Category: Beer Writing

The “Remember Before We Went Through The Looking Glass?” Edition Of Your Beery News Notes

Remember a month ago? Before “the” debate? Before France went right then went left faster than Gretzky ever could? Before Britain finally ditched the Tories? Before some dumb kid decided to murder Trump and just murdered someone’s Dad? Remember before everything went sideways? Well, except for England losing in fitba… again. Thank God somethings never change. Like bees. Bees don’t care. As I witnessed the other day in the zucchini patch. They just undertake some sort of death battle for pollen from time to time, mindlessly fighting and stinging each other for survival. Isn’t nature wonderful.

First up, Pete Brown was provided a number of bolts of broadcloth to set out his thoughts on the state of CAMRA this week in The Times. It is an excellent piece and even a bit of an artifact in terms of the rare access to the pulpit. I particularly like this paragraph that goes to the heart of the organization:

And Camra saved that culture in a uniquely British way. Whatever else cask ale is, to thousands of campaigners and volunteers it’s a hobby. And as George Orwell once observed, we are a nation of hobbyists — “of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans”. Camra is an organisation of amateurs and enthusiasts. Some are eccentric, some are pub bores, some are cliquey. But they always turn up. Others are charismatic, engaging and keen to welcome anyone who might be persuaded to share their interests. Everyone I speak to inside the organisation describes Camra as a family. If they’re frustrated with it, for most, it’s the type of frustration you feel for an annoying sibling who you will defend to the death.

In North America someone might have chosen the phrase “grassroot” but remember those roots in that conception stay in the dark serving the showy fronds above. Not so in the image Pete paints. For him, it’s an organization for people. Not “The People” – just people. All sorts of people. Great point.

Speaking of a sort of people, The Beer Nut wrote about the gulf between hype and quality. Let me spoil his conclusion without revealing the subjects of his study:

If the road through hype leads to refined and high quality beers like (most of) this lot, then perhaps it’s tolerable. And I’m glad that both of these breweries are still turning out great stuff even when their praises are no longer being sung hourly on social media.

Speaking of praises not being sung, Jordan updated the news on Ontario’s LCBO workers strike on his periodically irregular update on the provincial scene adding an interesting observation to the news shared last week of grocers’ disinterest in the new deal:

This might not go quite as well as the premier seems to think. Under the new plan, grocery stores are staying away in droves because they don’t want to have to deal with returns of bottles and cans. The margin they make on beer and wine sales would be eaten away by it. Probably, the margin they make is eaten away by planogramming. Look at the picture above from a midtown Toronto Loblaws from day four of the strike. They’re using the beer fridge for margarine and the selection is down to about five items. It wouldn’t surprise me if the number of grocery retailers actually drops this year.

Butter and margarine in the beer aisle, folks. Butter and margarine. But little wine in some spots. And a rollout by the government that appears to be being rewritten day by day.

BREAKING NEWS FROM SCOTLAND: “WHIT? No Vitamin T???”

Jeff had a portrait of Czech polotmavý published in Craft Beer & Brewing (a style of beer I have enjoyed after ordering a mixed two-four to be delivered from Godspeed) and pointed out a bit of a puzzle in the chronology:

… to connect the dots from märzen, granát, or Vienna lager—another style that some have cited as a precursor—to polotmavý, you have to skip decades in the historical record. When I ask Czech brewers and experts where (and when) polotmavý came from, I get something like a collective shrug. More than a century ago, Bohemians were making amber lagers—and a few decades ago, they were making polotmavý. In between, no one seems to know what happened.

I wish the crack team at CB+B avoided concepts like “mysteries” which is the neighbour of “magical” even if in this case it does not relate to that most tedious of applications – the brewing science mystery. Those claims put the “moron” back in “oyxmoron.” But here it is different. Here there is a gap in the records. A conundrum perhaps. Yes, a conumdrum mixed with an interlude of Soviet authoritarianism.  Which does have that hint of “The Third Man” so… fine. A mystery. Yet, as Evan noted in 2009, Ron had previously noted* that polotmavý were an amber lager “roughly in the Vienna style” and that:

Vienna lagers aren’t dead: they’ve just moved over the border. No country produces such a range of amber (polotmavé pivo) and dark lagers (tmavé pivo) as the Czech Republic. I can’t quite understand why no-one has twigged this yet.

Well, we’ve twigged now, Ron! I have it delivered. And… I might point out… they didn’t move over the border so much as the borders moved around them. Maps redrawn and all that. Did I ever mention that as a lad, when visting Grannie, I stayed in a small hotel run by friends of the family and had breakfast every morning with an older gent who, in the First World War, had fought the Austrio-Hungarian navy in the Adriatic? I have? Oh. Nevermind.

Pellicle‘s feature this week is by Fred Garratt-Stanley and is about the loss of pool tables in London’s pubs. I love me a pub game and have an entire category of posts dedicated to the concept… which I haven’t updated since 2011… no, 2017! Anyway, I’ve spent a pleasant afternoon playing pool in a London pub so anyone who is rooting for that has my vote. What is to blame for the loss? Money:

Costs vary depending on whether pubs opt for bog-standard tables or high-end ones more suited to league competitions. At Ivor Thomas, it’s £10 a week plus VAT for the former and £20 for the latter, but this is cheaper than most, with some pubs reportedly paying over £20 a week.  A week’s fee can be recouped in one busy evening, while plenty of extra cash is accumulated from drinks sales. But an increased emphasis on food in many pubs has changed the landscape. Writing for the Financial Times Jimmy McIntosh reports that, according to the British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA), “from March 2022 to March 2023, the number of wet-leds declined by 3.1 per cent, as opposed to food-focused taverns, whose number dwindled by 2.2 per cent.” 

Regular reader and archaeologist Merryn Dineley pointed us towards a very interesting news related to another sort of food stuff storage.  Based on the premise that “beer brewing is difficult to identify in the archaeological record” the authors explain how residues of beerstone as found in clay pot can be used. The study’s abstract as published in the Journal of Archaeological Science concludes:

In comparison to ungerminated and germinated barley grains, we find that beerstone preserves only a subset of the barley proteome, with the residue being more reflective of the final brewing product than of earlier brewing steps such as malting. Overall, we demonstrate that beerstone has potential to entrap and preserve proteins reflective of the beer-making process and identify proteins that we might anticipate in future archaeological analyses.

Got that? Good. Speaking of good, at the end of last week we heard from Will Hawks and his London Beer City project. Not a newsletter. A project. In this edition, he wondered which pub he should hit before an AC/DC concert and in doing so paints a picture of the jumbly sort of pub I’d much prefer over most of those pub-porny protraits all those other folk write about:

You go to De Hems, Soho’s Dutch-ish pub, because it’s recently been renovated and it’s really close to somewhere else you want to go (of which more later).  At 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon it’s busy-ish, mostly with men in pre-Covid business wear: ill-fitting suits, no ties, a smattering of skinny-fit v-neck jumpers. Most of them will not see 45 again. There’s a big TV on in the corner – it’s showing the Tour de France, where Mark Cavendish is about to win a record 35th stage – and there are high tables (boo hiss) around the front section of the bar… the floor is dark wood and the ceiling a sort of dried-blood colour that looks like it’s been there a while. There’s a lot of ageing beer memorabilia on the walls, and some Dutch stuff too, including a Holland football shirt in the corner.

Sweet! Finally, Boak and Bailey wrote in their monthly Substack newsletter about the state of beer writing. I won’t repeat what’s been said but I would point out one thing. “Beer writing” is a thing that only exists in a small fish bowl. ATJ rejects the term for himself. He is a writer (and on form this week, too). So (watch me taking perhaps a mid-sized logical leap) when B+B state “there are too many really good beer writers, and simply not enough outlets for their work” I don’t think I can agree. Or maybe I do. If they mean there are “too many really good writers writing about beer” I have to disagree. Show the me the novels, the essays in a range of periodicals, the CVs with a wide range of seriously and well received writing. not the filler. Some qualify. Others don’t. But if they mean “many really good beer writers” we have to ask ourselves this: what is this narrower thing, the “beer writer“? The phrase has always reminded me of that chestnut “craft beer community” and the circle of affirmation that is so unlike the messy complicated and increasingly inclusive CAMRA Pete describes above. The question then moves to the even narrower phrase “professional beer writers” which they define as those trying to pay a mortgage from income. By that standard, all people who are paid are “professionals.” Which leads one to other words. One commentator responding to social media outreach wrote them about one particular word:

I was a freelance journalist for several years. I guess fundamentally I don’t really think of beer journalism as A Thing, as opposed to “that blogger I used to read, only now he’s got a byline, good luck to him I guess”.

“Top Ten Beers For Summer” journalism anyone? (“It goes with salad!” Amazeballs.) We also see “expert” a bit too generously applied in a similar fashion, too,** even though we know there are some actual experts each in their specific areas related to some corner of the wide world of brewing. What do we take from all this? It is possible that scribblers’ personal dreams of an achievable goal got ahead of actual capability and capacity? Does that cause unfair marketplace where those who are established and have an “in” are heard while others (the often more interesting) are left out? I wonder. There’s plenty of good and plenty of not good. I sift. See, me? I read about beer every week. For this here website. For you. Well, for Stan. You others, too, but between you and me I think of Stan as the managing editor who is oddly never seems to be there at the desk, still not back from lunch who, once in a while, still drops off a sticky note.***

There! Plenty to read and discuss. And with that… now we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections.**** Want to keep up with the news before next Thursday? Check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan back each Monday… with a top drawer effort this week. Elsewhere go look at then listen to Lew’s podcast. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a few podcasts… but some may be losing steam… until… Lew’s interview! And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water… is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that but is writing for 47 readers over there. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link! Errr… nope, it is gone again.

*Ron’s source code says the page was written 2004 to 2010.
**Is there a fine line? Consider this observation from  wine writer, Jason Wilson: “I remember arriving at the grand tasting in Montalcino for the release of the 2014 Brunellos. Early grumbling had already labeled 2014 as “challenging,” which is the wine world’s euphemism for “shitty.” We were to taste all day, through dozens of wines, at our own pace. I arrived at the event about an hour after the doors opened and sat down. Before I had even taken a sip, or written a note, an American wine writer I knew waved, came over and, by way of greeting, said, “Ah, I can’t believe you came all the way over here to taste the 2014s. They’re shit.” Apparently, he’d already tasted more than 100 wines in the previous hour, and already rendered his judgment. I don’t know what he did with the rest of his work day.“
***Me – “a high-involvement reader“!?! Certainly gave me airs.
****This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,483) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear. 

Your Sodden And Soaked Mid-July 2024 Mid-Tropical Storm Beryl Beery News Notes

OK, a busy week. Away on the weekend for the rugby, Canada v. Scotland in Ottawa. Photo by me. Scotland won. I wore blue. Then covering for others at the office. Others won. I was blue. So… early in the week I was thinking that this week’s update may be a short one. Or I might just make some stuff up. Then… Beryl came a’callin’. Tropical Storm  Beryl that is. Formerly Hurrican B. I won’t really know if the tomatoes survived until after this here update hits the presses. I may have even scheduled this early for publication, typos and all, just to be on the safe side of the power grid. Wouldn’t want to leave The Beer Nut with nothing to read. That’d be bad.

What else is going on? Big news hereabouts is the strike at the government store, the LCBO. Here is a handy primer on some of the main issues. The Premier is out there on his intern’s social media feeds telling people to buy local, buy elsewhere while the strike goes on. Gary, being the anarchist, wants to burn the whole place down. Robin, being the authoritarian, reads everyone their rights. Jordan broke out some of his excel sheetery, gave it all a good shake and shared a few resulting thoughts:

The LCBO’s dividend to the Ontario government as a crown corporation is up 770 million dollars since 2015 and it is because they have repatriated funds that were going to foreign owned brewers through The Beer Store chain. That 770 million dollars represents 13.3% market share. Back of the napkin math says that if The Beer Store gets run out of town, there’s 2.39 billion dollars up for grabs annually, and increasing rapidly due to inflation… Grocery and Convenience are likely to continue being wholesaled by the LCBO, which means there are going to be a lot of warehousing positions that need staffing. A lot of logistics. A lot of administrative positions. If you let the approximately 2.39 billion that’s about to shift direction go without a fight go, you’d be crazy.

See, in conservative Ontario, statist socialism is incredibly good business. See? Similarly, there was a bit of handbaggery in the UK over “socialist member owned  grocery chain” The Co-operative* when they put out an ad recommending that people shop for their beer at their stores ahead of some sort of sporting event. The Campaign for Pubs, clearly a business oriented front, even issued a press release as illustrated to the right.  Le Protz exemplified the capitalist outrage:

If you can’t make it to the pub to watch the England match, please don’t buy beer from @coopuk in response to their anti-pub #EURO2024.

It strikes me a odd that a business is not able to advertise its own wares without striking terror in the hearts of another set of businesses. It seems odder that Mr. Protz is backing the right wing of the discussion over the left one. Me? When I drink, I drink at home more than in pubs. Old Mudgie seems to share my views:

…this response comes across as distinctly thin-skinned and precious. Pubs are commercial businesses, not sacred institutions, and have no right to be shielded from the rough-and-tumble of competition… The venues that benefit most from the football will tend to be knocked-through drinking barns where most of the customers are on Stella or Madri, not chocolate-box locals or trendy craft bars, many of which won’t even show it in the first place… Being referred to in your competitors’ advertising is generally regarded as a sign of strength rather than weakness, as pointed out by licensee Joe Buckley, who took the ad as a compliment to the pub sector.

Hmm… What would Mr. Protz think of one medical professional’s advice on drinking during these summer heatwaves, as reported in The Daily Star:

But did you know it can also affect you or your partner’s ability to perform in the bedroom? When dehydrated, your body reacts by producing less red blood cells and plasma needed for proper blood flow. It also produces increased levels of a hormone called angiotensin to compensate for low fluid levels, meaning your blood vessels will narrow to conserve fluid, reducing the amount of blood able to reach the penis, causing issues getting or maintaining an erection. Consider limiting your caffeine and alcohol intake as these can have diuretic effects.

