Category: France

The Death Defying Mid-July 2022 Thursday Beery News Notes

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

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

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

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

Note: Cookie advises don’t get Humphed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There. That’s enough. It must be! For more, check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday but not from Stan every Monday as he is on his summer holiday. Check out the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday (Ed.: ??? ) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s (Ed.: now very) irregular newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water. There has also been the Beer O’clock Show but that’s now winding up after ten years.

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

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For The First Thaw

Not the big thaw, the ice jam busting thaw. Just the small thaw that tells you a big thaw is not that far off. The thaw that tells you you probably don’t need to buy more bird feed for, basically, the squirrels. The bastardly squirrels. You can sit out now. In the sun. With your Bobo and you Eephus. Yup, it’s a time when your mind starts to look forward to spring. And outdoor unpaid labour followed by a nice cold beer. That’s where it all started, right? As the old Temperance Society hymn told us, yardwork is the root of all evil. Soon coming. Get ready.

But for now, first up is The Beer Nut who found a bit of an expensive dud this week and it does make one wonder how much silent regret there is out there for this sort of thing:

Clearly this has been designed, and priced, for the special-occasion market. Anyone new to big barrel-aged stout and apprehensive about what it brings may find themselves enjoying how accessible it is. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it’s rather bland given the specs. I don’t want a sickly bourbon bomb but I do want more substance and more character than this displays. Perhaps releasing it fresh would have been the better move.

So not a drain pour but, still, not necessarily a beer you want to share with pals who know what’s what – or the price with thems who might not. Is there a word for that? There has to be a word. And what would our man in the EU think of this: blue beer in France: “Question?” “Yes, is it a shitty beer? “Quoi?” “Votre bier… c’est un biere du merde bleu, monsieur?” Peut etre.

Elsewhere, on a day out in Kent (are there ever days not out for Martin?) we gained another bit of knowledge on the rules of pub snacks as they relate to the odd hairy bits:

The Larkins was a lovely cool pint; that ramekin of scratchings a tad let down by the inclusion of pork crackling, which really ought to be outlawed. Unless scratchings have hairs on them, they have no right to that name.

There was a bit of a bittersweet tale posted by Boak and Bailey this week, a story of something found in a pub which starts:

On Saturday 8 March 1975, a 16-year-old boy wrote an autobiographical note on a piece of thin chipboard and concealed it in the skittle alley at The Lord Nelson pub in Barton Hill, Bristol.

Hey look! It’s Ren Navarro appearing on CTV discussing dessert beers nationally. A great public education public service.

Jeff wrote about what he called “malt consciousness” this week and I think he is partially, almost entirely quite right:

I had to spent eight days in Bavaria before something magical happened in my appreciation of beer. Because the main difference among the beers I drank (and drank and drank) came from the malt, I was able to tune into that wavelength. For the first time, I developed “malt consciousness.” I understood the role malt played—something many American brewers and most American drinkers still lack. Brewers are a lot more sophisticated now, and they understand that you’re not going to make a very interesting helles from generic two-row pale. Yet I’m not sure we’ve quite arrived at full malt consciousness.

If you go back to the brewing recipe books of twenty years ago, you will see much more interest in a range of malts that you do today. One of my first posted beer reviews eighteen years ago included the faded but one time most important US micro, Pete’s Wicked Ale. Before the new millennium, ales were malt and lagers hop focused. They really weren’t so binary but that was the story, as we see in this 1991 article about the Buffalo brewing scene or this one from 1987. Full bodied dark ales. Malt was the main event before craft appropriated and reframed micro in the early 2000s preparing us for the everything is IPA world we now want to leave behind. The present malt revival is great and adds another dimension to local brewing for sure. But it’s not new. We are remembering.

The big theme went off in another direction this week, a few more indications of the continuing death… or perhaps these are the zombie years… of craft like this:

Observation: There’s a LOT of confusion right now among wholesalers, trying to get a bead on the current direction of the craft beer industry. A general feeling of “something has fundamentally changed, but we aren’t quite sure what” going around. It’s creating some paralysis.

And Chris Loring of Massachusetts’ Notch Brewing shared this thought:

US brewers can take anything of value and tradition and make it a gimmick before beer drinkers experience the real thing. When was it decided we’d be clowns instead of professionals? I’m done, this is embarrassing.

Then… we learn again that a portion of CAMRA is populated by pigs. Then there was the end-timsey news about contract brewing no alcohol beer being a thing with the unskilled… and, of course, the Flagship February dead cat bounce. It is all flounder or founder? Whatever, I presume it all is the sort of cleansing we would expect after a pandemic… or a recession… or a competing innovation that draws attention elsewhere. Sorta facing all three makes for a guaranteed shift. M. Lawrenson had some interesting thoughts about the perhaps associated irritability of drinking establishments with social media observations:

Unfortunately, some places don’t see it this way.  Apparently, they live and die by their Google rating.  I gave 4/5 to somewhere last week.  On Sunday afternoon, they sent me a message saying “Hi, is there we can do to get you to change your rating to a 5?”  I struggled to think of a reply, as I’ve been to this place twice a week for the last 6 months and it’s been pretty much the same every time.  They could make it perfect for ME, I suppose.  But what’s perfect for me ain’t gonna be perfect for everyone.   Perhaps they recognised my name and imagined I’m some kind of “influencer” in the pub world.

Also, relatedly, I think this is one opinion that is about 180 degrees wrong about the nature of change we are seeing:

As someone who’s covered the seething angst and vexing contradictions of America’s craft beer industry and culture for over a decade, I find this a remarkable development. Where have all the hate tourists gone? Or, to put it another way: How did a craft beer industry and community so opposed to selling out become so inert in the face of their beloved breweries getting sold off?

Umm… maybe the development of small local breweries with no chance of ever being in a buyout maybe? The hate stop hating big craft and just moved on to a more interesting experience. That’s only the main story in history of good beer circa 2015-2022. Sweet status-based self-citation, however.

Note: “not Britain’s oldest boozer.”

I really dislike most beer culture cartoons as they are… umm… not all that likeable* but I do like the more deftly drawn ones by Emily Thee Cannibal, possibly a proctologist, like this one about a pairing of Allagash White with a soft cheese… except I can’t stop feeling that the cheese looks like a dying PacMan. It’s a slower more dignified death for sure… but still.

