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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note: no GBH Sightlines for five weeks. Done?

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK. Mailed that one in. Didn’t even have to mention BrewDog. Or baseball now that I think of it. Fine… just roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes. There is a lot going on down here and, remember, ye who read this far down, look to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (up again to 123) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (913) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,450) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (up to 165), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. I now have admitted my dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat, relocated the links and finally accept that BlueSky is the leader in “the race to replace” Twex even while way behind.

Fear not! While some apps perform better than other we can always check the blogs, newsletters and even podcasts to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations in the New Year from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan really doing what needs to be done Mondays. Look at me – I forgot to link to Lew’s podcast. Fixed. Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now revitalised and wonderful newsletterThe Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a podcast… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link! Errr… nope, it is gone again according to Matty C.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s a lot. The clear and unclear. The plain and the cluttered. The unexpected and the shoulda seen coming. Ways that are fair while others are rough. Enough!! Once again… roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes. There is a lot going on down here and, remember, ye who read this far down, look to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (up again to 116 rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (static at 911) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,437 – down one) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (down to 163), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. I now have admitted my dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat, relocated the links and finally accept that BlueSky is the leader in “the race to replace” Twex even while way behind.

Fear not! While some apps perform better than other we can always check the blogs, newsletters and even podcasts (really? barely! This era’s 8-track tapes!)*** to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations in the New Year from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan back at his spot for 2024 on Mondays. Look at me – I forgot to link to Lew’s podcast. Fixed. Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now revitalised and wonderful newsletterThe Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a podcast… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

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

A Brief But Paradigm Busting Edition Of These Beery News Notes For Mid-November

I’ve been mentioning that beer writing seems to have gone a bit quiet this autumn and – horrors – it’s gotten into such a state of the doldrums that Stan’s booked off until the first Monday in December. Lordy. What to do, what to do? Scour the globe? Look near and far. That’s what we always do. When we are not sifting clues we scour the globe. Beer helps. Had this one on Saturday, bought in Quebec as a standard shelf item with a reasonable price tag. Not sure why we can’t have the nice things they get at the SAQ…

UPDATE: Lew posted a new podcast. Normally I would not encourage podcasting… because… you know… but look at all of what he’s done on one short trip!

Hanover may have thought it was a frontier town, a market town, a transportation hub. But the peckish German-Americans who populated it in the late 1800s and early 1900s knew better. Their ovens and kettles, and a vague hunger between meals, were destined to make Hanover known as Snack Town!  My friend Dave Dreese and I hit town on our way to Baltimore, and wow. We visited two of the biggest snack food companies in America, two very old school hot dog joints, and a great butcher shop with their own smoked sausage and cheese. And of course, all those snacky eats need beer, so we hit the town’s six breweries. I interviewed the man who makes the last hand-rolled pretzels in Snack Town, Kevin Bidelspach of Revonah Pretzels.

Two hot dog joints… “two very old school hot dog joints”… Lordy…

Resuming normal service: I am starting off this week with a news item from Jessica Mason published at The Drinks Business at the end of last week. I like this because it acknowledges that values can clash in the world of craft – and not the ones you might think at first:

… even though the regulations and consumer pressures have led to sustainability fast-becoming a “licence to operate”, rather than a “nice-to-have” novelty, beer trends for variety were contrary to the guidance… Stronger consumer appetite for variety over volume has undoubtedly created commercial opportunities for breweries, but producing up to 100 different varieties of beer in a large-scale plant means that short production runs will require more energy and water.

I like that – push back on all thing to all paradigms. The bulk of beer brands are not only fleeting but gotten a bit lazy. Add a sauce or swap the hop so you can change the label.  Even the best brewers who attempt to make all things for all people are putting out too many clangers. Focus.

Factoid: One beer in Iceland costs the same as nine beers in Hungary.

In science news, a yeast strain has also pushed back… or perhaps been pushed back by the lab coat wearers at the University of Wisconsin:

A key trait of yeasts used in beer production is the ability to break down maltose, the most abundant sugar in the material used to brew beer. The team chose a yeast strain that had evolutionarily lost this ability despite possessing many of the genes required for maltose metabolism. After running evolution experiments growing the yeast on maltose and selecting decedents that thrived, the lab’s S. eubayanus yeast reacquired the ability to eat maltose. 

Hmm… I know that these things are important but wouldn’t starting with the strain that could do the thing you wanted it to do in the first place have been a faster way to get to your goal? Are they just jerking the poor things around?!?! [ED.: …Just a minute… let me check my high school science grades again… hmm… yes, you’re right. I don’t have a clue.] Perhaps similarly in terms of getting somewhere, Mudgie pitched something that, to be honest, I had never considered, probably because it has not yet come from the oracle Elon’s mouth:

…surely one of the main potential benefits of driverless cars is that they will extend mobility to people who are unable to drive themselves either through old age or medical conditions. It is also impossible to have driverless taxis – often suggested as one of the main applications – if there always needs to be a competent driver on board…  If an automated taxi can travel without a driver to its pick-up point, then surely it can carry a passenger who is incapable of driving, whether through age, infirmity or intoxication. And if a taxi can do it, why not your own driverless car?

I’m not sure I want to live in that world… but if you give it a quarter century that’s not likely going to be an issue. Question: who cleans up the vom? Conversely, certainly in quesions of personal control, my favourite character is all of beer writing is Delores, Ron’s wife, and this week we learned a bit more about her and her ways when travelling:

Luckily I have Dolores with me. Who, from years of travelling on overcrowded Deutsche Reichsbahn, is an expert in elbowing her way to grab seats. It’s not too difficult as the train isn’t totally packed… “Andrew would have loved it here as a kid. We could have just left him looking out of the window all day.” Dolores isn’t wrong. I’m tempted to do that myself…. Weighed down both by shopping and the kilo of pork in my belly. I sip on whiskey while Dolores flicks through the German channels. We only get five on the Amsterdam cable.

The next day, we read “Dolores has the morning all planned out” which is great news given I have been out and about with Ron and know what the possibilities really are and what needs to be done about it. I was not at all reminded of Ron when I saw this interesting comment on the reasons behind all the Bud Lite $105 million-a-year sponsorship deal with the UFC:

He said: ‘It’s like this whole Bud Light deal. People are talking s*** now. “Sell out” and all this s*** they f***ing say. Believe me, I’m the furthest f***ing thing from a sell out…’I look deeper than just f***ing “oh you know, they did this can with whoever”. I don’t give a s***. You guys think you’re all looking for an apology, they ain’t going to f***ing apologise to you.

My. A couple of bits of experimental hop news came out this week. Stan (because he was not totally slacking) issued another edition of Hop Queries including a few invitations to help with leading edge research like this:

Do not feel left out. The Hop Research Council currently has more than 2,500 pounds each of three varieties that have advanced to elite status available for brewers to use. They expect feedback. That will help determine which ones, if any, get named and become available to farmers. The hops cost $9.25 a pound in 11-pound and 44-pound packages and $10 a pound in one-pound packages. Each has two names: HRC-002 (2000010-008), HRC-003 (W1108-333) and HRC-004 (201008-008). HRC-003 has been top rated in early brewing trials, with intense ripe peach, mango and other tropical aromas. 

Here is the form to send in your request to participate in this program. The other hops story appeared in Pellicle where Adam Pierce wrote about a hop called Strangs #7:

The taste of Strang’s #7 is like no other British hop I have experienced before. It has a kaleidoscope of flavours from pithy orange marmalade, tangerine, a touch herbal; dill, lemongrass, a hint of pear drops, sweet bubblegum and finally the “controversial” coconut note, similar to the one found in the Japanese Sorachi Ace and North American American Sabro varieties.

Note: the role of beer league hockey’s most important team member explained.

And the latest edition of London Beer City was released by Will Hawkes last Friday and includes a short study of Eko Brewery at Unit 2A-2, Copeland Park, Peckham:

Eko bucks the trend by drawing on African drinking culture and brewing techniques and recipes, plus ingredients such as palm sugar, cassava, yam and hops grown in South Africa. “The main focus is to incorporate African ingredients in the beer,” says Anthony, “but the first beer we made [in 2018] didn’t have any African ingredients – but it was low bitterness, low carbonation, to ensure it went well with food, which is the way beer is enjoyed in Africa.” Anthony grew up in Peckham and his family comes from Nigeria (Eko is the Yoruba name for Lagos), while Helena’s are from Congo. That’s had a big impact on her approach to beer. “In Congo, women drink a lot of beer,” she says. “My mum, my aunties drank beer when I was growing up. A lot of the women in my family drank beer more than the men.”

I love auntie culture. I had aunties. And aunts too. Two separate categories.

Speaking of assigning categories, a court ruling about beer from Canada’s top court was published in the Ontario Gazette this week, months after its actual release by the Supremes. Facts are always fascinating:

A constable of the Ontario Provincial Police (“OPP”) formed the intention on a highway to randomly stop the respondent to ascertain his sobriety, and followed him onto a private driveway to do so. Once the constable approached the respondent, he observed obvious signs of intoxication and the respondent indicated that he might have had 10 beers. Two subsequent breathalyzer tests revealed that the respondent’s blood alcohol concentration was above the legal limit.

Why did this get to the highest court in the land? The random stop… tsk-tsk… nope… naughty naughty:

…the police officers did not have statutory authority under s. 48(1) of the HTA to follow the respondent onto the private driveway to conduct the random sobriety stop. Accordingly, the police officers breached the respondent’s rights under s. 9 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms…

Also here in Ontario, @starbeer of the Toronto Star is speculating and rumour mongering again (based largely on things like “investigative journalism” and “fact gathering”!!!). As we’ve been monitoring for the best part of the decade, we the agreement governing our semi-monopolistic big brewery owned sales outlet is coming up and it appears that the government is not going to renew the deal with the imaginatively named The Beer Store (TBS). This effectively places all beer retailing policies on the table. I don’t have the text of the Star article (as it’s behind a pay wall and I save my pennies for other things like cheese) but BlogTO is providing a helpful summary of the issues including:

The agreement as it stands now expires in 2025, and this year is the cutoff for when the government must notify affected parties if it is not being renewed. And experts are noting that the Beer Store has been downsizing and selling off multiple properties in recent years, cutting four per cent of its footprint… While talk of the vendor potentially closing is nothing more than a rumour at this point, many citizens appear to feel strongly about the subject, with the vast majority celebrating the end of what they see as one of many problematic monopolies or oligopolies in the province. Then there are the thousands of jobs that will be lost if the Beer Store goes under, and the fears that beer prices could actually end up going up.  

Concidentally… as most things I report in a week are… big brewer Labatt is expanding its London Ontario plant with a 27 million investment:

The new machines will see beer packaged using paperboard — which is one layer of paper compared to recycled cardboard which is three layers of heavy paper. It will also use  less glue than older machines… “It allows us to get our products to market for consumers in the most sustainable way possible…” the new tanks will also expand the capability to ferment beer by over 59 million litres — the equivalent of 24 Olympic sized swimming pools… “Our London brewery is the largest in Labatt’s network, brewing over 40 per cent of the beer we brew for Canadians, and this significant investment boosts the facility’s production capacity and sustainability performance…”

Someone is optimistic. And look – there it is again: sustainablility. Greenwashing? Cost cutting? Or real?  Going back to the question of the TBS agreement, who will take on the bottle recycling the TBS does now if a deal doesn’t continue? Who knows. But the province is moving to a general scheme of producer paid recycling generally so maybe that’s at play. Another question: can price rises be stopped in at least one respect? See, the currents scheme has for almost a century levelled prices throughout the province. Meaning a beer bottled next to one TBS retail outlet costs the same as when sold that beer is sold at a remote TBS outlet. Effectively, southerners and urban folk subsidize transportation costs for more remote Ontarians. The roads are still poor and beer is heavy. Back in 2012, the CBC reported that as an odd consequence booze is relatively far cheaper in northern Ontario.