Perhaps reading those sorts of reports, big brewer Carlsberg announced plans to move in a decidedly less boozy direction, according to The Independent:

Brewing giant Carlsberg has agreed a huge £3.3 billion deal to buy Robinsons squash maker Britvic. The UK soft drinks firm, which also makes J2O and Tango, told shareholders on Monday morning it will recommend the latest deal – which is valued at £4.1 billion when debts are taken into account – after rejecting a previous £3.1 billion offer. Carlsberg will pay 1,315p per share to Britvic investors under the deal. Britvic also holds an exclusive licence with US partner PepsiCo to make and sell brands such as Pepsi, 7up and Lipton iced tea in the UK.

Speaking of which, here is a stat that I can’t wait for US craft beer spokespeople to spin. Have a look at this graph and then read the following as published in Craft Brewing Business:

…the BPI is a forward-looking indicator measuring expected demand from beer distributors — one month forward. A reading greater than 50 indicates the segment is expanding, while a reading below 50 indicates the segment is contracting. The craft index for June 2024 was 27. Blah. The BPI’s total beer index of 58 marked the highest June reading since 2021, as well as the fourth straight month in expansion (>50) territory.

Craft = Blah. That’s not good. It was also a drop to the 27 Blah Zone from 2023’s Ho Hum of 38. Which is all sorts of yikes.

Neither blah or yikes is the tale told by Isabelle O’Carroll in Pellicle this week of a Balkan pastry, the Burek:

At its core a burek is a yufka (or phyllo pastry) pie, often filled with an egg and cheese mixture, (but sometimes vegetables or meat) and usually (but not always) rolled into a spiral before baking. Take a glancing look at the AskBalkans subReddit and you’ll get an idea of the roiling debates on the proper name and correct filling for bureks. “Go to Bosnia and ask for a burek with cheese, suddenly you’re waking up in the ER with multiple life-threatening wounds, I don’t think we even agree on burek,” one Redditor said. “You said a pita is a burek, which is not true unless you’re okay with calling all pitas bureks, which means you’d call maslenice, mantije, and other meals with jufka bureks, too! Which you said you don’t. It’s okay to just admit you’re wrong, you know?”

Glad we cleared that up! Speaking of science, we read this report that came out this week and see this is the summary in the abstract presented by the journal:

Moderate chronic consumption of IPA beer and hops infusion showed antigenotoxic effects in mice but no antimutagenic action.

Pretty sure that does not equal “[d]rinking IPAs in moderation has shown it does not have an adverse effect on health” very much at all. Seems to me the more likely route to something that does not seem to have an adverse health effect (with all due respect to all neo-boozy-Babbits dreaming of the unthinking life) is not drinking alcohol. Which means NA beer. There’s a lot of money apparently in selling nothing. Yet, if that nada produces nuttin’… why keep it from the kids?

Since these beverages contain virtually no alcohol, they can largely be sold to anyone, anywhere; they’re stocked on grocery and convenience store shelves around the country, and purchasable online. But Collins doesn’t sell to anybody under 18 years old at this store, and he checks ID’s to enforce that rule. “When there’s no minimum age, can a nine-year old come into your store and buy a non-alcoholic Corona? For me, I don’t want that perception,” Collins says. Collins set his own age limit, and he’s free to set it however he wants because in Maryland — as in the majority of states — there are no state age restrictions on who can buy adult non-alcoholic beverages.

Really? That’s odd. I would not buy them for my kids – if I still had little kids – because they are slightly insanely expensive! Odd. And Katie in an abbreviated edition of The Gulp asked another  very odd question:

Why do men order default drinks for the ir female partners without asking them what they’d like?

I’d get shot if I did that!  My mother would have shot my father if he did that – and don’t even start about Grannie! Or Great-Grannie for that matter! I am and come from a long line of men who would be dead if, you know, they weren’t dead already.

Speaking of socialists, did you hear that Keir Starmer and the Labour party gave the Tories the boot in the UK? Always nice when the Tories get the boot somewhere. He is by reports a pub lad. The Spirits Business, not a journal for professional clairvoyants, gave its thoughts on the wish list of policies which may now roll out for the British booze trade, including this from Mark Kent, chief executive of the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA):

“During the rest of 2024, there will be opportunities to support Scotch in the first budget of the new Parliament, secure a trade deal with India which will reduce tariffs on Scotch whisky in this key market, and work closely with the industry as we continue on our journey towards net zero.” He added that the organisation looks forward to working with the MPs to “ensure that Scotch whisky is at the heart of the central mission of the next five years – growth and economic renewal”.

Not correcting the imbalanced non-dom taxation, not strengthening national defence, not boosting public education or restoring health services… whisky.

Before, as discussed below, the doors close, ATJ got in one last post at GBH which refreshingly is about hunting out good beer and some sort of perversity in Belgium:

Perversely, in the land where Lambic, gueuze, and Trappist ales are heralded and celebrated, lager is dominant. However, these beers might be popular, but they are often seen by connoisseurs as one-dimensional and simply designed to quench thirst as well as being easy on the pocket. Most of these beers have as much in common with the Ur-lagers of central Europe as a kangaroo has with a chicken—they both have two legs, but that’s it. This is why Brasserie de la Mule, led by its young founder and head brewer Joel Galy, is unique, especially as it has only been in existence for three years.

And finally, Good Beer Hunting has suspended operations with a florish offered by way of announcement:

We have some ideas for what the future of Good Beer Hunting might look like—and soon I’ll be working on that vision with the counsel of my colleagues to see where it takes us. But the earliest vision is so drastically different than what GBH currently is, that the only way to get to the other side is to make a clean break. We’ve got to clear out the cache. We’ve got to quiet everything down for a bit and see what it all sounds like on the other side of that silence. We’re shutting down our various content streams—the podcast, the website, social—ending a sort of always-on feed of content that’s been, for many of us writers, editors, and artists, our life’s work. And for most of us, our best work.

Quite so. And that makes sense despite the lamentations of the writing circle. For some time, as careful readers will know, I have noticed** that the focus had shifted as the frequency of posts decreased. Sightlines continues under separate URL but with little seemingly on offer given the sparce front window. And the business model has had a heavy burn rate. Yup, a new title and framing as perhaps a broader audience travel and lifestyle magazine would fit better with the pieces which have been the mainstay of GBH for some time. As noted above, these are not the days to invest in whatever craft has become so any retooling is the wisest approach.***

There! Plenty to read and discuss. And with that… now we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections.**** Want to keep up with the news before next Thursday? Check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan back each Monday. Elsewhere go look at then listen to Lew’s podcast. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a few podcasts… but some may be losing steam… until… Lew’s interview! And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water… is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that but is writing for 47 readers over there. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link! Errr… nope, it is gone again.

*Great-grandpa apparently refused to eat anything bought from anywhere but The Co-op.
**Perhaps after others, I’ve always remembered this tweet from Matty from 2018: “…for a short while now I have felt my own ambitions do not align with that of GBH, and as such I have chosen to go in my own direction…” which was the beginning of Pellicle in a way.
***Conversely, following through on the comment sent to contributors might not be wise: “We still plan to pursue our special print edition featuring original work and new stories from the world of beer, spirits, and food, called “Beer & Brine,” although we’re not committing to a specific timeline for that at the moment.“
****This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,483) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear. 

The Flip Flops Flappin’ Cold Beer Cracking Summ-Summ-Summertimin’ Beery News Notes


Jumping right into it, last Friday’s cartoon strip, a snippet of which site above, in Pellicle by Dave Bailey mocking craft brewery culture was something of a milestone, a bookending of sorts finally… finally confirming those inside the bubble understand what the greater world knew in 2014 when that New Yorker cover of the hipster craft beer bar was published.* The details of all the embarassing characteristics that Bailey notes as he roasts craft culture were not so publicly discussed back in 2014- even if they were obviously known to those present and paying any attention. We are told that the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there but we perhaps forget how, even over one short decade, how quickly those differences may develop.

Fortunately, Boak and Bailey** have saved you all the need to look back to through this blog’s archives just there to the right to trace all the changes which arouse at least in the UK during those intervening times. They’ve provided us with a real gem of an update on their book Brew Britannia also, conveniently,  published in 2014. It’s a beast of a bit but I am not going to ruin it for you so much as, I hope, give you reason to go dive into the full +10,000 word essay:

This long post is an attempt to fill in some of the gaps and hold ourselves to account: what did we get right, what did we get wrong, and what took us totally by surprise? More importantly, it’s about gaining some perspective. It’s easy to mistake the fact that we personally have become older and more jaded to mean that there has been a decline in the quality and vibrancy of the beer scene. Maybe there has, maybe there hasn’t – but there must be some objective facts we can use to test our gut feelings. We know other people have different perspectives, though, so we’ve also asked as many people as possible for their thoughts.

To answer all those questions, B+B applied their list of eleven indicators from 2013 of whether a community has a healthy beer culture and drew some thoughtful conclusions. Go have a look.

Speaking of lists, Jeff wrote one this week that got me thinking, too. It was a list of his top ten beer drinking experiences. I would re-arrange their order, kick a few out and add some others but the exercise is quite interesting. Consider his #10 “In the first half of a sporting event in which you are not deeply invested”:

Sporting events are festive affairs, and drinking a beer early in a game helps elevate the sense of occasion. It builds a mood of camaraderie, binding the watchers in the clink of glass. The beer itself tastes of promise—of the next couple hours, of a win, of greasy food and more beer. By the second half of any sporting event (later innings in baseball, third period in hockey, etc), the drinking event has become a sporting event and attention turns fixedly to the game. Ah, but those first minutes…

See, I see that differently – not as a linear experience but one that turns on the flow of each game. Reminded me of a 1987 Canada Cup pre-tourney hockey game between Canada and the US that I watched with pals. We ended up (like UTTER MORONS) sitting in the bar during the third period drinking beer with our backs turned to the ice because Canada was up something like double digits to diddle over the Americans. Why were we morons? Because Gretsky and Lemieux were on the ice at the same time. And between 27% to 73% of all the other hockey players who I’d ever worshiped were also right there playing. But, you know, there was beer over there on the concourse… soooooo…

Martin marked the fifth anniversary of the passing of his friend Richard Coldwell with a bit of a public service – a report on the gumwashery of Thornbridge‘s brewing of Jaipur on their new old fashioned Burton Unions saved from wreckers… or perhaps the storage locker… earlier this year:

Richard wasn’t a great fan of Burton’s beers, but would have had intelligent things to say about the Thornbridge “saving” of the Burton Unions this year. You’ll know I couldn’t care less about history or the brewing process, and argue the quality of the publican is by far the biggest determinant of the quality of the beer in your glass (see : the improvement of Bass in the hands of a smaller number of committed landlords). On Saturday, back in Sheff from Italy, I thought I’d better taste the new Jaipur at my nearest Thornbridge pub…

He approved. As did John aka TBN himself when he first encountered his first fonio:

Have you heard of fonio? If you haven’t yet, you will, at least according to Brooklyn Brewery’s Garrett Oliver who has become an advocate for this climate-resistant African grain. Its most important attribute is that you can make beer from it, which will be terribly useful once the Earth decides it can’t do barley any more. Garrett had come to St James’s Gate to make a fonio-based collaboration beer, although that won’t be out until much later this year. He also brought over some beers of his own to share.

He liked it too. You know, I am not sure whether “quite a shock; incredibly soft and chewy” or “if it’s saving the planet, then all the better” is higher praise. Clearly both worth seeking out.

Ron has been looking for a new local and last Saturday found himself with his gang checking out a really good looking stop in Amsterdam called Soundgarden – offering us a pretty good photo essay:

Soundgarden is slightly unusual as it backs directly onto a canal. Which gives it a nice view. And also means that customers can arrive by boat. Which is exactly what happened not long after we got there. How cool is that? Unlike the garden itself. Which was pretty warm. Too warm for my liking. And with almost no shade. That’s a mark against the pub. The inside was totally empty. Which meant I could take lots of nice photos without people getting in the way. I won’t bother trying to describe how it looks. I’ll let the photos do the talking.

Similarly – except a whole country away – Franz Hofer posted a study of a beer garden in Munich with this startling geolocating sentence:

Once the location of the smallest royal blacksmith, the Swiss-style hut at the edge of the estate allegedly served as Ludwig and Lola’s love den.

Now, let’s set all that traipsing wandering about the taverns and such aside. We live in a real world and many in the UK today will be needing one or celebrrating with one as it is election day. One poll by More in Common in particular caught my eye when it hit the sosh-meeds.  It detailed voting intentions according to a fabulous sixteen different favourite clinky-drinkies. So we learn that cider drinkers prefer Labour by an advantage of only half that of IPA fans. Almost twice as many SNP voters prefer shandy to whisky. But Sherry drinkers?  Totes Tory. They’ll be sucking back the sticky raisiny toffee gak tonight!

Speaking of the unhappy, The Times had an extended investigation into the new eco-lairds of Scotland including, as noted hereabouts last April, one Mr. Watts semi-formerly of BrewDog and his failed forestry project:

At Kinrara, Dave Morris, 77, of the Parkswatch Scotland blog, points to the dead sticks which should have grown into great Scots pines. “We should not be planting in the uplands,” he said. “There is inevitable disturbance of the soils which brings peaty ground to the surface, leading to carbon loss for decades.” Morris is furious that BrewDog received nearly £700,000 of money for the project, arguing that the land should have been left to regenerate naturally. A few metres away from the dead and dying saplings, young trees are thriving, pushing their way through the heather. Without the chomping teeth of deer or sheep to tear them down, these trees are growing naturally. All it needed was a fence to keep the animals away.

