Health – Page 3 – A Good Beer Blog

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 Most Thoroughly August Edition Of Your Beery News Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Sodden And Soaked Mid-July 2024 Mid-Tropical Storm Beryl Beery News Notes

OK, a busy week. Away on the weekend for the rugby, Canada v. Scotland in Ottawa. Photo by me. Scotland won. I wore blue. Then covering for others at the office. Others won. I was blue. So… early in the week I was thinking that this week’s update may be a short one. Or I might just make some stuff up. Then… Beryl came a’callin’. Tropical Storm Beryl that is. Formerly Hurrican B. I won’t really know if the tomatoes survived until after this here update hits the presses. I may have even scheduled this early for publication, typos and all, just to be on the safe side of the power grid. Wouldn’t want to leave The Beer Nut with nothing to read. That’d be bad.

What else is going on? Big news hereabouts is the strike at the government store, the LCBO. Here is a handy primer on some of the main issues. The Premier is out there on his intern’s social media feeds telling people to buy local, buy elsewhere while the strike goes on. Gary, being the anarchist, wants to burn the whole place down. Robin, being the authoritarian, reads everyone their rights. Jordan broke out some of his excel sheetery, gave it all a good shake and shared a few resulting thoughts:

The LCBO’s dividend to the Ontario government as a crown corporation is up 770 million dollars since 2015 and it is because they have repatriated funds that were going to foreign owned brewers through The Beer Store chain. That 770 million dollars represents 13.3% market share. Back of the napkin math says that if The Beer Store gets run out of town, there’s 2.39 billion dollars up for grabs annually, and increasing rapidly due to inflation… Grocery and Convenience are likely to continue being wholesaled by the LCBO, which means there are going to be a lot of warehousing positions that need staffing. A lot of logistics. A lot of administrative positions. If you let the approximately 2.39 billion that’s about to shift direction go without a fight go, you’d be crazy.

See, in conservative Ontario, statist socialism is incredibly good business. See? Similarly, there was a bit of handbaggery in the UK over “socialist member owned grocery chain” The Co-operative* when they put out an ad recommending that people shop for their beer at their stores ahead of some sort of sporting event. The Campaign for Pubs, clearly a business oriented front, even issued a press release as illustrated to the right. Le Protz exemplified the capitalist outrage:

If you can’t make it to the pub to watch the England match, please don’t buy beer from @coopuk in response to their anti-pub #EURO2024.

It strikes me a odd that a business is not able to advertise its own wares without striking terror in the hearts of another set of businesses. It seems odder that Mr. Protz is backing the right wing of the discussion over the left one. Me? When I drink, I drink at home more than in pubs. Old Mudgie seems to share my views:

…this response comes across as distinctly thin-skinned and precious. Pubs are commercial businesses, not sacred institutions, and have no right to be shielded from the rough-and-tumble of competition… The venues that benefit most from the football will tend to be knocked-through drinking barns where most of the customers are on Stella or Madri, not chocolate-box locals or trendy craft bars, many of which won’t even show it in the first place… Being referred to in your competitors’ advertising is generally regarded as a sign of strength rather than weakness, as pointed out by licensee Joe Buckley, who took the ad as a compliment to the pub sector.

Hmm… What would Mr. Protz think of one medical professional’s advice on drinking during these summer heatwaves, as reported in The Daily Star:

But did you know it can also affect you or your partner’s ability to perform in the bedroom? When dehydrated, your body reacts by producing less red blood cells and plasma needed for proper blood flow. It also produces increased levels of a hormone called angiotensin to compensate for low fluid levels, meaning your blood vessels will narrow to conserve fluid, reducing the amount of blood able to reach the penis, causing issues getting or maintaining an erection. Consider limiting your caffeine and alcohol intake as these can have diuretic effects.

Perhaps reading those sorts of reports, big brewer Carlsberg announced plans to move in a decidedly less boozy direction, according to The Independent:

Brewing giant Carlsberg has agreed a huge £3.3 billion deal to buy Robinsons squash maker Britvic. The UK soft drinks firm, which also makes J2O and Tango, told shareholders on Monday morning it will recommend the latest deal – which is valued at £4.1 billion when debts are taken into account – after rejecting a previous £3.1 billion offer. Carlsberg will pay 1,315p per share to Britvic investors under the deal. Britvic also holds an exclusive licence with US partner PepsiCo to make and sell brands such as Pepsi, 7up and Lipton iced tea in the UK.

Speaking of which, here is a stat that I can’t wait for US craft beer spokespeople to spin. Have a look at this graph and then read the following as published in Craft Brewing Business:

…the BPI is a forward-looking indicator measuring expected demand from beer distributors — one month forward. A reading greater than 50 indicates the segment is expanding, while a reading below 50 indicates the segment is contracting. The craft index for June 2024 was 27. Blah. The BPI’s total beer index of 58 marked the highest June reading since 2021, as well as the fourth straight month in expansion (>50) territory.

Craft = Blah. That’s not good. It was also a drop to the 27 Blah Zone from 2023’s Ho Hum of 38. Which is all sorts of yikes.

Neither blah or yikes is the tale told by Isabelle O’Carroll in Pellicle this week of a Balkan pastry, the Burek:

At its core a burek is a yufka (or phyllo pastry) pie, often filled with an egg and cheese mixture, (but sometimes vegetables or meat) and usually (but not always) rolled into a spiral before baking. Take a glancing look at the AskBalkans subReddit and you’ll get an idea of the roiling debates on the proper name and correct filling for bureks. “Go to Bosnia and ask for a burek with cheese, suddenly you’re waking up in the ER with multiple life-threatening wounds, I don’t think we even agree on burek,” one Redditor said. “You said a pita is a burek, which is not true unless you’re okay with calling all pitas bureks, which means you’d call maslenice, mantije, and other meals with jufka bureks, too! Which you said you don’t. It’s okay to just admit you’re wrong, you know?”

Glad we cleared that up! Speaking of science, we read this report that came out this week and see this is the summary in the abstract presented by the journal:

Moderate chronic consumption of IPA beer and hops infusion showed antigenotoxic effects in mice but no antimutagenic action.

Pretty sure that does not equal “[d]rinking IPAs in moderation has shown it does not have an adverse effect on health” very much at all. Seems to me the more likely route to something that does not seem to have an adverse health effect (with all due respect to all neo-boozy-Babbits dreaming of the unthinking life) is not drinking alcohol. Which means NA beer. There’s a lot of money apparently in selling nothing. Yet, if that nada produces nuttin’… why keep it from the kids?

Since these beverages contain virtually no alcohol, they can largely be sold to anyone, anywhere; they’re stocked on grocery and convenience store shelves around the country, and purchasable online. But Collins doesn’t sell to anybody under 18 years old at this store, and he checks ID’s to enforce that rule. “When there’s no minimum age, can a nine-year old come into your store and buy a non-alcoholic Corona? For me, I don’t want that perception,” Collins says. Collins set his own age limit, and he’s free to set it however he wants because in Maryland — as in the majority of states — there are no state age restrictions on who can buy adult non-alcoholic beverages.

Really? That’s odd. I would not buy them for my kids – if I still had little kids – because they are slightly insanely expensive! Odd. And Katie in an abbreviated edition of The Gulp asked another very odd question:

Why do men order default drinks for the ir female partners without asking them what they’d like?

I’d get shot if I did that! My mother would have shot my father if he did that – and don’t even start about Grannie! Or Great-Grannie for that matter! I am and come from a long line of men who would be dead if, you know, they weren’t dead already.

Speaking of socialists, did you hear that Keir Starmer and the Labour party gave the Tories the boot in the UK? Always nice when the Tories get the boot somewhere. He is by reports a pub lad. The Spirits Business, not a journal for professional clairvoyants, gave its thoughts on the wish list of policies which may now roll out for the British booze trade, including this from Mark Kent, chief executive of the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA):

“During the rest of 2024, there will be opportunities to support Scotch in the first budget of the new Parliament, secure a trade deal with India which will reduce tariffs on Scotch whisky in this key market, and work closely with the industry as we continue on our journey towards net zero.” He added that the organisation looks forward to working with the MPs to “ensure that Scotch whisky is at the heart of the central mission of the next five years – growth and economic renewal”.

Not correcting the imbalanced non-dom taxation, not strengthening national defence, not boosting public education or restoring health services… whisky.

Before, as discussed below, the doors close, ATJ got in one last post at GBH which refreshingly is about hunting out good beer and some sort of perversity in Belgium:

Perversely, in the land where Lambic, gueuze, and Trappist ales are heralded and celebrated, lager is dominant. However, these beers might be popular, but they are often seen by connoisseurs as one-dimensional and simply designed to quench thirst as well as being easy on the pocket. Most of these beers have as much in common with the Ur-lagers of central Europe as a kangaroo has with a chicken—they both have two legs, but that’s it. This is why Brasserie de la Mule, led by its young founder and head brewer Joel Galy, is unique, especially as it has only been in existence for three years.

And finally, Good Beer Hunting has suspended operations with a florish offered by way of announcement:

We have some ideas for what the future of Good Beer Hunting might look like—and soon I’ll be working on that vision with the counsel of my colleagues to see where it takes us. But the earliest vision is so drastically different than what GBH currently is, that the only way to get to the other side is to make a clean break. We’ve got to clear out the cache. We’ve got to quiet everything down for a bit and see what it all sounds like on the other side of that silence. We’re shutting down our various content streams—the podcast, the website, social—ending a sort of always-on feed of content that’s been, for many of us writers, editors, and artists, our life’s work. And for most of us, our best work.

Quite so. And that makes sense despite the lamentations of the writing circle. For some time, as careful readers will know, I have noticed** that the focus had shifted as the frequency of posts decreased. Sightlines continues under separate URL but with little seemingly on offer given the sparce front window. And the business model has had a heavy burn rate. Yup, a new title and framing as perhaps a broader audience travel and lifestyle magazine would fit better with the pieces which have been the mainstay of GBH for some time. As noted above, these are not the days to invest in whatever craft has become so any retooling is the wisest approach.***

There! Plenty to read and discuss. 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… 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.