Finally and weirdly, odd news from (i) the folks fighting against the bad actors and powers of BrewDog and (ii) the folk rooting for Mikkeller despite the bad actors and powers. Both groups seem to have engaged the same consultants to deal with their respective complaints. I hadn’t appreciated that in January there was an announcement that@PunksWPurpose had acquired a “platform to affected Brewdog workers to assist [them]… in their core mission of tackling Brewdog’s cultural issues” but saw today that the same consultancy was hired by Mikkeller to provide provide  a “Workplace Reconciliation Program.” This is a little confusing for me, being a lawyer who dabbles in areas of owner v. contractor, employer v employee issues, as you are either on one side or the other in my profession. Do you really want to share your experience to be used against an allegedly overbearing employer with someone hired by another allegedly overbearing employer to smooth the waters?**

Perhaps it is just as one correspondent wrote privately, “folks might be more interested in catharsis than anything else” regardless of the outcome in terms of justice. The display may be enough. Me, I’d say don’t rely on a consultant, get your own legal advice (especially when the consultant does not seem to understand independent legal advice means) or go to a tribunal (usually free). Whatever you do, be especially careful to not create a record of any complaint that ends up owned by the party against which you are making a complaint. You will see it next in your cross-examination when you do end up making that legal complaint: “… but didn’t you say in Feb 2022 the following…“***.

There. Done. For more check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and from Stan every Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Or is that dead now?) There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s irregular newsletter, The Gulp, too (… back this week!) And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (which I hope is  revived soon…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*rahrah, craft is great, comes in brown and other colours…kittens!
**Then the odd news turned into an odd thread when the consultancy lead jumped at the tail end of a chat I was having with DSL, wanting a discussion with me about Mikkeller, then suggested I was aggressive (no), directed me to the FAQs (no thanks) and sought to get me off Twitter and speak on the phone (really, no thanks). Crisis management deflection stuff. Frankly, I think I find most offensive thing is the use of “reconciliation” which is appropriate when talking about bringing a fundamentally divided nation together, not helping a frigging contract brewer cope with its self-inflicted crisis.
***But, then again, I pretty much did the same thing spilling my beans such as they are, a bearing of witness to a hired investigator about my tangential involvement in a similar issue… which was where the discussion with DSL started – and should have ended. Go figure.

The Very First Thursday Beery News Notes For The Second Half Of November 2021

I like this image above. It is a bit of an edit off a photo from Great Lakes Brewery off the north shore of Lake Ontario (as opposed to the one to the south of Lake Erie). Depth of field hit very nicely. Gran’s hand towels being put to good use. And clean lines every day. Best practice. Speaking of which, let’s see what else is worth noting in another week in the life of good beer and related stuff, shall we?

First off, Katie Mather wrote a very interesting piece of these times about a trip to sip natural wines in Paris which was as much about herself:

I ended up at Notre Dame every day I was in Paris. The resilient aura of a burnt-out cathedral was something I hadn’t been prepared for. I stared, making excuses to pass by, marvelling at the Medieval-like wooden supports bolstering the flying buttresses just like when they were new, wrong-footed by the stained glass rose window I had first seen in a Disney film, now blackened with soot. A dark emblem of survival—or perhaps a reminder of how close it has been to ruin, of being rescued, and still being rescued, and maintaining that iconic but now fragile facade. I was unwell, and I found a hand to grasp in the sight of this building. It seemed as tired as I was, of holding itself up, of being under so much of its own weight.

I am a bit interested in natural wine as I’ve known for a long time that I’m fairly sensitive to sulphite-based preservatives. This has been brought a bit into focus in the last few months as I am working on an intermittent diet that sees me weeding certain things out of my diet. Turns out I also have a problem with wheat and barley. Like a glass of red wine, good crusty bread triggers a histamine reaction. As does… beer. Weeping eyes. Inflammation. Drag. But manageable.

UPDATE: ghost tips over beer!

In his blog by email, Dave Infante took a very grim lesson from the Bell’s Brewery sale:

Remember early last decade? Selling out was anathema, and the U.S. craft brewing “movement” looked unstoppable. Now it’s starting to look insolvent. Sales are slowing; reports of workplace discrimination are up; a generation of new drinkers are reaching for hard seltzer and canned cocktails to power the party. In a 10 mere years, craft brewing’s rock-ribbed corporate antagonism has given way to self-imposed purity tests and fading relevance. In the same time, its product has morphed from zeitgeist-y leader to cheugy afterthought. Craft beer remains a product with a value proposition. But make no mistake: a dark night of the soul has fallen on its anti-commodity, independence-over-everything cultural dogma.

He’s probably right. Craft sucks. Right? Or is it “craft – doesn’t suck!” Can’t remember. Never mind – just remember who was calling craft “cheugy” back in May. The cool kids, that’s who.

Gary Gillman has been doing a fabulous job exploring eastern European brewing history with a focus on the role of Jewish culture. This week he wrote about  hops:

Hop-growing in the former Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia was an established but relatively small-scale business up to World War I. Prior to 1850 one source, Penny Cyclopedia (1838), states “a few hops” were grown, a cottage industry at best. By 1879 hop-growing is on a more solid footing. The Journal of the Society of Arts was particularly approving of quality, stating at their best Galician hops could hardly be distinguished from classic Bohemian Saaz.

Speaking of things easterly, here’s your Belarus update: still finding myself filling the hours at home rather than sprinting out into the local upsurge in the delta, I came across a video blogger who rides the rails of eastern Europe looking for former Soviet things to talk about. In this episode, it’s about five beers from five cities in Belarus.  Half seem to be gak. It is an interesting way to turn to Jeff’s thoughts (which we may have discussed before) about nationalism being the way to understand beer:

In the 44 years since Michael Jackson wrote The World Guide to Beer, people have become much more sophisticated in the way they understand and describe our favorite malty substance. The subject is incredibly complex, and over that span we have collected, classified, taxonomized, and shared information, refining what we know along the way. This effort has produced a shared (if disputed and endlessly debated) vocabulary and conceptual framework for discussing beer. For the most part, people have identified and developed the big concepts and we now focus on refining them. I was therefore surprised to discover a huge dynamic in beer that hasn’t gotten the classification/codification treatment: national tradition…

There is a lot in there to disagree with – that the subject is incredibly complex or that big concepts have been identified. Or that people have become more much more sophisticated. Consider this on that last point. But it is a reasonable additional way to look at a subject mired for a few decades in one fixed conceit – style. It is reasonable to have a number of ways to look at one thing to cross reference and improve understanding. But it is hampered by words like nation and culture that are greasy and malleable. Nations shift and cultures morph. Consider the political and cultural constructs just in Gary’s post above. And the concepts are prone to being coopted. Me, I am more of a globalist technology and trade story arc person myself.  But that is another way of looking at things in addition to style and national tradition, isn’t it. No good comes of the unified theory approach except perhaps in physics. Maybe.