I’ve mentioned from once in a while that I worked teaching English in Kołobrzeg, Poland back in 1991 but probably didn’t mention the time I watched a construction crew out the window of the classroom. Two things caught my eye. First, they used the trunks of pine trees, bark and all, as a form of embedded rebar as they poured the building’s concrete floors. “How long until that collapses?” I thought foreshadowing a future dabbling in construction law. Second, there was a regular flow of empty beer bottles crashing down upon the work site’s ground level many floors below as the crew kept themselves… hydrated all day long. “Lordy… Lordy…” thought I. I recalled this scene when I read the news about the neghbouring Czechs cutting back on their intake as reported by Jessica Mason:

The average number of beers drunk per capita in 2023 was 256 beers per head, which is equal to approximately 128 litres, reflecting similar figures to the lowest average consumption figures ​​during the pandemic restrictions and the lowest record number in 1963. Radio Prague International (RPI) also highlighted how in 2005, beer consumption reached a record high when Czechs consumed 163.5 litres, or 327 beers per head. Consumption per person was 153 litres in 2009 holding at 140 litres for nearly a decade before falling to 129 litres in 2021… In 2021, the Czech Statistics Office estimated that beer consumption that year was the lowest since 1989 when it had been at around 151 litres per person and even jumped above 160 litres momentarily in the 90s.

So… is that really all that bad a thing for Czechs? I have consulted Max‘s dispatches for clues.

Pellicle‘s feature this week is a piece on a pub called The Swan with Two Necks by Katie, which contains some great detail of the life of a license holder living under pub chain owership thirty years ago:

One day in 1992, they received a letter welcoming them to the PubMaster group, their only notification that Whitbread had sold their pub. After a while of trying to acclimatise to their new owners, it seemed like they might need to move on again. “We just didn’t get on with PubMaster,” Steve says. “There was such a reduced selection of beer, restrictions on what we could and couldn’t buy, it was just an aggravation all the time. It just wasn’t what we set out to do.” PubMaster agreed to talk with them to see how they could help improve the situation. Before the talk was had, Christine and Steve received another letter. It read: ‘Welcome to Jennings’… “They came to me and said they had a tenancy agreement with Whitbread through PubMaster, and that they wanted me to change from partial to full-time leasehold with no compensation. And then PubMaster was bought by Cafe Inns, who were even worse.

Philadelphia magazine had an article this week on an unexpected subject, the city’s obsession with that most basic of drinks that turned out to be well suited for the most basic of bars. The drink? Twisted Tea:

The price point for Twisted Tea was lower than that for any beer they were selling, says Keenan’s owner and Grays Ferry native Scott Keenan, meaning he could sling Teas for two bucks and still turn a decent profit. Combine the price with the drink’s lack of carbonation — if you’re reading this and have somehow never been down the Shore in your early 20s, that translates into “dangerously drinkable” — and Twisted Tea was primed to explode. “It just ran like wildfire,” Keenan recalls. The numbers were eye-watering: Every week that summer, he’d sell between 350 and 500 cases of Twisted Tea. Reread that sentence, then do the math. Every week, one bar in North Wildwood was slinging between 8,400 and 12,000 bottles of Twisted Tea, outselling everything but Miller Lite.

Finally, some wise words from Jamie Goode on the subject of the role of a critic when it comes to wine which are worth thinking about in relation to good beer, too:

…what people come to a professional for is an honest opinion, built on solid tasting experience and good taste. They are looking for the model critic as described by David Hume: someone free of bias, with good sensitivity, and good aesthetic sense. Low involvement consumers are well served by the wines they are being sold. High involvement consumers – the people who are listening to the critics – are well served by critical opinion. That there might be a discrepancy is not a problem: this will always exist in any field, whether it is food, or fashion, or art, or movies. Popular taste often departs from critical opinion, but this doesn’t mean that the critics are out of touch or irrelevant. They are all part of a larger ecosystem and are doing their job. A food critic concentrating on fast food and large chains is entirely useless. So is a wine critic endorsing and second guessing the tastes of people with no real interest in wine who just want something cheap that doesn’t taste bad.

Does beer have those principles? Critical opinion writers? Or just… you know… We can think about the question for a while before we meet again next time. Send in your essays on that point by Tuesday at 5 pm. Marks deducted for late submissions.

And with that… now we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections.*** Want to keep up with the news before next Thursday? Check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan back each Monday. Elsewhere go look at then listen to Lew’s podcast. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a few podcasts… but some may be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water… is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that but is writing for 47 readers over there. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link! Errr… nope, it is gone again.

*Along with of course, the crowd pleasing cult classic The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer – A Rant in Nine Acts of earlier that same year.
**Yes, yes – no relation.
***This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (929) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,484) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear. 

Summer’s Here… And Canada Day… And St. Jean Baptiste… And Another Thursday So Here’s The Beery News Notes

We went to Montreal earlier this week just for the one night. Supposedly to catch the tail end of their Saint Jean Baptiste / Fête nationale celebrations marking the founding of Quebec. It was a bit subdued in the area we were in, though the Old Port was hopping. We walked and snacked, walked and snacked. As we do. The lad and I each had a Joufflue which hit the spot on a hot day. Paired well with watching the wait staff panic over the play of Italy against Croatia. We could have easily left without paying. Definitely a pick me up after my personal all absorbing Euro 2024 situation. Little known fact: my fair city once had a seigneurial set up as part of New France, too, so I was representing. It led to thoughts, again, of retiring to La Belle Province. Or maybe just to 5 km west of LBP. Less of an administrative hassle that way. Bonus points for guessing my location in the picture. But – just to be clear – Gary can’t play. Insider knowledge. Gotta keep things on the level.

What is going on? There was a bit of a call for input at the end of their post in which Boak and Bailey traced another bit of English berwing history with their incomplete history of Smiles Brewery of Bristol, 1977-2005. You can read it yourself – but if you can provide any more information you can also help with the preparation of an update, as their epilogue invites:

We’re frustrated by the bittiness of the story we’ve been able to tell above. It feels unfinished – and we’re certain people are going to have additions and corrections. To which we say, bring it on! We’d love version two of this post to have more human voices, more pictures, and more detail from the frontline. If you worked at Smiles, or, indeed, founded it, we’re contact@boakandbailey, or @boakandbailey on Twitter, if you want to get in touch.

Delving further back in time, Ron published something pretty interesting this week, parts of newpaper report on the hearing that followed the 1814 catastrophe at London’s Meux brewery when a large vat burst and the ensuing flood caused multiple deaths. Here’s the scene as recounted by George Crick, the brewery’s store-house clerk:

“I can not account for the accident. The vat which gave way had been built about ten years, and it has been full of beer for two-thirds of the time, during which I have been on the premises. It was built on uprights or pillars of oak. The foundation did not give way. When the wreck is cleared, the bottom of the vat will be found perfectly level; neither did the vat touch the wall. It stood full eight inches from it. We can account for the accident in no other manner, but by the hoops giving way – by the rivets bursting. An hour before the accident a hoop was started; hoops frequently burst – two or three times a year – but such a circumstance does not produce any idea of danger.”

Was the Burton Union developed as a structural alternative to these massive vats? No idea. But another bit of that last union has been saved by Epochal Barrel Fermented Ales.

And ever further back, have we witnessed the birth of another Law of Lars: “Repeat after me: there are no ancient Egyptian recipes.” Yet… OK… but it’s a recreation with what seems to be an aggregation from a few texts with very well intentioned careful ingredient sourcing. Not a recipe but still. Yet… how do you get to 5% and not 11%, 4% or 1.5%?

Back to today. Me, I subscribe to The Times legal briefs newsletter to keep up with my professional distant cousins and this well sourced item caught my eye which, initially, sets out as a description of how drinks centered social culture in law firms can hinder the careers of young observant Muslim lawyers:

According to the report’s authors, many candidates from those two backgrounds feel “underprepared compared to their peers due to limited access to professional networks and social capital”. They went on to target the “prevalent drinking culture in law firms” as a “significant challenge for Muslim candidates”, many of whom abstain from alcohol. “Social events centred around pubs and bars create an uncomfortable environment, forcing these candidates to navigate situations that conflict with their religious beliefs,” the report said.

But then the story goes on to additionally point out (i) “City law firms are significantly better than their peers in the financial markets”; (ii)  it is now more common “to head to the gym for spin classes… after work than it is to head to the pub“; and (iii) “most of the associates just aren’t interested in a late-night drinking bender”! I’ve worked with alcoholic lawyers so this rings entirely true. Still, pity the young unfit accountants of London.

This is a fun bit of Euro 2024 reality for English fans in Germany. In addititon to the shock of learning that the previous visitors from Scotland put a serious dent in Cologne’s beer supply, when they do find it it seems to be served in tiny glasses:

It may not have been a thriller, but with England through to the knock-out stages of the Euro 2024 championships, it was a good opportunity for fans to celebrate with a few glasses of locally brewed cold Kölsch beer. Kölsch, which is the traditional beer style of the city, is served in 200ml tall glasses. But, according to the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, this smaller serve have been criticised by fans for the paucity of liquid. The tall and thin glasses were described as like “Champagne flutes” and thirsty fans complained about having to get a large number of rounds in to match their drinking habits. One of the reasons for the bemusement could be that fans have been used to pictures of two pint steins in Germany, often showcased during Munich’s Oktoberfest…

And Pellicle published a piece about beer that tastes like beer. By Matty himself. Those pitch negotiations must have been difficult. Anyway, it’s about a favourite beer… sorta… well, it’s all a bit… artsy*:

We stood there, motionless, in the blinking room’s perpetual silence. Then, suddenly, one of the thin men stretched out an arm, opened its greasy, white palm, and spoke with what appeared to be its mouth. If I could describe to you what I heard, I would, but it was not a sound in a conventional sense, more like a feeling, similar to what I’d experienced when the shape approached me in the field. I remember hearing four distinct waves of a flat baritone that did not waver in pitch, but it felt like there were layers upon layers of complexity to whatever the thin man had uttered.

AJT, recently becalmed, is going to have to watch out for folk making moves on his impressionistic patch. Speaking of impressions, Stan asked me a question this week but I answered another one:

Hmm… do I understand that people prior to the 14th century apparently didn’t understand ice cellars… or storage of foods either, for that matter. Despite Central Europeans using and living in caves and around ice for many millennia.

Many, there is some astoundingly deep… errr… poorly thought out beer writing out there. Greater context? Why bother! [And it is not just the trade puff stuff either: “…highly prestigious World Beer Cup, often referred to as the Olympics of the beer world…“? Said no one ever who was not being rewarded one way or another ever.] Anyway, Stan wanted to like my comment and that is all that matters to me. I actually answered his question over at B+B at the P the day before:

That cream ale story’s history is pretty good fiction. There were two or three eras when “cream” was a flag adjective for premium. 1850s Hudson Valley cream ale was a big burly ale. What is mid-1900s western NY cream ale comes from the earlier forms like 1800s Kentucky Common which in turn came from pre-lager late 1790s German immigrants. It’s all clearly set out publicly if someone takes the time to use Google.

[See here, here, here, here and here for example. Not hard.]

Barley Cluster? I loved their second LP! What’s that? Not that sort of cluster? Hmm:

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) announced a new Canadian National Barley Cluster, a significant initiative aimed at advancing barley production in Canada. With a value of $9.6 million over five years, this Cluster will drive research efforts to enhance the competitiveness and resilience of the Canadian barley industry. More than just a financial commitment, the Barley Cluster represents a united front in securing the future of the barley value chain. Administered by the Canadian Barley Research Coalition (CBRC), the new Barley Cluster will fund research projects that advance feed barley, barley genetics, agronomy, disease resistance and sustainability to make it a more resilient and profitable crop for Canadian farmers and end users.

In fact, we seem to be hubbing it up all over the place, grain-wise. You know what this means: “all your beer is us!!!”

London’s TimeOut had quite a pop at “craft” beer this week framing it as so 2019:

Remember the glory days? When we all had skinny jeans and immaculate beards and wore beanie hats, even in summer? When going for a pint meant nine percent porters, pink rhubarb sours and whatever a ‘saison’ is. It meant tasting each and every beer on tap to make sure they weren’t ‘too hoppy’. It meant, perhaps more than anything, bright, graphic labels and deeply silly names.  Nowadays, trips to the pub look a little different. Rows of pastel-coloured IPAs have been swapped out for classic lagers and big boy beer brands, all seemingly owned by one omniscient beverage uber-corporation. Craft beer options are few and far between (often rotating on just one tap)…

Finally and not unrelated, I’ve noticed that some of the advice to craft brewers these days being written has a couple of odd aspects to it. Reiterating the sort of advice you would might have expected before the downturn is one thing. Buy board games. Hold quiz nights. Hire HR specialists. Not “make sure you diversify your revenue streams to hedge against further consumer disinterest!“** Salty snacks? Used cars! Mens wear!! Anything!!! Another is minimizing the retraction, denying youth’s reduced interest. We see the code word “mature” to describe the industry contraction. Good sign that the writer’s a team player, I suppose, but lacking a certain… certaintly. And Boak and Bailey pointed out last Saturday, the actual news continues to be otherwise in the UK:

There was apparently a sharp acceleration in the number of pubs closing in the first quarter of 2024, according to a report compiled by commercial property intelligence company Altus. Of the 472 pubs that closed between April 2023 and March 2024, a remarkable 236 closed in the first three months of this year – equivalent to around 80 per month.

There sure are loads of factors piling on good beer, not the least inflation. Putting a hurt on wine too. But that complexity just makes things harder to address. One quite singular story underlies the closing of Cascade Brewing of Portland, Oregon – a tale of succession plan gone awry as reported by Jeff:

It was a strange and developing story, but involved the death of Founder Art Larrance last month. That was odd, because he announced he’d sold the brewery four years ago. In the announcement’s fine print he described it was a “phased transition” sale, however, and it turned out that transition never quite happened. The details blur here, but Art’s daughter, who was unaware her father still owned the brewery, didn’t have the money to continue on.

That’s a tough one but a lesson – get to the accountants and lawyers and get things put properly in place. Costs way less than screwing up.

And with that… now we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections.*** Want to keep up with the news before next Thursday? Check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan back each Monday. Elsewhere go look at then listen to Lew’s podcast. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a few podcasts… but some may be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water… is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that but is writing for 47 readers over there. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link! Errr… nope, it is gone again.

*Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
**How long has Twisted Tea been around serving as the obvious example?
***This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (down 1 to 132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (up to 928) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (up 3 to 4,482) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (flopping 1 to 162), crap Threads (somehow up to 52 from 43) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear. 

The Ever Uplifting Beery News Notes For The Beginning Of That First False Canadian Summer

We are hitting the ground running this week. The image of the week up there is from Liam who posted a few shots on #BeerSky of his latest find, a “grubby 1920s silver-plated pint tankard” from Clery’s Restaurant in Dublin. I think it is all very charming. Careful readers will recall my own foray into such matters with a mid-1800s pewter quart pot I picked up in 2012. Just the thing for a very large measure of Porter.

And there was again a lot about beer writing this week. Not sure if that is good or bad. Stan beat me to one particular thought on Monday. A few years back I complained to him in an email that so much beer writing was repetative, timid and sort of dull and he gave me the best advice which he has repeated in his post this week – you’ve been around too long, seen too much… or something like that:

I would add this thought. What is new to me or Evan Rail or Jeff Alworth or Alan McLeod might be different than what is new to somebody finally getting around to visiting a new brewery because one opened in their neighborhood… There are many opportunities to write something new, for both the beer experienced and the beer inexperienced audiences.

Gary writes on a similar note. Yet having heard that and agreeing to a point, I am also mindful of the tweet David Jesudason posted about his current situation. You will remember that he is the current holder of The Michael Jackson Award for Beer Writer of the Year from BGBW. But, if you click on that thumbnail, you will see he says:

I am currently in a position where I am not sure I can continue this type of work.

Because while there may be “many opportunities to write something new, for both the beer experienced and the beer inexperienced audiences,” I would submit, there is little to no support for many types of normal business reporting and investigative reporting that we see in  other areas of lifestyle writing. And why is that? Does it leads to things like this? A story about one British brewer with a claim:

Speaking about the expansion, Vault City’s co-founder Steven Smith-Hay said: “Our ambition is to be the biggest dedicated sour beer producer in the world. This new site will be instrumental in achieving that.*

The headling added certainty by way of the “to be” rather than “may become” sort of grammarical structure. And, yes, the author does not write the headling but it all led to the statement “I’ve got a lot to say about that Vault City interview but tough cheese I’m on holiday” as well as the statement “was from a press release anyho” with questions about the reality of that ambition. To be or not to be. But only on social media. Will there be follow up? Will track records be tracked? Is it that we don’t really care and it’s all puffery for… well, you know.

It also may be related to the opinion piece “Hazy IPA Conspiracy Theories” from Andy Crouch. He who upset my world by this article – by leaving me more in agreement with the very Mr. B who Andy sought to criticize. As reported last week, Mr. B pointed at Hazy IPAs as either the cause or at least a key symptom of US craft’s sputtering retraction.  Why? Well, in addition to simmering tone of “one does not question craft”, Andy also surprisingly uses that hallmark of a weak argument: poorly dolled out snark. Phrases deployed included “grumpy old craft beer cowboys” and “strawman” and “laugh out loud moment” and especially “55 year old dudes grumbling” as, you know, Mr. B is older than that. Setting such faux juveneilia aside, what he really misses is this:

The popularity of consumer products, including beer, wine, and spirits, ebbs and flows over time. In just the past decade, we’ve seen the rise and fall of cocktails, cider, hard seltzers, and many others. Each will continue to play some role in the drinking landscape but no drink has a right to the public’s attention. Craft beer has many issues but chief among them is a generational disconnect. The audience for craft beer continues to age, younger folks make fun of craft beer dads and their beer samplers on TikTok, and the industry stands in a corner publicly wishcasting for the return of “beer-flavored beer.” 

What Andy does not seem to want to admit is that it’s not about the rise and fall of each particular form of drink but a greater overall trend. These sugar bomb beers that are labeled as Hazy IPA are nothing more than the beery sibling to RTDs, coolers and hard seltzers. Interchangible. Forgettable. Cavity causing. They may sell but they are part of that continuum that speaks to a candy fixated palate. Kinderbier. Easy to make and easy to sell with the right cartoony can wrapper.  In fact, their rise was perfectly culturally appropriate for the troubled times, a perfect drink for an era of crisis that started with the shock of Trump getting elected and then continued on through the daze of life in the pandemic. They are booze for unsettled people who have bigger things to deal with, those who don’t want to think about it. Any of it. The “eating a box of ice cream sandwiches stnading by my fridge because I can” of beers for folk who no longer can muster the energy to give a shit.  What sort of industry bases its long term health on that sort of consumer? By all appearances, this shrinking one called craft.

Speaking on asking why things are the way they are, Steve Dunkey wrote a bit of a exposé of the Good Beer Guide that was publishing in What’sBrewing, describing some of the politics behind the scenes including this bit of a revelation:

There isn’t enough room in the printed book for every pub that could meet new nationalised selection criteria. Each branch has an allocation that it can fill, and it’s well known that the allocation will be filled regardless of the quality of the pubs, because it’s believed at a branch level that if it doesn’t fill its allocation, it might not have as many entries the following year. This would restrict it if it then did have the great pubs to fill the quota.

That is quite the thing. I had no idea that there was no centralized editing of submissions from the regions. The story raises other questions, too. Check it out.

Stan (for the double) has all the questions and this week shared another Hop Queries where he pointed out again another few trends trend that point to continued retraction:

Hop Products Australia harvested 26 percent fewer metric tons of hops in 2024 than in 2023. Much of that was intentional, taking into consideration that the worldwide supply of aroma hops is greater than demand. Production of Galaxy, which is 65 percent of what HPA sells, was down 20 percent to 879 metric tons. Vic Secret dipped 22 percent and Eclipse 57 percent…. A report from Germany suggests acreage has not been reduced to the extent it has been in the United States. When the numbers are toted up, Perle and Hallertau Tradition will likely decline the most, while high alpha acreage will likely increase slightly.

And apparently the days of food and beer pairing are well behind us. As Jeff noted from a recent newsletter reporting from a conference speech by a commercial investment banker – it’s now all about “the mood management” business! As a banker might, the points being made included a grind that sounds a lot like someone worried about their ROI:

      • If consumer are walking away from beer, Nik asks that you explain Modelo, Pacifico, Michelob Ultra, Voodoo Ranger, Busch Light, and Coors Banquet to him, which are all performing great.
      • We’re not in the beverage business, we’re in the “mood management business” per Nik. He says we drink 8 beverages a day and that alcoholic ones are competing with non-alcoholic ones.
      • “There’s no such hing as lazy markets, only lazy marketers”
      • Prices have been going up lately. Are we doing enough to reinforce that value we provide to command the new, more premium price? (He implies no)…

Mmm… mood management. That’s a lot of “out-Barting” even BA Bart (as recently seen as a few weeks ago) for pushy positivity in a retracting market but RBC (actually my own bank, with those very unAmerican two out of three letters) and its investment bankers have needs. The problem with beer is you, you and you… especially you… are LAZY!!! I know I am. And, yes, so does my bank.

Next up, Millie Bowles writing for Kent Online shared the tale of neighbours fed up with the smells off the neighbouring property, the contract brewers South East Bottling:

Fed-up neighbours say the stench from a brewery is so bad they cannot sit in their gardens – but bosses are urging residents to be more “pro-business”. People living near South East Bottling (SEB) on Northdown Industrial Estate in Broadstairs have complained of a “yeasty, sickly” smell which can even force them to keep their windows shut. Such is the pong, Thanet District Council has now ordered the company to carry out an odour assessment. SEB, which works with brands such as Old Dairy and Tiny Rebel, says it is “unfortunate that in current times, local residents and the council choose to operate in an anti-business manner”.

Stench! Pong!! We read that Marion Langelier, 82, is stopped from going out in the garden because of the smell as well as “noise issues, notably “banging and crashing’ bins.” Giving equal time, we also read that Chris Prentice, 49, says it is “like hot Weetabix. It’s quite comforting. It’s nice.” Hot Weetabix? How spicy! But the real question is this – why do UK newspapers include people ages? Otherwise, solid business reporting.

Not quite as smelly apparently but still irritating is Albania where NHS Martin unpacked** some of the trials and tribulations one can meet when traveling there:

… we sprinted to Berat’s bus station where the bus driver checked 3 times we really wanted to go to Lushnje. “Can we go to the Station please” we asked as the bus pulled up in an unprepossessing centre, the Mansfield of the Balkans, but the driver just pointed vaguely to the west. If in doubt, follow the tractor. Well, there’s a building called “STATION” anyway; five minutes to spare for the 10:38. No bus stops, no timetable, no-one to ask, just (bizarrely) two cafes side-by-side. Resigned to missing (if it had ever run) the 10:38, we resolved to seek advice from the cafes. It’s what you’d do in England, isn’t it, ask in a pub. The chap in one pointed heavenwards, the lady who brought us two espressos borrowed Mrs RM’s phone to point at a roundabout a half mile south, though a bus driver taking a fag break added “autostrada” mysteriously…

There is more. I think they ending up catching the 1:38 pm bus. Me, when I worked in Poland in 1991 I tried Albanian carrot jam. Cured me of making further travel inquiries.

As a follow up on the receive spate of breweries going under, Ed wrote an interesting post on his pre-brewing life as a microbiologist with a firm that went into receivership:

When I worked as a microbiologist the company I was at went bankrupt and managed to re-open a soon after with a slightly different name doing the same business. It had been obvious the company was not doing well for some time. A big customer had been lost so the work just wasn’t there like it once was. When I saw the owners daughter updating her CV on a work computer I thought the company was definitely going under, but despite this it still came as a shock when it finally happened. I’d worked there for years so though intellectually I’d guessed I’d soon be on the sausage it hadn’t prepared me emotionally for when reality hit. 

Finally and perhaps along the same line… in my undergrad years over 40 years ago, one entertaining pal would discuss hypothetical washroom fixtures he wanted to see. He dubbed one the VomKing 5000? Apparently they exist for real in Germany according to one posting on the Dull Men’s Club on Facebook. Note: this is a free standing barf station in a public washroom there. Handles and all. I think it only lacks the mist of ice cold water spraying your forehead that my pal had designed into his porcelain dream. His grip handles may also have been refrigerated in his version. But here you can head butt the flush button in this model. Reminder: the internet was made for educational purposes. You have been educated.

And with that great moment in blogging history… from Alpha to Omega… input to output…so… once again… that is it and we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections.*** Want to keep up with the news before next Thursday? Check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan back each Monday. Elsewhere go look at then listen to Lew’s podcast. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a few podcasts… but some may be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water… is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that but is writing for 47 readers over there. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link! Errr… nope, it is gone again.

*I couldn’t gather the energy to keep up with the Vault City thing further –  but Stonch made a great point.
**Travel pun!!
***This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (128) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (913) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,474) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (163), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. 

This Week We Celebrate Queen Victoria, The Two-Four And These Beery News Notes

Victoria Day weekend is here. Err… I mean… VICTORIA DAY IS HERE!!!  That’s better. It’s gonna get boozy. Break out the two-fours. No, not those ones. We were thinking of a couple of nights in nearby Montreal  but the hotels weren’t cheap so now it’s going to be all about what’s within an hour’s drive. HMVR is pissed – won’t even look at me now. Back solidly turned. Shunned. Wow. Seriously, wow. Also wow in an entirely different way was a comment left by Maureen Ogle at the foot of last week’s update:

…thanks for the weekly dose of thoughtful snark. So many years of pleasure….

Fabulous. What could be better than when someone you admire provides you with the obvious name of the anthology for my top 1001 of these here blog posts from the last two decades – Thoughtful Snark. I will get right on that.

What’s been going on? Well, for one thing, a trio of the old guard of beer writing each shared their thoughts one way or another on the state of beer writing… and… it’s apparently not entirely good – but also not entirely bad. First, we have Evan Rail‘s thoughts on the state of beer writing:

…we have a new opportunity to focus on truly great writing: not getting there first, so much as covering the subject beautifully; not breaking news (though of course that can be important, too), so much as understanding and explaining its nuances; not reporting on every new beer or brewery that opens (an impossibility, given our current numbers), but writing more selectively about the ones that truly matter.

Then, we have Jeff at Beervana and his piece “Is Beer Less Interesting Or Am I?” which builds on the passage above:

I relate strongly to the idea that it’s harder to find anything new in beer, and that so much seems repetitious. (Let’s not get into the way beer media now seems to be infected with listicles, poor explainers, or pieces with titles like, “The Best ______ According to These Experts.”) Evan takes the point of view of a writer who has been covering beer for a quarter century, and as a fellow old I identify with it. But as an old I often find myself coming up short and asking: is the beer world really less interesting, or am I?

And finally we have Pete Brown who shared a few observations on, first, a beer junket to Spain and, then, a recent piece he wrote on the succession plan at BrewDog*:

Read this! Claiming it as “exclusive” is hilarious given I was on the same press trip, along with journos from the S*n and the Daily Heil, and some “influencers”. But at the brewery, this guy was the only one apart from me who was actually taking notes. Nice bloke, good journo.

and:

…commenting can be tricky. My brief was for an over-arching piece on the industry impact since 2007. If I’d just focused in on actions towards people in the business it would have been rejected. I tried to get the balance right and hope it doesn’t trivialise.

They, each in their turn, hit on various degrees of hope and despair and reality. But together they sort of expose the nature of the writing gig. Not everyone is taking notes, not every idea is interesting and not every page is beautiful. The same stark facts would face a sports, pop music or political writer too. I don’t think it is naval gazing either. If we consumers of the writing, if we readers are to value the effect of a story it is good to know that the writers are thinking about what they are doing, if the brief is a constraint – and certainly if they have just been hanging on at the edge of a junket, not bothering to even take notes.

