New York – A Good Beer Blog

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For The First Fabulous Harvest Of The Year

Here we are. Scape pesto to the left of me. Scape pesto to the right. OK, fine. Not really. But the mid-June plucking of the 435 or so scapes and zipping them into a small bucket of goo with a litre of olive oil is a good thing. Martha Stewart circa 1998 good. Free food. And there’s more. I’ll lift the whole plants in three or four weeks to be bundled and dried in the shed before they are sorted and replanted in October. You get the 450 seed cloves for planting in the fall for next year’s harvest, more than 1000 second best cloves for eating, the three litres of scape pesto and – who knew? – the scape tips and dried garlic straw for anti-bug mulching around the tomato patch. All from a 5 x 11’s worth of raised bed. Highly recommended. Start your own tiny garlic ranch come the autumn.

The biggest bestest reading this week was from Katie at The Gulp and her piece “Beer Has A Sex Problem.” It’s a theme that is admittedly well explored but perhaps not as well – dare I say as radically – argued as this:

…in a conversation with drinks writer Rachel Hendry, we both agreed on something: women who don’t drink beer want something that matches their mood. A drink that accentuates their style and punctuates their sentences. A drink that makes them feel how they want to feel. When I go out and choose not to drink beer—and I’m reminding you here, I’m a woman—it’s because I want something chic like a martini, or sexy and flirty like a spicy margarita. Easy-breezy like a vodka tonic. Beer is seriously unsexy. Is that why women who don’t love beer for all its flavours and styles and aromas don’t drink it? I don’t know. Has anyone asked them? What do women want? As Rachel says: “To feel sexy! And strong! And smart! And sensual! Give me a champagne coupe!”

Question: is that just an approach exclusively for women? Beer trade writers will tell you that a beer suits all situations… but does really? Don’t you feel like a bit of a dork with your brown tall neck brewski when everyone is having wine and talking intelligently about it? Wouldn’t you feel dumb having a beer chaser when there is a dram of good whisky in the other paw?

Speaking of social situations, Boak and Bailey linked to this great article in Esquire on ceremony of buying a round:

Maybe six people took me up on the offer. To my left, a pair of guys who were visiting from Atlanta told me one of them was a doctor, and he could tell I’d just had a baby because of the hospital bracelet on my wrist. They drank beers, and as one of them took a sip, I heard him say, “This is why I love New York.” The guy sitting next to me was only there for a burger, but he congratulated me and asked if he could pick up my personal bar tab. I thanked him but told him it wasn’t necessary. Another guy, about sixty-five or seventy, who looked ready for a long day of golf, opted for a shot of whiskey. He walked over to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and asked what we’d had. When I told him a daughter, he smiled and said, “A blessing. Daughters are truly a blessing. I’ve got three kids, and the oldest is a girl. She’s my world.”

Memories rushed in. I’ve been in pubs and bars with naval connections, like my dear old college tav, that made it simple. Ring the bell by the end of the bar and you buy for everyone. And don’t touch the damn bell if you don’t intend to! In 1986, in the Rose Street brewpub in Edinburgh I was on the receiving end of the most subtle buying a round ever seen. A gent in a group who came in and placed an elbow at the bar just waggled his index finger ever so slightly. There was less energy in that wagging digit than in a rural Nova Scotian passing pickup driver’s hello. I was asked by the barman “what will you have?” even though I had a pint in front of me. I had to have the whole thing explained to me. Which led to me spenting an hour chatting with the group and having a great old time.

In Pellicle, Ruvani de Silva presented a scathing report on the failure of craft beer to participate in equity, diversity and inclusion in any practical or meaningful way and the resulting burnout banging their heads against walls:

I could go on about how bad things in beer really are, and I will, because we need to address the inconvenient truth that these problems have not been solved and things are not okay… As belts tighten and global attention moves to new disasters, DEI is being left behind across the board. “Breweries and venues [are] desperately trying to survive, so are not putting the time and energy and resources into this kind of work…

Read the whole thing. Best line is the first one: “DEI is so 2021.” I would add one thing. Craft beer awarded itself a gold star for achieving top marks in all matters from day one. It tells itself it has been a success story people enter after the victory was achieved. Everyone is great. A cause fed by passion propped up by trade writing. It’s a big fib. But a profitable even cultural foundation for craft beer. As a result, there is less concern with the performative nod to the bigotries and botches because, you know, it’s craft! Govern yourselves accordingly.

Slightly on that theme, I like this anti-sucker juice statement from Marcel Haas in the Netherlands from his website Tasting Craft Beer:

I should have ignored this advertisement. I should have bought local. Buying locally helps the local bottle shops to survive. They are the ones who make sure that interesting, high quality offering is found around the corner from my house. Another selection around the other corner. When everybody starts buying the same small box from the same (inter-)national importer, then all variety in the beer landscape will cease to exist. I should have reconsidered, and I should have taken my bike to my local bottle shop. And I will.

Speaking of regrets, this story in the NYT by Susan Dominus is a great bit of thinking about drinking which is all about… thinking about your drinking:

No amount of alcohol is good for you — that much is clear. But one might reasonably ask: Just how bad is it? The information we receive on health risks often glide over the specifics of how much actual risk a person faces, as if those were not details worth knowing. These days, when I contemplate a drink with dinner, I find myself wondering about how much to adjust my behavior in light of this new research. Over the years, we’ve been told so many things are either very good or very bad for us — drinking coffee, running, running barefoot, restricting calories, eating all protein, eating all carbs. The conversation in my head goes something like this: “Should I worry? Clearly, to some degree, yes. But how much, exactly?”

ATJ wrote a fine bit of reflection on life as a pub goer:

Another sip of my beer, a long glance at the road outside, and then I think about the Venerable Bede’s parable of the sparrow flying through the mead hall and about how my time in this pub is akin to the flight of the small bird on a cold winter’s night, which takes it briefly through the warmth and the light of the hall. Life. Yet there is nothing sad about my feelings. It could be worse. Remembering some of the most dire pubs I have had to spend time in over the years I imagine the purgatory in which the same dismal pub is visited night after night and the same dismal beer is drunk and the same dismal conversations are had, the purgatory of a failed life, the collapsed star of the only pub in town.

And The Mudge wrote about less finer things said about pubs, election promises never fulfilled:

It’s noticeable how, when an election comes around, politicians suddenly discover an interest in pubs that had been notably lacking in the preceding years. The latest example of this comes from the Labour Party, who have proposed a policy to “give communities a new ‘right to buy’ shuttered pubs.” It must be said that this is a bit rich coming from the party responsible for the smoking ban and the alcohol duty escalator… However, setting that to one side, what would such a plan involve?

Here is an excellent illustration of an explanation of terroir which should serve you well should you encounter someone insisting that Hazy IPA have, you know, terroir:

The current clos is 99.6% owned by Lambrays. It is triangular in shape and has a difference in elevation of 60 m from the top to the bottom. It is east-facing but far from uniform, with undulations, and some parts with red clay, other parts with brown, and different sized limestone stones in different areas. Unusually, the rows are perpendicular to the slope, to help fight erosion. This row orientation also helps protect the developing bunches from direct sun.

Speaking of wine, as the breweries are plumping up their prices, at least one wine writer is helping with your budget. Here is Eric Asimov from The New York Times with his best summer wines under $20 with this caveat on value:

Despite the seemingly endless climb of wine prices, it’s still not difficult to find intriguing bottles in the $20 and under category. Most will not be familiar producers or grapes, nor will they come from well-known areas in great demand. But that’s why they don’t cost very much. Still, inflation has had an effect. A 20 Under $20 column from 10 or 12 years ago will look quite different. Those bottles remain great, but they cost quite a bit more nowadays. So, we make way for other terrific values.

And in their monthly supplementary newsletter, the media-multiplex of B+B shared thoughts on the concept of psychogeography:

To understand pubs and their place in the landscape you also need to understand how towns develop. Old town, new town, ring road, slum clearances, tower blocks, estates, railways, canals… pubs either stud these spaces, or are noticeably absent from them. Some notable psychogeography practitioners also happen to be keen on pubs. John Rogers, a YouTuber and the author of This Other London, often pauses to look at pubs on his rambles, and often finishes his walk in the pub. And many beer writers and bloggers take a psychogeographic approach, whether consciously or not. Martin Taylor’s posts often include details of the journey to the pub with wry and sometimes snarky commentary on the towns he visits.