*Great-grandpa apparently refused to eat anything bought from anywhere but The Co-op.
**Perhaps after others, I’ve always remembered this tweet from Matty from 2018: “…for a short while now I have felt my own ambitions do not align with that of GBH, and as such I have chosen to go in my own direction…” which was the beginning of Pellicle in a way.
***Conversely, following through on the comment sent to contributors might not be wise: “We still plan to pursue our special print edition featuring original work and new stories from the world of beer, spirits, and food, called “Beer & Brine,” although we’re not committing to a specific timeline for that at the moment.“
****This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,483) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For The First Fabulous Harvest Of The Year

Here we are. Scape pesto to the left of me. Scape pesto to the right. OK, fine. Not really. But the mid-June plucking of the 435 or so scapes and zipping them into a small bucket of goo with a litre of olive oil is a good thing. Martha Stewart circa 1998 good. Free food. And there’s more. I’ll lift the whole plants in three or four weeks to be bundled and dried in the shed before they are sorted and replanted in October. You get the 450 seed cloves for planting in the fall for next year’s harvest, more than 1000 second best cloves for eating, the three litres of scape pesto and – who knew? – the scape tips and dried garlic straw for anti-bug mulching around the tomato patch. All from a 5 x 11’s worth of raised bed. Highly recommended. Start your own tiny garlic ranch come the autumn.

The biggest bestest reading this week was from Katie at The Gulp and her piece “Beer Has A Sex Problem.” It’s a theme that is admittedly well explored but perhaps not as well – dare I say as radically – argued as this:

…in a conversation with drinks writer Rachel Hendry, we both agreed on something: women who don’t drink beer want something that matches their mood. A drink that accentuates their style and punctuates their sentences. A drink that makes them feel how they want to feel. When I go out and choose not to drink beer—and I’m reminding you here, I’m a woman—it’s because I want something chic like a martini, or sexy and flirty like a spicy margarita. Easy-breezy like a vodka tonic. Beer is seriously unsexy. Is that why women who don’t love beer for all its flavours and styles and aromas don’t drink it? I don’t know. Has anyone asked them? What do women want? As Rachel says: “To feel sexy! And strong! And smart! And sensual! Give me a champagne coupe!”

Question: is that just an approach exclusively for women? Beer trade writers will tell you that a beer suits all situations… but does really? Don’t you feel like a bit of a dork with your brown tall neck brewski when everyone is having wine and talking intelligently about it? Wouldn’t you feel dumb having a beer chaser when there is a dram of good whisky in the other paw?

Speaking of social situations, Boak and Bailey linked to this great article in Esquire on ceremony of buying a round:

Maybe six people took me up on the offer. To my left, a pair of guys who were visiting from Atlanta told me one of them was a doctor, and he could tell I’d just had a baby because of the hospital bracelet on my wrist. They drank beers, and as one of them took a sip, I heard him say, “This is why I love New York.” The guy sitting next to me was only there for a burger, but he congratulated me and asked if he could pick up my personal bar tab. I thanked him but told him it wasn’t necessary. Another guy, about sixty-five or seventy, who looked ready for a long day of golf, opted for a shot of whiskey. He walked over to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and asked what we’d had. When I told him a daughter, he smiled and said, “A blessing. Daughters are truly a blessing. I’ve got three kids, and the oldest is a girl. She’s my world.”

Memories rushed in. I’ve been in pubs and bars with naval connections, like my dear old college tav, that made it simple. Ring the bell by the end of the bar and you buy for everyone. And don’t touch the damn bell if you don’t intend to! In 1986, in the Rose Street brewpub in Edinburgh I was on the receiving end of the most subtle buying a round ever seen. A gent in a group who came in and placed an elbow at the bar just waggled his index finger ever so slightly. There was less energy in that wagging digit than in a rural Nova Scotian passing pickup driver’s hello. I was asked by the barman “what will you have?” even though I had a pint in front of me. I had to have the whole thing explained to me. Which led to me spenting an hour chatting with the group and having a great old time.

In Pellicle, Ruvani de Silva presented a scathing report on the failure of craft beer to participate in equity, diversity and inclusion in any practical or meaningful way and the resulting burnout banging their heads against walls:

I could go on about how bad things in beer really are, and I will, because we need to address the inconvenient truth that these problems have not been solved and things are not okay… As belts tighten and global attention moves to new disasters, DEI is being left behind across the board. “Breweries and venues [are] desperately trying to survive, so are not putting the time and energy and resources into this kind of work…

Read the whole thing. Best line is the first one: “DEI is so 2021.” I would add one thing. Craft beer awarded itself a gold star for achieving top marks in all matters from day one. It tells itself it has been a success story people enter after the victory was achieved. Everyone is great. A cause fed by passion propped up by trade writing. It’s a big fib. But a profitable even cultural foundation for craft beer. As a result, there is less concern with the performative nod to the bigotries and botches because, you know, it’s craft! Govern yourselves accordingly.

Slightly on that theme, I like this anti-sucker juice statement from Marcel Haas in the Netherlands from his website Tasting Craft Beer:

I should have ignored this advertisement. I should have bought local. Buying locally helps the local bottle shops to survive. They are the ones who make sure that interesting, high quality offering is found around the corner from my house. Another selection around the other corner. When everybody starts buying the same small box from the same (inter-)national importer, then all variety in the beer landscape will cease to exist. I should have reconsidered, and I should have taken my bike to my local bottle shop. And I will.

Speaking of regrets, this story in the NYT by Susan Dominus is a great bit of thinking about drinking which is all about… thinking about your drinking:

No amount of alcohol is good for you — that much is clear. But one might reasonably ask: Just how bad is it? The information we receive on health risks often glide over the specifics of how much actual risk a person faces, as if those were not details worth knowing. These days, when I contemplate a drink with dinner, I find myself wondering about how much to adjust my behavior in light of this new research. Over the years, we’ve been told so many things are either very good or very bad for us — drinking coffee, running, running barefoot, restricting calories, eating all protein, eating all carbs. The conversation in my head goes something like this: “Should I worry? Clearly, to some degree, yes. But how much, exactly?”

ATJ wrote a fine bit of reflection on life as a pub goer:

Another sip of my beer, a long glance at the road outside, and then I think about the Venerable Bede’s parable of the sparrow flying through the mead hall and about how my time in this pub is akin to the flight of the small bird on a cold winter’s night, which takes it briefly through the warmth and the light of the hall. Life. Yet there is nothing sad about my feelings. It could be worse. Remembering some of the most dire pubs I have had to spend time in over the years I imagine the purgatory in which the same dismal pub is visited night after night and the same dismal beer is drunk and the same dismal conversations are had, the purgatory of a failed life, the collapsed star of the only pub in town.

And The Mudge wrote about less finer things said about pubs, election promises never fulfilled:

It’s noticeable how, when an election comes around, politicians suddenly discover an interest in pubs that had been notably lacking in the preceding years. The latest example of this comes from the Labour Party, who have proposed a policy to “give communities a new ‘right to buy’ shuttered pubs.” It must be said that this is a bit rich coming from the party responsible for the smoking ban and the alcohol duty escalator… However, setting that to one side, what would such a plan involve?

Here is an excellent illustration of an explanation of terroir which should serve you well should you encounter someone insisting that Hazy IPA have, you know, terroir:

The current clos is 99.6% owned by Lambrays. It is triangular in shape and has a difference in elevation of 60 m from the top to the bottom. It is east-facing but far from uniform, with undulations, and some parts with red clay, other parts with brown, and different sized limestone stones in different areas. Unusually, the rows are perpendicular to the slope, to help fight erosion. This row orientation also helps protect the developing bunches from direct sun.

Speaking of wine, as the breweries are plumping up their prices, at least one wine writer is helping with your budget. Here is Eric Asimov from The New York Times with his best summer wines under $20 with this caveat on value:

Despite the seemingly endless climb of wine prices, it’s still not difficult to find intriguing bottles in the $20 and under category. Most will not be familiar producers or grapes, nor will they come from well-known areas in great demand. But that’s why they don’t cost very much. Still, inflation has had an effect. A 20 Under $20 column from 10 or 12 years ago will look quite different. Those bottles remain great, but they cost quite a bit more nowadays. So, we make way for other terrific values.

And in their monthly supplementary newsletter, the media-multiplex of B+B shared thoughts on the concept of psychogeography:

To understand pubs and their place in the landscape you also need to understand how towns develop. Old town, new town, ring road, slum clearances, tower blocks, estates, railways, canals… pubs either stud these spaces, or are noticeably absent from them. Some notable psychogeography practitioners also happen to be keen on pubs. John Rogers, a YouTuber and the author of This Other London, often pauses to look at pubs on his rambles, and often finishes his walk in the pub. And many beer writers and bloggers take a psychogeographic approach, whether consciously or not. Martin Taylor’s posts often include details of the journey to the pub with wry and sometimes snarky commentary on the towns he visits.

I like this idea. One of my roles at work is supporting the built heritage team and as a result of a couple of decades of looking at buildings and street layouts, I see the town in decade by decade layers. One good start is to notice every date carved in the facade of a building. Why do they date buildings anyway? B+B also mentioned the streetscapery of Will Hawks’ London Beer City which this month included coverage of an event at the massive Downham Tavern in 1931 where a memory and fact entertainer put on a show… and also coverage of those who covered it:

Among the crowd is Daily Herald journalist Hannen Swaffer, who tracks down landlord Fred Johnson. “That Irishman’s a stranger,” he insists. “He doesn’t come from around here. The Downham people all behave themselves.” Swaffer (…according to the British Journalism Review, he was remembered after his death for “little more than the mixture of dandruff and cigarette ash on his velvet collar”) is much taken with the show. He likes the acts. He likes the crowd. He likes the notion that a music-hall revival might be on the cards, even if its real glory days are a few decades in the past. What Swaffer, boozer-turned-teetotaler, really likes though is the attitude to alcohol. “Alcohol is dying out naturally,” he tells his Daily Herald readers.