Relatedly, Victim of Maths has shown a similar phenomenon affecting “Today’s Britain Today”*:

Arguments about the affordability of alcohol during the cost-of-living crisis also don’t seem to hold much water. The fact that alcohol prices rose at lower than inflation levels means that even a stagnation in disposable incomes didn’t stop alcohol becoming *more* affordable.

As per usual, he provided a handy graph which I have included for your clicky pleasure. Note how beer in the UK becomes notably even more affordable compeared to wine and the hard stuff right around in the mid-2000s and becomes slowly more and more so. And concurrently climate change may be playing a role too – at least in terms of pure alcohol levels according to Jancis:

As the planet warms up and dries out, it is going to be increasingly difficult to make wines below 14% anyway. I recently attended a tasting of 32 red bordeaux from vintages 2011 to 2019 from the stocks of Justerini & Brooks, a traditional wine merchant not known for favouring flashy wines. Seven of these clarets had 14.5% on the label and two 15%. This would have been unimaginable in the last century.

And finally, just as the previous discussion was triggered by thoughts on the meaning of “full-bodied” in today’s market, Matthew Lawrence of Seeing the Lizards was posting at Twex and responded to the challenge to create a top ten list of beer euphemisms: 1. lively = overcarbonated; 2. easy drinking = flat; 3. juicy = sludge; 4. aged = musty; 5. light = tasteless; 6. fruity = syrup; 7. dank = weed soup; 8. imperial = loopy juice; 9. blonde = bland; 10. challenging = undrinkable. Like. Your list? You could even do one forensically in five year increments for craft beer. Talk among yourselves. I might add overly ripe exclamations as seen in reaction to beer news from “…utter joy to read…” to “…totally gutted by…” or even the “brewery is one of the most successful in the country…” Please.

Done. Remember, ye who read this far down to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. But beware! Mr. Protz lost his Twex account five weeks ago and still hasn’t recovered his 27,000 followers. Update on my emotional rankings? Now, for me Facebook remains clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (80) rising up to maybe pass Mastodon (903) then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,429) hovering somewhere above or around Instagram (161), with unexpectly crap Threads (42) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Seven apps plus this my blog! That makes sense. I may be multi and legion and all that but I do have priorities and seem to be keeping them in a proper row. All in all I still am rooting for the voices on the elephantine Mastodon. And even though it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins over there, here are a few of the folk there 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? Anywhere else? Yes, you also gotta check the blogs, podcasts (barely!) and even newsletters to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays when he is not SLACKING OFF! Look – I forgot to link to Lew’s podcast. Fixed. Here’s a new newsletter recommendation: BeerCrunchers. And  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 newsletterThe Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a podcast… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

*My dream of a name for a current affairs show.

An Irritable If Not Confused And Perhaps For Once Even Cranky Set Of Beery News Notes This Week

It’s been another week without frost. It’s going to be a short winter if this keeps up. Garlic still is stilling in a big pot waiting for the necessary chill coming this weekend, sorta the bookend to maple syrup time in the spring. Going to get 500 in the ground this year… but when? It’s the not knowing that gets you on edge. Too early and they sprout. Too late and they suffer. Yet I checked the photos on Facebook… and last year I planted my garlic another three or four weeks from now. What’s that about?

Enough of that! You are here for the beer. First up, Stan had a great linkfest on Monday and especially made pointed comment on the news in circulation on the fate that hops may face from climate change… aka global warming:

I am all for anything that draws attention to what global warming is doing to the planet, although, quite honestly, there are more and larger disasters looming than the demise of certain hop varieties. Even the ones I love. But I do wish the authors had acknowledged there are more agronomically vigorous cultivars available. And that there are new ones on the way. Now is the time for brewers to consider using them. More of my thoughts in the most recent Hop Queries. 

You know I enjoy Hop Queries, probably the best beer newsletter out there. Here’s that update he mentioned. News you can trust. Speaking of which, there was a bit of an interesting slag this week in The Guardian‘s piece on fancy schmancy cider (the type we all like), a bit of a primer that takes a sideswipe in passing:

…they cost more than the vast majority of ciders on the supermarket shelves, although they’re still generally cheaper than natural wines, which they often resemble in packaging and marketing style. In fact, cider is more like wine from the point of view of having a single annual harvest and (pét nats aside) the time it takes to produce a bottle, which is certainly much longer than beer. As a result, producers have generally gone down the artisanal, rather than the craft beer route. They’re also attempting to raise cider’s profile by holding “salons”, or live consumer events, which are a mixture of tastings and talks.

My oh my: “gone down the artisanal, rather than the craft beer route“!!! I love how I don’t exactly know what is meant but, yes, we know what is meant. An actual craft. What craft beer lacks. Perhaps not all that dissimilar is the wine taverns of Vienna, as discussed this week at the Beeb:

Heurigen, the rustic winery-run taverns showing off their aromatic white wines around wooden tables set under grape arbors and laden with traditional Austrian fare that might include schnitzel and blood sausage, always potato salad and ham and a variety of savory cheesy spreads to go with dark sourdough bread. Paris might have its bars du vin, Rome its enotecas. But Vienna’s relationship to wine (and wine-friendly food) is unique. The Austrian capital is the only major European metropolis with a designated wine-growing area within its city limits, counting more than 600 producers on some 1,700 acres of vineyards. “Our city’s long viticultural history goes back to the time of the Celts and the Romans,” explained Ilse Heigerth, my guide in Vienna and a city historian.

I just saw a repeat of a Rick Stein’s Long Weekend shot in Vienna and he corroborated the whole thing. Staying in the centro-Euro, Martin reported on a trip to Belgrade, not a locale high on my list for my wanderings ways – and I am apparently not alone:

These foreign posts don’t get a lot of views because a) No-one else has been there and b) No-one else intends to go there. Oddly, it’s the unsung towns that get the most views. But in the last week I’ve referred to three posts from Ron, Duncan and the European Bar Guide folk and I’m sure if I live long enough my posts on Cuban pubs will be useful to someone, though possibly not the nice American lady we met last week who’s visiting every country in the world (except Cuba, obvs). We did eventually find the more ornate bits of Belgrade, but Mrs RM was more interested in photos of the trams.

Speaking of Ron Pattinson, he’s gone back in time again to the 1970s to the world of romance that was his youth:

As we were guests at the hotel, the pints didn’t need to stop at closing time. When I was young, opportunities for pints after 11 PM were as rare as flamingos in Leeds. I never passed them up. Which is a problem when you’ve paced yourself to end at “normal” closing time. I wasn’t feeling great when I rose after far too few hours’ sleep. But I wasn’t going to let that stop me eating the full English that I’d paid for. On the way back to Newark, we stopped at a Kimberley pub for a few pints. I was a bit overenthusiastic, as I rarely got to drink their beer. I was already feeling a bit unwell when we picked up the hitchhiker. About 10 minutes later I really needed to spew. Being considerate, I pushed past the hitcher, opened the rear door and puked on the road. What a hero I was.

Gary – perhaps more properly – neatly added to a space that is too often left alone, temperance drinking prior to US prohibition. Three posts were added to the whole this week on the topic of a church-run dispensery operated in Raleigh, North Carolina from 1904 to 1907 by the members of the local clergy with the blessing of the City government:

The Raleigh experiment formed part of a larger plan in parts of the South to substitute a municipally-run alcohol dispensary for the swing-door saloon of commerce… It competed with other liquor-control plans, such as outright prohibition and so-called high license. High here referred to the cost of the licence to sell liquor. A state might feature examples of all these: normal license, high license, local prohibition, and dispensary. 

Someone is getting still the good word one way or another as we read that even the Finns… the FINNS(!) are cutting back:

During the third quarter, beverage companies sold 10.4 million litres less beer than in Q3 2022. The federation based the figures on sales data from its members: Hartwall, MBH Breweries, Momentin Group, Olvi, Red Bull and Sinebrychoff. Year-on-year, Q3 sales of all alcoholic libations sold by its members fell by 2.4 percent, while sales of alcohol-free drinks were also down, by 6.8 percent. 

Well at least there is that. David Jesudason has written another great article for Pellicle, this time on the point of those things often written around but never as directly defined, the UK micro-pub as illustrated by the inhabitants of The Shirker’s Rest:

While the others help with the administration and publicity of the pub, James is the one that gets his hands dirty and provides the graft—he built the bar with a friend called Pete Lyons and created the beer boards. He also provides the (slightly deadpan) personality. At the bar is a notebook called James’s Book of Sayings which includes his recurring requests for customers to slide the toilet door closed, look at the boards to see what’s on offer—the keg badges are not easily viewed—and for Ben not to crowd his cellar with too much beer.

And Alistair Reece wrote a good piece on how a visit to one Virginia cider maker got him thinking about the utility of the word “house”:

Given their oenological background, Will lamented that the term “house” has come to mean the most basic wine on offer, something almost cheap and cheerful, but decidedly not excellent. His aim with House Cider is to be the exact opposite, to be the very best that Troddenvale puts out, and it is a magnificent cider, easily up there with the best being made in Virginia today, no I didn’t take notes, I was too busy enjoying it. This got me thinking about the concept of “house” products when it comes to beer. We quite often use the term “house beer” in homebrewing circles to refer to something that we brew regularly, but I don’t recall a brewery, at least not in my neck of the woods, hanging their entire reputation as a brewery on a single “house” beer. Is it perhaps that modern beer drinkers are constantly on the hunt for the new, or is it a case of fear of missing out by not pushing every possible style out the door in case the crowds choose to go somewhere else?

I wonder if they are familiar with the book The Cider House Rules by John Irving which was made into a movie I never watched in 1999. But the idea of a set of governing principles that, according to that Wikipedia summary, sorta fits tthe disfunctions of craft beer nicely:

The name “The Cider House Rules” refers to the list of rules that migrant workers are supposed to follow at the Ocean View Orchards. However, none of them can read, and they are completely unaware of the rules – which have been posted for years.

Sort of related is this message and accompanying clickable image from BlueSky, shared in whole for those without access:

Cask beer write up in heavy metal magazine by Courtney Iseman? Yeah, it’s been kinda a weird year for cask beer. Ups and downs. This one is a big up. Love it.

I like the honesty that US “cask beer’s growth is glacial” but apparently there according to those interviewed by Iseman. Is anyone seeing this on the ground as a consumer? If so where?

Note: Andreas shared information on the beer halls of Munich you might want to visit next time you’re there 150 years ago:

The sheer number of beer halls and restaurants made the area around Unter den Linden/Friedrichstraße/Leipziger Straße the “entertainment quarter” of old Berlin. They even got nicknames: “Unter den Linden” was “Laufstraße” (walking street), Leipziger Straße was “Kaufstraße” (shopping street), while Friedrichstraße was “Saufstraße” (boozing street).

One does not know what to make of certain statements when the fact in question is a couple of minutes on Google away:

FYI: “Brazilian-Germans held slaves (a fact that has been clearly demonstrated) but… Germanophone authors… presented a uniform image of Germans as masters, one that rendered slavery an aspect of the civilizing narrative of German settlement in Brazil.”

