Category: Beer Writing

The Nights Have Gone Cool But Thursday Beery News Notes Go On

Achy. A bit from leaving the window open all night despite the forecast of quite cooler air. And me swimming in the big lake when its no longer quite so warm. Winter is coming. I’ve been in the lake maybe seven or ten times over the last few weeks. How long will it last? I grew up swimming in forest rivers as well as the North Atlantic Ocean back home in Nova Scotia. Lakes were always a bit stagnant by comparison. Folk call that “wild swimming” these days. I just call it swimming. Who knew the big water in the nearby big lake would be so big? Beach sand in the car. Beach toys in the trunk. Battered and beaten and happy am I.

First off, before the snow blows, Retired Martin has taken us on a trek to a pub in a lovely traditional thatched roof village in Devon, the Globe Inn in Beaford:

…turns out to be the most crafty of any place I visited in Devon. Plain but welcoming, a good all-rounder whose GBG credentials are a bit mystifying till you taste the beer. That little fridge on the right (below) was packed full of 10% DIPAs and mango sours…

Last weekend, I listened to a repeat of a short piece on the NPR radio show TTBOOK on the changes for the worse that have been imposed upon Bourbon County Stout through the sale of Goose Island to evil big industrial beer. It was particularly gratifying to see guest Josh Noel demonstrating the “nostril in the glass” technique I have been advocating for for about a decade and a half. Not unrelated but to the contrary, Mike reminded us on Twitter of the upside of the buy-out of craft:

You know when a brewery sells to the big guys and they say that it offers them more resources than they would have normally? This example shows that perfectly. Safe place for customers and their employees continue to have jobs. Just sayin.

Everyone’s favourite Midwest bar, the Olympic Tavern, that they have never visited had a rough bit of bad customer experience this week, something that highlights that during times of crisis some folk place having a beer and a Margarita high up on their priorities. Handled well. Along a similar vein, Pellicle has posted the tale of a Scottish drinking habit that, being Scots, I’ve never quite heard of:

The hauf an a hauf is traditional and modern at the same time. It’s a Scottish cultural institution we can be proud of: a combination in which to luxuriate, rather than down in pursuit of a buzz. The hauf an a hauf is about savouring both, two halves coming together to create something new, whole, and wholly wonderful. 

There must be an alt-tartan reality that excluded the generations before me as the idea that there is some long  pervasive history of buzz avoidance going on north of Gretna Green is news to me. Rather than suggesting it is a tradition, in 2014 TheBeerCast described the novelty in this way:

I guess the bottom line here is what do you want from a hauf and hauf? To get loaded, quicker? A US-style ‘Shot and a beer, Dolores’? Or to give a depth of flavour to each drink? It seems, judging from the conversation, that the way half and halves are being seen is changing, as a newer generation of beer/whisky fans indulge in the practice as a tasting exercise, rather than an end-of-shift exercise…

That makes more sense. That’s more in line with Great-Grannie Campbell between the wars being banned for life – a number of times – from the James Watt pub in Greenock even though she lived right above it. Or more likely because. Then the grandchildren being kicked out when they were sent to get a gill on her behalf.

More currently, Matt noted with some hesitancy the creation of something called the Small Brewers Forum in the UK. It is open to breweries:

The Small Brewers Forum has been formed to protect and preserve small British breweries and those who operate them. We have a successful and strong collective voice and campaign on behalf of our members to ‘fight for fairness’ in the industry. We take our campaigning to the highest level at national government as well as local government and within the brewing industry.

The published material indicates that the “only let small brewers join (sub-10000hL) so I can be sure that they represent what’s good for me without any of the big guys pulling the strings.” This makes a lot of sense to me. The numerical majority of brewers are small and have local markets. Their issues are very different from regionals and big craft. Here in Ontario, while there isn’t a second organization after OCB, the membership of that organization represents only the minority of the province’s brewers. Trade organizations structured on “craft” or geography make less sense than those with common issues based on scale.

In the ha ha dumb dumb news item of the week, Budweiser was caught echoing Eco*:

On Friday, the company wrote, in a now-deleted tweet, about two of their brands, Budweiser and Bud Light. “Reject modernity, embrace tradition,” the tweet read, telling consumers to enjoy the original beverage over it’s lower-calorie counterpart. Pictured were the sleek, modern-looking Bud Light can, along with the classic designed Budweiser beer. However, the seemingly simple message raised some eyebrows. One Twitter user, Joshua A.C. Newman, pointed out the origins of the text for the ad. “Are you deliberately quoting the first two elements of Umberto Eco’s 14 elements of Fascism?” he responded to the since-deleted tweet.

There’s that concept of “tradition” again. Calling card of the casually ahistorical.

And, as recommended by Andy, I signed up for the beer newsletter by David Infante – and was pleased to find out it was also a blog. There are a lot of beer blogs holding themselves out as online beer magazines and newsletters these days. It’s a bit sad that self-publishing is that little bit needy that it needs to hide itself behind odd labels and a thin veneer of exclusivity. Anyway, his latest blog post “Hire me, White Claw” caught my attention primarily as it confirmed what I should have known – this year’s trendy cooler White Claw is Canadian!!!** While Jordan mentioned it in passing in his recent post he did not hit me over the head with the fact. Never had one sip myself. Nope. So virtuous I am.  Plus I have Pickled Green Bean Clamato for that.

Stan has been telling tales again – this time about new hops being named and brought to market:

By announcing a name for the experimental hop previously known as HBC 692 the company signaled she is her own brand. “We were getting very significant pull (demand),” said Jason Perrault, CEO and hop breeder for Yakima Chief Ranches. HBC is a partnership between YCR and John I. Haas. “We’ve seen the impact it can have in a beer. Unique, but appealing. It was just time to give it its own identity.” The name, Talus, is a nod to the talus slopes found in the Yakima Valley. She is a daughter of Sabro, the hop formerly known as HBC 438 and commercialized in 2018.

