Beer in the End Times – Page 14

It’s Mid-May And Here’s The Thursday Beery New Notes

Here’s the real news since last week. I had to get the car battery jump started. Things have gotten so idle around here that the battery went flat. In spring. Not that you would have known it was spring with the temperatures but that is not my point. The point is the second biggest investment in my life is sitting there entering an entropic state, proving the one or more of the laws of thermodynamics. Or something. Fords. Go figure. Plus the other real news is that Max went to a bar and drank a beer. In Prague. Really. I think it is going to be alright after all. I did that last on the 6th of March. Seventy days ago or so.

What else has been going on? Work has been busy and drinks few so there has been a wee bit of a slide in my reading this week. Zoom meetings. All the zooming… who knew? One thing that’s being going on is that Robin and Jordan hit a one year anniversary of their podcast. Note: a word which is not about dealing with the residue left after a good pea shelling session. I listened to the first at a ball diamond parking lot up north in Sydenham, Ontario. I’m listening to broadcast #52 as I type. This week, they discuss the local new world order of home delivery direct from breweries which reminded me of this news from California‘s Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control:

The investigation’s findings, posted as an industry advisory to the ABC’s website, say “the Department’s recent enforcement actions have revealed that third-party delivery services are routinely delivering alcoholic beverages to minors,” and that “many licensees, and the delivery services they use, are failing to adhere to a variety of other legal obligations.” The situation is being exacerbated by the pandemic because of “a marked increase in deliveries” once the state began allowing the sale and delivery of to-go cocktails and other forms of liquor in March.

Also in Toronto, Mr. B commented on the fiscal prospects a beer writer faces these days when contemplating a new book project:

HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA… (breathes)… HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHA

Not unrelated, please tip more.

Conversely, there was a great splash out on the typewriter ink ribbon for Boak and Bailey’s #BeeryLongRead2020 fest-a-bration earlier this week and they posted a handy round up of seven of the submissions. A prize in the form of a bundle of books was sent to the best entry, Josh Farrington for his essay “Something in the Water“:

Some of my first memories of drinking come from those summer holidays. Sips of pungent sea-dark wine, acidic and overwhelming; a sample of gin and tonic, bitter and medicinal with a gasping clarity; and of course, beer – not ale, nothing my grandfather would touch – but lager, cold and crisp and gassy, a fleeting glimpse of adulthood.

Ah, the pleasure of the amateur pen. But if that were not enough to dissuade you from a career path, there was big news on the sensational front reported this week:

To test this, we first compared a group of wine experts to yoked novices using a battery of questionnaires. We show for the first time that experts report greater vividness of wine imagery, with no difference in vividness across sensory modalities. In contrast, novices had more vivid color imagery than taste or odor imagery for wines. Experts and novices did not differ on other vividness of imagery measures, suggesting a domain‐specific effect of expertise.

Modalities. Again with the modalities. Frankly, I have long suspected there was no difference in vividness across sensory modalities. You doubted me but there it is.

“How to Bottle Condition Beer” by Stephanie Brindley for the brewery tech services firm, Murphy and Son. Just the one. In case you wanted to know.

@oldmudgie offered a wonderfully reactionary, counter-reformation laced call to turn back the clock by arguing that the pub smoking ban should now be reversed as part of the new world order:

It should be remembered that smoking continued to be permitted in outdoor areas because it was felt that there was little or no risk to others from environmental tobacco smoke. (The same is true indoors, of course, but that’s another matter). If people don’t like it, that’s up to then, but it seems a warped sense of priorities to be more worried about the risk from second-hand smoke than from coronavirus.

He also added that there is evidence that heavy smokers may actually offer some protection against Da Vid. It is an evil disease that prompts you to save yourself by killing yourself.

Conversely, the anti-neo-prohibitionist Straw Man Society will no doubt have frothed at the mouth over this interesting BBC bit on why you might be drinking too much during lockdown:

“In the moment, it feels like relief and we feel better,” explains Annie Grace, author of This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol. “Our blood alcohol level rises and things feel slower; our mind relaxes and there’s some disorientation and euphoria.” But the relief is transient, she says, as “20-30 minutes later the body starts to purge the alcohol, because that’s what the body does with toxins, and as the alcohol leaves our blood we start feeling uncomfortable and even more stressed”.