What else is true if you can’t get that right? One wonders. And the NAGBW awards were announced this week and – again – we do note the similar themes and similar candidates… but this time with also some real gaps in this subset. Having been a judge in the past, you don’t really want to name names in these things especially now given (i) the fragile state of it all as Jeff noted and (ii) the majority of the uninvolved beer writing that does not get itself self-nominated so, you know, it’s all a bit la crème du milieu… but really. For example, there’s no award or even a mention for David Jesudason’s book Desi Pubs the best book of the year!?!* Seriously? And third and an honourable mention for his other submissions? Please.

Aaaaaannnd… that’s it. I have to tend to other things. Still more to get out of – and into – the garden before the freeze snaps. That zucchini is growing by my front step even as I write this. Look at it! What an odd year. Pray for them and me next Sunday night, just a week before Halloween when the next steep drop of the mercury is due. If we are lucky and hold off the frozen air I am going to go out on the big night as Jack and the Bean Stalk with my own 12 foot tall potted pole beans by my side.

As per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. I have yet another update on the rankings. TweX is now really starting to drop in the standings. I am deleting follows there more and more in favour of mirroring accounts set up by favourite voices elsewhere. Now, for me Facebook is clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my friends and family) then we have BlueSky rising up to sit in a tie with Mastodon then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex** hovering somewhere above or around Instagram with Threads and Substack Notes really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence just sitting there.  Seven apps plus this my blog! I may be multi and legion and all that but I do have priorities and seem to be keeping them in a proper row. All in all, I still am rooting for the voices on the elephant-like Mastodon, like these ones just below discussing beer, even though it is #Gardening Mastodon that really wins:

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 (barely!) and even newsletters to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly 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 newsletterThe Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a podcast… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

*I even reached out already and shared my thoughts. Also see above, of course. 
**Gary shall turn off the lights at X unless it’s done to him first. I judge not.

Your Farewell To Summer 2023 Edition Of The Beery New Notes

Ah summer. Well, that was fun!  It didn’t snow once and I never had to scramble up after taking a spill on an icy sidewalk. But it is done. Calendar wise at least. Who knows how long until the first frost. Two years ago this week we came within half a degree.  What a drag. Nothing near that on the two week outlook. I have about a hundred green tomatoes out there. What the hell would I do with them?

Speaking of what to do with where and when, Pellicle has an interesting article from Adam Wells this week on how cider does not benefit at home or in the pub from the plastic bag in a cardboard box treatment… which is odd as I just saw something on some social media app about how they work so well now for a better sort of wine – you can decide after you have a read:

It is still far too common for ciders and perries on sale in pubs and bars to be heavily affected by a serious liquid fault. I’m not talking about matters of preference here, or simply about something not quite being at its best; I’m talking about liquid that does serious, lingering reputational damage to the image of “real” cider in the mind of the consumer. I’m talking about vinegary acetic acid. I’m talking about the eggy, sewage-like fug of hydrogen sulphide. I’m talking about the gluey nail varnish remover of ethyl acetate, the cardboard of oxidation (no, that cider is not supposed to be mahogany and opaque), I’m talking about the appalling musty kickback of mouse—a horrendous off-flavour (also known as THP) that can be caused by certain types of wild yeast.

Sounds all very much a fail. Oh, for the good old days. Remember way back when? Remember? Well, forget remembering as then is now! What? Well, in the now in the sense that these two images on TwitterX caught my eye and drew me back. The one is from the 1978 Postlip Beer Festival to the left and and the other to the right from the 1980 Greater Manchester Beeer Festival. Are it really “a cacophony of brown beer“? Was it really “a very different beer scene“? I dunno. If you time traveled back to 1978, you could certainly buy Suncrush Squash which I suppose you could pour into any of the ales if you really needed a modern day abombination. Somewhat related in that sense, Jessica Mason reports on a new angle on selling NA beer… or whatever it is:

Speaking to the drinks business, ON Beer founder Chris Kazakeos said: “ON Beer is a revolutionary, zero-alcohol beer crafted with a special blend of superpower plants, that uplift and elevate your feelings.” In querying what makes the beer different from other alcohol-free beers vailable, Kazakeos explained: “ON beer delivers a uniquely refreshing and full-bodied flavour. Infused with our ON X Blend of superpower plants, each sip carries subtle botanical undertones, seamlessly blended with the robust, richly malted flavour that beer lovers crave. The complex layers of taste unfold gradually, creating a balanced, deeply satisfying experience.”

Nice to see that the sucker juice movement has found new and fertile ground.  Why do they still bother calling it “beer”?  Speaking of movements, you know when folk call something “neo-prohibitionist” and it never makes any sense at all? Yes, me too. But in this case, there is no doubt a significant share of one Canadian community that actually qualifies:

After more than a century as one of the last dry towns in Alberta, Cardston’s 3,500 or so residents no longer have to leave to buy an alcoholic beverage.  On Tuesday, Cardston town council voted 5-2 in favour of allowing sit-down restaurants and recreational facilities like the local golf course to apply for liquor licenses.  A non-binding plebiscite in May set the stage for Tuesday’s decision. When asked if they would allow limited liquor sales in the town, the yes vote won in a narrow 494 – 431 victory. 

Speaking of things being over, are big beer convention fest things so… umm… pre-pandemic? Courtney Iseman at Hugging the Bar might be suggesting so:

Earlier this year, I strongly considered finally attending my first GABF. But then this month ended up being the only time that made sense for me to get overseas to visit some friends, and I also came out of CBC thinking…one behemoth beer to-do per year is probably enough. After running into a few people doing this in Nashville around CBC, though, it did occur to me that maybe the least stressful, most fun approach to going to GABF is to not go to GABF—but instead just head to Denver the same week to take advantage of all the external events put on by individual breweries.

Jeff* contends to the contrary, stating that the GABF is relevant but perhaps just not really a true national event – and also concluding with this pro-fest argument:

I have been somewhat dismayed by how much beer chat has turned into industry and/or business chat. Discussions of the pleasurable turn quickly into the salable. The GABF is one antidote to that. People get together in a large hall to select the tastiest beers in the country, and later thousands more gather in an even larger hall to guzzle beer for the sheer pleasure of it. It’s a reminder that the root of our passion isn’t measured in dollars, but something only our tongues and noses can tell us.

I don’t disagree. Beer has sort of run its course or at least its present direction and too often in such a situation all that is left is the business related  stuff. But… think about it… if it takes getting under one conventiton center roof or even one town where the convention is held to find a worthy discussion about beer… whether at the Jeff’s GABF or CBC… doens’t that sort of mean that the discussion of beer is limited to (i) the amount of people who can fit in those spaces and (ii) to those people who can afford the cash and time to get to those places? Are these things also perhaps as isolated fom the average beer consumer as that business side chit chat is? Time for something new in beer, folks… but what? Cacophonic brown beer!!

Somewhat illistrative of the boring stiff, did the Washington Post misplace a word or two in this headling this week: “Explore the evolution of beer, from Stone Age sludge to craft brews“? Those words sit above an odd piece of publishing, a sort of participatory quiz about an extremely summary level of brewing in human history, some of which might actually be nearly true, all with heavy input from the graphics department. The goal is apparently find you your dream beer match, sorta like that quiz in the May 1978 issue of Teen Beat to see if you would be a good match for a dream date with Andy Gibb.

Far more reality based was “Double double. toil and trouble” this week. Jeff uses the phrase as a title to his post about an interesting hopping experiment (perhaps not remembering it is in fact a reference to beer):

A decade ago, then-small Breakside Brewery made a fresh-hop beer using an outlandish process. They froze the hops, still fresh and 80% water, with liquid nitrogen. This turned them into vitreous emeralds, brittle and ready for smashing under what brewer Ben Edmunds likened to a potato masher. Once broken into shards, the lupulin glands were exposed for easy access to the beer they would soon enter. They’ve continued that process ever since, but until this morning, I’d never actually seen it for myself.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle in France where the Rugby World Cup is being played. Apparently the beer service was not up to expectations and the government is rolling up its sleeves:

France’s sports minister is so eager to “reconcile” with England fans irritated by poor organisation at Rugby World Cup games that she will attend their next match on Sunday to monitor security, transport and even the beer supply. Amélie Oudéa-Castéra told the Financial Times she would “personally monitor every detail” at the match in Nice to ensure that fans unhappy about overcrowding, beer running short, and other problems at previous games would be well served this time. “Their experience at the match against Japan must be impeccable from start to finish,” she said… “The English are still mad at us,” Oudéa-Castéra said ruefully.  

“Ruefully”?!?!? Seriously? The world is on fire, World War III is simmering just on the edge of the timeline and yet here is a member of a nuclear power’s cabinet is worry about whether the English get enough to drink? Someone needs some sober self-reflection. Just like Martin did when he had a moment this week that led to reflection about being a pub photography weirdo that in turn led to an invention waiting to be invented:

I don’t know why I didn’t just own up to photographing pump clips, loads of weirdos do it, but instead I said I was sureptitiously Shazamming the track playing at that moment. Shazam was on strike, so the nice lady hunted down the playlist for me, and I dutifully wrote the details in my notes. Anyway, my cover story worked, though when a few minutes later I heard another post-millennial banger I didn’t recognise I was too embarrassed to ask. Pubs should replace those electronic display boards with beer details with ones showing music playlists and county cricket scores.

And Ron finally took Delores on one of his trips. I am not saying he shouldn’t get out once in a while by himself but Delores is my favourite character in Ron’s writings so a trip to the former Yugoslavia is bound to be just the thing:

“This will be my second new country this year.”
“Good for you, Ronald.” Dolores says unenthusiastically
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”
“Don’t make such a big thing out of everything.” That’s me telt.

He does make a big thing out of everything Delores, doesn’t he. You nailed it. And how will Ron treat himself to the clinkies and drinkies at the airport this time?

No duty free for me today. “You can buy something in Belgrade. It’ll be a lot cheaper there.” Dolores suggests. And I’m not going to argue with her. I know where that will get me. To not a good place.

Magic! Love it!! Entirely conversely, this has got to be the dumbest logo ever. It’s  slightly nausiating  even. Are you supposed to drink from your thumb now? Does your thumb allow you to grab a glass of another brewery’s beer? I’m sure I am thinking to much about it. In that respect, I believe I am in a similar situation to that of the logo designer.

Finally, Stan’s latest edition of Hop Queries came out last Friday and he is running a contest:

The rules are pretty simple. The winning prediction will be the one that comes closest to total hop production in Idaho, Oregon and Washington. Over or under does not matter; just the closest. Please include eight or nine digits (for example, 99,999,999 or 100,000,000). The USDA will report harvest results in December. The deadline to enter is Sept. 25. You may enter by hitting reply, but I prefer you email your prediction to hopqueries@gmail.com.

How jolly. And way more fact based than that thing in the Washington Post up there. And… that is that. Finito. Unbelievably, still no drunk elephant stories this week. I looked, I tried Stan. Still, as per always and forever, 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 newsletterThe 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!

*For the double!

The Almost Sweater Weather Edition of Beery News Notes

See that up there? That’s the news of the week. Maybe news of the week last week but are you really the news of the week if you don’t stretch it out to two weeks? That’s a crop from Kat Sewell‘s image from Les Twits and it is one of many out there. Everyone is fascinated in the UK with blue and white cardboard suitcases apparently. On BlueSky, it’s the easy-to-carry box that makes the deal according to B+B… but then we learned of this sad take from one unhappy Pete:

You’re quite possibly right. However by contrast, the box I picked up was damaged and required two hands to carry it. I then had to transport it on my push bike. I ditched the box in the store bin and carried all 10 bottles (loose) in my back pack. It was quite heavy.

