Surely Your Bestest Christmas Present Ever… These Cheery Beery News Notes

So, here we are. We have slipped into Yule itself, the semi-conscious days of the competing forces of the sugar highs, the alcohol buzz and the tryptophan doze. And napping. I recommend you start with the 3 pm nap. That nap rewards you for putting in 3/4s of a day’s effort and sets you up for  pre-dinner cocktails. One of the classic naps. Very relaxing. Sorta like the mood in this week’s front page above the fold photo right there. That picture, by the way, is the Yuletide beery photo contest winner for 2010, perhaps the apex of the madness of submissions every December back then. It was submitted by Brian Stechschulte of San Francisco and was declared Grand Champion. It was called that for no other reason than there were also twelve other separate prize packs awarded that year. Crazy.

First up? What’s that you say: “what’s the news on Japaneses  two-row barley breeding?” Well… funny you should ask:

“This study detected key traces of Japanese barley improvement inscribed in the genomes of two high-quality modern cultivars. Japanese beer barley breeding began around 150 years ago by introducing Western high-quality beer barley. The hot and humid Japanese climate and soil-transmitting virus diseases hampered the development of beer barley suited for Japan. Western beer barley cultivars inevitably required crossed with virus-disease-resistant East Asian barley, despite the latter having undesirable brewing quality characteristics. Balancing virus disease resistance and malting quality was extremely difficult.”

Interesting. I also struggle to balance resistance and quality… as you know. Also interesting is how this time last week, I told you about a piece in The Times of London on how to survive and even enjoy the UK version of the Christmas office party. This week in The New York Times (no relation) there was something of a companion piece but one with a very different outlook:

DoorDash, which cut about 1,250 employees at the end of last year, is hosting happy hours in regional offices — many of them starting early, like 4:30 p.m. in San Francisco — as well as “WeDash” meet-ups where employees can compete for prizes like a Vespa scooter. CNBC did a low-key morning celebration in New Jersey, with mimosas, as well as an afternoon party, accommodating employees who work different shifts. TIAA, the investment firm, did on-site holiday celebrations from 4 to 7 p.m. called “Gratitude Gatherings… “When you’re doing an event to inspire people, motivate them and reward them, do it on terms they’d appreciate. Even me personally, I want to get home earlier…”

ZZZzzzz… the article even used the word “wholesome” in a positive sense!  Wholesome!!! I hope any Brits reading this are having a good belly laugh. There, the verdict is in: UK pub sales up over 7% compared to Yule2022 – and no doubt up 92,919,845% compared to some sort of wholesome late afternoon gatherings. Conversely, you can check in with Ron who has been sending dispatches from a proper holiday with Dolores in Britain, with three posts with three pictures of three breakfasts and a trip to the Museum on their last day there featuring this fabulous exchange:

Bags packed and dumped, we head to the British Museum. We spend an hour or two there each trip. Concentrating on one section. We’ve still lots left to see. This time, it’s Dark Ages and medieval Europe. There’s quite a queue for the security checks. A jangle of Chinese girlies in front of us are taking selfies. Lots of selfies. “I wonder what they do with them all?” I ask Dolores. “The same as you do with all your boring pub photos. Nothing.” “They’re for my blog.” “Right. Nothing to do with your weird building obsession.” “That’s not true.” “Then why do your photos never have people in them?” “They do sometimes.” “Only by accident.”

And Ruvani has a story out on an interesting new IPA – an actual interesting one! – from brothers Van and Sumit Sharma who developed it with Alan Pugsley, British brewmaster and founder of Shipyard Brewing in Portland, Maine as well as disciple of the late Peter Austin who we lost recently:

In creating their own IPA, the Sharmas and Pugsley decided to brew what they consider to be a “British-Indian IPA,” stylistically modeled on more traditional English IPAs, acknowledging the style’s history, while maintaining Rupee’s ethos of making high quality easy-drinking beer meant for food pairing. “Rupee IPA is brewed in the traditions of classic English IPAs, enhancing malt and hop balance—creating a drinkable beer with a dry crisp hop bitterness balanced with subtle maltiness,” says Sharma. He emphasizes that the beer’s copper color and bright clarity mean it is far removed from American West Coast and New England IPA styles.

Yum. I mean I expect it’s yum. Confession: I like Pugsley beers. I sleep in t-shirts covered in Pugsley brewed beer brand logos. But also a “Blueberries for Sal” one, too. So there. Napwear.

Note: NHS Martin encounters the perfect perhaps prototyical proper pub… possibly. Not at all related, an inproper pint has been punished:

An ice lolly-themed beer has been discontinued after a boy saw his dad drinking it and burst into tears because he wasn’t allowed to try it. The four-year-old’s mother complained about Rocket Lolly IPA to alcohol industry trade body the Portman Group, which agreed that the ale appealed to children. Portman Group upheld the mum’s complaint and brewery Northern Monk agreed to discontinue the beer. The mother, who is unnamed in the report, said: “We raised our four-year-old to understand what alcohol is and why he is not permitted to try it.”

Quite right, too, though I would have thought the prohibition on really stupid branding would have applied, too, and not just the crying toddler rule.

Alistair, my lower mid-table nemisis in the Pellicle EPL pool, has found plenty to not cry about but instead to praise in his annual review of his favourite beers of the year, starting with the pale ones:

Ah…the first day of two weeks of Yuletide holiday. Time to make mince pies, plan menus for the various festive days, and to wonder if I even bother buying beer given the amount of cider in the alcohol fridges. It is also time for the annual review of the year, which thanks to having managed to get out of the country a couple of times will include both a drinking den and a brewery of the year. As ever though, we start with pale beers, those that are yellow or golden, without veering too much into orange.

Not one to be caught napping, Matt is also pushing back against the current gloom with some longer term thinking, gazing towards the end of the decade and seeing some light at the end of the tunnel shining in the form of investments:

But with the industry facing such difficult trading conditions that will likely continue into 2024 and beyond, why invest in such a large chunk of the hospitality industry now? Surely this is a time for caution, not confidence. Investors are a savvy bunch though, and firms like Breal will be intentionally investing in projects it believes will provide them with a profitable return, usually within five to seven years… While Breal’s moves could be framed as blind optimism, I posit that there’s a good deal more logic to it than that. It likely means that, by 2028 and beyond, the investor expects the beer and hospitality markets to be in a far better position to trade profitably.

Buy low. Sell high. Makes sense. And this is the low, right? Right? Hard to tell what is what these days. For example at the end of last week, one report in The Drinks Business received some comment over its overly enthusiastic characterization of the tiny THC laced bevvy trade:

Phil McFarland, Wherehouse Beverage Company’s general manager of THC Beverages and who worked at Half Acre Beer, told Axios that the move reminded him of what happened with craft beer. McFarland said coming “through the craft beer wave, this feels very familiar to me. In five years or so, this is going to be as pervasive and accepted as craft beer has become.”

Mirella was not convinced by such plain puffery but Dan put a finger on one thing: “Only if you consider a growing variety of fruity drinks equivalent to the craft beer wave!” Given that the craft beer trade, embracing the slippery slopes in its despiration, over the last few years has allowed the debasement of its brand along with its products, Dan may well have a point. Except even with that level of meaninglessness… it ain’t happening either. Confess! Do any of you actually drink that stuff? Not just taste it once or twice at trade shows booths but actually repeatedly buy it?

Note: the Badger. Govern yourselves accordingly!

Speaking of which… hmm… ever wonder about the availability of light beer in North Korea? Me neither. So…

Rowan Beard, a tour manager of Young Pioneer Tours, anticipated that the new beverage could be a success. “There is an outspoken demand for a beer that can avoid men putting on weight in North Korea,” he told NK News. Beard explained that many North Koreans drink soju not only because it’s cheaper but because many want to “avoid putting on unnecessary weight caused by beer. I can see this beer selling well if they’re able to price it the same or cheaper than the current beers available in the country,” he said, as many will want beer “without the guilt.”

Bet there’s plenty of “unspoken demand”… if you know what I mean. And there are beer tours! Which means now you can go where people are one, now you can go where they get things done.

Q: is the Bud Lite botch and backlash really over? Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps relatedly, Jessica Mason reports that ABInBevBudCo faces a new problem

The union told Fox Business that out of 5,000 members who work at 12 AB InBev breweries in the US, 99% voted to authorise a strike. This means that if the workers cannot secure a new labour contract raising wages, protecting jobs and securing benefits before the union’s contract expires on 29 February 2024, then strikes will take place and beer production will likely become affected. Teamsters general president Sean O’Brien said: “Teamsters stand firm in our fight for the best contract at Anheuser-Busch, and this powerful strike vote proves it. Our members’ labour, talent, and sacrifice are what put Anheuser-Busch products on the shelf, and we are committed to getting a contract that rewards and recognises their hard work.”

Solidarity!!  Fight the power!!! It is a time of endings. Many sorts of endings as Boak and Bailey* have carried through with their long promised exit from Twex. I might just keep linking to their roundups for a while as a public service but, then again, there’s this sort of weird comment when helpfully directed where to find them…

Yes, it’s goodbye to B&B from me as well as I don’t follow any other platforms either – and have no plans to do so.

