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The Thursday Beery News Notes For Your “Summer’s One Third Over” Warning

Whether calculated by the two summer months of July and August or the astrological summer from solstice to equinox, today pretty marks the ending of the first third. This is your two-thirds of summer warning. WEEEEEEEET!!! Remember, you can still plant seeds in patio pots or right into the ground as you will eat vegetables in September, too. A great time to pick up stuff on discount, too, in prep for garden 2024. And it’s still all good foreplay for a good cold beer, believe me. Or a G+T… if you have the tonic. Hauling seed packets around is tiring thirsty work. Lordy.

What else is going on? Russian proved the value of the loyalty Carlsberg offered this week. As careful readers will recall, last February I broke the news… reported… err, repeated the story that the Danish brewery was seeking ways to re-enter the Russian market despite the issue of its ongoing genocidal invasion of the Ukraine. This week?

Carlsberg said it had not received “any official information from the Russian authorities regarding the presidential decree of the consequences for Baltika Breweries”. The Danish brewer also said it had completed an “extensive process” to separate the Russian unit from the rest of the company. Last month, the company signed an agreement to sell Baltika Breweries but had not yet completed the deal. “Following the presidential decree, the prospects for this sales process are now highly uncertain,” it added.

Ruh-roh. And in the most recent edition of London Beer City, Will Hawkes shared these interesting observations on the state of beer in and amongst the restaurant trade in London:

What is clear is that beer in restaurants has settled into a post-craft rut over the past half-decade, pre- and post-Covid. Restaurants, in the main, want just three beers: lager (the house option), pale ale and one more. The paler and crisper the better. Bottles are preferred, although 330ml cans work – but not 440ml, as Biercraft discovered when Pressure Drop moved to that format, and demand from restaurants plummeted.

Remember those beer dinners and those experts in pairing? What are they experts in now? Speaking of the unreal, Ron vented about one of the fibs of the brewing trade today, the debasedment of IPA as a term:

If there’s a beer style that pisses me of, it’s English IPA. Because it only has the most tenuous connection to any beers brewed in the UK bearing the name. In reality, it’s a recerse-engineerd American IPA, with tweaks to make it English. Basically, reducing the hopping or using English hops. And not based on IPAs brewed in the UK at all. 1.050º to 1.075º, 5% to 7.5% ABV, is what the BJCP guidelines say the strength should be. How many examples do I have that fit those parameters? Not one, either bottled or draught. Though the classic one, Red Triangle/White Shield, is missing. Though, at 1052º, even that only just scrapes in. What do the three draught beers called IPA have in common? Bugger all.

It is true. Needy US craft has poached so much of the terminology in its scrambling to pretend the whole ftuit sauced makey-uppy has some connection to brewing traditions. Who is to blame? Who suffers when business decisions backfire? Other than Ron, I mean. Back to a greater reality-based reality, British railroading news from Martin this week:

I can tell you now that drinking beer (or coffee) before boarding ANY train in 2023 is a very bad idea, as the tw*t who was reluctant to let folk sit on an empty chair housing his coat (tw*t) found when he attempted to get to the loo as we crawled past Burton at about 7mph. What is up with trains these days ? They’re all either cancelled or late or squeeze you in like sardines. Sardines who have paid for the privilege.

And in all that unhappiness we add the news that Katie (and Tom) Mather’s hugely optimistic project Corto is closing due to bigger realities than they could have imagined facing:

It has grown into a community hub, where local artists could showcase their work and regular live music nights and events would take place. The couple say they are “extremely proud” to have realised their vison to open their “ideal bar. But in a heartbreaking statement on social media, they say “times have never been harder” than over the past six months of “increasing costs and shrinking turnover”. “We knew the bar was never going to make us rich, but that wasn’t the point,” the statement added. “People have less money now and we understand this. Sadly, we won’t be the only people in this position….”