So let’s see who’s done the best at that this week! I really like Jess’s piece at B+B on the particulars she loves in a pub as she rediscovered on a recent say out:

The crawl took us to three of the four pubs in St Werburghs: The Farm, The Miners’s Arms and The Duke of York. All of them have hippy vibes of varying degrees and make me feel nostalgic for her early drinking days – while leaving Ray a little on edge. He’s such a clean boy! The Farm has an enormous beer garden and several of my drinking companions told me it was more of a family pub than an alternative one these days, especially on Sundays. Last time Ray and I visited someone was trying to persuade the bar staff to give them the beer slops from the drip trays, allegedly to keep slugs off their plants in their allotment.

Hippies and slugs and slops. Excellent. Like what you like. And that photo of the skittles alley! As I’ve mentioned about a billion times, we could also do with a similar bit of honesty about value like we see a bit more these days in wine writing like this about the next opportunity to buy Bordeaux futures:

…right now – today – 2023 Angélus has been released at a price that comes in at more than the 2020, 2019, 2018, 2016 and 2015 vintages, all of which have some very punchy reviews and, moreover, are the finished product.  You can buy a case of wine rather than title to nine litres of wine sitting in a barrel in St Emilion. Quite simply: there is zero point in buying it.  Even if your name is Mr Angélus and your first born is a 2023: in this instance you can just stick £3,120 in the bank for a couple of years, get 5%, and buy the same wine, in bottle and in the UK, for the same or less money.  Again: this is not rocket science or cutting edge economic analysis.  It’s just obvious.

Mr. B. himself in Just Drinks broke out the honesty in his thoughts on the state of US craft beer, pointing a very particularly pointy finger in one particular direction:

This ‘haze craze,’ as it’s become known, led to several market shifts in North America, including the one most cited by craft brewers themselves: an overabundance of beers of very similar, sometimes almost interchangeable, character and flavour. As one veteran brewer who asked to remain anonymous put it: “There are only so many ways you can make a lasagna and it’s the same for hazy IPAs. That’s why so many of them taste the same.”

And, speaking of innovations becoming stagnation, over at The Gulp Katie Mather wrote about A.I. and her doubts:

I doubt I’ll ever be convinced of its merit in the fields of creative writing, painting, drawing, poetry, and music. In my opinion, it should be used as a powertool. It makes boring, labour-intensive jobs easier, in order to enable the creative and skilled work to be carried out by people who have the talent to do so. We are all good at different things. AI Art is not a leveller, it is a thief.

Boom! Plus it’s, you know, pretty shitty.** I mention this in particular given the news that one western Canadian brewery has made an all A.I. beer:

Amber Waves of Grain, released in February by Grain Bin Brewing Company, is an amber ale in which everything — the name, the price, the packaging and the recipe — was decided by OpenAI’s Chat GPT, an artificial intelligence tool trained to mimic human responses. “We decided to just be as hands-off as possible, to see what the limitations were and what the actual final product would be if we relied solely on artificial intelligence,” said Dalen Landis, a co-owner of the brewery in Grande Prairie, Alta., about 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton. In an interview with CBC News, Landis said the beer is meant to be a conversation piece. He said it also raises a moral dilemma particularly with the packaging generated from sources across the internet. 

While it was a bit of an exploration, maybe performance art, the whole thing reminds me a lot of the glory days of this here blog when I was interviewed about things, especially the time I was asked by The New York Times about what was called Open Source Beer back in 2005. It was sort of a manual form of artificial intelligence as I recall. Made no sense. Beer isn’t that hard, is it?

But maybe it is. In Pellicle this week Laura Hadland writes about the disruptive force that Anspach and Hobday have released on the unsuspecting population of London:

Jack and Paul are happy to admit the pervasive influence of the global brewing giant on their work, and it’s hard to overstate the influence of the shadow that St James’s Gate throws over the entire brewing world, especially when it comes to nitro porter. When attempting to take on Guinness, it’s also worth pointing out the scale of the challenge. 350,000 litres of London Black are now being brewed each year, with further expansion planned. From a standing start, that’s an impressive achievement in less than three years. But if litres were metres, then Guinness’ UK on-trade volume is the height of The Shard with London Black just a Labrador standing dolefully beside it. At the current rate of expansion, Anspach and Hobday aren’t going to be treading on Guinness’ heels any time soon.

Staying in that fair city, in his latest edition of London Beer City, Will Hawkes shared a lovely bit of observation and, yes, honesty that makes total sense as far as I’m concerned:

A dog is sniffing my leg. I’m standing at the bar at the Parakeet, a gastropub in Kentish Town, in brief beer-related discussion with the bar-lady, and I can feel its cold nose through my trouser leg. I turn and look. It’s an XL Bully. I didn’t intend to turn this edition of London Beer City into an XL Bully Special, but here we are. Honestly, there are loads of them about. I see them in the street. I avoid them in the park. I take an involuntary leap back when one sniffs my leg in the pub.

Third London tidbit: the beer spend in the city for the upcoming Euro 2024 will be £120 according to El Predicto… or something  sorta like that.

Gary posted another interesting slice of 20th century brewing history with a study of the strength of Rainier Old Stock Ale – 5%? 7.5%? 9%? What ever it is… PEP UP!

The King and Queen have announced their Royal Warrants including those for the clink and the drink. These things are not part of the Canadian Royal fam set up but, still, gonna be looking for that little crest on my box of Weetabix. First beer to get the sticker on the label?

In 2014, the Prince of Wales also gave permission for the Royal Warrant to be used on bottles of Shepherd Neame’s Spitfire Amber Ale, first brewed in 1990 to commemorate the Battle of Britain. “We have a long association with the Royal Family, and are incredibly proud to be among the first UK businesses to be awarded a Royal Warrant by His Majesty King Charles III,” said Shepherd Neame chief executive Jonathan Neame.

Probably the only warrant you want being issued with your name on it.

Was that enough snark? I don’t really think so. That’s a pretty positive and mild one this week. Oh dear. I will have to do better next week!

And with that… once again… we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections.*** Want to keep up with the news before next Thursday? Check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan back each Monday. Elsewhere go look at then listen to Lew’s podcast. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a few podcasts… but some may be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water… is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that but is writing for 47 readers over there. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link! Errr… nope, it is gone again.

*To the greater point being made, get the backstory right like the Daily Mail did: “Mr Watt comes from a family of fishermen and used to help his father on his fishing boat in the North Sea. On his LinkedIn profile he claims to be a ‘fully qualified deep sea captain’. He graduated from Edinburgh University with a degree in law and economics. After landing a job as a trainee solicitor he quit after two weeks – branding ‘conforming’ as ‘painful at best – and, three years later, started BrewDog with Mr Dickie.“
*And a bonus first footnote observation from B+B’s own gossipy (I said) Footnotes on the connection between putting in the hours and building trust: “We’re Patreons of Pete Brown which means every now and then we get an email with some behind the scenes info. He’s had a busy week covering various bits of brewing news, including the Burton unions story. On that, he reveals that he had inside info on the deal. Which makes us think that when he says in his Pellicle piece about Worthington White Shield “Rumours are now circulating that a deal may be struck…” he knows (a) that this is definitely the case; and (b) exactly who is likely to be brewing White Shield. Again, we wonder if it might be Thornbridge. The brewery wot does heritage would be an interesting niche for them.“
**From the NYT: “It’s a little hard to believe that just over a year ago, a group of leading researchers asked for a six-month pause in the development of larger systems of artificial intelligence, fearing that the systems would become too powerful. “Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” they asked. There was no pause. But now, a year later, the question isn’t really whether A.I. is too smart and will take over the world. It’s whether A.I. is too stupid and unreliable to be useful.“
***This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (bloop! 127) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (slumoing to 913) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (up t0 4,472) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (162), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Fear not!

The “Is It Tra-La Month Already?” Edition Of The Beery News Notes

Tra-la? Really?? How many times have you had to write to remind me not to repeat myself in these weekly notes to myself?  I know. I know.* But in my defence, I am a man of little imagination. As you know. I take photos of pots yet to be filled with soil and seed.  Imagine being so dull.  Which is entirely unlike The Beer Nut whose blog turned nineteen this week so is, therefore, of legal age in all of Canada. Always a gent and always a source of the best information. I wonder what life would be if I ran this place on that basis?

Speaking of sorta which and as a bit of spice to start off the week to contextualize what follows, one of my favourite people from one of my favourite breweries (Max of Godspeed) got into it on Twex yesterday when he posed the following:

This happens at an alarming rate in Toronto, too. It’s not unusual to find myself in earshot of someone in the industry slagging another brewery in town…

See, he was responding to a similar comment from someone whose slow frail hand reached and pressed delete mere moments after posting. It’s an odd aspect of the bigger craft scene that insider smack talk is a bad idea. Me, I spell that sort of “bad” with the letters F-U-N! Me, I want to consider myself to be on Team Godspeed. I fact, I want elbow pads with “It’s Godspeed or it sucks!!” on them. They and maybe ten others stand above in this marketplace and they each should be loud and proud once in a while.  But do they? Do we? What follows this week is a lot about beer and language.

Not unrelated given that it is about one presents oneself… or one’s can I suppose, this bit of social media promo is perhaps the bestest, truest observation on the sad state of craft beer today:

Does your beer name have TOO MANY ADJECTIVES? Are there 3+ ingredients or flavours are namechecked on the can?You may have found yourself in possession of a GIMMICKY BEER – but is that a bad thing? Tune in to find out more…🍻

That’s the Beer Ladies Podcast talking right there… and it you click on this link you can get to the actual talking. When did what written on the beer can get so far down such a wrong path? Do we still have to use language like that?

There has, in fact, been a general concern with the state of writing these days. It’s the talk of the town, the topic of the week. Jeff propounded with a broad brush upon “The Death of Books“… even though new book sales are still ahead of the pre-pandemic rate in the USA. In their monthly e-letter, Boak and Bailey addressed the slightly narrower question of usefulness of the UK pub guide:

The fundamental problem with pub guides – or any kind of print guidebook – is that they go out of date between writing and printing. And that’s especially true in 2024, on the long tail of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis, with hospitality feeling rather volatile. It was always a problem, of course. Our copy of Fred Pearce’s 1975 guide to Bristol pubs came with a paper insert with updates from April 1976: “Oliver’s Bar, Victoria Street… The Courage depot’s local is now closed down.” Actually, to an extent, it wasn’t a problem at all. It was part of the business model. If not planned obsolescence than at least a rather helpful incentive for people to buy next year’s edition.

Authors of the soon to be published book Beer Breaks in Britain responded with a bit of a stiff upper lip: “The fact is, people are still buying guidebooks. But that’s because they tell stories that can inspire travel, exploration, not just tell you where to go.” That statement reminded me of something that we need to be thinking about when it comes to discussions about things beery – that ever present need to tell the white lie when we are not, you know, just parroting the press release.  Perhaps it should be considered not all that surprising given we are talking about a subject that literally numbs the senses.

In fact, that comment reminded me greatly of the recent coverage of the slightly less recent Craft Brewers Conference in Las Vegas where the news of the continuing loss of public interest in craft beer was apparently the theme. Dave Infante described it in VinePair as evidence that we are in what he framed as “Craft Brewing’s ‘Could Be Worse’ Era“:

The industry in aggregate has concerns aplenty, though, and they were discussed at length over three days’ worth of seminars, meetings, and after-hours drinks on and off the Strip. Direct-to-consumer shipping and franchise law reforms are top of mind for the BA’s policymaking double threat, general counsel Marc Sorini and senior director of federal affairs Katie Marisic, and potentially onerous nutritional labeling requirements from the TTB aren’t far behind. Bob Pease, the BA’s president and chief executive, made sure to flag “growing threats from neo-Prohibitionist groups” in his opening remarks on Monday, as did several other speakers throughout the week.

You know when folk start blaming the straw man bleat of “neo-prohibitionism” that something else is really really going sideways. Something something else like (…umm..) customers losing interest in the cyclical fads of craft (… err…) curomers are just sick of the horse apple hype as David Bailey so bluntly put it last Friday in Pellicle? There is no lack of proof of the slide if Jessica Mason’s stories just this week are correct… and they are: laters Ballest Point, see ya Greene King and buhbye BBF. Yet… we also consider the reasonably described booster Don Tse in Forbes uncritically summing up the slew of negative numbers by repeating the trade association’s lead voice of the boosterocracy:

Watson estimated that, “125 million Americans who drink didn’t have a craft beer last month” and suggested that there was still opportunity for brewers to grow. Speaking to the audience of brewers, Watson said, “Many of your customers are fiercely loyal. Breweries that are succeeding are finding ways to have customers drink their products on more occasions… Craft beer as a category has seen fads in beverage alcohol come and go,” said Watson. “But craft is here to stay.”**

Really? Same as it ever was? That’s all there is? Cue the great Ms. Peggy Lee!***

So if we take all that in and that is all there is… which of the two trades are doing more poorly? Books or craft beer?  If Stan is to be understood correctly, craft is down to 2014 levels of interest, five years worse off than the book publishing marketplace apparently.  Whichever it is, books about beer should be expected to face a tough future.

Entirely conversely and far more reality based, Ed wrote a piece this week about another sort of understanding – one based on gaining an actual educated understanding of beer and brewing – which he drew from his conversation with Kathryn Thomson, the Head of Education and Professional Development at the Institute of Brewing and Distilling:

I have for a long while been insisting that as a professional brewer every pint I drink is CPD but that does seem to have bitten me on the arse now that recording CPD is something I’ll actually have to do properly. I don’t suppose untappd submissions will count. The blog however might, my write ups of brewery visits whilst on study tours have been described as “great examples of reflective CPD”. I may be a beer nerd but I’m also a technical beer geek! Well lubricated though those IBD study tours may be there’s a lot of actual studying too.  Kathryn is trying to develop a practical and pragmatic approach to CPD which sounded very positive to me. And I also got a chance to go off on one about brewing education which was great because I have opinions.

