Your Mid-February 2022 Edition Of The Beery News Notes And That Odd Problem With Rice

What a week! A trip to the dentist and the Federal imposition of the Emergency Measures Act!! It could drive one to drink. Except I haven’t. Had a couple of really good beers on Saturday, though. Stone City’s Ships In The Night. Oatmeal stout is rarely not a good call. But I have acquired my protest gear as illustrated, should any protests come my way. One must be prepared.

What else? Super Bowl. Stupor Bowl. Superb Owl. It also happened this week. Unlike much of the continent, me I had not one beer. I paid little attention to the game itself on TV which ended up as a bit of a yawner even with the close final score. But would it be better live? Well. it’s not exactly for the snack bracket me and my peeps, is it?

…a double measure of Don Julio, Ciroc or Tanqueray 10 would set punters back US$25. Meanwhile, the craft beer selections clocked in at $19, which would get drinkers a serve of Kona, Golden Road Mango Cart or Elysian Space Dust. The premium beer serve was Michelob Ultra, which was priced at $17. And it’s fair to say that fans were taken aback by the prices.

More breweries closed this week. As Jeff reported, Hair of the Dog and Modern Times -both of the US West Coast wound down in whole or in part. The latter announced it this way:

Today is the most difficult day we’ve ever had at Modern Times. Over the last two unimaginably challenging pandemic years, we’ve done everything we could to keep all of our newly-opened locations afloat in a landscape we never could have imagined when we began building them. As new leadership has stepped up and taken the helm over the last few weeks, it became clear that the financial state of the company that we are now tasked with directing is not just unsustainable, but in immediate and unavoidable peril

Hair of the Dog is/was one of the greats that never had dreams of delivery fleets and HR departments. Retirement is well earned. I put the last cardboard box from the fabulous HOTD misadventure of 2006 out with the recycling just last Sunday.

Elsewhere, building on the momentum to challenge the ethics within Ontario’s brewing industry led by Erin Broadfoot,  Mallory Jones the brewer and co-owner of my beloved Matron Fine Beer in nearby Prince Edward County on behalf of herself and fellow brewer and co-owner Jessica Nettleton, shared experiences of their lives in beer, starting with this remarkably concise statement:

Behind the ‘good times and camaraderie’ there is a dark underbelly, a booze-fuelled side, a sexist and skewed patriarchal side, a side that desperately needs to change.

Note in particular this statement: “…beer events often (read: all of them) result in over consumption which always equals disgusting behaviour from a wide variety of individuals on both sides of the bar…” It boggles the mind how it took so long for such obvious and open behaviours to be simply and plainly stated after years of the trade and trade writers telling us how it’s all one community and craft beer people are good people. I am very careful who I buy from now as well as whose word I take.

There was a great short video of a Polish railway standup tavern car on Twitter this week. One of my favourite memories of working in Northern Poland thirty years ago was the the Polish railway standup tavern car from Kołobrzeg to Gdansk. The good old PKP (“puh-ka-puh”). There is even “fruit syrup for beer” now.

Over in India, the government has taken a very sensible approach to the healthier regulation of the beer market that would be a great first step towards the listing of ingredients:

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) will soon come out with fresh regulations for two important everyday consumption items – bread and beer. Beer brands will have to disclose the calorie count per bottle or can while bread makers will be allowed to label products as ‘multigrain’, ‘whole wheat’, and ‘brown’ bread only if the items have specified amount of multigrain or whole wheat in them, FSSAI CEO Arun Singhal said.

There will be boo-hooing from the please-do-nothing crowd but calculation of beer calories is a reasonably straight forward matter. The only problem is how surprised the beer buying public might be.

Everyone one loves a story about a truck load of beer crashing across the roadway. I think only a load of fish thrown upon the hot asphalt is considered more remarkable but that’s because of the gross immediate squishy slippy driving conditions.

Martin wrote this week about the experience at a little investigate site of beer imbibations – a fitba corporate hospitality suite  – and found it… a bit sad:

£6.50 your pie and mash and peas from memory, and beer not much above Northern Quarter prices (double Kelham prices, of course). This is the cheaper end of the hospitality market, giving you a nice seat with your pre-match pie and pint, and seems to be a treat for the old fellas and the well-off bloke dragging his girlfriend to the match. And then you walk from the social club style bar to your padded seat and get distracted by Caitlin Jenner and goal flashes from Blackburn.

He then had a bit cheerier but also reflective experience with his Pa, down at the Plough & Fleece:

Across the road, we could see the nondescript cafe at Scotsdale Garden Centre busy as usual. The coffee and cake at the garden centre has long replace fish and chips and a pint at the pub, even though the pub is often cheaper and always the more homely option.

Lars as usual used social media to the fullest this week to discuss the role of alder wood as a filtering tool in Norwegian farmhouse brewing undertaking both hallmark mapping excellence and scientific journal review enroute:

I found a modern scientific paper which extracted substances from alder bark that they found to be antibacterial. Unfortunately, they were also antifungal and very effective against yeast, so clearly the concentration in beer isn’t enough to have an effect.

Q: has beer historian Amy Mittelman returned to beer blogging?

And just before the long last topic,  this week we received the sad news of the death of one of the leaders in the early years of the UK’s craft beer movement of 12-15 years ago. Dave Bailey was the owner of the Hardknott Brewery which was founded in 2006 and closed in 2018. He was sought out and sought out others who were thinking about beer, like we see in 2009. Alistair at Fuggled interviewed him in 2010. Dave’s brewery was as well known and certain as central to the scene as BrewDog in those years. He was only in his mid-50s when he passed. Dave was a great friend to those interested in discussing good beer and was a regular chatting in social media. My earliest Twitter chats go back to 2009. He kept an excellent beer blog that gave the straight story about life as a small scale brewer like when in 2017 he shared painful business realities connected to the question of how far to capitalize his venture. He had announced in 2020 that he was living with cancer. Very sad news of the loss of a pioneer. Thoughts are with his partner in life and business, Ann.

Finally, there was a bit of faff over the weekend about something claimed to be “Japanese Pilsner” which was neatly summed up by Jenny Pfäfflin this way:

Anyway, brewers using rice in their beer =\= a “Japanese Lager”—it’s a made-up style in that sense—but I don’t think you can write off the possibility there are distinct ingredients and processes that make Japanese-made rice lagers a style of its own…

I called it a fiction and some poor widdle cwafters went a bit boo-hoo. But were they right? It is always important to understand you may be 100% wrong 100% of the time. So let’s see.

First, the thing is even with that narrowing of focus that Ms. Pfäfflin recommends, we have to consider how late brewing beer came to Japan as well as how rice came to be in beer. Until around the time of the US Civil War in the mid-1860s, Japan was governed under a feudal system which had a strict cultural and economic isolationist policy that the western powers were actively seeking to break down. Breweries founded in the ensuing Meiji period were European and even American affairs. As I mentioned last November, the Spring Valley Brewery, founded in Yokohama in 1869 by Norwegian-American brewer, William Copeland. That brewery later becomes the Japan Beer Brewery Company and then Kirin. In line with the new general national policy of opening up to industrialization, what is now Sapporo was founded by what looks like a government agency, the Hokkaido Development Commission which hired Seibei Nakagawa, a Germany-trained brewer, as its first brewmaster in June 1876. Sapporo still brews Yebisu a Dortmunder/export lager, and Yebisu Black, a dark lager which were  first brewed in Tokyo in 1890 by the Japan Beer Brewery Company. These breweries were brewing German beers. As the CEO of Kirin Brewery, Kato Kazuyasu, in 2011 stated:

The Japan Brewery Company shared its primary objective of brewing authentic German beer. Veteran German brewmasters were recruited and the most advanced equipment and steaming systems of the time were acquired, all under the mantra of providing Japanese consumers with the most authentic quality and satisfying taste possible…

Now… consider Japan’s next few decades. Expansionist military imperial government leading through the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 through to the end of WWII. European influence continued in partnership with government industrialization policy as described in the 2014 article “Structural Advantage and the Origins of the Japanese Beer Industry, 1869-1918” by Jeffery W. Alexander*:

Like Kirin Beer, the firm that we know today as Sapporo Breweries Ltd. underwent a rather complex evolution – one that would take twice as long to unfold and would involve four unique phases through 1949. The first three of those phases are of interest to us here, for between its founding as a government-directed and development project in 1876, its reestablishment by private investors as a limited company in 1888, and its merger with two major rival brewers in 1906, the brewery received extensive technical assistance from a variety of foreign experts.

Through this merger, the Dai Nippon (Greater Japan) Beer Company, Inc. was created on 26 March 1906. It was only broken up in 1949 as the Allied Occupation forces sought to reverse the imperial policy of concentrated economic power. And, as Alexander states, beer in Japan “was brewed, advertised, and sold in Japan as a proudly German-styled commodity into the late 1930s.

