Category: 1900s

The Final And Totally Mailed In Beery News Notes of August

I have a new hobby. Doin’ nuttin’. After last week’s chores, we took off and wandered a bit around Montreal on the weekend and said hello to Leonard. Crescent‘s bars were bustling last Saturday evening. And we hopped over to Syracuse NY last Wednesday for an afternoon AAA baseball game, a driveby glance into the Loop Grill and some serious American snacks shopping to bring back to Canada but otherwise this summer vacation has been mainly about nuttin’. There should be ads on the TV about staying home and doing nuttin’ like one of those for visiting the Gulf States or Arizona. Except it’s about the backyard. I could monetize that. Become a backyard doin’ nuttin’ influencer. Post TikToks about it. Have a Patreon site about it behind a subscribers only wall. Except that would be doing stuff. And not nuttin’. I am too into nuttin’ to be doin’ something about nuttin’.

What has been going on? First, Pellicle‘s Wednesday piece is about a fairly large diversified English farm operation that includes barley and brewing in its mix of production. It’s a farm with a focus on something more essential – thoughtful care of the soil:

There’s one question which is unanswered: what does this do to the flavour of the beer? Duncan takes a moment to answer, frowning as he thinks of the right word. “Nothing,” he says. He thinks some more, then shakes his head as if confirming the answer to himself. “Nothing. It’s not necessarily about that,” he says. “It’s the ethos that’s gone into building it so you can talk about having environmental benefit and food in the same sentence. That’s the point of it.”

Somewhat similarly in the sense of place, Jeff has written about a relatively secluded micro in eastern Oregon and draws a useful conclusion:

This is perhaps the greatest advantage of remote brewing. In cities, brewers are aware of what people are doing around them. It’s almost impossible not to be influenced, to borrow techniques or discover new ingredients. In Baker City, Tyler and his current head brewer Eli Dickenson can easily drop into their own groove. Their customers know what they do and expect them to do it—and they don’t spend a lot of time at other breweries getting distracted by the trend du jour.

On the opposite end of the reality v. non-reality scale, it was brought to my attention by @DrankyDranks that a fraud is about to be perpetrated on the drinks buying public:

Couple of new non-alc brands on the horizon. White Claw 0% “non-alcoholic premium seltzer,” comin’ in 4 “full-flavor” variants at 15 calories per can with “hydrating electrolytes”: black cherry cranberry, mango passion fruit, peach orange blossom and lime yuzu. Expected in Jan.

The double negative has been achieved! Speaking of the potentially unecessary, care of Beer Today we may have also reached peak data point – an observation I make given the uncertainty I have as to the necessity of this level of detail:

…trading improved in line with the temperatures last week. There was a particular surge in sales in midweek, with Tuesday (up 10%), Wednesday, which was boosted by England’s semi-final victory over Australia (up 17%), and Thursday (up 15%) all in double-digit growth. But trading was more modest on Friday (down 3%) and Saturday (up 4%) as rain moved back in.   Warmer weather lifted the beer category, where sales rose 10% year on year. Wine (up 9%) and cider (up 1%) were also positive, but soft drinks (down 2%) and spirits (down 4%) were both negative.

Does the well informed publican check the weather forecast before placing orders for cask deliveries or setting prices? “Hmmm… rain’s coming Friday, need me a happy hours special…” Maybe. Having once created a 15,000 cell Excel table to track (among many things) hot dog sales and visiting team placement in the league’s standings over six or eight years I am sensitive to the possibilities of such things.

Speaking of stats, France is paying winemaker to destroy some of their stock to cope with this drop in some markets – blamed by the BBC on an increase in craft beer sales:

European Commission data for the year to June shows that wine consumption has fallen 7% in Italy, 10% in Spain, 15% in France, 22% in Germany and 34% in Portugal, while wine production across the bloc – the world’s biggest wine-making area – rose 4%.

Lisa Grimm is posting at Weird Beer Girl HQ and this week comes to the defence of what she calls a trad bar in Dublin, Piper’s Corner:

I’m aware I’m on slightly dangerous ground here, as there’s absolutely a place for the shows aimed at tourists (if they are willing to pay for a specific kind of experience that’s keeping musicians working, why not?), and also because folk music is never static – it’s always evolving, so there’s no one ‘right’ way to play or enjoy trad tunes. Now, this doesn’t mean visitors are not welcome – not at all – just that it seems to be a more organic experience (for lack of a better word – and this is largely based on word of mouth, since you know I’m asleep by then most of the time).

Last Friday, Boak and Bailey posted a review of the new book Cask – the real story of Britains unique beer Culture by Des de Moor which by all accounts is a very good and comprehensive read – if for no other reason (though there seem to be many) than Moore’s willingness to share various points of view:

Though clearly a passionate fan of cask ale, he isn’t an unquestioning cheerleader and points out that it doesn’t work well for every style. American-style IPAs and sour beers, he argues, rarely benefit from cask dispense. He comes right off the fence when it comes to the price of cask ale: “[If] cask beer is to have a sustainably healthy future, its average price will have to rise in comparison to the pub prices of other drinks… One argument for cheap cask is that it helps drive sufficient turnover to keep the product fresh, but that effect has surely reached its limits when price becomes a barrier to maintaining quality.” For balance, he quotes others who disagree, and who worry about cask ale becoming an expensive, niche product, rather than an everyday pleasure.

And Martyn has embarked on a journey about journeying, writing a series of pieces on the value of giving oneself over to the pre-planned pre-paid beer bus tour, all under the umbrella heading “If it’s Tuesday, this must be Kölsch!” So far we have parts one, two and three with more promised. It’s a bit mind melting in the pace, one which may tax even Ron, but he shares a number of observations like this on why one might want to subject oneself to this sort of exercise:

…one big advantage of joining a largeish group of people on a European beer trip is that when you get to, say, a place like Cantillon in Brussels, where the brewery tasting room/bar has a large range of aged 75cl bottled beers costing up to 70 euros a (literal) pop, sharing those rare beers you may never get the chance to drink again among half a dozen or more drinkers cuts the cost per head dramatically.

Good point. And another sort of good reminder this week from The Beer Nut: “Slagging off hazy IPA is easy (and fun!) but well-made beers like this do make it a little bit harder to do.”

Heavens, they do things on a certain scale in Kenya when it comes to allegedly skirting the licencing laws:

A Chuka court in Tharaka Nithi County has issued a warrant for the arrest of Simon Gitari for failure to honour court summons over the alleged operation of an unlicensed brewing industry. The millionaire brewer, popularly known as ‘Gitari Boss’, is the director of Hakim Commercial Agencies which owns the factory located in Ndiruni village in Chuka Sub-County. On Monday, a multi-agency team led by Tharaka Nithi County Police Commander Zacchaeus Ngeno raided the distillery and seized 250,000 litres of illegal liquor.

