Category: Belgium

The Thursday Beery News Notes For The Second Third of The Tenth Twelfth

It’s hard coming up with new headlines every week, isn’t it. Look at that up there. It hardly makes any sense at all. And it’s getting a bit hard coming up with light entertaining content about beer to share. It’s usually all about something other than beer or like beer or nearly about beer. Like the best thing I saw this week – the tweet accompanied by the image to the left, captioned:

Toddlers in the 1970s looked like pensioners waiting for happy hour in a working men’s club.

This week, let’s look at stories about beer. Beery stories. You bet. Not about something related to beer or something just associated with beer. Hey, Jordan wrote something about beer… or actually drew it. He has created a map and a spreadsheet of all the current breweries and contract beer companies (firms which by beer from actual brewers, including on contract) on Ontario. It’s on his site and over to the right under the dropdown thingie. There. Help him by sending corrections… err, updates. Everyone likes that.

That’s about beer, right? Sure… well, maybe. Is this about beer? Ron wrote about UK cask during WW2 – not cask ale, just the wood in the casks:

In normal times British brewers would never have used American oak as it imparted too much flavour to the beer it contained. Unlike today, brewers wanted to avoid any trace of oak in their beer. Its presence was seen as a fault. But, with the supply of Memel oak dried up, brewers had little choice. When supplies of American oak in turn began to evaporate, brewers had to turn to a more local source.

OK, may be not but it was about something touching beer. Stan! Stan writes about beer like he did last week. He wrote again and got published again – this time about hop creep… which is not actually about the loud loser at the end of the bar in the crafty tavern:

“Hop Creep” isn’t the name of a beer-themed horror movie—just a real, ongoing mystery that brewers and hop scientists are still sorting out. Oregon State University’s Tom Shellhammer, one of the country’s top brewing scientists, says that his earliest moments of being introduced to the phenomenon were about five years ago, although he didn’t realize it at the time. “I was giving a talk at the 2015 Craft Brewers Conference, and somebody in the Q & A asked, ‘Hey, do you see people getting diacetyl when they dry hop?’ I was like, ‘No.’” Diacetyl is one result of hop creep. Beer with more alcohol than a brewery intended—which brewers call “out of spec”—is another, as are bottles or cans with dangerously high levels of carbonation.

Hops! Hops are in beer. And, in his return to London pubs and the blogging of same, the Tand put the beer into the Tand:

…there was a mission to accomplish. A visit to a Sam’s pub to establish London prices following the recent price increase. We chose the John Snow… a nice little boozer and trade was steady on this Wednesday afternoon.  I had the stout, which needed the gas changing, while E had a half of Pure Brewed. The price list was snapped when the barman wasn’t looking and duly posted to a certain Curmudgeon. Prices are on the wickedly high side and now by no means a bargain. It does make you wonder how they’ll compete on this basis.  One other thing. The notices forbidding this and that, which are found all over Northern Sam’s pubs, are conspicuous by their absence. I know. I checked everywhere. Double standards from Mr Smith it seems.

Hardly anything about the excellent Pellicle post this week by Helen Jerome on a cidery in Devon was about beer, but it did start with expected traditional character profile on the person behind the operation in question, deviating only by finding someone who was not first an unhappy accountant:

Spool back to late 2015, and Polly decided she’d had enough of sitting in an office. She needed a fresh challenge. Growing up in Devon, she gained a foundation in science with A-levels in chemistry, physics and biology; taken a module with Master of Wine Susan McCraith while doing a degree in Equine Business; studied Sustainable Agriculture at postgraduate level, then completed an EU-funded ‘slow food’ study tour in Tuscany. She’d never really been into cider though… 

Speaking of science and even a bit about beer, Ed wrote about the scourge of taking the free case of beer and how that ethical flaw of his gnaws at his very soul – except there was a twist:

As every beer blogger knows getting free beer is the easiest thing in the world. Though breweries might grizzle about it, threaten them with a bad review and they’re sending you a case of beer as fast as their little legs can carry it. But despite this due to my insatiable greed I immediately said yes when offered a Hobgoblin beer and bugs snack pack.

Speaking of which, BBC News itself ran an excellent piece on social median influencers – aka what used to be called blegging – and the associated cap in hand:

Like many businesses during Covid-19, Reshmi has seen a change in her customers’ behaviour. Although many people cut back on unnecessary purchases, her bakery was busy as people carried on ordering her celebration cakes. Yet she also noticed influencers were asking for more freebies too. It’s something she has done in the past – looking at the influencer and their posts, who follows them, how they engage with their audience, but says it didn’t work for her. “We have never had a sale off someone [saying] they saw our cake on someone’s post or profile, it’s always been through word of mouth, from paying customers.”

This is interesting. Even if cake is not beer. I have heard many a chortler and scribe announce that “it’s not like anyone could think I have compromised myself by the free samples” but it’s not something you can really say for yourself. And it never plays out that way. Best to pay your way. Folk notice and note. Unless there are edible bugs involved.

Related, the question of free food in pubs. Discuss.

Suzy Aldridge posted something of a goodbye to all that in response to a BrewDog franchise opening up in her English city of Lincoln:

Now I’m out. It’s surreal. I’m looking in from the outside and seeing the struggles in the industry, seeing how friends are marching on. I almost feel left behind, lost, but also that I’ve escaped. I’ve sidestepped into a new career path by pure luck. It’s not something I love like beer but it’s interesting, it pays the bills and, unlike hospitality, the rug won’t be swept from under my feet, then shoved back, then removed again. I’m comfortable, even as I drink some of the very last bottles of Lincolnshire Brewing Co that are in my fridge. 

Eoghan Walsh posted a new podcast at Brussels Beer City featuring an interview with Jean Van Roy of Brussels brewery Brasserie Cantillon. He wisely avoided raising my accusations of 2006 but, still, had a good beery chat:

On a scorching hot early September day on the eve of brewing season for Cantillon, we met at a bar influential not only for the city but also for him, and his family brewery. We talk lambic evangelisation in a country that still doesn’t really get it, his youthful escapades drinking crap beer with friends, how is approach to brewing has changed thanks to his relationships with winemakers and chefs, and how the brewery’s corridors ring hollow and lonely in the absence of American, Italian and other foreign accents.

Elsewhere, you know there is nothing going on in beer in some corners if the discussion turns to flat flavoured water with vodka added.

Speaking of beer and corners, in this week’s edition of That Sorta Happened in Beer History, Mudge the Elder asked this question and got answers:

It’s before my time, but does anyone remember (or have talked to those who do) whether waiter service was commonplace in pubs across the UK in the 50s and 60s, or was it primarily a Northern thing?

A whole new world was revealed to mine eyes.  Someone identifying themselves only as “[Bx2-B=R]” stated:

Primarily northern, my Lancastrian mum says, and common enough there that she didn’t find it weird; down south, mostly seems to have been an inter-war fad in big new pubs and died out with WWII. [Ray]

Talk of bell pushes, tipping and waiters in burgundy jackets with “silver” trays ensued.  Sit down before you start through the thread.

Beer crime of a newer sort happened over in Michigan, as noted by the worst beer blogger ever:

…there was no money on the premise, and luckily no vandalism, but the intruders were there for more than a half an hour. “They ended up pouring nine beers,” he said. “It’s not somebody having a quick beer and leaving.” One of the men called someone and then soon, a bunch of kids entered the premises, running around and looking through the brewery’s merchandise. Luckily, the kids seemed to only have pop, not alcohol…

Another sort of loss is happening in bars like this out of Winnipeg that I don’t think I’ve seen reported in this way before even though it is very 2020:

It’s enough to make a brewski aficionado weep while sudsy hops are poured down the sink. An enormous amount of beer is going to waste in Winnipeg thanks to some bars and pubs being forced to close due to the coronavirus pandemic. Other establishments operating at reduced capacity are also having to dump hundreds of gallons down the drain…

I love the first sentence. If you hate sudsy and brewski, then you at least have to admire the proper use of aficionado.