After WW2, the United States occupied Japan from 1945 to 1952. There was an economic boom starting in 1950 due to the UN using Japan as it base for the Korean War. Starting at this time, breweries like the smaller Orion shifted from German style brewing to beers which more reflected American tastes. Not much of a vernacular brewing tradition to this point. For the next few decades that consolidated industrial approach continued as a handful of macro industrial brewing supplied the market (as Alexander states elsewhere**) “until Japan’s government decided in 1994 to again permit small-scale brewing.” Kirin held over 60% of the market during those years and competition was primarily related to draft innovations, packaging design and the dry beer market. Japan’s generic international-style macro adjunct lagers which required a minimum of 67% barley malt*** were joined by sub-standard happoshu starting in 1994 and in 2004 sub-sub-standard zero-malt dai-san biiru, a third-category beer all to feeding, one supposes, the salaryman market.

As Lisa Grimm explained in her 2018 Serious Eats article, early Japanese small breweries replicated the adjunct lagers:

The first craft brewery to open in Japan was Echigo Beer, and they struck something of a balance between the entrenched ‘dry’ beer trend and German- and American-influenced craft brewing techniques. In addition to pale ales and stouts, they also made (and continue to make) a rice-based lager that competes with the bigger players in the market—something of a gateway beer.

By twenty years ago, the Japanese branch of the globalist craft beer movement was moving at pace. Created in 1996 as the brewing division of an establish sake maker, Kiuchi, Hitachino Nest is one of Japan’s best known craft brewers. Its Red Rice Ale is first logged by a reviewer at the BeerAdvocate in 2002. So it’s done… even if only as a recent thing. But whatever is done, like German lager brewing in the later 1800s as well as US macro brewing in the mid-1900s, it is being done on the crest of another wave of globalist economic and technological innovation – craft.

So when you read about an American-made Japanese pilsnerbrewed with rice in the Japanese tradition” you have to understand this is really a sort of untruth. And a bit of cultural appropriation, I suppose. Rice in beer is an American innovation. American restructuring of the economy of Japan in the mid-1900s introduced rice into beer brewing because that is how Americans brewed. But that may make it actually a sort of truth as long as we set aside the fibs of craft and look at the situation with a more open mind. Let’s continue to look around a bit more.

When does rice get into beer? In Ambitious Brew, Maureen Ogle tells us in detail how Adophus Busch in the 1870s experimented with a form of what looks like a decoction brewing method which had eight pounds of rice to every five bushels of high quality barley.**** Light and bubbly beer. Tremblay and Tremblay explain how rice is used in the best US adjunct beers still to produce the effect they call “crisp” with again a fairly limited amount being all that is required. Budweiser, Coors and Miller Genuine Draft all having just under 5% rice in the mash which include +/-20% other adjuncts.***** They also explain how around 1950 US national advertising of beer hits its stride with Anheuser-Busch, Pabst and Schlitz being the premium brands.****** What America wanted. Home or away. It is so popular that the brewers of Canada in the mid-1920s******* during US Prohibition started brewing rice beer to serve the huge and very lucrative bootleg market. Including in Japan where they were the occupying government restructuring the economy including a oligarchical macro brewing industry that stayed in that form of few players, big players for the next 45 years. Which makes Japanese premium rice lager US premium rice lager.

Not only does rice make beer crisp, it makes production cheap. Barley malt is the best barley, the rest going to cattle feed and Scottish soups. Rice for brewing, however, is broken rice:

As brewing adjunct, rice has a very neutral flavor and aroma, and when properly converted in the brewhouse it yields to a light clean-tasting beer. Rice for brewing is a by-product of the edible rice milling industry, any kernels that may get fractured during the milling process (~30%) are considered undesirable are therefore sold to the brewing industry at a cheaper price. ********

The adoption of rice in brewing was part of a general move over decades to move away from heavier foods and drink, what Tremblay and Tremblay call “the growing mass appeal of lighter beer which drove most of the domestic brewers of dark beer out of business.“********* Short-grained or japonica rice is preferred in brewing.+ Japan’s brewer ride that wave, too, as part of the globalization of US macro industrial adjunct lagers that made Carling out of a Canadian beer, gave Kenya Tusker, gave Australia Fosters, etc. etc.

One more thing. How does rice get to the US to get later into the beer? In The Cooking Gene Michael W. Twitty explains how the Asian strain of rice came to colonial America in 1685  care of a very lost ship from Madagascar. Captured and enslaved people from Africa who knew how to grow rice were used forced agricultural labour and by 1770 150,000 acres of the US eastern shoreline were slave labour concentration camp rice plantations with 66 million pounds produced annually.+* After the US Civil War, about when Japanese isolationism policy weakens, rice production drops with emancipation but then shifts inland and become mechanized in Louisiana and Texas which, by the 1890s, are producing 75% of the US rice crop.+** Which creates a lot of broken rice for brewers, notably quite distinct from the top quality rice used in sake.+***

So if, starting in 1685, short grain japonica rice comes to the US, becomes a massively valuable cash crop with a very useful by-product of broken rice that is found to have a role in US macro brewing and then is taken to Japan as part of the post-war era of US Occupation… hasn’t that strain of rice circled the globe over about 260 years? And hasn’t the history of Japan been so affected by these global influences… even if they are arguably economic colonial or even technological hegemonistic influences… that their culture legitimately has a tradition of international rice adjunct premium lager that could be called “Japanese rice pilsner”? Hasn’t Japan’s brewing history been almost entirely based on international influence from the 1860s to now? But can you have a national tradition which is not… vernacular? I will leave that question with you as you next look at a bottle of craft beer labelled Japanese traditional rice pilsner which says “made in the USA” on the back. +****

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

*Brewery History (2014) 158, 19-37.
**Brewed in Japan – The Evolution of Japanese Beer Industry” (UBC, 2013) sample introduction at page 5.
***Not the main ingredient as some claim.
****Ambitious Brew (Harcourt, 2006) at pages 76-77.
*****The US Brewing Industry (MIT, 2005) at page 7.
******Ibid., page 52-53.
*******The King v. Carling Export Brewing & Malting Co. Ltd., 1930 CanLII 46 (SCC), [1930] SCR 361 at page 373.
********The Use of Rice in Brewing” in Advances in International Rice Research (InTech, 2017) by O. Marconi et al. at page 57 as well as this at page 51: “Usually, brewer’s rice is a byproduct of the edible rice milling industry. Hulls are removed from paddy rice, and this hulled rice is then dry milled to remove the bran, aleurone layers and germ. The objective of rice milling is to completely remove these fractions with a minimal amount of damage to the starchy endosperm, resulting in whole kernels for domestic consumption. The broken pieces are considered esthetically undesirable for domestic use and sold to brewers at a low price. Rice is preferred by some brewers as adjuncts because of its lower oil content compared to corn grits. It has a very neutral aroma and flavor, and when properly converted in the brewhouse it results in a light, dry, clean-tasting and drinkable beer.”
*********Tremblay and Tremblay, supra, at page 107.
+O. Marconi et al., supra, at page 50.
+*The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty (Amistad HarperCollins, 2017) at page 243.
+**See Wikipedia article “Rice production in the United States” at section on 19th century.
+***See MTC Sake and Home Brew Sake websites.
+****Heck, name a brand “1685+1876+1945+1994=???” if you like.

Addendum: Cream Beer Was Once Cream Beer

Over five years ago now I wrote the last of a few posts on the question of cream beer.  It co-existed with cream ale and Imperial Cream Ales and all the other creamy drinks. I traced it from Ohio in the 1840s back to NYC and Pennsylvania in the 1820s. It has been referenced as a predecessor to Kentucky Common. It was a thing until it wasn’t:

‘The scent of roses clings round it still.’ Cream beer, which was brewed by our best brewers, is, like the ale-sangaree, is a thing of the past. The rich cool beverage has gone out of use…*

Note: cream ale as not “a thing of the past” when that was written. One of the puzzles was whether it was something from Germany. One of the records I came across referenced “…cream beer, or Lauderschaum…” My problem was I thought there were two waves of German immigration to the USA which did not line up with this timing: the Pennsylvania Dutch from before the American Revolution in the mid-1700s and then the Germans of the 1840s escaping the backlash against other revolutions like George Gillig, bringer of lager.

So much pleased was I to come across that notice up at the top from the Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette of 19 Nov 1816. A notice for the sale of indentured servants, or German Redemptioners. To the right is another notice for Redemptioners from New York City in 1785. No brewers were mentioned in this group unlike the notice from thirty one years later. According to Wikipedia, redemptioners were continental European immigrants in the 18th or early 19th century who sailed most often to  Pennsylvania by selling themselves into indentured servitude to pay back the shipping company for the cost of the ticket. Including brewers.

Which means there was a third sort of immigration, one with a supply of brewers with contemporary brewing skills within the right time frame who would be able to make “…cream beer, or Lauderschaum…” just like Gillig was able to bring his lager brewing skills a few decades later.