Also somewhat irregular in expectations, Gary wrote an interesting piece on the intersection between pubs and the pulpit in mid-1900s England this week including this example:

The padre Basil Jellicoe (1899-1935) descended from Anglo-Catholic churchment and naval figures, and was Oxford-educated. He had no apparent exposure to pubs as a youth, in fact was a teetotaller. His pub interest was of the old-school missionary-type, inspired by doctrine and the Bible. If church adherents were to be found he wanted to cultivate the ground, and would not let prevailing notions of propriety get in the way. He also wanted to improve social conditions in and related to the pub. He started to operate pubs so he could have full control to promote this goal – the Church was henceforth in the pub business.

Katie wrote about one way of responding to loss through ritual in her most recent edition of The Gulp, one of the few drinks “newsletters” still holding its own:

Despite the tragedies of the past months, spending time with friends is always a celebration, and I intend to treat it as such. My main contribution to the evening’s events will be the wine we drink during feasting and the extremely technical/spiritual practice of “burning shit”. I need to choose carefully. It should be wine that’s good enough to change our fortunes and lift us up. Wine good enough to offer to Hecate, wine good enough to stir our souls and clear our minds. It also needs to pair well with a vegan barbecue.

One of my favourite stunned concepts amongst right-wing US fear mongering is the use of “Canada-style” when used as the ultra “woke” by the “freedom” folk… as in this story’s headline:

President Joe Biden’s chief adviser on alcohol policy said his agency may issue new guidelines that limit Americans to just two drinks per week. Dr. George Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), told the Daily Mail that he’s interested in tightening U.S. guidelines to match Canada’s alcohol recommendations, which say that both men and women should consider having only two drinks every week. Canada’s health department issued the recommendations this year under left-wing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Note: while publicly funded, the Canadian two-drinks standard is a recommendation of a private entity which is one part of a bigger and heavily leaning academic discourse amongst many of a variety of points of view, much also fueled in whole or part directly and indirectly by public funds. We also do not follow the Canada Food Guide all that closely if grocery store shelves are anything to go by. Note also: we live much longer.

Vinepair published an almost self-defeating piece on the role of celebrity and beer replete with branding consulting jargon which then veers off into a reality-based (perhaps even inadvertenly honest) view near the end:

Celebrity involvement will entice journalists to write about a brand once. But star wattage eventually dims as a selling point. “Someday we will not be new news anymore,” says Eight’s Campbell. Any fermented liquid must stand on its own merits, hitting that sweet spot of price point and pleasure. Convincing customers that they should shoehorn another beer into their crowded drinking calendar takes effort, a long play in a world that celebrates the fast windfall. “Even though you have somebody with a big mouthpiece, you still have to build a brand,” Campbell says. “There’s got to be a meaningful connection.”

And finally for Stan (and apparently on brand pachyderm-wise) we have the story of an elephant which did not get into the beer but still sussed out something else:

Placidly and professionally, the mammal sweeps the ground with its trunk several times before tossing up a nondescript black rucksack, trumpeting as it announces its discovery. Border police were already on the scene. The officers had arrived to escort the elephants out of a nearby village, reported China National Radio (CNR). Mindful of their primary duty, police waited till the elephants had made their safe exit before inspecting the elephant’s “gift”, reported CNR. The elephant did not disappoint.

There. A shorter post perhaps but my world is whole even if the news is a bit quieter this week. And as per ever and always, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect – even including at my somewhat quieter than expected Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Got on BlueSky this week and added it to my IG, FB, X, Mastodon, Threads, Substack Notes and a deservedly dormant Patreaon presence. I am multi! I am legion!! Yet totally sub. All in all, I still am preferring the voices on Mastodon, like these ones discussing beer:

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

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters to stay on top of things (though those things called “newsletters” where 1995 email lists meet the blogs of 2005 may be coming to an end of value if the trend with so many towards the dull dull dull means anything) including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many 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 much more occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a podcast.  There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube soon celebrating a decade of vids.   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!

The Absolutely Last No Doubt About It Beery News Notes Of July 2023

It’s a very busy week. A good tiring busy week. Old pals are coming this weekend. Family visitors left yesterday. And a really tough bit of business negotiations at work Tuesday and Wednesday. Summer. Folk on the move. Including me. Which leaves me tired. But I am bouyed by some of the great beer reading out there this week. Last week was a bit dreary but not this one. I am all a bit… you know… excited by all the jam packed excitement. Practically rippling. As illustrated. Not like Gary. Gary is quiet. Alone. But not alone in being alone. If you know what I mean.*

Where was I? For starters we see that another great article by Alistair Reece of Fuggled fame has landed in Pellicle, this time about Virginia’s Black Narrows Brewing and how they approach the question of “local”:

Remarkably, almost 90% of his ingredients are sourced from his home state. The majority of his hops are grown about 50 miles down the shore from Chincoteague Island, Josh only brews with malt from Murphy & Rude Malting in Charlottesville, and for his Gose, he uses oyster liquor, the water from inside an oyster shell, sourced from local oyster shucking factories that would otherwise pour it away. The beer that’s perhaps most emblematic of Josh’s dedication to using local ingredients is his corn lager, How Bout It, brewed with an heirloom variety of corn called Bloody Butcher that has been grown on the Eastern Shore since the middle of the 19th century, and which Josh has become a steward of. 

I like it. But… dangle, preposition, dangle. I bet it’s proper in the Gaelic. Gotta be, right? And in GBH, we have another excellent piece of writing from David Jesudason about the Jamaican-owned pubs of Brixton, London in the 1960s:

The majority of South London’s Jamaican-owned pubs were located on Coldharbour Lane, a major thoroughfare which runs between the neighborhoods of Brixton and Camberwell. It was a poor area even before members of the Windrush Generation settled in London, and with their arrival came depictions of the area as a ghetto by the white media, even though the newcomers were able to forge a strong sense of community. From the 1960s onwards, Coldharbour Lane witnessed a flowering of Black-owned businesses, especially in and around Brixton Market, including grocers, barbers and record shops.

Excellent. And The Mudgemaster5000 has posted a post with this interesting observation about thems who write about beer and how they may also avoid certain places:

The biggest enemy of cask quality is slow turnover and, while overall volumes have fallen, the number of lines hasn’t dropped to follow suit. There’s nothing like quick sales to paper over a lack of cellarmanship skills. But, while they may be fully aware of the problem, if the people who write about beer seldom experience poor quality themselves, it won’t seem particularly urgent to them. The battle for cask quality is being fought in the outlets that the beer writers and enthusiasts never visit. No doubt this Autumn there will be the usual round of hand-wringing about cask beer quality and declining sales. But, as usual, the industry will sagely nod, dismiss it as someone else’s problem, and move on.

Ron has been describing the English beer trade in the 1970s, including in this post on offerings you might see in an average pub:

Whilst looking for something completely different, I tripped over a series of images for pub price lists from the 1970s. The first thing that struck me was how short some of them were. A couple of draught beers and half a dozen bottled ones. A far narrower offering than in pubs today. The price list we’re looking at today is from John Smith. It doesn’t say that on it, but it’s pretty obvious from the beers. One word of caution. This looks like a generic list, rather than from a specific pub. Not every pub would have sold the full selection of draught beers in the list. Many would have had just a Bitter, Mild, Lager and a Keg Bitter.

