Category: Hops

The Thursday Beery News Notes For The Week We Are All Cape Verdean

We need a new anthem:

Let’s root root root for Cape Verde
If they don’t win it’s a shame…

Actually, that tie will do just fine. Just fine. Still, Uruguay has have the best strip. We remember the Graf Spee after all. Isn’t it fun how many old simmering bigotries and grudges come out during international sporting events! Speaking of fabulous cups, Lars shared that image this week: “… carved by a Norwegian farmer… The king bought this mug in 1798 for 60 riksdaler, an absolutely wild amount, equivalent to roughly 10 cows.” The Scandenavian bovine value (SBV) scale to the rescue… again.

How many cows is the World Cup worth? [Ed.: “…crickets...”] Studies have shown that a beer at the stadium might cost you about one-third of a cow. On the other hand, it is pretty clear what inviting the Tartan Army to your town is worth to breweries:

The Tartan Army chartered dozens of school buses from Boston and Providence to get to the game. On the ride with the Scots were many father-son pairs, kilts and even more beer. Organizers brought 10,000 cans of Narragansett Lager for the Foxborough-bound buses from Providence alone. None were left by the end of the night.

Wow. The call has gone out for an extra 100,000 more! My own wee cousin** is out there representing the fam. Seems like the Army is working hard to beat the English in Spain in terms of fluid input, according to one French news source. And Ruvani has also been on the World Cup beat and shared the thoughts of opinions of commentator Roger Bennett what makes for a great fitba focused bars in the US including this good point:

Bennett is keen to emphasize that there are aspects of great American soccer bars that are both unique and essential to the U.S. In other countries, “you commune with fans of your team and everyone else is the enemy, but in the U.S. most fans are young and have come in since the Premier League started being broadcast by NBC in 2013,” he said. “Their discovery and passion have created a unique culture that’s not divided into us-against-you.” This difference means that bars must be ready for and welcoming to multiple fan groups, fostering an inclusive spirit. 

Speaking of welcoming, Ontario’s fading but venerable former retail monopoly The Beer Store is doing something very unusual the days – opening two stores as it closes many more. But its doing so seemingly primarily to receive back more empties as much as to sell beer:

The Beer Store has closed dozens of retail locations across the province over the past two years, citing changing market conditions and the expansion of beer sales to convenience stores, more grocery stores and gas stations. Many of these retailers do not accept empty container returns… As Ontario’s largest beer retailer, The Beer Store recently unveiled a new “Take back what’s yours” campaign aimed to boost awareness of the province’s deposit return system. A recent analysis by the Toronto Star suggested Ontario consumers lost more than $60 million in unredeemed deposit refunds last year by placing empty alcohol containers in their blue box or the trash instead of returning them to The Beer Store.

And Stan has issued his latest Hop Queries and you are all well advised to govern yourselves accordingly. And he’s used a concept that’s been unfamiliar in the brewing world in recent years – stabilized:

After reducing acreage from 60,872 acres in 2021 to 41,654 in 2025 (that’s 19,218 acres), American farmers indicate that total acreage will remain basically the same in 2026 (at 41,642; 12 fewer acres than in 2025, less than three-tenths of one percent lost). The German Hop Growers Association reports that farmers will harvest 5.8% fewer acres in 2026 after slicing 6.5% in 2025 — leaving 44,117 in 2026, compared to 50,136 in 2024…. It should not be a surprise that a press release from the German hop growers about acreage states, “The mood in the hop market is currently poor” and “the oversupply of aroma hops had made production cuts necessary for several years.” 

In amongst some cheeky chat about NA beer, Andreas Krennmair stood up and sensibly explained with semi-cited research why it is that German NA beers are better than elsewhere in the world:

I’m sure the technology will eventually cross the ocean. From what I’ve been told, all the Bavarian breweries launching new and better NA beers basically comes from one guy’s PhD thesis at the Technical University of Munich at Weihenstephan. I’m not sure the thesis has been published yet, but… here’s one paper from the same guy about the impact of different NA production methods on aroma compounds. 

Here’s Dr. Guy’s paper. I like the acronym they use too, NAB. Suits my feels as a consumer some times. Andreas also shared the best beery gross out of the tournament so far, the drink to accompany an early match:

If you’re looking for the perfect drink for today’s Germany-Curaçao match, here’s a 1970’s beer cocktail for you: Isarwasser. In a 1 litre Maßkrug, combine a bottle of Bavarian wheat beer, half a litre of orange juice or orange soda (e.g. Fanta), and a shot of Blue Curaçao liqueur. Enjoy!

I’m all for fighting the hegemony of homigeneity but… I was sure he was joking. Here, however, is independent evidence of this crime against the clinky and the drinky.

Matty C had a good go at the numbers behind the lack of a GBBF this year, the reasons for which have become clearer with time:

… attendance was way down, with 13,000 people attending over five days – far short of the event’s apparent 23,000 target…  both the main GBBF and its winter equivalent have been cancelled. According to one discussion on its members internal forum, the festival made a staggering £320,000 loss. This feels significant, because you don’t plan the largest beer festival of the year and then move on after losing more than a quarter of a million pounds. A loss of this magnitude isn’t made simply by mismanagement – it’s gross negligence.

Wow. Wowsie-wow-wow even. Knut‘s written about another sort of challenge facing those in the trade – finding yourself brwing quality niche brewing in an isolated location. He noted a few interesting strategies to deal with that reality:

Carl brews beers inspired by Belgian classic styles, usually with malt from the Trøndelag region and with Belgian organic hops. I am lucky to have a designated driver, as we sit down to sample a few of his saisons. It’s a tough market these days, there are some beer bars in Oslo and Trondheim who sell his beers, but not many. He has teamed up with a local company that sells high end salmon fishing in the nearby Gaula river, probably a wise choice with guests paying good money for a quality product. The lower alcohol beers are available directly from the brewery, get in touch with him if you are passing by.

As you consider your route to the Gaula River, here some notes:

Note #1: this vid on UK pub habits also is about Canadianness.**
Note #2: “…BUD stock up 29% yr-to-date…”
Note #3: Ron on Scottish Sweet Stout.
Note #4: “…stuck in 2016 for a moment… Just like DogHouse Edinburgh.“

Question. Horse brasses – history or heritage?*** Boak and Bailey were on the case this week:

Newly built pubs on housing estates and new towns across Britain, desperately in need of instant personality, also often came with horse brasses fitted as standard. For example, when Scottish & Newcastle built The Moorcock at Peterlee, County Durham, in 1973, to provide a “tinge of country atmosphere… in a tasteful blend of ancient and modern” they fitted it out with “beams and timbers and rustic brickwork and horse brasses, sporting prints, and game birds”. (Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 15 November 1973.)

So a bit of each. And Alistair has been back home in the UK and has started sharing his thoughts on what he’s missed, starting with a day in Windsor waiting for his flight on to Inverness:

I had been to Windsor all of once previously, but I may have been about 12 years shy of being able to drink legally, and as such I don’t remember much about that visit. There is though a family legend/inside joke that at some point whilst wandering near the castle, I asked my parents why it wasn’t finished yet given the scaffolding that surrounded many of the buildings. I was then somewhat keen to walk by the castle to check up on progress in the intervening 40 odd years – there was still scaffolding to be seen, still not finished then I guess. It was getting pretty bloody warm by this point of the day, even though it was only 9.30 by now, so I took myself off along the river to get to my first planned stop of my tour of the town’s hostelries.

Alistair, being the good saintly lad he is, was well advised to leave out the visit to the city if the latest edition of London Beer City where Will Hawkes explains something I, also being a good saintly lad****, was not aware of… the class of establishment known as the strip pub:

Now – a bit like the Ploughman’s Lunch – strip pubs have almost entirely disappeared. This week the owners of The Nag’s Head in Aldgate submitted plans to Tower Hamlets council which would see this long-established strip pub turned into a “traditional pub” and 24-room hotel…. For younger Londoners – who make up the bulk of my readers, naturally – it must seem incredible that so many pubs once featured women taking off their clothes, but the past was a different country. What was most remarkable, actually, wasn’t the stripping – that still exists, albeit largely in glitzier surroundings – but the low-key, unglamorous, seedy-in-a-specifically-British-way nature of it. No stage, no pole, pounds-in-a-pint-pot for payment… Crucially, these strippers moved whilst naked…

Heavens. Naked people just wandering around the pub among the drinkers? Yik. These places probably reeked of Isarwasser. Speaking of another form of the unfortunately unsavoury, Lesley Chesterman wrote about criticism this week:

When reviewing dishes like that, you can’t lie and say everything was great just to keep things positive. I saw this in my time as a critic as well, this idea of being “mean” when criticizing professionals cooking. People obviously focus on the negative side of criticism, but the truth is, it can be beneficial too. How will any chef improve if you don’t give it to them straight? And how will we uphold a high level of gastronomy here in Quebec if we’re all afraid to call out mediocrity? It is constructive criticism after all, and the goal in cooking should always be excellence. Undercooked frog’s legs and rice are not excellence. 

Agreed. In one of the sillier examples of forecasting yet, the International Wine and Spirits Record (now IWSR) has predicted what the world will be like in 2035… without any reference to the coming global resource wars:

According to the findings, the stabilisation in global volume from 2031 will be driven by two main factors: a “substantial rebalancing” of the global market, and continued growth in the worldwide drinking age population. Over the next decade, the global beverage alcohol market is, according to the analysis, anticipated to be “shifting away from China, North America and Europe to India, South America and Africa”. From a global perspective, this is said to be “most clearly illustrated by looking at consumption by servings” with the research highlighting that “the different serving size volumes of different categories” is a factor to consider.

Serving size? I might have thought fire spewing drones sweeping the landscape into a hell zone might have been a more important factor in the future to come… but I’m like that.

On a similar sort of standard, some attention was drawn to a PR infographic calling itself a summary but being held out as a research study about the NAB drinking habits of the British. Example: “New research from non-alcoholic brewery Athletic Brewing Company and KAM Insight shows that 94% of alcohol-free beer drinkers also consume alcohol.” There seems to be no statement of the research’s definitions, the methodology or the manner in which data was collected. Noce. I’d move to know the criteria for establishing whether one is or is not a “highly active, performance led consumer“! The 94% to 6% split on “alcohol-free drinker” habits is a head scratcher. Is anyone who ever had a NAB included in the 94%? One wag commented that it was akin to this sort of statement:

The Benson & Hedges Wellness Institute reports filtered cigarettes offer a smoother more pleasurable smoking experience.

Oh. That was me! Still, this sort of effort seems to discredit itself from the start. By the way, I’ve been “Zebra Striping” regularly for about four decades. It’s called water.

There you go. That’s enough for now. Another jam packed week in beer and brewing… and the World Cup. As we wade through more and more matches, please take time to check out Boak and Bailey posting on Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And do look out for more of Stan’s new “One Link, One Paragraph” format including this week’s wisdom: “People need to get out from behind their phones, go to a bar and talk to each other.” Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter (but always never with this week’s NSFW warning) and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.

*The young lad possibly as illustrated on a FB page name of The Boston Calendar. I tihnk that the the City Hall plaza if I remember correctly.
**H/T Gladman. Note the dropping of the terminal consonant at the ends of syllabels.
***Heritage being that approved part of history promoted for present purposes.
****Apparently, according to a key word search, I’ve never told you how at the dinner table one evening when I was about 15 my mother out of the blue advised me “oh, and if you ever think of going to one of those stropper places think of me up there!” She may have pointed her fork at me as she said that. I never have cross the doorstep.

The Charming Disarming And Slightly Alarming Beery News Notes For A Thursday In June

The nice thing about the youngest kid having a job with shifts that end at 11 pm is a fella like me can stay up late for the NBA Finals, listening to 660 AM every second evening when I am waiting out in the parking lot for the kid’s shift to end.*  I am not saying I am some sort of “Mr. Knicks” but this run has been fun. But that’s ending soon and it’s all going to be World Cup naptime late afternoons for the next few weeks. It’s exciting be this idle. And when I am not fixated on bandwagoning basketball or ignoring what FIFA actually stands for, I fill the empty hours with social media where this week I saw that shard up there, a bit of a jug pulled from the mud of the Thames by the ever excellent Nicola White on FB. Obvs I noticed what you notice. Mr Lovibond? Turns out John L. was (maybe*) the father of Joseph L. who was the inventor of the Lovibond scale used to describe the colour of beer. Neato. That jug is no more 150 years old given the trademark registration of 1876. I am but a pup.

What’s else up? Well, for starters, we are coming up is the 150th edition of The Session as Boak and Bailey explained:

On Sunday 28 June 2026 we’re going to post something inspired by the late Martyn Cornell’s final epic work of beer history Porter and Stout. We’d love you to join us. The first problem is that the book is quite expensive. The second is that it is large and intimidating. To make this easy for ourselves – and for everyone else – we’re suggesting that you can join in the Session even if you haven’t read the book. Your post just needs to be in some way a response to it, or to Martyn’s previous work on the subject of porter and stout. If you can read some of the book, though, even if it’s just a few pages or a chapter on some aspect of the history of porter and stout that particularly interests you, that would be great.

Excellent. Perhaps as an aid in your considerations, reflect on what Dr Christina Wade posted an excellent post this week on the need to be aware that choices are made when topics are chosen:

I love beer, in particular, and most especially, I love craft beer. And to add an additional layer to that, I love history. Adore it… So, to be able to combine those interests together into a research topic is a personal favourite of mine. I love both of these elements so much. History and beer. And I have decided, because I love them, that everyone else should as well and I am going to write about them in a way designed to convince you of that. This doesn’t sound particularly sinister, but it can be. Think of all the ways people write to try to convince you of a certain standpoint, or view, or historical ‘fact’. So when you are reading, and indeed, when you are writing yourself, keep this in mind. But even choosing the topic can be this way.