[BREAKING: man starves due to fork being placed on left side of bowl, not on the right.] They explained the move in their newsletter… which is a little like dancing about architecture but never mind:

We got to dislike feeling tethered to a particular platform. Feeling as if we couldn’t leave irritated us. It’s also been unstable and chaotic for a year or more, with sudden changes in functionality and policy. That made us anxious. It also turns out that starting from scratch on other platforms comes with benefits. We’ve got far fewer followers on Mastodon, BlueSky, and Instagram, but they seem more engaged.

In another serious sort of loss, venerable Canadian industry watcher Greg Clow has announced the winding up of his 15 year run as editor-in-chief and bottle washer at Canadian Beer News, a ticker tape of sorts that provided updates on every announcement in the national scene:

After 15 years and more than 17,000 articles, I’ve decided that it’s time to bring Canadian Beer News to an end, meaning this year’s hiatus will be permanent. On one hand, this wasn’t an easy decision. I still enjoy spreading the word about brewery openings, beer releases, festivals and events, and other developments in Canada’s beer and brewing industry. But on the other hand, I’m also pretty damn tired of it.

Thanks, praise and some sadness ensued but this admission from Greg put things pretty clearly into focus: “…honestly, the idea of having to report on so many closures, and the loss of so many people’s livelihoods, just isn’t appealing to me…” Greg promises that he just might revive his blog Beer Boose & Bites after a 12 year snack break.

And Stan has also signed off… but just for the rest of the year.** In addition to his excellent linky selection, this week he explored the state of the industry and shared this message to and from the trade:

A “Year in Beer” summary produced by the Brewers Association and chief economist Bart Watson’s presentation last week for association members and the press both focused on the business of beer. They made it clear that the numbers reflect an ongoing trend, and that 2024 will be just as challenging for breweries. Why should beer drinkers care? For one thing, if your favorite brewery goes out of business you’ve lost something. So consider Watson’s last two slides. He suggested that “most of the challenges craft faces have opportunities in craft strengths.” Flavor and variety matter, a wide range (including next to zero) ABVs serve different occasions well, and where diversity grows niche and local opportunities do as well.

What kills me about these sorts of trade messages Stan shares right there is how they are too often affirmations of what the trade is already doing! Plus everything is a plus. With that lack of critical consideration, I expect 2024 to be worse than 2023. And you see something of a similar analytical gap in those interviewed for a piece by Kate Bernot in GBH on the state of homebrewing that on, one hand wants, to convince the reader that there is hope for the hobby while, at the same time, pretty much identifying that interest has seriously faded – and that there’s good reason for that dwindling within the greater slide of craft beer:

…interest in the club declined six to eight years ago as more craft breweries opened in the Birmingham area. As older members of the club have moved away or aged out, fewer new members are replacing them… Ask an existing homebrewer to invite a friend to brew with them, and statistically, that friend is likely to be a white man, too. The Carboy Junkies’ membership reflects this homogeneity: Joines says the club is made up of 80% white males over the age of 35, with the majority of them being older than 50. He says everyone in the club is married; most are affluent; and most have graduate degrees.

Even I, the lasped bad homebrewer, never personally had the need for a club. It was a kitchen to basement thing for me. (Like farm to table but with stairs… sorta.) Well, other than, you know, that club formed by my friends and sudden wave of strange new acquaintances who drank up whatever I made. Then I had kids. Then I, you know, grew up. Or woke up. Was that it?

That is it! Happy holidays!! The days are already getting longer. And remember, ye who read this far down to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (98) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (912) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,427 – I actually gained one!) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (163), with unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. All in all I now have a bit of dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat and accept that BlueSky is catching up in “the race to replace.” Even so and although it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing or perhaps only waiting to discuss beer:

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

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

*Check out their best beer writing of 2023 post, too. I won’t be doing one. I live in the now, baby.
**Man, no wonder they set up the beer roundup writers’ holiday party for next week… oh well, more of the cheese ball for me.

The “Where Does The First Third Of May Go?” Edition Of The Beery News Notes

OK – gotta be quick about this. The second week of the month sees me busy on Wednesday evenings. I’m on a community radio station board. CJAI… and it’s our funding drive!  You there. And you!! Send in money. Moolah. Dollairnoes.  And it’s gonna be like that much of the month. (Plus the mow mow mow, plant plant plant…. though the tomatoes started from seed in February now seem to be surviving a few near nippy nights.) Aaaaand work meeting next Wednesday night and then off to another country to discuss a deal. Sounds exotic to those not in a border town. So… gotta be quick. Let’s go.

First, Lew has too much booze. He does. It’s pretty clear that he does. He really does. And that’s just a third of it.

Boak and Bailey discussed one of the interesting trends in brewing – getting away from all that beery taste:

For a start, the cans often look appealing with bright colours, attractive pop art typography, and words like ‘sherbet’ or ‘tropical’ that get your mouth watering. (Don’t tell the Portman Group.) Secondly, they don’t look, smell or taste like beer, just as berry cider doesn’t look, smell or taste like cider, and the original Hooch didn’t look, smell or taste like booze at all. This is a major selling point if you don’t like beer, or the culture that comes with it. Drinking a kiwi, melon and mango session sour this weekend, we marvelled at its similarity to actual mango juice, even down to the viscous texture, achieved with oats.

One commentator pointed out an obvious: “it’s important to remember that these beers *are* manjo juice- it’s absolutely staggering to me quite how much purees juices are added to them post fermentation…” Mango puree juice with beer added. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Mmmm… aseptic

How was your coronation weekend? Better for Lionel Love than perhaps the UK pub trade.

And Gary added to the discussion of Japanese brewed beer and touched on the role of rice, a topic I discussed a bit over a year ago. I like this tidbit:

Australian lager usually contained sugar by then, an adjunct. Despite the German influence on Kirin’s Hiroshima plant Kirin may have used rice, also an adjunct, by the 1930s. A 1916 issue of The Japan Economic and Financial Monthly, in a summary of Japanese beer brewing, stated rice was used to supplement both imported and domestic malt. The amounts given work out to about one-third for rice, similar to contemporary American practice. In any case, as the soldier’s remarks suggest, a blonde international lager style had emerged, progeny more or less of Central European pilsner.

That 1916 record indicates that a standard brew included a malt bill of 28.5% rice to 71.5% baley malt. Clearly not introduced by the Americans after WW2 but also not yet clear when it was as the article also confirms the desire to replicate German traditions.

There was an excellent piece this week in GBH by Tasha Prados on the forgotten history of the Jewish brewers of Bamburg:

Jews didn’t just work in Bamberg’s beer industry. They were its pioneers, helping to put Bamberg on the brewing map. Jews invented such important aspects of brewery technology as the returnable bottle and pelletized hops, Raupach says, also establishing pasteurization and bringing in international expertise in fields like packaging.”The worldwide reputation of Bavarian beer would never have become reality without the involvement of the Jews,” he says.

I was immediately reminded of Gary’s series on “Prewar, Jewish-Owned Breweries in Central and Eastern Europe” which he published back in the spring of 2021. You will find a handy index under that link. Both these works speak to Prados’ observation, that the Jewish past in the brewing trade often hides in plain sight but is left out of the popular narrative.

The ever wonderful website A London Inheritence told a tale of a pub, a stairway to the river and lots of algae:

It may be that fires were at the start and end of the Anchor and Hope, probably built after the destruction of the 1763 fire, and destroyed in the 1904 fire. After the 1904 fire, the area once occupied by the pub seems to have been included in the space occupied between river and gas works, probably used for the movement of coal from river to gas works. I continue to be fascinated by Thames Stairs. They are some of the oldest features to be found along the river and almost certainly date back many hundreds of years. Most times when I walk down stairs and on to the foreshore, even on a glorious sunny day, they are quiet. It is not often I find someone else on the foreshore.

Speaing of water, Layla Schlack wrote an interesting article on the particular environmental impact of dealcoholized wine, with implicit extrapolations for beer:

To remove that ethanol is less straightforward. In  a reverse osmosis process, wine is pressurized against a membrane to separate water and ethanol from concentrated wine. The water is distilled and added back to dilute the wine to a palatable state. While effective at preserving flavor and texture, this method is water-intensive, making it less environmentally friendly… “The number one insight you need to have is that dealcoholization is an energy intensive process,” says Mehmet Gürbüzer, head of sales for Oddbird, a Sweden-based company that makes non-alcoholic still and sparkling wines.

More eco-news with bit more than a little Moon Base Alpha astronauts drinking their own filtered pee about this story out of Japan:

Craft beer made using uneaten rice with mixed grains from a cafeteria for tenants at the Osaka Umeda Twin Towers South has been sold to employees working in the office since mid-March. Hankyu Hanshin Properties Corp., which manages the building in front of JR Osaka Station, launched this initiative as part of its efforts to reduce food waste with entities such as Crust Japan, a startup that strives to do the same… The bottled beer is sold for ¥1,100 at a bar only for people who work in the building.