Note: 13.5p for a wee Cream Sherry back then. Also note from today’s news: non-alcoholic beer for dogs and for children as well as beer in vending machines as we are told in The Guardian:

Anyone watching the Ashes at Old Trafford this week will have seen the EBars, a wall of mobile vending machines pouring pints at the touch of a button. They were at Manchester international festival last week too, where even those despairing at yet another ancient industry being dehumanised by technology couldn’t resist a pint of Amstel for £4. There are 40 automated EBar kiosks in the UK, popping up regularly everywhere from Murrayfield Stadium in Scotland to Twickenham in London. When Sam Fender played a series of huge homecoming gigs last month at St James’ Park, Newcastle United’s home ground, the EBars were deployed to quench the thirst of thousands of his fans.

What is the fuss? We had one of those in the workplace cafeteria in Holland back in 1986. Or at least one offering wee little Heinekens tinnies for a guilder or two. Speaking of history, Andreas Krennmair did a bit of unpacking this week, tracking the locations of the breweries of Bamburg Germany as described in Das Bamberger Bier, oder praktische, auf chemische Grundsä from 1818. He actually started out thinking that this was a job for our man in Amsterdam but then…

My initial plan was to just send Ron an email with a few corrections, but very quickly I realized that I should turn these into a proper map, not just for myself, but for everyone to look at… When I created this, certain patterns became apparent very quickly. The 65 breweries were not just spread out over the city, but they formed clusters. If you’ve ever been to Bamberg, you may remember how the breweries Spezial and Fässla are opposite of each other. This is not a happy accident, but rather a remnant of basically one big street full of breweries. Only these two breweries remain nowadays, back 200 years ago, the road that was then called Steinweg and is nowadays Untere and Obere Königstraße was home to a whopping 21 (!!) breweries, spanning over just ~400 metres.

Lumpy. Very lumpy. Unlike Stan who issued another edition of Hop Queries reporting on the front lines of the hop glut… which admittedly does sound all a bit lumpy:

It would take an historic disaster to wipe out the surplus of many of the most popular varieties. However, the difference between the Saaz harvest in 2021 (best production 25 years) and 2022 (half of 2021 production) is a reminder that #beerisagriculture. A wildcard this year in the Yakima Valley is “early bloom,” that is plants flowering early after an extremely cold April. It has been most apparent in Centennial, Simcoe and Cluster, but may also negatively impact the yield of other varieties. Adding to the challenge, Eric Desmarais at CLS Farms explained, is that “split bloom” usually accompanies early bloom. What looks from a distance to be one bine climbing a string may be made up to as many as six. What typically happens, he said, is the more advanced bines grow too tall before the longest day of the year and start flowering. “But the shorter vines stay vegetative and are on a more typical flowering schedule . . . and many times flower at the correct or near correct time.”

Yes, beer is agriculture. Not a mystery. Are these the great three sins in beer writing? – (i) brewery owner bios or BOBs, (ii) using a ten dollar word where a fifty cent one will do and (iii) when cornered, defaulting to vauge wanderings of the mind suggesting there is alchemy, magic or mystery in beer.**

Finally and speaking of which, this week’s point of view discussion was led by Boak and Bailey who asked whether beer felt boring. Their latest Substack newsletter includes subheadings like “The thrill is gone” and “Is beer just worse?” Jeff responded saying or at least effectively saying that if you understood beer on as many levels as he does you would understand. I paraphrase. And I jest. But I do disagree with this:

For a good decade, beer was incredibly exciting. Breweries opened like crazy, new styles were reshaping the landscape, and everyone was getting into good beer. For a decade, craft beer was the fun party and everyone wanted to be there. For those of us who got used to that mode of being—or who didn’t know anything else—2023 has the feel of the hangover after the party. We have vague regrets and our moods are dark. A world in which beer isn’t the coolest party in town must be a boring one in which nothing is happening. Time to move on.

See, having spent the last third of my life scribble around here I can confirm my own personal view (and the view of a lot of people if we are honest) has been that beer was actually not all that incredibly exciting at all points in time and that for the most part everyone was not getting into it at all.  That was just how the trade promoted it. And the over reaching trade writers wrote about it.*** And, yes, some folks welcomed it. Certainly. But fifteen years ago good beer was also difficult to define as either craft or kraphtt and was already a couple of decades into fobbing off dubious awards. The groundwork was also being established for its own self-inflicted demise which really had hit its stride by 2016.  So… it’s been rife with concurrent contrary tensions. Not so much a cycle as a constant pageeant of parallel but conflicting points of view.  Yes, we do want to love good beer and good beer culture – but then we notice how utterly unlovable it can be.  That all being the case, it is both interesting and dull… and shall always be. Which means both Boak and Bailey as well as Jeff are right – but which of course also means I am righterer. My only goal achieved. Again.

Roll the credits! As per, you can check out the many ways to connect even including at my new cool Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Have you checked out Threads? They appear to achieved to make social media offer less and less. Brilliant but I never got IG either. Don’t forget the voices on Mastodon, the newer ones noted in bold:

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

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters to stay on top of things – including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those  Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many 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 more occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a podcast.  There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube soon celebrating a decade of vids.   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!

*We note for those who come after us – though I must say I am not sure I ever really ever know what “vibe-check its off-times” really means.
**I am compelled to submit these observations into evidence: (i) “...a writer can change that story, totally take it in a totally different direction, if they so wish and are able to — bit more magical realism needed perhaps?” and (ii) “…there’s nothing wrong with mystery, I try to use it when I can for if you stuck to the plain facts with beer you would have writing on a par with that covering the drainage industry or the world of pallets…“
***I am reminded of a line from an email many years ago from a beer writer to me speaking of another beer writer “…you aren’t an idiot. I don’t think he is either, but he’s chosen this path that includes him making sense of the beer world for all of us. Which, of course, is impossible.” And, no I won’t. 

Your Beery News Notes For The Beginning Of A Grim March

I used to celebrate March and look forward to what is coming but this horrible week makes me look back at 2021 with envy. Events north of the Black Sea are utterly horrifying and in line with what we see in Yemen and Burma and elsewhere. Not much of a cold war left these days. My ignorance is not complete but what could one add other than it is heartening to see the solidarity that may put a beating on the Russian economy swiftly as spring itself comes forward to help save Ukraine. We here in safer lands are particularly aware that our Canadian population includes the third largest Ukrainian community  in the world.

In local response, the provincially own LCBO monopoly is removing Russian made booze from the shelf. The LCBO is one of the biggest booze buyers in the world so that is good.  Carlsberg may be taking a more direct approach with their bottles.