Excellent. And Stan published his Hop Queries this past week with more details on the continuing decline in production:

…the US hop industry has 35-to-40-million-pound aroma hop surplus. Nobody disagrees. In the last six years, farms in the Northwest have produced an average of 1,848 pounds for hops per acres. Across 9,775 acres (this year’s reduction), that would amount to about 18 million pounds of hops. It would, and should, put a serious dent the surplus. Still, it will take much longer for supply and demand to return to balance. You are going to see flash sales like this recent one from Yakima Chief Hops for a while. Although eliminating those pounds is necessary, it also is painful. The average farm gate price last year was $5.40, so we are talking about almost $100 million pounds of hops.

Question: so it, as Stan also says, 2023 is really the twin of 2015 for US craft beer… will 2025 be 2010? That surplus isn’t being used up over one growing season. As you consider that, also consider the post Jeff put up – replete with graphical presentation of data – on the growth in excess brewing capacity:

American breweries are currently at about half their capacity. That’s not good! But it’s actually worse that in looks because growth has been dead flat for three years. Were the industry growing, it would need headspace, so to speak, for future expansion.

Heavens. Tettering. Could deflation be next? One thing is practically for certain. DEI isn’t the next big thing in these conditions.

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.**

*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 (133) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (915) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,479) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (162), crap Threads (43) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.
**Not that many footnotes really this week. Look at this one. An out and out joke really. Sad.

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 “Gotta Mow And Gotta Pay My Taxes” Time Of Year Beery News Notes

Late April reminds you why it is the cruelest month. Taxes and lawns. Taxes and lawns. You know, the neighbourhood’s lawns may look a bit crap because people can’t figure out and if the “No Mow May” thing applies (i) up to and including May or (ii) just during May. Me, I am just lazy. See, I have one of those whirly manual mowers that doesn’t cut so good so it takes five times longer than it should and leaves me beat. What’s new this year, however, is news that “No Mow May” might actually be bad for bees! Apparently it’s like feeding your children by leaving hard candies around the yard. Not sure how that fits into my lazy plan… but I’m working on it. That’s my Grandfather up there, by the way, out with the lads about a century ago when he was in his twenties. Second from the right. In case it isn’t obvious to one and all, his name was Jimmy.

Speaking of the crop to come, I wondered to myself when I saw this report in the Western Producer on the forecasts for the next Canadian barley harvest:

Canadian barley supplies are likely to be burdensome in 2024-25, according to a market outlook published by the Saskatchewan Barley Development Commission. Supplies are forecast to be in the range of 10.7 to 11.7 million tonnes. “This is well above the 2023-24 supplies at 9.65 million tonnes and the five-year average of 10.3 million,” stated the report authored by LeftField Commodity Research.

Last time I heard the word “burdensome” used like that was when I was eight years old and asked too many questions about the rules of the hockey as Dad was trying to watch an NHL playoff game on a snowy black and white TV. Seems the language of barley forecasting is all rather ripe. We read “…lower prices combined with poor movement have cast a shadow…” and “…supplies will be bloated…” as well as “…France has got some problems…”

While we are on the subject of brewing malts, Matty C has been busy scribbling away and shared his story “How British Heritage Malts Are Making a Comeback” at CB&B starting with the tale of one particular ale:

That grist includes small portions of amber, black, brown, and chocolate malts—each about 5 percent of the bill. The most significant twist, however, is that McKenzie replaces 20 percent of the pale base with malt made from a specialty heritage barley variety known as Chevallier, produced by Crisp Malt of Great Ryburgh, Norfolk, in the east of England. A two-row, narrow-eared variety, Chevallier dominated barley farming in England throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, beginning to fall out of favor about 1920. By 1940, production of Chevallier had ceased. In 2017, however—after four years of small-batch trials—Crisp commercially released a five-ton batch produced at its traditional floor maltings at its headquarters in the east of England. At RedWillow, McKenzie was one of the first brewers to get to play with it.

Sounds good – but bring me my Battledore Porter and I’ll be right in there. Speaking of wishes come true, NHS Martin moved beyond the boundaries of mere beer when he and she explored a rather empty Sophia, the capital of Bulgaria, this week:

Blimey. 9 million in 1985 before Communism crumbled; 6.5 million and falling now. And further Googling revealed plenty of commentary on the ageing and depopulation of Bulgaria, the result of migration, falling birth rates (1.6, same as UK) and the sporadic availability of London Pride on hand pump. It had certainly felt “spacious” on our night out, and though those craft beer bars we’d visited were busy enough I guess there’s your warning about judging a place by its craft beer bars.

Speaking of wandering worldly ways, the Tand has been considering the pubs of Oz and found one away from the tour group that made his day, The Exeter Hotel in Adelaide:*

…we found ourselves in a proper public bar, with a central bar serving the room we were in and another room opposite. It was basic, unspoilt with wooden floors, a few bar stools, a handful of characterful locals and a couple of rather fearsome women serving. We immediately knew we were in safe hands. It was stunningly good. Even on a warm Adelaide night, indoors here was way preferable. This was smashing. It turned out to be a Cooper’s of Adelaide tied house, with a reasonable number of their beers on offer. I settled on Pale Ale – fermented in the keg as are all their beers – and took in the scene. It was amusing to see some people – tourists I assume – entering, looking round and leaving with a look of dismay and concern on their faces. This was a proper pub.

However fabulous that proper pub on that wonderful evening might have been, it still can’t rank to probably the most fabulous beer related object ever… as witness by Lars:

Just saw this: the Oldenburg horn. A family relic of the Danish royal family, kept in the vault with the Danish crown jewels, so this really is the Danish royal drinking horn. And it has a legend attached to it… According to the legend, Otto, first of the house of Oldenburg, was out hunting back in 989 when he became thirsty and said “How I wish I had something to drink,” whereupon an elf maid appeared out of a hill with the horn…

You will have to read on for more of the elven lore. We of MacLeod are totally here for these sorts of things.

In Pellicle this week we have a good bit of writing from Rachel Hendry on the phenomenon known as Babycham, its cultural meaning, its logo as well as (a bit to my surprise) its content:

Thankfully an alternative name was already being used. Be it short for champion or champagne, Baby Champ—as the legend goes—was the term used by workers in the factory to distinguish the smaller individual bottles of Champagne de la Poire from their larger siblings. This term of endearment was overheard in an early marketing meeting held at the premises and adopted as a result. Baby Champ, then, became Babycham. Ralph Showering, you may recall, had been appointed head of sales and marketing, a position he did not take lightly. The Showerings family had purchased a small herd of Water Deer from Herbrand Arthur Russell, the 11th Duke of Bedford, for their growing property and it was here that Ralph took inspiration for Babycham’s logo.

I say a bit to my surprise as I spent my high school years over forty years ago in Truro, Nova Scotia. “Of course” you say, “the connections slaps one in the face!” But… in that place there was a factory next to the facory where I made carpets on the night shift for only one week one summer** which made such delights as Moody Blue sparking wine made in part from blueberries as well as Baby Duck made of God knows what. You may still be able to buy a magnum of it for $13.95.

Some classic Ron just after last week’s deadline, starting with a photo of a plate of breakfast and summing up like this:

I fiddle around on the internet for a while. While sipping whisky and stuffing my face. Eventually it says my flight is 45-minutes late. Though, by the time it leaves, it’s delayed by more than an hour. Not much to report about the flight. We take off, fly for a bit, land and then spend forever taxiing to the terminal. When I open my front door, there’s a cup of tea ready. Andrew tracked my flight this time.

Good. Cup of tea and a rest. That’s what Ron needed.

I’ve done a few modest sponsorship deals so it was interesting to read that the English Premier League is moving forward with a four year deal with Guinness as sponsor:

English football’s top flight is toasting a £40m sponsorship deal with Guinness after the Diageo-owned brand saw off competition from Heineken. Sky News has learnt that the Premier League has informed its 20 clubs, which include Everton, Manchester City and Sheffield United, that it is backing a £10m-a-year agreement beginning next season. The deal, which has not yet been formally signed, represents a big financial uplift on the Premier League’s existing partnership with Budweiser’s owner, AB InBev.

The match makes more sense than Bud… except it seems a bit, you know, cheap even though it is up from £7,950,000 a year for Bud.**** When you do a deal like this you should get some exclusive access to the fans in all those twenty fitba stands. That’s a lot of thirsty people. Unlike most naming rights sponsorship deals, the sponsor here actually should get a enhanced revenue stream in addition to loads of advertising and name placement. This boils down to £10 million divided by 360 games or £27,777 per league game not counting Cup or other games. Average game attenence so far is 38,486 meaning its 72p per attendee per game. Won’t this deal generate more value to Guinness than that?

Note: one of the reasons I look away whenever I see the word “neo-prohibitionists” is that the arguments from those who use it are so poorly made. Their cause may have a point… maybe… but, face facts, no government is shutting down the alcohol trade – the taxes are too sweet even if the behaviour causes so much harm. Which is the other reason: the dumb calls to liberty. It’s like that call for the liberty to starve under the highway overpass. The only argument that makes sense is that this is all about taking reasonable risks.

Much conversely, Boak and Bailey wrote a review of Dr. Christina Wade‘s The Devil’s in the Draught Lines which immediately saw me reaching for my iPhone so I could buy my own copy online:

Structurally The Devil’s in the Draught Lines resists the simplicity of chronology. Instead, each chapter covers a different angle and whizzes us back and forth through hundreds of years, from the mediaeval world to the 21st century. There’s also room for stories around race, culture, gender identity, with names and faces unfamiliar to us, like Lizzie and Lucy Stevens of Closet Brewing, and Apiwe Nxusani-Mawela of the Tolozaki Beer Company. In fact, there’s the equivalent of about 25 Pellicle articles hidden throughout the book – and we mean that as a compliment to both parties.