Glad, then, to have been able to support them in a small way at a trans-Atlantic distance with my now even more cherished cool t-shirt and warm wooly hat. A happier if less serious reality was discussed in The Growler this week, the question of foam and the LUKR faucet:

If we dissect the faucet body, we can observe that it is formed by a nozzle, a mesh, and a longer faucet, making this part effortless to disassemble and clean. The body has an additional part before the shank that will regulate beer flow, called a kompensator. Finally, the handle acquires another dimension because it is tuneable and has a side-pull one with 180-degree freedom of movement. This feature frees the Tapster to control the amount of beer being poured, triggering the ability to try new flavours and textures in foam serving.

Yum. Even if the adjectival cheese is a bit ripe. Speaking of ripe, The Beer Nut had an unhappy experience lately and shared his feelings:

… it’s not a good lager at all, leaning too far in to the rustic farmhouse thing, except without the charm. Were it a home brew I’d be suggesting its maker do something about fermentation temperature before attempting anything else similar. Since it’s not I’ll just say thanks but no thanks.

Note: I didn’t know it was possible to out-newbie the newbie guides but someone found a way. Buy in a good store. Got it. Here’s an actual news flash… beer is going out of style in some stores in Canada:

A trip to a grocery store in Toronto for your favourite wine or beer could leave you empty-handed. That’s because a handful of grocers in the city have quietly stopped selling alcohol due to rising levels of theft and razor-thin margins. “It’s really becoming unmanageable and getting out of hand. And so some grocers have taken the decision to remove these products from their shelves,” Retail Council of Canada spokesperson Michelle Wasylyshen told CTV News Toronto.

That’s sort of amazing if you ask me. Never thought that it was a matter of the wrong location for the market. And, you know, I wish there was an urban winemaker like this in my town who could come and deal with the mess of my tiny vineyard to add to their vats. This week’s Pellicle article by Paddy Gardiner features someone doing something like that but not much like that in London:

I think we never want to be 100% English, but we’d like to do more and more. That said, my argument around the sustainability side of bringing fruit in is that we only use road transport and ferries, we don’t use any air freight. We only bring in fresh bunches of grapes in reusable crates. The only impact carbon footprint-wise is the journey from the vineyard. The truth is that any wine that you buy from outside of the UK will have travelled that journey, but usually in a heavy glass bottle, and often rerouted around various storage facilities and distributors. If you eat or drink anything you haven’t grown yourself, then it has to have travelled. Then it’s about minimising impact, which [for us] looks like reusable crates and only using road transport.

Speaking of wine journalism, the slow death of The Montreal Gazette sees the conclusion of the 16 year run of Bill Zacharkiw‘s wine column, one that he celebrated with the republication on a favourite column – the pairing of wine and… ketchup:

I do know that after years of eating the stuff, ketchup is problematic for wine. It is both sweet and vinegary, and can have a decidedly herbal, earthy edge. Its powerful flavour tends to dominate whatever you are eating or drinking… What was a bit shocking was how many of the wines actually tasted bad with ketchup. I have done dozens of food- and wine-pairing trials and rarely have I seen good wines turn absolutely undrinkable when paired with something. Well, this is what happened.

Boom! And, speaking of which, Stan dropped the mic on the Anchor closing that sucked a lot of the fresh air out of the room:

…you’ve probably read enough already (including the stories I would link to), so I will simply point to one about the property the brewer is sitting on.

Gary also shared his thoughts which I’m largely in agreement with:

In the end Anchor mattered because it made beer people wanted – not because it gave expression to American myth, or was a counter-culture hero. Maytag, scion of the famous washing machine family, especially was never that. Yes, Anchor resonated for years as the little brewery that could. It played off that image for a long time, but image and reality are different things.