I raise all this by way of background as this week, Stan wasn’t entirely on board with the nationalist construct or at least the rendering of it that made the era of craft special. He wrote thusly by way of counter example:

Last week, during the virtual portion of the Master Brewers Conference, Greg Casey discussed “The Inspiring Histories & Legacies of American Lager Beer.” Casey, who worked for several of America’s largest brewing corporations before retiring in 2013, is writing a trilogy of books that focus on the period between the 1840s and 1940s. He points out that America gave the world “ice cold beer here!” Americans learned about brewing adjunct lagers from the Germans, but made them their own. They perfected chill proofing, allowing beers to be served crystal clear even when cold, changing the look of beer and the culture of drinking beer.

See, this is why we have all those facets of a topic. Like history. See, America did not give the world adjunct beer after receiving them from the Germans. The Germans handed it around themselves as part of their global mercantile and military empire from before the First World War. For example, Germany took over the “port city of Qingdao in north-eastern China in 1898, and ruled over it until 1914” and established Tsingtao beer. See also Argentina. As Boak and Bailey explained in Gambrinus Waltz, they also brought it to Britain. In Japan, a German trained Norwegian (who did admittedly touch down in the USA) founded what is now Kirin. In a bit of a twist, in the 1920s rice-based adjunct beer took off in Canada, to sent it the other way sending it south into the US black market during American prohibition.* Americans then took it with them where they went and often stayed. All of which leads me to think that while nationalism may not be the right unified theory, the paths of nations and the interacting influences upon them may as important as the history of technological advances if we are to understand why beer is what it is.

Speaking of beery culture, the local version got weird this week. I have to admit, I used to drop in at the place a few years back as it was handy to my ride home from work in the family car. Small pitcher of basic adjunct lager and a basket of onion rings was my order.

In a more sensible context, retiredmartin prodded me to read this post from the blog Prop Up The Bar which I liked for a number of reasons but especially the man on the street view:

As I arrived the gaffer was on the phone making a very angry call, his mood not improved by muggings here standing underneath the ‘table service only’ sign at the bar. During his phone call he threatened to “just shut the pub” which would have made this an epic pub ticking fail. Not sure what had upset him so much, but looking at my picture maybe he was on the phone to the company that looks after the shutters.

See also Lord Largis illustrating the “non-tick”:

I hadn’t eaten properly and as the bus approached the Hussey Arms I remembered how good the food is in there, but I’ve been spending too much on takeaways and meals of late and I’m trying to cut this cost down. I had an R Kelly lyric pop into my head. “My mind’s telling me no, but my body, my body’s telling me yes”. But as it was now dark and I wasn’t overly convinced that I knew where my first pub to visit was, my mind won and I remained on the bus.

I like that clarity of the vignette. Much uncertainty, conversely, surrounds a news release that informs us that two of Ontario and Canada’s best established craft brewers have done a form of a deal focusing on efficiencies in distribution. Trouble is… it seems to be more than that. As Jordan stated:

Getting increasingly angry about this entire set of messaging and the general level of competence. Insulting to everyone’s intelligence to dangle the shiny thing at exactly the same time as letting the majority of staff go.

Ottawa’s news source The Review had more on the background:

“I can confirm that layoffs took place today, but they are largely not related to the Steam Whistle announcement,” said Beau’s spokesperson Jen Beauchesne, in a Tuesday afternoon email to The Review in response to an inquiry about the layoffs and the Steamwhistle announcement. Most of temporary layoffs which occurred this week are because Beau’s is slowing down production, while the company does maintenance work on its lines and brewing tanks, said Beau’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Steve Beauchesne. “We have been having some fermentation issues,” Beauchesne said. “We need to empty the tanks and do a deep clean.”

Questions have arisen but, look, the Beauchesnes are family brewers from a small town in far eastern Ontario and (a rarity) I happily call them friends. They are great fun folk who I’ve had over to the backyard and who’ve had me to their fests. The times, however, may not be kind and if the business changes coming are greater than they are in position to discuss today, I can only wish them and their community the best.

B.O.B.** of the Week:  Mr B on a rather good brewery in his neighbourhood. The denial of standard B.O.B. context at the outset is an interesting variation on the brewery owner bio.

Finally: “Man driving 870 miles in world’s smallest car” – not about beer but, still, please send your 500 word essays as usual on how it is still like beer to the regular address to be entered in the context for our weekly prize of a photograph of a ten dollar bill.

That’s a lot. Busy week. For more, check out the updates from that same Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and from Stan now on a regular basis again every Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday (where a parsing of press releases was featured this week accompanied by giggle, chortles and the mewing of cats) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword which may revive some day.  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*See The King v. Carling Export Brewing & Malting Co. Ltd., [1930] S.C.R. 361 at page 373.
**“Was ist eine B.O.B.? Das is eine B.O.B.!!” Translation: Brauereibesitzerlangweiliglichbiografie.

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For The End Of Q3 2021

Do you ever find yourself on a Wednesday evening and realizing you didn’t note a lot beery news in a week? No? Me neither. No way. What’s been going on? I can tell you for sure. Because I have been attentive. Saw stuff like this:  Curtis walked into a 2005/2010 central New York beer store cosplay event this week. That was something. And I cracked a new databased to dig through for new 1700s New York brewery information as part of the work on Empire Beer. Just typing “Lispenard” gave me, like you, a rush as well as a renewed sense of purpose. I found a reference that pushed the brewing career of Mr. Leadbetter back one whole year. And Craig found Albany beer for sale in Boston in the 1730s. Inter-colonial beer shipments almost 300 years ago. Neato. Oh – and I didn’t drink beer in a graveyard. So there.

First up, I had no idea about France… keeping in mind the first thing that comes to mind with much beer industry writing is the question “is that really true?”:

It may be famous for its wine, but France is also the country with the largest number of breweries in Europe. This is how French beer changed its image from a “man’s drink” to a refined beverage worthy of an apéro… The number of microbreweries here has exploded over the past decade. The country went from having 442 active breweries in 2011, to 2,300 today, meaning no country in Europe has more breweries than France, according to the trade union Brasseurs de France. 