Anyway, finally and speaking of which… perhaps… no, not really… there were comments made after the announcement of the NAGBJ awards… what’s that?… oh, it’s back to a “w”… BAGNW… is that it? Anyway, my comments were limited to “Third?!?!” and “Third?!?!” given I was mystified at certain outcomes. But I used to judge these things as part of panels, too, and I know that there are limits and these limits are realities. As I have noted before, these quibbles mainly hover around process and in particular nominations being from the authors and/or publishers. It would be easy enough to just send all members ballots rather than the filtering function of judging panels. They are also limited in audience as many folk don’t need or care about awards, especially once an “award-winning” adjective is already allocated to the bio.* Yet:

I just want people to know it’s totally normal, okay, and valid to wish for recognition and acknowledgement of a job well done. I don’t write about the things I write about because I NEED those things, but darn if it doesn’t feel good when it happens.

Boom! As with all the medals, I presume it is a stepping stone for the aspiring – which is good and normal and to be encouraged. And a small reward in a field without much recognition.

But, unlike during the years of my own experience, concerns and even unfair slags were raised about it all being too GBH focused or even bad back scratchy.  In homage to 1830s British Parliamentary politics, lobbying continues for the establishment and the reformers. While many entries or entrants have appeared on that bloggy space’s webby pages… well, what is wrong with that?  Especially as other outlets have been disappearing for years? Small pond. That’s where we swim. I do say that while acknowledging (having sifted through it all week after week now for years) I think there is a sort of beer trade writing of a sort not only is a bit samey and a bit goal oriented or even formulaic (the last paragraph often seems written first, as it were) but still a sort which may attract praise within a circle of co-aspirants. Well? So what!?! Why be a grump in all things? It’s just, yes, light entertainment – and we have to remember that much beer writing is actually very good, including, yes, even at GBH.** Perhaps not as much as they would say… but, in the end, Beth did entirely the proper thing and set the record straight in vivid technicolour. Go Team Beth.***

That’s a lot. I’m done. As always, remember there’s more out there. Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays (this week Jordan touts discount ham!!!) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Not to mention Cabin Fever. And Ben has finally gone all 2009 and joined in with his own podcast, Beer and Badword. And remember BeerEdge, too.

*No one cares about being “awards-winning” do they?
**Let’s stick with very good, shall we. Superlatives are so… not superlative. Plus, I’m a Pellicle sort of person. 
***See the “*” here.

Your Thursday Newsy Notes For The End Of July In Beerland

After last week’s mess of unified theory of a something or other, it would be nice to find some chat that is (i) about beer and (ii) not about other things. You know, those bits of the trivial dribble that attracted me to scribbling about beer in the first place. It’s not just that good beer got into sectarian schisms, then politics, then laced with the pandemic – it’s that it all got so real. Don’t get me wrong, the real is good and important. But sometimes I like to wallow in, the vital but unimportant things in life. Like that really sad BBQ pack, above, that my pal Brian saw at a Maritime Canadian grocery store this week. Pointless… yet strangely compelling.

As a means to hopefully show what I mean, consider this wonderful bit by Katie in Pellicle on the place of burger vans in her life:

This is where I draw the line between burger vans and food trucks. For me, food trucks bring me images of gourmet falafel wraps, jackfruit tacos, outrageous fried chicken and homemade sauces. They’re run by chefs and dreamers on enthusiasm and aspiration, passion and excitement. I enjoy them, but they are a different beast. A burger van might also be a grill on wheels, but that’s where the comparisons stop. A burger van is a means to an end. The owners are chipper, but brisk and efficient. The sauces are bulk-bought and sharp with vinegar and citric acid.

Lovely writing about what is basically… well, is “…what my mum would call “a waste of money.” I have especially enjoyed following her family’s obsession with Superbike, something which really does not exist in my imaginary North America, something British which I only know through staring at 1930s racing championship programs on offer at eBay.

Beer reviews. That is pretty old school straight forward beer blogging, right? Well, Alistair over at Fuggled has renewed his blogging activity and shared his thoughts on one old friend, London Pride:

There are times when I drink this that I really understand why American brewers and drinkers have such a hard time grasping the fact bitter should be, well, bitter. It’s not that it is terribly sweet, though the mouthfeel feels a little like undissolved jelly cubes, it’s that the hops are nudged out by the famous Fuller’s yeast character, as well as not being the same kind of citrus as folks are used to here. So many breweries here use very clean top fermenting yeasts that the character of the beer is so different, and I wonder if American breweries under hop the tyle as a result?

And when the conscientious beer blogger is not writing reviews, she or he should be discussing pubs like the Tand himself did this week when he wrote about one of his “…favourite pubs in the UK, the Coalbrookdale Inn in, well Coalbrookdale…” and included this fabulous paragraph:

After a few minutes – the pub has a more or less square bar – the landlord shouted “Phone call for Peter”.  We all ignored this. Now to explain to my younger reader, back in those days – pre mobile phone – it wasn’t at all unusual to call a pub and ask to speak to “whoever” if he is in.  Now nobody knew we were there we thought and therefore the call out in a busy pub could not possibly be for any of us and could be safely ignored. We carried on supping. Having got no response, the barman returned to the phone, presumably to relate the lack of success to the caller.  A few seconds later he appeared in front of us. “Any of you lads Peter Alexander?” quoth our hero. I stammered “Me” while we all looked on in astonishment. “Phone call for you” he said.

Do you like brewing history? Good news for all! The UK’s National Brewery Centre’s archives have gone online:

Two years ago a project began to produce a digital catalogue and this is what launches today. At a cost of £50,000, it was funded by generous grants from the likes of the Consolidated Charity of Burton on Trent, Staffordshire Community Foundation, the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) and the Brewers’ Research Education Fund, additional funds were raised from corporate and individual donors as well as via a crowdfunding campaign. The archive system was designed and built by Shrewsbury-based digital heritage consultants Orangeleaf Systems, whose other projects include The Parliamentary Archives and the Royal Mail Archives.

More fabulousness!

Lars opened up a small can of worms in a very small pantry when he asked “What counts as a farmhouse ale?” in an actual blog post:

The most common question I get in interviews is “what do you consider to be a farmhouse ale?” and since the answer is a little involved I decided to write it up more fully. There is a fairly clear-cut definition, but it takes a little explaining.

I think the only issue is that Lars has to have one footnote to the first paragraph that reads “*supra, Lars” given he is both the reporter and the compiler of the information in the topic. I don’t necessarily agree with the idea that there is a thing called “farmhouse ales” which is an umbrella noun under which all styles fall. But I do like it as a process description that is identifying similar practices playing out in sheds and kitchens in disconnected locations. As a function of what the life of a farmhouse includes.  As Lars notes in his piece:

In the 18th and the 19th Centuries, you had plenty of farming treatises being published. In most if not all of them you have a chapter on brewing.

Brewing as a farming function as much as managing the manure pile or tilling the fields. Note: the wonderful Girardin grows its own grain and has done so for generations… but it may not be brewing farmhouse ale.

Perhaps less monumental that van burgers or les bieres des shed, is the story told by B+B of pubs collecting pennies for charity in post-war Britain:

Looking through old brewery in-house magazines from the 1950s and 60s, one recurring image is inescapable: a monstrous pile of pennies on a bar, in the process of being toppled by a celebrity.

Jeff wrote about losing his blog’s sponsorship to Covid (sorta like I did in the aftermath of the market crash of 2008) which is a very brave admission and not really fabulous at all:

The first question was whether I should even continue with the site. Most writers don’t maintain blogs. They would rather put their effort into procuring and writing paid gigs. It was kind of crazy that I hadn’t monetized the site at all for its first decade, and I realized I couldn’t put the hours of work into it for free anymore. Either ditch it or—sorry for the crass jargon—monetize it. I decided to try the latter before resorting to the former, and considered how to do so in the way that would minimize my conflict of interest while maximizing revenue.

