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Your Beery News Notes For The Solemn Pause Before The Festivities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyone else? Anywhere else? Yes, you also gotta check the blogs, podcasts (barely!) and even newsletters to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Here’s a new newsletter recommendation: BeerCrunchers. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now much more occassional but always wonderful 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. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

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

The Woooooooooo Scariest Hellbound Beery News Notes Ever Unleashed From The Bowels Of Hell!!!

Ha-ha! I wrote bowels. If you’re not born of Scots, that might not be daily dinner table language so I apologize as I refer you in the alternative to the basso loco of Dante’s Inferno for a clearer sense of the reason for the season. But if you are Canadian of a certain age, however, there is only one true representation of the hellscape of pure evil – SCTV’s Monster Chiller Horror Theatre from around forty years ago. Wooooohooo. Scary. Lots of beer content on SCTV: Biller Hi-Lite, Moose Beer and twist off beer caps on American beer bottles. Not at all horrible is my new plan for Halloween… which I can’t believe I have not come up with before… a plan to buying candy I like, keep it to myself and eating it as I hand out the crap candy I don’t like so much to the kids. Except I don’t like candy all that much. More extreme measures will not be necessary… unlike apparently in Japan:

In other news, Tokyo’s Shibuya district has banned public drinking, hiring 300 private security guards and urging local stores to stop selling alcohol to ward off revelers this Halloween.

What? That’s some sort of crazy. Are nutty Halloween pub crawls a thing where you live? They seem to be a thing in Buffalo, NY, Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Lexington, Kentucky. I like it. Pack the streets. We did a similar thing in the Halifax of my 1980s youth at Halloween – but we called it Mardi Gras for some reason. Tens of thousands of us. Once I went as junk mail (my best costume ever if I am going to be honest with you) with a buddy who went as a breakfast nook – that could actually toast toast. Out there. On the street. Street toast. Class.

Anyway, have you ever seen a lede buried as deep as this one was in GBH? In a neat and tidy piece on a rebranding at the Chicago Brewseum this little bomb is dropped in the middle of paragraph ten:

Theresa McCulla, curator of the American Brewing History Initiative at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, will leave that post in early November, and the role will no longer exist after her exit.

The Smithsonian program, largely funded and framed in terms of narrative by the Brewers Association’s involvement, started up in 2016. While I was disappointed in the periodic press releases highlighting things like Papazian’s paddle from the great white male hero era of craft, I trust that records and objects from throughout the over 435 years of brewing in the what are now the United States have been protected. Wonder why the Brewers Association gave up on their affiliation? A special thanks to all those beer journalists getting on that story even as I type these very words.

Speaking of endings, Stan discussed the piece in VinePair on the declining influence of US craft beer in Europe, asking if “the story totally supports an assertion that beers from America aren’t influencing change” which I get but, still, I like the arguments set out in this well thought out piece by Will Hawkes:

California-founded Stone’s failure in Europe is symbolic of a wider issue. Craft beer has made a huge splash across the Atlantic, but American breweries, for the most part, have not prospered as they might have expected — and things don’t appear to be getting better. Extrapolating from Brewers Association (BA) figures published by the organization and in Forbes, the overall craft beer volume exported to Europe declined from 78,994 barrels in 2021 to 63,755 in 2022. The reasons for this are complex, but they get to the heart of Europe’s beer market and the limitations of American craft breweries in a place where their economic power has rarely matched their cultural cachet.

TL;DR? Reasons not so much complex as just numerous… BrewDog being everywhere, other Euro brewers holding branding rights, uncompetative pricing and the botch by Stone diluting the value. Brutal line: “[at] this year’s Berlin Beer Week, Stone beers featured in a tap takeover at a pizzeria.” Perhaps relatedly, things are also not going well for brewers in New Zealand:

“I was talking to a brewer recently and he said: ‘It’s all just beer now.’ The problem with craft is it’s always been ill-defined. Does it mean small scale? Does it mean independent? Does it mean flavoursome?” Without that clear definition, the territory was ripe for major beer companies to step into – and all the big breweries have done exactly that. “You now have Lion with their Mac’s brand, DB with Monteith’s and Asahi with Boundary Road. Those are the three main ones in that area, and what they’re doing is just pumping up the flavour in those brands. They’re making great beer at a more affordable price.”

I know that this is all a bit of a downer – even though this is the “scary” season – but at least things are not as bad as they are in Rioja according to the newsletterist Jason Wilson of Everyday Drinking who includes this summary of recent findings:

I was shocked to read Tim Atkin’s piece about serious problems in Rioja — “Rioja on the Rocks” — a couple of weeks ago. I knew that Rioja had issues, but Atkin (the foremost English-language expert on Rioja) paints a dire picture of a region in crisis. As Atkin reports, the regional governments of La Rioja and the Basque Country plan to detroy 30 million liters of surplus wine to try to balance supply and demand. Another 150 million liters, unwanted by the market, is sitting in cellars. The 2023 harvest has been terrible, and grape prices are at unsustainable lows—in fact, many growers cannot sell their grapes. Reportedly, one major co-operative is on the verge of bankruptcy, two large bodegas are in administration, and Campo Viejo, Rioja’s largest winery, is allegedly up for sale. There are threats by large groups of growers and producers to leave the consortium altogether as they argue over whether to focus on quantity or quality.

Yikes! Just last year things were looking up.

Better news? How about the best big brewery marketing of the moment? Heineken making fun of its own name and using Plastic Bertrand for the soundtrack. That good. And The Brewnut has proven once again how he is the best commentator on what’s actually in the glass, illsustrated by this review of the offerings by Wicklow Wolf:

This year’s twist on the all-local ingredients spec is the inclusion of Kilmacanogue raspberries in a sour ale. Shame they didn’t have a go at spontaneously fermenting it, for extreme local character. Regardless, it’s very nice. The raspberries taste fresher and realer than they do in most raspberry beers, almost bursting on the tongue the way the fruit does. There’s no sugary, syrupy jam here, just a cleanly medium-pitched tartness, again similar to what you’d get from actual raspberries, building to a slightly puckering finish. While it’s only 4.2% ABV, I can’t see this working well as a refreshing summer beer — it’s too intense, with lots going on it. While I definitely liked it, I’m glad I waited until a dull day in October to drink it.

See that: not fawning, explains how it stands out, explains what might be done to improve. I’d buy that beer. Speaking of buying beer, David Nilsen wrote an homage to “Brouwerij Van Steenberge’s Tripel Van De Garre” in Pellicle this week and how it illustrates a few trends:

“In today’s market, imports are struggling against the locavore movement,” says Michael, noting the plethora of local options. “We have 97 breweries in the city limits [of Chicago].” Sara Levin, the package beer buyer for The Barrel House, a beloved beer bar and bottle shop in Dayton, Ohio, has been a professional beer buyer for close to a decade and says the current attitude toward Belgian beer among many American craft devotees had already begun to take shape when she started in the industry in 2014. “Before me it was a little different, but in my time I feel like Belgian beer has always been the old money craft beer,” Sara says. “It’s been the OG beer geeks who really respect the old school styles.”

That right there is one of the sadder things about the craft beer movement’s rush to chase the tale of novelty, the loss of interest in hounouring Belgian styles. Got an opinion on that? You can explain how you feel about such things if you take part in this week’s study on the habits of craft beer and real ale drinkers? Do you have habits? They want to study you. In a similar note, Gary came across a study of real ale drinking in England from 1866… with some very and sadly familiar themes:

Less than one-half of it is drunk in perfection, or at its best condition, the larger percentage becoming more or less flat, hard [tart], and unpalatable, or even sour before it is consumed. From the day of the tapping of the cask, with the gradual entrance of atmospheric air, the liqour undergoes progressive deterioration, first becoming flat and unpalatable, from the loss of its carbonic acid, and then sour from having its spirit converted in acetic acid by the absorption of oxygen. In fact, day by day, as the palate unplesantly detects, it may be said to advance one step further on the road to vinegar.

Yik. Too much OG old school right there. And sorta samesies [h/t] at the blog run by Triskele Heritage, an archaeological consultancy, there was a sweet disassembling of the claim made by an Irish pub as to its status as the world’s oldest tavern:

The problem here is that the fabric of the building is claimed to date to the ninth century, and this is repeated from one website to another, but no archival or archaeological evidence is ever offered as the root source of the information. Instead, the listed entry for Sean’s Bar on the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage… notes that the current standing building was constructed c 1725 as a coaching inn which was known as The Three Blackamoors Heads by 1738. The record goes onto confirm that renovations were indeed carried out c 1970 but, instead of finding ““wattle and wicker” dating back to the ninth century”, the walls in question were dated to the seventeenth century. That is a potential exaggeration of at least seven centuries.

Speaking of even more not quite right, perhaps that green bottle of Tsingtao isn’t just skunky:

In the clip which appeared online on Thursday, a worker, dressed in uniform with a helmet on, can be seen climbing over a high wall and into the container before urinating inside it. The location tag of the clip reads “Tsingtao beer No.3 factory”, local news outlet The Paper reported on Friday. Business outlet “National Business Daily” later cited an internal source as saying both the person who took the video and the person appearing in it were not direct employees of the company… Shares in Tsingtao Brewery fell sharply when the Shanghai Stock Exchange opened on Monday morning but were trading broadly flat by the afternoon.

Boo-tastic. Now we have pee in the stuff. In other scary health news, the Time of Londinium shared a story on the problems with a certain sort of stress drinking and had this very interesting fact:

A recent study… found that women with high levels of cardiorespiratory fitness are between 1.5 to 2 times as likely to drink moderately or heavily as those who are sedentary. Charlotte considered herself to be healthy. “I’d go running on Saturday at 8am with my friends after drinking two bottles of wine on Friday. Parker tried all the right things to manage stress. “I went to a meditation teacher, I was looking at my diet, I ran a lot” — everything except quit drinking.”

That is interesting. Fact filled and interesting. And scary.

Enough!!! I leave you there for this week. As per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. I have yet another update on the rankings. TweX is now really starting to drop in the standings. I am deleting follows there more and more in favour of mirroring accounts set up by favourite voices elsewhere. Now, for me Facebook is clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (74) rising up to sit in a tie with Mastodon (899) then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,344) hovering somewhere above or around Instagram (167) with Threads (41) and Substack Notes (1) really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Seven apps plus this my blog! That makes sense. I may be multi and legion and all that but I do have priorities and seem to be keeping them in a proper row. All in all, I still am rooting for the voices on the elephant-like Mastodon, like these ones just below discussing beer, even though it is #Gardening Mastodon that really wins:

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts (barely!) and even newsletters to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Here’s a new newsletter recommendation: BeerCrunchers. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now much more occassional but always wonderful 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. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

The Near Mid-October 2023 Edition Of Your Beery News Notes

Took a week off this week just to make sure, you know, all the turkey leftovers were consumed and all the necessary prep chores were done well ahead of winter. To the right is half of the garlic crop as well as the bundle of garlic greens that will be tomato mulch next year. They get replanted soon. Haven’t noticed any particular theme this week but no doubt that quiet is due to the horrors in the Middle East piling upon the horrors in Ukraine. Facing uselessness in the presence of such evil, what do you do? Keep garden and scribbling? Yup.

First up, being October, Pellicle has a timely feature this week by Ariana DiValentino on one of the more venerable and more drinkable pumpkin ales out there, Pumking by Southern Tier of western New York State:

“Pumking should be the brewer’s target for a pumpkin beer,” he adds. Critics and craft beer fans alike echo this, crediting the balance between spicy, sweet, bold, and bitter. Personally, I think it manages to strike a balance in another way: the type of drinker it attracts. Though pumpkin ales are traditionally maligned, there’s something about taking one and turning the volume up to 11 that transforms it into a magnet for craft devotees. And yet, you don’t need to be a beer geek with an encyclopaedic knowledge of hop varieties to appreciate Pumking. You don’t even need to be a beer drinker, really; anyone who likes pie is likely to find the phrase “pumpkin pie in a glass” tempting. Drinkers come for the pie and stay for…also the pie, because in this case, there’s truth in advertising.

Southern Tier was a favourite of mine in the old cross border beer shopping days of ten to twenty years ago. I played a role in bringing their beers into the Ontario market after years of enjoying their range of beers, especially the big ones that led up to Pumking. My first note on Pumking dates to 2009 when a bomber cost you $6.49, well after the after-party. My first pumpkin beer note goes back five years earlier to October 2004 when I bought Post Road by Brooklyn Brewing. But by 2011, unlike what the Pellicle article seems to suggest with the phrase “the nascent hype in the early 2010s“, cracks were already starting to show in the reputation of the long established style. Even the venerable The Atlantic in 2011 questioned their place:

Some beer styles are loved, some are ardently despised, but none is more divisive than pumpkin ales. Those who love them wait all year for their seasonal release; others can’t even broach the subject without foaming at the mouth. “I hate pumpkin beers,” wrote my friend and Washington City Paper beer writer Orr Stuhl. “Even picking a ‘favorite’ — say, Dogfish Head’s — is like picking a favorite airborne illness.”

