Category: Ethics

The December Is Almost Here Edition Of The Beery News Notes

And… that was November. or it will be soon. From mowing the lawn to frozen ground in a mere 30 days. World Series to free agency. Stout sales go from “?” to “!” It’s good like that, November. Knows it’s place. The saddest month. Not cold enough to be bracing and clear like January. Look, I’ve already started to move on. Christmas pressies have been bought. Just have to see if they arrive before January. What else might arrive by then? A Christmas photo contest entry pro photographer Peter B. Collins in 2011 might give you some idea.

Now then… first up, a nice bit of work from Retired Martin this week, a photo essay on Whitelock’s in Leeds interspersed with witty tidbits:

All tables taken, but obviously I’d brought the fine weather with me oop north and you don’t get much better outside seating than this, watching life amble by and end up in the loos for the Turks Head, wondering where you are.

Note: I am pro-deposit for reservations.

Not to overload you with pub observations, Life After Football shared some thoughts on one funny gaffer in “Pickled in Branston“:

The Gaffer had a glint in his eye and when I said, “Can I have a pint of Bass?” He replied with “No you can’t – it’s all mine!” Clearly, a man after my own heart and with four other people in there at about 12.05 he has a base of local punters happy to roll in on a Monday. “I’ll get you that pint young man,” he said and when I said I’d not been called that very often, quick as a flash he replied “I’ve been known to lie!”

Har-har… har… And Boak and Bailey asked a couple of good questions this week, one in their newsletter but first, in a variation on the theme, this about memories of past pubs perfect:

We’ve been struck down by nostalgia lately and find ourselves yearning for a particular experience of the pub. Maybe it’s birthdays. Maybe it’s the emotional impact of the two weirdest years we’ve ever lived through. Or perhaps it was just that excellent pint of Young’s Special at The Railway in Fishponds in Bristol.

They were again a bit nostalgic in the monthly newsletter, this time for beer blogging days.

…in the UK at least, the growth in professional (ish) outlets has sucked up a lot of content that would previously have been on blogs. That’s great news for writers – they get paid! They get proper photography and illustrations to accompany their piece! And it gets promoted properly, too. A few years ago, everyone was fretting about the death of beer media, meaning print magazines. But we wanted that and blogs, not one or the other, right?

Well, no. Print writing can be narrow and often by commission. My take? It may not be so much about the death of blogs as the ascent of a duller sort of paid writing. Don’t get me wrong. Some is great but commissioning editors with creditors set parameters.* People with just an interest have gotten to project themselves as people with authority without the decades of Stan‘s experience or the miles Jeff puts in. Others writers – sometimes the better ones – got jobs, moved on or just ran out of imaginative takes on a limited niche topic.  

Yes, that is where we are. It happens. And when things are slow like they have been in 2021, we tend to move backwards hoping we are staying in place.  This year of almost entirely updated next editions is almost over but not until we have, tah-da, the personalized beer flavour wheel. Beer flavour wheels have been around for decades. I am not sure why I need someone else’s different beer flavour wheel. Never bothered with one yet. But beer flavour wheels have been around for decades so someone must have. Schmelzle‘s dates from 2009. Dr. Morten Meilgaard seems to invented them in the 1970s. I asked a related question a decade ago and still have no idea what the answer is.

Speaking of flogging, this year’s version of the GIBC advertorial in the Chicago Tribune has led to some astounding information, not least of which is this:

The “reserve” package is the one the beer nerds want — 9 Bourbon County beers, including the most limited brands aged in the fancy barrels, for $259.99.

Bizarre. Takes some convincing folk that these prices (and I suppose the advice itself) aren’t suspect – if not grand larceny.

And speaking of the more than a bit weird, the US magazine Esquire published a short opinion piece that led to a long list of complaints:

The first half of a beer is why we drink beer. The second half is an afterthought at best, backwash at worst. If you were to watch all the beer commercials from the beginning of time, you’d hear the words cold and refreshing over and over and over. That’s because marketing people aren’t that creative, and also because that’s what sells beer. No one drinks beer for the tepid second half….

Comments included: (i) No one in their right mind would say this about another foodstuff. “Feel free to toss that second half of cold pizza in the garbage…”; (ii) “You know you can order smaller pours if you want beer to stay cold the whole time?”; and (iii) “Like she had to meet a word count quota before she left for Holiday break.” Esquire has apparently claimed that this is a stab at satire which, if it is true, suggests that it is not actual good satire.

PS: never heard of him either. But it appears the status you are desperately wanting to achieve is so incoherent that it requires outside intervention. And tricks.**

That’s a bit of negativity right there. For a bit right up there. What caused that? Nostalgia? Getting away from the pubs? We need to get grounded. Beth Demmon takes us to the hear and now with the first in a series on the state of the water supply in Southern California where the ground is dry and how the San Diego brewing scene may be facing change:

In such a water-thirsty region, it’s imperative for beverage companies like AleSmith to maximize their materials through sustainability initiatives. Cronin says AleSmith is on a two-year track to become Pure Water compliant through the city of San Diego, which aims to provide one-third of the city’s water supply locally by 2035 by purifying recycled water. Considering that Cronin estimates AleSmith rinses 7,000 – 10,000 gallons of wastewater into the municipal system every day, that’s millions of gallons available for reuse.

I brushed against this topic in 2015 in my superficial way but this is seven levels better. Excellent described detailed research. Additionally and also in the present and the positive, Jordan wrote about himself and what he is doing in beer these days – and this time it all makes utter sense:

I would guess that I probably try somewhere between 500-1000 beers every year, not counting repetition. Beyond a certain point, professionally speaking, beer is content. It’s informational. My fridge is more than half full of obligational beverages that people have sent for review and which might end up on instagram or in an article. I probably won’t finish more than about half of any of them, because the point isn’t drinking them; the point is knowing about them. Beer contains calories, as the new pair of jeans remind me.

Good advice. And look! More good advice. Three ingredient cocktails. Sensible simple tasty booze. That’s positive.

What next? History? History is good. Edd the BHB on 1910 Nottinghamshire ales, the Warwicks & Richardsons range. Did they still sing the song 120 years later? More history? Graham Dineley posed the question of beer stone and prehistoric pottery and found fatal flaws in the research to date:

Many scholarly academic beer “experts” have never actually made beer, and so have no experience or expertise. Brewing beer is a particularly experiential process, where the subtleties and nuances are necessary and essential for the full understanding. Many of these “experts” confuse beerstone with calcium oxalate. 

Finally but not happily, this tweet got my attention from Ren:

The irony of being written out of beer history by women hoping to change beer history…

Reality again. I do wish folk would get out of the way. I was also disheartened this week to see another part of Black experience filtered (again) by GBH through the inclusion of the hand of someone from outside. This is a bit of the opposite of my recent experience with the Beer Culture Summit 2021 produced by the Chicago Brewseum. Hand over the keyboard and get out of the way. No amount of time or miles can replace the unfiltered voice of one who has been there and has something to say.

That’s it. A tough one for good pics this week. A bit of a hard row to hoe if we are looking for the captivating in beer writing. Every week can’t be thrilling. I suppose, that’s the way it goes. Still, check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and from Stan every Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Or is that dead now?) There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. (That’s a bit now and then now.) And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (which he may revive some day…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*Very tempted to go all Ogden Nash and spell it “paramitors.”!
**If your studies include flash cards and tricks… maybe you are not actually studying something at all.

The Thursday Beery News Notes For Remembrance Day 2021

Today is Remembrance Day, a fairly significant thing here in Canada which is largely apolitical even now well past a century after the end of WW1. The image to the right is a photo I took in 2005 at the naval memorial downtown. We’ve had a naval presence here in town since 1673.  And here’s a bit of what I wrote in 2014 about the day on Facebook:

…There are no politics with our vets. More than hockey and donuts, we all actually love our square do-gooder Dudley Do-right military and RCMP. I am lucky to be in a congregation at 51 years of age with a man* who commanded CFB Greenwood near Kingston in NS where I lived when I was 9 years old – and who attended the church where Dad was a minister. We remembered today that when I was a kid and he was in his 40s that all the vets were WW1 and there was even likely a Boer War soldier in the pews…

We government workers in Ontario have the day off but it isn’t a general holiday like it was when I grew up in Nova Scotia. Schools and shops are open. Feels weird.  Vets will be at Legions again this year after being shut in 2020. Drinking beer. I’ll donate a few coins into the little cardboard box and, once again, buy maybe the 7th poppy of 2021 – they seem to disappear within four hours after putting one on.