Next, an update on the Umqombothi situation. You will recall that in June a man took the prize for making the best Umqombothi, right? Well, now the traditional South African beer faces regulation:

With the newly-amended Liquor Products Act that came into effect last Friday, there are now strict production requirements that traditional beer merchants will have to abide by in order to stay on the right side of the law. Thembisile Ndlovu has made a name for herself as the queen of brewing umqombothi the natural way it was done by grandmothers back in the villages. The 36-year-old from Zondi in Soweto, who is owner of All Rounder Theme events that organises themed parties and provides catering, said the new law regulating the making of umqombothi would not affect her business.

Odd seeing Pellicle win second place in a “best blog” award this week. From Beer 52 which fulls wells knows what Pellicle is. It’s not that it got an award or came second. It’s that it recognized that the drinks website was a blog. There is an interesting comment hidden in the explanation of the award:

…Pellicle has stuck to a founding principle that I recall finding quite radical at the time: kindness. Next to the toxic dumping ground of rivalry and acrimony that is Beer Twitter, Pellicle has been unremittingly positive in choosing what to cover and how to cover it.

I don’t disagree but I also find it weird that the fairly barren wasteland for any beer discussion on Twitter is set up as the comparator. Having made a hobby of reading this stuff every week, beer Twitter died off a long time ago. May still be general jerk Twitter, sure. And both GHB Sightlines and Dave Infante’s  Fingers have recently seen the need to put up a paywall to make ends meet. Is “beer blog” the last phrase standing? Maybe so – if that is what Pellicle is. Speaking of which, they published an excellent piece by Will Hawkes on  hops growing in England:

Crucially, the hop gardens sit on rich, fertile Brickearth soil, windblown loam and silt, deposited during the Ice Age. The Thames Estuary is just three miles away, and the hops, which grow on a gentle east-facing slope, are frequently buffeted by wind. This proximity to the sea is part of what makes East Kent Goldings what they are, although John regards it as a mixed blessing. “They can end up a bit bashed and brown,” he says. “The German hops are always pristine! They must get no wind there.”

Speaking of which, Stan’s Hop Queries blog by email showed up this week including observations on the Colorado hop market:

MillerCoors (now MolsonCoors) subsidized Colorado’s mini-hop boom in the teens, paying much more for Colorado grown hops than the brewery would have for the same varieties from the Northwest. They were, and are, used in the Colorado Native line of beers. That includes seven year-round brands and four seasonals that are brewed with 100% Colorado-grown ingredients. However, a few years ago MolsonCoors cut back its hop contracts to “right-size” inventory. Many farmers weren’t ready to compete.

Stan also noted that the Ales Through the Ages beer history conference has gone Zoomy and yet, even after scrapping the junket side, has also ditched all of the original speakers. Did ticket sales bomb for what many thought, as I observed last April, could have been called “Males on Ales Through the Ages”?

And Andy Crouch guided me to an article in Wine Enthusiast on the tepid performative solidarity craft beer is displaying in response to bigotries in the craft beer trade:

“… I keep getting messages and emails and calls, and people just stopping by the brewery, every day, just being like either this person apologized to me, or this person was fired, or the company just did this for everybody, and just letting me know all these really positive changes that people are actually sticking to and doing what they say. “It is heartwarming to know that it actually is helping people and creating lasting change.” To bring these issues to light in the customer sphere, in July, Allan announced a collaboration beer called Brave Noise. Its aim is to promote a safe and discrimination-free beer industry. At press time, fewer than 100 breweries had committed to the project.

Craft fibs category ticked. Back in England but still about forms of ticking, Mudgie guided me to the post at Real Ale, Real Music about an excellent pub crawl in Preston:

I retraced my route, passing dozens of takeways, a few restaurants, vape shops, beauty salons, and the odd pub as Saturday evening came to life. I had decided I would visit one more place before getting the train home. It was back across town, back to Fishergate, where down the side street by Barclays Bank was the Winckley Street Ale House, another recommendation from earlier in the day. There were tables outside, as there were at other spots on a pleasant side street, and as I walked in I joined a queue to the bar. It moved slowly, but finally it was my turn.

Reality. I believe what I read in that story more than I believe that France has more breweries than any other country in Europe. Or that much of craft cares. Facts! That’s what we need.

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

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For The Quietest Week of Summer

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

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

Archivally, interesting news out of North Carolina:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…and…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Beery News Notes For The Middle Of May 2021

Here we are. Fed up with the pandemic. Fed up with hobbies, as illustrated above. I even had to cover the damn tomatoes again this week as we approach mid-May just to be sure. But sunshine, warmth and all things good are promised from here on out… you bet… so I am looking forward these days. Speaking of hobbies, I even have a second beer related project, one in addition to Project X. Let’s call it Project Y, shall we? Project X has a longer arc for sure but Project Y is cheery, quite positive. You know how these things are.

And, well, for Project Y as part of my due diligence I had to go hunting for a particular beer book, a particular history of a particular patch of the Earth.  And I was struck by something as I dug through my shelves – how many creative and interesting beer books came out from about 2008 to about 2017 or so. That was the Golden Era, wasn’t it. I was buying a book once a month back then. When things were not about craft selling to big beer or then about craft adulterating the beer with fruity adjuncts… or non-beers like seltzers and sodas. Could you imagine writing a style guide to seltzers? A few people are dripping tears upon the keyboard even as they read those words… because that is what they are doing.

Anyway, not me. I have Projects X and Y to keep me smug and warm as this lockdown continues. Speaking of which, is this true?

Seltzers were the inevitable end. Throughout history people have always desired beer that tastes less like beer. The death of gruit. The death of smoke beer. The death of highly roasted beers. And now, the death of beer.

There seems to be a lot of seltzer based anxiety in the beer writing world as much as the beer brewing world. What to write about when there is nothing to discuss? Add alcohol, flavouring and carbonation to water. Bingo! Same story over and over.

Interestingly and instead of books, some beer writers appear to be engaging in a relatively recent sort of paid web event. Pete Brown is running book club events on his back catalogue where you can join in the discussion for a fee. One of the most successful books of the Golden Era, his 2009 book Hops and Glory,  was the topic last night.  And Gary Gilmore is appearing at a conference this very afternoon, speaking on the topic of Margaret Simpson: Pioneer Publican-Brewer in Upper Canada. A paper will follow. And Pellicle is holding a second anniversary beer bash where, at least in the UK, you can buy a selected six pack and drink along. I might pop in, if only at the end of that one given it is still at the end of the work day my time.  I highly recommend jumping on these sorts of things as with any luck, like apparently interesting beer books themselves, they will also be a thing of the past once the vaccines are all in arms and the world moves on to its next norm.

