Hops – Page 6 – A Good Beer Blog

If That Was April Is This Thursday’s Beery News Notes?

Boy, did that fly by. April 2021. Lots of real world activity in my life even in the time of the enhanced Ontario lockdown. Vaccine jabbed, moved a kid from one city to another, annual income taxes submitted, another birthday… So things are looking up. Certainly could be worse. I could have concerns about the Truman Brewery Shopping Mall development as illustrated above. I know nothing about it. But the Evening Standard of London, England reports:

…heritage groups, residents and existing business owners have said the new plans are not in keeping with the area, the work could obscure views of the landmark’s Grade II listed chimney and there will be less need for office space post pandemic. Developers Old Truman Brewery said there has been “extensive consultation” with the council, residents, local workers and businesses and is a “high quality design with appropriate uses.”

Speak of the old and the brewing related, there was a fair bit of interesting char related to this article on an archaeological dig in Pembrokeshire, Wales:

Some 2000 years after Neolithic occupation began on the site, a stream became a focus of activity, where hot stones were used to generate steam or hot water, which resulted in the formation of a burnt mound. Water contained in the wooden trough was heated by stones placed in an adjoining hearth. While this process is well understood, the purpose of such features remains a matter of ongoing debate, with use for cooking, craft activities, brewing and saunas all suggested. Over 40 such mounds were found along the pipeline, with radiocarbon dating at one site indicating reuse over a remarkably long timespan of over 1500 years.

“Bronze-age Welsh brewery, I’d say” according to Martyn and “…the size of the troughs matches the batch sizes for farmers brewing for their own household…” says Lars. Barry: “I used to survey them… to calculate potential number of uses based on fracture rate of the stone used and the size of the mound…” Plenty of neato.

He’s the thing… as you may appreciate I have little interest in the alcopops labeled as “vodka soda” or even “craft beer” or even even “IPA” so you likely can guess how little I care about small-dose cannabis beverages. But there was this money quote in this article in Forbes this week which was fairly blunt:

“This is not a medical product. This is an alternative for White Claw,” Kovler says plainly. “No one under 35 likes beer anymore and calories and hangovers are unattractive. For us, it’s an obvious, forward-thinking idea… there is so much opportunity.”

Has anyone mentioned that cannabis comes with a hangover called crippling anxiety for many? No. Thought not. Anyway, it this were to kill off White Claw I suppose it would be something. But it won’t. Just another product in a pretty can on the shelf that really doesn’t have much to do with beer which is fine as I am well over 35 and don’t plan changing that in the near or medium future.

The Beer Nut celebrated his 16th bloggaversary this week, channeling Beckett. Less focused with a piece in Pellicle by ATJ on smoked beer or perhaps just the one sort of smoked beer called rauchbier or… well, when you reference both Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings along with Prometheus, well, it all gets a bit… well… but it is important to note that Game of Thrones did actually make a beer:

This strong golden ale is co-fermented with pinot grigio and viognier grape juices, then bottle conditioned with Champagne yeast.

So this wasn’t that… as it were.

Stan issued another edition of Hop Queries this week and, as usual, shared some excellent insights into corners of the brewing trade few others write about – including this time stuff related to a “fuss that resulted from a few things Shaun Hill of Hill Farmstead Brewery said in New Zealand last month”:

“I’ve unfortunately had to brew with some of that Galaxy and destroyed batches of beer that tasted like pencil shavings because of it. At the point that something of highest quality is not being produced with transparency and things are being done for the sake of homogeneity, monoculture and, basically, just earning capital, things can get pretty far out of whack pretty quickly.”

Stan also shares the position of Hop Products Australia on the matter, contrasting the needs of the niche specialist brewers like Hill Farmstead and the general craft brewing trade stating a bit obliquely “consistency encourages a level of brand loyalty that forms the foundation for future growth.” I am not sure with whom I sympathize but Hill comes off as suggesting he should get first access to goods produced by others to literally cherry pick. Sounds like the folk who get to the grapes at the grocery store first, picking through the bunches leaving bruised fruit behind.

Lily Waite joined a trend I have noticed and referred to the craft beer trade as “we” describing an article on the craft beer trade… but she runs a brewery so it is all inside baseball. Good. And a great tl;dr ensued.

I found this an odd statement from the wine world:

No more Kiwi wine for me while New Zealand kowtows to China.

I presume Mr. Johnson is similarly concerned about the authoritarian tendencies of Viktor Mihály Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, home of Johnson’s beloved Tokaji. New Zealand has taken a path that is distinct from the battling one that Australia is taking in its trade war with China, a diplomatic row that includes malting barley:

Beijing hit Australian barley with a 73.6 per cent anti-dumping duty and a 6.9 per cent countervailing duty last May, in a move Canberra regards as politically motivated. Previously about half of Australia’s feed barley and 86 per cent of its malting barley, by value, was exported to China – but that trade has withered since Beijing’s taxes took effect.

Speaking of the politics of beverage alcohol, Chuck nailed it:

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer trolled Donald Trump’s former adviser, Larry Kudlow, Sunday with a tweet mocking him for apparently failing to realize that all beer is “plant-based.” “Excited to be watching the Oscars with an ice cold plant-based beer. Thanks Joe Biden,” Schumer posted, along with a photo of himself sipping one in front of a TV.

Nice. That’s it for now. Enjoy your May Day. Wave a red flag and, while you are doing so, check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday (who marked their 100th episode with gratitude for all) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness. And remember BeerEdge, too. Plus a newcomer located by B+B: The Moon Under Water.

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For The End and Beginning

Here we are. The end of March and the beginning of spring. Baseball is on the TV. Shorts and sweater weather. Excellent. I even planted lettuce seed and radish seed last weekend under row cover. Just a bit. I’m no idiot. Well, not that sort of idiot. Like many this year, it’s been a quiet week for good beer writing. Hopefully everyone else has been planting their first radishes, too. It’s also the end and beginning of the year of the plague and the second… year of the plague. Things are weird. Free beer for the vaccinated? Jab-based pub passports… why not? Me, I’m not doing too much soul searching or looking back but this by Martin serves as a milestone of sorts:

A year ago I walked into tourist Cambridge on the hottest day of the year so far. The tourists (typically two-thirds Japanese and Chinese) were completely absent. The Universities looked forlorn. Pubs were advertising their loo rolls, and the staff at Fopp treated me like their first visitor of the week. Perhaps I was.

Enough of that. In good news of 2021, The Guardian reported on an outcome which gives joy to any staff lawyer working for a municipality:

…after a dogged six-year campaign by locals, the Carlton Tavern will reopen next month – lockdown permitting – after the developers were ordered to rebuild the pub “brick by brick”, a ruling that pub campaigners say has set an extraordinary precedent. “People said it was impossible,” said Polly Robertson, a leading member of the Rebuild the Carlton Tavern campaign… “I just thought, no – I’m not going to let it lie.”

Speaking of the pubs of England, Mudgy wrote about Cask v. Covid and picks a winner:

Nowadays, the pubs that don’t offer cask tend to fall into the categories of places that are effectively restaurants, down-at-heel boozers that only appeal to a local clientele, high-end trendy bars and some beer-focused places that think not selling cask puts across a modern image. Any pub seeking a wide appeal rather than just a captive market of locals will offer cask in some form. There is a huge amount of loyalty to the category that isn’t going to disappear any day soon. The day Wetherspoon’s start dropping cask from some of their pubs in England and Wales is the day you really need to start worrying about its future. It’s not just changing a brand on the bar, it’s making a statement about what kind of pub you aim to be.

