Category: Ontario

The “It’s Not Funny At All Out There” Edition Of The Beery News Notes…

Wow. I am going to leave it at that. Because there ain’t much of the big issue sorta news I want to be reading, I suppose. Not now, not this week. Nope. I am definitely having 9/12 waves myself. Not good. But 150 years ago? Well, Jennifer Jordan on BlueSky has been discussing the 1874 business ledgers of Milwalkee Valentin Blatz and there is plenty of news. Price fluxtuations, losses at sea… but for me… just look at that penmanship!  That upper case K is out of this world! You can practically hear the pen tip scratching across the page. Whatever the coming years have in store for us – and it may not be pretty – we can at least look back at the hand of Blatz for a lesson in confidence and verve.

Where are we? Starting with some beery beer news, Andreas Krennmair shared a re-creation of a much forgotten German beer style, Adam:

Dortmunder Adambier, apparently often also just called “Adam”, was a very strong dark wheat beer, often aged for years, and thus very clear, with a dark-red-brown colour. The malt made to brew it was kilned to only a pale colour, and no additional dark malts were used, so any colour of the beer came from “browned proteins”, as the article says it, basically from the long, intense boil the wort undergoes. When Adambier was poured, it poured like oil, but without any foam, and had a sweet taste and vinous taste to it.

Sounds a bit like a beer Boak and Bailey wrote about this week after spending some time in Gdansk, Gdinya and Sopot Poland recently – Danziger Jopenbier:

It’s a historic style associated with the city, brewed to some kind of original recipe, and selling at 16 Polish złoty  (£3) for a 50ml shot. In presentation, it was treated much like a liqueur or a sherry and reminded us of both Riga Balsam and Pedro Ximinez fortified wine. It was extremely sweet and sticky, completely flat, with a funky, leathery, pipe tobacco stink. A curiosity, then, rather than something to session on.

This is just a bit of their an excellent and extended piece about their merry trip, there just a few kilometres across the waters from Putin’s own nuclear navy yards at Kaliningrad. I taught English along those same Baltic shores of Poland in 1991-92 so it’s interesting to read what’s new and what’s the same:

The city itself is a war memorial. At the end of World War II it was 90% destroyed, an apocalyptic rubblescape. The new Soviet-controlled authorities debated what to do and, at one point, someone suggested leaving the city centre as a vast ruin, to remind the Germans of what they’d done… Gdańsk was rebuilt not as it was in 1939, but instead to recall the days before 1793 when it was part of the Kingdom of Poland.

Yup. I remember being in a large church in Gdansk where a tank battle had happened in 1945… within the church.* I mentioned in the comments that that I recalled there being no pubby pubs back then either – except a rougher sort of stand up tavern for men just off work that the guide I bought suggested “are best avoided.” I mainly drank my Gdanskie at home.

David Jesudason published another pub profile last Friday and discussed a feature installed in the 1950s, a snob screen:

“They could have privacy not just from the other side of the pub,” says Ralph, “but from the bar staff as well. You open it to order your drink.” The pub had a revamp in 1956 when Young’s took it over, previously it was a cider house, and Ralph reckons the snob screens are from them and still have the original 70-plus-year glass.  Ralph finds it amusing that as a gay person he’s living and working among all this archaic segregationana.

I like that word. Perhaps we might also suggest “segregitus” Or is it “segregitis“? Or did the “segregitus” leave us with a case of “segregitis“? Such questions I have.

You know what is weird? Finding out that Canada exports the fifth most bulk wine of all the nations of the world. More than much larger producing countries like France or South Africa. And what’s weirder? Canada also exports by far the cheapest bulk wine of any nation in the world, at just 29 cents US a litre. What’s that about? What is bulk?** Where is all the dirt cheap wine being consumed?

You know what is also weird?  Chaos packaging. Like putting gravy in beer cans or, perhaps, as the ultimate end game for a certain sort of craft, the next step after NA hop water perhaps:

…the decision to market the cans of air came from marketing specialist Davide Abagnale, who initially saw an opportunity when he started with selling Lake Como posters online. Explaining more about the initiative to can the air from the area, a spokesperson for the business told CNN, that Abagnale wanted to offer “something original, fun and even provocative” as well as “create a souvenir that could be easily transported in a suitcase for tourists”. Abagnale explained how the cans, which rather than contain any liquid, subvert the norm and give people something closer to a “memory” rather than a “product”.

So, not so much about the experience but the illusion of experience. I’d gladly pay with a photograph of some money.

Have you ever wondered what something extreeeemely tannic tastes like but don’t want to taste it?  Wonder no more as, for free, Barry himself guides you through the physical convulsions that are part of the experience.