Yup. It’s been a little wicked watching folk get things wrong* about the brewery in their respective obituaries and elegies, laced with what is really a form of commercial propaganda. It was not actually the oldest craft brewery. It did not revive porter in the US. And it was propped up by significant Maytag money in the first decade. And, as the press release says, “…there’s still a chance another buyer might emerge during the liquidations process…” which is now in place. As I say, it’s good to let the fresh air in and get all this out to set the record straight.**

Finally and somewhat related to the airing of things, Boak and Bailey asked an odd but perhaps timely question this past week. And The Tand Himself gave the culturally appropriate Scottish*** “how’s yer bowels?” obsessed answer. [Ed.: …shivvers…]

There. Once again, that’s it! There’s a lot of different forms of negativity around this week. These are those times it seems. As per, you can check out the many ways to connect even including at my new cool Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Have you checked out Threads? They appear to achieved to make social media offer less and less. Brilliant but I never got IG either. Don’t forget theose voices on Mastodon, the 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 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’ve never seen so many slappy-backy semi-starving semi-pro newsletter jockeys in the small citation circle eagerly rushing to get a bit of brewing industry news so wrong as was seen this week. I have no idea what this even means: “…So many craft breweries exist because of Anchor“… given, you know, how no one followed the business model. At all. Interestingly, GBH never mentioned the whole affair, preferring to “break” the news about, what, the hard kombucha market? How long will it be before “beer” quietly slips out of that organ’s name as it wanders away?
**You know, if another failing brewery instead of Anchor had been bought by a silver spooner, another that sold 600 barrels p.a. of soured beer in the mid-1960s, no one really would have noticed Anchor slip away under back then with all the others that died off in that wave of industry rationalizations. But if you tell the younger folk that these days and, well…
***ma peeps so…

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And even more eco-relatedly-wise:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!*

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

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 Absolutely Final No Returns Accepted News Notes Of April 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

Semi-spoiler: “…the disastrous rebrand…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Thursday Beery News Notes For A Few Big Numbers

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

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

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

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

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

Note: craft‘s meaninglessness reaches new depths.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Marchy Marchest March-laden Beery News Notes Of All!

I did mention that I like March, right? Almost met my maker on Saturday shovelling wet snow. Boo-hoo, you say! It’s your own damn fault for being Canadian, you shout!! I get it. I get it. But it is March and while the sun’s heat melts the alpine peaks created on the weekend by the driveway, seedlings are getting ahead of themselves in one corner of the basement under funny looking lights. Those courgettes are pushing it, frankly. Who knew they’d take to subterranian living so well? The endive is looking OK. Taking its time. That stuff at the bottom? Dead by Saturday. Waaaay too leggy.

Hmm… yet to mention beer related things again… must still smarting from getting absolitely owned by TBN over at Twitter on a question of the royals… I had no idea I was dealing with a crypto-monarchist… acht weel… First up, Katie Mather wrote a wonderful goodbye for Pellicle about a well loved spot that has shut:

The Moorcock has been more than a pub to me in the small years it was open—for yes, sadly, it has closed. There is no way in high heaven that The Moorcock could have ever been called my local. I’m not as lucky as that. Stood on top of a hill above Sowerby Bridge, this pub is more than two hours of a trip either way from my home in the Ribble Valley. It is far away enough to merit a whole weekend break to be structured around eating there. Or, it was. I keep forgetting.

And Ed also wrote about something a bit sad and also a bit too common these days, the closing of a small brewery or a pub. The twist in Ed’s case is that the brewery was his former employer:

The news that the Old Dairy Brewery had gone bust didn’t come as a huge surprise to those of us that knew the company. It didn’t mean it wasn’t sad though. I spent a few years working for the company. I learnt a lot there, met some great people and had some good times. I also met some right arseholes and had some bad times, but such is life.

Finding a moment from his own daily postings, Martin shared an interesting comment under Ed’s thoughts on some of the particular problems this place faced: “I was also told that those old Nissen huts weren’t particularly suited to house a brewery – freezing cold in winter, and baking hot in summer.”