Update: I should also link to this 2018 post about schenk and Bavarian beer.

*What the hell is ale-sangaree?

The Beery News Notes For The End Of 2021’s 10/12ths

Here we are. November looms. I’ve never thought Halloween was all that scary given November is right there behind it.  The dreariest month. If it snows, winter will be too long. If it rains, the rain is bone achingly cold. Dreich. But a big month for beer. Big beers, in fact. I’ve been laying off but maybe it’s time to lay on again. Treat yourselves nice in November. It’s like it needs its own month to celebrate itself. Like gag-tastic #RauchBeerMonth but with, you know, the prospect of someone actually being made happier. And that’s what we want. To be happy. Despite the dreich.

This November marks the seventh anniversary of perhaps the high point in the craft phase of good beer, circa 2003 to about 2016. The cover of The New Yorker from November 3, 2014. Mere months after the publication of the cult classic The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer. Josh Noel‘s comment was spot on – a moment in time before hard seltzer. And perhaps a moment that had some aspects we are well rid of – if this article on Colorado’s New Image brewery is anything to go by:

The idea that brewery employees should expect less money because they are “doing what they love” is a cliché that needs to go away, he adds. “We are trying to take that out of craft-beer culture. It’s about damn time we have good benefits and good pay for people making beer.” Having a second taproom with higher margins on sales will help that effort as well, Capps says. And New Image is now “aggressively” seeking out locations that it can buy to add a third or even a fourth taproom.

The past is a foreign land. Conversely, there are a lot of words that come to mind in this story of today. Gall. Cheek. Privilege. Arseholes probably the correct term as the Manchester Evening News reports:

The Pack Horse, which is in the Peak District village of Hayfield, was visited by a group who didn’t flag any problems with their food when staff checked in with them, but chose to complain when they’d already eaten most of the meal, staff said. They allegedly tried to demand a new dish – which was refused – and eventually left without paying their bill. Owner and chef Luke Payne said that one member of the group then had the nerve to wink at him as they left.

The article goes on to suggest that manners have dropped in these later pandemic months. Arseholes, I say. Matt C. explored other forms of late pandemic angst in an article in Pellicle this week:

Before the pandemic, one place in particular I would find both solace and kinship was at a beer festival. In my search for remembering what it was like to feel more normal, I fondly recalled the deep-seated warmth I felt from head to toe as I travelled home from Cloudwater Brew Co.’s Friends & Family & Beer in February 2020. While there I had a wonderful time enjoying many delicious beverages, and spending quality time with friends old and new—some who had travelled half-way across the world to attend. The festival took place in Manchester, too: a city my partner and I had decided we would soon make our home. I felt ready for the next chapter. Then the wheels came off, the world grinding to a halt at the mercy of the bastard virus. 

I’ve never liked beer fests myself. Don’t miss them.  Too many drunks. Perhaps I differ in this regard from The Beer Nut who celebrated 30 years of the European Beer Consumers Union, the sort of institution North American beer culture lacks. No fest to back up the celebration, however. Just Zoom.

Another venue for drinking that’s much more to my liking is also disappearing as The New York Times reports:

Several decades ago, the beer bar, with its dozens of draft options and deep bottle lists, delivered a liquid education in bitter I.P.A.s and monk-brewed Belgian ales alike. They were places “where customers discovered craft,” and helped the genre grow, said Bart Watson, chief economist for the Brewers Association trade group. But with growth of the taprooms, craft-bar release parties for special beers dried up. What was once “a prime way of bringing people into bars was gradually taken away by the breweries themselves,” Mr. Black said.

No, beer bars were not where folk discovered craft. They predate craft. (You’d think people would get it. Obey the chronology.)  In their finest form they are a dive with very good stock. Like Max’s in Baltimore. Conversely, craft is the taproom. But it is true. Craft killed the beer bar. Including by aggressively opening new taprooms, as we read above. (I know… I’ve been quoted as an expert in the subject. Sorta.) But I was quoted by Stan who posted a follow-up post (a post that poses possibilities predicated on the prior post) on the question “wuzza beer bar?“:

Two names I heard more than others were Rino Beer Garden and Finn’s Manor. Finn’s has a shorter tap list — curated, as the kids say — and a cocktail menu. Rino has more than 60-plus taps. Would both be classified as beer bars? Pat Baker provided a definition in his “Beer & Bar Atlas” in 1988. His classifications included classic bar, neighborhood bar, beer bar, Irish bar, German bar, English Pub and fern bar. (Yes, neither wine bar nor sports bar.)

At this point, I pause to consider this week’s candidate for the wonderful graph award. Gaze upon this for a moment:

Look at that graph. I have stripped a few identifiers from it to get to the nub of the matter but it is from Colin Angus as posted under his handle @VictimOfMaths and came with this message:

The UK’s approach to taxing alcohol is stupid. In the budget next week there is a strong possibility the chancellor will overhaul it. Before we find out what he has planned, here’s a thread on what is the current system and what exactly is wrong with it? 

Thread. And it does all look stupid when put that way. Why is beer taxed at a higher rate as it strengthens while wine moves in the opposite direction? The actual changes to taxation were announced Wednesday. CAMRA wrote of games being changed. Matt had a summary as well as  particular view as to the taxed event within the supply chain which is useful:

…the consumer doesn’t pay that duty, nor does the pub. The producer does. So on a 9 gallon cask of 72 pints, that’s £2.16 off costs. Maybe a bigger saving if its below 3.5%…

Speaking of the graphical representations of data, Lars has updated his yeast family tree based on a number of recent studies and included lots of wonderful graphs as well as new info:

They also found a separate subgroup of African beer yeasts, which is very interesting. Africa has an enormous variety of traditional farmhouse brewing going on in many different countries over much of the continent, and many of those brewers still maintain their own yeasts. (Martin Thibault spoke about Ethiopian brewers and their yeast at Norsk Kornølfestival in 2020.) Now it looks like they, too, have their own genetic subgroup of yeasts.

Note: be flexible.

Finally, Boak and Bailey’s post this week on the Stokes Croft Brewery, Bristol, 1890-1911 contains this fabulous image which goes a long way to explain the gradation of late Victorian stouts and ales. I got all excited when I saw it. Lovely. Place a laminated copy in your wallet for handy reference.

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

The Last Of August’s Thursday Beery News Notes

What was that? Summer 2021? Done? It’s still going on here as I am on an actual holiday and doing fun stuff like getting new spectacles for my face and a new electrical panel for the basement. Wooot! This is the dream and I am livin’ it. I even had 330 ml of a 3.8% beer yesterday and watched a Netflix show about the Korean buckwheat noodle dish naengmyeon, as recommended by DSL.* Both a drinking and then hangover dish apparently. Now I know why my buckwheat noodles suck. I didn’t immediately rinse and rub them in ice water. And, yes, a hundred other reasons. Never again. Probably. Maybe.

First off, it was good to read “The Ancient Magic of Malt: Making Malt Sugars and Ale from Grain Using Traditional Techniques” by sometimes reader Merryn Dineley in the journal EXARC.net,* 2021 (vol 2) who set the record straight:

This paper is presented as a historical narrative as well as being an explanation of basic ‘mashing in’ techniques. I aim to tell the story of the development of my understanding of how to make malt and malt sugars from the grain. I have learned from other experimental archaeologists, from ancient technologists and brewing scientists as well as from ethnographic research and the study of traditional style malting, mashing and fermentation techniques. One of the common myths about the origins of beer thousands of years ago is that grain was perhaps left in a container, it got wet and, somehow, turned into beer. This is impossible. The conditions for making malt and malt sugars do not exist in this situation. 

A bit later in time but still in the past, Rob Sterowski at “I Might Have a Glass of Beer” wrote about Epochal Barrel Fermented Ales, a brewery intent of brewing the old fashioned way:

Possibly the most erudite of Scottish brewers, Young deserted the world of academic philosophy to devote himself to a study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century brewing literature instead, and Epochal Barrel Fermented Ales is the result. A skilled home brewer, he has set up his small brewery in Port Dundas to make beers influenced by the way it was done two hundred years ago. His beer is fermented with a multi-strain yeast, cleansed to rid them of excess yeast and then allowed to mature to completion in oak barrels with a handful of whole-cone hops. The finished product is naturally carbonated in the bottle.

As Boak and Bailey noted, suggestions that the #MeToo and #BLM movements’ efforts to expose craft beer’s ugly side have faded were found wanting with the news of an open letter to England’s West Berkshire Brewery. You can click on the image to the right to read the complaints yourself. It is certainly one of the long failings of the drinking entertainment pleasure trade to address the piggish attitudes that go along with booze. So it is good to read that folk won’t be bullied to keep quiet when it comes to bigotry and harassment even if a lot of the privileged voices have wandered away.

I wasn’t familiar with English comedian Sean Lock. He passed away this past week but I am glad to know he had a hobby.