Keep the blog. Writing gigs may make money but the writing is Dullsville.

And lastly, Stan went into the woods this week and he sure got a big surprise.

Enough unreality for you? Fine. OK…. here are the top real news items for the week:

1. JJB took a side on the small brewers’ tax credit reforms in England and Wales. Matt is angry over the same thing.

2. Jeff has split off his political writing from his beer blog to share what he is seeing on the front lines of the fight in the US’s pro-democracy movement in his hometown.

3. Alcohol use, especially heavy use, weakens the immune system and thus reduces the ability to cope with infectious diseases.

4. And today would be a great day to arrest those who killed Breonna Taylor.

Don’t forget it is real out there.  The cool sip of a mild legal intoxicant that is wearing down your internal organs prematurely should not distract you too much from the real. Beer isn’t real.*

There. Done. Some great pro-am and am beer writing for the week. A bit of a side show but, still, worthy in itself. For more, check in with Boak and Bailey most Saturdays, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Not to mention Cabin Fever. And Ben has finally gone all 2009 and joined in with his own podcast, Beer and Badword.

*The latest blurt from Stone should be enough proof of that.

The Two-Thirds Into Spring 2020 Edition Of Thursday Beery News Notes

I am having trouble with time. I thought it would drag but it’s racing for me. I thought it was maybe May 9th when I woke up. 11:45 am comes at an alarming pace each day. Things are opening up here. Tennis but no football. Playing catch as long as no one get tagged out at home. It’s sensible as we have done a good job locking the damn bug down… but then what. Society is temporarily reorganizing to maximize activity safely. I want to get a beer at a patio but so far it’s still my own patio in my own backyard. Just grateful that this isn’t happening in any November I’ve known.

As excellently illustrated above by Yves Harman, Reuters reported that the Mons of the Saint-Sixtus abbey are up and at’em:

The Saint-Sixtus abbey, home to 19 monks, launched an online sale on Thursday evening of 6,000 crates, with pick-ups starting Friday. Exceptionally, customers can buy three crates. Normally it is just two. Customers can come as usual by car, but are told not to leave their vehicles while queuing until they pass a newly installed traffic light before the pick-up point. There, a lay worker in mask and gloves passes their 24-bottle crates through a small gap in a plastic screen. 

Good for them. I am not obsessive about the stuff but nice to see money flowing. Beer Ritz is opening, too, and Buckfast is back – buct Cookie wants more. You know, it’ll be interesting in the post-mortem if we learn that Covid-19 can actually be transmitted though small gaps in plastic screens.

Matthew has gotten his game going, too, as illustrated by this post on how beer bloggers are coping with Covid-19. I must be losing my touch as all the targets are not obvious to me (but interesting to see Tandyman disappointed in being left out):

Any kind of pub-type experience is at least ten weeks away at this point, so at best we’re not even halfway through this yet.  But if you, dear reader, think that you are suffering, imagine the travails of those most affected by this ordeal – the pub and beer bloggers of the UK.  As this particular blog is among those that are most well-regarded and connected, we at Seeing The Lizards have asked a select group of other bloggers on how they’re coping while cut off from their usual stimuli.  And, importantly, how much they’re drinking as a result.

Dr. J. J.-B. tweeted some excellent thoughts about her role in the overall construct of social justice advocacy within craft brewing and lessons learned from both Covid-19 and her carpentry skills:

Keynote speaking, workshops, and intensive on-site consulting are simply not tools that we can rely upon in a post-COVID world. And those tools had severe limitations that I am enthusiastically addressing over these weeks of physical distancing.

Good. She has shared hints of this before and I have to admit I am pleased. I have had at times a role in advocating for indigenous rights among legal circles as well as the importance of records related privacy rights and the public speaking role can seem to trigger a easy nod from the audience rather than a revivalist’s commitment. I am rooting for her. Fight!

Gary has posted a very good discussion on California Steam Beer which I like most of all because it aligns with my own thoughts on the matter while going into more detail:

The one area I do not necessarily agree with these authorities, contemporary as they are, is their assignment of steam beer as solely bottom-fermented. Clearly they state this, indeed Wahl & Henius state that lager yeast is a special type of bottom yeast. Kummerlander simply states that steam beer yeast is “a bottom-fermenting yeast”, but that’s clear enough. Buchner ditto. I find the area much less clear. To scientists and technical brewers after about 1900, classification was increasingly important, as of course today. Between 1850 and 1900 when steam beer was in ascendancy in California and still often made in rude conditions, e.g., without mechanical cooling of wort, such distinctions would have been less important.

It also serves as a good companion to Jeff’s post on Anchor Steam of a few weeks ago. It is settled. “Steam” was just useful techno-branding.

Speaking of early 1900s brewing, Ron posted an interesting piece on German WWI brewing constraints:

I’ve seen UK brewing records where ther’s (sic) the odd much stronger version brewed, which is then blended with weaker beers post-fermentation. The point being to get healthy yeast to be pitched into later brews. And that was when worts were in the 1020ºs, considerably higher than the 3º Plato (1012º) they had been forced down to in Germany.

And in more brewerio-historique news, Martyn has made a plea for today’s brewers to record what is happening during this pandemic for the future Rons out there:

…even though brewers have plenty and more to do just to try to survive right now, I have a request, as a historian: when this IS all over, or even before, if you have a moment, please, take time to record what you did, what you’re doing, to survive, what strategies you adopted, what changes you made, from organising home deliveries to turning your beer into hand-sanitizer. Because in ten, 20, 50 years’ time, people will be looking back at this and saying: “Wow – what must it have been like to have lived through that, to have tried to run a company, keep it going, while all that was going on?” And you can let them know.

Katie is taking sensible breaks.

For the double and as part of the Twitter discussion on the utility and limits of style as a construct, Ron has posted a challenge to identify which late 1930s British ales were branded at IPAs:

To emphasise the difficulty, nay, impossibility of splitting apart UK Pale Ale and IPA in the 20th century, I thought up a little game. It’s called spot the IPA. The table is of various beer brewed in 1938 and 1939. Some were called as Pale Ale and some were called IPA. Can you tell which is which? The IBU value is my calculation, based on the recipe. Got gospel, but at least a general indication of the bitterness level.

I am of the “style = branding” school of grump but many other well stated views are in the thread which may have started back here with Jeff (double) on May 10th… (who cites Ron which may make for a treble.)

And, if you squint, you can read Beth‘s contribution to Craft Beer & Brewing mag on the situation in Oakland. Excellent.

That’s it for now. Might have a couple of beer after work tomorrow. Now that the blood pressure is back down. Gotta watch out for bad habits in these times of stress. Keep writing and reading and keeping up with the chin uppitry. Check in with Boak and Bailey most Saturdays, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Not to mention Cabin Fever. Thanks for stopping by while not leaving the house.

 

 

These Are Ye Beere News For Yon Thursdayish This Month From Yuletide

And I suppose the lead up to US Thanksgiving. I am not in the US and, honestly, does it feel a bit late for a harvest fest. The parsley is under snow now around these parts. But the Grey Cup is on this Sunday so that’s good. Hamilton versus Winnipeg.  Oskeeweewee Oskkeewahwah! Say that out loud a lot this weekend – wherever you are. And whether it’s Canada’s autumnal glory* or turkeytime down south, do take care. I didn’t… by which I mean I forgot to note whose tweet I grabbed this lovely common sense public health poster from last Friday. D’uh. [I lie. It was Martyn.]