And, perhaps reflecting that, Jeff did just that when he applied a little mathematics to do a fact finding exploration of the obvious this week with his description of the state of big craft breweries since 2021:

Behold this table… The list excludes companies like Tilray, with many brands and breweries. The “Change” column on the right-hand side measures the breweries’ five-year performance. An asterisk indicates a brewery the BA does not designate as “craft.” As you can see, one-third of these larger breweries grew, while two thirds shrank. If you remove Athletic, which actually produces a different product, the overall performance of these big breweries worsens considerably. It’s a collective loss of around 2.2 million barrels, an overall decline of 16%.

You can follow that link to Beervana to check out that table but while Jeff says he didn’t provide any analysis in his post the fact is he didn’t need to. The math is the math. You know, it’s not fun to keep pointing it out but it is necessary given how many trade officials and some trade writers aren’t addressing, aren’t really admitting.  But “chef’s kiss” to that comment about the Athletic… that’s funny… and correct.

And over at the Cleveland Prost, Will Cleveland has provided us an extended explanation of the origin of Genessee Cream Ale, the best old school beer brewed on the south side of my very own lake:

In the late 1950s, Geminn was working with two offerings that each had a ceiling: Dickens Dry Ale, available between 1956 and 1958, which consumers found too spare, and 12 Horse Ale, popular but heavy in a way that limited how much you wanted to drink of it. He needed a middle ground. The influences pulling at him were multiple. Genesee had deep German roots, but brewery owner Louis Wehle had long been drawn to English ales and Burton-style brewing systems. “Clarence was looking for a lighter-drinking traditional ale,” says Tyler Muhs, Genesee’s brewing manager. “We had that German heritage, but Wehle was infatuated with those English ales, Burton systems. So I think that’s what they were looking for when they came up with it.”

And remembrances have been shared for Rob Jones of Dark Star Brewing, that started out at the Pitfield location that I visited back in 1986, hauling back polypins and two of Dave Line’s books on brewing across the ocean in my backpack. Phil Mellows shared his thoughts in the Morning Advertiser:

Rob Jones, the founder of Dark Star Brewery and landlord of the Duke of Wellington pub in Shoreham by Sea, Sussex, has died following illness. A quiet genius of modern brewing, Jones shot to fame when he became the first independent microbrewer to win the Supreme Champion title at Camra’s Champion Beer of Britain contest in 1987 with a hard-to-classify strong ale called Dark Star, created at his Pitfield Brewery in Hoxton, east London.\nHe had started that brewery in 1981 with his schoolfriend and fellow home brew enthusiast Martin Kemp.

Speaking of a classic brewery, Ed visited Sarah Hughes and shared his findings this week:

Having been a fan of Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby Mild since I was a teenager I was determined to visit the brewery when I heard that the Brewery History Society AGM was being hosted by Bathams. Sarah Hughes and Bathams are only six miles apart so it seemed like an ideal opportunity. It took a bit of organising, and I was so looking forward to it I was nervous something would go wrong. But the people at the brewery were very helpful and it all went fine on the day.  Is it’s a small brewery we were taken down in several groups and I wasn’t in the first group. This did make me a bit twitchy as I waited for my turn. But it wasn’t for long. 

Twitchy. Ed has been on a roll recently. I have often wonder what causes a revival of bloggy scribbly but brewing equipment that’s made of wood and copper is one good reason. That and the twitch.

Care of Laura H, we read that the fine municipal curatorial authorities in Wolverhampton have made an excellent decision:

The history of one of the West Midlands most important businesses is being preserved for future generations by Wolverhampton City Archives…  Beer was first brewed in Newbridge in 1874, before the Park Brewery was established in Wolverhampton the following year….  When Park Brewery closed last year, the importance of preserving its history was recognised, and a large and varied archive relating to the brewery and its associated companies has now been donated to Wolverhampton City Archives. The collection spans from the late 19th century through to the early 21st century and… includes a wide range of records, such as brewing and stock books, ledgers, minute books, maps and deeds, annual reports, photographs, packaging and publicity material. There are also employee records including wage books, pension scheme information, and a First World War roll of honour.

Good job. Back to the scene today, Coors Light has rarely been on my radar as a particularly clever culturally sensitive brand but this new use of Québecoise slang in their regional ads is just that:

The campaign, ‘T’en veux une frette?’ (Want a frette one?) leverages a local slang term for ‘colder than cold’ – frette – to remind Québeccers that they don’t just want a cold beer, they want a frette beer, through a series of humorous vignettes showcasing Québeccers’ strong preference of frette. The situations pay off with a twist to the brand’s current tagline, ‘Want a cold one?’ with ‘T’en veux une frette?’

See, me? I would order une frette but never a Coors Light. Sticking with me, once upon a time, I got to negotiate part of a verticle interior leafy greens farming deal. Faces challenges bit it can make a lot of sense in northern Canada where something like a railway container can pump out the stuff of salads when it’s below freezing outside. Interesting, then, to see the idea adapted to hops:

Ekonoke started life as a leafy greens operation, but shifted gears long before that part of indoor agriculture started its brutal and ongoing correction… As with outdoor production, hops inside Ekonoke’s farm grow vertically, wrapping around trellis-like structures that climb eight to 10 meters high. The process is significantly more complex than growing leafy greens indoors, says Sagrario. In addition to longer crop cycles, the process requires constant updates to the nutrient formula pumped to the plants, based on the stage of the crop. Humidification control is also a constant challenge…

All of which is to say that there will be fresh hop beer on Mars in 2063. Again with the me, Knut has written about a Norwegian brewery using Norwegian ingredients and somehow I show up:

There is a side story here. Back in 2007, we were a handful of beer bloggers scattered across the globe. I had the pleasure of having frequent contact with Alan McLeod, who continues his beer writing to this day. I’m thought his blog posts from that golden age were long gone – but look what I found.. He had a bit of advertising on his blog, and decided to spend some of the money to buy a few bottles of Westvleteren 12 from a Dutch web shop to send to a few of his contributors. I was one of them. 

Aaaahh for the days of paying ads on a beer blog. And for customs documents with Belgian ale, shipped from the Netherlands to Norway to pay for the price of an ad on a Canadian beer blog. As you wrap your mind about the way we were, here’s some notes:

Note #1: “Thanks. I hate it.”
Note #2: Australian wine prices have collapsed in China.
Note #3: Is beer losing out to wine and spirits?
Note #4: Pellicle’s portrait of Purple Moose Brewery in Porthmadog.

Sausage meat!?!? Mr. Gladman says it is a you thing, not a gin thing:

Sweet summer child, do you know how many shit whiskies there are? Nor is it necessarily any less industrial than buying in and redistilling neutral spirit may sound. I mean good God, some Scotch giants pump the stuff out like so much sausage meat. So no, gin isn’t “just” flavoured vodka. Gin is gin. Like it or don’t like it, that’s up to you, but please don’t kid yourself it’s an inferior category just because it’s not for you. Maybe you just don’t have the palate for juniper.

What’s that? Where’s the World Cup beer news? I can’t find the link to the story that some educator posted “Ten Pastry Stouts to Pair With Haiti v Scotland!” but, yes, Voodoo Rangers is likely the proper order to make on Saturday. “No Scotland No Party” is the song that I have just learned my traveling first cousin (once removed) will be (drunkenly) singing:

 … they live by the motto: No Scotland, No Party. “In Munich (during those Euros two years ago), you saw the impact the fans had. People just seem to love Scotland,” says Duke… People seem to feel at home with us because we don’t take ourselves too seriously”… They thought the estimate of 100,000 travelling Scots was a joke until Munich, the beer capital of the world, was drunk dry before a ball had even been kicked. It was a similar story in Czech capital Prague for a European Championship qualifier in 1999. The Scotland fans had congregated in the old town square, so when the area’s bars ran out of alcohol, the riot police arrived expecting trouble. Instead, when the lorries arrived with more beer, the Scots hopped aboard and helped unload the kegs themselves.

For some of the Home Guard who can’t travel, Imran has shared the best pubs to watch in Edinburgh. Elsewhere, England’s Gus bought beer from every nation. Here in Ontario beer stores’ opening hours have been extended just as have restaurant hours in Boston. Expectations are high for mass consumption:

To reach its 1bn pint estimate, analysts from Jefferies extrapolated beer consumption data from previous World Cups. The extra sales equated to a 3 per cent uplift during the 39-day tournament, which Jefferies annualised to 0.3 per cent, equating to 5.9mn hectolitres, or an extra 1bn pints. Analysts expect the World Cup — which is being hosted across three major beer markets: the US, Canada and Mexico — to boost sales volumes by between 0.2 and 0.3 per cent for 2026. Jefferies analyst Ed Mundy said “match timing is the unsung hero of World Cup beer consumption”, pointing out that games featuring countries in Europe and the Americas had largely been scheduled to coincide with peak local drinking hours of between 5pm and 11pm.

Sadly, as CNN reports, Michelob Ultra will adorn an MVP trophy given to a player after every match. Hopefully that side of the trophy can be turned to the wall. Now, where is my tartan scarf and my copy of that 1978 Scotland World Cup LP?

That is it. A jam packed week of news and cogitations. As you soak it all in, don’t forget to check out Boak and Bailey posting on Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And do look out for more of Stan’s new “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain 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 wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.

*Now, I hear what you are saying: “WTF? New York isn’t part of Canada, Al?!?” But for 23 years I could see the northern edge of the state out my office window. And I’ve listen to WFAN sports radio for decades and, yes, the game is on 880 AM but the freaking fan DJs are on 660 AM. Plus OG Anunoby was my favourite Raptor who went to the Knicks so…
**what about Henry?

The Dreamy But Sadly Last Beery News Notes For May 2026

I have liked May so much this year that I am already missing it. Forty-eight weeks to May 2027.  I’ve already circled it in my calendar. Just in the last few days it finally feels like spring. I’ve got more twenty tomatoes outside into the spot where they’ll be sitting until November. Isn’t that twine tying action photo there to the right interesting? I really outstripped myself with that one. That is one snugly tucked in beefsteak, if you know what I mean. And there’s been more. I’ve mowed and then mowed again. Got a few semi-sunburns and even listened to a Blackcapped Warbler as it stayed just out of view. Not that it’s been Euro-hot but I will take 23C and sunny any time. Err… give me a sec. That knot. Wow. OK, let’s go.

First up, the residue in 4,500 year old clay pots from the Masovian Lowland in northeastern Poland have been analyzed and certain conclusions have been drawn:

These findings represent the earliest chemical traces of fermented alcohol beverages in this region, dating to the second half of the third millennium BCE,” the researchers wrote in the publication. The study also identified biomarkers linked to grain processing, including azelaic acid and plant sterols, suggesting the use of cereals such as wheat or barley, fruits and possibly resins used to preserve or flavour beverages. Researchers said the apparent use of wheat and barley is significant because the oldest known evidence of cereal cultivation in the region dates to the Late Bronze Age. “This suggests the possibility of importing raw materials for alcohol production from other regions where cereal cultivation was already well-developed…”

See also the 2,300 year old beer bottle from China. Do ancient jam jar findings get such rapt attention from archaeologists? Not a chance. And speaking of the sciences, The Beer Nut made a quality observation this week about one of the adjectives that gets tossed around rather freely – “tropical”:

I’ve voiced my concerns before about the t-word being rarely indicative of actual tropical fruit flavours. So it goes with this one, but that’s not a problem. In lieu of mangoes and pineapples, this 5.7% ABV hazy IPA has a bright pithy bitterness, pushing mandarin zest and lime rind. There’s an almost earthy tang on the finish, where the bittering compounds concentrate together on the palate. Despite the haze and the claim of tropicality, this tastes like an IPA from the classic era of Eight Degrees: big flavoured and technically proficient. I’ve missed that.

I don’t have an issue with degrees of abstration in the game adjectival. As a result “hoppy” is perfectly fine as a high level quantiative descriptor. But “tropical” has that next level general category aspect that TBN unpacks neatly up there through a winnowing to find out what is really going on. Mango? There ain’t no stinkin’ mango!

Speaking of getting to the specifics, Boak and Bailey examined a trade publication from 1960 called 200 Years of Brewing in the West Country, a 40-page booklet produced by West Country Breweries on the subject to West Country Breweries and found a firm in transition – whether they knew it or not:

From the first page, though, it’s clear that something unusual was going on. The obligatory foreword from the chairman is signed by… Colonel W.H. Whitbread. He was also chairman of Whitbread itself and his presence here signals that West Country Breweries was under the larger brewery’s protection as part of the so-called ‘Whitbread Umbrella’. The Whitbread Umbrella was “a novel structural arrangement that incorporated a dual-voting shareholding structure aligned to a controlling interest in the publicly listed Whitbread Investment Company (WIC), an investment trust that housed minority shareholdings in some twenty regional brewers” (Julie Bower, 2016.) Protection is an interesting word, isn’t it? In organised crime it’s a euphemism for extortion and predatory behaviour by criminals. 

This excellently illustrates and avoids the presistent problem of drinkers, trade association and beer writers confusing ownership with control that we have seen play out in the last decade or come of US craft brewery shell game. Show me the shareholders’ agreement!!

For Craft Beer & Brewing, Kate Bernot has a detailed update on Fonio, an small-scale farmed African cereal malted for brewing purposes that has gained acceptance since the 2018 introduction to Garrett Oliver described in this article in The Guardian as noted hereabouts back in 2023. Bernot shares some obervations that give a sense of what Fonio adds to a beer:

Vinnie Cilurzo, owner and brewer at Russian River in Windsor, California, agrees that fonio’s vinous, lychee-like contributions defy what most people—brewers and drinkers alike—expect from malt. A Belgian-style blonde ale brewed with 30 percent fonio has become a semiregular beer at Russian River’s taprooms—particularly during the warmer months, when its lean body and bright fruitiness feel especially appropriate. Cilurzo says it doesn’t take much fonio in the grist for it to have an impact. “My advice: You don’t have to go all the way to 30 percent,” he says. “Fifteen to 20 percent will also leave a thumbprint on the beer.”