I like this idea. One of my roles at work is supporting the built heritage team and as a result of a couple of decades of looking at buildings and street layouts, I see the town in decade by decade layers. One good start is to notice every date carved in the facade of a building. Why do they date buildings anyway? B+B also mentioned the streetscapery of Will Hawks’ London Beer City which this month included coverage of an event at the massive Downham Tavern in 1931 where a memory and fact entertainer put on a show… and also coverage of those who covered it:

Among the crowd is Daily Herald journalist Hannen Swaffer, who tracks down landlord Fred Johnson. “That Irishman’s a stranger,” he insists. “He doesn’t come from around here. The Downham people all behave themselves.” Swaffer (…according to the British Journalism Review, he was remembered after his death for “little more than the mixture of dandruff and cigarette ash on his velvet collar”) is much taken with the show. He likes the acts. He likes the crowd. He likes the notion that a music-hall revival might be on the cards, even if its real glory days are a few decades in the past. What Swaffer, boozer-turned-teetotaler, really likes though is the attitude to alcohol. “Alcohol is dying out naturally,” he tells his Daily Herald readers.

Excellent. And Stan published his Hop Queries this past week with more details on the continuing decline in production:

…the US hop industry has 35-to-40-million-pound aroma hop surplus. Nobody disagrees. In the last six years, farms in the Northwest have produced an average of 1,848 pounds for hops per acres. Across 9,775 acres (this year’s reduction), that would amount to about 18 million pounds of hops. It would, and should, put a serious dent the surplus. Still, it will take much longer for supply and demand to return to balance. You are going to see flash sales like this recent one from Yakima Chief Hops for a while. Although eliminating those pounds is necessary, it also is painful. The average farm gate price last year was $5.40, so we are talking about almost $100 million pounds of hops.

Question: so it, as Stan also says, 2023 is really the twin of 2015 for US craft beer… will 2025 be 2010? That surplus isn’t being used up over one growing season. As you consider that, also consider the post Jeff put up – replete with graphical presentation of data – on the growth in excess brewing capacity:

American breweries are currently at about half their capacity. That’s not good! But it’s actually worse that in looks because growth has been dead flat for three years. Were the industry growing, it would need headspace, so to speak, for future expansion.

Heavens. Tettering. Could deflation be next? One thing is practically for certain. DEI isn’t the next big thing in these conditions.

And with that… now we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections.* Want to keep up with the news before next Thursday? Check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan back each Monday. Elsewhere go look at then listen to Lew’s podcast. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down. Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a few podcasts… but some may be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. The Moon Under Water… is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that but is writing for 47 readers over there. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link! Errr… nope, it is gone again.**

*This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (133) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (915) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,479) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (162), crap Threads (43) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.
**Not that many footnotes really this week. Look at this one. An out and out joke really. Sad.

Your See Ya Later Frikkin’ Winter 2024 Edition Of The Beery News Notes

This is it! I know… I know. It’s like a weather bore blog around here with some news items Scotched taped on – but really is there any better day to see coming than the first of spring? Or is that too hemispheric of me! It’s the last day of summer in our nether regions… southern… southern. That’s where Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin found himself this week, photographing these bush beer barrels from the Cook Islands in the national museum. As the tiny print says, the beer they made was based on oranges and honey. Yah-ummm.

First up, beer writer and big city crime beat journalist Norm Miller celebrated the third anniversary of his not dying this week with some great advice :

Three years ago today I nearly died. Still alive. Don’t be like me, go to the doctors, don’t ignore what your body is telling you and move.

Good advice. Thanks for being there, Norm. And in the latest edition of Prohibitchin’ Beth Demmon wrote this week about Ellen Cavalli who is both an established cider maker and now a non-drinker thanks to her own health scare:

“I want to be alive,” says Ellen simply. “I don’t want it to be like I chose alcohol over a longer life with my family.” Not drinking was the easy part. Feeling disconnected from the community and industry she helped build was the hard part. She had to make a choice. “Do I want to continue living with constant anxiety, sorrow, grief, depression, no joy and faking it?” she asked herself. “What do I want my life to be?” She told Scott something had to change for her to find meaning in her life’s work once again. For her to feel joy. For her to feel hope. If she couldn’t drink alcohol, then the choice was clear—make a non-alcoholic cider. After a few months of expedited trials, Ellie’s Non-Alcoholic Gravenstein became the first commercially available dealcoholized cider in the United States…

I like the sound of that drink, coming from Nova Scotia which is one of the other places like part of California where Gravensteins are grown. Speaking of sounding good, Pellicle this week ran a feature on the Lacada Cooperative Brewery in Portrush, Northern Ireland by Ewan Friar featuring a great set of photos, including one of a Mr. Whippy van and oceanside scene Pr0n:

Portrush lies on a mile long basalt peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic off Ireland’s North Coast. Two gorgeous, golden sand beaches flank the base of the peninsula to the east and west, while the northern tip rises to the dramatic cragginess of Ramore Head. It evolved from what was originally a small fishing port into one of Ireland’s major tourist towns in the 19th Century. With its colourful town houses, pleasant promenades and the world famous Royal Portrush Golf Club, the town became an all out Victorian pleasure resort, and much of that character still exists today.

Perhaps less on jolly holiday – but totes Irelandish, too – Eoghan has told a tale that he has called proof that has has “reached my boring era” but I think it has a certain charm:

Every Friday evening during the school year, I cajole the children into the bike by 18.40. I cycle them up the hill to the local municipal swimming pool and wave them through the door by 18.50. By 18.55 I’m sitting in the pub around the corner with a beer in front of me and a book in my hand. By 19.45, I’ll have finished the second of two beers, made no headway in the book, paid up at the bar, and be out the door so I’m back at the pool for the end of class at 20.00. Then it’s pile them back in the bike, and cycle them home where my Friday night routine ends and their bedtime routine begins. Lather, rinse, and repeat the following Friday.

Jessica Mason apparently needed to explain what for me was understood as the clear meaning of the word “however” in her story on Black Sheep’s rather sudden rebranding soon after being takeover and the seemingly complete corporate amnesia over a rather similar effort in 2014:

According to the Yorkshire brewery, this is its “biggest rebrand since it was founded over 31 years ago” and the “sleek new design will feature across all Black Sheep Brewery beers, included keg, cask, and bottles, as well as online merchandise” however the makeover both echoes its previous attempts to modernise the brand, uses similar terminology used by its new owners and also comes amidst the brewery’s restructuring causing a stir across the industry in what has been questioned as a means of diverting attention away from other media.

Ah, the end times. Another country, another end to a good beer landmark. This time, it is New York’s Spuyten Duyvil as Luke Fortney reports in the NY Eater:

“No bar in the city pays more loving and thorough homage to beer.” That’s how New York Magazine once described Spuyten Duyvil, but after two decades, the craft beer bar is shutting down. “Craft beer’s current ubiquity combined with rising rents have made operating Spuyten Duyvil unsustainable,” said owners, Joe and Kim Carroll, who also run nearby restaurants Fette Sau and St. Anselm. When Spuyten Duyvil opened in Williamsburg in 2003, it stood out for its selection of imported European beers — “the beer you couldn’t find anywhere else,” says Joe Carroll. “Now you’d be hard pressed to find any place without it.” The last day at 359 Metropolitan Avenue, near Havemeyer Street, is April 21.

I get but don’t get the “fresh ale” thing as also reported upon by Jessica Mason. It just appear to be a new mid-lower end of market dispense. Is it simply the use of the handle? Liam add this:

Not *quite* the same, but I’m sure many people would-if-they-could have mocked and derided Michael Ash’s invention too, but look at them all slobbering over Guinness Draught now ..!

Elsewhere and to the upper left of the map, Jeff is fighting the neg by creating a non-profit to promote beer in Oregon which is an excellent idea:

It’s a story that deserves to be told, and visitors and locals alike should be aware of its special place in American brewing. So, on Monday, I signed articles of incorporation to create Celebrate Oregon Beer, a nonprofit 501(c)(6) that will do just that. It has the backing of both the Oregon Brewers Guild and Oregon Hop Commission, as well as 26 breweries, growers, and allied groups (and counting) that have pledged donations to launch the project. I’ve convened a Board of Directors, and soon we’ll get started. In the meantime, let me tell you a bit more—and borrow your wisdom as I do.

I like that. Put your time and effort in where your interests lie. Me, I am on and have been on community radio station boards, one in the US for a decade and now another closer to home. Good to get involved. As corporate secretary, my minute taking skills are right up there. And, speaking of radio, one of my weekly listens is CBC Radio’s show Now or Never who this week interviewed Don Tse – who also happens to have a wide selection of beers – as part of an episode dedicated to dream job:

There aren’t many jobs that have “drinking beer” as the first requirement. Calgary’s Don Tse, also known as the Don of Beer, left behind a successful law career to pursue his ultimate dream job — tasting, judging and writing about the bubbly brew.

You can hear the episode by clicking on that link. Utterly conversely, as Boak and Bailey shared on their Patreon footnotes, I’m also “a bit sick of hearing and reading and talking about BrewDog” but Will Hawkes had a great piece in VinePair on the dull faux punks:

…many Britons have had enough of Brewdog’s schtick. Even as the company continues to expand — and as rumors of a forthcoming IPO circulate — it remains a lightning rod for criticism, most recently when complaints it made about a BBC documentary were rejected by Ofcom, Britain’s television regulator. The response from online commentators was not sympathetic. So how did Britain’s most important modern brewery accumulate so many, to use Watt’s own term, haters?

