The Beery News Notes For That Week The USA Does All That Weird Thanksgiving Stuff

It is instructional to live next to a bigger neighbour. As long as they don’t attack you… any more. And by bigger I mean the most influential state in the most powerful nation in the history of the western world. Which is to say I can see a slice of New York state from my office window, peeking back at me out there about ten miles to the south. So we get the TV and radio in addition to the general social media onslaught. And – who knew? – turns out it’s Thanksgiving week and today is Thanksgiving Day! Their Thanksgiving. We Canadians naturally give our thanks for the harvest at harvest time. And we keep it to a wholesome day or two. And find things to do like yard chores. Our pals to the south? It’s like they just discovered treats… to eat!! Even though Halloween was just three weeks ago. Any advice you can offer explaining it all will be most welcome. In local news, the basil is up as illustrated. I am aiming for a wrap around 12 month tiny crop of something or other now that there’s a grow op in my life while some tasty stuff is likely still alive out there under the row covers even with the -9C temps the other night. Jings. Gotta start thinning soon.

Which reminds me of beer. Not. So what is up in beer? Well, for starters, the call for papers for Beeronomics 2024 has gone out:

The 2024 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 …

It-lay! That’d be nice in June.  Maybe something for Al can be whipped up via AI so I can pretend to be clever enough. Speaking of research, Gary has uncovered facts on the heretofore unknown background of the 1950s English beer writer, Andrew Campbell – stumping even Boak and Bailey who had looked at the mystery some years ago:

It is interesting that they mention theatre – why this occurred to them is not explained. The skein was evidently felt inconclusive, as they repeat that Andrew Campbell was possibly a pseudonymous figure. In fact Andrew Campbell who wrote The Book of Beer was quite real. And there was a theatrical connection.

Speaking of Boak and Bailey, they took a bit of an unsual turn in the road this week as they, the keen observers of others, became something of their own subject matter when they took a family trip to an old favourite Somerset cider farm with a restaurant of sorts attached:

When we entered, Jess immediately said, “This feels like a German beer hall.” And she was right. Not a historic one – the kind you find in a post-war block, or out in the sprawl, or in a neat little village. It’s something to do with all the polished wooden surfaces, perhaps. Or the pervasive smell of roast pork. Or the people: there were plenty of sturdy looking country folk digging into heaped plates. If it wasn’t Bavaria of which it reminded me, then it was one of those diners Guy Fieri visits on Diner, Drive-Ins and Dives. 

A great bit of writing. And Matty C has taken on the task of rehabilitating the phrase “reverse creep” with his piece in What’s Brewing, an organ of CAMRA, on the new lower ABV trend in UK beer:

Prior to the legislation’s introduction, breweries would have received a discounted rate for drinks rated at 2.8 per cent ABV or lower. Under the new system it has been extended to account for drinks rated at 3.4 per cent or less. The savings that can be made will likely encourage producers to focus on drinks that are lower in alcohol and therefore, in the government’s eyes, carry less long-term health risks. Encouraging news for a market where younger customers are increasingly focused on mindful consumption and wellness.

The cost implications are significant: “…if, over a year, a small brewery produces 5,000 hectolitres (880,000 pints) of a beer it has reduced from 3.5 to 3.4 per cent, it will make a saving of £211,400.” Moo. Lah.  Stonch finds the effect of the tax policy depressing. Colin understands the policy is not the main cause of the lower strength beers. Lots of factors at play but hard to not see this as an opportunity.

I don’t usually go for brewery bios given there too often is a bit of an appropriation or maybe just mimickery at play. But in this piece about a Czech focused brewery in small town Texas of all places, Ruvani de Silva explains the local authenticity:

“The concept of a Czech lager brewery made a lot of sense in Bell County with its rich Czech heritage and the Czech Heritage Museum and Genealogy Center nearby,” he says. “The more I discovered and learned about Czech lager, the more I fell in love with it… I’ve learned so much about my family history and our connections within the community since starting the brewery,” he says. “I’m always probing my grandmother for more stories.” Martinec was inspired to play Czech polka in the brewery after discovering a collection of records in his grandmother’s side table. “They belonged to my great-grandmother and grandfather­—my grandmother didn’t even know they were there,” he says. “Now regulars will come by and donate polka records, too.”

Before we go further, say to yourself “soon… soon I will know a lot more about bottle caps” because it is true… because Liam wrote all about it from an Irish perspective:

Before his invention there were other methods of closing bottles, one of the most popular and historic being the plain cork bung of course, and other metal closer had existed but none were quite as strong and easy to apply as Painter’s. His crimp-edged, strengthened metal caps clamped on the edge of specially made bottles with a cork liner between the cap and bottle rim ensuring an airtight fit. These caps were easy to apply and remove and would go on to revolutionise the drinks industry around the world. They were also disposable – they were never designed for reuse – a clever way of ensuring a steady income for those involved in their manufacture.

Next, Katie Mather is on to the second installment of her series on packaged foods called “Process” and this week considers the humble oven fry:

The brand of oven chips you had at teatime was a status symbol when I was a kid. McCain’s Home Fries were the holy grail—if you were having those with your Turkey Drummers, you’d really made it. It’s really strange, I didn’t consider oven chips and deep fryer chips and chippy chips as the same thing. It didn’t occur to me until much later on in life that oven chips were meant to be approximations of the soggy, vinegar-coated potato hunks I was used to from Sam’s Bar on Morecambe seafront. Don’t get me wrong, I loved both of them. But they just weren’t the same food at all. They didn’t even speak the same language.

I always find global references to McCain’s brands odd as it’s from my neck of the woods in the Canadian Maritimes and I even went to undergrad with a McCain.* One of the few dynasties which keeps the lights on in New Brunswick.

Courtney Iseman wrote about the SAFE Bar Network, a program that a nonprofit working with alcohol-serving venues on bystander intervention training in anticipation of one ugly downside of the impending festive season:

…it is also a good time for these conversations because we’ve officially arrived at the holiday season, and this time of year can really crank up the already-intense situation at many bars and restaurants in terms of parties and customers’ drinking and behavior. I know this is unfortunately an impossible wish, but I do hope folks working in bars and breweries and such make it through these season as safe and happy as can be, and—perhaps more realistically—I hope more and more venues see the light and bring in training like SBN.

The Shadowy Portman Group has popped up its head and this time it isn’t complaining about cartoony labels or, you know, anything related to BrewDog. This week it’s defending the booze trade against being lumped in with unhealthy smokers and gunky** processed food fans in a wide ranging study of the costs of unhealthy lifestyles to the UK economy:

The Portman Group, an alcohol industry trade body, said a crackdown on alcohol was unnecessary because most adults drank moderately. The health groups’ proposals, including minimum unit pricing, were “disproportionate and inappropriate”, said Matt Lambert, its chief executive. “Significant progress has been made to tackle harmful drinking in recent years, thanks in part to schemes funded by the alcohol industry, and it is counterproductive to try to prevent further cooperation between the government, industry and third sector organisations on these issues.

They make a reasonable point up there as reported in The Guardian – consult your Hornsey if you need to but we are clearly built to digest alcohol but no one ever rationally claimed a ciggie isn’t a coffin nail. Interesting to note The Times raises another source of health care worry: toxic doctors! Interesting that they are alleged to cause 11,000 deaths per year in the UK while the booze causes just over 9,000. Lesson: don’t forget to take your drink!

In high school, 44 years ago or so, we had a Swedish exchange student on the soccer team and he taught some of us about eating spruce tips. The winter beer Jeff featured this week brought that all back to me:

The brewery puts in a lot of work to create that subtle sweetness. Beginning in May or June, depending on the year’s winter, Dan and members of the brewing and restaurant staff head off to a forest that is just west of town. They harvest sustainably so the trees aren’t harmed—they even need a permit—which means more time. The trees must be a certain height to harvest, and they can’t pick too much of the new growth. “We bring a load of grain bags out with us—it’s beautiful,” he said. “I love it.” It takes more than one visit to collect 200 pounds of tips, which they freeze.

Mmm… tree flavour.  It’s the new thing. Stan also wrote about another way to get more tree into your diet:

“I think the thing I love most about the beer is that it certainly makes me feel something, often several things. The time and effort spent harvesting the cedar with my friend realigns my heart to a deeper connection and purpose in brewing. I can feel the sun on my face as I’m reaching to trim a branch in the cool autumn air. I can feel the wind on my face as I give thanks to the grove of trees that play such an important part in the entire experience. Something in me awakens each time I sip.”

Remember how I mentioned that the Russian government nationalized the local branch of Carlsburg, Baltika? Things still getting worse for those involved:

Police and Federal Security Service (FSB) agents carried out more than a dozen searches at offices affiliated with Baltika in St. Petersburg, the local news website Fontanka reported Thursday, citing anonymous sources.  Two unnamed Baltika executives were charged with abuse of trust and large-scale fraud, according to Fontanka.  The state-run TASS news agency later identified the detained executives as Baltika president Denis Sherstennikov and vice president Anton Rogachevsky, citing a law enforcement source.

Yikes. And I know I include something from Pellicle every week but they really do stand heads and shoulders above other publications. This week, a portrait by Neil Walker of The Coopers Tavern, a modest old pub and the beer it serves:

In front of me sits my deep-gold pint of Joule’s timeless pale ale, glowing and topped with a bright white head of foam, which creates halos down the glass as I sip. But, really, this is a beer for glugging; a subtle well-balanced bitter, with a delicious caramel undertone from the pale tipple malt, a foil for the floral, drying, hop character. The overall impression is of a bittersweet, incredibly drinkable ale, a balm for dry workers’ throats which slips down pint after pint. Underpinning the beer is the same mineral-rich water which made the brewery’s pale ales so sought after a century or so ago, drawn from an ancient Triassic aquifer.

Excellent. A decendant of the Brimstone Alehouse of the 1680s. At another snack bracket appears to be The Devonshire, a big London pub and restaurant complex… oh, sorry… a butchery, bakery, a pub, restaurant and asado complex. What’s an asado? Nick Lander explains:

Welcome to London’s first asado, where the food is cooked entirely over wood embers. Carroll admitted that it had been harrowing at times, assuring everyone from the landlords to numerous representatives of Westminster Council that the process would work and would be safe. Simply, the logs are burnt and then the ingredients are cooked over the embers. It is this process that has made a name for the likes of Asador Etxebarri in Spain, Burnt Ends in Singapore and Firedoor in Sydney, all of whose chefs have been consulted by Carroll and Rogers.

And finally, in their monthly newsletter and for the double, Boak and Bailey have you all pegged. There’s no wiggling out of this one:

If we say that interest in craft beer in the UK began to increase from around 2007 (when we started this blog – a symptom, not a cause) and peaked in around 2014, when our book Brew Britannia came out, that’s plenty of time for a full cycle of hype to play out. There’s a generation of people who have made ‘being into beer’ part of their identity. That includes people who used to blog; people who started breweries; and people who’ve ended up as middle-aged managers in the industry, having started on the frontline a decade ago. Now, they’re getting old.

ZINGGGGG! They’re shit talking us. Deservedly. So here we are, at the end. The time of the sales, the mergers, the moves. Maybe just the beginning of the end but, yes, I feel bad everytime I read an investment announcement of one sort or another. Ouch. No, not commenting on what they said. Just reached over for the mug of tea. Everying aches now. ‘Cause I’m ooooollllld.

Other than that, we are done. Remember, ye who read this far down 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. But beware! Mr. Protz lost his Twex account five weeks ago and still hasn’t recovered his 27,000 followers. And Boak and Bailey declared they will #QuitTheTwit at the end of the year. Update on my emotional rankings? Now, for me Facebook remains clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (83) rising up to maybe pass Mastodon (905) then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,427) hovering somewhere above or around Instagram (161), with unexpectly crap Threads (42) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Still trying to figure out the Threads and BlueSky distinction but at this point Threads seems more corporate. Seven apps plus this my blog! That makes sense. I may be multi and legion and all that but I do have priorities and seem to be keeping them in a proper row. All in all I still am rooting for the voices on the elephantine Mastodon. And even though it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing beer:

Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
Stan Hieronymus | The Man!
Boak & Bailey | The B² experience
Curmudgeon Ale Works | Jonathon is Brewing
Katie Mather | Shiny Biscuit and Corto
David Jesudason | “Desi Pubs” (2023) author
BeoirFest | They say “Let’s Talk Beer”
Ron Pattinson | The RonAlongAThon Himself
Al Reece AKA Velky Al | Fuggled
Jennifer Jordan | US hops historian
Andreas Krennmair | Vienna beer and lager historian
Beer Ladies Podcast | Lisa Grimm and colleagues
The Bar Towel | Toronto’s chat zone for beer lovers
Chicago Beer Society | Folk in Chicago getting social over beer
Jay Brooks | Brookston Beer Bulletin
Joe Stange | Belgian beer expert, beer magazine editor
Cider Bar | Barry makes Kertelreiter cider
Laura Hadland | CAMRA historian and beer writer
Brian Alberts | US beer historian
Jon Abernathy | The Beer Site
Maureen Ogle | US Beer Historian
Lars Garshol | Norwegian Beer Historian and Kveik Hunter
James Beeson | Beeson on Beer
Carla Jean | MAINER!!!
Thandi Guilherme | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Lisa Grimm | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Roy of Quare Swally | Beery ramblings from Northern Ireland
Rob Talksbeer | Podcaster and Youtuber
Anthony Gladman | UK Drinks Writer
Jeff Alworth | Manna Of Beervana
Northwest Beer Guide | Fairly self explanatory… but not NW Latvia…
Evan Rail | Prague based GBH editor, freelance writer, NYT etc.
Todd Alström | 50% of the Alströms
Jacob Berg | Beer talking librarian

Anyone else? Anywhere else? Yes, you also gotta check the blogs, podcasts (barely!) and even newsletters to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays when he is not SLACKING OFF! Look – I forgot to link to Lew’s podcast. Fixed. Here’s a new newsletter recommendation: BeerCrunchers. And  get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many 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 much more occassional but always wonderful newsletterThe 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. 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!