Elsewhere, Mudgie took a trip into the city centre of Manchester and posted a bit of a travel piece on a certain sort of pub. I was taken by this photo to the right, the absolute dream seat, right there in a wee nook in the tiny Circus Tavern. Fabulous:

It has two small cosy rooms with bench seating. The one at the front always seems to have a vault character and is frequented by the regulars, while the one to the rear is more of a snug. I managed to take a snap of the seating opposite in the brief interlude between it being occupied by groups of customers. Understandably, the Circus didn’t reopen until social distancing restrictions were lifted in July, and anyone concerned about getting too close to others would do well to avoid it. 

Note: another photo of the Circus Tavern with people added won the top prize in our 2012 Yuletide Beery Photo contest.

The other week I was correctly corrected about the lack of a certain beer fest holding a meeting in person – so giddy was I to realize that an update on another and rather gentle in person event was posted by The Beer Nut this week. The live action photo at the end is helpful for scale:

From Zwolle, we set off further westwards on Saturday morning for Gramsbergen, a small town about 3km from the border with Germany. G-berg, as nobody calls it, is home to the Mommeriete brewery, set in a rustic canalside inn, all oak beams and porcelain fireplaces. We missed getting to see it as its normal cosy self since they were gearing up for a beer festival: one organised to celebrate 20 years of the Dutch beer consumers’ organisation PINT, onto which was tacked the official 30th birthday bash for EBCU. It was a modest affair, beginning in the the afternoon and finishing at 7pm, and only three guest breweries were in attendance.

Note: cheese cutting diagrams.

Beer experts don’t really exist like wine experts do. Well, a very few of the former might while a few more of the latter do. If you don’t believe me and still think your website generated certification means anything like expert, consider the career path of Kevin Zraly including this:

That any American restaurant would have a cellarmaster or a sommelier was a rare thing in those days. In 1978, Frank J. Prial, the wine columnist for The Times, wrote an article about the virtual disappearance of the sommelier in restaurants, citing Mr. Zraly as one of a very few good young ones in New York, “the knowledgeable type, not the wine hustler…”

I followed this link to his courses at Wine.com. Look! No phony academic rhetoric, no layers of prerequisite that would shame a Scientologist. Just accessible authoritative information at a plain price and presented directly and on the level. Why can’t beer do that?** We need to consider the relationship between access to information along with inclusion and levelling and the commonality of those who opposed them.

Resulting question: why do wine educators start with the premise that wine is not as complex as we consumers have been told while beer educators seem to start with the premise that beer is more complex than we have been told?**

Much to the contrary, I spent bits of last Sunday watching presentations from the Beer Culture Summit 2021 produced by the Chicago Brewseum. I found the structure refreshing as there was none of the Masonic mystery gatekeeping guild approach to information that is a hallmark of what passes for too many claims expertise in good beer culture. The difference? The focus on professional and personal experience as a pathway to leveling and inclusion. Call it cred. The presenters had cred. I particularly liked “Under-Attenuated: Women, Beer History Studies and Representation” session: Dr. Christina Wade, Tiah Edmunson-Morton, and Atinuke “Tinu” Akintola Diver on their careers researching brewing history. And not only because of Dr. Wade’s defense of the value of blogging brewing history – depth, accessibility, primary citations and immediacy both in terms of time and audience** even if Stan is still standing there at the graveside.  In a time when we see bland generalities devoid of citation but plenty of errors*** win awards for best beer history, it was a call for quality within a call for, you got it, levelling.

Best tweet with beer and meat.

Crop-wise, we saw the 150th anniversary of the first sale of Fuggles this week, as Martyn reminded us:

Today, November 8, marks 150 years  since the Fuggle hop first went on sale, in a field in Paddock Wood, Kent, after Richard Fuggle and his brothers Jack and Harry had spent ten years propagating the variety until they had enough, 100,000 sets, to sell commercially.

Wonderful. And we are also seeing a second crop of the heritage barley variety bere in Scotland this year. Isn’t nature wonderful! More on bere here and here.

Taking a break on his book tour, Jeff wrote excellently about what he has seen in America’s downtowns in late 2021:

Most of my adult lifetime downtowns have been shiny, clean, and fun. They’ve always been a bit artificial, but we social beings flowed into these hubs to see shows, get a meal, buy something nice, and mostly, to feel the exciting hum of other people doing the same thing. Now downtowns are listless and depressing, and many of the businesses are boarded up or on long-term hiatus. There’s less and less reason to visit them.. When cities become nothing more than storefronts for the rich, they teeter on a narrow balance point. Did Covid just disrupt that balance?

Possibly the winner for Generic Praise-Laced Brewery Owner Bio Template of 2021.  B.O.B.s are the best. But this one has the header “A World-Class Pairing” which really takes it over the top.

More B.O.B. as a Euro male led publication hires Euro male writer to speak to a Euro male bar owner about diversity in the beer scene in BC’s Okanagan. I’d have more trust in the editorial call if the statement “…only a couple of people in the BIPOC community that even lived here when I was growing up…” was fact checked. While there is a reference to a Indigenous family business, here’s the map of Indigenous communities (aka the “i” in BIPOC) for BC. The communities of the Syilx Okanagan Nation are right there in the south centre. The Central Okanagan Local Immigration Partnership Council formed in 1983 seems pretty active, too. Question: why do writers of B.O.B.s never check in with customers or staff to find out if the claims are correct? The subject in this case could be fabulous… but we don’t know.

Beer prices are going up. Beer prices are going down.

Finally, I was sad to see a dismissive response to my comments about Pellicle’s decision to run and highlight a childish cartoon image about an actual ambush of soldiers where many died. Part of a story that is still recalled hurtfully in my region which touches on both my actual job and my brewing history research. It’s also an entirely unnecessary image and adds nothing to the story. At best, it is just a failed analogy. In an era when we are trying to drive out misrepresentation, appropriation and negativity from the good beer discussion, this sort of hyperbolic grasping for aggrandizing analogies is more than unfortunate. Do better.

Oh… and somebody sold their brewery.  Good beer. Nothing much will change.

There’s plenty to chew on. To complain about. For more, check out the updates from that same Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and from Stan now on a regular basis again every Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword which may revive some day.  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*This is he
**We appreciate that folk have ambitions but actual earned and experienced knowledge is always more helpful than insta-recognition by those editors with creditors. BTW, EWCs are not levellers. BTWx2: what even is a “certified pro“?
***1500s Flemish farmers? 

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For A Oddly Green Mid-October

It’s an odd autumn, isn’t it. Not just the pandemic that is no longer as scary but not resolved either. At least in the privileged bits of the planet. It’s also odd on the longer game scale too. The leaves aren’t turning colour here. Weeks behind schedule. Took the national harvest time short week off with the expectation of cleaning up the yard and there is still mowing to do. The last grapes still on the vine. Potatoes to pull from the ground. Shorts weather at least still today.

What else is going on? First with the positive. Gently manic blogger Retired Martin posted no less than 15 tales over the last week, each with quite attractive photos and a decent measure of wit as he, among other things, defines both cosy and comfy. The aggregation of his writings provide more than a list of taverns ticked off a list. His eye for detail as above (“For Drinkers Only”!) and brief observations on the places he visits are perhaps deceptively rich, adding up to something of an ethos:

Bill the fisherman came in for his late pint, the girls night out were laughing at a boy called Mark who I felt sorry for, and it felt like a happy pub.

Staying in the UK, I was linked to a story by an author this week so I thought it only polite to read rather dedicated fitba and beer blogger Jane Stuart‘s story about the scene around the Blackpool v Blackburn Rovers match on 2 October:

…I now felt hurried because I’d arranged to meet Wilf (of Yorkshire Seasiders fame) in Cask & Tap, which opened at noon. This left me no time for breakfast (not that I can face food first thing anyway) and meant that I was pretty much getting up and going straight to the pub. We did make a pit stop at the ticket office en route to collect around £350 worth of tickets for the next four away games at Forest, Reading, Sheff U and Swansea (there is a Swansea!). Clubs in general have been coy to release away tickets more than 7-10 days in advance this season so it was a bit of a shock (not least financially) to have all these tickets on sale – including one for a match at the end of November.

Supply chain news: beer bottle shortages hit tiny Prince Edward Island.

As Jordan noted, a favorite brewery of mine, Half Hours On Earth of rural Seaforth, Ontario and Canada’s first online retail beer store is shutting down and selling off its brewery gear:

As we wind down the brewery (see full post on Instagram), we’ll be putting our parts and equipment up for sale here on the webshop. This is the first lot, and there will be more listed as equipment becomes out of use. Sign up for our newsletter to be first notified. If anything goes unsold, prices will be reduced until gone. When an item is sold, the listing will be removed. All items are in used condition unless stated otherwise.

As they shared on Instagram, the owners are transitioning to a new focus and a new business, Worldlet, offering sustainable healthy household products:

We opened an eco-shop two years ago, and have plans for something new on the horizon that we hope will be the most impactful of all. It will require more of our attention going forward, and unfortunately, there’s simply not enough hours in the day.