Err… no, not Watt’s term. People actually do hate them. Speaking of growing or not growning up, Boak and Bailey wrote about a really interesting topic for one like me who had, many years ago, served as a bouncer and faced the overly rouged and wobbly high-heel vision of fifteen year olds with fake IDs:

When did you last see underage drinkers even try to get served in a pub? It’s what you might call a dying tradition. Ray’s dad says he started drinking in a pub on the Somerset Levels when he was 12, surrounded by adults who made sure he and his brothers (mostly) behaved themselves. And in the mid-1990s, Jess went to East London pubs from 16 hiding behind her tall friend, though nobody ever got asked for ID.

Some great comments followed up on that post. They also pondered the nature of the American cheese slice on Bluesky this week:

Discussing American cheese AKA ‘cheesy singles’ with my other half. “It works so well in some sandwiches but you’d never eat one on its own, would you?” I say. “No, because it’s actually a semi-solid sauce,” she replies. My god. This is exactly right.

Pete Brown also seems to have gotten things right when he and his left London for Norwich, which sounds very nice according to his emailed newsletter:

If we leave the house and drive left, the heart of the Norfolk Broads is ten minutes drive away, and a choice of excellent beaches, some home to seal colonies, is twenty minutes beyond that. If we leave the house and turn right, it’s twenty minutes walk to the heart of a culturally vibrant city, with eleven of the best pubs I’ve ever been in punctuating the route. (The pic above is from the nearest one, the Rosebery.) Cask ale is £4.50 a pint and always in excellent condition. People speak to each other. It’s all rather lovely, and I’m losing weight, the bags under my eyes are no longer grey and lined, and the persistent cough I’ve had for years has disappeared.

ATJ share a less idylic scene as he made his way to a pub in Devon recently:

…outside an east wind blew, a persistent hangnail of gloom. The year had shifted and it was spring, but the weather hadn’t budged one bit and winter had left a dastardly booby-trap of an easterly that gusted through these western lands with a dismal stretch of the soul — however, bundled up like a parcel of joy I had cycled five miles to this pub so that I could have my first pint of the year outside.

And Stephane Grant shared a few thoughts about another sort of unpleasant beer drinking experience at last years CBC as she plans her plans to avoid the downside this year is Vegas:

It’s no surprise that craft beer has a problematic relationship with drinking. Last year, I found myself drinking too much and even when I tried to slow down, someone was pushing another beer in my hands. The situation sucked, and my plan to avoid it this year is to keep hop water on deck. A little hydration, a little smoke and mirrors—it’s pretty much a win/win.

Sensible. And just after I published the update last week my “YOU GOT MAIL” notice sounded off, echoing through the house – and there was Katie Mather in her newsletter The Gulp sharing her love of running, a thing which I have never enjoyed as it appears to including running but not include 21 other people chasing a ball… and it is not limited to a modestly sized rectangle:

The day matters. The haze clears. I never get bored of my usual run through the lanes. I am in love with a certain dip in the road where an old woodland congregates either side of a humpback bridge. I feel Pendle behind me and watch as its western flanks follow my course. I spot siskins and chiff chaffs, and robins eye me suspiciously from inside hawthorn hedges. The first blossom is out now, white and frothy high up on tall Serviceberry trees. I pretend, after the first mile, that I’m nowhere near home, that I’m in the middle of the countryside and I’m just running, and running, for no reason, just for the joy of it. This is my lane, and I feel like I can tell it’s happy I’m back.

Finally, from Mastodon and Emergence magazine, some ancient thoughts on aging well which seems to require a rather large capacity for drinking, even larger than perhaps at the CBC:

Now that I’m old with shaved hair and thin clothing, I feel
a vastness inside of me.
Let me pour empty the River West as wine, use the Big Dipper as ladle and invite all worldly things as my guests.
The world is but a passing guest of my mind.
Alone I strum my zither and sing, forgetting what year it is,
while time keeps passing through my body, so time lives.

Zhang Xiaoxiang 1132–1170, Southern Song Dynasty

Mr. Deep. That is what they call me. Cause I post poetry. And with that… that’s it! Again … we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes. There is a lot going on down here and, remember, ye who read this far down, look to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. I saw this comment on Mastodon this week that is worth applying to all social media… and perhaps craft beer too:

Business Insider has written about how much TikTok’s growth rate has collapsed. I think it’s a combination of a few things: (i) Law of large numbers. Almost every eligible user is already on it. (ii) Every major competitor has added similar features and (iii) Attention is a zero sum game. There are no more available entertainment minutes in the day. So it has to compete with streaming shows, gaming, other apps, etc.

Interesting. And check out the collapse of Twex in the graph! Me? This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (125) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (914) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (still climbing up to 4,465) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (165), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. I now have admitted my dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat, relocated the links and finally accept that BlueSky is the leader in “the race to replace” Twex even while way behind.

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

The Almost Sweater Weather Edition of Beery News Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is incredible. A Wisconsin bar offered free drinks if the Jets lost. After Rodgers went down, they started running up their tabs. The news was live when the jets won in overtime and everyone realized they had to pay.

Finally on the question of value (and by the way is it is so great to have gotten to the era that we can talk about value without some semi-pro consulto-journo beer writer jumping in to play the broken record “you can’t put a price on experience!!!“) – finally on the question of value… Boak and Bailey asked about the linger legacy of value pricing at Sam Smith’s:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yikes! And that is that. Done. Still no drunk elephant stories this week. I looked again. I really tried, Stan. Still, as per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect – even including at my somewhat quieter than expected Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Got on BlueSky this week and added it to my IG, FB, X, Mastodon, Threads, Substack Notes and a deservedly dormant Patreaon presence. I am multi! I am legion!! Yet totally sub. All in all, I still am preferring the voices on Mastodon, like these ones discussing beer:

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters to stay on top of things (though those things called “newsletters” where 1995 email lists meet the blogs of 2005 may be coming to an end of value if the trend with so many towards the dull dull dull means anything) including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now much more occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast. There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube soon celebrating a decade of vids. And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

The Sore Back Grimey Nails Bug Bit Edition Of The Beery News Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excellent. Sleep on, Jumbos. And as per ever and always, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect – even including at my somewhat quieter than expected Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Waiting for a BlueSky invite but having IG, FB, X, Mastodon, Threads, Substack Notes and a dormant Patreaon I am not sure why I would add another. So many created to make social media offer less and less. Brilliant. I still prefer the voices on Mastodon, any newer ones noted in bold:

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

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

Your Thursday Beery Beer Notes For When He Hardly Makes Any Real Effort

It’s been a week. Four out of seven days on the road, driving in a car for about 21 hours. No time for blogging much. The upside? Rhubarb ginger ice cream at the fabulous Slickers of Bloomfield in Prince Edward County, our nearby wine growing region of Ontario. Downside? Highway 401 from Halton to Kitchener upon which I had to drive coming home, telling my son to be quiet as we had 50 km of 130 km/hr traffic packed tight with what felt like a foot or two between cars. Evil. Fortunately, the ice cream came second. On the way there Saturday, as noted on Le Twit, we also ate at the highly recommended Northern Dumpling Kitchen which blew our minds. That image there? That’s the Chinese broccoli with garlic. Very simple. Nutty nutty good. And lamb and leek dumplings. Imagine! The restaurant looks like this. It’s located here along with 25 other small food spots. Go. But don’t go when I go. KDK only has about 30 seats. Wednesday’s dash to Syracuse, NY for a work meeting with some of my favourite business clients was a treat. And I hit the Watertown Hannaford grocery for, you know, Dinosaur BBQ sauces and oyster crackers. Things denied to Canadians.

Enought about me! In the world of beer, Jessica Mason guided us to consideration of a new thing in the UK’s pub trade – the label “fresh ale” as seen in the wild or at least in pubs asking if the new beer category will help lager drinkers migrate to cask or if it actually cannibalises real cask ale for good:

A new beer category, named ‘fresh ale’ has been created by Otter Brewery to bridge the gap between craft beer, cask ale and lager. ‘Fresh ales’ are beers that are initially brewed as cask ales, but instead of being filled into casks they are gently carbonated before being put into kegs. The Devonshire-based brewery’s first beer being launched as a ‘fresh ale’ is named Amber Fresh and paves the way for “a new form of ale for pubs, designed to be fresh in name and fresh by nature”.

We are told that the beer will stay in great condition for longer, remaining fresh to drink for weeks, rather than days. Which is interesting.

Pellicle posted an interesting tale, the story of state of American Porter which paired last evening with a Godspeed Kemuri Porter at this very minute as my fingers do their dance. And what’s that state look like?

