Category: Craft Fibs

The Thursday Beery News Notes For Summer 2022’s Second Third

The trouble with writing something on a weekly basis is you notice that another week has passed. This is why I don’t shave every day. Looking at the same mug in the same mirror at the same time each and every morning? No thanks. You notice too much. Like that one third of this summer is already done. And the last three weeks don’t even count. Panic! Panic!!! Max is having none of it. He is squeezing every moment out of the good weather – and has found a new cocktail to go along with it. I say cocktail but it seems to be booze free: “The coffee is hot. Then they mix it with tonic and ice, add the lime and you get a glass of refreshing goodness.” I will have to try that.

Heatwave. Euro heatwave. Best place to be? In an old pub painted white on the outside with thick insulating walls and a hearty aircon system? Worst place to be? In the car when the prosecco blows. Or working in a brewery for that matter, as one witness confesses. Fact: 3.6 times more people in the UK think drinking beer is a proper way to beat the heatwave than eating iceberg lettuces. Plural. That’s what the graph says – floating, a little alienated even, just there above this Bloomberg story. Looks like Tesco’s estimate for sales this past week:

…there’s pressure on retailers too, though more to keep the nation in supply of its summer quenchers. Supermarket chain Tesco Plc expects to sell more than 9 million ice creams and lollies in the coming week, a record. The supermarket also expects to sell 9 million bottles and cans of beer and 50,000 bottles of Pimms, the classic British summer gin-based fruit drink… Peas, lettuce and apples are particularly susceptible, he said, and crops can’t be shielded. “It’s not catastrophic — it happens,” said Ward. “Extreme heat is uncomfortable for people and plants.”

Either way, bad week to be a lettuce: get eaten or burn. Perhaps making matters worse for the the green crunchies, it appears that some lab coated type people are telling some other not lab coated people to lay off the sauce when being slowly roasted during a heatwave:

“Alcohol is a diuretic, which means it encourages the kidneys to lose extra fluid. That is why you tend to go to the toilet to urinate (pee) much more when you drink alcohol. Alcohol also makes you sweat more. The combination of sweating more in the heat, and going to the toilet more, means you lose more fluid than you take in and become dehydrated unless you replace that lost fluid by drinking water.” Official guidance also urges people to avoid caffeine during the hot weather for the same reason.

WHAAAAATTT!!!  Hot cuppa tea is the best thing on a hot day. That’s what Grannie always said. Never mentioned lettuce either, come to think of it. And they call themselves scientists.* Thankfully, the New York Post found a couple of people perhaps partially of the lab coated variety to root for beer as the mercury climbs:

…in the midst of an international heat wave, one physician on Twitter claimed beer can help with hydration. Academic Ellie Mackin Roberts sparked a now-viral debate when she recently tweeted 10 steps to help beat the heat. Tip No. 9 read: “If you are dehydrated (and an adult, and able to do so) drink a half a pint of beer (inc. alcohol free!) and then move straight onto water (or a sports drink or cordial if you don’t like water).” Followers of Roberts, an expert in ancient Greek history, quickly responded, questioning how beer could ever be helpful in trying to avoid dehydration. However, Dr. Stuart Galloway, of the University of Stirling told Femail that the beverage contains electrolytes, sugar and salt, which helps the body retain fluid, rather than it going straight through. 

Gary added an interesting but also labcoatless and lettuceless post on the conditions in pubs in Halifax, England in 1932 and how the local establishments managed another heatwave ninety years ago:

“The public do not realise the trouble we have to go to, to keep our beer cool,” one licensed victualler said. “When you have a rock cellar as we possess, the business is bad enough, but publicans that do not possess this advantage have a busy time trying to cool their beer. Some of the best bitter beers require nursing if our customers are to be satisfied in these hot days,” he continued, “and even with advantages regarding cellarage I have to keep a succession of wet sacks over my casks to keep them cool.” In one restaurant sacks, thoroughly dampened, are placed over the casks of beer, and from time to time a system of sprayers pours ice-cold water over them.

That’s the spirit – and at least they were not resorting to putting crap in the lager and calling it innovation! Honourable mention and a big “thanks for coming out” for at least shitting on the 2009 video “I am a craft brewer” even if it took them thirteen years to admit how stupid it was. All very “wad some Power the giftie gie us“… Dave! Some are still unaware.

This week in beer writing mildly troubling angst: dashes.

Health update: booze bad. Relatedly, in Jerard Fagerberg’s disappointingly brief but excellent interview (within an important health confessional of sorts) former beer writer Norm Miller shares some thoughts on his 2018 decision to back away from drinking:

During his tenure, Miller became synonymous with the Massachusetts beer scene. But by 2018, Miller was drinking too much. As an obese man in his 40s, he needed a holistic lifestyle change. He never felt physically addicted, he says, but the pressures of being in the beer media were indeed getting to him. “I didn’t consider myself an alcoholic, I just drank because I felt like I should keep up with everything,” he says. “It was a combination of trying to keep up with everything and sincerely liking to try different things. It was a bad combination. I decided to step away, because my health was more important than a weekly column.”

PS: Norm‘s normal now… nearly. I applaud the raising of the ill effects of booze but it is sad to see it hidden in the lower shelf of GBH well behind all the regular dubious claims to fame for booze.

Canadian craft Faxe weekly update.

Note: there are upsides to the heat or at least a moderate amount of it. The barley crop in Ireland is loving it, according to grower and not well dead poet, John Dunne: “…grain fill looks really good. You can’t beat sunshine to put weight in grain.” And, did you know, that actual grains make interesting flavours that can be expressed though a resulting booze-laden beverage? No, really. Apparently adding buckets of jam is not required according to this heads up from Curmudgeon Ale Works citing an article in Modern Farmer:

“There were a few older, open-pollinated varieties that really didn’t taste very good. But then there were a few that were absolutely stunning. And what fascinated us was that all of the hybrids kind of tasted the same.” Time and time again, the flavor of the heritage and heirloom grains outperformed the hybrid rye varieties—but that doesn’t mean hybrids don’t have their place. Swanson still grows hybrid grains, such as the popular AC Hazlet, because they “are incredibly robust in the field,” he says. “They give beautiful standards, they yield astronomical amounts.

Pay attention, brewers. And an addendum to last week’s comment about medieval alcohol making:

Later this week blackcurrants are going to make wine too… farmers will convert anything to alcohol, it’s our superpower…

In addition to all its issues, craft beer also has a labour problem, according to this excellent and detailed article by Julie Rhodes:

Think about it this way, if the 1990s were like the kindergarten stage of the overall craft beer industry journey, full of wide-eyed enthusiasm and experiential learning moments, the 2020s are proving to be like middle school – full of angst, infinite possibilities, and pivotal decision-making that will determine the long-term future of the industry. We will have to wait to see if the cool kids can mature enough to make equitable and mutually beneficial decisions that will carry this industry beyond the awkward stage, but many are hopefully optimistic.

AKA the era of the spotty faced gits. I like it.

And finally a question: why bother with B.O.B.s** (or W.O.B.s for that matter) set in places you will never see and drinks you will never have? Among the usual questions about veracity in drinks writing, don’t these reach a further level of abstraction from reality, so far that they might as well be entirely made up? A sort of social science fan fiction?

For more, check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday but not from Stan every Monday as he is on his summer holiday. Check out the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday (Ed.: with a good discretion of the purchase of Amsterdam’s recent buyout by Danes this week at about the midpoint but avoid around the 24th minute if you don’t care for sputum) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s (Ed.: now very) irregular newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. 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 wound up now after ten years.

*Other points of view have been circulating.
**Beer Owner Bios, that sort of subset of puffery that is as close to press release reporting as there is… well, except for when that’s all it actually is…

The Death Defying Mid-July 2022 Thursday Beery News Notes

That’s a bit of a bold claim. Death defying. But, having checked the stats, I am 98% sure that no one has died as a direct* result** of reading the weekly beery news notes. I also can confirm that no one has been harmed by reading Taste, the recent memoir by Stanley Tucci.*** It is mainly about his life with food. I finished reading it just yesterday. If you need any assistance in identifying what I am talking about, that is actually the book’s cover just there to the right.  No, really. Taste about his life with food and people, too, and makes for good light reading except when life was not light when it is actually a bit better. Recommended – especially as he includes recipes. So it is a 87% memoir and 13% cookbook… or recipe book. Which is good. I thought when finishing it… I have never read a book about beer that is remotely similar. I wonder why.

Enough about me… and Stanley.  First up, some history. Martyn has opened up a very interesting discussion on the question of medieval England and whether they actually didn’t drink the water – something I also doubt – by excellently questioning society’s capacity to replace it with ale:

The population of England in 1300 was approximately 4.25 million. If we leave out those too young to drink ale, that equals about 3.5m “adults”. The recommended liquid intake is 3.5 pints a day. So if they are only drinking ale, those adults are going to require a little under 560 million gallons of ale a year, minimum – and much of their time would be spent doing hard labour under a hot sun, when the requirement for liquid might be as high as ten pints a day…

Now, I am not going to get all linky and suggest that the initial conclusion drawn is incorrect (as I suspect it might be) but I would like to add a few assumptions into the mix which might also make it not entirely correct. While Martyn has quite rightly deducted kids from the calculation, I would suggest a few other points. First, there is no need to suppose that there was equal distribution between men and women, between rich and poor and between town and country.  Male labourers in rich country estates may well have consumed more than their share.  Second – and I think this is even a bit more important – access to more fermentables than statistically captured malted grains would have been common, especially in the countryside. Plus remember the wine trade. Third, I am not sure what is meant by “ale” in that it could be 1% or 10% alcohol. If it is too thin… what else makes up the necessary caloric load for life? That’s key. Water won’t do that. Fourth, Unger**** states that the requirement per person in the English Navy in 1535 (yes, 200 years later) was 4.6 litres a day. Was there an agricultural explosion during those two centuries that could support a change in diet? Fifth, our pal from 1378 Piers rated water the lowest of all drinks but did indicated that sloth was to be avoided or “ye shul eten barly breed and of the broke drynke…” I know that Martyn would agree that this sort of more granular review would be required to finalize the answer – but I do agree that there is no evidence that medieval people did not drink water to be found in the statistics that they drank a lot of ale.

Note: Cookie advises don’t get Humphed.

And I missed this last week, Lew Bryson on stouts and porters as used and then abused by the micro and craft beer movements in their turn:

Both types were throwbacks to much older Anglo-Irish beers, and as is often the case, the beers that were brewed in the 1980s were, by and large, guesses at what the older beers were like… [I]f porter and stout were the two sources of the river of dark beer that would grow to capture the palate of beer geeks and the Yummy Beer Drinkers (YBDs, that’s my name for the people who want diabeetus dessert in a glass)… Porter’s melody got drowned out. Despite slam-hopping it (“robust” porter), throwback-lagering it (Baltic porter), sweet-tweaking it (coconut and vanilla porter), and bomb-boosting it (the inevitable imperial porter), porter got smacked aside by imperial stout, and never recovered.