What else is going on? Well, an apology to Martin who left a comment on last weeks post that I didn’t get around to noticing needed approval for three days. Such are the consequences and resulting administrative burden from the flotsam, jetsam and other forms of abuse that usually appear in the comments. But chit chat is always welcome so, again, sorry for the delay.

Liam at BeerFoodTravel has posted a second discussion about the history of hops in Ireland, this week covering the 1800s in a detailed calendar entry style like this:

1835 – Under the headline ‘Irish Hops’ a Belfast newspaper states that The Commission of Revenue Inquiry recommended that Irish grown hops should pay a similar rate of duty as those grown in England. (There are also mentions of duties on ‘Irish hops’ in 1843, 1845 and 1846 in various parliamentary records.) Once again this would indicate that hops were possibly still being grown somewhere on the island and in enough quantities to warrant discussion in parliament.

In other hop news, an email that gave me pause came into the spam filters this week from the otherwise reputable firm Yakima Chief Hops:

In 2017, YCH launched a line of innovative hop products known as Cryo Hops® using a cryogenic hop-processing technology that separates whole cones into two components—concentrated lupulin and bract. These concentrated lupulin pellets provide brewers with maximum aroma impact while reducing the negative effects experienced with brewing hoppy beers. The Cryo Hops® brand has since been recognized on beer labels worldwide.  YCH has combined this novel process with cutting-edge hop lab analysis techniques to create Cryo Pop™ Original Blend, formerly known as trial blend TRI 2304CR.

Really? See, I just want Fuggles. I want a bucket worth of Fuggles pitched into a hot bubbling malty wort out of which comes something called ale. I don’t want the “TM” or the “R” all that much either.  How pleasing it was, then to read the announcement of nearish-byish Aston Brewery’s new mascot, Fermie.  The logo was too small for my preferred slogan “Consume me very soon or time will ravage me!!!”

In the UK, trade interests have no doubt rallied effectively to block the right to know what goes into your body should this initiative to list calories in beer get come to pass:

Public Health Minister Jo Churchill has told colleagues she wishes to launch a 12-week consultation on the plans. They would force any business with 250 or more people to publish the calorie information about drinks – meaning the change in the law would hit most major pub chains. Churchill points to the fact that 7-8% of drinkers’ calorie intake come from booze, with lower socio-economic households and those already overweight benefiting the most from the policy. But last night critics slammed the plans as “madness” saying they would be a hammer blow to an already struggling part of the economy.

Not quite clear on the scope of her jurisdiction. And apparently neither was Minister Churchill as the whole thing was scrapped within minutes… days… well, a few weeks for sure.  A fair bit further along the continuum of health and booze, a grim bit of good story telling popped up on BBC Scotland this week, the story of a violent addict who got past it.

Related? Are we really to believe that we are all supposed to not notice the information quality provided by influencers but we are all supposed to sneer a bit a bloggers? I might have to revisit the hierarchies of content control but it is becoming clear that one of the hallmarks of expertise more and more is not actually publishing anything. All a bit topsy turvy.

Related? Nice bit of beer porn out of France this week from GBH. The text is characteristically precious GBH-style likely state funded tourism PR mixed with an NBC Olympics level coverage sweet heartwarming personal story but, well, there’s a lot of nice imagery in there.*

Note: “Historic England believe that only 10 to 15% of identifiable maltings survive.”

Is that it? Barrel bottom scraped? A bit of a quiet week. Keep hunting. And I’ll learn again about all the good stuff that I missed on Saturday. And, speaking of which, please don’t forget to check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday  and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness. And remember BeerEdge, too. Plus a newcomer located by B+B: The Moon Under Water.

*I had to preserve this response from Tom C. on FB: “Made me laugh so hard, I almost scalded myself with the single-farm free-trade coffee that I was sipping in the waning darkness of the early dawn, after having been so heartily accosted by my dog, ravenous for his morning gruel, that I relented and fed him, putting off for the moment my Thursday-morning ritual of dallying over Alan’s beery news roundup. And, then my day began.“

The First Thursday Beer News Of October 2019

Beer: less popular year after year!

Ah, beer. You ever ask yourself on why you bother thinking about it? You know, if it’s not your last ditch effort to cobble together a career? BA Bart posted a thread on Twitter this week on the latest stats – which seem to be in line with the previous stats. All worth considering, for sure, but there is that underlying personal question that I suppose everyone who reads this blog has asked themselves since their first glass – why do I bother? Knitting bloggers have a way easier answer. Mittens. Knitting bloggers get all the breaks.

Speaking of big stats over time, relatedly and with a similar set of graphs, apparently Russia’s public policy program to reduce alcohol consumption has been… a fabulous success:

In 2018, Russian life expectancy reached its historic peak, standing at almost 68 years for men and 78 years for women. The experience gathered by the Russian Federation in reducing the burden of disease stemming from alcohol represents a powerful argument that effective alcohol policy is essential to improving the prospects of living long and healthy lives.

By contrast, Gary thumbs his nose at Mr. Putin and gives us a portrait of one of my old favourites,* La Choulette, and the under-respected biere du garde style:

It has a full, complex flavour, quite different from the standard conception at least in North America of a “Belgian ale”. The beer is somewhat earthy, dark fruit estery, with malty/caramel tones, and an interesting tonic or “camphor” edge, almost gin-like to my taste. It has no tart notes, and is quite different from a Flanders brown style, East or West.

Before going on junket with others of the cap in hand crowd,** young Mr. Curtis wrote a response to a typical Stone-based blurt a ripping set of tweets on the failure that has been Stone Brewing’s experience in the UK and Europe including this bit of honesty:

They’ve had to sell there entire U.K. brewing operation. Instead of trying to understand their export markets, they’ve attempted to subvert them. And it’s backfired time and time again.

Yowza! It’s all true, of course, but as we know with the stale older monied end of US craft beer – facts are not all they are cracked up to be.

Perhaps related, GBH shared Jeff Alworth’s sharing of the Instagram posting by Baltimore brewer Megan Stone of @isbeeracarb on sad reality of brew house work conditions.  Because I don’t want to know what my kids do on Friday night, I stay away from Instagram so this was helpful.

Beth Demmon has published a wonderfully in-depth piece at CraftBeer.com on brewing while raising a family:

As Oliver, 34, and her generation have children—albeit later and at a lower rate than generations past—more beer professionals are increasingly finding themselves in similar situations as Oliver. Child care costs, lack of parental benefits, and other obstacles mean employees working in the estimated 7,500 breweries across the United States face the potential of their children existing in alcohol-centric spaces.

