Category: Germany

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Perhaps Much Abbreviated Thursday Beery News Notes For My Big Week Off

Off. It’s not like I’m off doing very much but, you know, I have actual chores to do, a couple of nights in Montreal… and other day trips to take… and summer’s slipping away so maybe there won’t be so much in this week’s beery news notes.  And I am going to have limited access to scribbling time during the middle of this week so let’s see what I can come up with… no one wants someone to get that sad and lonely feeling if there isn’t something to read as they slurp down their Froot Loops early this Thursday morning. Hmm. How to cover up my half arsed effort? Perhaps another slightly different format will suffice. Let’s have a Q+A session!

Question #1: Does anyone do social media as well as Lars does? It was on display in this week’s photo essay on a little historical brewing recreation he did last weekend at a museum:

Had to clean the inside of the rost (lauter tun, the wooden vessel), because it was mouldy. Hard to avoid with wooden gear… Foundation of the filter is alder sticks. For color, flavor, and to give the wort space to run underneath the real filter, which comes on top…

My observations: I hates me a mouldy rost.

Question #2: do we care if we use the original language’s grammar and spelling when referring to beer related things? I am disinclined to worry about this all that much but that is not a universal thing. There’s a thread:

Not to nitpick the thriving transatlantic linguistic exchange through l/Lager, but for anyone not writing bilingual #WhatsBrewing blurbs, what generally would be pro-copy guidelines for US-ENG capitalisation in writing keller, kellerbier, but: Kellerwald?[…] My remark goes beyond the basics of why other natural languages should/can drop German capitalisation when importing, trying to get at the desired branding (“auratic”) effects of opting back in when it creates perceived authenticity, say for Scandinavian or Czech diacritics.

My thought: be consistent but be prepared for people to think you are weird when you talk about Poland’s capital amongst English-speakers.

Question #3: why should I care about NA beer? NA beer to me is expensive fancy soda pop that is made in an unnecessarilily convoluted manner. I thought of that on Monday when Stan reported from the World Brewing Congress:

Today there will be three presentations related to making sure non-alcoholic beers are safe to drink. This is important and was already on my radar when I read “How Mash Gang is Breaking the Alcohol Free Mould.” That is not to imply that Mash Gang beers are not safe, or that the story should address what the company is doing to assure the beers are free of pathogens. It simply reflects my current fascination with what brewers might do to make non-alcoholic beer better without the many useful functions ethanol performs. One of those is making beer safer to drink.

My concerns: in addition to a swath of cheaper established competition, the idea that NA beer has not solved the sanitation issue is decidedly off-putting. And this may well explain in part last week’s omission. Plus it was a very bobby B.O.B.

Question #4: do you miss RSBS as much as I still do, all these years later?  Answer: well, we may have a form of this care of Boak and Bailey tinkering around at BlueSky. They have set up a list that allows you to follow all added on that list to effectively create a aggregator displaying those who sign up for those who follow. Have a look.

Question #5: do any of you not draw lines in the sand? I am 100% on board with Laura Hadland this week in The Drinks Business:

I have a personal blacklist of the companies I will not deal with because of their past actions. I don’t write about them, I don’t spend my money on them, I don’t visit them. This quiet boycott is a private affair. If I don’t agree with someone’s ethics, I don’t fan their flames. There are so many fantastic businesses out there that I do want to shout about, it’s rarely an issue. Last week, however, I was approached by a PR company offering me a spot on a very interesting project. I was feeling pretty excited as I scanned through the details. Until I spotted one of the toxic names from my blacklist. Deflated, I immediately replied to the email letting them know that I could not participate. I told them why too. That was that. It felt quite good for a minute.

My total concurrence: I won’t ruin the punchline but, again, go have a look.

Question #6: so if the CBHOF is using the Baseball Hall of Fame nomination process, will the “good character” rule also apply? That states:

Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.

So, given the recent years’ allegations of sexism, racism and a bunch of other serious -isms in craft beer… how will that be taken into account? See, working as I do in governance, I can assure you that there is always a set of process rules that run along side the substance rules in these things. You can have the greatest process in the world but they only affirm the substantive standards which have to be set out before any nominations are considered. Do we know what they are?

Question #7: does my national, regional and local construct for North American craft hold water? Jeff asked for more:

I think we should talk about local and regional, since you hinted at it and Stan picked it up but didn’t elaborate. I am hesitant to respond without understanding your fuller take.

My point: all those nice cans from the like of Sierra Nevada and Sam Adams fill grocery store and gas station shelf space where other distributed beers used to be found.  As I said, “basically I see that one of the tensions is framed by the economics of investment required for scale. Locals have done well. Turns out there was space for a few big grocery store national craft breweries but at the expense of those intercity / interstateers.” See, I think that the mob of ankle nipping locals can defend themselves from big craft in each market but regionals have found themselves, for a few years now, neither here nor there.

Question #8: Maybe related, is there any passing of a micro era brewery more shocking than the closing of Cambridge Brewing C0mpany which will serve its last beer on December 20th? The notice was on Instagram:

We were the first commercial brewery to produce a Belgian Style beer in this country and one of the first to embrace multiple yeast strains in-house and even to intentionally invite wild organisms into our brewery…. A heartfelt thank you to all who have participated in our dream. To our customers that have joined us time and again over the years, your support and friendship enabled our success. To all that are working or have worked here, you guys are what made this place so great. What an honor and a joy it has been to work alongside you! So please join us often over the next 4 months! We still have Patio Season, Festbier, Fall Menu and more coming. 35 years, one hell of a run. 

My thoughts: Perhaps it’s an east coast thing but I heard about CBC long before I had ever visited. Along with Shipyard and Gearys in Maine, it was a name I heard when I was a young beer fan in Nova Scotia, a name spoken with reverence by those coming back from the Boston states.  Then in 2013, we found ourselves right there and witnessed the making of pumpkin ale with the actual pumpkin harvest and made a bit of a photo montage over at FB.  Get over to CBC while you still can.

Question #9: What the heck is “hop preparedness” anyway?

Question #10: Has Ron out-Ronned himself with this dialogue? It’s a two-part play between father and son as they recall visiting Dad’s old home town:

“Marks and Woollies next door to each other and Boots over the road. Used to be typical of a UK high street.”
“But now they’re all gone. I’ve heard this story before.”
“They aren’t, though. Boots is still there and Marks has moved to by the old Warwicks brewery.”
“Loads of pub pictures coming up, I suppose.”
“There sure are, son. There sure are.”
“Don’t talk like John Wayne, Dad.”

My response to these things is always that Ron missed his calling as an author, getting sidetracked into a pub as he was at age twelve. Fabulous bit of writing.

Question #11: did you have any beer in Montreal? Yes, on Tuesday a cask brown ale at a funky fermented veg place called Poincaré and also a Mexican style lager at La Capital Tacos. Both were local beers but to be honest the food outshone them. Fish terrine at the first place before crossing St. Laurent to the other for Pastor tacos. We walk, we eat. We eat, we walk.

Last question, #12: why did it rain all Wednesday? We still saw the penguins and marched around town but I feel like moss is growing behind my ears. My nooks and crannies felt a certain alliance with the wild managed orchards of Cidrerie du Golfe in Brittany as featured in Pellicle this week which contained this excellent facts:

Their emphasis on nature is a way for them to preserve cider’s heritage, they say, strongly attached to rurality and peasantry. A tradition partially lost since the World Wars, when cider was relegated to second place in the region. “Soldiers were given red wine in the trenches while cider was distilled to be used in weaponry, it changed people’s habits,” Virginie says. “Before WWI, people in Rennes were drinking up to 400 litres per year!”

Used in weaponry! Heavens. Well, that’s it. Enough of this inquisition! I wrote half of this on an iPhone. So it is what it is and we all will simply have to live with that. 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.

*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 (+13=146) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (929) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (-2=4,464) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

The Ever Uplifting Beery News Notes For The Beginning Of That First False Canadian Summer

We are hitting the ground running this week. The image of the week up there is from Liam who posted a few shots on #BeerSky of his latest find, a “grubby 1920s silver-plated pint tankard” from Clery’s Restaurant in Dublin. I think it is all very charming. Careful readers will recall my own foray into such matters with a mid-1800s pewter quart pot I picked up in 2012. Just the thing for a very large measure of Porter.

And there was again a lot about beer writing this week. Not sure if that is good or bad. Stan beat me to one particular thought on Monday. A few years back I complained to him in an email that so much beer writing was repetative, timid and sort of dull and he gave me the best advice which he has repeated in his post this week – you’ve been around too long, seen too much… or something like that:

I would add this thought. What is new to me or Evan Rail or Jeff Alworth or Alan McLeod might be different than what is new to somebody finally getting around to visiting a new brewery because one opened in their neighborhood… There are many opportunities to write something new, for both the beer experienced and the beer inexperienced audiences.

Gary writes on a similar note. Yet having heard that and agreeing to a point, I am also mindful of the tweet David Jesudason posted about his current situation. You will remember that he is the current holder of The Michael Jackson Award for Beer Writer of the Year from BGBW. But, if you click on that thumbnail, you will see he says:

I am currently in a position where I am not sure I can continue this type of work.

Because while there may be “many opportunities to write something new, for both the beer experienced and the beer inexperienced audiences,” I would submit, there is little to no support for many types of normal business reporting and investigative reporting that we see in  other areas of lifestyle writing. And why is that? Does it leads to things like this? A story about one British brewer with a claim:

Speaking about the expansion, Vault City’s co-founder Steven Smith-Hay said: “Our ambition is to be the biggest dedicated sour beer producer in the world. This new site will be instrumental in achieving that.*

The headling added certainty by way of the “to be” rather than “may become” sort of grammarical structure. And, yes, the author does not write the headling but it all led to the statement “I’ve got a lot to say about that Vault City interview but tough cheese I’m on holiday” as well as the statement “was from a press release anyho” with questions about the reality of that ambition. To be or not to be. But only on social media. Will there be follow up? Will track records be tracked? Is it that we don’t really care and it’s all puffery for… well, you know.

