Category: Fests and Gatherings

These Be The Week Before Christmas Mailed In But Merry Beery News Notes

Well, they would be mailed-in if we hadn’t had a postal strike here in Canada. My Christmas cards are in limbo. Parcels replaced with e-cards. How unjolly. So I have had to find other things to fill my days. Like reading. I was up to a book a week during the pandemic. This year? Not even one a month. I was grateful, then, to read the passage to the right from Prof. Smil’s facinating but dense (not to mention tiny fonted) book Size which is something of an apology to the reader. It’s good to know that sometimes the feelings are mutual when it comes to these sorts of things. Which other writers should issue apologies?

What is up? ATJ starts us off whistfully today, daydreaming of the scene in a favourite pub on Christmas Day:

A pub I regularly visit, The Bridge Inn at Topsham, five miles from where I live, opens for a couple of hours and the landlady Caroline recently told me that hundreds of people turn up and that there was a separate bar to dispense Branoc, which is the pub’s popular session ale. Other beers poured from the wood are of a stronger cast, the kind of strength that would make a cat speak. I am sure that the mood is joyous and celebratory, a cacophony of voices and laughter, inside and outside the pub. The parlour to the left of the pub corridor I guess to be warmed by the well-lit fire and full of eager drinkers, as would I suspect to be the back bar, again with a well-warming fire and conversation ebbing and flowing like the tidal river just below the pub. One day I shall get there on Christmas Day.

Boak and Bailey also consider their actual visits to the pubs of Bristol during these holidays – first at (me being Nova Scotian) the most wonderfully named pub that I will likely never enter, The Nova Scotia, then moving on to The Merchant’s Arms:

The Bass was excellent. The Butcombe was excellent. The Christmas tree twinkled and was reflected in the chocolate brown paintwork. There were more lads in Christmas jumpers, more rugby boys… no, actually, the same ones from The Orchard, on the same trail as us. Again, we found it hard to leave, but The Merchants Arms was beckoning from across the water… We squeezed through the door and through the crowd to a spot within shouting distance of the bar. As we peered at the pumps we heard a voice shouting “Ray! Ray!” but ignored it because, frankly, The Merchants is the kind of pub where almost everyone is called Ray.

If I ever meet B+B, I hope I first see them from a distance so I too can shout “Ray! Ray!” but to be clear I will likely shout “Jess! Jess!” so as to be both cheery and nice while also sneaky and clever.

Also striking a holiday pose, in Foodism we see Will Hawkes wrote about Christmas ales as an echo of Victorian times:

Christmas meant stronger beer, often brewed in October and longer aged to soften the edges. In December 1888, for example, the Phillips Brewery advised readers of the Oxford Times not to miss out on their “Christmas Specialities”: a strong ale, a double [i.e. stronger than usual] stout and an ale aged for two years. These were powerfully flavoured beers designed to accompany the rich, fatty, indulgent dishes then central to, and still part of, a British Christmas: plum pudding, stilton and roast meat of various kinds – this was a time when most Britons did not drink wine. Beers were dark and heady, like liquid Christmas Pudding, and often stronger than 10% ABV.

Now… I would note that English strong ale is not a Victorian invention as careful readers will appreciate. But the point of the reformist middle class Victorian – really Albertan – homey Christmas is quite correct. Still, I do think the Georgians were more fun. Disgusting but fun.

Going further back while remaining ecclesiastical, Dr. Christina Wade shared some snazzy facts this week over on BlueSky about the work of a medieval Cellaress:

The pages of this late 13th-century manuscript, La Sainte Abbeye, detail what would make up a perfect abbey. & what would such an institution be without ale, or, perhaps more precisely, the nun in charge of it, the Cellaress… Pictured in this illustration, between the Abbess, singing nuns, and a small handful of deacons is the cellaress, the woman in charge of food and drink… In medieval monastic communities, ale was an important part of diet. It was critical to the running of many of these nunneries. And not only did they drink it, they often also brewed it on site.

Keeping up with this sort of academic wisdom is what makes this here blog what it is – but I have to admit I also love running across new favourite jargonese like “pseudo-targeted flavoromics” which is just fabulous. Whaaaaaaat does it even mean?

…a comprehensive flavoromics integrating untargeted, pseudo-targeted, and targeted analyses was employed to characterize volatile development across RTs with 14 annotated compounds. Notably, non-linear patterns have been observed in malt coloration, precursors consumption, and volatile development for the first time…

Fabulous. Super dooper fabulous. Speaking of which and yet giving me something of my own flashback, David Jesudason wrote about the experience about returning to the pub as a member of staff, something he had not done for 25 years:

…working in a pub gives you a rare gift of seeing the space for what it truly is even if that is amorphous – at first it went from being a slew of self-contained tables and then a communal mass with multiple conversations tied together with the love of beer. And, at times when I wasn’t part of the fun or the work, I had a vision of it being a high-street shop – the marvel of the micropub unwrapped. The most shameful confession is that for a few seconds when facing random customers I felt like I over-explained to somehow overcompensate that I was more than a bartender – maybe James’s intervention was warranted. That I had somehow failed in my career as a writer and become perma-frosted since 1999, which reveals how I may subconsciously view service industry jobs as somehow inferior to other pursuits.

My trick as a bartender?  Give change in dimes and nickels. You get it all back. Speaking of the jolly, did you see the 1975 BBC new item on the Guinness tanker ship posted at the FB page of the Brewery History Society? It’s not the ship itself that’s jolly but that turtleneck blazer combo… though the “draught” and other puns do strain the patience.

Tariff news update!  Did I mention that Ontario’s government booze store (retail and wholesale) is the biggest in the world? Well, apparently our provincial government is considering restricting the Liquor Control Board of Ontario from buying any American-made alcohol:

“We’ll use every tool in our toolbox, as we put a tariff on bourbon last time. The LCBO is the largest purchasers of alcohol in the entire world. But I’d prefer not to do any of this,” Ford said Friday. Earlier in the week, Ontario’s premier threatened to pull the plug on the electricity supply that powers 1.5-million homes in New York, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Looks like I’ll be sipping rye this winter. As Michigan grinds to a halt. And speaking of sipping, The Tand took himself and herself out for a walk recently to spend the day drinking cask ale in London and shared what he found:

I knew trouble was afoot when the server put my glass under the handpump and splashed beer into it while pouring a half of lager. It was the worst pint of Vocation Bread and Butter I’d ever had, but I supped it quietly and left most of it. I hadn’t the heart to pull this hard-working lass up about it. Someone should have trained her better. At our table we started talking with a couple of lads who’d lived locally for a few years, They too had started on cask and abandoned it so we enjoyed Hofmeister instead…

Somewhat speaking of which and before we get into the “craft rot” stories, they of Pellicle posted some thoughts on the year soon past and their plans for 2025:

While these features remain popular, in that they’re well read, we’ve come to realise that readers are often seeking more than simply a narrative piece about a brewery with a friendly owner who makes really tasty beer. There needs to be an angle, a hook, a proper story to dig your teeth into. We will continue to publish stories about beer and breweries in 2025, but with greater scrutiny and tighter angles focusing on what we feel really matters to our readers. Throughout this year we’ve been pausing to check ourselves and ask “who really cares about this, and why does it matter?” Two hugely important questions when you’re publishing content about any given subject.

This is good. Where ever they are published, brewery owner bios (herein “BOBs”) tend to be samey. Cavity inducing even. Where the reader can find investigative work like fact checking brewery owner assertions or interviewing former employees or business partners for alternative takes on official history these piece might have some hang time. But they are nice and have their place so keep them in there as long as they are matched with as many more analytical critical studies. Good move.

Also looking a bit forward as well, drinks writer Jason Wilson prepared a What’s In and What’s Out chart for the turn of the year. Click to the to the right for a larger version. The bad news that we all know has come to pass is that craft beer* is in the out column but has sake really given it the boot? As is often the case, there is an underlying argument that things that were a bit precious are being left behind so craft beer joins caviar, mini cocktails and Mezcal on the list making room for oysters, dirty martinis and calvados. Now, you can live the life that you think is right for you but I am always going to vote for oysters and calvados.

Note: BA Bart takes the shrinking ship’s helm as the foundering continues. And this is during the week when the frankly “long forgotten to many” RateBeer announced its own demise after five years of big beer ownership – and announced it with some very specific instructions:

Login to the RateBeer website and navigate to the My Profile page… In the right-hand column below “Beer Cellar” is the “My Account” section… In the “My Account” section, click “Compile My Ratings”.. The next page will provide options for downloading your ratings in CSV (comma-separated value) format…

Wow. It’s soon gonna to be gone gone gone goner than Hunter Biden is getting struck from the White House Christmas party list. Just to avoid the link-a-cide, I am connecting to the story at BeerAdvocate, too.

And Jordan noted another passing, of The Growler a beer magazine he edited. Print magazines about beer have never done well in Canada. Ontario had a section in Great Lakes Brewing News from 2009 to 2019 before… the scandal. And we had TAPS that folded its last print edition in 2016, then we had Mash which lasted a few issues the next year, then we had a Canadian edition of Original Gravity for a bit – and now we have The Growler‘s Ontario edition taking its leave in turn, though the BC edition seems to live on. In good times and bad, beer magazines have never seemed to be the thing. Will someone try again?

Speaking of which, interesting zing! from a former blog publisher over Google delisting the “unvetted and often bogus content” of Forbes’ contributor network where a few struggle down the mine axe in hand, hacking against the rock face, convincing others that beer is interesting.

Note: a list of 10 or 25 or 30 people naming their favourite beer or breweries of the year (or anything of the year) isn’t a list of the top 25 or 30. It’s just 25 or 30 lists each with only one listed. End of the year content filling season is here!**

Finally and in far better shape than that second half what was set out above, Drunk Polkaroo is back after 12 weeks off alcohol and counting for health reasons, the details of which he has shared. After a bit of a glum re-entry with a discount brand review, he is one his feet again with a cheery review of a NA beer from one of Canada’s finest brewers. Is this his new thing? It’s certainly a good thing.

That’s it! Happy holidays! Merry Christmas and all that!! Until next time when we will be gathered ’round the Boxing Day Box, please check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan going strong again each and every Monday. Then listen to Lew’s podcast and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the (sometimes even but never) odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. The Share looks to be back with a revival. Ben’s Beer and Badword is out there with the all the sweary Mary! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? Check out the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good and they are revving up for a new year. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too.  All About Beer has podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s one cost a fifth of that but only had the one post. Such is life.

*As per Beer Insights: ‘ Whole Foods beer buyer Mary Guiver reflected on the theme of focus, resisting the urge “to do everything” and “chase everything”… Whole Foods “had to weather the storm of being a craft-centric retailer,” Mary said, and “it sucked.” ‘
**Plus… “beer pros“!

Festive But Still Pensive Are These Beery News Notes Now Two Weeks Out From Boxing Day

Well, there’s nothing like the fall of a murderous dictator to make the season bright. Sadly, no Nicky Ceaușescu moment but, still, it’s all good news. For now. Almost as cheery was this ad for Younger’s shared at the FB page of the Brewery History Society, It isn’t dated but I am thinking it’s 1920s if we are going by the plus fours of the gent leaning at the bar. They might even be plus eights!

Speaking of the happy jollies, Kate has posted some holiday gifting suggestions over at her site The Gulp with a note of sympathy for anyone needing the advice:

It sounds like an impossible job, buying presents for ungrateful bastard beer people, and honestly, it’d be understandable if you didn’t bother. However, if you’re still dead-set on making your favourite beer lover happy, here are some bolt-from-the-blue ideas you’ve still got time to work on before Christmas comes.

I like the reasonably budget conscious Guinness toque idea. Speaking of getting in the holiday mood, Lars has a tale of ales of yore in Craft Beer & Brewing that starts with a timely reminder for you and you and especially you:

One Christmas Eve in the late 19th century, the family on the Hovland farm in Hardanger, Norway, was sitting down for a festive dinner. The food was on the table, the candles were lit, and the big wooden mug was full of beer. Then, suddenly, enormous hands appeared between the logs from which their house was built, tilting one side of the house into the air. In the gap between the logs, they could see giant eyes staring at them, glittering in the candlelight. The farmer didn’t panic. He immediately knew what the problem was. He grabbed the mug of beer from the table and ran out the door to the burial mound, just beyond the farmyard, and he poured the beer on the roots of the tree growing on top.

Feed the frikkin’ tree, wouldja?