Speaking of porter, could this Goldthorpe whisky be associated with the long lost malting barley strain Battledore? Could my dream of a hordeum zeocritum porter come true?

Pellicle published a very interesting bit of reading about the first bottling by a small scale scavenging side project run by English film maker, Thomas Broadhead – Dimpsey Cider. It is written by Hannah Crosbie, who clearly identifies as a wine writer  – which gives us passages that are less, you know, about the squishy chumminess of things than many a beer writers might jot on about … like in this:

“It’s a miracle it was actually a drinkable product,” Thomas admits. “We left those barrels until February, we finally tasted and were like, ‘oh, this is actually tasting quite good!’ Only then did I order the bottles and commission the artist for the label.” And so, Dimpsey’s first cuvée, Unprecedented Times, was born. Notes of caramel apples, citrus and smoke from the barrels envelop a vibrant pétillance. Around 470 bottles were made, and those that weren’t smashed by ParcelForce found their way to London’s aesthetic-led drink spots: Bar Crispin, Gipsy Hill Brewery and—the restaurant where I first came across it—Top Cuvée.

There’s a lot of good in there. The writer was attracted to the drink first as a consumer. And, while there is a bit of bio in the piece, it is not beating us over the head. I do also like that the question of balancing time for this side project is a topic that runs through the article. There are some deft touches in there, leaving the question of Broadhead’s life choices just hanging a bit. Will there even be a second batch?

Breaking: there are at least two approaches to handling information. Reminds me of that 1976 homebrewing club.

My spam filters snagged something called BeerBoard this week and I noticed it was enticing me to hand over my personal contact information to gain more on that fast breaking news that “Volume and Rate of Sale are down double digits, while Percentage of Taps Pouring also dipped.” Wow. I am shocked. Not really. These days of jostling bleggy blogs for the shy – aka newsletters – seeking (cap in hand) to let us know the same four things that all the other newsletters and social media links (and sometimes actual new outlets) are saying, well, they lead me to one conclusion. I don’t exactly need another newsletter to tell me there’s a downturn. We all know things are tanking when the BA uses the magic words “mixed bag“! The arse is out of it, as we say.  Boak and Bailey picked up on the endsy timesy theme asked an interesting question this week about the UK public’s response to the uptick in pub prices during a time of general inflation:

In the context of supply chain issues, rampaging inflation and staff shortages, let alone the long-term structural problems caused by the pubco model, how much control do most really have over the price of a pint? That’s not to say, of course, that some people don’t do quite well running pubs. We find ourselves thinking of a businessman who owned several pubs in Cornwall and would turn up for inspection in a huge Range Rover with personalised plates, gold cufflinks flashing. It’s perhaps no wonder his customers got the impression that running a pub might be a nice earner and occasionally grumbled about the price of a pint.

My thought was not that it was about getting ripped off so much as customers voting with their reduced buying power to make sure this end met that other end. (This is not a club and I don’t really associate beer with self in the sense that it is an end needing meeting.) Plus I am still not ready to move back to the idea of hanging out in bars – not with, what, the seventh wave upon us? For this? These things are going to take a bit more than naïve possy cartooning and #LetsBeerPositive to get over. Or maybe it just goes the way of that weird but brief big band revival of the late 1990s. Remember that? Me neither. Again, no time to invest in craft beer folks.

In a happier time and place, Gary Gilman has let loose a social media blitz of his trip to France, tweeting up a storm while handing the keys to his blog to his better half – including this fabulous photo of a market fish stall in Calais. What manner of beast is that in the foreground? I am thinking monkfish but who knows. Well, the guy in the sweater with all the stripes does, I suppose.

Speaking of which,***** I am not sure I can fully, heartily, entirely… hesitantly… marginally… agree with Jeff in this particular application of what looks like the great white male theory:

Stone also helped convert Americans to hops (though they had a lot more company than they once admitted). It was, ironically, that strong association to hops that ultimately led to the awkward phase—though Stone also had quite a run as an established, successful brewery. When the haze displaced bitterness, Stone had a hard time adapting its brand.  

I think one needs to include the words Berlin and Keystone in any eulogy of the Stone that was. For me, repeated poor business decisions might have been central to the… awkwardness of that business ending poorly. Plenty of good regional and national breweries followed other paths.  Sometimes I wonder if that sort of quieter success is considered less interesting. Because…

Congratulations to Eoghan Walsh on the successful completion of his series “A History of Brussels Beer in 50 Objects” and the accompanying book launch, finishing up sorta where it began:

In December 2021, Brussels Beer Project publicly announced what was both the worst kept secret and the most unexpected recent development in Brussels beer: they had started brewing Lambic. They did so in a quintessentially Brussels Beer Project manner – by wheeling one of their coolships onto the Grand Place and parking within a couple of metres of the Brouwershuis, the centuries-long seat of brewing power in Brussels. 

This whole project is a great illustration of the power of properly handled personal websites combined with a clever social media presence.

Finally: beer awards. Q: if this is the ultimate… which is the penultimate?  And which is the antepenultimate? Shouldn’t this be clearer? One would want to know when and where one is wasting one’s time.

There. That’s enough. It must be! For more, check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday but not from Stan every Monday as he is on his summer holiday. Check out the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday (Ed.: ??? ) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s (Ed.: now very) irregular newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. 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 winding up after ten years.

*made you look.
**made you look again.
***I have now read 32 books in 2022 which is part of my personal productivity project for the year. Along with a number of things like being over ten months in to intermittent fasting which made the Tucci book a risk – but one worth taking. A fair few have been this sort of celebrity bio, some of which lean on happy times and avoids much of the bad times. Not something that I might have taken up before too often – though I highly recommend Alex Trebek’s if only for the news that he swore like a stevedore like any good northern Ontario lad should. Greg Allman, George Clinton, Stanley Tucci, Mel Brooks, Dave Grohl might serve as a handy scale against which one might measure these things. Allman being the most revealing of life’s grimmer side and Grohl the least. Note that Tucci is in the middle. But there is a gap to his left and a fair distance to Clinton. Clinton is only to the right of Allman because he seemed to cope better with many of the same demons – or perhaps just because he is still alive at 80 despite much whereas Allman ended his days at 69 in large part due to his addictions in youth. 
****A History of Brewing in Holland 900-1900: Economy, Technology and the State by UBC professor Richard W. Unger, published in 2001 at page 88. He also shows at page 90 that per person consumption in the Netherlands from 1372 to 1500 averaged between 210 and 320 litres a year based on total population.
*****See? Fishy. Ha ha. Funny joke.

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For The Mid-Year Checkup

Me. Wednesday morning. I ran out into the backyard in my slippers to cover up the small Romaine plants before 8 am –  given there was the dumbest rabbit ever out there, eating some weeds in the lawn about seven feet away from the finest dining he ever saw… if he were to ever see it. It seems it’s hard to get a good class of lawn rabbit these days. I may have triggered the neighbours’ yappy dog in the process. Jings. Life’s rich pageant or what? Breaks up the week, I suppose. It can be a bit of a challenge coming up with things to write about in the good beer world every week. Every once in a while interesting stuff pops up. For example, I had no idea that there was a Malting Barley Committee (MBC) of the Maltsters’ Association of Great Britain (MAGB) that issued edicts but late last week, care of Nigel‘s careful watch, we learned that they have made their decision on crops for the 2023 malting barley planting season. Say goodbye to the Splendor and Tungsten in your ales! As if you noticed…

It is Canada Day down Canada way… or at least it will be Friday. Eight years ago, I told the tale of how our Constitution of 1867 was first described to the leading lights of the future nation by a future Prime Minister. You can go read the whole thing but here is the portrait painted by one present of Sir John A. in his natural state:

…John A. entered bearing symptoms of having been on a spree. He was half drunk. Lunch is always on the side table, and he soon applied himself to it – and before we had well entered on the important business before us he was quite drunk with potations of ale…

Being as I am fascinated by all the tinkery clinkery bits of technology, I had a read through the current online edition of  Brewer Magazine, a trade journal that looks like an industry version of the old weekly newspaper that was 80% ads for members of the the downtown business association. Unlike the Gammy Bird, however, the ads seem to be real and are fairly interesting, especially this machine that would seem to be a robot that would take over the middle kid’s 2019 summer job, smashing out of date cans of beer out back of the contract brewery. I could never figure out if it was a good job or not. I suppose being covered in stale malty good spraying from smashed cans on 33C high humidity days may not be exactly how one wants to take one’s ale.

Q: is booze collapsing all around? Not in Illinois. Josh Noel wrote about in The Chicago Tribune (perhaps paywalled) wrote an excellent piece about Dovetails’ kolsch service in the Windy City:

While it may not be surprising to find a brewery such as Dovetail, dedicated to reproducing continental European beer styles, also reproducing European beer culture, there has been an unlikely development in Chicago since Dovetail’s first kolsch service in 2019: other breweries have also started doing it. Logan Square’s Hopewell Brewing hosted two kolsch nights in spring, and Double Clutch Brewing, which opened last fall in Evanston, has also done it.

In his mastery of the thing all the beer experts foolishly tell beer writers never to do, The Beer Nut displayed all his skills this week in his considerations of one of my all time favourite beers, Jolly Pumpkin‘s Bam, first encountered around 15 years ago. The resulting observations should serve as a bit of a life lesson for the rest of all you all:

It’s a medium orange-yellow in the glass and quite opaque. The aroma is a fun mix of fruit salad — with pear, mandarin and lychee in particular — meeting a very Belgian saison spicing and a lacing of farmyard fun. That’s a lot of complexity already for something that’s only 4.5% ABV. There’s a floral, perfume intensity in the foretaste, mixing bergamot and lavender with softer white grape. The body is quite thin and that renders the flavour a little harsh, accentuating the bitterness. It’s still very tasty, though. There’s too much going on for it to be refreshing, but it still just about works as a sipper.

Notice the use of observe fact and clear language. No reference to chemistry puffery and not burdened by style. As I read recently, observation defeats theory every time. Or something like that. The human sensory experience laid out plain.

Again with the use of personal eyeball powers, I would never have guessed that beer pub ticking was a jet-setter sort of function but there we are, the lad with the guide in the carry on luggage on an aircraft cabin flying over salty seas:

Right, if you’ve an allergy to the Channel Islands I should come back to this blog in, ooh, October. Twenty-three GBG entries for 170,499 islanders, and I needed ten (10) ticks for the set, having not set foot there since 2014 (before this blog started). If I’m going to finish the Guide this year, I needed to get those ten done in one trip. Nipping back to Sark for one pub in September is far harder than nipping back to Sandwich, and costs ten times as much.

Also: Auld Mudgie linked to a blog of a wandering pub lover that I had not noticed before, Merseyside Pub Guide.

Alistair triggered the sort of interesting discussion that Twitter is still letting you have – this time about the lack of actual special glassware utility, one of those old chestnuts in beer. Best comment? From Max:

I must add the glass I used for smaller servings is the same I use for wines, brandy, and whisky. I got it after judging at a beer competition (which uses the same glass for all styles, go figure).

