Category: England

Your Beery News Notes For The Return Of Sweater Weather For 2024

September. The grapes are ripening. And evenings are cooler. And those nightmares about having to go back to grade 11 math class even though that was 45 years ago are back. The rest of the day, you daydream about college days when you were two months away from having to pass in any classwork. And thoughts turn to sweater vests. Over a white t-shirt… if one’s yuff was from that WHAM / Ferris Bueller era forty years ago.* Labour Day Monday was the end of the humidity around these parts. Evenings are cooler. Sweater weather.

First up, in the unending ping-pong game of whether alcohol is good for you or bad for you, Drinks Business summaried the powerful and damning critique of Prof. David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University appeaing of the BBC’s World Service The Food Chain programme:

He said that statistically the overall risk of one beer or wine per day on your life expectancy — which is within current UK government guidelines — has no higher impact than driving a car or eating bacon. Spiegelhalter said that research showed the health benefits of drinking in small amounts, as previously highlighted by the drinks business. He added: “Frankly, I get irritated when the harms of low levels are exaggerated, particularly with claims such as ‘no level of alcohol is safe’. For a start I don’t think the evidence supports that, but also there’s no safe level of driving, there’s no safe level of living, but no one recommends abstention.”

Much, of course, turns on the fuzzy concept of “safe” given that these sorts of statements do not characterize the degree of safety that is, you know… safe. It’s a form of argument that would make the evangelical at the door proud. Fortunately, at least one solid opinion is shared. Spiegelhalter “described the current NHS guidance on levels as ‘ideal’ .” That being…  David Morrison, data-driven wine blogger at The Wine Gourd makes a detailed and well footnoted argument against WHO guidance which unfortunately starts with that sad car driving safety analogy (yes, there is a warning… it is called the licensing process) but then making a good recovery:

…as Robert Joseph has noted: ‘we need to promote the unique, historic qualities of wine that make it such a great convivial product and such a delicious partner to food.’ That is, in the words of Erik Skovenborg, we need to note: Wine as part of a healthy lifestyle; and Drinking with friends: wine’s role as a social lubricant. If the wine label has to list the risks (as is being suggested for the new USA guidelines), should it also list the benefits?

And there was much talk in the UK is about the new government’s plan to enforce a ban on smoking in beer gardens and on pub patios. The Independent discusses the implications:

If implemented, the outdoor smoking ban would make it an offence for people to smoke in certain spaces such as pub gardens or outside sports venues. Should it be enforced in the same way as the 2007 indoor smoking ban, smoking in certain outdoor spaces would carry a Fixed Penalty Notice of up to £150. If you refuse to pay this, you are liable to be prosecuted. According to Action on Smoking Health (ASH), the 2007 ban led to a 2.4 percent reduction in hospital admissions for heart attacks, and a 12.3 percent reduction in admissions for childhood asthma.

This is something we have had this sort of ban in Ontario for quite a number of years now – and we’ve expanded it over time – with the result that no one misses breathing in the neighbouring table’s ciggie gak. But these things are local. Apparently elsewhere, not so gak. The Guardian covers some of the frustrations with the proposal:

…Sean Short, 54, was smoking on the pavement outside a Wetherspoon’s pub – there is some suggestion that pavements outside venues could also fall under a new ban. “I think it’s ridiculous. As if there’s not enough pubs being closed anyway at the minute,” he said. “I can understand them banning it outside hospitals, that makes sense, but not outside pubs.” He said an outdoor ban would not stop him from coming to the pub, but he could see that it would for other people, especially when alcohol is cheaper to buy in supermarkets.

Still, will any of this matter if, as The Guardian also asks, the kids ain’t even drinking the stuff:

A seemingly endless stream of recent reports have warned that baby boomers, who have fueled the industry, are retiring and spending less, and millennials aren’t picking up the slack. “You’re looking at a cliff,” the industry analyst Rob McMillan told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2022, following a key report that showed wine consumption in the US hadn’t grown in 2021 – despite bars and restaurants reopening. McMillan foresaw wine consumption by volume declining 20% in the next decade, with millennial habits key to the shift. Last year, Nielsen data showed 45% of gen Zers over 21 said they had never drunk alcohol.

Not all that relatedly, Jordan has been doing his annual stint at the Canadian National Exhibition – aka the CNE – selling beer tokens in a booth, acting as huckster to both carnies and marks alike. Observations include: (i) “Big Boi didn’t draw the crowds”; (ii) a pickle shot is “a pickle, cored out, filled with tequila”; and (iii) someone asked “What is tokens?”

Note: Gary is not linking over at Twex anymore so keep and eye on hiblog for updates. This week he explains why some Canadian troops in WW2 fighting in Italy drank British beer while some of the British fighting there drank Canadian beer.

Boak and Bailey in their footnotes posed a question about the cartoon in Pellicle last Friday:

…cartoonist David Bailey seems to be arguing that confusion, jargon, and being pushed around by expert staff, is part of the fun of artisanal drinks. But maybe he’s also asking: really? Is that how you want it?

Me, I took the cartoon as pure mockery. I felt badly for the poor beer buyer, there in her tiny version of Pilgrim’s Progress facing the craft carny. Could it be that the craft carney stuff is also off putting… or mid… from the perspective of Gen Zers?

Never mid, Ron introduced me to a new word this week… no, not that sort of word, a brewing related word:

… what’s odd, is that there isn’t a full fermentation record for the “Double Stout”. Just one or two entrie. While there is a full record for Single Stout, right up to racking. Why would that be? Eventually I twigged. There’s a reason there isn’t a full fermentation record. Because that wort wasn’t fully fermented. At least not on its own. I’m pretty sure that this is “heading”. One of the elements of Irish Stout. It’s a strong wort in a high degree of fermentation which was blended in at racking or packaging time. It’s effectively a sort of Kräusen.

Now, I had understand that certain Irish stout had a lesser portion of stale for tang as well as fresher for the body in a blend so, if Ron is listening, does this mean that three different agings including a heading as part of finishing were used? Or am I, as per, wrong?

Laura Hanland posts an interesting set of questions which popped to mind after a certain sort of restaurant experience:

In essence then, my food was deeply “not too bad” – usually enough for me to decide not to return for a repeat visit – but I loved the restaurant so much that I really think I am going to go back and give their pasta a go! And this is my conundrum. If you’re reviewing food, then the food must be good. Surely? But the lovely team, the genial surroundings… these were charming elements that I couldn’t ignore. Also I was a little bit taken by the scowling Italian elder who peered out at me from the kitchen. He gave the whole thing a very authentic feel of a family business. This review makes no sense. I don’t know if it will help you decide whether to visit or not. But I’ll be sure to tell you if I do get back for the pasta.

I think it makes perfect sense. One of the problems in the social media age with its instantly curated expertise (just add water… or, as with the craft carney, booze) is the expectation of mind blowing experiences. They rarely actually happen. For example, my chicken burger was actually a bit bland when we were out this week. Could have done with some chopped green onion in there. Or something. But the server was great as was the sharable carrot cake dessert. Look for the good in things. And put a little black pepper on the burger yourself. Don’t be lazy.