In 2023, only a few legacy porter brands remain. Fitz is still ubiquitous here in Ohio and the Midwest in general. Deschutes Black Butte from Oregon is still around, though it’s getting harder to find here on the opposite side of the country. Bell’s Porter can occasionally be spotted, though who knows for how much longer. Anchor’s and Sierra Nevada’s porters have not been seen in the wild in years and are presumed extinct in these parts. Sales figures from Bart Watson, Chief Economist at the Brewers Association (the trade body representing small, independent breweries in the United States) show porter’s share of total craft has dropped by 60% by sales volume since 2007, the earliest year for which numbers are available.

Fitz is good code. And, not really relatedly, Katie Mather is back with another edition of her newsletter, The Glup, this time sharing thoughts on the role of music in one’s thoughts:

Where the void (a term used in BPD circles and treatment to reference the absence of or inability to define emotion—the void can last moments or days depending on the episode) can be a black hole taking in and vaporising thoughts of comfort, in these playlists I can find ways to play with its distortion of reality. Daydreaming has always been my preferred state of being, and learning to find and clarify these powerful places in my mind has been empowering. Liminal spaces have always fascinated and terrified me…

I am a big time daydreamer, me. Katie also advises that she has upcoming articles in Pellicle as well as Hwaet! and Glug and Ferment, too – and that her book(!) will by published by Wine52 later this year.

Gary continues to speed though the archives and provides us a take of mid-century drink, Tenpenny ale:

In comments to my recent post “Walker’s S.B. Sherry Bright Ale”, Ron Pattinson pointed out that the name Tenpenny, shown proximate to the Sherry Bright name in adverts I considered, denoted a separate beer. He indicated it was 5.4% and quite dark in 1951. Edd Mather added that this Tenpenny was a brand originally made by George Shaw & Co. Ltd. of Leigh, Lancashire, a brewery bought up by Peter Walker’s parent company, Walker-Cain.

I shared that this brought back memories of a dear departed but distinct Ten Penny ale. Your uncle’s beer… well, maybe your great-uncle’s.

As noted in B+B’s Saturday round up, Mark Johnson has shared some thoughts about his relationship with alcohol under the grim but honest title of “Chasing Oblivion“:

It would have potentially been helpful for me to find something else as a lifestyle or as a hobby. As it was, my genuine love for tasting beer and visiting different types of pubs pulled me away from oblivion. As much as social media aspects of beer and self-proclaimed bloggers are routinely mocked, that energy made me approach beer differently . It made me focus on the positives without the need for pushing it that extra few drinks. I’ve made no secret that writing about my struggles with depression, my suicidal thoughts and some of my issues from the past have probably kept me alive. Before I had no such outlet. It has never truly occurred to me that my previous release was alcohol. It wasn’t every day. It wasn’t inhibiting my day-to-day life. But I was using it as both therapy and medication. Seeing alcohol purely through the beer lens helped me recalibrate.

An interesting story in the continuing saga of craft buy outs and closings this week sees a CNY veteran brewery buying out one of the top micros of days gone by. As my co-author Don Cazentre* reports from the scene:

Utica’s F.X. Matt (Saranac) Brewing, makers of the Saranac line of craft beers and the traditional lager Utica Club, has agreed to purchase Flying Dog Brewing, a large craft brewer based in Maryland. News of the deal was broken by Brewbound, a site that covers the national brewing industry. The deal announced today will likely make combined Matt / Flying Dog one of the ten largest craft brewers in the country, according to statistics compiled by the national Brewers Association, based in Colorado.

Mike Stein added that this may be a relief to those transitioning to the new leadership given the seemingly poor record of the former.

There is nothing good to report on the Bud Light market these days. Transphobic customers walk, good union jobs perhaps at risk and a welcome inclusive marketing plan gutlessly abandoned as fast as possible:

Bud Light is offering generous rebates for Memorial Day that in some cases amount to free beer as Anheuser-Busch continues its scramble to recover from the Dylan Mulvaney controversy… The rebate offer comes as Bud Light sales have worsened for the sixth consecutive week since April 1, when trans influencer Mulvaney shared an Instagram post of a custom Bud Light can the Anheuser-Busch brand sent her to celebrate “365 Days of Girlhood.” Rebates have already been offered on Bud Light by individual vendors looking to rid themselves of the embattled company.

Question: if your kid was in a local sports organization which, by Jeff’s reckoning, had only 80% committment to being the sort of place that “welcomes all, that straight up supports human dignity with action“… would you stick around? Not me. I am not picking on Jeff at all by saying this as I think he has the numbers shockingly right when it comes to craft beer. He also added another bit of math this week, a verbal description of the graphical representation of data this time which, again, is quite correct:

Nevertheless, the situation arises, at least partly, from a fault line that has always bedeviled the organization. From the very start, the Brewers Association saw itself as not just a trade association, but the central champion of a new culture of beer and brewing. This put them in the position of speaking for an industry far larger than their member breweries, and necessarily created compromises when the interests of their members deviated from the industry’s in general.

So, that entity with 80% top drawer actors is also just one side of a fault line – “fault” being an excellent double entendre – with people who are not produces on the other side of the line. Fans, hangers on, most beer writers, consumers, the public I suppose. People, as Jeff correctly says, who are not makers but are, according to the BA, still seemingly supposed to line up in lock step with them under the banner of the unified champion. Which we already consider to be 20% dodgy to one degree or another. Gotta tell you: if this is that rec league situation me and my kids would out of there in a spray of gravel as fast as I can get the car our of the ball field’s parking lot. In particular, I share the opinions expressed by a reader identifying as “gingersnap” in the comments at Jeff’s post on the underlying situation and how the mechanism actually works:

The problem with the language is that privilege is not a superpower to be used as an instrument of leverage. Privilege, in this case for white brewery owners, is a result of systemic oppression of non-white folks, it is not something that was earned. To talk about leveraging this power of privilege is part of the “white savior trope” and suggests that those without privilege should be grateful for whatever efforts are made on their behalf. That kind of thinking is hurtful, elitist and white-centric.

That cause is pretty all purpose for the effect of bigotries, if history is any sort of teacher. And I have also long thought and even said that this sort of thing (along with all the BA’s upward pricing encouragement and flaky faddish brewing technique promotions) is exactly why North America needs its own verion of CAMRA which sits apart from and even faces the BA. A consumers’ group for and led by beer drinkers, that’s whats needed. Why? Because it would appear that currently, the people in charge of the construct, the culture, the dialogue are not the consumers who actually control the cash with their spending decisions.

Such a plan would be reasonable, given the BA was formed twenty years ago in part to address some late micro era rogue weirdness while protecting the trade and perhaps cushioning the still prominent actor dabbling in some outrageous sexist marketing… as John Noel has confirmed. The yikky pattern continued, for example, two years before #MeToo in the sexist choices of certain prominent trade members at the CBC in 2015 as well as the 2018 Zwanze Day mess again involving a prominent man in beer. Still, all is presented as A-OK in the big craft picture. And still all associated with what gingersnap above called the “white savior trope” or what I have called “Great White Male Hero Theory Problem” in craft beer.

And while the Brewers Association is this keystone in the craft culture it is yet not, as Jeff says, able to respond in any effective manner to these issues. It “wants to be politically neutral in terms of state politics” and, when facing toxisity, found it “impossible to relocate this event.” That all being the case… is your kid still playing in this sports league? Why are you showing up to sit in the stands knowing or even experiencing the bigotries within ear shot form the stands or the benches? Why support the BA? Because it’s all we have?* And why do you think it’s all we have? Probably because we have forgotten what we should have.

Oh… and one last thing. Jeff also wrote that:

…the BA itself bringing smart people who think like these folks (and there are a lot of them!) into BA’s upper management would be a good first step in transforming the way the organization thinks.

Sadly, and as I noted two weeks ago, the BA does have at least one such excellent leader already in their organization and has for a number of years: Dr. J Jackson-Beckham, the Brewers Association’s Equity & Inclusion Partner. Seems there’s been plenty of stumbling at that first step. More on this from Stan, Robin and Stephanie Grant.

That’s it! That’s enough from me. I’m having a glass of wine this evening and relaxing. Let the others now scan the beer news for you! As per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon:

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 newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast. There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube soon celebrating a decade of vids. And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!***

*I just note that he and I are on the team writing the hitory of New York State brewing for SUNY Publishing. He knows everything one needs to know about the CNY brewing business and more.
**Update: well after my press time, Courtney Iseman went so far in her newsletter to carefully suggest and also plainly express a few things about the power dynamic that the BA imposes on craft beer culture when she wrote: “There are good things about CBC, and there are good people at the Brewers Association. I’m not comfortable telling people they should never go to CBC again. I’m not optimistic the BA will really take the note and meaningfully improve CBC, but I’m hopeful, so while I have no plans to attend again for the foreseeable future, I think it’s too soon to make any certain, sweeping statements… I think it’s important for us to remember that there are many people in the industry who don’t have as much of a choice. Their jobs might essentially require them to regularly attend CBC.” Which is absolutely nuts when you think about it for three seconds: get in line or get another job. Thanks BA.
***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?