It’d be nice if a consumer oriented equivalent was created so that one was not defencelessly subject to the fist punch “craft is here to stay!” sort of yahooism. You know, one where we’d see more of the specificity, respect and honesty that good beer avoids. A discussion like those reports we read this week about how the spirits markets are facing “destocking” and even there candor about value we see in the famously puffy world of wine trade writing these days. Just consider this from James Suckling on the conditions faces by those setting prices for the soon to be sent to market 2023 Bordeaux futures:****

“People are not going to buy if you don’t drop the price,” concurred Hubert de Bouard, whose family owns Chateau Angelus, which last year raised its prices significantly with some backlash from the market. “You can’t go against the wave. If you don’t [drop prices] you can’t sell. It could be 20 percent or more, but it depends on the name of the chateau.” It’s not going to be easy to drop prices to a level that will generate interest in the vintage for en primeur. The market situation is very tough, as any wine merchant knows regardless of where they are based. For a start, the cost of money from banks is the highest in decades in the United States, and wine sales are down in most key markets around the world. There are overstocks with importers, distributors and wine merchants. And prices are falling for many top wines. And then there are two wars and an anxiety-ridden U.S. election in November. It will be difficult for many buyers to tie up money, especially if it’s credit from the bank, for almost two years before the wine is delivered.

Whole lot of context and grounding right there. Could you imagine a leading beer perioidical publishing something like that, being that honest about value?

Lisa Grimm is also all about the real and last Friday her Weirdo Guide to Dublin proved it with a visit to Hynes’ Bar in… of… at Stoneybatter:

On a recent Saturday evening, I found people making the most of the remaining visit from the sun in the beer garden, which comes complete with a DJ booth and Oasis-v-Blur cigarette disposal – a reference that here in Ireland is both a GenX comfort blanket and general Father Ted reference that even the younger set who don’t recall the 1990s will recognize – they know all about Fathers Dougal and Damo (though I note that as I write this, it’s the 30th anniversary of the release of Parklife, so I may crumble into dust before we’re through here – let’s see!).

And ATJ got real over at his newsletter AJTbeerpubs in his reminisings of trips to American dives with some fine character portraits:

It was either his grandfather or great grandfather who had come out west and made something good of himself. ‘Have you heard of so and so?’ I was asked, an unremarkable town in the north-west of England whose name sounds like a low comedian who had a TV series in the 1970s. ‘It’s a fine place and I intend to go there one day.’ I muttered something, but my thoughts were rather, shall we say, less complimentary about his intended place of pilgrimage, but I was a guest. As these kind of evenings do, when we are not expecting anything to happen, stories flew backwards and forwards, and more beer was ordered. Meanwhile, Dean Martin from Rio Bravo staggered in and was served this time. He was a fisherman, who’d come ashore that day, and presumably was drinking away his profits. 

And Pellicle published something that didn’t need to make much of an argument to convince me: “The Case for Perry” by Adam Wells. Perry is the greatest fluid this planet ever created as far as I’m concerned but never gets its due:

These days there is so little perry made, so little known about it, and so few people who care that we pass down lies and generalisations and they stick. We say that it’s always sweet: it isn’t. We say that it’s always light—that’s not true either. We ho-ho about pears containing sorbitol and claim perry is a laxative—if that was true I’d be a ghost. We equate the whole, broad, fascinating flavour spectrum of a labyrinthine, spellbinding drink to Babycham and Lambrini, and wise, sensible people—people who know and care deeply about other drinks—nod and shrug and pass the lies along. At best, perry has been filed as a sidekick; a chapter in a book about cider.

I say I love perry but I never seem to get my hands on much of the stuff. Which places it in the realm of “readily available” when you compare it to the subject of the article in Cider Review “Hymn to the Quince” by Beatrix Swanson:

… it doesn’t take much digging to discover plausible reasons why you don’t see many British quince drinks, either: quinces struggle to ripen fully in some parts of the UK and need to mature in storage for up to two months after harvest; they seem to be unsuited to machine harvesting; and they are not commonly planted and therefore expensive to procure post-harvest. What’s more, until the UK government’s August 2023 alcohol duty reforms, ciders made with quince — or hops, or elderflower, or anything else other than apples or pears — were taxed as ‘made wine’ in the UK and therefore subject to higher duty than cider or perry.

So, again we see, there is good writing out and about right there to be read. Sure, not enough to balance off the other stuff but it is worth the digging. Which means… once again… we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections.***** Want to keep up with the news before next Thursday? Check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan who, like the swallows to  Capistrano, show return next Monday. Elsewhere go look at then listen to Lew’s podcast. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast . Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a few podcasts… but some may be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water… is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that but is writing for 47 readers over there. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link! Errr… nope, it is gone again.

*2023… 2020… 2019… 2009… 2008… 2007… you get the point.
**“Peace for our time!!!“
***For those in need of the footnote…
****Me, I’ll be buying* my mixed two or three cases or so as I have been since the beginning of the pandemic. Investing for my retirement! I’m already menu planning for Christmas 2031. Here’s a cheat sheet for the futures buying process for Ontario.
*****This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (holding at 128) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (back up to 916) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (crashing down nince t0 4,463) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (162), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Fear not!

The “What’s Beer Got To Do With The Solar Eclipse” Edition Of The Beery News Notes

I couldn’t stop myself from reusing this image…***

A couple of weeks ago, I flagged the upcoming solar eclipse that is passing over our region, as illustrated again above. All other topics have stopped, it seems. We are calm and composed but at the other end of the lake, the Ontario version fo Niagara Falls has even declared an emergency due to, according to their Mayor, the million people estimated that might show up. So… what is beer to me when the sun is about to be eaten by the moon… or is the moon eaten by the sun? Bear with me if the perspective of these notes this week veers a bit towards the centre of the solar system… but not directly. No way. We and our pets do not look at the sun… except when we can… and only with proper filtering glasses except when they aren’t needed.  Easy.

First up, David Jesudason has continued his investigations of the story of Brewdog Waterloo and has noted a few very strange things. First, he has screen captured the story in the UK edition of Metro magazine which disappeared under mystereous circumstances. And he wrote a follow up piece in his newsletter Episodes of My Pub Life or rather from a duty manager from another BrewDog location did:

There are times when we stay open when I believe we 100% should not be open. We had no water on a Saturday night, it was rammed, we couldn’t wash glasses or dishes, couldn’t wash hands. The operation team was called, the situation was explained and they flippantly asked if people could use the loos in the bar next door. We just ignored them and closed. In my experience the operation managers can’t handle their workload. I feel there’s too many bars for them to manage and this leads to urgent emails regularly unanswered…

There is more but for me it is hilarious that there is a “OPERATIONS CONTROL ROOM HQ” that has to be called for permission to cope with local circumstances. Best fact: “There’s no training materials…” Speaking of power hungry beer chains, The Beer Nut himself has been investigating the phenomenon of the UK pub chain:

They sure love a chain restaurant in England. They have loads of them, and there’s something about a town like Bournemouth — lots of visitors looking for something familiar, perhaps — which seems to concentrate them. I did not go there with the intention of exploring exotic English chain restaurants. It just kind of turned out that way. There is, for example, a Brewhouse & Kitchen, a chain of brewpub-restaurants that felt to me like a modern successor to the Firkins of old, and memorably described by Boak & Bailey as “a bit like business class Wetherspoons.” Now there’s a demographic to aspire to. I wasn’t there to soak up the ambiance, however. I was there to try the beers, brewed on-site on the smart brewkit out front.

More to actual beery side of beer, Lars¹ has unleashed his powers of research and share two fact: (i) there is actually an east-west axis to Norway in addition to north-south and (ii) there is also a place called Atrå where their yeast is not kveik but berm. The story reads like the narration by John Walsh on America’s Most Wanted:

Then I stumbled across a guy on Facebook who had gotten hold of farmhouse yeast from a neighbour. In Atrå, as it turned out. He told me that several people locally had their own yeast. It was usually pitched at 30 degrees C, and everyone thought it was “old”, whatever they meant by that. Then came the surprise: nobody in the village brews in the traditional way any more. Those who brew use malt extract, but they still keep the yeast. This was very unexpected: a village with no brewing tradition, but they did have their own farmhouse yeast? Could this yeast really be genuine?

And looking back in time, Martyn has shared his clearly non-eclipse effected view of a very focused topic – the truth as to the identity of one pub in London, the Tipperary of Fleet Street:

…what of the claim that the Tipperary stands on the site of the Boar’s Head, and therefore has a history going back at least 580-plus years? Here I put myself in the hands of a man called Bren Calver, who aggregated many hours of research on the stretch of Fleet Street between Water Lane/Whitefriars Street and Bouverie Street, in particular studying contemporary illustrations, and who is convinced that the Tipperary occupies what was originally 67 Fleet Street, not the post-Great Fire 66 Fleet Street that was home to the Boar’s Head, which Calver believes was demolished around 180 years ago. This is about to get complicated, so hang on to your hat.

Laura Hadland shared some thoughts on the naming of those spaces where the brewery that brews the beer also sells you a glass of their beer:

Recently I visited the delightful Little Martha Brewing in Bristol, where I got embroiled in a fascinating discussion about the nature of pubs with co-founder and brewer Ed Morgan. Little Martha, for Ed, is assuredly a brewpub, not a taproom: “Rather than being a drinking space that is an add-on to a brewery, we’re a pub with a brewery at the back. When we started the business, the thing driving it was that we always wanted to have our own venue. We wanted to make it a cosy, warmer space certainly than some of the very large taprooms you see now. We wanted it to feel like a local pub, rather than trying to build a beer brand that would attract people here.”

For me, brewpub and taprooms that serve food are much the same thing. I was in Edinburgh’s Rose Street Brewery, drinking with the owner/brewer back in 1986. Pretty much the same set up as Middle Ages in Syracuse, NY back in 2006. When I was there, was I in a pub, a taproom, a microbrewery or a brewpub? All and none of the above… maybe.

BREAKING!!!… “Saskatchewan announces changes to homemade liquor rules”:

On Tuesday Saskatoon Churchill-Wildwood MLA Lisa Lambert announced that the province has amended liquor regulations to allow people who have applied for and received a special occasion liquor permit to serve those two types of homemade alcoholic beverages to their guests. “Previously, these products could only be served among family and friends in their own home,” she said. The new regulations officially came into effect on Tuesday. “This change is yet another example of our government’s ongoing efforts to reduce unnecessary regulation and red tape where possible,” Lambert said.****

Because… that is the one thing that is filling the jails of Saskatchewan… Uncle Fred’s homemade wine at the community Thanksgiving Supper down at the arena without a permit. Speaking of law, Beth Demmon is back with another edition of Prohibitchin’ and features Davon D. E. Hatchett, wine lawyer and The Bubbleista:

“While I was in law school, I took a class in intellectual property. I did not expect this to happen, but I LOVED the content in this class,” she says, adding that she ended up getting the highest grade in the class… But rather than set aside her passions, she decided to merge them, despite some skeptics…  “I actually went and talked to one of my professors at law school when I moved back, and he essentially told me you can’t have a viable practice in trademark law,” she recalls, disappointed. While she figured out what direction she wanted to go, she started working in corporate consulting and taking continuing legal education classes that Texas required. It was there that she first realized the potential for working in beverage and hospitality law.

Jealous. I mean I never knew what sort of law I would want to do but ended up being an owner’s side bridge building lawyer. Concrete. Rebar. Geotech studies. Fun stuff. But wine law sounds really good.

Note: Gary sums up his beers of France.

We flinch about a few things… pairing… IPA… branding… but there were some interesting thoughts from the exporter perspective in The Japan Times about a category of beer that is not necessarily well framed – Japanese beer:

For Japanese beer companies, there is work to do on more clearly defining their image. Mike Kallenberger, a senior adviser at brewing and beverage industry consultancy First Key, said aside from big mainstream imports such as Corona and Heineken, the majority of beers imported into the U.S. are typically associated with a specific occasion — in the case of Japanese beers, as a pairing to Japanese cuisine. “Japanese beers are typically seen as lighter and more refreshing, which makes them very good for pairing with food. Beyond that, the current image may not be very distinct,” Kallenberger said, but noted that given the focus of Japanese brewers on the U.S. market, that perception will likely evolve.

Never lacking in focus, The Tand displayed his full powers this week, as illutrated to the right where he took down Marks & Spencers and their farce of a mezza gigantes. this may have been deleted by some shadowy power or another. The powers behind mezza gigantes should not be underestimated in these matters. But, as we have learned from David Jesudason above, there’s more than one way to skin a cat whe we are dealing with the dark forces of the interwebs… or something like that…

Speaking of full powers, if you sign up for Boak and Bailey‘s Patreon account, you will learn the secret behind this statement:

It was the fastest Ray has drunk a single pint for a very long time and we both stayed on it for the rest of the session.

And still in Britain, The Daily Star has identfied a good marketing tool for these troubled times – one that even the Tand himself has not trotted out – ale is cheap!

With the cost of living crisis ongoing, many of us are dodging the pub in favour of boozing at home or cutting back on alcohol altogether. But for those of us who still enjoy an evening at the local watering hole, we can keep costs lower by opting for a drink other than lager – which, on average, set consumers back £4.24 in 2022… In contrast, ales – including stouts – cost just £3.60 in 2022, about 15% less than lager… Ales tend to be the more budget-friendly option in general…

Stan has declared “MayDay!!” for April and won’t be back for four whole weeks* but left us some good beery links including some considerations on the pretendy world of A.I. as it relates to beer:

I remain skeptical about AI beer recipes, but the information that Kevin Verstrepen’s laboratory at the University of Leuven shares could also be put to good use by humans. Consider this:

“Both approaches identified ethyl acetate as the most predictive parameter for beer appreciation. Ethyl acetate is the most abundant ester in beer with a typical ‘fruity’, ‘solvent’ and ‘alcoholic’ flavor, but is often considered less important than other esters like isoamyl acetate. The second most important parameter identified by SHAP is ethanol, the most abundant beer compound after water.”

Ah, yes. alcohol. So plenty to read in the Nature Communications article, and a lot of sexy charts.