It also may be related to the opinion piece “Hazy IPA Conspiracy Theories” from Andy Crouch. He who upset my world by this article – by leaving me more in agreement with the very Mr. B who Andy sought to criticize. As reported last week, Mr. B pointed at Hazy IPAs as either the cause or at least a key symptom of US craft’s sputtering retraction.  Why? Well, in addition to simmering tone of “one does not question craft”, Andy also surprisingly uses that hallmark of a weak argument: poorly dolled out snark. Phrases deployed included “grumpy old craft beer cowboys” and “strawman” and “laugh out loud moment” and especially “55 year old dudes grumbling” as, you know, Mr. B is older than that. Setting such faux juveneilia aside, what he really misses is this:

The popularity of consumer products, including beer, wine, and spirits, ebbs and flows over time. In just the past decade, we’ve seen the rise and fall of cocktails, cider, hard seltzers, and many others. Each will continue to play some role in the drinking landscape but no drink has a right to the public’s attention. Craft beer has many issues but chief among them is a generational disconnect. The audience for craft beer continues to age, younger folks make fun of craft beer dads and their beer samplers on TikTok, and the industry stands in a corner publicly wishcasting for the return of “beer-flavored beer.” 

What Andy does not seem to want to admit is that it’s not about the rise and fall of each particular form of drink but a greater overall trend. These sugar bomb beers that are labeled as Hazy IPA are nothing more than the beery sibling to RTDs, coolers and hard seltzers. Interchangible. Forgettable. Cavity causing. They may sell but they are part of that continuum that speaks to a candy fixated palate. Kinderbier. Easy to make and easy to sell with the right cartoony can wrapper.  In fact, their rise was perfectly culturally appropriate for the troubled times, a perfect drink for an era of crisis that started with the shock of Trump getting elected and then continued on through the daze of life in the pandemic. They are booze for unsettled people who have bigger things to deal with, those who don’t want to think about it. Any of it. The “eating a box of ice cream sandwiches stnading by my fridge because I can” of beers for folk who no longer can muster the energy to give a shit.  What sort of industry bases its long term health on that sort of consumer? By all appearances, this shrinking one called craft.

Speaking on asking why things are the way they are, Steve Dunkey wrote a bit of a exposé of the Good Beer Guide that was publishing in What’sBrewing, describing some of the politics behind the scenes including this bit of a revelation:

There isn’t enough room in the printed book for every pub that could meet new nationalised selection criteria. Each branch has an allocation that it can fill, and it’s well known that the allocation will be filled regardless of the quality of the pubs, because it’s believed at a branch level that if it doesn’t fill its allocation, it might not have as many entries the following year. This would restrict it if it then did have the great pubs to fill the quota.

That is quite the thing. I had no idea that there was no centralized editing of submissions from the regions. The story raises other questions, too. Check it out.

Stan (for the double) has all the questions and this week shared another Hop Queries where he pointed out again another few trends trend that point to continued retraction:

Hop Products Australia harvested 26 percent fewer metric tons of hops in 2024 than in 2023. Much of that was intentional, taking into consideration that the worldwide supply of aroma hops is greater than demand. Production of Galaxy, which is 65 percent of what HPA sells, was down 20 percent to 879 metric tons. Vic Secret dipped 22 percent and Eclipse 57 percent…. A report from Germany suggests acreage has not been reduced to the extent it has been in the United States. When the numbers are toted up, Perle and Hallertau Tradition will likely decline the most, while high alpha acreage will likely increase slightly.

And apparently the days of food and beer pairing are well behind us. As Jeff noted from a recent newsletter reporting from a conference speech by a commercial investment banker – it’s now all about “the mood management” business! As a banker might, the points being made included a grind that sounds a lot like someone worried about their ROI:

      • If consumer are walking away from beer, Nik asks that you explain Modelo, Pacifico, Michelob Ultra, Voodoo Ranger, Busch Light, and Coors Banquet to him, which are all performing great.
      • We’re not in the beverage business, we’re in the “mood management business” per Nik. He says we drink 8 beverages a day and that alcoholic ones are competing with non-alcoholic ones.
      • “There’s no such hing as lazy markets, only lazy marketers”
      • Prices have been going up lately. Are we doing enough to reinforce that value we provide to command the new, more premium price? (He implies no)…

Mmm… mood management. That’s a lot of “out-Barting” even BA Bart (as recently seen as a few weeks ago) for pushy positivity in a retracting market but RBC (actually my own bank, with those very unAmerican two out of three letters) and its investment bankers have needs. The problem with beer is you, you and you… especially you… are LAZY!!! I know I am. And, yes, so does my bank.

Next up, Millie Bowles writing for Kent Online shared the tale of neighbours fed up with the smells off the neighbouring property, the contract brewers South East Bottling:

Fed-up neighbours say the stench from a brewery is so bad they cannot sit in their gardens – but bosses are urging residents to be more “pro-business”. People living near South East Bottling (SEB) on Northdown Industrial Estate in Broadstairs have complained of a “yeasty, sickly” smell which can even force them to keep their windows shut. Such is the pong, Thanet District Council has now ordered the company to carry out an odour assessment. SEB, which works with brands such as Old Dairy and Tiny Rebel, says it is “unfortunate that in current times, local residents and the council choose to operate in an anti-business manner”.

Stench! Pong!! We read that Marion Langelier, 82, is stopped from going out in the garden because of the smell as well as “noise issues, notably “banging and crashing’ bins.” Giving equal time, we also read that Chris Prentice, 49, says it is “like hot Weetabix. It’s quite comforting. It’s nice.” Hot Weetabix? How spicy! But the real question is this – why do UK newspapers include people ages? Otherwise, solid business reporting.

Not quite as smelly apparently but still irritating is Albania where NHS Martin unpacked** some of the trials and tribulations one can meet when traveling there:

… we sprinted to Berat’s bus station where the bus driver checked 3 times we really wanted to go to Lushnje. “Can we go to the Station please” we asked as the bus pulled up in an unprepossessing centre, the Mansfield of the Balkans, but the driver just pointed vaguely to the west. If in doubt, follow the tractor. Well, there’s a building called “STATION” anyway; five minutes to spare for the 10:38. No bus stops, no timetable, no-one to ask, just (bizarrely) two cafes side-by-side. Resigned to missing (if it had ever run) the 10:38, we resolved to seek advice from the cafes. It’s what you’d do in England, isn’t it, ask in a pub. The chap in one pointed heavenwards, the lady who brought us two espressos borrowed Mrs RM’s phone to point at a roundabout a half mile south, though a bus driver taking a fag break added “autostrada” mysteriously…

There is more. I think they ending up catching the 1:38 pm bus. Me, when I worked in Poland in 1991 I tried Albanian carrot jam. Cured me of making further travel inquiries.

As a follow up on the receive spate of breweries going under, Ed wrote an interesting post on his pre-brewing life as a microbiologist with a firm that went into receivership:

When I worked as a microbiologist the company I was at went bankrupt and managed to re-open a soon after with a slightly different name doing the same business. It had been obvious the company was not doing well for some time. A big customer had been lost so the work just wasn’t there like it once was. When I saw the owners daughter updating her CV on a work computer I thought the company was definitely going under, but despite this it still came as a shock when it finally happened. I’d worked there for years so though intellectually I’d guessed I’d soon be on the sausage it hadn’t prepared me emotionally for when reality hit. 

Finally and perhaps along the same line… in my undergrad years over 40 years ago, one entertaining pal would discuss hypothetical washroom fixtures he wanted to see. He dubbed one the VomKing 5000? Apparently they exist for real in Germany according to one posting on the Dull Men’s Club on Facebook. Note: this is a free standing barf station in a public washroom there. Handles and all. I think it only lacks the mist of ice cold water spraying your forehead that my pal had designed into his porcelain dream. His grip handles may also have been refrigerated in his version. But here you can head butt the flush button in this model. Reminder: the internet was made for educational purposes. You have been educated.

And with that great moment in blogging history… from Alpha to Omega… input to output…so… once again… that is it 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.

*I couldn’t gather the energy to keep up with the Vault City thing further –  but Stonch made a great point.
**Travel pun!!
***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 (913) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,474) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (163), 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. 

Only One Thing Overshadows Eurovision… Could It Be These Thursday Beery News Notes?

Hmm… on the one hand international entertainment with, yes, a limited number of perhaps well worn themes played out, yes, over and over and over. On the other… Eurovision! It’s big. This here beer blog? Not so much. There is an overlap, however, as The Beer Ladies Podcast have a primer. They’re a bit into it: “Our own Katie and Lisa are jetting over to Malmö to revel in the madness…” And The Beer Nut will no doubt be live tweeting the formation of the next day’s piercing hangover, likely as illustrated. There is only one thing bigger – Stan is back. He never lets me take a week off. Stan wants a month away? Stan gets a month away. Me? I write this blog.

What is going on out there?  The big news or, as Ron put it, the great news is the relocation for a remaining Burton Union set from Marston’s Brewery, the traditional brewing system that Laura Hadland discussed last February as being mothballed. Pete Brown shared his thoughts at The Drinks Business:

This week, it’s been announced that Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company (CMBC) has given a set of the famous Burton Unions to Thornbridge…, and is helping the Derbyshire craft brewery get it up and running. This has sent some much-needed cheer through the craft brewing world. Why does this matter? Once upon a time, Burton-on-Trent was the most important brewing town on the planet. And by the middle of the 19th century, most beer in Burton was being fermented on the town’s eponymous Union Sets. The unions were a system of barrels, pipes and troughs, basically an adventure playground for fermenting yeast. The yeast had loads of fun, foaming through the pipes and running down the trough and back into the barrels from which it had spouted. The belief was that happy yeast made better beer.