Hah!! Good one. More timely and far less snippy, Jessica Mason has reported on some new solid data on inflation in the UK’s beer maket ‘Spoons sub-sector:

Using pricing data gathered at every Wetherspoons pub in October 2022 and October 2023 via the pub group’s app, the analysis identified how, currently, the average price of a pint of Carling in a Wetherspoons pub is £3.35. This has increased 11% since Oct 2022, when it was £3.02. According to the findings, 740 Wetherspoons pubs have seen inflation over the last year, 58 have seen deflation, and five saw no price change. Drilling down into the data, the Wetherspoons pubs with the highest inflation rates are The Rann Wartha, Cornwall (42.2%), and The John Francis Basset, Cornwall (42.2%) while the Wetherspoons pubs with the highest deflation rates are The Golden Beam, Leeds (-20.1%), and The Myrtle Grove, West Yorkshire (-19.7%).

I’ve always liked The Myrtle Grove… or at least I would have if I had ever heard of it. And it’s not just in the ‘Spoons. Sucker Juice is always right there begging for your attention:

Brewed independently by the artisans at Freetime Beer Co in Wales, Nothing Beer embraces a minimalist ingredient list; just water, rice, malted barley, hops, and yeast. “As a London-based tech company we are proud to have partnered with another independent British brand in Freetime Beer Co for this launch,” says Ryan Latham, Nothing’s Global Director Brand & Creative. While the limited-edition release (at £20 for a pack of six) is only available in the UK at the moment…

That’s $33 a six. Nuts. Everyone is on the take. Same as it ever was. Except it isn’t. Because inflation is also tied with contraction as Nickolaus Hines explains at the InsideHook:

“…beer as a whole [is] losing out to other alcohol categories, as well as the rise of people who abstain from alcohol altogether… “In plain English, the industry has lost about 30%, or 2.2 million, of its youngest LDA consumers in five years,” Purser said. “This is a pattern, and the current brand crisis has accelerated this broader category concern.”*

Somewhat relatedly in terms of the scramble, here’s a bit of a sad turn from the world of wine which I am quite aware of being replicated in a way in beer, a private financial exchange need to receive a tasting note back from a known beer writer – thus underlining any semblance of the writer’s independence. But in this case, it is the publisher limiting access to the notes issued by a group of critics to those out there who pay 160 Euros. Wine writer Jon Bonné considers the situation thusly:

The fascinating part: This is the first time I can recall anyone has taken a stab at putting a dollar figure (euro figure) on this specific bit of content generation. I won’t say it’s what the market has determined, but it’s what someone thinks the market will bear. It also cuts off at the knees one of the more wobbly arguments of recent years: that these tasting notes and scores are for consumers. Consumers are grabbing bottles from the aisle cap, or checking on the latest orange fad. These are for producers + their agents. If that’s so, then how much more ripping off of the fig leaf is this than the many existing shades of trade-writer clubbiness?

Speaking of wine, the Count Alexandre de Lur Saluces has died… which surely leads each of us to ask “who hasn’t been in this situation?”:

Unknown to the public at large, however, the count owned only 7 per cent of the estate with 48 per cent held by his elder brother and smaller amounts by other members of the extended family. They rebelled against his autocratic behaviour and lack of dividends, which led to an embarrassingly public fight, when in 1996 they agreed to sell majority control to Bernard Arnault, the billionaire owner of the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH. Bitter words were spoken by all sides of the family, with the count declaring “Mr Arnault is financing [other family members] to get rid of me. If he gets hold of this château he will install his fashion models here and start producing a perfume called Yquem!’’

Indeed. And the no doubt well-perfumed Ron’s gone a bit further back, lingering in the early 1970s for a bit this month:

I’m just getting the mixture right between water and dirt to let me have a good old wallow in nostalgia. Or at least, casting a glance back at the past. And hoping no-one is returning my gaze. We were looking at Whitbread’s 1973 set of beers. Time now for the other fermentables: adjuncts and sugar. What should be remembered here is that Whitbread had long been a holdout in the use of adjuncts. Only starting to use them in 1965. Much later than most of their rival brewers. Other than wartime, of course, when they had no choice but to.

For Cider Review, Barry Masterson went a bit further back in time to the Middle Ages of Bavaria to tell the tale of perry’s hayday there:

A chance discovery I made while reading some older articles tracing the ancestry of Austrian perry pear varieties yielded one of the earliest definite mentions of perry in central Europe. The Bavarian-Austrian poet Neidhart von Reuental, probably one of the most famous Minnesänger or minstrels of the period, made a reference to perry in one song. Around 1240, after he had moved from Bavaria to the area near Melk in current day Austria, he added two verses to an existing song, written of course in Middle High German…

A great tale of daring do was set out in Twex this week, a story of inebriated public menace once upon a time in New York City:

In September 1956 after drinking heavily at a bar in New York City, Thomas Fitzpatrick made an intoxicated barroom bet that he could travel from New Jersey to New York City in 15 minutes. At 3 a.m. he stole a single-engine plane from the Teterboro and flew without any lights or radio before landing on St. Nicholas Avenue near 191st Street in front of the bar where the bet was made. The New York Times called it a “fine landing” and a “feat of aeronautics”. For his illegal flight, he was fined $100 after the plane’s owner refused to press charges.

For the double, we have another story of dissent from about the same time – but this time from Belgium:

Never forget how on Nov 16, 1949 a bunch of Belgian students from Ghent took over a fortress and attacked the police with fruit because the city had raised the price of beer. On November 16, 1949, 138 students (including one girl) entrenched themselves in the Gravensteen in Ghent. The battlements are adorned with playful student slogans, while the police and fire brigade are treated to overripe fruit and smoke bombs. The student-like violence can only be contained with the greatest difficulty by the police. The student joke is front-page news in the international press.

And you think you’re a beer evangelist. Pffft! Sadly, such clear-headed thinking, taking on issues head-on does not seem to exist in all quarters:

Paul Leone is the executive director of the New York Brewers Association, and he says craft beer simply isn’t a growing industry anymore. Before 2016, the growth of the industry was 10% year over year. “No doubt there are breweries that are looking to sell, there are breweries that are not going to make it for the long haul, unfortunately, but I would caution people and say that this is a business like any other business,” Leone said. “There are breweries that are no doubt struggling, and there are some that are expanding… We are not over-saturated and there is no bubble.”

I don’t know what to make of that… don’t worry be happy… whistling in the dark? Also not sure how homogenized craft beer culture is across North America. Can we even make generizations about the politics? I would note if pressed (contrary to Jeff’s suggestion that it identifies as left/liberal rather than right/conservative due to the Bud Lite botch of just a half a year ago) that in 2013 this was the results of a study involving a number of prominent breweries, mainly in Colorado – progressive as anything:

Craft beer drinkers tend to embrace healthier active lifestyles as well as exist on the fringe of conformity. This segment typically enjoys riding bikes, walking from place to place, hiking, camping and in general embraces an outdoor lifestyle. Consequently, they frequent places such as Whole Foods, Sprouts, local fresh markets, REI and national parks. Their choice of music is more generational than driven by their consumption of craft beer; most of the brew pubs we visited played indie-pop music like Dave Matthews, Mumford & Sons or Dawes. Our local observations revealed that many craft beer drinkers value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, creativity, intelligence, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, and witty banter.xxix This definition matches the “hipster” sub-segment of the millennial generation. Craft beer drinkers did not appear to be lazy as they aspire to be accomplished and productive. Craft beer drinkers tend to be more professional than then the blue collar working-class.

And remember: that New Yorker cover is coming up on its ninth anniversary. Still holds up… unlike Mumford & Sons. I am more in alignment with Jeff’s post this week, “The State of Beer Education” or at least the conclusion:

…as the everyman (everyperson) drink, most people feel comfortable ordering and drinking it without deep engagement. What makes it so popular is the very thing that leads to incuriosity. I have reconciled myself to this reality and, on balance, I think it’s a good thing. Beer is wonderful because its accessibility enables it to be the mass social beverage. That requires a simple, unfussy product.

I like that. But I don’t fully buy the route he gets there. Let’s be honest. Beer as a subject for an education just does not attract all that much actual independent study or scholarship other than perhaps in the bio department. Resulting titles are a bit overblown, newbie guides are praised as if they are a thesis while actual thoughtful writers are still refused footnotes by publishers. There isn’t even anything as detailed and complex as the popular annual guide for consumers published under Hugh Johnson‘s name but long overseen by Margaret Rand. [Get yourself a copy.] And too often beer courses are often proprietary, without a published syllabus or independent peer reviewing in any true academic sense. And beer (sorry to break it to you) is simply not “every bit as complex and nuanced as wine“* – especially in these days of adjunct focused, easy-to-please kettle sours and fruit sauce variants. But do you care? No! As Jeff says, the best of the many beer courses you can take online or at say a community college are very helpful entry points especially for ambitious brewery and bar staff but it is self guided study that creates the best education you can gain – whether with wine or with beer. On you way! Hit the books. If that’s your thing. If not, have a beer.

And… there are still no drunk elephants stories for Stan again this week. Just a drunk monkey on the loose in Indianapolis which… makes one wonder whether this is really news:

A monkey named Momo is on the loose in Indianapolis — and one neighbor reported seeing the simian sipping a beer. Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department said Momo escaped from his owner’s home in the Ironridge Court area of the city’s east side on Wednesday and was subsequently spotted the Gate Drive neighborhood, about a quarter mile away. Police said they were unable to confirm whether Momo has bitten anyone while on the loose.

What the hell kind of good is a “monkey on the loose!” story if there isn’t any biting?!?! Fine. That’s it. As per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect. I have an update on the rankings. TwitterX is now really starting to drop in the standings. I am actually deleting follows there when I find strongly established mirroring accounts set up by favourite voices elsewhere. Now, for me Facebook is clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my friends and family) then we have BlueSky rising up to sit in a tie with Mastodon then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex hovering somewhere above or around Instagram with Threads and Substack Notes really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence just sitting there. Seven apps plus this my blog! I may be multi and legion but I do have priorities and am getting them in a row. All in all, I still am rooting for the voices on the elephant-like Mastodon, like these ones discussing beer, even though it is gardening Mastodon that really wins:

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts (barely!) and even newsletters to stay on top of things (though those things called “newsletters” where 1995 email lists meet the blogs of 2005 may be coming to an end of value… if the trend with so many towards the dull dull dull means anything… Lordy… it’s not my place to say but there’s at least two that seem think you still get paid by the word…) including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now much more occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary they can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s good. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast…… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube soon celebrating a decade of vids. And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

*Phillies v. Braves fourth inning update!
**It is an observation often paired with “I don’t know much about wine…” (Update: A point Jeff later sorta took pains to illustrate.) Sure, there are many excellent examples of fine and facinating beers but only a fraction of those found in good wine. Why? Vintages for one. In the twenty years since my first pumpkin ale, each decent winery has put out twenty versions of the same one wine and each winery puts out any number of wines. And then each one changes usually beneficially with understood time frames. There is so much to explore. Beer aging is now often sort of a joke – when it isn’t a source of familial accusation and humiliation!

The Beery News Notes To Help You Understand Canadian Thanksgiving Weekend

“Gather round family! It’s time to unwrap the boiled turkey from its flannel wrap!!” What joy, what child’s glee can match that wonderful moment when the bird is wrapped in Grandpa’s old work shirt from back on the farm. And, for the Canadian craft beer fan, the annual moment to gloat over how no wine can match flannel boiled turkey than a good old musty stock ale in a can. I love how even the branding is classic Canadiana passive aggressive around this time of year:

Extra Old Stock holds a pleasant grain character with a light sweetness. You will enjoy a medium-dry finish with a mild sweet aftertaste.

Damn right you will. You better. Speaking of things Canadian and agricultural, BA Bart has reported on the continental barley crop:

Total N. American barley harvest down 14%. Change mostly driven by lower yields in Canada (better than terrible 2021 but down from last year & 10 year avg).

It’s driven that way in large part because, as the handy graph provided shows, Canadian malt production passed the plummeting annual US crop about forty years ago from a combined high then of just under 1.25 trillion bushels to around 540 billion now. That’s a drop to 43% of peak production. That’s quite the statistic.

Next, an apology to Martyn whose story of the King’s Walden Brewery was published on September 23rd but went unmentioned last week. I note it now for many reasons – but expecially this really interesting bit near the end:

Fellowes went on to be one of a number of British entrepreneurs who invested in American breweries in the 1890s and 1900s: he was on the board of the Bartholomay Brewing Company of Rochester, New York in 1900, and chairman of the company by 1913, and by 1907 he was also a director of the San Francisco Breweries Ltd, an amalgamation of nine Northern Californian concerns. Fellowes was still on both companies’ boards when Prohibition arrived in 1919.