*…not all that rare… also a Labatt as well as Anne Murray’s neice and someone whos godparent was claimed to be the Pope. Et cetera. Et cetera. Lucy MacNeil was in a dorm next to my pal, too. LUCY!! It’s all just one town out there. Go to the tavern for lunch? There’s a member of cabinet. Hit the late night dance club? There is your local MP… dancing with not Mrs. Local MP. Oh dear. Not smart.
**Ouch! Katie Mather just hit me!!!

Your Beery News Notes For The Solemn Pause Before The Festivities

The question of when one begins to get Christmassy in Canada includes a  particular matter of etiquette and propriety. We have Remembrance Day on November 11th and it is often said that the commercialization of Halloween and the commercialization of Christmas need to take a seat in early November to pause. It is a good idea but not one enforced with any particular stridency. Now that I am somewhat shocked to be in my seventh decade, it is good remind those whose youth didn’t include regularly runninging into known veterans of the world wars that there were people who didn’t get to be in old age. I often think at this time of year of the relatives like my great-uncle John who came back from the trenches in 1918 shellshocked as well as his sister great-aunt Madge who was a frontline nurse in the north African campaign. And, as mentioned two years ago, I think of the man at the naval memorial downtown in 2005. It is good to pause to think about such things.

And while we pause we still can consider the state of the world, including the lighter things like beer and the adjacents. Which has been a bit quiet over the last week, too. Good thing, too, as I had to dash over to Montreal to do some paperwork last Friday but still took the time to get a small measure of ice perry into me and eat at Arthurs. I reserve the right to retire to Montreal. You are on notice – vous et vous aussi! Slow, yes, but with a bit of digging, there were stories right there to be read. Look, we had local news of a beery nature, the tale of an unfortunate delivery van which had also paid a visit to La Belle Province:

In a case of the odd and perplexing, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) have charged the driver of a rental van who continued to drive after blowing a tire, ostensibly in an attempt to get away with an illegal – and massive – alcohol purchase… While speaking with the driver, officers noticed four cases of beer the the front passenger’s seat area, all of which had only French labelling on the box. Questioned about the beer, the driver became and remained evasive, even as police confronted the driver about the transportation of beer from Quebec into Ontario. Police then carried out a search of the vehicle and found “the entire back of the van was filled with beer cases,” the OPP said. 

Jings. Others have been out and about, too. ATJ, for example, was in a very nice seat and got a view of a hobbity decor. Not so many going out in Hong Kong, so CNN reports due to the departure of expats as well as locals with access to foreign passports:

Increasingly, these two groups are being replaced by people from mainland China, who now account for more than 70% of the 103,000 work or graduate visas granted since 2022, according to the Immigration Department. The newly dominant migrants, economists point out, tend to have very different spending habits. Yan Wai-hin, an economics lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said the city’s previously robust nightlife was propped up largely by a base of expats and middle-class locals steeped in the time-honored drinking culture of enjoying a nice cold one after a long day. “The makeup of the population is different now,” Yan said. “Now we have more immigrants from the mainland, and they tend to love to go back to mainland China to spend instead.”

Times past weren’t like today. I was reminded (despite craft beer’s fibbery that there was a singular craft beer revolution) that the “generally revolution related to all consumer products” has been all around us all at least since when I were a lad, as confirmed again by this bit of rearview mirroring in The Times about an aspect of The Times, one that’s always struck me as odd:

…on the afternoon of July 16, 1972, Tony Laithwaite pulled off the motorway on his way back to Windsor after visiting his parents in the Lake District. What happened next changed Britain’s drinking habits for good. Laithwaite bought a copy of The Sunday Times and saw his name in the letters page. He had written to praise the newspaper’s exposé of unscrupulous UK bottlers who were buying vin that was distinctly ordinaire but labelling it as Margaux, Meursault and many other top French names. Laithwaite was all too aware of the problem. After years working in French vineyards he had returned to the UK to set up Bordeaux Direct, which imported cases directly “from châteaux that do actually exist”, he wrote in his letter. The counterfeiters were hurting his business.

What developed out of that letter eventually became the creation of The Sunday Times Wine Club which was led in part by Hugh Johnson who wrote The World Atlas of Wine in 1971 as well as since 1977 the invaluable annual pocket guides to wine which certainly led certain people to think that beer might benefit from a similar set of such things, ran with it and away it went and here we are. But I had not really twigged that the original motivation was counterfeiting counterfeiters! Heavens. Never one to merely counterfeit, appropriate or really even emulate, TBN provided the unexpected turn of phrase of the week:

Schnitzel doesn’t grow on trees, or so I believed until Privatbrauerei Schnitzlbaumer entered my life, its name conjuring an image of juicy breaded cutlets, hanging ready to be picked.

Ah, the land of schnitzel trees… ah… Perhaps conversely, GBH has taken a break from its cycle of fast fading news summaries and brewery owner bios (BOBs) from places you (likely still) will never go to and taken a page (and perhaps a topic) from Pellicle with this wonderful (and perhaps followup*) article on Gales Prize Old Ale by our friend and mentor (he now in his third decade of comment making at this here blog) Martyn:

I’m standing in the tasting room at Meantime Brewing Company in Greenwich, southeast London, drinking the latest iteration of Gales Prize Old Ale, an almost unique survivor from Britain’s brewing past. Set to be released on November 16, this new edition is just about the only U.K. beer made in what Spanish sherry producers call the “solera style,” where a fresh batch is added each year to a vat containing the remnants of editions from previous years. This process means uncounted generations of Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus, and other yeasts and organisms survive and thrive to add fresh depth—and strength—to a beer that is powerful enough at the outset. Prize Old Ale goes into the vat around 9% ABV. A couple of years later, it can come out at 11%.

Fabulous. Fantastic even. Another of my favourite writers, Katie Mather, sent out good news this week on a new series she is publishing called “Process”:

I plan to share 10 essays over 10 weeks, talking about my personal connections to certain snacks, and discovering the mysteries and interesting histories of some of our most taken-for-granted and newly hated foods. I want to show how integral to modern life processed food is, and how interesting it is that we’ve be taught to find the idea of refining ingredients into convenience food repulsive.

Wonderful. Sign up. And Jeff wrote an excellently innovative thing this week (doing what ought to be done more by all) when he explored one small corner of our good beer culture and cast a broader light on the best of all this:

To arrive at Dave Selden’s workshop, you wind down a wooded lane next to picturesque river. I would like to report that it gets ever narrower until arriving at a rustic, moss-covered cabin deep in the fir trees, but in fact it’s actually housed in one corner of a metal warehouse. The dreamlike experience picks up again inside, however. Packed into a space about the size of a large dining room are strange artifacts of a steampunk past. Dave is the creator of 33 Books, a small company that started as a kind of analog Untappd (and in the same year, 2010, by coincidence). His first product was 33 Bottle of Beers, a little notebook the size of the back pocket of a pair of jeans. Beer fans could record their encounters with tasty ales and lagers inside, even tracing out a spider graph of the flavors if they wanted to really get their nerd on.

Love it. Dave was an early supporter of the dearly departed annual Yuletide Kwanzaa, Hogmanay, Christmas and Hanukkah photo contest and sent off wee packets of 33 Bottle of Beers to lucky winners.

And Jordan wrote many interesting words on the upcoming re-regulation / de-regulation of the beer retail trade in Ontario which is an exceptionally good lens through which to consider any retail structure in any jurisdiction but one that requires a measure of patience with the acronyms and percentages if one is going to get a correct understanding, as this passage illustrates well:

At the time that the MFA went into effect in 2015, The Beer Store made up 50.3% of the alcohol retail market in Ontario, with the LCBO sitting at 37.7%. This has largely reversed as a result of the MFA and the dwindling market share of beer when compared to wine and spirits, but mostly because of the MFA. The Beer Store now sits at 41.7% of the alcohol retail market while the LCBO is up to 51.9%. The Beer Store still controls 64.61% of the beer market in the province, with LCBO making up 35.39%. What this means is that by becoming the wholesaler for wine, beer, and cider in grocery, the LCBO’s remittance to the province of Ontario has gone from $1.81 Billion to $2.55 Billion over the course of something like an eight year period, not including calendar year 2023. The MFA, which allows grocery retail, is worth $750 million to the province on an annual basis, and that amount is likely to increase over time as the number of LCBO convenience outlets has quietly grown by 180 over the same period while the number of Beer Stores has dropped by 30 to 420. 

I do have one quibble and that is the tinyiest too much bit of weight given to the role of cannibus in the overall calcuation of what’s happening to craft beer. Generally speaking I mean, not by Jordan. As he notes in extremely appropriate detail, someone in Ontario “could get 1.53 times as much Cannabis in Dec 2022 for the same amount of money you would have paid in Dec 2018.” Me, I understand this is indicative of a glut and a consumer interest for weed that is far less than originally anticipated. It’s own separate fail. While Jordan’s points are aimed elsewhere, at the effect of excise taxation on these matters, it is important to put again on the table that craft beer is failing in part by its own doings and not as much due to external competative pressures as some might want to say. Yes, the paradigm shifted well before the pandemic and before the inflation but those blows have piled on. Which means we the clinky drinky of craft are all now out at sea, floating of an ice shelf as spring approaches.** Stay tuned for more from Jordan on the new regularory arrangements, however, which need to be in place in Ontario in about 18 months.

In another example of its thoughtful and frankly superior touch, Pellicle this week features a piece on a welcoming Glasgow pub, The Laurieston:

As you enter The Laurieston, arrows point towards the public bar on the left and lounge bar on the right, both served by the same raised island bar. Most of the original furnishings are in a well-used but good condition, including red vinyl covered arm chairs, tartan curtains, custom red Formica tables, a raised gantry with wood panelling and a suspended canopy with built-in lights. The old McGee’s hot pie heater sits to the right of the bar, a family heirloom serving hungry customers Scotch pies with a good lick of gravy and peas piled pleasingly on top. “A three course meal!” Joseph says with a wry smile.

I want to be there. Conversely, Ron has continued his explorations of where I don’t want to be – back the 1970s – with his excellent piece on the function of recycling the returns:

I take the piss out of Watney for all the returned crap that they mixed into their beers. Didn’t that make their beer rubbish? But I only know that because I’ve seen their internal quality control document. Which shows 10% of “stuff” added to most beers after fermentation. Due to the tax system in the UK, adding crap on which there was effectively no tax made a huge deal of sense. Financially. The brewers weren’t so keen. Derek Prentice told me of the effort it took to stop Fullers trying to recycle beer, even when it made no real financial sense any more. After the introduction of brewery-gate taxation.

And Gary has continued his long series on “drumming” which was the parlance for traveling sales folk in North America and beyond around a century or so ago. In the seventh post on the matter, he shares in detail what he has found out about one Mr.Kauffman:

It seems fairly clear this American was Kauffman. Like most good sales people he included a dose of exaggeration when recounting his success to the two Americans trailing him. Of course too, it is a trite datum of beer historical studies that American beer sales were almost completely domestic at the time, and remained so for decades to come.

Finally, the British Guild of Beer Writers has announced the nominees for this years awards. A good selection for sure… thought I have never understood the surprise folk express for being nominated when they themselves submitted the applications and associated fees. And, yes, some concerns as to some named have been raised but isn’t that always the case… and sometimes warranted. That being said, these awards are clearly the premier contest. The top drawer. I particularly like the openness about the corporate sponsors and that the focus on trade writing is clear. The role and the goal here is to add to CVs. Nothing wrong with that. If you’ve decided this is your path.

Still, I wish there were more routes to recognition for other sorts of writing. I know I have said it before. Maybe a few categories even with open nominations, a readers choice award? Maybe structured to encourage more non-trade views, a greater variety beyond the BOBs and the tourism board funded pieces. Even a lot of the inclusion oriented writing is falling into habits. When you read the amount that I do week after week, the sameness can be striking. If that’s the goal of the “citizen” and “self-published” categories, it could be made clearer, the measuring sticks explained. As I mentioned the other day, the final result of any rational anaysis is that we are all really just weirdos. So shouldn’t it be about being more widely welcoming weirdos, too?***

Done. That’s a lot. As per always and forever, 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. But beware! Mr. Protz lost his Twex account and still hasn’t recovered his 27,000 followers. Update on my emotional rankings? Now, for me Facebook remains clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (78) rising up to maybe pass Mastodon (903) then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,430) hovering somewhere above or around Instagram (164), with unexpectly crap Threads (42) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Seven apps plus this my blog! That makes sense. I may be multi and legion and all that but I do have priorities and seem to be keeping them in a proper row. All in all I still am rooting for the voices on the elephantine Mastodon. And even though (even with the Halloween night snows) it is #Gardening Mastodon that really wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing beer:

Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
Stan Hieronymus | The Man!
Boak & Bailey | The B² experience
Curmudgeon Ale Works | Jonathon is Brewing
Katie Mather | Shiny Biscuit and Corto
David Jesudason | “Desi Pubs” (2023) author
BeoirFest | They say “Let’s Talk Beer”
Ron Pattinson | The RonAlongAThon Himself
Al Reece AKA Velky Al | Fuggled
Jennifer Jordan | US hops historian
Andreas Krennmair | Vienna beer and lager historian
Beer Ladies Podcast | Lisa Grimm and colleagues
The Bar Towel | Toronto’s chat zone for beer lovers
Chicago Beer Society | Folk in Chicago getting social over beer
Jay Brooks | Brookston Beer Bulletin
Joe Stange | Belgian beer expert, beer magazine editor
Cider Bar | Barry makes Kertelreiter cider
Laura Hadland | CAMRA historian and beer writer
Brian Alberts | US beer historian
Jon Abernathy | The Beer Site
Maureen Ogle | US Beer Historian
Lars Garshol | Norwegian Beer Historian and Kveik Hunter
James Beeson | Beeson on Beer
Carla Jean | MAINER!!!
Thandi Guilherme | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Lisa Grimm | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Roy of Quare Swally | Beery ramblings from Northern Ireland
Rob Talksbeer | Podcaster and Youtuber
Anthony Gladman | UK Drinks Writer
Jeff Alworth | Manna Of Beervana
Northwest Beer Guide | Fairly self explanatory… but not NW Latvia…
Evan Rail | Prague based GBH editor, freelance writer, NYT etc.
Todd Alström | 50% of the Alströms
Jacob Berg | Beer talking librarian

Anyone else? Anywhere else? Yes, you also gotta check the blogs, podcasts (barely!) and even newsletters to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Here’s a new newsletter recommendation: BeerCrunchers. And  get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many 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 much more occassional but always wonderful newsletterThe 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. 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!