The Tand shared his initial reaction too: “A cynic might just think that multinational brewing companies care little for either history or cask beer, and this is a cheap way to put a slightly embarrassing problem to bed and come out of it looking rather good.” I entirely agree… but do the yeast care one way or the other? Well, yes, of course… if the alternative is extinction!

And congratulations were also earned by Pellicle this week for this announcement:

We are not sure how this has happened, but we are very honoured, and a little taken aback to have been nominated in the Best Magazine section in this years @GuildFoodWriter awards. Against The Guardian. And the National Geographic. This is nuts. 

Boak and Bailey analyzed the recent news the Buxton Brewery teetering towards administration and focused in on the problem with being “merely quite good”:

This is what we think sometimes happens with breweries like Buxton. They’re not bad enough to have anything specific to fix, but not good enough to generate word-of-mouth enthusiasm. People don’t mind drinking their beer, but they don’t seek it out, or detour to drink it. They might have one pint but won’t stick on it for a session, or stay in a pub to have one more pint than they ought to. And they won’t order it by the box from the brewery shop.

And continuing with the good news / bad news, a statement was made this week by Hadrian Border Brewery about a contract brewing deal gone very wrong:

THEY WON’T PAY. No disputes on product or services! By November 2023, we had no more head space for it, it was making us ill, so we passed the case to a Debt Collection Agency…  

Quite right to call the deadbeats out publicly. But… gee… was “posting this on such a platform is detrimental for the beer industry“? No, not talking about things like this is detrimental. As is not talking about how so much of non-alcoholic beer is a let down… except perhaps for its perhaps natural audience according to the New York Times – children:

…more and more he has noticed children asking for nonalcholic drinks. “It’s not exactly daily, but more than weekly,” he said. The restaurant, which sits inside Saks Fifth Avenue, has two spirit-free concoctions on the menu…  He ultimately decided that while it still feels a little strange to serve the sophisticated beverages to children, it felt satisfying to contribute to family dining experiences “in an interesting way.” As nonalcoholic cocktails, wines and beers have become staples on bar menus across America, some children — people way under the legal drinking age — have begun to partake.

Not that there is any meaning left, but that’s one new twist on the “small” in small, independent and traditional, I suppose. Sorta like this take on the role of the trad:

Novonesis is a leading global biosolutions company formed through a combination of Chr. Hansen and Novozymes. It creates biosolutions for all types of industries. from nutrition and biofuel to chemicals, energy and water. Novonesis’ SmartBev range offers yeast solutions for low/no-alcohol and regular beer. The range includes both unique yeast solutions, like its NEER products, as well as lactic acid bacteria solutions, such as those used in its Harvest range. The company was pushing these products at CBC 2024 — especially its NA alternatives — which Guillory sees as a rapidly growing segment in the last 12 months.  

Mmmm…. biosolutions.* That’s what I am looking for in my glass. Speaking of the world of chem, Ed Himself once again shared some thoughts from the tech side of brewing gleened from his trip to the Murphys Brewery in Cork Ireland, owned by Heineken since 1983:

They can do 12 six tonne brews a day in it in two lauter tuns. Heineken, Coors, Fosters, Tiger, Moretti, Lagunitas, Murphys and Beamish are brewed there, the stouts being perhaps four brews out of a weekly 35-40. Cider is also made there from sugar and concentrate. They can mash every two hours and ten minutes, lautering takes three house. They have a holding vessel between the lauters and the copper, and unusually the yeast propagation plant is in the Hauppmann brewhouse. Overall extract losses are less than 7%. They have heat recovery on the stack on the copper and a heat recovery tank holds hot water which is used to pre-heat the wort via a Plate Heat Exchanger. They have four 120 tonne malt silos and…

Yeow. Right about there my brain started to hurt. Like it hurts when the kids were in high school and asked me to help with their math homework.

BREAKING: Ron had breakfast.

Beth Demmon is back with another Prohibitchin’ this time featuring the career arc of Maura Hardman, now Seattle Cider Company’s marketing and PR manager – including this tidbit of transitional good luch from her previous stint with Whole Foods:

It was during her time there she first found out about Seattle Cider Company, via their partnership with the local nonprofit City Fruit. “They’d take their ugly apples, crab apples, things that can’t be used for their CSA program or food bank program and put them into cider,” she explains. Whole Foods then sold the City Fruit ciders and sponsored the Seattle Cider Summit, so she began to learn about and appreciate the beverage as a fan. But appreciating cider was one thing. Working in the industry? It hadn’t even occurred to her.

And David Jesudason shared the story of Melba Wilson, an American who moved to London in 1977 – and how she had to “endure a shocking ordeal” in a pub just twenty years ago:

“He was surrounded by his squaddie buddies, so I guess he felt emboldened to carry on. He stopped after a while, I went up to him and looked at him. He didn’t show any signs of remorse. The other customers weren’t treating him negatively – it was like they thought you could get away with saying that in a country pub if there was only one black person around. “It was one of those incidents where you’re shocked that somebody is doing it and then you think ‘how am I going to challenge this?’ I said to my husband: ‘did you hear what he said?’ and I wanted to complain.”

The stunning bluntness of senseless bigotry. Saddest part: “I believe racism – overt or covert – has risen since the noughties.”

On a far less serious topic, Jessica Mason reporting live from the SIBA press conference:

Scary stats: “24% of drinkers NEVER visit their local; 41% WOULD VISIT if prices were lower; 25% of drinkers say NOTHING would make them visit more often & 8% of drinkers choose a pub because of the indie craft beer it stocks.”

And less important still, I am not even sure I have the energy to lift my hands to the keyboard to report on the news that James Watt has shuffled the deck of name plates and has swapped out CEO while retaining his shares, the board seat and adding a new title that makes no sense – captain. Best line was in the Guardian:

He will now be replaced by the company’s chief operating officer, James Arrow, who is expected to focus on returning the loss-making company to profit.

Confused? Imagine my state of mind when Liam gave me hope of a Battledore revival. Because Goldthorpe. Because Goldthorpe may be Sprat. Which may be Battledore. Maybe. But there may actually be Goldthorpes. Maybe.

Speaking of things not appearing as they are, so much for the Euro lifestyle thing as Latvia is moving its legal drinking age from 18 to 20… and the brewing trade lobbyists are lobbying:

…chairman of Saeima’s Social and Employment Matters Committee Andris Bērziņš, [stated] certain coalition and, possibly, opposition deputies may propose excluding beer, cider and wine from the list of alcoholic beverages to be applied with new age restrictions. Bērziņš said he doesn’t support this proposal, as the proposed exception for beverages with a lower content of alcohol does not match the Saeima’s recently passed regulations on the handling of cigarettes, which states how as of 2025 only persons of 20 years of age will be allowed to purchase tobacco products.

And nearby-ish in Germany, access to that friend of the drunk night out – doner kebabs – has become a hot economic policy topic:

Kathi Gebel, the youth policy spokesperson on the board of the Left Party, told Business Insider…  said the government “must intervene to prevent food from becoming a luxury item.” The party plans to propose a government price cap of €4.90 (around $5.30) or €2.90 (around $3.10) for young people, The Guardian reported… [T]he German government said in February that prices of the doner kebab are rising because of rising wages and energy costs… Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke about the issue in the past, saying that he is asked by young people “everywhere I go” if there should be a price reduction for doner kebabs, according to the outlet.

Finally, once upon a time, people actually paid me actual money to place ads on this here blog. One of those ads was for faux-esque Worthington’s White Shield.** There it is to the right. The little white square to the lower left of a screen shot from early 2007. From the emails I can see that I had to explain PayPal to the PR rep, Danny. Well that fact and Danny’s later emailed disappointment at the results of his hard earned cash placement didn’t make it to the story Pete Brown filed for Pellicle this week but he covered the rest of the issues surrounding of the great beer’s demise admirably:

Molson Coors don’t understand British ale, and of all the big global brewers, they’re the ones who haven’t really got craft beer either. The real reason they “paused” production of White Shield had nothing to do with “production routes.” It was a marketing decision. There are good people working at Molson Coors who adored this beer, but from a corporate perspective, once the company stopped ignoring it, and once Steve Wellington retired for the final time, they didn’t have a clue what to do with it. Turning a completely invented fake Spanish lager into the most successful beer launch in British history? No problem. Continue the production of a legend to satisfy legions of discerning fans across the world? Nah, too difficult, mate.

Such is the way of the world. Still, that 300 USD for the three months of the ad sure was handy at the time. Thanks Molson-Coors!

And with that… once again… we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections.*** Want to keep up with the news before next Thursday? Check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan who, like the swallows to  Capistrano, show return next 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.

*ever since some guy at work started calling the ten minute ciggie timeouts during day long meetings “bio-breaks” I just can’t see the world in the same way.
**Note the apostrophe – Worthington’s White Shield.
***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 (holding at 128) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (slumoing to 914) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (up t0 4,467) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (162), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Fear not!

The “What’s Beer Got To Do With The Solar Eclipse” Edition Of The Beery News Notes

I couldn’t stop myself from reusing this image…***

A couple of weeks ago, I flagged the upcoming solar eclipse that is passing over our region, as illustrated again above. All other topics have stopped, it seems. We are calm and composed but at the other end of the lake, the Ontario version fo Niagara Falls has even declared an emergency due to, according to their Mayor, the million people estimated that might show up. So… what is beer to me when the sun is about to be eaten by the moon… or is the moon eaten by the sun? Bear with me if the perspective of these notes this week veers a bit towards the centre of the solar system… but not directly. No way. We and our pets do not look at the sun… except when we can… and only with proper filtering glasses except when they aren’t needed.  Easy.