I’m not a hop spotter myself, preferring to drink and think about beer once made but it is interesting to see how in the hop trade these sorts of things matter. Mr Stange even admitted to having been aware of the name (before the name was released) by way of  an embargoed press release – which made me wonder if new shoe lace tech also comes with embargoed press releases. You should also sign up for Stan’s newsletter Hop Queries to really keep up. It’s a blog he sends to you monthly by email.

Finally, Jeff posted a post on Wednesday about the brewing volume stats coming out of the Oregon Liquor Control Commission so far in this very odd year:

The Oregon Liquor Control Commission tracks the taxable barrels sold by Oregon breweries in Oregon. I’ve been watching to see when the June report would drop, because that will give us six months of data to see what kind of violence COVID-19 has done to breweries. The upshot: it’s been bad, but maybe not as bad as we might have guessed back in March. Thirteen of the top twenty breweries were down from this time last year, some substantially. But overall, the top 20 breweries were only down 2% from the same period in 2019.

While that is an average that is great news. If I could go back to myself five months ago, in the middle of the beginning of the stress of what was to come, and say “don’t worry it’ll only be 2% off” I’d be ecstatic. Now, it’s clear that it is an average and some are suffering more than that but for an economic snapshot that’s a pretty sweet picture.

In news of the ancient, Merryn gave me the heads up about a weekly web event put on by EXARC, “the ICOM Affiliated Organisation on Archaeological Open-Air Museums, Experimental Archaeology, Ancient Technology and Interpretation”:

Historical-archaeological Beer Brewers unite! We meet for a chat, this Saturday, 20:00h CET. It’s free, it’s open access and for anybody with a serious interest and / or experience with historic, archaeological craft brewing, anywhere in the world.

You sign up, too! Now!! I may be mowing as that’s mid-afternoon on the best day of the week. The heart of Saturday afternoon which is prep time for the heart of Saturday night.***

Here’s an interesting bit of news. An Albertan laboratory ran a study of beers entered into an awards judge-y thing to see if there were patterns in award giving outery:

The Raft Beer Labs analysis, published on its website, showed a few trends among medal-winning beers. Fresher beer was more likely to win an award. Medal winners were more likely to have a dry-finish than non-winners. Award-winning beers also tended to be clearer, with less turbidity than non-winners. Medal winners were also found to have lower free amino nitrogen levels and tended to be slightly higher in alcohol content than their target. The analysis also showed that both winners and non-winners were less bitter — measured in IBUs, or International Bittering Units — than the listed level, and both winners and non-winners had some microbial contamination, from wild yeasts or bacteria.

Interesting. Clearer, stronger and less bitter beers were preferred. The opposite of trendy low-alc murky hop bombs the blogs and micro blogs and photo blogs and podcast blogs and multi-author blogs are all talking about.

Finally, I am not sure I understand the point of this story. Why care about a brewery that many have written off? Why write and publish “Founders continues to defend its corporate culture”?

Done! For more of the good stuff but from a different view and in a range of blog formats, check in with Boak and Bailey most Saturdays, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays (listen as they shit on Belleville this week!) 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. Not to mention Cabin Fever. And Ben has finally gone all 2009 and joined in with his own podcast, Beer and Badword.**** And BeerEdge, too.

*I know – excellent, right?
**Which is sorta like saying “Soylent Green is people!” in some circles.
***Yup.
****The greatest Great Lake is obviously Lake Ontario as it contains all the other Great Lakes.

The Dog Days Of August Offer Similar Beery News Notes

It’s August. If the barley ain’t in, it will be soon. That’s out the outside world. In inside world news, DSL reposted the image above, the interior of C’est What in downtown Toronto. Does it really pose a problem? C’est What is one of my favourite “waiting for the train home” pubs, as noted 15 years ago and again 5 years ago. I haven’t been on a train for five months. No idea when I will again. But I will.

What’s been going on? I don’t know how to footnote a podcast* or quite a passage from one so all I can do is recommend Andy’s thoughts on the needs for independent reportage of the brewing trade. More meta arose in response to Jeff’s further thoughts on the state of making a freelance living from beer writing:

Many hours in a freelance writer’s life are not occupied by the activities that directly contribute to finished pieces, and a level of chaos emerges from all the other odd work that rattles around, inevitably demanding attention at inconvenient, unexpected moments. Let’s spend a moment unpacking them.

Responses ensued** from many including Eoghan, Maureen, Boak and Bailey and Katie. Me, it’s a mug’s game honestly entered into that often leads to this which leads to this and then oddly this.

Elsewhere, Jon Abernathy reports on the Black Is Beautiful project in Oregon:

I just checked, and the number in Oregon is now 37 on the website, though it doesn’t count Deschutes Brewery, which partnered with The Ale Apothecary (as I mention in the article), so really it’s 38 in Oregon. This is a vitally important project that shouldn’t be ignored. If you see a Black is Beautiful beer on tap, or available in cans, buy it—your dollars will help to fund the necessary change we need to see right now.

Some questions arose over the weekend as to how many of your dollars were actually helping fund change as the differences between proceeds and profits were discussed. But elsewhere real money was gathered: $20,000 and $12,000 for example.

Speaking of gathering resources against the forces of badness, I like this bit of brewing industry legal news. Source Brewing in New Jersey has released a beer called West Coast Troll to help raise funds to help Sawstone Brewing in its defense of the odd threat of an intellectual property legal action brought by one of big craft’s top millstones, Stone:

Here at Source, we do not condone bullying and we are all about supporting small businesses. It’s important to stop and remember how we got here, and how beautiful and life-changing the craft beer community is for so many people. Rising tides raise all ships and our collective focus should remain on sticking together and resisting the corporate bullying often exercised by “Big Beer,” and not on picking on one another. We stand with Stone Brewing in their dispute with MillerCoors, but we firmly support Sawstone Brewing in defending their right to exist.