Not me. I’m off the bottle. Largely. Me, I am pumping up my immune system as fast as I can… and maybe now taking up a two-pack of smokes habit a day.

Care of Cookie, we learn that the scholars of the UK’s newspaper The Sun have taken a different tack on the issue of health and drinking and offered this regulatory suggestion from local Tourism Alliance Director, Kurt Janson :

“The urgency of the situation should let shops look at having outdoor seating areas – which is a permitted development – meaning you can just do it. Or you could change planning rules to shut down streets in the evenings. He also explained how pubs in less-populated areas could reopen: “Pubs could open back onto fields, especially in rural areas, and use farmer’s fields to increase the footfall.”

Farmers fields! Filled with newly heavy smokers trying to cope with their new smoking habit as well as their new habit of sitting out in a farmer’s field. Better than out behind a disused railway line, I suppose.

Rather than such neverlands of past and/or future, Jeff has been writing more about the now:

One of the challenges of this moment is uncertainty: we have no idea—we can’t know—how long this will last. It’s impossible to guess when I’ll be able to sit down for my next pint of draft beer. Those two months feel simultaneously like ten years and also ten minutes. It’s a disorienting time, made all the more so because we don’t know how long it will last.

That’s all for now. Is it still now? Now. And in seven days it will be a week from now. And now again.* Meantime, keep writing and reading and keeping up with the chin. Check in 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. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Thanks for stopping by.

Not So Much The “Tra-La It’s May!” Edition Of Thursday Beer Notes

A short edition this week me thinks. It has been another odd week, weeks which are each in their own way odd unto themselves. This week “murder hornets” were the new form of crap the planet has offered up – except they make a tasty snack. And Cinco de Mayo came and went but some Mexicans were not even able to get to their beer. Not essential. A few more things are opening up here in Ontario. Jordan noted that cideries are now suddenly relieved of an arbitrary five km limit on direct sales. Jeff is still posting photos from his walks about Rye which is another form of relief.

Tomorrow being Friday, 8 May, sees is the return of #BeeryLongReads2020 care of Boak and Bailey. Me, I am not looking like a likely participant myself given I have nothing to write about and no energy to write the noting that I have to write about. So I look forward to a good read. Me. Selfish. Keep an eye out for the roundup of last Friday’s revival of The Session over at Fuggled, too.

Jeff’s take on the homebrewing machine that is no more is pretty much my take: “I never understood the appeal of these things.”

PicoBrew, the homebrewing appliance startup based in Seattle, is effectively shutting down the Spoon has learned today. Back in February, the Spoon broke the story about PicoBrew entering the Washington State bankruptcy process in the form of court-managed receivership. Earlier this month, we uncovered news that the company had put up for sale via auction what looked to be most of the company’s warehouse and PicoPak assembly equipment.

Note #1: not a victim of Covid-19. Note #2: these things have been failing for at least 209 years. CBC TV’s archives have a bit from 1985 on the hobby. Spot all the clichés. Sweet Dave Line sighting!

Speaking of doing it all yourself, Seeing the Lizards has published a guide to creating your own private pub experience with theme options from the tedious to the fearful:

Unfortunately, even if you were allowed past the top of your street, there are no open pubs to go to (unless, nudge nudge wink wink, you “know” somebody). But never fear – in one of the gestures of community spirit and generosity that this blog is famous for, we at Seeing The Lizards are providing you with an instructional guide to make your own preferred pub experience without having to leave your property boundaries and risk being fined by the fuzz. And remember, getting those subtle touches right only adds to the sense of authenticity, as is imagining the requisite atmosphere.

This is interesting: “NEIPAs are killing the Ontario hop industry.” And this is the story about it:

Many growers in Ontario are now sitting on at least two years worth of inventory, and have to sell older hops at discount rates. Things have gotten so bad for some farmers in two of Canada’s biggest hop growing provinces—Ontario and British Columbia—that they’ve decided to get out of growing the product all together. “At the beginning there was a big allure,” says Brandon Bickle, an Ontario grower who has decided to shut down his hop farm, Valley Hops, after seven seasons.