First up, David Jesudason has continued his investigations of the story of Brewdog Waterloo and has noted a few very strange things. First, he has screen captured the story in the UK edition of Metro magazine which disappeared under mystereous circumstances. And he wrote a follow up piece in his newsletter Episodes of My Pub Life or rather from a duty manager from another BrewDog location did:

There are times when we stay open when I believe we 100% should not be open. We had no water on a Saturday night, it was rammed, we couldn’t wash glasses or dishes, couldn’t wash hands. The operation team was called, the situation was explained and they flippantly asked if people could use the loos in the bar next door. We just ignored them and closed. In my experience the operation managers can’t handle their workload. I feel there’s too many bars for them to manage and this leads to urgent emails regularly unanswered…

There is more but for me it is hilarious that there is a “OPERATIONS CONTROL ROOM HQ” that has to be called for permission to cope with local circumstances. Best fact: “There’s no training materials…” Speaking of power hungry beer chains, The Beer Nut himself has been investigating the phenomenon of the UK pub chain:

They sure love a chain restaurant in England. They have loads of them, and there’s something about a town like Bournemouth — lots of visitors looking for something familiar, perhaps — which seems to concentrate them. I did not go there with the intention of exploring exotic English chain restaurants. It just kind of turned out that way. There is, for example, a Brewhouse & Kitchen, a chain of brewpub-restaurants that felt to me like a modern successor to the Firkins of old, and memorably described by Boak & Bailey as “a bit like business class Wetherspoons.” Now there’s a demographic to aspire to. I wasn’t there to soak up the ambiance, however. I was there to try the beers, brewed on-site on the smart brewkit out front.

More to actual beery side of beer, Lars¹ has unleashed his powers of research and share two fact: (i) there is actually an east-west axis to Norway in addition to north-south and (ii) there is also a place called Atrå where their yeast is not kveik but berm. The story reads like the narration by John Walsh on America’s Most Wanted:

Then I stumbled across a guy on Facebook who had gotten hold of farmhouse yeast from a neighbour. In Atrå, as it turned out. He told me that several people locally had their own yeast. It was usually pitched at 30 degrees C, and everyone thought it was “old”, whatever they meant by that. Then came the surprise: nobody in the village brews in the traditional way any more. Those who brew use malt extract, but they still keep the yeast. This was very unexpected: a village with no brewing tradition, but they did have their own farmhouse yeast? Could this yeast really be genuine?

And looking back in time, Martyn has shared his clearly non-eclipse effected view of a very focused topic – the truth as to the identity of one pub in London, the Tipperary of Fleet Street:

…what of the claim that the Tipperary stands on the site of the Boar’s Head, and therefore has a history going back at least 580-plus years? Here I put myself in the hands of a man called Bren Calver, who aggregated many hours of research on the stretch of Fleet Street between Water Lane/Whitefriars Street and Bouverie Street, in particular studying contemporary illustrations, and who is convinced that the Tipperary occupies what was originally 67 Fleet Street, not the post-Great Fire 66 Fleet Street that was home to the Boar’s Head, which Calver believes was demolished around 180 years ago. This is about to get complicated, so hang on to your hat.

Laura Hadland shared some thoughts on the naming of those spaces where the brewery that brews the beer also sells you a glass of their beer:

Recently I visited the delightful Little Martha Brewing in Bristol, where I got embroiled in a fascinating discussion about the nature of pubs with co-founder and brewer Ed Morgan. Little Martha, for Ed, is assuredly a brewpub, not a taproom: “Rather than being a drinking space that is an add-on to a brewery, we’re a pub with a brewery at the back. When we started the business, the thing driving it was that we always wanted to have our own venue. We wanted to make it a cosy, warmer space certainly than some of the very large taprooms you see now. We wanted it to feel like a local pub, rather than trying to build a beer brand that would attract people here.”

For me, brewpub and taprooms that serve food are much the same thing. I was in Edinburgh’s Rose Street Brewery, drinking with the owner/brewer back in 1986. Pretty much the same set up as Middle Ages in Syracuse, NY back in 2006. When I was there, was I in a pub, a taproom, a microbrewery or a brewpub? All and none of the above… maybe.

BREAKING!!!… “Saskatchewan announces changes to homemade liquor rules”:

On Tuesday Saskatoon Churchill-Wildwood MLA Lisa Lambert announced that the province has amended liquor regulations to allow people who have applied for and received a special occasion liquor permit to serve those two types of homemade alcoholic beverages to their guests. “Previously, these products could only be served among family and friends in their own home,” she said. The new regulations officially came into effect on Tuesday. “This change is yet another example of our government’s ongoing efforts to reduce unnecessary regulation and red tape where possible,” Lambert said.****

Because… that is the one thing that is filling the jails of Saskatchewan… Uncle Fred’s homemade wine at the community Thanksgiving Supper down at the arena without a permit. Speaking of law, Beth Demmon is back with another edition of Prohibitchin’ and features Davon D. E. Hatchett, wine lawyer and The Bubbleista:

“While I was in law school, I took a class in intellectual property. I did not expect this to happen, but I LOVED the content in this class,” she says, adding that she ended up getting the highest grade in the class… But rather than set aside her passions, she decided to merge them, despite some skeptics…  “I actually went and talked to one of my professors at law school when I moved back, and he essentially told me you can’t have a viable practice in trademark law,” she recalls, disappointed. While she figured out what direction she wanted to go, she started working in corporate consulting and taking continuing legal education classes that Texas required. It was there that she first realized the potential for working in beverage and hospitality law.

Jealous. I mean I never knew what sort of law I would want to do but ended up being an owner’s side bridge building lawyer. Concrete. Rebar. Geotech studies. Fun stuff. But wine law sounds really good.

Note: Gary sums up his beers of France.

We flinch about a few things… pairing… IPA… branding… but there were some interesting thoughts from the exporter perspective in The Japan Times about a category of beer that is not necessarily well framed – Japanese beer:

For Japanese beer companies, there is work to do on more clearly defining their image. Mike Kallenberger, a senior adviser at brewing and beverage industry consultancy First Key, said aside from big mainstream imports such as Corona and Heineken, the majority of beers imported into the U.S. are typically associated with a specific occasion — in the case of Japanese beers, as a pairing to Japanese cuisine. “Japanese beers are typically seen as lighter and more refreshing, which makes them very good for pairing with food. Beyond that, the current image may not be very distinct,” Kallenberger said, but noted that given the focus of Japanese brewers on the U.S. market, that perception will likely evolve.

Never lacking in focus, The Tand displayed his full powers this week, as illutrated to the right where he took down Marks & Spencers and their farce of a mezza gigantes. this may have been deleted by some shadowy power or another. The powers behind mezza gigantes should not be underestimated in these matters. But, as we have learned from David Jesudason above, there’s more than one way to skin a cat whe we are dealing with the dark forces of the interwebs… or something like that…

Speaking of full powers, if you sign up for Boak and Bailey‘s Patreon account, you will learn the secret behind this statement:

It was the fastest Ray has drunk a single pint for a very long time and we both stayed on it for the rest of the session.

And still in Britain, The Daily Star has identfied a good marketing tool for these troubled times – one that even the Tand himself has not trotted out – ale is cheap!

With the cost of living crisis ongoing, many of us are dodging the pub in favour of boozing at home or cutting back on alcohol altogether. But for those of us who still enjoy an evening at the local watering hole, we can keep costs lower by opting for a drink other than lager – which, on average, set consumers back £4.24 in 2022… In contrast, ales – including stouts – cost just £3.60 in 2022, about 15% less than lager… Ales tend to be the more budget-friendly option in general…

Stan has declared “MayDay!!” for April and won’t be back for four whole weeks* but left us some good beery links including some considerations on the pretendy world of A.I. as it relates to beer:

I remain skeptical about AI beer recipes, but the information that Kevin Verstrepen’s laboratory at the University of Leuven shares could also be put to good use by humans. Consider this:

“Both approaches identified ethyl acetate as the most predictive parameter for beer appreciation. Ethyl acetate is the most abundant ester in beer with a typical ‘fruity’, ‘solvent’ and ‘alcoholic’ flavor, but is often considered less important than other esters like isoamyl acetate. The second most important parameter identified by SHAP is ethanol, the most abundant beer compound after water.”

Ah, yes. alcohol. So plenty to read in the Nature Communications article, and a lot of sexy charts.

Alcohol?!?!? Speaking of alcohol,** Pellicle published a piece by Alistair of Fuggled fame on Big Fish Cider of Monterey, Virginia:

Each autumn, Kirk’s father would harvest his trees—amongst them a Northern Spy, a Grimes Golden, and a Winesap—pressing the fruit to make sweet cider, which they stored in a barrel. It was here that Kirk’s lifelong obsession with apples and cider began. “I can still remember the scent hitting my nose, and the flavour just exploding in my mouth, and I still think fresh cider off the press is the best thing going,” says Kirk in his soft Virginian drawl. “I love the taste of apples, I love the smell of the bloom. My mom reminded me that I would come in and say if I could make a perfume with the smell of an apple bloom, I could be a millionaire. I never did make it mind.”