Elsewhere, some in the beer nerd world are apparently unable to contextualize the biggest risk of WWIII since glasnost without some kick at current issues in craft. I am not sure this approach illustrated in the tweet to the right is one I would take. I would have though praise was due for the BA (and the LCBO) taking an immediate stance that would propagate quickly back to the staff of breweries and distilleries in Russia, good folk who may not be getting fed the facts from their local tyrant-owned media.

Jeff shared some excellent thoughts on an awful week but, conversely, this sort of thing is a little sad. Feels like coopting a murderous war crime to promote trade. Maybe a bit too soon?

From a happier place and time, Boak and Bailey wrote a fabulous post on a late 1960s Swingin’ Englan’ sort of place called The Chelsea Drugstore and then, in true modern style,  elaborated even more elaborately on Twitter. An excellent example of how blogs and social media are far superior to the printed page. Anyway, it was a place:

“The day they opened, we were all so damn high we ran around putting handprints all over it until owners had to set up a roadblock to keep stoners off,” Beverley ‘Firdsi’ Gerrish is quoted as saying in a biography of Syd Barrett. Apart from the visual aspect of the design, the business model was new, too. Bass Charrington needed to recoup its investment and intended to sweat the premises for every penny. So, as well as selling its beer in two bars, they also sold breakfast, lunch and dinner; records; tobacco; soda; delicatessen products; and, of course, drugs, in a late night pharmacy.

Go and see the clip from A Clockwork Orange that B+B include in the post for a sense of what the place was like. Looks like a small smart shopping plaza that you’d see in sci-fi TV of the time. Where the second incarnation of Doctor Who might shop for his jelly babies. Except it was the fourth that really handed out broadly so would have needed a good supply.

Reaching back further, Liam posted an interesting set of thoughts on Mild in Ireland and neatly unpacks an advert from 1915:

Here we see that under their O’Connell’s Dublin Ales brand they were selling a Dark Extra Strong ale and a Pale Mild on draught – and let us not forget a rare mention for an Irish Best Bitter for bottling! Allowing for dubious marketing and the leeway that advertisement writers have with the truth this might be a nice mention for a Strong Dark Mild? Even if I am stretching terminology, styles and descriptions to the limit then if nothing else it is a nice record of what D’Arcy’s were brewing at this time. 

On the ethical gaps beat this week, we learn from a “team update” that NYC’s three bar chain Threes Brewing’s CEO stepped down as CEO after pushback from his comparison of the local proof-of-vaccination policy to the Holocaust and segregation in the Jim Crow South. His self-congratulatory resignation was due to, and one quotes, “his duties as a parent and a citizen” which, in the scheme of things, don’t matter all that much. Except if you are taking any comfort or congratulations in the resignations. It is good to remember this: a CEO is the head of staff, the Chair is the head of the board of directors who tell staff what to do and the shareholders tell the board what to do. No word that he is leaving his role as a director or as a shareholder.  BTW: never heard of them either.

Ron is back in Brazil. His last junket** there seemed to be a bit miserable but back he went despite the quality of the entries last time: “The Viennas are as expected. Almost all riddled with faults. Except for the only decent one I judged on the first day.“. The hotel breakfast buffet coverage is amongst his finest work, like this from just last December:

No need to rise early. So I don’t. It’s just after 9:30 when I finally wander down. The breakfast room is pretty much empty. Just one other punter. Not someone from the contest. Daringly, I give some of the cheese a try. And the ham stuff. The thrill of the unknown. The orange cheese is pretty tasteless. Doesn’t have much in the way of texture, either. I’ve not been missing much. I feel the fruit working its magic. Or perhaps that’s just a fart coalescing in my gut.

Sounds magical. This time? It’s raining. But at least the currency is gently collapsing and Martyn‘s there to share the joy.

Beth Demon is blogging wonderfully and generously at her substack, Prohibitchin, featuring the underrepresented in the drinks trade. This month, she interviewed Michelle Tham, the head of education at Canada’s venerable Labatt:

As the largest brewer in Canada, Labatt is an inextricable part of Canadian identity, and as a Chinese-Canadian woman, it’s something Michelle finds herself deeply rooted in. “Millennials like to joke that Labatt is ‘Dad beer,’ but it literally was my dad’s beer and still is today… it is a bit of a symbol of the Canadian experience,” she says. “Canadians Google more about beer than any country… It shows they’re interested in wanting to know more about it, and I believe the more you know about it, the more you’re going to enjoy it.”

Through writing Ontario Beer it became clear that Labatt was always one of our most progressive breweries – from focusing almost a hundred years ago on women as valuable customers worth reaching to having honest Dudley Do-rights for shipping clerks.

This week, Stan sent out the latest edition of his Hop Queries newsletter, number 5.10. This is a great set of facts about one of the great US beers:

Bell’s buys 500,000 pounds of Centennial each year – which amounts to about 14 percent of the Centennial harvested in the US Northwest – from multiple farms. Most of those hops go into their iconic IPA, Two Hearted Ale. But you aren’t going to hear drinkers discuss the merits of Two Hearted hopped with Centennial from Segal Hop Ranch versus Centennial from John I. Haas, because the hops all end up in a master blend. The largest blend any facility can process at one time is 200,000 pounds, so it takes three passes during several months after harvest. That’s scale.

Note: not the #1 and #2 craft breweries in Canada.  Also… if one entity buys out another, they both can’t continue to claim to be independent.

Finally, one attentive reader emailed me with interesting link related to a proposed oddly modest bond issue by GBH. It was not so much the fact that they were looking for a small amount of money – $100,000 to be repaid over 5 years at 5.5% – that interested me so much as they publicly filed four years of financial statements as part of their effort to get the bonding put in place. The financials tell a few interesting stories. Most obvious is how the vast majority of their income is from consulting services so the writing is subsidized but, before the pandemic, GBH lost 32% of that income flow from 2018-19. We also see that subscriptions to their blog run at well under 10% of their total income and under 3% 2021 at $24,044. They are moving more and more to “underwritten” stories and events, funded by the subject matter. In fact, subscription income for GBH seems to be about half than that of Pellicle as the latter is apparently close to £3,000 per month or  around $48,000 USD a year. (I send a paltry two figure amount to Pellicle every month.) Note worthy, too, is how GBH also took in a bit over $153,000 in pandemic loans and paid out $133,000 or so in 2021 as members’ distributions – both larger figures than the goal of the bond.* These matters are not highlighted in the information provided by GBH but they are disclosed.

There we are. Pray for peace. For more check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and from Stan every Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Or is that dead now?) There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s irregular newsletter, The Gulp, too. 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.

*Why effectively borrow around $130,000 (bond amount plus interest) right after drawing out more than that? 
**Particularly miserable in terms of cheapskate reimbursement for making effort to give free PR, according to the disclosure: “The organisers of the Brasil Beer Cup paid for my accommodation and food during the period of judging (four nights and three days) Beer, too, which was provided by one of the sponsors. I had to pay for my own cocktails. And all other expenses, such as flights and extra hotel nights.” As usual, I agree with whatever Doris says about all this.