Similarly, see this consideration of the role of Brett v hops in the transportation of strong ale long distances yoinks ago. So much more interesting information comes out of discussions backed by solid records.

Conversely, we had a sighting of the content control clique movement this week. Same as 2009 and 2016, arises in times of crisis. In the hardscrabble ill-considered beer writing trade, this tendency is sorta like the anti-Christ of the weekly beery news roundups. Leads to bizarre results. Deny the call to obey! Good thing Lew is on the job.

And, yes, the creative if not needy spins on the sale of Stone to mega brewing was the theme of the week amongst a certain set. Beth Demmon, as usual, offered the perspective with the clearest view from a local vantage point:

… this type of deal is a well-worn path. Big business-buys-smaller business in a seemingly mutually beneficial, nine-figure deal. Life goes on, capitalism lives to see another day.

This set of quotes from those attending these days of remembrance is hilarious. Not one using the phrase “decades long cluster fuck!” As noted in 2004, likely the seminal makers of sucker juice.   Jordan and Robin prodded the corpse, heroically finding the energy this week to care enough to discuss what are effectively the two stale assets of apparently no value in the Stone deal: (i) the face of the business and (ii) the long term business plan. Neither now needed. Isn’t the deal just a fire sale to avoid further losses if the long descent from the core business as a premium gas station brand allowed to continue further?

Finally – and in a more fact based reality – beer snakes!

Yorkshire’s decision to ban beer snakes, the comically long stacks of empty pint pots so beloved of cricket fans, forced luminous-jacketed stewards to engage in a series of slow-motion chase scenes with unruly cup-collectors, one of whom was amateurishly but unmistakably disguised as Scooby Doo. The England team have been restyled as great entertainers but the fans’ response has been: hold my empty beer. And also this one. And several dozen more. And now run! These races were surprisingly hilarious – though clearly not for the stewards, who, by tea, had completely given up… 

That is it!  For more, check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday but not from Stan every Monday as he is on his summer holiday. Check out the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday (Ed.: me finks the teens are hired for fests because that is all the can afford as the dream of craft continues to collapse…) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s (Ed.: now very) irregular newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. 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 winding up after ten years.

The First Thursday Beery News Notes For Summertime

I took the week off. Things to do. That toilet flap with the itsy-bitsy trickily drip? Replaced. Raised bed cover? Mended. Hedge? Trimmed. Whipper?Snipped. So I am a bit tight for time. Good thing, then, that the beer world went dead this week as far as news goes. Me, I might go over to the USA on Friday but might just go to the west end of Ottawa instead… border still have rules you know. Maybe nip over to a dep and an SAQ in Quebec, too. I’ll let you know if I did next week. Please stay calm in the interim. Please. If I was going south over the big river this week, I could hit the Thursday night “Beers, Bikes and Barges” talk in Albany, NY where Craig is talking.

Join the Historic Albany Foundation, Discover Albany, the Albany Ale Project, and the Erie Canal Museum for this hourlong cycling tour through Albany looking at the city’s Erie Canal and brewing history. See sites like the location of the enormous John Taylor and Sons Brewery and Lock #1 on the Old Erie. The ride begins and ends at C.H. Evans Brewing Company, where you will be treated to a beer as part of your ride as well as a brief history of the brewery itself.

That sounds like a lot of fun. Though they misspelled enooooooormous. Because it really is that big. H_GE and a zillion U’s in between. Big. And that’s only the remaining part of the facility. There is even a stream running right under the building still. That’s the sort of thing you get to see when Mr. Gravina hauls you all over town saying “LOOK AT THAT!!!” 37 times a minute.

Stan released his latest Hop Queries bulletin by Telex… err… email subscription and, as always, has the substantive news that the kids all are filling the streets demanding.

Hop acreage strung for harvest in the three northwestern states of Idaho, Oregon and Washington declined this year for the first time since 2012. Given what happened to world beer consumption beginning in March of 2020, that shouldn’t be a surprise. There’s an overall surplus of hops, in various forms, to be worked off. Fact is, farmers only reduced acreage 2%, planting 59,896 acres, which is 1,255 more acres than they harvested in 2020 . . . and 30,213 more than 10 years ago.

So… is it Crisis, What Crisis? or These Be Yon End Times! Dunno. I tend to pay more attention to my reassuring blood test numbers than freaky hop acreage stats. Other news? Apparently BrewDog didn’t share it’s private business planning with the world a few years back – just like every other private business didn’t:

Brewdog’s CEO James Watt was involved in preliminary discussions about a potential sale of part of the firm to rivals Heineken, the BBC has learned. Leaked emails from 2018 reveal he told Heineken he was “open to being more pragmatic in our views on independence”. He previously criticised craft brewers for “selling out” to bigger companies. Brewdog said the BBC’s reporting had demonstrated “vindictive scrutiny and malicious criticism” of the beer firm.

Why would this be something anyone would think would be made public? I was thinking how BrewDog has basically replaced all of macro industrial beer as the “bad guy of beer” – some of which – maybe much of which – is probably deserved… but the weird thing is how they have seemed for a whole to soak up all the attention for the past few months – and perhaps letting other bad actors off the hook.* So, it was some relief to see that GBH has shifted focus to another toxic situation well worthy of attention:

A current Tired Hands employee says Broillet has effectively resumed his role as CEO and is at the brewery’s facilities six days a week. A former brewer who left the company this spring as a result of Broillet’s presence at the brewery confirmed that the founder has been working at Tired Hands’ property for months. “The public wasn’t made aware of that at all. He just kind of snuck in and [employees] really don’t want him around,” the former employee says.

Conversely – at least in the heroic outcome department – Martin himself shared another bit of research no doubt uncovered in the preparation of his upcoming book on stout with the tale of how Guinness administered under medical care got one particular gent out of a rather challenging personal situation:

On Sunday June 18 1815 at around 6pm in the evening, at the height of the Battle of Waterloo, ten miles south of Brussels, a 33-year-old captain in the 7th (Queen’s Own) Regiment of Hussars named William Verner, born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, was hit in the head by a French bullet — one of 47,000 casualties that day.

Fabulous. Far less corpse ridden, Ray wrote an excellent piece for their B+B Patreon subscribers on his father’s approach to pubs:

He also taught me everything I needed to know about pubs and drinking, when I started (a bit late) in my early twenties. I remember sitting with him in the Railwayman’s Club in Bridgwater while he explained that I was drinking too slowly to be sociable: “Bloody hell, son – like this! Chug, chug, chug…” Third of a pint goes. “Chat, chat, chat. Chug, chug, chug.” Next third disappears. “Chat, chat, chat, then finish it…” Final third down the hatch. “Then get the next round in.” I think of him, I guess, as the ultimate Pub Man.

My old man was a church minister… but he was late to the ways of the cloth and shared hints of a similar youth in industrial Scotland. A short poured pint would “have gone back in the bartenders face when I was a lad.” Tales of great uncle with head butting skills. Hence my familiarity, no doubt, with this sort of grim news from the Old Country:

…alcohol-related hospital stays were nearly eight times higher among the most deprived Scots. Minimum unit pricing was introduced to curb excessive alcohol consumption and related harms, including death, crime and unemployment. But a separate PHS report published earlier this month found “no clear evidence” the policy had reduced consumption amongst the most harmful drinkers.

Bad news continues. Good beer is at risk of collapse, according to one correspondent from the antipodes:

Joseph Wood started making beer in a shed in New Plymouth more than a decade ago. Now he’s a master brewer, and the beers he makes at Liberty Brewing north of Auckland are some of the most awarded in the country. But he’s never seen anything like the past 12 months. “It’s a miracle we’ve managed to keep stock on the shelves. People moan about the price of beer – they’ve been lucky to get it at all.”

Is it that bad? Let’s watch and see if the brewery closings speed up. I give them a summer grace period. We’ll know by October. And, speaking of the neg, there was a interesting anti-craft comment of  note over at NHS Martin’s post about his visit to the Ring O’Bells:

I can barely recall* a time when I’ve resorted to the can fridge for a beer in a pub, I’m so utterly mistrustful of the fancy can lottery, which in pubs is often the repository for the wackiest sweet and sour high abv fruity-sweet hell-beers that I’ve never heard of. Also, is it just me that regards drinking what is in effect the takeaway/off license option in an on-licensed premises, somehow like eating a takeaway in a restaurant, kinda not the point. And finally, why is it that what’s probably the only acceptable use of a specialist drinks fridge, for bottles/cans of good dry ciders, is as rare as speckled hen teeth…

Lordy. An unhappy man in beer? Never hoyd of it! Well, neither did the person making the comment as he was actually quite happy in a good pub with a pint of plain beer.  But… it does speak to division in a way that I get – and worth tucking away should a new sort of craft collapse actually be underway. As to the fancy can lottery, just this week I got tricked** into trying a Cold IPA*** in a fun can which, if true to Nu-Styl Rools, means an unbalanced blast of hot Minwax furniture polish to the mouth with thin traces of malt. Similar themes were afoot in this YouTube bit Eoghan Walsh noted shared of Irish people trying craft beer. Hint: they aren’t signing up anytime soon. Not a growth sector. Thinking of investing your time or money further in craft? Please tell us why in the comments.

There. Thought it would be shorter. Sure didn’t take that long to write. Last week? I poured over that one over and over for days. No one gave a crap. As they shouldn’t. For more, check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday but not from Stan every Monday as he is on his summer holiday. Check out the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday (Ed.: back again this week) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s irregular newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. 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 winding up after ten years.

*Time for another reminder of the “Sex For Sam!” project that still gets that pass.
**Tricked, I tell ya!!
***I name no names.

The Mid-June 2022 Edition of Thursday Beery News Notes

Finally. I am now convinced we may not get snow again… probably… the crops are a’risin’ and they are getting noticed and even harvested by strangers new to the neighbourhood. I even sharpened the manual mower and dug up the now dead fig tree’s root. In fact, I was reminded just last Saturday how much better beer was than having a fat guy at 59 heart attack when, laying on the lawn sweaty and staring at that damn fig root once cut from the planet which gave it life, I chose to have a beer rather than a heart attack. Good call. Meantime, I got on the Dall-E app thingie to see what all the cool kids are up to. Apparently the AI for the app likes its beer writers fat, white and male. I don’t dare show you the other three panels. Still… quite extraordinarily perceptive.

First up, I love this image from the Mi’gmaw academic Robbie Richardson of Princeton – and his caption: “There was a two man band doing a mix of Pink Floyd and Louis Armstrong covers.” Fabulous. He was in a London working man’s pub and captured the spirit of the scene in this shot as well as a second photo. Note: not yet included in the listed, upgraded or relisted by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on the advice of Historic England.

Speaking of pubs, there is pub ticking and there is speculative pub ticking that requires you to tick a pub just in case only to find out that the pub was not worth the tick! But in the tick that was not ticky there are also gems, like this beer right here, a Dulse Stout. I like the sound of that. But I grew up near the Bay of Fundy.