Update: there was a yesterday post on Belgian Smaak by Eoghan that Jordan pronounced “It’s some of the best writing I’ve read this year on any subject” so I better include a link here. It’s on the Belgian tram line I believe I mentioned a few months back. But Eoghan has way more  detail in his story “Flavour Track — A Culinary Crawl On Belgium’s Coastal Tram“:

…my early morning train from my home in Brussels—skating past wet, flat polder fields with pitched roof village steeples occluded by an early morning mist—terminates in the village of Adinkerke and its well-proportioned brick train station. From here, the sea is a 45 minute walk through corn fields and acorn-strewn dunes, where the entrance to Belgium is marked by a Leonidas chocolate shop housed in a former customs station. By the time the train pulls into the sidings at Adinkerke the mist has congealed into a fine rain. Fortunately, there are already two trams waiting to start their journeys up the coast. 

Nice! What else is making folks happ-happ-happy? Kids in pubs? Really? This spot near Manchester apparently hopes so:

It’s wonderful to head out to a countryside pub for a cool drink on a sunny day – but for those without a car, public transport options are often quite limited in getting to some of the region’s prettiest villages. But it’s not something you have to worry about when heading to Mobberley in Cheshire – where there’s a brilliant village pub right next to the train stop. The Railway Inn (in a nod to its convenient location) has been widely acclaimed with both CAMRA beer awards in recent years, as well as with rave reviews from visitors on Tripadvisor. Reviews from this year hail it as a “hidden gem” with its huge beer garden and brilliant play areas for kids. The pub also boasts its own bowling green.

Seems like a huge investment on the pub’s part. To make youg families happy. Kids are great. Right? Not always if the news out of New York City is to be believed:

A crime tale straight out of Charles Dickens is unfolding in the Big Apple — with adults “directing” children who appear no older than 10 to steal from unsuspecting businesses, witnesses told The Post. The chubby-cheeked crooks have terrorized bars on the east and west side of Manhattan and Brooklyn for months, graduating from snatching money in unattended bags to stealing cash from open safes in at least two watering holes in the last few weeks, according to workers and owners. In many cases, the kids at first try to solicit money to raise money for their “basketball team,” and then run amok.

OK, what else… is this a bad idea or a good one? Announcing you are raising pub prices to deal with those times of the week with busier workloads?

Britain’s biggest pub chain has started charging its customers 20p extra for a pint during busy trading periods. Stonegate Group, which owns more than 4,500 pubs across the UK, has begun adding a surcharge at peak times at 800 of its sites across the country. A ‘polite notice’ in one Stonegate pub said ‘dynamic pricing is currently live in this venue during this peak trading session’. The sign says the surcharges will pay for extra staff, extra cleaning, plastic pint glasses, and ‘satisfying and complying with licensing requirements’. The notice explains that ‘any increase in our pricing today is to cover these additional requirements.’ 

It’s referred to as dynamic pricing and it is not receiving a warm welcome: “Tom Stainer, chief executive of the Campaign for Real Ale, a consumer group, called the move troubling…” Wow, there’s a strong statement. The proprietor of the Ypres Castle himself is not clear on the point at all and goes even further: “It’s utterly weird, isn’t it. Surely the thing to have done was to raise prices overall but introduce long happy hours, achieving the same thing but spinning it positively.”  Wetherspoon pubs are doing the opposite – lowering the price – but just for one day:

It’s that time of year again when all Wetherspoon pubs slash all food and drink by 7.5 per cent. The annual move is to highlight the benefit of a permanent VAT reduction in the hospitality industry. And that means that if you pop into a Wetherspoon’s on Thursday, September 14, then, to mark Tax Equality Day, you will get some money knocked off. That means a customer who spends a tenner will only pay £9.25 for example. Wetherspoon’s founder and chairman, Tim Martin, said: “The biggest threat to the hospitality industry is the vast disparity in tax treatment among pubs, restaurants and supermarkets.

And while you are out there looking for bargains, just be clear about the rules:

This is incredible. A Wisconsin bar offered free drinks if the Jets lost. After Rodgers went down, they started running up their tabs. The news was live when the jets won in overtime and everyone realized they had to pay.
Finally on the question of value (and by the way is it is so great to have gotten to the era that we can talk about value without some semi-pro consulto-journo beer writer jumping in to play the broken record “you can’t put a price on experience!!!“) – finally on the question of value… Boak and Bailey asked about the linger legacy of value pricing at Sam Smith’s:

When people on Trip Advisor are still advising tourists to go to Samuel Smith pubs for good value food and beer, however, there’s clearly a mismatch between reality and reputation. We might also be more relaxed about these prices if we felt they were covering the costs of a good pub experience but… Dirty glassware. Glum service. Grim atmosphere. Evidence of a death spiral, perhaps?

Spicy!!! But enough of your obsessions with filthy lucre. Time to go all ag and to that end Stan has reported in from the hopyards on the effects of climate change before taking a bit of a break over the next few weeks:

The photos at the top and bottom were taken in USDA research fields near Prosser, Washington. The babies in the seedling field (top) are cute, don’t you think? The odds are very much against them ending up with a name and being used to brew beer. But if that happens, farmers will know they are agronomically prepared to survive in a climate wild hop plants in Mongolia did not know five million years ago. A constant topic of discussion last week was the Great Centennial Disaster. In recent years, farmers in the Yakima Valley have harvested about seven to eight bales of Centennial per acre planted. This year, some fields produced only two-plus bales per acre. Not every field was such a disaster, but when the USDA releases harvest data in December the results will not be pretty.

More on this phenomenon in The New York Times where Catie Edmondson providing extended coverage from the hop fields of Spalt, Germany:

The plant is so central to the town’s culture that signs advertising “Spalter Bier” can be found on nearly every street, many of them hanging from the half-timbered, red-roof houses that were built hundreds of years ago to store and dry hops. But the crop and those timeworn traditions are being threatened like never before. The culprit is climate change. The promise of a warming, drier climate has dealt a brutal hand to the hops industry across Europe. But it has been especially ruthless to Spalter, a crop that has sustained this tidy town of 5,000 in southern Germany for centuries.

And Martin continues his quest for pubs but took a break to go to a rainy music fest where he and herself still found their way down country lanes to a pub:

One of the annual traditions at End of the Road, along with watching Mrs RM put the day tent up while we watch and spilling curry down our new T-shirts, is a half hour walk along the narrow lanes to the Museum for a pint of Sixpenny’s 6d Best in a proper glass. Yes, missing last food orders (which seem earlier each year) is also a Retired Martin tradition. So this time we earmarked Saturday lunchtime for a visit, and with the promise of morning WiFi we set off at 10:30 on the “jumping into hedge to duck incoming lorries” routine. It’s worth it for the thatch.

Nice. Similarly but without all the hassles of the actual travel, Gary continued his wanderings around the pubs of the UK in the mid-1900s with this post about a 1940 exhibition of paintings at the National Gallery in Britain on the Blitz including this scene from Wales:

Perhaps, then, the pub next to theh Masonic Hall was St. Ives, also known as St. Ives Inn. Or if not it was presumably one of the other four known to have traded on Caer Street before 1939. Whichever pub it was, one can only hope that it wasn’t occupied when Hitler’s bomb fell. The Masonic Hall, for its part was not occupied; Swansea Masons had shut its doors a few years earlier when they moved to a new location.

It reminds me of how common “getting blitzed” is for slang among my pals. Speaking of which, Cookie wrote a post this week, about the Hillgate Mile pub crawl in and around Stockport:

The hillgate mile was many years ago an iconic pub crawl in and around Stockport. A strip with a high density of pubs that had come about to service high density housing and factories in the area. Much of that housing had become flats and many factories closed and with it the need for so many pubs. The area and its pubs was in decline when I first encountered it and whilst now there has been a revitalisation of the area with new build nicer looking flats there will never be demand for that number of pubs again. It was noted not only for the number of pubs but the variety of brewers that owned pubs under the tied system. 

His remembrances about these sorts of endings are worth the read. And reminded me that a few weeks ago, I cast doubts upon the notion that in Britain “Cask is the only beer poured beneath the bar where you can’t see what’s going on and this greatly adds to the uncertainty around it.” Is it really about the show that draws people into pubs, that they are now missing out on? Well, a form of that notion appears to have maybe crossed an ocean if this observation in GBH is to be believed as a major factor in the continuing decline of draft… something that has been on the steady decline for decades:

Draft beer, even when brewed by a multinational beer company, absorbs context from its setting: the bartender who poured it, the adjacent guest on the barstool, the glassware in which it’s served. Adding a humble orange slice to a glass of Blue Moon elevated the way millions of U.S. drinkers thought about beer. In packaged form, beer has fewer tools to pitch itself to drinkers. It works with the same set of variables as any other beverage in a can or bottle, whether wine or pre-made cocktails or hop water.

I am pretty sure that is not the problem, people no longer hankering for an orange slice and a stranger on the next barstool. Again, its only about the relative value proposition and, as with cask lovers in the UK, dive bar beer drinkers are just not as big a part of the population, maybe just because they have found something else to do. Sober up. Collect stamps. Get a happier family life. Netflix. Something. I am also very mindful of the frank words of Katie Mather in her newsletter The Gulp! this week on the closing of her bar Corto:

I want to be clear about the reality of opening a bar like Corto in a small, rural town—even one as permanently lauded in the national press as being the “ideal beer staycation destination”. Last week we opened and drank three bottles of Riesling worth £100 because after three attempts to drum up interest in a tasting event (which we have been repeatedly told by well-meaning folks that we should do more of) only two people came along. The world of premium and craft drinks is not what it was, or what we believe it to be. I sell three times as much basic organic Tempranillo as I do orange wine or sour beers.

In another sort of ending, Andrew Cusack in The Spectator considers the  his low alcohol coping mechanism in his remembrances of Sam Smith’s now departed, his beloved Alpine Lager:

Sam Smith’s Brewery has sadly failed to realise the strength of Alpine’s weakness. There has been a downward trend of the main lagers, such as Carlsberg which has reached 3.8 (and which has announced they will move down to 3.4 this year as well) and Fosters at 3.7 per cent. But almost nothing exists in the peak quaffable-but-still-tasty range of 2 to 3 per cent. Many of Sam Smith’s loyal customers will mourn the passing of the Alpine decade and hope that some other brewery might take note of the open territory before them.

Over at Pellicle, Ruvani de Silva has written about a lager in England which is dedicated to the Windrush generation as well as the people and the process behind its development:

If that sounds like a lot to pack into one beer, that’s because it is. Robyn, however, talks passionately about how immigration has shaped her, her family, and her community, consolidating and distilling her thoughts and feelings into brewing a beer that she wants to speak for those experiences, and to resonate with those both inside and outside the Caribbean diaspora.

On this side of the Atlantic, the hippytown of Guelph, Ontario has announced one of the more attractive beer bus deals as Jordan explains:

Running September 16, October 14, November 18, and December 16, the beer bus is a great solution to the logistical problems behind your next afternoon pub crawl… Five breweries, more than five dozen beers on tap, two full food menus to choose from, buses running once an hour, and the best part is that it’s free! Donations are accepted on the bus and proceeds go to a scholarship fund at the Niagara College Brewing program. If you can think of something better to do with your Saturday afternoon than go to Guelph, I’d like to hear about it.