Finally, Pete Brown was in The Guardian this week giving advice to the beer drinking fitba fans has part of a bit of a paranoid series of stories about strong lagers in the lead up to Euro 2024 in Germany based on a bit of a confessional:

Years ago, at the start of my career as a drinks writer, I visited Oktoberfest for the first time. The beer at the festival is served in litre tankards… You swing them as much as you drink them, the beer disappears quickly as you sway along to the band and you have quite a few, but it’s OK because the beer is Helles, a light lager style at about 4% ABV. So when we visited a biergarten the following day and saw Oktoberfest Bier being sold by the Maẞ, I naturally assumed it was the same thing we had been drinking at Oktoberfest… It’s typically between 6% and 7% ABV. I didn’t know this. I had seven steins over the course of the afternoon, and then I tried to stand up. We’ll draw a veil over what happened next.

Me? Been there. Syracuse, NY. Blue Tusk circa 2007 or so. Being served a stout whch was actually my first 10% imperial stout. Then four more pints. Samesies.

Enough!! We roll our eyes at misspent yuff as, 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 (126) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (914) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,468) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (163), 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 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.

*Yes, that is how months generally work.
**Which reminds me to note again how it was not good beer hunting again this week.
***Cry for help or what… hey, what do you mean it’s a crappy headline image… and what do you mean this footnote is out of chronological order? YOU’RE OUT OF ORDER!!!
****Note: the government claims to have reduced red tape by adding a new class of permit… think about that for a moment…
¹Beer history’s Tommy Hunter.

Your Super Exciting Beery News Notes For Q3 March 2024

Fine. It may be spring but it was also -4C on Tuesday morning. Better warm up before eclipse day. They say half a million people might head our way. There’s not enough food to feed that many people… let alone a good seat at a bar.  I’ll be in the backyard, myself. But not to worry – I won’t be hogging all the eclipse beers like this:

After the 2017 eclipse, “I marked my calendar,” said Sam McNulty, co-founder of Market Garden Brewery in Cleveland, which is in the eclipse path this time and will see nearly four minutes of dimmed skies. Last year, McNulty’s team brewed a hazy IPA called “The Totality” to help drum up interest in the eclipse… In the coming weeks, “thousands and thousands” of cans are set to hit store shelves, McNulty said — adding they decided to go big because of how rare the event is. Cleveland won’t be in the path of totality again for a long time — not until 2444. “I don’t want to have to wait 420 years to brew the next batch of cans,” he joked. “So we made a very large one this time.

Eclipse eclipse eclipse. It’s all we talk about these days. Except there were lots more stories this week about “young people these days” like this in Canada’s Old and Stale on the effect the reduced interest in partying is having on urban planning:

Many of the businesses at the heart of urban nightlife are taking note. And as Canadians reimagine their relationship with booze, restaurants, bars and clubs are starting to question the future of cities where drinking is no longer the trend, nor the linchpin for socialization… “People rely on booze to make events fun,” Ms. Monaco says. “If you’re not drinking, you need something else to occupy yourself. I like to have a theme and activities.” “Throughout the Americas, cities are hosting museum nights, bookstore nights, bicycle nights”…  Toronto and Montreal are considering 24-hour nightlife zones and, despite an overall decline in drinking, some business owners are advocating for 24-hour alcohol licences, saying it would put Canadian cities on par with hubs such as London, Paris and New York. 

Yeah, like that’s going to happen. New York, Paris, Saskatoon? Me? When I was a university lad in my twenties in a east coast navy city it went the other way. For a year or so there was a bar that changed its draught beer prices by the day of the week. Friday nights, a 8 ounce glass of generic draught cost 69 cents, ten cents more than on a Thursday. Monday was 29 cents. You can guess why the place closed. And while it’s not quite same – isn’t dynamic pricing – “At Stock Market Bar Night, Buy Low and Drink Up” in the NYT tells the take of price fluctuations within the one night as some London establishments:

The young and the thirsty had come for “Wall Street Wednesdays,” where drink prices fluctuate with demand like a stock market. Attendees queue three-deep at the bar for a “market crash,” when an air horn pierces through conversations and prices plummet. “You need to keep your eyes on it,” said Emily Bjurqvist, a 23-year-old graduate student, as she nodded to TV screens showing price changes. “It’s more active than just a pub. And the prices might be better than a pub nowadays”… They had gotten a Moscow Mule for £8.20, or just over $10. But that wasn’t rock bottom: It dropped to £7 during a crash. Ms. Bjurqvist eventually saw the price climb to £11 ($14). “People like to think that they’ll save more money than they actually do,” she said.

“Nowadays”? Do people really say that? Much more sedately, Liam and Gary had an interesting discussion on Twex about the difference between the actual history of a brewery and the history as presented in advertising. Gary pointed to a newspaper notice from 1941 on Guinness which perhaps contained a wee fib and Liam countered:

Even back then it was being said in adverts that it had been brewed since 1759 – and the same way. It’s hard to write about Irish brewing history when you have to rewrite so much of it first, and when beer writers are *still* stating that erroneous ‘fact’ …

I stuck my note in – as is my wont – and pointed out that the question pointed out the excellent, venerable and ancient tradition of what we in law call “puffery” in relation to brewing and how it has been recognized by courts and tribunals including in your favourite bedtime reading Anheuser-Busch, Incorporated v Molson Canada 2005, 2012 TMOB 112 (CanLII) where the exercise was illustrated:

In my opinion, the Applicant’s argument that the word “certified” does not bear any reference to temperature is not of assistance to its case. Again, the Mark must not be dissected into its component elements. It must be looked at in its entirety. In my view, the word “certified” in the Mark cannot be read separate and apart from the word “cold”. In other words, it can only be seen as qualifying the word “cold”. It is also of no assistance to the Applicant to argue that despite showing a number of compound words beginning with “cold”, the dictionary evidence does not show a compound word for “cold certified”. 

The case revolved on the question of whether one brewer’s branding and ads “clearly describe the conductions of production of beer.“  I will leave it to you to absorb the considerations. Speaking on analytical thinking, Jeff published a rather interesting thesis on the effect on inflation on the real value of your good beer purchasing power this week:

We imagine a dollar represents something solid, like the actual price of a good, when in fact it has a lot to do with currency strength and stability. During hyperinflation, people bring wheelbarrows of cash into stores to buy a loaf of bread. The bread’s intrinsic value hasn’t changed, the amount of the currency needed to purchase it has. That illusion has been enhanced by the incredible stability of inflation. Stuff has seemed to be worth about what we expect for so long it has made us believe prices and value were identical. When we see a $12 sixer or a $7 pint, our minds tell us it’s expensive because, thanks to inflation, it deviates from our expectations of what a beer should cost. The price of a six-pack went up about a buck every decade in actual pricing. What was the price of beer in 1994? The nominal price was a fixed and real $3.65. But if you look backwards from 2019, it was $6.32; from 2024 it was $7.65.

Note: National Geographic magazine says “Declaring any city Britain’s best for beer would be ridiculous.” Don’t tell the good people of Copford:

Carys Miles, 40, of Copford, is the owner of a very special jewellery and accessory brand called Craft BEERings. The idea for the business came to her five years ago when she and her husband Pete discovered their shared passion for craft beer. The stunning artwork on the cans of their beverages had started to catch their eyes, so Carys decided to begin upcycling them. She said: “It was a period of time where I needed a creative outlet, so, of course, I cut them up and mounted them on earring fittings like anyone would. 

What about Edinburgh? Nope… not if the law has anything to say about it:

Police in Edinburgh have seized a “beer bike” over road safety concerns. Officers stopped the pedal-powered bar on Leith Walk at about 11:20 on Saturday. The vehicles, which allow revellers to sightsee while enjoying an alcoholic beverage, are popular in several European cities. A spokesperson for Police Scotland said the vehicle had been stopped due to road traffic offences but inquiries are ongoing.

Either they are still sifting clues (because that’s what the police do… they sift clues) or somewhere someone like a character from a Rebus novel is beating the crap out of  someone else in connections with these arrests. Likely in the woods. If you ever find yourself in a Rebus novel and you are told by the novelist to go into the woods… just don’t. OK? Don’t.

There was another interesting juxaposition this week that is also worth noting.  On Monday, Boak and Bailey wrote about what they framed as “the evolutionary advantage” of booze based on their considering William Golding’s 1955 novel The Inheritors, a book about early human history that I am pretty sure I read about four decades ago:

They’re drinking some form of mead from beakers – which the Neandarthals, who don’t even have the simple technology of cups, conceive of as round stones. This orgy of drunkenness continues for several pages until the humans drift off to their caves, or sneak off to shag in the woods. It’s easy to imagine Golding making observations, and taking notes, in the pubs of Salisbury on Saturday night. He was also an alcoholic and had plenty of personal experience of how it felt to binge yourself silly…

After reviewing some review and academic considerations of the novel, they conclude:

We think this can be interpreted to mean that societies which drink together become stronger overall, as a unit, and so gain a competitive advantage over other ‘tribes’. From our own perspective, as generally well-behaved, rather uptight 20th century specimens, there’s something in this. When we’re tipsy with friends and relatives, we express our feelings more freely. It helps us resolve conflicts and strengthen connections.

I thought about this and the bias involved by framing this as advantage when I read ATJ‘s latest Substack offering* :

I hear an American male voice in another part of the bar. ‘Nuremberg is my kind of place, I went to university here.’ He is sitting at a table with another man. ‘I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in Franconia.’ Meanwhile, I also spy at the opposite end of the bar at which I am sitting on a stool a man with a rock lion’s mane of thick hair. He is perched on an identical stool to mine. His glass is empty and I hear him order another beer. ‘Helles, bitte,’ he growls… I have a sense of belonging with regular visits to my local pub, but when you begin travelling and become a kind of nomad it can be possible to carry this sense of belonging along and when walking into a new pub, as I did on this benign evening, maybe the welcome and the mood handed out a temporary passport of belonging. We may drink in the company of strangers and, while looking for the lavatory, half think of the tale of the Minotaur in its maze and wish for a ball of thread, but if you know pubs you will belong. 