Perhaps oddly in this economic climate, Ontario’s oldest micro has been bought by a macro – and for a pretty good price:

The province’s OG craft brewery has reached new heights with exciting news of its acquisition by a gigantic beer giant. Little ole Waterloo Brewing has officially been acquired by Carlsberg Canada (a subsidiary of The Carlsberg Group) as of March, 7. The gigantic business deal is estimated to be in tens of millions of dollars, with CTV News putting it at a whopping $217 million in cash. Known for its creative Radler and IPA flavours (guava lime, tart cherry and original grapefruit), classic lagers, and cute boar icon, Waterloo was first established in 1984 as Brick Brewing.

Note: calling a brewery “craft” in 1984 is like calling Canada’s temperance era prohibition.* Not sure what the attraction is, given the trends noted last week right about here. A facility for brewing more Carlsberg?

Elsewhere, things are still happening and mixing was a bit of a theme this week. Jeff discussed the blending old and young ales while Matt shared some thoughts about wine and beer co-existing. In each case, the point is creating something new out of complimentary qualitities… like this:

…the chalk seam that runs beneath Westwell’s vineyard is the same one that travels all the way to the Champagne region of France, this terroir giving the grapes a similar – if not identical – quality to those cultivated in the storied wine region. This imbued the beer with the rich, spritzy and dry quality of the famous sparkling wine that, when buoyed with the acidic tang of the Beak saison, and the crunchy, bone dry character of the beer from Burning Sky, created a beverage that was somehow even more delicious than the sum of it parts.

Compare force of attraction that the bit of a push that Jeff describes:

Nationwide, there’s an overcapacity of barrel-aged beer of all types. Breweries invested in barrel rooms because, for a time, beer geeks were paying a lot of money for bottles of the stuff (both wild ales and barrel-aged beer). That has changed, and while people still pay a premium for aged beer, it doesn’t move like it used to …

At least the barrel cellars feel the same pain that the thousands of beer stashes have. Just too much of that stuff. Much too much.

And Australia’s website The Crafty Pint published an interesting article on Cherry Murphy, beer and spirits buyer for Blackhearts & Sparrows, drinks retailer:

…the role of beer buyer is something she’s done for close to five years. In that time, the number of breweries has grown significantly. But, while there’s more beer to work through and more options to stock, Cherry says there’s a fundamental they always return to: whether it’s a bottle of lambic, a tall can of hazy IPA, or their own Birra (brewed with Burnley Brewing), their focus is on what tastes good and ensuring their stores can suit many tastes. “We do always say we’re a broad church,” she says, “so we don’t want to alienate anyone or be snobby because good beer is for everyone. Sometimes a good beer is a cheap beer and sometimes it’s expensive, but as long as it’s a good product I’ll range it.

And also Beth Demmon has posted an excellent sketch of cider seller, Olivia Maki of Oakland, CA over at Prohibitchin’:

There aren’t very many cider-centric bars or bottle shops in the United States: I’d guess there are fewer than a dozen. They’re not even an endangered species—more like an ultra-niche novelty that I would really like to see become more popular. Through Redfield, Olivia is doing her damndest to transform cider’s novelty into the mainstream. She laughs when she remembers the initial idea to open a cider bar and bottle shop. “The world didn’t need another beer spot,” she says. But selling the concept to landlords proved difficult. “None of them knew what cider was!”

Keep an eye out for Beth’s soon to be released cider guide. Then Katie Thornton interviewed Adrienne Heslin who, in 2008, opened the first female-owned Irish brewery for the website Love Dublin this week:

I was born in the 60s and you can imagine it’s not plain sailing. Coming to brewing, I actually found the opposite because it’s such a small industry. When I started I was introduced very quickly to the bigger micro-breweries and to my amazement they were just nothing but cooperative. A down-side on the female end of things – it’s amazing, you give a man a job, and suddenly everybody think he’s in charge, so I find that a lot. In particular, I have a gentleman now who’s wonderful and in charge of production, but they refer to him as the brewer, whereas he came in as an intern. I taught him everything.