Inspired by the clever as I scanned the wide world for more beer reading, I saw that The Journal of The Institute of Brewing had released a few issues for 2024 on its relatively recent site and, while some can thrill to tales such as the “role of temperature in sporulation was investigated at 25, 27 and 30°C by measurement of the rate of sporulation over ten days,” this article drew my eye perhaps a bit more avidly towards the screen as it deals with that old chestnut, the diastatic variant:

Diastatic variants of Saccharomyces cerevisiae are unusual in producing an extracellular glucoamylase which enables the breakdown of starch to fermentable sugars. Diastatic S. cerevisiae has long been viewed negatively as a contaminant of especially beer packaged in cans or bottles. However, this view is being reconsidered due to the opportunities that diastatic strains present for niche fermented products and distillation applications…. This review highlights the utilisation of diastatic S. cerevisiae for its flavour potential, and processing applications in the brewing, distilling, and biofuel industries.

“Whachamacsayin’?” I hear you cry out? More in laypersonspeak over here at Escarpment Labs*** but I think we can all agree on need for increased oppportunities for niche fermentated products. Unless that means White Claw.

Treat of the week? Check out “Eating high” the 1966 video of the London Post Office Tower’s rotating restaurant included with this post at A London Inheritance.

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

*The actual scene that very evening as personally witnessed by the Tand.
**See, the shift was from midnight until noon for some unknown reason. Plus I was coated outside and in at the end of every shift with polyester from the spinning machines I was to operate. Good wage but goodbye.
***See, for example: “Saccharomyces cerevisiae var. diastaticus is beer yeast that can break down longer-chained carbohydrates (dextrins and starches) that regular yeast can’t. It doesn’t actually consume them directly, but it secretes an enzyme (glucoamylase) that breaks down dextrins outside the cell into smaller sugars that the yeast can then metabolize.“
****All stats via Lord Goog. Math by me. Govern yourselves accordingly.
*****This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (up one to 128) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (down one again to 915) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (up five to 4,472) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (161), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Fear not!

Your See Ya Later Frikkin’ Winter 2024 Edition Of The Beery News Notes

This is it! I know… I know. It’s like a weather bore blog around here with some news items Scotched taped on – but really is there any better day to see coming than the first of spring? Or is that too hemispheric of me! It’s the last day of summer in our nether regions… southern… southern. That’s where Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin found himself this week, photographing these bush beer barrels from the Cook Islands in the national museum. As the tiny print says, the beer they made was based on oranges and honey. Yah-ummm.

First up, beer writer and big city crime beat journalist Norm Miller celebrated the third anniversary of his not dying this week with some great advice :

Three years ago today I nearly died. Still alive. Don’t be like me, go to the doctors, don’t ignore what your body is telling you and move.

Good advice. Thanks for being there, Norm. And in the latest edition of Prohibitchin’ Beth Demmon wrote this week about Ellen Cavalli who is both an established cider maker and now a non-drinker thanks to her own health scare:

“I want to be alive,” says Ellen simply. “I don’t want it to be like I chose alcohol over a longer life with my family.” Not drinking was the easy part. Feeling disconnected from the community and industry she helped build was the hard part. She had to make a choice. “Do I want to continue living with constant anxiety, sorrow, grief, depression, no joy and faking it?” she asked herself. “What do I want my life to be?” She told Scott something had to change for her to find meaning in her life’s work once again. For her to feel joy. For her to feel hope. If she couldn’t drink alcohol, then the choice was clear—make a non-alcoholic cider. After a few months of expedited trials, Ellie’s Non-Alcoholic Gravenstein became the first commercially available dealcoholized cider in the United States…

I like the sound of that drink, coming from Nova Scotia which is one of the other places like part of California where Gravensteins are grown. Speaking of sounding good, Pellicle this week ran a feature on the Lacada Cooperative Brewery in Portrush, Northern Ireland by Ewan Friar featuring a great set of photos, including one of a Mr. Whippy van and oceanside scene Pr0n:

Portrush lies on a mile long basalt peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic off Ireland’s North Coast. Two gorgeous, golden sand beaches flank the base of the peninsula to the east and west, while the northern tip rises to the dramatic cragginess of Ramore Head. It evolved from what was originally a small fishing port into one of Ireland’s major tourist towns in the 19th Century. With its colourful town houses, pleasant promenades and the world famous Royal Portrush Golf Club, the town became an all out Victorian pleasure resort, and much of that character still exists today.

Perhaps less on jolly holiday – but totes Irelandish, too – Eoghan has told a tale that he has called proof that has has “reached my boring era” but I think it has a certain charm:

Every Friday evening during the school year, I cajole the children into the bike by 18.40. I cycle them up the hill to the local municipal swimming pool and wave them through the door by 18.50. By 18.55 I’m sitting in the pub around the corner with a beer in front of me and a book in my hand. By 19.45, I’ll have finished the second of two beers, made no headway in the book, paid up at the bar, and be out the door so I’m back at the pool for the end of class at 20.00. Then it’s pile them back in the bike, and cycle them home where my Friday night routine ends and their bedtime routine begins. Lather, rinse, and repeat the following Friday.

Jessica Mason apparently needed to explain what for me was understood as the clear meaning of the word “however” in her story on Black Sheep’s rather sudden rebranding soon after being takeover and the seemingly complete corporate amnesia over a rather similar effort in 2014:

According to the Yorkshire brewery, this is its “biggest rebrand since it was founded over 31 years ago” and the “sleek new design will feature across all Black Sheep Brewery beers, included keg, cask, and bottles, as well as online merchandise” however the makeover both echoes its previous attempts to modernise the brand, uses similar terminology used by its new owners and also comes amidst the brewery’s restructuring causing a stir across the industry in what has been questioned as a means of diverting attention away from other media.

Ah, the end times. Another country, another end to a good beer landmark. This time, it is New York’s Spuyten Duyvil as Luke Fortney reports in the NY Eater:

“No bar in the city pays more loving and thorough homage to beer.” That’s how New York Magazine once described Spuyten Duyvil, but after two decades, the craft beer bar is shutting down. “Craft beer’s current ubiquity combined with rising rents have made operating Spuyten Duyvil unsustainable,” said owners, Joe and Kim Carroll, who also run nearby restaurants Fette Sau and St. Anselm. When Spuyten Duyvil opened in Williamsburg in 2003, it stood out for its selection of imported European beers — “the beer you couldn’t find anywhere else,” says Joe Carroll. “Now you’d be hard pressed to find any place without it.” The last day at 359 Metropolitan Avenue, near Havemeyer Street, is April 21.

I get but don’t get the “fresh ale” thing as also reported upon by Jessica Mason. It just appear to be a new mid-lower end of market dispense. Is it simply the use of the handle? Liam add this:

Not *quite* the same, but I’m sure many people would-if-they-could have mocked and derided Michael Ash’s invention too, but look at them all slobbering over Guinness Draught now ..!

Elsewhere and to the upper left of the map, Jeff is fighting the neg by creating a non-profit to promote beer in Oregon which is an excellent idea:

It’s a story that deserves to be told, and visitors and locals alike should be aware of its special place in American brewing. So, on Monday, I signed articles of incorporation to create Celebrate Oregon Beer, a nonprofit 501(c)(6) that will do just that. It has the backing of both the Oregon Brewers Guild and Oregon Hop Commission, as well as 26 breweries, growers, and allied groups (and counting) that have pledged donations to launch the project. I’ve convened a Board of Directors, and soon we’ll get started. In the meantime, let me tell you a bit more—and borrow your wisdom as I do.

I like that. Put your time and effort in where your interests lie. Me, I am on and have been on community radio station boards, one in the US for a decade and now another closer to home. Good to get involved. As corporate secretary, my minute taking skills are right up there. And, speaking of radio, one of my weekly listens is CBC Radio’s show Now or Never who this week interviewed Don Tse – who also happens to have a wide selection of beers – as part of an episode dedicated to dream job:

There aren’t many jobs that have “drinking beer” as the first requirement. Calgary’s Don Tse, also known as the Don of Beer, left behind a successful law career to pursue his ultimate dream job — tasting, judging and writing about the bubbly brew.

You can hear the episode by clicking on that link. Utterly conversely, as Boak and Bailey shared on their Patreon footnotes, I’m also “a bit sick of hearing and reading and talking about BrewDog” but Will Hawkes had a great piece in VinePair on the dull faux punks:

…many Britons have had enough of Brewdog’s schtick. Even as the company continues to expand — and as rumors of a forthcoming IPO circulate — it remains a lightning rod for criticism, most recently when complaints it made about a BBC documentary were rejected by Ofcom, Britain’s television regulator. The response from online commentators was not sympathetic. So how did Britain’s most important modern brewery accumulate so many, to use Watt’s own term, haters?

Err… no, not Watt’s term. People actually do hate them. Speaking of growing or not growning up, Boak and Bailey wrote about a really interesting topic for one like me who had, many years ago, served as a bouncer and faced the overly rouged and wobbly high-heel vision of fifteen year olds with fake IDs:

When did you last see underage drinkers even try to get served in a pub? It’s what you might call a dying tradition. Ray’s dad says he started drinking in a pub on the Somerset Levels when he was 12, surrounded by adults who made sure he and his brothers (mostly) behaved themselves. And in the mid-1990s, Jess went to East London pubs from 16 hiding behind her tall friend, though nobody ever got asked for ID.

Some great comments followed up on that post. They also pondered the nature of the American cheese slice on Bluesky this week:

Discussing American cheese AKA ‘cheesy singles’ with my other half. “It works so well in some sandwiches but you’d never eat one on its own, would you?” I say. “No, because it’s actually a semi-solid sauce,” she replies. My god. This is exactly right.