Alcohol?!?!? Speaking of alcohol,** Pellicle published a piece by Alistair of Fuggled fame on Big Fish Cider of Monterey, Virginia:

Each autumn, Kirk’s father would harvest his trees—amongst them a Northern Spy, a Grimes Golden, and a Winesap—pressing the fruit to make sweet cider, which they stored in a barrel. It was here that Kirk’s lifelong obsession with apples and cider began. “I can still remember the scent hitting my nose, and the flavour just exploding in my mouth, and I still think fresh cider off the press is the best thing going,” says Kirk in his soft Virginian drawl. “I love the taste of apples, I love the smell of the bloom. My mom reminded me that I would come in and say if I could make a perfume with the smell of an apple bloom, I could be a millionaire. I never did make it mind.”

Finally, Pete Brown was in The Guardian this week giving advice to the beer drinking fitba fans has part of a bit of a paranoid series of stories about strong lagers in the lead up to Euro 2024 in Germany based on a bit of a confessional:

Years ago, at the start of my career as a drinks writer, I visited Oktoberfest for the first time. The beer at the festival is served in litre tankards… You swing them as much as you drink them, the beer disappears quickly as you sway along to the band and you have quite a few, but it’s OK because the beer is Helles, a light lager style at about 4% ABV. So when we visited a biergarten the following day and saw Oktoberfest Bier being sold by the Maẞ, I naturally assumed it was the same thing we had been drinking at Oktoberfest… It’s typically between 6% and 7% ABV. I didn’t know this. I had seven steins over the course of the afternoon, and then I tried to stand up. We’ll draw a veil over what happened next.

Me? Been there. Syracuse, NY. Blue Tusk circa 2007 or so. Being served a stout whch was actually my first 10% imperial stout. Then four more pints. Samesies.

Enough!! We roll our eyes at misspent yuff as, again, we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (126) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (914) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,468) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (163), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Fear not!

Want to keep up with the news before next Thursday? Check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan the very next Monday he decides to show up at the office. Look at me – I forgot to link to Lew’s podcast. Fixed. Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And I listened to the BOAS podcast bro-ly interview of Justin from Matron. And the long standing Beervana podcast . Plus We Are Beer People. There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a few podcasts… but some may be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link! Errr… nope, it is gone again.

*Yes, that is how months generally work.
**Which reminds me to note again how it was not good beer hunting again this week.
***Cry for help or what… hey, what do you mean it’s a crappy headline image… and what do you mean this footnote is out of chronological order? YOU’RE OUT OF ORDER!!!
****Note: the government claims to have reduced red tape by adding a new class of permit… think about that for a moment…
¹Beer history’s Tommy Hunter.

Your See Ya Later Frikkin’ Winter 2024 Edition Of The Beery News Notes

This is it! I know… I know. It’s like a weather bore blog around here with some news items Scotched taped on – but really is there any better day to see coming than the first of spring? Or is that too hemispheric of me! It’s the last day of summer in our nether regions… southern… southern. That’s where Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin found himself this week, photographing these bush beer barrels from the Cook Islands in the national museum. As the tiny print says, the beer they made was based on oranges and honey. Yah-ummm.

First up, beer writer and big city crime beat journalist Norm Miller celebrated the third anniversary of his not dying this week with some great advice :

Three years ago today I nearly died. Still alive. Don’t be like me, go to the doctors, don’t ignore what your body is telling you and move.

Good advice. Thanks for being there, Norm. And in the latest edition of Prohibitchin’ Beth Demmon wrote this week about Ellen Cavalli who is both an established cider maker and now a non-drinker thanks to her own health scare:

“I want to be alive,” says Ellen simply. “I don’t want it to be like I chose alcohol over a longer life with my family.” Not drinking was the easy part. Feeling disconnected from the community and industry she helped build was the hard part. She had to make a choice. “Do I want to continue living with constant anxiety, sorrow, grief, depression, no joy and faking it?” she asked herself. “What do I want my life to be?” She told Scott something had to change for her to find meaning in her life’s work once again. For her to feel joy. For her to feel hope. If she couldn’t drink alcohol, then the choice was clear—make a non-alcoholic cider. After a few months of expedited trials, Ellie’s Non-Alcoholic Gravenstein became the first commercially available dealcoholized cider in the United States…

I like the sound of that drink, coming from Nova Scotia which is one of the other places like part of California where Gravensteins are grown. Speaking of sounding good, Pellicle this week ran a feature on the Lacada Cooperative Brewery in Portrush, Northern Ireland by Ewan Friar featuring a great set of photos, including one of a Mr. Whippy van and oceanside scene Pr0n:

Portrush lies on a mile long basalt peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic off Ireland’s North Coast. Two gorgeous, golden sand beaches flank the base of the peninsula to the east and west, while the northern tip rises to the dramatic cragginess of Ramore Head. It evolved from what was originally a small fishing port into one of Ireland’s major tourist towns in the 19th Century. With its colourful town houses, pleasant promenades and the world famous Royal Portrush Golf Club, the town became an all out Victorian pleasure resort, and much of that character still exists today.

Perhaps less on jolly holiday – but totes Irelandish, too – Eoghan has told a tale that he has called proof that has has “reached my boring era” but I think it has a certain charm:

Every Friday evening during the school year, I cajole the children into the bike by 18.40. I cycle them up the hill to the local municipal swimming pool and wave them through the door by 18.50. By 18.55 I’m sitting in the pub around the corner with a beer in front of me and a book in my hand. By 19.45, I’ll have finished the second of two beers, made no headway in the book, paid up at the bar, and be out the door so I’m back at the pool for the end of class at 20.00. Then it’s pile them back in the bike, and cycle them home where my Friday night routine ends and their bedtime routine begins. Lather, rinse, and repeat the following Friday.

Jessica Mason apparently needed to explain what for me was understood as the clear meaning of the word “however” in her story on Black Sheep’s rather sudden rebranding soon after being takeover and the seemingly complete corporate amnesia over a rather similar effort in 2014:

According to the Yorkshire brewery, this is its “biggest rebrand since it was founded over 31 years ago” and the “sleek new design will feature across all Black Sheep Brewery beers, included keg, cask, and bottles, as well as online merchandise” however the makeover both echoes its previous attempts to modernise the brand, uses similar terminology used by its new owners and also comes amidst the brewery’s restructuring causing a stir across the industry in what has been questioned as a means of diverting attention away from other media.

Ah, the end times. Another country, another end to a good beer landmark. This time, it is New York’s Spuyten Duyvil as Luke Fortney reports in the NY Eater:

“No bar in the city pays more loving and thorough homage to beer.” That’s how New York Magazine once described Spuyten Duyvil, but after two decades, the craft beer bar is shutting down. “Craft beer’s current ubiquity combined with rising rents have made operating Spuyten Duyvil unsustainable,” said owners, Joe and Kim Carroll, who also run nearby restaurants Fette Sau and St. Anselm. When Spuyten Duyvil opened in Williamsburg in 2003, it stood out for its selection of imported European beers — “the beer you couldn’t find anywhere else,” says Joe Carroll. “Now you’d be hard pressed to find any place without it.” The last day at 359 Metropolitan Avenue, near Havemeyer Street, is April 21.

I get but don’t get the “fresh ale” thing as also reported upon by Jessica Mason. It just appear to be a new mid-lower end of market dispense. Is it simply the use of the handle? Liam add this:

Not *quite* the same, but I’m sure many people would-if-they-could have mocked and derided Michael Ash’s invention too, but look at them all slobbering over Guinness Draught now ..!

Elsewhere and to the upper left of the map, Jeff is fighting the neg by creating a non-profit to promote beer in Oregon which is an excellent idea:

It’s a story that deserves to be told, and visitors and locals alike should be aware of its special place in American brewing. So, on Monday, I signed articles of incorporation to create Celebrate Oregon Beer, a nonprofit 501(c)(6) that will do just that. It has the backing of both the Oregon Brewers Guild and Oregon Hop Commission, as well as 26 breweries, growers, and allied groups (and counting) that have pledged donations to launch the project. I’ve convened a Board of Directors, and soon we’ll get started. In the meantime, let me tell you a bit more—and borrow your wisdom as I do.

I like that. Put your time and effort in where your interests lie. Me, I am on and have been on community radio station boards, one in the US for a decade and now another closer to home. Good to get involved. As corporate secretary, my minute taking skills are right up there. And, speaking of radio, one of my weekly listens is CBC Radio’s show Now or Never who this week interviewed Don Tse – who also happens to have a wide selection of beers – as part of an episode dedicated to dream job:

There aren’t many jobs that have “drinking beer” as the first requirement. Calgary’s Don Tse, also known as the Don of Beer, left behind a successful law career to pursue his ultimate dream job — tasting, judging and writing about the bubbly brew.   

You can hear the episode by clicking on that link. Utterly conversely, as Boak and Bailey shared on their Patreon footnotes,  I’m also “a bit sick of hearing and reading and talking about BrewDog” but Will Hawkes had a great piece in VinePair on the dull faux punks:

…many Britons have had enough of Brewdog’s schtick. Even as the company continues to expand — and as rumors of a forthcoming IPO circulate — it remains a lightning rod for criticism, most recently when complaints it made about a BBC documentary were rejected by Ofcom, Britain’s television regulator. The response from online commentators was not sympathetic. So how did Britain’s most important modern brewery accumulate so many, to use Watt’s own term, haters?

Err… no, not Watt’s term. People actually do hate them. Speaking of  growing or not growning up, Boak and Bailey wrote about a really interesting topic for one like me who had, many years ago, served as a bouncer and faced the overly rouged and wobbly high-heel  vision of fifteen year olds with fake IDs:

When did you last see underage drinkers even try to get served in a pub? It’s what you might call a dying tradition. Ray’s dad says he started drinking in a pub on the Somerset Levels when he was 12, surrounded by adults who made sure he and his brothers (mostly) behaved themselves. And in the mid-1990s, Jess went to East London pubs from 16 hiding behind her tall friend, though nobody ever got asked for ID.

Some great comments followed up on that post. They also pondered the nature of the American cheese slice on Bluesky this week:

Discussing American cheese AKA ‘cheesy singles’ with my other half. “It works so well in some sandwiches but you’d never eat one on its own, would you?” I say. “No, because it’s actually a semi-solid sauce,” she replies. My god. This is exactly right.

Pete Brown also seems to have gotten things right when he and his left London for Norwich, which sounds very nice according to his emailed newsletter:

If we leave the house and drive left, the heart of the Norfolk Broads is ten minutes drive away, and a choice of excellent beaches, some home to seal colonies, is twenty minutes beyond that. If we leave the house and turn right, it’s twenty minutes walk to the heart of a culturally vibrant city, with eleven of the best pubs I’ve ever been in punctuating the route. (The pic above is from the nearest one, the Rosebery.) Cask ale is £4.50 a pint and always in excellent condition. People speak to each other. It’s all rather lovely, and I’m losing weight, the bags under my eyes are no longer grey and lined, and the persistent cough I’ve had for years has disappeared. 

ATJ share a less idylic scene as he made his way to a pub in Devon recently:

…outside an east wind blew, a persistent hangnail of gloom. The year had shifted and it was spring, but the weather hadn’t budged one bit and winter had left a dastardly booby-trap of an easterly that gusted through these western lands with a dismal stretch of the soul — however, bundled up like a parcel of joy I had cycled five miles to this pub so that I could have my first pint of the year outside. 

And Stephane Grant shared a few thoughts about another sort of unpleasant beer drinking experience at last years CBC as she plans her plans to avoid the downside this year is Vegas:

It’s no surprise that craft beer has a problematic relationship with drinking. Last year, I found myself drinking too much and even when I tried to slow down, someone was pushing another beer in my hands. The situation sucked, and my plan to avoid it this year is to keep hop water on deck. A little hydration, a little smoke and mirrors—it’s pretty much a win/win. 

Sensible. And just after I published the update last week my “YOU GOT MAIL” notice sounded off, echoing through the house – and there was Katie Mather in her newsletter The Gulp sharing her love of running, a thing which I have never enjoyed as it appears to including running but not include 21 other people chasing a ball… and it is not limited to a modestly sized rectangle:

The day matters. The haze clears. I never get bored of my usual run through the lanes. I am in love with a certain dip in the road where an old woodland congregates either side of a humpback bridge. I feel Pendle behind me and watch as its western flanks follow my course. I spot siskins and chiff chaffs, and robins eye me suspiciously from inside hawthorn hedges. The first blossom is out now, white and frothy high up on tall Serviceberry trees. I pretend, after the first mile, that I’m nowhere near home, that I’m in the middle of the countryside and I’m just running, and running, for no reason, just for the joy of it. This is my lane, and I feel like I can tell it’s happy I’m back.

Finally, from Mastodon and Emergence magazine, some ancient thoughts on aging well which seems to require a rather large capacity for drinking, even larger than perhaps at the CBC:

Now that I’m old with shaved hair and thin clothing, I feel
a vastness inside of me.
Let me pour empty the River West as wine, use the Big Dipper as ladle and invite all worldly things as my guests.
The world is but a passing guest of my mind.
Alone I strum my zither and sing, forgetting what year it is,
while time keeps passing through my body, so time lives.

Zhang Xiaoxiang 1132–1170, Southern Song Dynasty

Mr. Deep. That is what they call me. Cause I post poetry. And with that… that’s it! Again … we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes. There is a lot going on down here and, remember, ye who read this far down, look to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. I saw this comment on Mastodon this week that is worth applying to all social media… and perhaps craft beer too:

Business Insider has written about how much TikTok’s growth rate has collapsed. I think it’s a combination of a few things: (i) Law of large numbers. Almost every eligible user is already on it. (ii) Every major competitor has added similar features and (iii) Attention is a zero sum game. There are no more available entertainment minutes in the day. So it has to compete with streaming shows, gaming, other apps, etc.

Interesting. And check out the collapse of Twex in the graph! Me? This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (125) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (914) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (still climbing up to 4,465) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (165), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. I now have admitted my dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat, relocated the links and finally accept that BlueSky is the leader in “the race to replace” Twex even while way behind.