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 pilsner “brewed 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 newsletter, The Gulp, too (… back this week!) And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (which I hope is  revived soon…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*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.

A Few Beery News Notes For Early May As I Ail Rather That Ale

This may be a brief one as I find myself on Wednesday off work sick from something with nothing to do with a virus. Food allergies. Love. It. I blame the Hungarian salami provisionally. The deli had none of the German stuff I normally buy.  I know you will join me in shaking my fist at the sky from a doubled over position as you marvel at the enhanced level of excitement the ailments of the middle age offer to the modern beer blogging reader.

Still, I expect you have other things to do as those do in the picture of the week, posted on Twitter by Will Hawkes. My first reaction was “OH MY GOD!!!” as we have been in total lockdown for most of 2021 around these parts.  Even though Boak and Bailey are out on the crawls these days, I am no where near heading out into a crowd even though I have had my first AZ jab for half a month now. Still, it does look pleasant. Looks like the scene is near Kings Cross Station at Stoney Street. This would be more likely the scene I’d find myself in. Also in Britain this week:

i. a UK Member of Parliament told a beer joke this week.
ii. a beer rating service on CEFAX, the 1970s and ’80s TV based internet service of sorts, was remembered, too.

Update #1: according to Tom in the comments, apparently May is Mild Month so once again by June 99% of beer drinkers will say to themselves “what’s that mild stuff?”*

Update #2: Good to see our local Stone City Ales managed a local crisis in supply so well. See, they planned for a normalish patio springtime and then faced a renewed lockdown so they had waaaayyy too much beer. Their solution worked according to my email inbox:

Since we started our 25% off sale last week, we have been overwhelmed by your support, and we are so grateful. We just wanted to let you know the sale ends tonight at midnight, so if you would like to take advantage of this opportunity (for the first time, or again) just be sure to order online today, and simply choose a future delivery date. We don’t want to sit on fresh beers, and we had brewed lots thinking our patios may be open. Alas, we are take-out window and delivery only, so every sale really helps.  We are so proud of these beers we have out right now. Don’t miss out. To all of the health care workers and essential workers out there — WE SEE YOU, and deeply appreciate what you do for us all. 

The Beer Nut had a busy week with three posts and eleven beer reviews. Best of the lot appears to be the stemwear worthy beers of Land & Labour but no such joy for a sad faux choco-orange imperial stout from the obscurely named brewery, Wander Beyond:

On the flavour, oranges are conspicuous by their absence. It goes big on the chocolate, which doesn’t sit well with the assertive carbonation. The sweetness, bitterness and savoury side are all what you’d get from dark chocolate or cocoa powder, and there’s only the faintest hint of Jaffa Cake orangeiness on the finish. I’m down on gimmicks in beer generally; poorly rendered gimmicks like this are unforgivable.

When cooking cicadas, beer is optional.

Ron has done a series of posts on AK beer during WWII.

Someone mentioned recently that they thought AK died out between the wars. That’s not really true. AK was given a good old kick in the bollocks by WW I. Many found their demise in the war’s brutal gravity cuts. Others, though fatally weakened, soldiered on. Another war was the last thing they needed. Kicking off the war at a little over 1030º, there wasn’t far they could go once a new round of gravity cuts began to bite.

Posts on the grists, sugars and hops in AK brewing followed. Then he provided a brew it yourself recipe for an AK from 1945. Rather completist of him.

Gary is doing us all a great service with his continuing series of posts on pre-WW II Jewish-owned East European breweries. This week he wrote about the Teitel Brewery of Ostrow Mazowiecka, to the north east of Warsaw and the site of the murder of hundreds of Jews in 1939. Some good research supports the piece:

I located a print ad for the brewery in the National Archives of Israel. It appeared in the June 1, 1928 Trybuna Akademicka, a Jewish-themed, Polish-language newspaper in Warsaw. I wrote earlier that at least two other Polish breweries with Jewish ownership, the Pupko and Papiermeister breweries, placed ads in the paper in the same period.

By comparison with the above, please note elsewhere that it’s not a blog, its a “premier beverage research firm“! Such cringy puff.

Oktoberfest went and got itself cancelled again. Way. To. Go. To the north-west, another sort of doom is on the way as hard seltzers are boing brought to Belgium via AB-InBev-etc-etc. The Brussels Times tries to explain:

To begin with, the name ‘hard seltzer’ is aggressive enough. On the drinks’ British website, meanwhile, the company states, “It’s like alcoholic sparkling water, because that’s exactly what it is,” and “Don’t overthink it”. “We want to be a company that brings all people together, not just beer people,” said Elise Dickinson, marketing manager for hard seltzers at AB InBev. “Hard seltzers are an integral part of that. The demand for the drinks is also starting to increase in Europe. AB InBev is well-placed to help retailers enter this booming market.”

It really is an accusing finger at the craft beer trade that such a vacuous product is kicking it in the marketplace. Could a food product be less skilled? Still, gives a reason to pay freelancers in need. Canadians are less interested as we know how to pour vodka into club soda at 20% of the price.

Conversely, Asahi is investing in no-alcohol beer as opposed to no-beer alcohol:

“Non-alcohol is a good all-around product,” Atsushi Katsuki, Asahi’s chief executive since March, said in an interview. “It helps to resolve social issues, it connects us with new users and it leads to our profitability.” Low and non-alcohol beer sales have benefited as people spent more on drinks to be consumed at home during lockdowns, suiting Asahi’s broader strategy of focusing on higher-margin “premium” beverages.

As with seltzers, the big money is in offering less.

Odd that the previous Game of Thrones beer isn’t referenced. Is this even a story? GoT has become the My Little Pony of beer brandings. Looking forward to Game of Thrones sugary breakfast corn pops.

Retired Martin has been pumping out the blog posts and, in this piece on a trip to a place called Flatt Top in England, posts what has to be the single most honestly unattractive photo of a British pub that I have ever seen. Click on that thumbnail if you dare.

There. Back off to bed for me. While I’m there shivering under the covers, 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 newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness. And remember BeerEdge, too. Plus a newcomer located by B+B: The Moon Under Water.

*Ha Ha. Funny joke, right? No, really. Joking.

As January 2019 Dies Off Another Set Of Beery News Is Born

A surprisingly long set of links face me in my inbox today. Folk send me suggestions all the time… well, some of the time… OK, once in a while. Honestly, for the most part to make this weekly update of the news in good beer I just email myself links as I notice a story through the week. Usually there are seven or nine by early in the week. This week, I had over twenty by Monday. And, yes, emails. So… let’s dive right in.