Free! Free is good. Except free runnings. Unexpectely free. Which leads us, finally, to the saddest drinky clinky video of the week: “Streets flooded with wine after tanks burst at Levira, Portugal distillery.” Here is the background:

This is the moment a flood of red wine surged down a street in Portugal after two massive tanks with enough booze to fill a swimming pool burst. Winemakers Levira Distillery were due to bottle the 2.2 million litres when the giant tanks suddenly gave way in Sao Lourenco do Bairro on September 10. Video footage showed a huge, fast-moving river of red wine flowing down a hill and around a bend as baffled locals look on.

Yikes! And that is that. Done. Still no drunk elephant stories this week. I looked again. I really tried, Stan. Still, as per always and forever, 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 newsletterThe 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 Sore Back Grimey Nails Bug Bit Edition Of The Beery News Notes

Not sure if this will end up being a very involved post this week. Vacation time. And this vacation this year comes with a bit of a to do list. Lots of little things getting done. Some small pieces of housework, a bit of slog in the garden and some wandering about locally. A minor league ballgame down in Syracuse NY yesterday, a new favourite restaurant in Pete’s Trattoria in our nearby Watertown and even threw a few Ithaca Flower Power in the grocery cart on the way home. A favourite for coming on 20 years. A couple of nights in Montreal coming up. All sounds good. Still… as the week progressed and I was having a lovely time noodling about, it became obvious that the good beer scene wasn’t keeping up – still so much neg around. What to do about that? Well… stay in the garden. Yup. And to that end I offer as an offset to all the unhappy news this blossom from a Purple Teepee bush bean that I was looking at Tuesday. Neato. I even made it clickable. They are like tiny orchids. Dandy. There you are. Fine. Let’s go. Enough of Mr. Sensitive.

First, Knut wrote a great piece about a beer fest being run as beer fest should be run, setting out ten reasons why Bryggerifestivalen i Trondheim works, things like the setting and the helpful volunteers who keep the event running smoothly. I think this is key:

The locals. A good mix of people. Young and old, town and country, beer tickers and something light, please. Family friendly during the day, which also means that everyone behaves. With 60.000 visitors over the three days, only a handful need to be escorted out.

Being broadly welcoming and well connected is always important. No one really cares about the terpenes. They just want to feel included and have a bit of fun. Speaking of which, The Beer Ladies Podcast will soon be back after summer vacation and they want to know what you want to know:

We’re (nearly) back! We’re planning out our next season this week, and would love to hear from you – any beer-y topics you want? Interview subjects? Haunted locations? And where do you prefer to find us?

Don’t all clammer about them interviewing me… I’m far too shy… and stuck with the doom and gloom label. (Not true. I’m a happy guy. People want happy. As they should.) Interesting observation about “where you prefer to find us” as in “where do folk find anything these days. Even Stan is unsure about where things are to be found.

Note: we actually love orderly lines in Canada. We also do not love patenting higher forms of life – unlike in the USA –  but who the hell gets to patent a life form, as Stan explained in this month’s HopQueries, that one does not invent but merely stumbles upon in nature:

A “found hop” has found a name. … Sattler first found the hop in 2015 in Idaho’s St. Joe River Valley, an area he had often visited as a child. He later brought back rhizomes for testing that confirmed the hop is genetically unique, and the new variety is patent pending. Approval is expected in the fall. In the late 19th century, miners and loggers in that area were known to brew beer. Sattler thinks Elanie likely resulted from open cross-pollination of local wild hops with hops the miners and loggers brought with them.

Similarly. A question. What is a “social drinker”?  Not sure the author of this piece knows – even after having quit the booze for a month:

I am a social drinker, and for most of my adult life I have always been the first person to order shots and often the last person to stumble home… After the hangover-free month, I won’t lie, I felt amazing. I felt like I had accomplished many things and I could remember every second. I didn’t spend any time in bed nor with my head down a toilet and I didn’t experience hangxiety. My relationship with alcohol has changed for the better and drinking to oblivion is no longer an option.

Un-bean-like. Definitely. As is this – you’ve all heard of the huge and horrible fires in Canada and elsewhere this summer. In British Columbia they threaten a region of Canada’s wine industry as reported at Jancis Robinson’s site by Arnica Rowan:

Two days ago, a forest fire took off on the parched slopes above the Niche vineyards. It tore across the hills, leaping from tree to tree, fuelled by tinder-dry brush and breathtaking winds. Joanna and James were at the winery preparing it for harvest when, at 4.30 pm, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police constable stopped at the gate and told them, their son and James’s parents, who live on the West Kelowna property, that it was time to leave. They locked the winery doors and drove down the hill and across the Okanagan Lake bridge to the younger couple’s house on the north side of Kelowna. As they fled, Joanna could see the flames snaking rapidly down towards the lake behind them.

Yikes. Very very not purple bean blossomish, that. Not good.

Speaking of doom and gloom, I am waiting for the argument that the main driver in craft brewing’s fall from grace isn’t the lack of value or the simmering bigotries that seem to pop out from every corner. No, it’ll be those large and listened to voices of the main news outlets stirring up troubles by proclaiming craft’s demise.  How willl that ever attract the necessary newbies to keep the lights on? Who wants to jump on to that sinking ship? Consider this in The Guardian this week:

Brown, who is American, said craft brewers had been through a “brutal” period. “The craft beer bubble burst in the States in the late 90s, and the same thing is happening here now. “Everybody thought it was cool, everybody started doing it and then everyone was competing to have the next new big thing. And you overwhelm your own market so that even your most loyal customers can’t tell the difference between your key brands and your one-offs. In a bust, people go back to things they recognise. And we’re definitely in a bust.”

Me? I am thinking people are more and more recognizing gin as well as a nice white wine spritzer, frankly. Better for the pocket book. You know, would it hurt good beer to come up with a simple postive spin about beer and stick with it? Ditch the unattractive clubby complexity like they have in Trondheim and make it easy to like beer again. And I don’t think this observation is gonna help:

Just because invention feels slow in real time doesn’t mean it’s happening. This is the kind of thing you may not realize until you look back 10 years from now—“Oh, wow, we didn’t even have X style of beer in 2023!” 

Wow? Really? What does the Pruple Teepee bean think of that? Let’s see:

The botanical species, Phaseolus vulgaris, was spread throughout South and Central America in ancient times and experts believed domestication occurred separately in South America and Mesoamerica sometime before 8000 BCE. The species was carried from the Americas to Europe through Christopher Columbus during his second voyage in 1493, and German physician Leonhart Fuchs drew the first official botanical drawing of Phaseolus vulgaris in Europe in 1542. After their introduction in the late 15th century, Phaseolus vulgaris spread throughout the Mediterranean, cultivated as a vegetable by the 17th century.

I had no idea. Tradition. That’s pretty cool. I just looked that up now. (Well, the “now” when I wrote this part of the post.) Fact: beans don’t need no damn innovation to be lovely and purple. Now, turning that line of argument a bit on its head, Jeff broke out the pilsners this week. Well, he may have had some to drink, too, but he tried to establish the state of the styles that use the word including Czech pilsner, German pils, North German pilsner, Italian pilsner, Alsatian/French pilsner and New Zealand pilsner as well as:

The pilsners mentioned above are either real styles or variants with enough substance most brewers recognize them. But out in the wild you might see a bunch of other stuff that they’re throwing against the wall: Polish pils, hoppy pils, Bavarian pils, imperial pils, Belgian pils, rye pils, etc. The existence of these random beers illustrates how much currency the “pilsner” name has achieved. Like IPA, it’s a category now, not a style—at least in the US.

I can easily live with all that. After all, how many beans varieties are there to plant? Many. Many many. Yet – still just beans. See, this is not a call for reducing the varieties of beer. Just improving the conceptual simplification. Perhaps relatedly, I was struck by this observation from one Phil under Boak and Bailey’s recent post about a perfect beer judging contest:

Ten or fifteen years ago one of the American craft beer sites/aggregators ran a “Best Beer In The World” poll; IIRC the top ten included eight imperial stouts from US breweries, including three different barrel-aged versions of one beer. Which I guess is the Jeanne Dielmann problem: your audience of experts/enthusiasts may be experts, but they’re also a social group with its own self-reinforcing preferences and prejudices. I suspect this problem is actually worse with enthusiasts than with experts, ironically – the Sight and Sound 100 isn’t all Jeanne Dielmanns, after all – so if you’re going to open something up to the public, make sure you open it right up.

Is adding “the public” to the pool going to be beneficial or not? Dunno… given the largely amateur clubby enthusiast nature of beer judging. (One is never sure who the others, those self-declared over complicating if not fibby “experts” are.) Let’s be honest. First, the judges are drawn from a pool of traveling keeners with time on their hands. Then the keeners are part of the activily reinforcing homogenous self-affirming culture that sets the norms and expectations. And the norms include the ever expanding the style categories and standards within those categories chasing that “wow!”… the tail of novelty. Then, of course, the problem of self-nomination of candidates for the judges’ consideration.* And what are the rules? Is it individual ranking with these awards or are panels used like at those awards – and is there silent averaging or cross table persuasion? Does the majority rule or is there a weighting formula? Finally, add the booze and the same faces’ boozy bonding. You might as well be handing round the hymnals and tamborines. As a participatory hobby, no prob. No one loses an eye. Fun tasting panels for casual comment? Sure, fill your boots. It’s a lot like achieving personal bean growing bliss. But as a method of establishing the definitive best and awarding glory while explaining the value of good beer to the broader community? Err… not so much…

Speaking of complain, complain, complain… James May, the somewhat annoying car show lad who acted as the foil for Clark on a very good wine show, was in The Times this week saying it is time for a pub purge… and he owns one:

I look at the past and I know it was awful. I know if we could be teleported back to the 1980s it would seem filthy and horrible and backward. Maybe the nostalgia thing is part of the pub’s problem. It needs to have a reality check — what does the pub mean in the modern world? — rather than desperately trying to preserve what we imagine is an institution. It isn’t. Britain is historically a bit oversubscribed with pubs. They used to function as a sort of home from home for a lot of people . . . and that role has largely disappeared. So there are probably too many pubs and, brutal though it is, there’s no harm in having a bit of a purge.”

Not sure where this fits into the bean-not-bean continuum. Hmm. Still, perhaps beer judging, cartoon guide writers and style huggers should be as honest or at least more brazen. Fight for your right! Make your case like James. If there is very little interest in actual traditional brewing and ye olde ways, why not stick it all in a corner, call it a museum and let folk get what they actually want – boozy fruit juice served in an IKEA showroom!

Where does that leave us all? Julie Rhodes argues this is all indicactive of what she describes as a mature market “characterized by market saturation, limited distribution channels, fierce competition for shelf space, a greater need for brand differentiation, and increased direct consumer communication”:

…as the craft beer landscape continues to evolve, brands can expect to see changes in the marketplace that are indicative of a fully mature market – crowded shelves, demand for calculated innovation, and the curation of increased brand loyalty. And these changes will be felt at all levels of the 3-tier system. “Own Premise” consumption is actually rising, so the taproom business is looking pretty good at the moment, which should be great news to owners and operators considering the profit margins are healthier than in the wholesale channel. On the flip side, the squeeze in the wholesale channel will continue as brands can expect to see national chains consolidate their craft beer sections due to declining velocity metrics.

Maybe. This article sees a similar scene in India where taproom sales expand as sales off the shelf drop. Interesting. And perhaps that might be as optimistic as we can hope for at the moment. Not yet in decline. Something like myself. A sort of stability in the face of change.