And Stan thanked me for a link to a story that I think is actually far more interesting that its initial interestingness might suggest. The initially interesting point is how pervasive alcohol is in nature and how common it is for animals, bird and bugs to consume it. I’m not surprised. In high school, we watched out the front window each autumn as tipsy starlings drunk on over ripe rowen berries flipped 360° loop-de-loops on the telephone wire – or just flopped to the ground unable to fly until they sobered up.  Interesting.  But check your mailboxes for your own copy of the latest edition of Trends in Ecology & Evolution wherein we can read the original study which also states:

…the ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas possessed a single amino acid change (from alanine to valine at site 294, denoted ‘A294V’) that dramatically increased its catalytic efficiency for ethanol. This arose approximately 10 Mya, following the Mid-Miocene Climatic Transition when African forests were gradually replaced by savannah. Around this time, our ancestors adopted a more terrestrial lifestyle and were possibly more likely to encounter fermented fruits on the ground…

That means the question may not be when humans first had alcohol. It may be about when they first learned to make it or store it or otherwise control it enough to have it year round and not just when the fruit was juiced laying about their feet. When did it start? One Million Years BC?

Perhaps relatedly, one of the things that makes The Beer Nut the world’s top reviewer of beer (other than his incessant reviewings of beer) is his egalitarian approach to all venues and all beers, high and low. This is especially evident in his periodic coverage of Wetherspoon beer festivals – which I take to be a sort of in-pub promotion across the chain rather than a fest in the GBBF sense. He treats this event with both respect and reality as he dropped in at a number of outlets recently. I share the alpha and the omega of his most recent thoughts on the topic:

The JD Wetherspoon Autumn Beer Festival arrived in mid-October. I managed to spend some time at it, both in the central Dublin pubs, and abroad… Unsurprisingly, stout and porter were the standouts. The cask format shines brightest in the dark. Plodding through all the cheap, samey bitters to find them is worthwhile to find the good stuff.

And speaking of which, Pellicle‘s article this week is by Gabe Toth, a profile of the cask specialists at Hogshead Brewery in Denver, Colorado including this bold admission:

“Cask beer, at least in America, has that reputation of being an older person’s beer, like your grandfather’s beer, versus the hip young thing, seltzer or whatever. Beer in general is suffering a little bit of that—I feel like younger people in general are turning more toward other beverages and losing interest in craft beer.”

Jordan did some thinking about loss of interest, too, this week as he assessed the Ontario good beer scene and declared the beginning of a new era – based on the new retail modalities and associated realities:

Does the world really need Carling Light when Keystone Light exists? Does Old Vienna mean anything to people outside Chatham-Kent and Windsor? Does Labatt regret sending one REALLY EFFECTIVE sales rep to Thunder Bay in the 1990’s to sell Crystal? Whoever that was, they’re legend.  You’re going to get consolidation of products. You’re going to get less choice, at least initially. The convenience and grocery and big box retail situation has less patience for variety and more desire for expedience than The Beer Store did. The new paradigm is about choice, but it’s largely about choosing how much you’re going to pay for a single product.

Finally, before the regular list of more alt-news about alts and other beers, I would note the suspension of operations at The Share from Stephanie Grant. Looking forward to an energized return. Also, congratulations to those shortlisted with the BGBW Awards.

Otherwise, a shorter post this week. Such the way of this point in time. Other things on the mind. Still, with all that has happened and will happen… for more beery news check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan going strong again each and every Monday. Then listen to Lew’s podcast (maybe he’ll do one again) and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the (now hardly at all) odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword is out there with the sweary Mary! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? Check out the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good and they are revving up for a new year. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s one cost a fifth of that but only had the one post.

**From this 2017 report on the British Columbian wine industry: “Nationally, it is important to note that Canadian exports totalled 72.9 million litres in 2015. Of this, only 1.8 million litres was premium wine (non-bulk), representing $32.8 million of the total $73.9 million of all Canadian wine exports. It is impressive that premium wine accounted for only 2.5 percent of wine exports, but represented 44 percent of the total value of all wine exports…” More here.
*Our beach side resort city, Kołobrzeg, on the other side of Kaszubia, was also destroyed and rebuilt as it was where the Nazis attempted a Dunkirk as the Soviets encircled them. They stuck around and the sounds of maching gun firing range welcomed one of my first late summer balcony beers when I got there.

