Category: Health

Fine… It’s March And Here Are The Thursday Beery News Notes

I thought the new month would have made a big difference. But a couple of twelve hour days in hard black shoes and a snow squall meeting me as I got off the bus that finally made it through rerouted traffic and, well… well… well, at least it ain’t February any more. Let’s see what is going on!

First, there was much fretting in Engerlant over the shadowy Portman Group issuing an edict against a beer label. Now, I’ve beer posting about the shadowy Portman Group’s edicts since at least 2008 so I don’t really care that much now. But the fretting of others was remarkable. SIBA objected to the lack of much due process. The BBC covered it like it was an actual news story. Martyn wrote: “Running with Sceptres is not the ditch to die in over the Portman Group and its bans…” and then wrote more. Folk were cloyingly superior, spitting angry and even spent all the rent money. Pete went all Pete and shouted from the barricades that we need to “…check out the beautiful, sometimes strangely moving, artwork.” See, that is my issue. To me, that label on the can looks like panels stolen from a 1950s Rupert the Bear book.  And me, I don’t buy beer for the artwork and especially not Rupert the Bear rip-offs. In fact, if the art is too good, I assume they are cutting corners on the actual brewing resources. The money can only be spent once after all. Watch yourselves out there.

In another chapter of the tale how craft goes bad, we learned that Goose Island tri-packs with bottles of 2017, 2018 and 2019 Bourbon County stout have been marked down in the US Midwest to about 20% of their original inflated price. Imagine how many casks of the 2020 and even 2021 are sitting there in brewery warehouses… err… cellars with operating managers knowing how little it is really worth now. With such bad value, maybe they will be candidates for that #FlagshipFlotsam* thing one day.

In yet another sign of craft’s collapse, I had originally thought that this was a parody post from Ben, the tale of a overly-branded vegan brewery in Toronto shutting:

It’s like gentrification on human growth hormones, delivered by “The 5700,” a company that “manages a growing portfolio of lifestyle and entertainment brands that live online.” Now excuse me while I clean up the rage-induced blood-vomit typing that phrase has induced. Vegandale Brewery, which seemed to actually just be a coat of paint and a new name for the main floor of the existing Duggan’s Brewery, who officially moved to the basement of the location six months ago, wasn’t helping the image of veganism. Vegandale Brewery launched with the slogan “Morality on tap” and poured beers like Morally Superior IPA and Shining Example Stout. Yikes.

One last bit of endtimesy-wimsey news from CNY:

The Gordon Biersch Restaurant Brewery in Destiny USA closed today, joining a growing list of locations the national chain has been shutting down across the country. The brewpub — a restaurant with an attached brewhouse — opened in the Syracuse mall in 2012 and occupied a space on the first level, near the Hiawatha Street entrance.

I went there once as the family shopped out in the unending megamall for transitory branded objects. I came away with no actual recollections of the experience. Apparently, I was not alone… or at least not as alone as the bartenders were.

More in line with the “get in line” section of the news, I was glad to see this bit of law enforcement in Ontario’s news this week:

Jason Fach, 38, pleaded guilty to impaired driving causing death in December. An agreed statement of facts says that he had had four 20 oz. beers in a little more than an hour at St. Louis Bar and Grill the night of the crash. Fach has been sentenced to six years in prison. On Feb. 28, police announced that they had charged the restaurant, its owners and two staff members. The charges include selling liquor to an intoxicated person, permit drunkenness on licensed premises and failing to facilitate inspection. Under Ontario law, an establishment and its ownership can be held responsible for overserving someone.

The liability of a licensed establishment is distinct from social host liability in which responsibility is much reduced here in the land of the maple and the moose.

On another sort of establishment in another land, Retired Martin posted a lovely photo essay, a snippet of one of which sits above, on a very specific topic this week:

“Should it be open ?” I asked the chattiest of the group, all of whom had OS maps in plastic wallets round their necks. “Oh yes, I phoned them up before we set off. They SAID they’d be open”. Hmmm.

Even more elsewhere, it was Icelandic Beer Day last Sunday.

A nice posi-post of a piece on a lager was sent out via the internets by Pellicle this week:

Thankfully, there was Keller Pils, a lemon-bitter pale lager from Bristol brewery Lost and Grounded. The first barely touched the sides: one gulp, two gulps, three gulps, gone. The second, golden and glistening with condensation in a Willi Becher—a classic straight German glass that tapers elegantly towards the top—took longer. It was crisp but rich, toasty and bitter, direct and deeply rewarding.

One problem with these sorts of nice posi-posts is how they remind you of other positive experience unrelated to the subject matter. I can think of fifty other beers that have happily let to “one gulp, two gulps, three gulps, gone” which is not, I suspect, the point of writing about a particular thing. I did notice the pretty can, however. And this rather honest comment from a co-owner of the brewery:

“It’s like a Rubik’s cube, you know?” Alex says. “It’s about the branding. It’s the communications. It’s the quality of the product. It’s about people out on the road talking about it. It’s about how you work with the wholesalers … it’s all sorts of everything.”

And speaking of nothing in particular, here’s an interesting bit of spam by email:

I am the marketing director for Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales. As you may know, Jolly Pumpkin is an all wild, oak-aged brewery. We are announcing the launch of a new canning line for our wild ales and thought that your readers might be interested in the news. The first beers off the line will be year-round favorites, Bam Bière and Calabaza Blanca. We will also be canning Hyrrokkin, the first release of a new fruited seasonal saison series. 

Jolly Pumpkin in a can! Long term readers will recall when I spent a happy late afternoon in the company of owner/brewer Ron J back in 2007 when beer bloggers were still unique enough to not have the parking lot lights turned off and all the doors locked when one showed up to check out a brewery.  Now they sell the stuff in a can. Pretty cans. Life comes at you quickly.

Speaking of the most fabulous thing I heard related to the drinks trade this week…

The bartender at the Radisson Kingswood Hotel in Hanwell, near Fredericton, helped deliver a baby in a snowstorm on Thursday night. Storey said she got the call when she was closing down the bar for the night. “The person who works the front desk, Nick, comes over and says, ‘There’s someone having a baby in our lobby,'” said Storey. “At first I thought he was kidding.”

That’s enough. Once a child is born we have hit peak beer news for the week. And remember, if you want more beer news, check out Boak and Bailey most Saturdays, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast now as well! Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. Check them out. They are like blogs but with people speaking and saying “umm” a lot instead.

*…which is still really better than #JetsamJanuary if you think about it.

The Thursday Beery News Notes For When Craft Gets Redefined Again!

Well, it really hasn’t been redefined – by it may as well have been. Tom noticed this image this week:

In this supermarket, cases of hard seltzer dominate the floor of its refrigerated beer aisle. 

Except it isn’t really just hard seltzer. It’s a cheap ass canned booze called Truly made and sold by the promoters at Sam Adams beer, right? Moo. Lah. Well, someone has to have money, right? Not you, of course. You believe there’s no money in craft. I didn’t write my comment back as any sort of serious prediction but if the day comes that the US Brewers Association allow this stuff as “craft” well you heard it here first.

What else is going on that’s a bit unsettling? I find this meme* about your dream job in beer odd. First, when did all the writing about beer become so trade side? Who the hell wants to actually work in beer? Beer is about the sitting and the not working. (Maybe not really paying attention seems to be part of the gig these days.) My dream job in craft beer? Good pay plus high health and safety standards along with job protection. And a union card. Like that is ever going to happen.

Josh Rubin** has a story in The Star on troubles at Ontario’s brewery former monopoly’s retail side:

Molson Coors and Labatt each own roughly half of TBS, with Sleeman Breweries owning a small percentage. In 2016 under pressure from the provincial government, TBS offered independent craft breweries “ownership” stakes without financial obligations, and a place on the board. Jeff Carefoote, owner of Toronto’s Amsterdam Brewery, which is a TBS “owner,” said he hadn’t previously seen a shortfall. “I certainly haven’t seen anything like this since we’ve been owners,” said Carefoote.

There is a suggestion that the retail operation might go away. The main reason E.P. Taylor configured it the way it is now, however, was on the wholesale side. He considered breweries competing on things like trucking costs waste. Smart guy. There’s a dream job in beer I want. I want to be E.P. Taylor.