Fear not! While some apps perform better than other we can always check the blogs, newsletters and even podcasts to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations in the New Year from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan promises to be back next Monday. Look at me – I forgot to link to Lew’s podcast. Fixed. Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the long standing Beervana podcast . Plus We Are Beer People. There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a few podcasts… but some may be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link! Errr… nope, it is gone again according to Matty C.

 

The Greatest Leapday Thursday Of Your Life Edition Of The Beery News Notes

So… today is Leap Day Thursday but tomorrow is March. The second event is more exciting to me even if it doesn’t happen only every 28 years. Careful readers will know that I’ve coaxed along those plants right there down in the basement, a bit of chlorophyll green under grow lamps since November. Click for the deets. But the thrill of knowing I am going outside on Saturday to actually plant actual pea seeds under thermal cover is palpable. Palpitational even. Spring. You know, baseball and outside veg live parallel lives in these parts. March to November if you are lucky. And did I mention there’s a solar eclipse coming? We are on the path. So much doin’s going on.

What is going on with beer? There’s a theme or two forming on the horizon over the last few weeks that I want to explore a bit. For beer drinkers, it looks like a bit of a positive pattern even if it’s a pattern small brewers might not necessarily welcome. And there has been some reflection on the point of being a beer writer that goes a little past navel gazing. Along with a bunch of other stuff. But there are no new drunk domesticated animal stories. Sorry Stan.

Let’s go. First, we received a check-in from France this week from Gary Gillman who’s taking a break from the blog as he only packed his cell phone. He sent holiday snap shots like that one there. We had flash freezing warnings here last night, ourselves. Frig. It’s March Friday, right? This is sort of a category #2 story but it’s a break Gary is taking that is being put to good use according to his emails:

I am in France again… The mountains shown are in Menton, on the Mediterranean, where I stay until next Thursday. Then to Toulon down the coast, til end of month… I checked again on the history of the Abbaye de Crespin and St. Landelin ales… they were brewed by tiny Rimaux Brewery in Crespin, on the French-Belgian border. Jackson lauded the little brewery in the 1977 The World Guide to Beer, and mentioned that the local abbey once had brewed beer.  Rimaux Brewery closed forever in 1988. After that, the small Jeanne D’Arc Brewery in Ronchin, and later Enfants de Gayants Brewery in Douai which bought out Jeanne D’Arc, issued these labels, maybe by buying them from the last Rimaux owner – either that or they just started to brew their own versions to keep the names in the market,  I couldn’t confirm which. Then, in 2010 Saint-Omer Brewery in Saint-Omer buys out Enfants de Gayants, closing the Douai Brewer, and continuing some of these labels including Abbaye de Crespin and St. Landelin. So one way or another the Abbaye de Crespin Noel I pictured relates back to one of the ales in the Rimaux line, and less directly to an old heritage of abbey brewing in France similar to the Belgian tradition.

So he’s on the hunt. Working it. As is this week’s feature at Pellicle by Jana Godshall is also a romantic romp in faroff Sicily and one, unlike Gary’s emails, that includes the word “Aldo” 33 times – which makes sense because he is the winemaker at the heart of the story:

Aldo has been connected with nature, communicating and listening since he was a boy. As a fourth-generation winemaker, Aldo carries on a family tradition that spans his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father, Don Ancilino. This legacy endures as Aldo and his brother, Alessandro, continue to bottle and sell their own individual wines. Though Aldo may not explicitly label himself a winemaker, he embraces the roles of artist, farmer, composer. This symphony of skills defines his approach to his land and illustrates the importance of communication in this trade. 

There’s four of them right there! If you want to travel, too, while enriching your understanding, check out the latest Beeronomics conference will take place at University of Milan Bicocca, Italy, 19-22 June.

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

Papers being presented are expected to cover trends and driving forces in local and global beer production, consumption, distribution; management, marketing, market structure and industrial dynamics; individual beer choice and health; policy and regulation; and the impact of beer on society and culture. Also, have a look at the Historic Brewing Conference being held in Manchester, England on the 5th and 6th of August, 2024.

Always giving a learned air, Mudgie wrote a good post that started me thinking about theme #1 – it’s on the tension in economic terms between premiumisation on the one hand and, on the other, the unfortunate habit of ever rotating novel offerings. He frames the question in terms of guest beers at a pub but I think the same applies for craft in the US:

To achieve premium status, you need to be able to exercise a strong measure of control over product quality at the point of sale. You must make it possible for people to readily find your product, and to be able to make repeat purchases if they like it. And you will need to develop the perception of your product over a long period of time through a carefully considered and crafted marketing strategy. But none of this applies to rotating guest beers. Yes, it matters that the individual pub knows how to look after its beer, but if one isn’t to your taste there will be another along in a couple of days, or even later the same evening.

This is an interesting counterpoint to Jessica Mason‘s report late last week on the price of beer in one higher end Irish pub hitting 10 euros a pint:

Reports highlighted that, currently, in the main bar at the Merchant Arch, drinkers are charged €9.10 for a pint of Carlsberg and €8.65 for a pint of Guinness but these prices are due to rise in the room upstairs at the venue to €9.95 for Carlsberg and €9.65 for Guinness. Additionally, after 10pm, the venue also reportedly increases the prices further to above €10 with a pint of Carlsberg setting customers back €10.90 and a pint of Guinness costing €10.50. As part of the “late hours” prices, reports confirmed that a pint of Kilkenny costs €10.65, a Blue Moon or Chieftain pint €10.50 and a Harp pint €10.60.

See, for me, all things seeming to be equal,* I look at a pint as a unit of personal drink decision the same way a glass of wine is. And there are five 150 ml servings of wine in a bottle.  So a pint of Blue Moon at €10.50 is competing with a €52.50 bottle of wine. I am pretty sure I can buy a very nice bottle of wine when out and about for $77.20 CND. For home consumption I can actually buy two at a far higher quality** than any NNY gas station shelf regular offering like Blue Moon. And so, going back to Mudgie’s point, even if we accept premiumisation with these stable standard brands is possible… is it sustainable given the recreational alternatives?

Still… Reuters has published an interesting article suggesting that big beer may have now hit the bottom and is ready for an upswing compared to the spirits trade – which I can believe if we trust the sort of math we see above:

Unsold bottles of spirits are already piling up in some markets, shaking investor confidence in top firms like Diageo as some drinkers ditch pricey spirits for cheaper options… The risks to spirits businesses were possibly underestimated, O’Hara said, adding the stocks were also relatively expensive. “Beer is easier: it’s resilient, there’s very little downtrading…” he continued, adding there was a consensus building around this view. The world’s largest brewer AB InBev… is expected to benefit in 2024 from easier comparative numbers following a sharp drop in U.S. sales of key brand Bud Light last year due to a boycott. Moritz Kronenberger, a portfolio manager at Germany’s Union Investment, which invests across spirits and beer, said some drinkers appeared to be swapping back from spirits to beer.

Building on that confidence (and with a passage that I might have written during 2008 market meltdown) Eloise Feilden has written about beer as the affordable luxury during the UK’s dip into recession:

…people still want to treat themselves, and alcohol is one of the major categories which experiences continued spending on luxury items. Half (49%) of adults bought premium alcoholic drinks in the 12 months to October 2023, including 42% of those describing their finances as tight/struggling, according to Mintel’s research…  “brands at the higher end of mass-market like San Miguel and Corona were among star performers in lager.”

So, if we see expansion of macro as micro-craft continues slides, as premium comes to mean Corona and not Hazy IPA made in your own town… who wins? Good at least to see a hint that beer might not actually be going out of style – even if beer that isn’t all that beery might be.

Slightly shifting, we see a different meaning of value for this season of Lent (according to a regular source that Stan and I seem to share) the Catholic News Agency:

The brewery created the beer in collaboration with Father Brian Van Fossen. The priest told CNA this week that he went to high school with Mark Lehman, one of the co-owners of the brewery. “I discovered a doppelbock beer which was rooted with the Paulaner brothers in Munich, Germany,” he said. “The beer consisted of strong grains and an interesting mixture of hops and barley, which provided a strong nutrient content.” The priest said the beer was originally developed as part of the “strict fast of the Paulaner monastery.” The beer “celebrates the history of the Doppelbock beer style and its ties with the Lenten season,” the press release announcing the beer said. The beer collaboration is meant to help fund the diocese’s “Rectory, Set, Cook!” program to help feed homeless people.

And Barry has been on top of his role at Cider Review seriously and shared the news of a piece on a recent tasting of traditional British ciders for the drinks press:

Looking around the room as we assembled at a charmingly re-appropriated high school science lab table-top, complete with obligatory teenage graffiti and holes where Bunsen burners once stood, Adam identified a number of very well-known wine writers. Quite by chance I got chatting to acclaimed drinks writer Jessica Mason, who then sat down with Adam and I for the tasting. In terms of writers with a laser-focus on all things of pomme-based origin, it was just Mr Wells and Mr Toye. Cross pollination in nature, as in drinks writing, is a wondrous thing however, and it was heartening to hear the inquisitive nature of many of the writers in the room, eager to find the similarities and differences between pressing the apple and pressing the grape.

Writing about writers! Speaking of which, GBH seems to woken from its extended winter slumber with the first “Sightlines” column shared beyond the handful from Kate Bernot in weeks (on the “declining sales, layoffs, vacant sales leadership roles, and two packaging rebrands” at Lagunitas) as well as this excellent piece by Kiki Aranita on how Pennsylvania’s strict liquor laws include a fabulous loophole that helps state drinks makers bigly:

It’s clear that this model has the potential to benefit customers like me, and the system works pretty well for winemakers and distillers in the region, too. Without a full rewriting of the state’s liquor codes, not much is going to change for the community at large, but Enswell is showing us that there is another way. Maybe our restaurateurs don’t have to be beholden to obtaining a traditional liquor license, and maybe they don’t have to source and serve alcohol from all over the world when there are excellent options being produced nearby. And maybe that’s the best we can do for now. 

No word on the effect of the law on beer. Which is… you know. Perhaps back to theme #2, Ron‘s been sharing some inner thoughts, skipping past that one question that has really bugged me for years:***

One of the questions I get asked most often – along with “Why is your blog called that?”, “Why don’t you get a haircut?”, “Who is this mysterious woman called Dolores?” and “Are you sure you want a pint of Imperial Stout this early in the day?” – is “When are you going to write a book about Ireland?” I think I’ve already got the title nailed down. But that’s about it. Which is why my answer has always been: “I don’t have enough information.” That wouldn’t have put everyone off. In the past, at least. Being positive (however uneasy that makes me feel), writers just making stuff up doesn’t happen now. So much. A second answer is: more research.

Fear not for Ron. He’s off junketeering in Rio. Not ATJ who wrote the partial sentence of the week over at his Substack blog not blog:

…I sat in a somnolent pub, alone apart from a small dog…

And Jeff drew back the curtain and explained – or perhaps started to explain – his obsession with beer:

I’ve spent half a life writing about beer, a decade and a half doing it for a living, and yet I’ve rarely even considered what it means to me, personally. I’ve always mined meaning from those breweries and countries I’ve visited, placing my spotlight outward. Looking back, I realize I have a lot of those Crown Street experiences rattling around my brain. More than that, over those long years—and well before, extending back into late adolescence—I see the ways in which beer has threaded through my life experience. It was there, as a rebellion, in high school. In college it was a celebration. In early adulthood, homesick in Wisconsin, it was a lifeline back to lupulin-green Oregon. Throughout my life it has rarely been center frame, but as my life morphed from wannabe professor to social work researcher to political writer, from single cab driver to married homeowner, from barfly to boring old man, it was never out of frame either. That is true of very little else in my life.

Good reflections. It’s a bit of a different experience from mine but not in any way more or less worthwhile. It’s good to reflect on one’s own singular experience.*** There are so many whys out there. Why is this publication more stable than that?  Why does that glaring error get hedged while that one sails through? Me, I only started out doing this to mainly to explain my interest in beer to me. The taverns of youth and all the money we left behind. Why’d we do that? And it turns out, I am lucky that my job gives me a lot of opportunity to unpack anything from criminality to specifications of concrete to the sope of medical consents… and asking every second day “why the heck did they do that?!?!” My hobbies too, including beer but in its place along with plenty of other things. A lot of looking for the why. So, the path of others has been always been of interest to me. Back in the fall of 2020 when Boak and Bailey broke the tension of the pre-vaccine Covid world by reaching out via Zoom by a few people including me, the main question on my mind was “why… why do we do this?” but I am not sure I put it in quite that way when we met screen to screen. Why? It’s a good question to ask.

Finally, we learned Wednesday of the very sad news of the passing of Van Turner retired from leading role with the Kingston Brewing Company, one of the founders of the microbrewing scene in Canada. Even before we lived here, we arranged travel to include the KBC going back around thirty years now. Van always had time to talk about everything from trends to history. Time for everyone. Very sad news.

That was that… And here we are. The 29th. Remember last week when I realized that this was the third time I’ll experience a Leapday Thursday in my life… then last Saturday I realized… could well be my last. The next one will be in 2052. I’ll be 88 – if I make it that far. So… err… on that cheery note… roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes. There is a lot going on down here and, remember, ye who read this far down, look to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (123) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (913) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (up again to 4,456) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (165), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. I now have admitted my dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat, relocated the links and finally accept that BlueSky is the leader in “the race to replace” Twex even while way behind.

Fear not! While some apps perform better than other we can always check the blogs, newsletters and even podcasts to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations in the New Year from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan really doing what needs to be done Mondays. Look at me – I forgot to link to Lew’s podcast. Fixed. Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a podcast… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link! Errr… nope, it is gone again according to Matty C.

*Check my math. €10 is pushing $15 CND which is an hour’s mini-wage here. In Ireland, minimum wage is €12.70 or $18.75 CND. But it seems average incomes in Ireland and Canada are about the same, say both lining up to about $48,000 USD.
**Like a five year old St. Joseph or a 15 year old Colheita port.
***The haircuts… the haircuts!!!