To the northwest, a tale of high tech beer packaging tech in Iceland:

The equipment in the line comes from numerous parts of the world, including the U.S.-made end-of-line Econocorp E-2000 cartoning machine. “We were led to Econocorp during conversations we had with other machine suppliers who are familiar with the kind of machinery that’s suitable for craft brewers,” says Ólafsson. “It’s just the right size machine for our production, and it’s very simple in design and, subsequently, in operation.”*

Me? I love everything from Econocorp. Elsewhere, Stan was good enough to send out his Hop Queries newsletter on Wednesday. Topics this month include “Up the downstream,” “Query of the month,” “UK hop exchange,” “Look & listen,” “At the Hop,” and “Hop profile: Nelson Sauvin” which confirm that, yes, this is a newsletter and, yes, even Stan can’t resist the hop pun. It’s also edition 4.11 which tells me he’s throwing a fifth anniversary party for the next one! I won’t spoil the Danny and the Juniors reference but Stan does provide this:

In a Wall Street Journal review of “The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats” a writer gushes: “Beer lovers, too, might want to raise a mug to (David) Fairchild. A boozy night in a village inn buying rounds for Bohemian farmers resulted in Fairchild procuring the finest German hops, which he smuggled out of the country, allowing American brewers to vastly improve their sour, inferior beers.” That’s simply not true. Full stop. No farmers in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century successfully managed to grow continental landrace hops, although English Fuggles did find a home in Oregon.

That is interesting. Formerly, I had a client in PEI who owned a former tavern which was formerly owned by a local brewer who, in his formative years, travelled to England and back, returning with hop rhizomes in pockets that he nurtured and kept damp that whole sailing voyage. The yard of the house was still rotten with them. Google maps shows it still there. Wonder what they are.

Jeff on government. As they saying goes, no one likes to see sausages made.

Also semi-officially, I like the idea of this notification from a bar as referenced on Reddit and Twitter and a bunch of other places. It would be useful for future reference in discussions with one’s children. I, for example, know some one which is or could be a grandmother who was also barred for life from a certain establishment two Saturdays in a row. Having better documentation and records retention principles may have helped.

Gary wrote a very interesting piece on an issue of Brewing Trade Review from 1962 including info on the iconic Toronto brewery set up by my hero E.P.Taylor in the early 1960s and still pumping out macro gak today!

The plant still exists, as Molson-Coors Beverage Co.’s main Canadian brewery. The tower-like, oblong-shape central building of dark brick with contrasting light frame atop, shown in the article, is still a leitmotif at the plant, on Carlingview Rd. in Etobicoke, Toronto, despite much expansion…

Ryuuhyou Draft. Japanese sea ice beer. Low in malt. Blue in colour. Speaking of weird Japanese beers…

“We will pitch the product as the standard beer for the new era.”

Ban-zoink! Elsewhere and much to the opposite, my personal hat supplier Katie M has written about her new business, Corto, with a deft dramatic touch:

“Did you know you can get down under the flooring?” our always-happy landlady beamed, on a final visit to sort the fire alarms. No. We did not know that. We’d agreed not to mention the storage issues for our sanity’s sake, clueless about how we were going to overcome the challenge of managing inventory in such a small space. Tom had only just stopped having nightmares about having to fill the entire ground floor with bathrooms. “The hatch is under the stairs, in the cupboard.”

DON’T GO IN THE BASEMENT!!! You’ll never believe what happens next.

By contrast, I found this portrait of startup Belgian brewers Antidoot a bit bizarre and even a bit disturbing, especially this bit:

A few months after the unpleasant Spring Release, Tom Jacobs read an article in Belgian newspaper De Standaard about a French winery in Bordeaux called Château Pétrus. Pétrus wines were highly coveted, partly for their quality (they are produced on an exceptional slope with blue clay soil) and partly for their scarcity (the vineyard covers only 11 hectares). A limited amount of Pétrus wine is released each year (the whole of Australia, for example, receives only 36 bottles). As a result, bottles of Pétrus were being purchased by speculators who resold them on the black market at huge markups, used as investments which which would grow in value with each passing year the wines aged.

Weird. I think they invented pre-speculation. Just to be clear, Château Pétrus is one of the great wines of the world, producing vintages since the 1700s. It does not attract high prices on the secondary market. It attracts high prices on the primary market as this LCBO screen shot shows. Antidoot, on the other hand, is one startup brewery among thousands. One of the least reflective articles on a brewery I’ve ever read. The passage where the rocket scientists also invent compost is amazing. Spinal Tap meets beer. Sucker juice.

One final note: beer bottles prove that recycling is bullshit. Never knew that.

There. Spring. Hmm… why doesn’t my heart go dancing? And that waltz isn’t particularly… you know… entrancing? No desire… no ambition leads me… WTF!?! Oh yes – the second spring of a pandemic but, screw it, still spring. Get a beer, turn that soil and plant some seed! While performing your ag-art, check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness. And remember BeerEdge, too.

*ZZZZzzzz….

The First Thursday Beery News Notes For A Brand Spanking New 2021

Well, here we go. One year gone and another year starts full of hope and promise… oh, and an insurrection in the US Capital. Nice. This is the year of the 18th anniversary of my beer blogging, too. That’s 31.56% of my life. What an utter waste. Not at all like the art of Joel Goodman, photographer of the image above as well as the partner photo of the same spot in Manchester one year before taken early on New Year’s Day 2020, a portion of which shows up here as a random header image. Lovely stuff and a great expression of where we are today.

Speaking of reality today… do you know about storm chips and the associated beer weather severity standard? Note I wrote “beer” and not “beers” as in much of Canada the plural of beer is beer. “Beers” means a selection of brands of beer. Twelve Molson Golden are twelve beer. I have my doubts about the particular application as there is no way Kings Co., PEI is in the 24 beer zone but Truro, NS is only at 12 beer. I have a pal from the little islands to the lower left who talked of 1970-80s storm stayed parties held in houses with bordered up windows lasting two or three days until the blizzard had gone past. As posted on the FB page for Storm Level Brewing.

First… err… second, I failed you all before Christmas by not mentioning Martyn’s post on the roots of Jamaica’s love of strong sweet porter:

Draught porter was sold from draught porter shops, in existence in Kingston, Jamaica from at least the Edwardian era; from casks in refreshment parlors that also sold fried fish and bread; and also by travelling salesmen, who would call out “draaf porter!” as they travelled on foot around rural villages in the Jamaican interior, carrying a large tin container with a spout, and cans in quart, pint, half-pint and gill (quarter-pint, pronounced “jill”) sizes, for serving. Jamaica also had itinerant ice-cream salesmen, who would sell a blend of “frisco”—ice-cream and “snow ball”, shaved ice flavored with fruit syrup, mixed together—and “a measure of draught porter for the older folks.”

I wonder if Sam Adams authorized either this guy’s keg delivery technique or his filming rights? The opportunities for injury are a bit boggling. Speaking of which, this non-beer entrepreneurial advice thread had one nugget I quite likes, somewhat related to the Great White Male Hero problem with the good beer narrative:

The biographies of tech unicorn founders won’t help you. Survivorship bias is terrible. For every one that succeeded thousands more failed.

After asking on Twitter if he should, Mark Solomon joined the beer blogging world with his new site Headed Up North on which he is going to share an Indigenous perspective:

There is a tradition in many Indigenous communities, and I have since learned in many other cultures, on winter solstice. Many communities light a fire at sunset and keep the light going all night. While winter solstice is known as the shortest day of the year, the one with the least amount of daylight, there is a refrain that it only gets brighter from here. Those fires are not to strike back at the darkness but to honour it and sit within it. In the Anishinaabe creation story there are songs and teachings about the nothingness at the beginning then came darkness. Darkness is not nothing. We learn a lot about ourselves and others in the darkness.

In our regular pandemic trade news corner this week, cellar sellers are most note worthy. Makes sense. We’ve seen it from place to place including now at Falling Rock Tap House in Denver:

“We weren’t going to make it if we just kept on doing what we were doing,” Black said. Luckily, for the past 23 years, Black and his team have been slowly amassing a nest egg. “We have just probably a couple thousand bottles of beer that are vintage,” Black said. The collection contains very rare, highly sought-after beers from big-name breweries around Denver and the US. The most prized item is a 750ml bottle of a collaboration blended sour beer made in 2008 by The Lost Abbey Brewing Company called “Isabelle Proximus.” When the Cellar Sale list was posted, the lone bottle sold in one second for $400.

Retired Martin has started to chronical the take away pubs from his new location in Sheffield:

…we’ve had some wonderful beer, alternating porters and bitters and crafty keg with impunity. The only problem is, cask must by law be enjoyed within 3 hours, which means drinking 4 pints between us in an evening out of Bass glasses (NBSS 3.5/4). That’s not a habit you can keep up forever.