Pellicle‘s feature this week is by Jacob Smith – a discussion with and of the definitely not lazy Judith Gillies, co-founder of Cairn o’ Mohr, a Scottish producer of fruit wines and ciders:

There was little money to spare—Judith fondly recalls a cupboard acting as their only shop—yet, the couple enjoyed something far more valuable than excess cash: access to some of the country’s best fruit. Thanks to its loamy soils, moderate temperatures and—for Scotland—dryish weather, Perthshire is home to an array of world class berries, apples and flowers. As head of production at Cairn o’ Mohr, Judith puts this bounty to good work, producing around 18 different wines, three alcohol-free beverages and five ciders. While popular fruits like strawberries, brambles and raspberries are central figures in several of Cairn o’ Mohr’s wines, less appreciated ingredients like elderberries, oak leaf and gorse are just as commonly used.

I like this line, too: “We tend to take knobbly fruit,” Judith says. “The ones that are too big, too small, too ripe for the supermarkets, things like that.” And speaking of seeking out new tipples, Jancis R reported from a tasting of independent wineries from 15 central and eastern European nations:

Of the other countries whose wines I tasted, Croatia was the most stimulating. The wines, especially those from Istria in the far north of the country, seemed to have an extra layer of sophistication. The region’s special white-wine grape Malvazija Istarska (nothing to do with most other Malvasias) produces full-bodied wines with an apple-skin character, real grip and ageing potential. My favourite examples at the tasting were made, respectively, by the well-established Kozlović winery and the much younger enterprise owned by the unfortunately named Fakin family.

Beating us to EuroEast for drinks, The Beer Nut has been reporting live from Bulgaria this week. It sounds so good:

80% of being on holiday is a random bottle of something that’s €8 in a supermarket and has a picture of a fruit on the label. To my veins, please. Directly…  The next song will be performed by a man who looks like he should be on the sex offenders’ register but has sufficient connections to have avoided it… This open-air bar is opposite my hotel. On beautiful sunny days I’ve been looking across and thinking it would be nice for a drink. Here I am and my beer tastes like it was triple-filtered through a skunk’s anal gland… 

And for Labo(u)r Day, Dave Infante in VinePair was fairly free with the finger pointery over craft beer’s record in labo(u)r relations:

Substandard products, dangerous equipment failures, hell, even terrible rebrands — workers can help owners solve these problems with union training programs, higher self-enforced safety standards, and honest feedback from outside the boardroom bubble. But they need a voice on the job, and protection to use it even when it’s going to piss the boss off. This industry is getting left behind by drinkers. It cannot afford to be left behind by its workers at the same time. Like the Teamsters organizer at Stone this past Monday, I have a message to deliver this Labor Day weekend. This one is for brewery bosses and workers alike. The country is changing, and so is this industry. Which side are you on?

I know what side I am on when it comes to beer cocktails (because port and stout is not a beer cocktail… even though I called it just that in 2012) but the National Post shared a very extended article on beer cocktails that lingered over something from the 1990s built around a recollection of youth as part of creating the argument that one should not overthink… or even, really, think about these matters:

…Dad mentioned that I’d left some beer in the basement fridge that I might want to take home to drink. Investigation revealed that the bottles in question were the remainders of a six-pack of Tequiza. Some of you may recall this late-’90s-era beer brand, juiced with “the natural flavour of lime” and sweetened with agave nectar, a brand that lots of people in flannel shirts and Doc Martens used to consume while listening to Pearl Jam and waiting for our dial-up modems to connect to the internet. The portmanteau name was supposed to suggest a marriage of tequila and cerveza…

Never thought Tequiza would get that much media footprint but there you go.  Finally and definitely in the Tequiza zone, today is the day here in Ontario when I can walk to the corner store and get beer… probably a macro brand I don’t want and at a higher price than elsewhere. But I can get it at 7 am. So that is excellent. Does this mean death to the near century old macro brewers’s run retail monopoly aka “The Beer Store”? Can you say supply chain?

“Bring it on — we’re ready,” Roy Benin, president of The Beer Store, said in a statement. “We see this as a new chapter for The Beer Store and we’re excited to compete. All of our channels – from distribution to retail to deposit return will continue to deliver for Ontario.” The beer conglomerate said it has also expanded its distribution fleet, helping to bring close to 4,000 convenience stores online to sell beer. The retail giant is involved behind the scenes in stocking many of those locations, and grocery stores, as well as its own storefronts.

That being the case – is The Polk right? Is it all politics and money?

It’s not about access. It’s about Dougie needing more bread & circuses distractions for the low information voter to drive more votes his way when he calls the election. He wants to get into another majority before the RCMP gets deeper into the Greenbelt. He’s gonna win, too…

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

*Ahh… we the drifty, Gen Xers in the era of the X: “What are you interested in?” “Nothing.” “Me neither.“
**Me, I’m all avout the social medias. Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (166) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (931) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,466) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

The Chores… More Chores… It’s The Weeks Of Chores Along With Some Beery News Notes

When last we met, I was happy as anything, wandering around Montreal on a few days away. That’s so last week. The first week of vacation. Then I came home to folk building the new fence and the related 24 foot tall tree removal on my side of the line. The fencing guys did a couple of the main branches with their power saws but I’m doing the rest by hand, sorting* and hauling most of the stuff away. Which is why this week’s beery news notes are brought to you by my Japanese pruning saw. It is the only thing I have ever bought which has each and every promised attribute. Forget that claim that beer makes you feel exactly like you wanted to feel like just before you had that beer. This beauty sits neatly in the cut, eats into the wood in both directions, stays sharp, creates minimal blisters. Japanese pruning saws. Get yours today.

First off, I am really grateful for Stephanie Grant‘s piece on her changing relationship with alcohol. She puts things so clearly, things that I have thought about myself and others over the years – especially this bit:

I haven’t dived into non-alcohol beers or mocktails, and I’m not sure that I will. I’m not someone who necessarily needs to replace beer with a non-alcoholic version. I know that there are some great options out there today, but when I am abstaining from alcohol, I don’t really feel the need to replace it with something that is similar to alcohol. I also feel the same way about meat substitutes. If I want to eat meat, I will eat meat, but if I want something vegetarian, I don’t necessarily need a meat-like substitute… if I really want a beer during the week, I have no problem drinking a beer and have no trouble sticking to one. That level of flexibility feels good to me and has made this new adventure feel even more doable…. It helps that I know other people who work in beer and the beverage industry as a whole that have also cut back on their drinking. I look to them for inspiration. Because of them, I know it’s possible.

For as long as I have been writing about beer my interest in drinking a lot of beer has slowly slipped away… well, maybe let’s say it has reduced. (Apparently, not unlike Ireland.) For a while now, I’ve been a none or maybe one with meals or maybe after mowing sorta person now.  I know, sounds like Old Man Day Napper. But that’s now due, you know, to hauling the boughs and branches to the yard waste depot.