First off, if you are in Toronto this evening (and I will be if only passing through via VIA) you can pop over to this fabulous fundraiser for an important cause to witness some top notch curling action (like that to the right from last year) at the Beer Sisters’ Charity Hopspiel:*

On January 31st, brewers from across Ontario will gather at the Royal Canadian Curling Club in Toronto’s east end. Clad in array of plaid, denim, light-up shorts, toques and matching jerseys, 24 brewing industry teams will face-off to raise money for the Native Women’s Resource Centre in Toronto. The Beer Sisters’ Charity Hopspiel, hosted by beer writers and educators Crystal and Tara Luxmore, is in its 7th year. The event has raised over $32,000 for the centre, and the sisters hope that this year they’ll cross the $40,000 mark.

Fabulous! And at the Royal Canadian Curling Club! An actual place I am assured, not just a mid-range brand of rye whisky from the 1950s.

Next, Katie wrote a wonderful piece on heritage barley published in Ferment that explores the use of Chevallier, the darling English malting from around 1820 to WWI. I immediately started badgering her about joining my Battledore revival crusade.

Note: Victorians represented in under 1% of the graph and the most striking thing is not their habits so much as the near replication of the feat right before the economic meltdown of 2007-08. Nonetheless, a very handy set of charts and who doesn’t like handy sets of charts?

Not journalism.  Or at least not good journalism.** Just badgering. Easy enough to get a quote from someone but it usually requires letting them speak.

An clear and accurate guide to tipping in Canadian tavs, pubs and bars.

Beer Ramen. Kill me now.

Update: We’ve had an actual update on #FlagshipFebruary and I couldn’t be more grateful for the clarification:

…it is in our and the industry’s best interest if we take a moment occasionally to appreciate the flagship beers of the industry’s foundational breweries…

So, the brewery has to have continued through the good beer era and the current flagship is the brewery hallmarks to recognize. Andy Crouch wrote a wonderful dense poem of a tweet on the same topic:

Revisiting long established flagships tastes of antiquity, success, failure, unfulfilled dreams of resurrection, and ultimately nostalgia. A place in time to momentarily revisit if only to remind you how far you’ve come but rarely a place to linger long.

I noticed this statement in a piece on German brewing culture and I thought it was extraordinary for suggesting agricultural capacity of a landscape is not the governing factor in whether beer was made or not:

Alsace is on Europe’s religious faultline. Beer is often thought of a drink of the Protestant north, but the facts don’t really bear that out. Belgium, Bavaria and Bohemia are historically Catholic (even if that religious attachment has faded); only Britain, of Europe’s foundational beer cultures, is Protestant. Does this suggest beer is less Protestant than thought? Perhaps, but I also think Catholic cultures are (as you might assume) better at preservation.

Well, I suppose someone has created a jam/jelly faultline based on religion. Me, I’d suggest many western and central European brewing traditions were pretty much established before the Reformation.

The effect of the US government shutdown on the brewing trade is measurable. Why the difference in processing wines and spirits? I blame the slackers attracted to a career in the beer label branch.

Gary’s piece on Watney’s Red Barrel as experienced in eastern North America at the time contains plenty of those links to contemporary primary documents that leave you persuaded. By way of contrast, this could really be read in two entirely opposite ways:

“I actually am mystified myself,” says Jeff Alworth. He should know…

Fine. I’ve held on long enough. Let’s talk Fuller’s or at least the highlights of the discussion. Promethean Jordan found a very helpful Brexit angle on the timing based on last year’s visit. Martyn argued convincingly that the whole sale spoke of business success and a strong future going forward. Then he added a bonus history of Asahi to deal with, you know, the legitimacy issues. Jeff at distance took it as a hefty body blow and mainly sees that it poses great risk to the English cask ale scene. Boak and Bailey wrote from their semi-characteristic personal perspective, supposing they are facing another long goodbye to a treasured relationship. Matt sided with the corporate success group and then started blatantly and publicly gambling with Boak and Bailey over the matter. Pete wrote first about his lack of levelheadedness when faced with the news and then got level headed and then sorta wobbled again in the semi-revisionist Book of Genesis stuff.***

My take? First, Fuller’s has been masterful in building up its reputation with good beer conversationalists over the last ten years. Remember how fun it was when @FullersJohn started tweeting? How beer writers were brought in and got their names on the label? What is really being noticed now is how the emotional credit Fuller’s they earned through that clever outreach has been truly a rich investment. And notice how none of the commentary comments upon that even though it was all done openly and with integrity.  Second, the only constant about the beer business over the centuries has been the goal of continuous growth, merger and acquisition. Brewing has two great outputs: beer and wealth. This is just the latter being successfully served after a long stretch merrily servicing the former.

I love this tweet by Jancis R:

Never ceases to amaze me when we get messages like this: ‘We’d like to find out how to go about having our wines scored by Jancis Robinson, as well as the costs involved.’ Who charges to taste wine?

Who charges to taste beer? I know some but it would be rude to mention, no? Conversely, there is a craft beer fraudster working the US south:

“The phone rang and rang and rang…I checked the house and it was empty. The door was unlocked,” Brandon Oliver says. “His chickens were still in the backyard…about 90% of his clothes were gone…he left as if he only had six hours to leave.” Foster left his tools out at the unfinished beer garden. He and his family left town overnight.

The abandonment of the chickens is a sweet detail.

As someone with hearing that will never get any better, I really like this inordinately nice idea from a campaign under the heading Quiet Scotland:

Ever left a shop or been unable to enjoy a meal or drink because the background music has been so loud? Don’t like complaining? Try leaving one of our polite cards to get your point across.

An email went around from NAGBW HQ about the impending demise of the All About Beer web archive and I first thought it was an oddly presumptuous thing to send… and then I thought it was kind to alert me. I did not save any of my own work as anything I pitched was not dubbed worthy – which made me happy. I really hate editors and others paid to make things duller. But I did save Stan’s story How Craft Became Craft for very obvious reasons.

And, finally, let’s just watch this**** and listen to the screams of those precious darlings witnessing a part of their personal emotional foundations, the rebellious idols of their youths, being washed away out from underneath their feet:

That’s it! A big week in the contemporary detritus of good beer culture. Please check out Boak and Bailey on Saturday and then Stan on Monday for more sensible and refined responses to the week in good beer.

* For those not in the punny know, see Bonspiel.
**Which is quite another point we never explore when a writer claims the journalism label… or at least the helpful bits. Seldom the adoption of the concurrent ethics lead at that moment.
***“Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale began life as an attempt to imitate Fuller’s ESB.” Really? How many beers is SNPA an clone of? Ballentine IPA. Burt Grant’s work. What else?
****And this, for that matter.

A Guide To Maxing Out Your Upcoming #FlagFeb Experience

While I suggested in the last Thursday update that I cannot find much drive within myself to take on the call to celebrate the flagship beers of yore in February I am not being a grump. As you can clearly see to the right, both the shed and I like flags. And I recognize that Master Polk and Mistress Polk, for example, appear to be positively enchanted. The Fuggled folk are all a’giggle. So, it is perhaps useful for me to see what I can do to assist even if I do not jump on the bandwagon. Let’s start with a clarification of terms. Mr. B. wrote this about #FlagshipFebruary on Facebook deep down on a thread:

Flagships are, I think, the beer that formed the foundation of the brewery… not necessarily its current best-seller. I’m sure there are brands that outsell Central City’s Red Racer Pale, for example, but I would certainly list that as the brewery’s flagship. Ditto Deschutes Black Butte.