Here’s a big of a helpful hint for the history buffs. If you look at this image from the Twitter feed of a sailing cargo firm you will see in the lower right an explanation of the various grades of tea. These grades appear in many 1700s and 1800s newspaper notices and may assist in determining if accompanying cargo such as beer are considered fancy goods – or nor.

Best historical slag of the week: “your bum is so heavy you can’t get up“! In another history fan news, Dr. Christina Wade at her site Braciatrix wrote about a Viking burial in Ireland in the first part of the release of her Phd thesis. I am hoping for more beer content so this as yet is a placeholder – but a useful one as she canvasses questions on the quality of evidence. I note this especially in the context of the Vikings in Canada and the archaeological evidence they left behind as described in this handy post from Ottawa Rewind, especially this bit:

Wow! Barrel piece…was this for wine? Again, where did they get the oak for this?

Careful readers will recall my 2011 post on the early European settlements in Newfoundland, including Vikings. I have not had any luck finding Viking brewing in my research but it is clear that beer and malt could well have been here before 1577, the earliest date I have so far. Were the Vikings masterless men happily brewing beer hundreds of years before the masterless men? Was there malt in that oak barrel?

Jonny the Ham* wrote in Pellicle about how Pellicle came to be. I like how it is illustrated by images from a particular journey:

The first and most important reason is that Pellicle, the concept, was originally meant to be a short photography zine taken on this trip which I would self publish—something of a passion project I had dreamt of for years, based on my love of travel and film photography. Secondly, I’m incredibly self-conscious about folk reading my innermost thoughts, so at the very least you can enjoy some nice photos.

His partner in crime – or at least publishing – Matt has written a bit in Beer 52 about his upcoming book “hopefully be called Modern British Beer” and the concept of a returning greater regionality in beer. I prefer this muchly to nationalism as a defining characteristic, if only given the reality that beer predates many borders and can reflect the more important factor of trade routes rather than anything like state regulation or even national culture. I had just one truly tiny quibble about this bit:

Historically in the UK, regionality was a strong differentiator in beer styles and helped develop so much in terms of how we know and enjoy beers today. Take Burtonisation—for example—a process developed by brewers to mimic the mineral content of the Burton-upon-Trent water supply. The hard water of Burton contains higher levels of gypsum, which when used as a brewing process aid in the form of brewers salts will lower your worts pH. This is preferred by some brewers when producing pale, hoppy beer styles, as it aids hop absorption rates, and thus how they are showcased in the resulting beer. It’s no coincidence the story of IPA began here, in the Midlands.

Quibble? The brewing with and drinking of the sulfurous waters of Burton predated the inclusion of masses of hops. Hops were first added by one clever brewer in the late 1600s at the Brimstone Alehouse to deal with those who had to deal with the, err, vomitous qualities of his local product ripe with regional… umm… vernacular. Which actually makes Matt’s point even a bit better.

Elsewhere, Dave Infante is “joining”** VinePair‬⁩ to cover the beer industry. Send him tips if you think it is a good idea to send other beer writers your tips. And speaking of speaking about beer, I liked this back and forth between Monsieur Noix du Biere and Matt. Are local voices too likely to be embedded or are the embedded ones the best perspective? Note also the second alt use of the word “indigenous” in today’s roundup. I prefer “vernacular “for this particular meaning but I don’t think anyone’s toes are aching.

Finally, two good posts this week from Boak and Bailey on, first, a surprising forerunner of an improved pub from the 1880s and, second, a helpful piece on the rare duck these days that is ESB. Looks like they spent their recent break from beer blogging over the holidays writing beer blog posts. Alistair is taking another sort of break this January but found time to post about a day dream he is having about another venerable beer, Trukker ur-Pils.

There. That’s a good start to the year. And for more good reading check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey, back now mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. We have a new entry from the DaftAboutCraft podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword. And remember BeerEdge, too.

*The Hammer? The Hamster?
**…which could mean anything from being a freelancer to CEO.

Christmas Eve 2020’s Merry And Very Own Beery News Notes

It’s gone a bit quiet, hasn’t it. Yes, yes… there’s lockdown after lockdown all around – but there’s also winter settling in and Yuletide, too. Watching the UK – French blockade news is disheartening but at least France 24 is reporting all the Scottish scallops now in Paris have been sold. So, while we can’t be like those folk above from 1775 – and while we can’t even be down the pub with Santa Sid – we can more quietly mark the season and the day as our beliefs guide us. Go make a snow angel or just watch the stars overheard if the clouds take a break. Or do whatever you want… MNSFW. It’s too late anyway, December 23rd as I write this. Tibb’s Eve in Newfoundland. Too late to change what’s happening now. The arse is out of it. We have bought the gifts, loaded the larder, filled the buttery and started to drain the bottles. Not quite the new roaring ’20s yet still a welcome break from the lockdowns.

Lockdowns. Always the lockdowns. One report on the lockdown from the auslanders on the way out of the EU comes from The Retired Man Named Martin who went out a shipping in Sheffield:

Well, there was no panic buying. Perhaps because Northerners are less reliant on brie than London, perhaps because Morrisons are better at stocking shelves than Waitrose, perhaps because there’s a choice of a dozen supermarkets within a mile radius.

No panic. Good. No one needs that. Similarly – but a word that beer nerds like to deny – one of the most important in brewing is also on the go. Consolidation. As Cookie noted, it is interesting then to read news of CAMRA welcoming one particular deal:

The Campaign for Real Ale said: “While we still need to see the detail of this deal, at first glance it appears a positive move. We hope this means that Marston’s will continue to run the pubs as beloved locals, securing their future for the communities that use them and the people they employ.” Findlay pledged to continue with Brains beers and said its tenanted tied pubs would now be able to stock the ales made by the Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company as well.

1,300 jobs saved. Maybe. Prepare ye for the top trend of Q1-Q3 2021. Consolidations are coming just as they always have after bottom is hit. Speaking of saving the day, I had no idea that there was intra-Germanic regulation of beer branding:

The consumer protection agency from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) has now banned a beer called Colonia, produced by a Frankfurt brewery, from being sold in NRW, where Cologne is situated. The State Agency for Nature, Environment and Consumer Protection (LANUV) said the Frankfurt beer’s name and label could lead consumers to think they were buying Kölsch… The word Colonia harks back to the Latin name of the Roman colony from which the city developed, Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium… The term “Kölsch” has a protected geographical indication (PGI) within the European Union, meaning that a beer can be sold under that name only if it is brewed within 50 kilometres (30 miles) of the city of Cologne.

The Beer Nut is not panicking either in this time of second or third wave – and gave a lesson to those unappointed and slightly sad mere beer experts who know not how to cram so much opinion, information and joy into just one paragraph:

Blackest of the black; shiny with a deep tan head, it looks like it promises a good time. The aroma is fairly mild, but gives you all the cocoa you could want from a porter. The flavour is where it really excels. Well, flavour and mouthfeel: the two are inextricably linked. Big and creamy, and a little chewy is how it rolls; cakey, gooey. On that texture rides dark chocolate and liquorice for two kinds of sweetshop bitterness: a rich coffee roast and then a fruity plum pudding thing at the end. It’s sumptuous, and one of those strong dark jobs that makes you wonder why breweries even bother with barrel ageing. More biggity-big no-gimmick porters please!

Speaking of excellence, Martyn noted one “ancient brewing” story that was 67% less full of lies – and utter lies – with only passing reference to Dog Fish Head and the Hymn to Ninkasi, both well trod recourses to the shortcutter, in favour of more interesting info:

The location suggests the Natufians—a hunter-gatherer group that lived along the eastern Mediterranean from 15,000 to 11,000 years ago—used beer in honoring the dead. The beer’s age—between 13,700 and 11,700 years old—is a surprise. The beverage is roughly as old as the oldest Natufian bread, from between 14,600 and 11,600 years ago, discovered at a nearby site in Jordan.