What really struck me is how pale the beer in the accompanying image is. Pale as Zima. When my crime novels set in the early 1990s come out you’ll see me using that image: “I could tell he was guilty – he’d turned as pale as Zima.”

Never that way at all, we saw Stan’s latest Hop Queries hit the inbox last Friday including this note on production levels in Australia after the harvest there:

Reacting to diminishing worldwide demand for hops, Hop Products Australia continued to reduce acreage for 2026. Farmers strung 8.3% fewer acres and produced 11.7% fewer hops. They harvested almost 2.9 million pounds. For perspective, that’s equal to 3.4% of the US crop or to the amount of Mosaic farmers in the Yakima Valley harvested. 

As you consider the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” antipodean, here’s the notes:

Note #1: “…craft beer off 8% for latest 4 wks thru May 9…”
Note #2: a beer blog becomes, what, a booze blog?
Note #3: a return to beer writing?
Note #4: another return I’m pretty sure I don’t care about.

What is it with otherwise sane folk trying to scratch a living from a niche topic that leads them to speak of praise the niche’s given opp – the necessary “evil empire” to the purity of the niche – with all the eloquence of a six year old with stomach flu talking to Beulah on the big white telephone? I thought of that when I read this grab bag of sneering cliché:

“The Bad Beer That’s an Incredible Beverage” by Tyler Austin Harper is a bad piece that’s an incredible prism for understanding how beer can continue to thrive as a symbol of populist Americana even as it continues to lose market share to flavored malt beverages, canned cocktails, and whatever we’re calling Cayman Jack these days. Much like the New York Times Opinion section’s hackneyed forays into thinking critically about the trade, Harper’s take advances the argument that the craft brewing “movement” (such as it is) has gone too far. It’s a mixture of personal preference and surface-level cultural observation of a piece with the dreck David Chang was pushing in the pages of Esquire literally a dozen years ago.

If you’re going to shit on someone else’s writing it might be good to be interesting yourself as you do. Why is it so hard to understand that very few care about your chosen drinking hobby? With far greater clarity, ATJ has been trying to put his finger on what makes Belgian beer culture unique and, after years of looking beneath the surface, is not quite sure he’s been successful:

… thinking about Belgian beer culture I thought about beer and its associated obsessions — metal, gaming, men’s solitary hobbies, loneliness, the need to be someone else which ends in self-immolation (Brunhild trying to burn down the hall with Hagen and associates still inside perhaps?). Belgian beer culture, like beer culture, whether out in the cities and towns or in traditional bars or specialist beer joints, could be confusing, and I am not sure I found what I was looking for. Or did I?

And sticking with beer joint culture, a great barman has passed away in Chicago, Sam Sianis of the Billy Goat Tavern:

Millions of Americans knew of Mr. Sianis and his bar without ever crossing Chicago city limits, thanks to one of its most famous regulars, the syndicated columnist Mike Royko… Mr. Sianis made it an equal-opportunity establishment: Prolific drinkers, wayward pols, off-duty cabbies and the occasional celebrity all received the same friendly beer and a shot, often from Mr. Sianis himself. “Sam was the perfect host,” Don Rose, a journalist, said in an interview. In Mr. Royko’s columns, the Billy Goat became a font of tales, true and tall. Mr. Sianis once kicked out the same customer six times in one night for fighting while drunk. And Mr. Sianis swore he witnessed another man down 150 drinks in a sitting.

Another sort of fluid based establishment was the topic of Every Pub in Dublin‘s focus last Friday – pubs on islands you can only reach by boat and not via a bridge:

Arranmore’s 6 pubs is quite a lot for one island, and it has made me wonder about what other offshore (before someone comes and lists most of the pubs in Cork City…) island pubs there are. And also if I can actually tick all of those off too. This is not a promise to do that. I might, but I’m not guaranteeing I’ll do it it like I have with Dublin and also The Rosses. I’m going off the 2024-5 full licence file here, so there is a very high chance I’m missing somewhere, but I made a reference back to the 2010-11 file to try find any lost pubs too. I’m going to start North and work my way counter-clockwise here, so places I’ve been mostly work their way to the top…  I am also only counting islands you still need a boat to get to – I may have an Achill great-grandfather, but you’re basically mainlanders now!

It is even an island if there’s a bridge? Which leads to this interesting piece from BBC Worchestershire on the state of small breweries and what may be keeping some open:

Sarah Saleh, owner of The Hop Shed Brewery, in Suckley, Worcester, said: “Without the tap room we wouldn’t still be here. I think the breweries that are closing are the ones without a direct outlet for their beers.” Saleh continued: “I know when we set up here, 10 years ago, I can think of two breweries locally that were set up but didn’t have tap rooms, and they’re now no longer here. “It always amazes me that on a Friday night when the tap room is open, and we stand here in a barn in the middle of nowhere, and before you know it there’s 200 people here. “They’re enjoying food from local providers and enjoying the beer that’s been brewed here on site.

It is even a community brewery if there isn’t a taproom? Maybe. What else can make a brewery part of the community? Reporting from Norway, Knut attended a gathering of five Danish breweries invited by local Haandbryggeriet to show off their stuff… and one of the attendees had a particularly interesting back story:

Together with the Danish employment authorities, Stepping Stone has developed a program aimed at improving the conditions for refugees entering the Danish workforce. It is deliberately flexible — designed around the individual rather than the system. Each participant’s working hours, responsibilities, and workplace are shaped by their skills, needs, and current life situation, creating a more realistic and supportive path into employment. But the program doesn’t stop at work placements. Alongside hands-on experience at the brewery, participants are offered opportunities to build skills that extend beyond the job itself.

And also out and about has been Ed, who continues his reports from his trade mission to Austria, this time with his stop at Trumer of Saltzberg where he witnessed a method:

They have a six roller mill from 1965 and use the Kubessa method when brewing. Named after the brewer from Cologne that patented it in 1903, in the Kubessa method the husk is separated from the endosperm during milling. It is not added to the Mash Conversion Vessel during the early stages of mashing, only being added prior to lautering so it can help with wort separation. It means less husk polyphenols get in the beer. It’s said to make a beer taste more elegant, and certainly the Trumer Pils in Vienna was very smooth. We had John Brauer, EBC grand fromage, explain to us on the coach that in fact little difference can be detected in fresh beer, but the Kubessa method give greater flavour stability so its advantages become more apparent over time. 

That’s a lot of specific technical information. Mr. Gladman has shared some very specific emotional information, facts which he believes form the foundation for his love of Pastis:

On Saturdays I would walk the half-hour round trip there and back to spend my pocket money. I still remember filling the small white paper bag each week. It started off smooth and stiff then slowly softened and rumpled over the rest of the morning as I dipped into it for treats.I remember the aniseed balls best of all. I never bought too many — I didn’t want to spoil my enjoyment. The immediate pleasure of fizzy cola bottles was showy but no match for the deep joy of a well-sucked aniseed ball with its slow reveal, layer after intense layer, leading to that tiny black kernel of anise almost too challenging but all the better for it. I saved them for last because they would perfume the bag itself — you could smell them even after they were gone.

And, speaking of lingering aromas, Jeff gave us a history of the Cascade hops with his thoughts on what have made them so successful:

I’d add that Cascades have, ironically, come to achieve that quality of “nobility.” It’s true they’re more intense and robust than the old landrace varieties from Europe, but they’re also incredibly balanced and elegant. They offer a lovely bitterness, and are versatile as aroma hops (we’re going to get a taste of that in this year’s Oregon Homegrown collab.) When people taste Cascade, they’re tasting the same thing, too, which isn’t always the case with modern hops.

There. We will leave it there for this week and for this month. Soon it will be June with all that entails. Live it up. And again with this one last thing thing. Your weekly reminder that there will be an edition of The Session next month celebrating Martyn Cornell’s final book Porter and Stout: A Complete History. Boak and Bailey will share an update soon on when you need to get your thoughts organized in preparation.

Which means you, please, need to keep an eye on Boak and Bailey postings every Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And do look out for more of Stan’s new “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain 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 wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.*

*No footnotes this week.

Your Mindblowingly Fabulous Beery News Notes For The Start Of The Best Two-Thirds Of The Year

April showers bring May flowers yet they are at the heart of what makes the most cruel month. I don’t get it. It’s good that we can put the whole thing behind us. Along with the payment of what was dues on the taxes. Done. And stuff like will it be a blizzard warning or one for a tornado? Now it’s time to put the feet up a bit. Check out what’s going on, like seeing who is passing through in the migration. Saw these Red-breasted Mergansers down at the shore this week. Bet they’ve dealt with their tax filings. Yup, best to tra-la for th new month starting tomorrow. Tra-la-ing is not to be dismissed. Shout it out or even sing aloud. Try it as an excuse on your boss in a meeting, for that particularly difficult clerk at a store or even on your in-laws! An all purpose response to any situation. Until, of course – WHAMMO – June shows up. Back to the grindstone in June.

Speaking of the seasons, Knut got a bit poetic in his wanderings around the hopyards of Poperinge in Western Belgium:

It’s springtime, even in northern Europe. I have harvested the first edible plants of the season, aromatic wild garlic. German restaurants are preparing for the Spargelzeit, when fresh asparagus dominate the menus. But beer ingredients also follow the seasons. From a beer perspective, the fields of barley are turning from gray to green. And in a belt from the English Home Counties via Flanders and Bavaria to Bohemia, the hop fields are showing their first shoots.

I had no idea that hops grow 20 centimeters per day. He’s got even more facts and figures on the start of the hop ag year.  Jen Blair was in a different place but, still, also full of the revelations when she considered the airport Cheez-it which led to some interesting thoughts about sensory perception:

You can imagine my delight when I boarded another flight a few months later to discover that Delta now offered Cheez-Its as an in-flight snack. A few years ago, Delta partnered with the then Atlanta-based SweetWater Brewing Company to create an IPA specifically formulated for flight, with reduced bitterness and increased perceived hop aroma. I wondered if they had done the same with Cheez-It. And here we have arrived at the Cheez-It sensory experiment. I had an upcoming flight to Colorado for World Beer Cup judging, and so did another friend flying in from Montana. I texted her to buy a bag of Cheez-Its at the airport, but not to open them because they were for Cheez-It sensory when we met up in Colorado.

She even proposed the identification of a “Cheez-It equilibrium” point in the atmosphere which is, obviously, quite excellent. I am tagging this under the “Science” category.  More science now… but with a political twist… out of the UK with the news… with a sports twists… that the country is running out of carbon dioxide… cause by a global crisis twist:

Fans of the beautiful game shouldn’t panic about the beer running out during this year’s World Cup — yet. Business Secretary Peter Kyle tried to reassure Brits Thursday that they’ll be able to enjoy a pint during this summer’s football tournament. It comes amid reports officials are drawing up contingency plans for a shortage of the carbon dioxide used to make fizzy drinks as the Strait of Hormuz closure bites. Directly questioned about whether Brits will be able to get a beer during the summer World Cup, which starts on June 11, Kyle said: “At this moment, this is not a concern for our economy, okay? I can reassure people of that.”

He “…tried to reassure…” Hmm… Not a concern “…at this moment…” Hmm… Commercial CO2 appears to be a by-product of gas and oil production so we up and over here have a bunch. Still sticking with the serious objective stuff, The Western Producer recently shared an update on the market for Canadian malt barley exports:

… about a year ago, Canadian barley prices started to fall as China resumed purchases from Australia after a lengthy trade spat. That pushed a lot of Canadian barley out of the Chinese market. And then Canada harvested a bumper crop of barley in 2025. Farmers produced 9.73 million tonnes, a 19 per cent improvement over the previous year, putting even more downward pressure on prices. “Prices have been a lot more competitive in the global market,” said Watts. At the same time, French malting barley prices climbed higher due to a short crop in that key exporting nation. Those events, combined with years of continued market development work, encouraged Colombia to reconsider Canadian supplies, and they were happy with that decision.

International harvest intrigue reigns. France is looking at another rough spring 2026 as far as barley planting goes, too.  That flat red line on that graph under the thumbnail tells the tale. And the competition is ahead of French farmers. On the other side of the planet, the Austrialian 2025/26 crop is “23 percent higher than last year and 21 percent above the five-year average.” Meanwhile… geopolitics can get one into some very odd places. As you think on that, here are some notes:

Note #1: Bun photography.
Note #2: “Rub my Dad’s bottom….”
Note #3: “…surprising health benefit…”

You know, I think the craft beer recovery needs to be measured in the returned of a staffed up BA because I really don’t get where anyone is going with the “return to 2012” narrative. But Dave Infante reporting from the Craft Brewers Conference for VinePair gives another angle on the boost to mood:

 Survivorship bias dictates that the brewers that made it to CBC 2026 are likely to seem the most bullish; after all, if they weren’t, they may have stayed home to save money and manpower. At the risk of sounding indelicate here, I also suspect that the segment’s years of closures have helped cull the herd of both excess numbers and outsized negativity. A dying brewery can only die once, after all, and with outfits that were never built for this market getting pushed out of it, those that remain stand to benefit from more focus and less vicarious angst.