There are a few things to unpack there. It’s not a beer that founded craft era so much as the brand for each brewery. So the brewery, practically, has to be old and its given candidate brand needs to be something of a survivor. And its not necessarily the most loved today which means you may need to do a little sleuthing unless you are going to stop at Sierra Nevada Pale Ale or Sam Adams Boston Lager. So how are you going to do that?

Act like a historian. One handy resource that you can start with are the Past Winners’ records for the Great American Beer Festival. So, if you look at the first awards list you see that in 1983 SNPA was the overall winner while SABL won top dog in ’85 and ’86.  Fine. But look at 1984.  Yakima Brewing won first and second place for an imperial stout and a Scottish ale. Hmm. Now, look at 1987 where SABL won as best “Continental Pilsner” as opposed to “Continental Amber Labers” – really.

The brief study of these records raises a few more questions. Is the brand’s recipe or even branding sufficiently similar now as it was then when it served as a foundation? Were those really the hops they use back then? Are you really experiencing the same thing? Does it even exist? Also, do these flagships actually represent the brewery’s foundation or are they just the lucky ones that now have survived the obstacle course of time, those whims of a succession of a beer fads and trends. Does its current status actually reflect its actual history or is it, like the beak of the finch, the one which by luck could accommodate unforeseen future? Figuring out that might take a little work.

My thoughts? Not that this initiative is any sort of minefield that we will fail at but that this is a great opportunity to consider the relationship between the micro brewing phase of approximately 1983-2003 and the craft phase from 2003 to the present. How much of craft’s history is made up and heavily laced with retrospective rosy coloured glassware? Plenty, I’d say. How much is even based on the lessening status of the great old white male brewery owner? Maybe a bit? So… if you really want to celebrate the actual foundation of the good beer movement, look at the structure of the early medal categories and go get yourself some stout, an amber or a porter. Find a Fuggle.

Use #FlagshipFebruary. Use it to explore and enrich your own understanding. Sours, fruit beer, barrel aging and even heavy hopping are developments largely from later in the second half of the history of your hobby. You may need to accept that what is actually the old and foundational is actually new and novel to you. Which is good. So do it.

 

 

The Difference Between Temperance And Prohibition

Looking around the law books the other day… OK, I actually hardly ever look at law books at all these days. Just databases… of cases. And when I should be working the search engine for the latest on “equitable estoppel” or “profit-à-prendre” I sometimes slip in a few phrases related to the laws of liquor. And sometimes I find a paragraph or two  like these from the ruling of the Ontario Court of Appeal in the case Re The Canada Temperance Act, [1939] O.R. 570:

There can be no doubt that the cause of temperance (and by temperance I mean temperance in its true sense, which is the antithesis of teetotalism and of prohibition) has made great strides since the Canada Temperance Act was first enacted [in 1878.] Open drunkenness which was not considered a disgrace at that time is so considered now. The most grievous blow which temperance ever sustained was the enactment in Canada and the United States of prohibitory laws in force throughout those countries, which brought forth the bootlegger and in his train the racketeer, who by illicit trafficking amassed millions of dollars and became a wealthy, organized and powerful criminal class.

Since the repeal of those laws, much has been done to overcome the evil, but it is yet by no means completely cured. Nevertheless I think no one would have the hardihood to suggest that an emergency, such as that described by Lord Haldane, exists in Canada.  At the present time each Province in the Dominion of Canada, with the exception of Prince Edward Island, has legislation regulating and controlling the sale of liquor within the respective provinces, and the validity of this legislation has been affirmed. In all these Provinces the sale of liquor has been made a Government monopoly and the traffic is regulated and controlled by Government Commissions or Boards charged with the duty of controlling the sale. In Prince Edward Island there is a prohibitory law. For these reasons, it seems manifest to me that the emergency, if any existed, has wholly passed away and that the foundation, and the only foundation upon which Russell’s case can be supported, no longer exists.

While the words of Justice Henderson appear in his dissent, they do address the idea that something normally managed under provincial law – like the liquor trade – can be legislated upon at the national federal level under its “peace, order and good government” power if there is a national state of emergency. For Justice Henderson, that emergency had passed by 1939. Blessed control, the state’s temperance tool, had ensured common open drunkenness never returned. For him, prohibition is by contrast the tool of wealthy, organized and powerful criminal class… and, apparently, Prince Edward Island where you couldn’t buy legal liquor until a decade later. So temperance and prohibition are opposites. The majority did not agree however on the facts, holding that there had in fact been no change of circumstances and, as a result, that the national Canada Temperance Act, R.S.C. 1927, ch. 196 remained valid.

If, as some argue, the federal government could now intervene to pass a statute – one to “correct” last week’s Comeau ruling – some sort of national interest would have to be invoked. It could be an interest like, theoretically, a booze related emergency which somehow silently has remained unchanged since the 1870s. That would require arguing, as the lawyers for the churches did in 1939, that “the menace of intemperance is still present.” Not likely now. And probably not really likely in 1939 if we think carefully about Henderson’s dissent. Provincial control boards managing the liquor supply created and still uphold the temperate way we all enjoy in modern society.

So if that national interest is not likely the one that could be relied upon,  what other national interest could there possibly be to justify a federal intervention into the local common sense approach administered by each province?

A New Indigenous Beer Style? Watertown Cold!

Searching the on-line archives on a quiet day off, I found a very interesting bit of news in a June 5, 1988 article in the entirely venerable Watertown Daily Times  under the headline “Prohibition Invention Made in City” which describes one aspect of the local bootlegging trade when distributing Canada’s gift of beer imports was a boon to the good folk of upstate New York. The border area was, as would be expected, a hotbed of smuggling – but in the middle of the article there was this startling passage:

By 1925, even the New York Times carried stories stating that Watertown was the hub of illegal beer shipments. On Aug. 20 of that year, newly appointed Buffalo Divisional Prohibition Chief Romaine Merrick, who was assigned to northern New York, told The New York Times: “In the Buffalo District, I will have the largest distillery in the state. It is in Watertown.” The next day, The Watertown Daily Times wrote a reaction story, stating that only near beer, a legal beverage at the time, was known to be brewed here. 

Little did they know that sometime between 1919 and 1928, the owners of the brewery had constructed a secret cold-distilling and bottling operation worth $50,000, concealing it in a nearby garage. The federal Treasury Agents were amazed. They thought they had sealed off the area nine years before… Federal officials had found two huge vats in the basement of the brewery, where cold water, malt, hops and yeast were being mixed and allowed to ferment slowly into high-alcohol beer. The beer was then filtered through special paper that collected impurities, and piped to an illicit bottling operation nearby.