Pete Brown also seems to have gotten things right when he and his left London for Norwich, which sounds very nice according to his emailed newsletter:

If we leave the house and drive left, the heart of the Norfolk Broads is ten minutes drive away, and a choice of excellent beaches, some home to seal colonies, is twenty minutes beyond that. If we leave the house and turn right, it’s twenty minutes walk to the heart of a culturally vibrant city, with eleven of the best pubs I’ve ever been in punctuating the route. (The pic above is from the nearest one, the Rosebery.) Cask ale is £4.50 a pint and always in excellent condition. People speak to each other. It’s all rather lovely, and I’m losing weight, the bags under my eyes are no longer grey and lined, and the persistent cough I’ve had for years has disappeared.

ATJ share a less idylic scene as he made his way to a pub in Devon recently:

…outside an east wind blew, a persistent hangnail of gloom. The year had shifted and it was spring, but the weather hadn’t budged one bit and winter had left a dastardly booby-trap of an easterly that gusted through these western lands with a dismal stretch of the soul — however, bundled up like a parcel of joy I had cycled five miles to this pub so that I could have my first pint of the year outside.

And Stephane Grant shared a few thoughts about another sort of unpleasant beer drinking experience at last years CBC as she plans her plans to avoid the downside this year is Vegas:

It’s no surprise that craft beer has a problematic relationship with drinking. Last year, I found myself drinking too much and even when I tried to slow down, someone was pushing another beer in my hands. The situation sucked, and my plan to avoid it this year is to keep hop water on deck. A little hydration, a little smoke and mirrors—it’s pretty much a win/win.

Sensible. And just after I published the update last week my “YOU GOT MAIL” notice sounded off, echoing through the house – and there was Katie Mather in her newsletter The Gulp sharing her love of running, a thing which I have never enjoyed as it appears to including running but not include 21 other people chasing a ball… and it is not limited to a modestly sized rectangle:

The day matters. The haze clears. I never get bored of my usual run through the lanes. I am in love with a certain dip in the road where an old woodland congregates either side of a humpback bridge. I feel Pendle behind me and watch as its western flanks follow my course. I spot siskins and chiff chaffs, and robins eye me suspiciously from inside hawthorn hedges. The first blossom is out now, white and frothy high up on tall Serviceberry trees. I pretend, after the first mile, that I’m nowhere near home, that I’m in the middle of the countryside and I’m just running, and running, for no reason, just for the joy of it. This is my lane, and I feel like I can tell it’s happy I’m back.

Finally, from Mastodon and Emergence magazine, some ancient thoughts on aging well which seems to require a rather large capacity for drinking, even larger than perhaps at the CBC:

Now that I’m old with shaved hair and thin clothing, I feel
a vastness inside of me.
Let me pour empty the River West as wine, use the Big Dipper as ladle and invite all worldly things as my guests.
The world is but a passing guest of my mind.
Alone I strum my zither and sing, forgetting what year it is,
while time keeps passing through my body, so time lives.

Zhang Xiaoxiang 1132–1170, Southern Song Dynasty

Mr. Deep. That is what they call me. Cause I post poetry. And with that… that’s it! Again … we 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. I saw this comment on Mastodon this week that is worth applying to all social media… and perhaps craft beer too:

Business Insider has written about how much TikTok’s growth rate has collapsed. I think it’s a combination of a few things: (i) Law of large numbers. Almost every eligible user is already on it. (ii) Every major competitor has added similar features and (iii) Attention is a zero sum game. There are no more available entertainment minutes in the day. So it has to compete with streaming shows, gaming, other apps, etc.

Interesting. And check out the collapse of Twex in the graph! Me? 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 (125) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (914) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (still climbing up to 4,465) 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. I now have admitted my dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat, relocated the links and finally accept that BlueSky is the leader in “the race to replace” Twex even while way behind.

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.

The First Beery News Notes For The Good Part Of The Year

This is great. Up there is an image posted this week on Bluesky by Liam of IrishBeerHistory, a quote from the book As I Was Going Down Sackville Street by Oliver St. John Gogarty which is just excellent. I will refer to it as such from now on. Govern yourselves accordingly. You know what else is great? Now is great. March 1st to January 1st inclusive – totally great.* Napping with the windows open even if bundled up because it is only +5C. The same thing occurred to Katie apparently:

I managed to have a lovely half hour nap in my garden today without freezing solid. I’m doing the Scandi baby version of whatever that ice water guy does. Wrapped in blankies, having a lil sleepy outside.

These are the actual joys. So what’s out there for our beery naptime reading? First up, if you are looking for that rarest of things in these times – some good happy positive brewing news – look no further than David Jesudason’s almost alarmingly optimistic study in Pellicle of an almost alarmingly optimitic brewer, Andy Parker, the founder of Elusive Brewing in Wokingham, Berkshire:

The word ‘nice’ has often been banned by editors I’ve worked with. The attributive adjective is seen as a nothing word, used to describe anything from Rich Tea biscuits, to mild weather, or a stranger’s demeanour. It’s an archetypal British word, and one Andy is forever linked to. Worst of all, it’s a term that does him and his incredible brewery a disservice. Firstly, yes he is the nicest guy in beer, but there’s nothing superficial about why he’s ‘nice.’ Many people I speak to describe him as one of the most thoughtful, kind and—above all—considerate humans they’ve come across. I found him to be a great listener in the numerous times we’ve met.

In their Patreon footnotes to last Satuday’s post, B+B indicated** that they were having an issue finding note worthy writings, a problem I can empathize with – but that bears no connention to my mentioning this post by The Beer Nut who highlights some very proper quality control measures being taken in the face of an issue popping up:

The prologue to today’s beers is that they were both recalled from the market. A problem with the can seamer meant that not all of them were properly sealed, running the risk of oxidation. Craft Central were kind enough to refund me the cost of the beers and I checked with the brewery, Lineman, if it was OK to review them, since I couldn’t detect any flaws. Mark showed me how to spot the defective cans and I’m confident that neither of these were affected by the issue.

Bonus quality control about quality control right there, that’s what that is. Conversely, thinking about things getting out of control, some interesting news out of Britian as cuts to taxes imposed on beer have not had any particular positive effect on trade:

The relief reduced the tax on them by 9.2%. Mr Hunt said: “we’re protecting the price of a pint”. But beer prices have continued rising. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said they were up 7.5% in January 2024 compared with the same month last year, with prices increasing every month of the year, despite draught relief… figures show that almost exactly the same number of pubs closed in the UK in the second half of 2023 (266) as had closed in the first half (265).

The Cookie and the Mudge shared thoughts on this matter:

C: Does anyone really believe that if all the beer, pub, and Camra groups got everything they wanted in the budget, then pubs would enter a golden era of prosperity and success? They’d continue to die on their arse but just pay less tax in the process.
M: Yes, the long-term decline of pubs is primarily caused by social change, not by price.

I have to agree with that. It’s all bad news on both sides of the cash box and in other areas of life. What’s a good sign that beer in the UK is priced at a pretty penny? Crime:

A haul of suspected illegal beer equivalent to 132,000 pints has been seized at a ferry terminal in south Scotland. Police worked with the Serious Organised Crime Taskforce and HMRC as part of the clampdown at Cairnryan Port, near Stranraer. … An HMRC spokesman added: “Disrupting criminal trade is at the heart of HMRC’s strategy to clamp down on the illicit alcohol market which costs the UK around £1bn per year.”

Speaking of taxation of the pleasures of the nation, something of a milestone was passed here in Canada which bodes ill in another way.

Canada’s federal government collected more excise tax revenue from cannabis than it did from beer and wine last year. That comes as a parliamentary committee is recommending the government ease up on the cannabis tax. In the 2022-23 fiscal year ended March 31, the federal government received 610.1 million Canadian dollars ($450 million) from excise duties applied to beer. Beer and wine excise revenue combined was CA$887.7 million. Federal excise duties from cannabis that year, meanwhile, amounted to approximately CA$894.6 million, of which CA$667.6 million was transferred to provincial and territorial coffers.

See here, folk aren’t turning to crime so much as the now decriminalized. Yet… the national spliffy trade still complaining about facing headwinds… get it? But that is not really what has gone on:

Beer sales fell by 96 hectoliters per 100,000 people immediately after adult-use legalization, and by a further 4 hectoliters per 100,000 people in each following month, equalling an average monthly reduction of 136 hectoliters per 100,000 person.

So why they complaining when they are facing being the beneficiries of inevitable cultural change? Same as it ever was. And just to pile on the reasons for the miserable forecasts for beer’s future, Jeff explores another bummer of a story – did Covid make hangovers worse?

A recent paper suggests that hangovers are worse for people with longs Covid… The study only looked at four people and it’s just a review of their cases. Statistically, not much there… [but] – what portion of the dip in alcohol consumption and the rise in N/A may be due to people just feeling super crappy when they drink? We’ve had four years of young people coming into their drinking years. If their experiences were mostly negative—especially because drinking’s social component was dulled or absent—might they just have abandoned alcohol before developing the usual youthful infatuation with it?

Youth! What the hell do they know? Speedy if tenuous advice to youth segue! I came across a social media reference to The Instructions of Shuruppag, a Sumerian document from around 4500 years ago reciting older sayings predating the Flood. What I first noticed was one of those decontextualized “hey cool!” quotes people share just because it mentions beer a couple of times. But if you look at the text itself, you realize that the sayings are warnings of the wise aimed at a youth – as well as a window to a very alien, even very tenuous culture:

You should not boast in beer halls like a deceitful man… You should not pass judgment when you drink beer… You should not buy a free man: he will always lean against the wall. You should not buy a palace slave girl: she will always be the bottom of the barrel… Fate is a wet bank; it can make one slip… To have authority, to have possessions and to be steadfast are princely divine powers. You should submit to the respected; you should be humble before the powerful… You should not choose a wife during a festival… A drunkard will drown the harvest.