I was complaining (again)** about the lack of interesting beer writing last week and immediately I was hammered by some fine examples. Consider this realistic vision of Brussels from Eoghan Walsh at Brussels Beer City:

Brussels stinks. It really stinks. Some days it smells glorious, of skewered rotisserie chickens dripping their paprika-stained grease onto the footpath or of the sweet scent of mashed-in grain that marks a new lambic season. On other days it is repellent – the amoniac fug of warming piss rising from pavements heralding summer’s arrival, or the damp choking fumes of the city’s unending winter congestion. 

Lovely stuff. In another hemisphere, Jordan St. John painted another sort of truthful picture of the start of affairs off the Mimico station platform a few stops to the west of downtown Toronto:

…I get the sense that 18 beers would be a lot to maintain. Some of these beers are re-using constituent elements and are not unlike each other. Take the Steampunk Saison, my notes verbatim: “Quite Sweet, Graham Cracker malt character, a little golden raisin or apricot jam character here. Low carbonation for a Saison. Mild notes of spicy orange peel amidst that.” It struck me as closer to Fuller’s ESB with the yeast switched out than a classic Saison. The Belgian style Tripel struck me as a larger version of the same beer. Still stone fruit and graham cracker, but with the intensity dialled up, reaching towards peach nectar. Checking in with the brewmaster, Adam Cherry, he confirmed that the ingredient builds were similar.

It’s a lovely portrait of the sort of locally successful, regionally recognized but also somewhat ordinary brewery that unfortunately rarely gets noted in the rush for the next amaze-balls moment. My immediate response was that Jordan had deftly displayed how to be both fairly critical and warmly encouraged – and encouraging – simultaneously. Exactly the best sort of analysis that, like Eoghan’s olfactory piece, places you by the writer’s side senses engaged.

An excellent and not unrelated discussion took place this week between Beth D and Crystal L as well as others on the role of judging and judges. I took my usual coward’s stance but went back to consider both the challenges of seeking and independent voice while wanting to be recognized as a peer. I’m grateful that they shared their thoughts.

Elsewhere, humility not being their strong suit, I am not surprised by the puffery. But would you really pay for the ever-loving cattle branded “two sides to every story” approach? Real money? Me neither. No doubt in response to the other subscriber offering mentioned a few weeks ago. God love ’em.

2020 is coming. Are your ready? I’m not. But I might feel better if I was heading to the Alcohol and Drugs History Society’s meeting on Friday, January 3rd and 4th, 2020 at the New York Hilton, Concourse Level.  I’d want to be there if only for the presentation by Stephen N. Sanfilippo, of the Maine Maritime Academy, of his paper “It’s My Own Damn Fault; or Is It?” Alcohol and the Assignment of Blame in Mid-19th-Century Maritime Songs and Poems. Being a lad raised by the sea in Nova Scotia, the only place cooler than Maine, I eat this stuff up:

Many nineteenth century seamen’s songs praise consumption of alcohol. Naval victory ballads often end with a toast by the victors, and sometimes include the sharing of liquor with the vanquished. Jack-Back-in-Port ditties also sing the praise of alcohol. This paper will give only passing attention to such songs. Instead, attention will be given to those seamen’s songs, and temperance reformers’ poems, in which alcohol consumption leads to disaster. Such songs and poems always involve the placing of blame. This placement is often not what might be expected, and is frequently complex and illusive.

In their monthly newsletter, Boak and Bailey sought to calm the waters of beer’s social media effect on those caught in its grasp:

Twitter in general can be frustrating, of course, but the conversation around beer is so much better now for us than it was a few years ago when the volume of trolls and bullies felt overwhelming at times. But this is a genuine request: if you think Beer Twitter is particularly terrible, if it really gets you down, can you drop us a line to explain why? Maybe there’s something we’re missing, and maybe there’s something we could do to help.

I think I agree. My behaviour has particularly improved. Far less bastardliness going around these days. At least amongst the scribblers as not all sorts of bad behaviour in beer is gone as Matt let me know of the crime and punishment of a figure in the UK’s craft beer scene.

The founder of a Norwich brewery who duped a businessman into paying £30,000 for equipment he never owned showed a “cavalier” approach to business, a court has heard.  Patrick Fisher, 39, has been jailed after he pleaded guilty to two fraud charges, including one which saw him submit false invoices. Fisher, of School Avenue, Thorpe St Andrew, who was previously a director of Norwich’s Redwell Brewery, admitted one count of fraud by making a false representation to Russell Evans between January 1, 2015, and January 31, 2017, when he claimed to own brewing equipment, when he did not.

That seems to be a bit unfair to Cavaliers, doesn’t it. No, he showed a criminal approach to business. Nice sort of old school larcenous heart to the court case, however.  Very Greene v. Cole, circa 1680-ish.

You might think the same thing is going on with the news about New Belgium being sold into the Kirin universe.  Yawn, I thought. So four years ago. And  the workers got a big payout, right? But then I read this one Facebook from a (former?) employee:

…please don’t lose your “dangerously unbridled in my passion for craft beer” I still have mine. That is the saddest part of this, I feel like everything I was taught, believed and shared at NBB was a fucking lie. I still love this industry and am proud to be working with new, small independent and innovative breweries everyday! It’s not OK to tap out! We need to remain CRAFT to the core. Watch your growth, listen to your employees and don’t chase trends continue to be a trendsetter. The industry needs you stay strong!!

Hmm… has that ship sailed? Maybe. Anyway, that is the week that was. For further beery links, your weekend starts with the Boak and Bailey news update on Saturday and then turn the dial on the wireless to the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays. And look to see if there was a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter. It’s usually got even more linky goodness.

*Not unrelated to my own glory days… because they pass you by… glory days…
**Even Jeff noticed with concern.

The Week We All Decided Good Beer Is Anti-Fascist Edition Of The Thursday Beer News

Ah, the last few days of summer… as long as we were are in the northern hemisphere. The neighborhood is literally humming with sound of critters, birds and bugs out gathering in the last of their winter’s stores. It’s actually quite the thing. Consider for a moment Keats’s Ode to Autumn, would you? My grapes are in that place between perfect ripeness and being mobbed by robins and blue jays. The chipmunks are invited. Few others are.

First up, Jordan and Robin interviewed the principals of the kveik roadshow driving through central Canada this week. Note: Lars says “kwehk” at the 8:10 mark of the audio but everyone else is saying “kvehk” so I really need this cleared up. I had to give up my own ticket to the event but it was put to good use as the photo above shows.

Speaking of beery gatherings, an interesting comment was made about the reaction to beers at a festival by one Florida brewer:

I make beer, have had this happen countless times, and completely disagree. Not everyone is going to like everything. And in a festival setting, etiquette often goes right out the window. I’d suggest removing ego from the equation, but then we wouldn’t have 7,500 breweries.

My thought was it was important to leave buckets and spittoons at fests as the dumping of the unwanted beer is always so common, either by the frenzied ticker or the simply disappointed.

The Chicago Tribune has reported on the hugely positively social media phenomenon #IAmCraftBeer that Dr. J thought to use to redirect a discussion that began with a very ugly start:

Chalonda White checked her phone Monday afternoon and saw a strange and jarring email. It was just three sentences and 35 words, sent to the address on her Afro Beer Chick website, where White, a Rogers Park resident, has blogged about her love of craft beer since 2017. It came from a name she’d never heard of — she suspects it was a pseudonym — laced with hate, misogyny and racism, including three uses of the N-word.

I might have just gone straight to “hate mail” and “Nazi” myself having seen Chalonda’s reaction on Twitter soon after she posted it.  It was certainly good to see the hundred of positive reactions but also an important reminder that fascists find dirty corners to crawl into in every aspect of life. Good to make them uncomfortable anyway we can.

The Pursuit of Abbeyness has shared a welcome blog post on national parks in the British Peak District.