Evan demonstrated a deft use of social media on Wednesday with his multi-tweet, multi-media argument on the relationship between Czech culture and a state owned Czech brewery. Read it. It’s better than 87% of the paid beer writing this week. Here, let me start you off:

I keep seeing Czechs ask “Why shouldn’t we privatize Budvar?” aka “Why should the Czech Budweiser brewery remain under state ownership?” A few quick thoughts on the pros and cons.

A bit further out there, we have either apparently run out of gimmicks or have achieved master level gimmick:

A Scots brewery has joined forces with a company of professional musicians in a bid to discover whether playing piano to fermenting beer affects the taste… Sean Logan, a member of the company, is playing a wide selection of his music to two batches of new beer now in the fermentation tanks at Bellfield’s brew house. The two new beers – Resonancy IPA and Resonancy Pilsner- have been brewed specially for Pianodrome’s summer-long ‘Resonancy’ at their new, upcycled piano amphitheatre at the Old Royal High School.

And, never the gimmick, I missed this a month ago about the last Fred Fest coming and going:

This weekend marks the final Fred Fest, a rare beer charity event created to honor the birthday of legendary Portland beer journalist Fred Eckhardt. Later this summer venue host Hair of the Dog Brewing is closing, and this will be one of the last occasions to celebrate both owner Alan Sprints and Fred Eckhardt’s invaluable contributions to the industry in-person.

Boak and Bailey had somewhat positive experiences at three ‘Spoons and were pleasantly confused:

It was busy but peaceful with mostly older drinkers chatting in groups as diffuse sunlight warmed them through big windows. Ruddles was, again, surprisingly, delightful, this time at £1.49. Adnams’s Ghost Ship (£2.10) was good, too – a reminder of what a great beer this can be, full of citrus zest. The tables were spotless and polished and the in-house mag sat there looking harmless, with a cover feature about Curry Club rather than, say, DOES TRUTH MATTER? 

But what about goes into what is in the glass? A study is being undertaken by my old alma mater, Dalhousie, in combination with two local breweries, 2 Crows and Propeller. They are looking to see if they can solve an old issue with how malt is made:

Historically, malting involved soaking barley in water, laying it out on the floor to germinate, and then drying it. This is a process called floor malting. Today, pneumatic malting is automated with large maltsters spreading the barley out on a perforated floor and blowing air through that floor to precisely control temperature and humidity before drying the malt. Two concerns about floor malted barley have been hindering the growth of craft malting: the potential for higher levels of a flavour-altering compound called Dimethyl Sulphide (DMS), and a condition called premature yeast flocculation…

Big picture, brewing industry economic challenges continue. Belgian brewers face bottle shortages:

Companies like the historic Huyghe brewery in Flanders, for example, are starting to run out of bottles. The lifeline, for now, is the accumulated stocks of bottles that were purchased from a supplier company in Russia. These days, supply has been interrupted and finding alternative suppliers with the capacity to respond in Europe is anything but easy due to the strong concentration that has occurred in the industry in recent years.

Similar stories out of the UK and Germany. Plus not enough C02. Plus drought. Plus the hot sauce is disappearing. (Glad I have backup.) In Hawaii and in Asia, the brewing basics are not as easy to get your hands on:

All food prices are going through the roof in Singapore. “It’s getting harder and harder for us to get any supplies at all,” Jesemann said. Hops and malt, delivered by ship from Germany, are also becoming hard to come by. The pandemic and the Russian war have made everything more complicated.

Now… there was an interesting set of three separate posts this week which added up to a bit of an interesting conundrum or at least signs of change. Worth unpacking.  First, to set the scene, Jeff used all his fingers and toes and came to the correct conclusion that there are a lot of beer  brands out there:

I was doing that same back-of-the-envelope math recently, and things have changed just a smidge. American breweries are within spitting distance of making a million individual beers. Maybe they already do. Three changes account for this. (1) The US has seen a more than fivefold increase in breweries since 2010, to around 9,500. (2) The number of beers each brewery makes has skyrocketed. Partly that’s a function of a changing market that rewards churn. But partly it’s a result of the fact that (3) almost all those breweries have taprooms, and a a lot have multiple taprooms. People are in turn drawn to those retail sites to sample new beers and buy four-packs they can’t get at the store. 

I totally agree. We could also do a similar calculation of local bakery cookies, squares and other doodads. As things localize and multiply – as the dream of big national craft continues to fade – we have a splendidly mindboggling range of options… as long as you can be everywhere all the time. Which you can’t. Which leads me to Robin and Jordan writing in conversation as they do monthly for Good Food Revolution. This month they discuss the fragmentation of style over the same timeline that Jeff discusses his numerical ker’splosion:

J: It’s not just flavour, either. As part of the instruction at George Brown, I’m explaining to people about the Lovibond Company. They were stained glass manufacturers who came up with a standard colour spectrum for beer. Sort of pale straw down to deep brown, but in gentle gradation. One of the students asked, “So what happens when beer is suddenly pink?”

R: I do take your point. While styles have changed so much throughout the centuries, things do seem to be going pretty alarmingly fast in terms of flavour development, with everything but the kitchen sink being put into a beer. Sometimes the beer is even aged in a kitchen sink for that flavour.

It’s an interesting discussion – but, with respect, it does move a titch to the reactionary. In the sense that it depends on chestnuts like Garrett Oliver on wine (no, wines have a massive range of flavours) and dear old Michael Jackson (whose declaration of style as periodic table flopped way before the beer went pink.) But it serves as a great X axis to Jeff’s Y.*  Facing this shock of the new… well, newish… we (rejecting the 1880s Michelson and Morley approach) should not worry about preserving a conceptual status quo. In the million brand universe the idea that beers can “rise up above all of the nonsense” like hit songs may not recognize that (i) the hits were rarely the most interesting songs** and (ii) there are far too many beers now for it to mean anything when a tiny foil Sunday School gold star gets awarded. It is simply no longer meaningful. That centre no longer holds.

Which leads us to Ben Johnson who has rejoined the land of the beer writer and posted his first post since last he posted in over a year and a half, reminding us all to disclaim the freebie:

It’s pretty basic marketing. For the cost of beer and shipping, you can put your product into the hands of people who are happy to share news and images of that product with your target audience. Beer writers and influencers get beer, they write about it and photograph it, and then share their work with their beer-loving followers; and the brewery, at least in theory, sells more of that beer.

This, too, is now a bit of a read guard action. Not because people don’t let folk know when a freebie is being discussed. We see disclaimers all over the place now – and that is great. Problem got solved. But the new problem is… it’s also sorta useless. And sorta 2018. Think about it. What beer drinker is now so weak of will that they are influenced? Wanted to be subjected to marketing? Second, many of the more interesting breweries just do not send freebie samples just like they don’t submit beers to award competitions. They know their base and have no need of the TikyToky marketplace of ideas. Third, too many freebie opinions boiled down to generic praise. Worse, fingerwaggery may ensue. Me, I can buy the beer.*** I can take the risk with a few bucks that I might not like something once in a while. Frankly, I am much more likely to be attracted by a skillful brewery that also displays a bit of good humour and jokes with itself. I am also much more interested, like Mr. Lemon, in what is a short walk away.

All of which adds up to something. And its something very different from even just pre-pandemic. The pre-pan. There is now just too much in beer to be aware of all that much about all the beer. It has been foretold, of course. Over seven years ago it was clear that it was impossible to be a “beer expert” but we are also well past even that. With the explosion of brands and styles and influencers (not to mention the seemingly hundreds of beer award competitions – now including a prize for iconic supermarkets? FFS. Really?? Have things gotten that tight for the award fee gatherers?) the confusion isn’t fading, it’s now a bazillion times worse. Or maybe better. Is all that variety actually all that bad ?

What can the poor beer writer do? No problem. Keep it specific. Look for the details. Experience what is actually there and now what you’re told should be there. And maybe write about it. That’s what I say. By this I mean if you are someone with the knowledge of what is good right there in your local area write about it… or write about what London Cooper was or… what is interesting about trademark law as it affects brewing or… or even what Ron has been eating… well, then you have half a chance to still be interesting and informative or even just funny. Write – even if its probably not all actually journalism. Writing is good. I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating. Write. It’s hopeful thing. The hope that we acknowledge the rich niches which have replaced outdated umbrellas and overarches and authority figures. THIS JUST IN: no one need read Michael Jackson ever again except for archival purposes.

Perhaps connectedly, Stephanie Grant thought about something like it and wrote an interesting piece at her space “The Share” comparing craft beer now to the downsides of dating, including the fork in the road at phase 3 :

This is the part of the relationship where you start questioning things. Should I stay or should I go? It’s a hard question when beer has become part of my identity. What happens when it’s not? I left my job at the brewery. I started freelancing full-time. Initially, I dreamt of writing for breweries, but I started questioning that. Did I even want to work in the industry anymore? During this stage, my beer fridge went mostly untouched. It had been months since I posted about beer and even longer since I purchased a six pack. Meanwhile, my cocktail bar GREW.

Did she ditch the dud at phase 4? You will have to go read.

The rut is real – and, let’s be honest, maybe its because just as we have this unwieldy explosion of beer brands and alleged styles, we also have a limited range of beer writing themes.**** So much writing has not caught up with the scene from the consumer’s seat. Why listen to drinkers when you can talk at brewery owners? Yet… I think the last few years’ worth of new writing on social justice through the lens of beer is invigorating and, like the niche and the local, points to the way. Focused as it is on their personal experience, it is a step forward exactly because it’s written by people who actually do “think about press freedoms or the politics of their readers” and then think about their experience in beer overall. These writers have had to work to be heard. And beer doesn’t traditionally have much time for the bad news. Commissioning editors get the yips about bad news but these writers now sometimes write uncomfortable personal things. Discomforting interesting things – unlike what that DALL·E mini app would have us believe as illustrated above. It is also interesting that it is occurring just as established news services also shine a brighter light on the little ways of brewing.  Again, I speak of hope. This is excellent. And it bodes well for a better future.

What’s it all add up to? In the million brand world, just don’t be a follower. Be the subject of the story of your own experience. We simply don’t have any use for the good old days when craft beer was the defined as the domain of the heroic great white male, whether brewer or writer. A past when perhaps, to channel Mr. Ahmir Thompson, we have been burdened by the achievers who kept down creatives. Someone should let the DALL·E mini app up there know we may be done with that. If we are lucky. It’s a needed change – because it was not all good and fun, whatever you were told.*****

There. Another long variation on a theme. But that’s what the beery news notes is for! Reading the writing. And for more, check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday but not from Stan every Monday as he is on his summer holiday. Check out the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday (Ed.: back again this week) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s irregular newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. 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 winding up after ten years.