Finally, we also have this story out of India… as if they heard Stan‘s call for an update earlier this very week week:

On Tuesday, the Villagers living near Shilipada cashew forest in Keonjhar district were in for a surprising sight when they went inside the woodland to prepare ‘mahua’, a traditional country liquor. Instead, they found a total of 24 jumbos, apparently drunk, sleeping near the place where mahua flowers were kept in water in large pots for fermentation. “We went into the jungle at around 6 am to prepare mahua and found that all the pots were broken and the fermented water is missing. We also found that the elephants were sleeping. They consumed the fermented water and got drunk,” Naria Sethi, a villager, told PTI.

Excellent. Sleep on, Jumbos. 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. Waiting for a BlueSky invite but having IG, FB, X, Mastodon, Threads, Substack Notes and a dormant Patreaon I am not sure why I would add another. So many created to make social media offer less and less. Brilliant. I still prefer the voices on Mastodon, any 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 much more occassional but always wonderful newsletterThe 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!

*But how else to earn the entry fees that pay for the judges’ buffet?

This Week’s Beery News Notes Are Fraught With All That A Thursday Might Entail

What a week. I spend the week’s few forecasted dry sunny hours on Tuesday evening hands on knees with this newly acquired handy friend indeed clearing out a patch invaded by raspberries and catnip about seven by ten foot to move some of the tomato plants into. I wanted to lay down and weep by the end me being an old guy and all but it’s got to be done. It’s really getting out of hand out there. I have a pot problem. Bought another six to fill Monday night just in case. “Just in case of what exactly?” I later thought. Seventeen zucchini seeds hit the soil on Saturday and pole beans were added on Sunday too, as illustrated. Who is going to eat all this other than the bugs and birds?

Where to begin this week? There’s a lot so perhaps at the outset just a summary of the endsy timesy news of the week. The spokesperson for the BA actually used the phrase “craft slowdown” this week. Mirrors perhaps the excellently honest new B+B tag for these times: “the age of divestment“! We learned this week, as Stan noted, “stunning is the news” that Anchor‘s beer will be far less common a sight. We also heard (as I dutifully discussed back in late April) that things are not going so well financially at BrewDog as the Morning Advertiser shared:

BrewDog has reported an operating loss of £24m in its latest trading update… which BrewDog founder James Watt attributes to the cost of investing in the brand, its people and its bars, alongside the “devistating” increase in input costs.

All of which unnervingly indicates that the losses were due to making less money than they spending on, you know, their core activities. All of which leads me to wonder if an ebbing tide lowers all boats. Not yet here in Canada where there was a very sensible bit of consolidation as reported by the clever folk behind the Canadian National Beer News Service, a branch of the Department of The North:

Corby Spirit and Wine Limited has announced that it is set to purchase Ace Beverage Group, parent company of Ace Hill Beer and several other beverage alcohol brands, including Cottage Springs and Cabana Coast ready-to-drink cocktails, Liberty Village cider, and Good Vines wine spritzers. The transaction will see Corby acquiring 90% of Ace’s shares for $148.5 million, with call options on the remaining shares that can be exercised in 2025 and 2028.

That’s real money but apparently the beer assets is one of the least attractive part of the deal. Despite its ongoing move to be about less beer hunting, there was an similar tale told about Ninkasi Brewing in GBH. More good beer settling in as just a part of a portfolio.

Settling. Phil of the excellently named Oh Good Ale in a post also excellently named as “Toil and Trouble“* wrote about a survey retaken after ten years, a repeated of a 2013 census of sorts studying pubs, breweries and cask ale in one part of Manchester England, Chorlton, and had surprising results:

What’s changed? Well, many things have changed – I’m comparing April with June, apart from anything else, so it may possibly be that some of those bars were running dry due to warm-weather demand. Other than that, I was expecting to see little change among the (seven) bars of 2013 – six of them still are bars, after all – and carnage among the (22) breweries, but if anything it was the other way round. As far as I can make out, only three of the 22 breweries have closed outright…

What he found had changed was in the pubs, that the range of service had retracted leading him to state that “the cask bubble in Chorlton and environs has pretty well burst” leading in turn the Tand himself to comment:

…leaving cask to those that handle it well is good policy and the points about addressing a mixture of beer expert and cheapskate are well made.

So perhaps not so much a burst bubble as enthusiasms becoming cammed doon. No, craft is not to blame as it is retracting too. It’s all just a bit of balancing out.

Lisa is not settling. She has scouted out another weird pub for her guide to Dublin starting with this appealing intro:

I must admit, the immediate vicinity of this week’s pub is something I typically speed through as quickly as possibly – the visual clutter from its side of Westmoreland Street is not the most inviting vista, featuring, as it does, the National Wax Museum (NATIONAL WAX MUSEUM), lots of plastic major-brand logos, and CCT Dublin’s building in that block must be one of the worst insults to architecture in any European capital (and I have a soft spot for a lot of ‘ugly’ kinda-Brutalist buildings, but this…is not that). 

Beet beer is in the news care of Pellicle (and it’s a favourite of mine given we have year round access to my nearby neighbours’ MacKinnon Bros Red Fox Ale which is made with good Ontario root veg):

Given all these strengths, I asked the brewers why they thought beets weren’t a more common beer addition, especially given the great diversity of fruits and other adjunct ingredients brewers are experimenting with these days. Part of it, of course, is that beets are just a contentious food. Todd, for his part, doesn’t find it terribly surprising that so few brewers have touched beetroot. “I recently saw a meme about fast food variety, and it just showed fried chicken sammies from every chain. That is basically craft beer right now, but sub in hazy IPA/kettle sour. Yes, there is a lot being added to beer these days but I would say that it isn’t really experimental, or very courageous,” Todd says. “For real, no shade over here, but the ingredients people are using could be mistaken for a candy shop or ice cream parlour.”

I like that… because if ye’ve no eaten your veg you cannie hae any puddin!

A fitting obituary for a great rugby player and beer man, Paul Rendall:

He would often proclaim Nunc est bibendum. For those old team-mates who had not studied Latin, he would explain, in the bar, of course, that now it is time to drink.

Drinks Business had a great piece this week unpacking more about that waste water beer building that I mentioned a month ago in San Fran:

In an experiment, Epic fed wastewater from a large San Francisco apartment block through “ultrafiltration membranes” 100 times thinner than a human air. They filter out impurities and the cleaned water is then disinfected by using ultra-violet light. Tartakovsky told CNBC this process is comparable with the biology that takes place in the human stomach. And seemingly it works. He claimed that independent testing of Epic’s cleaned water shows it meets US Federal standards for drinking water and often exceeds them. Cleaned water was passed to Devil’s Canyon Brewing Co in San Carlos California, which produced the Epic OneWater Brew.

What else is out there in the world? Well, The Beer Nut continued his wandering ways and has reported on a trip in May to Haarlem in The Netherlands and found a lack of wallop:

While I’m used to the Dutch people’s effortless fluency in English, I’m not sure that Black It Up! was a great name for the beer. Echoes of Zwarte Piet linger there. I liked the tarry bitterness in the aroma here, presented with a little black pepper spice. It was unfortunately rather more ordinary to taste: dry and roasty with only a token treacle effect to thicken and sweeten it, and no proper hop wallop. I feel that something of this nature should be delivering wallop aplenty; instead this is calm, restrained and frankly a bit boring. Oh well.

Sounds a bit like me. Anyway, speaking of The Netherlands, Ron has been in Vietnam revealing all on the breakfasts to be found near the lobby among other things. And, elsewhere, Stan is reporting from the hop fields again, with his jam packed June 2023 edition of Hop Queries now out. This month we learn that:

Friday the USDA forecast hop acreage strung for harvest in 2023 in the Northwest will be down 8%, or 5,067 acres, from 2023. That’s only about half of the reduction John I. Haas CEO Alex Barth told those attending the American Hop Convention is necessary to begin to get American hop supply and demand back in balance. More likely will be needed… Because general agreement is that the alpha market is in balance, that means the reduction must come from varieties valued first for their aroma and flavor. In fact, farmers added more than 2,500 alpha acres (primarily +1,960 CTZ and +555 Pahto), and aroma acreage was down more than 7,500.

The fabulousness that Stan brings is rooted in the shameless presentation of hop production as agriculture. Fact fact factity fact. You might as well be reading reports from an early US ag societies studying barley growth over 200 years ago. It is all a continuum of knowledge development that sits as a counterpoint to the sorts of approaches to appreciation that startle one with their admitted limitations:

…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

Speaking of facts, we had a wonderful bit of pushback published this week by a very unhappy investor in the now restructuring Black Sheep Brewery, one of England’s longest serving micros. See, as noted in my May 4th editon of these my scribbles, when everyone cheered Hooray! at the idea it was not shutting so much as getting its affairs in better order we must remember that one of the realities when a firm goes into administration is that the necessary new money may well have to bump away a lot of the old. As we are told is happening in this case:

Long before Covid, when interest rates were at all-time lows and trading conditions were relatively benign, I clearly identified the coming apocalypse, and tried to spell out to those few of you who would listen that “The End was nigh”. Back then, there was still an opportunity to raise new equity, properly invest in our brand, arrange for regulatory accreditation of the packaging plant, smell the coffee, or rather understand where national beer consumption, and indeed alcohol, trends were heading, and to truly “Build a better Black Sheep”. My prescient web-site spelled it all out for you.

The piece goes on to name names and point pointed fingers. I expect the law will be applied appropriately.

Not dissimilarly in terms of a daring do done, I was surprised in a very familiar way by the wild eyed responses to the excellent opinion piece published by Pellicle this week. An editorial. Now, right up front we have to be clear – good beer is no place for forming and certainly no place for sharing opinions or editorials so it is fair that it created a sort of confusion in the hearts of many. Don’t worry. It’s just like that feeling you felt when you saw a small dog in bright yellow rain boots for the first time. Odd but it actually works.

And what was the problem? What upset the universe? Well, if you really want to know, this is the sort of vile sprew that society faced when it woke on Monday morning:

I respect the importance of linking beer back to its agriculture—in fact this is something I feel personally invested in—but this is not the same thing as terroir. Beer is not merely a representation of the land from where its ingredients came, and to advertise it as such underplays the significance inherent to the production of both beer itself, and its individual raw materials.

Good Lord! The gall of the man!! See… see… err… well, that actually all makes fairly perfect sense doesn’t it. Hardly an opinion at all. Most agreed. It’s practically cheery out there. Yet… we are faced with three sorts of minor rebuke (aside from the usual scoffy self-satisfied crab bucketeers in the corner): (i) “Wrong!” (ii) “Clickbait!!” and (iii) you have to appreciate that to be an expert you need to understand that nothing means anything so trying to explain stuff is pointless…  as well as combinations of that trio of top notch beer writing principles right there. We are, as always, formed and framed by our weaknesses more than our strengths.

Stan shared a well considerd counterpiece supporting the use of terrior in relation to beer. Read the whole thing but here is the nub:

I became more comfortable with the word as I researched “For the Love of Hops” and continued with “Brewing Local,” although I continue to prefer “taste of place.” Amy Trubek concludes “The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey Into Terroir,” an absolutely terrific book, by writing “ . . . the taste of place exists, as long as it matters.” To repeat myself, I’m more inclined to use the words taste of place opposed to terroir, but I’m fine with “beer terroir exists, as long as it matters.” Both matter to me.