Yet… when I do have a drink, I like to drink the swell stuff. So what are you drinking when in Lisbon? Not what you expect you might be, if Jason Wilson is right:

My choice for the first stop of the evening would be Quattro Teste, one of the best cocktail bars I’ve visited in any city. Run by Alf del Portillo, from Spain’s Basque Country, and Marta Premoli, from Lombardia, Italy, at Quattro Teste you can start with a shot of cider straight from the barrel, Basque style. Then move on to Alf’s take on the low-brow classic kalimotxo. It’s usually just a mix of red wine and Coke, but his version has a healthy pour of Amaro Lucano and a splash of Branca Menta to make it a kalimotxo revelation.

I am not sure my meagre daily ration would go in the direction of a kalimotxo but, go ahead, make the case for it. Jeff made the case, unpacking his thoughts on our conversation about the economics of local v regional noted last week as Question #7:

The regional breweries can’t compete with the giants on price, and lose the advantage of “local” affection the further they try to send beer. I recently got to see the barrelage of those regional breweries, and it is mostly sinking as this dynamic squeezes them more. And yet if you zoom in a bit, something interesting is going on as well. If you surveyed the beer cooler at the local grocery store in different regions (not just the U.S., but anywhere), you’d see different retail space given to local, regional, and national brands. Some places I visit have mostly national brands and a sad little pocket of local brands. In other places, the reverse is true.

There was also follow up over at their Patreon-based footnotes this week, when Boak and Bailey (Hello Jess and Ray!) looked for just the right word:

The idea of national-regional-local that Jeff Alworth writes about, after a discussion with Alan McLeod (hello, Alan!) feels like an important one. We look here at breweries like Butcombe, which are definitely tied to the West Country, but which don’t feel especially… loyal? Is that the word? They’re not national, exactly, but they’re too big, too remote, and too slick, to feel quite part of the scene. In Bristol, local means from the city. And ideally from the neighbourhood. Somerset and Gloucestershire too, at a push. We need to think about this some more.

I like that reference to “the scene.” A scene is something to which you can have personal affinity. My scene, for example, for a long time pre-pandemic extended much more to the south into central New York than to Toronto to my west.  It is about identity as much as anything but there is a clear tension between the economics and the identification with regionality. Put it this way. I support local breweries as much as I do because I can drive to them all. That is a distinct relationship where the economics and identity of local might look like loyal but perhaps it is only practical. At the regional level one needs to make more of an effort, both the brewer and buyer. I probably put a premium on spotting a Great Lakes zone beer. National craft? Might as well be ketchup. I’ll buy it but mainly on based on the price with hard eye on the best before date.

On the subject of scene, it has many facets. We see that in the piece Laura Hadland had published in What’s Brewing which explored the history of beer serving measurements below the pint. It illustrated the hazards to be encountered in place to plane and time to time – as illustrated by the “schooner”:

The two-third pint measure was not legally recognised as a specified measure until October 2011. Despite this late introduction, the measure was not new. A publican in Greenock, Scotland, is recorded as testing the market for the schooner – a glass of American invention – in the 1870s. His tuppeny drink was described by locals as the Wee Pint and seems to have met with relative success, spreading to other venues in the area. The two-third schooner for beer is not to be confused with the sherry glass of the same name – a tall, waisted 3.5oz glass that was popularised in the UK in the 1960s, alongside its smaller cousin, the clipper. To add another layer of bemusement, a Canadian beer schooner is a 32oz super-sized affair!

I like that, the “wee pint” – basically the size you get in the US now when you ask for a pint. What else is going on? Pete Brown posted his take on George Orwell’s perfect urban pub “Moon Under Water” but with the perfect English country pub in mind:

There’s a big open fire at one end of the room. In winter, you have to be here at opening time to claim the table next to it. There’s also a large, shiny-seated wooden chair opposite. It’s the kind of chair you don’t sit in unless you’ve been drinking here since the pub was built. The walls and ceilings are decorated with random stuff – nothing as obvious as horse brasses or old black-and-white photos of the pub. A lot of the décor relates to the name of the pub (which isn’t really the Old Stone House.) But on top of that (sometimes literally) there’s a collection of old scythes. A bowsaw. A 1930s policeman’s helmet. A case full of arrows.

And… wait for it. There is a twist. By the way, R+J of B+B may have found their own new perfect pub even though the first dealt with some well-founded doubts:

…people who are much more clued into Bristol pub gossip than us told us they’d heard Sam Gregory, landlord of The Bank Tavern, was interested in taking it on. You might have heard of The Bank, even if you don’t know Bristol: it’s the one with the four-year waiting list for reservations for Sunday lunch. We filed this news under “We’ll believe it when we see it”. So much can go wrong with plans to revive pubs, as we’ve seen with successive attempts to take on The Rhubarb.

Also extolling the ideal pub this week was ATJ whose A Pub For All Seasons comes out soon. He summarized the goal of the book:

Deep breath, then: A Pub For All Seasons is a narrative non-fiction travel book about my journey through the UK over the four seasons in search of how pubs change organically, unconsciously, without fanfare, almost with nobody noticing. It is about how pubs echo the seasonal drinks and dishes we fancy throughout the year — as they change a pub also changes.

Speaking of which, I received my copy of Martyn’s new book, Around the World in 80 Beers: A Global History of Brewing, a study of brewing history through 80 beers from around the world. Very oddly, exactly 2.5% of the beers discussed were from my homeland, the Canadian Maritimes. The entry on Keith’s IPA is (shall we say) kind but does highlight, as do a number of others, the imperial reach of British brewing.  My first skim though did raise one question. Has anyone actually seen that receipe for great-grandpaw’s beer that was the foundation for Sam Adams Boston Lager?

Other than witnessing the praising of glitter beer well after it “glit-ted” its last “-ter“**, I was interested in the thoughts Doug Veliky shared on the effect of Hazy with about a decade’s reflection – and expectually its effects on other style as well as style itself:

The term “American IPA” appears to mean little that can be trusted anymore, at least consistently and nationally for someone traveling, and might as well be shelved completely by the US brewing scene. It’s turned into a filler word to show more intention to the style, but that intention is now be muddy and misleading. The reason I used to like the descriptor is because it could serve as a way to communicate clear and bitter, while letting West Coast IPAs be their more specific versions, still leaving a wide range of variables to incorporate and differentiate with.

In Pellicle, Will Hawkes explored other sorts of fundamental changes in his excellent biography of an important figure in mid-1900s British brewing, Dr. Dora Kulka, and her escape from the Nazi we well as how her work in yeast biochemistry supported the early adoption of lager brewing:

Dora produced a stout (“Your vitamin stout is good,” Erna Hollitscher, to whom she sent a bottle, told her; “In spite of the protest of some English people I still don’t think it is so very different from beer!”), a pale ale and, most significantly, a lager. She probably thought little of it, but for the powers-that-be at The Hope Brewery it was like a lightbulb flickering on. Just a few years later, Claywheels Lane became the first British home of Carling Black Label, the beer that started the British lager revolution, and that has been the nation’s favourite since the early 1980s…. Hope & Anchor began making their own lager—Anchor Lager—very soon after the War ended. “Dr Kulka got us brewing a lager. She noticed Sheffield water was similar to that of Pilsen in Czechoslovakia, where her family came from, and suggested we make one. That’s what set us going.”