Your Beery News Notes For Another Week Filled With Frosty Risks

Here we are. Mid-May and… the tomatoes have had to been covered and stuck in the shed for two nights. It was +0.7C Wednesday at 6 am and -1.0C on Thursday at about the same time. Lordy. BTW, I’ve hit 60 (as I have mentioned a number of times) so I plan to say “Lordy” more. Martin, who I suspect also says “Lordy” a lot, thumbed his nose to the fear of frost and spent some time at the seaside. Withernsea, to be exact. He spotted the same thing in real life that I did in his photos: “… the pub a minor joy with comfortable seating…” Now that I’m 60 I can say what I’ve known in my heart since I was a teen. Nothing like a comfy seat. Now, I know that this may not the sort of hard hitting beer journalism that you have come to expect hereabouts but I say it is beer realism. Happy butt, happy lad.

First up and not as happy, Lew made an interesting observation this week in his column at The Full Pint:

Failure might be on the way, because cost inputs in brewing have gone up and up, and people don’t want to see more price increases in the cooler. How can they not, when I hear from brewers about double-digit increases in packaging prices (glass, cans, kegs), 50% jumps in energy costs, and (finally) increases in labor costs. That’s why prices go up…mostly. But prices also go up sometimes because everyone’s waiting for the big brands – either in sales, or reputation and cachet – to go first, and when they do, everyone rushes to follow. That’s not collusion, they didn’t conspire to do it, it’s more like a stampede. When one buffalo starts running, pretty quickly they’re all running, because no one wants to get left behind.

It’s true that there’s price input pressure but there’s also the reality of sluggish interest in beer. Because, you know, people can run in any number of directions – including to straight to pouring other drinks in their glass. How many breweries are comfortable with the prospect of cutting output and raising prices?

Speaking of which, I had my first natural wine last weekend. My notes: “Yeasty, orange pear juice fruit, dry with light bubble and green pepper end with a little white pepper. Watery Creamsicle with mineral herb?” Perhaps not a repeat buy for me but interesting enough as experience goes. I only mention that (and not anything else like the name of the wine) as I read a piece in a newsletter called Everyday Drinking about how unpleasant natural wine fans are and I don’t want anyone showing up on my door:

Almost immediately, our natural winemaker launched into a rant. First, about the winemaker we’d just visited. “What is biodynamic anyway?” he said. “They can just buy the biodynamic preparations online.” This rant wasn’t surprising. There is possibly no group of people on earth who talk more shit about one another—behind one another’s back—than natural winemakers do. Plus, the biodynamic winemaker had already told us he’d once partnered with this guy and they’d had a “philosophical” falling out.

Yikes. Yet… is it true? Pellicle steps up to the defence of the naturalistas with a day in the life of an Australian harvest:

It is one of the rainiest seasons you’ve ever seen or heard of, and winemakers are anxiously racing against the threat of mildew and rot—the two inevitable results of rain falling on grapevines. Not to mention the birds and the kangaroos, constant predators of your fruits who find their ways past fences and through the netting, so much do they enjoy sucking the juice out of the berries or nibbling entire bunches.

Not at all unpleasantly, Eoghan guided us to an article in The Brussles Times about, what, appropriation of Belgium’s national drink by adulterous hegemonistic US craft:

The competition had a total of 24 “Belgian-style” beer categories, for which US beers took home most of the prizes. Canadian brewers also got more medals than Belgian ones for “Belgian-style” beers, receiving four prizes. “It’s been said that Belgian beer is having some difficulties on the international scene due to a lack of innovation. I think we are proving the opposite with our Seefbier, a beer style that dates back to 16th century Antwerp,” said Johan Van Dyck, founder of the Antwerp Brewing Company.

See also. Interesting use of “innovation” up there which leads us to Ron who suggests it’s a misuse and mislabelling of what is really just change:

True innovation in brewing is far rarer. Things like the adoption of the hydrometer and thermometer. Baudelot coolers. Refrigeration. Pure yeast cultures. Mash filters. Continuous fermentation. (It may have been a total disaster, but it was truly new.) Stuff that really hadn’t been done before. And genuinely transformed brewing. Most of what’s called innovation today? Mere tinkering with ingredients. While change is inevitable, it’s rarely innovation.

Speaking of which, I was there until the flavoured barrel-aging. Why can’t we respect the fundamentals? Speaking of which, the archeological record could support a Journal of Archaaeological Brewing but no one seems to want to do it.

Jeff posted a few thoughts about “innovative” collaborations in the land of good beer, a concept which long ago morphed from brewers getting together to beer writers getting their names on beer bottle labels to anytihng imaginable to… to… perhaps the unimaginable:

I may be an outlier here, but as a rule of thumb, I personally would never green-light a collab with any packaged meats product. No doubt some drinkers will cotton to the idea of a meaty brew, but are their numbers sufficient to offset those who gag at the idea? Put another way, one way to consider the potential harms and benefits of a potential collab is to ask whether people will confuse it with an April Fools joke. If the answer is even a maybe, it’s probably a poor opportunity.

And Cass posted an excellent update on the state of brewing in Syracuse, NY over at A Quick Beer:

Syracuse has an up-and-coming beer scene with many new breweries in a city that’s easy to explore. We enjoyed just a taste of Syracuse’s thriving beer scene, including pioneer Middle Ages, modern breweries such as Talking Cursive, Meier’s Creek, Buried Acorn and Bullfinch, plus checking out Syracuse’s Tipp Hill neighborhood and Seneca Street and SingleCut in nearby Manlius.

What that? NO, that’s just the blurb. He posted a video! Cass also runs the excellent (and perhaps older than this here space) The Bar Towel Forum for all your beer chatting needs. Speaking of which, the Craft Beer Channel has hit a decade of beers by video.

Health question: why does the congratulations around someone saying they are doing so well and feeling much healthier off the booze require also praising the person for also not recommending anyone else try it? Taboo?

Only tangentially related, Stan was having to be pretty blunt this week. His round up was only about the botch of a conference put on by the Brewers Association that I touched on that week – a botch which left him in less than a positive mood:

Last month I wrote, “It’s not my goal to find less pleasant stories to balance the feel good ones, but some weeks that is pretty easy.” There were stories last week that you might label “feel good,” but by the time the week ended nothing felt very good.

The Beer Nut made a few interesting observations about the state of BrewDog’s beer as well as the big surprise in beer for 2023, the battle for stout supremacy:

he first beer to catch my attention was Black Heart. BrewDog has been marketing this heavily as a Guinness substitute, and just like with Ansbach & Hobday’s London Black last year, I wanted to put that to the test. Unlike London Black, however, this one does actually meet the brief. They’ve matched the strength of Draught Guinness in Britain where it’s 4.1% ABV. They’ve got the texture spot on, while the flavour is very dry and rather boring, presenting an equivalent amount of toast and roast but lacking the tangy sourness which is Draught Guinness’s only real nod to having character. Mission accomplished, I guess, though BrewDog normally makes much more interesting beers than this. I would like to try them side by side if I ever get the chance.

David Jesudason (he of the BBC article on his new book, released yesterday) had an interesting article in his Substack newsletter Episodes of My Pub Life and prefaced it with this interesting heads up:

This article should be paid content. In fact, like last week’s article, it was commissioned but I chose to withdraw it from the publication as they wanted to change it too much from the initial brief. There’s no bad feeling about this decision and sometimes you have to value a compelling story above financial concerns.

Have I mentioned that gatekeeping backseat driving editors take away as much as they add? Oh, yes… many times. Anyway, the story is about two British people who ran a pub in rural South Africa from 2003 to 2011 and all the racist bigotries they experienced. Like everything David touches (except for some editors) you will find another read that few others are sharing in the beer world.

Lastly, the structure of this piece by Will Hawkes on Copenhagen illustrates something I notice about beer writing – a familiar structure. First, I like to count paragraphs and this one comes in at a bit under 30 paragraphs with about the first two thirds revisiting known facts. Even if in this case the facts are about negative things. Not a lot of beer writing is about negative things so this is good. And this is for VinePair so that context is important. This is not craft beer bubble writing. The “story” is in the last nine paragraphs and really the final five. The fifth even starts with an introductory sentence: “On a sunny evening, it’s clear that Copenhagen is a beer town.” Then a reference to hygge (that Pete Brown told us all about way back when in his 2006 book Three Sheets to the Wind which I interviewed him about when he was speaking to me.*) And then the final happy hopeful.

That’s it! That’s enough from me. As per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon:

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 newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast. There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube soon celebrating a decade of vids. And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!**

*Funny ha-ha only. Me kidding. Just a joke… with a citation of sorts… you know… for accuracy purposes…
**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?