We are told that history is written by the victors but, I guess, we have to ask in this market what is “victory” when overall US craft production is down 9% over the last two years and down 17%* since hitting a peak in 2019? Speaking of questions… is the use of “lifestyle” as a descriptor ever not a red flag? Consider this PR blurb about a new beer-like substance:

Carlsberg Britvic premium beer marketing controller Rebecca Allen revealed that the 4.5% ABV beer is strategic in answering the trends of the moment and admitted that “the timing reflects a broader shift in drinking culture, where boundaries between categories are increasingly blurred and consumers are more open to hybrid, lifestyle led propositions”. Allen told db: “1664 Rosé takes its name from its distinctive flavour profile, a refreshing berry flavoured beer. The ‘rosé’ cue reflects both its taste and its visual appeal, positioning it as a lighter, fruit-forward beer.”

What style of life is being referenced? And where has that style led the life of the consumer in question? Speaking of style, Ron has given us a few background insider sorta notes on his presentation flow while on the road, working it in Chile:

For my talk, I speak a couple of sentences and then the interpreter translates them into Spanish. It interrupts my flow a bit. But does give me a chance to drink some beer while the interpreter is taking.  My talk is about Irish Porter and Stout. I should probably update it. I wrote it a while ago and have since got hold of a lot more Irish brewing records. In particular, examples of heading, the sort of Kräusen used in Ireland. I get through my beer so quickly, I have to request a refill. That’s a first. Just making sure my throat doesn’t get too dry. Wouldn’t want to get hoarse. Usually, I only get to take a sip or two, as I keep rattling away. When I’m done, I sell a few more books. Which is good. I’m nicely building up dosh in my PayPal account. Dolores will be so happy. Why have I never brought books with me to sell before? Because I’m an idiot. That’s why.

When Dolores is happy, I am happy. Conversely, there’s bad news out of the other end of Lake Ontario as the Toronto Festival of Beer has gone under** and has left creditors and suppliers holding the bag according to CTV News:

Applying to work for the festival was costly, Kowalik noted, as she and her partner spent $1,000 on the entry fee and an additional $200 on liability insurance. She says they both took time off from their day jobs to work since the festival started on Friday. Over the course of the weekend, Kowalik said they went through all 20 cases of beer that they brought up, amounting to a total of just over $2,000. 

The story shares a twist on beer fest tokens. Because the festival sells them and not the breweries, the money paid for the beer tokens does not go to the brewers. Kiss it goodbye. Anyone owed money can call into to the bankruptcy meeting this afternoon at 3 pm. But seeing who else is on that list of creditors, the news may not be good. For $2,000,000 in liabilities there’s only $8,000 in assets.

On the Burton Union question, we have had Laura H in (t)DB on challenges posed to the survival of the Marston brewing kit and also providing CAMRA with a backgrounder on the history of the system. Now, a Mr. M. Curtis has visited the part of the whole which became lodged at Thornbridge and reported back:

Fixed to the head of each oak barrel is a large, cast iron “X”, painted black. If this seems familiar it’s because, for a time, an illustration of three such barrels, stacked in a triangle formation, formed the logo of Marston’s Brewing Company in Burton-upon-Trent, Staffordshire. Still in operation, today Marston’s brewery is owned and operated by British-Danish conglomerate, Carlsberg Britvic. In January 2024 Carlsberg Britvic—then known as the Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company—decided to retire the remaining four working union sets at Marston’s. Once used to brew what was once some of the most well-known ale brands in the country, including Marston’s Pedigree and Owd Roger, the brewery’s website famously used to state: “No Burton Unions, No Pedigree. End of.” Now, it seemed certain this storied piece of British brewing history, first invented in 1838, was due to be consigned to the dustbin of time and memory.

I was going to say that it is too bad that the United States has little similar interest in its brewing history as we could see the mid -1800s pontoon room of Taylor of Albany recreated even if in part but then was saddened to see that the link in my post of 2016 to Martyn’s at Zythophile failed. It’s all there at the Wayback Machine site. But the key word search does not seem to work and Martyn did not use a URL system that included the date. So you can hunt out his post at your leisure. In the alternative, I can only direct you to the work of a couple of rough sorts, Messers Gravina and McLeod, at page 80 of their opus on, in and abouts Albany which you can review under that thumbnail to the right… well, your right my left.

Lastly, following up on observations on the word “critic” in beer writing a couple of weeks ago, The Times also appears to be confused as the sub-header for one story this week describes Pete Brown as “our critic” and then he himself states as follows:

Of all the arguments the beer world loves to have, there can’t be many topics more divisive than JD Wetherspoon pubs.  Critics attack them as a refuge for those too old and/or drunk to mind the harsh lighting. Supporters say this is just snobbery, and what’s wrong with cheap beer? Critics believe the beer is cheap because it’s bought “short-dated”, or about to go off. Supporters ask where else can you get a meal and a pint for under a tenner now?  The thing is, both sides are right. Except that the beer isn’t short-dated and never has been.

“Critic” is not a synonym for detractor.  Pete isn’t the one who created this. But as Stan reminded us, the “…critic’s job, nine-tenths of it, is to make way for the good by demolishing the bad” as it was put by Kenneth Tynan. What is it about general beer culture that is uncomfortable with the common form of two handed discussion and intelligent criticism with a bit of peer review thrown in for good measure? Oh well.

That’s it for now. Report upon your tra-la-ing in the comments if you like. Until we meet again, please check out Boak and Bailey who are posting every Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And look out for more of Stan’s new “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, as noted, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword seems to be on pause since November but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. See you in May!

*26.3 bbls in 2019 compared to 21.9 bbls in 2025. What’s the degree of collapse that will send a message to the PR trade, one wonders. 
**Sixteen years ago, Jordan shared his thoughts on the unappetizing event.

 

Your Sunny Warm Bountiful Springtime Beery Beer Notes For A Satanically Chilly Late April Week

a car dashboard showing a temperature of minus twoOn Monday as the sun came up I thought I might do a little weeding in the garden. But something was strange. Wrong even. The top of the soil was like rock. Solid. The hoe just cracked it intopt large chunks. Then I realized it was under zero. Oh. My. Lord. A month into spring. Of all the feels (uses fingers… denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) I only hit the second and the fourth. Lordy. It was up to +4C by the time we got to noon on Tuesday. Can this please be the end of these freezy frozies? Please?*

What is happening… elsewhere where it is warm and cheery? Well for starters, when in Rome, you may want to do what The Beer Nut does as he has some great observations from his recent trip there:

In an age of beery uncertainty — when the consensus of the craft era is, if not completely dismantled, then at least creaking with important bits falling off — it’s nice that some certainties remain. I’ve developed a newfound appreciation of the beers and bars I discovered in the early years of this blog, and before, which are still operating despite the barbarians being inside the gates. So it was especially pleasing to arrive into Rome and find that two of its fondly-remembered institutions are still going, same as ever.

Also warming is the south of England where we have a pair of stories. First, in The Guardian we read of a boom in one corner of the drinks trade:

While Britain remains far down the list of global wine producers – behind countries including Uzbekistan and Tunisia – it is the fastest-growing wine region in the world, according to the property group Knight Frank. It reports the area of planted vineyards in the country has quadrupled since the turn of the century. Langham’s estate is part of this boom, almost tripling in size since 2009 to span about 34 hectares (84 acres) of the 1,000-hectare site. Increased wine production means the company has outgrown the converted farm buildings it was using to store barrels and bottles and it has just invested £2m in a new winery which should be completed by the summer.

Then, Mr. R. Protz shared his thoughts on one aspect of that boom writing for CAMRA’s publication What’s Brewing:

Here’s a fact that will freeze the blood of all beer lovers: there are now more vineyards in Kent than hop farms. Since the 16th century, the county of Kent has been at the heart of hop growing. It has what the French call terroir – the right balance of soil, sunshine and rain to grow the finest hops. The soil in the Garden of England is sandy and loamy. This means it retains rain and moisture and enables the hops to grow fast and develop the piny, spicy and peppery aromas and flavours for which English hops are famous. The decline in hop growing has been calamitous, not only in Kent but in other major cultivation areas such as Hereford and Worcester. In 1962 8,200 hectares were devoted to hop growing. By the end of the century the number had fallen to 1,060 with just 45 hop farms left.

This leads to the question of the relative profitability per acre of hops destined for brewing compared to grapes destined for wine making. In 2019, the ag mag South East Farmer stated:

“The first stage is to talk about the elephant in the room, which is profitability,” said Duncan. “Establishment costs, depending on vine density, is £8,000 to £10,000 per acre and farmers should be looking to establish 20 to 30 acres to justify the investment into viticultural machinery. If you choose the right site and plant the right varietals, clones and rootstocks there is no reason not to be aiming to grow three to four tonnes per acre. Payback, which includes the cost of establishment as well as the annual running costs in the early years, is expected after year nine. Fruit is selling at approximately £2,000 per tonne at the moment and it costs around £3,000 per acre to produce. So if you can turnover £6,000 per acre, the gross margins on an acre is £3,000 and that is well worth waiting for.”

Note that the phrase is “gross margins”. Now, this might be a question I should have put to Stan but what is the gross margin for hop growing in southern England? The UK Department of Enviroment, Food and Rural Affairs has plenty of info on the standards that apply to hop farming but not a lot on economic expectations.  One sees that an acre may produce 1,000 pounds of dried English hops on average (or half a ton) and that recently a ton retailed in 2024 for a little over $9000 USD or £12,000 pounds (or £6000 a half ton acre.) Similar. But what is the gross margin? Also… it might be a error to even compare. In both cases, the acreage is so small that it’s unlikely the vineyards are directly muscling out the hop yards. Yet one is an expanding market while the other isn’t. Thoughts on the resulting… err, actual… numbers much appreciated.

Moving from the question of “what’s in it?” to “what’s it in?”, Tim Holt shared a link this week to an article in the Royal Society’s Notes and Record after he received his hard copy of the publication.  The reason? About a couple of months ago, the Royal Society reported on receiving Sir Isaac Newton’s wooden pint flagon:

In this article, we first tell the story of the wooden pint flagon by considering Newton’s college friendship with John Wickins, the latter’s appointment as rector at Stoke Edith, the relevant histories of the Wickins and Hussey-Freke families who owned the flagon, and public notices and exhibitions of the artefact in the nineteenth century. This evidence allows us to track a circuitous yet plausible itinerary for the drinking vessel from Trinity College to Hannington Hall.

At the time of Newton’s use, a pint flagon filling would be 1d at Trinity College and while about 2d in Glouchester according to a contemporary reliable source* – though that may refer to a quart which would make sense. It is also interesting to compare the vessel to two Tudor examples we looked at, oh, about thirteen years ago. Also wooden but not nearly as fine as Newton’s, having a conical shape rather than new more recent on in the form of a small barrel. Less stable in form for perhaps a less wild context?

Going further back in time, Merryn guided us to an re-examination of a 1927 study of Italian ceramics dated to between 750 and 725 B.C.:

Gas chromatography and mass spectrometry analysis of residues in the gourd detected organic compounds commonly found in fermented fruit juice, perhaps from grape, apple, or pear. No tartaric acid, a component of wine, was found. Tests conducted on the gourd residue also identified heated pine resin and mastic resin, which were believed to have medicinal properties.

Which leads to the interesting idea that alcohol may have been prized early on as a medicinal rather than just the jolly juice.  And going even a bit further back, the Times of India reported on a Danish study of an ancient Sumerian tablet:

A small clay tablet has offered a remarkably human glimpse into life 4,000 years ago. Researchers studying ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions in Denmark have identified what may be the world’s oldest known beer receipt, a written record of beer supplied for workers in the Sumerian city of Umma.Instead of chronicling war, kings or religion, the tablet appears to document an everyday transaction. The discovery was made by scholars from the National Museum of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen during a fresh review of museum collections. Experts say the find highlights how some of the earliest writing systems were created to manage trade, labour and resources.

So while beer probably didn’t caused civilization, it may have advanced the need to record the growth of civilization. Notes time!

Note #1: Speedy cocaine-laced salmon.
Note #2: Authorities in India claim ABInBev part of cartel.
Note #3: What’s a Chester?
Note #4: Scratchings!

Speaking up there of Stan, this month’s edition of Hop Queries is out and he asks this question:

What hop variety shares her name with a hop disease?

Figure it out yourselves. I won’t ruin the fun. Conversely, we have two no fun tales tales of failure today from the big names in craft circa 2016. Turns out that the lingering BrewDog legacy includes a number of forms of debtor deadbeatery:

Brewdog went under with £550m of debts. The administrators have now filed a (long) list of creditors on the Companies House website. Among them is Lords cricket ground which is owed £420,000. Since the debt is unsecured Lords are likely to get less than a penny in the pound back of what they are owed, around £4,000. Another London sporting venue where Brewdog got the beer franchise (and still have it) is West Ham’s London Stadium at Stratford. Here the debt, £12,000, is much smaller….

Innis & Gunn, it turns out, stuck their 200 business partners with less than 4% of that pile of bad paper. And, in the UK, BrewDog’s brother from another culture, Stone continues to see its legacy fade at least in Virginia:

The beer-making operations of Stone Brewing Co. are not long for Richmond as the California-based brand is being sold for the second time in four years.  This week industry giant Duvel Moortgat USA announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Stone Brewing from Sapporo Holdings, the Japanese brewing conglomerate whose US division bought Stone in 2022.  While the Stone brand and beers will continue to exist as a subsidiary of Firestone Walker Brewing Co., a California company owned by Duvel, Stone will no longer have a manufacturing presence in Richmond. Its sizable production facility at 4300 Williamsburg Ave. in the city’s Fulton area will become a full-time Sapporo USA production facility, Sapporo-Stone CEO Zach Keeling said in an interview on Monday. 