Note #1: I could write this every week as opposed to every third week but Martin has another wonderful photo essay of a corner of Britain. This week he adds another twist as he’s in Rye daydreaming in a wonderful pub without really explaining how he is daydreaming in a wonderful pub:

And as you’ll know, has one of the UK’s top pubs on its doorstep. But even more than that, it has working WiFi.

Speaking of pub life, two more good discussions of the effect the cancellation of a number of British cask brands by megabrewers and ultimate licence holders Carlsberg UK and Marston’s PLC will have. First, Phil Mellows in British Beer Breaks shares how one of the beers being cut is a vital part of pub life at The Royal Oak, Chapel Ash:

“It’s tradition. It’s like waking up and seeing the time on a clock. Walking into the pub and not seeing Banks’s Mild in the bar will be very weird. It has been the milk of Wolverhampton for decades and so many people are upset about it going. I am a very proud Wulfrunian and Banks’s Mild has been here all my life. It feels like CMBC has ripped out our hearts.”

And David Jesudason found a similar loss at The Pelton Arms, Greenwich where Bombardier set the tone:

I served the bitter at the first pub I worked in – three cask pumps, always Pride, always Bombardier, the other rotated – and it wasn’t seen as fashionable even then in the late 90s. Which is perhaps to do with its branding – St George’s Cross etc – but the drink is actually quite subtle with a soft finish with hints of toffee, fudge and fruity tones of raisin and sultana. And this is the pint the locals go for here. Or went for, because of a decision made in a far off office they’re having it taken away just at a time when a pub needs to keep its drinkers – its regulars – who may think it’s not worth it after all and not make the trip to the pub.

I’ve seen a bit of a blip in the craft beer code recently, like this from Doug Velky:

Craft beer is currently in a cycle where nostalgia is playing the role that innovation was driving for so long. The pendulum will eventually swing back the other way, but it’s a great time to revisit and remind fans of their favorites that got us here. Despite the added stress we’re all under, here is still an awesome place, so let’s not forget that.

Nostalgia. That’s this week’s word. For what? What was he talking about? Black IPA. Yup, the only beer trend so disappointing it made us forget that the candle wax goodness of White IPA was even worse. Thankfully, it isn’t coming back. We just live in time times when manufactured positivity needs to grasp at straws. See also.

Speaking of what is in the bottle as opposed to what is pasted on the outsides… did I?… was I?… one scribbler I follow but don’t often mention is Mikey Seay of The Perfect Pour. This week he shared his thoughts about the process of bying Kirkland beer, Costco’s house brand:

We have been talking regularly on the Perfect Pour about Costco’s store brand beer Kirkland. Joking about it mostly, but it’s also making me want to try it. Especially since I am told that the fine Oregon brewer, Deschutes, makes it I am not a member of Costco, and it’s a member-only kind of place. But there is an alcohol loophole. Costco can’t put alcohol exclusively behind the membership-only wall. So I/you as a non-member can go in and buy some Kirkland beer and whatever else ones they have.

I don’t think that applies in Canada… yet… but it terms of quality it reminds me of the Bon Appetit episode on the Kirkland range of wines. And by range I do mean range.

Looking over at perhaps the other side of the season too often not acknowledged, Ray posted some thoughts about loss at B+B this week which were both personally heartfelt but also an exploration of what many go through as we demand happiness and joy this time of year:

I’d always got the impression Dad didn’t like the pub much but Mum told me that wasn’t the case at all. In fact, after their first visit, he said he was worried that, in retirement, it might be a bit too easy to end up there every lunchtime spending money they didn’t have on booze that wouldn’t do them any good. So he avoided it altogether. Mum and I had been there a while, one round in, before we noticed that both of us were bopping along to the jukebox. It was non-stop blues music – not exactly the kind of songs Dad would have chosen himself, but not far off. We shivered. It felt spooky.

Far less seriously, in Australia where it is summer a beer snake interrupted an international cricket match:

The beer-snake-wielding cricket fan who ran through a roped-off area of the Adelaide Oval on Friday night has revealed what was going through his head when he interrupted play in the second Test.  Lachie Burtt, now better known as “beer snake man”, hoisted his pile of beer cups above the sight screen just as India’s Mohammed Siraj was about to bowl to Marnus Labuschagne late on day one. “In my head at that time, I just wanted to get away from the guard, so I saw the space and hopped over the tiny white rope,” he told 9News.

The Times of India was less amused. And also not fully amused, Stan had a great round up this week – many new thoughts on the state of things here and there – including this on some of the questionable writing we have to put up with:

If you somehow didn’t see one of the gazillion stories about the role social media stars played in the recent election, one of them was Joe Rogan. Before I grew weary of reading the same story over and over, and wondered to myself who the Joe Rogan of beer might be.

Spill!  The comments are open.

Speaking of something even more dubious, the story of Carlsberg’s somewhat reluctant exit from its Baltika brand and the Russian beer market appears to be coming to its conclusion:

The management buy-out, announced today (3 December), sees a company established by two Baltika employees become controlling shareholder of the subsidiary, which reportedly has eight breweries in Russia, including one in St. Petersburg, and produces more than 50 brands… According to documents seen by Reuters, the deal, which has been approved by both the Russian and Danish states, is worth a reported 30.4 billion rubles (£226.4 million at the time of writing)… A press release from Carlsberg Group also revealed that, as part of the deal, Baltika Breweries will transfer all of its shareholdings in Carlsberg Azerbaijan and Carlsberg Kazakhstan to the Carlsberg Group.

“At the time of writing” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that passage, although the load is lightening by the hour.

Note #2: samples are not gifts.

In Pellicle, Claire Bullen takes us along to Mikulov, Moravia in the Czech Republic where we meet Jitka Ilčíková, the founder of Wild Creatures brewery:

The brewery now occupies an expansive industrial unit just north of Mikulov, in the village of Dolní Dunajovice. The space itself is nondescript and utilitarian, all concrete surfaces that echo with the zap of electric fly killers. Outside, its riches are more apparent. The land here is almost laughably lush, with its orchards and vineyards and fields of nodding sunflowers. At one point, we pass a plum tree whose fruits are still green and hard. But when they are ripe, Jitka says, they taste like honey… Wild Creatures today owns several vineyards, which contain multiple varieties of wine grapes, as well as two apricot orchards and part of a sour cherry orchard. The rest of the fruit comes from friends or partner suppliers.

Last week, we discussed (you and I… we did!) Christmas office parties and how they were dying off. This week we read in The Times of how some are fighting for being included in the inviting:

The Public and Commercial Services Union, the largest civil service union, told its members that if they were not invited to festive dos — and they suspected it may be because of their age, gender, religion or ethnicity — they could have an employment tribunal claim. The union told civil servants that sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour are “just as unacceptable at social events as they are in the workplace”…  They also warned: “Excluding someone from a work social event due to a protected characteristic such as gender, age, religion, or ethnicity, could also constitute discrimination.”

It is an excellent point. Which is another good reason to not have this sort of horrible event and do something else instead. And finally, also following up on the final news item of last week and proving one again that if you have to explain that something was a joke then it wasn’t a joke or at least it wasn’t a good joke, we have this retort care of one K M Flett:

The beer writer Pete Brown had a lengthy Q&A about all matters beer in the Sunday Times magazine on 1st December. It was of course well informed and entertaining. He posed, to give one example, the question ‘does anyone drink mild anymore’ to which he answered simply ‘no’. I’m not sure whether this was a joke (fair enough) or a personal view but either way it is of course not true. Mild has long been characterised as an old man’s drink, and I am an old man (well 68 anyway) so I would say that. Except I’ve been drinking mild for decades even when I was younger, so much younger than today etc.

Zing Not Zing? Oh well. Still, an opportunity to use the rather dusty “Mild” category tag. PS: Matty C also drinks mild.

Note #3: can an introduction really also be a masterclass?

Whew. That is it!  Counting down the days rather than the weeks from here on out. Work will be busy up to the bell for me but hopefully you will start seeing things lighten up soon. Until next Thursday, please check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan going strong again each and every Monday. Then listen to Lew’s podcast and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the (never ever) odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. The Share looks to be back with a revival. Ben’s Beer and Badword is out there with the all the sweary Mary! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? Check out the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good and they are revving up for a new year. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too.  All About Beer has podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s one cost a fifth of that but only had the one post. Such is life.

The First Beery News Notes For December 2024

The countdown is on! I already feel like Ed Grimley and it’s only the fifth of the month. I am too excited. That rotten cold I had is finally in the past and now I am seeing holiday things everywhere, like in the red and green scene at one pub’s outdoor washroom posted by Beer Nouveau. How cheery. Retired Martin* also included an exposé on the outside gents in one post this week:

No, I don’t know what “To the huts” means, either.

Speaking of cheer, are you having an office party?  The Times says they are in mortal danger from, frankly, sensible updates to the law. I say that as a lawyer given I have never been to such madly lavish and deeply souced Christmas parties as those put on by private law firms. But that was decades ago. Here is what is going on now:

Employers that are found to have failed to do so could face claims for unlimited compensation at tribunals. Lawyers are advising that financial services businesses in the City of London — renowned for alcohol-fuelled Christmas parties — “should be particularly mindful of the new rules”… Updated guidance published in September by the Equality and Human Rights Commission emphasised that workplaces must take an active approach to assessing risk. That translates to an obligation to identify any action to clamp down on possible sexual harassment and the requirement for regular reviews of systems.

This lines up with what is… or rather isn’t… happening in New Jersey whether because of cell phones and social media, workplace harassment, remote working arrangements or lower interest in excessive drinking. Did you know some offices bizarrely arrange for staff to buy holiday party gifts for ownership? And perhaps not oddly, given Russia’s foolishly and murderously self-inflicted economic collapse, but holiday office parties are being cancelled there too. Apparently, there are after effects of this sort of thing well beyond the office:

A new low-alcohol beer has been launched by a train operator in a bid to tackle the number of passengers having drunk accidents during the festive period. The Safety Thirst beer, at 0.5% alcohol, will be stocked onboard Avanti West Coast services, which run on the West Coast Main Line between London Euston and Scotland. The company said the pale ale will create a “more enjoyable travel experience” and help passengers “drink responsibly”. 

The Tand doesn’t need no stinkin’ office parties for his jolly holidays. Because he found his perfect beer:

…I probably don’t score beers as much as I ought to, but I regularly do. I am probably quite a strict scorer, given that I judge beer in competitions and also that over the years, I know what its what.  So, that’s a long winded way of saying, until now, I have never given a five. So let’s get to the point. It had to happen and last Friday, in an infrequent visit to our local Wetherspoons, I gave a beer a five. What was it I hear you scream? Well, perhaps not surprisingly given the quality of the brewer and the beer, it was Thornbridge Jaipur. Why a five? Well, this was perfectly brewed, clear and untainted with no off flavours, at a perfect temperature and was bursting with condition. The body and mouthfeel were perfect. The glass was spotless. In my mind I went over everything. Could it be improved in a normal pub environment? Not as far as I could tell. It was, simply, faultless.

Boom! What’s the news from the ag markets? Oh… as we have heard out of Oregon, the hops news coming out of Germany is not good:

Declining beer consumption worldwide is hurting German hops growers, who face lower prices and possible farm closures amid a dip in demand for the bitter crop. A strong hops harvest in 2024 means that Germany has regained the crown as the world’s top producer of hops, but prices have slid. According to the German Hop Industry Association, 2024 is the 11th year in a row in which more hops were produced than required.

And, speaking of not boom,  Canada’s barley supplies appear to be very close to a 25 year low:

With the 700,000-metric-ton (mt) projection being only slightly higher than 542,800 mt remaining after the devastating drought of 2021, there is little room for error…. Given the drought stress experienced and the lowering of yield estimates by provincial counterparts, it is widely anticipated that final production estimates from Statistics Canada will be lower on Dec. 5. The problem is, even a 3% cut in production would take 228,000 mt off the ending stocks (all else equal), leaving them below the 2021-22 level.

In addition to drought, prices and planted acreage of barley were both down in 2024, too. If you want to obsess over this on a regular basis, check out the tables and charts of the Canadian Grain Commission’s weekly stats.  And that’s all the malt news this week… NO IT ISN’T!! The Maltsters Association of Great Britain also issued an update on the 2024 numbers:

The UK malting barley harvest is now complete and the overall picture is one of reasonable quality and good supply. Winter malting barley can be summarised as variable with predominantly low nitrogen crops and grain retention levels similar to 2023. Winter barley yields are recorded at 10-15% less than the 5-year average. Conversely, the spring barley harvest in the UK has seen low nitrogen crops throughout all regions with good retention levels and yields described as better than average.