Your Definitely Final And Last Chance End Of Summer 2024 Beery News Notes

The next time we meet it will be autumn. Who submitted the requistion for that? Thanks. A lot. At least we get one more Saturday in. We’ve had a good run of weather to see us out, picking a couple of pounds of tomatoes a day.  I’ll need a new hobby once the garden slows down. Maybe I could join a men’s pie making groups or something. The American Association of Wine Economists is one of my favourite BlueSky feeds to follow. They seem interesting. That up there? Germany 1920s. Men with a hobby. Comparatively speaking, a better sort of marching in those times.

Speaking of weird, Stan’s monthly newsletter Hop Queries is out for another month and, under the surprising heading “Bitterness and Attitude”, he wrote:

When we moved from the low-altitude flatlands of Illinois 700 feet) to New Mexico (5,320 feet), a professional brewer told me to just throw in a few more pellets when I brewed an IPA. I hope the information in the archives is more useful.

Oh!  Altitude. He wrote altitude.  That makes waaaaay more sense. Note: rumours of Stan O’Eire. Another bit of a puzzle was encountered in this story of the passing of a venerable Mancunian:

…for ten years straddling both decades there was one constant on the streets of Moss Side and Old Trafford – George Powell, the self-syled Ginger Beer Man. He became a legend too selling his home made brew from his bike. George has died, aged 97, and later this month 500 people from all over the country and abroad are expected to pay their respects and attend his funeral. And his son Glen is going to ensure he will get the send-off the big family man deserves after his perfectly timed win at bookies Betfred. Self-employed handyman Glen won £20,000 from a £4 wager… much of his winnings will be spent on George’s funeral at the Church of God of Prophesy in Moss Side, burial at Southern Cemetery followed by the wake at Bowden Rugby Club.

Would that have been an alcoholic ginger beer? I used to brew one based on the CloneBrew recipe. This January 1978 edition local CAMRA newsletter “Whats Doing?” from Manchester suggests (at page 9) that the Salford brewers Walker & Holmfreys brewed a ginger beer along side ale brewing.

Staying there about, you know some things are worth repeating. This same passage in Katie’s edition of The Gulp at the end of last week was quoted in the Boak and Bailey Saturday update but I have to note this fabulous bit of stream of consciousness too:

…I have to check myself before I wreck myself. Tonight is going to be a late one. But it’s just so delicious, so perfect in this moment. Savour it, I tell myself, knowing that I can’t. I’m not a savourer. I eat in big bites, drink in big gulps. I want the best things all in one go, now.

There go I, too. Back here at home, Ontario’s new booze sales in corner stores have attracted all sorts of attention… including the independent accountants:

When the Ford government expanded sales of beer, wine, cider, and ready-to-drink cocktails into Ontario convenience stores and gas stations on Sept. 5, it did so ahead of schedule. A master framework agreement (MFA) signed under the Liberal government in 2015 gave the privately run Beer Store exclusive rights to sell 12—and 24-packs of beer. It was set to expire in 2026, but the government’s expedited plan involves an “early implementation agreement” with the beer retailer that will see the province pay the company up to $225 million. The FAO report will estimate the financial costs and benefits of accelerated expansion “and compare these fiscal impacts to a scenario where the Province expanded alcohol access at the expiration of the MFA on Dec. 31, 2025.”

Listening to CBC Radio 1’s Ontario Morning the other day, they played an audio reworking of this story including interviews with convenience store clerks and customers about the new rules and heard some interest points of view. Shop owners have not been informed about expired product returns so many only place small orders. And a portion of product has to come from small producers – 20 per cent for beer, ciders, and ready-to-drink cocktails, and 10 per cent for wines. Which is not a bad guaranteed return. But there are supply chain issues getting all the stores stocked up. Me, I have not taken advantage of the new world order yet.

Conversely, over on FB, Max has been out and about posted a brief report on his trip to Vorkloster, a brewery in Predklasteri, Czechia… using many words I do not know:

Vorkloster’s pivnice is cute and friendly, it does feel like part of a monastery, and many of the punters are locals dropping by for a pifko. The kulajda was just luvly. The Výčepní tasted jaded, like the feeling of an afternoon after a couple of very rough days at work. Jantarový Ležák is like an otherwise very good sauce that’s just not thick enough. Tmavý ležák has the right balance of coffee and milk chocolate.

Breaking news out of Albany, NY:

Free pizza is almost dead at the City Beer Hall! Long live pizza at CBH! A promotion in place since the City Beer Hall opened in spring 2011 at Howard and Lodge streets downtown provided a small individual cheese pizza for free with every pint of beer sold. The practice is being sharply curtailed, now available only after 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.