Good. A doubly sensible approach if you ask me. And net positive.

Thing never said in beer: “…and certainly thanks to all those who nominated the winners…” Oh… ***

Speaking of positive news in with a first tiny appearance of neg, it appears that the US hospitality work force has gotten fed up with being low rung on the ladder with millions quitting their dead end jobs:

Quits hit a new series high going back to December 2000, as 4.3 million workers left their jobs. The quits rate rose to 2.9%, an increase of 242,000 from the previous month, which saw a rate of 2.7%, according to the department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. The rate, which is measured against total employment, is the highest in a data series that goes back to December 2000.

Good! Want my advice? Don’t make these jobs suck. Support your staff or soon you will understand that not only are they the ones who make the money but they are also customers of the next place down the road. Create careers for those you hire.

[Q: “bin fire“? You do know you can just not follow unpleasant people, right?]

Stan on the state of beer writing or at least one form:

In the 13 or so years I’ve intermittently posted links on Monday I’ve always looked beyond blogs, and beyond beer stories for that matter, for interesting items to pass along. If you are disappointed that I don’t point to more beer blogs, well, so am I. But let’s face it. Beer blogs are dead. That is why you are not reading this.

I know what he means but we have to be honest. As we wallow in newbie guides and second editions and other ways people in financial need find to get by, we have to remember that many narrower focused web periodicals are just blogs repainted and rebranded.** And similar content is created daily in Twitter threads and Instagram posts with great effect. And newsletters arrive regularly, sent from those gentle wee souls who fear the comments blogs receive, sent by people correcting claims in the content. I see plenty of writing is out there even if the deck chairs have been rearranged due to fiscal anxieties and dreams of monetization.

Maybe really probably bad is the news reported by Canada’s ag new source The Western Producer coming out of China that its insane residential construction boom meeting no identifiable demand for residential construction may hit the world’s food commodity markets:

Companies like Evergrande have fuelled themselves with debt while building millions of homes that stand empty, leaving China with an array of ghost cities and neighbourhoods. If Evergrande goes bust the whole industry, which more and more seems like a house of cards, could collapse. That would be bad for demand for steel, coal, copper and other industrial commodities used in construction.

Why mention that in a beer blog? Global prices for hops and barley depend on demand forecasts. As commodities drop, niche markets like hop growing and malt barley get hammered. As WP states: “It’s a potential killer of general demand — around the world.” Massive supplier Russia is also jerking around its own grain farmers with an export tax causing farmers to “abandon wheat, corn and barley in favour of soybeans, rapeseed, flax, lentils, peas and summer fallow.” Put that on your horizon.

Finally and certainly now very negative, the big news this week I suppose… if you can call it news anymore… relates to the continuing implications of sexist behaviors in craft, this time related to the Danish beer brand but not quite a brewery Mikkeller which has seen presumed acolytes ditch a fest being put on in Copenhagen, all rather late in the day as one Toronto brewery staffer noted:

I find it hard to believe these breweries didn’t know about the Mikkeller allegations. Working in the industry it was all anybody talked about for months. It took public shaming for them to pull out, which is a form of pressure.

Another observer tied events to the call for unionizing what really needs to be differentiated as the legacy big craft beer industry.

What’s really interesting is the continuing greater reticence to engage with the boycott by trade voices who may have invested in the brand too deeply as part of craft’s tight circle of reciprocal praise narrative.  Something called The Drinks Business reports on the response to allegations but puts as much effort into polishing Mikkeller’s brand than inquiring into the problem. We read that the fest is “renowned for featuring some of the most highly sought-after breweries in the world” before, in a classic example of beer trade writing reporting on beer trade writing, repeating the GBH praise that Mikkeller is a “tastemaker within the beer world.”

Even with some pretty strong observations on the allegations in past posts including the statement “founder… Mikkel Borg Bjergsø… actively participated in bullying and harassment…” GBH itself still took the time (as if to meet an editorial requirement) to label (if not slur) those rejecting sexist environments in brewing as “activists” and implying a level of ineffectiveness in quite a remarkably dismissive paragraph:

The reversal for these breweries and potentially others is a response to continuing pressure activists have exerted on these companies, urging them not to participate in collaborations or festivals with global beer company Mikkeller, which is based in Copenhagen. Nearly 100 breweries from across the world are still listed on the event’s Facebook page as attending. 

Not necessary. Not every issue has two sides with equal merit. Matt of Pellicle was much more to the point:

I do think that breweries attending this festival in light of ongoing, unresolved issues, paints the entire craft beer industry in a bad light. It feels like a “fuck you” to the victims who’ve shared their stories these past months.

Indeed.* The beer brand owner at the centre of all this has continued to make some astounding statements as Kate Bernot has helpfully shared. But if all that wasn’t enough, what is really unbelievable (but for this being craft beer sucking up and sucking out loud) is how eight UK breweries responded on Wednesday took the time to issue a bit of absolute PR hari-kari of a note explaining their continued participation on certain  “conditions” including:

a. They state (as Matt points out) that they demand a meeting will be held – including other brewers, the abusive and also the victims of abuse (presumably not asked about this kaka meme process at the time of the press release) to move the industry forward;

b. They state that social media (the prime medium for applying ethical pressuring in this case) “is not a productive space” presumably meaning best to keep these things quiet or at least behind closed doors; and

c. They are still attending the event because… why? And each brewery has aligned themselves with the mainly unmoved Mikkeller and each have taken the time to sign on – and openly identify themselves as doing so making it easier for customers to buy somewhere else.

Un. Buh. Lievable. Except… you know… craft.

Positive and negative. Personal experience as opposed to scale and ambition and shameful behaviour. As always, for more check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and from Stan now on a regular basis again every Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*And this weeks gold winning use of an obscenity nudging out this tweet by Evan Rail.
**Filled (he unkindly said) with tales that I pass on mentioning every week even if they win a hubcap in the tight circle of reciprocal praise awards.
***By the way, where did those Flemish farmers in England in the early 1500s come from. You know, when aliens were subject to residency licenses and other severe controls in England. Oh, by “farmers” is it “traders” that was meant… like almost one hundred years before that? Or was it the elite English access to hopped beer in the 1300s or perhaps 1200s? Such a muddle.

The First Thursday Beery News Notes For Rocktober 2022!

Me? I love Rocktober. No, not that beer. That’s just for show. A middling beer from the middle of the Baltic. I am talking about the month. Yes, that’s where we are all now. Rocktober. When recreations start to shift indoors. Fun. And if I call it that I will forget for a moment it’s also when all the leaves die and the ice first forms. Better to rock. Speaking of death… wasn’t it great when Facebook died this week – even if only for a few hours? Some may live in an upside-down world but, really, Facebook is a cesspool of anti-democratic and anti-science lies lies lies… and Twitter is just fun even if chippy… but blogs are sweet and charming. Web 2.0 > Web 3.0. So welcome aboard for another week. What’s going on?

First up, this looks like an interesting hour on “Under-Attenuated: Women, Beer History Studies and Representation” at the Chicago Brewseum’s Beer Culture Summit on the first weekend of November with a few familiar faces:

… while beer history studies is a newer field recognized in the academic landscape, it’s no surprise that it too is a male dominated area of study. Archaeologist and historian Dr. Christina Wade, archivist Tiah Edmunson-Morton, and organizer, attorney, author and documentarian Atinuke “Tinu” Akintola Diver discuss the unique experiences (both successes and roadblocks) they have seen throughout their careers researching, collecting and documenting beer and brewing history in a man’s world. This session is moderated and hosted by co-founder of the Albany Ale Project, Craig Gravina.

Nice to be referenced: “co-“! There are a whack of other topics, too, with loads of interesting speakers with loads of different points of view. No wonder the “Males on Ales Through the Ages” conference scaled way back.

Next, the Mudge himself wrote of the state of pubs and cask ale in the UK this week:

Heavy-handed Covid safety protocols largely seem to have gone by the board, although a few Perspex screens at bars and pointless one-way systems remain. I have walked out of one pub where it was clear that the full works of safety theatre were being applied, and declined to go in another because of a sign outside saying the same, but those were isolated examples. In general, rural and semi-rural pubs seem keener to retain restrictions than urban ones, maybe because they feel they have a captive market who can’t take their trade elsewhere so easily. 

Note: The editorial board of A Good Beer Blog lean heavily towards the screen and mask ethos but we are a full service blog of many opinions. And we just don’t want to die of Covid-19 personally. Mask up and take your needles.

“Ancestral beer“? It’s the new thing that turns out isn’t actually a thing at all:

“If you want to sell something on a large scale, you’ve got to have a standard flavor that’s replicable from one bottle to the next,” Juárez said. “Whereas, with a wild beer, no two are ever the same.” Her quest: to bring the old world into modern times. “We’ve brought flavors that were being left behind back to life,” she said. Ancestral beer is determined by the type of yeast used as the main ingredient…

Apparently the proponents of ancestral beer have slept through the micro and home brewing movements entirely. The phrase “it’s not off, it’s Belgian style!” ring any bells?