For me, there is a sort of deep sense of “same as it ever was” in the two considerations. But not sure whether this speaks to advantage or just survival.**  Also reminds me all a bit of the movie Shirley Valentine, too. Something sometimes to escape.

Speaking of Neanderthals as Ray’s book did- and perhaps even doing Neanderthals a disservice in doing so – David Jesudason published an exposé of an unnamed pub’s terrible business practices on his newsletter, Episodes of my Pub Life. It’s based on a “20+ interviews, numerous edits and investigative work” as well as a refusal from a publication based on legal concerns that naming names could lead to ramifications:***

One source claimed that they worked with a manager who boasted about employing a homeless man to clear glasses in exchange for inedible food and say they reported this manager to the management at the time. “The manager bragged to me about it,” they said. “I had to walk away. It made me feel physically sick.” The toxicity allegedly also extends to accusations of misogyny, racism and ableism. One source alleges that she was told she was turned down for a promotion because it was “a man’s job” and she also says that workplace adjustments for her disability were removed leading her to go on sick leave. 

Arseholes. I’d like to hope the rumour mill will take care of this anonymity thing but… no need to worry about that as it appears the word is out. Most telling comments from David: “4,000 people have read this article in five days… And all the publications that told me this story wouldn’t have wide appeal can fuck off“!  Apparently beer publications don’t know what to do when they encounter a journalist.

Fight! Fight the power. And finally, Katie Mather wrote a lovely story for Pellicle this week about a trip she and her man Tom took after the the loss of their dream pub, Corto. They went apple picking and found some healing:

For three years Tom and I had worked late hours, until suddenly, we didn’t. On the Nightingale farm, we had free reign of our surrounding patch of woodland, and yet every night we were in bed by 8pm. There is nothing on earth like the exhaustion of stress. We were drunk on it, stumbling around, squinting in the daylight. Waking up in the middle of an orchard is bliss. There’s no other word for it. In the very early hours, tawny owls make their final calls before their nocturnal bedtime, and as the night is diluted into dawn the countryside begins to wake. I scan through my messages even though it’s 5am, and check in with how I feel. I am sad, it feels heavy in my limbs, but I’m looking forward to the day ahead. Something I’ve not felt in a long time.

Something we all need, looking forward to the day. Except maybe eclipse day around here. That’s going to be weird. Annnndddd… 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 (pus one to 126) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (up one too at 913) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (down one to 4,464) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (165), 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! While some apps perform better than other we can always check the blogs, newsletters and even podcasts to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations in the New Year from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan promises to be back next Monday. 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 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 according to Matty C.

*Word of which I received via Twex with the startling teaser “It’s always Nuremberg in my head” which is starting to me given the whole, you know, legal aspect of the toddlin’ town’s history.
**Sorta something like this: “It’s not just a beverage; it’s a part of our social fabric that brings people together.” Really?
***As a lawyer, I often think this concern is often a bit overstated but likely not in this case. And we remember the poor planning when GBH got the legal advice after the fact and the subsequent litany of features on back of nowhere brewers under the heading “Why? It matters???”

The Slightly More Exciting But Definitely Final Beery News Notes For January 2024

Can you believe this month? What a month, you know, as months go. Last week it was in the -20C range with the wind chill but now it looks like we are preparing for spring. Nutso. Just remembered I planted tulip bulbs out there in the fall. Hope the squirrels enjoy them. What’s that? You don’t care about that and want some beer news? Let’s go!

Perhaps unexpectedly or at least unusually for me, a listicle of sorts right off the top. This week VinePair published a very interesting article which caught me eye. It proposed a list of “The Most Overrated Beer Styles” in which they included the following – hazy IPAs; heavily fruited smoothie beers; New Zealand pilsners; sweet, opaque double IPAs; non-alcoholic beers; lactose-heavy beers; pastry stouts, kettle sours, and sour IPAs. Notice something? I would suggest that these are also the most heavily promoted styles of beer over the last few years. This is not a list of obscure faddy fan favourites. This is sorta basically something like the US Brewers Association’s recommended focus in model business plan 2018-present. It is, isn’t it. “Brew these and you will hit the ground running!” Hmm. Isn’t that a little problematic?

Another interesting but problematico trendo to note – fewer people want malting barley:

Beer sales in the United States declined in 2023, and that, combined with a robust supply of barley on hand has resulted in a decreased demand for malting barley, Mark Black, Malteurop North American procurement and trial manager, told farmers… Younger people are drinking seltzer, mixed drinks and other liquors instead of beer, said Black, who works for Malteurop in Great Falls, Montana. Draught beer sales have decreased by as much as 20% and during the first half of 2023, craft beer sales dropped by 2% and commercial beer sales by 3%, he said. Malteurop had not yet offered farmers 2024 contracts as of Jan. 16, 2024, but that could happen “any day,” Black said on Jan. 16.

Whatever is going on… has gone on… it doesn’t seem to be really about Dry January.  This was made even clearer by a comment made by Richard Hughes, head of the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility as reported in The Telegraph this week:

Clean-living youngsters threaten to blow a multibillion-pound hole in public finances as alcohol and tobacco tax income declines, the head of the spending watchdog has warned. Richard Hughes, head of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), has questioned whether assumptions about future tax income from what are often dubbed “sin taxes” are realistic. He told the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee: “There are some bits of the tax system which are themselves not sustainable. In a few decades’ time we won’t collect any fuel duty because every car will be electric, and they don’t pay any fuel duty. “Nowadays, you have to ask whether young people are drinking and smoking enough for us to be collecting alcohol and tobacco duties at the current rate that we are.”

Wow. See also this story in The Guardian which leads one to consider how perhaps those pesky sober kids are further undermining the ecomomics of concert venues.   With that as the background context, in their monthly newsletter Boak and Bailey asked about what they frame as a “healthy beer culture”:

When it comes to beer styles, despite the dominance of c.4% hazy pale ales, we reckon we could go out this afternoon and find decent, locally-brewed versions of almost any beer style we fancy, from best bitter to Rauchbier. If it feels unhealthy, despite all that, perhaps it’s down to how the direction of travel skews our perceptions. A growing scene feels healthier than one that’s consolidating, or shrinking, even if what’s left is objectively better (terms and conditions apply) than at any point in the preceding 70 or so years.

According to those sorts of considerations, I probably have never lived in a healthy beer culture. The selection just isn’t there. Which is fine. The considerations appear to be what you might find in a larger city than the one I live in. Plus brewery closing and consolidations give a bit of a tone to the whole experience. And perhaps the concept really doesn’t translate well as English-speaking Canadians are far more excited by the retro doughnuts at Timmies than any innovations in beer.

Perhaps considering a Dutchie himself, Jordan wrote somewhat relatedly about being an observer also looking for a healthy beer culture while at a no- lo-alc beer fest:

Entering the festival, I noticed something that bothered me: with a small amount of alcohol on board, a crowd undulates. There is a little flux to the crowd, and pathways form as people try to get to the booths. I would attribute this to the slight loosening quality alcohol has and the urgency of people wanting to use up their tickets. Because of that people develop an awareness of their surroundings. In this instance, people stood firmly planted and clear-eyed and generally didn’t get out of each other’s way. For the most part, they talked to the people they showed up with. There was live music, but not much toe tapping. It reminded me of nothing so much as a United Church Tea Social; a genre of social activity that certainly provides fellowship but infrequently gets referred to as a banger. It led me to wonder, “What is the purpose of a beer festival?”

And Ron was also waxing anthorpological but also in a sorta retro doughnut way when he looked back to what people in 1970 thought the futre fifty years out looked like for brewing:

…neither of those predictions turned out to be true. Whitbread’s ill-fated Luton plant probably wasn’t the best example of a new brewery to pick. Bass Charrington genuinely had a plan of serving the whole of the UK from just two breweries. Neither did concentrated wort factories appear. So, 100% miss in the first paragraph. The other extreme – small, local continuous fermentation plants – didn’t happen, either. Mostly because continuous fermentation couldn’t be got to work. At least, it couldn’t be made to produce beer people actually wanted to drink.

One thing happened this week that folk in 1970’s UK brewing industry may well have assumed would have been gone long before 2024. Carlsberg Marstons is mothballing the Burton Union system that had been been used less and less in recent years. As Ed reported:

I used to work with an ex-Marston’s head brewer. Even in his time most Pedigree was brewed in stainless fermenters. They kept the unions for yeast propagation but did use the beer too. Owd Roger was the only beer made entirely in the unions as they’re the smallest fermenters.

Jessica Mason summarized the situation: “The move by CMBC has been cited as a bid to cut costs, along with the decline of the cask ale market meaning that brewing using them no longer makes fiscal sense, is reportedly a way for the brewing giant to move with the times.” Plenty of outcry – but what is to be done with outdated tech? Is there anyone lobbying for the return of the “ponto” system? Nope. “Inevitable” says The Mudge. One of the things small scale brewers can do is replicate mini-systems like the one operating Burton Union left (we are told) that can be found at California’s Firestone Walker. It would be interesting to know if that is effectively subsidized by other forms of production.

On the upside, Jeff published a lovely photo essay of his wanderings around U Fleků in Prague and a bit of the Old Town neighborhood that surrounds it including the clickable one right there to the right. Next door, almost… not really, Will Hawkes wrote about Störtebeker Braumanufaktur for Pellicle this week:

This is a North German brewery, an East Germany brewery, a Hanseatic brewery, a brewery right on the edge of Germany—and yet, in a nation where per capita beer consumption has been falling for years, it is remarkably successful, having tripled production to 350,000 hectolitres (close to 62 million pints) in the past decade. From packaging to non-alcoholic beer, Störtebeker is as confident and innovative as many German breweries are conservative.