I will have to check in with Craig to find out of I was ever there. Over at Pellicle, Katie (for the double) wrote about a beer that I used to cross provincial borders* to buy, Theakstons’ Old Peculier:

If it wasn’t for the Steel’s Masher, Old Peculier would not be the beer it is today. The way that the malt is hydrated and mashed by the machine is incredibly efficient, releasing enzymes and raking through the grist before it can form dry-centred clumps. This machine makes short work of stiff mashes. It was invented in Scotland by James Steel, a brewer who, like many of his peers in industry, was making a lot of Scotch Strong and Wee Heavy beers—high malt content, low water content mashes. Getting the paddles around a mash like that is like stirring six tons of day-old porridge, in intense steam heat, in cramped conditions.

Speaking of the good stuff, Matty C wrote about cask ale for What’s Brewing (apparently a play on words of the 1978 Mancester journal of note mentitoned above, What’s Doing) and makes a very good point about the enjoyment of things in the abstract:

I tend to find that foreign visitors who appreciate their beer genuinely revere the cultural significance of cask dispense. But they also find only disappointment when, after months of anticipation, they arrive at last only to be served a tired pint of London Pride that is, well, warm and flat. We’re responsible for that reputation because in so many places where cask beer is served it’s not treated with the care it deserves. I don’t believe in the notion that cask should be some sort of protected appellation though. For me, the problem exists because advocates too often tend to raise cask beer on a pedestal, when really it should be treated like the most normal thing in the world. Yes, it’s a wonderful way to drink beer, but it’s not that special, really, it’s just beer, after all. Care and reverence are not the same thing.

On the topic of keeping the beer cool, one award winning pub has a related issue on its hands with the authorities due to a noisy fan:

Mr Bull took over the listed corner boozer in Gosport, Hants, in 2022. The previous landlady had the cooling unit located in a door cavity close to the beer cellar but after receiving safety advice, he moved it into the courtyard. Following a complaint, he was visited by a planning department enforcement officer last summer and later informed he would need planning permission for the unit. As part of the application, Mr Bull spent £1,500 on a sound survey as part of this in order to prove that the unit was not noisy. However, the survey found that the unit was loud enough that “it would cause sleep disturbance” to someone sleeping on the ground floor of the house next door, and ‘may’ do so for someone sleeping in the upstairs room.

Speaking of a proper pub, I have seen such things in histories of Victorian saloon hellholes… but never in real life:

…see that trough in the pub? That was so blokes didn’t have to leave the bar to relieve themselves. People in London are posh now though; they go to the gents for a piss.

Want a job in beer? Perhaps an open position with the Anderson County Beer Board is for you!

The three members would serve a three-year term expiring in September 2027. The Beer Board was established for the purpose of licensing, regulating and controlling the transportation, storage, sale, distribution, possession, receipt and/or manufacture of beer, according to a county government information. Interested residents can send a resume or pick up a request-to-serve form at the County Commission Office, 100 N. Main Street, Room 118, Clinton, TN, posted outside the office door. 

Will Hawkes is doing an excellent job in London Beer City with his extended series on the history of the biggest pub in London from the 1930s to the 1990s, reminding us that the past is a foreign country and that includes the fairly recent past including the era of the rave:

…Fascination at the Downham Tavern took place on Sunday afternoons, taking in not only DJs but also live bands like Natural Life. These all-dayers quickly became a huge thing, according to Wilson, who always played the last three hours, and who played at Bonnie’s on Saturday nights.  “We had the best laser show, we had the first gyroscope in [a dance] venue,” says Wilson. “When we first started [in 1988] we had 300, 400 people but it just took off. It got to stage where we had ticket touts … the build-up was massive, ‘I can’t wait, I can’t wait!’” Unusually for a pub, all this excitement was not fuelled by beer. Ecstasy arrived in the UK in a big way in the late 1980s, and it’s fairly safe to assume it was a key part of the Fascination experience. “Oh yeah,” says Wilson with a chuckle. “That was flying about.” The Downham Tavern all-dayers ended in 1990. By that stage, media hysteria about rave culture had reached fever pitch, and policing had become much stricter…

There was a good piece in the Manitowoc Herald Times on a 71 year old ship that has helped make that fine community the “Specialty Malt Capital of the World”, the self-unloading freighter SAGINAW:

The name was changed to SAGINAW on Nov. 20, 1999, in honor of Michigan’s Saginaw River. By 2008, the vessel was repowered from steam propulsion to diesel. Today, the 14,000-ton SAGINAW routinely transits between the ports of western Lake Superior and the Port of Manitowoc at least twice a year. Briess confirmed we can expect to see one more shipments of grain this year aboard SAGINAW. With up to 25 million pounds of raw barley in each delivery, that equates to about 40 million 12-ounce bottles of beer.