A Doubtful Dubious Display Is What You Get With This Week’s Beery News Notes

Tra-laa! How many first posts in May have I “tra-laa-ed” at you? It is because I have no imagination? NO! It’s because it’s from the musical Camelot which earned 110% of it’s reputation to Canada’s greatest gift to world culture, Mr. Robert Goulet!!! Surely the handsomest man of the 20th century. And a clinker of a drink or two, as illustrated. What’s that got to do with beer? WHHHAAAATTTT??? Have you lost your marbles? First, he had a TV show called Blue Light which is obviously the inspiration for Blue Light. AND he did TV ads for Molson Canadian which was owned then (and are again) by the owners of the Montreal Canadiens at the time. Who were right in the middle of proving themselves as the greatest hockey team of all time. Tra. La.

First up this week, happy news as those purveyors of interesting stories, Pellicle, hit its fourth anniversary which by my fingers and toes makes it 20% of this here AGBB‘s longevity. There is a party this very evening or, if you are western hemispheric, this afternoon. You know, at work there is a portrait (like these) of Michael Flannagan, our fair city’s municipal clerk who was in office from the 1840s to the 1890s. If I retire in five years as might be normal I will have made it to what I call the half-Flannagan. In 12 years, Pellicle will half-Flannagan me. Happy news.

And by way of proving the point of their prominence, Pellicle posted a piece (Ed.: STOP IT!!!) on The Five Points Brewing Company, Hackney Downs railway arch, London and its dedication to the craft of cask – with some particularly proper beer pR0n photography (Ed.: STOP!!!!):

“Cask beer is the very definition of craft beer,” Ed says. “Some people can think of cask beer as something different from craft… that it’s boring, brown, British bitter, and craft beer is all about New World hops, and intense flavour experiences, and carbonation. But craft beer is actually about provenance and quality and artisanal approaches to manufacturing,” he adds. “And it’s not just about the manufacturing process, it’s the dispense process. It’s a living, breathing product that continues to condition in the cellar, and that is an art form in itself.”

Me, I can get into that idea of “provenance” way ahead of claims to terrior.

In the police blotter update, I am not sure if this new federal amending statute applies to this here place and whether soon I can expect to be in handcuffs, taken away based in part by your petitions. I am probably sure it will go unnoticed by the law just as the rest of society ignores it… but it is interesting interesting to note that the summary of the amendments to be found at section 2(3) of Chap 8, First Session, Forty-fourth Parliament, 70-71 Elizabeth II – 1 Charles III, 2021-2022-2023 (aka Bill C-11):

…specify that the Act does not apply in respect of programs uploaded to an online undertaking that provides a social media service by a user of the service, unless the programs are prescribed by regulation…

Interesting that they use the phrase “social media service” which may or may not inclue WordPress. And what is a blog if not a soap opera which is indubitably a program. We await the regs.

Boak and Bailey wrote a lovely and well reasearched piece on the lost pubs of Bristol by way of a bit of a tour:

Next, let’s turn left onto Mary-le-Port Street. Except it’s not there any more, so we can’t, really, but we can cut through the park to look at the ruins of St Mary-le-Port Church hidden behind the brutalist Lloyds Bank and modernist Norwich Union building. Then follow the path that tracks the old street pattern towards the site of The Raven. C.F. Deming, author of Old Inns of Bristol, published in 1943, reckoned The Raven dated back to the 17th century and was “mentioned in 1643”.

The article immediately reminded me of the time, gosh, ten years ago when Craig and I went a wandering in Albany NY, looking for evidence of the 1600s town and found the King’s Arms tavern intersection where the American Revolution started locally and where, interestingly, my fair city of Kingston, Ontario was in a very real way born:

But that, oddly, is not my point in posting that picture. Do you see how the street distinctly turns to the left? That turn expresses something a hundred years older than the King’s Arms, the southern design of the palisades of the original settlement. You can see it in this map from 1770 but, more particularly, you can see it in the 1695 map Craig posted to describe the community in the 1600s Dutch era.

Three or four eras in one small corner of Albany: 2013 when the photo was taken, the late 1800s buildings, the revolutionary-era tavern intersectiton and the curve of the 1600 pallisades. Lesson: everybody take B+B’s advice, get outside and look around you! It’s remarkable to see what isn’t quite not there.

Not for any particular reason other than it is a very nice portrait of some very nice beer people having a nice bit bit of beer. The source. The setting.

Jordan by way of IG (the app which I personally hope Bill C-11 SHUTS DOWN) has declared a winner!

There have been lager brewers in Ontario. O’Keefe, Reinhardt, Carling, Labatt. I walk past Toronto’s first lager brewer, John Walz, several times a week in Mount Pleasant Cemetary. I spent so much time looking at fire insurance maps that I researched corrugated iton. I spent so much time reading documents that I needed a nap. I wrote histories. With the help of @wornoldhat, we reviewed all the beer in the province twice. I’ve seen the vast majority of the beer that exists in the modern era of brewing. I checked with people I respect about it, including @beaumontdrinks. I legitimately think that Godspeed’s Pitch Lined Sklepnik is the best lager style beer that had ever existed in Ontario. First to Last. It is SIX DOLLARS A PINT on Sundays.

I love the non-pitched home delivered Sklepnik so have no reason to disagree. And I would not limit that to Ontario. And… I bought a mixed case with some in it because I see that it’s in cans and available for delivery right now. Big sale on Tmavý Ležák 12º. Just saying…

Nineteen years ago, I included Black Sheep Ale in a list of well loved English pale ales that I could find in my eastern Ontario nothern NY ecosystem. Well, this week the brewery went into administration, a step short of bankruptcy:

The Black Sheep Brewery has announced that it intends to appoint administrators to protect the interests of its creditors after the business was hit by a “perfect storm” caused by the pandemic and rising costs. A spokesman for Black Sheep, which is based in Masham, North Yorkshire, stressed that the business is trading as normal and there have been no job losses to date. It employs around 50 staff.

Fingers crossed. Malt still being delivered. And remember you can see Black Sheep as it was in 1997 in this broadcast of the Two Fat Ladies, those foundational thinkers in relation to my life with food and drink.

Beth Demmons has another great edition of Prohibitchin’ out, this time on NA winery Null Wines‘ co-founders Catherine Diao and Dorothy Munholland in which a very good argument is made, one that might move a skeptic like me:

The vast majority of people buying non-alcoholic beverages also drink alcohol, suggesting that NA alternatives are simply an extension of choice rather than trying to act as strict replacements to their boozy counterparts. Dorothy and Catherine say giving consumers more high-quality options was the driving force of launching their business rather than chasing a trend. “One of our internal guideposts for ourselves is ‘Don’t add more crap to the world,’” says Catherine.

Skeptic? Well, when the shadowy Portman Group is jumping on the bandwagon you have to wonder. By the way, look right. What a weird photo to illustrate NA bevvying in the news article. In any other context in any other decade, that image is pure code for being stoned out of one’s cranium. Very mixed message, PG. Very mixed indeed. Can’t be having that. You best be having a word with the Evening Standard.

Question: consider this from Mr.B:

I am repeatedly amazed by the speed with which respected and accomplished chefs will attach their names to suspect beers, ciders, coolers, and seltzers, while at the same time touting the quality of ingredients in their dishes. #MoneyTalks

Aside from the bald accusation of the role of money (something as common enough in beer), if no one has convinced most restaurants high and low from having a serious beer list, well, is this not something that advocates for treating beer more seriously have to take some responsibility for? Let’s be honest – if folks actually wanted it by now folk would have it by now.

Somewhat relatedly… seven years out forecasting. When everything matters does anything matter #3928? As scheduled:

WHY IT MATTERS: The growing strength of Modelo’s cheladas and aguas frescas point to a likely second act for a beer brand that, if current trends continue, is set to unseat Bud Light as the U.S.’s top-selling beer (by dollars) by 2030.

Less cheerily, at the end of last week just after hitting the publish button over here at AGBB HQ, Ruvani de Silva posted a very detailed, well researched and extended piece on the experience of being subject to online trolling as part of the bro culture side of craft beer world (which I have to admit for me isn’t limited to males as I have been on the receiving end from women, too.) But I immediately took to it as it made me think of the causes of craft’s bro culture.

Societal bigotry, yes, but also vestiges of X-Treme? Maybe tribal claims to one community, expertise with a leadership class fed by great white male hagiographies of semi-phony founders?.

I should have added booze obvs. But what do I mean by expertise? Perhaps this sort of smug self-affirmed but highly dubious expertise as opposed to this sort of largely self-driven expertise that makes no claims to extrapolation or even… you know… social status or higher moral ground*! David Jesudason’s thoughts were this:

Thoughtful piece. It mentions some abuse I got. I reported it but the police did nowt. Luckily I’ve done lots of work on resilience and it isn’t a trigger tbh. But some of the other types of trolling I do find difficult including subtweeting criticism cos I hate being ignored…

What else is going on? Not unrelatedly, this past Monday Stan commented on Jeff’s comments on Bud Lite’s maker’s woes following learning they were utterly unprepared and botched the response to their hiring of a trans woman Dylan Mulvaney for an ad campaign. The comment of Jeff’s that Stan considered began with this: “…years ago, I argued that it’s bad business for companies to take political positions. That was correct then, but it’s not anymore.” Note: Jeff made that earlier statement in October 2016 just before the US election when he wrote about Yuengling endorsing Donald Trump. He said it was a bad move. With total respect, I don’t really agree partially as democracy needs robust debate but also because I’m also not sure the two situations are even comparables as that would depend on the badness of the business move being the measure. Still, put it this way if I am wrong: at this point are we sure who is worse, the makers of Yuengling or Bud Lite?