Retired Martyn notes a Covid-19 passing of someone I was fond of, David Greenfield, the keyboardist of The Stranglers:

At the age of 14 I furtively met an older lad in the corner of the playground at Cottenham Village College and handed over my 30p for an ex-demo copy of The Stranglers classic with that new wave late ’70s theme of Armageddon (See also : Atomic by Blondie and Luton Airport by Cats U.K.).

Jeff* has been at the front line of the Covid-19 battle, publishing first-hand reports from brewery owners, like this on the struggle one faced to get part of the Federal small business support funding:

After contacting every business person and bank I could think of, there seemed to be little I could do. Our company was stuck with our existing big banks who didn’t seem to care. Meanwhile I was reading about Ruth’s Chris, The Lakers, and Shake Shack. I was so angry and did my fair share of yelling at my computer. I can relate to Van Havig’s post and have not been the best person to be around the last few weeks. I feel bad my family had to put up with me.

Brian Alberts took the opportunity to compare today with the Spanish Flu of a century ago for GBH through the lens of the the competing forms of crisis that faced Wisconsin:

Milwaukee’s leaders stepped up in a crisis, and largely handled it well. But, for the city’s brewers and saloonkeepers, this wasn’t the only battle to fight. From a business standpoint, it probably wasn’t the most important battle in the fall of 1918, nor the second, and maybe not even the third. After all, when the President criminalizes your beer supply, a university threatens to shut you down completely, the Senate tries to brand you a traitor, and a pandemic ravages your community—all at the same time—how do you decide what takes priority?

A few interesting notes in this trade article on not getting stuck at the “off-flavour stage of sensory training but I am not sure about this:

“It is important to revisit brand flavor profiles as they change and evolve according to consumer preference, and I do think that brands really should evolve,” says Barr. “I’m not a believer that brands should just maintain as they are out of some kind of philosophical reason. I do think they need to be updated, and incremental changes should be made based on the palate of your consumers, because it is changing and developing.”

Don’t like that idea. While it is true that the hallmark of a good brewer is how to make the same beer out of ingredients of differing qualities, it is odd that the idea of “brand” should not be fairly closely tied to a certain flavour profile. If your creating brand loyalty, don’t dilute it with changes that can be perceived… and often perceived by the customer as cutting corners even if the intention isn’t quite that.

Well, there you go. Not a tome but not haiku either. Keep writing and reading and keeping up with the chin. Check in 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. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Thanks for stopping by.

*for the double!

The Session 144: Mea Taverna Quarantina

Hmm… what have I been up to… or… how I spent my involuntary semi-vacation in the house and yard… or … I dunno… let’s see… what did Alistair say I should be writing about…

Having been bombarded for the last 4 or 5 weeks by various media sources and corporate email blasts telling everything that companies are doing to combat COVID-19 and how they are “on your side”, the phrases that have been so heavily used as to border on cliche include “abundance of caution” (title of the next Coldplay album apparently), “unprecedented times”, and “the new normal”.

4 or 5? My last normal day was March 6th when I took the day off to watch the Canadian national curling championships in our town. By the next week, folk were staying away from the office and the NBA shut down. Late winter has turned to spring as I watched out the kitchen window. I was in the office for 30 minutes in April. Being on the edge of response events, I have had waves of busy interspersed with very very busy but they are waves on on that part of the ocean called the doldrums. Quiet. Waking up and being aware that the light is a bit different and the grass greener. Waiting for the next Zoom meeting. Always the next Zoom meeting.

We have 15 rooms in our 1964 bungalow. And a front yard. And a back yard. And a shed. You remember the shed, right? Five people with places to hide from each other. Four of age. We’ve been buying local beer and Prince Edward County wine for home delivery and, this being Friday, will have some this evening. We buy take away dinners from our favorite spots once or twice week. I am happy to report that the brewery folk I have talked to have been saying that switching from draught account kegs to curbside home delivery cans has worked. Money is flowing.