*Compare, careful reader, just for example how in September 2022 we read that the “…long boil produced caramelisation and darkening of the wort, which was then fermented in wooden fermenters…” with in November 2023 that the “…long boil produced caramelization and darkened the wort, which was fermented in wooden vessels…“! I have nothing but admiration and even wonder if he thought of the prospect of this very future footnote as the keyboard’s keys clicked.
**It was actually quite charming this week to read otherwise in a newsletter this week sweetly suggest this inordinately bland and decontextualized advice: “unlocking outside-the-box ideas without the preconceived notions that often surround decision-makers can serve as a welcome breath of fresh air” like we were back in 2015 or so…
***Probably need to work this idea a bit more – and noting the hours to press time – but if I read another beer writer lamenting how fewer and fewer are interested in beer or how there is more interest in wine… without noticing they themselves are one of the spokespersons for the topic, not noticing they are complaining about their own shortfalls… well, it boggles a bit.  And I got to thinking along these lines even more when I read this passage, again in The Times, about someone called Nicky Haslam, apparently one of the great exclusionary English bores of our times: “Old-fashioned posh is losing its landmarks. Internationalisation has done what democratisation could not. Things that are now considered crass are not working class but originate in the United States. These things will take hold and become “common” at warp speed because of social media…. they are a threat to a unique sense of British identity. My list would include: fasting. Ice plunges. Leg day at the gym. Infra-red saunas. Green smoothies. Cockapoos. Botox and lip filler. College consultants. Being overtly spiritual. Virtual reality games. Helicopter parenting. To resist this fretful, vain, striving, to resist describing that journey on your own podcast, is to stay British, and to stay classy.” Apparently strawberries are to be shunned now! Brilliant. Message: don’t even strive because once you get there, be honest, your sort still won’t be welcomed. Classy? That’s what this sort of class really is. Code for caste. Who needs it? It’s like those from that closed set of the constrained and privileged who bleat about “identity politics” in others when it comes to public policy. Code as cloak. Forget that. Better to be interested and interesting. Best to be weird. Welcoming and weird.

The Thursday Beery News Notes For The Week I Did Rock

Well, to be fair, it was more like rock-grass. Prog and Western. Yup, we headed north to Ottawa on the weekend and saw Alison Krauss and Robert Plant play an outdoor concert. I even had a beer as they played. A Hop Valley Bubble Stash by Creemore. At twelve bucks it wasn’t as shocking as the 17$ for a small glass of Ontario made Pinot Grigio. The beer tasted exactly like an IPA, you know… if you are wondering. Honestly, I was just happy that the drinks weren’t distracting. I was trying to pay attention to the music. I only heard one “baby” but really wanted to hear him rip just one “babybabybabybabybaby.” We did hear a couple of “oooh yeahs” and maybe an “oooh yeah oooh yeah” but, to be honest, we weren’t sure. Great show. Got me a tour tee. Cost me less than three of those dodgy Pinots.

As a result, I am bouyed this week by pure positivity. We also saw a bit of that this week from Boak and Bailey who wrote about one beer shop in Plymouth England – Vessel:

What was clear from that conversation was that Vessel had not only survived the pandemic but to some extent found its feet, and its people. How to describe Katie and Sam? They’re the kind of people who default to smiling. They are optimistic by nature, and full of ideas and energy. They’d made it through the pandemic with a mix of deliveries, takeaway, events over zoom, and sheer enthusiasm. That challenge out of the way, they told us about plans for expansion, for a brewery, for more trips and tastings.

Boom! Good stuff. See also their post on The Cockleshell in Saltash, Cornwall packed with pure perceptive positivity like this: “There’s plenty of greebling, for example, with every surface covered with nick-nacks, oddments and vintage decor.” Nice. And not just nice nice. Greebling sweetness nice.

And Liam wrote a tribute to Beer Twitter itself, sort of an interesting subject in these days of further collapse and sudden new competiton from Threads. And his approach was comparing the social media landscape to his choice of pubs:

…for me personally the place operates in the same general way. I can enter through the same front door and choose who to sit with, who to talk to, and who to ignore – although admittedly I’m not on the premises as often as others so perhaps that makes a difference. For me it’s the people within the walls who make the pub – it’s only a building after all – and if you enjoy conversing and interacting with them then why leave or change locations? I’ve investigated some other pubs to see what the fuss is about; I’ve even drank in one or two – but they are not quite the same. They feel wrong, they are not a good fit for me and not all of the people I enjoy mingling with are there either.

I agree. That is a good way of putting it. Jeff, anticipating the same patient’s final stages might be approaching,  wrote something of a sweet goodbye to Twitter this week:

Unlike any other social media platform, Twitter allowed me to build my own community and have immediate and sometimes extensive discussions with the people in it. That’s you. I’ve always appreciated how generous you’ve been with your engagement.

I can only say that speaks for me, too. There has always been a lot of comment that #BeerTwitter is a dumpster fire but it has been a great resource, too. And fun. At this moment, however, things as feeling all a bit endtimesy as Jeff also shared this:

I write a blog. About *beer.* It is unnecessary. It is largely for amusement. (Though I’d like to think edification plays a small role.) I would NEVER debase the site by throwing up a garbage AI post.

The endtimsey big news in US craft this week I suppose is the press release issued by Sapporo on Wednesday, as described by Dave Infante in his newsletter Fingers:

This morning at about 1:45am local time, Anchor Brewing Company issued a brief press release announcing its imminent liquidation, citing “a combination of challenging economic factors and declining sales since 2016.” The brewery has been operating in one form or another since 1896; its current owner, Japan’s Sapporo conglomerate, acquired the firm and its iconic Potrero Hill facility in 2017 for a reported $85 million.

Quite a blow given the narrative of craft’s whole genesis story. I am not convinced (at all) that the hagiography necessarily matches reality (at all) but I sure did like Liberty Ale back when Ontario was part of the sales footprint a few decades back. There has been much by way of erroneous speculation, questioning, cherry tree chopping, wailing and rending of garments along with some common sense and respectbut… the bottom line is this from The Olympian:

I ran a cheap “pizza and pint” feature. It helped for a while, but then hazy IPA became a thing. Beer geeks turned their laser focus on to that style and unfortunately, a lot of other brands/styles just slowed down or stopped selling altogether. Anchor was one. I think there’s only so much life a publican or retailer can do to breathe life into a cherished heritage brand before they finally give up and switch to something new and shiny. But when I see 3 cleaning dates marked on the top of a keg, it’s a slow mover and time to move.

AKA: no one bought the Cro-Magnon of beers anymore. Be honest. You may have loved it, but you didn’t actually like it all that much. Elsewhere, beer sales in Romania down 9% in the first months of 2023. Moving on, no- and low-alc beer sales well up in England but there is one hitch in the stats:

Perhaps more surprisingly, away from our living rooms, the British Beer and Pub Association says pubs are also chalking up a 23% rise in driver-friendly beer over the last year, with sales more than doubling since 2019, just before the pandemic… the overall UK sales of low- and no-alcohol beer – which covers anything up to 1.2% ABV – still represents just 0.7% of sales of UK consumption.

The immediacy of the cultural paradigm shift that has been caused by David Jesudason’s book Desi Pubs A guide to British-Indian pubs, food and culture can’t be understated… and The Morning Advertiser knows it:

Like accidentally biting on a cardamom pod,  ‘Desi Pubs’ has exploded on our complacent palates and spiced up the way that we think about the great British pub…

Even though the literary cheese is a bit notched up in the way that Phil Mellows puts it, he’s spot on that the charm is also real and widely embraced, triggering fond and thoughtful discussion and eager recommendations. Phil’s article goes on to say this book as shaken the beer world like the popular and widely read works of Pete Brown as well as Boak and Bailey did a decade ago. So far it is the thing of 2023. Just like Anchor is the not thing. It’s the thang. The thing and thang of 2023. Right there.

I also would like to say that being positive is not about just being a booster. There are things needing improving, needing to be addressed. Otherwise, any idea of community is a convenient falsehood. To that end, Beer is For Everyone published a personal essay by Lindsay Malu Kido, the group’s founder. It was on the poor experience many faced at the Craft Brewers Conference in Nashville, discussed here back in May. The findings against the Brewers Association were telling:

The Brewers Association had the power and responsibility to set the stage for a more supportive and inclusive conference experience. While they can’t control every individual interaction, they can certainly influence the overall atmosphere. By staying silent on the political climate in Tennessee and not visibly showing support for marginalized attendees, they indirectly contributed to the isolation I, and many others, felt. Their failure to act emphasized the dismissiveness and lack of care that seemed to permeate the conference.

Why is this such a persistent part of craft, not just the bigotries but the institutionalized comfort with the bigotries? What is it about beer… hmm… Perhaps not unrelatedly, Gary wrote this week about a 1949 study of pub culture in England which even included a pointed criticism of the high and holy mid-1900s UK “Beer is Best” brewing trade advertising campaign and how its encouragement of mindless drinking was worth noticing. To be fair, Gary is not fully convinced by the authors – but summarizes the results very fairly:

The period they describe exemplified the heyday of the English pub and draught beer, with men (usually) supping from one to three or four pints every evening afer work. The was apart from the dissolute group who spend most of their day in the public house. A shopheeper had that sad fate, leaving the shop to his wife’s administration… The authors tend to be hard, once again, on the drinking ethos, stating at one pint the typical drinking pattern progresses from “exhileration to “anaesthesia”. For them, the idea of the public house as valued community cetre is pretty much, to use an appropriate vernacular, tosh, excepting in some rural areas.

Speaking of the disfunctional in plain view, it is sad that one of the legacies of what people call craft beer is this sort of design disfunction:

If you put fruit pulp in beer and do not fully ferment it this happens. It has happened to other breweries over the years. It isn’t just unfortunate, it’s dangerous. There is NO reason to have unregulated, unplanned fermentation in sealed containers.

Note: if that is what is happening on the beer store shelf, what the hell is happening in your guts? Don’t the people who buy this stuff know the burbling brook is not suppose to be a feature?

Aaaaannnnnd… once again, no politician of any stripe in Canada suffers from displays of beer culture prowess:

Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim (left) generated lots of social media buzz when he shotgunned a beer on stage at the Khatsahlano Street Party on July 9.

As a result of our political culture, I wonder if this sort of thing operates very differently north and south of the 49th parallel:

The Beer Institute, a national trade association representing the $409 billion beer industry, hired Cornerstone Government Affairs to lobby on economic, budget, tax and appropriations policies impacting large beer producers. The Beer Institute recently launched StandWithBeer.org, which alleges large liquor companies exploit tax loopholes to lower their effective tax rate. John Sandell, former tax counsel to the House Ways and Means Committee, will work on the account.

And this week’s feature at Pellicle by Rachel Hendry is about the placement of fine wine in the TV show Succession. [Confession: never watched one episode. Never watched on of The Wire, Madmen or Dexter or a whole whack of other must see TV for that matter.] I do really like this sharp observation shared from a wine writer’s Twitter feed about one drinking scene:

In a Twitter thread by sommelier Rapha Ventresca, they break down why this choice of wine is so intriguing. As half-brother, not only is Connor the oldest of the four siblings, but his oddities have him consistently excluded from the machiavellian manoeuvres that make up most of Succession’s plot. Château Haut-Brion, then, is not only the oldest of the first four Bordeaux Chateaux, but it is the only one grown outside of Medoc, to have majority Merlot in its blend and to be bottled in a sloping shape that breaks away from the traditional Bordeaux style. In essence, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Not unlike the man using it to drown his sorrows the night before his wedding.

Sweet. I had a pal who knew so much about trucks and cars that he was a pain to go to the movies with. In any given car crash scene, he would count off how many vehicles were actually filmed and presented as the one car driven through the mess by the hero. Me, I price the flower arrangements given I was raised by a florist and trained in The Netherlands myself in the wholesale trade. No one in 99% of all movies can afford the flower arrangements in their home. But I’ve told you that before. Must have.