Also thinking historically-wise, Gary posted a double this week, both on the question of English Christmas ales. One about Hallett and Abbey’s version from 160 years ago and, then, the associations between the day and the beer:

The Belgians and northern French took in general to branding beer for Christmas especially after World War II. It was a progenitor to the current widespread practice by craft brewers to label beers for the Season. Anchor Brewery’s annual Christmas Ale was influential here. Its beer is spiced, a different formula each year, reflecting that part of the Christmas beer tradition. Christmas ale was never, in other words, a fixed style or type of beer. At best it might mean something special made available at Christmas. Sussex-based Harvey’s award-winning Christmas Ale, a barley wine (old Burton type), is an outstanding current example in the UK.

Never knew that. And speaking of things I had never heard of until just now, Stan released his latest Hop Queries monthly newsletter this week full of stats and non-stats sharing mucho including this about “dip hopping”:

So what do we know? Kirin began using the process in 2012 for its Grand Kirin beers. Basically, brewers there make a slurry by steeping hops for about an hour at temperatures (150-170° F) lower than found in conventional whirlpooling, then add the slurry into cooled wort before pitching yeast. Kirin found that the resulting beers contained as much linalool as dry hopped beers but less myrcene (which may mask fruity aromas associated with linalool and other oxygenated compounds). This also reduced production of 2M3MB (an onion-like off flavor).

Onion an off flavour? Don’t tell my Yuletide roasts. All in moderation, of course. And one last note. Stay within your means. Even Jude Law, the other lesser Leonardo DiCaprio, has issues with focusing on managing the load. Govern yourselves accordingly. Ho. Ho. And… ho.

There. Soon 2020 will be gone. Like I said about 1987. That one sucked. Let’s see how the last week of 2020 plays out but Trump’s going, we may now be past peak beer writer editor fawning and the vaccine is well on the way. Can’t be all bad. And remember that for more good reading check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (who advocates for a blog renaissance this week… though it is funny that he says “paid=good”… just means obedient far too often.) And remember BeerEdge, too. Go! Merry Christmas all you all. See you on New Year’s Eve.

The Last Autumnal Thursday And Its Beery News Notes

I have been burning off unused holidays built up over the months of the early times, back when there were no days or even hours to be had. This week, I motored 20 km west, over to MacKinnon Brothers to pick up gifty swag and chatted briefly about business with brother Dan, the brother who joined the 1780 challenge and pretendy stabbed the rebellious Craig for the camera. They brew on the lands the family has farmed since the 1780s when they first arrived as Anglo-American Loyalist refugees. The site has got to be one of the most attractive in all of brewing-dom, especially with the new barn space upgrades Dan showed me and that just slightly less new build cathedral-like reception building. Gorgeous. More images below.

Other than that, it has been a quiet week in my corner of the universe. Some Tuesdays I open up my folder for the weekly round up and find thirty things to consider. Others, not so much. Let’s see what’s up? First up, our local government run store started and stopped a ill-considered deal with Skip The Dishes, a meal delivery service, providing a way for prepared food and food-like objects to be delivered to Ontarians with some hootch. Not no more – and with good reason:

Through the partnership, customers could have ordered alcohol from the SkipTheDishes app and website. The partnership caused consternation in the restaurant and bar industry, which has been relying in part on the sale of alcohol through takeout and delivery to pay its bills. “Following direction from the Ontario Government, effective end of day today, LCBO’s partnership with SkipTheDishes is paused until further notice,” the LCBO said in a statement on Sunday.

In other offices elsewhere, folk are more successfully branching out to keep the lights on. I have to say, I have no idea who the market is for the Cicerone Explore Beer which, for $25 gets you a digital badge… but not decoder ring. The next level up, the Certified Beer Server program is simple enough for anyone needing such things. Also – and this one really does me in – one of those blogs that pretends it’s a magazine, Hop Culture, has sold. Fruit juice oriented stuff. Scan my site. Never referenced it. Often times, these sales are for the IP to the name or the URL rights so go figure.

Much more substantive is the piece in this week’s Pellicle (of which I have to admit I am a low-mid-level patron, my only such dalliance), a neato exploration of the Neomexicanus hop of New Mexico which Stan has written of some years ago now:

I’m stunned by this revelation. The hop bines I’m looking at—while not at their most majestic—are very much viable and alive. It seems like a miracle. For other varieties, surely such water deprivation would leave nothing but a shrivelled brown mess? “If I had Chinook or Cascade and had the same situation where I lost water, they would probably die” Brain agrees. As we climb back into the Mule, I’m bristling with excitement for what I’ve just seen; hops deprived of water for many weeks that are alive and well.

[Note to self: I need to search the Pellicle sight to see how many things have “stunned” its cadre of authors but “bristling” might be a new one.]

And as for the man who will never sell*, The Beer Nut has launched and investigation into the clone beers of grocer Aldi and finds the relationship is only branding-deep:

What a jape! What an absolute wheeze! When discount supermarket Aldi brought out obvious knock-offs of BrewDog’s flagship beers Punk IPA and Elvis Juice, the Scottish brewer retaliated with ALD IPA, appropriating the German chain’s company livery. Suspiciously soon afterwards, Aldi agreed to begin stocking ALD alongside their specially-commissioned BrewDog doppelgangers, Anti-Establishment IPA and Memphis Blvd. It seemed like a perfect opportunity for some blind-taste fun, to find out if Aldi really can go toe-to-toe with a brewery of BrewDog’s stature. Of course, the recipes of Anti-Establishment and ALD have nothing at all in common with each other, and the beers look very different: one a russet amber, the other purest spun gold.

The question of whether Scotch eggs are a “substantial meal” has popped up again and again given England’s pandemic rules. Law. This story about the situation at the establishment Number 29, in Burnham Market, Norfolk illustrates how frustrating such as vague standard is for all involved:

Mr Roberts, 62, says he refused the two ‘black-booted bouncers’ entry and after a confrontation escorted them off his premises. The former fireman said: ‘They said they wanted to come in but I said they did not have the right of entry….” He added: “I took the commercial decision to offer a free Scotch egg, either with chips or with a salad, to anyone who wanted a drink. I’d call that a meal. Two government ministers have said a Scotch egg is a substantial meal. That’s good enough for me.”

More beer law! I hear it’s what the cool kids want. Wine Enthusiast has published an article on one of craft’s dirty secrets, the commonly sticky hands even when the goods are intangible:

Palfreyman, the attorney who works with breweries on trademark issues, says the key to avoid problems is “common sense.” Think before you print or post, he says. Ask for input from attorneys, or someone from outside of the company first. Breweries that push these boundaries “might find something funny about what they are doing, or think it’s an homage,” he says, but they’ll find that corporations that own and defend their trademarks “are humorless.”

Ha ha. So funny. Me make money off your skill and efforts. Not unrelated, I like the thinking being applied in Thailand as they consider the advertising taxation of no-alcohol beer:

Beer companies could have one non-alcoholic product advertised legally at the same time as an alcoholic product creating a link in the audience’s mind to the product that are restricted from advertising.

Conversion. That’s what lawyers call these sorts of cheater pants allegations! Or appropriation. Or… something… not that different from swiping the intellectual property of another if you think about it. And in Kenya, the rules about trying to control the image on embossed beer bottles are being considered in court:

Minor players have over the years been pointing fingers at East African Breweries Limited (EABL) for engraving this type of bottle with its trademark bottling out rivals. This has led to long-winding legal battle on whether EABL is legally allowed to do so. In January this year, High Court Judge Grace Nzioka ruled that EABL had the right to collect and package their beer brands in their embossed bottles pending determination of a case in which six beer distributors affiliated to Keroche Breweries had challenged the move.

Finally, some bad direct adulteration news out of Brazil for at least three fans of craft beer:

A third person has died in Brazil of suspected poisoning from a batch of craft beer contaminated with a toxic chemical used in antifreeze and other products, police in the state of Minas Gerais said on Thursday… Traces of the sweet-tasting solvent were found in the water tank used by the Backer brewery, whose craft beers have won international prizes and are widely available in Brazil.

Not good. But that’s it for the week so you can cogitate your knogging on that for the next seven days. As always, for more good reading check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter (except last week because she is busy with opening her new bar business), The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword. And remember BeerEdge, too. Go!