Things I have not done: learned a new language, picked up the idle guitar, cleaned off the pile of crap on the old computer desk, taken up jogging. I have, however, gotten the garden going, napped a lot and generally destressed after being excessively stressed for the first few weeks. Even though I shop in a surgical mask there now seems to be a sense of this thing now, even if it is smothering – in all the meanings of that word.We have been lucky even as some nursing homes in other towns have been on fire wit the virus. A restructuring of much will be coming.

It’s good that I’m a homebody. I have most beers I drink around here, in the living room or out in the yard. Garden centers start to open Monday here in Ontario. I don’t miss the pub. Much. I sorta miss the ability to go out even when I don’t go all that much. Maybe soon. Maybe next month?

Who’s doing the next edition of The Session? Maybe next month.

The Thursday Beery News Notes For The Last Of April 2020

Hello again. It’s been another week. We seem to have all hit some sort of peak with our experience of this pandemic, if only for this phase one. I sat in the yard last Saturday mainly by myself. Had a beer or two. Pretty grateful for that yard. Still, knowing it all sits heavy on the shoulders, it’s not a bad idea to seek out light entertainment and isn’t that what good beer is? In moderation? Or just as prescribed. It’s not easy. Emma Inch has had a personal essay on her particular challenges published in Original Gravity and it mirrors the experience of my few friends who are especially vulnerable. It is certainly not easy.

Now, a public service announcement. Alistair at Fuggled has declared a special edition of The Session is to be held this very Friday. The Session was one of the best ideas in beer blogging* that ran for over a decade. On the first Friday of the month everyone who was anyone had to write a post about the designated topic. Alistair has continued the concept:

In there is the genesis of the theme for the Quarantine Edition of the The Session, in these unprecedented times, what has become your new drinking normal? Are you drinking more? Less? Have you raided the cellar regularly? Is there a particular brewery whose beer is keeping you company while you are confined to barracks? Has there been a beer revelation in these times?

Write!

Brewery folk are having to redirect their attention, as described in a piece by Josh Noel for the Chicago Tribune. And in Atlanta in Georgia, Monday Night Brewing has released the results of its survey on intended return to the taproom with some fairly specific and graphically displayed results:

While taproom visitors have some trepidation about the immediate future, they are cautiously optimistic about medium-term. 61% of respondents expect their visitation frequency (vs. their reported frequency pre-COVID-19) to go back to normal within 3 months. Still–28% of respondents expect a decline in their brewery visit frequency lasting at least 3 months.

Not unrelatedly, The Tand himself has written a very interesting post on the question of what happens to the pubs when folk get wise that drinks at home are not shabby and no where near as expensive based on his own experience of this new world order:

I’ve enjoyed a different kind of beer o’clock. Around five in the evening E and me have had a beer or two in the sunshine in our garden. Not every evening, but certainly most if the sun is still shining. We have had to wear fleeces on the odd occasion and once, given the rather spiky wind that generally accompanies sunshine in the Grim North, we reinforced our outer apparel with blankets. We have remarked, like everyone else, about the perfect blue skies, the absence of vapour trails and aircraft and enjoyed the birds singing. Not so much though the whirring sound of wood pigeons, but you can’t have everything, can you?

As a bit of counter-measure (and when not wanting help in finding the best British lager), JJB joined the discussion on how pubs in England (he owns one) should deal with the question of pubco tenant rents:

…those getting the grants should indeed apply them toward rent, as the government intended, but pubco should forgive any shortfall if the rent is too high or the closure protracted.

Others are finding that there are things to do in a pub if you live in it:

Dom, 29, said: ‘I moved in just a couple of months before lockdown which has worked out well, considering.’ He is the assistant manager at the pub after starting there as a barman and has been passing the time with Steve, 39, by playing improvised crazy golf inside. They place chess and cook barbecues on the roof when the weather is nice and have been enjoying the fresh beer on tap with no customers to serve.

When will the pub return? Cookie himself says in England it might happen in steps – but is that fair to the little loved places?

A staggered pub opening strategy could see large chain pubs with app ordering and table service and capacity for social distance open first as a trial an then traditional pubs open around xmas and micropubs by summer 2021.