It will be harder to find a lager in some communities in northern Ontario now that the implications of the new beer sales in private stores are playing out:

The Beer Store has confirmed that the 8 James Bay Rd. location in Cochrane is permanently closing on Sept. 9… In Cochrane, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) has approved two licences for convenience stores that will be able to sell alcohol — the Cochrane Truck Stop at 99 Hwy. 11 S., and COSTCAN Liquor at 143 Fourth St. W. Unit B. The Beer Store locations in Geraldton and Nipigon are also set to close next month.  Gordon Mackenzie, a former Nipigon councillor wrote to The Beer Store president, highlighting the impacts of the closure on the community, noting his concerns that the closure will add to the long-standing issues of vacant buildings populating the downtown core and the loss of job opportunities. The community has also noted that The Beer Store is the only location to return empties to.

Note: “My bet is the price of beer will go up, especially in northern Ontario.” In suburban southern Ontario, the issues are different, as over licensing as 350 new retailers will open up in one municipality on the same day. Plus: “stores will be allowed to sell starting at 7 a.m. and up to 11 p.m., two hours earlier in the morning and later at night than the current operating hours.” Really? Pre-school beers? How long until we read the “drunk guys in grade 12 first class home room” story?

And, relatedly perhaps in terms of change, in his Hop Queries, Stan shared some news about the German hop harvest that ended up with a bit of an odd conclusion:

Each of Germany’s five hop growing regions (Hallertau is by far the largest) provided estimates as harvest began. Production in the Hallertau increased 21 percent over 2023, to 42,350 metric tons, while overall German production grew 18.8 percent to 48,964 metric tons (98.1 million pounds). Why? Yields in Germany were up 20.5 percent. Although yields in 2023 had improved on 2022’s particularly disappointing harvest, they were still below average… The overall harvest yielded about nine percent more hops than an average crop the last 10 years, which a press releases notes will be sold into a market that is “. . . oversupplied.”

“Oversupply” does no lead to cheering as it turns out. A bumper crop causes concerns in a retracting marketplace for beer.

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

*Those straight branches to the right are all around ten feet long and will be next year’s tomato poles.
**Not sure if or even how my disinterest in glitter beer translates into sexism but there you have it. Adulterations and adjuncts are simply gak.
***This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (151) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,469) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

The Mid-August 2024 “No, You’re The One Dreaming Of Sweater Weather” Beery News Notes

Great. Stan took this week off. And probably next week too. He may hover in my mind like the absentee desk editor like I mentioned a few weeks ago. But he also has a nickname, too: cheat sheet. Stan “The Cheat Sheet” Hieronymus. Yup. See, come Monday when I can’t think of anything to go look for in the world of beer to think about, I can go see what Stan has been thinking about first. He’s a bit like that nice smart left handed kid in grade 11 math class with really good posture that I sat one row back of and one seat over to the right. Gave me a good view. Made tests just a bit easier.

By the way, there is little beer related in that photo up there. Took the image Monday evening looking due south, down over central New York State. A pinhole sunset catching the anvil cloud from below. Right about in the middle of that horizon is Oswego, NY.  On still days in winter, you can see the plume rising from Nine Mile Point Nuclear. Also, home of Rudy’s. Where you can skip stones and drink Genny Cream Ale.

Did someone mention beer?  Starting hereabout, as we face almost 4,000 new beer retailers in these parts in a few weeks, Ontario’s public broadcaster TVO published a great piece by Matt Gurney about the shock of the new he has experienced in the last few years of deregulation of the provincial booze market, with a particular focus on that one odd rule that allows 7-Eleven to qualify as a restaurant:

Seeing someone drinking in a 7-Eleven or walking out of my local variety store with a bottle of wine will probably feel exactly the way seeing people openly smoking cannabis felt like for the first few years after legalization. I have a specific memory of standing at an intersection, waiting for a light so I could cross, and noticing two young men standing on the corner passing a joint back and forth. I thought to myself, huh, that’s unusually brazen. And then, seconds later, my brain caught up with reality: it would have been brazen a few years earlier, but that day, it was simply two law-abiding citizens engaging in a legal activity in public. 

On undoubtedly similar sorts of offerings, Doug Velky of Revolution Brewing in his newsletter Beer Crunchers, unpacks how craft has turned full circle with craft’s adoption of “cold” in the race to make light generic lagers:

…we also recognized that Cold Time, whose model focuses more on volume than margins, would require broader adoption than just our loyal Revolution customers to ever be considered a success. To achieve this greater scale, early investments would be crucial to get Cold Time into new places to find audiences who don’t currently think of themselves as craft beer fans, but are very open to a great, locally made lager.

Volume. Hmm. Disclosure. I’ve been buying Ice Cold Beer from Toronto’s Left Field Brewing for at least three years so there is no news here. But that branding had at least a level of self-parody in the mix along with the tasty within. Is that self-effacing sort of joke now all so… what… 2021? They may not be dipping as low as the macro-lags but aren’t they fighting for the Centro-Euro buyer‘s attention? Given how well “beer from anywhere you like” can sell, can we blame them?

Interesting bit of history over from Katy Prickett at Auntie Beeb this week on industrialization of England during the Roman Era, including brewing at scale:

“At Berryfields, we found evidence of malting and brewing and the tanks used to steep the grain before processing,” he said. “We tend to think of the Roman world as being very much a wine-loving place. “But actually a lot of the population in Roman Britain were drinking beer and we see that in the pottery they were using, large beakers in the same sort of sizes as modern pint glasses.”

Being someone who never gives a second thought for the Roman Empire, this was all news to me. I am told that Barryfield was located “at an intersection along a major routeway” and was “the location of multiple roadside industries, such as brewing, woodworking, and metalworking, aimed at supplying the travellers passing through.” Here, too, is an archaeological report on a neighbouring site complete with maltings and even malted spelt deposits along with some barley and even some apples and beets.*

In an exploration of more recent history and in light of far more recent racist events in the UK, David Jesudason published the story of a hopeful scene in late 1940s Wales as recoujnted by historian Kieran Connell, the story of an event that showed how working class people rejecting racist hostility are always as he says the vanguard of multiculturalism:

In 1948, the CIAC organised a black-tie event to celebrate Douglas’s success after he made 39 first-team appearances for the team, with the CIAC inviting white members of Cardiff Rugby Club. Announcements were placed in Tiger Bay shop windows and St Clair attended the night which was held ‘not at a dingy clubhouse’ but in the convention room of a city-centre hotel rented for the occasion. “He [St Clair] entered the hotel,” writes Kieran, “without any of the stares or comments that might ordinarily greet someone from an ethnic minority in central Cardiff. In the hotel lobby, he spotted five white girls and two black girls chatting with a group of four white boys. Further on, four or five boys of mixed ethnicity were trying to set up a large keg of beer.”

