals & other things that are wanted which, if timely supplied with he could with six men & a boy manufacture 250 bushels a week which would clear £200 … My Overseer is a very good one & I believe as a planter equal to any in Virginia but you are sensible few planters are good farmers and barley is a farmer’s article.”

And Boak and Bailey have posted about one of my favourite forms of Victorian writing, the recollection of how things were in youth, that leads them on a chase for the meaning of Kennett Ale:

The novelist and historian Walter Besant’s 1888 book Fifty Years Ago is an attempt to record the details of life in England in the 1830s, including pubs and beer. Of course this doesn’t count as a primary source, even if 1888 is closer to 1838 than 2020. Besant was himself born in 1836 and the book seems laced with rosy nostalgia – a counterpoint, at least, to contemporary sources whose detail is distorted by temperance mania…

These sorts of writings were very handy as part of the patching together of the 1800s tales of Albany Ale and Cream Beer. I trust them as recollections in the way one trust evidence in a court proceeding. Something to build upon.

In the category of upside effect of pandemic, ATJ had dusted off Called to the Bar and is getting back in the blogging game as part of his isolation skills development program. His first new post was about his experience of “PSS” – pub separation syndrome:

Where shall I wander when I’m told if I’m old and need to be at home? At what shall I wonder if I cannot stroll alone? The cities and towns in which I clowned but also frowned and then classed glasses of brown, gold and amber beers with varying degrees of hwyl are closed to me for now. 

And Jeffery John himself has fired up the coal-fed servers and has Stonch’s Beer Blog running again:

Day one of being a pub landlord on Coronavirus lockdown: mothball the cellar; thoroughly clean lines; switch off all non-essential equipment.

Day two: turn the remote cooler back on again; connect a keg up to *just one* line for personal consumption.

Day three: get the ice machine going for 5pm G&Ts; decide it’s reasonable to have one IPA line and one lager line in operation for me and my cabin-mate.

JC’s Beer Blog is also revived. Any others?  We need to recall that blogging was one way that we got through the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It’s good to write.

In the world of not-beer, another positive out of the lock down of the planet appears to be the delay in releasing the next vintage of Bordeaux so that it will be first reviewing from the bottle not the cask:

Normally, tastings for the new vintage would take place at the end of this month and early April. Scores and reports would emerge at the end of April and into early May and the first wines, bar the odd wild outlier, would start to trickle out in late May with trading properly happening in June and all wrapped up by July. All in all you have five months of Bordeaux-focused discussion and selling, something entirely unique in the world of fine wine. It’s no wonder it causes such jealousy. In a normal world the Bordelais would not want to release the 2019 wines until the trade has tasted them and formulated an opinion but when can this happen? France is currently in lockdown and the UK is rapidly following suit. When exactly both countries – and indeed other western countries that constitute en primeur’s primary markets – will be fully released from this limbo is unclear at present.

Remember – even in these troubled times, there is more beer news every week with Boak and Bailey most Saturdays, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast now as well! Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. Check them out. Hunker down. You got this.

*Must check on this. A rogue porter brewery in Newfoundland would not surprise me if it were not for their happy habit from the 1500s on of importing all the good stuff they need.

Really? Is There Any Beery News To Tell On A Thursday?

What to make of a week like this. Two weeks ago I was at the Canadian national curling championships among 5,000 strangers and now I slip into work by a side entrance, go up an elevator and work on the top floor/attic of out office building behind a thick door maybe made in the 1840s. I didn’t even listen to social distancing Robin and Jordan when their podcast came out. I was up to my arse in emergency response stuff… but still…

That image up there? Three of my pals at a frosh beach party in Nova Scotia thirty five and a half years ago. When the Soviets were about to glaze us at 17 minutes notice. Our Halifax college apparently had its own nuke aimed at it because in WWII it was an officer training centre for the Royal Canadian Navy. We survived. We will again. I love that photo.  I want that on a t-shirt they put on me when they bury me in the grave.

What is up? I am enjoying my backyard when the sun shines. A bit of warmth in the sun is good.  Robin and Jordan were happily wrong that the booze retailers were shut down but also happily wrong that folk would not listen to the advice. The old obedient Tory DNA of Canada kicked in and everything shut when we were told to shut. St.Paddy was no-where’s ville around here and that was good. We are exercising our right to hunker down. Know your strengths, Canada. Thank God for all those years training in nuclear fear. If Leonid didn’t get me, well.. Listen to Leonard instead.  Travel light. Be grateful. Take care.

News? Here are a few tidbits:

      • Prognostications are a’happening. Josh in the Chicago Tribune was all early days, sharing the begging for at least a few sports channels, maybe some sort of vestiges of March 17th…
      • My personal hero Maureen Ogle shared her experience in isolation with the Des Moines Register after visiting Italy at entirely the wrong time.
      • Distillers are making hand san-za-tizer. As is Louis Vuitton.
      • Fest have ended.
      • Craft brewers are being hit but no one is much mentioning if better or worse than average because… maybe… craft PR.
      • Ron has begun to tell the tale of the judging junketeers.
      • Business interruption insurance is not insuring the interruption of UK pub businesses.
      • Don’t forget that pre-crisis craft was hitting the “sure sucks” stage. Post-crisis? Malt. All malt. Crystal malt. Yum.
      • Cambridge, England silent and still.
      • Immortal teens will be immortal teens… and they will serve as the incubus for the Grim Reaper, inoculating us all. Did I mention I lived under Soviet nuclear terror? Good times…

Glum? Help! Buy home delivered good beer like I did this week. One of my favourite regional craft brewers, Matron, delivered to my house this very week. Keep the cash moving if you have cash to move. That is the point of the household consumer stimulus subsidies that are rolling out. Spend. Spend. Spend.

Still glum? Looks for Thursday’s revival of #beerchatafterdark. Pants optional. [Update: no option… no pants…]

Story of the week? The defiant citizens of Syracuse who insisted on getting out at midnight first thing St. Patrick’s Day to paint the street:

How many were there? According to Moriarty, the attendance stayed under the new limit of 50 people per gathering. “I was one of the 49 but stayed safe in the vehicle.” Moriarty said in her post. “Btw the only reason the painting ended up happening is because tradition was about to be broken and we would NOT let that happen by anyone so the true painters came through!!!” The midnight event traditionally includes the artistic application of a gallon of green paint, some piping and drumming, the reading of the names of Tipp Hill residents and friends who passed on in the previous year and the singing of “Danny Boy.” It’s usually over in 15 minutes or so. 

God love them. I’ve spent many happy times in Syracuse and will again.

That’s it. Not too much.  A short one this week. I am exhausted and there’s still two work days to go. And thank God I moderated the comments.  I have spared you all the continuing emotional drama. Never mind. Leonid never got me.

Just don’t forget there is more beer news every week with Boak and Bailey most Saturdays, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast now as well! Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. Check them out. Hunker down. You got this.