And even more eco-relatedly-wise:

A water-recycling company is seeking to answer that question, with help from a local brewery. The result is a beer made from wastewater, and I can tell you from personal experience that it’s pretty good. Epic OneWater Brew, from Epic Cleantec and Devil’s Canyon Brewing Company, is made from greywater recycled from showers, laundry and bathroom sinks in a 40-story San Francisco apartment building, where Epic has onsite equipment to capture, treat and reuse water for non-drinking purposes. You won’t find the beer for sale anytime soon.

I suppose this is good to explore the tech… and… as noted above… you know… mango puree. Unrelatedly, there was this good news came to my email this week:

Reaching out to share some exciting news about the newly formed National Black Brewers Association, NB2A.  The organization was announced this weekend at the Annual Craft Brewers Conference in Nashville, TN with the goal of promoting the Black brewing community, increasing the number of African American individuals in the brewing industry at all levels of production, and many more. The craft brewing business accounted for nearly $29 billion in beer sales last year, which is nearly one-quarter of the $120 billion beer industry revenue in the U.S.  But of the nearly 10,000 craft brewers in the country, only about 1% are Black individuals.  NB2A is looking to change that dynamic.

This is great. Here’s some happy photos. I have long argued that the “one ring to rule them all” approach of the centralized unified homogenized Brewers Association was serving certain classes of brewers over others. More productive schisms and separate interests assertions of this sort please.

Speaking of the alt-reality of the Brewers Association, those great folk who brought you such wizardry as “small=big” and “traditional means fruit sauce” has given us another great indoctrination… err… education session winner at the Craft Brewers Conference 2023 as you can see to the right: “Privilege as Your Leadership Superpower”! Now, I would say you would have to live under a rock for the last decade not to realize how offensive just the title of the presentation is… but this is, after all, the BA and the BA says this of itself:

The Brewers Association (BA) is committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse craft brewing community for both brewers and beer lovers.

The BA is great! They says so, after all. Just look at all that promotion! The pick all the best locations too! But looking at the l’ship consulto’s website, it appears that the presentation topic  is something on the shelf in the can, an easy to replicate dog and pony show* so in this case the BA knew what it was getting.  If fact, the topic even appears to be an idea perhaps lifted from elsewhere, as this Australian consulto conference indicates.** Sadly, it was a disaster as Ren Navarro reported: “…it’s the reason I moved my flight up by a day and left the conference early. It was beyond offensive.” Libby Crider provided an image and wrote:

The tone deafness is shattering. You insulted my colleagues, my friends & their life’s work. But pat yourselves on the back for your presenters who “are excited to bring women on board to their brewery” as part of their plan to be more inclusive. Fuck off…

Just hope some “beer writers” (like actual journalists) clear all this up. Let’s wait for that, hmm? Relatedly perhaps, I may have learned this week after last week‘s discussion, debate and revelatory comments on goodness appropriation, that through the craft beer lens cultural appropriation is generally bad but appropriation of crisis may still be something craft can feel good about leveraging to make some sweet sales.

That’s it! That’s enough from me. You got your mango puree. You got your beer made of pee. You got your BA not able to read the room. You want more? As per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon:

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

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters to stay on top of things – including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those  Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now more occassional but always wonderful newsletterThe Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a podcast.  There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel this week on Youtube.   And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!*

*Is this phrase broader than in the legal world? Conveys the sense of a regurgitation of slightly moronic simplicites, often with powerpoint, as in: “here is a slide of a dog… and here is a slide of a pony… now… here is a slide of a dog and a pony…” Apparently things got cruder this time. By the way… is Jay daydreaming or bored at this session?
**In fact, the words “leadership” “privilege” and “superpower” are sort of the nose candy for these sorts of consultos these days.
***And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like  both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again.  The Fizz died in 2019.  Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

The Absolutely Final No Returns Accepted News Notes Of April 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

Semi-spoiler: “…the disastrous rebrand…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters to stay on top of things – including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and now definitely from Stan at his spot on those  Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason every Friday. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletterThe Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. Ben has revived his podcast, Beer and Badword. Still gearing  up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too even if it’s a bit trade… and by “a bit” I think mean not really just a bit.  There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel this week on Youtube.   And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!*

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

The Thursday Beery News Notes For A Few Big Numbers

OK, I turned 60 on Tuesday. I am in my seventh decade. Just like that. Snap. Me, I am not that shocked and appauled by the prospect of time’s sands slipping so easily though my shaking fingers – but I also face the reality that I… began blogging twenty years ago this week, too. On a generic platform that within weeks included beer writing and around a year later split off into a bespoke beer blog. What an absolute waste of a lifetime! Seriously, think of all the languages I could speak, the instruments I could play if I had not taken to publicly scribbling back on 25 April 2003. That being said, I didn’t exactly become a polygolt before I hit 40 and it’s been a lot of fun… and look at all the stuff down there I read just this week… so…

First up, Gary has been on fire (to be clear – not actually aflame) recently with a servies of posts about beer in Egypt pre-WW2 followed by posts about wartime brewing in Tripoli, Libya. Great-aunt Madge was a frontline nurse in the Eighth Army so I was raised on this timeline with Airfix soldiers clad in shorts and ammo belts:

The OEA brewery was located in central Tripoli, near the sea. On Facebook a contributor, familiar with modern Tripoli, pinned the location on a map, near Dahra district. He adds other interesting information of a past and present nature, including that the brewery no longer stands. In any case, the Malta enterprise known today as Simonds Farsons Cisk was running OEA not long after it fell into British hands. It continued to do so until 1948, according to Thomas’ second discussion. In that year, he states, OEA was returned to its Italian owners, who are not named.

Less farthy-backy, Ron’s been writing about life in his 1970s, including this week about his early days of homebrewing which mirror mine in the 1980s:

After a while, we got hold of a five gallon cider barrel. Off-licences often used to sell draught cider back in those days, served from such a small plastic barrel. It made life much easier, doing away with all that bottling mess. Though you needed to drink the beer fairly quickly. A week to ten days was about the longest it would last. I can remember having a barrel of Mild my brother brought up to Leeds towards the end of my first year at university. The very hot summer of 1976. We sat drinking glasses of iced Mild on the balcony of my student flat in North Hill Court. 

Note: craft‘s meaninglessness reaches new depths.

Cookie guided me to the story of one familiar face on Canadian TV in the 1970s and ’80s, our own perhaps second best snooker champ after Cliff Thorburn, ‘Big Bill’ Werbeniuk:

During his hay day, Werbeniuk would consume upwards of 40 pints of beer a day, with him often having six pints before every game and limited himself to just one pint per frame. Werbeniuk’s incredible super human ability to handle the beers was due to him suffering from hypoglycemia, a condition that means the body is able to burn off alcohol and sugar extremely quickly, allowing him to drink places dry daily. The Canadian’s drinking was actually encouraged by doctors, due to Werbeniuk suffering from a familial benign essential tumour.

I recall from the time, as reported in his 2003 obit, “that his prodigious drinking was the only way he could stop an arm tremor that hampered his play.” A perfect foil to the dapper Thorburn and likely a reason I took up the game for such a long time… pre-kids… you know.

Lisa Grimm’s Weirdo Guide to Dublin Pubs continues this week with consideration of the former pub known as JW Sweetmans, now reborn as the new pub known as JR Mahon’s:

With the return of cask last weekend – and with a pre-planned event there anyway – it was a perfect opportunity to check out the changes. The pub occupies the same enormous spot on the Liffey, with multiple floors and masses of dark wood, but it has been beautifully renovated and considerably brightened up – the stained glass on the ground floor gives some much-needed colour, and while the warmth of the wood remains, things certainly seem lighter and much more airy than in the previous incarnation. There are still many – possibly more – little snugs, nooks and crannies, but the flow is much better overall, with all four floors of space having a bit of their own character.

I had always thought grapes for wine were a sort of forever thing but it appears that they are only as old as the post-last-ice-age era and are formed to be what they are today in large part by hunter gatherer selection:

Grapevine has a long history as one of the world’s oldest crops. Wine, made from grapes, was among the earliest products to be traded globally, playing a key role in the exchange of cultures, ideas, and religions. At the end of the Ice Age, grapevine originated from the European wild vine. Today, only a few relic populations of this wild vine still exist, one of which can be found on the Ketsch peninsula along the Rhine river, between the cities of Karlsruhe and Mannheim.

Speaking of basic ingredients, Jordan was on a jaunt recently, one funded by a Ministry of Agriculture. When I lived in PEI, my local MP called himself the “Minster of Aggykulchur” so I am fond of these sorts of things. This particular MoA is in Czechia and was hosting a number of the glad to be invited to look at piles of malting barley:

For a hundred and fifty years, in a cellar in Benešov, a man with a rake has trodden up and back, up and back along carefully ordered rows of germinating barley nearly six inches deep. The slick slate floor mimics earth the kernels would find themselves in had the grasses been left to go to seed. The maltster pulls the rake with a practised motion long committed to muscle memory, stepping backwards while pulling with his upper back and triceps, rowing through the barley and leaving a patterned wake at three foot intervals.

To be fair, not a man. A series of men, we trust. Also to be fair, Jordan pre-discloses and then discloses in the best fashion and also shared at one moment via DM that across the taproom table “Joe Stange five or six pints in speaks of you as a free floating conscience” over my junkety requests thing which is a good thing to know. Especially when it’s a meaningful learning experience as opposed to being in the buffet lineup at another identi-fest.  Releatedly, check out the CB&B podcast about top service standards in one Prague beer bar.