“Wow. Secrets of the maltsters. c1911.”

In the U.S. of A., C.B.S has done some investigatory investigations on why booze costs a lot:

The first stop: a North Dakota barley farm that has been operated by state native Doyle Lentz’ family for over a century. The grain harvested from the cold northern plains could eventually make its way into a pint of beer or a glass of whiskey. “I make about a penny a beer,” Lentz said. He said it was about the same as what his grandfather made during his time running the farm. “I’m pretty sure if your cost of your alcohol’s going up – probably not happening out here in North Dakota too much,” he said.

Damn. I was hoping to blame the farmers. Lew rightly points out the research seemed to be a bit limited: “[a]ccording to the people in the supply chain, NO ONE is making more money off the huge increases in the cost of a drink at a bar.” Someone is making money. It might be disbursed but follow a few drinks owners and upper staff on Facebook and you get to see the holiday homes you paid for.

Speaking of being co-opted for the benefits of the ownership class, did you notice this floating around social media this week? Apparently BrewDog wants you to go neaten up their shelf displays as if you care? I’d rather stick nails in my eyes that do volunteer shelf stacking like some cheese eating school boy*** just so the brewer can’t require the distributor doesn’t pay for this part of the supply chain job. BrewSuckers.

I couldn’t care less about anti-health advocacy on behalf of brewers… but Martyn does so here is the link.

Jeff wrote about the importance of branding but I am not sure I agree:

Branding and marketing is hard. It requires a global perspective, one that touches on sales, marketing, product development, distribution, packaging—really, it touches every part of a brewery. Done properly, it becomes an integrative exercise that brings these pieces together. The problem is that most breweries don’t want to devote the time to such a big project, and so things proceed piecemeal, and the brand develops in a shaggy dog fashion with no strategic purpose.

See, to me the 10,000 brewery world means that thinking globally is what makes you a BrewSucker. Beer is now becoming like the local bakery. You go there because it’s good. One reason beer and food pairing, that darling of a decade ago, failed so miserably is those paid PR folk pushing it were trying to analogize to Michelin star restaurants. It isn’t. It aimed to high. But a good neighbourhood bakery? Good beer can be that. And branding won’t help if the cheese scones aren’t any good or cost too much.

Mudgie wrote in praise of boring brown beer in support of a few observations by John Keeling like this interesting one:

He also makes the important point that “CAMRA was formed to save the great beer that was being brewed and not to get people to brew great beer.” It’s often claimed today that CAMRA’s primary objective was increasing choice, but in fact this represents an attempt to rewrite history. In the early days, this was definitely not the case. Real ale was felt to be under threat, and so the core purpose was a preservationist one, to champion the beers that were already in existence, encourage people to drink them and spread the word about where they could be found.

Tradition! So sayeth Topol. Speaking of which, Matt was a bit unhappy on the idea of “beer that tastes like beer” but beer that tastes like beer is a valid concept. My point being that “beer that does not taste like beer” might also be a valid concept, just one for others. Not me. Truly.

My hero Jancis was writing about sustainability and wine and noted one particular culprit in this tweet:

Wine producers could make MASSIVE impact on carbon emissions if we communicators could successfully re-educate consumers about glass bottles. Handful of international wine writers travelling by train and boat ain’t going to do it alas…

What is the evil unsustainable practice in craft? (You know, other than the pay, the health and safety standards and the lack of union cards.) I’d say trucking. The idea that we need west coast North American beer trucked across the continent to compete with good local product is weird. Big craft? Big evil craft.

Jordan, who wrote me just today in realtime of a less than charming cider that tasted like pig shit, has again proven the joys of coming into a point in life with a comfortable income and written freely about Toronto’s Rorschach Brewing, unburdened by thoughts of risks he might pose to future gigs, unshackled by obligations past:

It seems to me an interesting reversal of fortune for the Rorschach brand. At the time of launch, the lineup of beers all drew their names from the world of psychological concept. The Rorschach inkblot test itself is designed to reflect the patient’s state of mind; the kind of thing a Hollywood movie might use as signification for diagnosis. The names were in some cases quite clever. Take Icarus Complex: A Double IPA with Kiwi and Lactose, named for a condition in which spiritual ambition is thwarted by a personal limitation. Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? I don’t think much about Browning these days, unless it’s Maillard.

Again with the Maillard! BANE!!!! Otherwise, another excellent outing.

A tankard from Alchester (43-200 CE).

And finally, Lars found a lady in Chuvashia, Russia with yet another unique strain of brewing yeast and spoke of his work:

Just normal searching. Helps to know the Russian for “village beer”. Push absolutely every contact you have, over and over and over, until eventually someone helps you out. In this case, colleagues at work, and the Chuvashians I visited in 2017.

Neato. I went a hour to my east today to a cafe to drink my favourite beer, Bobo, and the brewer walked in. Sorta the same thing. Right? Sorta.

Well, that is enough for me.  For more, check out Boak and Bailey most Saturdays, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. There’s the  AfroBeerChick podcast now as well! Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. What else? What indeed.

*pronounced “me me” as that’s what they really are all about.
**aka Canada’s Josh Rubin.
***…Gotta get up and take on that world…“

Your Unimpeachable Thursday Beery News Notes

Sad news to start with. We lost one of the greatest comedians I have known in my life – as well as a figure at the early end of this wave of good beer culture. The role of Terry Jones of Monty Python, along with co-conspirator Eric Idle, in bringing real ale to the attention of the British public during the mid-1970s was recorded by Boak and Bailey in their fabulous book Brew Britannia, excerpts of which were posted on their blog for the 100th edition of the dear departed Session:

This should not have come as a surprise to anyone who had seen Palin in the famous 1974 ‘travel agent’ sketch in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, in which Eric Idle delivers a ranting monologue with repeated disparaging references to Watney’s Red Barrel. Of the two, Terry Jones was the more enthusiastic about beer. When his accountant, Michael Henshaw, introduced him to another of his clients, Richard Boston, they entered into partnership on two projects. First, an ‘alternative’ magazine, The Vole, to be edited by Boston; and second, a brewery, which they initially intended to open in Berkshire.

I love that an accountant was involved with getting him going on good beer. Roger Protz remembered him, his brewery and a particular moment before the press with this tweet:

I remember it well. Terry Jones… didn’t want to pose sniffing the beer. He suggested pouring it over his head. He had to do it twice as the incredibly old-fashioned Fleet Street photographers in their trilbys were not ready with their cumbersome cameras.

My favorite remembrance today was from Stephen Fry: “Farewell, Terry Jones. The great foot has come down to stamp on you.” Lovely.

And from a slightly earlier point in beer culture, David Sun Lee shared this Youtube vid for Carling Black Label noteworthy for its significant Mabel content. My mother’s cousin Mabel married a Glasgow pub owner and mailed them Canadian “Hey Mabel, Black Label!” related breweriana when I was a toddly kid in the 1960s.

In corporate news, all is not so real. We learn from Matt that Australia’s Lion Beer, a Kirin subsidiary, is consolidating its “Little World Beverages” arm to include New Belgium, Little Creatures, Panhead, Fourpure and Magic Rock.  And Atwater Brewery of Detroit is selling to  Molson Coors under an agreement that sees all of its brewing assets, taprooms and a biergarten moving to Molson Coors under its craft beer division Tenth and Blake. Adjust your buying preferences accordingly.

Speaking of shadowy corporate goals, I found an email from Beer Connoisseur webzine in my spam folder which had, miracle of miracles, a softball Q+A with well-known promoters Jim Koch and Sam Calagione which included this sad statement of where we are:

Jim: Who would have thought a few years ago that The Boston Beer Company would play in hard seltzer? Truly was an innovation we explored as an alternative for drinkers – and we’re happy we took the chance on it when we did as one of the first to market… We’ll continue to innovate within this lifestyle space with beers like SeaQuench and Slightly Mighty, but in the past two years, the hard seltzer category has grown more than 830 percent and more than 220 percent in 2019 alone. Hard seltzer sales have now surpassed all IPA sales, one of craft beer’s most popular styles, demonstrating the shift in drinker preference, which Truly is capitalizing on.