*Another interesting X and Y graph would be where one axis represented the collapse of  stylistic and branding certainty and the other axis represented the increase in card carrying Cicerones.
**Have you ever seen “Pina Colada Song” aka “Escape” lip sinc-ed vids? Big hit. In its fifth decade of existence. Shitty.
***This is my favorite line when a brewer offers me samples, that I am not one of that sort of writer. Brewery owner then laughs. Then I laugh. It’s a nice bonding time. Then I pay and go.
****They include: (i) social justice through the lens of beer, (ii) comforting praise for the rural brewery preferably founded by career changers… perhaps before they change back, (iii) beer writers interviewing beer writers and other circles of praise, (iv) possy spin over what arrived for free this week (yet… who could deny him this time?) and (v) affirmations of the abiding beer fibs through time like there is nothing to worry about the marketplace, temperance bad, puritans really bad, j-curve good ’cause beer is health food! (I often think of whether Gary Bredbenner so well remembered by Lew at the time now 13 years ago was affected by this… and Norm Miller as well.) Not to mention the crap that isn’t even beer. Fibs and lies, I say. Money in this case is the root of all evil, isn’t it… yet so is its absence.
*****Which is to say we are well past the day a decade ago when Melissa Cole could say that “brewing industry is not only booming and forward-thinking, it is also fabulously friendly” while James Watt was calling someone out by saying “…if we wanted advice from you, it would be about how to simultaneously patronise women and bastardize beer…” Quite the reversal! But it is a meaningful reversal of sorts as brewing is not and has not been a friendly place even if there are friendly faces to be found. And it’s good for us all to have grown up even if it means you leave behind those things of interest in youth.

These Are The Beery News Notes For The Week Of Jubilee Madness

It is here! Jubilee!!* There shall be bunting. Confession time: I like the Queen herself. I like the structure that the Crown in Canada give the law that I practice. And… that’s pretty much it. Others are less enamored thanbeven that. So… we recognize that Her Maj does like a drink and a pub yet we do recognize that the whole rah-rah Union flag bunting and the children of Oswald Mosley’s nasty jingoism has tainted the whole flaggy wavey aspect… along with the colonial record… and… rampant and growing inequality… and well… Boris… but HRH like a drink and a pub!  In commemoration of the Platinum Joobe, I participated in one of the few ways the government in Canada provided and got a few pins. Pins! What Canadian child doesn’t long for their very own lapel pin celebrating HRH? And in mad cap celebration, one will be gifted to the maker of the cleverest comment left below this post or on social media responding to this post on an appropriately related theme. Remember – cleverest.

First, I missed this a few weeks back, a post from Ashley Newall with a number of forms of branding from Bradings brewery of Ottawa, the first step on our blessed patron E.P. Taylor’s rise to fame.  Of particular note is the photo of the Bradings Man by Yousuf Karsh and how similar it is to one of EPT’s assets, the branding for Cincinnati Cream Beer discussed in the bigger scheme of cream beer six years back.

Two writers took the helpful step this week of tweeting guidance on stories located in obscure journals. First, a Lily Waite bio in Waitrose Magazine (as illustrated) and, second, ATJ in Brewing & Beverage Industries Business saved here on the perils facing brewing industry in these uncertain times. Brewery closures, investment failures and hegemony from big craft. Times are hard at all corners of the trade, especially given the UK’s situation. It was all foretold of course, if only by the obvious patterns set out in brewing industry history. Consider this letter from Carling to Molson in the 1930s. Beer competes. Beer colludes. The small and weak fail. Spend your pennies wisely.

Not sure the monks were all that wise with the pennies as Jeff explores, here quoting from reporter John W Miller** of the publication America: the Jesuit Review:

“…it is very modern, with automated machines that require only a handful of workers. Everything is top-of-the-line. Bottling lines come from Italy, brewing gear from Germany…” In order to service the debt and fund the monastery, the business plan called for the monks to build to annual production of 10,000 barrels a year… Miller helpfully reports that they had annual revenues of $1.5 million, which is pretty good if you’re not servicing a lot of debt.

In Boak and Bailey’s newsletter for May there was a comment made which, unlike everything they have ever ever written, had me shaking my head. It’s this passage in a good discussion about when to stop blogging:

Another natural full stop on a blogging project might be when you ‘make it’ as a writer and sell your first commercial piece. That’s not why everyone gets into blogging but we’ve certainly seen quite a few people make that transaction, with the blog as a stepping stone.

Perhaps what is meant is that this is the reason folk themselves think to stop blogging about beer – which I agree with – but it is not an actual reason to stop writing for the public without pay on a website you control. Why write to make someone else money? Seems weird. Let’s be honest. You have not made it or (too often) you have not made much of anything. So much of what I have to sift through to put together this weekly review is boring derivative and/or feeble writing for pay.  Very generously I would say half of what is most interesting is writing shared freely.*** Very generous half. Hunt out that other good stuff along with me. And write.

Lew on blind tasting:

We taste 5 spirits (blind picked by my daughter from 20 whiskies, rums, barrel-aged gins, calvados) in colored @GlencairnGlass & fearlessly guess all but one wrong.

Lew: “I’m dead sure we’re stupid…” Gold!

Not really related at all, BBC Four apparently ran a replay of Abigail’s Party last evening. You can see the entire miserable drunken thing here. A great trip back into “not nostalgia” for anyone convinced the past was a better place.

Perhaps it’s just an unfortunate camera angle but only in Montreal could someone out-Scandinavia the Scandinavians when it comes to stark and grey:

The space, designed by Ethan’s wife, interior designer Annika Krausz, has soaring ceilings, a firehall door with daytime light streaming through, and heated floors for the winter. Two immense earth-toned paintings by Annika’s father, renowned artist Peter Krausz, and a huge red light fixture above the semi-circular bar further enhance the space.

Another sighting of a brewery sending 100% of proceeds and not just profits as part of supporting the Ukraine cause. Good.

Debates of the week: (i) In the US, can you cool warm beer that was previously cold and (ii) are UK rough pubs a real thing?**** Expertise abounds with, as per, many contradictory positions taken.

Conversely, for years I wondered why beer writing did not focus more on particularly fabulous pubs… then I realized that there would be a chill from the many of those not mentioned,***** one of the great drivers in beer writing topic selection. Robot says “must raise all ships must raise all ships.” Happy then are we to see in Pellicle an honest to goodness warming tribute to a great singular pub, The State Bar of Glasgow:

The State Bar isn’t particularly trendy or arrogant, it’s a humble affair with an unassuming frontage. Possessing an Edwardian horseshoe bar upstairs—an ideal spot for watching football, doubly so as the bar is strictly non-partisan, (a rare blessing in Glasgow). Head downstairs and you’ll find yourself in what feels like the cosy library of a well-to-do Victorian household, complete with dusty books to read, well-worn leather chairs and a crackling fireplace. You can find all the essentials here; house wines and spirits, Tennent’s, Guinness, Cider & McEwans 80-/, or “wee heavy” as it’s known by the locals, and a stage for the bar’s weekly comedy or acoustic nights.

Nice. Now on to cheery international beery news time. Price hikes of 6% to 10 % expected in Japan. In India, beer drinkers may also be facing beer price hikes in addition to the local rationing mentioned last week. South American brewers are seeing “early signs of demand destruction” while a beer contamination scandal in Brazil (in which coolant and wort mixed during the brewing process leading to deaths) has reached the courts. Brewing for a rare medical disorder charity in New Zealand.

Finally, GBH seemingly did the right thing – though in the wrong order – and got some actual advice about writing risky bits about BrewDog and British court processes now republished, though there is the odd suggestion that others can rely on the legal opinion received. Beware! Now… it will be interesting to see if a legal paperwork of some sort now follows. As I have often said, just getting a legal opinion doesn’t stop a plaintiff from taking steps. I trust all involved got independent legal advice, too, just in case assurances had been given.

For more, check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday but not from Stan every Monday as he is on his summer holiday. Check out the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday (Ed.: but not again this week) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s irregular newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. 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…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water. Things come. Things go.

*I expect scenes not unlike those in The Return of the Archons to play out. In tribute, an old pal used to shout “Festival!” in bars as he smoked three cigarettes at a time. That sort of thing.
**Quoting heavily yet still slightly slagging the author he relies upon as it relates to a side issue: “… but he’s not an industry writer and doesn’t realize…” No need of that… I clearly like to project a less saucy approach!  
***If you have any doubts, read Boak and Bailey‘s archives… then go on to Jeff at Beervana… or Jordan‘s site or… or… or…
****Of course they are. The playgrounds of racist, sexist and every other sort of beery bigotry… oh, and violent, too. But most labeled as such are not.
*****And perhaps also the tourist association funders who ensure junkets are (i) paid for and (ii) non-selective. I mean, sure, a rising tide raises all boats but who doesn’t want to control the tides???

Your Mid-May 2022 Thursday Beery News Notes

Chores. Garden chores. The pruned willow is just about casting enough shade for its six month tour of duty, leaning over me as I sit and sweat and drink a beer. And, about thirty feet away, I built a nice small patch of salad-y things this week radishes, red and green lettuce. Stuff getting done. That’s something, quite a something. For a place that had three frosts under two weeks ago. Then I remembered I have rabbits. Not mine. The wild bunnies of the neighbourhood. So… now I need to box in the patches with walls and a cage top. Perhaps a hinge top will be introduced. Not having chicken wire dig into your neck once the top slips as you gather in the harvest? That’s innovative. Innovation born of not thinking something through fully in the first place. That’s my style.

Beer news? Beer news! It’s a big week this week. First up, the Craft Brewers Conference 2022 ended up having a couple of note worthy twists this week: a fine beer got runner up to the runner up where the runners up don’t actually exist aaaaannnnnnnnd… it was a Covid-19 super spreader event. There’s not much you can say as not one saw it coming… except Robin:

So uh…everyone at cbc just not wearing masks huh…

Not hard at all, doing the right thing. And if that wasn’t enough, plenty of folk wrote have thoughts about the #1 third place for an American classic. Andres wrote the thread o’the week on process. We also got juries of beer fans standing up to snarkily defend the indefensible verdict… the “not credible“*… because “they’re all world class experts of course“… which I take to be a dig but it might not be a dig. AJT added a useful note:

Reminds me of the story that John Keeling tells about when he was at Fullers and judging in the US – their ESB was knocked out of the ESB category for being out of style…

In longer form, we had omni-directional finger wags from Jerard Fagerberg and… my pal Lew who may want to recognize the third possibility:

But as I say to people who complain about the Electoral College, if you don’t like the way the rules are, work to change them. If you’re a brewer who thinks that every medal in every category should always be awarded, because we’ve reached the point as an industry where common levels of excellence are understood and achieved – or, hell, just because – then get organized, find other brewers who feel the same way, and get the rules changed. Or don’t. But if you don’t agree with it, and you don’t do anything about it, you’re just going to be pissed when it happens again. Savvy? Now get out there and brew, or drink, and stop worrying about this. There are a lot more important things, even in beer.