Future forecasting done. For this week’s look at somewhat recent history, the blogwerk** at Seeing the Lizards continues with this installment on the Dutch lager of the 1980’s Oranjeboom 8.5:

Belying it’s current reputation a black-tinned cornershop-stocked super-strength filth, Oranjeboom pilsner was once quite popular in the UK, and was promoted with ads such as this, rammed full of all the Dutch stereotypes the copywriters could think of.

In other history notes, Martyn has been tweeting about gruesome deaths in breweries of yore, a crushing and a boiling so far.

And in very very recent history, Pellicle has published a piece by Will Hawkes on a trip to a hop farm in Kent in 2019… which all seems like a dream to me now:

It’s the end of July, the start of a key period in the Kentish hop-growing calendar. August is when the volume of the harvest is decided: plenty of sun and rain, and all will be well. But rain, like sunshine, cannot be conjured or cajoled. In 2018, during the UK’s hottest summer on record, just 15 millimetres came in August, and the harvest suffered. The year before there was 95mm and it produced the best yield that Haffenden Farm, Hukins’ family plot, has seen in 100 years.

This twitter thread promises an academic dissection of the imagery on a can of sorta Chicago‘s Old Style beer. But it is exceedingly silly.

Escaping the Covid-Blase** Beth Demmon has shared a wonderful portrait of one of the world’s most accomplished beer judges – and in doing so has explained a fair bit about what being one of the world’s most accomplished beer judges means:

Cockerham took her first exam in March 2007 and steadily moved up the hierarchy. In 2012, the same year she achieved Master level, she also became an official mead judge. She reached Grand Master in 2014 and has moved one level higher each year since. And last year, she reached her current level of Grand Master VI. She also became a certified cider judge in April 2019 and is currently the Midwest region representative and assistant exam director with Gail Milburn, whom she laughingly calls her “best beer friend, my BBFF.”

See, that is way better an explanation that the “I went to a fest in [pick a country] and saw all my pals… and we got into it… and it was fun… and some of us made the judging session” sort of tale we see more often.

The Beer Nut himself reached his fifteenth anniversary as a beer blogger this week and celebrated with a beer from Ontario:

Like an increasing number of people, this blog is spending its birthday in lockdown. Happy 15th oulfella. To mark the occasion I have retrieved something from the cellar that, honestly, I meant to drink a while ago and now seems the perfect excuse. I bought this bottle of The Exchange Δ Spontaneous Ale when I was at the brewery in Niagara on the Lake in 2018. It came lauded by local expert David Sun Lee, with a recommendation that it be let sit for a year before opening. Well, it got that, and a bit more.

And finally this week, at Boak and Bailey, Jess herself shared a review of Mûre Tilquin, a lambic with 260g blackberries per litre and it turns out she is a bit of a fan of the fruit:

I have Strong Opinions about them, too. For example, I strongly believe that urban blackberries are better than rural ones and that the best of all come from Walthamstow Marshes; should have Protected Designation of Origin status; and ought to be the subject of lengthy essays about terroir.

I like that. very pro-blackberry. Fight! And keep writing and keep reading. Check in 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. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Thanks for stopping by.

**Name twelve!!!
**Not an actual German word.

A Thursday Beer News Update For An Even Sadder Week

Another week in lock down. What is there to say? Things are moving along a bit of a path, maybe showing a bit of the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe. I hope the world hasn’t turned too upside down where you are. Things are looking a bit better in Rye, England where as we see above James Jeffrey has created the “Beer Delivery by Stonch!“* service. I’m not sure of the legalities of it all but how lovely to get a couple of pints of fresh drawn ale delivered from the pub. We’ve had new laxer laws pub in place here so no doubt there are more novel opportunities out there to be discussed.

The new home delivery here in Ontario has been so successful that some breweries are now being drained:

Thirsty Ottawans in lockdown are drinking beer faster than local breweries can produce it, causing some to run dry of their most popular varieties. The demand for canned beer is keeping some breweries afloat during the economic slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’re definitely moving beer faster now,” said Laura Behzadi, co-founder of Bicycle Craft Brewery. “Our beers will sell out in a day or two, sometimes three.” Like many craft beer breweries and brew pubs across the province, Bicycle has shifted solely to taking orders online since public health officials in Ontario commanded restaurants to close in mid-March.