Now perhaps building upon those last two stories, “scandal” and “Ontario” usually evoke as much shock as the combination of “curling” and “action” but this week the decision of Ontario Craft Brewers*** to attend and post on social media about a government PR announcement which included standing with a certain Member of Provincial Parliament (“MPP”) due to his past and presumably present day quite intolerant positions. Ben Johnson I believe was the first to point out the glaring problem:

For an organization that has made public overtures to women in their industry, the @OntCraftBrewers looks pretty hypocritical here posing for photo ops with a kid who said he wants to make a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body “unthinkable in our lifetime.”

Brewers issued social media statements: Muddy York, Bench, Sawdust City,**** People’s Pints, Manantler. There are others. It made the news. And there was some unhappiness that the associated larger event got tarnished.  Some didn’t comment. Jordan posted his thoughts on the naturally resulting trade backlash this way:

The OCB’s leadership is actively undermining its own credibility. They have lost two members this week in Block 3 and Manantler and may well yet lose Muddy York. Their largest members are backpedaling faster than I have ever seen them and while I would like to think that this would be a wake up call to them, I just don’t believe it. I think they believe this will go away because this is an emotional response. 

Disastrous decision. In other key conservative political news which might be related, have a gander at British Cabinet member Michael Gove recently pickled out of his skull – not only in public but in the UK’s Parliament.

In more positive news, co-creator of this stuff Max headed out from Prague tracing a line north to try out some actual (and not craft bastardized) kviek in Norway as part of a program to establish partnerships between Czech and Norwegian people who practice traditional trades and crafts:*****

After a hearty lunch prepared by his wife, Julie, Sigurd took us a couple of kilometres uphill to pick juniper and get some alder wood for the next day’s brew. We came back with a full trailer and we sat in the garden to have some home made beer while we waited for our accommodation to be ready. That’s when I had my first contact with a Kveik Ale, brewed with juniper but with a boiled wort. It was amazing! It had notes of green wood and spice that reminded me of Szechuan pepper without the burn, but they weren’t overpowering. It still tasted like beer thanks to its sufficiently muscular malt base.

Wow. And no one adding fruit syrups at all!  Finally, some other beer news in brief:

a. The craft beer hangover.
b. Zwanze Day fightin’ words!
c. Beer powered radio.
d. A trip to JJB’s (aka the formerly Stonch’s) pub.
e. The most blatant example of entitled craft ripping off someone’s intellectual property yet. Oof, indeed.
f. Barry in Germany is now selling his own clinky drinky produce!

Finito! I’m actually sick as I put this together. The autumn school bug. While I recover, I can look forward to expect the Boak and Bailey news update on Saturday and Stan should back on Monday. Check out the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays, too. Heck, there is so much to follow – what do you need me for… sorry… it’s  just the cold medicine talking… zzzzzzz… zz… zlurp… zzzzzzzzzzzz…

 

*Ten summers ago…
**If I have done anything, my part in making “the junketeer’s admission” a norm has been my proudest achievement.
***Former sponsors of this blog.
****Oddly, even having to explain a former senior staffer wearing their t-shirt as if he was still representing.
*****Sounds actually legitimate!

The Thursday Beery News Update For Fire, College, Style and Being Fifty-Six

I picked that picture up there of a fire in France earlier in the week, the night time warming of the vineyards at Chateau Figeac: “rows and rows of candles on the vineyard to protect the vines from frosty nights…” Here’s perhaps an even more stunning image, the French Côte-d’Or lit up at night form above. I spent three weeks in Paris with pals in 1986, weaving from art galleries to bars to cafe’s to our small family run hotel. We were there so long we got grief from the owners for being so bad at getting to know Paris, for wasting the experience that we were being told where to visit and that led to me, a gawky probably hungover 22 year old, staring at the blue glass at  Notre-Dame. Lovely then. Sad now.

Let’s go! Diageo has done a good thing:

The maker of the iconic Irish stout Guinness has announced it is removing plastic from beer packaging. Plastic ring carriers and shrink wrap will be removed from multipacks of Diageo’s beer products – Guinness, Harp, Rockshore and Smithwick’s. They will be replaced with 100% recyclable and biodegradable cardboard.

Excellent. And here’s an excellent suggestion for a gravestone, one that speaks to one of our lingering and perhaps pre-Christian rituals.

I am a bad man. I missed a post by a co-author, mainly because it came out two Thursdays ago, exactly when I am in a post-update publication funk. It’s Jordan’s post on the things he has learned creating and running a college course about beer:

How do you create something unique from scratch?  For one thing, it’s continuing education, which means that it’s nights and weekends. It has to be affordable. It’s a self selecting group of students and they have presumably been through a long day at work or a long week at work by the time they get to you. It has to be instructional, educational, and entertaining enough to hold their interest. It probably needs to be a little interactive and there has to be room for discussion. That goes for all 67 hours of class time from the preview workshop to the last week of the last class.  So there I was: anxious about public speaking, with no experience teaching, tasked with creating and administering 67 hours of content, and just bloody minded enough to think I could pull it off.

Speaking of structures, Jeff wrote and excellent thing on the development of flash in the pan styles and by excellent I mean he stated something that I have long considered the case:

With trends, there’s a push-pull, and the pull is what establishes the style. First breweries gamble with something new—that’s the push. With a style like gose or a technique like kettle-souring, the push may last for years before a brewery scores a hit. But then that organic interest comes and customers start asking for the new thing. Brewers have been pushing saison for 20 years and Americans are just not taking the bait. But hazies? That’s all pull now. Even brewers who hate them feel compelled to offer their ravenous customers what they want. 

Pay attention to that push. Many folk deny it exists, saying its all demand driven. As if there ever was a public outpouring demanding a gap needed to be filled by Black IPA or sugar coated breakfast cereal gose. Officially absolving the beer drinking public from these sorts of abominations of marketing is a welcome thing. And the distinction between trend and style also fits better with the original Jacksonian intention of style to be an emulation of a classic. Good stuff.

Speaking of writing excellent things, Evan Rail has been tweeting about writing longer writing beery-wise as part of his process of writing a new piece of longer writing:

As a writer, you’re constantly doing short-term, short-gain work, which makes it really hard to get ahead. The work that brings real satisfaction — and which often makes for long-term success, financial and otherwise — is hard to fit into the day-to-day grind.

It’s the same for the amateur boy beer writer. Time is the commodity I simply don’t have. I’ve put in 24 hours since 36 hours ago. Frankly, I was glad to get a number of posts on beer and 1400s Bristol this winter but if I had my druthers I would do that sort of research and writing all the days of my life.