Given this longstanding industrial heritage, it is no surprise to find brewing prevalent in and around the Peaks. Burton-upon-Trent sits just 25km to the south, after all. Within the boundaries of the national park itself lie Thornbridge, Peak Ales, Taddington, Intrepid, Bradfield, Flash and the Wincle Beer Co. On its fringes there are a dozen or so more, including Abbeydale, Buxton and Torrside. And that is before we get to the thriving beer culture of Sheffield proper, or indeed Manchester.

Did someone say England? The BBC Archives shared video of the 1948 English hop harvest last Friday.

Furthermore and within that same decade, this series of photos commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Brussels when British troops arrived on the outskirts of the city in the evening of September 3, 1944 includes the image of Manneken Pis dressed as one of the liberating soldiers in full dress uniform.

The New Yorker magazine had an interesting article by Troy Patterson this week on natural wines which have always struck me as a partner to some of beer’s crueler styles. This snippet does not deter me from that suggestion:

One section featured the variety of skin-contact wines known as orange wines. One of these, from Friuli, glowed tropically in my candlelit glass. The list explained orange wine as a white wine that is made like a red; the skins and seeds, left to macerate in the juice for a while, impart color and texture. There was honey in the aroma. An intense whirligig of tannins metallically attacked my mouth and, on the finish, there was an astringent sizzle, with undertones of acid reflux. Tasting notes described this as a “long persistence.” I found it to be a test of stamina. While I waited for the wine’s acrid smack to wear off, I meditated on how this chic but peculiar elixir reflected the terroir of the urban social landscape.

Speaking of the cruelties of craft, Sophie Atherton has written in the UK’s Morning Advertiser about how craft has just gone too far:

What I see now is a hell of a lot of style over substance, with a glut of shoddy beers that appear to get away with it because they are on trend. The flip side is that more traditional beer is neglected, both in availability and keeping standards- which threatens to return us to the era of people viewing beer as a poor-quality drink.

This sort of succinct observation is one that you do not see made too often, given is it saying something bad in relation to brewing. Quite pleased to see it pop up in a major industry  periodical.

This weeks winner of le dubbel extraordinaire is Jordan who also posted this week on his blog about his family’s very small hop farm or rather his failure to tend to his family’s very small hop farm:

The Centennial hops on Mom’s property in Kingston have been growing all summer. Some other year, I will go and watch them train up the trellis and coir, straining sunward at midday in their ascent. This year, it has been hard to find time, but it becomes obvious that for a good vinedresser, time is something to be made. You cannot learn physical skills by reading books. Even Stan Hieronymous’s excellent book on hops does not really tell you how you are to harvest them: 15 bines that do not quite express their full height and cluster together decoratively but not optimally for growth. 15 bines that now in the late summer take on the allium tinge of garlic where they have been sunburnt. 15 bines that I am a week late for.

On that story of the summer of 2019, Lew Bryson has founds some more excellent facts on White Claw: (i) one in three people will buy it again, (ii) seltzers are brewed, not formulated, (iii) nearly every liquor store and supermarket carries White Claw, only 20 percent of bars and restaurants are currently selling it, and (iv) he underestimated the tie-in with the keto diets. I still don’t think I am going to buy it. But my kids might. And, really, who cares?

There. Dusk at 7 pm now. Time’s a tickin’!  I expect Boak and Bailey will have more news on Saturday and Stan should be there on Monday. The OCBG Podcast is a reliable break at work on Tuesdays, too. Except this week when it was on Wednesday. Go figure.

The Summer’s Lease Hath Far Too Short A Date Edition Of Thursday Beer News Links

Gather ye rose buds, lads and lassies. Five more weeks until Labour Day weekend looms. Back to school ads on the TV start soon. Remember: every fair from fair sometime declines. Boom. Chucka. Lucka. Photo of the week is from retiredmartin who has been out gathering. Note the first:  check out the third person’s experienced expression. Note the next: there is a missing fourth person. What is not to love?

A great start this week so far, don’t you think? Let’s go! Next, Dr. J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham spoke at Slow Food Nations about the progressive influence craft beer has on communities – something I would have thought would have been happening at every slow food conference since time began. She sat for an interview on her thoughts about food and justice:

Largely people are heartbroken because their intentions are good but haven’t actually been realized in their business. The project of equity, inclusion and justice tends to overwhelm people with a sense of fear of doing it wrong. So my approach is to come at this as a huge opportunity for a business both in terms of social good and the bottom line. To do this, a business has to think about it on par with all other organizational goals, build infrastructure and then talk through specific tactical scenarios that people can grab on too.

Here’s some science for you. Drinking is being studied studiously and one study has found out that folk are not altering their habits all the same way. It asked the question “why are alcohol-specific deaths going up in Britain when alcohol consumption is going down?”

Countervailing alcohol consumption and alcohol‐related harm trends in the UK may be explained by lighter and heavier drinkers having different period and cohort trends as well as by the presence of cohort trends that mean consumption may rise in some age groups while falling in others.

I heard a similar science-like story on NPR Monday morning but never found the link. [It’s sad when things turn out like that.] But the point was teens seem to be reversing what the last set of teens did and the newbies are turning to the bottle after their elder teens of the last ten years have been subsisting digitally.

Writing advice. Boak and/or Bailey included more than one excellent observation in their monthly newsletter but I liked this one the bestest:

A couple of weeks ago we posted about migrant workers from Suffolk in the Burton brewing industry. In a follow-up Tweet we said: “TIP: If you really want to learn about beer and brewing, don’t just read beer writers – look beyond.” This is something we think is important. When we wrote Gambrinus Waltz, for example, most of the research was undertaken in newspapers, old magazines, books about London, theatrical biographies, autobiographies… We hardly looked at a single book by a capital-B, capital-W beer writer, except for Ron Pattinson and Martyn Cornell.

Sounds like a couple of dodgy sorts to me… but the point is correct: get ye to the primary records as often as possible. Right after the rosebuds. Or perhaps they are your idea of rosebuds. Good all-round general thinking advice, when you think of it.

Hmm. Not sure I like this. The next nightmare beverage has apparently shown up in Malaysia:

Asians love the bubble milk tea. They love beers as well. One franchise has decided to merge the both together in what it considers the “matchmake of the century”… The Boba Beers consists of Butter Beer made with Kirin Ichiban, Guinness Milkshake with Guinness (duh), Strawberry Lime Cider made out of Apple Fox Cider, and Watermelon Beer mixed with Tiger Beer.

I don’t judge but, well, it sounds pretty yik. I expect some craft brewer will update* it and the kids will go nuts.  Because tea+beer=boba can’t help but be cheaper to make than even beer+juice+radler.

Geoff Latham had a good go at pointing out that one craft fabulous UK brewer selling into the EU was seemingly breaking the law:

It’s not allowed under EU rules. They closed the “personal import by post” loophole when tobacco sales by post rocketed. The person importing can have their goods seized and face prosecution. The company exporting also can if the correct customs documents don’t accompany the beer

I liked Zak Avery’s experienced views on the matter, too. Craft is all fine and good but a couple of weeks of short sharp shock might be called for.

New brewery news: Ontario emigrants brewmaster Andrew Bartle, marketing manager Marissa Bégin have declared their new operation The Church Brewing open for business. This is great and especially so as they are located in Wolfville, Nova Scotia** near where I grew up, where my Dad was a United Church minister which means he likely went to presbytery meetings in a future brewery.

I am enjoying the approach Matt Curtis and his journal Pellicle are taking in treating good beer as part of broader food and rink production.  British wine has been included in that scope this week:

Thanks to this bumper crop, British wine is being spoken about with more fanfare than ever before. British sparkling wine, particularly from vineyards based in Sussex and Kent, is now widely recognised to be on par with Champagne. This perhaps explains why in 2017 the Champagne house Taittinger planted vines in Kent (though, due to its appellation, they cannot call what they make here Champagne) in order to exploit similar growing conditions as the prestigious house enjoys in France.