Lifestyle space! It’s like he writes the advertising himself! Grim stuff. Speaking of pressures on actual good beer, we learn that there is just too much darn pot in Canada!

In just a year after Canada’s historic pot legalization, pot producers built up a massive surplus of pot. In fact, only 4% of pot produced in Canada in July has been sold! The rest is being stored in warehouses… just like crops during the Great Depression. For much of the past century, laws held back pot production like a dam holds back a river. But Canada threw those floodgates wide open, and the market was flooded with millions of kilos of pot.

More grim stuff – and quite a distance from what Terry Jones was advocating for back in the mid-70s. Heck, I’m pretty sure Mabel wouldn’t want any of this, either.

Note #1: don’t blame higher alcohol duty rates in the UK for whatever you need to blame something for. They are actually lower.  Good news!

Note #2: telling others their descriptors are poor is an utter waste of time, reflects a weak understanding of how language works and is also a bit of bullying.*

For more gooder news, look at this fascinating story of how one scientist (for whose work the world should be on its knees thanking its lucky stars) is making a personal medical breakthrough in his own struggles with alcohol:

Electrodes are inserted into a targeted region of the brain to recalibrate activity in that area using electrical impulses – controlled by a pacemaker-like device placed under the skin of the patient’s chest – and ease cravings. Dr Plummer was the trial’s first patient and underwent the experimental surgery just over a year ago. A total of six people are expected to eventually participate – all with a history of chronic alcohol use disorder proven resistant to other types of treatment.

And here’s another ray of sunshine. Pete Brown dusted off his blog and shared two posts this week, including this one on the modest increase in the number of pubs in the UK in 2019:

Now, a friend of mine has pointed out that when you dig right down into the data, rounding numbers in individual regions may mean this very modest increase is even smaller than it looks. It’s also worth noting that the modest increases in 2003 and 2007 – the only other years this century with a net increase – did little to alter the overall downward trend that’s seen more than a quarter of British pubs disappear in the last twenty years. But rather than quibble about the size of the rise, what’s more important is that the number of pubs hasn’t gone down.

Speaking of revival, Will Hawkes has a story in Imbibe on turn in craft’s  rejection of traditional Fuggles-based bitter:

The key to the beer is the use of Fuggles hops, sourced from the Weald of Kent, their ancestral home. Hobbs says the brewery has brewed one batch with Goldings, but that they plan to stick with Fuggles for the foreseeable future. ‘The quality of the Fuggles makes that beer,’ he says. The volume of hops used makes for a fi rm, almost austere bitterness that is very diff erent from some of the more mimsy family brewer ales; ‘That’s how we like it,’ says Hobbs.

And Katie (who assures us she is NOT TO BE FEARED!) wrote about the use of local woods for barrel aging beers in Brazil for Ferment web-mag-thingie:

“Culturally we use a lot of local botanicals in our drinks because fresh hops were hard to come by, and this includes the wood we use to store them,” he explains.  “In fact, brewers and cachaça makers are starting to use small pieces of wood or specially made spirals for an infusion effect. In cachaça there are more than 30 types of wood that can be used to give the flavours of the drink. The trees this wood comes from are local and usually are only found in Brazil. This gives these drinks even more cultural value and adds to their identity.”

Speaking of old beer methodologies, via a h/t to Merryn, we learn for those out there studying China circa 4,000 BC that there is news that “Chinese people experimented with two different methods of making BEER** 6,000 years ago”:

One method, employed by the Yangshao people in Dingcun, was to use malts made of sprouted millet, grass seeds and rice to produce low-alcohol drinks.  Whereas another made use of qu, mouldy grass and grains, to produce stronger drinks. ‘Yangshao people may have been experimenting with various methods to find the best way for alcohol making, or were brewing multiple types of alcohol for different purposes,’ Dr Liu Li, writes in the study.

That’s it for now. The real and the sad. The fake and the glad. Don’t worry. Just five full weeks to March. We can make it. As we wait for sugnshine and warmth, don’t forget to check in with Boak and Bailey’s on Saturdays, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast now as well! Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast.

*Or put another way…
**Random pointless capitalization is one of the best thing about mid-range UK newspaper headlines.

This Thursday’s Beery News Notes Are Brought To You By Dog Sled

OK, it’s finally winter. I accept it. Pals in Newfoundland are reporting 150 cm of snow. Other pals in Alberta are living with -40C.  But… it’s six more weeks to March. I will survive. As I learned all those years ago from my personal hero, Gloria Gaynor. And, just like someone looking for a friend out there on the dark frozen suburban tundra without any luck, Matt asked about new beer blogs this week and seemed to get no answer – even if a few promises to start one up were offered.  Boak and Bailey even mentioned the same thing in Last Saturday’s round up:

Blogging is dead, people sometimes say, but it’s so frustrating that great information is left lying in Twitter where hardly anybody can find it within ten minutes of transmission.

So let’s see if it is all death of a disco artist out there or not, shall we? Or are blogs so alive that we just forgot to notice. This week, it’s getting meta!!!*

Blog. Found one. Jordan visited a brewery this week. He found it odd. But he thought he was doing beer journalism** when he was just writing a blog post:

Editor’s note: Just going and reviewing a brewery is seemingly an old fashioned idea. When was the last time you saw someone do it? That’s a legitimate question, by the way. If you can picture a Maslow’s hierarchy of beer journalism, reviewing a brewery is somewhere towards the bottom of the pyramid. It’s fundamental, but who goes places anymore? Ah, well. Some idiot has to do it. 

He then goes on to examine the realities of one new brewery’s prospects in Toronto. They aren’t all good but they ain’t all bad. And Jordan explains why. No proper news organ is ever paying for this. Which is great. Because it’s on a blog.

Nudder blog. The Beer Nut also went to a brewery – which means Jordan thinks he is also an idiot. And it was also in an odd part of town, too. And he also had problems with the purpose of a blog:

BrewDog Outpost Dublin opened its doors in December. This long-anticipated addition to the Dublin beer landscape has chosen a daring location, at the very far eastern end of the south quays, where the city is still very much developing. They’re clearly hoping for a high enough concentration of wealthy young tech and finance workers to keep the large pub/restaurant/brewery in business. But this blog isn’t where you come for speculation on the economic ins-and-outs of the local on-trade. This is where I talk about beer.

Meta.

Anudder blog. That’s three. Pints with Polk pulled out the crystal ball and set it to 2020 to discover nine trends, one of which is the pox of influencers:

My wish that those types of people would not be given any credibility by those who matter will no doubt fall on deaf ears and I’ll just say I take most things I see with a grain of salt, while continuing to try and tell the truth about what I drink at every turn, good or bad. Influencers aren’t going anywhere anytime soon and as long as they remain docile and pliant to only saying nice things, they will continue to be rewarded.

Hmm… Seems like blogging is actually in! The kids know it. You should know it, too. We just need to face facts. And, as if we needed proof, Ed added a bit of excellent technical brewing bloggetry to this week’s reading all about the mystery of a black malt addition:

My current boss, has been a brewer for many a year, occasionally drops a fascinating fact into the conversation. He started out working for Courage, so Imperial Russian Stout occasionally crops up, and I’m pleased to say that last week the mystery of black malt in the copper was solved.

I also liked this blog post by Liam about Smithwick’s dabbling with lager in the 1960s, this one from the Boak and the Bailey on whether there is a mild in disguise all around us, this one from Jeff on the weirdness that is Bud Light Seltzer, and this one telling craft brewers to embrace that same weirdness. And the daily output from Ron. They are out there. Here’s one from Amsterdam and another from Eindhoven. Here’s one from the far frozen northlands. Plenty are run by Gen X men. Many by Canadian Gen X men. During the blizzards while the lights are still working. When beer blogging started, it was all a side gig run by folk in the IT world. Now so much of it is left to Canada. Like saving Royals from themselves. What is up with that?

Anyway, there you are. Blogtastic stuff. Get the fever… and now the news. First up, the really important news that the silver spoon child*** who runs Sam Smith’s empire is as dull and dim as the rest of us:

He is the ultra-traditional – indeed some would say Victorian – brewery boss who has notoriously banned mobiles at his pubs. But it seems Samuel Smith’s owner Humphrey Smith has found a cunning way to get around his own rules – by popping into a Wetherspoon’s to check his phone. The seldom-photographed brewer was spotted in the rival chain in Heywood, near Manchester.