Table tennis? Bun fight? A bit of both? That’s the theme in an article by Ted Simmons in The Spirits Business about the dispute between the  American Craft Spirits Association (ACSA) on the one hand and, on the other, the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America (WSWA) over what is causing the great retraction. We join the debate half way in progress:

WSWA released a second statement [:]… “Blaming wholesalers for the industry’s challenges is shortsighted. The focus should instead be on how the entire supply chain, including wholesalers, can adapt to changing market conditions and support each other in navigating economic pressures,” it read…  ACSA cites a study that found that 87% of craft spirits drinkers want to legally purchase via DTC, and 82% of craft spirits drinkers support laws changing in order to expand DTC… The WSWA calls for an end to any finger pointing… 

Speaking of handbaggery, Ed had a posted about the redistribution of CAMRA branches which so far has not yet popped up into the general finger pointery zone but might be heading that way:

CAMRA currently has a plan to change its branch structure so no branch straddles CAMRA region or county boundaries. From what I can gather it’s a top down proposal from the National Executive… I’m a bottom up man so am dubious about the proposal. Though a devout member of our Mother Church I’m not very active in the branch, but it is the branch I’ve been in since I was a teenager so I would be sad to see it end. Our branch chairman has written a long reply detailing how the branch came to be and why its current structure works.

BREAKING: Ron + Uruguay: one, two, three, four plus one alarming admission: “I want a rest from being Mr. Beer“!!! Heavens. Jings even.

And Jessica Mason shared details on the losses left in the wake of the failure of one brewery, the unfortunately** named Anarchy Brew Co of Newcastle:

Following the pandemic, the business also reportedly fell into financial difficulties after being unable to pay back loans and financial obligations on top of rising supplier costs. Reports have outlined that the trouble began when directors of the company took out Covid support loans and used tax deferrals to manage finances. FRP Advisory has since put together estimates with a breakdown, showing the shortfall owed to creditors stands at approximately £492,413 and an additional £158,016 still being owed to HMRC. Many in the sector with debts currently unpaid by Anarchy are set to lose out with 22 businesses in the industry, including malt and hop suppliers, still being owed thousands of pounds. 

In the referenced reports, it is stated that unsecured creditors such as trade creditors, the landlord and loans and finance agreements are owed £261,468. Assets came in at about one-third of that fugure. What to take away from all that? Certainly the interconnectedness what with so many others dependent on the success of the brewery. Plus… would it have been a kindness had the pulg been pulled earlier?

Perhaps speaking of which but definitely for the double, makring the Molson Coors cutting of losses Doug Velky posted a neat and tidy summation of the recent string of ditchings of unwanted craft brands which has seen one firm… consortium (… collector… aggregator…) named Tilray picking up the pieces to perhaps slide up to fourth place in the contracting US craft brewer market:

For Molson Coors’ there’s no growth potential looking forward for these brands as each posted negative trends in 2023. The brands aren’t dead as nearly 200,000 BBLs across four regional breweries is nothing to sneeze at, but in order to reverse these trends it would take focus, vision, energy, and dollars. As a public company focused on growing shareholder value, cutting these brands and focusing on positive trending formulas is where they’ll head instead. We saw the same of Anheuser Busch who dumped more than half of their crafty brands to Tilray in 2023 and Constellation Brands who quickest to take their “L” in craft and move on when they cleaned house and sold off Ballast Point, Funky Buddah, and Four Corners.

Jeff asks some good questions and triggers good thoughts – but there seems to be an assumption that “local” and “regional” are similar constructs. I don’t think they are. By the way… does one now cheer in 2024 as much as one booed in 2016? Such a long time ago, isn’t it? Wasn’t it? My thought it that it all such a case of corporate deck chair shifting that it really no longer matters. Macro abandoning craft at the same time craft is seeking to mimic macro. Whoda thunk it? What an odd scene this is for so late in the play.

Headline for these times: “World Of Beer Has Filed For Bankruptcy, Here Are The Details.”

Interestingly and conversely, the government of Western Australia has created a ten-year economic development plan to boost the state’s craft beer industry:

The plan was put together by the state’s Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, the Independent Brewers Association (IBA), West Australia Brewers Association (WABA) and South West Brewers Association (SWBA). As part of the strategy, the four parties’ two main goals are increasing the volume and value of locally produced beer threefold by 2034 from a 2023 baseline and creating “greater vertical integration of the craft beer value chain” in the region. Over 120 craft breweries exist in Western Australia, representing 20% of total craft beer production in the country.

A ray of hope? A futile effort given the bigger picture? Who knows. Finally – and as a welcome night cap if you get my analogy – ever the optimist or at least open to the possibility, The Beer Nut gave credit where credit was due in his piece this week on a brewery that has turned its luck around:

There’s hope for us all, I like to think. Today’s beers aren’t the first to come from a brewery premises whose earliest wares I didn’t care for and thought poorly made, but under new management seem to have been turned around. Investment in better equipment? Less corner-cutting? Or just a more highly skilled brewer? I don’t know. I do know that the beers from the Hillstown brewery in Co. Antrim were usually a raft of off-flavours, of the homebrew rookie sort. It seems that there’s a new broom about the place now, going by the friendly and approachable name of Modest Beer.

PS: I like shameless. I can work with shameless.

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

*How do you say “ooh, look, my pee’s gone all pink” in Latin?
**Although perhaps not as unfortunate as Jolly this week.
***This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (+1=133) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (-1=929) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (plummeting a bunch to 4,466) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

The “We Are Only Now Actually Halfway Through Summer 2024 This Week” Beery News Notes

 

Midsummer. This week. It’s now been 48 days since the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox is still a whole 45 days away. Mid. Summer. I blame public education for the false impression. The months of harvest are really just getting in gear. Moved: school should only be held in the months which are not summer gardening months. Approved. And Pete‘s #1 beer is exactly right. Beer after garden or yard work. Except… beer during garden or yard work. Or after coming back from the hardware store, I suppose.

What’s up? First off, I know my people can be a dour lot but I have never heard of it being a selling point in the hospitality trade until now in Inverness:

Dog Falls Brewing Co has applied for change of use to convert the long-closed Semi-Chem chemists’ to a beer “taproom” selling its product and other selected beers – but without music or entertainment. The brewery through planning agents Davidson Baxter Partnership Ltd, say in a supporting document to Highland Council: “The concept revolves around experiencing fresh beer from Dog Falls and selected other breweries in a setting where locals and visitors can talk, laugh, and interact with each other rather than being distracted by loud music or entertainment.” Dog Fall proprietor Bob Masson explained the concept further saying: “We want to encourage a convivial atmosphere among the customers without the entertainment add-on…

Got that? No need to repeat the point again. No entertainment. None. Nada. Don’t be looking to be entertained at this place. No way. Don’t. Not apparently related at all, I have never really needed twenty-four drinking each day in my life. Once forty years ago I got hammered starting at 4:30 am but that is only because I was a campus police officer at my small college and I arrested a guy breaking into cars at 3:30 am. After the fist fight in the wee hours and after handing the over to the actual cops, me nerves were a bit shot. So when I was offered unending tequila sunrises by my pal Bruce who was also technically my managing supervisor at that moment, I took up the opportunity.  Anyway, all that is to say, by way of intro, that the entire City of Montreal is now acting like my pal Bruce and is offering drinks around the clock for interesting reasons – and the BBC took notice:

Montreal will become the first city in Canada to allow 24-hour drinking. In Toronto venues have to close by 2am, and it is 3am in Vancouver. In the US, Las Vegas and New Orleans have long allowed bars and clubs to stay open all night. While in New York the cut off time is 4am, and in Los Angeles it is 2am. On the other side of the Atlantic, pubs in London still typically close at 11pm… Ms Alneus agrees. She says the fact that so many bars and clubs all currently close at 3am presents problems for the police. She believes by allowing 24-hour drinking, those venues that don’t wish to stay open all night will be able to close at different times across the night.