*Sell out… I meant to write sell out… really…

Your Final Thursday Beery News Notes For November 2020

Time flies when you are having fun. I’ve likely started more than one of these posts with that quip since this all began, haven’t I. Probably should have my head examined. Except. I have. Twice this week. Drove a pleasant drive to an hour and a half to a sleepy rural district hospital for one sort of probing on Monday and another sort nearer by this week. Nothing serious.* Poking and prodding. The joys of middle age with the next stage coming into view. If I get a third test this week, perhaps I might be given a top hat like the gent above. The image from the West Sussex Archives triggered a lot of interesting chat about the nature of their outfits and that clay pipe but it’s the beer mugs that are the show stopper. Are they pints or quarts? I have one smaller version, a 1940’s green Wedgewood which sits proudly on a shelf.

Speaking of which, the distinctions and differences between a Czech dimpled mug and an English dimpled mug were excellently explored this week by Casket Beer:

Yes. The distinction between these two glasses matters based on history and tradition. Aside from the subtle differences in design, they come from different places and have been vessels for different styles of beer. Further, getting it right adds to our experience when we drink, which is important for breweries in today’s market.

Me, I prefer to get some things wrong and take pleasure in how well they work out – like having IPA in a weissebier glass. Or in a frozen one. Speaking of being one’s own master in small matters, Matthew L wrote about the state of his personal nation as another lockdown struck from a consumer’s point of view:

The final straw for me was the aforementioned Tier 3 announcement. All pubs not serving a “substantial meal” were to close. That kiboshed most of my typical weekend. I contemplated walking to Spoons, or any of the nearby places that do food, sitting on my own with a pizza and 2 pints, then going home (how many “substantial meals” can anyone consume in one day). Any fun I’d have just wasn’t worth the effort on top of everything else I’d have to do.

Also from one consumer’s point of view comes this post from Kirsty of Lady Sinks the Booze on the moments she has missed, including missing the train:

Since getting a promotion and a pay rise I have done what many working class people do and tried desperately to avoid working class people. Instead of the bus (albeit the wifi enabled fancy express bus with nightclub style lighting) I now get the train, and pay over a ton for a monthly season ticket. Of course since privatisation there are three different trains home and because I’m tight I will never pay extra to get a different company’s train if I miss mine. Hence I will spend £9 on beer, to save the £5.60 train fare.

Vaccines soon. That’s what I’m thinking. Others too – rather than pretending that owning a brewery means you know more than public health officials, Kenya‘s Tusker is sharing the safety message:

Speaking on the campaign, EABL Head of Beer Marketing, Ann Joy Muhoro, said, “Tusker believes that Kenyans can enjoy their favourite drink with friends in a safe and responsible manner, in line with the set protocols. That is why through the “dundaing” campaign, we are encouraging our consumers to adhere to the set health protocols, as they enjoy their Tuskerat home or at a bar.”

Historically-wise, Bailey and Boak studied the introduction of the jukebox into the UK pub and shared their findings:

This turns out to be surprisingly easy to pin down thanks to the novelty value of these electronic music boxes which guaranteed them press coverage. We can say, with some certainty, that the first pub jukeboxes arrived in Britain in the late 1940s. Even before that date, though, the term ‘jukebox’ or ‘juke-box’ was familiar to British people through reportage from the US.

Best “political tweet with a side of beer” of the week. Second best “political tweet with a side of beer” of the week. Best tweek of the week:

Currently slightly obsessed with TGL-7764, the East German standard for beer. It‘s basically a beer style guideline with some brewing instructions. Only thing I struggle with is colour, though, it‘s provided in NFE and „Einheiten nach Brand“ and I have no idea what these are.

And then he followed up with a link to the TGL-7764. Neato. Similarly mucho neato, Stan wrote about the 107 words to describe hops but neither “twiggy” nor “lawnmower driven into a weedy ditch” appear so I am not sure I can give it all much credit. But that’s just me.

In China, new fangled hydrogen fueled trucks are being used to deliver beer:

The Asian subsidiary of beverage giant Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV, meanwhile, added four hydrogen fuel-cell trucks to its fleet, the company announced Sept. 28. It plans to deliver beer using the trucks, making China the first nation where the company has deployed such vehicles for beer shipments.

Martyn found an excellent cartoon from 32 years ago, framing the thoughts from the time about low and no alcohol beer. I have to say I am of the same mind. It can lead to things, that sort of thing. Just this week I watched as two fully grown adults who have always appeared to have a complete set of marbles going on about the wonders of sparking water. Which they seem to be paying money for. Money they earn. With effort.

My thoughts, as always were, “historic beer style” is an oxymoron. “Style” is a modern international construct, a form to which brewers brew. As Ron has effectively proven, forms of beer in the past were brewed to brew house standards to meet local market expectations. Different names for similar things and similar names for different things were far too common.** Andreas Krennmair*** explored both the oxy and the moron in his post this week about Dampfbier which has that added excitement of relating to a variant of “steam” – a word so many want to own but never seem to understand:

The problem here is… if a beer style’s origin story sounds too good to be true, it probably is not actually rooted in history. Naive me would simply ask why other beers like Weißbier brewed with wheat malt wouldn’t be called the same name because supposedly, the yeast would ferment as vigorous. When we actually look at historic sources though, an entirely different picture is unveiled…

And lastly, Matty C. had an article published this week on a topic near and dear to my heart – the disutility of all the artsy fartsy craft beer cans:

Important stuff like beer style and ABV is too often – in my opinion – printed in a tiny font to make space for more artwork, or isn’t even featured on the front of a can at all. And while this isn’t an issue for most hardened beer fans, for those who exist outside of beer fandom’s bubble (and let’s be honest with ourselves here, that’s most people) it’s actually making it more difficult for people to differentiate between brands. The result of this? Consumers turning back to old, faithful brands – probably owned by big multinational corporations – and turning away from craft beer.

The phrase I shared was “barfing gumball machine” for these things. Much other similarly thoughtful comment was shared.

Done! Soon – December!!! Meantime, don’t forget to read your weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword. And remember BeerEdge, too. Go!

*Weirder and weirder I am. Seems I have a fully formed molar deep set up into my cheek bone. It is not doing anything. Just sitting there. Thanks for paying your taxes so that could be confirmed.
**I linked it up there! Why are you looking here, too?
***Pour le double!!!!

The Thursday Beery News Notes For The Week Before The Neighbour’s Holiday Season Begins

A quiet week. Not surprising in mid-November, I suppose. Being next to the United States and, even more to the point, being within the FM broadcast range of local US based heavy metal FM radio station, it is difficult not to be aware that something is starting. Their unending holiday season is upon us. In Canada, the holiday season is really, say, December 10th… maybe… until the last of the bought-once-annually Grand Marnier is shaken into a coffee sometime in early January. Weeks, not months. In the US, the future is now. Which means we have turkey and beer pairing blurts clogging up the news. Do these really affect beer sales… or turkey sales for that matter? Get back to me on that.

What’s really going on? Max got out and about. That’s nice. And real. While we are locked down in one way or another, it’s good to find some outdoors. I’ve taken up staring at the sky at night myself. I have really fallen for Epsilon Lyrae myself, which makes sense for a Canadian seeing as it is a double double. I even bought a 20x to 60x scope, the sort of thing also used to bird watch or be a creepy neighbour. The Pleiades alone at 20X are worth the price of admission. And you can drink a beer as you gawk. If you have to. Just sayin’.

Whatever you are experiencing, it could be worse. You could be caught up in the Tomsk Beer Company scandal in Siberia:

The Investigative Committee said earlier that Ivan Klyain is suspected of using his official post to illegally prevent the construction of a building in 2016-2017 on territory close to the Tomsk Beer company, which he controls. The 61-year-old Klyain has served as the mayor of Tomsk since 2013. Before being appointed to the post, he had been the director-general of the Tomsk Beer company, one of the largest breweries in the region, since 1994. After becoming mayor, his wife was elected by Tomsk Beer’s board of directors as the facility’s director-general.

Bad. Bad bad. But the good news is that beer in stadiums is coming back in Tatarstan!