The key facts that I would include on any brewing history exam are: (i) British money poured into the North American brewing industry in the later 1800s seeking large returns, (ii) consolidation along with equipment upgrades was an important means to achieve those returns and (iii) how many of those amalgamated nine breweries were steam breweries… or did the British money pay for steam? Along with trains, this cash influx was a main cause of the retraction in the number of breweries, a phenomenon we see today in US craft but in reverse. Now we have many more breweries making less and less.

Note: If it was in my town, I would spend many hours at the place called Dave’s Pie & Ale House.

Interesting to note that the right-wing bigotry issues continue to dog cask ale in England* all of a sudden. Boak and Bailey unpacked the general nationalist scene:

But in these days of the supposed culture war ‘conservative’ isn’t just about your attitude to economics. It’s also about your stance on feminism, gender, racism, Brexit, vaccination… Nigel Farage, the most prominent champion of Brexit, made pints of cask ale part of his personal image, and the preservation of the crown-stamped pint glass a key talking point of the ‘Leave’ campaign. As beer writers are fond of pointing out, cask ale is uniquely British (terms and conditions may apply) and so lends itself to nationalist posturing. Cask ale is also associated with ‘proper pubs’. For many, a proper pub is the very dream and ideal. For others, it’s an idea loaded with danger signs: doesn’t it just mean white, male and possibly, or probably, racist?

The Drinks Business noted an odd response to the situation: ignore the obvious implications of a botched PR rollout and go straight for some bland messaging by the usual suspects all singing from the well thumbed hymnal, suggesting that the best way to deal with a problem is to deny the problem:

The messages, which came in thick and fast during Cask Ale Week, were in response to the sector feeling that cask assessor Cask Marque’s recent tie up with GB News had done little to amplify the positive aspects of cask. One key message that rang true throughout was that “cask is for everyone” – a turn of phrase which, following the debacle, became a hashtag on Twitter. What then unfolded was a swathe of messages from beer fans and voices from across the industry who set about beginning to preach about cask ale with raptures of how it was such a “perfect” and “comforting” drink, especially when enjoyed in a pub setting.

David calls on the British Guild of Beer Writers to separate themselves from the taint. No perceived groundswell out there. Wouldn’t be comforting. Nope. He addressed the question in his newsletter who uncovered some convoluted weirdness in the accounting department:

As a former director of the Guild, I believe that the members (beer writers) should hold the managers of the institution (the Guild) to account for having problematic sponsors (such as Cask Marque). But what is exactly the role Cask Marque has with the Guild, as their involvement isn’t mentioned on the Guild’s website? I was amazed to discover by the chair of the Guild that “all incoming and outgoing finances go through Cask Marque” despite them not being a corporate sponsor.

WTF??? Do many people know this? So much for an independent press.

Perhaps relatedly in terms of hidden obstacles but certainly interesting, then, to read how one arguably conservative… or is it progressive… institution, London’s 140 years University Women’s Club, which is even now released the legal team to try to achieve parity as reported in The Times:

The club was founded as the University Club for Ladies in 1883 by pioneers of education for women to provide a retreat from the stresses of life with a library and intellectual events. Since 1921 it has been based in a handsome townhouse in Mayfair… In a letter to the City of Westminster council’s licensing committee, they say that councillors must ensure “that the only traditional members club in London dedicated to women and their careers is given comparable privileges to those enjoyed by other traditional clubs dedicated to men”. The lawyers argue that the club “provides direct support to women in their careers, and offers access to a network of unparalleled female talent in a host of industries and fields”. The club is seeking to extend its licence which restricts alcohol sales to between 11am and 11pm and to allow for functions for non-members including music and dancing.

Dancing? Non-members dancing?!? Imagine what that could lead to… And speaking of yes, no maybe so… you can tell it’s no longer summer with the first of the calls for month long no alcohol campaigns. Here’s a story of how US drinker turned a dry month into a year:

The benefits are obvious. I have a higher disposable income, I’m sleeping a lot better, and I’m more focused at work. I’ve gotten through birthdays, weddings, dates and Pride season, all without a drop of alcohol — something I could not have foreseen 12 months ago. There’s also the freedom of not having to think about the next time I’ll potentially embarrass myself by drinking. Sobriety hasn’t solved all my issues. We often hear about the life-changing aspects of putting down alcohol, but doing so also has shed light on the other work I need to do on myself.

Sensible stuff. But the odd thing is… humans embarrassing themselves while not drinking. Or, if we consider the Bangor Daily News out of Maine, non-humans embarrassing themselves while drunk:

Wild berries and other fruit have reached peak ripeness and are falling to the ground. Cold nighttime temperatures concentrate the sugar in the fruit and when it warms up during the day, the sugars break down, forming alcohol. A very potent alcohol. No matter how high the alcohol content, animals and birds rely on the fruit for their fall diet. They consume it, get drunk and behave oddly. But wildlife experts warn that a tipsy animal or bird looks very much like a diseased animal or bird.

That story was just for Stan as once again the elephants have let us down. And surely not related, don’t forget that there is no such thing as a beer expert.

I have to say I am much happier with the new cartoonist at Pellicle, David Bailey.** I think I would have had to spike my tea with catnip to have a clue about the last storyline about cats meant. That right there is but one-twelfth of this month… last months… offering. And now that the monthly funnies are back to being about beer, the features essays continue to be all about all things but in the best of ways. This week we read about a subject that has gotten Alistair a bit weepy over the thought of a fishy snack, the prawn sandwiches as the Green Seafood Shack in Oban, Scotland written by Jemma Beedie:

Tony Ogden always knew he wanted to work in his father’s seafood shack. Known variously as the Green Shack, the Green Seafood Shack, the Original Seafood Shack, the Oban Seafood Hut, Oggy John’s, or any combination of that list, Tony’s shop is the highlight of any trip to the West Coast. Whether taking in Oban’s seaside vibe or jumping on a ferry over to the Inner or Outer Hebrides, it’s an essential stop. A modest shed around the corner from Caledonian MacBrayne’s ferry terminal, so popular it needs no true designation.

While we are out there in the wider world, a question: why does “Czech” get a pass as an adjective for international craft brewers but “Belgian” and certainly “Lambic” do not? We were warned off that sort of appropriation, were we not? Why is “Czech” transportable but “Belgian” is not? Jeff nips around the heels of the question a bit in this article about cloning the dark lagers of Prague:

As Americans have largely turned their backs on darker beers, Czech tmavý is a bit of a cheat code—looks dark, but tastes sweetish and chocolatey, with the smooth drinkability lagers offer. Tmavý—almost always described as “Czech dark lager” in the US—isn’t a giant presence, but it keeps growing incrementally. Yet even where it has found a following, the style remains obscure to most people, and unlike other ur-beers that define their style (Saison Dupont, Schneider Weisse, and Pilsner Urquell), the small brewpub that defines tmavý is unknown to any American who hasn’t visited Prague.

I mean we don’t call it “Belgian saison” when it’s made in another country, do we? And of course it is not called “Czech” went served in its homeland. An update to the etiquette might be timely.

Are blogs boring? Personally, I think podcasts are far more boring, seeing as you sometimes have to wait 45 minutes to find out how frikkin’ boring it is. Dr.J considered her own space and caught us all up a bit:

Blog posts have gotten boring. In fact, I got so bored of my own blog posts that I stopped writing them for the better part of two years. Listicles are mind-numbing. How-tos never feel quite in-depth enough. And the long form editorializing that I was so fond of when I still had one foot in academia has revealed its true nature–navel gazing, self congratulatory, social media obsessed grandstanding–with some much needed time and distance from the ivory tower. But beyond keeping myself entertained, I am a writer who is fond of useful narrative structures. And more importantly, I’m a firm believer that we are most effective when we stick to our strengths. Though I am no longer a college professor, my core strengths are still rooted in being an educator. And when the conviction strikes me to “do something,” my something has always been to leverage the spaces of teaching, learning, and storytelling for the uplift of the communities I belong to.

(I say blogs are merely public diaries… sorta… Dave Winer re-upped this about that on Wednesday.) So… what is the doing that is going to get done by Dr. J? A course called “Topics in Social Advocacy For the Craft Brewing Industry”! Excellent. Why? Because “the progress of social advocacy work in craft beer is in danger of stalling out completely or even rolling backward.” Yup. And good.

That’s it. Time to get the flannel shirt out of the shed and to argue with the neighbours about how to make the stuffing. Or even what to call it! Quel que chose dans le dindon? Stuffing? Dressing? Still, as per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect. How do they rank today? Well, TwitterX is still the first stop followed by (for beer, not cousins) Facebook but BlueSky has rapidly moved past the beery Threads presence. Mastodon also ranks above Threads with IG and Substack Notes really dragging and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence just sitting there. So the rankings are T/X, BS and Masto maybe tied, then Threads with IG close behind then Substack Notes and Patreon at the bottom. Seven plus a blog! I may be multi and legion but I do have priorities. All in all, I still am rooting for the voices on the elephant-like Mastodon, like these ones discussing beer, even though it is gardening Mastodon that really wins:

*I say England as Scotland, land of my peeps, has its own tiny batch of whack jobs who go a’courting the same nutters: “A press release from the channel said: “Over a pint [Farage will] debate the tough subjects of the day with guests including representatives from the Alba Party, the Conservative Party and GB News presenter Neil Oliver. “He’ll also host a live Q&A with the audience which will be broadcast live across the UK on TV and radio at 7pm [on Thursday April 20].” It is understood that an Alba “activist” will be on the show.”
**…no relation…

The First Tentatively Autumnal Beery News Notes For 2023

Lots going on this week. I am a bit surprised that there is a lot going on this week. Not a lot of good stuff, to be honest. “Good” in the sense of rewarding, interesting and new. See… umm… that which is going on includes some goings away as well as some goings on and some other stuff the needs to be long gone. Raspberries are still going on, however, I can tell you that. Look at that! That’s really good. That’s just out by the shed. Mere feet away. You know, September is ending with warmth in the low 20s C as well as a bit of a drought. Both welcome and a bit odd. Still nothing near frost forecast out into mid-October.

Speaking of things which are welcome and maybe a little odd, Martin guided me to a new beer blogger, the Beer Moose (no, I don’t know) who is covering the pub scene in Cambridge, England:

Is this something I’ll forget to do or give up on in a month’s time? Maybe. But I’m going to try! I’m also not doing this for financial gain, but if you fancy giving me a big bag of money for writing about something then I’ll likely do it. Where does the name Beer Moose come from? Is it linked to Cambridge United having Marvin The Moose as a mascot? Well I like beer and from an early age my sister called me Moose, it kind of stuck as my family nickname. The Cambridge United bit is just a coincidence. Let’s see how this turns out.

Now I know! Welcome aboard! And, also always welcome, Liam has shared another of his pieces on Ireland through the lens of 50 distinct brewing artefacts, this time (a bit of a cheat by my math) two objects:

These are the last relics of what was a huge industry of the past, where most of the beers consumed on this island were served in pint, half-pint and one-third-of-a-pint bottles, and when bottling companies as well as the publicans themselves bottled huge amounts of the output from Ireland’s breweries… So in most of Ireland the bottle was the most common way of drinking beer both at home and in the pub, but our love for the pint bottle is a relatively recent affair, as the half pint version was the most popular way of serving most beers for decades here, and certainly for a long period after the formation of the state in the 1922. It remained so until Draught Guinness and other draught keg beers became popular, and took over the pub beer sales in most of country. So these bottles -especially the smaller size – would have been a familiar sight in pubs, grocery shops and homes throughout Ireland.

Speaking of Ireland (…you were, weren’t you? I know I was…) the Beer Nut* there situated has reviewed** some fruity drinks from Lithuania which attracted these firm conclusions:

It doesn’t keep the beer from being quite boring, but at least it gives it some level of character. I guess I should be happy it’s not a sugary mess, but I don’t really see the point of it… I will award it some credit for not tasting like toothpaste, but it’s also not far off it. I think the concept is sound but the execution isn’t great: everything should be brighter and fresher-tasting, even allowing for the ten months it had been in the can… I don’t know if the brewery has other versions of this but I think the recipe could be a good fit for all sorts of other fruit. Sometimes the crazy recipes work, and sometimes they don’t. Guesswork based on the description is pointless.

I also mention the firmness of conclusion due to my own unhappy conclusion which I shared at Boak and Bailey’s last weekend. I don’t really don’t like to do that (a fact which some of you may be surprised to learn) as it comes across as such a downer in this discourse… except, however, that this exactly the point that needs to be made and what sets The Beer Nut* apart. I wrote:

“…which are all very well made of course…” Not a comment on the post as a whole – but there’s the issue with taking beer cultural serious right there, neatly summed up. Nothing in human experience qualifies for that sort of blanket statement.