I remember the same thing happening in my mother’s shop when my father, the reverend, would be there. He quite forcefully would admit his ignorance on all subjects, directing folk back to the one in charge.

When he wasn’t rearranging royal wedding memorobilia, The Beer Nut encountered that strange creature, an “eighty shilling shilling“:

It’s about the same strength as the previous beer and is an unattractive murky muddy brown. The flavour is mercifully clean, but not very interesting. One expects hops from a pale ale and malt from a Scottish-style amber-coloured ale, and this shows little of either. There’s brown sugar and black tea, finishing up so speedily as to resemble a lager. I suppose one could be happy that there’s no “scotch ale” gimmickry or cloying toffee, but I thought it came down too far on the other side, being boring and characterless.

That’s what’s been said about me. Mercifully clean. Not very interesting. And, finally, David Jesudason wrote a very interesting piece – this time for for GBH (regrettably accompanied by distracting retro java script looping weirdness) – about the history of the British curry house and the curry district and the bigotry those who worked there had to put up with:

Curry quarters like these sprang up first as community spaces for South Asians to carve out support networks and enjoy familiar food together. But to make their businesses viable from the 1960s onwards, restaurant owners had to cater to the wider population. This is where many first- and second-generation workers faced racism head on—serving white people “while absorbing their shit at the same time,” says dancer Akram Khan about his curry-house upbringing. It was common for waiters to be mocked for their accents, or to face abuse over the prices they charged.

Keep an eye out for David’s also soon to be released book, Desi Pubs. There. We have concluded our broadcast for the week. Next week? The winter that was. Now the acknowledgements. Consider Mastodon. Here’s your newbie cheat sheet:

And check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and maybe from Stan at his spot on those Mondays but, you know, he writes when when he can. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. 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. Still gearing up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too even if it’s a bit trade. 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!**

*Winky Face Emoticon!!!
**I’ve reoganized to note 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. Ben has had his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…) Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

The Brief And Very Short First Beery News Notes Of 2023 In Summary

Surprise! On the road. Really. Away. Unexpectedly. Secret location. Sorta. Bit of a gift extending the old vay-kay. Gondie. Outta here. Over there. Gotta be brief. Good thing Stan got to all the good stories already. Go have a look.

Speaking of which, Twitter is getting gondier and gondier. That’s a screen shot of the textless version I was presented with this week. It was flickering in and out like the lights in a ignored back shed during a blizzard. It hasn’t got long to go. So, starting off these very brief beery news notes, it’s good that Chuggnutt, he of The Brew Site fame, has provided a very helpful guide to using Mastodon for the beer ners. Given the instability of the platform (not to mention the platform’s owner), best to get over there and start getting a feel for the place. I am updating the list of familiar faces regularly… daily… surely hourly as you can see far-ish below. And, on your way out, save your Twitter archive like It’s Pub Night did.

Right… happy news about booze… hmm… The son of the late AA Gill, who I loved greatly as a critic and a social commentator, has published a stark tail of alcohol recovery, a family tradition of sorts:

He was AA Gill to his readers but just a gentle old dad to me. He died of cancer on December 10, 2016, at the age of 62. Three and a half years later, I’m making my fateful train journey. Dad once confided in me that on his own train journey to rehab, back in the 1980s when he was a similar age to me, he shared two bottles of vintage champagne with my grandfather as they made their way to Wiltshire, to the clinic Clouds. I’m sure it was a far less glamorous scene than the one I picture, but a fierce new wave of grief swarms over me as I sit there, fatherless, champagne-less and en route to attempt the impossible.

Also quite happy, Jaega Wise on hangover cures.

And I just finished Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres by Kelefa Sanneh and I noted this passage quoted by way of thumbnail to the right? The end of negative reviews explained in context. Sound familiar? Buy the book. Explains seven genres of music: rock, R+B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance, pop. Quite a good read.

Dubai makes booze cheaper if still heavily restricted. Oddest fact?