Elsewhere and for the great indoorsmen amongst us, Pete Brown and a few others commented on the four episode BBC2 TV broadcast Saving Britain’s Pubs hosted by someone named Tom Kerridge. Now, if we are lucky this will show up as a cheap filler on Sunday afternoon on PBS or TVO sometime in 2023 so I have time. Maybe. Rather than a documentary followed by panel format on UK licensing policy, it actually sounds like just a restaurant refit sorta show that pre-dates, you know, the pandemic:

If there’s a common theme running through all four pubs in the series, it’s that the people running them need to add a keener, shrewder business eye to the the long list of talents they already display in running pubs that are popular but not profitable. The things a pub needs to do to survive may not always got down well with the regulars: The first thing Tom tells the Prince Albert to do is put up the beer prices. The domino players nursing one beer all night in the Golden Anchor are shifted to the back room to make way for the craft beer-drinking hipsters who are gentrifying the area.

Yeah, get those happy regulars the hell out of here! But… remember people shifting spots in a bar? Remember people in bars? 2019 was great, wasn’t it? Maybe it’s really just to be taken as a show about the before times. But talking about beer has a notoriously poor track record when it comes to TV… and radio… and newspapers… and so Mudgie also shared his thoughts:

People still like the idea of pubs in theory, but in practice they visit them less and less. Of course it is still possible to do well in a declining market, but that should not be allowed to obscure the wider picture. By and large, the reason so many pubs have closed is not because they haven’t been run as well as they could have been. And it was disappointing, if not entirely surprising, that an entire hour discussing the decline of the pub trade passed by without a single mention of the legendary Elephant in the Room…

Good point. There was a slow death well underway before the more rapid form came along. Speaking of which and on the smaller small screen… is it just me or did Craft Beer Web Event replace Beer e-Publication Editor** as the odd new thing of 2020? Seems like that to me based on the barrage of beery things to watch on line for the last week or two’s worth of Thursdays to Sundays. Not that I watched any. It’s getting like those 47 global beer awards things. Too Organic, if you know what I mean.*** I felt particularly badly seeing as two of my own co-authors were presenting at two of these web events – but they spoke at the same time, I simply could not in good conscience choose one over the other.

Speaking of webby things podcasts, Beer with Ben* finds someone called Ben with interesting things to say about beer and its beginnings:

I’m back for a second series and this time we will be taking a journey through history, as well as beer. 2020 will see us finding out how our earliest counterparts would have made those first brews, look to the local environment to forage and find some of the ingredients and, of course, see if it’s possible to do it ourselves.

Excellent. That sounds really real and not in decline even if likely… organic.***

And speaking of odd jobs sort of in beer, I have no idea what this is if it is not a overly fancified web intern in the ABev macro construct. Consider these strange but assigned tasks:

– Work cross-functionally to plan and manage the Organic Social content calendar which supports key activations across both brand and eCommerce.
– Manage the content creation process for both Paid and Organic Social, from brief to delivery.
– Upload and schedule Organic Social content.

Caught up with excitement by the prospect? Me neither. Nice to know the opposite of “paid” is “organic” which is perhaps a comment on what is left of you and your span of years when you go unpaid too long.

Somewhat to the right on the scale of things that are cryptic was ATJ in Pellicle wandering on and about lagers this week. I wonder if he might benefit from a backyard telescope. The over ripe prose is pungent:

I am both mystified and enthralled whenever I think of the deep sleep of lagering, the process that brings the raw ingredients of the beer into a sharper focus. Enchantment touches me like a spell when I consider the steampunk-like nature of some of the brewing techniques such as lautering and decoction mashing. Then, as if conjured up by some celestial agent, there is the aristocratic elegance of noble hops, which, when writing its entry for the Oxford Companion to Beer, I was surprised to discover that it was a marketing term from the 1970s instead of something from the days of Hansel and Gretel.

Heavens! All very prog. Fortunately, sensible Stan sent around his hops newsletter with it’s dedication to a plain speaking, staid and common sense outlook when it comes to hops – with an update on Hopfen and Stopfen:

The verb stopfen has a slightly different meaning. It is used when repairing clothes or to be more precise darning socks. But more importantly it’s the same word (potentially even etymologically) as to stuff. Whether you want to say one stuffs a pillow with feathers or food into oneself, the word stopfen can always be applied. Hopfenstopfen is therefore the act of stuffing beer with hops, which I guess is an even more fitting term now with all the hazy beers around.

Not at all organic, that. Pretty real, too.

That’s it. As I say, a quiet week. But don’t forget to read your weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays (this week Jordan speaks warmly of Tom Arnold) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Not to mention Cabin Fever. And Ben has finally gone all 2009 and joined in with his own podcast, Beer and Badword. And remember BeerEdge, too. Go!

*h/t to Merryn. The podcast comes in multiples of series which is odd as Ben told me they come in multiples of seasons. Note: Ben’s Beer Blog is not associated with Beer with Ben.
**I actually saw some folk fawning over their favourtie best beer writing editors the other day. Tres Organique!
***Wait for it!

The Thursday Beery News Notes For The Second Third of The Tenth Twelfth

It’s hard coming up with new headlines every week, isn’t it. Look at that up there. It hardly makes any sense at all. And it’s getting a bit hard coming up with light entertaining content about beer to share. It’s usually all about something other than beer or like beer or nearly about beer. Like the best thing I saw this week – the tweet accompanied by the image to the left, captioned:

Toddlers in the 1970s looked like pensioners waiting for happy hour in a working men’s club.

This week, let’s look at stories about beer. Beery stories. You bet. Not about something related to beer or something just associated with beer. Hey, Jordan wrote something about beer… or actually drew it. He has created a map and a spreadsheet of all the current breweries and contract beer companies (firms which by beer from actual brewers, including on contract) on Ontario. It’s on his site and over to the right under the dropdown thingie. There. Help him by sending corrections… err, updates. Everyone likes that.

That’s about beer, right? Sure… well, maybe. Is this about beer? Ron wrote about UK cask during WW2 – not cask ale, just the wood in the casks:

In normal times British brewers would never have used American oak as it imparted too much flavour to the beer it contained. Unlike today, brewers wanted to avoid any trace of oak in their beer. Its presence was seen as a fault. But, with the supply of Memel oak dried up, brewers had little choice. When supplies of American oak in turn began to evaporate, brewers had to turn to a more local source.

OK, may be not but it was about something touching beer. Stan! Stan writes about beer like he did last week. He wrote again and got published again – this time about hop creep… which is not actually about the loud loser at the end of the bar in the crafty tavern:

“Hop Creep” isn’t the name of a beer-themed horror movie—just a real, ongoing mystery that brewers and hop scientists are still sorting out. Oregon State University’s Tom Shellhammer, one of the country’s top brewing scientists, says that his earliest moments of being introduced to the phenomenon were about five years ago, although he didn’t realize it at the time. “I was giving a talk at the 2015 Craft Brewers Conference, and somebody in the Q & A asked, ‘Hey, do you see people getting diacetyl when they dry hop?’ I was like, ‘No.’” Diacetyl is one result of hop creep. Beer with more alcohol than a brewery intended—which brewers call “out of spec”—is another, as are bottles or cans with dangerously high levels of carbonation.

Hops! Hops are in beer. And, in his return to London pubs and the blogging of same, the Tand put the beer into the Tand:

…there was a mission to accomplish. A visit to a Sam’s pub to establish London prices following the recent price increase. We chose the John Snow… a nice little boozer and trade was steady on this Wednesday afternoon. I had the stout, which needed the gas changing, while E had a half of Pure Brewed. The price list was snapped when the barman wasn’t looking and duly posted to a certain Curmudgeon. Prices are on the wickedly high side and now by no means a bargain. It does make you wonder how they’ll compete on this basis. One other thing. The notices forbidding this and that, which are found all over Northern Sam’s pubs, are conspicuous by their absence. I know. I checked everywhere. Double standards from Mr Smith it seems.