Boak and Bailey have hit for the double this week when on Wednesday they posted a tweet with a link to a 1971 article from the publisher of the foundational and likely all-time leading home brew and good beer books in terms of sales, Amateur Winemaker. The article is about beer tourism to Belgium, a copy of which is produced to the right. I love it. While a bit cringe making on topics matrimonial, it is far less creepy in its sexist approach than the sometimes leering thoughts of one Mr. Jackson when he spoke of ladies AND it does an excellent job describing the subject matter of his article – traveling to Belgium in that year of 1971 to explore the beer culture. I particularly like the observation that sweetening sour beers like Rodenbach or Gueuze was locally common. This primary record proves their earlier observation – and raises again the question of why no one has seriously studied the influence of Amateur Winemaker publications. Then again, perhaps Columbus did actually discover the New World.

Finally, a point of view from our side good beer on the word authenticity. While I am a bit of a loaf, I do like reading about good menswear as I am a man who needs to wear things. Permanent Style is one of the best current guides to things I can never afford which offers an alternative voice on matters analogous to good beer and here is their take on that word:

In the past couple of years ‘authentic’ has become increasingly important to how I see clothing.  Partly, this is because the other terms – or values – have become less important.  Heritage has been overemphasised. Frankly, some old companies make terrible products and are stuck in the past, unable to adapt either to changing consumer expectations or the media that markets them.  So too has craft. The fact it is done by hand doesn’t necessarily make it better. Some craftsmen set out on their own before they’re ready, and deliver a poor product. And some things are just better made by machine. 

Interesting. Given most “craft” beer is made on computerized set ups that manage much of the process automatically, the comparison may well be a useful one.

Well, that is it for now. Not a boring week at all. Boak and Bailey should have even more to share on Saturday and I am now trusting Stan to being back again Monday. Consider, too, the OCBG Podcast which is broadcasting the thoughts of Robin and Jordan as they observe upon good beer each Tuesday now coming on three months or so.

*aka poach.
**pronounced “Wuhff-fuh” locally.

The Thursday Beer News For All Of Us Actually Putting In A Day’s Work

I don’t know if this is a warning or tidings of good cheer. Boak and Bailey issued a short news post on Saturday because “not much has really grabbed our attention” and Stan followed suit. That’s reasonable given the time of year, folks out wandering and such, but I now feel somehow obligated to prove to you – to each of you – that beer blog news roundups matter.*

Speaking of Boak and Bailey, they were on the tartan trail and made it to Fort William in Scotland… or as we call it in the family For Twilliam. Dad’s Dad’s People were from there. Real kilty folk with McLeod at the end of each of their names.  They hit all the pubs and probably hung out with a zillion of my third cousins. But we don’t talk with them. Something happened in the mid-1930s and, well, you know how that goes. The Campbell branch sorta blew up around 1908 and, well, we only started chatting again around 2009. Anyway, enough of me. What did they find?

The one everybody recommended was The Grog & Gruel. We didn’t have a good time on our visit between grumpy service, farting dogs and pass-agg encounters with Canadian tourists determined to nab our space. But it’s certainly a nice looking, pubby pub, and we can imagine having fun there under different circumstances.

Friggin’ Canadians. They ruin everything.

Speaking of travel, [T]he Beer Nut has finally** started to unpack his notes from the gang freebie flip to a beer fest in Wrocław, Poland. Now, don’t get me wrong, as I trust no one more that TBN when it comes to the little things like experience, wisdom and integrity but seeing as I lived in Poland I was interested to see what he thought about the place:

From three days of flitting randomly around the bars I did, however, get a certain sense of generic Craftonia about the offer. It seemed like everyone had the traditional styles — their pils, their weizen and their Baltic porter — and then a plethora of trend-chasers: New England IPA, fruited sour ales, barrel-aged imperial stouts, much of it indistinguishable or unremarkable from one brewer to the next. Next to none of them seemed to specialise in particular styles or processes. I did make an effort to pick unusual-looking beers when I saw them, so hopefully the reviews which follow won’t be too generic in turn.

Interesting. I liked the image of the large concrete hockey puck stadium as the setting for the event. Comforting that my Slavic former neighbours have not lost their dab hand with a spot of grey liquid stone. Martyn also reported on the event and associated opportunities and found “the selections of beers are almost entirely Polish” which I take to mean breweries rather than styles.

In another bit of flitting about, Eoghan Walsh has written about going “Into the Valley of the Lambic Lovers” for the latest issue of Ferment:

By the late 1990s, the lambic industry was emerging from a prolonged depression. Competition from industrial, sweetened lambic had nearly wiped out the traditional breweries of the region, leaving only revivalists like Frank Boon and Cantillon to keep it alive. By the 1980s, even they were questioning the sense in persevering with a beer that no one seemed to want to drink. But lambic people are stubborn people, they toughed it out and their perseverance began to pay off. Export interest slowly took off. Their gueuzes started winning awards. Then in 1991 the first edition of Michael Jackson’s Great Beers of Belgium was published.

What else? It can’t all be about hitting the road. Paste Magazine has an article on Hazy IPA which, after a couple of years of the stuff, is about as interesting as hard seltzer.*** Oddly, the article’s author seems to agree:

…the quest for “juicy” profiles in IPAs has led the beer industry in a direction that is actively undermining its own aims, and the result has become a whole lot of bad beer. Worse still, these poorly made NE-IPAs have proliferated to such an extent that they’re confusing the consumer as to what a “juicy” IPA is meant to taste like in the first place. We’re weaning a new generation of beer drinkers on a style that is often fundamentally difficult to drink, and that is a problem.

“Style” itself, of course, is to blame. The need to establish the new experiment in the same hierarchical construct as the loved and established.  Find someone to proclaim that for you and, whammo, you are in the money. Fortunately, it’s all so transitory it is easily avoided. I am also one with Jeff on this and, as a bonus, give tribute his graph folk art skills.

Speaking of the oddnesses of style, Stan caused a ripple in the continuum when he tweeted a photo of a (yik… spittoui!) pumpkin ale by a (whaaaaaat?!?!?!) Trappist brewery. Mucho replyo ensued. He used the moment to argue that “Trappist beer is an appellation, not a style” which is quite interesting because I am not sure what it means.  It’s a bit like 1+0=0 mathematically but maybe it’s 1-0=1. You get my point. The other point is that the pumpkin as determined by God’s very own plan is last year’s old crop so I have no idea what the monks think they are up to.

Katie has stayed at home, found a home for her tomatoes then celebrated in her very own living room. Speaking of which, it is reported that overall beer consumption in the UK is down by a third over the last twelve years:

“Premiumisation is impacting the Beer industry through drinkers drinking less but better,” the report says. Figures show that British people spent £177.8 million more on 66.5 million fewer pints of beer in 2017 than the year before, while the latest statistics from 2018 say that gap is widening, with a further £279 million being spent on another 40.6 million fewer pints. “On trade beer volumes have levelled out in recent years after a change in drinking habits, favouring drinking at home rather than in the pub,” said the report.

“Premiumisation”! What a silly word. ATJ added his thoughts on the story but they are behind a firewall so I don’t know what he wrote.

That is it for another week. I have the highest confidence that we can expect more beer news from Boak and Bailey on Saturday but Stan..?  Stan is taking another hiatus as he will be “bouncing between cities in Brazil” which is something I would like to see. Bouncing?!? I may need to approach the travel authorities about this.  We’ll see how much bouncing is going on then! Until then, bye!

*Maybe.
**Finally!
***Or “American creamy milk” for that matter.

The Victoria Day Week 2019 Thursday News In Beer

Victoria Day. Is that done only in Canada? Probably. Well, we spent it in Ottawa with the fam and the friends of the fam and it ended up with me paying for it all. Warning to parents of young children: they grow up and they can’t afford their own needs. Anyway, we had fun and in two spots, Brothers as well as the hotel bar  I enjoyed the local Dominion City’s Town & Country  Blonde Ale. And I can confirm that Irene’s is still one of my homes, the honeyed wood even richer 15 years later.