GET OFF HIS LAWN!!! Note: Electoral College references are akin to Godwin’s Law. And that third possibility? For me, be like most people and realize these events are just low level oddly structured fun that are focused on brand promotion. No one loses an eye. Competitions are just a nice side-hobby in the beer world.

On a point much further along the parabolic niceness scale, Lily had her essay on a possibly perfect pub published in Pellicle this week, the story of the Salutation Inn of Ham, Gloucestershire which comes with a few extras:

The pub is welcoming and homely, with low ceilings, pew-like wooden benches, and a fireplace lending welcome warmth to the pub’s two front rooms in winter. The bar is lined with taps and hand pulls pouring beer and cider from across the South West—including the pub’s own brewery adjoining at the rear—as well as the trusty and ubiquitous Guinness… The walled garden which houses the pigs is dotted with apple and pear trees, and the odd damson. The pigs, raucous and rambunctious as we step through the door in the elderly wall, are fed on a mix of apples, cheese curds, and occasionally pellets. Once the private garden of the Berkeley estate manager (the castle’s estate covers 6,000 acres across the local area), it is shown on early 19th Century maps surrounded by orchard after orchard—a cider history now long gone. 

Traveling much farther, Jeff made a flash visit to Norway which I worried was was going to be a bit of a drive-by so it was comforting to see the both Lars and Knut gave it the thumbs up. Still… it was a bit of an American abroad with the experience being too much or too little like the USA:

… you might mistake it for a pub in Ohio. Lots of hazies and other IPAs, some barrel-aged stouts, assorted pales. They even have Guinness … Those styles drive the same kind of drinkers in the US, but the difference is that in America they are dwarfed by the number of “regular” craft drinkers… We go through different developmental stages, and the first one is imitation. Norway has yet to find what they like on their own terms. I expected farmhouse brewing and especially kveik to be quite visible, yet it’s not. In fact, when people at the beer fest asked me about my plans for Norway and I mentioned Voss, 80% of them had never heard of the farmhouse tradition there… On the other hand, I’ve been impressed with the beer in general.

Ah, that old assumption that a land matches one’s expectations. Man is indeed the measure of all things. I’ll still probably just stick with Knut’s or Lars’ take on their own homeland. Local knowledge. As Stonch wrote of Prague this very week:

Over the years I have benefitted enormously from the writing of Evan and also Max @Pivnifilosof. Evan also once helped me and my mate Dave get tram tickets when we were too drunk to put the coins in the machine

Elsewhere, the problem of payment came up in a discussion at Boak and Bailey’s over the weekend and I clued into something that had not crystalized within my brain bucket before. I was led to a thought only after I wrote this:

…inventive creative writing sure has taken a hit in the good beer world. Payment has never amounted to quality in my mind, often the opposite. Yet it’s becoming more and more the case that it’s either paid for writing that’s pleasant enough or bits and bob that never seem to get enough time to be properly fleshed out. I can’t say I’m ever comfortable, for example, with histories published and paid for by the word – but who even has the time to put in a proper effort as the amateur’s act of obsession? Retirees, that’s who. They seem to be holding up their end of the bargain.

I then thought “why did I write that?” I did so for two reasons. First, I am always reluctant to be disagreeable especially (honestly… not tugging at a dangling thread) with B+B and, second, I wondered whether it was even true.  But it is if you look at it this way. Writing for pay puts a meter on the writing. You will get X amount per word or a flat rate but the reality is that you really are putting yourself on a clock. Based on what you are worth per hour rather than whether the writing is any good. Leading to conserving resources, measuring time as well as money. And deadlines.

Screw that. When I was young and fancy free before a few years back, I had all the time in the world to swan about researching obscure stuff about brewing. Not so much given an uptick in very interesting but very demanding work related matters.  Hence Martyn and Martin and Gary and Ron and the Tand and any number of others of the golden handshake who are able to research and scribble with a bit more leisure. Interestingly, the abovementioned Lars has written honestly this week about the other side of the coin, my path not taken a decade and a half ago:

I worked hard to set up talks back in September and October and had one month of good income with from that, before covid stopped it all. So now I need to try to restart that, but without spending so much time on it that I miss my book deadline. I got a deal writing articles for Craft Beer & Brewing magazine, which has also helped. The long and the short of it, however, is that less than a year into this I’ve had to start dipping into my savings, and it’s not a great feeling. So while I will keep doing all of the above to produce some money it looks like it won’t be enough.

Lars then shared an interest in readership support. Go read and contribute if you can. I have written it before but it repeats saying: I have every sympathy for someone who has decided to write about beer. For all the money in beer there is very little money in writing about beer, however interesting the topic.

Which leads to a few things. Like the issues of scope creep and expertise extrapolation. Sure, multiple skilled interests are possible – Dave Sun Lee is but one example – but the good folk who are committed to writing for cash have to go out further upon the waters with nets and lines. They give us stories not about beer but about other alcoholic beverages – about boozy seltzers and things claiming to be non-alcoholic beer even though both are so often laced with fruity gaks that defeat any commonality with brewed malt and hops. Where does it lead other than the inevitable high priced craft NA still unflavoured seltzers?!? Tottering towards international economic collapse, that’s where!!! Consider this behind the The Chicago Trib’s paywall, summarized by author Josh Noel this way:

Goose Island is taking Bourbon County into the world of pricey NFTs ($499 each!).

We really need to know no more. Could you imaging chucking away your pay that way? Pet Rocks taught me enough about that sort of thing in elementary school coming up on 50 years ago… though it did allow me the opportunity to post “Sucker juice layered upon the sucker juice!” There. Dots connected. Thanks for walking this path with me. BTW: Josh Noel is just wrong this time:

After digging in, I can see the future where NFTs play a role connecting brands and customers. Especially in beer, where the bond can be strong.

More sensibly, Gary indexed his recent posts on colonial English pubs in India. Excellent.

Finally, what to think about GBH apparently crossing a line and pulling an article about a legal process?***  While it is entirely healthy to be dubious of craft breweries and their ways, a few grabs on social media about the article prior to its removal may help explain why a reasonable cease and desist letter was sent. Consider this:

“[BrewDog CEO/cofounder James] Watt may have tried to uncover this alleged plot by paying a former romantic partner nearly £100,000 ($125,000 USD) in Bitcoin to gather information on ex-BrewDog staff and others who have been critical of him.”

… and this:

“Documents and interviews suggest Watt paid her to help him uncover information about his critics” and “The woman says she did not defraud or harass Watt, and that she does not believe former BrewDog employees are plotting against him. Her lawyers say she will “robustly” defend herself against these allegations” and “Three women who had contact with Ziem say they did not believe her to be part of a plot to take down Watt, and say they suspected Watt was using Ziem to gather information on them.

Contempt of court. It happens. It basically means you are contemptuous of the judicial process. Usually it is raised when someone won’t respect a warrant demanding their attendance but it can also mean that you are not letting the court do its job of fact finding, that you are interfering with the process. You can see how speculation and allegation become restated as fact. I see it now as I did when I saw the story’s brief appearance:

Speculative review of partially obtained evidence to be framed under the unique system of Scots uncodified civil law! Amazing pluck. Plus “… Watt may have tried to uncover this alleged plot by paying…” and “…people he sees as his enemies…” Impugning skullduggery? Heavens!

I was more thinking that there would be a form of libel suit under Scottish civil law due to the assertions of fact exemplified above but The Beer Nut guided me to the other process, the contempt under English proceedings pursuant to a UK statute.  Statutory contempt seems to require consideration of whether there is a lack of good faith, if we have “fair and accurate report of legal proceedings held in public” and whether “the risk of impediment or prejudice to particular legal proceedings is merely incidental”… all of which only a judge would determine. Only an actual judge. Lessons hopefully learned.

There. So serious this week. For more, check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and from Stan every Monday except last Monday and next Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s irregular newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. 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…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*To quote my favourite source, me: “And how can you have a mythical standard second place beer? It not only represents something not present but superior while also being inferior to another not present beer. Both of which (not being present) are not contemporaneously experienced, just somehow recalled.”
**Question: While we are at it… why do we rightly (example) qualify one beer publication as “Ferment, the promo magazine of a beer subscription service” when GBH is rarely mentioned as the promo magazine of a beer consultancy service? Both publish very interesting pieces and both aren’t really “reader supported” but actually subsidized by the non-publication side of the business for, logic dictates, non-publication side of the business reasons?
***And not even related to this continuing weirdness.

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For The First Of May

OK, the lawn has been mowed. Even though we had frosts three times in the last week. That is a milestone. As is the Craft Brewers Conference for 2022. I like the logo. No reference to #CBC2022. Actually looks like it was used by the Minnesota Beer Distributors’ Convention back in 1974. Right down to the bottle rather than, you know, a can. So… some people are getting back together. To get a bag or two of fruit sauce. Even we were out last night at a favourite place and hardly anyone had a mask on. Yikes. Our local numbers have moved from worst ever to less than worst ever so people must have forgotten or given up. Fingers crossed!  That’s where we are. Fingers being crossed.

The big news is in beer periodicals… as it is periodically. Is there a comeback being made with the news that All About Beer has been revived to some extent by Beer Edge collaborators Andy Crouch and John Hall:

When we founded Beer Edge in 2019, we drew on our experiences with All About Beer and the role it had in developing our own education and careers to help define the vision for our new company. Meanwhile, All About Beer’s bankruptcy concluded and the company and magazine closed for good. Bradford and Johnson later regained control of the brand itself and the content archive. And in early 2022, they agreed to sell these individual assets to us.

I will be interested in hearing about the business model. Andy, a public service lawyer in the real world, is acting as publisher with John reviving his role as editor, a position last held in 2017. After learning that GBH is essentially subsidized by non-publication public and private revenues (and subject to the inexplicable* withdrawal of cash, too) I thought a bit about the other ways of making an entirely niche topic at least break even. Pellicle, for example, on its third anniversary has announced a sustainability goal based on subscribing patrons with a noble goal: “your subscription lets you ensure that people who can’t afford it can still access our features, free of charge“. I am among the subscribers as Pellicle often offers writing you don’t see anywhere else. The main remaining old school periodical is Craft Beer & Brewing run these days by Joe Stange appears to be run as a for profit business with generous old school subscription rates with various tiers no doubt providing quite a range of valuable benefits.  I don’t subscribe as I find the articles, however excellent, to be often aimed towards the supply side, rather than me and my consumer demands. What is the proposition now from All About Beer?

The other big news in the brewing world in 2022 is really the resurgence of big beer. Or rather BIG BEER. As illustrated this week by the fabulous news from Molson Coors:

Molson Coors Beverage Co. says its profits soared in the first quarter for its largest quarterly sales growth in more than a decade. The Colorado and Montreal-based company, which reports in U.S. dollars, says it earned US$151.5 million or 70 cents per diluted share, up from US$84.1 million or 39 cents per share a year earlier. Underlying net income excluding one-time items was US$63.8 million or 29 cents per share, compared with US$1.6 million or one cent per share in the first quarter of fiscal 2021. Revenues for the three months ended March 31 were US$2.2 billion, up nearly 17 per cent from US$1.9 billion, primarily as a result of strong growth outside of North America amid fewer on-premise restrictions in Europe.