Hardly anything about the excellent Pellicle post this week by Helen Jerome on a cidery in Devon was about beer, but it did start with expected traditional character profile on the person behind the operation in question, deviating only by finding someone who was not first an unhappy accountant:

Spool back to late 2015, and Polly decided she’d had enough of sitting in an office. She needed a fresh challenge. Growing up in Devon, she gained a foundation in science with A-levels in chemistry, physics and biology; taken a module with Master of Wine Susan McCraith while doing a degree in Equine Business; studied Sustainable Agriculture at postgraduate level, then completed an EU-funded ‘slow food’ study tour in Tuscany. She’d never really been into cider though…

Speaking of science and even a bit about beer, Ed wrote about the scourge of taking the free case of beer and how that ethical flaw of his gnaws at his very soul – except there was a twist:

As every beer blogger knows getting free beer is the easiest thing in the world. Though breweries might grizzle about it, threaten them with a bad review and they’re sending you a case of beer as fast as their little legs can carry it. But despite this due to my insatiable greed I immediately said yes when offered a Hobgoblin beer and bugs snack pack.

Speaking of which, BBC News itself ran an excellent piece on social median influencers – aka what used to be called blegging – and the associated cap in hand:

Like many businesses during Covid-19, Reshmi has seen a change in her customers’ behaviour. Although many people cut back on unnecessary purchases, her bakery was busy as people carried on ordering her celebration cakes. Yet she also noticed influencers were asking for more freebies too. It’s something she has done in the past – looking at the influencer and their posts, who follows them, how they engage with their audience, but says it didn’t work for her. “We have never had a sale off someone [saying] they saw our cake on someone’s post or profile, it’s always been through word of mouth, from paying customers.”

This is interesting. Even if cake is not beer. I have heard many a chortler and scribe announce that “it’s not like anyone could think I have compromised myself by the free samples” but it’s not something you can really say for yourself. And it never plays out that way. Best to pay your way. Folk notice and note. Unless there are edible bugs involved.

Related, the question of free food in pubs. Discuss.

Suzy Aldridge posted something of a goodbye to all that in response to a BrewDog franchise opening up in her English city of Lincoln:

Now I’m out. It’s surreal. I’m looking in from the outside and seeing the struggles in the industry, seeing how friends are marching on. I almost feel left behind, lost, but also that I’ve escaped. I’ve sidestepped into a new career path by pure luck. It’s not something I love like beer but it’s interesting, it pays the bills and, unlike hospitality, the rug won’t be swept from under my feet, then shoved back, then removed again. I’m comfortable, even as I drink some of the very last bottles of Lincolnshire Brewing Co that are in my fridge.

Eoghan Walsh posted a new podcast at Brussels Beer City featuring an interview with Jean Van Roy of Brussels brewery Brasserie Cantillon. He wisely avoided raising my accusations of 2006 but, still, had a good beery chat:

On a scorching hot early September day on the eve of brewing season for Cantillon, we met at a bar influential not only for the city but also for him, and his family brewery. We talk lambic evangelisation in a country that still doesn’t really get it, his youthful escapades drinking crap beer with friends, how is approach to brewing has changed thanks to his relationships with winemakers and chefs, and how the brewery’s corridors ring hollow and lonely in the absence of American, Italian and other foreign accents.

Elsewhere, you know there is nothing going on in beer in some corners if the discussion turns to flat flavoured water with vodka added.

Speaking of beer and corners, in this week’s edition of That Sorta Happened in Beer History, Mudge the Elder asked this question and got answers:

It’s before my time, but does anyone remember (or have talked to those who do) whether waiter service was commonplace in pubs across the UK in the 50s and 60s, or was it primarily a Northern thing?

A whole new world was revealed to mine eyes. Someone identifying themselves only as “[Bx2-B=R]” stated:

Primarily northern, my Lancastrian mum says, and common enough there that she didn’t find it weird; down south, mostly seems to have been an inter-war fad in big new pubs and died out with WWII. [Ray]

Talk of bell pushes, tipping and waiters in burgundy jackets with “silver” trays ensued. Sit down before you start through the thread.

Beer crime of a newer sort happened over in Michigan, as noted by the worst beer blogger ever:

…there was no money on the premise, and luckily no vandalism, but the intruders were there for more than a half an hour. “They ended up pouring nine beers,” he said. “It’s not somebody having a quick beer and leaving.” One of the men called someone and then soon, a bunch of kids entered the premises, running around and looking through the brewery’s merchandise. Luckily, the kids seemed to only have pop, not alcohol…

Another sort of loss is happening in bars like this out of Winnipeg that I don’t think I’ve seen reported in this way before even though it is very 2020:

It’s enough to make a brewski aficionado weep while sudsy hops are poured down the sink. An enormous amount of beer is going to waste in Winnipeg thanks to some bars and pubs being forced to close due to the coronavirus pandemic. Other establishments operating at reduced capacity are also having to dump hundreds of gallons down the drain…

I love the first sentence. If you hate sudsy and brewski, then you at least have to admire the proper use of aficionado.

Anyway, finally and speaking of which… perhaps… no, not really… there were comments made after the announcement of the NAGBJ awards… what’s that?… oh, it’s back to a “w”… BAGNW… is that it? Anyway, my comments were limited to “Third?!?!” and “Third?!?!” given I was mystified at certain outcomes. But I used to judge these things as part of panels, too, and I know that there are limits and these limits are realities. As I have noted before, these quibbles mainly hover around process and in particular nominations being from the authors and/or publishers. It would be easy enough to just send all members ballots rather than the filtering function of judging panels. They are also limited in audience as many folk don’t need or care about awards, especially once an “award-winning” adjective is already allocated to the bio.* Yet:

I just want people to know it’s totally normal, okay, and valid to wish for recognition and acknowledgement of a job well done. I don’t write about the things I write about because I NEED those things, but darn if it doesn’t feel good when it happens.

Boom! As with all the medals, I presume it is a stepping stone for the aspiring – which is good and normal and to be encouraged. And a small reward in a field without much recognition.

But, unlike during the years of my own experience, concerns and even unfair slags were raised about it all being too GBH focused or even bad back scratchy. In homage to 1830s British Parliamentary politics, lobbying continues for the establishment and the reformers. While many entries or entrants have appeared on that bloggy space’s webby pages… well, what is wrong with that? Especially as other outlets have been disappearing for years? Small pond. That’s where we swim. I do say that while acknowledging (having sifted through it all week after week now for years) I think there is a sort of beer trade writing of a sort not only is a bit samey and a bit goal oriented or even formulaic (the last paragraph often seems written first, as it were) but still a sort which may attract praise within a circle of co-aspirants. Well? So what!?! Why be a grump in all things? It’s just, yes, light entertainment – and we have to remember that much beer writing is actually very good, including, yes, even at GBH.** Perhaps not as much as they would say… but, in the end, Beth did entirely the proper thing and set the record straight in vivid technicolour. Go Team Beth.***

That’s a lot. I’m done. As always, remember there’s more out there. Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays (this week Jordan touts discount ham!!!) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Not to mention Cabin Fever. And Ben has finally gone all 2009 and joined in with his own podcast, Beer and Badword. And remember BeerEdge, too.

*No one cares about being “awards-winning” do they?
**Let’s stick with very good, shall we. Superlatives are so… not superlative. Plus, I’m a Pellicle sort of person.
***See the “*” here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just another line I rode down from 2004 to now…

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

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

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

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

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

The Nights Have Gone Cool But Thursday Beery News Notes Go On

Achy. A bit from leaving the window open all night despite the forecast of quite cooler air. And me swimming in the big lake when its no longer quite so warm. Winter is coming. I’ve been in the lake maybe seven or ten times over the last few weeks. How long will it last? I grew up swimming in forest rivers as well as the North Atlantic Ocean back home in Nova Scotia. Lakes were always a bit stagnant by comparison. Folk call that “wild swimming” these days. I just call it swimming. Who knew the big water in the nearby big lake would be so big? Beach sand in the car. Beach toys in the trunk. Battered and beaten and happy am I.