Now, as I wrote in Ontario Beer, we all know that even though Canada had a form of restriction on the legal sale of beer during our temperance era, there was never actual full on prohibition. Restrictions were largely imposed province by province. The breweries were not shut down as that was under federal law. And the era of temperance ended when the realization was realized that the breweries (and wineries… and distilleries…) were making masses of untaxed wealth off of the export trade. And the Canadian export trade was exporting into the USA. So, that the Feds, the G-men, were on the trail of bootleggers was normal.

But what was going on in that basement was not normal. What the heck was this cold fermented, filtered, high-alcohol beer? The 1988 story quotes a nephew of the final owner of the brewery who said “[e]veryone liked the beer…” and also Watertown resident Samuel Frazitta who said that it had a real kick to it and “tasted real good.”This is important to appreciate as these recollections were reported in the context of an area awash in the 1920s with good Canadian beer and liquor. But what was it? Apparently the secret brewing process did not require boiling the wort as that would have attracted the Federal agents far sooner.

There is more background in this 2017 article and in this 2014 report in Northern New York Business magazine stated that the equipment included “vats that contained 320 barrels of beer in various stages of fermentation” so not a tiny operation. After the end of prohibition, the brewery continued for about another decade as a legitimate operation under the name Northern Brewing Co and was known for its:

…malty, full-bodied, European-style brews, with high alcohol content and a head you could stand a spoon in. Specialties included Watertown Cream Ale, Old Style Lager, and Jefferson Lager Beer.

All of which is interesting. Notice the prohibition beer was made of malt and hops and not just some fifth-rate sugar thrown together to make some sort of hootch. It was both malty and enjoyable. Which is also reasonable as the operation during the prohibition era was actually making legal sub-2% alcohol beer. And reasonable given the brewery had three phases of legitimate brewing: Watertown Brewing Co.(1893 to 1901), Watertown Consumers Brewing Co.(1901 to 1920) and The Northern Brewing Co. Inc. (1933 to 1943). To these can be added the illegitimate operation from 1919 to 1928.

But what was the cold-fermentation, non-odorous brewing process that was used during the bootleg era? Certainly it appears to be a singular process, without replication elsewhere as far as I know. Maybe Stan or someone else knows more. Another indigenous hidden style. Heck, is it a new, mysterious hidden technique for the crafteratti to now explore, appropriate and, then, almost immediately ruin by loading it up with fruit flavours and glitter?  Maybe. Needs more study.

Your Thursday Beer News For That Day Just Five Weeks Before March

It gets like that in January. Counting the days to the warmer ones like prayers upon beads passed through the fingers. It’s time. Please be March soon. Please. Warmth. Now! Come on!! Time, like grace, arrives in its own pace I suppose.  Even calling this a Thursday post is jumping the gun a bit. These things get plunked together mostly on Wednesday. These things matter. Anyway, what’s been going on in the news?

I lived in PEI from 1997 to 2003 and am pretty sure John Bil shucked my first raw oyster. Love struck I was. Carr’s was an eight minute drive from my house and I often bought a dozen or two there to take out to the back yard and suck back on a Saturday afternoon. RIP.

Our pal Ethan and Community Beer Works are working with the owners of Buffalo’s Iroquois brand to revive a version of the venerable brew. An interesting form of partnership where craft leans of community pride in legacy lager.

Carla Jean Lauter tweeted the news Wednesday afternoon that Nova Scotia’s newbie Tusket Falls Brewing had decided to withdraw its Hanging Tree branding for one of its beers. Rightly so and quickly done as far as I can tell. That’s the Facebook announcement to the right. This was a good decision on their part but not one that goes without consideration. I grew up in Nova Scotia and, among other lessons learned in that complex culture, had the good fortune to be assigned as law school tutor in my last year to one of the leaders of the Province’s version of the Black Panther movement when he was in first year, the sadly departed, wonderful Burnley “Rocky” Jones. He did all the teaching in that friendship. I would have loved to have heard his views on the matter. See, Loyalist Canada was settled in the 1780s by the British Crown as a refuge for the outcasts, including African American freed former enslaved Loyalists, seeking shelter after the dislocation of the American Revolution. Court justice there as it was here in Kingston included hanging as part of that. Hell, in the War of 1812 at Niagara there was still drawing and quartering. As I tweeted to Ms Pate, another Bluenoser, the hanging tree could well symbolize peace, order and justice in Tusket as much as bigoted injustice elsewhere. Or it could represent both… right there. Were there lynchings in southwestern Nova Scotia? Some stories are more openly spoken of than others. Slavery lingered on a surprisingly long time here in Ontario the good. We talk little about that. And Rocky and others do not fight that good fight without good reason. We might wish it should and could depend on what happened in that place. But somethings are no longer about the story of a particular place. Somethings about beer are no longer local. And its not “just beer” in many cases. Yet, we happily talk of war. Q: could a Halifax brewery brand a beer based on the story of Deadman’s Island?

My co-author Jordan has made the big time, being cited as “Toronto beer writer and expert” by our state news broadcaster.* With good reason, too, as he has cleverly taken apart the fear mongering generated around the reasonable taxation of beer.

This is really what it is all about, isn’t it? Well done, Jeff. The setting, style and remodeling of his third pub, the
The Ypres Castle Inn all look fabulous. Good wee dug, tae.

I don’t often link to a comment at a blog but this one from the mysterious “qq” on the state of research into yeast is simply fantastic: “[t]o be honest anything is out of date that was written about the biology of the organisms making lager more than three years ago…” Wow! I mean I get it and I comments on the same about much of beer history, too, but that is quite a statement about the speed of increase in understanding beer basics. Read the whole thing as well as Boak and Bailey’s highly useful recommended lager reading.

Max finally gets a real job.

Gary Gillman has been very busy with posts and has written one about a very unstylish form of Canadian wine, native grape Canadian fortified wine, often labeled as sherry. Grim stuff but excellently explained. As I tweeted:

Well put. These were the bottles found, when I was a kid, empty up an alley or by forest swimming holes. I thought we had a few examples of better fortified wine ten or so years ago. But, likely as the PEC and Nia good stuff sells so well, no attraction to a maker.

Gary gets double billing this week as he also found and discussed the contents of a copy of the program from the first Great American Beer Festival from 1982. I have actually been pestering Stan for one of these off and on for years only to be told (repeatedly) that archiving was not part of the micro era. Tell me about it, says the amateur boy historian. The 1982 awards are still not even listed on the website but that seems to be the last year of the home brew focus.  Anyway, Gary speaks about the hops mainly in his post. I am more interested in the contemporary culture: which presenter got what level of billing, what the breweries said of their beers. Plenty to discuss.

More on closings. Crisis what crisis?  In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo. What’s it all about, Alfie?

That’s enough for this week. Plenty to chew on. See you in February!

*All I ever got was “an Ontario lawyer who reviews beers on his blog…” like I am some sort of loser…