Expatriates outnumber nationals by nine to one in Dubai, known as the Gulf’s “party capital”, and residents commonly drive to Umm al-Quwain and other emirates to buy alcohol in bulk.

Ron got noticed by Oz Clark. He’s sorta like a kinda big name. And Ron has also been reflecting on the meaning of it all:

Why do I blog? I’ve been at it for 15 years. Most of the beer blogs that were around back then have given up. Around a dozen or so are still active. The simple answer is: because I enjoy it. Would I continue if I had no readers? Maybe. I’m perfectly happy to tootle along with a couple of hundred. Just as well, as I’m unlikely to attract many more with the sort of stuff I post.
Posting every day can be a chore. So why do it? Partly, just to make sure I keep posting… It may not look like it, but I do have a plan.

Others have also been reflecting. Retired Martin celebrated a great year. Boak and Bailey think things are not as bad as they may seem. Jeff looked to brewers for comforting voices away from the news, data, facts… and then took off on a break. And Eoghan feels beer writing is massively undervalued. Andy is reflecting romantically, looking back à la recherche des brasseries perdu and he also posted this bit of what I would have thought was alarmingly unnecessary advice:

In the new year, do yourself a favor: resolve to order a second pint of a beer you’ve enjoyed. No need to scour the menu for your next beer. It’s cool to take a break and just enjoy a great beer a second time.

Seriously? You needed to be told that?

I missed this by Martyn in last week’s round up, a neatly parallel piece to mine in 2014 on how beers in the past were not all dark and smoky but as often sweet and light due in my findings from the lightest heat source, straw. Martyn confirms they were pale and fresh because of another method of drying the malt:

It was said of the 1st Duke of Beaufort, Henry Somerset (1629-1700), who lived at Badminton House in Gloucestershire with a household of 200 servants, that “all the drink that came to the duke’s table was of malt sun-dried upon the leads of his house”, “leads” here meaning “window sills”. (Thank you, Marc Meltonville, for explaining to me what leads were!) As you can see from this illustration of the duke’s unassuming little home, he had a very large number of windows, and this, presumably, a very large number of nicely wide sills on which to spread malt to dry, protected by the glass from birds and vermin.

Finally, Beth continues her Prohibitchin’ series with a portrait of Amber Nixon of Atlanta, Georgia and her studies in the world of wine:

…that desire to teach ultimately culminated into wine education. After an accidental (and very fortuitous) discovery of a wine professional giving a talk on Instagram, Amber decided to learn more about the distinguished beverage. By 2019, she was hosting tastings for a wine company as an independent consultant, educating guests about the story behind certain wines and the regions they come from, how climate affects grape harvest, proper serving temperature, and everything else an aspiring cork dork might want to know.

That’s all for this week. Continuing a now weeks-long tradition inspired by Boak and Bailey, I am slowly building upon a shared list of beer writing resources on Mastodon:

Go have a look. And also check for more as the year picks up from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan back at his spot on Mondays. It’s still the holidays. So, look around and check to see if there is the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. The OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it was there last week! 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! The Fingers Podcast has packed it in citing lack of success.

The Pensive Beery News Notes For That Dull Gap Between US Thanksgiving And Christmas

Are US holidays the most liquor laced of all? Not sure. But they sure are the most extended. I get the sense that nowadays* they just go on and on, one meeting the next at some sort of transition overlap. We seem to have all been in the HallowThanksChristEve zone for a while now and there are still weeks to go. Good thing I’m Canadian as we up here track time by following the sports calendar and the grain growing season cycles. Speaking of holidays, someone is not getting a bonus. Joe Stange shared an image of the aftermath of a disaster in Belgium. Look at that Westmalle, laughing at the Orval.

So what is going on out there? I liked this observation from The Beer Nut which could be applied to any number of things:

The best feature is the booze, delivering as it does a pleasant warming fuzziness, perfect for a miserable evening in mid-November. Overall, it’s fine, but not exactly high end, to my palate anyway.