I’ve been described as better than average, too.  A step up from that but facing similar climate and market pressures, traditional sake makers in Japan are heartened by UNESCO intangible cultural heritage designation for their brewing techniques:

“It’s still quite warm, even though it’s almost December. The price of rice is high and the harvest is poor, which has made sake-brewing (this year) very challenging”… The centuries-old method of making sake is unique for its three-step preparation, or “San-Dan-Jikomi”, of allowing multiple fermentation processes to progress simultaneously in a single container… While sake has lost ground as a regular drink, Maesako said it remains impossible to separate from Japanese culture. “We have sake at celebrations, at New Year’s, and also on sad occasions, like funerals,” he said. “The culture of Japanese sake is the culture of Japan itself.” The brewing technique is expected to be formally endorsed at a UNESCO committee session in Paraguay this week.

More on San-Dan-Jikomi AKA Sandan Jikomi here. Reuters posted a photo essay on the process in addition to the story quoted from above.

Panic!! PANIC!!! They are running out of Guinness:

The BBC understands that Diageo is allocating supplies on a weekly basis to make sure it has enough stock to meet demand over Christmas. A Diageo spokesperson said: “Over the past month we have seen exceptional consumer demand for Guinness in Great Britain. “We have maximised supply and we are working proactively with our customers to manage the distribution to trade as efficiently as possible.”

You know things are going to hell when folk use “proactively” in a press release. Always the actively pro, I think it’s fair to say that The Beer Nut has not always enjoyed the Canadian craft beers that have passed his way. It was good, then, to read how a couple of brewers from my old home in Nova Scotia didn’t disappoint even if one offering didn’t necessarily thrill either:

This is solidly made and workmanlike, but don’t expect fireworks. While I’m not saying that breweries running since 1997 have a particular safe-and-steady way of making their beer, this IPA suggests that there might be something to the theory. It’s not an exciting beer, but I’d say it’s a dependable one.

Boak and Bailey followed up on the recent news of a number of cask brands being discontinued with a consideration of how many brands had existed. Turns out not all that long given a number of constantly moving factors:

When we think of cask ale brands that have been around longer than that a few contenders spring to mind. Hook Norton Old Hooky dates back only to 1977. Adnams Broadside was launched in 1972. Fuller’s London Pride came to the market in 1959. And Marston’s Pedigree was introduced in 1952. You might make an argument for Bass which is not only still available but also having something of a resurgence in popularity. But it’s also, really, just the name of a defunct brewery. And that famous ‘first trademark’ was actually for ‘Bass & Co’s Pale Ale’, which is not what’s on the pump clips today.

Years ago, I noodled around looking up when the first branding attached itself to brewing, when the dissassociation of what is on the label from what is in the glass began. I can’t find the links but if you spend a little time over at Ron’s, you pick up quickly that beers up to a certain point in the middle 1800s were identified as gradations of a brewery’s output like this, not the individually animated distinct personalities in themselves we know as brands. Walk back through time. Trademarks get legislative protection in the UK starting in the 1860s. In the US, we see in the 1820s that beer being shipped out of the local market gets named with adjectives like “cream” added to impress buyers with the superior qualities of the product. A generation before in New York City of the 1790s you see beers sold by style and city of origin much like you would have seen in Britain 120 years before that.  That all being the case, if you think you’ll miss the brand now maybe buy the t-shirt. You’ll probably be able to find a similar drink all the same. As the same B+B wrote in their footnotes:

Perhaps it’s studying beer history that does it – you get used to the idea that beers and brands come and go as tastes change. And if we ran a smaller brewery such as Butcombe or Cheddar Ales, we’d be rubbing our hands in glee, because this would seem to leave a gap in the market for beers which are trad, but not boring. Perhaps we’re being naive, though.

BREAKING!  I had no idea that you had to “stamp” a beer sold in a bar in Quebec. Soon it will be over:

According to the microbreweries, the obligation to affix stamps to their cans and glass bottles is both unnecessary and time-consuming… Since 1971, the law has required a duty stamp to be affixed to all beer sold in restaurants and bars. The original aim was to prevent smuggling and tax evasion. Some microbreweries have recently been visited by police officers who have come to check that the labelling on the stamps complies with the law. Microbreweries that contravene the current law face fines of between $500 and $7,500. The minister was at pains to reassure, saying that a fined business could be forgiven.

BREAKING! I have no idea who these people are:

But how did a ‘celebrity’ couple come to take over this regionally-renowned boutique bar? For that, you’d have to go right back to when it first opened, in 2016. “Katy kept saying she wanted to move somewhere in the countryside but where you can also get a gin and tonic,” Adam says. “So I said: ‘That’s Knutsford.’ I spent so long persuading her to move here. Eventually she agreed and the day we moved in was the day this place opened.”

For VinePair and without any reference to Knutsford, Kate Bernot has unpacked the potential damage Trump’s proposed tariffs will do to the clinky drinky markets in a welcome greater level of detail than we too often see:

The global supply chain means that U.S. companies are heavily reliant on imported materials. For the beverage industry, aluminum is the most significant. Canada exports 75 percent of its aluminum production to the U.S., and domestic production here simply can’t replace that volume. It would take years, Uhrich says, to even begin construction on new aluminum plants, let alone to supply what U.S. alcohol companies need. Beer is obviously the most vulnerable to rising aluminum costs: Two-thirds of U.S. beer is packaged in cans. There’s simply no way, Uhrich says, that further tariffs wouldn’t drive up the cost of domestic beer as a result of costlier materials.

Canadian malt in Canadian cans – US craft! Finally, for the double in The Times, Pete Brown gave a primer on some of the newbie questions that folk who don’t know much about beer are going to ask. It’s an interesting use of the space but the paper must be concerned that there are reader lacking superficial understandings of beer such as this:

Every single menu and every single recipe in the history of humanity is based on one simple truth: some flavours go together better on the palate than others. It would be absurd to think that beer is somehow an exception to this. Beer actually has a broader range of flavour than wine. The caramelisation in a pint of bitter goes perfectly with roast beef. A Belgian-style wheat beer works well with anything you might squeeze some lemon juice over. And stout with a gooey chocolate dessert is so good, so simple, that it’s almost cheating. Just remember to pair light with light and strong with strong, that there’s no right or wrong and that it’s supposed to be fun.

Well, I suppose Christmas is the time for merry chestnuts. At least it’s better than sucking up to your commissioning editor!

That’s it! It’s been a busy week in the real world and that is where I live. Until next Thursday, please check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan going strong again each and every Monday. Then listen to Lew’s podcast and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the (never ever) odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is out there with the all the sweary Mary! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? Check out the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good and they are revving up for a new year. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too.  All About Beer has podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s one cost a fifth of that but only had the one post. Such is life.

*Check out his walk aroung Rye too.

The Beery News Notes For That Empty Feeling Between Thanksgiving and Halloween

Let’s be clear. By “empty feeling” I mean not bloated from either last weekend‘s turkey dinners and pumpkin pie or those mini Crispie Crunch bars yet to come. October is a bit of feed fest around these parts. It’s the cold turn, I suppose. Took me a while after we moved to this border city to gather from upstate NY media that in the United States their holiday season lasts from their Thanksgiving in late November through to New Year’s Day. Not us. We have two separate sessions. October is the time of harvest for us, first the family one… then the freaky one. Holiday season is still a couple of months off. It’s still autumn.

Last Sunday, on a walk I saw a Golden-crowned Kinglet hover. I had no idea that these tiny olive coloured birds hovered, pausing just for a moment before perching as it flit here and there through the autumn afternood. Staring up through the turning leaves, it was a enchanting few minutes until a red tail hawk came silently coasting through the stand of trees, scattering and silencing everything in view.  I am not sure that deeply fascination with the sheer wonderfulness of existence was similarly felt by Stan last week when he visited the GABF:

Not many hours later, Daria and I were at the Great American Beer Festival. We walked by the wrestling, but did not stop. We never saw the bull riding. If you were looking for a specific brewery, the layout was at times confusing. But I liked that the “Fright” area was dimly (very dimly) lit, that the National Black Brewers Association area was much more prominently placed than last year, and the proximity of “Meet the Brewer” to Homebrew Headquarters. So I thought, maybe they should rebrand the event as the Great American Beer Experience. 

Oh, that Stan and his dry sense of humo(u)r.  There has been one thing that benefitted from being called a capital “E” experience and that ended fifty-five years ago. Reviews? Jacob Berg pointed out there were 326 medals awarded and “…four states (California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington) won 176 of them, which is probably bad for the beer industry overall.” Probably. Jon A noticed the “beers were brewed by the brewers who were fired by @tilray this year.” They restrict cameras, halt beer service early and there were plenty of tickets left unsold. Some were not impressed but Andy Crouch wrote:

The 2024 iteration of the @GABF is a disorienting, immersive experience where beer is not the central draw but a companion. The layout is a baffling maze, with each turn offering something new or odd, including pitch darkness. Saw lots of smiling and engaged attendees.

There’s that word again. Is BrewDog still an experience? I think they were going for “experience” for a while there. Maybe not so much now. BrewDog’s big botched batch has made news:

Scottish beer powerhouse Brewdog has had to ditch an eye-watering amount of beer, reportedly worth millions of pounds, due to contamination issues. At their renowned brewing facility in Ellon, Aberdeenshire, batches of their celebrated Punk IPA were deemed unsellable following a “major quality incident” that plagued the production line. Chris Fielden, Brewdogs Chief Supply Chain Officer, expressed his exasperation over the mishap involving “sour beer” in a scathing email blasted across the company, indicating that the significant waste came after employees consistently failed to meet standard cleanliness requirements.

Matthew C himself noted: “Find it funny that everyone is having a good lol about the Br*wdog infected beer. Me? I’m having a good lol that they still haven’t filed their accounts, which are now four months overdue.” All very weird. These are strange times. Update: “…pre-tax losses soared to £59m, up from £25m in 2022…” Yikes.

Yet there are still innovations. Like thinopyrum intermedium. Or as it is somehow trademarked in the US, Kernza. It’s another sustainable grain, like Fonio, that is starting to work its way into the brewing lexiscon. Nebraska Public Media has the story:

The Kernza kernel is much smaller than a barley or wheat kernel, he added, kind of elongated and skinny. Almost flat.” Those differences did pose a few challenges. Thompson explained the Kernza slipped right through his mill when he tried to crush the kernels to expose the starch that’s necessary for brewing. In the end, Thompson adjusted to a different brewing technique that used a mix of milled and unmilled Kernza and the experiment worked. That was good news for Thomson but also for Kernza advocates who want the grain to succeed and see in its small seeds potentially huge changes to modern agriculture.

At the other end in the life a beer, the tap end perhaps, is the story told over at London Beer City where Will Hawkes shared the prior qualifications of Mr. Pat Ahern, publican of the Downham Tavern in the 1970s:

Pat and Sheila, an East London girl, came to the Tavern having run the New Gog, a pub in the Royal Docks north of the River. Pat, a barman at the pub, took over when the previous licensee committed suicide. One incident in 1963, when a young man, George Head, was “called out” onto the street and shot in an apparent gangland hit, illustrates what sort of place it was. Pat put a tourniquet on the wounded man’s legs and drove him to hospital. “That was a really rough house,” says Sue. Pat, who came to Britain at the age of 19, hadn’t wanted to work in a pub – the long hours weren’t conducive to family life – so he took a job at Ford’s huge Dagenham plant. A serious injury in which he fell down a pit and fractured his skull left him incapacitated for nine months, though, and the family was soon in desperate need of cash.

Staying in that era, Ron reminds us that these weren’t the only strange times. In his series of beer in the UK of the 1970s, he has been working through his records of the breweries now long gone and shared this:

One of the largest independent brewers, Greenall Whitley wasn’t that far behind Scottish & Newcastle in terms of tied houses. Lancashire, Cheshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Herefordshire and North Wales were lucky enough to be home to their tied pubs. I never cared for their beers, even though they were often available in cask form. It was also annoying the good brewers the bastards took over and closed. The Warrington brewery closed when Greenalls decided to get out of brewing and become a pub chain. Not a brewery I miss.