Update: I failed in not mentioning “Empire State of Mind” by David Jesudason published in GBH (thereby upping their average significantly) who looks at IPA from the point of view of the “I” as in India:

My father’s love of empire, and his belief that Britain was a civilizing force, was mirrored in the drink he called his own: the India Pale Ale. Of all of his beliefs, this one was particularly confused. His friends were Lager drinkers, and his adoption of IPA was a way of pretending to be refined in the days before the craft revolution had taken hold. But where he saw a drink that was emblematic of genteel, colonial India, I see something very different: Owing to the beer style’s association with the East India Company and its brutality, I can’t help but think of bloodshed, oppression, and enslavement.

I noted that it was an parallel to “Britain’s Idyllic Country Houses Reveal a Darker History“, the recent NYer piece on England’s National Trust but also cause for reflection on my own family’s path. One side included servants at big houses like that of the Collins publishing family as well as a great-grandfather who was a Sgt Mjr British army out in the empire while the other side, displaced highlanders in Greenock, built the ships that shifted the sugar that came out of the colonial system. Many died young, many had lives of if not poverty then at best modesty – with much drink caused troubles in industrial towns before many emigrated the hell out of there. If you have any doubt as to the way that IPA is code for empire consider this from that NYer article:

“At the end of the day, we went to a very, very, very rich country and transferred a lot of its wealth to this country, by trade, entrepreneurship, and looting,” Dalrymple said. In 2003, Angus Maddison, a British economist, calculated that India’s share of the global G.D.P. went from 24.4 per cent to 4.2 per cent during two and a half centuries of colonial rule. In 1884, the British state had a total income of two hundred and three million pounds, of which more than half came from its overseas territories, including seventy-four million pounds from India. Taxes were levied across the world and sent to burnish the metropole.

Good for someone to finally point out in depth the obvious issue with IPA as a placeholder for good beer.  Might as well brand US craft lager Berghof.

Note: craft.

One of Canada’s few pre-Confederations tavern/inns/hotels, the Queen’s Inn, is up for sale in my fair town. I wrote about it in 2004 when it was just 165 years old and I was only 41: and is ripe with history and charm:

…he remembers one particular customer who continued coming in until he was in his 80s. The gentleman, Mitchell recalled, was blind and had a booming voice. “Give him two drafts,” the bartender told the younger Mitchell. “We just put the price up to 50 cents. Have fun.” “I didn’t know what he meant. I put the two beers down and said, ‘That’ll be 50 cents.’” “Forty-five is all you’re getting,” the man bellowed back.

Another pandemic affected business. And, on that theme, Josh Noel pointed me in the direction of the tale of overzealous expansion which ended in the collapse  of Ale Asylum of Madison, Wisconsin:

Dilba said the pandemic “didn’t help” the business but added, “there were other extraneous factors, which I won’t get into, but the pressure applied by the pandemic was significant. And we’re not alone in that. Everybody in this world is in this fight together that really made moving forward very difficult.”

Factors cited elsewhere in the article include too many local beers, too many out of state beers in local bars and rent increases. Maybe also it’s because Americans are just drinking less, according to VinePair or, rather, the authors of the polling study they echo:***

Sixty percent is down nearly five percent from 2019. It’s down even more compared to 2010, when 67 percent of U.S. adults replied “yes” to the survey. There seemed to be a shift in drinking habits from 2019 until now. The average number of drinks per week (3.6) dropped to its lowest since 2001. Additionally, men (63 percent) reported drinking at a higher rate than women (57 percent).

Good reason to find another career than drinks writing! One person who does not care is likely Sister Doris Engelhard, the brewing nun in Germany whose story as told by NPR was the retweeted topic of the week:

“I only brew beer that I drink myself, so if the other sisters want to drink a wheat beer, they’ll have to buy it themselves,” she says. She also waves away any question about the intersection of her faith and her beer. “Beer is part of the Bavarian soul. If you’re not happy with yourself, you won’t be happy in a cloister,” she says. “And eating and drinking are part of that life. It’s not about being pious. All I need to do is believe in a higher power that accepts me as I am.”

Speaking of good stories about good outcomes, the BBC reported this week on the life of Cesar Kimbirima, a child soldier in Angola who found himself left for dead, now running a Wetherspoons pub:

…as the sky started spinning, and his consciousness faded to black, he thought it was over. His life would end in the long grass, while his blood poured into the dry Angolan earth. More than 20 years later, that dying soldier pours pints at the pub he manages in south London. As he chats to punters, and waves to babies in prams, there is no hint of Cesar Kimbirima’s former life.

There. That is it for now. Not sure if there will be an edition next week as I am driving to the sea. We will see. During these last lazy days, for more check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and (if I dare say) from Stan mostly every Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletterThe Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness! And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*who once posed as me just to be nearer Lars.
**an archaeological foundation of some sort out of The Netherland with an address on the fabulous street, Frambozenweg!
***Hah! I’m one to talk.

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For Mid-July

Beer season. This right here. This week. This is the week in all the beer ads. Mid-July. No “Back to School” sale ads on the TV yet and no freak snow storm hits Manitoba” news items of the Weather Network. Right here. Right now. The moment of beer. Perfect. I spent a similar perfect summer night, the night before last, stuck at the site of that weird weekend seven years ago with Ron Pattinson and hairy Jordan, when I stayed at an airport hotel full of wedding parties to save a buck. Well, I had to see my middle kid off on a plane so it only made sense to stay at the same place, right? No. Odd seeing the formerly jammed hotel essentially devoid of people. And devoid of services like food. I also had a work meeting from 5:30 to 10:45 in the evening by Zoom which was also odd to do in a hotel room. I don’t know how any of that relates to my new favourite web thing, pictures of dogs people have rescued that are really coyotes but there you go.

OK. Enough! Let’s get right to the good beer reading. There was a most thoughtful article on saison published by Joe Stange in Beer and Brewing. It provides great insight as to the methodology he recommends for formulating a beer.  Like this passage about grain options:

Chucking in different grains is fully in the spirit of saison. Keep it intentional: Know what malted or unmalted grains are going to do to your flavor and body, and choose them based on the profile you want. Wheat and spelt can bring softness and nutty, lemony notes, for example. Rye tends to bring peppery notes along with a certain smoothness. Or keep it clean and bright—Saison Dupont, after all, is brewed with 100 percent pilsner malt. 

Know. Great word choice. Best line: “I’ve never had a saison that was more drinkable because of spices, but I’ve had many that would’ve been more drinkable without them.”

Top tier side interest from Katie MatherSpeedway!

I was delighted to find Shove it, Chuck it, Toss it… a blog about English pub games, a topic near to my heart and largely distant from my experience. Consider this detailed description of The Princess Royal in Taunton, Somerset including facts facts facts like this:

With social distancing rules in place for another couple of weeks at least, pubs of all sizes are having to be very careful and creative around the potential for crowding, particularly during large sporting events like the EUROs. Some of the more traditional West Country pubs are better equipped than most to deal with these issues thanks to their (currently mothballed) Skittle Alleys. The Princess Royal is one such pub, with a substantial Twin Skittle Alley/Function Room that’s currently being put to good use as an overspill to the main bar when things get a bit too busy.

Staying in Britain* I spotted this excellent observation on the state of cask ale from El Mudgeo:

You might well think that, if cask beer is struggling, there is already an organisation ideally placed to champion and promote it, and indeed incorporates it in its name. However, over the years, CAMRA’s objectives have multiplied and become more diffuse, and cask beer itself doesn’t seem to feature very high on its list of priorities. No doubt many members will say that Marston’s beers wouldn’t be much loss anyway, while happily sipping on a keg mango sour in the craft bar. It is a touch hypocritical to claim that you are campaigning for real ale while at the same time dismissing most of it as not really worth drinking.

Excellent continuation of the story of a walk from Max:

The place I wanted to go to was about 7 km away, but the walk promised to be mostly under the sun and I just couldn’t be arsed. Fortunately, there’ s a train leaving regularly from the town’s main station that would take me (almost) there in a few minutes – it was a no-brainer. But what to do with the time I would save? Pivoing, of course; I remembered Minipivovar Labuť still had a few beers I wanted to try.

Excellent continuation of the story of Charleston:

Mr. Sammy Backman has been a family friend since I was three years old. A significant part of my upbringing took place on James Island at Backman’s Seafood, a family-owned dock and seafood market that’s been around since the late 1950s. In my life, I’ve never referred to him as anything other than “Mr. Sammy.” “Back then, Black folks didn’t own any boats. It was hard for us to get loans,” Mr. Sammy says. “My mother once paid off a $100,000 loan, only to have the bank ask for collateral when she later asked for a $10,000 loan.”

Excellent story elaboration via Twitter from Dr. Christina Wade:

We also have an Old Babylonian text from Ur, which is basically one giant insult, which among phrases like ‘’You are the one who disappears from work” and ‘you raise an afflicted hand in order to eat food’.