Class. And solidarity. And Stone as a result has earned itself a FB page rallying for a boycott. Brilliant. Surely completely unconnected was the sudden departure of Stone’s CEO.

Historically, Martyn has told a tale again, this time about Flowers Keg ale in the 1950s and an anti-slaver posse in the 1820s in US Midwest:

Let us begin at the beginning. I knew about Richard Flower because he is an important figure in the history of brewing in Hertfordshire, and I knew he had moved to Illinois to join his son George, who was one of the pioneers in developing what was called the “English Settlement” in the territory, which developed into the city of Albany. But I didn’t know that Richard, who was born in London, had trained at Whitbread…

Health-wise, Evan wrote about alcohol and health claims for Wine Enthusiast:

“Many people are aware of the negative effects of drinking, but drink anyway,” she says. For many, she says, such internal conflict can produce a feeling of mental discomfort. “Reading a newspaper article that states that drinking isn’t that bad after all might reduce this feeling of discomfort.” 

Note: there is still no J-curve.

And filed under very pleasant surprises, while it has not often been the case, I really enjoyed something in Good Beer Hunting. I’ve too often been let down by past cut and paste jobs leaning on too heavily on the published work of others followed by the typical “one the one hand on the other” tepid conclusions. But not this week when Kate Bernot really put the old boot in the Brewers Association. Consider this bit of well deserved finger-pointery:

The BA’s assertion that it will not kick out breweries unless doing so has strong support from other member breweries indicates the organization will not take a top-down approach to eradicating racism among members. Yet experts in the business world have said corporate leadership is especially necessary on these issues.

Among other responses, it got me looking through my own archives and found (then, imagine – tweeted) this gem of days now seemingly long gone:

From the archives: “The Eight Years Reign of Craft Beer Ends” (Jan., 2015) [See this timely thought… => “One of the key PR goals of the Brewer’s Association has been control of the discourse.”] 

Not no more. Good news that story. A bit of spine. Now, if we can just get the guild of pro-am beer editors with empty pantry issues stop praising crappy PR cut and paste sweatshops I might be able to sleep at night. Similarly, the Polk says F the guilds… sorta.

Getting back to the actual life of the actual consumer, the Tand himself wrote about the joys and pitfalls of app service as opposed to table service in the pandemic pub scene:

Our next stop Mackie Mayor had similar issues. If you wanted to only have a drink, you had to sit outside – fine – and use the app – not so fine. This time it wouldn’t download on Android, but it liked Mike’s iPhone. Details required were of the intrusive nature. This took 20 minutes or so again and this time, after a ten-minute wait, decent pints of cask, in proper glasses, were brought. Overall though much more bearable. But not that great.

Not great at all.

Worse? Yes, it could be far worse. Well, there is Cowbell here in Ontario. Check out the second half of the latest OCPG podcast for the details but it’s a bit of an ugly initial mess followed by a PR mess followed by not sure what next… ugh.

Well, that is it. For more of the same but different, 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. Not to mention Cabin Fever. And Ben has finally gone all 2009 and joined in with his own podcast, Beer and Badword. And BeerEdge, too.

*But is a podcast even a podcast without thirty-five “umms” and a dozen snorts? Can’t wait for the new profession of beer podcast audio producers and sound engineers to arise to follow in the brave footsteps of the post-2018 phenom of beer writing editors.
**Oddly, no suggestion that beer writing editors were the solution…

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For Mid-July

The heat had broken for a bit, we here just having a bit of summer for now but more storms and heat start to roll in today. There. Your weather update. The garden is doing great. Thanks for asking. Peas just about done. Third planting of spinach underway. Elsewhere, things are unhappy in good beer land. Gütbierelandia. People are cranky about this that, and the other. One pub in Cornwall, England even put up an electric fence to protect the bar, as excellently illustrated above. We all know why it’s like this and it almost pains me to mention it. Gütbierelandia ist traurig unt launisch. But that is all I do in this here weekly round-up, noting the week’s zeitgeist once again through sifting clues scattered on these information highways. That’s what I do. And what did I find this week?  Unhappy people.

First, Stan gave me a bit of a zing in his post about the future of beer writing:

Blogging allows writers to distribute words that would not otherwise be published. It is a hard way to earn money. On Thursday, Alan McLeod repeated his pitch for more beer blogging, more new voices. (Suggesting how complicated this might be, his weekly news wrapup included only one link to a personal beer blog, and that one has a corporate sponsor).

Of course, I went to go after him immediately on social media but then, as the blood red rage abated four seconds later… I realized he was right. Look at this list of beer blogs and notice how few are beer blogs.* And he was perhaps more right than even he realized, as I went on a’ commenting that too much quality beer writing started chasing a few trade writing bucks leaving only impecunity, edited-in samey banality, semi-heroic but years late taking of obvious stances, culminating with a drought of good personal writing related to the experience of beer. So different from investigative reporting.** I don’t know if there is any hope of a revival.  I don’t share his (or Boak’s/Bailey’s) hopes for e-publishing given that’s been around for yoinks.  Folk just need to write more and forget about the money. There isn’t a future in it. Never has been. Be like Kurt say. Click on the thumbnail.

Tales of Covid abound. How to have a gentlemanly BBQ is explored in what might actually be a parody. And the New York Post reports that teens are dressing up as mask-wearing grandmas to try to score alcohol. This from UK sugar makers Ragas may serve as a good benchmark from here on out:

Lockdown also resulted in the closure of on-licensed premise businesses such as pubs, bars, event venues and restaurants, with these accounting for 62% of alcohol consumption in the UK in 2019. As a result, demand for casks and kegs beer fell sharply. Larger breweries that have canning and bottling lines were able to ride this out. Regional, micro and craft producers that rely purely on keg and cask sales, however, did not have this option, and instead were forced to shutdown indefinitely.