And I came across a new mag worth checking out, Beer & Weed, out of area code 207 – aka the Great State of Maine aka the Canada of the USA. My favourite American second cousin in law Mike has an article in the December issue as does Carla Jean who offers some ideas for giving which go beyond the usual. Like taking a pal on a beer tour – or making an apple pie after soaking the apples in beer. I like that, a twist on mulled ale… or pastry stout. Think about that. Mmm…

Next – aside from my secret wondering whether it’s all an elaborate façade broadcast from a hidden Nordic mountain lair based on fantastic IT resources, access to private wealth and wicked sense of disruptive if extremely niche humour – Lars has once again produced an excellent thought provoking and well researched essay, this time pushing the history of hops back in northern Europe by more than a century or two, relying in large part on the unreliability of records:**

This, however, is the history you get from written documents, but hop usage began at a time when brewing was mostly something people did at home, for their own household, and almost none of what they did was ever recorded in writing. So we must expect that nearly all of the early history of hops has gone undocumented, and therefore we must turn to other sources of information to cast light on the early history of hops.

Personal note: this is exactly what my first beer experience in the late 70s were like. I’m a bit verklempt.***

I liked this very narrow study of Gary’s this week, a three piece article on something called Tipper Ale, a beer that relied on salt just as 1830s Albany Ale did. Except it wasn’t chucked into the barrel:

The key to the palate was use in brewing, or some use, of “brackish” water. The brewery was at a crossing, originally a drawbridge, over River Ouse near its mouth with the English Channel. Hence the seawater story is plausible, given location and typography. I cited various sources to this effect and there were others I didn’t, as all concur in result. One of the last sources, in 1941, was the most interesting I thought as it stated both regular and sea water was used.

One of my favourite discussions in the comments has to be the time back in 2008 when yeast scientists including a Dr Dunn and a Dr Sherlock took offense at being called “eggheads” and then embraced it. Well, the eggheads of yeast science were at it again this week with release of the news building on their work to explain… something:

It has been known for some time that S. pastorianus is a hybrid of two parents, one of which is S. cerevisiae (de Barros Lopes et al. 2002, Dunn and Sherlock 2008). However, the second parent, Saccharomyces eubayanus, was not isolated until 2011, from the Patagonian Andes in South America (Libkind et al. 2011)…. Regardless of when the hybridization(s) between S. cerevisiae and S. eubayanus occurred, they are likely to have occurred in Europe, and possibly in Bavaria. It is, therefore, surprising that no European isolates of S. eubayanus have been described… Here, we describe the discovery of the first European isolates of S. eubayanus. They were isolated from a university campus in Dublin, Ireland.

Excellent. And hardly any Irish inside jokes followed at all.

Andy Crouch marked the passing in early December of a New England brewing original, his pal Ray McNeill of Brattleboro, Vermont whose cantankerous nature was summed up neatly:

Ray was also legendary for his dislike of homebrewers. During one extended rant, he told me, “I don’t care what anybody says, there’s a big difference between making beer a few times a year in your garage and reading thousands of pages of technical literature and then making thousands of beers. Beer is a weird thing. It doesn’t come with a scorecard. If you’re a golfer and you shoot 112, you know that you suck. But if you’re a homebrewer and you make a third-rate beer, you probably think it’s great. A lot of homebrewers think they’re a lot better than they really are.” With Ray, you just never knew what you were going to get. And the same could always be said for his beer. The beer at McNeill’s was legendary: it would either be among the best you’d ever tasted or the worst. Consistency was not something anyone expected from McNeill’s and that was oddly part of the place’s charm.