Hmm.  And that’s the end of the news.

And it’s not all about blogging. It has also not all kind to the paid beer writer out there recently, either. Beth Demmon has been tweeting with some upset over new regulations in California Assembly Bill 5 – or AB 5 – which aim to get rid of unfair employment practices but which have sideswiped her career plans:

Fuck #AB5. I’m so upset. I’m sitting here crying bc everything I’ve worked for, the career I’ve created and based my entire life on, is crumbling around me and there’s literally nothing I can do about it.

Kate of the shine and the biscuit shared another downside in her weekly newsletter, The Gulp:****

My Stuff. Not much to report this week — I’ve got something I’m really proud of on an editor’s desk at the moment, and a few other things in my drafts pile. (I use the American spelling. I’m not sorry. “Draught” is such an ugly word, I don’t like it at all. It looks like I should be pronouncing it “Droauuft” and no. I won’t.)

There are still other perils as we remember when Megan reminds us that is OK not to drink. Who is paying anyone to report that? Nobody. Well, not many. But Olga Khazan got paid to write in The Atlantic about it in a way, about the lack of an anti-alcohol movement:

Breunig’s outlook harks back to a time when there was a robust public discussion about the role of alcohol in society. Today, warnings about the devil drink will win you few friends. Sure, it’s fine if you want to join Alcoholics Anonymous or cut back on drinking to help yourself, and people are happy to tell you not to drink and drive. But Americans tend to reject general anti-alcohol advocacy with a vociferousness typically reserved for IRS auditors and after-period double-spacers. Pushing for, say, higher alcohol taxes gets you treated like an uptight school marm. Or worse, a neo-prohibitionist.

And Colin Angus gets paid as part of his work with the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group at the University of Sheffield and he updated that map I liked so much last week. And by update I mean made more grim by adding Scotland. Good Lord, that is horrible.

Yikes. I better find something else to look at for a bit. But you? Want more beer writing, paid and unpaid, journalism and not? It’s there and happy to share what I see out there.*****  And don’t forget to check in with Boak and Bailey’s on Saturdays, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast now as well! Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. Plenty. Good ‘n’ Plenty.

*Yaaaaawwwwwwnnn!!!!!!! If you don’t believe me, check out the Google Images search results for the one word “blogging“!
**At a minimum, you need to be paid or in college to be performing journalism… unless it is performance journalism.
***h/t to the Tand.
****I signed up through a combination of fascination and fear, frankly. Gotta stay on the right side of Katie. For sure. Even across an ocean. She’d rip me apart. Does anyone read these footnotes? NO????
*****Could be worse. Could all be GBH even without those potential better Myanmar connections. And don’t check out #beerblog. That ain’t pretty either.

 

Your Thursday Beer News Notes For The Week That The Bills Come

It was supposed to be fun. All fun. But now there is the reckoning. Not just in the sense of #Dryuary but #Skint-uary. #I-spent-all-I-had-uary. No wonder folk feel a pinch and stop splurging. Remember, though… pubs can be for cheap sustenance, too.  And if you are really stuck, here is a guide to getting the booze out even if you want to go out. And even if you get the booze out, just thank your lucky stars you aren’t deep into big US milk.  It’ll be #Dairy-uary next year if this keeps up. Fighting all this as a voice raging in the wilderness, the Pub Curmudgeon posted his warnings about state control of such matters – and included this very attractive poster that should really be placed by every child’s bed.

That being said, first off all hail June Hallworth of the Davenport Arms in Stockport, England, Still working at her family’s pub at 81. Her secret is a surprise:

Despite a life spent around alcohol, Hallworth doesn’t actually drink. “My husband used to ask: ‘Is there nothing you like the look of?’” Yet she has witnessed changing drinking habits: before, you’d struggle to get people out of the pub after last orders. “You’d have to shout at them to drink up. Now, people drink earlier. You can lock up more easily.”

Clearly, June is on team #Dryuary. Wonder if she also minds a mobile phone or a little foul language, too? And here’s something interesting and not unrelated – a map of England indicating where alcohol and drugs are laying people flat, kicking or otherwise. Entitled “Deaths from alcohol and drugs by Local Authority in England” – does it make sense? By which I mean, are there cultural, logical, socio-economic aspect to the information? Why is the lower left tippy-toe bit so much worse off than that other bit up there off the North Sea? Hmm… also not unrelated… a poem… on drinking… circa 1700:

His trembling hand scarce heaves his liquor in,
His nerves all crackle under parchment skin;
His guts from nature’s drudgery are freed,
And in his bowels salamanders breed…

So, at least it is not all new. Speaking of getting at the new, I am not entirely sure that I agree with Matt but I do support his right to argue for the place of what he calls beer media:*

Establishing strong lines of communication with both the beer media and the drinker is essential, but as pointed out in the first part of this series, engaging with these two sets of people are actually very different things. Yes, a press release is an essential tool for getting out snippets of information and keeping people informed about what your business is doing. However, there are more effective—and importantly, more meaningful—ways of engaging with the press.

One would hope that sort of thing does not lead to this sort of thing… Because that is really not that far off other sorts of things. Like how baijiu got where it is today. Baijiu you say?

Produced at a state-owned distillery in Moutai Town, in the scenic southwestern province of Guizhou, Kweichow Moutai is rich in symbolism. “Moutai was the favourite drink of Premier Zhou Enlai, Mao’s longtime number two… He made Moutai the baijiu served at all official state dinners.” Legend has it that Red Army soldiers used it to cleanse their feet on the Long March, while in 1972 Zhou Enlai and President Nixon were famously pictured toasting each other with it. “So it became the baijiu of China’s elite…”

To avoid these various pressures of lobbyists and state control, we need information and, honestly, if believes that one really all should buy the new edition of The World Atlas of Wine:

Robinson bears the main responsibility for this new edition, and her limpid, authoritative style is part of what makes the book so engaging. “At least half of the words on 45% of the pages about wine regions are completely new”, Robinson points out. As with earlier editions, there are excellent introductory sections on how grapes are grown and wines are made, plus wholly new sections on the roles of temperature, sunlight, water, money and climate change on winemaking. There are twenty-two new maps, with some countries (including Brazil, Cyprus and Uruguay) receiving their own pages for the first time.

One thing I have not considered adding to my lifestyle** is home delivery of booze. But now craft is in so it must be good. Yet… the rules for these sorts of things at least in in Toronto are a bit involved:

“When we heard foodora was an option for delivering our beer, we immediately got on board,” said Joey Seaman, head of business development at Bellwoods Brewery said in a release. “This is definitely the most convenient way of getting our beer into the fridges of our local Toronto customers that can’t easily make it to our Bellwoods Brewery bottle shops. Only Smart Serve-certified foodora riders will be delivering alcohol. If the order recipient doesn’t produce valid ID, appears intoxicated, or attempts to purchase for a minor or impaired individual, foodora says that the delivery will be cancelled, and a $20 restocking fee will be applied.

I love that a delivery dude is now empowered to assess the appearance of intoxication and charge a penalty. Like that’s going to happen.

Finally, a bit of the old science after a h/t to Stan:

Here’s a sentence that I never imagined writing in a paper “More generally, the two fly species preferred different #beer styles”. Yup, dear tax payers, we are using your money to investigate which fruit fly species prefers which beers! (And Trust me, this actually is useful!)

At least they gave the flies a selection of fine Belgian beers as part of the program. Oude Kriek was one of the offerings!

Oh, and here is @katzenbrau revealed!

Now that it is a new year, there is still no reason to forget to check in with Boak and Bailey’s on Saturdays, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast now as well! Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast.

*The other term used – “beer writers” – is too wide a label for this purpose, something that the guilds seem to be forgetting.
**Do I really need to say it?