Josh Noel has been doing a great job in the Chicago Tribune covering the union busting ways at Goose Island:

Several people active in the union drive say they don’t doubt the company was under financial strain at the time. But they also believe Goose Island used the layoffs to target leading union activists and to finish off their efforts. According to current and former employees, the idea of unionizing Goose Island has withered away.

Then Josh linked to the Guys Drinking Beer social media feed where a brewery tour manager seemed to be facilitating a creep making pervy moves on a fellow member of staff. He “told the employee to let said harasser kiss her… apparently gave the harasser her cell phone number.” Now that is an actual grade A asshole.* Remember that next time some beer writing bootlicking hack drools over the keyboard next time there is a Bourbon County Stout junket needing a press release parroting.

Suddenly, I don’t feel well. Why oh why? Oh… it’s this.

Of higher note, I came across a fascinating paper this week, “Marckalada: The First Mention of America in the Mediterranean Area (c. 1340)” which discusses the new first reference to the Americas in southern European literature. Here’s the only bit of the sort I was really after:

Further northwards there is the Ocean, a sea with many islands where a great quantity of peregrine falcons and gyrfalcons live. These islands are located so far north that the Polar Star remains behind you, toward the south. Sailors who frequent the seas of Denmark and Norway say that northwards, beyond Norway, there is Iceland; further ahead there is an island named Grolandia, where the Polar Star remains behind you, toward the south. The governor of this island is a bishop. In this land, there is neither wheat nor wine nor fruit; people live on milk, meat, and fish. 

See that – wine. Or actually no wine. Now, it’s written by an Italian for an Italian crowd but what I am looking for is some contemporary reference to ale drinking in the Viking North American experience. Not in this paper…

What is this poll even about? Best comment was the one to the right…

Liam wrote about Coopers, Ireland’s first beer brand:

The most important point perhaps is that I think that Cooper may have been the first Irish – or at least Irish brewed – beer to be marketed with a brand, jingle (I know I am taking liberties here…) and editorial advert? I am not aware of any others that existed this early anywhere else on these islands in fact, although I have not overly researched it to be fair. I would guess that it was certainly the first trademarked Irish-brewed beer …

First brand? Well, consumer product branding as we know it only came about in around 1800. When adjectives like “cream” started getting added to descriptors. When the breweries rather than retailers posted most of the notices in the papers. (Somewhere I had a paper that explained it all… where is that…)

Finally, Bloomberg is reporting** that ABInBevBigCo is considering getting its Teuronic off:

Anheuser-Busch InBev NV Chief Executive Officer Michel Doukeris is considering a sale of some German beer brands it has owned for decades as the world’s largest brewer aims to prune less profitable businesses and trim debt. The brewer is exploring the sale of labels such as Franziskaner Weissbier, Hasseroeder and Spaten, and the portfolio could fetch about 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion), people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified discussing confidential information.

Interesting (if really badly edited) stat in that article: “Although Germany brews about a quarter of all beers originating from the continent, it exports less of the drink than both the Netherlands and Belgium…” Is that “either” or “combined”? Who knows?!? Thanks Mr. Editor.

Done. For more check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and from Stan now on a regular basis again every Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness! And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*Unlike one former beer writer when apparently drunk. Note also, however, that the Beer Culture Summit’s final event is at the Goose Island Brewpub. Watch out!
**Or as GBH would say after reading the same article: “GBH sources have stated that Anheuser-Busch InBev NV Chief Executive Officer Michel Doukeris is considering a sale of some German beer brands…” Again, no one responded to GBH’s inquiries.

 

“When Autumn Leaves Start To Fall…” Edition Of The Beery News Notes

OK – summer is done. Really. Six months to spring. We can handle this. Really. I knew autumn had come because I had a little private moment for the seventh anniversary of the release party in Albany with Craig for Upper Hudson Valley Beer where I got to meet that very nice young lady… right after we saw her go over to our box of books in the corner and then helped herself to a few. I think I bought her a beer as Craig stole our books back from behind her back. Community.

First up, Robin Leblanc wrote a very good piece on how the pandemic has unexpectedly introduced a number of positive changes in the craft beer scene:

So in looking at all of that, having to work as a professional and sum up the experiences of the beer world through its accomplishments, I began to see why this matters. Because for the first time in what feels like ever, it seems that the industry is actually trying to live up to the ideals that it set for itself. Progress has been slow-going, but something seems to have kicked in the past two years to create a newfound perspective.

I’m too much the crank to be so hopeful but it is good to see hope seen and shaped as well as Robin has in this piece.

From the science desk, Matthew reminded us of his July 2018 gaseous observations: “A few years ago, I was blamed for being excessive and causing global warming through trapping heat in the atmosphere.  But now, apparently, there’s not enough of me to go around.” Apparently  it is news again as Mr. Protz advised:

CO2 shortage impacting beer. No need to go without. In pubs drink real ale: handpump operates suction pump that draws beer from cellar to bar without applied gas. For home drinking seek out bottle conditioned beers with natural carbonation. #LiveBeer

See, that’s what I call supporting the actually traditional. The British co2 shortage is dramatic and touches on many parts of the supply chain, requiring government intervention:

Meat producers and food industry chiefs had called on the government to step in and warned that if they didn’t then food shortages would soon follow. Ian Wright, the chief executive of the Food and Drink Federation, warned on Tuesday that consumers would start seeing shortages in poultry, pork and bakery products within days.

At least one UK pub lad seemed to be on Team Protz as far as letting the beer supply its own gas:

Colin Keatley, of the Fat Cat pub and brewery group, said the shortage was yet to bite but that it would have a significant impact should it hit. “It’s amazing how so many businesses do rely on this one product and we rely on CO2 both in some of the beers we make and dispensing some. We do still have beers on gravity and pork scratchings – so if we have to just rely on them we will.”

Aside from science, the politics of the drink continued to be top of the discourse. I saw this bit of solidarity bruvvah! news last week and thought to myself “…wouldn’t that be nice if craft beer bars were like this…”

Employees at one of the country’s largest distillers have been striking since Monday after 96% of union members agreed to a strike.  “I’ll be out here however long it takes to get what we deserve,” union member Katie Gaffney said… Workers gained support from a local restaurant. Buffalo Wings and Rings will stop selling Heaven Hill products until an agreement is reached. “What were asking Heaven Hill to do is nothing short of what we do for our customers,” Buffalo Wings and Rings District Manager Jessica Raikes said. 

Somewhat along the same general lines, the essay of the week was definitely this excellent set of facts and opinions presented by Ruvani de Silva on the forms of gratitude expected from the historically marginalized:

Quebec-based beer blogger and influencer Amrita Kaur Virk, who also works in the baking and restaurant industries, has had similar experiences. “When diversity became cool… I felt like there were a lot of white beer advertisers that were creeping up on my profile and following me, but also expecting me to fully embrace them and be grateful that they finally noticed me,” she says. “I remember being approached by them like they were some kind of knight in shining armor and them asking for my experiences… I really feel like there are some white folks who are looking to just harvest my own personal experiences to appear to be ‘woke’ and virtue signal. Even the act of approaching/following me seems very performative. Like I should feel grateful for even being considered and approached”.

Boom. That is really particularly boomtastic. Boomeriffic. Like you, I’ve seen a fair few non-marginalized majoritarian pasty scribbly folk like me in beer (no doubt out of a sense variously mixed of story FOMO, cultural guilt and good intention) taking it upon themselves to elbow into view or play that knight over the last couple of years but that quote above nails it. Gratitude like this relates to manufactured passion in craft beer which sets itself apart from the Buffalo Wings and Rings approach mentioned above. Fabulous.

Perhaps relatedly, historian Doug Hoverson (whose book on Minnesota Land of Amber Waters sits in view every night) wrote about the idealized images of Indigenous North Americans in beer branding over the years:

How prevalent has the use of American Indian imagery in beer advertising been? An extensive though by no means exhaustive survey of labels, coasters, signs, newspaper ads, and other “breweriana” (any item with a brewery’s name or a beer brand name on it) shows that nearly half the states (and all the major brewing states) had at least one brewery that used Native imagery for identification or advertising. Nearly 100 breweries portrayed American Indians in logos or other illustrative contexts—mostly in the pre-Prohibition era, and almost exclusively in the pre-craft era.

Appropriation and pre-Disney Disneyfication abounded and was not limited to brewing. But did extend well past pre-craft as it was used by “Leinenkugel Brewing Co. of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin from 1933 to 2020.” I do wish there was more than one Indigenous view included as well as a little standardization and modernization of the terminology in the piece as using “Indian” as a stand alone or “vanquished” for Chief Abraham Meshigaud or “Mishicott” who died in old age on his own people’s lands is a bit uncomfortable – but it is a welcome survey.