No need to go hunt out what I was responding to, given that this sort of flappy flap flap is such a pervasive understanding of what is appropriate when discussing good beer – and yet it’s the opposite of what we get from TBN. We need to be aware that the centralized, homogenized and definitely authorized “Hooray for Everything!” approach circa 2009 may as well be a call to “Keep Craft Dull!” I mention this also because of the really odd revisionist piece posted at GBH this week that wants to reverse engineer (again) the history of US craft, even as it now lays in splinters about its feet, to praise those who frankly wielded the hatchet on their way out the door:

Ogle has also tracked this fracturing. She points out that for decades, the Brewers Association (BA), under Charlie Papazian’s leadership, was as much a unified craft beer marketing and public relations organization as it was a lobbying group. The BA was also an unofficial kingmaker, elevating certain figureheads to speak on behalf of craft beer to the public and the media. She calls the BA “the axis” that oriented the craft beer industry for 25 years. “It was a smaller pool, so very flamboyant people like Greg Koch [of Stone Brewing] or dead serious people like Jim Koch [of Boston Beer] and Kim Jordan [of New Belgium Brewing] and Carol Stoudt [of Stoudt’s Brewing] rose to the top,” Ogle says. “I get the distinct impression that the BA’s role is now lobbying more than marketing and PR.”

(Note: the BA under Papazian has been around for just 18 years.) For my money, many of those named in large part represent the fantastically unfortunate cult of personality which, yes, may have revived US microbrewing’s fortunes after the slump and scandals through (i) the formation of the merged BA as PR voice around 2005, (ii) the shift from micro skills to craft evangelizing in the parlance and (iii) the adoption of haigiographic leader praise comms. None of this has to do with Maureen Ogle’s correct historical statements (including the telling use of “unified”) yet… framing them in a larger story that suggests a lost Golden Age has passed (rather than a botched plan by a few to control the marketplace, to achieve the 20% in 2020 for big craft, to sucker the new entries and inflate costs to the consumers) is, well, really not all that palatable given how we now know these times and the players also watched as industry wide bigoties and false great white male hero narratives continued while plans were being made to cash out were being prioritized. It’s all one: making that money and having a sweet sweet comms team structured as a trade association. Thank God for the return in recent years to the actually small and skilled – the nanos and the taprooms – which has sent off that ugly era and opened up the trade to some fresh air. Still… a bit depressing seeing that these three particular voices are losing interest due to the lingering pong. But we can all understand why they’ve lost the love. Which leads us to this week’s piece in Pellicle by AJ Cox, I suppose. Yes, I suppose it does:

We are potentially on a slippery slope of exclusion and exceptionalism that is being enabled by people who are focused on building reputations built on marketing, hype beer, and the extreme hero worship of both legendary head brewers and “beer experts”. The awards, the accolades and the influencer culture surrounding beer are not inherently problematic on their own, but as we examine the impact on real people and the demographics of taprooms we can conclude that there are unintended consequences as we strive for elitism in an industry whose main product is a foodstuff that was originally made and consumed by the working class.

Excellent stuff – but why “potentially” when “self-evidently” will do? Hmm. It all makes clear that, as David Jesudason points out, taking a supposed neutral stance is just another form of complicity (as the Cask Ale Week folk learned this week):

…this is where a ‘neutral’ industry body found itself when it was approached by GB News to help promote cask beer by filming a piece with the White Lion pub in Beeston, Nottinghamshire. By not taking an anti-racist stance it allowed itself to be attached to a far-right operation that on the same day spouted conspiracy theories, misogynist bile and the usual attacks on anyone who isn’t a white male of a certain age. Any low level due diligence on GB News would bring to light its various platforming of hideous voices, its numerous Ofcom investigations and its vitriolic campaigns against protected groups, such as the trans community.

Exactly. What a mess! Still… there is good out there. Which makes the piggish bigorties so irritatingly unnecessary. Matt, as he often does, gives hope in this opinion piece in What’s Brewing. There is an opposite end of that line to which global craft is tied, the local tradition:

Somehow, the combination of these pubs, and their welcoming atmospheres, combined with this quintessentially traditional beer, gave me those same feelings of both excitement and contentment I felt when touring American taprooms more than a decade ago. Perhaps this isn’t about getting older, in a numerical sense, but finding a different level of maturity in terms of beer drinking. When the new wave of American-inspired breweries opened in their droves across the UK, we called it “craft beer”. To them, being disruptively different to the norm was the point. As they’ve gotten older both these breweries, and the people, like me, who drank their beer, have realised that, actually, we had it pretty good all along. Traditional British beer, and the pubs that sell it, is the very essence of “craft” beer.

I might have concluded that thought a bit differently (ie “cask” is all that “craft” isn’t) but you can see the point. The stuff is quite nice in itself. And there are , of course, other lovely things as Martin* shows us over and over, this time an excellent essay with accompanying photos from the hometown of Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor of Motörhead:

It was very quiet. Two old boys studiously ignored me as I tried to gain the attention of the bar steward who seemed to be in the cellar. “Am I invisible ?” I wondered. I walked from one bar to the next, contemplating whether to cough or go “Hulloah there“, but I couldn’t muster either. In most situations like this one of the locals will intervene on your behalf and shout “Customer, Dave” (it’s always a Dave), but here I was studiously ignored for 5 minutes before being asked “You looking for someone ?“. Er, no, just a beer.

And Gary is still sifting for clues through the 1900s and came up with this interesting piece on British military drinking habits round about WWII: “Pink gin is the navy drink, scotch and soda is the army drink and beer is the R.A.F. drink…” But what is the drink of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports? One should write and ask.

And there is plenty of good advice being shared, too, to make you a more thoughtful consumer and less of a gate keeper – especially for those considering learning more about wine. Just look at this bit of info on being a better host sharing the good stuff when people you like are paying a bit more attention:

It’s easy to get eight pours out of a standard 75-cl bottle. Don’t worry about the level of wine in the glass; for maximum pleasure (swirling, sniffing and all that), no glass should be more than a third full. At a professional wine tasting – as opposed to drinking wine with food at a table – wine producers and merchants reckon on a good 20 pours a bottle. For a more social wine tasting, an early-evening get-together of people trying to learn a bit more about wine for instance, roughly 15 pours a bottle is a useful allowance for six to eight different wines. But that would make about half a bottle of wine available to everyone, and social tasters are much less likely to spit out the wine than wine professionals

And, perhaps even better, look at the gentle day that Barry had this week at the press making his cider and perry:

Anyone else who says they like working with bletted pears is either a liar or some kind of masochist. All other runs got 70L in 25 mins from each pressing. This paste has yielded less than 40 after an hour. I fucking hate it. Letting it run tho, I want 50 at least!

Such Joy! And how to figure out if you are getting the best information in your hunt for the best? As B+B noted a few weeks ago, the rules of scribbling behaviour offered by cellarman and writer, Steve Dunkley are valuable but perhaps more so is this observation:

I wanted to be a beer writer many years ago. But I got disillusioned by the articles I was reading. I knew the people and the background to the stories, but I had a completely different experience and view to what was being written by respected journalists. How could that be? Obviously I was missing something, so I carried on as a cellarman, and eventually as a brewer. But during those intervening years I learned what I was missing, or rather what I wasn’t missing. And that was different views.

That’s it. We want different views, we want a vibant and rish ecosystem. Yes, there is a massive bit of intertia between here and there for the most part – vested interests and the “I’m all right Jack” dullards. Will we get there? Who knows! But that’s one thing that keeps me reading. That and the spicy infighting. By the way, if you like spicy, check out the bad language in the lead up to a great interview on Beer & Bullshit this week with Troy Burtch of Great Lake Brewery in Toronto. Then check out the great interview.

But be honest: we also want all the agricultural news, like this:

The global supply outlook remains tight though, and quality too is in focus considering the difficult harvest for many across the EU and UK especially. In France, most winter barley has been meeting malting requirements according to FranceAgriMer. But specific weights are varying following stormy conditions over summer. Spring barley results look more variable. In the UK, rain at harvest caused difficult conditions and germination data varies by region. With harvests finishing up, more data will be coming available indicating quality of barley crops.

And here is the longer term forecast according to The Financial Times:

Atsushi Katsuki, who has headed the Japanese brewer since 2021, said analysis conducted by the company found that global warming was set to reduce barley yields and the quality of hops significantly over the next three decades, and warned of a beer shortage. France’s spring barley harvest could decrease 18 per cent by 2050 under the UN’s 4 degree scenario, the most severe, while Poland’s harvest would shrink 15 per cent. The quality of hops, a key component for the preservation as well as the flavour of beer, would decline 25 per cent in the Czech Republic, one of the world’s largest hop producers.

Fuck… what a drag. But on that cheery note… that is that! Finito!! Again!!! Unbelievably, still no new drunk elephant stories this week. I looked, I tried Stan. Here’s a vintage situation from Ireland of all places. And you can serve yourself under the sign of the elephant in Michigan… but it’s not the same thing.

Still, as per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect. How do they rank today? Well, TwitterX is still the first stop followed by (for beer, not cousins) Facebook but BlueSky has rapidly moved past the beery Threads presence. Mastodon also ranks above Threads with IG and Substack Notes really dragging and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence just sitting there. So the rankings are T/X, BS and Masto maybe tied, then Threads with IG close behind then Substack Notes and Patreon at the bottom. Seven plus a blog! I may be multi and legion but I do have priorities. All in all, I still am rooting for the voices on Mastodon, like these ones discussing beer, even though it is gardening Mastodon that really wins:

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters to stay on top of things (though those things called “newsletters” where 1995 email lists meet the blogs of 2005 may be coming to an end of value if the trend with so many towards the dull dull dull means anything) including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now much more occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast. There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube soon celebrating a decade of vids. And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

*…aka THE Beer Nut, aka The Beer Nut…
**also noted by B+B but no less noteworthy now due to that, your previous pre-notification.
***For the double!!

The Almost Sweater Weather Edition of Beery News Notes

See that up there? That’s the news of the week. Maybe news of the week last week but are you really the news of the week if you don’t stretch it out to two weeks? That’s a crop from Kat Sewell‘s image from Les Twits and it is one of many out there. Everyone is fascinated in the UK with blue and white cardboard suitcases apparently. On BlueSky, it’s the easy-to-carry box that makes the deal according to B+B… but then we learned of this sad take from one unhappy Pete:

You’re quite possibly right. However by contrast, the box I picked up was damaged and required two hands to carry it. I then had to transport it on my push bike. I ditched the box in the store bin and carried all 10 bottles (loose) in my back pack. It was quite heavy.

Update: there was a yesterday post on Belgian Smaak by Eoghan that Jordan pronounced “It’s some of the best writing I’ve read this year on any subject” so I better include a link here. It’s on the Belgian tram line I believe I mentioned a few months back. But Eoghan has way more detail in his story “Flavour Track — A Culinary Crawl On Belgium’s Coastal Tram“:

…my early morning train from my home in Brussels—skating past wet, flat polder fields with pitched roof village steeples occluded by an early morning mist—terminates in the village of Adinkerke and its well-proportioned brick train station. From here, the sea is a 45 minute walk through corn fields and acorn-strewn dunes, where the entrance to Belgium is marked by a Leonidas chocolate shop housed in a former customs station. By the time the train pulls into the sidings at Adinkerke the mist has congealed into a fine rain. Fortunately, there are already two trams waiting to start their journeys up the coast.

Nice! What else is making folks happ-happ-happy? Kids in pubs? Really? This spot near Manchester apparently hopes so:

It’s wonderful to head out to a countryside pub for a cool drink on a sunny day – but for those without a car, public transport options are often quite limited in getting to some of the region’s prettiest villages. But it’s not something you have to worry about when heading to Mobberley in Cheshire – where there’s a brilliant village pub right next to the train stop. The Railway Inn (in a nod to its convenient location) has been widely acclaimed with both CAMRA beer awards in recent years, as well as with rave reviews from visitors on Tripadvisor. Reviews from this year hail it as a “hidden gem” with its huge beer garden and brilliant play areas for kids. The pub also boasts its own bowling green.

Seems like a huge investment on the pub’s part. To make youg families happy. Kids are great. Right? Not always if the news out of New York City is to be believed:

A crime tale straight out of Charles Dickens is unfolding in the Big Apple — with adults “directing” children who appear no older than 10 to steal from unsuspecting businesses, witnesses told The Post. The chubby-cheeked crooks have terrorized bars on the east and west side of Manhattan and Brooklyn for months, graduating from snatching money in unattended bags to stealing cash from open safes in at least two watering holes in the last few weeks, according to workers and owners. In many cases, the kids at first try to solicit money to raise money for their “basketball team,” and then run amok.

OK, what else… is this a bad idea or a good one? Announcing you are raising pub prices to deal with those times of the week with busier workloads?

Britain’s biggest pub chain has started charging its customers 20p extra for a pint during busy trading periods. Stonegate Group, which owns more than 4,500 pubs across the UK, has begun adding a surcharge at peak times at 800 of its sites across the country. A ‘polite notice’ in one Stonegate pub said ‘dynamic pricing is currently live in this venue during this peak trading session’. The sign says the surcharges will pay for extra staff, extra cleaning, plastic pint glasses, and ‘satisfying and complying with licensing requirements’. The notice explains that ‘any increase in our pricing today is to cover these additional requirements.’