Note: speaking of autumn,* the Beer Ladies Podcast is back for another session with their “what I did on summer vacation” edition. Don’t miss it. definitely better than Greenalls.

The Morning Advertiser succinctly reports on the effectiveness of the UK’s 2023 Alcohol Duty Review which saw taxes lowered for lower strength beers:

Alcohol Duty Review has seen 100m alcohol units removed from the market and a “boom” in new lower-strength products, the British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA) has said… The BBPA also revealed 1.3 – 3.4% strength drinks have leapt from less than 1% of beer sales in 2022 to now more than 7%, while the no and low alcohol beer category has also seen rapid growth, accelerating to 2% of the overall market in 2024. Moreover, some 90% of pubs now serve at least one no and low alcohol beer…

I like that 100m units stat. You rarely find absolute numbers in these matters, just change percentage. Speaking of change, you can still have fun drinking beer in Prague but not that sort of fun… not that not no more:

Prague council deputy mayor Zdenek Hrib confirmed that from hereon in “it will not be possible to have guided tours between 10pm and 6am”. According to reports via the national press, the city’s councillors have banned night-time pub crawls organised by travel agencies because the city would prefer to target “more cultured” tourists rather than British stag parties. Speaking about the decision to reporters on Monday, another deputy mayor for Prague city hall Jiri Pospisil revealed that the council was “seeking a more cultured, wealthier tourist” and “not one who comes for a short time only to get drunk”.

Cultured. So is it wine time? Is that what it means? Sure. First up, Pellicle published a piece by Anaïs Lecoq that unpacks the relationship between the wines of Champagne and the local working families who get the wine to the shelf:

…a more familiar, popular and approachable way of drinking champagne does exist, and advertisers have yet to realise it. If they truly want to convey something other than luxury, they could start by getting rid of that fancy crystal flute, and replace it with a blida. “Blida is the epitome of working class champagne,” Maxime tells me, and I couldn’t agree more. Originally made in Reims, this small, 70ml glass was sent to the town of Blida, Algeria, for serving mint tea. After Algeria’s war for independence in 1962, the market collapsed and manufacturers found another use for the glass—champagne.

I like that. Ditch the snobbery. Next up, Simon J Woolf of The Morning Claret wrote about Chateau Musar of Lebanon:

Musar remains a great demonstration of how to scale up production without compromising ethics and quality, while managing to stay fairly priced – especially in the UK, where it hovers around the mid-£30s on release. For a wine released on its seventh birthday, that’s value. It has mercifully not been ruined by speculation and cultism. We should be forever thankful that Parker only gave the 1995 82 points.

Musar is a maker I leap to which I have send my money when I have the rare occassion to find a bottle over here. Ever since Tom Cannavan helped me direct my folk to a bottle from the 1990s located in Edinburgh where they were visiting the fam. Quebec’s SAQ had their red Musar Jeune a year ago. Christmas dinners have often had a Musar on the table where I live. Again, less of the snobbery even with the nerditry.

Enough of that. Back to beer for our final thoughts. Joe Stange has writting himself a long piece on American IPA, long enough that you get the sense that it’s properly done. You know, not like the other stuff on a subject like this. Just look:

“I still think that’s a necessary thing in these beers,” says Alexandra Nowell, former head brewer at Three Weavers in Los Angeles, now working toward setting up a new brewery, Mellotone Beer Project, in Cincinnati. “But we’re talking really light—C-15, light-grade crystal that can still provide a little bit more complexity to the beer itself. … I think the concept of American IPA has drifted into a more modern place.” Caramel malt has become uncool among IPA brewers today. Many avoid it altogether, while others have reduced, lightened, and fine-tuned it—essentially, they’ve learned how to use it with finesse.

And only one “passion” in the whole piece. And it’s ahead of “-ate” and in a quote. So that’s good.

That’s it. A short one this week. For more beery news check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan now again every Monday. Then listen to Lew’s podcast and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is thereback with the sweary Mary! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? Check out the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s one cost a fifth of that but only had the one post.

*We’re still speaking of autumn, right? I’m only covering the tomatoes just in case. Still weeks of some sorta warm, right?

The “Happy Canadian Thanksgiving To You!” “Err… What????” Edition Of These Beery News Notes

Did you know that the entire meal is American. That’s the dirty secret of Canadian Thanksgiving. It’s not even ours. Roast Turkey. Mashed Potatoes. Stuffing and cranberry sauce. Pumpkin pie. Food as seen on cable TV. At least I will have my own damn carrots like those up there. And my own beets. Hmm… if the menu was really Canadian what would it be? I dunno. A big ass butter tart at the end maybe. And a roasted wild goose. Where I lived out east a couple of decades ago there were church hall community suppers serving hunter-shot local wild goose. They even created a special regulation to allow it. But only at church suppers. Fat chance with even that being allowed now. Frigging Ohio. Me, I’d have it with Fin du Monde. Suits the times these days.

What else is going on? I am pretty sure that when I were a lad no one cared about if me and the lads preferred beer or wine. I do find the obsession with Gen Z’s taste in booze a bit odd but let’s let the NYT explain their latest cultural findings as to why wine is doing well with them:

Farah Sheikh-Ogoe, who until August was a bartender at Moonflower, a wine bar in the West Village, said that many of the young customers she encountered were drinking, but drinking less. “It’s a little bit more of like, I’m going to be thoughtful about what I’m consuming,’” Ms. Sheikh said. Drinking wine isn’t like taking a shot of vodka or slamming a margarita, said Carson Bennett, a 24-year-old freelance writer and waiter in Brooklyn. “It’s something to sit and savor.” “I think of watching ‘Ratatouille’ and the way that they drink wine,” she continued. “It is a sort of event.”

Big H/T to the person I forgot to note who mentioned that reliance on a cartoon you saw as a child shaping your adult drinking preferences is all a bit heewhooheehaahaa.

And it is interesting to see some serious format changes coming to both the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF) next year and the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) next week. The first is run by CAMRA, a UK lobby group for the beer buying public, while the second is run by the Brewers Association, the USA trade association for brewers other than the really big brewers. The change coming to the GBBF is its move from London to new venue in the reasonably accessible city of Birmingham. The changes coming to the GABF were summarized this week by Andy Crouch who indicated in All About Beer that they were driven by the realities of “emptier aisles and far fewer attendees” in recent years:

Attendees at the 2024 festival will experience six distinct areas. They include “Prost!,” a German inspired biergarten featuring decor paying homage to Oktoberfest, live polka bands playing traditional Bavarian music, and a stein-holding contest. “Score!” is a sports-themed area that will host Lucha Libre Mexican Wrestling and Mechanical Bull Riding. “Fright” is a Halloween-themed area welcoming costumed festival attendees. “Blast Off” offers “liquid innovations and on-trend flavors from international and domestic breweries,” according to the BA. This includes the United Nations taproom, which hosts classic beers from around the globe. 

The event is held in the BA’s hometown of Denver, which makes for interesting logistical challenges. There would be three main classes of attendee: (i) locals, (ii) people in the trade one way or another using their expense accounts or tax write-offs and (iii) beer fans affluent enough to pay to attend. If you are heading any distance to Denver, you would need to have at least $1,000 to spend on the weekend – $220 for the pass, $250 for the plane, $400-600 for three nights at hotels and the balance for food, taxis and the after parties. By contrast, the GBBF pass to the new location in Birmingham costs £9.50 a day and there are four modestly priced trains an hour arriving from the old HQ in London. But even at that budget, the event still has B+B questioning whether to attend according to last week’s footnotes:

The news of the return of the Great British Beer Festival did somewhat gladden our hearts, even though we don’t really like beer festivals, and haven’t always had a great time at GBBF. It just felt as if something was missing from the calendar this year when it didn’t happen. All the old problems will no doubt still apply, however: how do you make a big, drafty conference centre feel anything like as pleasant as a pub?

Somehow I don’t believe they were thinking of “Lucha Libre Mexican Wrestling and Mechanical Bull Riding” as the solution to that conundrum. Yee. Haw. We shall wait on reports from these events before issuing our final condemnations… err… thoughts.

And, just as Hurricane Milton hits, the tough news continues to come out of the aftermath of Hurricane Helene but I was watching for this story:

As communities across the Southeast respond to the catastrophic damage of Hurricane Helene, Anheuser-Busch is actively supporting relief and recovery efforts across the region. Together with our wholesaler partners, we are working alongside the American Red Cross to provide clean, safe drinking water to communities impacted by the Category 4 hurricane… At the request of the American Red Cross, [for example] Anheuser-Busch and its wholesaler partner KW Associates LLC delivered three truckloads (150,000+ cans) of emergency drinking water to Greenville, South Carolina on Wednesday, October 3. 

Good stuff. Similarly, we read about this as well as this at a smaller scale from one craft brewery:

Workers at Holy City Brewing have temporarily shifted their focus from brewing beer to canning water, aiming to provide clean drinking water to those affected by Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina. “We haven’t really canned water, so we’ll see how fast we can run it,” said Owner Chris Brown. “Water’s a little bit different from beer. So, we can run the pressures a little lower. We’re not worried about carbonation.” The brewery’s team quickly adapted to the new task, processing between 200 and 250 cases of water… “We kind of had to scrounge some cans together…” 

More will be needed in Florida no doubt.

On a happier topic, in their weekly newletter feature called “WHAHWEDRUNK!!!” (or maybe something else) B+B wrote about one beer that made for a neat and tidy tiny essay:

We spent last weekend in London, and honestly, we keep thinking we should go somewhere other than The Pembury Tavern and drink something other than Five Points Best. But really, when it’s become one of the best beers in the country, why bother? To be fair, both of us tried the Best at a couple of London pubs that weren’t The Pembury, and it was just as good. On the face of it, it’s a really traditional bitter, but there are a few tweaks that make it next level good. There’s a honeyed, biscuityness in the malt; and a slice of orange, Fuller’s style, alongside the hard bitterness. If we were going to make comparisons it would be something like Bathams, or the various Boddington’s clones we’ve had over the years. But like Bathams, it also tastes like its own thing.

(I wish I was known for my honeyed biscuityness.) Moving on briskly, at the end of last week there was this news from the world of art, an incident in the LAM museum in the Netherlands:

An elevator technician, filling in for a regular worker, mistakenly threw away Alexandre Lavet’s All the Good Times We Spent Together (2016), thinking it was trash. The artwork, two hand-painted beer cans meant to evoke memories of friendship, had been intentionally placed inside an elevator shaft to mimic something casually left behind. LAM, known for its food-themed art and unconventional displays, places pieces in unexpected locations to encourage visitors to view ordinary objects differently. “Our goal is to make people see the mundane in a new light,” said museum director Sietske van Zanten in a statement. The technician, unaware of the museum’s approach, discarded the piece in good faith.

Empty Can Performance Art Note: a Nova Scotian tradition continues – though in my day we would leave an empty there any old day of the year.

In the political realm, Kamala Harris had a beer on TV this week:

When they go low, she goes high. Miller High Life to be precise. Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, took her election campaign to late night television on Tuesday by cracking open a can of the lager with host Stephen Colbert. The moment set her apart from Joe Biden and Donald Trump – both, famously, teetotallers.

Speaking again of the dry among us, apparently Canada’s game coming to Utah has triggered a Canadian response:

Not only did the Utah Hockey Club begin its tenure in Salt Lake City with a 5–2 win over the Chicago Blackhawks on Tuesday night, but also the NHL’s newest fan base arrived at the season opener with a thirst for hockey. And, well, good times. According to The Salt Lake Tribune, Delta Center sold a record-breaking number of beverages, with beer sales climbing over $120,000—more than any other previous NBA or NHL event in that venue, which has served as the home to the Utah Jazz since 1991. The beer prices weren’t cheap, either. A Michelob Ultra, which was $13 at the Jazz’s preseason tilt the night before, sold for $15 for the arena’s NHL debut.

I once had professional occassion to review the effect of the Belleville Bulls coming to town for a Friday night OHL game and I can assure you that the right crowd can sell a lot of beer.

Interesting that just as Ontario has opened up beer and wine sales in cornerstores the nanny state social engineering Tories posing as pretendy libertarians of Alberta have come out against the very same idea:

…the Smith government now says it’s not happening, in part, because they think most Albertans do not want beer and wine and ready-to-drink cocktails and coolers sold in convenience stores and grocery stores…  The minister for red tape reduction said those opposed felt there were already lots of liquor stores. “They weren’t being teetotallers in any way, suggesting we need less access to liquor. They seemed to feel we had good access”… There is a report on what the UCP politicians heard. It is not going to be made public.