Speaking of questions of appropriation, a wonderful debate broke out between Martyn and The Beer Nut over Irish Red Ale as being a 40 year old US marketing term or a far older organic term from the Gaels themselves:

Fact is, Smithwick’s was an ale, Irish and red, prior to 1981. I remember it. I was there.

Beer business law? You got it. A wonderful procedural legal situation is setting up as Brendan P. Esq. explained this week as Boston Beer Company has sued NY distributors over its efforts to terminate Dogfish Head distribution deals. Wonderful unpacking:

The rub is that if a brewery terminates a distribution agreement in this manner, it still has to pay the distributor the “fair market value” of the distribution rights that are being terminated… Big money time. Counsel for distributors Boening, Oak, Dana, and Dutchess claimed to Boston Beer that the FMV of the distribution rights as $56 million, and that if the agreements were terminated in violation of ABC law, Boston Beer’s liability could be $100 million… This will be fascinating because FMV is almost never calculated in public view; it’s usually subject to a NDA or calculated behind closed doors.

Look at that. A good mix this week. A veritable 1974-era ABC Wide World of Sports… of beer.  And not one newbie style guide to drag it down! For more check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and from Stan now apparently a regular again every Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday (again the talk was of awards this week) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness! And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For The Quietest Week of Summer

Crickety chirp chirp. Not necessarily in the beer world but certainly in this part of Canada. Holiday long weekend leading into the first week of a summer month? Everyone is gone. I am even holding the fort solo as others jump in a lake at a family cottage. O sole mio. Naps followed by long sleeps abound. Fortunately, the amusements never end in boozeland as the exchange above best illustrated this week.

First, take a moment this week to remember Florencio Gueta Vargas who died on July 29th in a hops field in Yakima County, WA. He worked for decades in the fields but was overcome by temperatures in excess of 100F that day. He leaves behind a wife and 6 children. Workers like Vargas endure conditions most of you would never accept.

Archivally, interesting news out of North Carolina:

We’re in the process of picking up a HUGE donor collection of national importance. A research collection and personal archive going back at least until the late 1970s. Historians of modern US craft beer history and brewers are going to drop their jaws as much as we have.

I know of one other particular private collection which would be likely mind boggling if released but these are the realities of this sort of hoardy hobby world.  The recipient of the donation of 20 boxes describes itself this way: “Well Crafted NC documents beer and brewing history in North Carolina from the breweries of the 1700s to the craft breweries today.” They are also colleagues in the same publication series that includes my two histories.  Likely need more of those sorts of landing pads created in more jurisdictions as a form of careful succession planning.

Not unrelatedly, Gary has written another fabulous post on aspects of eastern European brewing in the lead up and during WWII. This time it’s an interesting bit of research related to the hops trade up to early 1941:

…American cotton might be paying for hops ending in American hands… Such cooperation between Russia and Nazi Germany was not inconceivable. The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression treaty, was still in force between the two countries. It only terminated when Germany invaded Russia in June 1941… It does seem clear America imported no, or very few hops from Germany after the European war started on September 1, 1939. The Royal Navy imposed a blockade of Germany that was generally highly effective, for one thing.

Stan popped in this week for a few Monday musings on three topics. “Why We Drink” caught my attention:

A bit of context for the “hard seltzer is dead, no it’s not” flap. “How Big Beverage poured empty promises down our throats” (from The Goods at by Vox) barely mentions beer, but you can connect the dots.

The two points he highlights from the article (and you will have to go to Stan’s to find the link… bloggy etiquette must be observed) are (i) “we’ve created an entire category of ‘functional’ beverages that claim to have the ability to make us better in every single way, from our brains to our beauty” and (ii) “Instead of collectively admitting that we love drinks… we would rather fool ourselves into believing that drinks can fix us.” It’s interesting as the entire ethos of craft has been build upon personal improvement, a step up. But this is intentional as before craft was created as we know it today, micro-brewing was being led down the pervy and wastrel path. It needed cleaning up… but has it gone too far with, for example, the nutso health claims?

Beer law news? Bloomberg Law reports that Bell’s Brewery has settled a law suit in another copyright infringement situation:

Michigan’s Bell’s Brewery Inc. reached a confidential settlement of a suit alleging its “Deer Camp” beer infringes a “Deer Camp” coffee trademark held by hunting goods company Buck Baits LLC.

Note that the wording used is identical and the offended party may have deeper pockets, h/t MK.

Sir Geoff Palmer has been appointed Chancellor at Heriot-Watt University, home of Scotland’s great brewing college. I came to his writing through the human rights side first and, in particular, have enjoyed his use of social media to argue for a new interpretation of many historical Scots matters including many of the same figures whose names pop up in Canada, like Dundas and Picton. But, yes, he knows more about beer than any of you, too.

What else is going on in the world? I like these cardboard six-pack holder thingies from Norway, especially given the way the plastic ones are killing the planet:

The WaveGrip carrier has been developed in line with Berry Global’s Impact 2025 sustainability strategy, which aims to work with customers to help meet and exceed their sustainability goals. Each carrier weighs just 7.95g for a standard six-pack and is recyclable in most paper and board waste collection streams. Despite its light weight, it is strong and easy to use, while delivering excellent pack retention.

Note: “Excellent Pack Retention” was the name of my folk-punk band in the 1990s.

Not speaking of which, interesting to read that Anheuser-Busch InBev revenues are up even if profits are not matching the full trend. So much for (again) craft the destroyer. That being said, likely they are selling seltzers and auto parts somewhere out in the world, making up for the general disinterest in beer.

From France, two views of the new vaccination passes to get into shops and bars:

“Long live the health pass!” said Chastelloux, who, like the others interviewed for this story, spoke in French. “You have the right not to get vaccinated but not to stop other people [from] getting on with their lives. Shopkeepers need to work, and we need to be able to treat other medical conditions than COVID.”

…and…

“Show a pass in order to drink a beer with your friends? In France? The so-called country of liberty, equality, fraternity? I’m giving up going to restaurants. I’ll boycott cafés. We can eat with friends around each others’ houses. And shop in small stores, not supermarkets,” he said.

Retailers line up on both sides, fearing lost sales in either case. Were this to come to pass here in Canada – with our local double jab rate approaching 75% – there might be less disagreement.

Finally, here is a bit of a bizarre take from Alaska on the problems facing brewing and other hospitality trades in terms of get employee levels up:

Virtually every brewery in the state is looking for help. Like in all industries, it seems like Americans aren’t returning to work post-pandemic like labor and economic forecasters thought they would. There are a lot of reasons for this, and I’m not about to go into the political side of the issue – that doesn’t fit my singular writing objective of “making people thirsty for good beer” – but the bottom line is that, if you want in, now’s the time. Servers, publicans and tap room attendants seem to be in high demand, but there’s room in the brewery, too, if you want to get your boots wet and stir the mash with the big boys and girls in the industry. 

By “not getting into the political side” I assume the author means the low wages, health and safety questions and non-unionized environments. Claptrap from a trade shill it seems.

As you nap away the hours, too, don’t forget to check out those weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness! And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

The Thursday Beery News Notes For Summer’s Sprint

Here we are. The second month of summer. Soon it will be halfway through summer. Spring takes its time. Lingers. Summer is a sprint. To keep pace, I ran a couple of breakneck polls on Twitter asking you good folks about the biggest lies told by craft beer. Hard to narrow it down after writing this weekly column for so long. One immediate finding from the first poll was that the “craft is 99% asshole free” lie is a lie of general application. Whether it’s the bad boss, the sexist and the racist on staff at the bar, the beer writer spreading health myths or assigning blame for beer can hand grenades to the consumer… the general rule has wide application. So I ran it again with that option removed. We’ll see. Tune in for continuing coverage at 11.

Out there in the world beyond my own mind’s wanderings, Andy Crouch posted a really interesting audio interview at Beer Edge with actual reporter Norm Miller this week. Their chat starts seven minutes in but it is well worth the wait. Andy and Norm discuss things like their respective court room experiences – but the real angle on the story is their views of the unhealthy relationship with beer seen too often in the craft beer scene:

Norm wrote that he was giving up beer writing because he needed to stop drinking. He talked about the impact his tasting was having on both his physical and mental health. It was a bold and honest piece of writing and should be required reading for everyone in the beer industry. Spend anytime at a beer event or industry get together and it quickly becomes obvious that some and perhaps many in the beer business have an unhealthy relationship with the product they sell. Whether it’s overconsumption, drinking and driving, or forgiving behavior that would otherwise be unforgivable but for the presence of alcohol, it’s the third rail of the American beer business, one that few dare to touch.