The Tand wrote of “the Beer Police” which is nice if only because it reminds us that folk are getting back to normal and fretting over nothings:

It is funny how tables have turned, but didn’t CAMRA with its erstwhile disapproval of keg beer, used to get the same Beer Police allegations thrown at them? For the record CAMRA is all about choice with an emphasis on cask ale. In line with that, my drinking last Thursday, with its overwhelming predominance of cask, fully complied with this. “Take that Beer Police.” The Beer Police have also been having a pop at us Bass drinkers. Liking Bass is harmless, doesn’t mean approval of Molson Coors and there are bigger beery fish to fry, so lay off.

Speaking of Ron, he discovered that Canada was in fact part of the British Empire in both the spirit and letter of the law this week:

Have you spotted my current theme yet? Obviously, it’s Canada. Only joking. IPA…  Away from the topic of this post: Canadian IPA in the late 19th century. I’d forgotten that I had these. It was only when I started going through my analyses of IPAs that I spotted them. That’s the problem with having so much information. You can’t remember all of it. What strikes me is the similarity to domestic UK IPA. (Only because I was looking at those yesterday could I remember.). The Canadian versions average out a little stronger, by 3º in gravity and 0.34% ABV. While the rate of attenuation was a little lower, but still very high.  Still, a striking similarity between the two sets, despite being brewed 50 years apart.

And finally, more “BrewDog sucks” news at VinePair which is really getting so common is it even really news anymore?

Posts on the shareholders-only, company-run BrewDog EFP forum, reviewed by VinePair, suggest that the brewer has at times struggled to deliver on the perks it has promised its punks. A November 2020 thread has become a 2,000-posts-and-counting clearinghouse for equity punks’ grievances, ranging from long-delayed deliveries and reduced “lifetime” discounts, to poor communication from the company in which they’ve invested. “By the way still no EFP beer after waiting nearly 2 years,” posted a frustrated punk. “For a beer company that makes beer, wastes beer, pours away beer, makes more beer … is it really too much to send said beer to it’s [sic] shareholders as promised?”

Yes, it is too much. Because that was not the point of giving them money.

Contrary-wise to all the foregoing, have you noticed the over use and misuse of “nuance” in beer chit-chattery? It seems to be getting worse.  Tends to ultimately mean “my point is not being well made” as far as I can tell. In this moment, the second and third level writers** (none of which are mentioned above) seem to be jockeying*** a bit like the first level ones did not long after Michael Jackson died. That was more subtle. Folk suddenly added “top beer writer” to their web bios. Within days. “Top not dead beer writer” was more like it. Anyway – and as with “leading” – I think “nuance” is a marker of some sort. But what? Jockeying for the small cheques docile compliance offers? And how does it relate to finding yourself washing a coyote in your bathtub?**** I only mention it as I have to wade through the stuff each week.

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

*Unlike that trophy…
**The finest of the regularly wrong, much more so than that boogieman “the media“!
***It’s all a bit of a status v. merit struggle, like the 1790s tensions between the Washingtonians and the Jeffersonians. Whiggery depended on the mutual acceptance of status regardless of merit whereas libertarian might is right principle was all about the cacophony of the aggregate ends justifying the means. Whigs give us the small intense circle of praise seal mitten cartoons from Ackbar planet and the textual equivalent. Whigs praise each other as important. That makes them important, too. See? But who can really be trusted? None. Who is an expert? Nobody. In a small pond with too many fish for the available oxygen, things get rough. These aren’t those early days by that small lake at William’s Coopers Town.
****Other than, you know, the seeming requirement to be fundamentally wrong about obvious things.

These Be The Thursday Beery News Notes For The Summer Doldrums

A nautical theme this week. Or at least one at the outset that will soon wander away, off on its own, finding another purpose in life. It is dead out there. But you know what they say: no news is beer news. Beer is good like that. It’s the people related to beer that get in the way. Things got fully into or out of swing with the Fourth of July, remembered by Ottawa historian Andrew King in his description of bonfires made of old barrels… perhaps even boozy barrels… ka… boomski!

First off, the way of the world. One beer blog dies as another is revived with the publication of “News in Brief #62” at Seeing the Lizards including an analysis of a recent botch mentioned a few weeks back:

“You just have to look at history.” pontificated dubious scholar Sophie Aubergine-Pickle “They just got a handful of whatever grain they quite literally had to hand, threw it in some water. And left it.” “It stands to reason, doesn’t it? The human hand has all kinds of stuff on it. Bacteria. Wild yeast. Skin flakes. That stuff beneath your fingernails. If you leave it long enough, of course fermentation will spontaneously commence. And people back then would drink anything.”

Entirely conversely, I really liked this piece at GBH by Jamaal Lemon on the Charleston Schützenfest – a post US Civil War meeting space with beer and rifles, the sort of thing that developed in NYC a decade earlier in the mid-1850s. The story carries the combo of lived experience and scholarship that is too often lacking in these days. It also avoids another problem – the suspect helpful hand of the privileged. Since #BLM, #MeToo and even back to #Occupy we see too much of what we used to call the good South African Liberal* efforts to speak in support turning into taking on a heavy role in defining then steering the discourse. An allegedly helpful listing here gathered by those not on the list, a intervening pasty editor there. None of that in this piece – as it ought to be:

The beneficiaries of Charleston’s antebellum society have long manipulated virtually all local industries for generational gain, in an effort to maintain that established hierarchy. Just as it could happen in high school athletics, so it could in the local brewing industry, whose skewed diversity statistics serve as a testament to that longstanding inequity. This isn’t anything new: Systems of oppression constructed during Charlestown’s slave era were disrupted at the end of the Civil War, only to be violently reintroduced after the collapse of Reconstruction.

As you know, I have a very soft spot in my heart for brother Stonch but through these last few months he has done us all a service by sharing experience of being a pub owner during this pandemic with an independent eye, as in this tweet:

Our Ellie often spouts some absolute jarg lyrics, but I agree with her here. There’s danger of hospitality looking looking like, as my friend @jwestjourno put it, “the catering wing of the covid-denier corps”… Also, the problems of hospitality staff having to self-isolate after contact with infected – already crippling the industry (or even worse, becoming ill) – is only going to get worse without any degree of social distancing or mask wearing being adhered to in the workplace.

Excellent points. And remember this, too, next time you read some stumbling voice tell you his or her idea is too “nuanced” for Twitter. That’s just the hymn of the illiterati.

Some people have a blog on the side, about a bit of bun.

Boak and Bailey published an interesting post, sensibly and practically describing their thoughts on the success of Camden Town Brewery’s Hell lager. And, as we see often, received some feedback antagonistic to diverting off the single path of craft-thought or, in the German, KrafphtÜberlegen:

Helles means ‘light’. Beers badged as such tend to be very pale, light-bodied and with relatively low alcohol content. It’s got broad commercial appeal, as Camden Hells has proved, because that basically describes most mainstream lagers. Calling your lager a Helles is a great way to have your cake and eat it: it’s simultaneously (a) a normal, non-scary lager that people will actually want to drink and (b) a craft beer with heritage worth an extra pound a pint.

Apparently “helles” (like every word ever) has a variety of related meanings and (like every word ever) slightly different usages and different degrees of usage in slightly different contexts and cultures so be prepared for the wisdom of the self-certified in the comments. Yawn.

A PSA: if you see bad behaviour, call out bad behaviour. Whether it is bigotry or unfair employment standards or dangerous quality control only bad practices at breweries are assisted by saying “…[t]he responsibility to the consumer lies directly with them…” Nope. If you hold yourself out as a knowledge holder, withholding information is on you.

A fabulous story about a fabulous bar:

My dad said we could do something special for my 6th birthday. ‘Anything you want,’ he told me. I think he thought I was going to say ‘ice cream.’ But I said I wanted to go to New York City, and two weeks later we were on a plane. We spent the morning of my birthday shopping…

Here’s an interesting story in the Daily Mail about the late Eric Tucker, a pub man who painted what he saw:

Most of the pictures feature Lowry-type scenes from smoky pubs, tumbledown terraced streets and factories and showing flat capped locals with their wives… Now the former professional boxer – whose paintings were rejected by the art establishment while he was alive – is finally to have his talent celebrated after the unexpected discovery led critics to laud him as ‘the secret Lowry’. 

Finally, frankly a sad bit of apologia found at The Glass, describing the natural state of beer judging due to the ridiculous macho requirement that beer judges not spit unlike wine, spirits, tea and every other taster of fluids:

Of course that’s not the same as drinking that many beers in a day. A judge might take just a handful of small mouthfuls in the course of assessing a beer. But still, you have to swallow in order to get the aftertaste, unlike wine and spirits where you spit. At the end of the day you’re not drunk, but I certainly wouldn’t want to drive. And there’s an element of having drunk… that weariness and woolliness that can creep in after a spot of day-drinking.

Note: you’re drunk.