Noooo… not them… not “in any way”… no way… not a chance…

Speaking conversely of “yes, yes, yes” David Jesudason had a great feature in Pellicle this week. I like that Wednesday publication deadling thing by the way. You can imagine why. Anyway, David wrote about the subtitled “Harcourt, Altrincham’s Hong Kong Inspired Pub”:

“Because we’ve got the traditional Chinese character outside [on the sign] the locals didn’t expect us to be a pub,” Priscilla says. “They thought we were a Chinese restaurant.” “Some people thought maybe we’re just a restaurant serving some beers.” When customers who were sceptical about the food smelt the dishes being brought through, however, it turns out they couldn’t resist temptation. Harcourt reminds me of a great desi pub in that it mixes an important aspect of Asian culture in a British bar setting, offering a unique welcome so that the visitor believes they are visiting a home away from home. The best of Britain. The best of Hong Kong. The best of Manchester.

And finally… well, eventually finally… Matty C wrote an opinion piece on the ongoing debate in the UK about the pint and the proper serving size:

Lets say, for argument’s sake, that legislation was introduced where the pint was scrapped and only third, half and two-third measures remained. If, as the study states, beer consumption was reduced by 10%, then so too would sales volumes, and indeed, revenues shrink by the same amount. The trend in pub closures already indicates how fine a line hospitality businesses are walking in terms of operating sustainably. Any reduction in revenue would surely only hasten the demise of those already teetering on the brink, which, as evidence suggests, is a high proportion of operators.

It is an opinion piece so must naturally invite response. So I shall. First, however, a couple of weeks ago, I shared (or at least I hope I shared) my thoughts that the conspiracy theory about the lazy use of the “guy drinks beer from pint glass” is a bit much. It’s like the North American use of a martini glass (olive and all) in the style of a “banned!” sign. Wine bottles are common here, too. I don’t take these as a slight against wine*… or olives for that matter. Stock images are what they are. They offer continuity and a clue to what’s been written. Even if you don’t agree with what’s been written.

The other arguments often trotted out against the rejecting pinting or quarting for that matter are also well known. Unfortunately. Too many of them are simply not winners. If your best argument is “NEO-PROHIBITION!!” you’ve pretty much wasted the readers time. Same about “things should still be like twenty years ago!“… or even like 1824. And sorry to break the news… again… but medical science advances and public health measures are simply a couple of of those undeniably good things modernity has gifted us.

There are, however, some other good arguments to be made. Try the tax burden. Try other regulatory burdens and the supply chain markups. Try discussing the freedom to choose to drink. Matt does that. And maybe add in a (coherent) relative risk argument. Matt approached that* but then veered towards study sample size and a methodology complaint.  The best of these pieces also address the reality that people have so many more options for their entertainment purchasing power than 40 or even 20 years ago. That isn’t changing. Folk are passing on the pub for many reasons but they are choosing to be elsewhere.

And, for me, the “save the pubs!” argument included in the passage quoted above is – frankly – wishery and honestly even slightly corporate if we unpack it a bit. First, my liver is not an cash cow for anyone’s business. See, it’s an argument that big doughnut makers and the ciggie trade can also make. “Save the sugary snack bakeries!!” No one wants those team mates on the bench. And then lastly there’s that tie of these sin trades to Matt’s bias against the working classes. I am not liking this one – even if in classist England it is a reality. Because isn’t that easily reframed as “working class people ought to compromise their health to ensure pub and brewery owners maintain profitability“? Is that the argument? How can’t it not be? Me no like.

But you may see things differently. Get blog and let your yap trap clap. There. That’s my opinion. If Matthew gets to hoist an opinion so can I! Cancel your subscriptions. See if I care. Why you look to see how in fact to cancel your subscription, for more beery news check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and there is a promise that Stan may be back from his autumnal break starting (not last Monday but surely) this very Monday. Then listen to Lew’s podcast and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is thereback with the sweary Mary! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? Check out the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s one cost a fifth of that but only had the one post.

*But, let’s all be honest, the 250 ml wine glass is a bit nuts. A third of a bottle. 30 ml of pure alcohol. Gulp. Gulp. Nudder plz. Standard wine bottles have five or six sensible servings.

A Most Thoroughly August Edition Of Your Beery News Notes

What can you say about August that we each haven’t thought in our hearts of hearts? We are now well into the downside of the year, four months and three weeks and a bit until Christmas. It’s always struck me as odd that the first half of the year has seven months while the second only has five. August. Hmm. Plus it all gets a bit endtimesy around now. The garden gets weedy and a bit tired in the corners. We even got forest fire smoke from Pennsylvania this week, for God’s sake! Looks!! Good thing there’s all those fit folk at the Olympics in Paris, over there throwing themselves against the track, against the ball, against ocean waves and against each others fists to give us all at home cheering on the sofa an endorphin boost. Speaking of the Olympics, how’s the beer?

Anyone who was planning on heading over to Paris for the 2024 Olympics and expected to be having a boozy jaunt in a stadium is going to be sorely disappointed. Almost everyone who has got tickets to see bits of the 2024 Olympics will not be allowed to buy alcohol at the venues where the sporting competitions are taking place… if you must drink beer inside the venues then you’ll have to stick with the non-alcoholic stuff. For half a litre of non-alcoholic beer you’ll need to be spending €8 (£6.74), while if you want a 400ml drink of zero alcohol beer with some lemon juice in it that’ll cost €6 (£5.05).

Whhhaaaaat?!?!? Really? I’d be tempted to get me a robot but I suppose that makes sense in the keeping the eye on the ball sense for spectators but, more importantly, what is the point of cutting NA beer with juice? Don’t worry, however, as the rich in catered VIP zones will be able to drink… because… France… or the Olympics… or…

Same as it ever was? Things go around and around. Consider this piece from Jessica Mason in TDB on salting your beer:

According to the reports via Parade, the trendsetters claimed that “adding a bit of salt to your inexpensive brew will enhance the flavour” and described how “some people add salt to certain beers, like sours or IPAs, to enhance the fruity notes and reduce the bitterness” and suggested that “for those ‘cheaper’ beers, it’s supposed to make the brew taste a bit more highbrow”. The report emphasised how “Texans take beer salt so seriously” and said that drinkers were “likely to find lots of flavoured beer salt options when you want to crack open a cold one”.

Taverns when I was a lad in Halifax, Nova Scotia in the 1980s had shakers of salt on the tables. It was an old guy thing even back then, used by the hard cases in the back corners, but soon a little rattle of the shaker was a habit at the Seahorse or the Lower Deck when the unpasturized generic draft was a little off. Definitely done at the Midtown.

More information has been released on experimentation with the hotest new brewing grain in town, fonio. Interesting news even if this was a rather silly statement from Carlsberg director of brewing science and technology Zoran Gojkovic apparently (but I hope incorrectly) recalling a past discussion with Garrett Oliver:

“The internet says it is millet, but there are lots of millet grains and this one comes from Africa. But, back then, I misunderstood was what it really was all about. If someone tells you something is beef, but really it is like a variety, like wagyu steak, then it can be more easily understood. What I didn’t know was that fonio, compared to other kinds of millet, is like the wagyu steak of grains. Millet, as a cereal could be quite boring, but this in its pure formula is not boring. It is elegant.”

I’m more comfortable with it being the warp drive of millets – but only because that is obviously even more silly. Or is it the warp drives of wagyu? Or the wagyu of warp? That’s the fonio beer name I want to see: Wagyu of Warp!

And, speaking of silly, we have yet another study that resulted from the study of studies that studied booze and, again, it has been determined that there has been a lack of studiouness about that J-Curve fibbery:

…a new analysis challenges the thinking and blames the rosy message on flawed research that compares drinkers with people who are sick and sober. Scientists in Canada delved into 107 published studies on people’s drinking habits and how long they lived. In most cases, they found that drinkers were compared with people who abstained or consumed very little alcohol, without taking into account that some had cut down or quit through ill health. The finding means that amid the abstainers and occasional drinkers are a significant number of sick people, bringing the group’s average health down, and making light to moderate drinkers look better off in comparison.

I mentioned how dodgy the concept was at least as far back in 2018 but this newer focus on the problem of including “people who had stopped or cut down their drinking for health reasons in the comparison group” is critical. Note: not drinking because you are sick is different that being sick due to not drinking.

Note too: “golloping beer with zest” was a thing. Gary explains.

In Pellicle, David Jesuason wrote about one of the the tougher aspects, the mental health implications, that can go along with setting out to run a small brewery. This is how he set the scene at McColl’s Brewery of Evenwood, County Durham before help arrived:

“I came here thinking all I have to do is 150 casks a week and it didn’t happen,” Danny says. “Because I did it [before] I thought I was capable of doing it and not even knowing it was the wrong [thing to do] as well.” Danny’s mental health suffered because there was no long-term strategy, just day-to-day drudgery. Graft instead of focus. “I couldn’t make good decisions,” he tells me. He was running the entire operation by himself: brewing, selling and even delivering the beer to customers. It was far too much to take on, his mental health suffered and Gemma, his wife, became worried about him having suffered from depression herself.

That piece reminded me of the life of a farmer, alone with their business subject to the whims of nature and the trade. Should brewing trade associations provide mental health support programs similar to those being set up for agriculture?

Also on the ag beat, Stan has given us something to chew on with his July 2024 edition of Hop Queries, Vol. 8, No. 3 for those who are trying to collect a full set. He mentions that harvest time has begun, triggering images of golden light on hedgerow graced horse plowed scenes, perhaps mixing with Beethoven’s 6th wafting quietly in from somewhere… then – WHAMMO – the invasion of the lab-coated eggheads begins:

Scientists at Sapporo in Japan used headband sensors to measure the brainwaves of participants… The subjects reported feeling relaxed by the aromas of linalool and geraniol because they provided floral and green impressions… An increasing tendency in the rhythm regularities of the frequency fluctuations of the right frontal alpha-waves while drinking a European pilsner-type beer with aromas characterized by hops. 

HEADBAND SENSORS!!! And, for the double, Stan pointed to this number crunching post from Phil Cook on Monday but (even though I may risk breaking an unwritten weekly updating rule) I want to unpack this point in more detail – one key difference between Australian and other beer judging events:

Because there’s a list of every beer entered, not just those that win medals, we can calculate some ‘batting averages’ to better compare how each brewery fared. So, I’ve worked out each entrant’s medal percentage (MPC: how many of their beers won a medal, of any kind) and their points per entry (PPE: adding 3 for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze, then dividing by number of entries submitted). Bigger numbers are better in both cases; overall about 74% of beers entered earned a medal,2 and if your PPE was 1.00 or higher your brewery was in the top half of the competition. 

This would be a huge step towards making the results of these events more meaningful that those of the moveable buffet of the international circle of they who judge. Being able to figure out brewery top rankings as well as those surprising disappointments would be a great benefit to consumers. But who in beer puts the buyer first?

Perhaps connected, Jeff shared his thoughts on the financial perils of being a freelancer writing about the brewing trade without separate income:

Writing is a terrible way to make a living. It’s why people end up going into marketing. You could spend your days scrambling after $600 articles, or you could get a job for $60k with benefits. This is why we bleed great writers, who take their services to companies who will pay what their work is worth. It’s not just that the money’s bad—it’s also hard to get. If you could somehow stack up your articles and get a couple in every week, you could make a decent living, maybe fifty, sixty grand a year before taxes… Trying to pitch stories, and then research, report, and write a hundred of them in a year? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but again, you’d be barely making more than working at McDonald’s if you somehow enjoyed that level of “success,” which perhaps 2-3% of working freelancers enjoy.

The best line was near the end: “If you have any other choice, don’t write.” What he means (of course… or rather I hope!) is don’t write for money but this isn’t news.* Still… write. Writing a free, joyful and easy experience of expression. Scribble, jot, draft, forget and rediscover – and, yes, even submit. Just don’t think you’re going to be buying the kiddies shoes with the income.