You can now lose hours and hours and hours to the excellent interviews of folk from the recent history of the British brewing trade care of brewingstories.org.uk.

Stan wasn’t really contradicting Jeff and Jeff really wasn’t saying it as any sort of main point but this is an important observation:

I agree, but would another clause. These brewers do have a vision for what they want to create, but they also have enough of an ego to think that they are making beer that will appeal to an audience broad enough to support a thriving business. They may not want to print money, but many like ending up on something of a stage and more look forward to feeling money in their pockets.

Show me a brewery that is not based on the profit making model and I will show you an impending failure.  Everything else has to be built upon that foundation one way or another if it is going to be sustained: capitalist or socialist, private or public. But pretty much anything can be built upon that model.

Beer in corner stores is coming to my province. I like it.

I was really taken by this answer wine writer Oz Clarke gave on why you need to keep an old copper coin in your wallet if you are in the habit of being in places where you are presented with dodgy red wine from time to time.  Now, while I have happily avoided any interest in taking an “off flavours” class (aka misery mongery) I am now interested to see if the copper coin works with any poorly made beers – and apparently I should be focusing on lagers. Any particular candidates for experimentation?

I had no idea there were jazz bagpipers. I approve.

I was quite pleased with the news in this brief article on the beer coming out of Grimbergen Abbey, a brewing monks’ collective that sold their branding in the 1950s. Sounds like it’s reasonably actually actual:

“We had the books with the old recipes, but nobody could read them,” Stautemas said. “It was all in old Latin and old Dutch. So we brought in volunteers. We’ve spent hours leafing through the books and have discovered ingredient lists for beers brewed in previous centuries, the hops used, the types of barrels and bottles, and even a list of the actual beers produced centuries ago… Stautemas, who lives with 11 other monks at the abbey, said: “What we really learned was that the monks then kept on innovating. They changed their recipe every 10 years.”

I like that last bit. Instability is at the heart of brewing. But TBN may well be right: ultimately, it’s really just big-brewery PR.

In this week’s stolen IP news, an Alberta brewery has been allowed by the trademark holder, the municipal government, to use up the last of its stock labeled “Fort Calgary“:

On Wednesday, city officials met with Elite Brewing and Bow River Brewing to discuss the cease-and-desist order over the use of the name, which is trademarked by the city. According to a memo that went to councillors from administration, the city has agreed to allow the brewery to retain the name until the beer is sold out “in the spirit of co-operation.” If any beer is left on July 30, when it’s projected the beer will be sold out, it must be stripped of the name. 

What is it with craft brewers and purloined intellectual property ? Do small bakeries steal the brand names of others? Do weavers and potters? Nope. This story is a bit different as there seems to have been a discussion and a resulting understanding that then was not fully understood.

Here is an interesting stat:

Prince Edward Islanders spend less money on alcoholic beverages than anyone else in Canada, according to a recent report by Statistics Canada. The report found Islanders spend $614.70 per capita on liquor. The national average was $756.90.

Apparently, folk in Newfoundland and Labrador spend $1,029.20 each a year for the national leadership. But note that this is not average sales per unit, just gross sales. And prices in Newfoundland, I suspect, are way higher per unit. But that’s not the interesting thing. The interesting thing was when I lived in PEI from 1998 to 2003 I had pretty much unlimited access through my neighbours to an excellent moonshine vodka called, in its finest form, Augustine. They also still had speakeasies. Everybody and his dog also home brewed. So the stats may mean less than the little they appear to mean.

Neato: six 5,000 year old yeast strains extracted from brewing related pottery in Israel.

Finally, this is weird. Apparently the deadbeat brewery left an unhappy employee in charge of the social media account:

After nearly 30 years Ironworks has come to a shameful end. Yesterday @ 3pm, five armed police officers and a tax enforcement official seized the brewery and changed the locks, and ushered the employees out.

The news is not good: $15,409 in taxes and fees. A pretty modest amount but then add on that no employees have been “paid in the last several months, as well as he stopped paying their payroll taxes over the last year” and you have a sense that there was much going wrong here. H/T Robin.

Well, another week goes by. A bit of a slow one. Such is life. Lessons? Pay your bills. Name your beer a name no one else owns. Simple! Check out Boak and Bailey this Saturday but be warned that Stan on hiatus this Monday. He does that. Hiatuses. Hieronymustic Hiatuses. It’ll be OK.

Notes: Flemmynges, Hans Beerpot, Thirsty Actors And An Odd Crusade

A bit of a jumble, this post. First, here’s an interesting 15th century slag:

Ye have herde that twoo Flemmynges togedere
Wol undertake or they goo ony whethere
Or they rise onys, to drynke a baralle fulle
Of gode berkeyne; so sore they hale and pulle
Undre the borde they pissen as they sitte

Those Dutch – they get so drunk they just urinate under the table as they sit drinking their beer! These sweet poetic thoughts are from Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, a short treatise in verse from the 1430s pumping up mercantile jingoism. I came upon it in the book Representations of Flemish Immigrants on the Early Modern Stage looking for references to a slightly later form of anti-Dutch slag, the stock theatrical character Hans Beerpot. We still have loads of lingering anti-Dutch sentiment in the English language hidden in phrases like “Dutch courage” (drunkenness) and “double Dutch” (lying) and even “going Dutch” on a date (formerly being cheap, now perhaps egalitarian) but I had presumed they arose in the 1600s when England and the Dutch battled for naval domination of the North Atlantic and the North Sea. I was about two hundred years too late in my thinking.

Point? This all ties into my recent noodlings about the question of when the English first brought beer to North America – which I presume depends on when beer first got to the ports of England from which expeditions to North America disembarked.* And, yes, the life in those ports was fairly beery in the first half of the 1400s. In “The Civic Franchise and the Regulation of Aliens in Great Yarmouth” by Liddy and Lambert, we read at page 131:

Cornelius Shipmayster, who also went by the name of Cornelius Ducheman, mariner, kept a hostel in the 1440s; his wife was fined for being a tippler of beer, and it is probably that she sold the beer her husband brewed. Beer production rose substantially in the autumn, to cater to the visiting merchants from the Low Countrys and during the quiet season men such as Robert Phelison were able to pursue multiple trades: a resident of the south leet, he brewed beer, ran an alehouse, and owned a fishing boat, which was arrested for naval service in 1437. In this multi-occupational community, hostelling and beer brewing were often practiced together.

Which leads to an observation: you have to slag someone’s nationality for being beer drinking drunkards only after observing them being beer drinking drunkards. So for the Dutch or Flemish or other sorts of low country aliens to be the focus of slagging they needed to be (i) present in England, (ii) drinking hopped beer and (ii) disorderly drunk.  The stereotype is framed in Hans Beerpot from the 1550s play Wealth and Health.** He arguably plays no function other than to arrive in the plot as a stranger, drunk, singing in Dutch and (as an additional sixteenth century touch) representing military menace. But that’s all a bit late for my purposes. I’m interested in earlier things.

Context. The War of the Roses came to a head in the 1450s just when the Hundred Years War was ending with English loss of French possessions, including Bordeaux where (as mentioned a few posts ago) Bristol had had a thriving wine trade.  There was still a spot of the plague going about. Normal ties, internal and external to England, were being disrupted as the very question of being English was being framed. No wonder aliens were being registered. No wonder the ways of the Dutch amongst them were being observed.

Anyway, this is about beer, right? Let’s go a little earlier.  Three records of the Cofferers’ Accounts of the Gild Merchant of Reading, Berkshire from 1420, 1424 and 1427 seem to indicate part payment to theatrical players was in terms of hopped beer: seruicia or ceruisia in Latin. A later similar record from the 1452 accounts of St George’s Chapel of Windsor, Berkshire again for the part payment of actors states:

Et in ceruisia data lusoribus recitantibus ludum habitum in Collegio erga donatoris festum.