Covid tweet of the week: “The waiter served tapas in a hazmat suit…”

And Jeff in Beervana considered how the pandemic is going four months in and makes this interesting observation about the Times Before Now:

The arrival of seltzer and FMB was actually a warning sign, signaling exhaustion with the rather baroque shape beer had taken. People wanted an uncomplicated buzz. All that excitement and energy buoyed a product that was, in volume terms, not actually growing. If a year-long pandemic saps consumers’ interest in going out for ten-dollar pints, if they seek refuge instead in simpler, cheaper beer, what becomes of those halcyon 2010s? Will beer still be fun?

Now, consider this and tell me Jeff is wrong:

Kombrewcha CEO Garrett Bredenkamp is looking to the hard seltzer segment for inspiration as the hard kombucha brand backed by Anheuser-Busch’s ZX Ventures looks to compete in the fast-growing segment.

That’s about seven layers of dumb right there, folks. And it’s all not to mention the less than passive aggressive attitude stuff from breweries. And as Norm noted, what all started with one brewery, Trillium, putting out bad beer in bloated cans what go boom in the night… or the hand… ended up with much comment ensuing when they declared it more of a feature than a bug:

We don’t want anyone to have to clean up a mess and advise that you store these cans in a refrigerator immediately. Refrigerated (38ºF) batch samples that our QA team retains have not burst and upon further testing, we’ve seen no yeast growth from the time of packaging.

Speaking of which almost, elsewhere people (again) are unhappy with BrewDog. This time about the use of the new ideas of others:

Scottish multinational brewery BrewDog has been slammed for allegedly “stealing” marketing ideas… A Reddit user wrote: “Brewdog commissions work or sets fake interviews to solicit marketing ideas, steals them without paying or crediting the contributors. Owner doesn’t understand when people take issue…”

The story does not exactly have solid sources but, you know, who does these days?** I will leave you to your own conclusions.

And this sounds like a reason for a full on boycott, I’d say. #HTKT

In the story of the week and perhaps echoing Stan above in asking the musical question “where have all the good times gone…” Lew Bryson went all universal theory of what is bad, evil and ungood about craft beer today and in doing so slammed (excellently, I might add) the thirty years legacy of the core pre-craft and then craft ethos of having a hate on for the “other”:

That’s what happens when there’s no hate in your heart. You can work on the things that are based in love: improvement, care, transparency and truth, good flavor, authenticity. Craft beer has that, in plenty, but damn, we keep fighting about it. If we hadn’t made such a big deal about what craft brewing wasn’t…we wouldn’t have had these big fights when craft brewers decided that they were going to blend, and brew with corn (and donuts!), and put beer in cans, and make light lagers.

Oddly, this reminded me of the efforts of eight or more years ago to have craft take on 20% of the market by 2020… which is where we are now.  If we are honest, any movement towards that goal was only going to achieve it by adding bulk non-craft quantity like Yeungling and also allowing Sam Adams to stick around well after the stale date. What it might have in common is that head scratch as to why US craft finds the has needed to be so… so… so macro. Ah, the path not taken…

Which leads us right into the next tale,  on the question of the governance of the Brewers Association itself and in particular people calling for the resignation of head honcho, Bob Pease. As I mentioned last week, I found the mind boggling level of remuneration a bit… mind boggly. Now, care of a podcast interview with Andy Crouch, things have shifted to the lack of diversity and complacency with members’ bigotries in the BA itself. What exactly does the actual small hardscrabble brewer get for his or her membership dues anyway? Suits. But your own suits!!! Then even Andy got heat for asking the questions. Or is it “caught heat”? Yowza. Yet… the idea that a Euro-sort interviewing a Euro-sort will not lead to greater understanding of the lot faced by non-Euro-sorts is compelling.

Best non-covid tweet.

Finally, there was one break in all the pent up unhappiness. Some good news in Boak and Bailey’s review*** of Lars’ new book on “being Lars and finding kviek was there just waiting to be found”:

Lars’ subject matter was, until recently, the kind of stuff of which footnotes are made. Here, commercial brewing of the type that dominates globally is the footnote, or at least the over-familiar postscript to a much longer story that is rarely told.

I’d buy it based just on that one review but… bought it already.

Remember – keep writing and tell us what you see. Be brave. Do it! Make Kurt proud. And 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. Not to mention Cabin Fever. And Ben has finally gone all 2009 and joined in with his own podcast, Beer and Badword.

*What’s a blog? Start with Scripting News.
**…not so much…
***Sweet reference to They Might Be Giants, too.

The First Thursday Beer News Notes for A Q3 2020 Week

See, we made it to Q3! Now we can sing all the Q3 carols, dance the Q3 dances and enjoy all the hot mulled ales of Q3s of old. It’s stinking hot here. Nutty hot. +40C with the humidity hot. Too hot – I might add – even for a beer. At a certain point, I’m just of the iced club soda sorta guy. And busy. This has been a nutty week already. I’m writing this wearing a tie in my laundry room waiting for my chance to answer a question over the next five or six hours on another Zoom meeting. Oh, no… a Webex meeting. Choppier Webex.

The return to pubs in Britain, as Mudgie noted, led to a lot of chat about whether we are being fair to all our brothers and sisters in ale and lager when we think of who got to the newly reopened door first. I liked the image above tweeted from that good day which included the comment ” Jimmy hasn’t gone to bed after his night shift tarmacking the roads.” Nice. I’m on Team Jimmy. Jeff marked the last day of carry-out at his pub with another great image and I am convinced he, too, is on Team Jimmy. We all, however, hate the no-shows and, as Katie noted, hate the bad reviews on day one. But beware the worst beer garden in Scotland.

Jeff at Beervana has been sharing some stories provided by the breweries and brew pubs and bars in his part of the world and what Covid-19 has meant for their businesses. Matt Van Wyk of Alesong Brewing shared some thoughts about the problem that his clients are mainly human beings:

…if you don’t work very hard to keep order in your facility (rules, signs, verbal herding) people will certainly move toward chaos and do whatever the heck they want without remembering we are in a world pandemic. “Please don’t touch that water pitcher with the sign ‘Staff only!’ on it.” Most people are very respectful of what we in the industry have to deal with but it’s hard to serve both sides of the “caution spectrum.”