Trade friendly insider commentators will no doubt call this retraction an consolidation. Hope springs eternal.  BAer fans of Stone on the East Coast are now looking forward to… mmmmm… stale older beers.  And Boak and Baily shared another aspect of the retraction in last weekend’s footnotes on Patreon:

We used to take much more of an interest in US craft beer than we do today. When we first started blogging, back in 2007, most ‘craft beer’ was American and we spent a lot of time and money hunting American craft beer around London. As the British craft beer scene grew its primary influence was America and there were times when it felt like Brits cosplaying Americanness… These days, though, there’s less American beer around in the UK and British craft beer feels like its own thing. It doesn’t feel as if what’s happening with craft beer in the US has much bearing on what’s going on here, even if there are echoes of the same trends and cycles between the two scenes. 

We are retracting into our own scenes, deglobalizing. Perhaps as the Great Creator intended. Who benefited from international craft? Perhaps what is more attractive are the local habits. Relatedly, there were some interesting observations from Will Hawkes in London Beer City about the confusion someone from away might experience when entering an English pub:

A French family of four wanders into The Blackfriar and, spotting a table, sits down. The mother begins to peruse the laminated menu. The children chat amiably. The mother puts the menu down and discusses its contents with the father. Time passes. The father looks at the menu. He discusses its contents with the mother. More time passes. Eventually, the father decides to go to the bar. It’s been ten minutes. I wonder what it is about French visitors to our glorious capital that makes them skip the bit about ‘how pubs work’ in their guidebooks? Maybe French guidebooks just don’t have that section; possibly this crucial info is completely absent from l’internet. Perhaps they’ve been left (understandably) confused by the profusion of restaurants masquerading as pubs in London, where table service has become the semi-norm.  

I suppose I have been in a similar situation. After all these decades, table service is a familiar holdover here that carries echoes of the temperance cause and regulartory community control. Well, a minor version of that I suppose, at least compared to Iceland as Will Howard reports:

In 1908, the Icelandic government put the decision to vote, asking the public whether they wanted to outlaw alcohol in their country. After 60% of the voting populace said yes, the prohibition was put into effect in 1915. However, they reassessed in a matter of years. Wine was put back on the menu in 1922. Spirits came along a little later in 1935, but beer remained strictly forbidden for nearly the entire rest of the century. This was partially due to puritanical, classist logic about the effect that cheap beer has on the underclass, but there was also another, more important reason that beer was outlawed for so long – up until 1944, Iceland was an associated territory of Denmark, which was a cute way of saying that Iceland was under Danish rule, and the Danes loved their beer even more than the rest of mainland Europe did, thus, drinking beer was seen as coloniser behaviour.

Well, now you know. A Good Colonizer’s Beer Blog is my new title. Or rather Bjórblogg góðs landnema if you know what I mean.  And I know you know. It’s what brings us all together once a week, right? Right?? As we await your reponses on that point, please check out Boak and Bailey who are posting every Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And look out for more of Stan’s new “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, as noted, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword seems to be on pause since November but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. See you next week!

*Sunny and plus 15C by late afternoon Wednesday. Even put a daub of sunscreen on. Why were you complaining so much? Me? I wasn’t complaining. You were!
**Notice also both records reference Red Streak as a 1600s apple variety for fine cider.

Your Scattered Beery News Notes For The Lunar The Low The Looney And Perhaps Even The Ludicrous

Happy lunar loop de loop week. It’s hard to find a glimmer of good in an ugly world but the Artemis II mission into outer space did its best to try.  As has the prospects of the Two-Tailed Dog Party in this weekend’s elections in Hungary. Coming in at a solid 3.27% of the vote last time around, their past platform gives a bit of hope:

The party platform promised eternal life, world peace, a one-day workweek, two sunsets a day (in assorted colours), lower gravity, free beer, and low taxes. Other electoral pledges have included building a mountain on the Great Hungarian Plain.

Will the space craft land? Will greater freedom return to Hungary?  Will the ceasefire hold? These are the questions for the week to come. Until then, some beer news. First up, Lars announced the publication of a study of farmhouse yeasts of northern Europe, the culmination of years of work and a number of challenges:

The paper was done by the Verstrepen lab at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Microbiology, the same place that did the famous paper giving us the first view of the family tree for brewer’s yeast. Work on the paper started in September 2017, when I mailed off the first batch of yeast cultures to Leuven. It had gotten quite far when covid caused Belgium to shut down so hard that everyone must work from home, and obviously you can’t do lab work at home. By the time restrictions had lifted several people had moved on to other jobs, and the paper sat languishing until Peter Bircham decided to pick it up again. He and I worked on it for a while, until Peter moved to New Zealand. Eventually, once he was settled there, a Gang of Four got it moving once more, and last year we finally submitted it.

This is very important stuff and a worthy outcome for all his years of effort. The study describes seven cultures or zones rather than strains as these “cultures have been reused by farmhouse brewers for at least centuries, quite possibly millennia, so they consist of lots of different strains.” The, as illusrated by the map under that thumbnail, the study describes how each culture relates within its zone. Super neato. Lars has also been out skiiing in shorts, too.

Staying in Scandenavia, Knut has shared a profile of a pub in Sweden. Ruckel Beer Bar, where he spent part of Good Friday productively:

Ruckel means shack or hovel in English, a description or the building they took over when they were starting the brewery. I doubt the premises they have moved into with their new pub fit the ruckel description, but they have certainly put in many hours to make an inviting pub, split into various zones for eating, drinking and hanging out.

“Ruckle“ is a new and quite attractive word, at least for me. Not surprisingly, with an old Scandenavian connection, too. I have, on the other hand, heard of other old things like the Cooper’s Hill cheese roll as well as Royal Shrovetide Football but never before did I hear of the Hallaton Bottle Kicking each Easter:

…[a] brutal competition between rivals trying to wrestle barrels over a mile-long stretch of countryside. Hallaton Bottle Kicking is an ancient tradition, held each Easter Monday, in the village of Hallaton and neighbouring Medbourne… One “bottle”, which is a wooden cask much better suited to the rigours of the scrum than any glass item would be, is then decorated in red and white then paraded to the top of the village where the contest between Hallaton and Medbourne begins. The game is a best of three, with two “bottles” containing beer and the third completely wooden decorated bottle – which is referred to as the dummy. The outdoor sport is played across about a mile of open land and the two teams attempt to move the bottles over to the opposing team’s parish at each end of the area.

As noted in the B+B Patreon notes from last weekend, Eoghan alerted us to the closing of De Kulminator in Antwerp, a famous yet quirky beer bar with a vast selection of old bottles that created an odd test question that must be answered to qualify for entry:

Apparently they asked you what you wanted to do there – if you said drink a beer, no entry. If you said “enjoy a beer”, open sesame. But as I said, I never ran the gauntlet

One newspaper declared (testing your Dutch, not mine) “Het beste biercafé ter wereld is niet meer.” I think you can get the drift. Yet one Mr. W. Hawkes asked “What will they do with all that manky old beer?” Boak and Bailey visited in happier days in 2010, paying the price accordingly, as did The Beer Nut in 2017. Relatedly perhaps, Eric Asimov in The New York Times shared his observations on the shift in the sweet price point for best value in wine:

Good wines can come from anywhere and anybody. The value is in identifying these little-known producers and regions before they are more widely discovered, and prices go up. That requires a fair amount of trial and error and taking chances on the unknown. How long will $15 to $20 remain the sweet spot for these sorts of wine values? It’s a lot harder to find them today. While I will continue to take on this particular challenge, it’s fairer to say $20 to $30 today is what $15 to $20 used to be. But that conversation is restricted to the least expensive value rung… That underscores a key rule of value hunting: The greater the splurge, regardless of the price, the less inclined you are to explore and the more you want a sure thing.

Do we talk of value with good beer in a similar way? Does manky old ale have value? Perhaps a few do but through the arc of the rise and fall craft beer over the last twenty years, the wider market never really established the sort of constructs that provide some confidence in relative value that we see with wine. Too often commentators seem content go back to the same shallows that may have helped set up good beer for its cultural nosedive in the first place. Even as so many beers were presented and consumed as near clones of each other in an oligopolistic manner, little attention was given to advising consumers about which beer could be swapped out for what at, say 50% or 80% of the cost.  Could that change now that the kid (if not boxing) gloves are off? As you think on that, here are some notes:

Note #1: Perhaps don’t cheat on your forensic expert wife.
Note #2: “Broken toilet, no showers and farts“… yet not a pub.
Note #3: “Trends continue to oscillate week-to-week…“

And… we are back. Following up on that last note, discussions in investment circles are indicating… or at least suggesting… or maybe only postulating that the price of shares in brewing corporations may have hit bottom and are (…potentially…) ready to rise:

The central question is whether shipments will finally catch up to depletions. Analysts note that consumption trends accelerated throughout the December-February period and continued improving in March, but shipment data through February hasn’t yet reflected this strength. Multiple Wall Street firms cite distributor feedback indicating momentum has returned, particularly in scanner data showing March beer volumes up 6.5%.

At that point in the marketplace, the trends are most relevant for macro brewing. Will you invest? For What’s Brewing, Laura Hadland shared an experience at Heineken where the mega brewery approaches the task at hand from an unexpected angle:

I was baffled as to why the tour guide was giving us the in-depth view on its malt and the hallowed Heineken-A yeast, but nobody was talking about hops. At all. I even asked the question explicitly: what hops do you use? The tour guide didn’t know. Neither did the colleague that she ran off to ask. It was only when I (luckily) found myself in the company of global master brewer Willem Van Waeberghe, that I discovered the answer. The answer was, it doesn’t matter. In the Netherlands, Heineken sources hops from the US, but its licensed brewers around the world can source whatever they want. All the hops are added at the start of the boil for bitterness only. They never have a second hop addition. All of Heineken’s flavour, which is perhaps a little fruity, a touch herbaceous with just the tiniest note of aniseed, comes from the yeast esters.

Conversely perhaps, as reported by Kendall Jones, tiny Big Block Brewing in Washington State has found new flavours in old hops:

​“We got a bunch of ladders and laid them down over the blackberries and used them to get into the hops,” says Julum. “A lot of cuts and scrapes later, we had enough hops to make a batch of beer. The problem was that Sammamish State Park was in the process of removing all of the invasive species from the land, and hops are an invasive species, so we needed to do more than pick the hop flowers. We had to dig up the rhizomes so we could replant them”… Likely, Ezra Meeker was the source of the original rhizomes, as he was for so many farmers in the area at that time. Meeker primarily cultivated English Cluster hops. The Monohon hops are very likely a descendant of that variety. 

Well, likely by the time those hop rhizomes hit the continent’s Pacific side, Cluster-esque might be the better way of putting it. And Colbier Brew Co., a “Bootle-based brewery” is the subject of this week’s feature in Pellicle. “Bootle” is also another old word for a dwelling which may well be a cut above a “ruckle” but none of that is part of the story as told by Rebecca Crowe who first encounters a beer by Colbier named Falsetto:

As a lover of the darkest pint of cask beer available, the ideal of white stout is like a unicorn to me, and I must find it. Eventually, I receive a message from the team at Doctor Duncan’s, a pub on Queen’s Square near Lime Street station, who tell me it’s in their cellar and that it’ll be on soon. When I finally get a pint of Falsetto in front of me, I’m entranced by its bitter, chocolate notes. Close your eyes, and you’d swear you were drinking a dark beer, albeit not as unctuous and creamy-tasting as Colbier’s oatmeal stout, Nocturne. However, the bitterness and innovative nature of a white stout is the perfect signifier of what this Bootle-based brewery likes to do.

White stout, eh? Something like myself, I suppose. Enough of that. Next, a tale of crime at the government liquor store back home in Nova Scotia:

In 21 years of policing, RCMP Sgt. Serge Landry says he’d never seen anything like what was seized from a home in Dartmouth, N.S., just before last Christmas. After a two-month investigation into significant alcohol thefts from NSLC stores in the Halifax region, officers seized more than 450 bottles of hard alcohol worth almost $20,000 from a home on Floral Avenue. Police even seized a ledger detailing the alcohol being delivered to the home and what had been resold. “I’ve never seen it to this scale,” said Landry.

Not just alcohol. Hard alcohol. Always been this way. As a lad, I remember a summer job painting a house next to the one run by the bootlegger. Steady traffic on a Sunday afternoon, back when the government store was shut. And there was the other job at the senior’s house when one resident born before the First World War ratted out another of a similar age for running the ice delivery warehouse which contained a bootlegging operation out of the middle of the warehouse, amongst the walls of neatly stacked ice blocks.

Finally, following up on last week’s story on the effect of Gulf War III on the cost of beer packaging in India, NPR is reporting this week on another pressure that might arise as global aluminum supplies have also been affected:

Aluminum prices recently hit a four-year high, after Iran struck two large smelters of the metal in the Middle East. Both of them were major suppliers to the United States. Aluminum, which is on the list of 60 minerals deemed critical by the U.S. government, is widely used for beer and soda cans, in cars and packaging.

Well, that is it for now. Crisis and crime yet exploration, each in its way human-kind caused. And another possible positive week for the beer trade. Beer likes peace.  As we wait for the results, please check out Boak and Bailey who are posting every Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And look out for more of Stan’s new “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, as noted, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword seems to be on pause since November but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. See you next week!