Conversely, there was recently a piece about a store that’s a real piece of Maine’s beer history which I was looking forward to being familiar with the area as a Nova Scotian but which I was quite quickly saddened by… being familiar with the area. See, Novare Res Bier Café in Portland was not at all the first craft beer bar in the state. I know because in 2008 I wrote about going there when it was new. Not even the first Belgian beer bar. That’s Ebenezer’s Pub. The Great Lost Bear is my candidate for oldest good beer bar, opening in 1979. We are also told that in the 1980s and 90s the breweries of Maine “were clustered around the urban center of Portland to the southeast” even though north aka downeast, at the shore just 48 miles from Bangor there were at least Bar Harbor Brewing, Maine Coast Brewing Co. and Atlantic Brewing in Baa HaaBaa.  Most oddly, we are told “the Arline Road” connects Bangor to the bordertown of Calais. That’s the well-referenced Airline Route which I drove many times, called that because (before it was upgraded) you rode along on many hill crests with drop offs that felt like you might flip off into the clouds. I mention all this to point out how poor fact checking, a plague in beer writing, sadly places the value of an entire piece in doubt.

Note: complaining about this to the left but not this is, what, a bit calculated? Both are just harmless if utterly bland boosterism.

You know, I could post the same one observation about NHS Martin every week: excellent photography, understated insightful comment. Like this piece on a suprisingly lively pub in what I now understand to be the less than attractive town of Maidenhead:

It was a wonderful pub. Outside, children organised a fundraiser for Brain Research, inside the telly was ignored by professional drinkers and lovely staff called you “darling” and you could almost forget you were in Maidenhead at all… I don’t know exactly why, but the joy was infectious, and I’m going to resist mentioning Maidenhead’s red light area, grim underpasses and terrifying multi-storey on this occasion.

And I really enjoyed this BBC piece on small liquor shop drinking places in parts of Japan called kaku-uchi that may date back to the 1600s:

While kaku-uchi have evolved since then – for example, the choice of drinks has widened, with some serving cocktails and others specialising in beer or wine – they’ve stayed true to their proletarian origins. Everyone mixes on an even footing and, often, fluid seating or standing arrangements mean that all customers gather around the same table or counter – making it disarmingly easy to strike up a conversation. Simple snacks are available, with typical fare including canned and dried goods, pickles and oden, or Japanese hotpot.

So, and finally for this week, last week I made a comment about something Boak and Bailey wrote (my point: I would worry if beer was my only hobby) and found their response in… a funny place. As the scramble to find the next Twitter accellerates, the have (in addition to FB and IG as well as Mastedon and Patreon) Substack and its new notes. All very decentralized. So over there… and I am not sure the link would even works so bear with me… This was said:

In a quick, rather heartfelt blog post, we reflected on the positive role beer plays in our lives, and why it shouldn’t feel like a chore or obligation. Alan used the word ‘prop’ here, with concern, suggesting (if we read it right) that beer shouldn’t be anybody’s main hobby. We’d disagree with that because… it’s none of our business. Let beer be as important as it needs to be, as long as you’re happy and healthy. 

I am of course fine with other people having other views… except for that idea that “it’s none of our business.” I mention this not to disagree or be disagreeable but to point out how much of beer writing is actually about making observations on the business of others. In the same newsletter, for example, B+B extended comment is made on how one navigates pub culture best by understanding that a “sense of community is created through exclusion” in many spaces. Frankly, I avoid boozehalls full of alkies one a very similar basis that I would avoid those full of racist memorobilia and junior goosesteppers. I judge both as forms of human degradation, distinct but, yes, sometimes overlapping.* I would also speak up frankly to a friend who was going off the path in either respect. Because I make it my business.

So, yes, my point was it is important to extend that sort of advice as a writer to anyone who might be reading, that it is good to check in with yourself about priorities and to remember that a singular fixation with booze is not generally a milestone on the path of well-being. Which is part of why I get such a kick from Mr. Newman‘s other interests. Or Jeff’s pilgramages. Or Ron’s Brazilian breakfast buffets. And if I am are going to speak publicly about the many jollies of the clink and the drink, I would be, what, insincere or even a bit false not to mention (let alone explore) the downsides, too, ** lest we end up as passion parrots. Balance please. Get that goldfish. As Stan wrote on Monday:

Each week there are stories that reinforce the myth that there is a halo ’round the craft beer moon.*** And there are stories that scream bullshit. There are more of the former, maybe because they are more fun to write. In my youth I worked at a newspaper where the publisher said, honest to goodness, that if we wrote something bad about a person we should find an occasion to write something good about them within the next year. Some sort of balanced ledger. It’s not my goal to find less pleasant stories to balance the feel good ones, but some weeks that is pretty easy.

All of which also leads to the further diversificatiton of conduits in our efforts to hunt out both the pleasant and the unpleasant truths. As Twitter slowly crumbles, there are more and more lifeboats to find all the interesting voices.  It the thing to do is that we all add emailed newslatters and add Substack Notes and also Patreon and, additionally, consider (as I have) making Mastodon all yours. All again in addition to Facebook and Instagram. What else?

I’m still most pleased by Mastodon. I’ve built up 825 followers there over a few months which is nice as they are responsive but I really like the feature that I can follow a hashtage as easily as following a person. Here’s your newbie cheat sheet:

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

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters to stay on top of things – including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and now definitely from Stan at his spot on those  Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason every Friday. Once a month, WIll Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletterThe Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. Ben has revived his podcast, Beer and Badword. Still gearing  up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too even if it’s a bit trade… and by “a bit” I think mean not really just a bit.  There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel this week on Youtube.   And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!****

*Now, to be clear, there are degrees of dependency from just being a beer dullard though to self-harm… and, yes, I the one who once faced the consequences of saying out loud to a EDI gathering that there were two sorts of racist. What I meant was there were (i) the ill-informed who could be eduated on the one hand and, (ii) on the other the intentional Nazi shithead… but facing a room of really pissed off Indigenous leadership led by one chief who said “OK, you are going to have to *#$&ing unpack that one, kid… and do so slowly and carefully” reminds me still that one needs to take care in exprerssing certain things. 
**I am also reminded of the lesson in wilful blindness or at least abiding stupidity amongst beer trade friendly/dependent/sychophant beer writers when, years ago, sent out feelers years ago about why craft beer was not taking on anti-drunk driving as a cause and received this from a now little heard from voice: “As much as I am against careless driving caused by drinking, smoking, the application of eye make-up, over-tiredness, cell phone conversations or the accidental spilling of tomato sauce off the veal parmigiana sandwich being scarfered whilst at the wheel…” Classic.
***Stan provided this link to his “halo round the moon” reference.
****And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like  both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again.  The Fizz died in 2019.  Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

 

The Beery News Notes For The False Promise Of An Early Thaw

Thaws. They deceive in February. Being unwise, I have started seeds. Thaws also jack the walkway tiles and bricks outside, too. Spent lunch Wednesday discovering the front step tiles are stuck on with stuff that’s now the consistency of chocolate pudding. So things are getting loose, a bit cracked and sorta smashed. But not quite as badly as these late 1600s and early 1700s manganese mottled tankards from Ireland posted on the internets this week. From Newmarket in Dublin we are told. Others have showed up in the colonies, in Maryland and at Harvard Yard. Lovely things. But most won’t hold beer.

Mid-morning Update: Jordan decided to post an homage to Toronto’s Godspeed and its pitch-lined Sklepnik project – posted at 2 am Thursday morning I would add, well past the time this weekly normally goes to press. But it is not worth waiting around another seven days to bring it to your attention:

Every piece is as important as every other piece. Not everything that Godspeed has done has been a triumph, and the situation has been challenging. It was the potential that excited people, and the pitch-lined Sklepnik represents years of earnest effort, not just in the brewhouse, but interpersonally. A month spent learning from people who have spent their entire careers on a single style, and whose trust creates possibility. Functionally speaking, the odds against its existence are such that it is construable as a miracle, and that’s before the first sip. The only way you can get here is trial and error. There’s no ironic posture as a brewer. It’s not a hobby. The secret ingredient is your life.

Also lovely. Now, back to our normal broadcasting…

Unlike our man in The Netherlands (when he’s not in transit.) And, while we are speaking of lovely, Ron, who, yes, often holds a beer, has posted an image of a 1930s ad for Barclay Perkins lager along with his discussion of their 1941 brewing techniques:

Good news for me, as it gives me a chance to preview (use a recipe I’ve already written) a recipe from “Blitzkrieg!”. Though for any of the four options I could have found a recipe in the book. For a book about UK brewing in WW II, it has quite a lot of Lager recipes. 37 in all. Though there are well over 500 recipes in total. Not that huge a percentage, really. Lucky old Dark Lager has seen its gravity increase by 0.5º compared with the previous year.

Elsewhere and also with increasing gravity, the continuing concerns that Guinness has or has not slipped under the radar and ended up in first place somehow in the UK diet… continue. A call for anecdotal evidence was sent out by B to the B and a summary was posted earlier this week. There was a whole lotta comfort out there as far as I could tell. My thoughts?