I will be over there in a few weeks but I am pretty sure I won’t be checking out that scene.  Yet a few hours after the party ends, in the UK for some on the move it starts up:

“Whether it’s 3am, 6am or 5pm, we all know that having a pre-holiday beer is a true British tradition. “Most of the time it’s a Fosters or a Carling and we all know they don’t exactly hit the spot. So, we decided to work with a local brewery and create the ultimate breakfast beer – the first of your holidays that matches perfectly with breaky.” Further findings from the research also revealed that a large majority of Brits (72%) believed a beer pre-10am is a “must” on our holidays.

Really? Honestly, I though it was just Ron. He’s been on the road in South America, as mentioned a couple of weeks ago, but he has finally gotten around to sharing the deets as well as the breakfast buffet experiences not to mention the glimpses into family life on holidays:

It’s quite chilly inside. Feeling a little cold, I put my coat back on. And notice no-one else has taken theirs off. They aren’t great on indoor heating here in Santiago. There’s a TV showing non-stop heavy metal videos… “Would you like to climb Mount Fuji, Dad?” Alexei asks. “No.” “Why not?” “For obvious fucking reasons. Like age and not wanting to die on a fucking mountain.” “If you weren’t old and scared, wouldn’t you want to climb it?” “No. I probably wouldn’t be able to breathe at the top of it.” “Well, apart from that?” “Just leave it.” After our first drink, it’s time for food.

In opposition to both Montreal and Ron, TDB reports that India is continuing its tightening of the prohibitions against liquor advertising after it became clear that there were efforts to circumvent the ban which already “outlaws direct advertising” by adding laws against “surrogate commercials and the sponsoring of events…” Examples:

Carlsberg would no longer be permitted to promotes its Tuborg drinking water in India by showing film stars at a rooftop party using the slogan “Tilt Your World”, which echoes its beer commercials. Nor would Diageo’s YouTube ad for its non-alcoholic Black & White ginger ale [which] features the iconic black-and-white terriers used to promote the scotch whisky brand of the same name.

Speaking of things that make you go “…hmmm…“, Jeff did some interesting data collection this week which has raise questions about some other data collection:

I found many of the breweries were no longer around. It wasn’t a marginal number. Despite the ambiguities in identifying what a brewery is, the number I ended up with was about 30% less than the Brewers Association’s official tally. For a number of reasons, this may be higher in Oregon than elsewhere: we have a more mature market, which means a lot more breweries have taprooms, which confounds things, and we also have more breweries closing because competition is so fierce. Nevertheless, it seems almost certain that the number of breweries in the US is thousands fewer than the regularly-cited figure of 10,000.

Which leads one to ask, of course, if that number is that wobbly – what else is? I mean, it’s not like any of this stuff is peer reviewed and footnoted.

Displaying far more solidity, The  Guardian had a pretty good interview with ‘Spoon owner, Tim Martin, who shared some interesting information about his approach to business including this early decision:

He wanted to be a barrister and studied law at Nottingham University, but was paralysed by a fear of public speaking. “I went to my first law of contract lecture and the professor started asking questions, so I didn’t go back. It made me very nervous. It sounds pathetic but you can get these little phobias.” The solution, it turned out, was getting into the pub trade, which he did in 1979 with the opening of Martin’s Free House. The JD Wetherspoon name came later, a mashup of JD Hogg, a character in The Dukes of Hazzard, and Wetherspoon, the name of a teacher who did not think much of  him.

And Jessica Mason has taken a cheeky approach to a piece which at the outset appeared to be about the place of fruity hazy IPAs in your fridge this summer as illustrated by one brand’s offering of something that is “effortlessly drinkable with a fresh watermelon taste and a pink haze” – and then is smartly turned on its head with the help of a couple of colleagues:

Tierney-Jones explained: “There’s a market for them and beer should have an element of fun but personally I tend to regard them as baby food for adults, the infantilisation of a great and noble beverage, it’d be a bit like a great wine producing chateau around Bordeaux adding mangoes or preserved lemons to their vintages.” Author and beer writer Pete Brown added: “I talk to so many brewers who say they brew hazy, fruity beers because that’s what the market wants. Then I look at the total share that hazy, fruity beers have in the market and think….’really? Looks to me like they want Guinness and ‘Spanish’ lager’.”

Brutal. Speaking of honest truths, Martyn has a book he wants you to buy and, as always, I was most obedient to the call. It sounds a bit like a reverse engineering of that earlier Jacksonian idea of classics:

There are certain classical examples within each group, and some of these have given rise to generally-accepted styles, whether regional or international. If a brewer specifically has the intention of reproducing a classical beer, then he is working within a style.

I say a reversal as Martyn is taking each of these eighty beers and expanding on their inherent implications – and not without peril as he explains:

One big problem with writing a book about beer with one foot firmly in the present is that the present is constantly changing. After I submitted the manuscript, it was announced that the Anchor brewery in San Francisco was shutting down. I hesitated for some time over whether to take the chapter on steam beer out, decided it was too interesting a style to ignore, and was saved by the announcement that the brewery had – at the time of writing – found a buyer. Similarly the chapter on Gale’s Prize Old Ale had to be rewritten twice, first after the closure of the Dark Star brewery, where POA was revived, and then after the closure of the Meantime brewery, where the brewing of POA was transferred. 

Speaking of wordcraft – and for the double – Jeff wrote about a subject that never has left me with much satisfaction – authenticity. What is that you say? He summarizes: “Authenticity is a self-referential quality. We associate ourselves with products that have the social currency of authenticity because it reflects well on us. We become authentic when we consume the right products.” It has always seem circular like that to me. A vessel of an adjective into which pretty much anything  can be placed. And Stan provide some more context particular to one beer related point:

In 2003, Holt and Cameron created a commercial that features a character they called The Tinkerer, who finds an old bicycle at a garage sale, carefully restores it, and then happily rides it into the Colorado countryside.  They outline their strategy for New Belgium in a chapter called “Fat Tire: Crossing the Cultural Chasm” within their book, “Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands”… The word authentic comes up in most chapters, but usually as a given and without a definition of what it means to be authentic. What is clear is how important whatever they label authenticity is to those focused on marketing.