Your “The Thaw Cometh! The Thaw Cometh!!” Mid-February Edition Of These Beery News Notes

Now that the temperatures have moderated from -30C at dawn way up to -3C, the nation asks itself what the hell was all that? There is no answer to the question. Fortunately, there is a second question: how to still look dapper in a Canadian winter while lugging a lot of beer? Well, this gent can help. First, walk around in one of Toronto’s well loved black and white neighbourhoods where people must wear vintage clothing. Then, bottle your homebrewed beer only in second hand O’Keefe quarts you have nicked from the upper bric-a-brac shelves of old taverns. Finally, invest in an industrial quality paper packaging printing press you keep in the basement solely for the recreation of 1950s brewery boxes. Easy! Speaking of being on one’s feet, Boak and Bailey have written about how they didn’t do a Dry January so much as a very mobile one, a habit that has continued well into February:

We didn’t set out to make a mission of this, but we realised about halfway through January that, as it happened, we hadn’t yet made a repeat visit. That made us wonder if we could keep it up for the remaining few weeks. We were particularly conscious that we’d tended to stick to tried and trusted favourites last year. In fact, in 2025, over a quarter of our logged Bristol pub visits were to just two pubs – The King’s Head and The Swan with Two Necks. You might have noticed the word ‘logged’ and be wondering exactly what that means. Well, Jess, an accountant and spreadsheet nerd, of course keeps track of every pub we visit.

What a good realization! We have nothing like that possiblity here so much replicate 1950s Toronto to amuse ourselves but this comes a very good second. In the US of A, something else appears to be amuse or perhaps console according to BMI :

Beer posted positive $$ growth in 4 of the last 5 wks, and Jan 2026 is on track to be beer’s best monthly trend in years, at least in these channels. Including wine & spirit RTDs in the mix brightens the picture even more; broader beer + RTD category $$ grew more than 5% with wine & spirit RTDs adding close to 2 full pts in scans. 

Booze up! And somewhat similarly Ed stood up for the honour of Guinness this week with a response to what he called a a hatchet job on the Guinness’ Open Gate brewery in London published by The Guardian:

For some reason restaurant critics put the boot in more than any other type of reviewer… I was going to the brewery as part of the CIBD Southern section’s AGM, but first we had to do the business part to do at Diageo’s HQ.  I don’t know what deal the CIBD had done with Diageo or if we were subsidised, but we paid a tenner. This gave us pie and mash, which was nice, and a pint of Guinness (brewed in Dublin). I was keen to have somethng brewed on site though, so I had a hazy IPA next, which was nice enough. I think the ABV was a bit hefty, as on top of the three pints of Guinness I’d had I was defintely feeling pissed by the time I’d fininished it. So there you have it. The Guardian journo’s main complaint seemed to be that you had to take a lift to the toilets.

For others, the trip to the pub and then to the toilet is even easier. They are visiting the pub virtually from home, a remote non-work arrangement of sorts:

The 24-year-old from Yeovil, Somerset, regularly tunes into the feed from Morgan’s Arcade Bar in Carlisle, Cumbria – despite never having been there or anywhere near. What hooks Katie in is seeing different people come and go: the women enjoying a work party, the couple singing along with the musician, the young lad trying to chat up a girl at the bar… On some nights Morgan’s Arcade Bar, which can only fit around 60 people in it, has up to 5,000 viewers on its livestream at any one time. But like other bar streams, it has been subject to bans and restrictions for reasons they don’t quite understand. Bar owner Morgan Taylor has been streaming for nearly nine months. He noticed a huge rise in viewers over Christmas, then a few weeks ago his account was deleted.

Cass Enright got out of the house and on the road in his latest installment of A Quick Beer takes us to Montreal – a favourite destination of mine – and revisits some of the great brewpubs there in a video with this intro:

Join us on a step back in time as we have A Quick Beer at three of Montreal’s original brewpubs! Discover the enduring charms of Dieu du Ciel!, L’amère à boire, and Le Cheval Blanc, three spots that have been serving up delicious beer for decades. Although Montreal offers many modern breweries and taprooms nowadays, some of our fondest beery memories over the years have been here, and they’re all still going strong.

For me, it’s L’Barouf on rue St-Denis. If you are ever looking for me, check there. Also all about winnowing the better and the best, Pete shared some firm thoughts in his column in The Times this week, always welcome sight:

My beef is not with hazy pales — those original examples were pretty good. But if you don’t need to worry about balance or clarity in the beer, and you’re throwing in enough hops to cover up any off-flavours from brewing mistakes, a hazy IPA is very easy for a mediocre brewer to make. From a drinker’s point of view, if you grew up with soft drinks and don’t like the taste of actual beer, it’s perfect. It’s also great for Instagram — everyone can see you’re not drinking a boring, mainstream beer. But instead you’re drinking a boring craft beer. A boring, one-dimensional alcoholic fruit smoothie in a gaudy can with hop monsters or skeletons on it. If I wanted to drink sour grapefruit juice, I’d buy some Tropicana and leave it in the sun for a bit. 

The many botches of “craft” is a venerable topic which even comes with its own primodrial gospel but it is true that for all its eager keener passion craft never seems to fail to find a way to fail.  Nice to see that we have a paper of record confirming what Pete called the “sustained decline.” Viva crystal malt! Viva!! Viva!!! And Phil Mellows guided me to this article in The Caterer on the why to Pete’s what including this suggested impetus:

“…we are beginning to see the movement of some younger adult drinkers towards nostalgia brands, and given our history and heritage, we feel well-placed to meet this trend through some marketing and awareness driving activity.” Brookfield Drinks has launched a trial bringing long-established premium Scottish lager Kestrel back on draught. Brookfield managing director Nigel McNally says: “We’ve shown that a brand that’s nostalgic, like Kestrel, can be repositioned and revitalised. “Most pubs are serving the same products, and the trade’s been guilty of allowing brands which aren’t authentic onto the bar. Alcohol by volume (abv) have also come down, and I think overall customers feel they’ve been short-changed. A return to brands with heritage and nostalgia is offering customers a point of difference.”

Nostalgia and getting short changed? One must be on one’s toes. Which is related to Lars’ new maxim: “if you don’t know how the beer is made then, no matter what the beer is named, you have no idea what kind of beer it is.”

Speaking of no knowing, The Beer Nut made a confession this week that I suspect is made on behalf of many of us:

Anyone who pays attention to trends within microbrewing will have noticed in recent years the explosion in variety of proprietary hop products. I don’t think these assorted extracts and powders and boosters were ever meant to have a consumer-facing role, but brewers seem to love them, and love letting us know that they’ve used them. Does that get them a discount from the supplier? I wouldn’t be surprised. For my part, I can’t help wondering if these enhancers actually enhance the beers in any real way. I’ve certainly never identified any pattern among them: which ones to look out for and which ones aren’t worth the paper their patents were filed on.

Note #1: Ludlow prices!!!
Note #2: Laura’s top tap rooms.
Note #3: Jeff doxxed.
Note #4: Burton Union Pr0n!
Note #5: Actually, no you can’t. You’d die.

The British Royal Navy has recently announced it is cutting booze rations in the service, limiting intake to 14 unit per week while on board. The Telegraph in its emailed newsletter presented a few responses to the news from readers:

Jenny Jones, however, recalled an age of largesse: “Many years ago in Malta, my husband and I were invited on board a Royal Navy ship that was giving a party. The atmosphere was convivial and, thanks to attentive stewards, I was able to enjoy several gin and tonics before dinner. “On departing, it seemed to me that the gangway had become a lot steeper. Back on dry land, our host asked how many drinks I’d had. When I said three, he told me that in fact I’d had nine, as naval tots are about triple the size of what one would get in a pub.”

Ah, Jenny Jones… what’s that? Not the same one? Fine. Me, I was once invited with a gang up the plank and onto a Canadian navy ship helpfully docked a walk from the Halifax taverns by a pal’s navy boyfriend. Among the minty green paid we worked our way though a number of 25 cent beers. I expect that sort of service is no longer offered.

The feature this week at Pellicle was written by Newt Albiston who shares his thoughts on drinking in Epping, just north of Greater London the tough town where he grew up which lives with division:

The day I return to Epping, my first trip home in some time, I can feel the tension, and the hesitance. The high street is pretty quiet, and there are lingering looks as I make my way past the various coffee chains and charity shops. Signs of the change in mood are everywhere: Union flags fly at half-mast on lamp posts, as if to declare the death of Britain as she once was, shadowed by the residue of torn-off patriotic stickers. Although I am instantly greeted by familiar faces when I walk into The Duke, the tension is still present in the quietness of the venue.

I like this: “…no fancy ginger beer or small-batch kombuch…” Perhaps related to The Duke, Stan guided us to a question this week – “what’s that smell?” Or rather…

“Olfaction helps shape our cultures, although it often does so unknowingly or without us noticing,” says (Inger) Leemans, who led the Odeuropa project. “When we talk about cultural heritage, we can think about religious rituals, but we can also think about specific scents that we’ve been cherishing and living with for a long time.”

Cherish. Hmm… I spent a good chunk of my teens in Truro, NS where the smell wasn’t always cherished and I am mindful of that reference The Breweries of Kingston & The St. Lawrence Valley by Steve Gates to a brewery a couple hundred years ago near my current place of work at City Hall which doubled as a pig sty. The next brewery to the north itself had a manure pit.  My point is that there were no scents without the full sensory array around it. Did 1890s Mild pair well with coal dust? Did Porter marry well with the pong of streets filled with horses? Perhaps we can never know.

And Charlotte Cook, brewer and scribbler, at took us along to Asturias, Spain for Everyday Drinking and shared her thoughts on the food and the cider:

When you taste the intensely rich stew, you can understand why cider rather than wine prevails in the north—the sour and fizzy is needed to cut through, cleanse the palate, and prepare you to dive in again. Cider is omnipresent in Asturias. As you walk around the town center of Oviedo on a Sunday morning, as families returning from church mix with football fans heading to an entirely different type of cathedra, cider is everywhere. Before 11 am, people will be drinking a bottle of cider for the table. Spaniards are famed for their ability to drink until the wee hours and still make it to work, school, or church as if nothing has happened. And having a little tipple of cider in the morning isn’t seen as such a stain on your character as it is at home.

Finally, some very heartfelt tributes were shared after the news of the death of beer writer Des de Moor like this from David J:

I think a lot about the pints we had one night in South London where he held court, sang songs and was so warm to everyone.

Pete also remembered Des the singer:

Des was a man of many layers. Years after the event, I discover my first interaction with him was buying the 12” remix of Charlton Heston by Stump – that was him, as half of the Irresistible Force. He made the Popbitch newsletter as Secretary of the Ramblers Association (moor, geddit?)… He was a great singer, a walking encylopedia. An absolute stalwart of judging the World Beer Awards. Never once heard him angry, pissed off, or anything other than kind and decent.

There are many more. His Wikipedia bio explains his musical side. Here he is singing Bowie and, here, an earlier solo album. By all accounts a wonderful guy. A sad loss.

Until next time, please check out Boak and Bailey who are posting every Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And look out for more of Stan’s new “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, as noted, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword seems to be on pause since November but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.

Your Sunny Yet Still Cold But Not Standoffish Beery News Notes For Early February

February flies by. That’s just the way it is. Good time to take stock. Good time to eat the little chocolates filled with beer brought by a visitor from Belgium. Early review: the “…chocolate is dry and dark so a lack of sweetness in the kriek left it a bit stark but the Palm was that bit richer.” Not sure I am chowing down on these outside of a winter like this but all quite a bit better than expected. Paid endorsements welcome. Winter was also on the mind and under the feet of Jordan as he wrote about the weather at the end of last month or perhaps just his efforts to get about in it:

Monday, Jan 26th: The deep freeze is well and truly upon us, and looking at the forecast for the next couple of weeks, it looks like we’re in four-layer territory. If your primary mode of transport and exercise is walking, then -25 with the wind chill does you no favours. Besides, the sidewalks are not shovelled in any meaningful way. Dry and cold is a great combination to ensure you’re reminded of the various injuries you’ve had over the years. Sometimes I get the unprompted sense memory of an ankle ligament rolling.

Also looking at the world as it exists below the knee, Stan shared some research he has done on the word Hopfenstopfen and its relation to a certain pair of boots:

The shoes were worn by a worker processing hops. When a bag was filled, a worked would jump into it, stomping down the hops to make sure the bag was full. When I dug this out, I wondered if these could have been called Hopfenstopgen boots. That’s because in Hop Queries Vol. 4, No. 6, I wrote about dry hopping in Germany in the 19th century. That was called Hopfenstopfen, which can be translated at hop plug. Simon Moosleitner, a subscriber in Germany, suggested there is more to think about…

I won’t spoil the fun but speaking of getting the boot in, late last week in VinePair, Dave Infante wrote about the effect of the homicidal ICE intrusion into Minneapolis on the beer trade in the city including this from Drew Hurst of Bauhaus Brew Labs:

You can see it in the firm’s sales figures. Taproom sales are down 40 percent compared to January 2025. “It’s a wildly unsustainable thing,” says Hurst. “None of us signed up to have to live through a federal occupation and figure out how to run a business at the same time.” Not that it was easy before the onslaught: Bauhaus wrapped this month last year down around 30 percent from January 2024. Craft brewers have been struggling to find their way for years in the face of shifting demand, new competition, and rising costs. In Minneapolis and Saint Paul, they’re doing all that with the MAGA jackboot on their necks.

At first I thought it was an odd angle but then realized it illustrates the principle that beer prefers peace as well as how quickly that peace can be lost. Dave also shared in his email updates that he was told to “stick to beer” and that some paying subscribers to his newsletter Fingers canceled their subscriptions. Perhaps if those folk didn’t “stick to” amateur neo-fascism it might be better. Funny how the “stay in your lane” crowd don’t show up for this sort of politicization within the pub:

A beer tap labelled “Rachel Thieves” has appeared on the bar of a Hertfordshire pub protesting Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves introducing crippling tax hikes. Anyone ordering the beer will receive only water. The Green Dragon in Flaunden, which is run by publican Chris Ghazarian, has added the spoof cask ale pump badge as a protest – telling customers that pints of this particular beer are “very bitter” and cost more than anything else on the bar and anyone ordering it will receive only water. Speaking to the British national press, Ghazarian said: “They find it hilarious. I obviously don’t make them pay for it.” 