Welcome To The 2020s Edition Of Beery News Notes

I think I lost about three days over the last week. I mean I didn’t notice them slip by at all. It wasn’t any happy haze of a drunken hour or anything. Just the slow drip drip drip of the chocolate assortment boxes being passed around the rooms filled with cousins-in-law, nephews and the pets of others. I was practically temperate all weeks as a matter of fact. Thanks to Katie, I watched the first season of the Detectorists  on DVD – which earned me the stink-eye from our eldest for, again, not having Netflicks.  [See, I didn’t even know it is spelled “Netflix”!]  So, needless to say, I have no real news updates to share.

First up, the blogger known as Wee Beefy had a bit of a sharing post on Boxing Day:

…regular and more astute readers may be aware that since my stroke and more so since my recent brain injury, memories, whatever they are, have not been very high up on my agenda. Longer term readers may also note that throughout the nearly ten year history of my blog, accurate memories of liquids consumed and other aspects of crapulence have thus far regularly escaped me, or at the very least, presented themselves in my memory through a dizzying, contorted haze. So last night, when it took me an hour to find and recall the name of Yorkshiremen the grumbleweeds (not a pub), I was prompted to write.

I’ve actually wondered to myself what, after 17 years of this sort of writing hobby,  might happen were I to have a similar change of life. I assume I would not keep writing. Good to see someone not making that mistake.  I will be reading to see what I can learn.

Jeff at Beervana posted a great scrapbook… album… post… of the favourites among his beery photos.

And to the visual accompaniment of The Beer Nut* on New Year’s Eve, Stephen Beaumont himself concurrently tweeted an excellent and pointed set of wishes for 2020 including:

6) That more breweries operating tap rooms realize that in so doing they are in the hospitality game, and start creating spaces in keeping with that understanding. Also, treating their customers with respect and appreciation. 6/11…

8) That fining and filtration stop being viewed as sins. Yes, hazy works, cloudy works, but there is also nothing wrong with a brilliantly clear beer. 8/11

Switching vices, this is an interesting take from the Beeb on the lack of change that cannibals (aka dope)  becoming legal had on Canadian society:

There were early signs of trouble. When cannabis became legal on 17 October 2018, there wasn’t enough supply to meet the demand. Long lines and backlogs of online orders plagued consumers. Producers weren’t sure what strains would be most popular where, and kinks in the distribution chain were still being ironed out… Where there was once a shortage, now producers have too much product, in part because of the lack of retail. 

The story goes on to say that while we Canucks bought 11,707 kilograms in Sept 2019, about 165,000 kilograms of finished and unfinished products was ready for sale. Frankly, I know of no one who picked up the habit and hear of plenty who still buy off the illegal unregulated market at a much lower price.

On the one hand, I suppose this is entirely good news for Evan and the other authors… but on the other I am not sure why it is news. A gratuitous gift just seems odd. So I trust per word rates will also go up for 2020.

And speaking of curated community, Beth has noted an important limitation on “curation” of “community” – two concepts I have never had much time for: everyone and everything should not be welcome just because sales increase, numbers increase or popularity increases. Things can be bad, especially around alcohol.

You will be happy to know that craft beer is booming in Saskatchewan:

…the major trends right now are hazy New England IPA-style beers, and fruit and sour beers. The hazy beers “are generally very juicy in flavour and they offer a big citrus flavour,” Gasson said. The fruit and sour beers range from very tart to having almost no tartness depending on the style. Gasson thinks those trends will continue, but he also sees more traditional IPAs — that may appeal to a broader audience — making a comeback.

This illustrates the paper-doll moment that good beer is in now. Swap out Saskatchewan for Alabama or Aberdeen and the same sameness applies. Some call it a golden era. It’s conformity. Perhaps even self-censorship.

Contrast that with Gary Gilman who has again added again to our collective substantive experience of beer history with a post on the unrelated brewing Reinhardts of Ontario and Quebec 170 years ago in a series of three posts, including this from the last:

On August 31, 1889, a box ad for the brewery, about 2″x 2″, appeared in Toronto’s The Globe & Mail (institutional access or paywall). The brewery was called Berlin Brewery, with a statement that “E.V. Reinhardt, Prop.”, was “manufacturer of the celebrated Berlin lager” on Queen Street. The ad was in a group of ads from town merchants that accompanied a multi-page feature on Berlin life and industry. Seemingly the business was on a good footing at this time. One imagines that the Toronto Reinhardts were not thrilled to read this over breakfast in their home city. True, it was small beer in relation to them, but as an outpost of an older, well-established Montreal brewery, they probably experienced disquiet over it, apart from seeing “their” name used by someone else.

Elsewhere this week, The Beer Nut* has published his Golden Pint Awards for 2019. This is a thing started by those who have since drifted away into more successful modes of human existence but, along with some really clever wit in the comments section, it’s nice to see a bit of Windows XP era nostalgia being clung onto:

This month makes it ten years since Mark Dredge and Andy Mogg suggested categories that beer bloggers might like to use for an annual run-down of the best in beer. I’ve stuck with it steadfastly since, even if I do change my criteria for the winners each year, and sometimes during the process of writing that year’s entry. It’s not meant to be taken seriously or considered meaningful, is what I’m saying.

[Edit: an earlier entry by Boak and Bailey should be noted, too, as should be the fact they have not posted for two weeks. PANIC!!!!]

Stan‘s latest Hop News by Email! (aka “the HNBE”) newsletter came out this week  and it was a great addition to the beer news chit chattery, including:

Attendees filled out provided evaluation sheets, giving beers a score of 0-5 in seven categories (floral, spicy/herbal, woody/resin/pine, citrus, vegetal/onion/garlic, red fruits, tropical fruit). This certainly was not scientific. The sheets were intended to enhance the experience for attendees more than provide peer reviewable feedback. This was not a trained panel, there was no calibration and it would be silly to present you with a cumulative radar chart for each of the beers. So I won’t. Instead, a couple of overall observations:

Now, based on the above I am not going to make any large observations about my thinking this was all a bit…err… detectorist** but I will leave you to the more fundamental questions of why it is that (i) men like hobbies and (ii) all hobbies eventually bear a strong resemblance to other hobbies.

Note: I drove from the 1780s to the 1840s bit of Ontario on our holiday drive in a Ford Transit mini-bus, passing the Fryfogle Tavern each way. Alarmingly lovely, I always look behind it as we drive by to get a glimpse of where Tiger Dunlop drank in a leanto in the 1820s. Up there at the top is an image actually tweeted alongside the note “John Severn, Brewery, Yonge St., northeast corner Church St.” indicating perhaps that it may well have been painted by Tom Thompson. Which would be lovely.  It was actually apparently painted by Frederic Victor Poole, however. Which is still lovely. Two bits on Ontario’s pre-temperance existence in one paragraph. Beat that, 2020 guess-timate articles.

I must admit to not having much interest in the people who will make the news in beer in 2020 given, as science of yore has explained clearly, they are always about people identified as such in 2019 or earlier. My prediction? 2020 will clearly be best known for the Pellicle-GBH mid-year Asian land wars. We already have a sense of who the loser may… err, will be. And we’ll have plenty more of the really great pro beer writing. That’s always guaranteed.

Somewhat similarly, I can’t think of a better example of underwhelming fact finding than this article in Forbes which seemingly relies exclusively on old big craft brewery owners or executives posing as a “cross-section” assessing how we got to the current market as “beer experts” – a term without meaning in itself – here used to suggest that somehow they are not just players with a possibly fading interest.  Consider this:

…according to Schuhmacher, all of that capex spending could become a problem in the years to come. “The next decade will reveal a tremendous amount of excess brewing capacity, which will drive closures, consolidation, and lower pricing,” he said.

As we know,*** this actually was the tale of 2018 which accelerated in to 2019. We are well down this path. In my own town we are three breweries down compared to a year ago. A healthy retraction. But, again, remembering presented as forecasting. Who saw tree hug leftie New Belgium selling to the pals of the right wing military dictatorship? Now that would have been forecasting!

Should grocery stores selling beer have designated beer aisles as opposed to loss leader end placements? Recovering alcoholics might prefer it:

…it’s “inappropriate” to be displaying alcoholic beverages in grocery aisles alongside basic food items, including products that are marketed to children. “Alcohol is not a normal commodity. It makes you intoxicated. It’s a psychoactive substance. It’s a Group 1 carcinogen. So, from the point of view of a child seeing alcohol in a grocery store, it normalizes a substance which is not the same as the other products that are in that grocery store.”