Speaking of the new, there’s exciting archaeological news out of the studies from the recently announced findings of a BCE Ecuadorian civilization. Along wih canals and public urban architecture, they found brewing as explained by James Evison in TDB:

…it is believed that jugs discovered were used to consume “chicha”, a type of sweet beer. The beer, which has a full name of Chicha de jora, is a corn beer which is prepared by germinating maize, extracting the malt sugars and boiling the wort, like a traditional barley beer, and then fermenting it in large vessels. These were traditionally large pieces of eathenware, and would be fermented for several days before consumption.

You know and I know that I do mention wine regularly. And not only because the Pope said so.  No, even as a good Scots Presbyterian I regularly look to learn more and more from wine writers including from Jancis Robinson’s books and opinion pieces. And this review posted at her website of an unexpected restaurant experience really struck me as a warm and thoughtful bit of review writing:

Named after a city in the province of Shanxi, north China, the restaurant offers a broad window frontage (one panel of which had been smashed when I lunched there recently), and a sign for Hungry Panda riders (the Chinese delivery service) of which at least a dozen came in to collect their orders while I was there. The interior of the restaurant is long, deep and slightly more modern and comfortable than many in Chinatown. Although it was only 12.30 pm, it was already crowded with many Asians of whom the majority appear to be smartly dressed young women. The waiting staff are also young and, again unlike too many of their counterparts in Chinatown, smiling, extremely charming and willing to communicate.

More positivity in the Reuters report that the Austrian Beer Party is aiming at gaining a seat in upcoming parliamentary elections:

It ran in the last parliamentary election in 2019 and secured just 0.1% of the vote but its leader Dominik Wlazny, a 37-year-old doctor and rock musician with the stage name Marco Pogo, came third in 2022’s presidential election with 8.3%. To enter parliament, a party needs 4% of the vote… The Beer Party’s egalitarian message also appeals to left-wing voters: the leader of the opposition Social Democrats, Andreas Babler, has said he voted for Wlazny in the last presidential election.

Just for Stan: “16th Century Astronomer Tycho Brahe Had a Drunken Pet Moose“!

And some good health news from Polkville aka The Hammer where the Drunk Polkaroo discusses not being quite as drunk:

Somehow, fate intervened again, and I was let go from a toxic, degenerate workplace that had helped me manifest the very worst of who I was each and every day, a path leading me to an early end and a decidedly tarnished one at that. I took a few weeks this summer to just be, to let go of a lot of the internal self hatred that often manifested itself in way too many drinks and seek perhaps a new path forward. I found a job that was exactly what I needed, a place where my most valuable asset was myself and slowly began to climb up and poke my head out of the hole I had created over the last half decade. I felt that it was time to find a way to change my own relationship with this character I had created and when Covid finally came calling on December 9th, 2023, I put down my phone, my glass and stopped the tap for the first time in 8 years.

Good. Really good. We see a fair number of people in beer that are not doing well and the culture… well, the culture isn’t exactly about interventions… is it. Happily, we have watched Norm get healthy after a very close call. My own issues were not related to my innards so much as blowing out my knee and all the carbs. I’ve now lost over 10% of my total weight as I work away at being better to myself. Others haven’t been so lucky. All the best for the Polk as he goes forward. This stuff isn’t just messing around.

Finally and somewhat to the contrary (even if also in the eastern Lake Erie-Niagara-western Lake Ontario zone as Polkalopolis), your moment of zen from last Sunday night’s NFL game between the Bills and the Chiefs. Note: the gentleman featured in this excellent New York Post (…via USA Today via Reuters…) photo is (i) a pro football player himself as a Philadelphia Eagle, (ii) the brother of one of the stars of Kansas City Chiefs, the visiting teams but (iii) he still adopted the natural plumage behaviours of the fan base of the home team, the Buffalo Bills. Already a contender for the best beer photo of 2024.*

There. Sweet product placement, too. That’s it for now. So once again… roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes. There is a lot going on down here and, remember, ye who read this far down, look to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my 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 113 rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (static at 911) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,438 – another week with a gain!) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (creeping – literally – down to 164), 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. I now have admitted my dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat and accept that BlueSky is the leader in “the race to replace” Twex. Even so and all in all, while it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins, I still include these links to these good folk over there waiting to discuss beer with you:

Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
Stan Hieronymus | The Man!
Boak & Bailey | The B² experience
Curmudgeon Ale Works | Jonathon is Brewing
Katie Mather | Shiny Biscuit and Corto
David Jesudason | “Desi Pubs” (2023) author
BeoirFest | They say “Let’s Talk Beer”
Ron Pattinson | The RonAlongAThon Himself
Al Reece AKA Velky Al | Fuggled
Jennifer Jordan | US hops historian
Andreas Krennmair | Vienna beer and lager historian
Beer Ladies Podcast | Lisa Grimm and colleagues
The Bar Towel | Toronto’s chat zone for beer lovers
Chicago Beer Society | Folk in Chicago getting social over beer
Jay Brooks | Brookston Beer Bulletin
Joe Stange | Belgian beer expert, beer magazine editor
Cider Bar | Barry makes Kertelreiter cider
Laura Hadland | CAMRA historian and beer writer
Brian Alberts | US beer historian
Jon Abernathy | The Beer Site
Maureen Ogle | US Beer Historian
Lars Garshol | Norwegian Beer Historian and Kveik Hunter
James Beeson | Beeson on Beer
Carla Jean | MAINER!!!
Thandi Guilherme | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Lisa Grimm | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Roy of Quare Swally | Beery ramblings from Northern Ireland
Rob Talksbeer | Podcaster and Youtuber
Anthony Gladman | UK Drinks Writer
Jeff Alworth | Manna Of Beervana
Northwest Beer Guide | Fairly self explanatory… but not NW Latvia…
Evan Rail | Prague based GBH editor, freelance writer, NYT etc.
Todd Alström | 50% of the Alströms
Jacob Berg | Beer talking librarian

And remember to check the blogs, newsletters and even podcasts (really? barely! This era’s 8-track tapes!) to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations in the New Year from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan back at his spot for 2024 on Mondays. 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 long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a podcast… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

*You may also play “Where’s Waldo” with Taylor Swift in the same image. She may be in there.

The Mid-January Blues 2023…Errr… 2024 Edition Of The Beery News Notes

You know what is weird? I write these posts weekly but because of that my mind frames the passage of time in thirds of a month. So today is the eleventh which means we are in the second-third. Freaky, right? I can’t figure out if it slows or speeds the pace but with this messy weather week happy to have a sense of moving on. Even with a bracing feed* at No. 900 on Notre Dame the night before, as illustrated with the Habs looming in the background, I had a bit of another sort of moving experience getting back from Montreal where we bid bon voyage to the eldest who is now the blog’s Euro-correspondence for the winter.  Maybe I’m just getting old but I don’t recall speed racers on the highway coming up from behind as I am passing and then passing me on the outside shoulder. In the slush and low visibility on the Ontario-Quebec border I actually had to hit the gas to given them enough space without hitting me as they performed their Grand Theft Auto XXIII fueled manouver.  I clearly don’t know what it means to be cool these days.

Where to begin? Talk of the town! Especially if your town toddles, the talk was was the price of a pint in one Chicago establishment, as noted in Paste magazine:

Well, the one really catching people’s eye does seem to jump off the page: $16 pints of many of the beers on tap, including not only DIPAs but a few single IPAs as well. Suffice to say, that was more than some of the local beer geeks could stomach, and the idea of a $16 pint immediately raised a plethora of questions. Why, for instance, does it seem that Other Half prices in Chicago are significantly higher than what the company charges for the same beers in its other taprooms in New York, Philadelphia and Washington D.C.? 

As Paste wrote, the price in question was questioned by Chalonda White and got pretty swift response as noted by HopNotes himself:

The short-lived $16 pint thing at the Other Half/Ramova taproom was weird, and kudos to them for fixing it so quickly (those pints are now $8 and $9). Seems like that was rooted mostly in being a concert venue and thinking they could get away with airport/stadium pricing.

At the other end of the scale, ATJ posted an exploration of intoxication** as a concept on his newsletter:

It is perhaps the moment when your voice seems to become distant as if being spoken by someone else, though sometime during the next day we will hopefully feel patched, retreaded, and approved for the road, but you do wince at the behavioural altitude you reached.

Conversely, on the health beat as always The Mudge has been tracking the interesting angle on NA beer that has come into the news recently – that it’s got an issue with wee bit of the old switcheroo:

The annual Dry January campaign inevitably turns the spotlight on non-alcoholic beers, which in recent years have been the subject of a growing amount of publicity and hype. Obviously in terms of the specific objective of reducing alcohol consumption they have an undeniable advantage. Many people, though, have come to see them as being a healthy option in a wider sense. But does this belief really have any substance? A recent study has found that many of them in fact contain considerably more sugar than their normal-strength equivalents.

This  is going along with another bit of recent news that there may be more than sugar to worry about in them there NA beers:

The experts investigated the survival of bacteria like E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella enterica, and Listeria monocytogenes under different conditions. They found that while L. monocytogenes eventually perished, E. coli and Salmonella could thrive for over two months, especially in non-alcoholic variants. These findings point to non-alcoholic beer as an especially conducive environment for pathogen growth, though bacteria managed to survive in both non-alcoholic and low-alcohol beers under various conditions. By contrast, regular beers, with higher ABV percentages, didn’t exhibit this vulnerability and are often safely stored at ambient temperatures in stores.