There. Once again, that’s it! Ooooh, yeah… baaaaaaybeeeee… As per, you can check out the many ways to connect including at my new cool Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Have you checked out Threads? Seems a bit thin to me so far. But I don’t like IG and it is like mini-IG. Don’t forget theose voices on Mastodon, the newer ones noted in bold:

Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
Stan Hieronymus | The Man!
Boak & Bailey | The B² experience
Curmudgeon Ale Works | Jonathon is Brewing
Katie Mather | Shiny Biscuit and Corto
David Jesudason | “Desi Pubs” (2023) author
BeoirFest | They say “Let’s Talk Beer”
Ron Pattinson | The RonAlongAThon Himself
Al Reece AKA Velky Al | Fuggled
Jennifer Jordan | US hops historian
Andreas Krennmair | Vienna beer and lager historian
Beer Ladies Podcast | Lisa Grimm and colleagues
The Bar Towel | Toronto’s chat zone for beer lovers
Chicago Beer Society | Folk in Chicago getting social over beer
Jay Brooks | Brookston Beer Bulletin
Joe Stange | Belgian beer expert, beer magazine editor
Cider Bar | Barry makes Kertelreiter cider
Laura Hadland | CAMRA historian and beer writer
Brian Alberts | US beer historian
Jon Abernathy | The Beer Site
Maureen Ogle | US Beer Historian
Lars Garshol | Norwegian Beer Historian and Kveik Hunter
James Beeson | Beeson on Beer
Carla Jean | MAINER!!!
Thandi Guilherme | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Lisa Grimm | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Roy of Quare Swally | Beery ramblings from Northern Ireland
Rob Talksbeer | Podcaster and Youtuber
Anthony Gladman | UK Drinks Writer
Jeff Alworth | Manna Of Beervana
Northwest Beer Guide | Fairly self explanatory… but not NW Latvia…
Evan Rail | Prague based GBH editor, freelance writer, NYT etc.
Todd Alström | 50% of the Alströms
Jacob Berg | Beer talking librarian

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters to stay on top of things – including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those  Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many 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 more occassional but always wonderful newsletterThe Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a podcast.  There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube soon celebrating a decade of vids.   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!*

*And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like  both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again.  The Fizz died in 2019.  Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

The Rushed Beery News Notes For A Bloggy Hangover Week

Not my hangover! The beer blogosphere’s hangover. Some weeks like last week have so much happening that it takes a few hours over a few days to put it all together… even thought you know you’ve missed stuff. Weeks that follow those one, like this one does, are not so much dead as hungover. The world takes a little breather. Plus it is the time of the great watering. My spare moments from the reading and writing is, as you know, caught up with tomato patches and peas in pots. June will be June after all. Climbing beans are now climbing for God’s sake.

Speaking of matters agricultural, on the whole I am not one for beer writing about drinky scribbling personalities but I definitely take exception to my exception when it comes to this article in Pellicle on Barry Masterson, founder and maker at Kertelreiter in South-West Germany’s Schefflenz with whom I have chatted on line for years (and in whose project I have invested a tiny wee bit of Canadian coinage):

Since Barry began harvesting pears from ancient trees on those morning walks with his Border Collie, Anu, he has become not only one of Europe’s finest perrymakers, but a leading authority on this most mysterious and understudied of drinks. “His passion is irresistibly infectious,” cider and perry writer Chris Russell-Smith says. “He has spent countless hours presenting at online cider events, engaging with cider lovers on social media, writing about the history of perry, and promoting the International Perry Pear Project.”

Barry himself was also published this week, in Cider Review on the question of “the winification of cider”:

…every so often on social media there is a kind of kickback against the apparent winification of cider. Some appear to fear this as a kind of erosion of the traditions of cider and argue that cider is cider (and I do agree) and can stand on its own two feet. But is this really something that is happening at a meaningful scale that changes anything? Or is it something that cider has actually lost? What does this idea of winification really mean?

So many questions. Read the piece for some answers. Sticking around in Germany, a tip of the hat to Jeff who alerted us all to this piece on Köln / Cologne and its beer scene from A Tempest in a Tankard:

Unlike the fairly marked variations between the Altbiers of Düsseldorf just downriver, Kölsch is like a ski race. Yes, there are differences between the Kölsch from different brewhouses, but for the most part, the quality is measured by the fraction of a second. You won’t leave disappointed. There’s way more to the story of Kölsch — the Kölsch Convention of 1986 that granted the beverage protected status, for example, or the difference between Kölsch and a local historical style called Wiess (not to be confused with Weißbier), which was the precursor of Kölsch. There’s also the Köbes, the illustrious beer servers of Cologne. But I’ll leave all of that out here and just give you a quick run-down of pubs and brewhouses for your next visit to Cologne.

The Tand posted this week on the sticker shock one finds when out drinking in London these days and sometimes the experience of stickerless shock:

Prices of course vary, and here, as you can imagine, I’m talking about prices in pubs. Oddly, though, prices of beer, as often as not, aren’t clear as you’d hope. It is not at all uncommon – yes, I’m looking at you Stonegate as a main culprit – to list the price of everything but beer on table menus.  Is beer pricing so volatile that it can’t be committed to print? I’d have thought not, so what could the reason be for this omission?  There are laws of course about displaying prices, though I think these are rather loosely complied with generally and for sure can’t be relied on, though again this varies and in most of the places I go to, the prices are out in the open, but when you go of piste, rather less so.

Martin posted a post this week with some excellent coverage of the gull nesting scene in Newcastle Upon Tyne which is really worth recording here for posterity – just in case his blog gets shut down by the North East Gull Community Personal Data Privacy Protection Commussion (hereinafter “the NEGCPDPPC”) or some such administrative entity. Not really beer related but, having seen The Birds, I think it is important to keep an eye on these things.

Here’s a new twist on the Bud Light botch – was it intentional? Warning – check the source:

The whistleblower stated on “Tomi Lahren Is Fearless” that “nobody’s happy” about the fall in sales and “everybody” considers the move a “very bad idea.” However, on the corporate level, he claimed that this could have been part of a strategy to undermine the American company. “When the company was bought over by InBev, a lot of things changed when it was owned by Anheuser-Busch. You know, it’s an American brand,” the whistleblower remarked. He explained that the company previously offered many benefits prior to its purchase by InBev. Through the fall in sales for the Bud Light brand, the former employee stated that the corporation could restructure both employee benefits and its company standards through layoffs and renegotiating contracts.

This week’s obits: Skagit Malting, Brick Brewery, O’Fallon. Relatedly, another indication of the times from GBH on the sadder sort of old school in craft, a throwback to twenty years ago in the form of another glut of second hand brewing equipment:

Now is an opportune time to be a U.S. brewery looking to score a deal on used equipment. Brewery closures and an increase in mergers and acquisitions have led to more used brewing equipment on the market than in years prior, with low prices as much as half-off new equipment. The glut of fermenters, canning lines, mash tuns, and more is a symptom of a mature market facing a low- or no-growth future—and it could be a harbinger of even tougher times ahead for craft breweries.

Well, an opportune time if there was any hope of an expansion of beer sales. As per, no one would answer the phone when the GBH call was placed to equipment manuacturers but that might because the repo man has already been by and removed all the office equipment.

More pleasantly, Katie Mather published another excellent edition of The Gulp this week under the title “My Favourite Bar Is A Petrol Station Forecourt“:

The buzz of the bikes coming through and past the petrol station is only part of why I love drinking here—because drinking here is what is done. All along the spectator side of the barriers and buffers are fans with cans, dressed in racers’ merch and sponsor hats, listening to the local radio’s coverage of the race. I love the strangeness of the situation, of spending time somewhere that was never intended to be used as a space for people to linger, a place I shouldn’t really be. I like the atmosphere that strangeness creates, a kind of collective in-this-together spirit, where everyone is sound, everyone chats, everyone realises the absurdity of the situation and relishes it. 

Casket Beer did a bit of a service to pre-craft microbeer history reaching all the way  back 23 years to revisit Michael Jackson’s Great Beer Guide with a particular eye to the glassware used:

Published in 2000, the Great Beer Guide is a fantastic book and offers a nice snapshot of what the beer world was like at the time. It does this by offering a brief overview of 500 beers from around the world. While many think of the United States beer culture as still being in the dark ages in the year 2000, there’s an impressive number of beers from the States represented in the book. Though Jackson may have been a bit polite in some cases, there are many that are or were, excellent.

I relied on this book heavily in my earliest days of writing about my own beer hunting and gathering two decades ago and always liked that photo of Fuller’s 1845 – snazzy, thought I. The scene in 2000 was definitely more about the imports than the locals . The disassembling of the glassware offered in the book points out how developed the marketing was even if the US market had not at that point been on par with the rest of the world.

I wish we had more lower alcohol actual ales (mild or ordinary bitter, for example) so I am a bit of two minds about the effects of the new UK taxation scheme that is driving breweries to lower the pop of some of their mainstream brands as the Daily Mail noted this week:

…the ABV for Old Speckled Hen is down from five per cent to 4.8 per cent; Spitfire Amber Ale is down from 4.5 per cent to 4.2 per cent; and Bishops Finger is down from 5.4 per cent to 5.2 per cent. While the reductions may appear small, they generate a tax saving of 2p to 3p on every bottle and can made. Rather than passing this saving on to drinkers, the cash is being pocketed by the brewers and retailers. They argue the cut protects them against rising costs, rather than profiteering, while some say they are cutting alcohol levels for the ‘good of public health’.

Boak and Bailey’s monthly newsletter had a wonderful bit of the old vignette this time around:

The area around the Arnolfini arts centre is a particular hotspot for bag-of-cans drinking. Wander around there on any summer night and you’ll see plenty of people sitting on benches, or on bare stone, with their supermarket carriers. As Shonette observes, they might dangle their legs over the water, or sit cross-legged in a circle. Some of them might be dressed smartly, straight from the office; others in more typical stoner-student style. And there is usually, of course, a background hum of weed, along with music being played from phones or USB speakers. Something about this habit strikes us as pointedly democratic. Even if you can’t afford £5+ pints in one of the harbourside pubs, you can still be out in town, feeling the buzz of the city.

There’s some concern about the resulting detritus… but how does that compare to the wreckage caused at another economic snack bracket attending an all-you-can-drink prosecco brunch as reported in The Times?

“It doesn’t matter, anyway. I’m here to get drunk,” she hollers. The rest of her table chant in agreement. “More prosecco! More prosecco! More prosecco!” Brunch trudges along. You’ve managed to escape for two cigarettes. Three women have vomited. One man had a fight with the DJ. He stood beneath the ladder hurling abuse as the DJ danced to Afraid to Feel by LF System and waved him away. You told the man to sit down. He called you a “snake” and stared you down as he drank a whole bottle of prosecco in a few gulps. You told a manager. They said: “It’s brunch. What do you expect? Just give him some free doughnuts.”

Finally, the King has commissioned a portrait of Scottish brewing educator @SirGeoffPalmer along with nine fellow members of the Windrush Generation. What a lovely thing.

That’s it! That’s enough from me. I’m off to the garden now. Gonna transplant a tomato from one spot to another. Because I can. As for beer news, it’s back to you all for now as always. And as per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon, the newer ones noted in bold:

Stan Hieronymus | The Man!
Boak & Bailey | The B² experience
Curmudgeon Ale Works | Jonathon is Brewing
Katie Mather | Shiny Biscuit and Corto
David Jesudason | “Desi Pubs” (2023) author
BeoirFest | They say “Let’s Talk Beer”
Ron Pattinson | The RonAlongAThon Himself
Al Reece AKA Velky Al | Fuggled
Jennifer Jordan | US hops historian
Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
Andreas Krennmair | Vienna beer and lager historian
Beer Ladies Podcast | Lisa Grimm and colleagues
The Bar Towel | Toronto’s chat zone for beer lovers
Chicago Beer Society | Folk in Chicago getting social over beer
Jay Brooks | Brookston Beer Bulletin
Joe Stange | Belgian beer expert, beer magazine editor
Cider Bar | Barry makes Kertelreiter cider
Laura Hadland | CAMRA historian and beer writer
Brian Alberts | US beer historian
Jon Abernathy | The Beer Site
Maureen Ogle | US Beer Historian
Lars Garshol | Norwegian Beer Historian and Kveik Hunter
James Beeson | Beeson on Beer
Carla Jean | MAINER!!!
Thandi Guilherme | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Lisa Grimm | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Roy of Quare Swally | Beery ramblings from Northern Ireland
Rob Talksbeer | Podcaster and Youtuber
Anthony Gladman | UK Drinks Writer
Jeff Alworth | Manna Of Beervana
Northwest Beer Guide | Fairly self explanatory… but not NW Latvia…
Evan Rail | Prague based GBH editor, freelance writer, NYT etc.
Todd Alström | 50% of the Alströms
Jacob Berg | Beer talking librarian

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters to stay on top of things – including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those  Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now more occassional but always wonderful newsletterThe Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a podcast.  There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube soon celebrating a decade of vids.   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!*

*And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like  both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again.  The Fizz died in 2019.  Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For The Greatest Week Of The Year

Can you believe late May and early June? I was so caught up with the darling buds of May on Tuesday morning, I even posted a third of this two days early. Significantly… no one cared. Anyway, that’s the life of a blogger two decades in. No time to fret. Summer is coming on soon. Last weekend, I got out the big hat and the SPF 50 and partook of a bit of rugger spectating and – I say I say – I shall do so again this week. Wha-hey! Look at that action. The eastern Ontario league games are free and, as you can see, the seats are good… as long as you remember to bring one. You don’t get as close as that gent in grey, mind you, but he was a linesman so there is that.

First up in beer – because there was no beer tent at the field of play –  very interesting news from Evan Rail and the publication of an anthology of the best of his his beer writing.