Politics? Here in Ontario, we have a particular form of conservative government which is dedicated to changing the way we get our booze and dope. It even affected the annual provincial budget to the point I have to go into work today to look at some beer law, an interesting puzzle. This was a telling tweet:

Number of times Doug Ford’s budget mentioned the words “alcohol” or “beer”: 46. Number of times “poverty” was mentioned: 0. Priorities.

That being said, we regularly regulate these things at the provincial level and alcohol has been at the forefront of cultural policy at many times in our past, not only from the 1870s to the 1930s the period people can’t cope with. Ontario, the true foundation of all hoppy beer trends. Buy our book Ontario Beer for the full story. Seriously. Grow up. Buy it. Pretend it’s my birthday.

A short post this week. But lots of good stuff to share. And it really is my birthday. On a Thursday before a four day springtime weekend. “W” to the “oooot”! And this is the one I have been waiting for. Fifty-six! Remember when you were nineteen and you couldn’t wait to be fifty-six? As you reflect in the arm glow of that, don’t forget Boak and Bailey on Saturday and Stan on Monday. Each a gift to us all. See you next week!

Toasting The Defeat Of Napoleon III With Belgian Beer

A quick historic vignette. To the right is a portion of an article entitled “The Surrender of Napoleon” published in the 7 September 1870 edition of the Daily Albany Argus from New York’s capital reporting on events from 1 September, occurring an ocean away after the defeat of France at the Battle of Sedan which took place on the Franco-Belgian border. The full article is here.

The interesting thing for present purposes is, of course, the fact that Bismark calls out for a drink and is presented with Belgian beer. He shares it with the journalist as well as General Forsyth, a US officer who was present to observe the battle from the perspective of Bismark’s Prussian lines. In another article from the day before published in the Commercial Advertiser of New York, there is a suggestion that the beer met the needs of the moment, the Belgian beer washing down the hearty congratulations which were being passed around.

For me, this is one of the earlier references to Belgian beer that I have found. This may be surprising but we need to keep in mind that Belgium only becomes the independent country in 1830 so it would be reasonable for earlier references to be regional rather than national. I would be happily corrected if that is not the case, if others have earlier references.

Immediate Update: via a Google Books search in an 1858 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, I found this passage in a temperance minded travel piece fabulously titled “Vagabondizing in Belgium” which uses the term once:

One day in Antwerp I asked if they had good water there. A washer-woman sitting near me, with lager-pot in hand, promptly answered, “Oh yes, excellent water, all the Englishmen that come here bring such gray, dirty shirts, but once or twice washing here brings them white as milk.” A stevedore close by, seeing by my countenance that my question was not fully answered, undertook to set the matter right by saying, “Ohyes, we have first-rate water, only that sometimes in winter it gets so hard on top that the vessels can’t go at all, then comes tight times for all us commercial people.” The landlady (who is also cook and barmaid), corrected the ignorant, uncivil persons—”it was not the river-water, nor the sea-water that the gentleman was inquiring after at all, but it was the well-water that the gentleman wished to know about, “and proceeded to inform the gentleman that it was the very nicest water in the known world, and made the nicest soup (just by adding a little beef, and cabbage, and turnips, and potatoes, and a few such little things) that ever a gentleman partook of. But the gentleman himself corrected and startled the whole company (as much as so heavy a company could be startled), by asking, “Was it good to drink?” Each heavy head swung slowly upon its heavy shoulders, each heavy eye was aimed directly at the querist’s face and stretched wide open with stark astonishment. At such a crisis only the landlord had words to offer. That important and heaviest individual of them all—he who seldom deigned to make long speeches—whose placid nature was seldom ruffled—who deemed it pious to drink and smoke, and who devoutly followed the path of duty—he who, saturated like a sponge, swelled from the topmost bristle to the tips of his toes with honest lager—he whose favor I had assiduously courted and whose resplendent face had begun to beam benignly o’er my foreign faults—now turned upon me looks of pity and contempt; and, stretching the doubled chin full half an inch above his massive chest, in his sharpest tones demanded, “To what?” then feeling that he had full well resented the serious insult to his profession and his country, he slowly turned upon his broad, flat heels, elevated his ponderous elbow, a connecting spring turned up his face, his jaw dropped down, his eye rolled up, a short faint gurgle, a long-drawn sigh, and he glanced serenely through the bottom of a large glass tumbler. But I never regained the great man’s esteem, nor do I, to this day, know whether the water of Belgium is fit to drink.

Notwithstanding their constant guzzling, I was ten days among Belgian drinkers before I saw a man so drunk that he could not walk erect and treat politely each one he met—which proves it, though an unseemly practice, yet a safer one than drinking whisky. Since Noah left the ark and the sons of Noah raised up new cities, each new-formed nation has found some new stimulant; but not one among the list of findings is at once so wholesome, cheap, and harmless as Belgian beer, and I look upon its introduction into the United States as an important reformatory movement. Temperance, total abstinence, Washingtonian, and other reforms have had their day and are forgotten, and the current year sees more alcoholic destruction than any former one has done. Those villainous mixtures that are labeled Brandy, Port, Champagne, etc., that flow into every street and alley of our cities, to every village and crossroad of our country, are rapidly telling upon our national health, temper, and reputation. Our ambitious men are changed by fiery poisons to reckless adventurers, those of medium virtue to rabid criminals, and we are coming to be looked upon as a nation of desperadoes. One of the first salutations I receive from nearly every person with whom I become acquainted is, “You have a great many murderers and incendiaries in America.” I answer that of course we have, while receiving hundreds per day of the vilest outcasts of all Europe; but feel all the time that that is not all the reason, and am anxious that the introduction of weak malt liquors and the increased growth of light wines should quench that fire which is burning out the best young blood of our country. The almost universal robust health that I meet is a powerful advocate in favor of this least of many evils. Four persons of each five I see have perfect, substantial health, while in the region I came from four native adults in five arc in some way diseased. Of course the constant indoor life of females, the worst of all kitchens, and the infernal quackery that reigns triumphant there, have much to do with that degeneracy; but the effect of our national tipple is not likely to turn out a slight one, provided that tipple continues to increase in quantity and deadly power as it has done for ten years last past.

Hey… if I coped another 400 words from the article this would be a #BeeryLongRead!