That’s all for this week. For more, don’t forget to check out those weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday  (a particularly good one this week) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletterThe Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness. And remember BeerEdge, too, where this week they ask the question if Sam Calgione is the dullest man in beer – and they get an answer. Plus a newcomer located by B+B: The Moon Under Water.

*Related to some so don’t bother…

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For When July Is Closer Than May

I will be positive. I will try to be positive. That’s what I say to myself. Every week. I will try. I do try. But it is trying, isn’t it. Not even sure it is all that interesting.  Far better being interesting than being positive. That’s why #ThinkingAboutDrinking >>> #BeerPositive.  Not schmarmy.  No need of that. Nope. I will try to be interesting. I will be interesting. I will. I will try.

As a start, it was interesting to see in The Telegraph the vision above of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau looking like Castro and Zappa’s love child while drinking a pint of ale as HRH The Queen had her back turned and Chuck looked pained but also comfortably numbed by the gin. By way of my review, an excellent G7 moment captured. Canadian politicians must love beer.

Elsewhere, there are few people writing about beer these days as interesting as Dr. Christina Wade of Braciatrix who wrote this week about a topic near and dear to my heart – beery references on cuneiform tablets within the records of Sumerian society:

Administration was a key part of these organizations. According to Peter Damerow, beer was not a simple agricultural product but, ‘belonged to the products subjected to the centralised economy of Sumerian states’. Indeed, he stated that the consumption and production of beer were separate entities and beer held this positon even after the decline of Sumerian culture. 

I say near and dear as I wrote of a similar thing in 2017, shared that info and had a merry chat with the good doctor.

Sticking with history, Martyn also wrote an extremely interesting piece this week drawing information out of the William Helliwell* diaries of the 1830s (much discussed in Lost Breweries of Toronto) that Jordan shared – and then contextualizing the info into London’s porter scene of that time:

William seems to have seized every chance to look round breweries on his journey: he visited two in Rochester, New York state and two more in nearby Albany on his way to New York to catch a ship to England, where he arrived in mid-June after a six-week journey from Canada. In London he had an introduction to Timothy Thorne, owner of the Westminster Brewery on Horseferry Road, from Thorne’s son Charles, whom William knew in York. The brewery, which made ale and porter, had been founded by Timothy Thorne in 1826. 

Leonard Lispenard of NYC took a similar trip in 1783 and trained under his cousins the Barclays. Did he keep a diary? Hmm…

Even more recent history was discussed by Boak and Bailey as they wrote about the demise in the later 1980s of a traditional pub in London’s Docklands, victim perhaps of a misplaced application of the new Duran Duran laced lifestyle:

We came across this small story of the loss of a specific pub through ‘Eastenders’, an episode of the ITV weekly documentary series World In Action available via BritBox. Jess being a Londoner, and Ray being a hopeless nostalgist, we often find ourselves watching this kind of thing and there’s invariably a pub somewhere among the grainy footage.

Never a good look for a writer to look for an expert to confirm a premise after the article’s been approved. Far more interesting was Max’s walk to Litoměřice:

I needed to have my computer serviced, which meant that I would have to do without it for a couple of days, which meant that I wouldn’t be able to do much else than fuck all at home. The thing had been acting up for some time already – some issue with the hard drive – and I’d decided to wait until I finished with a couple of big projects I was working on, always hoping it wouldn’t give up on me. It didn’t, and the timing could not have been any better. With the covid restrictions on all the fun stuff mostly lifted, and the weather finally nice, now I had the perfect excuse to take a couple of much needed days off to partake in one of my favourite activities: getting a train or a bus somewhere to go on a long walk in nature, with a brewery as destination. 

Sadly but interestingly so, the car crash within the wider sexism in craft car crash that is the Brewdog story keeps on giving and it is always wonderful when a beery bit of news gets the attention of someone in journalism** like this excellent balanced opinion piece by Camilla Long in The Sunday Times:

Will anyone now work for Brewdog? Thirty years ago the answer would probably have been a grudging yes. For people over 40, a cut-throat, stressful working environment — or as Brewdog’s founder put it, “a fast-paced culture” — is still closely associated with good results… But if you are under 40, the idea of working for somewhere that isn’t calm and friendly is horrifying. Young people simply won’t work for places that don’t offer good vibes. In America, where companies these days can’t hire people fast enough, hotels are offering free holidays and stays to attract good staff. Jobs are competing for people, rather than the other way round.

People still looking for a better placement within the beer industry don’t get that direct in their writing. As usual, Matty C comes closest but still hedged the best with the unfortunate use of “snafus” and describing Brewdog’s investors as “wolfish” even though it was the owners of Brewdog who took the cash. As noted these hesitancies jar the reader, leave doubts. Charlotte Cook in Beer 52 also added to the story with her personal experiences as relatively early BrewDog staff:

The inability to read the room also astounded me, women are finally speaking up for the horrible treatment they have endured in the craft beer industry. The lack of an apology from James, or any assurance of the steps being taken to improve things, suggests to me that BrewDog has not yet understood the moment of change we are going through. 

Who? indeed, would work there? Or buy the beer. Not even me and I used to take from them when they were wee needy advertising sponsors of this blog. Relatedly, Jemma Wilson succinctly shared her suspicions as to the Cicerone sexism situation. Gotta love an an independent investigation report that states “…Cicerone will be more responsive…” That’s not an investigative finding or even a recommendation.

Finally, Eoghan Walsh published the story of how and why Brussels’ grand new beer museum came to be:

Krishan Maudgal has worked in Belgian beer for over a decade, for the likes of Alken Maes and its well-known Abbey brand Affligem. In 2021 Maudgal was appointed to Gatz’s old position as director of the Belgian Brewers Federation, and he’s worked for the brewers on the museum concept almost from the beginning, helping to shape what the project will be – and what it won’t. “It’s not a showroom for only the international major brewers of our country,” Maudgal says. “It’s to promote the Belgian way of living. Eating, drinking, beer and food.”

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

*Helliwell would likely have called himself “British” or “English” but unlikely “Canadian” as there was no unified Canada of the British sort at the time. Canada then was still the name for French Canadians given they had lived in what they called Canada since the early 1600s. There was an Upper Canada which Helliwell did live in. In Nova Scotia, Ontarians are still called Upper Canadians even though the jurisdiction ceased to exist in 1841. This is all unpacked here to another degree or so…
**meaning having qualifications which do not include being on a first name basis with the subject of the beery news story.  H/T to the Tand.

 

Your Thursday Beery News Notes Welcoming The Second Third Of June 2021

I keep telling myself it will be a short update this week because not much happened but then (i) something happens and/or (ii) I get into my notes and I see that more happened than I thought. That’s the way of the world, folks. Speaking of which, robsterowski guided my eye to the jokey image to the right which is a helpful guide to the clans of beer writers today. Or is it? Sad commentary, that’s what it is. But what do you expect when there’s seltzer scriveners about?

But this is the way it is going for beer these days, not just those writing about beer. It’s all so uninteresting all of a sudden – which, if you think about it, is somewhat interesting.  Consider this extraordinary open letter to BrewDog published by Punks with Purpose. There are over 100 named and anonymous co-signers who say they are former BrewDog employees making extremely pointed accusations about the workplace environment:

Put bluntly, the single biggest shared experience of former staff is a residual feeling of fear. Fear to speak out about the atmosphere we were immersed in, and fear of repercussions even after we have left.

What an extraordinary statement about something as banal as a brewing outfit.  Who needs to impose a culture of fear to make beer? Update: James, corporate head of the brewery, attempted a response and made it pretty much worse.

You could as easily ask who needs to be a sexist pig to make but but Ruvani de Silva of Craft Beer Amethyst came across another craft brewery with bigotry based branding. WTAF indeed.  I used to write posts with titles like “This Is How US Craft Beer Will Kill Itself” on the silly independent beer campaign on 2012 or 2014’s “Yet Another Way Craft Will Kill Itself?” in which we considered the beginnings of craft as gimmick, the foundations of today’s bewildering non-beer beer market. Interesting to see that it may well be the capitalist pigs who kill of craft through simply being found out. Who told you otherwise?

It does seem to be all collapsing slowly, doesn’t it. Former darling NC craft brewery destination of the ticking traveling set and the tourism associations providing the related funding, the venerable Weeping Radish which was established in 1986, has gone up for sale:

North Carolina’s oldest microbrewery, which originally opened its doors in Manteo next to the Christmas Shop, is now located 35 miles north on a 25-acre farm at 6810 Caratoke Highway in Grandy in Currituck County. The sale includes the building, land and the entire business, according to a listing. The asking price is $2.6 million.

No questions about the sale are being answered. That’s a great way to stoke up a market for your properties, isn’t it.