…until now, the old “Why Beer Matters” was never available in print, just on Kindle. (Yes, there was a limited-edition letterpress edition, but that doesn’t count.) This new print + ebook edition was made with the amazing @vellum180g. It looks great, if I do say so myself.

Many of the pieces he has included in the book speak from that era of optimism about good beer that existed before the buy-outs, the murk, the scandals, the fruit sauces and the closings. Very worthwhile and all excellently written. Buy it here.

Speaking of putting it all together, Matty Matt Meister 3000 has published a tale in Pellicle this week, a tale of an apple named Discovery:

You couldn’t possibly make proper cider with eating apples, I thought… I have since learned when it comes to any alcoholic beverage, this breed of snobbery gets you absolutely nowhere—all drinks are valid and have their place, after all.* And some of the best cider in the world is made using sweet, deliciously succulent eating apples. Chief among them: the noble Discovery. First cultivated in 1949, Discovery’s story began when Essex fruit worker George Dummer planted pips taken from the Worcester Pearmain variety in his garden, thought to be pollinated by another variety called Beauty of Bath. The tale goes that the young tree was left unplanted, and was exposed to frost, with only a light sack covering for protection. Fortunately it survived, and eventually came to the attention of Suffolk nursery keeper Jack Matthews, who took grafts of the tree and continued to develop the variety.

Note: unlike all drinks, all apples are valid and do have their place. White Claw and glitter beer are crap and you can’t even turn that shit into compost.

Stats on the UK beer scene are something that Victim of Maths more than dabbles in as this week when he notes that off-trade booze prices have siggnificantly dragged behind inflation:

The latest UK inflation data shows that in spite of continuing high levels of price increases in food and non-alcoholic drinks, prices of shop-bought alcohol, particularly wine and spirits, have not risen at anything like the same rate… you could speculate a few reasons: 1) We produce a lot of it domestically 2) Perhaps ingredients less affected by price increases 3) Ability of retailers/producers to stockpile due to long shelf life 4) Used as a loss leader.

Staying in Britain, The Times published an article on calories and booze and shared this interesting bit of metabolic prioritization info:

“Unlike protein, carbohydrates and fats, alcohol cannot be stored in the liver,” says Eli Brecher, a registered nutritionist. “Drinking large quantities results in your body prioritising the breaking down of alcohol over its other duties such as burning calories and the result is that your metabolism slows and calorie-burning is less efficient.”

Across the Channel, Boak and Bailey have been to Paris and have identified some key tips to navigating its beer bars, tips like this:

You wouldn’t cut towards the bar to greet the staff in a branch of Wetherspoon, though, before finding a table. In France, we’ve found, people will do exactly that, effectively announcing their arrival, and getting (quiet, possibly unspoken) permission to take a seat… Of course we got it wrong at craft beer bar FauveParis at 49 Rue St Sabin on our way out to Italy, while we were still warming up. We then spent 30 minutes trying to win over the staff whose feelings we had hurt. They wouldn’t look at us, talk to us or crack a smile because, fair enough, we’d rudely walked in and failed to greet them before looking at the beer list.

Not dissimilarly except it’s elsewhere, Martin is on the road again, this time in Estonia and Latvia with a series of posts (along with the usual generous accompaniment of excellent photos) that also unpack what you might expect if you found yourself there and thirsty such as these two observations in Riga:

Across the church square was Banshee, a brand new craft bar and another pre-emptive tick, which seemed to specialise in orange murk, a change from the sour obsession in Tallinn… And the local specialties of dumplings and blood sausage were worth the calories, though an impulse late order of dried fish and squid was a step into Estonian authenticity too far.

Closer to home, a great bit of vid was posted this week from here in Ontario where two beer fans report on the limited joys of that regulatory loophole that allows a 7 Eleven convenience store to be deemed a restaurant that serves beer… as long as you don’t leave with it.

Odd story in GBH this week about efforts to undo US alcohol regulation related to category management and how the Brewer’s Association is going to submit something to the Federal regulaory body, the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau… but there’s not much input from either the Bureau or the Brewer’s Association:

“…that’s what the BA’s for. Maybe they bring on category management expertise to represent them regionally,” Fisher says. “Now you’d have a category manager who represents these 20 regional beer brands to help them with their business.” The BA declined to answer questions about what would fill the void left by category management, saying it is not speaking further about its comments to the TTB at this time. Brandt says that if the BA is going to put category management under the regulatory microscope, the trade organization should consider an alternative solution that it thinks would benefit its members. (This is a complex question, as some of the BA’s largest member breweries employ their own category managers.) “It would be really cool if they proposed an alternate method,” Brandt says. “Bring me a solution, not a problem, right?”

Not that complex at all. Just that once again, the Brewers Association has no solution what with its hands being tied by the big members… like their hands are tied in implementing EDI…  or kicking out bad members, etc., etc., etc…

And I ran a poll this week and, as never before, people on Twitter responded. An exit poll of sorts,  305 nice folk… or maybe 105 folk and 200 bots shared their thoughts on why their interest in craft beer faded. These things aren’t interesting for any sort of overall result so much as the patterns. 11% found other nerdy hobbies, 20% moved away from craft’s culture but almost 70% expressed it’s too pricy or too much of the same experience – both of which speak to value. Then we look at the comments. “NEIPA” says Knut. “Same-ish says Andreas. “$20+ for a 4-pack I might not like makes the price not fine” says Andres. “Too many mediocre/bad quality offerings and a backlog of aged beer in retail” says Dan. “I am simply too old to drink things flavored with children’s cereal” says Kathleen. I likd that one particularly. Then… we also heard “a repetitive online culture that seems more invested in getting clout from strangers on the other side of the world” from Robin. “Gatekeepers” says Japhet and “deliberate antagonism towards those who like their beer from a cask” says Ben. And another Dan wrote: “…there is a lot of crappy performance beers (I call those that seem to have been brewed on a dare or a whim and are more like candy than beer) & it has dulled my interest in exploring.” Add growing up and getting more health conscious. Good comments. Not even all that cranky. Some folk just not as interested if they ever were.

By way of contrast, Stan wrote an interesting post about the residual interest in treating craft brewers like “rock stars” in the context of considering the new revised edition of The Complete Beer Course by Joshua Bernstein. This is an idea which, as Stan kindly noted, I have thought is utterly nutso for over 15 years. I am not alone. But, like those moving on surveyed above, the value decision in the other direction is still a real for some:

In 2023, Bernstein chose to include brewery workers like sensory scientist Rachel McKinney at Fremont Brewing and packaging manager Marcus Crabtree at Kings County Brewing Collective. “I really want to give a voice to these people that are in the industry and show people that beer is more than just one single person, that breweries are miniature factories and everybody has different roles, and getting that beer into your hand requires a lot of hard effort and a lot of [teamwork],” he said to Iseman. What does that mean for the exalted few? Tod and Cilurzo are in the index of the latest edition; Maier and Calagione are not (although Dogfish Head makes multiple appearances). Call it coincidence. Photos posted on Instagram from The Brewers Retreat this week prove, plenty of fans are still willing to pay to hang out with their brewing heroes.

Hero is a word tossed around a lot. And, like rock star, it is too often misplaced. If these be your rock stars, get to a few good concerts. And if these be your heroes, well, maybe time to go volunteer somewhere and find people quietly contributing to those in need with little fanfare. One aspect of this, of course, is that these labels are applied by writers and not the people themselves. Writers with a dictionary that might be a week bit too concise. Or maybe with an interest in plumping up a recycled tale within their chosen narrow area of focus. Still – is this enthusaism any less valid than those who choose to move on after losing the love? Probably not. As we were all so wisely told before… back in 1986.**

Note: “philly dive restrooms are nicer than most cities’ whole bars.”

That’s it! That’s enough from me.  As per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon, the new ones noted in bold:

Stan Hieronymus | The Man!
Boak & Bailey | The B² experience
Curmudgeon Ale Works | Jonathon is Brewing
Katie Mather | Shiny Biscuit and Corto
David Jesudason | “Desi Pubs” (2023) author
BeoirFest | They say “Let’s Talk Beer”
Ron Pattinson | The RonAlongAThon Himself
Al Reece AKA Velky Al | Fuggled
Jennifer Jordan | US hops historian
Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
Andreas Krennmair | Vienna beer and lager historian
Beer Ladies Podcast | Lisa Grimm and colleagues
The Bar Towel | Toronto’s chat zone for beer lovers
Chicago Beer Society | Folk in Chicago getting social over beer
Jay Brooks | Brookston Beer Bulletin
Joe Stange | Belgian beer expert, beer magazine editor
Cider Bar | Barry makes Kertelreiter cider
Laura Hadland | CAMRA historian and beer writer
Brian Alberts | US beer historian
Jon Abernathy | The Beer Site
Maureen Ogle | US Beer Historian
Lars Garshol | Norwegian Beer Historian and Kveik Hunter
James Beeson | Beeson on Beer
Carla Jean | MAINER!!!
Thandi Guilherme | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Lisa Grimm | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Rob Talksbeer | Podcaster and Youtuber
Anthony Gladman | UK Drinks Writer
Jeff Alworth | Manna Of Beervana
Northwest Beer Guide | Fairly self explanatory… but not NW Latvia…
Evan Rail | Prague based GBH editor, freelance writer, NYT etc.
Todd Alström | 50% of the Alströms
Jacob Berg | Beer talking librarian

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters to stay on top of things – including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those  Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now more occassional but always wonderful newsletterThe Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a podcast.  There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube soon celebrating a decade of vids.   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!***

*Doubt it, Ralphie!!! For those not familiar with the ever excellent phrase “Doubt it, Ralphie” here is some background information.
**Winner of the 2023 Vacuous Conclusion Of The Year Award!
***And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like  both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again.  The Fizz died in 2019.  Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

 

A Warming And Growing Then Dashed Hopes Sort Of Beery News Notes

Ah, false spring. I have happily read Dan Malleck’s 2022 book Liquor and the Liberal State: Drink and Order before Prohibition to stay warm this week. It neatly explains the period between the “your betters” of the Georgian status-based mercentile world and modern life, illustrating the rise of the new “your betters” of the regulating bureaucracy through the brief decades in the later 1800s of Canada’s laisse-faire capitalist “your betters”! Perhaps not surprisingly, there is less actual liquor in Dan’s book than in last week’s 2016 update of the bio of Lemmy, White Line Fever* but, to be clear, waaaay more policy debate set in late Victorian Ontario. Lemmy dropped the ball in that respect.

You know, the two books fill handy gaps and together would make for a very interesting compare and contrast sort of essay question given each in its own way is an exploration of autonomy in the modern state. I highly recommend each of them – especially as it’s reasonable to suggest that the lads on the cover of the Dan’s book would, but for the non-invention of a time machine, no doubt would have picked up a fond affection for Motörhead. Especially that lad to the right. I might have post a full review of the book but (i) it is not 2008-14 and not one does that anymore and (ii) Dan warned me off:

Enjoy. If you don’t, I don’t wanna know 🙂

Get both books. Do it! Note: UBC Press’s online shopping is particularly handy.

Speaking of the song stylings of Motörhead, this week’s piece in the Pellicle about hearing loss is something worth reading. I fried my ears on cheap RadioShack headphones and late 70s punk as a kid, leaving myself now with tinitus, lost accuity leading me to say “what?!?!” a lot as well as pain from a whole range of sounds now. I actually had to flee a pub this year when the Irish band struck up. Hot knives in the head. Anyway, it’s real and if you  don’t believe me, think about what Emmie Harrison-West says about it:

…there’s no such thing as a ‘quiet pint’. I struggle if I sit at the bar, or next to barking dogs (which is torture, I tell you—being a lover of all four-legged friends), speakers, toilets, televisions, fruit machines, pool tables, and kitchens, as I have to strain to hear my friends, or ask them to repeat themselves. It’s as frustrating as it is exhausting. There’s only so many times I can say: “Sorry, what?” before I end up closing in on myself, smiling and nodding, becoming reserved, and making an excuse to leave.

There is a good descriptor for NA beer: a soft drink. I don’t care to write about them but others seem to need to include them in with, you know, actual drinks. Big in Germany, says Will Hawkes in VinePair:

It was introduced in 2018 after Reineke spent two years developing the beer. “All my brewer friends told me that it was a stupid idea, that nobody would want it in Germany,” he says. “But it’s getting more and more popular and I think it’ll be our No. 1 product within the next few years.”

Along a similar line of things not being what they suggest they are, are wet led pubs really taking off in the UK? The Mudge doubts it –  and considers it in the context of his local where he has seen kitchen food service come and now go:

There was a serving hatch in the extension from which a variety of straightforward food was dispensed at lunchtimes. I remember having some tasty bacon barms there. But the general decline of pubgoing meant that it became nowhere near as busy as it once was… They introduced a much more ambitious and expensive pub food menu, but it never seemed to find many takers, and the general impression that the pub still gave of being a traditional boozer probably put diners off. In hindsight, it might have made more sense to make the extension a dedicated dining area with a brighter colour scheme and return the main bar service to the old side. So the food has now been dropped, and according to WhatPub it now only offers “pies and barmcakes”, which presumably need no kitchen preparation. 

Similarly on the theme of what is is not what is said to be, The Tand Himself has taken his study of Sam Smith’s pub chain’s flaunted nanny alt-state rules… and found them utterly flouted in The Big City:

While it has never been officially confirmed, it is known that Humphrey’s son Sam is the supremo of all the Southern operations. Things are done differently there, and while recently in the North, innovations such as paying by phone and card have been accepted, it is true to say that no such restrictions have operated in London for quite some time.The reasons for this are pretty obvious when you look at the clientele. I think it’s fair to say that in the absence of paying by card or phone Mr. Smith would find insufficient customers willing to pay by cash, as payment by such is, in London, the exception rather than the rule. Also missing from most of the London pubs is the plethora of notices forbidding this, that or the other, though it is fair to say that the one prohibiting electronic devices is generally clear and present, but,  particularly in the case of phones, is blatantly and wholly disregarded.