Hmm… that actually seems reasonable.

So, there… another year and another decade.  It is now The Twenties.  The decade near at the end of which I get a pension.  There’s a cheery thought. As you contemplate that, don’t forget to check in with Boak and Bailey’s on Saturdays, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too.

*JOHN!!! HIS NAME IS JOHN AND HE IS A HUMAN BEING!!!!
**For the next three weeks I shall so compare all things in life’s rich pageant.
***Come for the news, stay for the gratuitous slag!

The Last Thursday Beer News Update Before Santa Visits And Delivers All The Stuff

Yuletide.  Its been busy so far this month but after one last late evening meeting for work tonight I think I might be sliding into Yule proper.  As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the days of the Christmas Yuletide Hogmanay Kwanzaa and Hanukkah Beery photo contest may be well past us but the archives go on and on. To the left is 2014‘s co-winning entry from Thomas Cizauskas, one of the drinks world’s longest serving bloggers (care of Yours for Good Fermentables) and general gentleman of the trade. I remember being immediately taken by the way it reminds me of Vermeer, busily full of subtle detail.

Speaking of detail, the efforts of Boak and Bailey to single handedly keep beer blogging going never fail to impress and this week we have, in addition to their normal weekly roundup as well as a summary of their favourites among their own posts,* a wonderful summary of the best that they have read from the blogs of others:

We do this not only as a reminder that there’s lots of great stuff being produced by talented writers but also because writing online is transitory – you sweat over something, it has its moment of attention, then sinks away into the bottomless depths of the Eternal Feed. The pieces we’ve chosen below excited or interested us when they were published an, rereading them this weekend, retained their power. They tell us things we didn’t already know, challenge our thinking, find new angles on old stories, and do it with beautiful turns of phrase and delightful images.

Wonderful and particularly wonderful as they liked my August 2019 post on Lambeth Ale to include it. I don’t get the time as much to do research so I am pleased that one was pleasing.

Look! A wonderful pub in England. In a time of need, too. Elsewhere, holiday tragedy struck in Scotland this week when a truck full of Brussel sprouts went off the road.

The vehicle pulling the trailer full of the Christmas dinner vegetable overturned in Queensferry Road in Rosyth at about 10.45. Police Scotland said it had closed the road and was urging drivers to avoid the area. A spokesman tweeted: “There’s been a bit of a Brussel Sprouts accident at the roundabout at Admiralty Road.” The tweet added: “Please avoid the area if possible. Traffic and Christmas dinners may be affected. Apologies for any delays.”

Now, you may say what has this got to do with beer but there is nothing so good as a sprout covered in gravy washed about the gums by a faceful of Fullers Vintage Ale on the 25th of December and I will call out anyone who disagrees. By the way, if the city is Brussels why is the sprout singular? Ha ha! They are not. It’s Brussels sprouts. I grew them once about twenty years ago. Only pick them after a few frosts. Top tip, that.

Speaking of not beer, there is a wine glut in the world:

From a balance of supply and demand for bulk wine as recently as a couple of years ago, we are now in surplus worldwide thanks to some abundant recent vintages, and also possibly due to declining demand as consumers trade up while per capita consumption levels off or declines.

Speaking of holidays, excess and mindless abandon, I have learned that the good folk in Australia have come out with new drinking guidelines which are prefaced in a very Antipodean style:

“We’re not telling Australians how much to drink. We’re providing advice about the health risks from drinking alcohol so that we can all make informed decisions in our daily lives. This advice has been developed over the past three years using the best health evidence available,” says Professor Anne Kelso, CEO of the National Health and Medical Research Council.  “In 2017 there were more than 4,000 alcohol-related deaths in Australia, and across 2016/17 more than 70,000 hospital admissions. Alcohol is linked to more than 60 medical conditions, particularly numerous cancers. So, we all need to consider the risks when we decide how much to drink.”

Good way to send the message. And similarly from the “the sky ain’t falling department, the Pub Curmudgeon reports on the after effects of the lowering of the drunk driving limits in Scotland five years on, objecting to a study’s core findings:

This month sees the fifth anniversary of the reduction of the drink-driving limit in Scotland in December 2014. At the time, the immediate impact on the licensed trade was such that it caused a noticeable downward blip in Scotland’s national GDP figure. Now, five years later a study by academics at Stirling University has examined the longer-term effect on the trade and, perhaps predictably, concluded that it hasn’t really made a great deal of difference, saying that “Most participants reported no long‐term financial impact on their business.”

He argues that the rural pub is affected the most and therefore the study places its finger on the wrong outcome. Interesting…

Speaking of criticism, there is a wonderful piece on the site for NPR’s foodie show The Splendid Table on how the role of restaurant critic has evolved since the 1970s:

Today, the relationship between restaurant critics and restaurants themselves is kind of adversarial; it wasn’t then. To me, we the people who were cooking the food and the people who were writing about it were all on the same team. And as time went on, I started seeing my role changing a little bit in that I honestly believe that cities get the restaurants they demand. I started in the mid-1970s, and by the mid-1980s I was starting to think that it was really important that people be more demanding of restaurants, that the food in the city would be better if people didn’t settle for mediocrity.

Is good beer, therefore, almost four decades behind?** Or is the good beer writing about good beer now good?

Speaking of being behind, I am ashamed I never heard of this story of racial discrimination, one beer and the Supreme Court of Canada from eighty years ago:

…since Christie vs. York was handed down, 80 years ago this month, little else has been known about the man who took a Montreal tavern to court for refusing to serve him because he was black. Civil rights activists in Montreal, wanting to honour his legacy, have been trying to locate Christie’s relatives and gather more information about him.  It was believed he moved to Vermont in disgust after the Supreme Court decision. That’s where the trail ran cold.

I should unpack that case. The majority opinion reads like something from the 1800s. The single dissenting ruling sounds like modern law.

Someday, brewery features will features sources other than the brewery owner.  Until then, there is this. Tell me if you’ve heard it before.

That’s it. A bit of coal after many pressies. Next week’s edition will be out on Boxing Day. Make sure you are good and lubricated for the wonder that ye shall behold. And don’t forget that there’s more news at Boak and Bailey’s on Saturday, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. Merry Christmas to you all!!!

*…in which they include my favorite post of the year from anyone, their piece “The Swan With Two Necks and the gentrification issue” from November.
**That is so meta of me.

The Thursday Beery News For When The Winds Of November Come Early

Fine. Here we are. It’s now dark as midnight on the bus ride home from work. The garden is all dead. Dead. Dark. Wind. Cold. And these sensations are also the first hints of the happy holiday season. Depending on your cultural context, it may be just three, four, five or six weeks from the day when everyone packs it in and hits both the bottle and the buffet hard. Not everyone is waiting. My pal Ben, who is semi-Nepalese, is traveling there and found a good beer that was also basically semi-Nepalese. As illustrated. No reports yet on if it was any good.

Also internationalistically, now that craft beer has co-opted kveik, is Lar on the hunt for another indigenous set of yeast strains from Russia?

Kveik signals very clearly when it’s done. It’s almost like the little critters are knocking on the glass, saying “we’re done now.” Starter turns all grainy, and once you stop the stirrer, they settle out in 3-4 minutes. Not so with this Russian yeast. It’s just as milky still.