It’s referred to as dynamic pricing and it is not receiving a warm welcome: “Tom Stainer, chief executive of the Campaign for Real Ale, a consumer group, called the move troubling…” Wow, there’s a strong statement. The proprietor of the Ypres Castle himself is not clear on the point at all and goes even further: “It’s utterly weird, isn’t it. Surely the thing to have done was to raise prices overall but introduce long happy hours, achieving the same thing but spinning it positively.” Wetherspoon pubs are doing the opposite – lowering the price – but just for one day:

It’s that time of year again when all Wetherspoon pubs slash all food and drink by 7.5 per cent. The annual move is to highlight the benefit of a permanent VAT reduction in the hospitality industry. And that means that if you pop into a Wetherspoon’s on Thursday, September 14, then, to mark Tax Equality Day, you will get some money knocked off. That means a customer who spends a tenner will only pay £9.25 for example. Wetherspoon’s founder and chairman, Tim Martin, said: “The biggest threat to the hospitality industry is the vast disparity in tax treatment among pubs, restaurants and supermarkets.

And while you are out there looking for bargains, just be clear about the rules:

This is incredible. A Wisconsin bar offered free drinks if the Jets lost. After Rodgers went down, they started running up their tabs. The news was live when the jets won in overtime and everyone realized they had to pay.

Finally on the question of value (and by the way is it is so great to have gotten to the era that we can talk about value without some semi-pro consulto-journo beer writer jumping in to play the broken record “you can’t put a price on experience!!!“) – finally on the question of value… Boak and Bailey asked about the linger legacy of value pricing at Sam Smith’s:

When people on Trip Advisor are still advising tourists to go to Samuel Smith pubs for good value food and beer, however, there’s clearly a mismatch between reality and reputation. We might also be more relaxed about these prices if we felt they were covering the costs of a good pub experience but… Dirty glassware. Glum service. Grim atmosphere. Evidence of a death spiral, perhaps?

Spicy!!! But enough of your obsessions with filthy lucre. Time to go all ag and to that end Stan has reported in from the hopyards on the effects of climate change before taking a bit of a break over the next few weeks:

The photos at the top and bottom were taken in USDA research fields near Prosser, Washington. The babies in the seedling field (top) are cute, don’t you think? The odds are very much against them ending up with a name and being used to brew beer. But if that happens, farmers will know they are agronomically prepared to survive in a climate wild hop plants in Mongolia did not know five million years ago. A constant topic of discussion last week was the Great Centennial Disaster. In recent years, farmers in the Yakima Valley have harvested about seven to eight bales of Centennial per acre planted. This year, some fields produced only two-plus bales per acre. Not every field was such a disaster, but when the USDA releases harvest data in December the results will not be pretty.

More on this phenomenon in The New York Times where Catie Edmondson providing extended coverage from the hop fields of Spalt, Germany:

The plant is so central to the town’s culture that signs advertising “Spalter Bier” can be found on nearly every street, many of them hanging from the half-timbered, red-roof houses that were built hundreds of years ago to store and dry hops. But the crop and those timeworn traditions are being threatened like never before. The culprit is climate change. The promise of a warming, drier climate has dealt a brutal hand to the hops industry across Europe. But it has been especially ruthless to Spalter, a crop that has sustained this tidy town of 5,000 in southern Germany for centuries.

And Martin continues his quest for pubs but took a break to go to a rainy music fest where he and herself still found their way down country lanes to a pub:

One of the annual traditions at End of the Road, along with watching Mrs RM put the day tent up while we watch and spilling curry down our new T-shirts, is a half hour walk along the narrow lanes to the Museum for a pint of Sixpenny’s 6d Best in a proper glass. Yes, missing last food orders (which seem earlier each year) is also a Retired Martin tradition. So this time we earmarked Saturday lunchtime for a visit, and with the promise of morning WiFi we set off at 10:30 on the “jumping into hedge to duck incoming lorries” routine. It’s worth it for the thatch.

Nice. Similarly but without all the hassles of the actual travel, Gary continued his wanderings around the pubs of the UK in the mid-1900s with this post about a 1940 exhibition of paintings at the National Gallery in Britain on the Blitz including this scene from Wales:

Perhaps, then, the pub next to theh Masonic Hall was St. Ives, also known as St. Ives Inn. Or if not it was presumably one of the other four known to have traded on Caer Street before 1939. Whichever pub it was, one can only hope that it wasn’t occupied when Hitler’s bomb fell. The Masonic Hall, for its part was not occupied; Swansea Masons had shut its doors a few years earlier when they moved to a new location.

It reminds me of how common “getting blitzed” is for slang among my pals. Speaking of which, Cookie wrote a post this week, about the Hillgate Mile pub crawl in and around Stockport:

The hillgate mile was many years ago an iconic pub crawl in and around Stockport. A strip with a high density of pubs that had come about to service high density housing and factories in the area. Much of that housing had become flats and many factories closed and with it the need for so many pubs. The area and its pubs was in decline when I first encountered it and whilst now there has been a revitalisation of the area with new build nicer looking flats there will never be demand for that number of pubs again. It was noted not only for the number of pubs but the variety of brewers that owned pubs under the tied system.

His remembrances about these sorts of endings are worth the read. And reminded me that a few weeks ago, I cast doubts upon the notion that in Britain “Cask is the only beer poured beneath the bar where you can’t see what’s going on and this greatly adds to the uncertainty around it.” Is it really about the show that draws people into pubs, that they are now missing out on? Well, a form of that notion appears to have maybe crossed an ocean if this observation in GBH is to be believed as a major factor in the continuing decline of draft… something that has been on the steady decline for decades:

Draft beer, even when brewed by a multinational beer company, absorbs context from its setting: the bartender who poured it, the adjacent guest on the barstool, the glassware in which it’s served. Adding a humble orange slice to a glass of Blue Moon elevated the way millions of U.S. drinkers thought about beer. In packaged form, beer has fewer tools to pitch itself to drinkers. It works with the same set of variables as any other beverage in a can or bottle, whether wine or pre-made cocktails or hop water.

I am pretty sure that is not the problem, people no longer hankering for an orange slice and a stranger on the next barstool. Again, its only about the relative value proposition and, as with cask lovers in the UK, dive bar beer drinkers are just not as big a part of the population, maybe just because they have found something else to do. Sober up. Collect stamps. Get a happier family life. Netflix. Something. I am also very mindful of the frank words of Katie Mather in her newsletter The Gulp! this week on the closing of her bar Corto:

I want to be clear about the reality of opening a bar like Corto in a small, rural town—even one as permanently lauded in the national press as being the “ideal beer staycation destination”. Last week we opened and drank three bottles of Riesling worth £100 because after three attempts to drum up interest in a tasting event (which we have been repeatedly told by well-meaning folks that we should do more of) only two people came along. The world of premium and craft drinks is not what it was, or what we believe it to be. I sell three times as much basic organic Tempranillo as I do orange wine or sour beers.

In another sort of ending, Andrew Cusack in The Spectator considers the his low alcohol coping mechanism in his remembrances of Sam Smith’s now departed, his beloved Alpine Lager:

Sam Smith’s Brewery has sadly failed to realise the strength of Alpine’s weakness. There has been a downward trend of the main lagers, such as Carlsberg which has reached 3.8 (and which has announced they will move down to 3.4 this year as well) and Fosters at 3.7 per cent. But almost nothing exists in the peak quaffable-but-still-tasty range of 2 to 3 per cent. Many of Sam Smith’s loyal customers will mourn the passing of the Alpine decade and hope that some other brewery might take note of the open territory before them.

Over at Pellicle, Ruvani de Silva has written about a lager in England which is dedicated to the Windrush generation as well as the people and the process behind its development:

If that sounds like a lot to pack into one beer, that’s because it is. Robyn, however, talks passionately about how immigration has shaped her, her family, and her community, consolidating and distilling her thoughts and feelings into brewing a beer that she wants to speak for those experiences, and to resonate with those both inside and outside the Caribbean diaspora.

On this side of the Atlantic, the hippytown of Guelph, Ontario has announced one of the more attractive beer bus deals as Jordan explains:

Running September 16, October 14, November 18, and December 16, the beer bus is a great solution to the logistical problems behind your next afternoon pub crawl… Five breweries, more than five dozen beers on tap, two full food menus to choose from, buses running once an hour, and the best part is that it’s free! Donations are accepted on the bus and proceeds go to a scholarship fund at the Niagara College Brewing program. If you can think of something better to do with your Saturday afternoon than go to Guelph, I’d like to hear about it.

Free! Free is good. Except free runnings. Unexpectely free. Which leads us, finally, to the saddest drinky clinky video of the week: “Streets flooded with wine after tanks burst at Levira, Portugal distillery.” Here is the background:

This is the moment a flood of red wine surged down a street in Portugal after two massive tanks with enough booze to fill a swimming pool burst. Winemakers Levira Distillery were due to bottle the 2.2 million litres when the giant tanks suddenly gave way in Sao Lourenco do Bairro on September 10. Video footage showed a huge, fast-moving river of red wine flowing down a hill and around a bend as baffled locals look on.

Yikes! And that is that. Done. Still no drunk elephant stories this week. I looked again. I really tried, Stan. Still, as per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect – even including at my somewhat quieter than expected Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Got on BlueSky this week and added it to my IG, FB, X, Mastodon, Threads, Substack Notes and a deservedly dormant Patreaon presence. I am multi! I am legion!! Yet totally sub. All in all, I still am preferring the voices on Mastodon, like these ones discussing beer:

The Back To School 2023 Edition Of The Beery News Notes

Corduroys wiff-wiff-wiffing down a linoleum floored hallway. That’s all I can recall from the first week of Septembers if I am being honest. The rest is all a mixed of high school anxious misery and stupid fun – except that sound of new cords on the first day of school. Was I really into beer that much then? Were there September beers before undergrad? I have no recollection other than drinking the one I was handed at some kid’s unfortunate parents’ place, grabbing whatever we could sneak out with while their folks were off shopping. Someone else’s hell to pay when it was all found out later. September beer was a thing in the 1620s. But what was it? Apparently went with Cheshire cheese. That September beer post also has one of my favourite harvest time images, from 1680:

In husbandry affairs they are very neat, binding up all sorts of grain in sheaves; they give the best wages to labourers of any in England, in harvest giving 4 and 5 shillings for an acre of wheat and 2s. a day meat and drink, which doth invite many stout workmen hither from the neighbouring country to get in their harvest. So that you shall find, especially on Sundays, the roads full of troops of workmen with their scythes and sickles, going to the adjacent town to refresh themselves with good liquor and victuals…

Ahh, harvest at the time of mellow fruitfulness… as I blogged about twenty years ago* yesterday. September is also the time when craft beer in the US apparently hits its highest share of the overall market. I know that this is the case because BA Bart posted the helpful chart right there up at the top of this post to confirm that fact. It also confirms that craft beer’s share is down overall something around 2.5% from 2018 to 2022. Which may explain why those breweries and bars are shutting. Yet it also shows that the share in September 2022 was about the same as July 2018. Is that important? Dunno. But it does somewhat create that discussion with many points of view my authoring team leader Carlo Devito triggered over at FB:

Call it a contraction. A correction. A classic cycle of Boom and bust. Whatever. But you are spot on…yes. My % is off but my numbers are correct….I feel. I’ll stand by 1,500 to 3,000. Remember. I’m including wineries and distilleries in this. Not just breweries. This is all craft beverage businesses.

More tiny breweries making their living making less beer? Could be. Seems a reasonable next reality. And Pete Brown asked a good question this week which received plenty of response about the realities of the past:

Question/discussion time: in general, but specifically in brewing, does heritage really matter? Without progress, everything stagnates. But is there value in remembering the past, and encouraging others to do so? If so, what is it?

My thought in these matters? Change is constant – but that still can’t explain bad ideas. It can be a bad idea just to cling on to heritage just as much as it can be a bad idea to run from it. No doubt those workers in 1680 would love the labour standards we enjoy today. Me, I responded that in the late 1800s new brewing techniques in North America were leading to new forms of beer, plus mergers and many closures which often now blamed on temperence.

Then as now, the breweries which didn’t move with the times were the ones left behind. In 1907, one Ontario old school holdout’s beer was tasted by someone hip to the new ways: “not at all nice and had a pronounced old, harsh flavour… devoid of character in every way…“** Sounds a lot like 2023 looking back at 1998. Or 1955 looking back at 1907 for that matter. Stagnation. Perhaps that old, harsh flavour could be recreated as Old Stag Pale Ale! Speaking of changing reality if not “de void” we see that The Beer Nut was frankly surprised after encountering a couple of NA beers:

Honestly, I thought these would be worse than they were. They can’t be accused of going for the lowest common denominator or turning out non-alcoholic clichés. They’ve put the work in and may even be in the upper tier of this sort of product available in Ireland. Not that that’s saying much.