Had one two weeks ago in an unfamiliar pub in Toronto. Old reliable friend, tasty with most pub food, creamy savoury with the tang and the roast – and not an alcohol bomb. Might have one or two a year.

It’s all good. Sure it’s made by a faceless international conglomerate. But so is vestigially produced Fat Tire – both the new phony and old – and at least Guinness doesn’t buddy up with Myanmar‘s murderous dictators! And at least it’s actually something not made on the same equipment as automotive window washer fluid. By the way… I don’t understand. Aren’t hard soda and boozy seltzers the same thing? I suppose it doen’t help that I don’t give a crap about this… crap. But I have no idea. Thankfully.

Note: not one craft buzzword bingo square was left undaubed in the making of this story.

Beth Demmon released another issue of Probitchin’, this month featuring the work and career path of Jacque Irizarry:

Her interest in art coalesced during college, after she realized how many years of (expensive) education it would take to become a lawyer. After switching her track from becoming an early childhood education art teacher to visual art, she dabbled in photography and painting before graduating with an art degree. With student loans looming, she worked in customer service before landing her current full-time position handling the graphics and design for a company involved in online education, where she’s been for eight years.

Beth’s newsletter is one of my favorites in the beer world. There is a lot to be said for good writing that avoids the unending wanderings and isn’t hip cool and 45 potty mouth serving as cover for cap in hand recycled PR. Mucho looking forward to Beth’s upcoming book on cider.

Speaking of newsletters… they are all the cool kids talk about these days… Kate Mather fabulously unleashed at The Gulp about unleashing at the pub!

Tom and Phil left for their teas, and we made a move too. On the way home I waved my arms like the two-pint revolutionary I am, telling my Tom how important it is to have common spaces for people to freely share ideas, to congregate—and the more that these places, like pubs, are restricted, taken away, closed down; the more the hospitality industry is left to wheeze on without support, the more suspicious I get.

That is what we like to see: two-pint revolutionaries waving their arms. And, speaking of revolutionary, the future continues to be defined in Japan:

… convenience stores can start selling alcohol and tobacco through self-check-out immediately, as long as they’re set up for compliance with the corresponding required regulations. Under Japanese law, a person must be at least 20 years old in order to purchase alcohol or tobacco. In order to confirm the buyer’s age, convenience stores that want to sell such products through self-check-out will have to equip their registers with a device that can scan either the purchaser’s driver’s license or My Number Card, a government-issued ID card that’s not yet mandatory and which the Japanese government is eager to accelerate the adoption of.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is also cooler in the future. And, doing a chronological 180, Nigel altered me to another good piece at the always excellent site A London Inheritance, this time about a street called XX Place:

To try and find some history on XX Place I carried out an online search on the Tower Hamlets Archives, and armed with a couple of reference numbers visited the archives on a Saturday morning… My first source at the archives was a small booklet published in 2001 by Ron Osborne titled XX Place. The booklet provided a description of XX Place. It was built in 1842 for locally employed workers. It was only a short street of 10 small terrace houses running along one side of the street. It was about 10 feet wide and the majority of those living in the street were employed at the nearby Charringtons Brewery.

Interesting observations on the three grades of Oregon hops in 1910 – fancy choice and prime.  Seventy five years earlier there also seemed to be a three tier grading system in New York state’s hop trade but named with a bit less of the marketing spin. In 1835 there was just first sort, second sort and third sort hops. Which suggests sorting. And a certain order. Choice? Fancy? Who knew what they meant! Fancy sounds all a bit “My Little Pony” in a way. By the pricing I can only presume that in 1910 “prime” was not actually… prime. But I suppose thems that knew at the time were in the know back then.

I missed this excellent observation by Ren Navarro on the nature of plans to bolster human rights in brewery work places:

While heady political questions are essentially baked into mutual aid work, a more immediate focus of all such groups remains meeting the needs of people who’ve been left out by existing power structures. For Navarro, industry-sponsored programs designed to address inequities are too often structured from the top down, and create barriers for applicants who really need the help. Applications that require resumes and essays, for example, require time and computer access and reliable internet. 

And Pellicle has a good piece this week about cider makers Lydia Crimp and Tom Tibbits of Herefordshire’s Artistraw Cider. You know, I usually don’t go for producer bios with beer but somehow the more immediately agricultural nature of cider makes for a more interesting read:

Observing that some apples lend themselves better to certain seasons, they reckon the bright acidity of dessert fruit works well with the freshness of Spring in Beltane—which boasts the Yarlington Mill, Reinette D’Obray, Chisel Jersey, Browns, and Kingston Black cider apple varieties. Whereas Knotted Kernel (with a dash of Kingston Black, Lambrook Pippin and Foxwhelp) has “cherry brandy” notes conjuring up images of roaring fires for their wintry, Hallowe’en release, Samhain (pronounced SAH-win.) Lammas marks the end of Summer and boasts Dabinett, Browns, Yarlington Mill, and a little Strawberry Norman. Imbolc is all about renewal and promise, with Major, Bisquet, Brown Snout, Chisel Jersey, and Ellis Bitter.

Why, I had a bit of the old Kingston Black myself just the other month.

Aaaaannnd… the coal fired generators at Beervana are back on line now that Jeff is back from holidays and he’s shared a tale of fruit coating yeast of a most natural sort:

The riper [the fruit] is, you’re getting ferments that are starting right away. That’s what the yeast and bacteria like. That’s when the birds start to eat it, and that’s when the insects come out and all these things. Nature is showing us these fruits are in their optimum time right when they’re ripe. The more time the fruit spends on the bush or the tree as its ripening, the more organisms are going to be there.

Hmmm… and finally… nice to see that Carlsberg has got its geopolitical ethics so completely all in order:

Danish brewer Carlsberg… warned on Tuesday that a possible slowdown of beer consumption in Europe because of increased prices could dent profit growth this year. The world’s third-biggest brewer also said it is buying out its partner in India and is seeking an option with the buyer of its Russian business to re-enter that market at some point in future.

Dastards. As the Danish military helps arm the Ukraine, Carlsberg makes plans for appeasement.

That’s it! Now… what to do… with these lists… They are getting to be almost 600 words each week and I am not sure how useful they are. Still… they do slowly mark the shift in the discussion. Podcasts dying, newsletters in flux, Mastodon perhaps peaked… As we think on that… hmmm… and song this week? What would I play if this were a movie and these were the scrolling credits? Could it be this?* Yup. That’ll do…

Boak & Bailey | The B² experience
Katie Mather | Shiny Biscuit and Corto
David Jesudason | “Desi Pubs” (2023) author
Ron Pattinson | The RonAlongAThon Himself
Al Reece AKA Velky Al | Fuggled
Jennifer Jordan | US hops historian
Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
Andreas Krennmair | Vienna beer and lager historian
Beer Ladies Podcast | Lisa Grimm and colleagues
Jay Brooks | Brookston Beer Bulletin
Joe Stange | Belgian beer expert, beer magazine editor
Cider Bar | Barry makes Kertelreiter cider
Laura Hadland | CAMRA historian and beer writer
Brian Alberts | US beer historian
Jon Abernathy | The Beer Site
Maureen Ogle | US Beer Historian
Lars Garshol | Norwegian Beer Historian and Kveik Hunter
James Beeson | Beeson on Beer
Carla Jean | MAINER!!!
Thandi Guilherme | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Lisa Grimm | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Rob Talksbeer | Podcaster and Youtuber
Anthony Gladman | UK Drinks Writer
Jeff Alworth | Manna Of Beervana
Northwest Beer Guide | Fairly self explanatory… but not NW Latvia…
Evan Rail | Prague based GBH editor, freelance writer, NYT etc.
Todd Alström | 50% of the Alströms
Jacob Berg | Beer talking librarian

You need to check out Mastodon. It’s so nice. You need to take the time and have the patience as regular posting attracts the audience as per usual. While you are at it, check for more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan spot on Mondays. And, yes, also gather ye all the podcasts and newsletters. Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again. See also sometimes, on a Friday, posts at The Fizz as well (Ed.: we are told ‘tis gone to 404 bloggy podcast heaven… gone to the 404 bloggy podcast farm to play with other puppies.) And the long standing Beervana podcast but it might be on a month off (Ed.: which I have missed from this list for some unknown reason.) There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now… nope, there was a post on July 25th… in 2022 even.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And sign up for Katie’s (Ed.: now very much less) irregular newsletterThe Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Still gearing  up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too. (Ed.: still giving it a few more weeks to settle in and not be as agreeable…) Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel this week on Youtube. Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has had his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that’s now gone after a ten year run… no, it is back and here is the linkThe Fingers Podcast has fully packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly.

*The setting is real.

The Thursday Beery News Notes For The Week Of Blue Monday

How long is Christmas? Until Candlemas? It’s should be long enough to deal with Blue Monday. In fact, for me Blue Monday should be in February. Why? Leftover Christmas liqueurs! There are still leftover Christmas liqueurs in the cabinet. Sure, it’s a dribble of Cointreau and some sort of nut cream thing but it’s still the holidays in some vestigial sense until that goes. Another way to beat the blues is to be not blue except in terms of your toes and your nose. Get out and see that blue sky.  Jeff took a great walk to a brewery near Prague this week and shared some of the countryside, one image of which is right there:

Prague tip: a hike from Prague castle to the satellite town of Únětice is only about 13km, really varied and ends at my favourite Czech brewery. Regular buses go back to the city and you could even summon up an Uber, so you’re not stranded at the end...