The US Brewers Association has been in the news – but not perhaps for one item that caught my eye, the salaries paid top staff:

CEO Bob Pease earned $341,950 in compensation in 2018, plus $44,370 in “estimated other compensation from the organization and related organizations.” That’s down from the $409,000 he earned in base compensation in 2017, and more than Charlie Papazian earned in the same position in 2014. Papazian’s salary at that time was $258,000.

Yowza!*  That’s hospital chief executive coin! And a hell of a lot of coin for an organization which in its hymnal offers the regular refrain “there is no money in craft beer.” GBH much to my surprise did some good digging, letting Kate Bernot do the job properly and and did a follow up with a post contextualizing recent staff shifts in a very neat and tidy way. Others raised other issue related to the value proposition including this:

I’ve been vocal about my concerns with @BrewersAssoc harboring racist members recently, and in response they followed me (perhaps to spy), and I’ve been ignored here and on Instagram while white folks both places get responses.

Not good. Dr J. invited folk to step up and get in there to make the change. Similarly from Beth,

…whoops just wrote a 1,500 word critique about San Diego beer for a local beer magazine, brb gotta go prime my inbox for hate mail.

Timely and excellent news, then, on the creation of a scholarship fund to increase diversity in brewing and distilling:

Renowned Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett Oliver announced the formation of the Michael Jackson Foundation for Brewing and Distilling (MJF) to help people of colour in, or who wish to join, the brewing and distilling industries. The MJF will be helping ‘predominantly people of colour’ by funding scholarship awards to ‘directly fund a more equitable and dynamic future for brewing and distilling’, Oliver said on Twitter…

Happy to see that the brewing scholarship is named as Sir Geoff Palmer Scholarship Award for Brewing. I have been following Sir Geoff on Twitter for a while but have to admit that I did not do so for any reason related to brewing. My parents came from Scotland, Dad from a sugar refining city, and I found him solely through his writing on racial discrimination there and through Scotland’s connections to the sugar slave trade. Fabulous decision.

Crowds of actual modernists – some wearing boaters! – flooded the streets of Dublin as noted by Monsieur Noix du Biere himself.

And Matt C himself had something dear to my heart published this week – an essay entitled “How to Start a Beer Blog“!!

The first piece of doubt you’ll form when you consider starting out as a blogger is that there are already loads of beer blogs in existence, so why does the world need another? In truth there really aren’t that many voices in beer, and there is no such thing as too many beer bloggers. Sure it might take a few good posts to earn your stripes from some of those who’ve been doing it for a while, but people love reading about beer, and a new voice providing fresh content is always welcome.

Boom!!! I’ve been saying that all month… or more… probably more…

Finally, traces of Iron Age beer have been found in Sweden.

Another week in the books. And as Matt said, keep writing and tell us what you see. Be brave. Do it! And 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.  In their latest episode, Robin and Jordan are showing signs of losing it from da ‘Vid… or they just really have an odd sense of geography and time. Never mind! 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. Not to mention Cabin Fever.

 

*Ms. Ogle did not share my thoughts.

 

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.

*Being early Gen X, this all makes perfect sense to me.

 

 

 

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!

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.

These Be The Final Thursday Beery News Notes For February 2020

Go. Go put on your 45 of Don McLean singing “American Pie,” his lament for the milestones marking the ends of innocence during the first two decades of the rock ‘n’ roll era. Go put it on and have have a good cry because that’s sorta what happened this week. BeerAdvocate got bought.  They didn’t “join forces” with anyone.* As they explained on Monday:

A large portion of our business relied on revenue from BeerAdvocate magazine. As the focus of readers and advertisers shifted over recent years, our publication wasn’t immune to the issues that have impacted the entire print media industry. Next Glass stepped up to ensure that our awesome community that we’ve all worked hard to cultivate since 1996 can continue to thrive for years to come.

They ran out of dough and needed someone to take them over. Which is fine.  Next Glass runs that Untappd thing I don’t use but others do. So that is good. BeerAdvocate  will continue in a fashion but just not what they have been doing excellently for over twenty years.  I share the photo to the right as testimonial to their excellence. I took that photo and they like it so much they put it in their magazine in the December 2007 edition. Didn’t ask. Didn’t pay me for it. But I got a good complaining post out of it sixteen years ago so it all worked out in the end.** But it sucks that they had to take a buy out.

From the archives and related: the state of beer mags in 2007.

As mentioned last week, Jancis Robinson is asking questions about the transport weight of wine bottles in a world more and more concerned with sustainability:

The most sustainable way of shipping wine is by sea in a tanker. A wine shipped in bulk to New York from Australia could easily have a lower carbon footprint than one trucked in bottle from California (though behemoth Gallo has long shipped wine across the country by rail). A container of bulk wine holds two and half times as much wine as a container packed with conventional 75-cl bottles. It may sound dreadfully unromantic, but the technology of bulk shipping of wine has improved beyond recognition in the last few years, as has the expertise of professional wine bottlers in major wine-importing countries in northern Europe.

What weight of beer is shipped around the world and how big a carbon footprint does that represent? Should that be calculated into the value of an imported beer – or a big craft beer shipped by truck across the continent?

Best image in beer this week from B and the other B.

Ben, Canada’s leading beer writer best known for not writing that much about beer anymore,*** took the time to do what I can’t be bothered to do – complain about #FlagshipFebruary which is on its last legs… err, week! I meant week!

At the risk of opening my door tomorrow morning to find a frothy-mouthed Beaumont on my porch with a straight razor in his hand, I’d suggest the way to move the needle forward in craft beer isn’t to have a handful of established beer writers talk about a handful of beers that were once relevant. They (the beers that is) are essentially relics of a bygone era and while they broke down doors for today’s craft beers, our interest in them now is and should be a sort of reverential nostalgia and tolerance. Instead of endearing icons, I’d suggest they’re now a bit more like once-great athletes, hanging around their respective sports just a little too long.