So much for the end times that all the experts spoke of. Like seltzers taking over. We do, however, still seem to have a slight bitterness in the mouth. Speaking of macro-lag, The Tand shared an image of what I think is a very attractive beer label, Cerveza Victoria lager from Malaga Spain. Utterly unhip with its middle aged guy in a suit wiping the sweat off his bald head, the use of white in his shirt, the hankie, the table and the background sends the image of pounding heat. I like the straw hat, too. Lovely design.

Less wonderful are the stories David Jesudason shared of his disheartening discriminatory experiences in the bigoted wine world for Glug:

One of the worst racist nicknames I endured was repeatedly said when I worked at a bar during my university days from 1999 to 2003. It was my job to carry the bottles of wine from the cellar and the manager of this West London establishment – Keith – would reward my efforts by calling me Gunga Din. For those not familiar with the Rudyard Kipling poem (and I’ve got a feeling that my racial abuser only knew the title) it’s about an Indian water carrier so expendable that after being killed helping the British Army his life is summed up by the jokey line: ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.’ Although it’s a highly offensive term, it’s actually fitting as I was as dispensable as Kipling’s Hindu hero and if I’d complained I would’ve been ushered out of the door.

Just to be clear, the need for the efforts of Crafted for All and Beer Diversity at #CBC2022 give me no greater hope for the experience in the beer world.

Also at #CBC2022, rolling out craft’s long stale mantras of “we” and “winning” and “wars” is so utterly bizarre. And to my mind, the group think enforced at these gatherings has led to things like hazy IPAs being effectively gateway drinks for seltzers. Dumbing down leading to loyalty leachate. And shit like this:

… beers brewed with marshmallows. This once niche ingredient has actually become a trendy adjunct, but will it stick? …the marshmallow beer trend is like a Peep in the microwave: it is on the rise! Just last year, the number of beers containing marshmallows available through Tavour increased 31% over the year prior… these brewers started using mallows in small doses in select Stouts… fans of the brewery loved it and continue to love it. Tavour recently featured one such Drekker, a dessert-inspired smoothie Sour –– Chonk Mango & Marshmallow. It sold out in less than 48 hours.

I feel dirty just mentioning that. Sharing another sort of thing I don’t want to experience, Ed told a tale of mixing beer and rock climbing this week as he retro-ticked:

On the last night of our trip as the pints went down we were planning what to do in the morning before we went home. We were tempted by the fizzy keg climb Double Diamond (HVS 5b) on the impressive Flying Buttress. I was also tempted to pour more beer down my neck, it was the last night after all. When it started raining heavily I agreed to lead the climb before heading back to the bar, confident it would be far too wet to climb in the the next day. So when I was greeting with blazing sunshine when in my hungover state I peered out of me tent in the morning I was not filled with joy. 

By contrast, Jordan has done the far more sensible thing and taken up writing about beer more often. I say this with the greatest of pleasure as for a certain set it can seem that one of the qualifications for being a beer writer, when not hiding in podcast oblivion,** is not actually writing all that much about beer. Not Jordan! His immediate focus? Actually reviewing beers that show up in the mail and being a bit honest about the process:

I didn’t read the label. Although I try to do right by everyone, sometimes, there’s so many samples that I’m profligate. Sometimes I’ll try things and they aren’t worth mentioning; I’d just hurt the sales. Sometimes, I’ll really enjoy something but I won’t find a place for it. With Hoppy Pollinator, I just didn’t want you to know about it on the off chance you’d prevent me getting more of it next year.

I liked this article by Will Hawkes about the current trend of Dark Mild in England’s Black Country, a theme I’ve seen nosed around periodically over the years. Twenty years ago and more, Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby Mild was a but of a lantern in the dark to the home brewing set. I say I liked it but more so after I did a bit of text analysis on the 3,800 piece to establish what I was reading given, you know, it was filed under the word “critical“… something of an unlikelihood.  I thought to do this primarily as the article makes no mention of the sorts of background to Mild that one would find in, say, a piece by Ron Pattinson… like his 2011 bit in the BeerAdvocate “A Short History of Mild.” So… 42% of the article is made up of quotes from folk in the trade. Three historical records are cited and the rest is mainly pleasant physical observations or input from or about four breweries making these Dark Milds: Yates, Bathams, Fixed Wheel and Box Car. What do we call this sort of writing? If it was in the newspaper, a lifestyle piece on a regional scene?

Matt mentions another aspect of reality:

News of another brewery closure. They are dropping like flies at the moment. My thoughts with all the affected staff.

That was raised in relation to Exe Valley Brewery shutting down. In operation since 1984, the current owners only held the reins since 2020. They join another brewery well into its fourth decade, Wood’s Brewery in Shropshire, along with many others. Normal churn or end times? Hard to know but hard times for the owners and staff.

On the up beat, Beth Demmon continues her series of profiles at Prohibitchin’, her blog receivable by email, with this week’s article on Lauren Hughes, head brewer at Pittsburgh’s Necromancer Brewing and how they are seeking to make change:

Strategic hires at Necromancer Brewing, ensuring long-term support of said hires through consistent mentorship, and plenty of community-facing events that signal safety and support for marginalized people. “Having people enjoy beer in a place where they feel welcome and being able to give back to the community so much, that means a lot to me,” says Lauren.

Finally, I am not sure I would call a beer experience “Schubert-like in its symphonic harmony” given he completed only six of his thirteen symphonies and one of those is named Tragic.

There. For more, check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and from Stan every Monday except last Monday and next Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s irregular newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. 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…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*Actually, quite explicable.
**Let’s be honest. They take up too much footprint in your audience’s available time, you can’t cite an idea within them for a quote, the attract no comments of consequence and they contain no means to link to something they reference. You may as well as be sending postcards to the handful of folk who listen. And writing “umm” for every seventh word.

The Thursday Beery News Notes For Tax Deadline 2022

It’s not that I have been doing my taxes. But I have been fretting about doing my taxes. I write this paragraph on Tuesday night watching the Mets play the Cardinals… and not doing my taxes. I can send them in as late as next Monday given the deadline is on the weekend. I will wait. I will wait and fret. I use paper. First a pencil. Then a pen. I do two versions. A draft and a good copy. Until I get fed up and just write in pen over the pencil draft. I complain. It sucks. Fanks for listening to my TED talk.*

So, now you know I live in Canada. But you did already. Lots of worse places to live I suppose. Not a lot happens here. That’s why I read and write every week about what the others out there are writing and doing elsewhere. Like this. Jeff has asked the question on many of our minds – how is Elon Musk going to screw up Twitter for beer fans:

Beer Twitter might not immediately descend into a hellscape of threats, and in fact I would instead expect it to look the same for a while—at least superficially…  The effect probably would probably be measurable only in months or years, as the diversity of voices slowly waned, as people moved elsewhere. We might not see overt bullying, but instead a steadily declining richness of conversation… It may not be a popular view, but I love Twitter. I find it far more usable than Instagram, far less creepy than Facebook. It’s the site for people with opinions, and you may have noticed I have a few. But it also feels a lot more “social” than many social mediums. I discovered a whole host of new voices there, and some of them have even turned into friends. I worry about a Twitter that seems more toxic to the people I want to hear. That would make beer a lot less interesting.

I agree. Instagram and TikTok just suck. As do podcasts to a lesser degree. I like the way Twitter encourages a variety of voices, the helpful heads-ups as well as the razzing and the inebriated confessions. I now understand, for example, that there is a thing called “my X-town pizza” that is emotionally important to individuals’ identity. I also do think that Twitter users will find a way to organically work with change to keep the opinions flowing. Unless the block, report and word filter features are removed. Then it’s going to be that tire fire over at the edge of the next town that can never be put out. I am signing up for alt services just in case but don’t have any trust they will do the job.

The craft beer market is getting a bit cramped in Canada accord to The Old and Stale:

“Things couldn’t continue the way they were,” he said. Mr. Sakthivel’s experience is a microcosm of an industry that to insiders and outsiders alike can seem like an inexplicable black box, in which heavy debt loads and financial red ink are the norm yet few breweries show outward signs of trouble and there is no shortage of new entrants keen to join the fray.

I met someone working on a similar story for a similar organization recently – a well situated business writer – and he was shocked when facing craft-normal stifled responses from industry members to his simple commercial reality questions. The “sunny days” approach to beer writing and trade PR over the last decade or more has not helped the immaturity of the conversation for sure.  Consolidation, the proposed reality-based response, is as old a tradition in brewing as adding hops. Likely older.

More fluidy fluid related considerations were raised late last week when Boak and Bailey asked about if it is important to know where your beer comes from, where it was brewed. I don’t think I do really but it’s not strong with me one way or the other. I wrote a comment that I might like to consider here with you for a moment… as if this was the Andy William’s show and there’s just a spotlight on him, his stool and a cardigan:

Isn’t one challenge is that beer really isn’t from somewhere in the vast majority of cases. The grain, hops, yeast and sometimes even brewing water are from sites other than and far from the brewery. The ownership and control is often not well understood or in any sense local either. There is a desire for local just as there is for “small” and “traditional” too but so often these are false claims as well. This chameleon capacity is probably one of beer’s greatest assets as long as consumers are not asked to frame their choices based on identity as opposed to loyalty or simply preference. Much of US made maple syrup is sourced in Quebec. The American made dishwasher I’m months into waiting for delivery of is made of components from Asia… which is why it’s not here. Why should beer be different now when at least 400 years ago Derbyshire malt was trundled by cart across England to make the best ales elsewhere?

What do we even mean when as ask where something is from? Is my dishwasher from where it was put in the cardboard box or where the components are from? In terms of beer, the same thing applies. Is a beer from where the packaging occurs? Where the wort is brewed? Where the malt is grown? Pretty sure ten or more years ago Quebec’s Unibroue (or a similar brewery) was trucking bulk beer (or wort) to be finished in the States where it ended up in Whole Foods (or some other chain) under a generic brand. Where was that beer from? Or should I just care that it was still tasty beer at a good price? Not unlike the questions I asked 15 years ago now (yikes!) in the post “Do We Love The Beer Or The Brewer?”

Good to see a Ukrainian charity beer being clearly actual charitable giving. 100% of sales and not profits please.

Speaking about tasty beer at a good price, The Tand himself has written about Wetherspoons but before I go there, isn’t there a prior question that needs asking? Ten to fifteen years ago beer chains were embarrassing plastic experiences that no one would consider supporting. McBeer. McGak. Which is quite an achievement, making selling gak and doing so in a way that actually further diminishes the experience down to the level of a McPigs.** That was related to the point the Tand-y-one was making:

..back to the hatred by some of Wetherspoons. What’s really behind it? Yes, they are a big company that force prices from suppliers to be lower than some would like, but unlike, say, certain other pub companies who also buy cheaply, they pass the savings on to customers. Bad people?  There is undoubtedly, too, a certain snobbery aspect. This will be vehemently denied, but really, many rather look down on ordinary people being comfortable with their peers in an environment that they can afford. Better by far they should learn to improve themselves and save up to buy expensive murk in a tin shed or railway arch. That would improve the beer market and give more money to deserving brewers, rather than to the ingrates flogging to Wetherspoons.