That works, too. For me? A bit of this has always been the way. There is a simmering desire in beer writing for the shortcutting convenience that making X mean Y brings. The extrapolation slipped in here or there. And there is no X that is more attractive to beer culture as a Y construct than a well grounded principle from the much more established world of wine. So, we have a slightly wonky beer styles construct because wine has naturally developed styles. And we have mildly informative beer atlases mainly because wine legend Hugh Johnson made an excellent one about wine that has been regularly updated.** Just recently  Garrett Oliver illustrated this tension (and perhaps even envy) recently when he wrote:

We sometimes forget that the projection of meaning is WORK. Hard work. The wine industry does that work. The beer industry, by and large, does not. This is one reason why wine and spirits are eating our lunch, especially in the US.

And the results and the dear are real. At least here in Canada, where we have moved from a marketplace where (i) in 2002, beer had a market share of 50 per cent by dollar value, while wine had 24 per cent to one (ii) to 2012, to one with a 44 per cent beer to 31 percent wine ratio and (iii) by 2022, we have a 34.9% beer to 31.3% wine. There is cause for concern.

Hmm.  What does it mean and where does it all take us? I like this take by T-Rex to my left, your right. And little while ago, Jeff wrote very sensibly how a technique is not a style. Similarly, things can only bend so far and we need to agree that terroir is not defined by a technique. Technique is not terroir. A yeast strain that’s been transported world wide as terroir? Nope. That’s all square-holery-round peggishness to me. Works for you? Fine… but it’s  utterly unnecessary and may undermine things. Don’t get me wrong. I have been into good wine for as long or longer than I have liked good beer. I have even tended to my own vineyards in two provinces, mainly to the delight of birds. For my money, the two trades deserve to return to their largely separate and well-defined lexicons if anything is to be understood in itself. Ditch the code and, as Matt wrote, all that it is covering up. Clarity avoids confusion. Get at that, please. Yes, you. The problem is… I am not sure how much of beer writing is meant to do that, if it is meant to make things clearer to the beer buying public.*** There is comfort in mystery apparently. And, in a world where some of the expertise is based on hanging out one’s own shingle or … where one has little else, well… one has to protect one’s reputation. Doesn’t one.

Finally and just perhaps unrelatedly, I have a hard time getting my head around the idea that the Nigerian non-alcoholic beer market is worth 6.2 billion USD when the same article states:

BusinessDay’s findings showed the firm incurred a loss of N10.72 billion in the first quarter of 2023 from N13.61 billion in the same period of 2022. The firm’s net revenue amounted to N123.31 billion in the first quarter of 2023, a 10.5 percent decline from N137.77 billion in the comparable period. “Despite challenges, the opportunities in the coming decades for non-alcoholic beers are quite as substantial. That is a prospect worth drinking to,” John said.

Worth nothing that the collapsing Nigerian Naira is currently worth 0.0021 USD and, as the same article states, roughly 50 percent of Nigeria’s brewing input costs is imported.

That’s it! That’s enough from me. I need to save my strength for the allotment my house now sits in. Back to you for now as always. And as per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon, the newer ones noted in bold:

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
Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
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. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now more occassional but always wonderful newsletterThe 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!****

*Here you go. Here’s the reference.
**When the fam says “What? Why?” when I pull out a bottle of something tasty, I pull out my atlas, point at a patch of a few hundred square metres and say “From that field right there!
***See, if you see nuance or complex or subtle being used to point at things that are merely specific or one part of a long list, just as with “mystery” as cited above, you might be in the doldrums of such conditions. Hanging out with engineers taught me this. Engineers are the heroes of the lengthy sensible to do list. Put things on it when you think of them and strike them off when they get done. Build a few bridges and you learn this sort of thing. 
****And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like  both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again.  The Fizz died in 2019.  Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

The Absolutely Final No Returns Accepted News Notes Of April 2023

OK, so what’s going on. I am still a bit stunned from the residual effects of da ‘Vid but I also got my taxes done last weekend as opposed to my usual next weekend deadline date with the docts. I have no idea why I didn’t wait for the last minute like usual. To celebrate or maybe just to get me through the filing process, last weekend I finally found a way to get a kick out of a fruity kettle sour. Eat cookies with them. Specifically, the coconut laced Voortman Strawberry Turnover known throughout Ontario when chased by a Left Field Strawberry Rhubarb Sour. YOWSA!!! Any bar that doesn’t stock up the $3.25 grocery store find and then resell to aspiring drunks for $6 is NUTSO!!! Candy. Baby. Boom.

9:20 AM Update: David Jesudason has published another teaser for his much anticipated book on Desi Pubs called Desi Pubs (to be published BTW in a few weeks on May 17th) this time in the newsletter Brown History:

“I must admit I’m a bit nervous. There will be a few difficult customers, no doubt, but I think I shall be able to manage.” Few remember the modest man who spoke these words about the Leicester business he was about to take over in 1962, but unknowingly he was to become a British-Indian trailblazer who paved the way for many others. His name was Soham Singh and he was being interviewed by local newspapers because he was deemed Britain’s first “coloured innkeeper” after he started running the Durham Ox pub with his wife Janet (described as an attractive 28-year-old English woman, “whom he married in a Sikh Temple five years earlier”). 

I have to admit I find these writings of his torturous to the point of being tortious – but never, of course, tortuous – as I have no access to a good Desi Pub but expect I would love having access to a good Desi Pub.

First up, Pellicle published an interesting article on a not very hot topic – the effect of a closure of local brewery:

I grew up in weather-beaten pubs like these, as did my father and his father before him. If you were local, you would say we were hefted to the land, such is our family’s connection to this obscure north-western part of this obscure north-western English county. Until recently, when it was closed by parent company Carlsberg Marston’s, there was a brewery hefted to this land too. A brewery called Jennings.

Semi-spoiler: “…the disastrous rebrand…

And, Stan is back from the Antipodes and reported on the New Zealand hop scene in his latest edition of Hop Queries – including on one matter I might not have noticed myself:

Equally surprising was to see that most often the hops are strung to 4.8 meters (less than 16 feet) on 5.4 meter trellises, so not as high as in other hop growing regions. Farmers in the American Northwest grow hops on 18-foot-high trellises, while in Europe seven meters is standard outside of the Tettnang region of Germany. In Tettnang, older varieties are strung to eight meters and newer ones to seven. I heard several suggestions about why New Zealand farms have lower trellises, and will report back once I sort out if there is a definitive answer.

The Beer Nut undertook a bit of market research by studying the JD Wetherspoon Spring Fest 2023 so you don’t have to and seems to have appreciated the experience as…

then, instantly, all the festival beers disappeared from the Dublin branches a day before the event was due to end. Maybe they bought exactly the right amount of beer, though I would be surprised. Overall there was enough decent stuff in the above to keep me happy, and no outright disasters. I still miss the token 7-8%er that used to lurk at the bottom of every programme. Bring that back.

And, like The Beer Nt, as we look forward to the Coronation next weekend, when 17 million extra pints will be downed, this story in the Scotsman about the role one pub played in the protection of the Stone of DESTINY!!!

According to pub legend, the real Stone of Destiny resides in the historic bar, The Arlington which has been operating since 1860, as this was where the students who stole it hid it. The story goes that the Stone of Destiny that was returned was a replica that had been fashioned by the students. The Arlington bar, which is located on Woodlands Road, displays the ‘real’ Stone of Destiny prominently in a glass case on the bar.

Speaking of Scotland, this tweet was maybe interesting. Apparently, at least on the books, BrewDog is losing money… well, lost it in 2021 when, you know, everyone was losing money. They ended up with almost £14m less in year end cash after taking in almost £20m in share sales… ie non-earned income. All on an net operating cash flow of £12.5m.  But they spent £21m on property and equipment which is usually good. But then lent £20m to subsidiaries… which is… perhaps speculative. Maybe.

Speaking of 2021, stats for alcohol use on the isle of Jersey were released and the societal effects are a bit staggering even if drinking is down 25% since 2000:

…in 2021, there were 725 hospital admissions specifically related to alcohol per 100,000 population, similar to the English rate of 626 per 100,000. Two thirds of alcohol-specific hospital admissions were men, the report showed. The report said alcohol played a role in almost one in six of all crimes recorded in Jersey in 2022, with 32% of assaults and serious assaults, 11% of domestic assaults and 23% of offences in the St Helier night-time economy.

I have a pal named Dave who is the CBC afternoon radio guy in Yukon. This week he had an interesting interview with sake importer Patrick Ellis which helpfully unpacks a lot of the basics of the drink.

Did you know that Brazilians over a certain age can now buy decade specific beer brands? I read about it on the internet, myself:

Beck’s 70+ offers a chance to start “a dialogue with the pro-aging culture movement, which understands that age does not limit people’s desires and aspirations,” he says. Well, that’s probably aiming a bit too high. Still, it’s a smart nod to an oft-marginalized audience, a welcome respite from the think/act/feel/dress/drink young ethos that’s getting so darn old already.

Jeff speculated on the implications of the “not at all news” that craft beer has become incredibly boring. We know that because appartently the Brewers Association says sales are flat… which really means they really are BZZZZZzzzzzmmmm….(….’fssst…)…zzzblubt……flpt… KABOOM!  Regardless, Jeff suggests a few things including:

With so much excess capacity in the industry, contract brewing is an attractive way to launch a brand cheaply. A slightly different model gaining traction is the alternating proprietorship—basically, a shared brewery. The two or more separate companies schedule time on one brewhouse and then have devoted tanks on the cold side. I’d never heard of this until Ruse launched their brand that way at Culmination. Some time later, Pono did the same with Zoiglhaus. Both Ruse and Pono had their eyes set on using these arrangements to bootstrap up to their own breweries and taprooms, and both have since done so.

I have known contract brewing where there is an expansion. Where there are hopes and dreams. And, in a way maybe, brewing co-operatives where the best stout known to humanity was made. Who knows? Could be.

What else is going on? Lisa‘s off being a weirdo again this time sharing her very own 2023-esque and rather dramatic Guinness story:

Glances were exchanged all around the bar – after all, many of the tourists were here specifically to try other local beers – but she wasn’t done yet. ‘Are you SERIOUSLY SUGGESTING I cannot get a Guinness – IRELAND’S NATIONAL DRINK – at this so-called Irish pub?’ There was a pause, as she looked around for support, and she continued, at a further-increased volume, ‘do any of you here find this AT ALL ACCEPTIBLE?’ To the credit of absolutely everyone in the pub, not a single person responded directly, though there was a light chuckle toward the back of the room. After another dramatic pause, she tried once more to garner some kind of support – once again, upping the decibels: ‘I cannot BELIEVE that a business like this can exist, in this day and age, calling itself an IRISH PUB without Guinness.’ And with that, she turned on her heel and flounced out of the pub.

You know, Lisa really needs to get me interviewed on that podcast. I nkow it’s a group decision but I really could answer questions like “seriously, Al, what the hell?” and “when does the song ‘Time the Avenger’ start meaning different things?”  and stuff like that.

What else… Miller cans crushed in Europe? Don’t care. Heineken not caring about poor widdle cwaft beer’s feelings? Who cares?  But, hey, what’s that? Could that be true? The white lab-coated nerds at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic are at it again… with ROBOTS FILLED WITH YEAST:

Millimetre-sized robots made of iron oxide and packed with yeast speed up fermentation of beer by swimming around in the fermenting container and can be removed with a magnet, eliminating the need for filtering out yeast

That’s extra nutso. Here’s a 2020 paper published by the Europeans Chemistry Society explaining the process. Egg. Heads.