On the other side of the planet, a very difference approach has been taken in Australia:

The Albanese government is seeking to put a hold on increases to the beer excise for the first time in 40 years. The Customs Tariff Amendment (Draught Beer) Bill 2025 seeks to pause the indexation of customs duty rates for draught beer for two years from August 1, 2025. Currently, the beer excise is indexed twice yearly to stay in line with the consumer price index, with Australian beer, wine, and spirit importers and producers saddled with some of the highest rates in the world…  Addressing the House of Representatives, Anthony Albanese said he was “proud” to introduce the Bill, “one of the most popular commitments that we took to the election”.

Boak and Bailey also wrote about another sort of pressure to conform but the context was less confrontational – just writing about their thoughts on a craft brewery:

Maybe that post was a bit too snarky, with hindsight, but it certainly didn’t warrant trolling impersonation accounts on Twitter, general abuse that last for months, or a stalking campaign. That was, as you might imagine, quite traumatising, and probably did make us nervous about being critical of breweries in the supposedly cuddly craft brewing sector. It didn’t stop us, but it had a ‘chilling effect’ on how freely and frequently we felt able to express ourselves. It’s easy to say “Don’t mince your words” but minced words are less likely to lead to sleepless nights. We can totally see why some people might decide it’s not worth the trouble, and certainly wouldn’t judge them.

On reflection, I have probably benefitted from folk starting with the assumption that I am a bit of an arsehole. I lose my sleep over other things.

Note #1: Take a news event and ram it like a square peg in a round hole.
Note #2: Martin at another fabulous pub, this time inordinately bright.

Ron TV continues to impress. This week he’s been presenting an extended interview with Mitch Steele and, like the comment maker Oscar, I am drawn to the brief introductory electro-thrash almost as much as the subjects of these interviews. Part 1 of the interview is over thirty-seven minutes long with Part 2 clocking in at thirty-three. Set aside an hour or so of your time. More if, like me, you keep replaying the first six seconds and that mesmerizing theme music over and over and over.  Good multi-media breakout for Ron – even if it likely doesn’t pay the bills. One a similar note, Ray of B+B on the prospects of a career in writing:

This is excellent. Depressing, but excellent. My response has been to give up, basically, and accept that writing is a thing I do on the side, while something else pays the bills. I also like that thing, so it’s fine, but I get sad thinking what I could have achieved if writing was my full-time job.

Perhaps also on the theme of less is more, Guinness 0 also continues to impress me and Pete‘s brief review does not surprise:

There are many great 0.5 per cent stouts from small indie brewers, but Guinness 0.0, which took years to develop, is indistinguishable from the real thing.

I noticed one thing when writing this. It is branded as “Guinness 0” in Canada but “Guinness 0.0” in the UK. Why? Is it a different formulation here and there? Whatever it is, I am finally seeing a point to NA beers. But things will be going in a slightly different direction in UK neighbourhood if one permit applicant has their way:

The shop also sought an amendment to the condition currently imposed on the licence… to “No super-strength beer, lagers or ciders of 6.5% ABV (alcohol by volume) or above shall be sold at the premises with the exception of Dragon Stout and Guinness Export beers.” The applicant’s agent, Frank Fender, told Bedford Borough Council’s licensing sub-committee (Thursday, January 29), that these “super strength” beers are not usually the “street drinkers’ choice of drink”. “They are they are widely consumed by members of the Afro-Caribbean community, and obviously this shop wants to be inclusive,” he said. This claim was backed up by Chris Hawks, the council’s licensing compliance and enforcement officer. He said: “What Frank says about Dragon Stout and Guinness Export is spot on.

For years, the word authentic was bounced around in the face of glitter and haze. That plan in Bedford sounds like authenticity to me. Similarly perhaps, crossing the Atlantic, Matty C has written some notes on the US beer scene for the supplier Get ‘Er Brewed‘s webpage and found something of a revivial going on:

Nostalgia is one play many breweries seem to be using. During my time in both Portland and in Colorado, (the latter of which I visit regularly to see family,) I noticed that many drinkers seem to be choosing the classics made by more established breweries. Allagash White, the Belgian style witbier from the brewery of the same name wasn’t just on tap everywhere in Portland, but it felt like everyone was drinking it too. The beer carries the kind of hushed reverence that money can’t buy, and demonstrated to me why establishing a core beer as part of your brewery’s identity is essential for longevity.

This is quite a reversal as, you will recall, in 2019 flagships were considered a dead concept: the “concept of a flagship in almost all ways maps to an earlier and obsolete way of thinking.” Futurisms rarely stand up to audit but it’s good to know, in an era too concerned with branding and other misinformations, that identity in the form of what is in the glass has made a come back. One never knows what is really going on otherwise. As with the news about the bills left unpaid and the suppliers left in the lurch by Rogue, James Beeson in The Grocer shared that the level of insolvency at failed Keystone Brewing had hit almost £15 million. Heavens! Remember when we all spoke of community?

Sticking with things in the USA, the feature in Pellicle is a portrait of Eckhart Beer Co. in NYC by Ariana DiValentino with its focus on central Euro lagers and foods that share the same theme:

The menu focuses primarily on Central European dishes that match the beers’ origins. There is a brat plate, and spaetzle gratin, and kartoffelpuffer (German-style potato pancakes), which you can order fried in oil or beef tallow. But there’s also a falafel dog, an Italian cold cuts sandwich, and a Moroccan-spiced ratatouille with vegan lemon yogurt. The variety of cultural influences feels very reflective of the brewery’s New York City context. “I wanted to offer food that supports the beer. It didn’t have to be Central European per se, but that felt like a natural foundation,”

Sounds like a great place for all. Not so in Japan where one establishment has embraced ageism:

The concept of age restrictions and minimum requirements is commonplace around the world. But have you ever heard of an establishment imposing a maximum age limit? Now, a Tokyo chain pub has set a ban on older customers – in order to try to maintain the raucous, fun atmosphere for which it is known. Tori Yaro Dogenzaka is an izakaya (an affordable Japanese pub) situated in Japan’s capital city. This year, the establishment propped up a sign outside the entrance, informing customers of the new rules. The sign said: ‘Entrance limited to customers between the ages of 29 and 39. This is an izakaya for younger generations. Pub for under 40s only.’

I wasn’t wanting to go there anyway. Screw them. That’s it. As as I sulk in a mode Japonais, please check out Boak and Bailey who continue to post every Saturday. adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And look out for more of Stan’s new “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, as noted, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword seems to be on pause since November but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.

Your Happy Merry And Even Supportive Beery News Notes For The Week Of Blue Monday

How does it feel? That’s what Blue Monday asks of you. Katie was particularly aggrieved as last Monday was her birthday. So first of all –  happy birthday! Apparently, Blue Monday is perhaps a floater with not 100% agreement on which date it is.* Like Easter but without the medieval calculation to give some assurance as with the death date of Jesus. So you have options and need advice. Fortunately I am full of good advice on this topic. Me, I prefer to celebrate what I call “Bleu Monday” on which I eat a lot of cheese. Also, it seems to also have been originally a term that in Germany was “der blaue Montag.” and then United States when workers told the boss to shove it, as we read in 1838:

Drink till all is blue. Cracking bottles till all is blue.

Blue meant the haze apparently. Or perhaps the slightly wicked as in “blue laws.” I dunno. But I like that it also has it’s own anthem, even if it’s a wee bit Dieter Sprockets.

Beer Marketers’ Insights have a note about a little blip that could be the beginning of a bit of a bump for beer:

Pretty much everything was comin’ up roses in beer and beyond for the first week of the new year in Circana multi-outlet + convenience channels. Beer, wine and spirits all grew for latest week thru Jan 4, 2026 (including Dec 29-31). Can’t glean much from just one week, but interestingly, craft beer’s 4.4% $$ gain outpaced total beer (+2.9%) for period. Multiple top craft fams saw sales pop for the week including New Belgium, Sierra Nevada and Elysian each up low double-digits by $$, Lagunitas up 8.5% and Bell’s (+5%), Shiner (+4%) and Blue Moon (+3%) up low-to-mid singles.

And these US market numbers exclude non-alcoholic beers so it’s more beery than we often seen in the booster stats announcements. But they could also indicate that fine spirit of “fuck it!” that one finds in a time of crisis. Speaking of which, can you write about the crisis in US hard liquor sales without mentioning the tariffs that have effectively cut out a massive share of your customer bases? VinePair seems to think so:

And though distilleries share similarities with other business closures — from layoffs to managing creditors — there’s uniquely challenging inventory to deal with: barrels of aging whiskey. “They’re a little bit of a problematic asset because they can only be sold to someone who has the license to hold them,” says Will Schragis, managing partner at WellSpun Consulting. “Barrels are in-bond, so they’re non-tax paid. There are only certain licensees and other companies that can acquire them.”

No mention of, you know, lobbying for free trade as a recourse makes me wonder if there is a ex-nay on the t-word going on, lest one draw wrathful attention away from Greenland. H/T to Jeff. It’s all about getting the spend in country it seems and Americans are doing their part:

Surveys have shown that consumers feel pessimistic about the economy as they worry about tariffs and the jobs market. More than half of voters believe President Trump is “losing the battle against inflation”, according to a Harvard Caps/Harris poll of 2,204 registered voters released last month. Yet despite the economic gloom, data suggests that spending has risen across all income groups.

Mikey Seay shared a few thoughts that are not unrelated to this moment:

It’s the price. I struggle with the price of NA and low ABV beers. This is my Dry January issue. I can get behind drying out for a month. Or (what I am trying) focusing on drinking lower ABV beers. But there is a hidden suck. Low alcohol/no alcs are priced the same as regular beers, sometimes even double. It’s hard for me to get over that. It’s like, I am getting ripped off, and I have a hard time shaking that. But I must. I know it costs a brewery close to the same to make a NA or low beer, so they gotta charge the same. And that cost trickles down to the stores and bars. So I gotta get over myself there..  Enjoy my low ABV beer, and don’t be a baby about what I am paying for it. I must do this for myself and the business of beer.

One must spend. Do one’s part. Think of England and all that. One of things I appreciate locally is that Guinness 0 is $11.95 at the LCBO and the regular draught is $13.50. Trouble is… no Guinness 0 to be found in the province these days. Guinness is experiencing a height of fame and fortune – and there are good reasons for that, according to Jeff:

The world is unstable, especially for young drinkers who spend half their paychecks on small apartments. Young people are threatened by more dangers than any generation in decades: huge college debt, a machine-learning era that may eliminate entire sectors of jobs, climate change, political instability, the corruption of media and the vitriol that marks society. This is not a time for risk-taking. It’s a moment when people are taking refuge in safe ports and reliable brands. Guinness isn’t alone in this appeal—the popularity of old Mexican brands follows the same script—but it has the advantage of being a 4.2% black ale that comes with a helping of theatricality and a creamy head. It is both safe and also different from other global brands.

I think some of this turns on that 4.2%. And low calories. Theme shift. Did you know you can watch RonTV?  He’s got a YouTube channel going:

You might have noticed that I’ve posted a few videos on YouTube over the last couple of days. There will be more to follow. It’s part of my drive to document and preserve. Initially, it’s mostly material that I acquired for my book on the 1970s, “Keg!”. I conducted several Zoom interviews Which I think are worth making public. Especially as the interviewees are all past retirement age. And won’t be around forever. I’m particularly keen on recording Derek Prentice’s recollections of more than half a century in brewing. Despite my urging, Derek shows no interest in writing his memoirs. But he’s happy to be interviewed and share his memories. I already have around two hours of video. And plan to record several more. Covering his time at Youngs and Fullers.

Next, Stan has published his newest edition of his monthly Hop Queries newsletter and there is much to consider. For one thing, he shared that chart of total US hop acreage which indicates the plantings of 2025 roughly match those of both 1997 and 2008, both years before further drastic drops. He also explained what BLP flash frozen hops are:

The idea began with hop farmer Jim Schlichting, who upon retiring bought 40 acres of land next to his home and began growing hops… Basically, he freezes the hops fresh off the bines and ships them in vacuum sealed packages along with reusable ice packs. The cones should remain frozen until brew day. After thawing them, brewers may use them as they would unkilned hops, replacing each pound of pellets in a recipe with four pounds of cones. Blue Lake markets the hops to both homebrewers and commercial breweries.

Whenever I read that some blog or newsletter on beer won some award or another I always think to myself “looks like Stan didn’t apply again this year.”

Note #1: to bar or to not bar ICE.
Note #2: medical thoughts from amateurs.
Note #3: the Magnus Lounge on the ferry to Orkney.
Note #4: are people outside of the beer echo chamber aware that many many others have quite happily active social lives… without beer?**

And Jordan continues to diarize*** his weeks in detail, appointments in pub and breweries plus the scribbling for magazines and books along with the totalling up of spreadsheets. He’s found that the current bottom line in Ontario is not good news:

Among the various hats I wear, I’m historian for the Ontario Craft Brewers and I get to update their timeline on a yearly basis. Since I’m updating the spreadsheet with news throughout the year, this gives me the opportunity to get paid something for the information I’m collating. …the end of the year has been brutal on breweries. Both Goose Island and Blue Moon have decided Toronto has beaten them. If the corporate guys are out, you know things are bad. It looks like 30 physical breweries closed in Ontario in 2025 and something like four contract breweries, but who cares? Some physical breweries switched to contract status and some ownership structures are more or less impossible to parse. Can you really say Indie isn’t a contract brand because of Birroteca at Eataly? 