Beth Demmons issued another great edition of Prohibitchin’ with the focus on Amie Ward and her project to make drinking establishment safer places:

“We [employees behind the bar] are in a very unique position because we are everywhere all at the same time. We hear everything, we see everything, we’re touching tables… we are in a perfect position to become those bystanders that really help change that landscape.” With this eye-opening knowledge and experience, Amie realized many other people weren’t able to manage health, stress, or sharing the responsibility of community safety in the same ways she had been able to hone over the years. “I saw my peers not taking care of themselves [and] really developing poor habits that were not going to suit them for the long haul,” she says. “That’s how I came up with the idea for The Healthtender: melding those two worlds together of wellness and hospitality.”

Turning to the end times, I used to post various noodly noddlings under the heading “This Is How Craft Will Kill Itself” from time to time and, in these fading days, it’s interesting to see how some predictions came to pass and how other factors I couldn’t have imagined contributed to the fall. For example, lack of differentiation posing as critical differentiation is a fatal flaw, as illustrated by this article:

“It’s a pretty neat thing when you go to a place that has a lot of beer selection. You’ll notice a huge variety of beer labels, and it is something that craft beer people look to,” said Scot Yarnell, brewer and owner of the downtown Earnest Brew Works location at 25 S. St. Clair St., Toledo. “They want a unique beer, flavor wise, and they also want a beer that has a unique look to it.”

There’s of course nothing unique about the look of what’s on the beer shelves these days any more than the identi-craft beer in the cans. Fadism gave birth to herd mentality homogeneity. Like gaudy late 1990s web design, there is a certain sort of vomiting bubble gum machine tone to the confusingly cartoony look that signals the trade friendly “blinders on” approach is engaged. But how does this help encourage the consumer – especially when mixed in with the continuing trade narrative’s reliance on tales based on amnesia, flat out untruths and revisionist bullshit mixed with earnest finger wagging over supposed myths that serves the residual wisdom of haut craft culture?**** Even those seeking the solace of knowledge in an honest off-flavour course offers an affirmation in the negative, as Jordan was good enough to admit:

Framed the off flavour training for next week’s class as “Well, you’re never going to be able to turn that switch off, so next week I’m going to ruin fully a quarter of the beer you’ll ever drink….”

Downer. No wonder the value proposition has gone all a’wobbly now in the face of these broader harder times. And no wonder things are as down, as Pete Brown shared in The Times. It’s a good read… but I am not sure I can agree with the proposed treatment as it looks like more of the same:

Refocusing on the aspects of “craft” that big corporations will always struggle to replicate could be key. “Local, independent craft breweries do far more than just make great beer,” said Richard Naisby, acting chairman of the Society of Independent Brewers. “They embed themselves in local communities, create jobs, and add value to the local economies they call home.”

Maybe. Could be. If you get rid of the phony and the baloney – and the kiddie cartoon profiteering prophets – and I also suppose if these fine locals have each paid their suppliers and the folk losing their jobs. Might be nice if enough of them just found a way to make great beer at a good price, frankly. Time to start talking about recession proofing, brewers. That might take a bit of change.

Speaking of which, an interesting and somewhat related call to arms crossed my eye in the course of me legal readings this week:

The Cannabis Council of Canada (C3) has called on the federal government to provide “immediate financial relief” for the legal cannabis industry and end the “stigmatization” of legal cannabis that allegedly limits progress on the key public health aims of legalization… According to C3, while the current framework has been “a financial success” for governments and provincial monopoly distributors who apply mark-ups, it has also been “a bloodbath” for investors of all sizes within Health Canada’s licensed producers and processors framework.

Hmm… dunno. Pretty sure I don’t want my tax dollars saving the less than half decade bubble economy of the Canadian grass trade. Think about it. Could it maybe just be that both craft and dope have to face the fact that there is no market for every investor who believed in a dream of easy cash from selling swanky new forms of intoxicants in each and every neighourhood? Is that what they mean by they “add value to the local economies they call home“?

I leave you there. That enough for now… you’ve had enough… take a break… when you’ve done that, 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!

*Excellent usage, no?
**See from the archives “One Brewery and the Problem with Records” from 2015.
***h/t Cookie.
****Oxymoron.

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.