Speaking of new forms of things, Eoghan wrote about a very rare bird, the new gueuze from Belgiums newest lambic brewers, Danseart:

The Dansaert Gueuze is the culmination of BBP’s mixed- and spontaneous-fermentation Dansaert brewery project, a beer that’s been in the works since January 2020. But the Dansaert Gueuze – a blend of one-, two-, and three-year-old Lambics made to the Oude Geuze specifications set down in EU law – is not just a milestone for BBP. It’s a landmark beer for Brussels too, because it’s the first of its kind to have been made in Brussels by a new producer for several generations. Lambic, indigenous to Brussels and once one of the city’s dominant beer styles, was virtually extinct by the early 1990s. There was only two lambic breweries left in Brussels, and only one – Brasserie Cantillon – still making beer the same way as previous generations of brewers. In fact, such was the complete eradication of the Lambic tradition in the 20th century that it’s entirely unclear who preceded BBP as the previous newest Lambic brewery.

Neato. An odder ripple in the beerosphere was noted this week, objections to one brewery taking on an more unexpected focus than a new lambic or NA beers. Joe‘s giving a side eye. Matt was particularly ripe: “How is the grain being farmed? How is the enzyme produced? Who has actually been to the brewery in question and seen the process?” and then apologized. To help resolve matters, the most patient and polite even if too pressed and perhaps put upon Jessica Mason in The Drinks Business published a response to questions raised about one NY state brewery’s raw beer brewing process and a defence of the practice’s benefits:

After all, he hinted, there will always be questions the business will be have time to answer further down the line. Regarding the debates online and the push for data-driven evidence directly and immediately from his brewhouse, he said: “These are very valid questions but are a distraction from what we are doing, which is simply skipping the malting process entirely… In other words, like-for-like if you take one barley farmer and one brewhouse and you brew the exact same beer in the traditional way and you brew it our way, in that controlled environment — where all things are otherwise equal — then this is what you save: 350ml of water and 16g of CO2 per 500ml of beer served.”

Hey maybe it will work! You know, I wonder if being overly concerned about this sort of stuff should lead one to be concerned. It’s all about perspective. Someone tries something. Maybe it works. Things go on. Conversely and probably more in the too much perspective category, there was a passing of note at least adjacent to the world of clinky-drinky with the death of Jimmy Buffet. Never owned a record of his. Still, I probably heard and hummed along to “Margaritaville” in pubs or at parties as much as any other drinking related song out there. Easy enough to do. But this observation from Jason Wilson of Everyday Drinking really is quite remarkable… so I remark… or at least take note:

I’ve always believed we experience drinks very much like we experience the popular songs of our youth. An ounce and a half of booze, a three-minute song—ephemeral for sure, yet in the right context you may remember it your whole life. We know that no new song, regardless of how well made it is, will ever matter as much the ones we heard as a teenager. When I listened to those 1970s Buffett songs again this week, I was struck by how melancholy they are. I’m definitely not the only one commenting on this. There is even a meme making the rounds on social media that suggests if you drop “Margaritaville” into a minor key, it becomes very dark.

Much more in the major key, Beth Demmon continued her Prohibitchin’ series with an interview with Bex Pezzullo of California-based Sincere Cider and her wide ranging interests and back story:

It took nearly 20 minutes for Bex and I to get through chatting about the Hollywood writers’ strike, comparing how quickly our social batteries drain, how to make friends as adults, why we both prefer honesty over tact, and how prison populations artificially inflate town populations for tax benefits to even start talking about Sincere Cider. But honestly, who wants to hear about target markets and five-year sales projections when Bex is talking about working at Bonnaroo? But in talking about Bonnaroo—the annual music and arts festival in Manchester, Tennessee—and her experience having to clear out the outdoor furniture section at Target to construct a makeshift backstage for the musicians after an incident with some destructive raccoons, her personal values still managed to reveal themselves.

Brimming with positivity, David Jesudason’s piece “Ypres Castle, Rye—A Bastion From Hate” in Pellicle yesterday with is a great portrait of the world created by our old pal Jeffery John Bell including his approach to creating a great welcoming tolerant pub:

“It’s my house, and I’m the one curating,” Jeff tells me. “I pick the music. I pick the beers. The lighting, the decor—everything is deliberate. And to some extent you have to curate the conversation at the bar—I don’t police it—but you can steer people. If someone says something beyond the pale or outside the environment you’ve created I say: ‘I don’t agree with that’,” he adds.”

It’s a wonderful portrait about making and shaping space with some particularly lovely photos by Claire Bullen, like this one to the right. Contented lad. I like it so much I am going to put it on the Christmas cards this year.

Do you like wines? I know Jeff does. And would you like a short but handy starter guide to liking them more? Eric Asimov published one this week in The New York Times:

The basics remain, but in between lie incremental alternatives that may offer a richer selection but require a greater degree of understanding. Consider the options that now turn up on contemporary retail shelves or wine lists. You might be asked to choose from transparent whites or golden whites, orange wines ranging from pinkish to amber, rosés in pale or dark hues and reds that are light, dark or somewhere in between. Additional subdivisions further complicate matters. If you want a sparkling wine, would that be pét-nat, traditional method or tank? Do you want that red chillable? Or dense and heavy? Perhaps you would like an oceanic white, or would you prefer it to be mountain?

Speaking of coming to an understanding, Boak and Bailey wrote about being excited by a few beers recently and helped me with this trim description of that thing called an Italian lager:

Bearing in mind Italian Pilsner was basically a mythical entity to us at the start of this year, it struck us as absolutely convincing. It was extremely bitter and desert dry despite its 6.4% ABV. It had the requisite white wine quality with suggestions of elderflower and lemon. On a warm evening, after you’ve schlepped up Christmas steps, it’s exactly the glass of lager you dream of drinking. OK, so beer can still excite us, we’re not dead yet, we said.

That so neatly summed up my last Italo-Pils experience that I had a Pavlovian response, then a Proustian recollection and perhaps even Swedenborgian moment all at once.***

Finally, did you think there would be an agument being made for a revival of malty beers? How about an 1800 word argument like the one by Jim Vorel in Paste this week which carries with it more than a hint of suspicion and perhaps an implicit accussaion:

The expected “malt backbone” once referenced in styles such as pale ale increasingly disappeared, while surviving styles such as amber ale, pale wheat ale or brown ale found their hop rates increased and malt character toned down to appeal more to IPA drinkers. Porter and stout increasingly ditched actual malt-driven flavors for the wide world of desserty adjuncts. By the mid-2010s, we had entered an era where malt-forward flavors were being shunned by many drinkers whether they realized it or not, and we still find ourselves in this position today. This holding pattern has stretched on for almost a decade.

Bet September ales were malty. Good and malty, I bet. Just the thing, a spot of the old September.

And that is that. Done. No drunk elephant story this week. I looked. I tried, Stan. Still, as per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect – even including at my somewhat quieter than expected Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Got on BlueSky this week and added it to my IG, FB, X, Mastodon, Threads, Substack Notes and a deservedly dormant Patreaon presence. I am multi! I am legion!! Yet totally sub. All in all, I still am preferring the voices on Mastodon, like these ones discussing beer:

*Yikes! This today is me at 60 looking back at me at 40 looking back at me at 20… and finding a beer related anecdote!
**Which sorta points out how “heritage” is the collection and shaping and editing of only the bits of history we like. See: “Practical Notes on a Visit through American and Canadian Ale Breweries”, Journal of Institute of Brewing, 1907, Vol. 13, Issue 4, page 360 – 362.
***Roughly, the image is of a tree full of slobbering angels stuffing their faces with tiny butter cookies but going on and on about the butter cookies from before.

The Final And Totally Mailed In Beery News Notes of August

I have a new hobby. Doin’ nuttin’. After last week’s chores, we took off and wandered a bit around Montreal on the weekend and said hello to Leonard. Crescent‘s bars were bustling last Saturday evening. And we hopped over to Syracuse NY last Wednesday for an afternoon AAA baseball game, a driveby glance into the Loop Grill and some serious American snacks shopping to bring back to Canada but otherwise this summer vacation has been mainly about nuttin’. There should be ads on the TV about staying home and doing nuttin’ like one of those for visiting the Gulf States or Arizona. Except it’s about the backyard. I could monetize that. Become a backyard doin’ nuttin’ influencer. Post TikToks about it. Have a Patreon site about it behind a subscribers only wall. Except that would be doing stuff. And not nuttin’. I am too into nuttin’ to be doin’ something about nuttin’.

What has been going on? First, Pellicle‘s Wednesday piece is about a fairly large diversified English farm operation that includes barley and brewing in its mix of production. It’s a farm with a focus on something more essential – thoughtful care of the soil:

There’s one question which is unanswered: what does this do to the flavour of the beer? Duncan takes a moment to answer, frowning as he thinks of the right word. “Nothing,” he says. He thinks some more, then shakes his head as if confirming the answer to himself. “Nothing. It’s not necessarily about that,” he says. “It’s the ethos that’s gone into building it so you can talk about having environmental benefit and food in the same sentence. That’s the point of it.”

Somewhat similarly in the sense of place, Jeff has written about a relatively secluded micro in eastern Oregon and draws a useful conclusion:

This is perhaps the greatest advantage of remote brewing. In cities, brewers are aware of what people are doing around them. It’s almost impossible not to be influenced, to borrow techniques or discover new ingredients. In Baker City, Tyler and his current head brewer Eli Dickenson can easily drop into their own groove. Their customers know what they do and expect them to do it—and they don’t spend a lot of time at other breweries getting distracted by the trend du jour.

On the opposite end of the reality v. non-reality scale, it was brought to my attention by @DrankyDranks that a fraud is about to be perpetrated on the drinks buying public:

Couple of new non-alc brands on the horizon. White Claw 0% “non-alcoholic premium seltzer,” comin’ in 4 “full-flavor” variants at 15 calories per can with “hydrating electrolytes”: black cherry cranberry, mango passion fruit, peach orange blossom and lime yuzu. Expected in Jan.

The double negative has been achieved! Speaking of the potentially unecessary, care of Beer Today we may have also reached peak data point – an observation I make given the uncertainty I have as to the necessity of this level of detail:

…trading improved in line with the temperatures last week. There was a particular surge in sales in midweek, with Tuesday (up 10%), Wednesday, which was boosted by England’s semi-final victory over Australia (up 17%), and Thursday (up 15%) all in double-digit growth. But trading was more modest on Friday (down 3%) and Saturday (up 4%) as rain moved back in. Warmer weather lifted the beer category, where sales rose 10% year on year. Wine (up 9%) and cider (up 1%) were also positive, but soft drinks (down 2%) and spirits (down 4%) were both negative.

Does the well informed publican check the weather forecast before placing orders for cask deliveries or setting prices? “Hmmm… rain’s coming Friday, need me a happy hours special…” Maybe. Having once created a 15,000 cell Excel table to track (among many things) hot dog sales and visiting team placement in the league’s standings over six or eight years I am sensitive to the possibilities of such things.

Speaking of stats, France is paying winemaker to destroy some of their stock to cope with this drop in some markets – blamed by the BBC on an increase in craft beer sales:

European Commission data for the year to June shows that wine consumption has fallen 7% in Italy, 10% in Spain, 15% in France, 22% in Germany and 34% in Portugal, while wine production across the bloc – the world’s biggest wine-making area – rose 4%.

Lisa Grimm is posting at Weird Beer Girl HQ and this week comes to the defence of what she calls a trad bar in Dublin, Piper’s Corner:

I’m aware I’m on slightly dangerous ground here, as there’s absolutely a place for the shows aimed at tourists (if they are willing to pay for a specific kind of experience that’s keeping musicians working, why not?), and also because folk music is never static – it’s always evolving, so there’s no one ‘right’ way to play or enjoy trad tunes. Now, this doesn’t mean visitors are not welcome – not at all – just that it seems to be a more organic experience (for lack of a better word – and this is largely based on word of mouth, since you know I’m asleep by then most of the time).

Last Friday, Boak and Bailey posted a review of the new book Cask – the real story of Britains unique beer Culture by Des de Moor which by all accounts is a very good and comprehensive read – if for no other reason (though there seem to be many) than Moore’s willingness to share various points of view:

Though clearly a passionate fan of cask ale, he isn’t an unquestioning cheerleader and points out that it doesn’t work well for every style. American-style IPAs and sour beers, he argues, rarely benefit from cask dispense. He comes right off the fence when it comes to the price of cask ale: “[If] cask beer is to have a sustainably healthy future, its average price will have to rise in comparison to the pub prices of other drinks… One argument for cheap cask is that it helps drive sufficient turnover to keep the product fresh, but that effect has surely reached its limits when price becomes a barrier to maintaining quality.” For balance, he quotes others who disagree, and who worry about cask ale becoming an expensive, niche product, rather than an everyday pleasure.