Grim life that, living in the shadow of the clay walls and those slippy dirt embankments that save you from the mountain people. Even with the beer. Somewhat related to the bottom of the barrel, VinePair has illustrated the lack of facinating beer writing by publishing the story you’ve perhaps not been waiting for:

Yes, it’s fine to drink the stuff hanging out on the bottom of the bottle. “It doesn’t give you the sh*ts. That’s preposterous,” Grimm says of brewing byproduct. “That’s where a bunch of the good B complex vitamins live.” And it’s true: Most brewer’s yeast is rich in vitamins. This doesn’t apply to hop particulates like one would find floating around in an unfiltered IPA like Heady Topper — we’re talking about the yeast, which tends to pile up at the bottom of saisons, mixed culture beer, and spontaneously fermented brews.

And here I thought the 2016ish “off-flavour seminar” fad was the dullest form of beer fan education that could be fashioned by humankind.*** Sludgy gak studies. Speaking of echoes of craft’s peaks past, at the end of last week and at the website of a homebrewing supply service, Matt discussed an interesting phenomenon of the lingering trade in sour and wild beers that once were craft fans’ darling but are now brewed perhaps as a bit of nod to nostagia:

The existence of each of these breweries is a statement. A financial analyst would probably describe them as being commercially unviable. But a romantic? They would call them bold, boisterous, and even necessary. Beer would be a hopelessly boring place if we just had a handful of similar beers to choose from, after all. Considering their existence, it still leaves me with the question: who’s buying these beers? Or perhaps more pertinently, who’s going to be buying them in the future?

The future. It’s all about the future this week, it seems. It’s like no one took the advice of old Shuruppag. Makes me wonder if craft beer is like cable TV facing the onset of the information super highway… what did we call it 25 years ago? Convergence! We are now converged. How big is your cable TV bill or your landline for that matter? So many other things to do, so many means to an early death to avoid, so many other things to spend money on, so many other states of mind to achieve – including good old sobriety. Note:

Athletic Brewing is now the number one beer of any kind at Whole Foods. More than all of beer brands with alcoholic contents.

Not good. Or maybe real good. And things appear to be getting worse in China (if you can wade through the AI generated shit text) and Will Hawkes alerted me to the plug being pulled on Meantime in London:

BREAKING: Asahi is closing the Meantime Brewery and moving all production to Fuller’s… Staff were only told today. Asahi says ‘intention is for Meantime to retain a footprint in Greenwich … Plans are underway for the creation of a new standalone consumer retail experience, including a continuation of brewing’

Meantime was a pretty Wowie Kazowie! brewery in its day. My first encounter was on an August 2007 shopping spree in glorious Rochester NY, with reviews of their Coffee Porter and the IPA the next couple of years. They got in to the LCBO here in Ontario in late 2009 or 2010 and were a regular for a while, perhaps last seen in 2019. There you go. The past is a foreign land. Ron confirmed that truth to perhaps the contrary when he shared this week news of a revolution in 1970s pub gub in the UK:

There are three recipe booklets, one gives 50 meals using Batchelors savoury mince or farmhouse stew, the next giving 50 recipes for sweets from Batchelors and the third with 50 recipes for entrées from Batchelors ready dishes. All the products, from soup to coffee, and including quick-dried vegetables, are convenience foods. They offer no shelf-life problems, all being guaranteed for at least 12 months under normal conditions. Reconstitution is by the addition of water, bringing to the boiling point and simmering for varying periods up to about 30 minutes… They may be made to suit the custom and, in particular, the evening out — when it is a natural thing to go to a pub for a few drinks and a meal not encountered in everyday household catering.

Holy Hanna! Sounds disgusting. You know why food like this is only sold to insane backwoods hikers and astronauts, don’t you!?!

That’s it! I can’t take it no more. Done. There we are… and again … we 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 (124) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (914) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (up again to 4,463) 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. I now have admitted my dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat, relocated the links and finally accept that BlueSky is the leader in “the race to replace” Twex even while way behind.

*Minus of course half of November. That’s it. Otherwise, best part of the year. The other ten weeks suck. The Leap Year thing made it worse, too. But the rest is great. Except… when the clocks change. That’s another bit of totally sucks coming up this weekend. Going to be totally baked next week, sun coming up at like 11:53 pm the night before. That really sucks. What’s the best beer for clock change Sunday? Coffee?
**“…we didn’t bookmark anything during the week, which is unusual. Then, when we checked our usual sources, we didn’t find tons of fresh writing that grabbed us. So, we dug deeper, and found some websites and blogs that were completely new to us… Heroes!
***Up there with branding consultants proclaiming the brand of their local business development clients is the best! The university’s press release is hilarious: commission a study to affirm a claim then reframe it as the awarding of a title.

The Week Baseball Starts Taking Over The TV Schedule Edition Of The Beery News Notes

Did you know that there are five Thursdays this February? FIVE!! I thought I was done for the month today – but I am not. It’s leapday Thursday next week. This will be only the third one in my lifetime, now in my 61st year having lived through this experience in 1968 and 1996. The fifth since the 1800s. The responsibilities for next week’s update have suddenly loomed ominously. Am I up to this rich and rare Thursdayness? The very first leap day Thursday since beer blogging began? Better put an effort in. A big effort. So… I can slack off this week and no one will notice. Excellent.

First up, Boak and Bailey are doing some clever things with their multi-media channels. For one thing, they are posting footnotes to their weekly beery news roundups on Patreon. As you can always see below, I like footnotes but rather than merely wallowing in snark like I do BB2 actually add a bit of context and discussion.* And, as you can see to the right, they play with the graphical display of information like with this table explaining their thought on what has been gained and lost over the last ten years of good beer in the UK. They published that in their monthly newsletter after gathering some thoughts from readers over at Bluesky. Which I received by email. Where do they find the time?

And I wrote something last week that caught even me by surprise: “could it be that beer might actually… be going out of style?” For years that was the quip – it’s not like its gonna go out of style. Did I mean it? I mean sure we all know that democracy and simple human decency are well on their way out… but beer?!?! It seems something it up… or, rather, quite a bit down. Stan posted another graph building on the graphs discussed seven days ago. I can’t just put the same graph at the top of my roundup this week (because that would break the weekly updaters Code of Conduct that B+B control with a ruthless efficency) but his point is worth repeating:

The pink on the right represents barrels of beer that would have been sold had sales simply gone flat in 2020, rather than declining, not completely recovering, then declining again. Obviously, that matters a lot to hop growers. When barrels aren’t brewed then hops aren’t used. In this case, about 20 million pounds of them. Two thoughts. First, indeed, little difference between production in 2015 and 2023. Second, if you draw an arrow from the top of the bar at 2015 to 2019 it looks much different than an arrow drawn from the top of 2019 to 2023. Production might be the same, but something different is going on.

One thing I do not believe is causing all this is the lack of detailed description of the offerings at taproom. Jim Vorel would beg to differ and does so at length:

Case in point: Not long ago, my wife was ordering at a large, well-funded and popular local brewery taproom. Looking at the electronic menu above the bar, she landed on a new beer labeled simply as “coffee stout.” She loves stout, and lightly adjuncted classic stouts such as coffee stouts, so she ordered one. The reality? The beer was actually a stout with “vanilla, caramel flavoring and cardamom” in addition to the coffee, which was the only thing mentioned by the sole source of information available to the consumer. Is that a valid concept for a “Turkish coffee stout,” or whatever? Absolutely it is, but the customer needs to know they’re ordering a stout with that kind of theming when they place the order. You can’t just surprise someone with “caramel, vanilla, cardamom” when they think they’re ordering a relatively dry beer. What if that person doesn’t really care for pastry stout concepts? Are they supposed to grill the bartender whenever they see “coffee stout,” to ask if there are any other adjuncts involved? Just how many questions are we expecting these busy taproom employees to answer?

Theming? I had no idea. Me? I just taste the stuff and make my own mind up. Now, let’s be clear. That graph showing US craft beer (including formerly recognized craft brewers kicked out of the BA) have slumped back to 2015 production levels** does not mean all beer is going out of favour, as Jessica Mason explained:

Molson Coors delivered six years of profit growth, six years of growth in just one year. That focus is a new baseline. We are ready for this moment”. To illustrate the size of the achievement, Hattersley explained: “In 2023, our top five brands around the world drove over two million more hectolitres than they did the prior year. This is like adding the entirety of Blue Moon’s global volume to our portfolio.” Looking at America, Molson Coors has seen a boost in both its distribution as well as its presence in supermarkets with more retailers listing its beers. In fact, this momentum and knock-on revenue spike is what has boosted the business to such great heights and reinforced distributor confidence in listing Molson Coors’ beers.

And Kirin is experiencing a bounce as well according to Eloise Feilden:

Kirin Holdings posted revenue of ¥2.1bn (£11.1m) in the year to 31 December 2023, representing a 7.3% rise year-on-year. Profit was up 4.6% on 2022, and operating profit rose 29.5% to ¥150.3bn (£79.4m). Revenue from the Kirin Brewery division was up 3.2% on 2022 to ¥685m. Kirin Brewery’s total beer sales increased 5.9% to 1.4bn litres. CEO Yoshinori Isozaki told analysts that price changes in October helped to boost beer sales “more than expected”, after the company dropped the price of beer brands including Kirin Ichiban. Kirin raised prices for its no-malt Honkirin and Kirin Nodogoshi Nama beers.

Interesting. So are people really just getting fed up with the craft beer nonsense? Remarkably, it’s been a decade since the cult classic The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer by Max and Myself was published – and this remarkably visionary review (given the interveining rise and fall of craft) by Alistair popped up in my Facebook feed this week:

I’ve been slowly reading my way through The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer by Alan and Max, and finding myself agreeing with most things, especially when it comes to tasting vs drinking. I’ve been saying it for a while now, beer is for drinking, not standing around pontificating about the supposed terroir of the hops, the provenance of your peat-smoked 80/- (as in it has none), or worst of all thinking that Pilsners are just American Light Lager without the rice or corn (have heard that more than once). I guess that’s one reason why I love breweries that make classic styles, and make them well, rather than brewing every gimmick going – you know they can make good beer, worth drinking, instead of random shit to taste a thimbleful of and never want to touch again.