Heavens! Speaking of which, The Guardian reports that Trappist breweries are suffering from a definite lack of Trappists. As a Protestant I can only say, theologically-speaking, it’s about time. But will we miss them when they are gone?

…uncertainties hover over the future of Trappist beer production in this traditionally Catholic country, where fewer people are drawn to a life of monastic contemplation. Those questions became more acute in January when Belgium’s Achel beer lost its Trappist status after being taken over by a private entrepreneur. The new owner has vowed to keep the recipe unchanged, but after the severing of ties with monks, Achel can no longer call itself a Trappist beer. “It must be admitted that the state of most monastic communities is precarious,” said Brother Benedikt, the abbot of Westmalle…

Furtherly similarly but from the wholey unholier point of view, will Boston Beer finally complete its BA Denied™ slow full rotation from micro to craft to something else to none of the above by selling itself off:

After riding high on the hard seltzer boom in the run up to the coronavirus, Boston and its shares fell from grace when it almost bet the ranch and lost on its Truly brand only to see demand hit the brakes leaving it to write off huge amounts of stock… Heineken is running its eye over Boston because the existing market positions of brands such as Truly and Twisted Tea could fill a strategic hole in the armoury of the world’s third largest brewer. While she does not believe a deal is imminent, she says such a move holds “strategic rationale for both parties.”

Does all this leave you less than… enthused? Does beer leave you feeling like Wojciech Weiss or even Walter Richard Sickert observed? Is there any doubt it’s been losing fans for very good reasons? Ron wants to know and even shares a confession:

I rarely join the chase foe a specific beer nowadays. Unless it’s something really special. And by special, I mean odd, forgotten and obscure styles. Not the latest trend. I can take or leave the newest type of IPA or adulterated Imperial Stout. My interest has now mostly shifted to history. Understanding how beer styles are formed and mutate as they spread out from their initial homelands. I put in as much time and effort as ever, Just in a different environment. No longer out in the field with my binoculars hoping to spot a rare bird to cross off my list. But at my computer, excavating the barrows of long-lost brews. Without enthusiasm, I wouldn’t be doing this work.

Ontario wine writer Michael Pinkus shared another sort of lack of enthusiasm in his monthly newsletters, the provincial monopoly’s moves to limit local drinks writers:

In 2019 the LCBO started to curate the wines that they were allowing journalists to taste. They were dictating to the local media what they should be covering. When I pressed the LCBO for an explanation nothing was provided. (Did money play a part?). And now, no local, independent journalist tastes any kind of extensive line-up of LCBO wines. So how do you really know what’s good and fits the Ontario palate? Today the LCBO saves even more money by “borrowing” notes from international journalists to sell the wines on their shelves; how does that benefit their ultimate consumer? Ontarians. What I find even more offensive is of late they use their own product consultants as “experts” to review wines.

Finally, some legal news. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled this week in a case of the often seen situation of a drunk guy on an ATV bombing along a back road… with a twist:

… a non‑exhaustive definition does not necessarily oust other definitions. Depending on the context, exhaustive and non-exhaustive definitions can be read together. Under a harmonious reading of the two definitions of “driver”, for the purpose of s. 48(1), “driver” refers to a person who is driving, or has care or control of, a motor vehicle on a highway. A person who has care or control of a motor vehicle but who is no longer on a highway would not be a “driver” under the HTA.  In the present case, Mr. McColman was not a “driver” for the purpose of s. 48(1) when he was stopped by the police. Even if it can be said that he had care or control of the ATV, he was not on a highway when the police effected the stop. Therefore, the police stop was unauthorized by s. 48(1) of the HTA.

See, the guy was stopped after he left the road and was on private property. Fortunately, the Court let the evidence in even though there was a violation of ATV guy’s rights holding that society’s interest in the truth-seeking function of the criminal trial process would be better served by admission of the evidence even though the police impacted Mr. McColman’s liberty interests when they the police questioned him in the course of an unlawful detention.  Sucks, as they say, to suck.

There. Done. Enough. Finis. Consider Mastodon. Here’s your newbie cheat sheet:

Stan Hieronymus | The Man!
Boak & Bailey | The B² experience
Katie Mather | Shiny Biscuit and Corto
David Jesudason | “Desi Pubs” (2023) author
Ron Pattinson | The RonAlongAThon Himself
Al Reece AKA Velky Al | Fuggled
Jennifer Jordan | US hops historian
Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
Andreas Krennmair | Vienna beer and lager historian
Beer Ladies Podcast | Lisa Grimm and colleagues
Jay Brooks | Brookston Beer Bulletin
Joe Stange | Belgian beer expert, beer magazine editor
Cider Bar | Barry makes Kertelreiter cider
Laura Hadland | CAMRA historian and beer writer
Brian Alberts | US beer historian
Jon Abernathy | The Beer Site
Maureen Ogle | US Beer Historian
Lars Garshol | Norwegian Beer Historian and Kveik Hunter
James Beeson | Beeson on Beer
Carla Jean | MAINER!!!
Thandi Guilherme | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Lisa Grimm | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Rob Talksbeer | Podcaster and Youtuber
Anthony Gladman | UK Drinks Writer
Jeff Alworth | Manna Of Beervana
Northwest Beer Guide | Fairly self explanatory… but not NW Latvia…
Evan Rail | Prague based GBH editor, freelance writer, NYT etc.
Todd Alström | 50% of the Alströms
Jacob Berg | Beer talking librarian

Anyone else? And check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and maybe from Stan at his spot on those  Mondays but, you know, he writes bits and bobs when he can… like this! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason every Friday. Once a month, WIll Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletterThe Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  Still gearing  up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too even if it’s a bit trade.  There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel this week 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!**

*Though neither than compare to Ron’s notes from the road.
**And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like  both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again.  The Fizz died in 2019.  Ben has had his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…) Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

 

 

 

The Marchy Marchest March-laden Beery News Notes Of All!

I did mention that I like March, right? Almost met my maker on Saturday shovelling wet snow. Boo-hoo, you say!  It’s your own damn fault for being Canadian, you shout!! I get it. I get it. But it is March and while the sun’s heat melts the alpine peaks created on the weekend by the driveway, seedlings are getting ahead of themselves in one corner of the basement under funny looking lights. Those courgettes are pushing it, frankly. Who knew they’d take to subterranian living so well? The endive is looking OK. Taking its time. That stuff at the bottom? Dead by Saturday. Waaaay too leggy.

Hmm… yet to mention beer related things again… must still smarting from getting absolitely owned by TBN over at Twitter on a question of the royals… I had no idea I was dealing with a crypto-monarchist… acht weel… First up, Katie Mather wrote a wonderful goodbye for Pellicle about a well loved spot that has shut:

The Moorcock has been more than a pub to me in the small years it was open—for yes, sadly, it has closed. There is no way in high heaven that The Moorcock could have ever been called my local. I’m not as lucky as that. Stood on top of a hill above Sowerby Bridge, this pub is more than two hours of a trip either way from my home in the Ribble Valley. It is far away enough to merit a whole weekend break to be structured around eating there. Or, it was. I keep forgetting.

And Ed also wrote about something a bit sad and also a bit too common these days, the closing of a small brewery or a pub. The twist in Ed’s case is that the brewery was his former employer:

The news that the Old Dairy Brewery had gone bust didn’t come as a huge surprise to those of us that knew the company. It didn’t mean it wasn’t sad though. I spent a few years working for the company. I learnt a lot there, met some great people and had some good times. I also met some right arseholes and had some bad times, but such is life.

Finding a moment from his own daily postings, Martin shared an interesting comment under Ed’s thoughts on some of the particular problems this place faced: “I was also told that those old Nissen huts weren’t particularly suited to house a brewery – freezing cold in winter, and baking hot in summer.

Perhaps oddly in this economic climate, Ontario’s oldest micro has been bought by a macro – and for a pretty good price:

The province’s OG craft brewery has reached new heights with exciting news of its acquisition by a gigantic beer giant. Little ole Waterloo Brewing has officially been acquired by Carlsberg Canada (a subsidiary of The Carlsberg Group) as of March, 7. The gigantic business deal is estimated to be in tens of millions of dollars, with CTV News putting it at a whopping $217 million in cash. Known for its creative Radler and IPA flavours (guava lime, tart cherry and original grapefruit), classic lagers, and cute boar icon, Waterloo was first established in 1984 as Brick Brewing.

Note: calling a brewery “craft” in 1984 is like calling Canada’s temperance era prohibition.* Not sure what the attraction is, given the trends noted last week right about here. A facility for brewing more Carlsberg?

Elsewhere, things are still happening and mixing was a bit of a theme this week. Jeff discussed the blending old and young ales while Matt shared some thoughts about wine and beer co-existing. In each case, the point is creating something new out of complimentary qualitities… like this:

…the chalk seam that runs beneath Westwell’s vineyard is the same one that travels all the way to the Champagne region of France, this terroir giving the grapes a similar – if not identical – quality to those cultivated in the storied wine region. This imbued the beer with the rich, spritzy and dry quality of the famous sparkling wine that, when buoyed with the acidic tang of the Beak saison, and the crunchy, bone dry character of the beer from Burning Sky, created a beverage that was somehow even more delicious than the sum of it parts.

Compare force of attraction that the bit of a push that Jeff describes:

Nationwide, there’s an overcapacity of barrel-aged beer of all types. Breweries invested in barrel rooms because, for a time, beer geeks were paying a lot of money for bottles of the stuff (both wild ales and barrel-aged beer). That has changed, and while people still pay a premium for aged beer, it doesn’t move like it used to

At least the barrel cellars feel the same pain that the thousands of beer stashes have. Just too much of that stuff. Much too much.

And Australia’s website The Crafty Pint published an interesting article on Cherry Murphy, beer and spirits buyer for Blackhearts & Sparrows, drinks retailer:

…the role of beer buyer is something she’s done for close to five years. In that time, the number of breweries has grown significantly. But, while there’s more beer to work through and more options to stock, Cherry says there’s a fundamental they always return to: whether it’s a bottle of lambic, a tall can of hazy IPA, or their own Birra (brewed with Burnley Brewing), their focus is on what tastes good and ensuring their stores can suit many tastes.  “We do always say we’re a broad church,” she says, “so we don’t want to alienate anyone or be snobby because good beer is for everyone. Sometimes a good beer is a cheap beer and sometimes it’s expensive, but as long as it’s a good product I’ll range it.

And also Beth Demmon has posted an excellent sketch of cider seller, Olivia Maki of Oakland, CA over at Prohibitchin’:

There aren’t very many cider-centric bars or bottle shops in the United States: I’d guess there are fewer than a dozen. They’re not even an endangered species—more like an ultra-niche novelty that I would really like to see become more popular. Through Redfield, Olivia is doing her damndest to transform cider’s novelty into the mainstream. She laughs when she remembers the initial idea to open a cider bar and bottle shop. “The world didn’t need another beer spot,” she says. But selling the concept to landlords proved difficult. “None of them knew what cider was!”

Keep an eye out for Beth’s soon to be released cider guide. Then Katie Thornton interviewed Adrienne Heslin who, in 2008, opened the first female-owned Irish brewery for the website Love Dublin this week:

I was born in the 60s and you can imagine it’s not plain sailing. Coming to brewing, I actually found the opposite because it’s such a small industry. When I started I was introduced very quickly to the bigger micro-breweries and to my amazement they were just nothing but cooperative. A down-side on the female end of things – it’s amazing, you give a man a job, and suddenly everybody think he’s in charge, so I find that a lot. In particular, I have a gentleman now who’s wonderful and in charge of production, but they refer to him as the brewer, whereas he came in as an intern. I taught him everything.

I remember the same thing happening in my mother’s shop when my father, the reverend, would be there. He quite forcefully would admit his ignorance on all subjects, directing folk back to the one in charge.

When he wasn’t rearranging royal wedding memorobilia, The Beer Nut encountered that strange creature, an “eighty shilling shilling“:

It’s about the same strength as the previous beer and is an unattractive murky muddy brown. The flavour is mercifully clean, but not very interesting. One expects hops from a pale ale and malt from a Scottish-style amber-coloured ale, and this shows little of either. There’s brown sugar and black tea, finishing up so speedily as to resemble a lager. I suppose one could be happy that there’s no “scotch ale” gimmickry or cloying toffee, but I thought it came down too far on the other side, being boring and characterless.

That’s what’s been said about me. Mercifully clean. Not very interesting. And, finally, David Jesudason wrote a very interesting piece – this time for for GBH (regrettably accompanied by distracting retro java script looping weirdness) – about the history of the British curry house and the curry district and the bigotry those who worked there had to put up with:

Curry quarters like these sprang up first as community spaces for South Asians to carve out support networks and enjoy familiar food together. But to make their businesses viable from the 1960s onwards, restaurant owners had to cater to the wider population. This is where many first- and second-generation workers faced racism head on—serving white people “while absorbing their shit at the same time,” says dancer Akram Khan about his curry-house upbringing. It was common for waiters to be mocked for their accents, or to face abuse over the prices they charged. 