Well, one of the third rails along with observed sexist behaviours, observed bigoted behaviours, the actual financial status of breweries,* the pervasive packaging of canned craft hand grenades….

Less ominously, here’s a lovely and witty visit to the Welsh town of Builth Wells presented by a very busy Martin which includes a portrait of the Greyhound Hotel. Less Welsh by far and over in the cyberverse, on Sunday, Ron and Mitch Steel and a few other guys are talking on your computer screen about IPA. Govern yourselves accordingly.

Looking into recent brewing history, Ray and Jess of the B and the other B wrote extensively about Harp Lager with lots of quotes and imagery  and then get some great comments providing further detail.

The brewhouse was fitted with a Steinecker Hydro-Automatic system which meant that “from a control console… the whole brewing operation is controlled by one man, from the selection and transfer of the grain to the pumping of the finished wort to the wort receiver”. The formal opening ceremony took place on 28 June 1963 with an inaugural brew started by the Queen’s cousin, Lord Mountbatten – a sign that this was a big deal.

I will never think of the phrase “Steinecker Hydro-Automatic system” the same way again. By they way, did I ever mention that my grandfather had a heated chat with Lord Mountbatten – right after he had told Lord Louis’s Admiral to go fuck himself? During of a naval engagement in WW2. Probably told you already…

Across the Irish Sea, Marble Beer Ltd., seemingly sensing that BrewDog was getting all the attention in the “how not to respond well to crisis” contest, came out with one of the best semi “sorry not sorry” admissions seen in a long time:

…we believe we owe it to not only our team but also our loyal customers and drinkers to set out how we are going to build and nurture a positive, inclusive and fair Marble community now, and in the future. However, before we continue we feel it’s only fair to our previous management that we first state that some of the allegations made on line were outright falsehoods, but that does not mean we do not wholeheartedly accept that the company fell far short at times…

Wow. There are a lot of moving parts in there. Cookie gave the heads up and a fair commentary, too. Unnecessary and not a wholesome part of any apology.

In industrial packaging news, once again another week sees another complaint about incompetent packaging errors in the drinks trade. Not quite the beer can hand grenade situation (as seen above) but the expensive bottle of cider that empties half of itself before you have a sip as reported upon by CiderReviewAdam:

There are too many ciders, particularly but not exclusively, pét nat ciders that are frankly explosive. This was marketed as high end and sold at, for cider, a premium price. It should not be losing half of itself on opening… The average consumer’s tolerance for this sort of thing is a lot shorter than mine is, and this sort of incident, happening with the regularity it does, comes across as amateurish.

Note: amateur is not the opposite of professional in this context. This is not amateurish. It is incompetent professionalism. As are beer can hand grenades. Unless you are you just pretending you are a journalist, tell this story.

My patronage recipient, Matt, linked to a story of his posted a few weeks ago at the Ferment 52 blog on the question of whether beer can be too fresh:

… I decided to speak to brewers about it. And while some denied it was something they had experienced, others said they found it to be a common phenomenon, and referred to it as can, or bottle shock. The idea being that the very process of packaging and shipping beer can cause its flavours to destabilise—albeit temporarily—and that giving them time to properly rest before serving is what’s required for maximum enjoyment. Some even took this view further, admitting that their beer didn’t taste quite how they wanted until several weeks after it’s packaged.

This reminds me of good wine having to sit for a day after travelling as well as coming in and out of point on a 6 to 12 month cycle. But it’s really also pointing out that very fresh beer is a different thing. Also good but different.

Over there in the wine world, the winner of the inaugural Crap Tasting Note of the Year awards has been announced:

From the very opening, with the rhyme of ‘bright’ and ‘light’ to the pointless alliteration of ‘excited effervescence’ (have you ever seen a lethargic effervescence?)  it’s clear that we are dealing with tasting gibberish of the very highest order. Yet the writer sustains it throughout. There’s more garbage in 97 words here than some writers manage in notes three times that size. There’s unnecessarily archaic language (‘writ’), more alliteration (vigour of the vintage), and garbled imagery. Why would a soloist be monochrome, for Chrissake? What does it even mean? And why have you mixed up sound and colour? 

Less honestly wholesome yet somewhat indistinguishable is one of the more embarrassing examples of the blog-for-pay** GBH self-promotion was published this week but it was not in GBH. Looks like Washington Post journalist Julia Bainbridge was pestered by emails from the cheap seats and gave them some space at her personal blog… oh, it’s a newsletter. Things we learn include: (i) “…we (the media) need to be clearer about the numbers and what they really mean…” (ii) “…Beers brewed with fruit have had a crazy last couple of years, and Bryan is like the only reporter I have seen cover this…” and (iii) “…American psyche for food and beverage is unique in the world…” Grab easily available stats, repackage the obvious as insight and – Voila! – expertise. Amazeballs.

I think that’s enough for now. Have to go gaze at the Twitter polls for another few hours. Hey, don’t forget to check out those weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness! And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*Remember when seeming adults presenting as seasoned beer writers but dependent on continued access to craft brewery owners insisted over and over that there was no money in brewing craft beer? That was great.
**“It’s a magazine… it’s a real grown up magazine… it is!!! I just have three other jobs to maintain access to my sources…“

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For The First Of Summer

Above, is an image from a conference posted by Ed Wray, which he dubbed “Ten Years of Barley Varieties.” It is lovely. And not unlike the chicken wings crisis chart, that. It is quite the thing to see how rapidly varieties come and go. When I worked in Holland in 1986 in the big cut flower auctions, I had a favorite rose –  Mercedes – which had a particular balance between its soft scarlet bloom and the pea green of the stem. But like all things, it fell out of fashion or the hybridization isn’t that stable and when back in Canada it only lasted a few years before it was no longer available in the market. Nice to see the constancy of Maris Otter. Something like myself.

Update: apparently, the G7 event at Cornwall England reported upon last week due to Trudeau’s pint has become a super spreader event that “…is closing down pubs, bars and hotels at a frightening rate.” I have moved forward my second jab to the end of tomorrow afternoon. There is some disagreement as to the cause, however.

Also from the UK, perhaps a different sort of political statement from Stephen McGowan on the issue of sticking with the process for evaluating the effect of minimum pricing in Scotland:

I would remind all stakeholders that the Scottish Parliament is under a legal obligation to consider the impact of MUP on licence holders and producers; as well as the impact on the licensing objectives, as well as the impacts on individuals and groups in society. “Success” is therefore a nuanced, complex pattern. Parliamentarians, like the rest of us, will always welcome news of falling health harms – but I urge us all to remain circumspect about whether MUP is a “success” for if we allow ourselves to view success through the sole prism of consumption levels, that is to ignore what the 2012 Act actually requires.

Like self declaration of importance, “nuance” is one of those proclamation that usually hides a combination of motive and the incapacity to actual state an idea. In this case, it’s really not nuanced at all. Just a call for balance. But we need to remember what is being balanced is the health of one person as opposed to the income of another. Such is the reality of a regulated trade in compromising pleasure products.

Note: “…allegations of widespread misconduct in America’s craft beer industry…” is how it is described in the journalistic part of the world. Misconduct is a great word for is as, like bigotry, it is an umbrella word avoiding the need to distinguish between the different forms of grasping that we are learning more and more about. Craft beer seems particularly fertile ground for this sort of bad behaviour, being not quite consequence free as its hymnals promise. BrewDog seems to be the gift that keeps giving in relation to now a number of aspects of this stuff. The Press and Journal of Aberdeen, Scotland shared information about the brewery’s (literally) dodgy habits when it comes to business partners:

Alex Cobham, chief executive of the Tax Justice Network, the advocacy group that campaigns for a fairer tax system, said: “This is a disappointing, but sadly common story – companies whose approach to tax havens is entirely at odds with their projected image. “Having major investors using Cayman as a conduit is certainly antisocial, but it’s about as punk as croquet… Asked how the company could reconcile its ethos with the fact such a large proportion of its stock was held by the Cayman entities, a Brewdog spokeswoman said she “can only comment about BrewDog’s own tax obligations and activity”.

But see, unlike those who look at this things as “snafus“, the relationship between investors having spare change from not paying proper taxes and investment recipients then receiving cash from the same the resulting pool of investment funds is entirely direct and, frankly, obvious. BrewDog receives a benefit because the UK Treasury does not. And the UK taxpayer is asked to make up the difference. Now, their brand’s health is dropping in the standings and, as Brewbound reports, BrewDog’s good housekeeping seal of advanced ethical status is now at risk. Are they a ponzi? Punk as croquet. Gold.