Can you really? Shifting from the crunch of numbers to the stream of consciousness, it’s a good thing ATJ prepared us with the subtitle of his piece this week – “an amiable ramble” – as this letter of love to beer culture touches on every corner of the pub and glass experience other than the variations on paper towel dispensers one might encounter, such as:

It is about the rattling bus snaking through the countryside with a pub at the end of the journey, the train skirting the wave battered coast with a pub at the next station, or maybe two or three, the walk through the rain, the nature of the game; under the hill all of us go at the final stage of our life but beer can be used to celebrate that passing, reconnect your memory with a swig and another swig, raise a full glass to the memory of dear old matey they all chorused, may he be never forgotten, but as soon as the rain stopped they walked out of the pub never to think of their dead friend ever again, for they were alive and he wasn’t.

Poor old matey! Gone and soon forgotten. Interesting legal news if you are into doing your own thing, a category of which I appreciate many of you fall into according to your own tumble of choice. The news is that the US District Court in Northern Texas assessed submissions in a case and last Saturday (odd date for a ruling to be issued) held:

…these documents reflect a shared First Amendment vision: Free Speech, Press, Petition, and Assembly rights combine to protect and elevate the public discourse necessary to self-government—not self-expression in all forms, and certainly not the libertine “expressive conduct” absolutism envisioned by
Plaintiff Spectrum WT… Spectrum failed to enforce its intended “PG-13” format during a drag show held off campus, as professional and student performers tasked with “breaking” and “destabilizing” sexual norms engaged in sexualized conduct more akin to a striptease…

Libertines! Libertines at a university?!? Now, keep in mind what “WT stands for: West Texas A&M University. The students of which the court determined included minors. Perhaps in Amarillo the age of majority is 35. Who knows. But it did remind me of the 2003 ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada in in the case R. v. Clay:

…the liberty right within s. 7 is thought to touch the core of what it means to be an autonomous human being blessed with dignity and independence in “matters that can properly be characterized as fundamentally or inherently personal”. With respect, there is nothing “inherently personal” or “inherently private” about smoking marihuana for recreation. The appellant says that users almost always smoke in the privacy of their homes, but that is a function of lifestyle preference and is not “inherent” in the activity of smoking itself. 

Lifestyle! Thankfully, the old wack-tabac is now legal in these parts. But these matters, in case you ever wondered, one has to be on top of one’s right to have fun as one wishes. The law of the libertines’ lifestyles may need more research.

Finally, Pellicle has a short survey out about their next steps:

It’s one thing to run a magazine based on the things we like most, but to grow and bloom into something bigger, we need our readers’ insights and support. That’s why we’ve created this survey: We want to hear what you want from Pellicle in 2026, and use your input to plan our next moves. For the next two weeks, we’re opening up the floor to learn what Pellicle means to you, and where you’d like to see it go next. The 2026 Pellicle Reader Survey is just a seven-to-10-minute task, and you can easily complete it on your phone. Plus, you can opt in to win one of three prizes…

As you know, I would pay to take a survey so the whole idea of prizes is just insane!  While you are busy with that, please check out Boak and Bailey who are posting every Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And look out for more of Stan’s new “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, as noted, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword seems to be on pause since November but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.

*It is, however, reliably closer to the start of 2027 than the end of 2025.
**I find this eager rush to shimmy right up next to the nutster RFK Jr somewhere between bizarre and disgusting: “…In explaining that approach, officials pointed to the social context in which alcohol is often consumed – its role in bringing people together to bond and socialize, while creating shared experiences – summed up by the idea that ‘there’s probably nothing healthier than having a good time with friends in a safe way.’ ” That’s two possible bits of bootlickery this week. A better take on the moment.
***Boak and Bailey do something along a similar line with their regular beers of the week posts on Patreon: “Running with Spectres was also on excellent form, much to Jess’s regret the following day.“

The Even More Fabulous Yet Slightly Chill Mid-January 2026 Beery News Notes

“CORK HEAD! CORK HEAD!!“

There really is no need for any further update this week is there. Andreas Krennmair posted an image of the “old interior of Schneider Weißbierbrauerei, presumably from before the rebuild 1901-1903” and this scene above was one of the tiny vignettes sitting in the back of the overall bar scene.  I can’t figure out if these gents are playing that old favourite, a game of “I’m a doggie, cork my brainpan!” or… the means by which this particular men’s club informed a candidate that they did not pass the initiation process. I find the physics involved problemative but, you know, art.

First off, some excellent reporting out of The Soo on pricing after Ontario’s expansion of beer sales to corner stores compared to grocery stores, the big brewery owned TBS as well as the government’s own booze agency the LCBO;

The editorial team bought two beers, a mass produced lager and a craft beer, as well as two bottles of wine from several locations around the city to find the best – and worst – deals in Sault Ste. Marie… A tall can of Molson Canadian will run you $3 at the LCBO, compared to progressively worse deals of $3.03 at Rome’s Independent, $3.14 at the Beer Store, and $3.81 at Circle K. For a can of Great Lakes Brewery’s Octopus Wants to Fight, the results are tighter – coming in at $3.75 at all locations but Circle K, where the surly octopus comes out to $4.04 per can. All told, a Canadian is 21.2 per cent cheaper at the LCBO than at Circle K, and Octopus Wants to Fight is 7 per cent cheaper everywhere other than Circle K.

I would point out something about that otherwise excellent research. Circle K sometimes has a nutty nutty sale price for a few pretty decent Ontario craft brews. I pop in once in a while when I am picking up a tank of gas just to check in.

And while I have been known to hover in and about the snack aisle of corner stores, I am not a taproom devotee. Too often they strike me as car dealership showrooms – “would you like to see the latest model except (in a fourdoor / with even more Citra)?” – but it was interesting to see Stan consider B+B’s thoughts on the key underlying principle involved;

It appears I may regularly come across taprooms with personalities than Boak & Bailey, but I wouldn’t argue cookie cutter establishments aren’t abundant in the US. Also, B&B tend to write short paragaphs and I try to stick to one. Their following words zero in on what I value in drinking establishments, that they are “run by human beings.” The others, without personality, I tend to forget. I acknowledge they exist, but I don’t have to think about them.

Speaking of places run by human beings, we have a new beer blogger alert. Colston Crawford, the recently retired pub and beer columnist with the Derby Telegraph has decided to continue sharing his thoughts on the topic including how the notion came to him:

It was a lunch at The Crispin in Great Longstone, in the Peak District, a week after I finished which firmed up the idea in my head. The food, the drink, the service, the ambience, was so good. I sat there thinking, if I still wrote a beer column, this one would be easy. I could dash it off right now. I’ve made two more visits to The Crispin since, the first to confirm that the previous one wasn’t a fluke, then the second was unplanned. I was with friends in a party of five, walking on New Year’s Eve morning, but the venue they’d fancied for lunch wasn’t open. The Crispin was five minutes away and a superb lunch followed.

There’s a lot of good advice in there. It is easy to keep a low pressure blog about something you have a general interest in. A striking experience will make for a good story. And it’s good to review the experience a couple of times to get the facts straight, too.

And Boak and Bailey shared an extended thread of thoughts on why people in the UK have cut back their visits to the pub with plenty their own interesting thoughts and those of others who joined in. I agree with their thought #7:

7. Basically, we’re not convinced the pub crisis is especially acute *right now*. In 20 years of blogging, and nearly half a century of being alive, we’ve never really known a time when pubs weren’t doomed and in decline. 

One of the things that concerns me about that form of doomsaying is that it always seems to be decontextualized as if pubs closing is the only difference since 1976.  Fewer are also going to church, too, over that same 50 years of existence. Many more play video games than before that point and I would expect more tofu is sold in the NATO countries. Preserving past practices as opposed to preparing to guide them through change is a bit of a fool’s errand.

Note #1: only available in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.
Note #2: Beer’s “Santa Claus Rally”.

Me, I’ve never developed a taste for collaboration beers but apparently the revenue authorities in Finland have, as The Beer Nut noted.  The EBCU has taken a position on the matter:

Finland is currently considering new excise-tax guidance that would effectively make many collaboration beers impossible for small breweries. Under the draft interpretation, if a beer shows more than one brewery’s name or logo (as collaborations typically do), it could be treated as “licensed production” and the breweries could lose their small-brewery tax relief for the entire year. This would impact not only Finnish breweries, but also imports and international collaborations—ultimately reducing choice for beer consumers.

This is an excellent example of the sorts of issues related to identity that can pop up in law. Obviously, if the non-brewing collaborator (let’s call them “the collaborator”) insists on putting their intellectual property in the form of a logo on a product, they are saying to some degree that the product is their work. Yet, for taxation categorization, that logo placement is argued to not indicate that the work is theirs but, instead, only the work of the brewer (let’s call them the collaboratee”.) I have no stake in the matter and have no idea how Finnish taxation policy plays out in term of brewers compared to cheesemakers or lumber yards – but I do have one raised eyebrow when I see these sorts of statements as part of the EBCU’s argument:

Collaboration beers are one of the joys of modern beer culture…  we believe consumers deserve choice, diversity and fairness. Collaboration beers enrich the beer landscape, strengthen friendships across borders and introduce consumers to new styles and tastes…

Wouldn’t the better argument be that collaboration beers are just a fun reciprocal staff training exercises for brewers that is only, for tax purposes, a businees expense and a burden upon revenue that is of little interest to consumers? After all, if one cannot detect the taste of collaboration beer… does it really actually exist?

Jeff had some interesting thoughts this week on hopeful hints he might be seeing in the US hop market and what it may mean about how breweries are reacting to the retraction, concluding:

…a last comment from me. As we exit the period of craft beer’s novelty era, when breweries made dozens of IPAs every year, it looks like it’s impacting not just the amount of hops brewers are buying, but the diversity. When I talk to brewers about new hop varieties, they are often hazy about them and most are not sampling every new one that comes out. Brewers seem to be more interested in hop products as a way of enhancing their beer. These products focus on the most popular hop varieties, which increases the “stickiness” of the major varieties.

Speaking of varieties, have a click on that image to the right. It’s a list of the top 100 plantings of France grapes posted by the American Association of Wine Economists the other day drawn from an agency of France’s agriculture ministry. I don’t have much comment about it other than to note, despite the pop culture slur, how much good old merlot* is still grown as mentioned by E. Asimov the other day in his discussion of wines you may want to explore.

Good news for cideries and brewers of New York. In this week’s “State of the State” speech, Governor Hochul announced support for local producers, as noted by KK in related to cider makers:

New York is the country’s leading hard cider producer, boasting more active cideries than any other state. Our cider industry has grown substantially over the last ten years, generating over a billion dollars in total economic impact for New York, yet there still remains untapped agri-tourism potential to explore. To support the industry and tap into the robust agri-tourism opportunity that cider presents, Governor Hochul will work with the New York Cider Association to establish New York as the State of Cider, marketing the orchards, tasting rooms, and food experiences that could become anchor destinations for visitors across the country. These actions will strengthen rural economies, uplift the exceptional work of local businesses, and establish New York as the foremost destination for American hard cider.

The Governor also indicated the “need for modernizing licensing across the board, from sports bars and cafes to airport lounges, hotels, and movie theaters.”

Conversely perhaps, Pellicle‘s feature this week is a post mortem by William Georgi of the Dutch brewery Nevel Wild Ales which had lofty and noble goals linked with but quite experimental standards:

“We were doing two expensive and time-consuming things at the same time,” he says. “Making a complex product that only a small selection of people actually like, while trying to set up a network of local farmers. A food forest like this is wonderful, but you can’t use it to make beer, as it doesn’t host perennial one-year crops”… Social sustainability was equally important for Nevel. The network of local producers Mattias established for sourcing ingredients—from hops and barley to chestnuts and kiwi fruit—showed him the challenges of farming at a small scale. “It isn’t economically viable at all,” he says. “Even if there’s a living wage being paid, the price doesn’t take into account the fact that most people harvesting the crop are volunteers. 

It’s pretty clear that the plan was not designed to pay its own way. Volunteer labour and crowdfunding plus unbudgeted expenses like organic certification were certainly signed that the business as a business was build on a weak foundation but I like one conclusion that was drawn from the experience: “…I don’t think Nevel failed. I hope I planted a lot of seeds in people’s minds about how things can be made differently.”

There was an excellent example of the old visual display of quantitative information** in A.G.’s post this week on Dry January. He shares my interest in maintaining data:

I find it helpful to keep a tally of days I drink alcohol and days I don’t. Nothing complicated, just a binary yes or no, and an aim to have at least three days off the booze each week. That’s all it takes for me to stay within healthy limits, despite working in an industry that can normalise and encourage dangerous levels of consumption. (If you recognise yourself here, check out The Drinks Trust.) Anyway… it’s Friday evening. The first one of the year. I’ve not had any booze since New Year’s Eve. Soon I will go downstairs, crack open a bottle of something nice, and have one or two drinks with some pizza while I stream a crappy-but-entertaining film – January be damned.

However sweet that bar graph, I am more a percentages guy, currently at a total of 52% dry days and 63% one or nones over the years since early November 2021 when I started keeping track. My booze budget this year is also set at around 1.33 a day, an average I beat by a few last year. Checking on that number from time to time – as well as your AST blood test numbers – are great ways to manage the hobby.

While we think on that, think on this. In the northern hemisphere, the darkest ten weeks of the year are already behind us. Soon be planting those tomato seeds. While we wait for that, Boak and Bailey are posting every Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And look out for more of Stan’s new “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, as noted, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword seems to be on pause since November but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.

*Once upon a time, the LCBO here in Ontario stocked Millbrook Merlot from a Hudson Valley, NY winery. Then Rufus Wainwright sang about the area. Went to the winery once around a decade ago. This is been this week’s edition of “wandering thoughts with Al”.
**I couldn’t live with anyone missing the reference.