Were these all Dutch actors? Maybe. They were likely travelers, at least. But that makes an odd parallel pattern. Flems in port towns and actors liked hopped beer in the early 1400s. So, to find more similar patters, searches for variants of the root of the now familiar cerveza might be in order to see what might be up.***

And we find some in the 1390 accounts of another sort of traveling, the expedition led by then Earle of Derby, later Henry IV (reign 1399-1412),  crusading through Prussia and, surprisingly, on to Lithuania. In a sort of code mixing English, Latin, French and plenty of numbers you see plenty of  interesting references. When the force passes through the friendly lands of the Hanseatic ports en route, Derby’s clerk of the buttery starts buying beer along with wine and sometimes mead. As a result and for example, in September 1390 we read this sort of expense (amongst hundreds) being recorded:

Clerico buterie super beer per manus Gylder, pro j barello de beer, pro portagio et tractagio beer et vini…

Looks to be a bill for the beer, for the barrel in which the beer sit as the hauling of the beer as well as wine. There are a lot of accounts like that on the expedition. A lot. Which is interesting. Because here we have Englishmen drinking a hell of a lot of beer over a long period of time. High status folk. Well before beer is considered to have been consumed much in England by Englishmen. Never thought to look for that sort of thing before.

Flems in England in the 1430s, actors in England in the 1420s and English crusaders in the 1390s. All having hopped beer very early in the timeline. I have to think about what this might add up to, if anything.

*This approach entirely sets aside the question of Viking brewing hundreds of years earlier in what is now Newfoundland but bear with me on that.
**See “Toward a Multicultural Mid-Tudor England: The Queen’s Royal Entry Circa 1553, and the Question of Strangers in the Reign of Mary I” by Scott Oldenburg – and especially the discussion around pages 110 to 115. The character also appears in the 1618 play Hans Beer Pot, his Invisible Comedy of See me and See me not by Daubridgecourt Capability Belchier.
***Examples of treachery in such matters abound. Consider the 1417 appendix to a will in which the summary states beer was to be brewed but the details make it clear it’s ale that being ordered by the future deceased.

 

The “I HATE YOUR THANKSGIVING!!!!” Edition Of Thursday Beery News Notes

I am the sad Canadian. I hate the week when Thanksgiving comes around late every November. It is the one holiday Canadians don’t get to participate in any way, even through analogy. Face it. Our early October Thanksgiving  is the least fun combo that vague residual churchiness and storage squash could muster up. And, yes, we have bonus days off like Boxing Day and Easter Monday – but what do we do with them as a culture? Nothing. Today to the south, Americans seem to plan to get hammered to cope with dodgy distant cousins while setting off exploding turkeys launched from vats of hot oil.  And not one of them in any way took seriously the advice on what beer to pair with their family festive feasts. I want a US Thanksgiving, too. Until that day, I am a sad Canadian.

That being said, Josh the Owner of Spearhead has spoken of one of the few things we have… or rather should have… that Americans can’t have…  but, in fact, he ain’t getting his hands on it at all:

Hey it’s been over a month since you opened. I made an order @ 6:45 AM on October 17. Still has not arrived. How do you ever expect to shut down an illegal market with such poor customer service?

You know what they say: Hayters gonna hayte.*

Early afternoon update: How did I miss this? Look at this fabulously transparent statement from the Beer Sisters on what working in what they call the beer sommelier gig looks like. No dubious claims to being independent and certainly not journalists. An excellent measure against which others should be measured.

While the US has had a truly horrible run of natural and man-made disasters to cope with, this call from Sierra Nevada to respond to the wildfires in its part of California stresses the need to respond to crisis by supporting the actual neighbourhood as you can:

“Although Chico and the Sierra Nevada brewery were spared, the Camp Fire has devastated neighboring communities where many of our friends, families and employees live,” said Sierra Nevada founder and owner, Ken Grossman. “This community has supported us for 38 years and we’re going to do everything we can to support them back.”

Speaking of fire, the maltsters Muntons tweeted out informative information about a fire at their premises that should be trotted out and thrown at anyone lost for words who blames Twitter as a communications platform:

Local Fire Services arrived quickly at the scene with 8 Fire appliances and a high-level access platform… Muntons have a robust Business Continuity system in place that has been tested annually and proven very effective… For further information please contact: Nigel Davies, Technical and Sustainability Director…

Speaking of the simplicity of malting barley for drink, I’ve been reading a bit in the southern media about the horrible prospect of jacked up prices for craft beer but up here in the true north strong and free that all adds up to good news according to the Western Producer:

Looking ahead to 2020, Watts showed data forecasting relatively steady beer production in the United States compared to 2015, with craft beer rising from 29.1 million hectolitres to 39.0 million, while non-craft beer declines from 194.5 million to 183.9 million hectolitres. However, due to the increased malt usage in craft beer production, the total U.S. malt demand will grow from 2.014 million tonnes in 2015 to 2.211 million tonnes in 2020.

Money, money, money. Speaking of prices getting all jacked up, one should note that GIBCS 2018 is not for keeping… apparently:

…a fellow beer writer who tasted this beer with me, said he wishes there was more of the soft, Tootsie Roll-esque flavors that have characterized past versions. Again, this is total nitpicking. This beer is better than 90 percent of the bourbon barrel-aged stouts other breweries are putting out.

Hmm. Spot the suspicious things with that assertion. Speaking of which, Gary Gilman places the singular success of Belgian beer this week in the lap of the now long late Mr J:

Stella Artois is of course today a growing force in the premium international lager segment, so Unibex was right in a sense, but that growth came in the wake of the romance Jackson created for Belgian beer. Without that groundwork, Belgium would be one of a number of European countries vying for sales internationally and likely well behind Germany, Denmark, and Holland with no cachet, moreover, attached to its beers.

I can’t buy it. Aside from the fact of the continuation duration of his particular death, the general fiction of the few founders in the micro/craft tale – and the necessity of the GWH – is how we would have to believe that no one else would have noticed… whatever. In this case, it requires us to believe that no one would have noticed the indigenous beer culture at any time during the 40 years since Belgium’s brewing.** Not happening. Romance? Nope – it’s been big beer driven, moolah motivated and, frankly, much of the export expansion came just far too late along the timeline for the Jacksonian touch of the hem: “…exports to the USA have risen tremendously from a mere 2 million litres in 2005 to over 130 million litres in 2009.” Stella! Stella!!!

I love this speedy 1983 BBC guide to speedy home brewing.  Notice how it ends with a simple “yum”?  It gave me nostalgic pause. And there was an interesting juxtaposition with that to be observed, drawing both from this ying to this other yang. I don’t know why in particular it struck me other than the first being the small mutual affirmation pool while the other was a powerful personal kick against construct. Which persuades you more? And do either give more pleasure than the happy man of 1983 enjoyed?

Finally, as the next few weeks drag on, each day shortening before the winter equinox, remember to lay off the sauce – as at least one Scottish medical man recommends:

He said: “We now have new evidence that the weather, and in particular the temperature and amount of sunlight that we are exposed to, has a strong influence on how much alcohol we consume. Furthermore this weather-related alcohol consumption is directly linked to our chances of developing the most dangerous form of liver disease – cirrhosis – which can ultimately end in liver failure and death.”

Death! I understand that is even worse than Stella.

Another week has passed. Soon it will be December – but before then we get to gather as a nation and watch the Grey Cup this Sunday. Bet just knowing there is three-down football to the north ruins many a US Thanksgiving dinner. Don’t let it. Be yourselves. And check out Boak and Bailey this Saturday where no doubt they will have an update on the UK’s plans for Grey Cup celebrations.

*For years I have wandered this earth waiting for the right moment to use that particular Dad joke. Notice I did not write “Hayter’s gonna hayte” as that would be rude.
**Whatever that in fact means.