Speaking of new discoveries, another new beer publication was launched this week, Beer Edge featuring the northeast US’s Andy Crouch and John Holl. The subscription rate is a bit out of my snack bracket but we are promised tidbits au gratis from time to time, focused perhaps more on the trade side of things than whatever community means or doesn’t mean:

From long-form writing that explores the culture, business, and process of brewing, to shorter essays, think pieces, and timely editorials, Beer Edge hosts sharp writing that provides context to an industry that often just receives cursory coverage. For consumers, bartenders, brewers, industry executives, distributors, farmers, bar owners, tourism boards, analysts, and anyone else eager for more news about the craft beer industry… 

Speaking of the trade everywhere, Crystal Luxmore tweeted about an organization and an issue that needs more attention:

When you love tasting, selling and making alcohol it feels like drinking is a joyful part of the job — but it also opens you up to massive health risks and addiction issues…

The organization is Not 9 to 5 and the issue is over-drinking on the job when your just is in the drinks trade. More here.  Not at all unrelated, a British self-described archaeologist, technologist, infovore, mediocre chef under the nom de plume “Archaic Inquiries” published a rather shocking piece on the role of alcohol in archaeology:

I’ve not worked outside of archaeology much, so perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that I didn’t think that was a particularly inappropriate thing to say to a supervisor you’d just met (though it didn’t strike me as very smart). But as I thought about it, I started to recall all the antics of archaeologists under the influence, both adorable (getting in trouble for using government jello for wrestling at the McMurdo Antarctic research station) and not so adorable (I once saw a crew chief fall out of the company truck because she couldn’t stand… at the end of the work day).

I also learned that we “shouldn’t giggle when someone pukes into their shovel test pit“! Wow. I have not had a drink since Saturday. Seriously.

Bread.

I have a confession. And not that I have puked in a test shovel pit. No, I am uncomfortably interested in one aspect of the TV show from 40 years ago, Three’s Company. Only one aspect, I said. The Regal Beagle. Why? Well, the past is a foreign land worth studying. And when writing my bits of the history of Ontario, I realized that SCTV’s McKenzie Brothers and their movie Strange Brew was a last vision of the world of Canadian beer before micro hit us all over the head. So, too, in a way was Three’s Company‘s  Regal Beagle – an American vision of a 1970s faux British pub.  I want to put together enough images to figure out the pub set to see what what props were considered necessary 45 years ago. Here’s a blurry analogue vid view of the bar unfortunately filled with bad acting. There seem to be three beer engines back there but were they used? Here is a gif posted this week of Ralph Furley walking into the place, showing the brasses by the door. Here is another tweet with an image of the one bleak plot of the entire show – but with the bonus of an out of place “Ye Olde English” nutcracker sitting at the end of the bar, the couple in the background (above) expressing it for all of us.

Getting back to real life nostalgia, Alistair of Fuggles fame was able to revisit the Prague of his twenties and visit his old favour boozer, U Slovanské lipy:

…no airs and graces, no pointless fripperies, and the majority of patrons were locals rather than tourists, perfect. The big thing that had changed though was the prices. Where I had been used to paying only 20kč for a half litre of Kout’s magisterial 10° pale lager, the nearest equivalent available, Albrecht 10° from Zámecký pivovar Frýdlant, was about double that. Yeah, it was odd having sticker shock in a Czech pub, but a quick conversion in my brain telling me the beer was $2 a pop for superb lager soon put that into context.

In upstate New York, a tiny town voted to go “wet” this week:

In a 3-to-1 vote, the referendum, aimed at making the town “wet” again, passed and a town that has been dry since Prohibition will now be wet. “I’m all for it, absolutely,” said Eleanor deVries on Tuesday afternoon after voting, adding that the town needs it economically.

I trust Eleanor has settled down since Tuesday’s results. Economically, by the way, is the new medicinally.

Sadly but yet again, your weekly reminder that good beer people are not all good people – this time, the distasteful and fairly racist Halloween outfit edition:

Breweries can talk about diversity all they want but when this idiocy still happens it shows how far craft beer has to go to create a safe and welcoming space for POC. You need to not just talk about diversity but “walk the walk”.

I might have added “…as well as a welcoming space for non-fascists…” but that’s just me. Not quite as horrible, but still thoughtless…

You know what’s shitty? A prime time TV show on one of the major channels asking for free beer for their changing rooms & wrap party in exchange for ‘exposure’. If you are paying hundreds of thousands of pounds for your ‘talent’ you can afford a few hundred on some fucking beers…

Conversely and to end on a happy note, Jeff gave us a four photo explanation of why in Sicily he has proclaimed:

This place immediately enters my top ten of best drinking establishments I’ve been to in my life…

Exhibit A. Exhibit B. Exhibit C. Exhibit D. Case closed.

There you go. A bit of a global tour. In space and time. The good. The bad. The ugly. For further beery links, check out the Boak and Bailey news update on Saturday and then bend an ear towards the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays. And look to see if there was a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well.

The Halloween Edition Of Thursday Beer News. Boo.

I’d be a bit nervous at the Sing Sing Kill Brewery

Ah, Halloween. A right nor-easter is promised meaning 100 mph winds, lashing rain – and me lonely and all dressed up at the front door looking at a bowl with a minimum of 15,000 calories per handful. We get maybe 12 kids max in a good year. Maybe. I have a vegetable garden on my front lawn. I am marked as a neighbourhood weirdo. But I get ahead of myself. Halloween is tonight. The Future. What’s gone on this past week?

Last Friday just as the weekly news cycle began, Jeff posted about the problem with novelty as it turns into longevity:

Every brewery that was once an emblem of a shining new future—Widmer, Hair of the Dog, Ninkasi, Boneyard (to cite local examples)—has seen trends move on without them. Great Notion and Ruse are the current trendsetters, but time continues to march. We have absolutely no experience of what happens when four thousand breweries immediately become “old school” before our eyes.

Coming up on three years ago now, I wondered about novelty and whether it was possible that today’s twenty somethings could “actually get a bit verklempt over memories of weird fruit flavoured gose thirty years from now.” Interesting that weird fruit flavoured gose is sorta dead to us all now. It’s so 2017. Novelty’s pace has increased. The Pub Curmudgeon posted about another aspect of the same phenomenon, the pervasive presence of recently but no longer quite cool craft:

 It’s not the absolute bleeding edge of craft, but even so it’s a pretty respectable selection, including the likes of Vocation, Magic Rock, Thornbridge, Five Points, Crate, Toast and Camden. It’s interesting that pretty much all of these beers now seem to have moved from bottles to cans. The German discounters, Aldi and Lidl, have introduced their own-brand “craft-a-likes” at even lower prices. This has attracted a certain amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the craft influencers, complaining that such low prices will devalue the concept and won’t give brewers a decent return.

Good value should always be something we are grateful for. In any other marketplace, this is called The Victory Of The Consumer! What? You disagree? Did I miss something?

Note: he didn’t drop the beer.

Ron unpacked an advert he found for the sale of Barclay’s Russian Stout from that part of the foreign land known as the past, aka 1922:

…another Barclay’s Russian Stout advert. With some more interesting claims. The oddest being that Bismarck liked Russian Stout. Especially as the advert is from just after WW I, when there was still considerable anti- German feeling.

These things are funny. In 1816, a year after the end of a bitter border war with the US of A, Albany Ale was being sold in my fair military town.

Business Insider posted an interesting short video bio of Celeste Beatty, the first African American woman to own a brewery in the US, the Harlem Brewing Company in New York City. Here is a Forbes story on her from a few years ago with more background.  Speaking of vids, here is a scene from a Scottish pub the very noo.

The shadowy Portman Group is at it again but this time I fully agree if only because the Bearded Brewery defended its cider named Suicyder because “the noose references reflected the owner’s previous career at the Forestry commission where a noose was used to dismantle unsafe trees“! If one is going to attorn to the jurisdiction of a trade tribunal please do not be silly. I am an owner of The Ashley Book of Knots and I know no one in their right mind would every use a noose to take apart a tree given a noose is used to tighten on to a short stubby think like a head. To be clear, I give you a selection of arborists knots. Knots don’t lie.

Health news update. Or really not an update as this is old news. Again, there is no j-curve. Don’t believe otherwise – alcohol is just about degrees of badness:

…for a long time, the consensus was that abstaining from alcohol is unhealthier than consuming moderate amounts of alcohol (equivalent to one or two drinks a day). But that “J”-shaped relationship between alcohol consumption, and death and disease, has come under criticism. It’s now widely understood that a lot of this data could be flawed: people abstaining from alcohol may be doing so because they’re unwell, rather than becoming unwell because they’re abstaining.