Speaking of wandering around Prague, remember when people like Evan wrote short stories around beer? Remember Beer Haiku Daily? Well, Beergeek is writing like its 2012 and getting creative, like this:*

If beer replaced water, swimming would be a very different experience. For one thing, the buoyancy of beer might be different from that of water, so it could be more or less difficult to swim depending on the specific gravity of the beer. Additionally, beer is not as clear as water, so visibility while swimming might be reduced.

Speaking of out and about, Paste mag has published an interesting article about the drinking laws of Japan:

… the idea of “public consumption” in Japan goes even further than you’re probably imagining. Drinking in public transportation, for example, is also legal—booze is sold on the famed shinkansen system of high-speed rail, and it’s not illegal to swig from a hip flask on the train, or even a public bus. Perhaps most astoundingly, though, drinking on modes of private transportation such as cars is also legal for everyone but the driver. That’s right: You can be cruising down the highway with an open bottle of whiskey being passed back and forth between all the passengers, and that is legal under Japanese law. 

Much to the contrary, Old Mudgie has shared thoughts about the loss of the love of and/or need for alcohol which he has witnessed over recent decades:

As something becomes less fashionable, people are more likely to prefer to do it in private than in public, which is bad news for the pub trade. According to the statistics produced by the British Beer & Pub Association, in the twenty years from 1998 to 2018 (which is as far as they go), total beer consumption fell by 22.8%, but on-trade consumption almost exactly halved. The trail of pubs now demolished or converted to alternative use is all too obvious. Some will argue that the Anteater Tap is still doing great business, while ignoring the fact that the Sir Garnet Wolseley across the road, which was ten times the size, has been replaced by flats. Even within a declining market, it is still possible to be successful, but that doesn’t make the wider narrative any less true.

Note: Oz hops ave.

Katie Mather has made the case for on-trade non-consuption of at least alcohol in here new piece for Pellicle on the pleasures of a lime and lemonade pub crawl:

When we decided to go on a lime and lemonade crawl, the idea started off as a plan to meet for food. Oversaturated by alcohol and the coming winter, we decided to make Mondays a strict no-alcohol day—the most obvious switch for a bar setting is one with food instead of drinks. But neither of us wanted food. We wanted the comfort of a pub, the atmosphere of a communal sitting room. We didn’t want to be wowed by flavours or waited on. We just wanted somewhere to belong. It’s easy to forget that you’re just as welcome in a pub as a non-drinker. Somehow it feels awkward; unusual. But, if you want to sit in a cosy corner and play cards, you go right ahead.

Note: infographics sucksuck. And is the use of isinglass really all that surprising? An odd criticism. I am still thinking of what it means to be critical in a  closed or sorta closed circle like good beer and saw this interesting similar discussion of the issues which bear upon criticism of Indigenous arts written by Drew Hayden Taylor:

…while we don’t know every single Indigenous person in the country, we may know someone who knows someone who knows someone. They aren’t an anonymous, blank population. Knowing this can be difficult. As Glen Sumi, theatre critic at large, told me, “there’s also the possibility of being too close to the community you’re writing about —  especially if you’ve worked with or are going to be working with some of the artists you’ll be reviewing.” True. I remember reading a quote from some famous novelist who said something to the effect of “I never felt freer as a writer than when my parents died.” Now picture that sense with a whole nation watching you. It can be somewhat problematic.

I would add one key distinction is that there is no community with good beer in the same sense even if there may be communities or at least circles. There is perhaps a sense of this in Eoghan‘s thoughts this week as well as something else:

…beer reviewing is subjective, and there are noses out there better able – thanks to training, genetics, or both – to catch what I missed.  And that, beyond the intellectual vanity and the sensory chaos, is why I think I dislike decoding beers: I am uncomfortable with this ambiguity. I trust my eyes, dodgy as they are, and the neural pathways they follow. I don’t trust the messages coming from my olfactory system and the detours they take into memory and recall. Despite all this, there is a reason I became a beer writer and not an art critic (well, there are many). Because good and all as Velázquez’s royal portrait or Picasso’s colourful interpretation might be, on a terrace on a sunny day in Brussels, a 17th century oil on canvas just doesn’t hit the same way as a cold glass of Zinnebir.

At least it’s a beer made in Belgium and not the disassembly of a long dumbed down clone of something Belgian. Telling that the Fat Tire chat has very little to do with the beer, just the sideshow of the brand being scotch taped on a can with something other than Fat Tire in it. Best comment so far?

Alright. Can we all agree that (1) nobody’s had a Fat Tire in years; and (2) nobody’s allowed to talk about New Fat Tire anymore unless it’s about what’s in the fucking can and you include a poorly taken picture of it in a glass. It’s what we do.

There. That’s quite a bit. Well, a middling sort of week. And now on to the index of others. Really, indices. Again I ask… what song should play if this were a movie and you were there scrolling though the slowly building upon a randomized list of beer writing resources on Mastodon** followed by the podcasts ‘n’ stuff? This? Yes, that’s it – an exploration of exploration… over 50 years ago… yikes…***

Boak & Bailey | The B² experience
David Jesudason | “Desi Pubs” (2023) author
Ron Pattinson | The RonAlongAThon Himself
Al Reece AKA Velky Al | Fuggled
Jennifer Jordan | US hops historian
Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
Andreas Krennmair | Vienna beer and lager historian
Beer Ladies Podcast | Lisa Grimm and colleagues
Jay Brooks | Brookston Beer Bulletin
Joe Stange | Belgian beer expert, beer magazine editor
Cider Bar | Barry makes Kertelreiter cider
Laura Hadland | CAMRA historian and beer writer
Brian Alberts | US beer historian
Jon Abernathy | The Beer Site
Maureen Ogle | US Beer Historian
Lars Garshol | Norwegian Beer Historian and Kveik Hunter
James Beeson” | Beeson on Beer
Carla Jean | MAINER!!!
Thandi Guilherme | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Lisa Grimm | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Rob Talksbeer | Podcaster and Youtuber
Anthony Gladman | UK Drinks Writer
Jeff Alworth | Manna Of Beervana
Northwest Beer Guide | Fairly self explanatory… but not NW Latvia…
Evan Rail | Prague based GBH editor, freelance writer, NYT etc.
Todd Alström | 50% of the Alströms

Go have a look. And also check for more as the year picks up from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan back at his spot on Mondays. It’s no longer the holidays. So, look around and check to see if there is the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. The OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it there again!  See also sometimes, on a Friday, posts at The Fizz as well (Ed.: we are told ‘tis gone to 404 bloggy podcast heaven… gone to the 404 bloggy podcast farm to play with other puppies.) And the long standing Beervana podcast but it might be on a month off (Ed.: which I have missed from this list for some unknown reason.) There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now… nope, there was a post on July 25th… in 2022 even.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And sign up for Katie’s (Ed.: now very) irregular newsletterThe Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Still gearing  up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too. (Ed.: give it a few weeks to settle in and not be as agreeable… not sure this went very far…) Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel this week on Youtube. Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that’s now gone after a ten year run… no, it is back and here is the linkThe Fingers Podcast has packed it in citing lack of success.

*Stan has admonished me in the mildest manner for not pointing out the use of artificial “intelligence” in this matter. I have commented in reply thusly...
**(again… inspired by Boak and Bailey… not stolen… not!)
***compare to 45 years later with the great Geddy Lee, grinning like a schoolboy at the 3:15 min bass break, sitting in for the dear departed Chris Squire at the RRHF induction.

Weeeeeeeeeeeee!!! It’s The Ten Days To Christmas Beery News Notes Post!!!

I can’t figure out if being pressed for time will make these notes this week brief or lengthy. The line “I didn’t have time to write a short letter” which is linked to Mark Twain mostly… but in my mind to Jonathon Swift… but in reality to 1600s French mathematician Blaise Pascal… comes to mind.  See, not only is it Yuletide with all the running around, I had to finish my bridge. One of the reasons the old beer blog and especially historical research leading to more on the old beer blog quieted a bit has been my part secondment to a big bridge project. Well, it opened to the public Tuesday as Fine Balance Brewing of our fair city’s east end celebrated on Facebook with the image above hoping to see a stream of west enders now heading their way. On time. On budget. Huge fun project. Happy to be the guy who wrote the contract and negotiated the deal.

Enough about me… first up, Christmas has beer RUINED for some in Gloucestershire:

Motorists faced delays on a motorway after boxes containing sweets and beer kegs were spilt over the carriageway. Two lanes of the M5 in Gloucestershire were closed after the spillage which also included books. The problem was reported at 06:30 GMT on Friday and lanes 1 and 2 southbound were closed between junction 13 at Stroud and junction 14 at Thornbury.