First off, before the snow blows, Retired Martin has taken us on a trek to a pub in a lovely traditional thatched roof village in Devon, the Globe Inn in Beaford:

…turns out to be the most crafty of any place I visited in Devon. Plain but welcoming, a good all-rounder whose GBG credentials are a bit mystifying till you taste the beer. That little fridge on the right (below) was packed full of 10% DIPAs and mango sours…

Last weekend, I listened to a repeat of a short piece on the NPR radio show TTBOOK on the changes for the worse that have been imposed upon Bourbon County Stout through the sale of Goose Island to evil big industrial beer. It was particularly gratifying to see guest Josh Noel demonstrating the “nostril in the glass” technique I have been advocating for for about a decade and a half. Not unrelated but to the contrary, Mike reminded us on Twitter of the upside of the buy-out of craft:

You know when a brewery sells to the big guys and they say that it offers them more resources than they would have normally? This example shows that perfectly. Safe place for customers and their employees continue to have jobs. Just sayin.

Everyone’s favourite Midwest bar, the Olympic Tavern, that they have never visited had a rough bit of bad customer experience this week, something that highlights that during times of crisis some folk place having a beer and a Margarita high up on their priorities. Handled well. Along a similar vein, Pellicle has posted the tale of a Scottish drinking habit that, being Scots, I’ve never quite heard of:

The hauf an a hauf is traditional and modern at the same time. It’s a Scottish cultural institution we can be proud of: a combination in which to luxuriate, rather than down in pursuit of a buzz. The hauf an a hauf is about savouring both, two halves coming together to create something new, whole, and wholly wonderful.

There must be an alt-tartan reality that excluded the generations before me as the idea that there is some long pervasive history of buzz avoidance going on north of Gretna Green is news to me. Rather than suggesting it is a tradition, in 2014 TheBeerCast described the novelty in this way:

I guess the bottom line here is what do you want from a hauf and hauf? To get loaded, quicker? A US-style ‘Shot and a beer, Dolores’? Or to give a depth of flavour to each drink? It seems, judging from the conversation, that the way half and halves are being seen is changing, as a newer generation of beer/whisky fans indulge in the practice as a tasting exercise, rather than an end-of-shift exercise…

That makes more sense. That’s more in line with Great-Grannie Campbell between the wars being banned for life – a number of times – from the James Watt pub in Greenock even though she lived right above it. Or more likely because. Then the grandchildren being kicked out when they were sent to get a gill on her behalf.

More currently, Matt noted with some hesitancy the creation of something called the Small Brewers Forum in the UK. It is open to breweries:

The Small Brewers Forum has been formed to protect and preserve small British breweries and those who operate them. We have a successful and strong collective voice and campaign on behalf of our members to ‘fight for fairness’ in the industry. We take our campaigning to the highest level at national government as well as local government and within the brewing industry.

The published material indicates that the “only let small brewers join (sub-10000hL) so I can be sure that they represent what’s good for me without any of the big guys pulling the strings.” This makes a lot of sense to me. The numerical majority of brewers are small and have local markets. Their issues are very different from regionals and big craft. Here in Ontario, while there isn’t a second organization after OCB, the membership of that organization represents only the minority of the province’s brewers. Trade organizations structured on “craft” or geography make less sense than those with common issues based on scale.

In the ha ha dumb dumb news item of the week, Budweiser was caught echoing Eco*:

On Friday, the company wrote, in a now-deleted tweet, about two of their brands, Budweiser and Bud Light. “Reject modernity, embrace tradition,” the tweet read, telling consumers to enjoy the original beverage over it’s lower-calorie counterpart. Pictured were the sleek, modern-looking Bud Light can, along with the classic designed Budweiser beer. However, the seemingly simple message raised some eyebrows. One Twitter user, Joshua A.C. Newman, pointed out the origins of the text for the ad. “Are you deliberately quoting the first two elements of Umberto Eco’s 14 elements of Fascism?” he responded to the since-deleted tweet.

There’s that concept of “tradition” again. Calling card of the casually ahistorical.

And, as recommended by Andy, I signed up for the beer newsletter by David Infante – and was pleased to find out it was also a blog. There are a lot of beer blogs holding themselves out as online beer magazines and newsletters these days. It’s a bit sad that self-publishing is that little bit needy that it needs to hide itself behind odd labels and a thin veneer of exclusivity. Anyway, his latest blog post “Hire me, White Claw” caught my attention primarily as it confirmed what I should have known – this year’s trendy cooler White Claw is Canadian!!!** While Jordan mentioned it in passing in his recent post he did not hit me over the head with the fact. Never had one sip myself. Nope. So virtuous I am. Plus I have Pickled Green Bean Clamato for that.

Stan has been telling tales again – this time about new hops being named and brought to market:

By announcing a name for the experimental hop previously known as HBC 692 the company signaled she is her own brand. “We were getting very significant pull (demand),” said Jason Perrault, CEO and hop breeder for Yakima Chief Ranches. HBC is a partnership between YCR and John I. Haas. “We’ve seen the impact it can have in a beer. Unique, but appealing. It was just time to give it its own identity.” The name, Talus, is a nod to the talus slopes found in the Yakima Valley. She is a daughter of Sabro, the hop formerly known as HBC 438 and commercialized in 2018.

I’m not a hop spotter myself, preferring to drink and think about beer once made but it is interesting to see how in the hop trade these sorts of things matter. Mr Stange even admitted to having been aware of the name (before the name was released) by way of an embargoed press release – which made me wonder if new shoe lace tech also comes with embargoed press releases. You should also sign up for Stan’s newsletter Hop Queries to really keep up. It’s a blog he sends to you monthly by email.

Finally, Jeff posted a post on Wednesday about the brewing volume stats coming out of the Oregon Liquor Control Commission so far in this very odd year:

The Oregon Liquor Control Commission tracks the taxable barrels sold by Oregon breweries in Oregon. I’ve been watching to see when the June report would drop, because that will give us six months of data to see what kind of violence COVID-19 has done to breweries. The upshot: it’s been bad, but maybe not as bad as we might have guessed back in March. Thirteen of the top twenty breweries were down from this time last year, some substantially. But overall, the top 20 breweries were only down 2% from the same period in 2019.

While that is an average that is great news. If I could go back to myself five months ago, in the middle of the beginning of the stress of what was to come, and say “don’t worry it’ll only be 2% off” I’d be ecstatic. Now, it’s clear that it is an average and some are suffering more than that but for an economic snapshot that’s a pretty sweet picture.

In news of the ancient, Merryn gave me the heads up about a weekly web event put on by EXARC, “the ICOM Affiliated Organisation on Archaeological Open-Air Museums, Experimental Archaeology, Ancient Technology and Interpretation”:

Historical-archaeological Beer Brewers unite! We meet for a chat, this Saturday, 20:00h CET. It’s free, it’s open access and for anybody with a serious interest and / or experience with historic, archaeological craft brewing, anywhere in the world.

You sign up, too! Now!! I may be mowing as that’s mid-afternoon on the best day of the week. The heart of Saturday afternoon which is prep time for the heart of Saturday night.***

Here’s an interesting bit of news. An Albertan laboratory ran a study of beers entered into an awards judge-y thing to see if there were patterns in award giving outery:

The Raft Beer Labs analysis, published on its website, showed a few trends among medal-winning beers. Fresher beer was more likely to win an award. Medal winners were more likely to have a dry-finish than non-winners. Award-winning beers also tended to be clearer, with less turbidity than non-winners. Medal winners were also found to have lower free amino nitrogen levels and tended to be slightly higher in alcohol content than their target. The analysis also showed that both winners and non-winners were less bitter — measured in IBUs, or International Bittering Units — than the listed level, and both winners and non-winners had some microbial contamination, from wild yeasts or bacteria.

Interesting. Clearer, stronger and less bitter beers were preferred. The opposite of trendy low-alc murky hop bombs the blogs and micro blogs and photo blogs and podcast blogs and multi-author blogs are all talking about.

Finally, I am not sure I understand the point of this story. Why care about a brewery that many have written off? Why write and publish “Founders continues to defend its corporate culture”?

Done! For more of the good stuff but from a different view and in a range of blog formats, check in with Boak and Bailey most Saturdays, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays (listen as they shit on Belleville this week!) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Not to mention Cabin Fever. And Ben has finally gone all 2009 and joined in with his own podcast, Beer and Badword.**** And BeerEdge, too.

*I know – excellent, right?
**Which is sorta like saying “Soylent Green is people!” in some circles.
***Yup.
****The greatest Great Lake is obviously Lake Ontario as it contains all the other Great Lakes.