Perhaps (taking in all the above) whistling past the graveyard, Jeff takes on a very apolitical question in this a very political time – the question of the middle market in craft beer:

In many ways, there is no single beer market. I stopped in at Culmination last night and found a brewery thrumming with activity. I had three beers: an expensive hazy, a rum-barrel Baltic (or Polish) Porter, and a Grodziskie. Not a one of those beers could ever enter the middle market. The people at the brewery weren’t there for “normal” beers, either. They wanted a unique local experience. In this sense, craft breweries are like restaurants.

Many questioned the fundamental premise but, me, I think of this as a just happy illusion. Once, I remember a middle aged, middle class radio host saying his favorite thing to do on a summer afternoon was lay upon a lawn chair, have a beer and daydream of former girlfriends. And not for any spicy reason. Just that they never asked in his dreamy mood for him to do any chores. Worrying about the middle class of the beer market is like that these days. We avoid troubles. We have a nap. The actual answer is the middle class of beer sits there before you there on grocery store shelves and in gas station  coolers. There is always something moderately interesting at a modest price, isn’t there. Brands may come and go but there’s always something.

Beer has always found a way to make it easy. Further back in time (when things were perhaps similar to today during the Gilded Age of the Capitalist Pig), we learn (as an image posted by Lost Lagers tells us) of 1890 global lager brewing capacity – which is interesting and especially compared to some of the numbers floating around Albany Ale, including Taylor’s Ale brewery in the 1880s having a capacity of 250,000 barrels, at a point in time well past its own heyday. (Note in the comments under that second link, the first time I came into contact with Craig, my partner in crime of over a decade now. Heavens!) Scale.

And certainly relatedly, I had a very good set of chats with Edd Mather this week of the Old Beers and Brewing blog. I was happy to share with him the 1811ish and 1830s era brewing books from Vassar in New York’s Hudson Valley and he immediately went to work unpacking the notes to provide instruction how to clone Vassar’s  single ale as brewed on the 13th of August 1833. Excellent stuff.

Another way beer has found a way to find its way was spotted in Afghanistan this week according to The Times of India:

Defence Ministry spokeswoman Christina Routsi said on Monday that a recent decision by the German commander in Afghanistan to ban the consumption of alcohol for security reasons had resulted in a pileup of beer, wine and mixed drinks at Camp Marmal in Mazar-e-Sharif. German soldiers are usually entitled to two cans of beer or equivalent per day. Routsi said the military had found a civilian contractor who will take the alcohol back out of the country ahead of the German troops’ withdrawal from Afghanistan as the NATO mission in the country ends in the coming months.

Note: Calamity Jane drinking at a saloon at Gilt Edge Montana in 1897. Perhaps related, happy to get a Halley Marlor update. You will recall her three months ago brewing this year’s Vintage Ale at Fullers. Now she has started in a new position with  Siren Craft Brew. Good luck! Avoid the fear.

Finally, I like this statement which I read this week in relation to some of the horrible news coming out in Canada but it seems to be fairly universal:

Gatekeeping is the way of the white man. Whether it be knowledge, resources, queerness or culture it’s rooted in the colonial and capital imperialistic fallacies of scarcity. That there is a somehow a limited resource and we should obstruct others and assert control and access.

I keep wondering who it was that for so long told us craft was special and how it was related to this sort of gatekeeping. This week, I also heard the acronym WEIRD for the first time: western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic which also goes a long way and has likely been around a long time and known by others – at least before since I entered my bubble. This is also jangling about my head in relation to brewing… don’t know how but it is.

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

The Day After St. Paddy’s Day Beery News Notes

There, at least that’s over. That’s him there to the right, apparently ordering two. You know, this may have been the St. Patrick’s Day that I’ve always wanted. Quiet. By force of law. Even last year, during the first week of something being quite wrong, there were college idiots half smashed on a Tuesday loitering around the downtown square, wearing green things made of plastic. Amateurs. Appropriating plastic coated amateurs. In 2017, I asked why craft beer hated the day. I don’t think that is the same now but it’s mainly because craft beer has ceased to exist in the same sense four years on. Not much taking a unified stand against anything these days. Not much of a soap box to stand on anymore so much as being an object of the inquiries.

Breaking: craft beer loves generic globalist multi-internationalism.

In days of yore brewing news, Martyn has undertaken the work I’ve been begging him to undertake for at least a decade: exploring the 1898-1899 Canadian Inspectorate of Foods and Drugs study on stouts and porters:

…the average strength of the Canadian porters was 5.73 per cent abv, nearly 20 per cent less than the average stout strength. The two beers had almost identical average apparent attenuation, at 81.4 per cent for the porters, and 81.5 per cent for the stouts. Other analyses show big differences, however. The average percentage of maltose in the finished beer was 0.594 per cent for the porters, and 0.747 per cent for the stouts. The average percentage of solids in the finished beers was 4.99 per cent for porters and 5.6 per cent for the stouts…

Whammo! Kablammo!! Now you can all shut your pie holes about it and face facts.  “What about McDonagh & Shea porter out of  Winnipeg, Manitoba brewed to 8.8 per cent abv?” you say? Shut up. Get out.

Speaking of relatively recent history, sad news of a pub closing trade in Burton England was tweet-paired with this fabulous image of a 1962 price list for brewers and pub chain operators, Mitchells and Butlers. A great opportunity to identify grannie’s top drinks as well as the relative price of things. Fact: Dubonnet is not vermouth.

And in even more recent recent history, this picture of Eugene Levy and John Candy as the Shmenge Brothers of SCTV fame in the 1984 Kitchener Octoberfest parade posted this week by the University of Waterloo Library is as cheery as it gets. Careful fans will recall how pivotal the same parade is in the plot of the 1983 film Strange Brew, staring fellow SCTV alumni Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis. That’s an actual production vehicle, by the way – a Messerschmitt Kabinenroller.

Thing you couldn’t do in 2019. Going back into past restaurant reviews and finding evidence of unidentified covid-19 symptoms being the unwitting basis for complaint.

Not quiet sure what to make of this supply chain news out of Australia, whether it means Asahi are switching their malt purchases to be more local or just that it is now going to be tracked as local:

The new supply chain means that local barley will be used to brew Australian beers like Victoria Bitter and Carlton Draught for the first time in decades. Asahi, which developed the new direct sourcing program after it purchased Carlton & United last year, will now buy more than 70,000 tonnes of malted barley direct from farmers in Victoria and southern NSW to be used at its Yatala and Abbotsford breweries. Growers in northern NSW are expected to join the scheme before this year’s harvest while the first beers brewed under the program will be rolled out in April.

This one program appears to include 7.6% of Australian malt production so what ever it is it is significant.

Not unrelatedly, though he will fully disagree and it pains me when he does, Stan captured one of the best examples of craft beer nonsense that I’ve ever seen:

Breweries have terroir as well. But instead of revolving around a patch of land, ours are centered on a group of people. We operate our business on a human scale and with a human face. 

Remember when people used to say stuff like that? Many copyright law suits later and the firings of all the women in the craft beer bar and… and… and… Speaking of which in a sort of contrapuntal way, diversity in brewing and the craft beer trade continues to be a big discussion circling about the topics of both inclusion and actual identify as this article in Foodism Toronto discusses:

Sandhu has a beer on his menu dedicated to his grandfather, Chanan, which includes Indian coriander as one of its ingredients. “I actually do see a high percentage of Indian customers ordering the beer that’s named after my grandfather,” Sandhu says. “I think these populations feel safe and they feel comfortable at our brewery. We don’t just see them coming in just once, but they become regulars.”

Unlike the samey “I miss the pub” teary tales or the quite uncomfortable “beer has been the only thing that gives my life meaning” confessionals, Mr. G. Oliver has looked to the future and sees hope as well as these three interesting trends:

What use is a “share bottle” you can’t share? It’ll be interesting to see if the stemming of the pandemic brings the 750 back at all. I think people are doubling down on case sales; we haven’t wanted to make any more trips to retail than necessary. People are also buying fewer expensive specialty beers.  I also think that the pandemic is helping fuel the rise of the non-alcoholic category. A lot of people are now home for lunch every day. What are you going to drink with your sandwich for lunch? NA beers can provide a perfect answer, and there’s nobody watching you “drink a beer” at lunch in your kitchen. NA is getting normalized faster than it would have otherwise.

By the way… does anyone know how you are supposed to find a story on GBH? What a hot mess of a front page.

Stonch, well known pub lad and operator of Britain’s longest-running beer blog, praised CAMRA on its 50th anniversary this week for, yes, achieving its goals:

Yes, there’s been a growth in excellent keg, and that has perhaps pushed cask ale out of the limelight in many beer-focused bars. Yes, the immediate after-effects of the pandemic will produce challenging conditions for cask-centric brewers. CAMRA has plenty to be keeping busy with, and without doubt can remain relevant and vital if it so chooses. Speaking as a publican, I can say with confidence that there is no way that a significant part of today’s pub-going public would be happy to visit a pub that didn’t offer reasonably well-kept cask conditioned ale. That commercial reality will preserve this particular part of Britain’s heritage for years to come.