Not every brewery has been able to adapt as Britain’s Left Handed Giant shared in detail:

Aim no 1 has been to try to find new revenue streams after the loss of both our bars, and around 85% of trade custom. All bars are shut and as such all trade we used to sell to wholesalers and bars direct has dried up. Worryingly very little of the beer we sold on credit through the early part of the year has now been paid for. Most bars and shops that have been shut have closed their books and are unable to pay. So not only have we lost current trade, we are staring at the possibility of losing the revenue generated from sales before the crisis even began. We are still paying our bills so we have hugely negative cash flow. All the money we owed going out, but very little of what’s owed coming in.

I do find the folk writing about today’s new situation the most interesting. By the way, here is great writing advice from Al Purdy, who wrote this. And this was my favorite tweet this week about the change:

Living next to a pub, I’m used to late-night revellers shouting but what really annoyed me was the chap who would imitate an owl hoot around 2.30am every night. Now pubs are shut I realise the hooting still goes on and it’s not a drunk. It is actually an owl.

Looking for something to do? Now you can volunteer to transcribe records on line with the Archives of the Province of Nova Scotia! Might be something about beer in them there archives. I wrote a paper in law school in that there building on the Court of Vice-Admiralty cases 1750 to 1760 on liquor violations. See, the local pre-Cajun Acadians liked their brandy but the conquering British wanted them to buy rum. It all ended up badly.

And while I want to hear about today, the odd post about what is missed is good, this one about a beer garden once visited in Germany:

I find myself thinking back to Bamberg. It was the height of summer and the middle of a Europe-wide heat wave with the sorts of temperatures that I, as a woman from the North of England, rarely come across; high 30s, each step an effort and bringing with it waves of exhaustion. We climb up a hill on the outskirts of town. It feels steeper than it is, the progress takes longer than it should and I grumble that it better be worth it.

Did I mention I wrote an actual post last weekend about actual brewing history? Dorchester Ale!!! Or beer… Dorchester Ale and Beer!!!!

Matthew L has continued his revivalist blogging (when he is not working to stock grocery shelves) with his admission that, along with Paisley patterned shirts, he has a thing for that thing Buckfast:

For me, the past two weeks have been like this – get up, go to work, stay there till Midnight (for maximum social distancing), go home, eat, have a few beers and go back to bed. The thing about this routine, is you have very little to look forward too at the end of the week. Basically, it’s the same as a work day, only without the work. And as such, you try to find the smallest thing about your old life to hang onto. With me, it will be Buckfast Sunday. Let me explain – every Sunday at 3pm, myself and few other regulars at a local micropub have a glass of the infamous Buckfast Tonic wine. Like all the best traditions, nobody really knows how it started (or even how a craft beer focused bar ended up stocking notorious Ned juice).

ATJ created a very interesting participatory project when he tweeted this and received many answers to his hypothesis:

Doing some research on regional beer styles, it’s my belief that the idea of regional differences in beer preferences has all but died out in the UK but am willing to be proved wrong if anyone has any examples. Be good to read all views based on personal experiences.

Robsterowski’s reply was practically haiku… or maybe half a sonnet: “Golden, flinty bitter in West Yorkshire. Sweet yet hoppy golden bitter in the West Midlands. Heavy in Scotland. Lightly flavoured quaffing bitter in Cumbria.” There are more than fifty other responses. Worth the read.

A timely joke…

Finally, as if things could not be worse, they did. As I mentioned last weekend on the bits of social media I use, I have been particularly struck by the horrible news from Nova Scotia because the crimes occurred where I used to live. The roads around Portapique were where I worked in high school and undergrad summer jobs, doing maintenance jobs in senior citizen housing or working up dirt roads piling pulp wood. Where we had summer beach parties, one of which included a pal’s car floating in the sea after being caught parked too near the world’s highest tides. School friends lived there along the northern shore of the Minas Basin. Some now back retired forty years later. Terrible. I mark this here to remember how it happened in a week like any other week, when we were already dealing with rotten news.

Having said that, we do know that things will be better and another day and week is coming. Keep writing and keep reading. Check in 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. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Thanks for stopping by.

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.