That’s enough from me. Back to social media scrolling and fretting over the risk of frost. BTW… fine. Mastodon not taking off like you expected? Do what you like. But here’s your Masto-newb cheat sheet. Because… because… things work best when folk get tucked in… Substack notes ain’t anyone’s saviour. I’m getting  t-shirt made that says that. You wait… I will…

Stan Hieronymus | The Man!
Boak & Bailey | The B² experience
Katie Mather | Shiny Biscuit and Corto
David Jesudason | “Desi Pubs” (2023) author
Ron Pattinson | The RonAlongAThon Himself
Al Reece AKA Velky Al | Fuggled
Jennifer Jordan | US hops historian
Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
Andreas Krennmair | Vienna beer and lager historian
Beer Ladies Podcast | Lisa Grimm and colleagues
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
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 now definitely from Stan at his spot on those  Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason every Friday. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletterThe 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. Ben has revived his podcast, Beer and Badword. Still gearing  up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too even if it’s a bit trade… and by “a bit” I think mean not really just a bit.  There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel this week on Youtube.   And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!*

*And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like  both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again.  The Fizz died in 2019.  Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

The Thursday Beery News Notes For March March March !!!

I like March. The mud. The late winter blizzards. The building anxiety about income tax return preparation what with that retirement savings deadline yesterday. This particular March is the last full month of my fifties. Yup, I go from being an old young man to a young old man in around seven weeks. Just like that. Which means, yes, I was in a bar when M*A*S*H ended forty years ago this week. It’s enough to drive one to drink. Except we Canadians are driving ourselves away from the bottle according to a government bean counting agency report – as even the BBC reported this week:

Canadians appear to be losing their taste for alcohol, according to findings in a new report that showed beer and wine sales at historic lows. From 2021-22, volume of beer sold per person in Canada slumped drastically. The volume in wine sales slid by its largest margin since 1949…  The report, released by Statistics Canada, a government data cruncher, found that sales of alcohol slid for first time in a decade, by 1.2%. Wine sales decreased by 4%, the largest decrease ever recorded by Statistics Canada. Beer’s time as the top alcoholic beverage by sales has shown signs of going flat, according to the report. Over the last 10 years, beer has continued to lose market share, totalling an 8.8% drop.

From breweries to the halls of academia, the news was met with discontent. Trouble is… this isn’t news. As the chart from StatsCan shows this has been a 50 year dteady decline, though with an extra bit of collapse since the recession 15 years ago. We are coming up on consuming half of what folks did two generations ago. I blame colour TV.

Far more pleasantly, Barry pointed us to a great article in Cider Review on the history of perry in the cider country of Normandy:

Pays Domfrontais; this crumb of land in south Normandy, where there are no more than perhaps twenty producers, where production is perhaps a per cent of Normandy’s total, if that, and where the perry might just be the best in the world. The landscape is all but flat; it ripples, rather than rolls, only rising to a swell at the ridge on which perches the medieval town of Domfront. Everywhere is agricultural; every patch of land tilled and tended, covered with corn or cows, narrow, sunken lanes cut into the sea of green. But, as in Austria, it’s the pear trees that make you coo and gasp. Rather than Mostviertel’s ubiquitous lines along the side of fields, here they just as often dominate widely-spaced orchards; always tall, high-branched— haut tiges in local parlance — towering over the handful of apple trees that cluster around them.

Sticking with the local scene elsewhere, Evan Rail has written about the Starkbierzeit beer festival in Munich, Germany for Vinepair this week, how a lesser known German tradtion has found even less traction in America – which may well be part of its charm:

Not every U.S. craft brewery has been able to make a starkbier festival work. Following an initial event in 2014, Wisconsin’s Capital Brewery discontinued its Starkbierfest after just a few years, instead focusing on its better-established Bockfest, which coincidentally takes place at about the same time of year. Other brewers have found that it helps to get back to basics. At the 9-year-old KC Bier Co. in Kansas City, Mo., earlier starkbier celebrations included different types of doppelbock released over several weeks. But the brewery’s 2023 Starkbierzeit sounds a lot more like an event in Munich, featuring a golden doppelbock called “Carolator,” in memory of Carol Crawford, sister of brewery founder Steve Holle. After receiving a blessing from a local priest, Carolator was released to the public on Ash Wednesday.

At the end of last week, Stan reported in his newsletter Hop Queries that there is a glut in the US hop market:

Speaking at the American Hop Convention in January, John I. Haas CEO Alex Barth estimated that the industry is sitting on an excess of 35 to 40 million pounds of hops. Therefore, farmers in the Northwest need to reduce the acres of aroma hops strung for harvest by 10,000 — about 17 percent — to balance supply and demand.  Acreage may not be cut that much immediately, and as one industry member told me it could take “three, four, five years” to work off the excess. But when the USDA releases data about 2023 acreage in June, expect the reduction of most proprietary varieties to be pretty stunning. Across the board, stakeholders who own the plant rights to many of the privately owned cultivars are discussing 20 to 30 percent cuts. That includes Citra and Mosaic, of course, because growers planted more of those two in 2022 than any other variety.

Expect the invention of Stale Hop IPA just in time for Christmas 2023. How else are they going to deal with this bit of surprise. Speaking of things not being as expected, apparently the old joke about American beer being like making love in a canoe is no longer acceptable if legal precedent is to be trusted:

The National Advertising Division, which is part of the Better Business Bureau, sided with Anheuser-Busch, which challenged a 2022 ad for Miller Lite that uses the phrase “light beer shouldn’t taste like water, it should taste like beer.” The agency said that Molson Coors should “discontinue” the ad because is “not puffery or a mere opinion.” In the 15-second spot, a cyclist takes a break from riding uphill, cracks open a beer and douses himself with it. No specific beers were mentioned, however the beer uses a similar blue color that adorns Bud Light packaging. NAD said that it “determined that tasting ‘like water’ is a measurable attribute” and that customers might “reasonably expect that the statement is supported by such evidence.” 

More observations. JJB aka Stonch aka Jeff Buckly* made a very intersting observation about big beer’s inexplicable recent interest in crappy no-alc beers:

…it’s so blatant the big brewers are pushing their awful alc free versions of their key beers largely so they can have the brand promoted at sports competitions. Idea is you see Heineken 0.0, and then think of actual Heiny.

Still more as Retired Martin is still wandering around the nations as well as around the factilities he and his visit:

That long trestle table is the only downstairs seating, which at least ensures you’ll talk to people like it’s 1995, but sadly we were (again) the only custom at 1pm on a Saturday, which Mrs RM resolved by chatting to the Landlord while I explore upstairs. You may not be aware, but 97% of people would rather stand outside a micropub in a storm, rather than be the first person to go and sit in the upstairs area, and that’s a fact. I could hear Mrs RM saying “He’s done all the Beer Guide pubs” which is always cringeworthy, so I didn’t overstay my visit…

I have no idea why the sink is on the cistern though it likely saves water… but… err… where do you place your feet when you use it?  Not at all relatedly,  as the newly hired voice of the competition noted, ABInBev have laid off employees at a number of the craft breweries they picked up during the buyout years begun now around seven years ago:

Employees have been let go from Houston, Texas-based Karbach Brewing and Patchogue, NY-based Blue Point Brewing … Citing anonymous sources, Craft Business Daily reported layoffs at Lexington, Virginia-based Devils Backbone and Asheville, North Carolina-based Wicked Weed.

As the craft-esque beer market continues to retract I am not sure why there is the assumption that there would not be layoffs, given the shelf really doesn’t care how production occured, how promises and assumptions were exchanged late in the era of the Obama administration.

Very much another sort of shutdown was the theme as Jeff shared his observations about drinking on a snowy day, a highly recommended way to pass the hours as a blizzard roars:

As we sipped and chatted, Sally’s eldest brother Tom mentioned that #StormDrinking is a thing in New England. Finding a warm nook with a cold beverage and friends is the perfect way to while away a Nor’Easter. We joked about its Portland equivalent, which would be more like #SnowDrinking. Even as we were planning our final move—a restaurant or pub near home—we were still thinking the clouds weren’t going to deliver more than a couple inches. Yet as we called around, we kept hearing the same thing. Places were shutting down and sending staff home while they could go, or planning to close soon. Fortunately for us, Migration Brewing was open, and the bartender said she was happy to hang out if anyone showed up. So off we went.

In a warmer setting, Mark Dredge wrote a good piece about a contest that apparently started here in my home town at Queen’s University – home of my rugby fandom – running a mile while drinking beer:

It’s a simple and relatable race: Short enough that anyone can attempt it, hard enough that most will fail miserably, absurd enough that anyone who learns about it will want to hear more. The event consists of four 400-meter laps around a running track, beginning nine meters behind the official starting line to reach the metric 1,609m of an imperial mile. That extra nine meters becomes the designated “chug zone” in which, before each lap, runners have to down one 12oz beer. It’s four beers, four laps, and try not to puke.

Runners World ran a similar story in 2015 with a bit of focus on the silliness of the concept. You know, around about when we packed the college bar for that last episode of M*A*S*H, we did a similar stunt at undergrad forty years ago: the annual three legged race. Why there I am twice in the yearbook in the spring of 1982, at the start of the race all big and fit and trim and full of youth… and soon to be full of beer. Long since sensibly banned of course. The insurers must have found out. See, you and your partner had to run up the seven four story stairways of the residences joined at the hip and chug a beer at each top landing. Most of us floated and spent more time on fancy costumes than anything like training. We two were dressed as “science students” and kept pace by saying “sign, cosign” over and over as we ran. The records were set in my era by a classmate (who was apparently ninth or tenth, just missing a seat on Canada’s Olympic eights rowing team) and whoever was tied onto to him. Upper left to the right. Artie and Wugg are there, too, to the far right. Fortunately, the architecture allowed for hosing down the stairs afterwards.

There, that’s enough for today. Did I mention that you still need to check out Mastodon. It’s so nice. Here is your cheat sheet if you want to have a look see:

Stan Hieronymus | The Man!
Boak & Bailey | The B² experience
Katie Mather | Shiny Biscuit and Corto
David Jesudason | “Desi Pubs” (2023) author
Ron Pattinson | The RonAlongAThon Himself
Al Reece AKA Velky Al | Fuggled
Jennifer Jordan | US hops historian
Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
Andreas Krennmair | Vienna beer and lager historian
Beer Ladies Podcast | Lisa Grimm and colleagues
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
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

Remember also to read the blogs and the newsletters for more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and also from Stan at his spot on those Mondays when he checks in from the road. . And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletterThe Gulp, too. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? 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. Book some time for Hugging the Bar as they go long as well as the Guys Drinking Beer in Chicago. And check out The Share with Stephanie Grant.

And, yes, also gather ye all the olde style podcasts while ye may. Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. Did you know Lew Bryson started a Seen Through A Glass podcast in November 2022? Me neither! And the long standing Beervana podcast but it might be on a month off (Ed.: which I have missed from this list for some unknown reason.) 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.  Still gearing  up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too even if it’s a bit trade.  Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel this week on Youtube.   And remember  the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

Finally, we lift our hats to the departed newsletters and podcasts… and those perhaps in purgatory.  BeerEdge may have been effectively absorbed into the revival of All About Beer. Looks like  both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again.  The Fizz died in 2019. Ben has had his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…) Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

*Proof! Since corrected to Mr. Bell himself. Though it still suggests that he only recently made a change to move away from food service at the Ypres Castle Inn. He’s run it for a few years now without a kitchen.