Yik. Or is it a “yikes!!”?  The authors stressed the necessity of pasteurization along with the use of sterile filtration and preservatives might be prudent. Might be nice to confirm on the label, too. Also, The Times reported that Dry January may be triggering some price hikes:

The average price of nine brands, ­including Birra Moretti Zero and ­Guinness Draught 0.0, have increased by 22.3 per cent at Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons and Waitrose since the start of December, according to ­research by The Grocer magazine. The biggest single increase was at Waitrose, where bottles of Erdinger Alkoholfrei Wheat Beer increased 75 per cent from £1 to £1.75. At Sainsbury’s 12-packs of Heineken 0.0 jumped 64 per cent from £7 to £11.50. The trade magazine noted that the average price of low and no-alcohol beers had risen faster than full-strength beers over the past year despite not being subject to any duty increases.

I do get most aspects of the NA thing being at least aimed at a generally healthier yet tasty (but, as illustrated, not always) outcome (even if I am very rarely going to participate given cheaper tasty options) but I really struggle with non-alcohol spirits and resulting cocktails. Pretty much spiritless by definition for me but you be you if that’s something you like. This was a handy if code-laden primer that passed by my eye this week:

Long derided as “mocktails,” alcohol-free cocktails (aka NA, zero-proof, or spirit-free cocktails) are increasingly stepping into their own, driven by changing consumer behaviors, a surge in alcohol-free alternatives, and good old creativity. But what distinguishes a great NA cocktail from a run-of-the-mill soft drink? “There are plenty of nonalcoholic drinks—but why is tea or juice or soda alone not a nonalcoholic cocktail?” asks Derek Brown, a longtime bartender and bar owner in Washington, D.C… “It’s because a cocktail is something specific, and there are sensory characteristics we assign to it that are really important.”

Convinced? Important? Speaking of posi-comms, here’s a good example of potentially unnecessarily creep in the scoring of wines which, as with beer PR, actually may not assist some of the wines in question.

Excitement and quality abound, Canada saw its best Gold (95-96 points) performance to date at the 2023 competition – dry and sparkling wines carrying a mass of the nation’s 19 accolades in the category, with the provinces of Ontario, British Columbia and Nova Scotia represented. ‘These days, Canadian wines are getting a lot of attention,’ explained DWWA judge and Ontario native Andrea Pritzker MW. ‘There are some really excellent smaller regions, both in southern Ontario and of course British  Columbia, that are really producing some phenomenal quality wines, white and red.’

Don’t get me wrong. There are many excellent Canadian wines and I am lucky to live near one of the primo regions – but how helpful is a “96” for a sparkler relatively speaking when this is the price of another with that same score? And, for present purposes, will good beer ever get anywhere near these sorts of relative value considerations?

And, speaking of wine, next time someone uses wine terminology like terroir to describe beer, here’s a handy primer from Eric Asimov of the NYT which explains the clearly distinct concept as well as a number of other things:

Jean and Pierre Gonon make the highly coveted Pierre Gonon wines in St.-Joseph, in the Northern Rhône Valley of France. Jean once explained to me the difference between Gonon’s St.-Joseph, made from an excellent terroir that requires arduous farming, and its Les Îles Feray, a wine from the easier-to-farm flatlands in the Ardèche. The Îles Feray tasted like syrah, he said, while the St.-Joseph, also made from syrah, tasted like the place in which it was grown. The wines provide different experiences for different occasions.

That’s terroir in a nutshell.

CNN has a story about a pub that surely must always get top marks from the customers:

At first glance, The Keys looks just like any other much-loved UK pub, with leather banquettes, rectangular wooden tables, and an ornately decorated carpet. But its décor boasts unique regal features, including a 16th century ceremonial ax and cabinets displaying Yeoman Warder uniforms. The pub is run by the Tower’s 35 serving Yeomen Warders, who get their “Beefeater” nickname from the daily meat ration they were traditionally given. Only they and their invited guests are allowed to enter. With lodgings for resident Beefeaters and their families, a doctor’s office and a chapel, the Tower can feel like a village for those living there. And like any proud village, the pub is an important part of the community – a place they can go to celebrate special occasions or unwind after a busy day.

I’ve bought a beer on a navy ship and walked into a pub built into a veterans’ hospital but sitting down for a pint there would be rather special.

Strangest boozy Scots law news of the new year: “Port Glasgow man acquitted after telling of cheese taunt.” We are assured that drinking was involved. As it so often is when the taunted with cheese defence is raised. The actual not at all strangest Scots boozy news is that BrewDog continues to refine its craft as little more than a personal money machine.

The better sort of beery news from a Scot is from Alistair who wrote about that big rauchbier revival… no, not now… that’s never happening. He wrote about the oen that could well have happened 115 years ago:

…smaller breweries in Bavaria were going back to malting their own grains because the cost of the raw materials was sufficiently low to make this economical again, rather than buying their malt from the likes of Weyermann, whose maltings is massive pile right next to the railway station in Bamberg. What jumped out most to me though was that the relative low cost of barley could lead to the return of “the old Bavarian smoked beer”. This raises the question then, did rauchbier die out in Bavaria in the latter 19th century and only revive when breweries starting taking back the ability to make their own malt…

Finally, two questions about forms of writing as illustrated by two unquestionably reliable sources. First, notice the structure of the paragraphs… call and response… lob and hit to the outfield.  Not necessarily my favourite type of article but clearly open about what it is. Second, for Pellicle Matthew revisitied, rewrote and greatly unpacked a previously published piece according to the emailed newsletter:

…a Director’s Cut of sorts, a longer, more detailed version of Matthew Curtis’ erudite love letter to RedWillow Brewery. First published in a more curtailed form in SIBA’s “The Independent Brewer” industry magazine…

Also not fully compelling to me. But no one other than Jeff likely gets that interview. And no one other than Matthew should unpack that story even if it is a brewery bio, admittedly not my thing. (Or, as we saw before, perhaps should.) And both clear about what was happening. So… i say how they developed does not matter as each expands the whole of the written beery record.  It is not like the old K-9 v. Turner and Hootch problem or anything. Or is it? Or is it the post holiday publication cycle reality? Or is it filling in info gaps?

Ponder that would you? And now, roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes. There is a lot going on down here and, remember, ye who read this far down, look to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (up eight to 112) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (911 – back up one) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,434 – another week with a gain!) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (creeping – literally – down to 164), 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. Stan’s take on it all?

I look at X once most days, which means I only see a sliver of what I might. Plenty of interesting people are still there, and I wish they’d move to Bluesky. I occasionally will retweet something to be polite, but I’m doing my best not to post

All in all I now have to admit my dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat and accept that BlueSky is the place in “the race to replace.” Even so and all in all, it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins but here are a few of the folk there perhaps only waiting to discuss beer:

Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
Stan Hieronymus | The Man!
Boak & Bailey | The B² experience
Curmudgeon Ale Works | Jonathon is Brewing
Katie Mather | Shiny Biscuit and Corto
David Jesudason | “Desi Pubs” (2023) author
BeoirFest | They say “Let’s Talk Beer”
Ron Pattinson | The RonAlongAThon Himself
Al Reece AKA Velky Al | Fuggled
Jennifer Jordan | US hops historian
Andreas Krennmair | Vienna beer and lager historian
Beer Ladies Podcast | Lisa Grimm and colleagues
The Bar Towel | Toronto’s chat zone for beer lovers
Chicago Beer Society | Folk in Chicago getting social over beer
Jay Brooks | Brookston Beer Bulletin
Joe Stange | Belgian beer expert, beer magazine editor
Cider Bar | Barry makes Kertelreiter cider
Laura Hadland | CAMRA historian and beer writer
Brian Alberts | US beer historian
Jon Abernathy | The Beer Site
Maureen Ogle | US Beer Historian
Lars Garshol | Norwegian Beer Historian and Kveik Hunter
James Beeson | Beeson on Beer
Carla Jean | MAINER!!!
Thandi Guilherme | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Lisa Grimm | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Roy of Quare Swally | Beery ramblings from Northern Ireland
Rob Talksbeer | Podcaster and Youtuber
Anthony Gladman | UK Drinks Writer
Jeff Alworth | Manna Of Beervana
Northwest Beer Guide | Fairly self explanatory… but not NW Latvia…
Evan Rail | Prague based GBH editor, freelance writer, NYT etc.
Todd Alström | 50% of the Alströms
Jacob Berg | Beer talking librarian

And remember to check the blogs, newsletters and even podcasts (really? barely! This era’s 8-track tapes!) to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations in the New Year from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan back at his spot for 2024 on Mondays. 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 long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a podcast… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

*Unfrikkin’ believably good! That little black pan behind the pizza is creamy polenta with gorgonzola and a spicy sausage all as a dip. Servied with little herby cheesy buns. Twelve bucks but everyone scraped their pizza crusts through it. Fabulous addition.
**Not in the legal sense.  This is a bit of an exploration of that around these parts: “Canadian law recognizes three degrees of intoxication for the purposes of the intoxication defence. Mild intoxication, if raised, might be useful for attempting to mitigate the severity of the offence but has no bearing on the mens rea intent needed for a conviction. Advanced intoxication can be used for specific intent offences to raise reasonable doubt about the mens rea. Even when successfully used as a defence, offenders are often found guilty on lesser charges. For example, if successfully used to secure an acquittal on murder charges, offenders are typically found guilty of manslaughter, a general intent offence that cannot consider the intoxication defence. Extreme intoxication refers to intoxication that puts an offender in a state of automatism in which they are lacking self-control and self-knowledge. When successfully used as an affirmative defence, it effectively negates the mens rea intent and renders a conviction impossible. While Section 33.1 of the Criminal Code had dictated that this intoxication defence could only be applied to non-violent offences, that requirement was nullified by the recent Supreme Court decision.“