Stan then broadened the question on how it reflects on the whole brewing trade and, again with total respect, drew in something which I have never actually found to be all that true:

Small breweries that some call “craft” have benefited by what is unspoken; that they are the good guys. Recently, they’ve been asked to prove it. Many have. The rest? We’ll see what happens.

The good guys? Really? How good is craft? Certainly doubts are raise by initiatives like the early and short lived co-opting of outrage against the war in Ukraine, the perhaps slightly deeper response with some to the Black is Beautiful initiatives even if not all the money ended up in the pockets pledged – not to mention, as Stan mentioned two weeks ago, the dimming of interest in DEI. (And not to mention… the continuation of bigoted operations like Founders… dots connected.)** Yup, it seems like its all just news cycle compassion so much of the time with craft.* Which builds on the question. Who is worse: the makers of Yuengling, the makers of Bud Lite or the appropriators of craft?

There’s another thing, a more important thing. I don’t believe that the existence of human rights even depends on political power or even the majority of folks’ conviction – and certainly not the stance of commercial operations like a brewery. Human rights are fundamental – a foundational fundamental good, not something politically sourced even if their denial by bastards in power is. Human rights speak to the simple inherent dignity of being a human in all its forms of subjective experience. The dignity shines through any denial and is always worth the fight. I hate to break it to you – but sooner or later we all will have one or more human characteristics which will annoy or even generate hatred by somebody. Don’t believe me? Wait for age. No, we can’t cherry pick which human rights are the winners. It’s all or none. Bandwaggoning the news cycle like craft isn’t any sort of conviction in support of human rights any more than leaving it to any stripe of politicans is. These are really appropriations of goodness. So show me a brewery that welcomes all, that straight up supports human dignity with action and little fanfare and I am there.*** Are there are all that many? Dunno but I do spend my money where there is a chance that they just might be worth my support. I suggest you do the same. It can have an effect. And if these my previous few hundreds of perhaps wandering words don’t convince you, think of what Brian Alberts wrote with just a handful:

Don’t just stick to beer, stick to just beer.****

Why? It matters. This actually matters.

That’s enough from me. You want more? As per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon:

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 newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast. There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel 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!*****

*Yes, a double footnote… but why always place craft beer on the rosy glowing end of the good-bad spectrum with, you know, Donald Trump at the other Satanic end. Isn’t this obviously self-serving, all this praise from within craft beer for craft beer? (Looka me! I’m part of a community!! ) And another thing… what the heck has craft beer ever actually done to stake its claim to a higher moral position? Do you think of your favorite shoe stores that way, your coffee shops, your cheddar and gin makers or neighbourhood bakers? Actually, I do know bakers who ensure their surplus gets to the homeless day after day so, yes, props to those bakers.
**Can you believe this shit: “When Dillard reported the incidents to management, she alleges that she received drastically reduced hours as retaliation or was ignored. The complaint also states she worked as a part-time manager for nearly a year without moving up, while white managers were promoted within months. The complaint also details alleged instances of sexual harassment from a fellow worker. When Dillard complained about the behavior, she says she was ignored. But once a white employee complained about the same behavior from the same worker, the offending worker was fired. Things were so bad that a white manager also resigned because of the ongoing racial discrimination against Dillard.” H/T to The Polk.
***Could you get a wheelchair in the taproom bathroom? Does the sort of language used on the brewing floor align with the branding?
****Cleverly succinct. Reminds me of a Billy Bragg quip from a concert maybe 35 years ago: “Remember: it’s not ‘how high are you?’ – it’s ‘hi how are you?'”
*****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…

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 newsletter, The 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 link! The Fingers Podcast has fully packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly.

*The setting is real.

The First And Rather Excitable Beery News Notes Of Yuletide 2022

Finally… nothing like seeing the end of November. My least favourite month. I used to always dread it. Days gloomily shortening. School papers needing to be put properly in hand. Time now to look forward, to the holidays. To life with family and friends, gathering inside. While not directly Christmassy, Max posted two images of insidey painting, each of which illustrate the excellence of non-brewing records to inform us about brewing history. In the first, “Vesnická Hospoda”, a 1863 painting by Czech artist Quido Mánes we have a tavern scene with a discussion being held by all ages. The beer glows. And not unlike today in a way… just the sort of thing that I was looking for in the 2006-15 beer blog Yuletide, Kwanzaa, Hogmanay, Christmas and Hanukkah photo contest. I sifted through hundreds of entries every year looking for a glow just like that to ensure all the pressies were directed to all the wee beer nerds’s stockings. Many of the entries are still saved at the Wayback Machine.

In the world of beer culture politics, British beer home delivery service Beer 52 had to issue a statement concerning some flack it had received over a poor PR decision that received some heat. Click on the image to the right to have a look. This is one of the odder but very consistent themes I’ve seen over the years that perhaps distinguishes UK craft from others – the need to not be too nasty to the competition. At a certain point, craft beer shops and craft beer home delivery service are hunting for the same shillings and guineas lodged in the purses of the nation. But, on the other hand, it is nice to be nice.

The British Beer Writers Guild were also in a manner of speaking required to issue its own statement of sorts, as the Guild’s top judging dog explained the almost Byzantine judging process in response to the howls which usually follow this sort of thing. I’d post a quote from the explanation but it does go on and one. Great transparency. No, I will share two bits:

This year the awards were judged by me, a publican from York, a committee member of the British Institute of Innkeeping, a magazine editor, a brewer, a beer importer, two freelance journalists (an unusually high number) a book publisher, and a cheesemonger. Hardly beer writers slapping each other’s backs… We usually have 13-14 categories, and this year there were a total of 190 different entries. That’s far too much for any one judge to read, so judges are paired up and given a few categories each.

Did you know I used to receive a few abusive responses for the photo contest? No? Did I care? Not much. My only recommendation was that this explanation of the process might have been shared prior to outset but, you know, what can you do? It is an unfortunate situation and in large part based on honest deep disappointment as much as gratuitous slag* – but Martyn has been checking the stats and decided that this year’s British Beer Writer of the Year Jonny Garrett is now the most successful contestant in the award’s last ten years. So that’s something. Oh, and madman Gary crossed the Atlantic to sit in on the awards and enjoyed himself very much.

There, that’s enough of that statement making stuff. Care of Mudgie, we learn of Bernard Bland, 92, of Grimsby:

When Bernard Bland made his first trip to the Nunsthorpe Tavern in 1954, a pint set him back eight shillings and 10 pence – or the equivalent of 45p. Yet despite the rising cost of a pint, Bernard is still going to his beloved Grimsby boozer 68 years later. In fact, the 92-year-old has been going there every day for seven decades – only missing his daily session when the pub closed during lockdown.

Not as regular in his pubbing habits – but who could be – this week Cookie wrote about his relationship to the pub at one of the sadder moments in life, the passing of a parent:

But life adjusts and new normals and patterns emerge. A worry for my father in living alone after 45 years of marriage led to spending much more time with my father to assist in his living, eat a meal or two a week with him, shop and administer things. Run 2 houses and lives in a way. Not a burden in any way, but a rekindling of a friendship that in its way has defined me more than any other. Thus, I ended up on a saunter around the pubs of Reddish. In truth I rarely pop in pubs these days, a couple on a Saturday afternoon in Wetherspoons being more or less it when a quiet couple of hours is needed. People don’t talk to you in Wetherspoons. You can just sink a pint.

Eric Asimov wrote an interesting piece in the NYT on the nature of a “wine bar” – which is also something I have thought about in relation to identifying as a “beer bar” as opposed to a bar:

Are they all wine bars? Or is the term so vague as to be meaningless? It might depend on whom you ask… Good wine bars are informal neighborhood gathering places rather than destinations, with occasional exceptions, like when a wine list is so deep that it draws in the trophy- and rare-bottle hunters. But mostly, they are places to drop in near one’s home. They might take some reservations, but they always have room for walk-ins. Wine bars mostly cater to young people. At almost every place I visited, I was by far the oldest patron there.

Don Cazentre wrote about something I had not thought about before – relative stats on which US community out drinks the others on bars at US Thanksgiving, something his hometown of Syracuse, NY has excelled at before:

The night before Thanksgiving, sometimes called Drinksgiving, is typically one of the busiest evenings for bars across the country. And the Syracuse area is often one of the leaders. That held true again this year, as the Syracuse market once again stood out, according to data from BeerBoard, an Armory Square-based company that manages and collects stats and information from draft beer accounts nationwide.