Yesterday’s beer for yesterday’s fans brought to you by yesterday’s… Oh. Yes… err… no… that would be unkind.

Note: …and then Ben goes and posts one of his best posts ever**** on Wednesday on the cancellation of the Ontario Beer Summit, a beer diversity conference in Toronto that was being organized by indefatigable Ren Navarro, due to lack of buy in from the target audience, aka the local craft brewers.

Katie is writing something… but what?

In the hot legal new department, Brendan tweeted about the Estate of Johnny Cash (yeah!) suing something called Cash Brewing Company Inc. (boo!) for ripping off the man in black’s trademark.  They even have a beer named “The Can in Black” which I think qualifies as a bastardly thing to do to the memory of old Johnny.

Dr. Christina Wade has written about on the connection and disconnections between alewives and witches in early modern England:

While we may never truly know if alewives were accused of witchcraft simply because they were alewives, it is clear that women who brewed were perhaps particularly vulnerable to the witch-hunts.

Not moving far in space but certainly in time, a brewer in Norfolk, England is pushing a beer barrel on a 140 mile trip. Why? To to raise money for the testicular cancer charity, It’s On The Ball. BBC Radio Norfolk has the story somewhere in this three hour broadcast at about the two hour and fifteen minute mark.

Stan’s Hop Queries digi-hop-zine came out this week and included this observation:

Peter Darby, who has been breeding hops in England for almost 40 years, once said this: “English flavor is like a chamber orchestra, the hops giving simultaneously the high notes and the bass notes. In comparison, a Czech beer is more like a full orchestra with much more breadth to the sound, and an American hop gives more of a dance band with more emphasis on volume and brass. The recent New Zealand hops (e.g. Nelson Sauvin) are like adding a voice to the instrumental music.”

I usually hate that sorta thing but I don’t fully in this case. Almost. Analogies? Really? So 2008. I really only mention it to remind you to sign up. That up there is just a tidbit and a bit of a blip at that on on the great information he periodically produces through the periodical. Did you know that there were 770 attendees at the 2020 American Hop Convention? Neither did I… until Stan told me so.

Stan also sent me an email asking my thoughts on this book, How NOT to start a F@ck!ng Brewery. I checked out the Amazon “Look Inside!” thingme and had flashbacks from writing the Al and Max book. So much dirty language. So much. 

And finally, sad reality in the form of far grimmer bit of news than anyone would want to have to face was shared on Wednesday with the shootings at MillerCoors in Milwaukee. Terrible news. Yes, be excellent to each other.

Next week, on to March. In the meantime for more beer news, check out 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. What else? What indeed.

*They also confirmed on their blog post that they didn’t run a blog, either.
**…and I never saw a case of beer either, Evan.
***A remarkably packed field competed for this award.
****Blogs are back, baby!

Welcome To The 2020s Edition Of Beery News Notes

I think I lost about three days over the last week. I mean I didn’t notice them slip by at all. It wasn’t any happy haze of a drunken hour or anything. Just the slow drip drip drip of the chocolate assortment boxes being passed around the rooms filled with cousins-in-law, nephews and the pets of others. I was practically temperate all weeks as a matter of fact. Thanks to Katie, I watched the first season of the Detectorists  on DVD – which earned me the stink-eye from our eldest for, again, not having Netflicks.  [See, I didn’t even know it is spelled “Netflix”!]  So, needless to say, I have no real news updates to share.

First up, the blogger known as Wee Beefy had a bit of a sharing post on Boxing Day:

…regular and more astute readers may be aware that since my stroke and more so since my recent brain injury, memories, whatever they are, have not been very high up on my agenda. Longer term readers may also note that throughout the nearly ten year history of my blog, accurate memories of liquids consumed and other aspects of crapulence have thus far regularly escaped me, or at the very least, presented themselves in my memory through a dizzying, contorted haze. So last night, when it took me an hour to find and recall the name of Yorkshiremen the grumbleweeds (not a pub), I was prompted to write.

I’ve actually wondered to myself what, after 17 years of this sort of writing hobby,  might happen were I to have a similar change of life. I assume I would not keep writing. Good to see someone not making that mistake.  I will be reading to see what I can learn.

Jeff at Beervana posted a great scrapbook… album… post… of the favourites among his beery photos.

And to the visual accompaniment of The Beer Nut* on New Year’s Eve, Stephen Beaumont himself concurrently tweeted an excellent and pointed set of wishes for 2020 including:

6) That more breweries operating tap rooms realize that in so doing they are in the hospitality game, and start creating spaces in keeping with that understanding. Also, treating their customers with respect and appreciation. 6/11…

8) That fining and filtration stop being viewed as sins. Yes, hazy works, cloudy works, but there is also nothing wrong with a brilliantly clear beer. 8/11

Switching vices, this is an interesting take from the Beeb on the lack of change that cannibals (aka dope)  becoming legal had on Canadian society:

There were early signs of trouble. When cannabis became legal on 17 October 2018, there wasn’t enough supply to meet the demand. Long lines and backlogs of online orders plagued consumers. Producers weren’t sure what strains would be most popular where, and kinks in the distribution chain were still being ironed out… Where there was once a shortage, now producers have too much product, in part because of the lack of retail. 

The story goes on to say that while we Canucks bought 11,707 kilograms in Sept 2019, about 165,000 kilograms of finished and unfinished products was ready for sale. Frankly, I know of no one who picked up the habit and hear of plenty who still buy off the illegal unregulated market at a much lower price.

On the one hand, I suppose this is entirely good news for Evan and the other authors… but on the other I am not sure why it is news. A gratuitous gift just seems odd. So I trust per word rates will also go up for 2020.

And speaking of curated community, Beth has noted an important limitation on “curation” of “community” – two concepts I have never had much time for: everyone and everything should not be welcome just because sales increase, numbers increase or popularity increases. Things can be bad, especially around alcohol.