Do we all not love a well priced pint? Like chains, over-priced beer was an outrage once upon a time. Isn’t where you brewery makes the beer very similar to which pub you go to to buy your beer? And does this relate to the integrity of the beer business or the identity of the beer buyer? I worry about people who identify too closely with the booze they drink. “I’m a rum drinker!” = “I am my own lab test’s petri dish!” I worry about that more than I worry about where the beer is from – wholesale or retail – to be honest. Also honest, however, are the let’s be looping back to sorta where we started observations from Boak and Bailey about the ‘Spoons:

We don’t tend to go to them these days, mostly because we had a run of bad experiences – poor choice, rough beer, disappointing food (even within the given parameters), poorly maintained facilities, and so on.

I have a limited experience of exactly three ‘Spoony moments but I have to admit they did seem like a shopping mall food court plus some enhanced grot and needy dipsos getting a fix. Yet… if you like the fitba terraces is it really that different?

Stan issued Hop Queries 5.12 right about 3 minutes after I posted last week and offered interesting thoughts about the next big hop with details from from an ag-productivity perspective that remind us to keep that ag-productivity perspective in mind:

Helios is approaching 20/20 territory, that is 20% alpha acids and yields of 20 bales per acre. The actual numbers are 18-21% alpha acids, 3.5-4.5% beta acids, 1.5-2% ml/100g total oil, and 3,300 to 3,600 pounds (16.5 to 18 bales) per acre. Hopsteiner does not oversell the aroma, calling it muted with soft accents. It is primarily resinous, secondarily spicy and a bit herbal.  Also, and quite important, she is resistant to both downy and powdery mildew, meaning she needs to sprayed less. Her alpha to resources used ratio (granted, that’s a number I’ve never seen calculated before, although I expect we will soon) it surely top of the class.

Witness: a rather long and somewhat well put together article on a very specific complaint – some beers served too cold. Nice to see the argument being made that the full range of temps is useful depending on the style.

Further to the well above the above. Twitter. Meta. I do like the point:

IPAs are just like the deep fried Oreo of beer: it is technically/chemically overwhelming and flavorful, whereas lagers, kolsch, or pilsners are more complex and delicate and, as you say, harder to get right.

Relatedly perhaps, a classic (and perhaps generic 2019-22) brewery bio safely landed at Pellicle this week:

“We were looking to tap into a new, seemingly insatiable demand for New England-style beers as well as fill a gap in both our range and the local and regional market,” he says of Nokota. “As recently as 2018 NEIPA was not the dominant style in craft that it is today, but those soft and hazy beers were really drawing a lot of people into craft beer, and turning the heads of those who were already drinking modern beer.”

Conversely perhaps, Brian Alberts wrote a startlingly honest personal story about his Uncle Ron and how Miller High Life will always be associated with a hard part of his family’s life:

Ron passed away nine years ago, but the High Life took me a decade beyond that—before the house was eviscerated and sold, before the 2008 housing crash dragged it and Ron’s life underwater, and before I could legally drink. I was 11 again, taking a covert sip on the long sidewalk linking Ron’s construction company truck and detached woodshop with the riverfront house he’d built. I blanched, naturally, but was thrilled that he’d offered it to me while my dad wasn’t looking. At the time, this explosion of neurotransmitters was its own illicit pleasure, but in hindsight, I wouldn’t describe it as a fond memory. None of my memories of Ron are fully happy anymore. That’s partly his fault, and partly mine. 

Finally, I like my local future… for it is here now. Le marché est ouvert!

There. That all offers some chewy thoughts for the coming weeks slurping. Yet for more if you need it, checking out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and from Stan every Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s irregular newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. 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…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*Just to be clear, this was not a TED talk. Don’t go looking for a YouTube video of me on a stage… either with the lights up standing in front of an insanely large PowerPoint behind me… or like on the Andy William’s show and there’s just a spotlight on my, my stool and my cardigan. But I do sport me a mean cardy, however. Just sayin’.
**Where I had lunch Tuesday, by the way, which makes me the biggest Fibber McFibFace on the planet.

Your Mid-April 2022 Thursday Beery New Notes

And how’s the wax-flavoured chocolate hangover going?  No tiny kids left around here so it has been a modest affair compared no doubt to others. Life moves forward. Still playing out the pandemic habits. The local news has not been great as the squiggly line up there shows. The sixth wave. Is it passing? Don’t know. So we are in the basement, now watching Moon Knight and, really, have no idea what is going on. Something about sand. Still, around here the snow this week only lasted hours.  And the radish seed is in the ground and the raspberry canes are starting to show their first green as buds open. Things are happening. Yes, the clothes dryer even died but I actually found and immediately bought a replacement that will be delivered today or perhaps tomorrow. Our one small supply chain victory. Not like the dishwasher. We ordered it after the last one died. It’s been months. The some day one day dishwasher, in whole or in parts, is floating somewhere offshore deep in a ship’s hold. Floating out there upon Pacific Ocean waves.

Beer? You stopped by for beer news? Let me see. Where did I put that folder. Here it is… first stop is in legal land. Brendan P shared that the modest personalities behind Stone have filed court documents rejecting the jury award of 25% of the original claim, seeking another $168 million based on the very questionable claim that the Keystone…

…rebrand caused a fundamental change in the trajectory of Stone’s business from which it has not recovered today and will likely never recover.

Really? I just don’t believe it. It would be nice if there was a separate trial of these assertions, given Stone’s self-inflictions and failures to move to the next level what with debacles like the Berlin brewery and never quite earning that grade A level of consumer respect that others second wave brewers have achieved in the marketplace. It would be good to have these facets of their commercial history carefully reviewed by the courts to see what trends and trip ups were really to blame.

One thing is for sure. Out there is the really real world, it’s not been a great year for craft beer generally – even if, given the real news, one may want to put that in perspective. As CNN reported:

For many of the nation’s small and independent brewers, this year will prove to be a true test of their staying power. Early data for 2022 shows that brewery closures are on the rise and some sales have been spotty… The pandemic and its ongoing effects, as well as the war in Ukraine, continue to drag down smaller brewers, who are battling climbing costs, rising rents, and seemingly interminable supply chain challenges… “2022 is going to be a make-or-break year for many breweries…” 

Now, while that may be true, it is always important to respect the chronology. Just as prohibition didn’t start the rationalization and reduction of players in the US brewery industry (a phenomenon started with the introduction of English modernization investments in the 1880-90s)  so too we have to remember and respect that craft brewing was starting to slow prior to the pandemic. 20% by 2020 never happened and even the numbers that are reported are propped up vastly by the Boston Beer fib and the muddling it up with comparisons to things which just aren’t beer. What do you reckon actual small brewery actually traditionally brewed actual beer represents in the market these days?  2%? 3%?

What does this wobbly market perhaps produce? Well, perhaps complaints about the complaints about a price of a pint. And perhaps even complaints about questions about the authority of beer writing. Relatedly, while we all wallow in myth, I am not sure I am buying the complaint in 2010 that overpricing of Cantillon was due to reselling, especially given I was buying  half bottles of their stuff in CNY for $7.50, $8.50 (pervy premium?) and even $9.00 USD around 2007-08 which was well above their cohort. Sure it was a prime example of being “shelted” but the brewery needs to take responsibility for part of their own no doubt quite profitable aggrandizement. Bottom line of all this? The training wheels have come off sometime ago and it’s shifted to a buyer’s market now. I* have choice and I know how to use it. Caveat braciator.

So be clever. Get the basics right. Pete Brown posted a very helpful guide to filling out a form – which may sound like a backhanded compliment but it’s not. Apparently the beer world is rife with folk who can’t manage to figure out how to submit the  beer to the right category in the contest as well as folk who can’t figure out how to structure categories in the contest. Here’s his help:

One year, we had an entry that was all about a piece of experiential marketing at a beer event. It was an installation I’d visited personally, and when we came to discuss it, I waxed lyrical about how brilliant it had been, how original and immersive it was, how professionally it had been executed, describing all the little details that made it truly special. The rest of the judges looked at me blankly, and when I finished, one of them said gently, “Yes, Pete, but none of that is on the entry form.”

And do right. David Jesudason has written an excellent piece for Pellicle about the obstacles faced by the beer fan with mobility challenges:

These include being ignored when ordering, or having his personal assistant asked by the bartender what he wants to drink. Not being able to use disabled toilets as they’re being used as a store cupboard. Not being able to attend eating areas or events as they’re located in inaccessible rooms. Or travelling to London from Essex only to be told at a pub that it’s “too busy” for him to enter. And it’s not just the establishments that can ruin his drinking experience. Other drinkers ignore him when there’s no table free that’s at the right height (a high table is useless for someone in a wheelchair) and his personal assistants can be verbally abused if he appears to be drunk—or is drunk, it’s his preference, after all.

Back to the economy. It’s still nipping at our heels. How bad are things getting out there? One English news outlet has suggested the answer is “bad“:

One of the oldest British traditions is meeting your friends at the pub for a nice cold drink. But all this could change soon as news suggests that the cost of a pint of beer could soon set you back £7… BlackCountryLive readers have expressed their fears the price hike could see many beloved pubs disappear from our streets. Phil said: “No pub would survive that.” The sentiment was echoed by Mick who wrote: “Not bothered but it’s the pub owners I feel for.” Brenden added: “It will destroy the local pub.”

I don’t know about these sorts of forecasts. I just don’t believe them either. Hasn’t beer and beer culture survived through adaptation? There have been plenty of dead ends along the way, century after century. Not all brewing industry trends have been wise. Stone is proof enough of that playing out in the US craft scene. Remember Pete’s Wicked Ale? Why wouldn’t today be the same? Yet… notice that Heineken sales are up in Europe over 11% in 2022 “with beer sales in bars and restaurants almost tripling.” Nutty. Beer survives. Things will adapt, especially as long as there are these sorts of places to enjoy… even if not exactly for the reason advertised:

Bass mirrors, Bass glasses, a beer range centred on everything but Bass. A pint of Plain, or was it the Usual ? I don’t care, and with half a dozen blokes seated along the bar discussing Ted Deighton I couldn’t read any of the pump clips even if I did. How do people score beers on What Pub when they can’t read the pumps. I’m not complaining, not more than usual, I just want to see lively pubs full again. The Angel isn’t an obvious “ale pub”, most here were on lager, but at £3.30 a pint the cask sells well enough.

I’m not complaining either. Beer will go on. The dryer will come. I know it in my heart. But will the dishwasher? Will the dishwasher?

There. That’s enough for this week. For more, checking out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and from Stan every Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s irregular newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. 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…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*Speaking as the Global Every- person Beer Buyer as per.