This has not been my sneaking suspicion so much as my clear understanding for years. I think we three are all on the same page so we can be honest. The call to generic authenticity is a useful call to nothingness, a warming abstraction which is is nothing more than a vacant space for marketeers. The sibling of “effortlessly drinkable” when you think about it. This is where we are. Craft beer has long abandoned the firmer footholds of traditional techniques and smaller scale* – but will current welcome interest in Czech lager and perhaps a building upwards blip in English cask now act as a counterweight to the mess big craft has made of itself?  If so, isn’t there a better word then authenticity? Perhaps credible. A credible rendition of something is a simple direct take – in the X=Y sense – without adding any intermediate generic analytical steps. I’d much rather have a credible take on a Světlý Ležák than an authentic one. Must now consider the other applications for the word in the beer world.

Finally, Matthew has written a personal essay about the pubs of his hometown of Lincoln and how his parents’ divorce when we was a teen affected his relationship them. To do that, he visits his Mum to spend a day about town:

The day starts off well. Mum has a hairdresser’s appointment on the other side of town and has offered me a lift. This means I have to leave early, burdening me with an extra hour to kill before the pubs open. No matter, I thought, this would give me a rare opportunity to play tourist in my birthplace. Mum, however, is running late, so puts her foot down. She banks hard down a side street, hitting 40 in a 20 zone. I grip my seat, before reassuring myself that she has spent her entire life driving on these roads, and probably knows them better than anyone. She drops me off close to my first stop and reminds me I need to be home before 7pm. It’s her choir practice this evening and she wants to make sure I’m back in time for tea.

We’ll have to tune in next week to find out if he made it back in time for tea. See, he ends the story in the last pub. I just hope his Mum wasn’t late for choir practice.

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

*A movement perhaps so spent that there’s only one move left – a Hall of Fame for the same approved names to give themselves a good old pat on the back! Will the nominating committee weigh each candidates downsides along with the PR pluses? Will “Sex for Sam” be to this HOF be what the steriod era is to another?  If not, what is the committee doing? Something authentic perhaps.
**This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,483) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Father’s Day Slackerfest Edition Of The Thursday Beery News Notes

When Monday morning arrives and my inbox has only a couple of links for the Thursday beery news notes, well, I get a yips. Then when Stan as well as Boak and Bailey post great linksfests… I get the shakes. Really. Well, not really but sorta. I look for reasons. I search my soul. And I see something. Something about myself. Deep in myself. I am actually pretty lazy. Just ask my lawn.* But… it’s Fathers Day weekend coming up so who cares!

First up, why aren’t the young folk drinking booze like we expect?!? Like we demand of them. So that they would be more like us. When we were them. A couple of arguments related to this passed my eye this week. First Jeff wrote a post about kids being more sensible these days:

Young people have more free time, fewer life complications, and are more socially motivated to hang out with each other. If they don’t develop the habit of going to bars when they might actually be drinking more, when will they? And, given that I think spending time with friends in pubs is one of the very best ways to spend your time, I agree. But here comes that big “on the other hand”: it’s better if they hold off developing a relationship with alcohol until their brains are less plastic and more able to handle it. High schoolers are going to flirt with danger. It is part of growth and maturity. But it’s good if they do it in ways that are less likely to have massive, life-changing consequences. More of them skipping the booze until they’re well out of high school? Awesome.

And Prof Dan Malleck made these comments in this discussion which I am joining together as I think they are related in terms of framing the zeitgeist:

I see @TheCurrentCBC has yet again doubled down on its neotemperance tendencies with an uncritically fawning segment on non-alcoholic socialization. Stop equating socializing with alcohol to getting blackout drunk… Booze understood as a social lubricant far predates what you call beer trade writers; in fact it predates what we call civilization… We are witnessing the outcome of a strategy by well-resourced temperance organizations that benefit from not appearing to have corporate interests so present as only interested in the public good.

I think there are many good reasons people of all ages for less drinking and these observations above capture some of them. Though the US legal drinking age of 21 is absolutely nuts and “neotemperance” is closing in from behind. No, we need to think about the realities in a realistic way. First, we have to admit that many of them locking themselves up in basements and “socializing” online. What do you call a pub like that? “The Mouse and Soda”? And, the cost of the beer itself is a thing as are the additional expenses that have popped up over the last couple of decades. “When I were a lad” there were little or no digital or communications bills coming at me. No cell phones, no subscriptions, no internet services. Once my food, stamp, rent and tuition was paid the rest in my pocket was “blow” money.  Bah-low! Plus… we were stupid. Err… stupider. Until 1983 there wasn’t even MADD in Canada so there was a fair bit of DD, if we are being honest. The health hazards of booze were known then and now just like they were known for “coffin nails” aka ciggies. So, if youth today are smarter, otherwise occupied, more health conscious and harder up for cash… why would they take up the regular drinking hobby?

Speaking of which, social media whipped up a frenzy over cask ale in the UK – or rather the seeming disinterest in it. It was quite a thing to watch. What started it? John Keeling pronouncing it dead, based on a recent SIBA report stating that “cask beer sales are now less than 9% of all draught beer sales and around 4% of total beer sales.” I think of this as being more the main area of concern, linked as it is to the discussion above:

Only 30% of 18-24-year-olds EVER drink beer, falling behind wines and spirits, and almost a quarter of consumers (24%) say they NEVER visit their local pub.

From afar, Jeff found fault suggesting cask suffers from its characteristic swift loss of freshness due to oxygen ingress and, almost nearly equadistant from Jeff, Laura in return found fault with Jeff’s argument – and by association with Mr. Keeling, too:

I disagree with practically all of this. I’m under 45 and literally wrote the book on CAMRA. If you think cask is in decline, talk to @WyeValleyBrew who have almost doubled their production volume over 10 years including over 20k BBL of HPA & c.19k BBL Butty Bach CASK in 22/23.

The jumpity-onnie-ness seemed to settle on this point Mr. K actually made in his original piece: “cask in the future will be brewed by specialist brewers for specialist pubs to be consume by beer drinking specialists.” Many pointed out, however (i) that this is already the case (given bigger pubcos botched it) and (ii) that holding 9% of the market and growing when in the right hands is not such a bad place to be. (By the way, why is that 9% a total failure while elsewhere 13.3% utter victory?) As usual, the Tand was authoritative.

Somewhat related is another “let’s parse B+B” like last week‘s discussion of the description of peeps in pubs. This week? From their Drinks of the Weekend Patreon posting… how to describe cask ale:

… pleasantly malty and sessionable… unchallenging but not unpleasant…  tasted like they could have been brewed forty years ago… in good condition and suitable unobtrusive… more often struck us as sour and muddy… reasonable… too oniony… balanced and moreish… 

All of which is more a feature than a bug. See, they the cask hounds that they are, are on a serious hunt even if a cheery one. For cask in form. Like any sports fans or concert goers do… or archaeology fans, flag nerds or men’s clothing geeks for that matter. Experience needs to be sought. You know, by adding the factor of understanding if something is or is not in top form – even just adding that bit of risk – experiences like cask poses interesting challenges. And it’s  unlike a super speedy version of the issues with good wine of (i) bottle variation and (ii) whether or not a bottle is en pointe.** Worth hunting out. Worth getting educated about. Because if everything is just great and right there always at hand, well, nothing is excellent.***

Enough!! Enough of your bickering!!! Time for a universal truth. You know what hobby we should all take up? Eating Manx kipper baps, that’s what! Katie has all the news of fish and bun from her Isle of Man sojourn as set out in The Gulp:

The only way to eat breakfast in Peel, in my opinion, is to scoff a Manx kipper bap with cream cheese while walking along the front. The Fish Bar, a little cabin in-between the castle and the prom, is where to get one. The lovely man will fry your salty, smoky kippers in butter in front of you while you look at the beautiful tubs of pickled shellfish you might snack on later. A bite is strangely like the best bacon butty you’ve ever eaten—crisp but meltingly fatty, salt balanced by creamy cheese spread, except with the scent of the sea all around. Eat on the move while the butter drips down your wrist and the fish is still hot from the pan.