Point. And Alistair (as well as someone in the comments) made the analysis that is often made in tighter times – is home brew really cheaper? Why yes, yes it is:

Thankfully, I don’t have to pay myself to make beer, neither do I pay myself to serve the beer, and so the real cost for a half litre of my own beer at home is about $2. One thing though that is really clear to me from this little exercise is that ingredients are not the bulk of the cost of making the beer, it is a the people, equipment, and place to do so. Obviously I am also not able to take advantage of the economies of scale that a commercial brewer (sorry idealogues, if your favourite beer is made by a company that does so for a living it IS a commercial brewery), especially when it comes to non-linear increases such as the ingredients, and don’t forget to factor in that a single decoction brewday in my garage takes about as long as a single decoction brewday at a professional brewery with the appropriate kit.

But… and I am a long lapsed home brewer… you don’t need the equipment and you don’t need the decoction. A nice pale ale or porter from scratch? Do it. Conversely, care of the BBC, here’s another reason I’ll steer clear of NA beer for the foreseeable future – unlisted ingredients:

UK-based brewer, Impossibrew, which specialises in non-alcoholic beers, uses a different means of arrested fermentation. “We brew it in such a way that we can cryogenically stop the fermentation process,” says founder, Mark Wong… Impossibrew also adds its “proprietary social blend”, a mix of nootropic herbs designed to imitate the feeling of relaxation induced by traditional beer. It is a precise blend developed in collaboration with Professor Paul Chazot at Durham University’s Biophysical Sciences Institute. Nootropics are natural compounds – billed as “smart drugs” – which improve cognitive functions.

Sweet. Playing with the psychological therapies. Here is a 2023 paper on nootropic herbs. Including a discussion of the allergies and side effects*** that one might encounter… if you knew what you had consumed.

Pellicle‘s offering this week is a portrait of Bristol, England’s Wiper and True taproom by Anthony Gladman.**** Spoiler – they have a dealcoholiser:

The second tool is a reverse osmosis dealcoholiser, which the brewery uses to remove the alcohol from beers like Tomorrow, and the low alcohol version of Kaleidoscope, which launched in January 2024. “That’s going to be a big push for us for the next… well, for a long time actually,” Michael says. “That’s what the whole business is galvanising around at the moment.” Installing a dealcoholiser is not something a brewery does lightly: the equipment is a huge expense, but so too is the floor space it requires, as well as the staff training, and the effort in recipe research and development to make owning one worthwhile.

Note: The Beer Ladies Podcast interviewed Lars this week. Have a listen.

Merryn has shifted to Bluesky and is still tracking the research on ancient grain residues. We learn that “interest in bread like, porridge like, lumps of charred cereal residues certainly has increased over the past decade.And quite a lot have been found” like in Ancient bread recipes: Archaeometric data on charred findings from the February 2024 issue of the Journal of Cultural Heritage:

This study examines charred bread-like samples found in several archaeological sites across northern Italy and dating from the Early Bronze Age to the Early Middle Ages, some of which are included amongst the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The aim is to investigate differences and homogeneities in bread production processes in different eras and cultures. Bread was a staple food in many ancient societies, but has rarely been found amongst the materials that survive in archaeological sites. When it is found, it is usually because the bread was charred by accidental combustion (falling into the oven during baking) or deliberate combustion (for ritual purposes). The literature on the issue is not abundant, but has been growing over the past decade

It’s beer, isn’t it. Err… wasn’t it. Speaking of was, some bad news for beer drinkers in Nigeria:

The Chief Executive Officer of Nigerian Breweries Plc, Hans Essaadi, has said that the economic situation in Nigeria has deteriorated to the extent citizens can no longer afford to buy beer. Essaadi said this on Monday at the company’s investor call following the release of its 2023 results. “It has been unprecedented year for our business in Nigeria. We saw a significant decline in the mainstream lager market as a result of Nigerian consumers no longer able to afford a Goldberg after a hard day’s work,” Bloomberg quoted Essaadi as saying.

Note: no GBH Sightlines for five weeks. Done?

Like clockwork, Stan has posted his February edition of Hop Queries – which is not a quote from Shakespeare, by the way. He built upon that glut of hops mentioned above, twisting the knife just a bit:

My story about why farmers in the Northwest are ready to remove 10,000 acres (about 18 percent of what was harvested last year) from production in 2024 has posted at Brewing Industry Guide (subscription required). Short term, this means there are plenty of hops out there, often at bargain prices.
Long term, think about how many times you have seen the term “soft landing” used when discussing the American economy. How does that usually work out? The market for hops has always been cyclical and landings have not often been soft. It will be a year or more before it is clear if this year is different.

Finally and speaking of honesty, consider this exchange in the comments at Beervana and ponder whether

Reader: Jeff, big fan of your blog and content. That being said, I would hope that we don’t start bashing beers here. The battle for beer should not be within the community but outside of it against wine and spirits. If we bash our own, regardless of how “eye-rolling” the content is we will lose the long game.”

Jeff: “Mason, it’s not my job to promote the brewing industry here. I try to write honestly and entertainingly about beer, and that means I criticize things from time to time. My “clients” are my readers, not breweries. Beyond that, I would argue that anyone who did want to promote the brewing industry would not whitewash negative stories, bad beers, or disappointing news. Concealing faults doesn’t help in the long run.”

Very well said, Jeff. One wonders how much this sort of call to disengagement from reality based reality that craft beer too often promotes has contributred to the slide that we discussed up top. That we see all around us. Maybe that’s what “theming” is. By the way, has anyone brewed a samey Doubly Hazy NEIPA and called it “Self Inflicted Wound”? As things change and interest in craft declines, it’s still good to watch how it falls if only to identify what stands the best chance of coming through the downturn.

OK. Mailed that one in. Didn’t even have to mention BrewDog. Or baseball now that I think of it. Fine… just 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 again to 123) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (913) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,450) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (up to 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. I now have admitted my dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat, relocated the links and finally accept that BlueSky is the leader in “the race to replace” Twex even while way behind.

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 really doing what needs to be done 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! Errr… nope, it is gone again according to Matty C.

*I mean consider this: “We have taken note of, and pre-ordered, Dr Christina Wade’s upcoming book The Devil’s in the Draught Lines about the history of women in British brewing. We nearly gave it a shout out (free advertisement) in this week’s round-up but decided to save that for next week. But, blimey, eh? CAMRA’s publishing strategy is interesting these days. You might call it public service publishing, doing what’s right for the good of the beer culture rather than what’s commercial (101 beers to drink before you die… again!). Except Desi Pubs seems to have been a substantial success.” That’s a proper bunch thoughts right there.
**IE: not actually “flat” at all.
***Note: “Plant nootropics are generally very well tolerated, but potential users should consider their overall health condition and consult a doctor about possible contraindications and drug interactions before trying a particular plant formulation.“
****This piece serves as an interesting counterpoint to Boak and Bailey’s thoughts from last July whose words from them bear repeating: “It used to be a ‘beer garden’ – a bare yard full of tables. It felt like having a pint in the car park of ASDA. But now it is a Beer Garden, or at least heading well in that direction. Around the perimeter are tall plants providing a green shield. In the garden between tables, there are loaded beds and planters. Grasses, shrubs and young trees soften edges, dampen sound and create depth. This is now a pleasant place to be, like a park or botanical exhibition.“

The First And So Far Most Februariest Beery News Notes Of 2024

Here we are. The second month of the year. Even though it sorta sucks around here, February is at least proof that dreary January isn’t forever. Sky watcher Jordan noticed, too. Sky watcher. I saw this weird blinding light up there just yesterday afternoon. It was strange. Everyone I know is looking forward to this month, solely to put January behind them. Was it that bad? It was. It really was. TGIF, baby. You know, January’s taking on a certain societal pong. It’s now the crappiest month of the year, isn’t it. Why? Well, perhaps as a first bit of evidence, Cookie puts his foot down about Dry January:

Boozing is part of culture. December is culturally a month of excessive consumption. January is always quiet. This has been a seasonal norm for centuries. Imagine the guy renting deckchairs on the beach, moaning that it’s quiet in winter. Hospitality is seasonal.

That is a reasonable argument. At least a reasonable baseline. Do people believe it? There have been a number of unfortunate tales of businesses doing badly, blaming the times, blaming others and bad luck, blaming the general cutting back. Can we call these exuberance hangovers?* It is a now problem or a back then one? As this handy graph illustrates, there are even exuberences in some sorts of exuberence avoidance, like in the no/lo marketplace:

The pattern was similar for spirits, with people paying more for no/lo spirits, on average, than standard spirits. Again, the gap has narrowed over time, after an initial ‘noisier’ period when the no/lo spirits market was extremely small. There was relatively little difference between the prices paid for no/lo and standard ciders in pubs, bars, clubs, and nightclubs, with no/lo cider being 5% more expensive on average in 2021. Wine was notably different to the other categories, with prices paid for no/lo wine remaining consistently around 25% lower than standard wine.

You are going to have to read that article for the graph to make any sense. But it looks so good I am just leaving it there. I also thought of this question of inordinate enthusiam when I read Jessica Mason‘s piece on the response of certain minority shareholders of Black Sheep Brewing at the brewery’s reorganization by new investor the private quity firm, Breal:

Regarding Breal’s interests in Black Sheep, Sturdy admitted in his letter that he was “glad that most of the jobs of the employees in the company were saved” despite news of redundancies and closures circulating, but queried “how the directors are fit and proper persons to run the new company”. Describing the issue, he highlighted… “most of us are not rich, but are hard working loyal people, including employees of the old company, farmers, licensees and local tradesmen”. He said: “Coincidentally the CEO owned no shares in the company at this time. The MD and export director owned 6,256 and 11,050 shares respectively” and added: “In my view these deals should be outlawed.”