You will be happy to know that craft beer is booming in Saskatchewan:

…the major trends right now are hazy New England IPA-style beers, and fruit and sour beers. The hazy beers “are generally very juicy in flavour and they offer a big citrus flavour,” Gasson said. The fruit and sour beers range from very tart to having almost no tartness depending on the style. Gasson thinks those trends will continue, but he also sees more traditional IPAs — that may appeal to a broader audience — making a comeback.

This illustrates the paper-doll moment that good beer is in now. Swap out Saskatchewan for Alabama or Aberdeen and the same sameness applies. Some call it a golden era. It’s conformity. Perhaps even self-censorship.

Contrast that with Gary Gilman who has again added again to our collective substantive experience of beer history with a post on the unrelated brewing Reinhardts of Ontario and Quebec 170 years ago in a series of three posts, including this from the last:

On August 31, 1889, a box ad for the brewery, about 2″x 2″, appeared in Toronto’s The Globe & Mail (institutional access or paywall). The brewery was called Berlin Brewery, with a statement that “E.V. Reinhardt, Prop.”, was “manufacturer of the celebrated Berlin lager” on Queen Street. The ad was in a group of ads from town merchants that accompanied a multi-page feature on Berlin life and industry. Seemingly the business was on a good footing at this time. One imagines that the Toronto Reinhardts were not thrilled to read this over breakfast in their home city. True, it was small beer in relation to them, but as an outpost of an older, well-established Montreal brewery, they probably experienced disquiet over it, apart from seeing “their” name used by someone else.

Elsewhere this week, The Beer Nut* has published his Golden Pint Awards for 2019. This is a thing started by those who have since drifted away into more successful modes of human existence but, along with some really clever wit in the comments section, it’s nice to see a bit of Windows XP era nostalgia being clung onto:

This month makes it ten years since Mark Dredge and Andy Mogg suggested categories that beer bloggers might like to use for an annual run-down of the best in beer. I’ve stuck with it steadfastly since, even if I do change my criteria for the winners each year, and sometimes during the process of writing that year’s entry. It’s not meant to be taken seriously or considered meaningful, is what I’m saying.

[Edit: an earlier entry by Boak and Bailey should be noted, too, as should be the fact they have not posted for two weeks. PANIC!!!!]

Stan‘s latest Hop News by Email! (aka “the HNBE”) newsletter came out this week  and it was a great addition to the beer news chit chattery, including:

Attendees filled out provided evaluation sheets, giving beers a score of 0-5 in seven categories (floral, spicy/herbal, woody/resin/pine, citrus, vegetal/onion/garlic, red fruits, tropical fruit). This certainly was not scientific. The sheets were intended to enhance the experience for attendees more than provide peer reviewable feedback. This was not a trained panel, there was no calibration and it would be silly to present you with a cumulative radar chart for each of the beers. So I won’t. Instead, a couple of overall observations:

Now, based on the above I am not going to make any large observations about my thinking this was all a bit…err… detectorist** but I will leave you to the more fundamental questions of why it is that (i) men like hobbies and (ii) all hobbies eventually bear a strong resemblance to other hobbies.

Note: I drove from the 1780s to the 1840s bit of Ontario on our holiday drive in a Ford Transit mini-bus, passing the Fryfogle Tavern each way. Alarmingly lovely, I always look behind it as we drive by to get a glimpse of where Tiger Dunlop drank in a leanto in the 1820s. Up there at the top is an image actually tweeted alongside the note “John Severn, Brewery, Yonge St., northeast corner Church St.” indicating perhaps that it may well have been painted by Tom Thompson. Which would be lovely.  It was actually apparently painted by Frederic Victor Poole, however. Which is still lovely. Two bits on Ontario’s pre-temperance existence in one paragraph. Beat that, 2020 guess-timate articles.

I must admit to not having much interest in the people who will make the news in beer in 2020 given, as science of yore has explained clearly, they are always about people identified as such in 2019 or earlier. My prediction? 2020 will clearly be best known for the Pellicle-GBH mid-year Asian land wars. We already have a sense of who the loser may… err, will be. And we’ll have plenty more of the really great pro beer writing. That’s always guaranteed.

Somewhat similarly, I can’t think of a better example of underwhelming fact finding than this article in Forbes which seemingly relies exclusively on old big craft brewery owners or executives posing as a “cross-section” assessing how we got to the current market as “beer experts” – a term without meaning in itself – here used to suggest that somehow they are not just players with a possibly fading interest.  Consider this:

…according to Schuhmacher, all of that capex spending could become a problem in the years to come. “The next decade will reveal a tremendous amount of excess brewing capacity, which will drive closures, consolidation, and lower pricing,” he said.

As we know,*** this actually was the tale of 2018 which accelerated in to 2019. We are well down this path. In my own town we are three breweries down compared to a year ago. A healthy retraction. But, again, remembering presented as forecasting. Who saw tree hug leftie New Belgium selling to the pals of the right wing military dictatorship? Now that would have been forecasting!

Should grocery stores selling beer have designated beer aisles as opposed to loss leader end placements? Recovering alcoholics might prefer it:

…it’s “inappropriate” to be displaying alcoholic beverages in grocery aisles alongside basic food items, including products that are marketed to children. “Alcohol is not a normal commodity. It makes you intoxicated. It’s a psychoactive substance. It’s a Group 1 carcinogen. So, from the point of view of a child seeing alcohol in a grocery store, it normalizes a substance which is not the same as the other products that are in that grocery store.”

Hmm… that actually seems reasonable.

So, there… another year and another decade.  It is now The Twenties.  The decade near at the end of which I get a pension.  There’s a cheery thought. As you contemplate that, don’t forget to check in with Boak and Bailey’s on Saturdays, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too.

*JOHN!!! HIS NAME IS JOHN AND HE IS A HUMAN BEING!!!!
**For the next three weeks I shall so compare all things in life’s rich pageant.
***Come for the news, stay for the gratuitous slag!