And Martyn has embarked on a journey about journeying, writing a series of pieces on the value of giving oneself over to the pre-planned pre-paid beer bus tour, all under the umbrella heading “If it’s Tuesday, this must be Kölsch!” So far we have parts one, two and three with more promised. It’s a bit mind melting in the pace, one which may tax even Ron, but he shares a number of observations like this on why one might want to subject oneself to this sort of exercise:

…one big advantage of joining a largeish group of people on a European beer trip is that when you get to, say, a place like Cantillon in Brussels, where the brewery tasting room/bar has a large range of aged 75cl bottled beers costing up to 70 euros a (literal) pop, sharing those rare beers you may never get the chance to drink again among half a dozen or more drinkers cuts the cost per head dramatically.

Good point. And another sort of good reminder this week from The Beer Nut: “Slagging off hazy IPA is easy (and fun!) but well-made beers like this do make it a little bit harder to do.”

Heavens, they do things on a certain scale in Kenya when it comes to allegedly skirting the licencing laws:

A Chuka court in Tharaka Nithi County has issued a warrant for the arrest of Simon Gitari for failure to honour court summons over the alleged operation of an unlicensed brewing industry. The millionaire brewer, popularly known as ‘Gitari Boss’, is the director of Hakim Commercial Agencies which owns the factory located in Ndiruni village in Chuka Sub-County. On Monday, a multi-agency team led by Tharaka Nithi County Police Commander Zacchaeus Ngeno raided the distillery and seized 250,000 litres of illegal liquor.

Also somewhat irregular in expectations, Gary wrote an interesting piece on the intersection between pubs and the pulpit in mid-1900s England this week including this example:

The padre Basil Jellicoe (1899-1935) descended from Anglo-Catholic churchment and naval figures, and was Oxford-educated. He had no apparent exposure to pubs as a youth, in fact was a teetotaller. His pub interest was of the old-school missionary-type, inspired by doctrine and the Bible. If church adherents were to be found he wanted to cultivate the ground, and would not let prevailing notions of propriety get in the way. He also wanted to improve social conditions in and related to the pub. He started to operate pubs so he could have full control to promote this goal – the Church was henceforth in the pub business.

Katie wrote about one way of responding to loss through ritual in her most recent edition of The Gulp, one of the few drinks “newsletters” still holding its own:

Despite the tragedies of the past months, spending time with friends is always a celebration, and I intend to treat it as such. My main contribution to the evening’s events will be the wine we drink during feasting and the extremely technical/spiritual practice of “burning shit”. I need to choose carefully. It should be wine that’s good enough to change our fortunes and lift us up. Wine good enough to offer to Hecate, wine good enough to stir our souls and clear our minds. It also needs to pair well with a vegan barbecue.

One of my favourite stunned concepts amongst right-wing US fear mongering is the use of “Canada-style” when used as the ultra “woke” by the “freedom” folk… as in this story’s headline:

President Joe Biden’s chief adviser on alcohol policy said his agency may issue new guidelines that limit Americans to just two drinks per week. Dr. George Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), told the Daily Mail that he’s interested in tightening U.S. guidelines to match Canada’s alcohol recommendations, which say that both men and women should consider having only two drinks every week. Canada’s health department issued the recommendations this year under left-wing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Note: while publicly funded, the Canadian two-drinks standard is a recommendation of a private entity which is one part of a bigger and heavily leaning academic discourse amongst many of a variety of points of view, much also fueled in whole or part directly and indirectly by public funds. We also do not follow the Canada Food Guide all that closely if grocery store shelves are anything to go by. Note also: we live much longer.

Vinepair published an almost self-defeating piece on the role of celebrity and beer replete with branding consulting jargon which then veers off into a reality-based (perhaps even inadvertenly honest) view near the end:

Celebrity involvement will entice journalists to write about a brand once. But star wattage eventually dims as a selling point. “Someday we will not be new news anymore,” says Eight’s Campbell. Any fermented liquid must stand on its own merits, hitting that sweet spot of price point and pleasure. Convincing customers that they should shoehorn another beer into their crowded drinking calendar takes effort, a long play in a world that celebrates the fast windfall. “Even though you have somebody with a big mouthpiece, you still have to build a brand,” Campbell says. “There’s got to be a meaningful connection.”

And finally for Stan (and apparently on brand pachyderm-wise) we have the story of an elephant which did not get into the beer but still sussed out something else:

Placidly and professionally, the mammal sweeps the ground with its trunk several times before tossing up a nondescript black rucksack, trumpeting as it announces its discovery. Border police were already on the scene. The officers had arrived to escort the elephants out of a nearby village, reported China National Radio (CNR). Mindful of their primary duty, police waited till the elephants had made their safe exit before inspecting the elephant’s “gift”, reported CNR. The elephant did not disappoint.

There. A shorter post perhaps but my world is whole even if the news is a bit quieter this week. And as per ever and always, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect – even including at my somewhat quieter than expected Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Got on BlueSky this week and added it to my IG, FB, X, Mastodon, Threads, Substack Notes and a deservedly dormant Patreaon presence. I am multi! I am legion!! Yet totally sub. All in all, I still am preferring the voices on Mastodon, like these ones discussing beer:

The Mere Days Before Vacation Edition Of The Beery News Notes

Mid-August. What to do? What to do? Soon I should have that annual dream about having to go back to school, never finding my courses, finding it all too late to catch up and… why am I even here anyways… seeing as I have more fingers on one hand than I have years to retirement. It’s coming. Thoughts of autumn come in shades of brown, whether new corduroys or old leaves. Like these lovely images from Warminster Maltings, a clickable one of which is nipped and tucked to the right. But I rush ahead. Too far ahead. Plenty of green days still to come, right? Right? Better be. I have plans. Plans a plenty for the next couple of weeks away from the coal mine. Well, the office. The home office, half the time. But my shoes are generally black so you get the idea.

First – and as much as for equal time requirements as anything – one very interesting bit of the old vid I came across this week is a wonderful PR piece for a maker in the old coopering trade:

The special delivery of a 9000L wine foudre by Taransaud at Château de la Chaize near Brouilly. Very proud of our coopers! (sound on).

Sound on indeed for quite a display of how staves and hoops come together to hold over 11,000 sleeping bottles worth of the old Chat de Chaz, one of which sits nearby, sleeping with others in the cold and dark, waiting for my own Christmas dinner in a few years.

Neither sleeping or in the dark is Mudgie who has some shareable thoughts on why of all the pubs that are lost the Crooked Pub, apparently of little interest when opened other than for being off plumb, is now a national cause:

Over the past forty years, the pub trade as a whole has been in a long-term decline that has led to tens of thousands closing down. The reasons for this are down to a variety of changes in social trends and attitudes, although certain government actions such as the Beer Orders and the smoking ban have exacerbated matters. There is undoubtedly a profound sense of loss about this, even from people who never used pubs much… At times this can turn into a kind of vaguely-directed anger, as we are seeing here, and people are keen to look for scapegoats such as pubcos, developers, supermarkets and government. But the reality is that pubs have mainly been undone by social change, not by some malign conspiracy, and there is no remotely credible alternative course of action that would have made it permanently 1978.

And Stan had some good thoughts on the benefits of not chasing the tail that craft’s been diving after for all these years now:

I am left considering what it means for a brewer to be creative, or what it takes for a beer to be considered new, even novel. New Image Brewing, located in an adjoining town, currently has a terrific helles called Do Less on tap and in cans. It is brewed with malts from Troubador Malting here in Colorado, and thus probably tastes more familiar to me than to you. The malt flavor in Do Less is different than the malt flavor in Bierstadt Lagerhaus Helles, brewed less than 10 miles from New Image. Bierstadt Helles, to me, is pretty much a perfect beer. I’m not going to quit drinking it because I’ve found something new (and practically speaking, Do Less is probably a one-off). But new, interesting and good, to me, that is creative. It would be greedy to ask for more.

Indeed. And greed may get one more – or less – than one counted on. Which is why context – the big picture and the long view – is so important. And Andreas Krennmair has added to that total sum by publishing his new book, Bavarian Brewing in the 19th Century: A Reference Guide. He advises that it is available on Amazon worldwide, both as paperback and Kindle e-book and gives the friendly caveat:

Please note that this is properly nerdy beer stuff….

Which is a healthy approach to such things. One can embrace the lighter topic – the hobby interest – too firmly and squeeze much of the joy out if it. Turn it into a belief. Fortunately for a scribbler, the downsides of things can be as interesting as the up and gives opportunity for humanity to expose its gentle foibles. We have as the current example this summer’s continuing flow of opinion about craft’s collapse yea or nay as with this article “Is the craft beer tide turning?“:

“Distributors and retailers have been reducing their focus on distributed craft and searching for growth in other pockets, but there are signs that the worst reductions may be in the past”, the association said. Overall, craft brewers “continue to face economic headwinds on both business and consumer fronts”, it said. From a business perspective, borrowing costs continue to rise, and while input cost increases have stabilised, they remain elevated over previous levels. Meanwhile, mounting evidence shows inflation eroding consumers’ buying capacity.”

Not to mention mega-brewers selling off craft assets.* The news has reached as far as India. Heck, even those boosters for booze at GBH have been having their swings at poor old craft:

“To me, that experience of drinking in your garage with your friends is universal whereas Braxton maybe isn’t,” Sauer says. “When a craft brewery is presenting to a retailer, [the buyer] asks, ‘Can this brand travel?’ I wanted to remove some of those assumptions.” He also hopes Garage Beer can shake off some of the flavor expectations with which drinkers associate the term “craft beer.” Research Sauer conducted in partnership with the marketing department at Miami University in Ohio found that the top characteristics respondents linked to craft beer were “hoppy” and “heavy.”

“Heavy” – oooof! Is that the new curse word? The Beer Nut shared his thoughts on craft meets US macro:

I can safely say it’s true to type for this inexplicably craft-credentialed American industrial style, being dry, crisp and very dull. There’s a tiny hint of fruity lemon fun hovering in the background, but otherwise it’s a straight-up fizzy lager of the nondescript sort. I couldn’t leave things there.

Endtimsey. But, you know, for many of those who have invested deeply in the fading trade on way or another there is still talk of turn around. Could be. As with maybe fringy party politics perhaps, there is that sort of normal human desire for plucky redeption when the hero is cornered, the hope against hope that fuels the observations of alien sci-fi characters like Spock or Doctor Who. Which is what makes reading about the beer trade and beer culture so perhaps unhealthily yet tantilizingly compelling. Especially when it isn’t as firmly footed in fact as I fully expect Krennmair is in his new book.

Note: CB&B has published a handy newbie guide to all mash home brewing – a clear sign of a downturn as ever I saw:

Mashing grain is what makes beer beer. Yes, hops, yeast, and water certainly play important roles, but it is only through the mash, whether performed in your house or in the process of manufacturing malt extract, that the soul of beer is liberated from its starchy origins. Mashing grain is to beer as crushing grapes is to wine, as pressing apples is to cider, and as collecting honey is to mead.

Also note: twenty years ago this very week, I invented the “Molrona” during the 2003 black out. You. Are. Welcome.

Martin noted a sad ending with a photo essay from his recent visit to Corto, Katie and Tom Mather’s establishment, which I never saw myself but supported as I could:

It’s incredibly cosy, and welcoming, and tiny. One spare table upstairs, where the cheery chap brought our Wishbone and Thornbridge… Sorry it was a flying visit, Corto folk, you were lovely. Best wishes for whatever you do next.

Say hello to Tom Grogan, 92, now in his eigthth decade in the pub trade:

Mr Grogan, who is believed to be the UK’s oldest landlord, said he was not that keen on alcohol himself. He said despite pouring thousands of pints, he drank “very little” and had been only drunk “half a dozen times”. His career began 71 years ago, when started helping out in a pub in Rusholme after arriving in England. Seven years later, he got the chance to become a landlord, but said it meant he and his girlfriend had to make a quick decision.

You’ll have to read on to figure out what that decision was… unless you guess… because it’s not much of a guess…

Ron’s Remebrances take us this week back to Scotland in the mid-1970s when a radical change in licensing laws were brought in:

I was dead jealous when my school friend Henry, who studied in Aberdeen, told me of pubs not only staying open all afternoon, but until 1 AM. All totally legal. And totally due to the interpretation of a new Licensing Act for Scotland. Which, I’m pretty sure, wasn’t intended to liberalise opening hours to the extent that it did… I can remember visiting Edinburgh in the late 1970s and wondering at the continental-style opening hours. And wondering why the same liberal treatment couldn’t have been given to the rules in England.

GBH has run an interesting if ripe study of Coopers Sparkling Ale this week:

It can be tempting to dismiss Sparkling Ale as an early offshoot of Pale Ale, without any notable idiosyncrasies to help define the liminal space separating the two. Most contemporary stylistic guidelines highlight a focus on Australian ingredients, but beyond this and some more proscribed production techniques, the difference is minimal. Though delineation between styles has never been an immutable barrier, for those of us who grew up on it, Sparkling Ale has a highly distinctive character.