We have to recall that there was a before times, that the “craft” brand is recent and has never been better than wobbly if not simply needy. Ed the actual brewer shared his thoughts:

As to actual craft beers many of them sound more like alcopops now anyway, and certainly some craft brewers have embraced exogenous enzymes, bollocks ingredients including actual bollocks, and genetically modified yeasts (something multi-national brewers have never dared use). I’m not going to make any moral judgement but I can’t see where the craft is.  The standard bearers of craft beer in Britain have always been Brewdog and it’s been obvious for years that they’re tossers. Recently their ten year plan was revealed and they’re going to focus on producing lager because they want to be bigger than Heineken. Can anyone tell me how becoming a giant lager selling multi-national is craft?

We have to remember that “craft” arose to prominence only around 2003 after (1) the stalling of the markets in the late 1990s, (2) the formation of the BA and (3) the “Sex for Sam” scandal. Micro needed rebranding. Then it starts to die a slow death starting in 2015-16 with the sell off which continues today with the trade abuse scandals.

Entirely conversely, Max continued his purifying walk to Litoměřice – and his story gets even better with this bit below proceeding an ending of this middle of the tale drawn surely from the early pages of Wind in the Willows:

The walk was as brutal as I expected given my shape, and there were several moments when I questioned the wisdom of the endeavour, but the sights and the utter peace that surrounded me more than made up for it. When I reached the highest point, I found a resting site and I spent a good while just admiring the view of the České Středohoří and feeling very well about myself. From then on, the way will be mostly downhill and I had already cover about two thirds of the distance.  The trail took me to the village of Hlinná, a few kilometres outside Litoměřice. It was not in my plans, but I saw a pub and couldn’t resist it. There was nothing in this world that I wanted more than a beer at that moment…

Somewhat similarly, Martin celebrates a stroll but one through less green, more hardened lands to reach the wonders of the Elton Liberal Club:

A succession of Old Boys come in and report difficulties renewing their membership, skilfully resolved by the young barman. Old learning from young, and vice versa. “There’s a wake later” the barman tells us. For the Liberals, I assume*. But not for the Elton Social Club, which seems in splendid health as I leave to the “Push the Button” by the Sugababes.

The BBC has one of those stories about beer bottled yeast in the holds of shipwrecks:

Scientists at Brewlab, a spin-out from the University of Sunderland, have studied yeast strains and brewing techniques for years. The firm’s founder, Keith Thomas, says that once beer from the Wallachia was in his lab, it was treated with the utmost caution. “We opened it in containment level two laboratory conditions,” he says. This involved unsealing the bottles in a special cabinet filled with sterile air, in order to protect the scientists from any possible pathogens in the beer. This measure also ensured that the samples did not become contaminated with any modern-day yeast strains.

I’d be sending the submarines to the Black Sea, myself. Home of ancient wrecks in deep cold oxygen-less waters. Imagine finding sealed beers from Hanseatic League in the Baltic. That would be neato.

Hints of things ending. A great brewery’s trappings being auctioned off. Maureen‘s recollection of her rejection of an otherwise beloved beer bar in Colorado. And Boak and Bailey’s call in their newsletter to save The Rhubarb:

This time, though, it feels different. The Rhubarb is the last pub in the neighbourhood. When it’s gone, it will be gone, and a great swathe of Bristol will be totally publess. They say you need to pick your battles. It feels as if this might be ours although we’re worried we don’t have the time to commit to a long campaign. The difficulty is at the moment there doesn’t seem to be an organised campaign to save it.

I am too Scots Presbyterian to accept the oneness of intoxicating substances even while I entirely acknowledge them. In Ohio, there is the 350ness of it all apparently. Still, not sure if this is correct as we have gone over the “unmalted grain becomes beer” scenario* a number of times over the years:

“Primitive beer is [as simple as] ripping grains out of the ground, taking them in your hand, and throwing that grain into water,” Muraresku says, wisdom imparted to him by a prominent beer scientist. “The microbiome on the hand could have been responsible for those early yeasts. Aside from not having to dehusk it or heat it, you’re creating a beverage that … is safer than water. And if the right grain was sitting in the right water over time, it would have naturally started to ferment with whatever yeast and fungi were on the grains.” 

Sir Geoff Palmer, surely one of the most interesting users of Twitter, shared a very interesting set of images illustrating the intersection of racist bigotry and brewing science at an early point in his career:

Our History: Truth-battle did not start with me calling Dundas a slaver, it started in the 1960s when my research said the Aleurone produced the digestive enzymes in the grain, not the Scutellum. Maths and more recent publications say I was correct. Lucky…l nearly got the sack.

Note: if anyone suggests they are a beer expert immediately ask them to describe the difference between the aleurone and the scutellum. Email me the response.

And Barry Masterson wrote about “Perry, Pomonas and Pomology” for Cider Review:

…the earliest developments of British pomology (the study of fruit and its cultivation) were tightly bound with the making of cider and perry, an industry that developed with great intensity during the latter half of the 17th century. With the end of the English civil wars, farming life was returning to normal, perhaps with renewed energy. At the same time, conflicts on the Continent meant that foreign wines were maybe not so easily imported, so the production of local wines became an important topic that exercised the brightest minds of Britain…

Finally, amongst the greatest bar tabs of all time we give you the Boston Bruins of 18 June 2011.

That’s a good bit of reading for you. Once that’s done, don’t forget to check out those weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday  and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness. And remember BeerEdge, too. Plus a newcomer located by B+B: The Moon Under Water.

*Are beer writing editors no longer a thing? 2018 seems so recent.

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For When July Is Closer Than May

I will be positive. I will try to be positive. That’s what I say to myself. Every week. I will try. I do try. But it is trying, isn’t it. Not even sure it is all that interesting.  Far better being interesting than being positive. That’s why #ThinkingAboutDrinking >>> #BeerPositive.  Not schmarmy.  No need of that. Nope. I will try to be interesting. I will be interesting. I will. I will try.

As a start, it was interesting to see in The Telegraph the vision above of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau looking like Castro and Zappa’s love child while drinking a pint of ale as HRH The Queen had her back turned and Chuck looked pained but also comfortably numbed by the gin. By way of my review, an excellent G7 moment captured. Canadian politicians must love beer.

Elsewhere, there are few people writing about beer these days as interesting as Dr. Christina Wade of Braciatrix who wrote this week about a topic near and dear to my heart – beery references on cuneiform tablets within the records of Sumerian society:

Administration was a key part of these organizations. According to Peter Damerow, beer was not a simple agricultural product but, ‘belonged to the products subjected to the centralised economy of Sumerian states’. Indeed, he stated that the consumption and production of beer were separate entities and beer held this positon even after the decline of Sumerian culture. 

I say near and dear as I wrote of a similar thing in 2017, shared that info and had a merry chat with the good doctor.

Sticking with history, Martyn also wrote an extremely interesting piece this week drawing information out of the William Helliwell* diaries of the 1830s (much discussed in Lost Breweries of Toronto) that Jordan shared – and then contextualizing the info into London’s porter scene of that time:

William seems to have seized every chance to look round breweries on his journey: he visited two in Rochester, New York state and two more in nearby Albany on his way to New York to catch a ship to England, where he arrived in mid-June after a six-week journey from Canada. In London he had an introduction to Timothy Thorne, owner of the Westminster Brewery on Horseferry Road, from Thorne’s son Charles, whom William knew in York. The brewery, which made ale and porter, had been founded by Timothy Thorne in 1826. 

Leonard Lispenard of NYC took a similar trip in 1783 and trained under his cousins the Barclays. Did he keep a diary? Hmm…

Even more recent history was discussed by Boak and Bailey as they wrote about the demise in the later 1980s of a traditional pub in London’s Docklands, victim perhaps of a misplaced application of the new Duran Duran laced lifestyle:

We came across this small story of the loss of a specific pub through ‘Eastenders’, an episode of the ITV weekly documentary series World In Action available via BritBox. Jess being a Londoner, and Ray being a hopeless nostalgist, we often find ourselves watching this kind of thing and there’s invariably a pub somewhere among the grainy footage.

Never a good look for a writer to look for an expert to confirm a premise after the article’s been approved. Far more interesting was Max’s walk to Litoměřice:

I needed to have my computer serviced, which meant that I would have to do without it for a couple of days, which meant that I wouldn’t be able to do much else than fuck all at home. The thing had been acting up for some time already – some issue with the hard drive – and I’d decided to wait until I finished with a couple of big projects I was working on, always hoping it wouldn’t give up on me. It didn’t, and the timing could not have been any better. With the covid restrictions on all the fun stuff mostly lifted, and the weather finally nice, now I had the perfect excuse to take a couple of much needed days off to partake in one of my favourite activities: getting a train or a bus somewhere to go on a long walk in nature, with a brewery as destination. 