Fabulous. Coming up in a close second in the Grand Prix du Fabuloso, Martyn drew my attention to the right sort of event with the right approach that I might be interested if I was in the right country:

If this intrigues you, courtesy of CAMRA’s Games & Collectables, we will be hosting a tasting featuring beers up to 40 years old and everyone will get a chance to try around 10 beers from a selection of over 60. They could be great, or they could be less than great; it will be a one off voyage of discovery! But we will begin the tasting with a modern day 18 month stored beer from Fuller’s – the freshest beer you’ll try on the day. Please note that we cannot guarantee the quality of any of the beers presented so the price includes two halves from the real ales on sale at the Pineapple – just in case!

Not so wonderful news. Are you an archaeologist? Is your working life laced with alcohol?  Are you an archaeologist whose working life laced with alcohol? Apparently it is a thing (h/t). A problem even. When I was starting out in law I would say it was a big problem. Drunk firm parties. older alcoholic lawyers drinking in the office. Plenty didn’t for sure and the reaction of the profession as being a bit Georgian about it all, an issue related to the individual and personal capacity rather than the whole business model. Well, click on the thumbnail and you’ll see that UK archaeologist Dr Chloë Duckworth has thoughts she has decided to share including “I drank every  single night on these projects…“ Yikes.⁦

Sporting news? No beer, only shandy at the Euros for fans watching Engerland v. Serbska, apparently for good reason according to The Mrrrrrr:

The move comes as authorities in Germany, where the major football tournament is being held, fear clashes between England fans and violent Serbian ‘Ultras’. German police fear the Serbian hooligans are planning to clash with drink-fuelled England supporters and so are banning strong lager from the game. It is thought around 40,000 England fans will be at the game and 8,000 Serbs, who will be joined by others from Germany’s Serbian communities.

Not sure hooligans is quite the right word. Elsewhere, The Sun reports Scots are drinking Munich dry. And in Franfurt, according to The Guardian rather comprehensively, the drink is Apfelwein:

England play Denmark here on 20 June, while Germany face Switzerland three days later. This is a nation renowned for its beer quality, of course, but those visiting Frankfurt for the football will find that here, another drink rules: Apfelwein. This traditional Hessisch cider – the beverage of the state of Hessen – is dry, still, unfiltered and is made from sour apples, making it taste tart. Many locals top it up with sparkling water, diluting the flavour, dampening the 5-7% alcohol and making the beverage particularly refreshing on hot days. Hardcore Sachsenhauseners drink Apfelwein pure.

And now… some short notes: (i) line up or pack the bar? Table service for me, thanks – another great gift of the temperence era, (ii) No beer writing received a 2024 James Beard Award, (iii) Pellicle did not win at the Guild of Food Writers awards, (iv) beer sales are up in Cyprus. (v) and still… those damn London prices:

The cheeky pub was charging £19 for just a third of a pint of “Iris 2025”, a 15 per cent speciality beer from Belgian speciality brewer Cantillon. Rob Healy, 52-year-old a retired TFL worker, said he was “outraged” when he saw the menu. “It’s the principle of the thing,” he told The Sun. “I know it’s London prices but that’s ridiculous.”

Outraged! Every English working man deserves a budget priced glass of rare lambic. Right?!? Speaking of which, have you ever not quite get a connotation in a beer reference from another country? Try this one out:

…politicians from the governing parties were shocked by the populist tone of Weimer’s tirade, which some said evoked the rhetoric of the far-right Alternative for Germany. “The bizarre . . . speech is more beer tent than Dax-listed company executive,” Verena Hubertz, deputy leader of the Social Democrats’ parliamentary group, told the Financial Times…  A spokesman for Deutsche Börse described Weimer as a “man of clear words” who is “not known for putting lipstick on the pig”.

Seeing that it is in a British paper, the German idiom might have been unpacked a little for those whose cultures do not include speech-ifi-cations in beer tents. Hicks? Neo-nazism? Drunk louts? Drunk neo-nazi hick louts?

Pellicle has a good piece up this week on the Ontarian abroad in German who unexpectedly became a natural wine maker, Alanna LaGamba, and her purple fizz:

Alanna had a thought. “Being half Italian, I grew up drinking Lambrusco. So I had the idea to do it German-style.” Frauen Power’s colour might be dark and stormy, but it smells like bing cherries, the ones that pair so well with boozy chocolate. It’s not sweet, however. It’s dry like blackcurrants that aren’t quite ready to leave their vine. Frauen Power is also a reminder that sparkling wines can do a lot more than toast to special occasions. They dress down just as well as they dress up, accompanying pizza, buttery crackers, or just a balmy afternoon.

Me, I like purple fizz. And I like this thought: “It’s cool because there are not many industries where you create your raw materials. When you think of a carpenter, he’s not growing the tree he gets the wood from. But everything in the bottle is me.” Inspiring. You know, maybe I will try making a 5% beer-wine with my own two Pinot Noir vines this August just to see if I can. Sure you can make jelly but there is no buzz from jelly. Except that jelly buzz but that is different.

Finally, in an update on the changes coming to Ontario’s retail beer market the government has announced that just as corner stores soon will be able to beer, the former retail monopoly The Beer Store is becoming… more like a corner store:

It’s all in a move to help ease the transition to corner stores and gas stations being permitted to sell alcohol starting this fall. Currently, the privately owned Beer Store is only allowed to sell ancillary items, such as bags of ice, beer mugs, and T-shirts, but the government is now permitting it to sell a multitude of other products including lottery tickets and food. The only exceptions being cigarettes, cannabis, and liquor, which will remain prohibited. It’s not clear if or when The Beer Store plans to expand its offerings.

All I demand are roller hot dogs on every TBS counter! If only for that smell, that body odor salty sweaty thing that makes the moment every time.

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

*Actually that image is from near here but not here here.
**Also dairy farm milk. A pal who grew up on one disliked milk in February (“ugh… dried hay and silage!”) and August “(“erg… weedy!”) due to the feed inputs.
***You know, if US craft beer was left to determine the fate of either good wine or cask ale, they’d no doubt add fruit flavoured syrup: “Chateau Palmer 2026 with a burst of real peach excitement!“
****This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (916) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,477) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (162), crap Threads (43) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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