Keep an eye out for David’s also soon to be released book, Desi Pubs. There. We have concluded our broadcast for the week. Next week? The winter that was. Now the acknowledgements. Consider Mastodon. Here’s your newbie cheat sheet:

Stan Hieronymus | The Man!
Boak & Bailey | The B² experience
Katie Mather | Shiny Biscuit and Corto
David Jesudason | “Desi Pubs” (2023) author
Ron Pattinson | The RonAlongAThon Himself
Al Reece AKA Velky Al | Fuggled
Jennifer Jordan | US hops historian
Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
Andreas Krennmair | Vienna beer and lager historian
Beer Ladies Podcast | Lisa Grimm and colleagues
Jay Brooks | Brookston Beer Bulletin
Joe Stange | Belgian beer expert, beer magazine editor
Cider Bar | Barry makes Kertelreiter cider
Laura Hadland | CAMRA historian and beer writer
Brian Alberts | US beer historian
Jon Abernathy | The Beer Site
Maureen Ogle | US Beer Historian
Lars Garshol | Norwegian Beer Historian and Kveik Hunter
James Beeson | Beeson on Beer
Carla Jean | MAINER!!!
Thandi Guilherme | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Lisa Grimm | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Rob Talksbeer | Podcaster and Youtuber
Anthony Gladman | UK Drinks Writer
Jeff Alworth | Manna Of Beervana
Northwest Beer Guide | Fairly self explanatory… but not NW Latvia…
Evan Rail | Prague based GBH editor, freelance writer, NYT etc.
Todd Alström | 50% of the Alströms
Jacob Berg | Beer talking librarian

And check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and maybe from Stan at his spot on those  Mondays but, you know, he writes when when he can. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletterThe Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  Still gearing  up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too even if it’s a bit trade.  There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel this week 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!**

*Winky Face Emoticon!!!
**I’ve reoganized to note the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like  both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again.  The Fizz died in 2019.  Ben has had his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…) Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

 

The Last But Decisive Beery News Notes For January 2023

Already we see an ending. The long goodbye, that’s what I say. It’s been quite a week. I went to a pub in another city with old pals for one thing. A cheery sort of dive. We talked about stuff like, you know, the anticipated next LP from The Cars and, umm, how the Trudeau administration is going, that sort of stuff. Like we would in the early ’80s. We drank beers like we would have then, too. My pals are generally not the fruity sour sort. Good brown bitter ales. Cheery pubs are good as Jeff has been reminding us from Prague. Not sure going to every pub in downtown Dublin in one day is quite the same thing. But I tell you what is the very thing – THUNDER SNOW!!!  Had a blast on Wednesday night. Neato.

Beer! That’s what you are here for. And as B+B highlighted, Cloudwater’s Paul Jones shared a bit of uncertainty about the brewery’s future in a BBC news item and a few people took notice – and quite rightly:

Mr Jones said his Manchester-based company has been in survival mode since March 2020, with high costs, debt, low consumer confidence and post-Brexit trading problems all bearing down on the business. “The cost to me has been pretty bleak,” he said. “I have a heart condition from stress and I feel constantly on the edge of what I can personally cope with.” His thoughts have turned to closing his business “probably once a month since 2020,” he said.

Reporting from the bar room floor, the Tand himself shared that he “had a pint (several) with Paul last Friday and he is really worried about the situation. But he is fighting on, which is good” – others in the thread thought they had as good a chance of getting through these tough times as any brewery. But, yikes… that heart condition.

Spinning the globe that sits by my desk, we see that The Beer Nut wrote about two Bulgarian beers last weekend and, as anyone with an eye on the globe would… I do like me a good tale of Bulgarian beers. Why, just a decade ago I wrote about a matter of brewery crime over there. Anyway, the principled defense of actual gose as against the forces of fruit sauce adjuncts that TBN posted was heartening:

There’s neither nonsense nor novelty in the aroma, just a nice dry saline kick with a suggestion of citric sourness to come. Sure enough, it’s cleanly tart; precise and angular in its flavour. The dry cracker base is a little soggier than I’d like, lacking a crispness it suggests but doesn’t quite deliver on. That does give it a fuller than expected body for only 5% ABV, and onto that they’ve spread grapefruit jelly and a spritz of sea spume. Refreshing? I’ll say. I drank it very cold and it suited it well. And then there’s just enough sourness to keep this sour beer fan happy. Overall it’s a cut above what gets tossed out as gose by most microbreweries these days. Some coriander might have been good too, but there’s plenty of flavour without it.

And TBN also heroically called out the practice of only speaking of beer in positives this week, too. He really needs a government grant to keep on this sort of thing, doesn’t he:

If you paid money for it, and it’s not good, it’s absolutely fair to say “it’s not good”. An out of ten scale is meaningless if you don’t use all the numbers.

On a similar theme but unpacked a bit more was David Jesudason in his excellent newsletter “Episodes of My Pub Life” last Friday:

… this is always going to be their comfort zone if they are from a background that has meant they have never had to work a busy bar or wait on a table. They’re always viewing their glass through the prism of being a privileged consumer – and that’s not to say I’m wholly exempt from this charge.  Many even see their sole role as promoters of the beer industry and, more critically, to tell it like it is is somehow negative – they also often feel the same about racism or any other ism. This isn’t journalism or what we were gifted to do and if people, like today’s interviewee, are clamouring to have the truth told then food and drink writing needs to change…  That’s not to say that beer writers shouldn’t be writing articles that make people yearn to be in pubs but what’s happening in the moment shouldn’t be played out on social media, while journalists bury their head in their hands.

Well said. And, to be honest, it’s like there’s a whole bunch of me circa 2010s out there now. Nice. [No, not Nice!] Over on Mastodon, Andreas Krennmair shared another less nice sort of beer writing issue – doubt:

…ever since I published my Vienna Lager book, I’ve had this awful feeling that no matter what I’d be writing next about, it will never be nearly as good or popular as the last one, and so I have a (probably 1/2 to 3/4 finished) book WIP lying on my hard drive for 2 years now that I occasionally touch a bit once every few months but never make much progress.

Conversely, never one to suffer doubt or at least be held back by it, Ron has been sharing the secrets of his corner of the writing trade by explaining how he interprets brewery logs and other records:

After the overwhelmingly tepid response to my series looking at a Barclay Perkins record, I’ve decided to plough ahead with another style of brewing record. What I call Scottish format because, well, it\s the type of record used by most Scottish brewers. And a few English ones, too. Such as Boddington, for example… Getting back to the topic, Scottish format records gave their pros and cons. Biggest pro is that you get more beers per photo. This period of Younger’s records have eight beers per double-page spread. Which means you get four beers per photo. Biggest con is that everything is rather cramped and often in tiny handwriting.

OK, enough about writing about writing. How about some bad news about your hobby! The Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction issued a statement this week that more than just two drinks a week was courting an increased level of risk from cancers and other harms and there was a bit of an explosion. Folks went crrrrraaaay-crrrraaaay. It particularly set drinks writer Craig Pinhey off  more than once, especially the two-hour national radio call in show Cross Country Checkup‘s coverage. Sadly, unhappy folk took to flogging the creaky and well discredited J-Curve and ignored that the latest medical advice* that, contrary to popular opinion, alcohol is not good for the heart. The contestants for leading voices in opposition ranged from the quite sensible Dan Mallack who advocated primarily for an overall calculation that balanced joy v. risk to some complaining Uncle Anti who is also against cutting back on sugary foodsmoking, gambling and even seat belts in cars, exercising one might say the Randian** ad absurdum. Such is life… or perhaps the path to an early death. Govern yourselves accordingly.

Returning to lucidity, I just finished reading book at the moment that the very self same Mr. Mallack edited, Pleasure and Panic: New Essays on the History of Alcohol and Drugs,  which canvasses a range of topics over the included essays and I am quite enjoying it. Buy it. He gets paid for such things. I actually referred to it as the “needles and booze essays” which I am glad to say was warmly appreciated. There are a legitimate range of views in these matters as that book illustrates – and it is good to explore them even if you have no intention of necessarily adopting one or another as your own. Me? I balance all joys and all risks along with the duties of life. I’ve had five or six drinks*** in the last ten days but I did go to a pub last Saturday with pals I met around 40 years ago and had a very nice time until the band started up and my earplugs proved insufficient to protect my punk rock ravaged hearing. The group photo shows me with a nice pint of ice water. It was my bourbon chaser.

When I think of those schoolboy days, I have to admit that I had no idea that some children needed to be coaxed to take their cocktails but there you have it… proof! The 1930s ciggie ad right there to the right says – so it must be true! I am not sure I’ve seen the truth, however, in the case of the boringest tale of beer of at least this short years. It continues with an old style Fat Tire handle spotted unloved in an airport terminal. Stan had the final word on that kerfuffle: so many people with so many opinions for a beer so many people abandoned so many years ago.

Albany ale sighting!!!

An odd blip on perhaps an alternative timeline was noticed. Last heard from in April 2022, an unhappiness with BrewDog was revived but to what end I don’t know. The most telling statement is perhaps the last: “…I consider any further acts towards me or my company a continuance of the retaliation against those former workers…” which reminded me of the time when a lawyer of my acquaintance decided to insist on a house deal not closing – and moved into the house himself to make sure that was the case!

Speaking of odd, I had no idea anyone was bothering to be anti-Cicerone. Given it’s a non-peer reviewed, unaccredited privately run hospitality course, I never thought it would worth anyone’s time… but I do respect Jenny so it’s noteworthy that she wrote:

I always find it funny when brewers are the ones who come out so anti-Cicerone — people who put in time to make the beer you brewed as good as it can be the moment it makes it to the beer drinker. If that’s irrelevant, then you don’t see the whole picture.

Fin! Enough!! Now on to the indices. Again I ask… what song should play if this were a movie and you were there scrolling though the slowly building upon this expanding and randomly organized list of beer writing resources on Mastodon** followed by the less reliable glom of podcasts ‘n’ stuff? Could it be this? Yes? Yes, that’s it – for this week…

Boak & Bailey | The B² experience
David Jesudason | “Desi Pubs” (2023) author
Ron Pattinson | The RonAlongAThon Himself
Al Reece AKA Velky Al | Fuggled
Jennifer Jordan | US hops historian
Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
Andreas Krennmair | Vienna beer and lager historian
Beer Ladies Podcast | Lisa Grimm and colleagues
Jay Brooks | Brookston Beer Bulletin
Joe Stange | Belgian beer expert, beer magazine editor
Cider Bar | Barry makes Kertelreiter cider
Laura Hadland | CAMRA historian and beer writer
Brian Alberts | US beer historian
Jon Abernathy | The Beer Site
Maureen Ogle | US Beer Historian
Lars Garshol | Norwegian Beer Historian and Kveik Hunter
James Beeson | Beeson on Beer
Carla Jean | MAINER!!!
Thandi Guilherme | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Lisa Grimm | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Rob Talksbeer | Podcaster and Youtuber
Anthony Gladman | UK Drinks Writer
Jeff Alworth | Manna Of Beervana
Northwest Beer Guide | Fairly self explanatory… but not NW Latvia…
Evan Rail | Prague based GBH editor, freelance writer, NYT etc.
Todd Alström | 50% of the Alströms
Jacob Berg | Beer talking librarian

Go have a look yourself. I am up to 750 followers myself. Time and patience and regular posting attracts the audience as per usual. While you are at it, check for more from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan back at his spot on Mondays. Check to see if there is the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. The OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it there again!  See also sometimes, on a Friday, posts at The Fizz as well (Ed.: we are told ‘tis gone to 404 bloggy podcast heaven… gone to the 404 bloggy podcast farm to play with other puppies.) And the long standing Beervana podcast but it might be on a month off (Ed.: which I have missed from this list for some unknown reason.) There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now… nope, there was a post on July 25th… in 2022 even.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And sign up for Katie’s (Ed.: now very much less) irregular newsletterThe Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Still gearing  up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too. (Ed.: still giving it a few more weeks to settle in and not be as agreeable…) Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel this week on Youtube. Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that’s now gone after a ten year run… no, it is back and here is the linkThe Fingers Podcast has fully packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly.

*World Heart Federation, Policy Brief, The Impact of Alcohol Consumption on Cardiovascular Health”, page 8: “Contrary to popular opinion, alcohol is not good for the heart. This directly contradicts common and popular message that alcohol prolongs life, chiefly by reducing the risk of CVD. The controversy over the role of low to moderate alcohol use and future heart attack relates to inconsistent results among the many studies on the topic. Historically, studies have shown a J-shaped distribution of outcomes. The lowest rates of heart attacks have been in those with low to moderate alcohol consumption and higher rates in those who did not drink or have high rates of alcohol consumption. However, new research has challenged this interpretation by not confirming the J point relationship in Chinese and Indian populations, where alcohol consumption is relatively lower, binge drinking is common and among people less than 55 years of age. Furthermore, there has been heterogeneity in the type and pattern of alcohol consumption in most parts of the world.”
**Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, chapter on “Sir Thomas Brown“: “There have even been outright bad writers blessed by the visitation of a poetic title. Ayn Rand had one with The Fountainhead, and another with Atlas Shrugged: a bit of a mouthful, but nobody has ever spat it out without first being fascinated with what it felt like to chew. Yet if those were not two of the worst books ever written—the worst books ever written don’t even get published—they were certainly among the worst books ever to be taken seriously.
***Fine, yes, I do keep track of a lot of stats…

The Fascinating If Not Captivating Beery News Notes For November’s Start

November. Yippee, November! No one ever said that. Maybe if you were born on the first of November. Or in New Zealand. A New Zealander born on the first of November might be feeling they hit the jackpot, come to think of it. DSL might, too. Speaking of which, the Austrian Beer Party is saying yippee or whatever it is you say thereabouts. Still at 10% in the polls, down from 13% a month ago but no joke:

An upstart satirical party whose flagship policies include an unconditional beer allowance for every citizen and municipal lager fountains has come out of nowhere to win fourth place in national opinion polls. Founded in 2015 by a charismatic punk rock singer, the Beer Party was until very recently a fringe phenomenon in Austrian politics, scraping only 0.1 per cent of the vote at the last parliamentary election in 2019.