Sadly but interestingly so, the car crash within the wider sexism in craft car crash that is the Brewdog story keeps on giving and it is always wonderful when a beery bit of news gets the attention of someone in journalism** like this excellent balanced opinion piece by Camilla Long in The Sunday Times:

Will anyone now work for Brewdog? Thirty years ago the answer would probably have been a grudging yes. For people over 40, a cut-throat, stressful working environment — or as Brewdog’s founder put it, “a fast-paced culture” — is still closely associated with good results… But if you are under 40, the idea of working for somewhere that isn’t calm and friendly is horrifying. Young people simply won’t work for places that don’t offer good vibes. In America, where companies these days can’t hire people fast enough, hotels are offering free holidays and stays to attract good staff. Jobs are competing for people, rather than the other way round.

People still looking for a better placement within the beer industry don’t get that direct in their writing. As usual, Matty C comes closest but still hedged the best with the unfortunate use of “snafus” and describing Brewdog’s investors as “wolfish” even though it was the owners of Brewdog who took the cash. As noted these hesitancies jar the reader, leave doubts. Charlotte Cook in Beer 52 also added to the story with her personal experiences as relatively early BrewDog staff:

The inability to read the room also astounded me, women are finally speaking up for the horrible treatment they have endured in the craft beer industry. The lack of an apology from James, or any assurance of the steps being taken to improve things, suggests to me that BrewDog has not yet understood the moment of change we are going through. 

Who? indeed, would work there? Or buy the beer. Not even me and I used to take from them when they were wee needy advertising sponsors of this blog. Relatedly, Jemma Wilson succinctly shared her suspicions as to the Cicerone sexism situation. Gotta love an an independent investigation report that states “…Cicerone will be more responsive…” That’s not an investigative finding or even a recommendation.

Finally, Eoghan Walsh published the story of how and why Brussels’ grand new beer museum came to be:

Krishan Maudgal has worked in Belgian beer for over a decade, for the likes of Alken Maes and its well-known Abbey brand Affligem. In 2021 Maudgal was appointed to Gatz’s old position as director of the Belgian Brewers Federation, and he’s worked for the brewers on the museum concept almost from the beginning, helping to shape what the project will be – and what it won’t. “It’s not a showroom for only the international major brewers of our country,” Maudgal says. “It’s to promote the Belgian way of living. Eating, drinking, beer and food.”

There. All positively interesting. Don’t forget to check out those weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday  and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness. And remember BeerEdge, too. Plus a newcomer located by B+B: The Moon Under Water.

*Helliwell would likely have called himself “British” or “English” but unlikely “Canadian” as there was no unified Canada of the British sort at the time. Canada then was still the name for French Canadians given they had lived in what they called Canada since the early 1600s. There was an Upper Canada which Helliwell did live in. In Nova Scotia, Ontarians are still called Upper Canadians even though the jurisdiction ceased to exist in 1841. This is all unpacked here to another degree or so…
**meaning having qualifications which do not include being on a first name basis with the subject of the beery news story.  H/T to the Tand.

 

Your Thursday Beery News Notes Welcoming The Second Third Of June 2021

I keep telling myself it will be a short update this week because not much happened but then (i) something happens and/or (ii) I get into my notes and I see that more happened than I thought. That’s the way of the world, folks. Speaking of which, robsterowski guided my eye to the jokey image to the right which is a helpful guide to the clans of beer writers today. Or is it? Sad commentary, that’s what it is. But what do you expect when there’s seltzer scriveners about?

But this is the way it is going for beer these days, not just those writing about beer. It’s all so uninteresting all of a sudden – which, if you think about it, is somewhat interesting.  Consider this extraordinary open letter to BrewDog published by Punks with Purpose. There are over 100 named and anonymous co-signers who say they are former BrewDog employees making extremely pointed accusations about the workplace environment:

Put bluntly, the single biggest shared experience of former staff is a residual feeling of fear. Fear to speak out about the atmosphere we were immersed in, and fear of repercussions even after we have left.

What an extraordinary statement about something as banal as a brewing outfit.  Who needs to impose a culture of fear to make beer? Update: James, corporate head of the brewery, attempted a response and made it pretty much worse.

You could as easily ask who needs to be a sexist pig to make but but Ruvani de Silva of Craft Beer Amethyst came across another craft brewery with bigotry based branding. WTAF indeed.  I used to write posts with titles like “This Is How US Craft Beer Will Kill Itself” on the silly independent beer campaign on 2012 or 2014’s “Yet Another Way Craft Will Kill Itself?” in which we considered the beginnings of craft as gimmick, the foundations of today’s bewildering non-beer beer market. Interesting to see that it may well be the capitalist pigs who kill of craft through simply being found out. Who told you otherwise?

It does seem to be all collapsing slowly, doesn’t it. Former darling NC craft brewery destination of the ticking traveling set and the tourism associations providing the related funding, the venerable Weeping Radish which was established in 1986, has gone up for sale:

North Carolina’s oldest microbrewery, which originally opened its doors in Manteo next to the Christmas Shop, is now located 35 miles north on a 25-acre farm at 6810 Caratoke Highway in Grandy in Currituck County. The sale includes the building, land and the entire business, according to a listing. The asking price is $2.6 million.

No questions about the sale are being answered. That’s a great way to stoke up a market for your properties, isn’t it.

Perhaps (taking in all the above) whistling past the graveyard, Jeff takes on a very apolitical question in this a very political time – the question of the middle market in craft beer:

In many ways, there is no single beer market. I stopped in at Culmination last night and found a brewery thrumming with activity. I had three beers: an expensive hazy, a rum-barrel Baltic (or Polish) Porter, and a Grodziskie. Not a one of those beers could ever enter the middle market. The people at the brewery weren’t there for “normal” beers, either. They wanted a unique local experience. In this sense, craft breweries are like restaurants.

Many questioned the fundamental premise but, me, I think of this as a just happy illusion. Once, I remember a middle aged, middle class radio host saying his favorite thing to do on a summer afternoon was lay upon a lawn chair, have a beer and daydream of former girlfriends. And not for any spicy reason. Just that they never asked in his dreamy mood for him to do any chores. Worrying about the middle class of the beer market is like that these days. We avoid troubles. We have a nap. The actual answer is the middle class of beer sits there before you there on grocery store shelves and in gas station  coolers. There is always something moderately interesting at a modest price, isn’t there. Brands may come and go but there’s always something.

Beer has always found a way to make it easy. Further back in time (when things were perhaps similar to today during the Gilded Age of the Capitalist Pig), we learn (as an image posted by Lost Lagers tells us) of 1890 global lager brewing capacity – which is interesting and especially compared to some of the numbers floating around Albany Ale, including Taylor’s Ale brewery in the 1880s having a capacity of 250,000 barrels, at a point in time well past its own heyday. (Note in the comments under that second link, the first time I came into contact with Craig, my partner in crime of over a decade now. Heavens!) Scale.

And certainly relatedly, I had a very good set of chats with Edd Mather this week of the Old Beers and Brewing blog. I was happy to share with him the 1811ish and 1830s era brewing books from Vassar in New York’s Hudson Valley and he immediately went to work unpacking the notes to provide instruction how to clone Vassar’s  single ale as brewed on the 13th of August 1833. Excellent stuff.

Another way beer has found a way to find its way was spotted in Afghanistan this week according to The Times of India:

Defence Ministry spokeswoman Christina Routsi said on Monday that a recent decision by the German commander in Afghanistan to ban the consumption of alcohol for security reasons had resulted in a pileup of beer, wine and mixed drinks at Camp Marmal in Mazar-e-Sharif. German soldiers are usually entitled to two cans of beer or equivalent per day. Routsi said the military had found a civilian contractor who will take the alcohol back out of the country ahead of the German troops’ withdrawal from Afghanistan as the NATO mission in the country ends in the coming months.

Note: Calamity Jane drinking at a saloon at Gilt Edge Montana in 1897. Perhaps related, happy to get a Halley Marlor update. You will recall her three months ago brewing this year’s Vintage Ale at Fullers. Now she has started in a new position with  Siren Craft Brew. Good luck! Avoid the fear.

Finally, I like this statement which I read this week in relation to some of the horrible news coming out in Canada but it seems to be fairly universal:

Gatekeeping is the way of the white man. Whether it be knowledge, resources, queerness or culture it’s rooted in the colonial and capital imperialistic fallacies of scarcity. That there is a somehow a limited resource and we should obstruct others and assert control and access.

I keep wondering who it was that for so long told us craft was special and how it was related to this sort of gatekeeping. This week, I also heard the acronym WEIRD for the first time: western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic which also goes a long way and has likely been around a long time and known by others – at least before since I entered my bubble. This is also jangling about my head in relation to brewing… don’t know how but it is.

There. I hope beer gets back to being about beer once day. Meantime, don’t forget to check out those weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday  and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness. And remember BeerEdge, too. Plus a newcomer located by B+B: The Moon Under Water.