And things are tightening in other ways, of course, but I won’t add my list to the lists of disappearing craft breweries as B² did last Sat. And even though I expect it would upset one of those passive aggressive reductionist kitten craft mascots who demand that no one expresses opinions… I have to say this is one of the more interesting observations on how bad the situation is situation from John Porter:

The problem, as we both know from Publican Industry Report days, is that new breweries and pubcos arrive in a flurry of PR and excitement, and tend to disappear quietly to avoid unpaid bills and disgruntled investors. Like you, I suspect there’s always a lot of double counting.

Jordan is crunching the numbers in Ontario and the news is also not that good here for the beer industry. Ontarians are getting older on average and newcomers may not all be all that interested in beer. Beer volumes sold have hit the lowest point in 73 years. He uses words like “eerily” and “painstakingly” and “hanging” and “I’m forced to manually” and “irresponsible” and “robust” which seems all very… err… physical… but  the point is not only made but well proven. The arse is out of it all.

The badness reaches out in all directions as these things go sideways. At what point should drinkers rally around with a bit of focus to save the best? And when is it an end or a new beginning?

Real ale fans were saddened to hear of the forthcoming closure of Manchester’s Beer Nouveau… Though Steve Dunkley’s popular tap is no more, the story is not yet over under the railway arch at 75 North Western Street. The space is being taken over by Katie Sutton, the new owner of Temperance Street Brewery. Renamed the Temperance Street Brewery & Tap, the venue will initially open Fridays and Saturdays. Katie works full-time in the NHS, so she is being supported by Matt Gibson of Temperance Street Cider. Both the brewery and the cidery already operate out of the premises and extensive work is not needed.

Speaking of the NHS, Martin once again has shown why private reportage of thing beery are so helpful, this time with a photo essay from his trip to Cologne focusing on Gaststätte Lommerzheim aka Lommi’s. Linger over the images like the one right there. Not all samey pretty beer porn like we see so often. And a brief tale of prowess:

More customers under 30 than over 50, and Mrs RM the only non-bloke, but she outdrank them all. 3 in 20 minutes and we were gone, after admiring the tree outside the Gents (so not quite the Combermere). Honestly, it was perfect, like your favourite Sam Smitha if it wasn’t run with lunatic rules.

It is interesting to see how quickly the discounting of bulk brewery owned Bourbon County is happening this year:

… stumbled upon the below this afternoon. Can confidently say I never expected the reserves and prop to be on the shelf 16 days after Black Friday. Happily took a barelywine and prop and went on my way.

Also interesting to note that one long standing ad placement with Sound Opinions, a US public radio music program out of Chicago, has been dropped. The email read:

We recently learned that we’re losing a significant portion of our funding in 2023. Our long relationship with our major sponsor, Goose Island, has ended due to the shaky economy. We have other revenue sources: a generous grant from the Goldschmidt Foundation, small ad buys, and individual donations from dedicated listeners like you. But it’s not enough to keep the show running at full speed.

If you like music, listen and give. It’s dandy and via Patreon there are a number of bonus features.

The Japanese marketplace appears to have recently hit a particular point of inflection beer-wise-ly:

Beer and quasi-beer sales fell 8 pct from a year before in Japan in November, still reeling from October price hikes, estimates from Kirin Brewery Co. and others showed Monday. Asahi Breweries Ltd. reported a 7 pct drop in the value of its sales, while Kirin logged an 8 pct fall in volume and Sapporo Breweries Ltd. a 7 pct decline. Brewers incurred marked drops in sales of canned products, mainly for household consumption.

Jeff wrote the first “best of list” that wasn’t an unrealistic, purely sample based thing submitted months ago to a mag for the editors to churn upon. He also led up front with excellent context:

Obviously, no one can try all new beers in a year. As all sample groups are, this is highly individual. And, since I do most of my drinking in Oregon, it’s got a lot of Oregon beer. It’s also not exhaustive. I recall a wonderful pFriem Canadian Lager I enjoyed at the brewery, a delicious gueuze from Tilquin I enjoyed at a beer festival in Oslo, a cracking good festbier at Heater Allen, and more. Furthermore, if you think I avoid hoppy ales, behold: this list is lousy with ‘em! I love all beer styles, and it seems like 2022 was a good one for hops.

And Pellicle posted a profile of Glasgow brewers Epochal, sometime past subject within these here weekly notes:

Epochal specialises in barrel-aged pale ales, table beers, Scotch ales, porters and stouts—the latter two having a rich history in Glasgow. The beers undergo an extended dry hop for the duration of their secondary ageing. The mature beer is then bottle-conditioned with a small portion of one-day-old fresh beer, a process employed by one of Scotland’s top 19th-century brewers, the Glasgow-born James Steel. The entire process takes anywhere from three months to a year, resulting in beers you can ponder over, or drink for pure pleasure, depending on your mood.

Is GBH becoming a travel vignette site?

Finally, wrongest quote about the history of beer passed my eyes this week:

For most of the time, intoxication was not the main purpose and could only be achieved to a limited extent, if at all, given that beer had a low alcohol content for most of human history. 

See, to make weak beer you either need to first make strong wort or you have to waste resources to boil way too much watery wort. It’s how it works. If you don’t believe me, ask Babylon. Please do better. If only at this Yuletide.

That’s it! Next week, the best reading of 2022 will be mentioned here as well as perhaps also in the updates from Boak and Bailey we see mostly every Saturday and also also perhaps from Stan more now on a Monday than almost ever! Check out the weekly and highly recommented Beer Ladies Podcast. The OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s coming back soon.  See also sometimes, on a Friday, posts at The Fizz as well (Ed.: we are told ‘tis gone to 404 bloggy podcast heaven… gone to the 404 bloggy podcast farm to play with other puppies.) And the long standing Beervana podcast (Ed.: which I have missed from this list for some unknown reason.) There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now… nope, there was a post on July 25th… in 2022 even.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And sign up for Katie’s (Ed.: now very) irregular newsletterThe Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Still gearing  up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too. (Ed.: give it a few weeks to settle in and not be as agreeable… not sure this went very far…) Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel this week on Youtube. Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that’s now gone after a ten year run… no, it is back and here is the link!

July 2022’s Very Own First Beery News Notes

What to do on summer holiday? Now that it is July, I really have to figure out what the second half of August could promise. Not just chores, right? Chores ought to be done by then, done well before the snow shovels and garden hose swap places again. Martyn’s eternal holiday got me thinking about this… again… this week with his post about the pub in Greve de Lecq, Jersey that is apparently separated from all public transportation access other than by foot. It’s like a pub in some unpublished work on Winnie the Pooh – if and when they all grow up, get jobs (and trousers, if we were into finger pointery) and drink a lot of beer. Look at that path to the village pub! While there are many attractions of the pub ticking life that do not do that much for me, this has me thinking about getting some of that woven into my upcoming weeks off. Toddling down earthy paths to bechy pubs. Too much to ask?

What else is going on out there? Are we at the dog days yet?* Certainly not – at least at one archeological dig to which news of which Merryn happily guided me, excavations in a place called Chalkpit Field where maltings from the Dark Ages are being uncovered:

Much of the work undertaken involved cleaning the main malting house features identified from previous years but with special attention paid to the most recently revealed features at the northern and southern ends of the trench. A the northernmost end of the trench, two kiln-like features appear to represent further malting houses, with a considerable quantity of collapsed daub still in situ.

Nosing around the internets as one does I learned that this dig is part of a project investigating “the entire range of human settlement and land use in the north-west Norfolk parish of Sedgeford” and that the maltings date to the triple digit centuries. Fabulous.

Still with the British stuff, there was a good, summarizing (if ultimately despairing) article in The Guardian about the state of pressures on the British pub:

The total number of pubs dropped below 40,000 during the first half of 2022, a fall of more than 7,000 compared with a decade ago… The hospitality sector has faced immense challenges in recent years as it recovered from the pandemic, which resulted in national lockdowns that caused closures and reduced demand. However, the researchers suggest that while pubs managed to battle through Covid-19, they are facing a fresh challenge because of record-high inflation and an energy crisis.

Also in TG, Singapore Slung? Beer made from purified sewage.

Pellicle ran a tribute to an old friend, an old neglected pal… and old pal perhaps we all take for granted… a pal that may not even be there anymore –  Newkie Broon:

“It doesn’t make it the same, and it’s a shame,” Mark tells me. “But that’s how things move on.” The beer has now become a joke back home, a travesty. A victim of its own success that has been transformed beyond recognition—proving that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But despite the bitter taste left by losing a legend in the North East, with bottles gathering dust on the shelves of Newcastle offies, the hardy heritage of my hometown lives on through determined, independent breweries sparking a resurgence in brown ale.

I like this near 40 year old clip and the message about what are reasonable sources of influence.

Moving west across the Atlantic, I encountered what was essentially a demand from Stan: “If it were Monday & I was recapping the previous week via beer links this one would be at the top“! Heavens. Good thing it is an interesting read. One Roger Baylor on the question of chatting over beer in America as a person who is outside US alignment, politically speaking, and how it offers hope in these pretty hard times:

I’m free to remain a leftist as it pertains to larger issues, and to vote accordingly, while also judging local grassroots political affairs by criteria unique to the immediate acreage lying just outside my front door. Stated another way, it’s possible for me to have a beer with David Duggins, a Democrat and New Albany’s public housing director, and talk about pressing issues of church-state separation and Supreme Court overreach. I did so last Saturday. It’s also possible for me to have a beer with Indiana’s U.S. Senator Todd Young, a Republican, and talk about federal regulatory issues affecting small businesses, American foreign policy, and other topics that have always been of interest to me.