Updated Immediate Update: So, let me get there. To reach the 1500 word minimum in an absolutely cheater-pants way I offer you an illustration of a slightly later reference from this magazine article in a periodical named Epoch, 1887, volume 2, pages 31 to 32 under the heading “European Correspondence: French Beer” authored by one Charles Seymour:

French Beer PARIS, August 6, 1887. The rapid and steady increase in the consumption of beer is likely to continue, for the phyloxera, mildew and black rot still make sad havoc with the vines, and although our American plants are well acclimatized in certain districts, the total average under cultivation does not increase. Wine is, consequently, not so good and so plentiful as it used to be, and beer fast replacing it as a beverage. This extension in the use of fermented liquor has finally aroused the French brewers to call attention to the fact that excellent beer is still made in France, and to show their unpatriotic countrymen that a good deal of beer purporting to come from the fatherland is really brewed at no great distance from Paris. For this purpose they have interested the Minister of Agriculture, and that official has decided, in concert with the leading brewers, to hold an exhibition of all the products, materials and machinery used in the manufacture of beer, and all the utensils employed in its distribution and sale. No foreign beer will be admitted, but any country is free to send samples of the raw material, machinery and implements used, provided they are represented by French agents. French brewers confidently believe that when their beer is drank at the Palace of Industry it will be found quite equal to any made in England, Germany or Austria. In fact, it is not impossible that the light, clear and sparkling beer manufactured in this country may prove to be superior in nutritious and digestive qualities to its German rival. Visitors to the forthcoming exhibition—which opens on the 21st inst. and continues until October 31st—will be enabled to sample the brews under the best conditions, as especial pains are to be taken to serve the beer as it should be served; for it is a fact that most of the dealers in wines and liquors have known very little about handling beer. The temperature of the cellar, the care of the casks, and above all, the cleanliness of the pumps and conductors are details utterly ignored by the majority of French liquor sellers. How often have I heard American visitors here complain of the detestable quality of the beer and sigh for a glass of Milwaukee. It is not because the French beer is bad per se, it is because a Frenchman doesn’t know how to serve it. When we remember that France is essentially a wine country, and that beer drinking here is comparatively a modern custom, it is not surprising that so much ignorance prevails about the way to properly handle the “blonde” and the “brune.” Another advantage of the exhibition will be to place before the eyes of French brewers the latest improvements in use in England, Germany and Austria, for it is unfortunately true that in this country the brewers are a long way behind their neighbors in the use of modern appliances. Curiously enough while so many Frenchmen think they prefer foreign beer to that made in their own land, France produces the barley that is used in the brewing of the best English, German and Belgian beer; on the other hand the French hops are not in favor with French brewers, who prefer to import the German and Belgian plant. So you see that beer is the fashion in this gay city, although Frenchmen claim that Gambrinus was a melancholy man with hazy ideas and consequently diametrically opposed to their national genius. Beer drinking, as it is practised in England and America, is, happily, unknown here. No Frenchman will stand up at a counter and toss off a glass of beer, and so all attempts to introduce the bar system have failed. A Frenchman wants to sit down when he takes a drink, and if he has some one to talk to, so much the better; otherwise he will look at the passing crowd, which is always an interesting study in this great city.

Result! Under both the newspaper search as well as Google books, prior to 1900 there are very few references to the topic, just a handful. Which is interesting. Fabulous reference to the phyloxera being a cause of increased interest in beer.

Bayonne Outside Cider Off Newfoundland In 1520

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I had lost this book. I found it again yesterday. The precursors of Jacques Cartier, 1497-1534: a collection of documents relating to the early history of the Dominion of Canada. Notice that it is a book published under the authority of the Canadian Federal Minister of Agriculture published by the Government Printing Bureau in Ottawa in 1911. We really used to know how to do government right.

Attentive readers will recall last March’s post in which I speculated on who might actually have been the first brewer in New France. A year earlier I wrote about the masses of beer transported along with the English Arctic iron ore mining mission led by Martin Frobisher in the 1570s. This is half a century earlier and might at least exemplify the earliest sort of alcohol use in North America – cider. Newfoundland is an obvious candidate. I suspect West Country fishermen drying cod for the summer caught on the Grand Banks were brewing at their coastal camps in the late 1500s. In the early 1600s they were clearly using beer and aqua vitae. So, its pretty much obvious that the earliest crews were enjoying strong drink in their earliest voyages as this record from 1520 shows:

To My Lord the Lieutenant of My Lord the Mayor, Sheriffs and Notable Council of Bayonne:

Messrs. Michael de Segure and Matthew de Biran make humble petition, setting forth that they have decided, at God’s pleasure, to send their vessel as far as Newfoundland to fish, and they need a large quantity of provisions, and among other things the number and quantity of forty butts of cider, of the best that can be found. And this being so, that the said de Segure has an orchard on his farm at St. Stephen, which is worked at his expense and from this he has a certain amount of cider; and also the said de Biran has certain debts at Seinhanx, for which he is willing to take payment in cider. In consideration of this, the said petitioners beg, supplicate and ask that you will be pleased to grant them permission, by special favour and without prejudice to the regulations of the said city, to load on board the said vessel forty butts of outside cider, part from the farm of the said de Segure and the surplus from Seinhanx, for the provision and victualling of the said vessel ; and you will be doing well.

Signed : M. de Biran.

The present request having been read and considered here in council, it has been ordered that the said petitioners, after they have taken oath before My Lord the Lieutenant, shall be allowed and permitted to load cider in their said vessel for the provisioning of the same, half the amount necessary thereto being grown in the city, and the other half being that belonging to the said petitioners. And this by special favour, in consideration of the voyage the said vessel is to make, and without prejudice to the regulations of the city making mention of wines and ciders, and to other restrictions and edict of the king, our lord, relating to the ports, loading and unloading. And should they be found doing the contrary, they will incur a fine of one hundred livres tournois, to be applied to the affairs of the city.

Given in council, 6 March, 1520.

Bayonne is a port town on the Atlantic coast just north of the French-Spanish border. You seem to be able to get cider and cod fish tapas there still. Early relations on the Canadian coast appear to have been friendly, Mi’kmaq chiefs joining them on the return trip over wintering in Europe on occasion. Crews from Bayonne had been sailing long distances for centuries before this request for cider was made. The Grand Banks cod fishery continued for decades after, well before settlement attempts. Strong drink would have accompanied them throughout the centuries. We even had a fish war with Spain in the 1990s. That image up there? It’s actually from 178 years after M. de Segure and M. de Biran set out with their 40 butt in the hold – according to the Government of Canada website where I found it. Hey. We still do this stuff through government action.

So… what is outside cider? I have no idea.