Here in Ontario, we have no need to worry about the j-curve or not as, woohoo, the new government is passing new relaxed liquor laws left right and center:

The Ford government is pledging more changes to alcohol access in Ontario — announcing plans on Monday to allow international airports to serve booze 24-hours a day, and to remove limits on how much beer, wine and spirits can be brought across provincial or territorial borders for personal use. Those two promises are among a sweeping list of changes, packaged as the ‘Better for People, Smarter for Business Act’… The Bill also promises to ease restrictions on bringing dogs onto restaurant patios, and inside certain breweries in the province.

Those booze runs I made into nearby Quebec all those years ago? Smuggling. NO MORE!!! What a great law. Huh? Holy crap! “The Bees Act is repealed“!!!

I enjoyed the personal essay, photo set and brewery founder interview by Lily Waite run in Pellicle this week on the Table Beer produced by London brewery, The Kernel:

“The other thing—and I think it helps Table Beer more so than the others—is the fact that we still put all of our beers through a second fermentation,” Evin tells me over a shared bottle. “The extra little bit of yeast character and fermentation by-products that you get—hop biotransformations, too—those really hard-to-define things, they’re key to Table Beer.” Though I’ve drunk many brown-papered beers in search of that fugitive quality, I’m reluctant to believe it’s simply down to a second fermentation. I’m much more inclined to believe that it is, in fact, a little bit of magic.

It’s good not always to dissect something but convey the pleasure of it all. I think the author has done that. These pieces, like Matt C’s before, are love letters. But there are technical tidbits, too: (i) “…as with all of their beers, the strength varies from batch to differently-hopped batch…“; (ii) “…[i]t’s now brewed weekly, every Friday…“; (iii) “…a fullness of body, achieved through high mash temperatures and oats in the grist…” All of which add up to a story that is telling you that the beer is borne more by the technique than the ingredients. Very interesting.

The proud Canadian company formerly known as Molson is still theoretically out there, now going through another hybridization and perhaps some degree of bionic implantation:

Most support functions, including finance, information technology, procurement, supply chain, legal and human resources, will be consolidated in Milwaukee. The company will continue to maintain global business services offices there and in Bucharest, Romania. The Molson Coors International team, meanwhile, will be reconstituted, with its Latin American team becoming part of a new North American Emerging Growth team headed by Pete Marino. Its Asia, Pacific and Africa team will fold under the Europe business unit, which will be led by Simon Cox.

Interesting to note that they are branching out into other areas including a “forthcoming line of cannabis-infused nonalcoholic beverages in Canada.” Sounds hellish to me but the baby boomers love this sort of stuff apparently.

That is it for now. Get going on the tricking and the treating. For further beery links, check out the Boak and Bailey news update on Saturday and then bend an ear towards the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays. The last one featured a great interview with Ren Navarro, owner of the consulting and education firm Beer. Diversity.  And look for mid-week notes from The Fizz as well.

 

The Thursday Beer News Update For A Week When My Mind Was Elsewhere

On Tuesday, I had a great joke all prepared for my proctologist, analogizing with him or her over the election results. But… well, at least in the end, we seem to have had a good result. In both senses. Not much time for me to focus on the beer industry, however, which makes this week’s beer update as much news to me as to you. Let’s see what’s been going on.

First, speaking of biological science, Stan sent out his regular hops newsletter this week and, as exemplified by the photo up at the top, decided to provide some photos from the Hop Research Center in Hüll, Germany that Evan recently wrote about, as mentioned in last week’s news update. Up there, that’s a picture of some of the Center’s germ plasm collection of long-held varieties. Want more? You will have to pay Stan for back issues of his newsletter now if you want to see the images but haven’t subscribed already.*

The biggest story has to be the member of management at Founders giving testimony in a disposition that he did not know if someone who was… well, let’s see see how the story was covered:

A transcript of the exchange between Founders’ Detroit general manager Dominic Ryan and Evans’ attorney, Jack Schulz, shows Schulz shifting from shocked to incredulous and perhaps a bit angry as Ryan claims he had no idea Evans is Black. Instead of just answering the question and moving on, Ryan digs in deeper and deeper, repeatedly asking for clarification when Schulz asks questions like “Are you aware Tracy is Black?” At one point, Ryan even claims that he doesn’t know if former President Barack Obama, Kwame Kilpatrick, or Michael Jordan are African-American, because he has “never met them.”

The Beer Law Center tweeted: “This is stupid. The “if I didn’t say it, you can’t prove it” strategy – quite simply – sucks. The law, justice, trials, and courts, just don’t work that way. Shame on Founders.” As a practicing lawyer a quarter century into his career, I can’t disagree. The person diving the testimony did themselves no favours. Plenty of rightly offended folk now rejecting the brewery like Beery Ed: “if you still drink founders , you suck.” Which is true.

Boak and Bailey proposed a scoring system this week to determine if a British pub is in fact a pub.

Monty Python’s Terry Jones was on the BBC in 1984 and discussed both dental hygiene in medieval Britain and his brewing. Wogan preferred keg to cask. Jones, having a multi-faceted shirt malfunction announced: “real beer can only be made on a small scale.” Heed ye all!

Lisa Grimm has had a timely article published in Serious Eats about the haunted history of the Lemp family of brewers out of St. Louis:

Today’s beer history installment is something of a micro-level view of my previous column on German-American brewers—but this one has a Halloween twist. The story of the rise and fall of the Lemps, once one of America’s most powerful brewing families, reads like something out of gothic fiction; and, as would be entirely appropriate for that genre, some say that they’ve never left. The story begins familiarly enough…

A great technical article on barley came my way entitled “Characterising resilience and resource-use efficiency traits from Scots Bere and additional landraces for development of stress tolerant barley” I believe from @merryndineley. Now I have to go and look again at the standard for “landrace” when it comes to barley as I’ve seen husbandry in the 1600s but when we are talking bere we are talking about something much older than that as the abstract suggests:

Potential sources of viable resilience and resource-use efficiency traits are landraces local to areas of marginal land, such as the Scots Bere from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Bere barley is a deeply historically rooted landrace of barley that has been grown on predominately marginal land for the last half millennia. The landrace yields well in these conditions. The project aim was to assess and genetically characterise traits associated with enhanced resistance/tolerance, and to identify contributing genomic regions.

Speaking of great technical articles, I was blessed with a copy of an article on the history of Fuggles hops by the perennially referenced Martyn which, this time, appeared in Technical Quarterly published by Master Brewers Association:

The Fuggle hop is one of the most important varieties on the planet, not only in its own right as a contributor to the flavor of classic English beers for more than a century but also for the genes it has given to almost three dozen other hops… It is surprising, therefore, that until this year there was considerable mystery over the parentage of the Fuggle—it seemed to be unrelated to any other English hop type, with a hop oil profile much closer to the German landrace variety Tettnanger—and a fair amount of doubt and confusion over exactly who developed the hop and when it was first commercially available. Now, however, research in England and the Czech Republic has convincingly answered all the questions…

Nice article in Pellicle on the realities of the beer scene in Iceland:

We had moved up to the bar at Kaldi, and the low-hanging bulbs made the copper bar top and our bartender’s shaved head shine in the dim light. I had just ordered the Borg Garún Icelandic Stout Nr. 19, an 11.5% behemoth. If you haven’t heard, beer and food are pretty expensive Iceland. Pints of basic craft styles were $12-$15 (£9-£12) everywhere, and the higher in alcohol pours were $20-$30 (£15-£23).

Even at those prices, beats the hell out of an vaguely described essay on (what Canadians properly spell as) bologna.  Sums something up.

Katie tweeting on junkets triggered that a discussion wasn’t the usual monocrop of defensiveness.

There was a discussion on Facebook on the early days of the British Guild of Beer Writers awards dinners with some entertaining recollections. Martyn** recalled a night 22 years ago:

The earliest awards dinner menu I have is from 1997 – ham cured in Newcastle Brown Ale (!), accompanied by figs steeped in Old Peculier, breast of guinea fowl braised in Fraoch heather ale, pears in porter and cheese served with McEwans Champion Beer. Dinner sponsored by Tesco …

Ah, the romance… Related perhaps is this thread about traditional brewing in today’s alcopop world.

That’s it? Yup. For further links, check out the Boak and Bailey news update on Saturday and then bend an ear towards the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays. And look for mid-week notes from The Fizz as well.

*I don’t make the rules. Stan does.
**Again with the Martyn!!!