I mean I get it – and there are the empty pocketed suppliers to think of too. A very January-ish story. The month of general public lament. I noticed that The New York Times published stories on the dangers to mental health by taking lots of things as well as on the various other dangers of cannabis however taken. Having given up on dope around 1981, I am a bit amazed that this is newsworthy because it is simply so. Not news. But then the same paper of record published something I found actually new and noteworthy: businesses responding to the challenges of these times head on, by undertaking all sorts of intentional narrowing in beer selection:

“I don’t need five pilsners,” said Olivier Rassinoux, the vice president of restaurant and bar at Patina Restaurant Group, which is headquartered in Buffalo. At Patina’s Banners Kitchen & Tap, a 72-tap sports bar in Boston, the bar turned two taps over to kegged margaritas last year and plans to add additional draft cocktails and wine. Max’s Taphouse, a Baltimore beer institution since 1986, is buying smaller kegs to fill its 113 taps and reducing its extensive cellar of large-format bottled beers. They’ve fallen out of fashion, and lingering bottles are “turning into nostalgic keepsakes,” said Jason Scheerer, the general manager.

Ahhh… Max’s. Got the kid a sweet tee there in 2012. He was 12. Fits him now. Better to be clever and cautious than closed. Relatedly, in his newsletter Everyday Drinking, after describing another sort of exuberance (his own recent training as a honey sommelier care of the American Honey Tasting Society) Jason Wilson posed the question that has parallel this era of gratification through certification:

…over the past decade, there’s been a creeping wine-ification in every realm of gourmet endeavor. Now, in our era of hyper-credentialism, there’s almost no sphere of connoisseurship without a knowledgeable, certified taste expert, someone who’s completed serious coursework and passed an exam. A two-day tea sommelier certification course (followed by eight weeks of home study) from the International Tea Masters Association costs $1,725. A five-day olive oil sommelier certification program in New York costs $2,800. A nine-day water sommelier certification program at the Doemens Academy in Germany costs more than $3,000 (travel not included). These programs prepare you to be a taste authority, a sensory expert, an arbiter and evangelist in the field, though you’re likely not producing anything.

That’s a lot. Was it also too much? Did we ever need all these niche claims to authority? Enthusiasts with paper. Is that also an exuberance passing out of fashion? Didn’t we have enough of authority when we decided to take a pass on the off-taste lessons and beer pairing dinners? Speaking of excesses, Stan published his latest edititon of Hop Queries and gave a vivid picture of of the excess hop production facing the industry:

A surplus of hops continues to hang like a dark cloud over producers and suppliers in the Northwest. Last week at the American Hop Convention, John I. Haas CEO Tom Davis told growers that as a group they need to remove an additional 9,000 to 10,000 acres of aroma hops from of production. Idling about 6,000 acres (including approximately 9,000 acres of aroma hops) in 2023 had no meaningful impact on inventory reduction. The estimated 35-to-40-million-pound aroma hop surplus has not changed… In the Czech Republic, the third largest hop producing country in the world, growers harvest about 12,000 acres, almost all of them planted with aroma varieties. Eliminating 10,000 acres would be much like eliminating all Czech production. It would reduce acreage to not much more than farmers strung in 2015…

Very much conversely, Lucy Corne had an excellent piece published in GBH about a small, succinct and successful Ontario-Rwanda project which I knew a bit about when it was first started by Beau’s Brewing** in far eastern Ontario – but one which I had lost track before it took a distinct turn just about 17 words after this part of the story below:

Beauchesne thought it sounded like a good fit, though it would present obvious challenges. “It was so much more out of our comfort zone than we had intended,” he says. “We flew down to Rwanda to meet Fina and to check out the business climate. The last thing we wanted was to start a project that had no chance of succeeding. I came back inspired. And also scared shitless.” Burying his fears, Beauchesne dove into the project, launching a crowdfunding campaign which reached its $100,000 target within two months. Over the next year, locations were scouted around Kigali, business plans were drawn up, and the team at Beau’s started working on recipes using traditional Rwandan brewing ingredients, including cassava and bananas.

And the very epitome of a balanced approach, the Tand published a neat a tidy story of a beer crawl in London the highligth of which was his vignette of busy normality:

This is an Irish style pub – without the umpteen intrusive televisions – and was severely rammed with after work drinkers. Nonetheless, the service was swift and cheerfully efficient, but it was so busy I could see little of the bar. I’m pretty sure there was no cask and I wouldn’t have had it anyway here, as everyone seemed to be guzzling Guinness. If you can’t beat them, join them is sometimes not a bad motto. The Guinness was the best I have ever had in London. Perhaps a tad cold, but certainly the best since I was last in Belfast, and at least a match for Mulligans in Manchester. So we had another. Seemed the right thing to do, especially since the same barman who’d served me, when collecting glasses, saw us standing in a corner and shifted some office workers who’d purloined the table that should have been there. Thus seated, we enjoyed the busy scene even more.

Note: one sort of beer, not 113 taps. And what a great heaving description. Balance was also a theme in Lily Waite‘s piece in Pellicle this week, a portrait of Ideal Day Family Brewery, a back to basics brewery situated in a rural English business cooperative:

Set in a central run of low-slung converted stone barns around a well-tended courtyard, and a number of other slightly less hashtag-aesthetic, more utilitarian farm buildings around the site, the various businesses work together in harmony. The hospitality centred ones all invariably use produce from the farm: the restaurant’s whole ethos is farm-to-table; the cafe uses and sells the produce; James uses wheat and barley grown on the farm and various miscellany from the kitchen garden in his beers.

And in his newsletter Episodes of My Pub Life, David Jesudason reflected on being included in a Deutsche Welle broadcast to share his thoughts on speakin of how things really were, looking back with clarity through his studies of the imperial roots of IPA while giving us a bit of an insight into his process:

I’m really proud of this podcast put together by DW (the German equivalent of the BBC) on the thorny subject of the IPA’s colonial legacy. It came about after the producer Sam Baker stumbled upon my first piece for Good Beer Hunting, which changed how we looked at how IPAs were marketed. (I have mixed feelings about that article as none of my subsequent ones for GBH ever reached the same mass audience.) The Don’t Drink the Milk podcast seeks to explain a subject ubiquitous but misunderstood. The IPA episode had a huge scope with numerous recordings in different countries but is easily accessible for listeners new to the subject of empire. It placed mine and beer writer Pete Brown’s stories central to the narrative and even gave international listeners a flavour of what the Gladstone in Borough is like. It’s what I want Radio 4 to be when I switch it on – and then quickly turn off as I feel alienated by a lot of the subject matter...

Reality checked. Finally and as reported in December, Jeff was invited to speak at a beerfest in Budapest. In his reportage from the scene, he posted something like that chapter in the middle of Hobbes’ Leviathan that cuts so quickly to the point that the rest of the book is a bit unnecesary. In sum, it is a summary – but to my mind some bits might need a wee edit like this:

What’s different is the internet—now information moves far more quickly. In the U.S., it took brewers 15-30 years (depending on the region) to develop native beer. Brewers weren’t even making the beer they imitated properly because most had never been to Europe and they had no information about how to make those beers.

There’s a couple of things. First, the US has given birth to many beer styles that would please any nativist. The cream ales, cream beers, steam beers or (the most obvious winner of the race… if it were a race) macro lagers have each had their day just as Pete’s Wicked Ale and then extreme beers have more recently. And Albany, Kentucky and California have all sent their distinct offspring out into the world. Which is why I prefer “regional” to “national” as the adjective in these matter.

Second, even though there weren’t 100 microbreweries and brewpubs in the USA until around 1988 (making them an oddity for most of the decade) in the 1980s there is no question that US craft brewers had access to plenty of information about brewing the good beer they were imitating. There were imported books and magazines as well as beer supply stores and beers of the world bars as meeting places. We see from one document that there were festivals like the Great American Beer Festival in 1982 at Boulder Colorado where Fred Eckhardt, Michael Jackson, Ken Grossman, Michael Lewis, Bill Newman and Charlie Papazian met with British brewers who all spoke and no doubt spoke with each other and anyone else who cared to listen. We learn from another primary record from 1986 that Michael Jackson was delighted with the Winter Ale brewed by Bill Newman at Albany, New York. Newman had learned his stills during the months in 1979 he worked under the tutelage of the father of the British independent brewery movement, the recently departed Peter Austin, at his Ringwood Brewery in Hampshire England. Alan Pugsley of Shipyard also trained under Austin and then trained others. Greg Noonan later of the Vermont Brewery was out there researching his first book “Brewing Lager Beer” before 1986, the same year the Buffalo Brewpub was opened by Kevin Townsell who “imports his malt from England via Canada, and gets hops, a fragrant vine that determines aroma and bitterness levels, from the Yakima Valley.” And, of course, Bert Grant had been in the brewing trade since the 1940s working his way up at E.P. Taylor’s Carling brewery in Toronto before later emigrating and opening Yakima Brewing in 1982. Suffice it to say, they all had the information. And shared it. And understood what they were doing.

That’s a lot. The clear and unclear. The plain and the cluttered. The unexpected and the shoulda seen coming. Ways that are fair while others are rough. Enough!! 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 again to 116 rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (static at 911) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,437 – down one) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (down to 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. I now have admitted my dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat, relocated the links and finally accept that BlueSky is the leader in “the race to replace” Twex even while way behind.

Fear not! While some apps perform better than other we can always 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!

*any number of the misheard lyrics of “Video Killed the Radio Star” may apply – we did country wine! Plus I knew a guy called Hubert. That explains everything.
**Disclosure: Steve B has been in my house at least twice and drank my beer…
***Thesis: podcasts and newsletters are a great way to minimize correction, criticism and citation by others so… playgrounds for affirmation. Antithesis: then why do I /you quote from them, numbskull?