The Last Thursday Beer News Update Before Santa Visits And Delivers All The Stuff

Yuletide.  Its been busy so far this month but after one last late evening meeting for work tonight I think I might be sliding into Yule proper.  As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the days of the Christmas Yuletide Hogmanay Kwanzaa and Hanukkah Beery photo contest may be well past us but the archives go on and on. To the left is 2014‘s co-winning entry from Thomas Cizauskas, one of the drinks world’s longest serving bloggers (care of Yours for Good Fermentables) and general gentleman of the trade. I remember being immediately taken by the way it reminds me of Vermeer, busily full of subtle detail.

Speaking of detail, the efforts of Boak and Bailey to single handedly keep beer blogging going never fail to impress and this week we have, in addition to their normal weekly roundup as well as a summary of their favourites among their own posts,* a wonderful summary of the best that they have read from the blogs of others:

We do this not only as a reminder that there’s lots of great stuff being produced by talented writers but also because writing online is transitory – you sweat over something, it has its moment of attention, then sinks away into the bottomless depths of the Eternal Feed. The pieces we’ve chosen below excited or interested us when they were published an, rereading them this weekend, retained their power. They tell us things we didn’t already know, challenge our thinking, find new angles on old stories, and do it with beautiful turns of phrase and delightful images.

Wonderful and particularly wonderful as they liked my August 2019 post on Lambeth Ale to include it. I don’t get the time as much to do research so I am pleased that one was pleasing.

Look! A wonderful pub in England. In a time of need, too. Elsewhere, holiday tragedy struck in Scotland this week when a truck full of Brussel sprouts went off the road.

The vehicle pulling the trailer full of the Christmas dinner vegetable overturned in Queensferry Road in Rosyth at about 10.45. Police Scotland said it had closed the road and was urging drivers to avoid the area. A spokesman tweeted: “There’s been a bit of a Brussel Sprouts accident at the roundabout at Admiralty Road.” The tweet added: “Please avoid the area if possible. Traffic and Christmas dinners may be affected. Apologies for any delays.”

Now, you may say what has this got to do with beer but there is nothing so good as a sprout covered in gravy washed about the gums by a faceful of Fullers Vintage Ale on the 25th of December and I will call out anyone who disagrees. By the way, if the city is Brussels why is the sprout singular? Ha ha! They are not. It’s Brussels sprouts. I grew them once about twenty years ago. Only pick them after a few frosts. Top tip, that.

Speaking of not beer, there is a wine glut in the world:

From a balance of supply and demand for bulk wine as recently as a couple of years ago, we are now in surplus worldwide thanks to some abundant recent vintages, and also possibly due to declining demand as consumers trade up while per capita consumption levels off or declines.

Speaking of holidays, excess and mindless abandon, I have learned that the good folk in Australia have come out with new drinking guidelines which are prefaced in a very Antipodean style:

“We’re not telling Australians how much to drink. We’re providing advice about the health risks from drinking alcohol so that we can all make informed decisions in our daily lives. This advice has been developed over the past three years using the best health evidence available,” says Professor Anne Kelso, CEO of the National Health and Medical Research Council.  “In 2017 there were more than 4,000 alcohol-related deaths in Australia, and across 2016/17 more than 70,000 hospital admissions. Alcohol is linked to more than 60 medical conditions, particularly numerous cancers. So, we all need to consider the risks when we decide how much to drink.”

Good way to send the message. And similarly from the “the sky ain’t falling department, the Pub Curmudgeon reports on the after effects of the lowering of the drunk driving limits in Scotland five years on, objecting to a study’s core findings:

This month sees the fifth anniversary of the reduction of the drink-driving limit in Scotland in December 2014. At the time, the immediate impact on the licensed trade was such that it caused a noticeable downward blip in Scotland’s national GDP figure. Now, five years later a study by academics at Stirling University has examined the longer-term effect on the trade and, perhaps predictably, concluded that it hasn’t really made a great deal of difference, saying that “Most participants reported no long‐term financial impact on their business.”

He argues that the rural pub is affected the most and therefore the study places its finger on the wrong outcome. Interesting…

Speaking of criticism, there is a wonderful piece on the site for NPR’s foodie show The Splendid Table on how the role of restaurant critic has evolved since the 1970s:

Today, the relationship between restaurant critics and restaurants themselves is kind of adversarial; it wasn’t then. To me, we the people who were cooking the food and the people who were writing about it were all on the same team. And as time went on, I started seeing my role changing a little bit in that I honestly believe that cities get the restaurants they demand. I started in the mid-1970s, and by the mid-1980s I was starting to think that it was really important that people be more demanding of restaurants, that the food in the city would be better if people didn’t settle for mediocrity.

Is good beer, therefore, almost four decades behind?** Or is the good beer writing about good beer now good?

Speaking of being behind, I am ashamed I never heard of this story of racial discrimination, one beer and the Supreme Court of Canada from eighty years ago:

…since Christie vs. York was handed down, 80 years ago this month, little else has been known about the man who took a Montreal tavern to court for refusing to serve him because he was black. Civil rights activists in Montreal, wanting to honour his legacy, have been trying to locate Christie’s relatives and gather more information about him.  It was believed he moved to Vermont in disgust after the Supreme Court decision. That’s where the trail ran cold.

I should unpack that case. The majority opinion reads like something from the 1800s. The single dissenting ruling sounds like modern law.

Someday, brewery features will features sources other than the brewery owner.  Until then, there is this. Tell me if you’ve heard it before.

That’s it. A bit of coal after many pressies. Next week’s edition will be out on Boxing Day. Make sure you are good and lubricated for the wonder that ye shall behold. And don’t forget that there’s more news at Boak and Bailey’s on Saturday, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. Merry Christmas to you all!!!

*…in which they include my favorite post of the year from anyone, their piece “The Swan With Two Necks and the gentrification issue” from November.
**That is so meta of me.