Joyful, too, is Dave “Still No Relation” Bailey’s cartooning, also in Pellicle, which this month explored the notion of perfection.  And if you want an example of writing for joy, ATJ has been working on one particular theme quite a bit over at his Substack, that being ATJ sitting in a pub and looking at the details of the scene around him. Second or third time I read one of his I thought “hmm…now, that sounds familiar” BUT as this week’s edition testifies its his process being worked out before our eyes:

My eye was caught by a faded photo of the pub, sometime before World War I. Outside it, there stood a line of long dead regulars, mainly men, standing still, a couple smiling, the rest sombre and holding themselves stiffly as if on parade, which several years later many of them would be, ready to march off to war. A long ago day, the sun shining maybe, though given the quality of the photo it was hard to say. Bowler hats, cloth caps, none of them bareheaded for that was not how they presented themselves to the world then. I’d like to think that once the photographer finished, off the men went into the pub, glasses of ale and cider purchased and amid the hubbub there would have been little time for reflection.

Sharp stuff. And it sure beats the sort of cash-focused writing that has recently given us such gems as “deepest echelons of the industry” and “with demand being high, the category has continued to thrive, despite the sector struggling” and the astoundingly poorly thought out alleged expression of expertise “Liquids within the same ‘competitive set’ are not distinctive from one another as liquids.” Bring on the robots of A.I.! Viva Robots!!

No, I didn’t mean that. There are no robots of joy. It’s actually all around us already now if you look for joy. We see it in a long wandering piece about wandering at length. And we also see it at home as when Rachel Hendry in her emailed newsletter J’Adore Le Plonk shared some thoughts on the role and value of the leftover bottle of wine there in the kitchen that was opened a few days ago… and may have lost whatever finesse it had:

Service work should neither be seen nor paid, tends to be the general consensus and when my wine joins me in a position of domestic work I attach the same framework to it. Why add this beautiful, evocative glass of wine to my dish when I can reach for something leftover, or looked down on, fuck it, why not just add water instead? The recipe provides a role for a wine that is past its best, that may otherwise be retired down the drain and into the bin. It doesn’t, however, mean the wine isn’t important. Wine has many roles in our lives and contributor in the kitchen can be one of them. As I work through my hesitation and add a splash of my wine to the courgettes slowly melting into butter I notice I have not lost anything in the process. The wine is still mine to enjoy, I have placed value on an ingredient as I would like to be valued myself and the meal tastes better for it.

And I should have mentioned that Katie wrote a few weeks ago about trying Italian wines with any sorts of unexpected flavours to see what works for you. My tip? Chianti with roast turkey. It can have a swell cranberry vibe going on. Try a turkey and blue cheese sandwich with slices of pear and a cold glass of Chianti. Could sound weird but it works. Not this weird, mind you, but there that gets a lot going on.

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

*My full sympathies (though I might have used the phrase “good writers” to convey a sense of realism.) I wrote this in an email to Max, now eleven years ago: “It is tough. There is no money in beer writing so if that is all you have to go on… I have met with pro writers over beer and always find them bagged out and drained from the nights of PR work in pubs to keep the wolf from the door. I complained once somewhere about how craft brewers should be supporting good beer writers directly without expectation of return and this was met with howls – even from writers. Earn your way as a freelancer, said the freelancers. Suck it up and take the junkets, said those on the junkets.” Is that the macho forehead + wall thinking part of the freelancing problem?
**This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,483) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BREAKING: These Are The Gentlest Most Supportive Beery News Notes Of All Time!

So… me here, you there. Again. It’s hit the lazy months. Or is it exhausted? As the dawn seems to start at about 4:07 am, so too do the times of laze. Good thing it’s warm enough to stick one’s toes in the big lake, as long as you don’t mind half the pee in America trickling by. I wonder if my attitude has affected the beery news notes this week? Let’s see.

First up, there was plenty written this week on the purchase of San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing. It actually led me to wonder how many days of hangtime the word “Breaking!” possibly can have on social media given how folk were still using it as a prefix to tweets maybe two days after the fact. Anchor is one of those foundational breweries of the fibby revisionist history of craft* so I am not particularly moved by the tales being told – except (a) I loved Liberty Ale when I could find it and (b) I do believe if anyone other than Christ can pull off a resurrection which does form a true twist in the narrative it is going to be Hamdi Ulukaya, upstate New York yogurt magnate.

Speaking of magnates and brewing and fire sales, there was some interesting information from Ron Elmer in The Drinks Business this week, this time about the current value of Boston Beer Co., the business that makes less and less of its revenue from, you know, beer:

Boston’s shares look attractive to a potential suitor, having plummeted more than 25% in the past 12 months. But the stock has jumped almost 31% on the recent rumours which started only two days after the shares closed at their lowest price since February 2019. At today’s price, Boston’s market capitalisation is about US$3.95 billion, far below its record valuation of US$15.98 billion in April 2021. The likely price put on a potential deal is unclear, although it would unusual if it did not include a significant premium, especially as no sale could proceed without the consent of Jim Kock, who founded Boston in 1984 and remains its chairman.

Aside from the Freudian slip, that is quite an eye popping collapse in value – under a quarter of previous corporate worth over just three years.  On May 17th, 2024 the stock was worth $260.75 compared to $1,294.93 on April 16th, 2021. That is closer to a drop down to 20% of peak value. Why? Well, if you click on that thumbnail you will see that the five year value really tracked in parallel with the pandemic. Compare it to the shape of the valuation for Moderna over the same period. Then to Constellation Brands. See? Boston Beer may also be the poster child for the general drop in interest in craft beer, too – even though they make more and more drinks that are less and less like beer. Still, hope springs eternal that an investor might be buying something more than a dead cat bounce.

Somewhat related, the Beer Ladies Podcast asked a question this week that was both exactly on point and a bit sad:

In this week’s episode, Lisa, Thandi and Christina debate an ever-popular topic in beer (and other things!) – ethos. Does the ethos of a brewery influence you to buy, or not buy, their beer? What happens when breweries make good beer, but treat their staff badly, or are divisive in their politics? We chat about a few stories that have been in the news over the last few years, and debate our own feelings on separating art from artist.  

Just run those thoughts that over in your mind as you consider: (a) it’s only beer (b) there are now exactly one bazillion breweries now, and (c) a huge amount of the beers being made these days are copycats of what everyone else is brewing. So… how can you not believe in ditching the assholes? For me, it is entirely on the beer buyer. Know your stuff. I would point out one comment made elsewhere, in relation to the well deserved dislike of Hazy IPAs recently from Sam Tierney of Firestone Walker:

I know some great brewers who playfully hate on the style and don’t make it, but they tend to be obsessive traditionalists. As long as you aren’t an asshole about it you’re allowed to not like any style. 

Which would guide me to recommend a point of consistency. If anyone doesn’t want the beer buying public to act like assholes when they mock the money-making gak, then as a mimimum don’t turn a blind eye to the assholes within the supply side of the equation. Me? My money walks and talks. But, let’s be honest, the big money about the talking about the walking is on Boak and Bailey as they displayed when they ripped out some opinionating this week about a pub crawl they undertook and the beings they encountered thereupon:

…Our fellow customers included a big party of beefy middle-aged blokes in quietly expensive casual clothes…  we found ourselves surrounded by classic 00s hipsters who are now in their forties, with kids. These days, the quiffs and waxed moustaches have gone grey, and the vintage workwear has baby sick on it… We found it fairly quiet inside except for a party of stags who kept bursting into song and breaking out in competitive banter… Instead of craft beer dads it was all black T-shirted youths and the background throb of heavy guitar music.

People! I was thinking about all this peopled populating of places when I read another rightly depressing comments from Jessica Mason on the experience of women in beer and the reasons why women like drinking beer with other women:

Personally, I find this side of the research the most galling. Damned if we do & damned if we don’t. Why gender stigma around beer leads to most women’s drinks order falling back onto a glass of fizz or a G&T. Because nobody would judge us making those drinks choices.

Let’s be honest. We all know that (both chemically and culturally) beer attracts, induces, comforts and/or reveals the asshole. Plus women are underrepresented in important positions in the industry so we quite possibly are losing a natural counterbalance. And, even when not taken to that degree, we also know that as mentioned by Rob Sterowski:

I wonder if the “craft beer” movement has been damaging by suggesting you have to rote learn a load of bullshit about styles before you can enjoy beer.

This led me to reach back to the greatest statement on the genesis of point as stated in the film Gregory’s Girl: “Why are boys obsessed with numbers?”

Generally conversely but still speaking of being obsessed with any number of things while also being clearly blessed with natural ability, The Beer Nut left the house and checked out yet another reno at the Guinness World HQ:

A few hours after the doors opened I wasn’t expecting many customers nor much on the menu, so was surprised to find the place packed with tourists and off-duty staff, and a full set of new beers to try. Better get the flights in, so. One definite retrograde step is the loss of the big screen menu, which provided useful information on the beers. Now there’s a sparse retro split-flap display board and a printed menu, which weren’t in agreement on details like what the beers were called and how strong they were. It’s all very well to dream in beer but occasionally you need to wake up and do your proofreading.

Spinning the globe again, from Japan we read an update of a story first shared here last October about a ban on public drinking within the autonomous Shibuya district within Tokyo:

Mayor Ken Hasebe recently told journalists: “We have been stepping up patrols and other efforts over the last year, but we have had people say, ‘Well, the rules say you can drink, don’t they?’ By establishing the rule, we would like to convey the district’s intentions, including during patrols — we would prefer people to enjoy their drinks inside restaurants.” This news may not come as a surprise to local residents… Mayor Hasebe says that local businesses supported the regulations in October 2023 and were behind the push to make them permanent.

Circumnavigating now via the northern pole, being out and about was also on the mind of Lisa Grimm this week who told the tale of her beery trip on the Eurovision trail to Malmo Sweden:

…the trip was a perfect excuse to explore the beery options on offer in the region, and we began with an initial visit to Malmö Brewing Company, located in an old brewery building, appropriately enough. These days, they brew a wide array of the usual hazy IPAs and fruited sours you find in most craft brewery taprooms, but they also have a few more meads, ciders and cocktails than you tend to find in Ireland or the UK.

And speaking of folk out there enjoying themselves, the Times o’London had a bit of a shocking yet not surprising story from the world of professional darts:

… concerns have been raised about the portrayal of a now predominantly sober sport, while alarming alcohol consumption allegedly occurs behind the scenes. The Sunday Times has learnt of an incident where one player had to be placed in the recovery position outside a PDC Pro Tour venue in Wigan. A player was also seen passed out in his chair in the practice room, where photography is prohibited, at a different event after, it is claimed, drinking about ten pints. A large number of professionals are still believed to fear that they cannot play well without alcohol, owing to performance anxiety; very few are widely known to play sober…

Yikes!! Speaking of anxiety and shock, Paste magazine has posted an ode from Jim Vorel to a long lost love – American Amber Ale… with an interesting intro:

As far as consumer selling points go, the allure of “subtlety” is not exactly an easy one to conceptualize and market. Take a look at the snack foods aisle of a grocery store, and you’ll see what I mean. The “crunchiest” potato chips on the shelf? The selling point there is easily grasped. The “tangiest” or “fruitiest” yogurt or ice cream? Ditto. It’s human nature for the consumer to think in terms of superlatives, because in exchange for our hard-earned money, we by and large believe that we deserve the best version of a product. And it’s an understandable fallacy to naturally believe that “best” is largely going to correlate with “most,” because we humans also want bang for our buck. It’s hard-coded into our behavior in a capitalist economy.

Now, you have read my recent thoughts on the individuality and subtly of Hazy IPA Clonefest (or, to quote a yawning Lisa Grimm up there, “…the usual…“) we are living in so to go to that sort of nutty extreme in the other direction to justify a place in the heart for Amber Ale is a bit much. Perhaps it’s just what Robin said: we still have lots of them in Canada. Or maybe it’s just obvious given how there is a whole load of badly thought out beers being sold today fighting it out for the attention of fruity seltzers and RTD drinkers. Maybe you need to think of them as the American version of a Mild. Whatever. But… but if you have ever held a small pile of amber malt in your hand, sniffed it and chewed a few grains. And then realize they can make a beer that tastes like that and can get you buzzed? It’s obvs to anyone who is paying any attention. Drink them for an evening and remember how good they are. And perhaps what a fool you’ve been.

Finally – and for the double! – I like what Robin wrote after reading the piece in Pellicle by Rob MacKay about A.I. and cartoony can lables:

I’ll say this, if you are a brewery that believes in the power of small, independent, local options, you are a hypocrite if you use AI to create your label art and framing it as a small business trying to keep the brand cohesive is intellectually dishonest and downright shitty.