And from the other side of the bar as well as knees under the organizational table, the Tand praised CAMRA on its 50th anniversary this week for, yes, achieving its goals:

I’m a relative newcomer, my tenure in the Campaign being a mere 40 years, but happily my anniversary as a member coincides, more or less, with the fiftieth year of our venerable organisation.  Like many, I’m looking forward to Laura Hadland’s book outlining CAMRA’s rich history and to reading the tales of those who have made this epic campaigning journey, both with and before me. Of course, while the organisation is to be congratulated, it is also an excuse for members to raise a glass to themselves, whether they are grey in beard and sandal or – like some of us – still youthful and inspired. Young or old, we are all the Campaign for Real Ale, and we can justifiably bask in our own reflected glory, even if just for a day.

For an alternative view, consider the Viz magazine perspective.

Best actual brewing thing I have seen this week? This:

OH MY GOSH – sooo excited!! Today’s the day we’re brewing our 1st 2021 Vintage Ale @FullersBrewery and I got the honour of mashing it in! Thanks @FullersGuy!

Me, I’d make my own now… but they employed a cunning strategy and reversed the image so we will never know how the beer was made. One thing is for sure. There aren’t any ambering hops in there.

There. Saturday is spring. Yes, the second spring of a pandemic but still spring. So while you turn the soil and plant the seed, check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  There is more from the DaftAboutCraft  podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletterThe Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness. And remember BeerEdge, too.

As Summer Soon Turns To Autumn Take Comfort In These Beer News Notes For Thursday

Hmm. Nothing of, like, a common theme out there this past week, was there? There was some great apple pressing porn to watch, for sure. That stuff is great. And my near neighbours at MacKinnon have been bringing in their hops crop, as illustrated. Fabulous. But there’s also the pending end of summer and, with it, the end of the best chance pubs and brewers had to store a few nuts away for the coming cold.  Something for the stretch until Christmas. Old Mudgie painted a bleak picture of what was to come in the UK for pubs and brewers. And a beer shop shut in Oakland… its obit just above the one for the creepy knife store shutting. And a brewery in Kitchener, Ontario is now up for sale. Polk told me so. 2021 is going to be the year of cheap surplus brewing kit. Not a cheery theme.

But that’s in the future, not in the now. Let’s check in there… err.. here. This week, let’s start over at the ever popular History Corner. Come along. Robsterowski of “I Might Have a Glass of Beer” shared it thoughts about an anti-steam brewing tirade posted in the 23 March 1862 edition of Allgemeine Bayrische Hopfen-Zeitung and even provided a handy translation:

The steam-powered breweries increase constantly in number and it seems they shall quite soon squeeze out the other breweries, or force them into imitating them. As in so many other [trades], the machine seems to make manual labour almost redundant in the brewery. The question must be asked: which beer is preferable, that produced by steam or by hand? Experienced beer conners prefer the latter. 

This goes to the idea that steam beer began simply as a next step industrial brewed beer – but I do love the idea of “factory beer” as the great evil. Because it’s all factory beer, now… right? Interesting that values which were frowned upon in 1862 include steel, lightness and speed. It’s a bit late of a date, I would have thought, for such a broad fear of modernity. Speaking of a similar thing, Jeff tweeted about Belgian Biere de Cabaret from 1851 including this  contemporary comment:

“Has a very sweet and pleasant taste, creamy, and something honeyish that is highly sought after by aficionados.” An amber-golden color, unusual for the time. It has always intrigued me, not least because of the name.

Something? Factory beer is never “something” beer. Boom, it’s there. Always or never. That’s it. Plus I like aficionadosKnut talked about that term back in 2008 but had a better one… though I would not have expected the Spanish word to be in 1851 beer commentary from Belgium… but then again it was once called the Spanish Netherlands before it was the Austrian Netherlands. Is that it?

Now, I do like the idea of #SoberOctober (even though I would have just called it #SoberTober)… except… I have never associated October with wild eye binge drinking. No big holiday, no big bowl sports game. No woo. No hoo. Which I suppose means I don’t like it. Hmm. Except it might be building on a self-fulfilling wish. No crazy reason to overdo it. So no one did! Hey, nothing changes but victory proclaimed!!

This is even weirder than #TotesSobeTobe. It was in fact with a heavy heart that I read the post with this bit of odd triumphalism:

It’s important to remember that there was no useful IRI data in 2017 that told @SierraNevada that they should make Hazy Little Thing. It took instincts, guts, and maintaining a pulse on the industry’s long tail. Doing so gave them a one year head start on their competition.

Kinda mainly wrong, no? I say wrong based on this end of year 2017 blog post (ie a primary source contemporary with subject matter) that recorded reality at that moment:

You know, much is being written on the murk with many names. Kinderbier. London murk. NEIPA. Gak from the primary. Milkshake. It’s gotten so bad in fact that even Boston Beer is releasing one, a sure sign that a trend is past it. Some call it a game changer, never minding that any use of that term practically guarantees something isn’t.

I blame belief systems. Needing to associate yourself with things. Do you associate yourself with such things? I wouldn’t mention it except that it seems to be, you know, a thing.

Hop. Not a belief. Fact. Here’s some slightly disorganized hop news. As if Brophy was really also on the other line… In other hop news – Arkansas. Boom! Who knew?

Next up? Awards. Folk were talking about awards this week. Are they just for the needy? Canadian needy awards are the worst given how needy Canadians are. Are they really too much about the fee and other money aspects? Really? I can’t believe you thought that. For me, it’s never going to get to the point that nominations come from someone other than the candidate… which is my minimum standard for a competition being of any interest. But is it also problematic due to systemic bias?

Imagine what your work would look like if you weren’t gunning for someone to tell you you’re the best, that you’ve beat your peers out this year. If you’re not chasing this particular carrot, shaping your work (even unconsciously) toward what usually gets these accolades, what do you do? Who can you be? The world might be bullshit, but maybe we can be free from the false narratives and stale aesthetics perpetuated by awards, at the very least. 

Yikes! But, certainly, when the same group of individuals own the contest, select the judges, set the rules, act as judges, report on the event, receive a payment or two and then spend the rest of the year being palsy-walsy with the next slate of fee-paying candidates, well, it is all a bit too weird, isn’t it . Too small a circle to be taken seriously. Which might be a good point – why aren’t they just really for fun?! Which is what model railroading is all about! Sorry, not model railroading… craft beer… yes, that’s it.

Speaking of model railroaders, a couple of late breaking “old guy shakes hand at sky” stories came in Wednesday. First was the troglodyte at Stone* yammering about something revolving about himself. You can go read it on your own time. But second was that weird article by ATJ advocating for less information. In particular, hiding the truth about calories in beer. (Perhaps it’s the wine press bullies.) Now, this is especially odd as the information is readily available. That didn’t stop the one Chicken Little’s solo becoming a duet:

Since calorie counts are meaningless to 99.99999% of drinkers, it’s mere virtue-signalling to call for their introduction, and an expensive pain in the butt for small brewers to have to supply for all the one-off beers they are likely to produce.

Whachamahuh? See, eleven years ago Bob Skilnik explained how easy it is to calculate the calories in beer. Here’s the story.  Here’s a calculator. Basically, it’s 250 calories to a 20 oz UK pint of 5% beer. Or 1/8th of your daily dietary requirement. Or 200 calories to a 20 oz UK pint of 4% beer. 1/10th of your daily dietary requirement. Standard. No research needed – but add a few more calories for any increase in heft. So it’s funny folk want to hide that simple truth. But the funniest thing is idea that calorie counts are meaningless to all but a few beer drinkers. Below is a handy comparison of trends for the term “beer calories” compared to “beer history” as search terms.  Now, I am not one to suggest one might want to examine one’s own life choices but if the dead end is where you are looking to find a niche of little interest, the study of beer history is clearly it.

Just another line I rode down from 2004 to now…

Finally, back to today and to reality… and as she has in the past, Beth has been very open again on her income from beer writing for the purpose of telling other freelancers to roll with the flow:

I just broke $12K for the entirety of 2020, which (despite being around 1/3 of my original 2020 income goal) is pretty damn impressive considering I’ve had zero childcare outlets for my ASD-diagnosed 3 year old since March.

I point this out to also note that if someone is going out of their way to be both painfully truthful about themselves while being encouraging to others, well, I expect that I can trust their word on other things.

Well, that’s summer 2020 going out with a load of complainers, complaints and the compliant. And me. I’m so great. Looking forward to Autumn 2020? Me too! As you do that, remember there’s  Boak and Bailey most Saturdays, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays (where Jordan shits on… no one!) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Not to mention Cabin Fever. And Ben has finally gone all 2009 and joined in with his own podcast, Beer and Badword (and this week rants about why beer awards are stupid.) . And BeerEdge, too.

*Wailing away at his social media presence pointlessly for at least eleven years!