I had no idea that there were service disruptions in out next province to the left, Manitoba… keeping in mind as my excuse that the border is almost 2000 km and a timezone away. Seems like the government store is on strike with unequal consequences:

When Shrugging Doctor, a local winery and vineyard, said in July it would expand and move operations, its owners had no idea it was about to head into a devastating strike-induced limbo thanks to a labour dispute at the Crown-owned liquor corporation. While Manitoba beer producers have the option of distributing their own products — by hiring delivery companies to drop off merchandise to private vendors, bars and other sellers — by law, wine and spirit manufacturers aren’t allowed to do the same, said Shrugging Doctor co-owner Willows Christopher, who founded the business in 2017.

Matt is doing a good job keeping an eye on Mikkeller’s deek around the ethical implications of claims made against it:

I see Mikkeller are pouring at another U.K. festival this weekend, which is honestly absolutely wild to me. I feel like there was a real opportunity to create real, progressive change in U.K. beer a couple of years ago. But this is being moved on from in favour of the ££££.

No doubt part of their long term plan which seems to have been successfully pulled off if this admission from late July is understood. Easy to enough to foresee back in February 2022.

A poem by Justin Quinn was noted by the ever lyrical M.Noix this week that is worth saving and sharing… and thereby trodding all over intellectual property rights but for this bit of review… lovely… I have dreams also like that… and it even rhymes here and there. Solid second stanza letter “u”use.

Four weeks ago, I forwarded the news that Russia had moved to grab Carlsberg’s assets, you know, those assets that really should have been shut down when the invasion of Ukraine began but, you know, money. Well, now the brewery has spoken out:

The chief executive of brewing giant Carlsberg has said he was “shocked” when Russian President Vladimir Putin seized its business there. Cees ’t Hart said the company had agreed a deal to sell its Russian operations in late June, but just weeks later a presidential decree transferred the business to the Russian Federal Agency for State Property Management. “In June, we were pleased to announce the sale of the Russian business. However, shortly afterwards, we were shocked that a presidential decree had temporarily transferred management of the business to a Russian federal agency,” he said.

Well, lookie lookie. Why buy when you can take? Beware with whom you think you are doing business with, I suppose.

Note: the ever increasing subdivisions of beer expertise never ceases to amaze.

And finally what week would be a proper week without a story like this:

A “plague” of racoons have stormed a number of houses across Germany to steal beer and kill family pets. Households have been billed up to €10,000 after returning home from their holidays to discover their kitchens destroyed. According to Germany’s National Hunting Association (DJV), a total of 200,000 raccoons were killed last year in a bid to control the population.

Furry bastards! And – that is it for another week. Not a record breaker for length this week and, frankly, a few familiar sites may have been mailing it in from the beach. Plus all those awards! Which claim to pick global champions …while also reminding you that judging is nothing more than what a few folk thought on the day. Ah, August! And as per ever and always, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect – even including at my new cool Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Have you checked out Threads as Twitter ex’s itself? (Ex-it? Exeter? No that makes no sense…) They appear to achieved to make social media offer less and less. Brilliant… but I never got IG either. I still prefer the voices on Mastodon, any newer ones noted in bold:

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters to stay on top of things – including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now much more occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast. There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube soon celebrating a decade of vids. And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

*Revisiting a thought, we discussed two weeks ago how that portion of Ontario’s smaller brewers who are members of the trade association OCB have launched a new lobbying effort that has a bit of an odd goal: “Keep Craft Beer Local.” I say “odd” as the argument that seems to be being made is taxes are too hight therefore small brewers will have to sell out to… dum dum duuuuuummmm… strange folk from away. As previously noted: “If no changes are made to the tax structure, he and the Ontario Craft Brewers Association, say they fear more and more of Ontario’s craft breweries will be bought up and merged with foreign buyers. The association says it represents over 100 breweries.” This is an odd argument, as I say, seeing as international mega brewers are divesting themselves of their craft assets. I wonder if this is just an example of bad timing, the power points keeping up with the news. Perhaps Ben can help explain.

The Absolutely Last No Doubt About It Beery News Notes Of July 2023

It’s a very busy week. A good tiring busy week. Old pals are coming this weekend. Family visitors left yesterday. And a really tough bit of business negotiations at work Tuesday and Wednesday. Summer. Folk on the move. Including me. Which leaves me tired. But I am bouyed by some of the great beer reading out there this week. Last week was a bit dreary but not this one. I am all a bit… you know… excited by all the jam packed excitement. Practically rippling. As illustrated. Not like Gary. Gary is quiet. Alone. But not alone in being alone. If you know what I mean.*

Where was I? For starters we see that another great article by Alistair Reece of Fuggled fame has landed in Pellicle, this time about Virginia’s Black Narrows Brewing and how they approach the question of “local”:

Remarkably, almost 90% of his ingredients are sourced from his home state. The majority of his hops are grown about 50 miles down the shore from Chincoteague Island, Josh only brews with malt from Murphy & Rude Malting in Charlottesville, and for his Gose, he uses oyster liquor, the water from inside an oyster shell, sourced from local oyster shucking factories that would otherwise pour it away. The beer that’s perhaps most emblematic of Josh’s dedication to using local ingredients is his corn lager, How Bout It, brewed with an heirloom variety of corn called Bloody Butcher that has been grown on the Eastern Shore since the middle of the 19th century, and which Josh has become a steward of.

I like it. But… dangle, preposition, dangle. I bet it’s proper in the Gaelic. Gotta be, right? And in GBH, we have another excellent piece of writing from David Jesudason about the Jamaican-owned pubs of Brixton, London in the 1960s:

The majority of South London’s Jamaican-owned pubs were located on Coldharbour Lane, a major thoroughfare which runs between the neighborhoods of Brixton and Camberwell. It was a poor area even before members of the Windrush Generation settled in London, and with their arrival came depictions of the area as a ghetto by the white media, even though the newcomers were able to forge a strong sense of community. From the 1960s onwards, Coldharbour Lane witnessed a flowering of Black-owned businesses, especially in and around Brixton Market, including grocers, barbers and record shops.

Excellent. And The Mudgemaster5000 has posted a post with this interesting observation about thems who write about beer and how they may also avoid certain places:

The biggest enemy of cask quality is slow turnover and, while overall volumes have fallen, the number of lines hasn’t dropped to follow suit. There’s nothing like quick sales to paper over a lack of cellarmanship skills. But, while they may be fully aware of the problem, if the people who write about beer seldom experience poor quality themselves, it won’t seem particularly urgent to them. The battle for cask quality is being fought in the outlets that the beer writers and enthusiasts never visit. No doubt this Autumn there will be the usual round of hand-wringing about cask beer quality and declining sales. But, as usual, the industry will sagely nod, dismiss it as someone else’s problem, and move on.

Ron has been describing the English beer trade in the 1970s, including in this post on offerings you might see in an average pub:

Whilst looking for something completely different, I tripped over a series of images for pub price lists from the 1970s. The first thing that struck me was how short some of them were. A couple of draught beers and half a dozen bottled ones. A far narrower offering than in pubs today. The price list we’re looking at today is from John Smith. It doesn’t say that on it, but it’s pretty obvious from the beers. One word of caution. This looks like a generic list, rather than from a specific pub. Not every pub would have sold the full selection of draught beers in the list. Many would have had just a Bitter, Mild, Lager and a Keg Bitter.

Note: 13.5p for a wee Cream Sherry back then. Also note from today’s news: non-alcoholic beer for dogs and for children as well as beer in vending machines as we are told in The Guardian:

Anyone watching the Ashes at Old Trafford this week will have seen the EBars, a wall of mobile vending machines pouring pints at the touch of a button. They were at Manchester international festival last week too, where even those despairing at yet another ancient industry being dehumanised by technology couldn’t resist a pint of Amstel for £4. There are 40 automated EBar kiosks in the UK, popping up regularly everywhere from Murrayfield Stadium in Scotland to Twickenham in London. When Sam Fender played a series of huge homecoming gigs last month at St James’ Park, Newcastle United’s home ground, the EBars were deployed to quench the thirst of thousands of his fans.

What is the fuss? We had one of those in the workplace cafeteria in Holland back in 1986. Or at least one offering wee little Heinekens tinnies for a guilder or two. Speaking of history, Andreas Krennmair did a bit of unpacking this week, tracking the locations of the breweries of Bamburg Germany as described in Das Bamberger Bier, oder praktische, auf chemische Grundsä from 1818. He actually started out thinking that this was a job for our man in Amsterdam but then…

My initial plan was to just send Ron an email with a few corrections, but very quickly I realized that I should turn these into a proper map, not just for myself, but for everyone to look at… When I created this, certain patterns became apparent very quickly. The 65 breweries were not just spread out over the city, but they formed clusters. If you’ve ever been to Bamberg, you may remember how the breweries Spezial and Fässla are opposite of each other. This is not a happy accident, but rather a remnant of basically one big street full of breweries. Only these two breweries remain nowadays, back 200 years ago, the road that was then called Steinweg and is nowadays Untere and Obere Königstraße was home to a whopping 21 (!!) breweries, spanning over just ~400 metres.

Lumpy. Very lumpy. Unlike Stan who issued another edition of Hop Queries reporting on the front lines of the hop glut… which admittedly does sound all a bit lumpy:

It would take an historic disaster to wipe out the surplus of many of the most popular varieties. However, the difference between the Saaz harvest in 2021 (best production 25 years) and 2022 (half of 2021 production) is a reminder that #beerisagriculture. A wildcard this year in the Yakima Valley is “early bloom,” that is plants flowering early after an extremely cold April. It has been most apparent in Centennial, Simcoe and Cluster, but may also negatively impact the yield of other varieties. Adding to the challenge, Eric Desmarais at CLS Farms explained, is that “split bloom” usually accompanies early bloom. What looks from a distance to be one bine climbing a string may be made up to as many as six. What typically happens, he said, is the more advanced bines grow too tall before the longest day of the year and start flowering. “But the shorter vines stay vegetative and are on a more typical flowering schedule . . . and many times flower at the correct or near correct time.”

Yes, beer is agriculture. Not a mystery. Are these the great three sins in beer writing? – (i) brewery owner bios or BOBs, (ii) using a ten dollar word where a fifty cent one will do and (iii) when cornered, defaulting to vauge wanderings of the mind suggesting there is alchemy, magic or mystery in beer.**

Finally and speaking of which, this week’s point of view discussion was led by Boak and Bailey who asked whether beer felt boring. Their latest Substack newsletter includes subheadings like “The thrill is gone” and “Is beer just worse?” Jeff responded saying or at least effectively saying that if you understood beer on as many levels as he does you would understand. I paraphrase. And I jest. But I do disagree with this:

For a good decade, beer was incredibly exciting. Breweries opened like crazy, new styles were reshaping the landscape, and everyone was getting into good beer. For a decade, craft beer was the fun party and everyone wanted to be there. For those of us who got used to that mode of being—or who didn’t know anything else—2023 has the feel of the hangover after the party. We have vague regrets and our moods are dark. A world in which beer isn’t the coolest party in town must be a boring one in which nothing is happening. Time to move on.

See, having spent the last third of my life scribble around here I can confirm my own personal view (and the view of a lot of people if we are honest) has been that beer was actually not all that incredibly exciting at all points in time and that for the most part everyone was not getting into it at all. That was just how the trade promoted it. And the over reaching trade writers wrote about it.*** And, yes, some folks welcomed it. Certainly. But fifteen years ago good beer was also difficult to define as either craft or kraphtt and was already a couple of decades into fobbing off dubious awards. The groundwork was also being established for its own self-inflicted demise which really had hit its stride by 2016. So… it’s been rife with concurrent contrary tensions. Not so much a cycle as a constant pageeant of parallel but conflicting points of view. Yes, we do want to love good beer and good beer culture – but then we notice how utterly unlovable it can be. That all being the case, it is both interesting and dull… and shall always be. Which means both Boak and Bailey as well as Jeff are right – but which of course also means I am righterer. My only goal achieved. Again.

Roll the credits! As per, you can check out the many ways to connect even including at my new cool Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Have you checked out Threads? They appear to achieved to make social media offer less and less. Brilliant but I never got IG either. Don’t forget the voices on Mastodon, the newer ones noted in bold:

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters to stay on top of things – including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now more occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast. There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube soon celebrating a decade of vids. And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

*We note for those who come after us – though I must say I am not sure I ever really ever know what “vibe-check its off-times” really means.
**I am compelled to submit these observations into evidence: (i) “...a writer can change that story, totally take it in a totally different direction, if they so wish and are able to — bit more magical realism needed perhaps?” and (ii) “…there’s nothing wrong with mystery, I try to use it when I can for if you stuck to the plain facts with beer you would have writing on a par with that covering the drainage industry or the world of pallets…“
***I am reminded of a line from an email many years ago from a beer writer to me speaking of another beer writer “…you aren’t an idiot. I don’t think he is either, but he’s chosen this path that includes him making sense of the beer world for all of us. Which, of course, is impossible.” And, no I won’t.