Yup. That being said I pass on any can that has a cartoony label unless I have some other info on what’s in the can that helps me overcome my suspicions about the contents. Cartoon labelled cheese? Bland gak for pre-schoolers. Cartoon labelled bread? It’s going to have candy imbedded in the loaf. I presume I am looking at a sugar bomb. Plus, you know, how A.I. “still constitutes copyright theft—a civil wrong, and under certain circumstances, a criminal offence” as MacKay notes. So… no thanks.

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

*[MY 2023 COMMENTS REPEATED IN FULL FOR POSTERIRY] The endtimsey big news in US craft this week I suppose is the press release issued by Sapporo on Wednesday, as described by Dave Infante in his newsletter Fingers: “This morning at about 1:45am local time, Anchor Brewing Company issued a brief press release announcing its imminent liquidation, citing “a combination of challenging economic factors and declining sales since 2016.” The brewery has been operating in one form or another since 1896; its current owner, Japan’s Sapporo conglomerate, acquired the firm and its iconic Potrero Hill facility in 2017 for a reported $85 million.” Quite a blow given the narrative of craft’s whole genesis story. I am not convinced (at all) that the hagiography necessarily matches reality (at all) but I sure did like Liberty Ale back when Ontario was part of the sales footprint a few decades back. There has been much by way of erroneous speculation, questioning, cherry tree chopping, wailing and rending of garments along with some common sense and respect… but… the bottom line is this from The Olympian: “I ran a cheap “pizza and pint” feature. It helped for a while, but then hazy IPA became a thing. Beer geeks turned their laser focus on to that style and unfortunately, a lot of other brands/styles just slowed down or stopped selling altogether. Anchor was one. I think there’s only so much life a publican or retailer can do to breathe life into a cherished heritage brand before they finally give up and switch to something new and shiny. But when I see 3 cleaning dates marked on the top of a keg, it’s a slow mover and time to move.” AKA: no one bought the Cro-Magnon of beers anymore. Be honest. You may have loved it, but you didn’t actually like it all that much.
**This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (128) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (915) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,474) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (162), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. 

 

The “Happy Birthday To Me!” Edition Of These Beery News Notes

Well, well, well. I entered the first day of my 62nd year today. No trauma. No big plans. Not like when you hit 25 or 40. Those were panicky birthdays. Feeling like middle age is coming too fast. Now that it is here… who cares? All one has to do is consider the alternative and sliding that bit closer to two-thirds of a century is mighty fine by me. Change is everything. Even the bird feeders are put away now. Winter is not coming. Not quite yet. So have one for me if you are having any at all. I’ll be the one gorging on cake.

First up, some very good news. In 2015, the world of good beer in California at least faced a stark reality – the water was running out. I noted that UC Davis had started a  California Drought Watch program which includes considerations for the brewing industry. So it was good this week to read this update on the situation:

California’s water storage is at its healthiest levels in over a decade. Virtually every major reservoir in the state has average to above-average storage, with a substantial 115% of average snowpack still to melt. The last two years have been an amazing reprieve from the multiple brutal, record-breaking droughts that have plagued the state in the last decade.

What else? Hmm… Jeff wrote this in his last emailed weekend update : “It was a quiet week and I can’t think of much to say up…” Double hmm… and Boak and Bailey in their Patreon footnotes: “We were quite thrown by the lack of a substantial news story this week.” I can’t believe it! There’s gotta be something to read!!

Sorta breaking all the rules*, I see that Ron wrote a wonderful piece about the serial relationship he’s had with his locals… plural. They come and go but something has to come along with each if it is going to qualify. He’s currently on the hunt:

Last Saturday was or third time there. Not really giving me a local vibe yet. But that takes time to build. Harder to bear is the lack of draught Mild and Stout. Especially Headroom. A beer that took me closer to the 19th century with every sip. Weihenstapher Dunkles Weissbier is OK. But three of four pints is enough. And Checkpoint Charlie does sell korenwijn. Drinablke jenever. Not like the industrial cleaner called jonge jenever. The presence of a pool table and pinball machine mean Alexei is much more likely to come along. And reminded me of a previous local.

Katie also wrote about pubs this week in her newsletter The Gulp sharing her thoughts on children in pubs… like Ron’s kids… who grew up in pubs… I suppose:

…in my experience, the people who claim to hate children, and make a big deal out of this fact about themselves, are younger. They are around 20-35 years old, and they invariably claim to like dogs better. Of course, personal choice is absolutely valid. It shows that they prefer unconditional love. Who doesn’t? What I find distasteful is the absolute disdain for children and their existence anywhere near their personal space. It’s brutally Victorian. It’s outmoded. It’s—I’m going to say it—it’s selfish. Selfish in the true sense of the word, of only thinking of one’s self. The problem is, pubs are not made just for one individual’s comfort. They are places of socialisation and congregation…

(You know, I am not sure that personal choice is always valid… but then again I used to practice divorce law and criminal law. Bad choices exist. Really really bad one.) But back to Katie’s point which is entirely valid – if you teach kids that pubs aren’t for them, well, you will graduate cohorts of young adults who have learned that pubs aren’t for them.

Speaking of choices, the stats released by the BA on US craft beer’s 2023 seem to have been worked pretty hard to find a positive glint to focus upon:

The top-five craft players included, D. G. Yuengling & Son, Boston Beer Co., Sierra Nevada Company, Duvel Moortgat and Gambrinus, while the leading brewing companies included Anheuser-Busch Inc, Molson Coors, Constellation, Heineken and Pabst Brewing Company. Despite craft production decline in the US, the number of operating breweries in the craft space hit “an all time high”, up 1.37% on 2022 to 9,683. These breweries were comprised of 3,900 taproom breweries, 3,467 brewpubs, 2,071 microbreweries, and 245 regional craft breweries. Craft-brewery closure rates however increased again in 2023 from 3% to “approximately 4%”. The US saw 495 openings in 2023, a 9.8% dip on 2022, while closures increased 31% with 418 breweries shutting up shop.

Add to that the conglomerates and businesses focused on drinks other than actual beer, there is a lot of shaping going on. Closures up, openings down but the number of operating breweries in the craft space hit “an all time high”! Lordy.

David Jesudason shared a tale in his newsletter that he foreshadowed this way: “…despite the subject matter it’s quite amusing.” It’s the story of a charmless man:

He barred people for a lot of class-based reasons which seem bizarre today. One of his biggest annoyances were people who wore braces – calling them “hideous apparel worn by grubby people and are offensive to me and other customers”. In fact, a lot of the reasons for barring people were ridiculous, like in 1973 he threw out a group of drinkers for wearing nuclear disarmament badges.  Tickell did, however, have no problem with rightwing political messaging and he proudly displayed two signs behind the bar – “Hands of Rhodesia” and “Keep the Falklands British”. He also gave speeches to local trade bodies – wearing a monocle around his neck and gold cufflinks – criticising customers who wanted chips with every meal and ate “deep freeze food and foreign-sounding fare”.

Braces!! The man knew nothing.** Then again, no one is useless – they can serve as a bad example.

And Jacob Smith wrote a bit of a semi-contrarian opinion piece for Pellicle this week suggesting that Britain’s community ownerd pubs are no answer in many cases:

In a 2022 report, the Plunkett Foundation, a charity which helps rural communities in Britain to create and run community-owned businesses, reported that only one in 12 rural community-owned pub projects reached trading status. That means 91.7% of all rural community ownership pub bids failed without ever pouring a pint. These failed bids are rarely, if ever, highlighted by mainstream media. And while it’s human nature to focus on the winners and allow the also-rans the dignity of anonymity, such blatant survivorship bias risks distorting our perception. If we’re not careful, soon everybody looks set to become the next Beyoncé.

I had questioned that this sort of use of “mainstream media”*** is a bit meaningless – and perhaps a manufactured strawman now that I think of it – given folk from Roger Protz to Boak and Bailey have also waived the “save the pub!” banner. Being involved with community organizations in a number of ways, it’s true many fail but we don’t need to look to big bad outside forces for why that occurs. As Jacob points out in parallel, locla factors like the involvement of difficult personalities can often but simply overwhelm the collective goal.

Sorta building on something I read about last year, I shared that story of how one building in San Francisco was capturing waste water which was passed to Devil’s Canyon Brewing Co in San Carlos California to brew a beer. In something of a closing of the bio-eco loop, this week we learned from Jessica Mason that researchers in Singapore have found a way to extract proteins from spent brewing mash for human consumption:

The researchers also said that the extraction method would also help mitigate a possible protein shortage due to a forecast 73% increase in meat consumption by the year 2050 which has been predicted by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN to occur amidst the future rapid growth of the global population. The NTU researchers also revealed that the proteins extracted from the brewers’ spent grains were found to be rich in antioxidants, which could not only protect human skin from pollutants but could also potentially extend the shelf life of cosmetics and skincare products.

That is sorta cool. Stan may be on holiday this month, including a stop at the Craft Brewing Conference in Las Vegas, but I found his latest issue of Hop Queries waiting on the front stoop when I stepped outside with my cup of coffee last Saturday morning. It includes that chart to the right which is cunningly identified as “the second chart”:

The second chart (clicking on it should enlarge it a bit)**** provides another way to look at genetic distancing. In this one (a two-dimensional principal coordinate analysis), the country of cultivar origin is represented by: Germany green triangle, Czech green square, UK green square with x, France green circle, Poland green triangle outlined, Slovenia green circle with x, Australia blue circle, New Zealand blue square, USA red circle, South Africa black circle. The research establishes the value of utilizing molecular genetic methods for “reliable cultivar identification or the evaluation of genetic variability and similarity by hierarchical cluster analysis and principal coordinate analysis.” 

Do I understand every word? No. But one gets the point. There are, as Stan says, relationships that should be understood to be going back through cultivar to landrace to wild. Maybe.

Speaking of the CBC Vegas, Courtney Iseman in her latest Huggering the Bar shared some tips for attendees seeking a decent beer in a land known for other things:

If you can’t get off the Strip but want a craft beer, your best bet is honestly to grab a tall boy from a convenience store. You won’t find much selection at casinos and you’ll pay stadium prices, predictably. Not too far of a walk (more on this in a sec) is Ellis Island. This hotel + casino is one of the most depressing I’ve been to, but! Stay with me and persevere through the casino part to The Front Yard, a bar and restaurant nice enough to feel completely disjointed from the rest of the hotel. Ellis Island brews its own beer, and it’s pretty great, based on the lager and Berliner weisse (for which they have a few different syrups) we had. If you want lunch and good, affordable, local craft beer, you could do a lot worse.

I read a nice little vignette from Jason Wilson in Everyday Drinking, the story of a starting a small sleepy wine cellar to last until retirement from someone in South Jersey who is now 86:

Pierre acquired much of his collection at one liquor store in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, one that also sold cigarettes and lottery tickets. “I got lucky,” Pierre said. “ “When I first built my wine cellar, that’s when the 1982s were just coming out… you could still occasionally find a knowledgeable, passionate wine person in a standard-issue liquor store. “I was lucky that I had a guy,” Pierre said. “I used to subscribe to the Wine Spectator, and I had a wine encyclopedia. But the guy at my local store knew what was good.” The wines at this tasting had been cellared well. Pierre does not have a fancy, custom-made wine cellar. “It’s all natural, three sides dirt and one stone wall. When I built the house, it was going to be a crawl space, but I said, ‘No, no, let’s make it a wine cellar.’” He added: “I’ve never had a bad bottle that’s been stored there.”

Jeff wrote a bit of a tough personal piece on his family’s life with alcohol this week – which starts with a surprise:

“Let me see my little Susan!” Mom recalls saying. Before ultrasounds existed, predicting a baby’s sex was apparently a primitive exercise, and my mother’s doctor got it wrong. The nurse held me aloft, announcing instead the arrival of little “Johnny.” It hadn’t occurred to Mom to have a boy’s name at the ready, so for a week I was Baby Gorostiza. She has never been sure why she chose Jeff, and used to joke that with a bit more warning she’d have probably named me David.

One of my favorite stories in beer is the nice tale of an historic beer recreation that turns out to avoid the actual characteristics of the historic beer… like this:

Brewing beer from bread is not without its challenges. “Early beers probably were a little bit bitty and maybe like an alcoholic porridge,” Ziane says. The method took some adapting – including an industrial shredder to crumb the bread slices, and rice hulls to prevent the bread from becoming an impenetrable sponge in the tank. The recipe Toast settled on replaces 25% of the grain with bread. In doing so, it replaces 25% of the carbon, water and land needed to grow the grain.