Do they also use gallon-sized tankards there like in the British Iron Age? The Tand himself has written on the subject of a smaller sort of vessel, Sam Smith’s proprietor, Humphrey Smith and the question of how steady his hand is upon the tiller:

…all is not well. I was told, recently, that no fewer than 120 Sam Smith’s pubs are closed through lack of people to run them. (You can often find them listed in trade adverts for managers) This is an astonishing number given that all of them are managed houses, and while they attract a smallish salary, not much above minimum wage, but they do have heating, lighting and rent thrown in on top. This is not an entirely unattractive package in these dodgy times, so why is there a problem in finding the right people to run them?

Jeff added thoughts from afar including the bluntly stated “no one drinks English ales anymore” which is hard to deny… except for the fact that they do.

Stan’s Hop Queries newsletter for November 2022 has landed on my driveway in a neat plastic wrapper and he has noted the end of the line for one particular strain:

CLS Farms has eliminated Medusa, the neomexicanus-only hop that introduced American brewers to a botanical variety of Humulus lupulus that produces unique aromas in beer, from its portfolio. Plants were “grubbed out” after the 2022 harvest. Before you ask, the future still looks fine for Zappa, a daughter of Medusa, being grown on six farms in five states. “It is time to focus on Zappa and let Medusa go,” CLS co-owner Eric Desmarais wrote via email. Quite simply, Medusa didn’t measure up agronomically. “(Medusa) doesn’t have the yield to be able to be super viable moving forward in a higher inflationary world, and a much more competitive hop variety landscape,” Desmarais wrote.

Bit of World Cup news even with the ban – the soak was on in Qatar and “bars overestimated surge pricing”:

Beer prices in Qatar could fall after some bars “overestimated what they can get away with” charging during the World Cup, according to a fans’ group. Supporters visiting the Gulf state say they have faced prices of up to £15 for a pint during the tournament, although many have found it cheaper and venues have offered deals.

The gouge is one elsewhere too with some UK pubs offering lower alc% beers at higher prices in the New Year.

And, finally, a Mastodon update. Now up to 573 followers after the blog was linked to one of those likely list compilers. Incuration, that’s what I call it. Seems I am incurable. Shocking. Still, I am looking more there than with the Twit. It’s happening. Please join us all at @agoodbeerblog@mstdn.social.

That’s it for this week and that month. As we move into December, please check out the updates from Boak and Bailey hopefully now again mostly every Saturday and also 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 newsletter, The 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!

*My only peep this year was that the apparently official award night photos were not wonderful at all. Unlike this one which was great. Which is good – as I used to be a right pain in the arse about these things. Transparency is everything in these matters.

The Tired Old Thursday Beery News Notes For The End of October

Tired and old? Not the notes! Just me. The municipal election was Tuesday and it was a long day at the coal face, pick and shovel in hand. My sixth election for work. I love it as I get to practice a very specific sort of thing that only applies one evening every four years. Like being good at Leap Year law. Well, at least good enough. I also crossed over to the nearby US of A this week for the first time in years. Didn’t buy any beer given how crummy the exchange rate is and how high the duties – but I did get a couple of boxes of Cracklin’ Oat Bran, one of the cereals our Canadian federal government denies us. The US port of entry at the bridge 35 miles or so from here has been rebuilt and looks like something out of Star Wars… or Red Dwarf maybe. It’s actually really an interesting bit of architectural design. Imposing. As it should be.

What else is going on? Well, Jordan was in town last week – but I was tied to the desk and couldn’t make the twenty-three minute walk to Spearhead (led by Josh, himself a municipal candidate!) to watch the brewery’s rather ultra set up produce an ESB for an excellent charitable cause. The brewery is very good about offering support like that also producing a light lager for CJAI, the community radio station whose monthly minutes I take as secretary of the board.* Jordan shared a bit about the experience:

…we’ve got Maris Otter, a little Dark Crystal, and some Black Patent Malt for colour correction. We’ve got Challenger, Fuggles, and East Kent Goldings which should give it some verisimilitude… The brewing system at Spearhead is so advanced that there are not a huge number of pictures you can effectively take of the brew day. I have raked out enough mash tubs on camera over the years and I always feel I look a little silly doing it. I also felt silly posing next to the console with my finger over the transfer button so I made Jacob do it. I feel like I look a little silly most of the time.

For Punch, Courtney Iseman wrote an interesting piece on simmering backlash against the vague concept of IPA. I was particularly pleased to see it reached back and made the case for continuity even if it suffers from the amnesia that beer writer interviewing beer writer summations like this also offer:

IPA’s true history remains buried in England, and is all but unknown in the United States. From a 19th-century influx of German immigrants to post-Prohibition consolidation of American beer under just a few behemoth brands pumping out yellow, fizzy water, the United States was a longtime lager land. Peter Ballantine & Sons Brewing Co. made one of the country’s few IPAs from the late 1800s until 1971, which inspired Fritz Maytag to make, four years later, Anchor Brewing Co.’s Liberty Ale, a dry-hopped pale ale that motivated more U.S. brewers to follow suit.

Craig described the history of American IPA dating back to the early 1800s in 2013 – and at least 1852 in Canada – but at least that part of the chain from Ballantine to today has been acknowledged.
Speaking of improving the track of actual brewing history, the comments last week illustrated the need to be diligent. That responsibility led me to one particularly unique factor to include in considerations, suggested in 1933 by the British scientific journal Nature, a stick to medically measure how pervasive ale was in the medieval era:

The medieval publican had a bad reputation for fraud and dishonesty, while the tavern was often regarded as a place of ill-repute. Alcoholism during the Middle Ages in England, as elsewhere, resembled in many ways the alcoholism of classical antiquity… Legislation dealing with drunkenness or control of the liquor trade was practically unknown in the ancient world, whereas taxation of drink, reduction in the hours of sale and the number of taverns and other restrictions were introduced in the Middle Ages. The absence of syphilis in both ages was noteworthy in view of the fact that alcohol was such a frequent incentive to exposure to infection and was liable to aggravate the disease when once it was acquired.

One more historical question – did this cleric actually first bottle a beer?

Pellicle sent out an update to subscribing supporters like me and the message is clear – the plan to have a self-sufficient quality beer writing without compromising dependence is possible:

…at the time of writing this we are at 296, which is the highest number of Patreon supporters we’ve ever had. We hope you feel your support is worthwhile, and if its not, please consider my inbox always open. We understand that circumstances change, and things aren’t simple for many of us at the moment, including ourselves. I want to ensure that the way we run Pellicle is transparent, and you can see where your donation goes… While we maintain our ethos is to celebrate the joy inherent within our favourite drinks cultures, we also believe that these spaces can only be truly joyful if they can be enjoyed by everyone. We’ll continue publishing articles in this vein in the future for this reason.

The recent piece by Emmie Harrison-West on the failure of UK craft to support a call to end sexism is proof enough of that intention. Compare assurances elsewhere that a “critique on the beer industry itself” is best avoided. I also liked this week’s article on the folly of wine tourism and suggest they apply equally to beer tourism which, as one wag recently put it, is a euphemism for getting drunk in a city where no one knows you. If you think of it, that second Pellicle article as well as the one in Punch above also align a bit with the image to the right, a brewery advert aimed at a French colonial soldier in Algeria spotted on Twitter this week. Click for deets.

Stan in his newsletter ~~Hopping Mad~~… ~~The Hoptician~~… err… Hop Queries included an extended bit on that thing I know nothing about called first wort hopping:

In 1995, the German brewing magazine Brauwelt reported on the “rediscovery of first wort hopping,” documenting that many German breweries implemented first wort hopping 100 years before. It is a technique where hops are added to the first runnings of wort from the lauter tun. This exposes hop material to wort at lower temperatures and an elevated pH for an extended period of time. Advocates for FWH claim it produces a beer with improved bitterness qualities that can be described as “smooth” and “harmonious.”

Sounds a bit like myself, smooth and harmonious.

Glynn Davis wrote about how interviewing one restauranteur who went alcohol free led to considerations of the overall value proposition:

Rather like Hussain has found at the Blue Naan, the adoption of non-alcoholic and low-alcoholic drinks is not going to help attract customers (quite the opposite could be the case, in fact), nor are they going to be some big money spinner for hospitality businesses. But that’s not to say they don’t have a place in helping companies achieve other aims that might be more focused on health, wellness and faith, rather than just being about hard cash.

One last thing? Was craft beer culture ever cool other than to the people with the buzz at the expensive beer bar? Or was the relatively dead air on social media after the results were released more the case?

Hmm… something to think about. As you do, please check out the updates from Boak and Bailey hopefully now again mostly every Saturday and also from Stan more now on a Monday than almost ever! Check out the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast. The OCBG Podcast is on a quieter schedule these days – and 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.) 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 newsletter, The 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 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!

*I like to play both sides in radio land.