And so much further west it is east again, I have heard of this sensible use of excess local crops like the neighbours of MacKinnon and their strawberry wheat of a few years back so it is good to see the trend-worthy idea elsewhere, this time in Japan:

Last summer, Ayumi Kato, a 32-year-old member of the town’s community revitalization team, planned the project to support farmers and others amid the pandemic by utilizing nonstandard agricultural produce that would have been discarded. After discussions with other women who are local farmers, Kato decided to create two types of beer: one using Amao strawberries and one using local corn. About ¥850,000 was raised for the project from all over Japan through a crowdfunding campaign. After being offered from the Kirin factory the malt produced in the town, the project members asked a craft beer brewery in Anan, Tokushima Prefecture, to produce the beers for Tachiarai.

Beth Demmon has published yet another in her series on interesting people in the good drinks world, this time Colette Goulding who makes cider in London with Hawkes. This is an excellent observation that came out of their conversations:

The future of cider, both in the U.K. and across the world, lies in the hands of people like Colette. But speaking up in a room full of mostly older men (who often come from more rural areas and espouse old-school ideas) isn’t always easy, especially as a relatively younger nonbinary person who has been in the industry for two years. Discussing diversity as an integral part of cider itself can be a challenge, they say, but one they’re up for.

It has yet to get stinking hot enough here to make the tomato leap in their cages but if it does some day soon, there is only one thing for it – hefeweisen. Nothing breaks the back of a mid-morning scorcher filled with when seven minutes of weeding and thinking about maybe weeding than a few litres of Teutonic clovey wheaty stuff followed by a good nap. And apparently, as Boak and Bailey found out, it is a good year for it – even if not everyone knows it:

BBF’s version, available in 440ml cans, actually pours stubbornly clear, or at least only faintly hazy. It has vanilla in the aroma and, of course, a bunch of banana. At 5%, it’s not as strong as the Schneider original – or, indeed, as most standard German wheat beers. We liked it so much we bought a box of 12 to drink at home. Perhaps others don’t share our enthusiasm, though, because it was discounted to £25.60 – about £2 per tin. At present, they don’t have any in stock.

More about wheat here which, characteristically for US beer writing, misses the entire two centuries of its own wheat beer brewing history.

Tweet of the week:

Finally, a helpful bit of health advice in you are finding too much is causing too much.

There. You have been informed. A bit. For more, check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday but not from Stan every Monday as he is on his summer holiday. Check out the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday (Ed.: Robin got a job!!!) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s (Ed.: now very) irregular newsletterThe Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water. There has also been the Beer O’clock Show but that’s now winding up after ten years.

*Could be as there is plenty of writing not about beer under the umbrella of beer writing. Keep keeping it dull, semi-pros!  As a policy point during the times of good beer’s gentle decline, it’s important to remember that beer has reasonably obvious boundaries. 

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For The Wayward Wisdom Tooth

So, I have to have a very high wisdom tooth coming out Friday. No beer for a while for me.  Day surgery. Nothing too drastic. Thanks for asking. And have had my mind on that and other things most of the week. Evan has found himself very much closer that he in his thoughts had assumed.  Lars has offered his hopes for peace and I share those hopes. Ontario brewer, John Graham, has put hope in motion by going to Germany to provide transportation support.  It’s going to be sunny and +11C on Thursday afternoon. Spring is here. A good time to have hope… and green beer… and paddy wagons.

The tedious days of trial hearings of the “Slurs Against Keystone” have started. The most interesting testimony for me has been this – the CEO of Molson Coors couldn’t have cared less about Stone. He had real problems:

…recapturing economy beer drinkers who had moved on to its competitors in the beer industry was considered a “quick win” by a steering committee of MillerCoors executives and outside consultants and marketing professionals working to increase sales of Keystone Light. Demographic data of Keystone Light consumers was also top of mind for Hattersley when MillerCoors introduced the 15-pack of Keystone Light. Forty percent of Keystone Light consumers earn less than $30,000 a year and either work in a blue collar job or not in the workforce. “It means they are price conscious — don’t mess with the pricing button,” Hattersley said.

Sensible testimony. Conversely, the lead witness has come across as a bit of a fool. He doesn’t appear to understand what the pit of his stomach is and…

Stone founder Greg Koch took the stand in the Stone vs. MolsonCoors lawsuit. Described his reaction to images of stacks of Keystone Light cases oriented to show only the word STONE as “horror”

Dope. Just remember… as noted last week, Keystone called its brand “‘Stone” before Stone Brewing was known. We shall watch for further updates as the intravenous drips… drips… drips…

Elsewhere in the annals of Big Craft Courtroom*, BrewDog is fanning the flames of its own roasting. As The Guardian newspaper has reported most excellently:

The boss of BrewDog, James Watt, hired private investigators to obtain information about people he believed were taking part in a smear campaign against him and repeatedly accused one woman of being involved until she blocked him on social media. According to multiple sources and evidence seen by the Guardian, private investigators who said they were working for Watt approached people to gather evidence about those who he appeared to believe had maligned him. One subject of their inquiries, Rob MacKay, an ex-BrewDog employee, had appeared in a BBC documentary, The Truth About BrewDog, which made claims about the company’s workplace culture and Watt’s personal behaviour as an employer, including towards women.

To be honest, this is a common enough thing in law. Private investigators are a regulated profession. Here is Ontario’s Private Security and Investigative Services Act, 2005, S.O. 2005, c. 34. I’ve been on a legal team that included a private investigator and proved a key allegation was not only probably false but actually utterly impossible. That’s what a PI can do. Here, there is a suggestion that the use of PI’s is itself improper. Look here, on a consultancy firm’s website that has an oddly Angolan revolutionary flag colour scheme – yet the firm works with other alleged offenders.  Still confused by the use of the word “reconciliation” in this context. Best to get all this before the actual courts and tribunals.

One last legal note: “More than 25,000 litres of illicit beer seized at Dublin Port“!!

The most interesting image on the internets this week was this ad by Timothy Taylor praising the care they take protecting their own wee yeast strain. As published in the October 13th edition of The Observer newspaper. The cartoon’s throwback style is particularly swell.

The youngest off-licence holder in 1974’s Britain. Try to identify some of the bottles behind her on the shelf.

Also in The Guardian, a cleverly constructed discussion triggered by Heineken that “inflation was “off the charts” and its costs would increase by about 15% which could lead to lower beer consumption. Clever? This:

The latest warning on inflation comes as Heineken said the price of beer it sold rose an average 4.3% in Europe in 2021, partly because of a shift to more premium beers and the reopening of bars and pubs, as well as like-for-like price increases. In the UK, beer sales rose by about 5%, driven by the group’s premium Birra Moretti and Desperados brands. Low- and non-alcoholic drink sales increased by more than 30%, led by the continued success of Heineken 0.0.

What’s happening elsewhere in the world? South Africa’s top brewing news story off the week? Cow dung:

Beer maker South African Breweries (SAB) says it will soon be using the manure of over 7 000 cows to power its operations. The company on Thursday issued a statement indicating it signed a power-purchase agreement with black-women-owned Bio2Watt. The renewable energy will be produced from Bio2Watt’s Cape Dairy Biogas Plant, located on one of South Africa’s biggest dairy farms – Vyvlei Dairy Farm – in the Western Cape town of Malmesbury. 

New ventures are popping up elsewhere. Japan’s Kirin is taking its fermenting skills in a new direction:

The company now hopes to use the technology of the beer-making process in its new biotech ventures. “We want to turn Kirin into a fermentation biotechnology company. We need to grow a new business while the beer segment is still healthy,” Isozaki told the FT. Kirin unveiled a three-year business plan last month, in which ¥100 billion will be invested in research and development and to expand factories in the health science and pharmaceutical sectors. A further ¥80 billion will be spent on in its beer and beverage business. As part of the shift away from beer and into pharmaceuticals, Kirin will increase production of Citicoline, a memory improving supplement.

Memory supplement? Is that a little note of a little something slipped in there?

Southern hemispherically, “Ron of the Road” has done Brazil to the Netherlands to Columbia in under 48 hours. Nuts. His blog posts are two trips behind him. The details, still, compel:

Getting money from the cash machine turns out to be problematic. Until I use my visa card. That’s a relief, having some Brazilian dosh in my pocket. The taxis from Sao Paolo airport are pretty good. They’re run by a cooperative of drivers, which has a monopoly. There are set fares to various locations in the city. My new German friend will be dropped of first, for the set fare. Then the driver will continue on the meter to drop me off. A couple of minutes outside the airport, it starts pissing it down. Really pissing it down. Full-on tropical downpour. Soon the roads are transformed into rivers. It’s all a bit scary. Doesn’t seem to faze the driver. I guess he’s seen it all before.

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

*Check out my new podcast, Big Craft Courtroom!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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