Finally, in what is really a challenging footrace despite there being only one competitor there was news from ParksWatchScotland of one of the more pathetic results from a BrewDog self-promotion project… with the added twist of a waste of significant public funding:

In mid-February I described how many of the trees planted by BrewDog, as part of the Phase I creation of its Lost Forest, had died and how they appeared to be investing little, if any, of their own money in the whole disastrous project.  A week after the post I received a response from Scottish Forestry to an information request I had submitted in December about the number of trees that had died, any related correspondence with BrewDog or their agents and the amount of forestry grant they had disbursed to date. The response stated Scottish Forestry had paid BrewDog £690,986.90 to date and confirmed that a very high proportion of the planted trees had died…

The anti-Midas touch, as usual. With that, again we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (up one to 127) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (down one to 916) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,467) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (161), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Fear not!

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

*Boak and Bailey had already noted this one which leads to consideration of this from the B+B footnotes last week: “(…on one unlinked story in the main article…) …certainly worth a read, especially if you have an emotional connection to Rhode Island. And Alan had already flagged it anyway, which is sometimes a consideration….” (…on another unlinked story in the main article…) “…the rest of the piece felt a bit like a sales pitch, as brewery profiles with access to the subjects can tend to do. And Alan had already flagged it anyway. Again.” This has been a heretofor an undiscussed phenomenon. I actually do like to not link on Wednesday evening to something that Boak and Bailey will no doubt mention Saturday morning. Reminds me of how when playing soccer or road hockey and I pathetically missed a pass sent my way – and then a teammate made more of the opportunity I ever could have… pals praising sarcastically with a “Well Left!!!” cheer. 
**I unashamedly share my supplier, Albert Thurston. Seriously. Buy yourself a couple of sets along with a few buttons and you have enough for a lifetime. You spend more on a pair of boots. Maybe I’ll spend my birthday money and buy a fourth set… you are sending birthday money, right? Right?!?!??
***The word “media” appears eight times. Is no one else to blame? Is there even any need to blame?
****Sure did. Stan no lie.

Well, That Was The Eclipse That Was… And Now Here Are The Beery News Notes

No throngs showed up apparently. It was even fairly quiet. But that thing in the sky was up there with the most amazeballs things I’ve ever seen. Certainly that I’ve seen from the backyard. As illustrated with a far better camera than the one that tried to capture my view of my new pal and master Sauron, via our actual eyeballs we could see two solar flares clear as day… except it wasn’t day… yet it was. We may have seen the out of focus lighting effect just for a moment and the seagulls had a pretty hard time of it, swirling overhead all through totality.  Here’s a video or two of the shadow of the moon passing across our fair city by the lake which really gives the sense of how there wasn’t anything like dusk, just diminishing light – whammo – dark and back to a return to light. See you all in 2399 AD… or whenever the next one is. Back to your regularly scheduled gardening notes next week.

Beer? Beer! Let’s go!! In all the grim news shared about the effect of Brexit on the UK brewing industry, this bit of a fact in an article in The Guardian is quite telling on the actual effect of the departure on the UK economy despite other indicators:

This, industry figures said, ignores the wider burden on brewers, including Britain’s departure from the EU, which has brought with it administrative hurdles that have added to the cost of importing ingredients and all but wiped out opportunities for export. At Charles Faram, getting British hops into Europe has become more complicated, at the expense of British jobs. Corbett said: “We’ve set up a company in Poland to facilitate that, shipping in bulk and distributing to the EU. We’re employing people in Poland to do the work we used to do here.”

Note: by “the work we used to do here” Corbett may mean “the work they used to do here.” That’s a bit amazeballs, too. The company followed the displaced workforce. Speaking of unsupportable policy decisions, I was unaware (given the constant flow of annoncements about beerfests at every second UK street corner) that some beer fests are actually are refused permission, like this one which faced a litany of objections* according to this BBC report:

Greater Manchester Police and council licensing officers objected to the Craft Beer Festival going ahead… The force believed there was a risk of “traffic chaos”, which organisers said would be prevented by asking people not to use their cars to get there. They also objected to the amount of toilets available – 25 toilet facilities for 460 ticket holders – which they thought could lead to public urination… PC Alan Isherwood said their biggest fear was how overcrowding would be “dealt with”… Licensing officers added their worry over “three days of noise nuisance” for residents with “the nearest property only 230ft (70m) away”…

Far more agreeably and right after last Thursday’s deadline to send these news notes to the press, Boak and Bailey posted a really entertaining collection of pub vignettes from their recent reading, like the voices of Welsh miners singing or the case of a pub that stradled a county line:

Some years ago the Wortham constable was about to arrest a man who had gone to earth in the inn after a poaching or similar minor offence. As it happened the wrong-doer was in the Wortham part of the house when the constable approached; but receiving warning he quickly slipped into the bar on the Burgate side, thus putting himself outside the constable’s jurisdiction.

In the latest science news update from under the microscope, Lars gave us the heads up over the weekend that a new study from Canada’s Escarpment Labs shows that the farmhouse yeast he has been stufying  forms one big and separate family of yeast titled rather generally as “European farmhouse yeast” as Lars summarizes:

The big finding is that group you see in the upper middle: a large group of farmhouse yeasts all next to each other. Yeasts from the kveik, gong, and berm areas as well as the Baltic all group right next to each other, with nothing else in between. The conclusion is that European farmhouse yeast is a separate family of yeast. Farmhouse yeast really is a separate type of yeast. And that family spans Norway, Latvia, and Lithuania, at least. I’ve been using the term “farmhouse yeast” for many years now, and now we learn that it’s not just a functional category (like bread yeast, or wine yeast), but it’s also a genetic family, a type of yeast.

For the double, announced speaker Lars has also shared some information on the prospects of the August 2024 Historic Brew Con being planned in Manchester by sharing this post from BeerNouveau:

Apart from having to postpone because we lost our venue, twice, and then the whole COVID thing, everything has been pretty smooth so far. Except ticket sales. Tickets have been on sale now for a couple of months and we haven’t sold enough to cover costs. A lot of people have said that they’ll be getting tickets, and if everyone who said they would did, then we’d likely be fine. But I can tell you now, if we don’t sell enough tickets in the next five weeks we’re going to have to cancel the event. There would still be eight or nine weeks before it went ahead, but there’s non-refundable deposits to pay, accommodation and travel to arrange, and a whole load of other costs that we have to stump up for before the conference starts.

I am not sure if there is a live feed option being offered but I had reached out a few months about about submitting papers, something I like as an option with an academic gathering. I did not hear back.

Slightly to the left on the map of the British Isles, Katie in her wonderful newsletter The Gulp shared an excellent glimpse of the ecosystem abord a ferry to the Isle of Man with particular stylish attention to its wee bar:

The bar on board the Manxman truly believes you are on a cruise. It gestures to the bar stools around a mood-lit console table, and wonders why you are not wearing a cocktail dress. The seating is a realistic shade of leather. Take in the atmosphere, make yourself comfortable. Prepare to disembark in an hour or two.

Here’s a thing I did not know. The Masters golf tournament has it’s own beer – and there isn’t much else known about it:

Crow’s Nest is a proprietary blend brewed exclusively for the Masters and not even available during the regular club season (which makes it that much cooler). It’s light, refreshing and tastes good, especially for parched golf fans wanting to fuel up after hiking up and down Amen Corner. It’s $5 and comes in a 20-ounce green commemorative cup, complete with italic Crow’s Nest text sandwiched between graphics of the tournament logo and the other Crow’s Nest (the one amateurs bunk in above the clubhouse). The brew is such a star, it even has its own shirt in the Masters Golf Shop. You think the domestic beer can claim that? Please.

Staying in the US of A, it’s been a difficult patch for the former beer focused firm, Boston Beer Co. according to one bot**:

Boston Beer Co’s revenue growth over a period of 3 months has faced challenges. As of 31 December, 2023, the company experienced a revenue decline of approximately -12.02%. This indicates a decrease in the company’s top-line earnings. When compared to others in the Consumer Staples sector, the company faces challenges, achieving a growth rate lower than the average among peers.

Speaking of stats, there were a number interesting graphs in the recent edition of Doug Veliky’s Beer Crunchers newsletter – a discussion about how beer trade stats are gathered. This one table in particular caught my eye. US beer sectors year to date 2023 v 2024. Craft down. Significantly. Now less craft sold off premises than that excellent category “domestic below premium” which includes such Hamms, Keystone Light and – much to my surprise – Miller High Life which is entirely above the below… if you know what I mean.

Great piece in Pellicle by David Nilsen on the revival of Narragansett of Rhode Island but not quite sure on the history of their porter. If their brewer Lee Lord started homebrewing in 2011 and…

When the Providence Historical Society reached out to Lee shortly after she started and wanted to brew a collaboration beer, she decided to revive the brand’s Porter with a new—well, old—recipe. She used a recipe discovered by British beer historian Ron Pattinson based on an 1822 Porter; nearly half the grist is brown malt, and no black malt is used at all. 

… then how did Lew and I gleefully drink their Porter no later than late 2009 and early 2010*** repectively? Ron. It’s got to be Ron who can explain what’s going on.

Speaking of revivals, GBH has an interesting story by Fred Garratt-Stanley of an English regional brewery, Lacons of Great Yarmouth, that thought ahead and stored its yeast:

“Securing the rights was a complex process that took two or three years,” says Carver, speaking to me over the phone. “Once we did, we went to the yeast bank and asked for the deposits of our yeast from 1956, of which there were eight: five top-fermentation yeasts and three bottom-fermentation yeasts.” Reviving these historic strains wasn’t simple, though. “Strains frozen in the 1950s have now been dormant for almost 75 years, so we have to revive them,” says Nueno-Palop. “Also, because many of the original depositors are not alive anymore, [breweries] need to acquire the rights. With Lacons, they had the original documentation pointing them toward the right NCYC strains … it was interesting that they had documented everything because this is very important for replicating recipes.”

Finally, it was interesting to note this comment on Twex from Jessica Mason:

As the end of the week nears, I look forward to a selection of men notifying us all of their ultimate line-up of most worthy beer news. Painstakingly collated into a list of what truly is best for everyone to read. Like they wrote it all. Can’t bloody wait.

As as far as I know, I get roundups from at least, yes, Katie Mather of The Gulp but also Jessica B. of Boak & Bailey and Stephanie Grant of The Share as well as I believe a few other women on recommended beery reading so I am pretty sure this corner of the hobby isn’t a chromozonal exclusive. That being said, good to have a sense of humour about being both the readers and the writers with these sorts of Nobel Prize ineligible topics. We hold each other up. As always, bring back RSBS so we wouldn’t have to rely on others!

Enough!! We roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (up one to 126) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (up three to 917) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (minus 1 to 4,467) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (down two to 161), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Fear not!

Want to keep up with the news before next Thursday? Check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan the very next Monday upon which he decides to show up at the office. Look at me – I forgot to link to Lew’s podcast. Fixed. Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And I listened to the BOAS podcast bro-ly interview of Justin from Matron. And the long standing Beervana podcast . Plus We Are Beer People. There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a few podcasts… but some may be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link! Errr… nope, it is gone again.

*One comment in the BBC report caught my eye: “… not to be confused with Didsbury Beer Festival, which has been held annually for 11 years at St Catherine’s Community Centre.” Is there some sort of tension between the Didsbury Beer Festival and the Didsbury Craft Beer Festival? Must be very civil peeing practices at the old DBF if the DCBF is called out on that particular fear. Just hope that there is none of that thimping thumping beat that neighbours complain about eminating from St Lawrence Church of York. 
**Note: “This article was generated by Benzinga’s automated content engine and reviewed by an editor” so take this situation with a grain of salt.
***Shameless mooch that I was back then, the emails flew back and forth and the press release from November 20, 2009 read: “Originally called Narragansett Dark, ‘Gansett’s Porter craft brew first premiered in 1916. ‘Gansett still retains their original recipe, offering the same great-tasting Porter winter brew today. ‘Gansett Brewmaster, Sean Larkin offers some tasting notes on the brew: “We produce the Porter using summit hops, black malt, pale malt, roasted barley and ale yeast. It is then dry hopped with Amarillo hops, creating a deliciously mild chocolate flavor with just a hint of smokiness.” The specialty brew is 5.4% alcohol by volume with 22 International Bittering Units. Narragansett Porter is brewed in small batches at Trinity Brew House in Providence, Rhode Island and Cottrell Brewery in Pawcatuck, Connecticut.“