What else is up? I need to make this snappy. Things to do. Naps to have. Hmm…. Crisp Malting issued its 2022 Harvest Report which contains some startling observations about the climate:

It was the sixth driest summer on record and the driest since 1995, with just 62% of the usual summer rainfall. Additionally, we also saw more sun than usual at 115% of the 1991-2020 average. As a result of all this weather, it was the earliest barley harvest ever – some fields were cut on June 29th – and by July 19th, 70% of the UK winter barley harvest was cut. In the 50s and 60s, this would have been a month later, in August. Harvest in Scotland closed out earlier than usual also, another demonstration of the impact climate is having on our agricultural calendar.

Jings. Word is by 2042, the harvest will take place in 2041 a full twelve weeks before the time of planting. Canada is also having a bumper crop – and seeing higher prices for the wrong reason.

And I’ve come across something I am not sure I’ve seen as much as I thought I might – a review of the Good Beer Guide from Phil Mellows of British Beer Breaks who attended the book launch:

The strength of the Good Beer Guide, and what makes it different from, and in many ways better than, competing guides, is that the people picking the entries are so close to the ground. They know exactly what’s going on with the pub, because they drink in there week in, week out. This is also a weakness. A pub can fall out of favour with these individuals for all kinds of reasons that may be obscure to the occasional visitor. And there must be, it seems to me, a growing pressure on the decision-making resulting from the limit imposed on the number of entries allocated to each county or region.

Economics abounds. Muskoka buys Rally. Bench Brewing and Henderson sorta maybe merging. And Jeff has it right – Ommegang has lost its way.  Another sign of the times? Lost Abbey is cutting back:

The Lost Abbey’s co-founder and managing partner Tomme Arthur says the scale-down is an acknowledgment of vastly different market conditions than those of the brewery’s sales heyday seven years ago… Arthur says he hopes that reducing costs, particularly on rent and property taxes, will mean the brewery can maintain its staff of roughly 35 employees. “You can’t get small enough quick enough if you’re trying to protect the flank,” he says. 

I’m worried. Not about beer. There will always be beer. I am worried about my problem with Twitter. If we lose Twitter there’s bound to be a new problem for me that will replace my problem with Twitter. I’m having a look at Mastodon but  who’s over there? 100% of everyone voted to not “Quit the Twit” in my scientific study. And what will I do without it, without for example good folk going all pointy finger over a history of lambic which is an accusation of all other histories of lambic? I quite like “jeremiads full of invective“… although he’s misspelled jeroboam, hasn’t he. Sad.

Sadder? A thieving beer guzzling monkey in India!

Matty C has also asked a question of verbiage. Specifically the use of Helles:

I’m talking about ‘Helles’, and how it’s become the latest in a stream of buzzwords the lager machine has sacrificed to maintain its youth and vim. But why this particular terminology, and how did it take hold? How accurate are modern brewers’ renditions of this classic Bavarian style? And does what a beer is called really matter, if people are enjoying great lager as a result?

I like my words to mean what they mean and not mean what they don’t mean. Otherwise it can lead to things.  Ron found himself lead to things and in a bit of a pickle out and about on the Brazilian beer tourism scene again:

Last full day in Brazil. A bit weird. An election and the clocks changed. Plus everything in the centre of Florianopolis is shut…. It’s going crazy outside. People clearly think Lula has won. I hope that’s fireworks and not gunfire.

I trust it all worked out.  Speaking of travel and a bit more sedate sort bit of travel, B+B took us to Cologne, Germany this week and laid down a new law:

We decided on a rule: you need a minimum of three beers per pub on a Kölsch crawl. The first one will taste weird because it isn’t the same as the last you were drinking. You gulp that one down. Get the city scum out of your throat. The second, as you acclimatise, allows you to pick up distinct aromas and flavours. How is it different? Why is it different? The third allows you to appreciate what’s in front of you in its own right, and decide whether you want to turn this into a real session. Or walk on. Because you’re never far from another.

In brewing history this week, Gary highlighted the upcoming 2022 Chicago Brewseum Beer Summit and, elsewhere, @AfricanArchives wrote about a moment in history that I had not heard about – The Battle of Bamber Bridge which saw US soldiers fighting each other in England in 1943… and the local English publicans taking a side:

In 1943 Black American soldiers faced off with white American Military police during World War 2 on British soil. Black American soldiers had to fight their own white American soldiers, while in England, where they were fighting the world war. …when the American Military police found out that their own black soldiers were drinking at the same pubs as white people, they went in to arrest them. The people in the town got mad about that treatment and decided to then turn their pubs into “BLACKS ONLY DRINKING PUBS”

Finally, a less inspiring story came to light just when the blog post was going to the presses. Ben Johnson posted an excellent exposé on one Ontario brewery facing little public condemnation after allegations of sexual harassment:

It is unfortunate then that, when the City of Kitchener recently opened up their Requests for Proposals (RFP) process to find a “non-premier brewery partner” to serve beer at the Kitchener Memorial Auditorium Complex and Kitchener Golf Courses, they awarded the contract to Four Fathers Brewing Company in Cambridge. Unfortunate, of course, because in 2018 Four Fathers founder and University of Guelph Professor John Kissick actually was charged with two counts of assault and one count of assault with a weapon. Those charges were ultimately dropped in 2020 when Kissick entered into a peace bond with the party who brought forward the charges, but to craft beer drinkers and any feeling humans who watched video of the (alleged) assault (myself among them) the incident likely left a bad taste in their mouth.

There. Nothings like ending on a crummy note. For better news, please check out the updates from Boak and Bailey hopefully now again mostly every Saturday and also from Stan more now on a Monday than almost ever! Check out the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast. The  OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – and also sometimes, on a Friday, posts at The Fizz as well (Ed.: we are told ‘tis gone to 404 bloggy podcast heaven… gone to the 404 bloggy podcast farm to play with other puppies.) And the long standing Beervana podcast (Ed.: which I have missed from this list for some unknown reason.) There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now… nope, there was a post on July 25th… in 2022 even.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And sign up for Katie’s (Ed.: now very) irregular newsletterThe Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Still gearing  up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too. (Ed.: give it a few weeks to settle in and not be as agreeable… not sure this went very far…) Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that’s now gone after a ten year run… no, it is back and here is the link!

These Are The First And Most Exciting Beery News Notes Yet For September 2022

So… me and we are back from holiday. And I’ve been away and back on the road for work already. Before the before I was roadlying it a lot but the big project is in the final strokes and, happily, it seems all turned out fabulously. To the extent I understand. We are well past the gravel, moved on from the concrete and are thinking asphalt. School starts next week, too. Just a few first days of school left in this family. Days are being squeezed by the junior ranks. I am looking forward to the big holiday one day, a life with days like Martin has been enjoying on his wandering retirement. He’s in the Isles this week, westering home, land o’me peeps, the Local Hero zone. I hope Alistair has been able to reach for the Kleenex. Plenty of pub social commentary and observation.

What else is going on?   First, expect a fresh breakout of the usually high quality amateur medical science* from the brewery consultancy classes as we have received harsher worser news about booze health wise in Canada:

Any level of alcohol consumption had a net negative impact on health for almost every disease reviewed by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA)… The health risks become “increasingly high” when someone has six or more drinks per week. And for women who have three or more drinks per week, the risk of health issues increases more steeply compared to men, research shows.

Note: four years after the j-curve was dumped, those cardio benefits have now  been ditched. You are on your own now. Ben takes the right path and suggests it is time for more consumer focused health info for drinks.

Stan shared more bad news. The Euro hop crop has been hit hard by their drought:

Estimates made as harvest began — late, in many cases — indicate that the German crop will be down about 20 percent from 2021, and 18 percent below and average year. The Czechian crop, which is almost entirely Saaz, will be down 43 percent from last year’s record crop. BarthHaas reports, the “early maturing German varieties (Hallertau Mittelfrüh, Northern Brewer, Hallertau Tradition, Perle) are affected and will yield poorly. Rainfall towards the end of August are giving hope for the later maturing varieties that still have time to recover.”

I am thinking of a GoFundMe for the new book a copy of Egypt’s Beer: Stella, Identity, and the Modern State by Omar D. Foda. $120.75 USD is like what… 24 bottles of wine? Have we had reviews that I missed? I need to know if I need to know.  

Note: the new knowledge embraces the new not knowledge.**

Our pal Evan has writing another great piece, this time exploring the sherry cask trade:

Those two legal rulings led to the growth of an important new business in the Sherry Triangle: the sherry cask trade, which produces sherry-seasoned casks for export. Today, Work notes, there are really two types of sherry casks made in the Sherry Triangle. “One goes into the solera process, and that stays in that solera for years and years and years. It grows patina around the outside, from the ambience of the mold and fungus growing in the area, and it gets the sherry flor inside,” he says. “And there’s another kind of barrel that the coopers are making, and basically these coopers are making an export-style barrel.”

Judging of the Scottish Beer Awards are underway and one of the most interesting thing is how the judges are not picked from the all too familiar international floatplane-assisted consulto set but are representatives of the actual local scene. Top marks for that. Bonus for actually naming the judges on line.

Speaking of jingoism, the question of whether something is related to a culture or not is a semi-spicy one. You may, for example, recall my own review last February of whether Japanese lager is all that much Japanese. Things are not as they seem. So the question of China‘s relationship with beer from Tsingtao to craft was immediately a topic I would find interesting:

Before resigning ourselves to understanding Chinese beer as—broadly and imperfectly—a beer brewed in China by a Chinese company with a brand recognized as being Chinese, there is still the question of style. No broadly-recognized Chinese beer style currently exists. Is it possible to create one? Considering how Cascadian Dark Ale became a Black IPA, despite having no historical connection to India, there is a possibility of it being co-opted by others and turned into a generic category.

Hmm… the problem also could be that trying to frame beers as national in nature is a bit of a dead end.

In England, Ed wrote about signs that he has seen that the pubs in his village are threatened:

…the natives of Ripley have long been staunch pub supporters. I mean it’s not like they’ve got anything else to do apart from stay in and watch DVD boxed sets. But it seems no more. The two evenings I’ve been down recently the number of people in the pub apart from me and my friends varied between nought and two. This is not good. If pubs in Ripley are quiet what hope is there for the rest of Britain? As a #PubMan I fear for the future.

Also much discussion of the another threat to another pub, the Compton Arms in Islington district of London. But it isn’t just another pub. It’s the pub George Orwell described in perfect in 1946, all as unpacked by Kat Thomas in The Spectator:

…the Compton Arms could soon be consigned to the history books. Four neighbouring households, having grown used to a more tranquil setting during Covid times, aren’t relishing the return of us locals – the people who give this pub its purpose and personality. They’ve successfully obtained a licence review, having pieced together a few claims around the pub being a public nuisance and a threat to health. Which, as a regular, seems an almighty stretch.

Time Out joined the response to the situation as did Roger Protz and many other voices.

Odd corporate brewing news out of India where seeking compliance with regulatory rules is cause for getting the boot:

Carlsberg said it is removing “certain” board representatives from its India unit that come from its partner Nepal-based Khetan Group, accusing them of acting against their joint venture’s interests. The move represents a deepening of a long-standing dispute that first came to light in 2019, when Carlsberg India board members from Khetan first protested internally before asking the Indian government to investigate what they said was Carlsberg’s non-compliance with laws on trade discounts, advertisement and sales promotion.

Finally, I was a little surprised by this response that I got from Mikkeller when I asked if their reputation restoration efforts would include a public compliance and improvement reports:

It’s not a part of our current action plan, but definitely something we will look into. Are you familiar with some relevant ressources or providers of public compliance and improvement reports, we should reach out to?… If you are familiar with a HR consultancy that is specialized in retail dominated companies like ours with a split between national and international locations, please let us know. We would be very interested in getting in touch with them.

I was particularly surprised as I thought they had a consultant and that this would have naturally been part of their response to acknowledging harassment claims but when I went back to the GBH report on their approach I saw that it really isn’t really about restoring public confidence:

“…we’re also trying to facilitate a process that doesn’t involve courts and extensive legal action that wouldn’t be good for anyone. We’re able to do that because we have the cooperation of the company.”

Not sure how consumer confidence is supposed to be restored if making outcomes public weren’t considered whether through the courts, an HR comms plan or otherwise.

Suddenly wish I had access to these sorts of beers…

There. Probably a dog days week. as there was not a lot of news and not a lot of wonderful this week… but life is life! As you ponder that bit of wisdom, check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and perhaps now from Stan once in a while on a Monday. Check out the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the mostly weekly OCBG Podcast on most Tuesdays or Wednesdays or Thursdays – and also sometimes, on a Friday, posts at The Fizz as well (Ed.: we are told ‘tis gone to 404 bloggy podcast heaven… gone to the 404 bloggy podcast farm to play with other puppies.) And the long standing Beervana podcast (Ed.: which I have missed from this list for some unknown reason.) There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now… nope, there was a post on July 25th… in 2022 even.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And sign up for Katie’s (Ed.: now very) irregular newsletterThe Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Still gearing  up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too. (Ed.: give it a few weeks to settle in and not be as agreeable.) Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water. There has also been the Beer O’clock Show but that’s now wound up after ten years.

*…swapping one dependency for another…
**See footnote three for more of the same.