Finally, word of two more passings. Many remembrances followed up the announcement of the passing of drinks writer and cider maker, Susanna Forbes:

Forbes, whose long fight with cancer had been known by those close to her, had not faltered over the past few years in her dedication to the industry she loved. Speaking to db last year, she outlined how much she “appreciated people and cherished the perspective that treatment and its challenges had uncovered”. Her generosity of spirit showcased by her constant reminder that “in times of hardship you recognise the people who go out of their way to really make a difference”. Friends and colleagues have come from far and wide to pay their tributes to Forbes for her personality and kindness being at the forefront of their descriptions.

And there was another passing this week of particular note for me, of a craft beer pioneer in my old hometown of Halifax NS, Kevin Keefe of the Granite Brewery:

When Keefe opened the Granite Brewery, it was the second microbrewery in Canada — and first east of the Rockies. That’s a far cry from today as there are dozens in Nova Scotia alone. Keefe first became interested in craft brewing after reading an article about it. In 1984, he went to the U.K. and learned how to do it at a brewery. Not only was Keefe a brewer, he was a savvy businessman. “If I retailed it to the liquor commission, I’d get 50 cents a bottle, but if I sold it in a glass to you, I’d get almost two bucks a bottle, so it didn’t take very much for me to figure out, well, what I want to do is sell it to you,” Keefe told the reporter in a 2017 interview for Halifax Magazine. And thus the Granite Brewery operated out of Ginger’s Tavern.

The Granite of Halifax was a big part of my good beer education. I was a bar rat there in my early twenties as soon as he opened the place. I can smell the Ringwood yeast in my mind’s schnozz this very minute.

There. Until next week, check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and let’s all see if Stan cheats on his declared early autumnal break from his updates on Mondays. Then listen to Lew’s podcast and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is thereback with the sweary Mary! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? Check out the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that but is writing for 47 readers over there.

*When we lived in PEI in eastern Canada, I would stop in Sackville NB when returning from Halifax NS just to grab a few Peculiers.
**Me, I’m all about the social medias. Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (183) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (932) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,457) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (152), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

Your Beery News Notes For The Return Of Sweater Weather For 2024

September. The grapes are ripening. And evenings are cooler. And those nightmares about having to go back to grade 11 math class even though that was 45 years ago are back. The rest of the day, you daydream about college days when you were two months away from having to pass in any classwork. And thoughts turn to sweater vests. Over a white t-shirt… if one’s yuff was from that WHAM / Ferris Bueller era forty years ago.* Labour Day Monday was the end of the humidity around these parts. Evenings are cooler. Sweater weather.

First up, in the unending ping-pong game of whether alcohol is good for you or bad for you, Drinks Business summaried the powerful and damning critique of Prof. David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University appeaing of the BBC’s World Service The Food Chain programme:

He said that statistically the overall risk of one beer or wine per day on your life expectancy — which is within current UK government guidelines — has no higher impact than driving a car or eating bacon. Spiegelhalter said that research showed the health benefits of drinking in small amounts, as previously highlighted by the drinks business. He added: “Frankly, I get irritated when the harms of low levels are exaggerated, particularly with claims such as ‘no level of alcohol is safe’. For a start I don’t think the evidence supports that, but also there’s no safe level of driving, there’s no safe level of living, but no one recommends abstention.”

Much, of course, turns on the fuzzy concept of “safe” given that these sorts of statements do not characterize the degree of safety that is, you know… safe. It’s a form of argument that would make the evangelical at the door proud. Fortunately, at least one solid opinion is shared. Spiegelhalter “described the current NHS guidance on levels as ‘ideal’ .” That being…  David Morrison, data-driven wine blogger at The Wine Gourd makes a detailed and well footnoted argument against WHO guidance which unfortunately starts with that sad car driving safety analogy (yes, there is a warning… it is called the licensing process) but then making a good recovery:

…as Robert Joseph has noted: ‘we need to promote the unique, historic qualities of wine that make it such a great convivial product and such a delicious partner to food.’ That is, in the words of Erik Skovenborg, we need to note: Wine as part of a healthy lifestyle; and Drinking with friends: wine’s role as a social lubricant. If the wine label has to list the risks (as is being suggested for the new USA guidelines), should it also list the benefits?

And there was much talk in the UK is about the new government’s plan to enforce a ban on smoking in beer gardens and on pub patios. The Independent discusses the implications:

If implemented, the outdoor smoking ban would make it an offence for people to smoke in certain spaces such as pub gardens or outside sports venues. Should it be enforced in the same way as the 2007 indoor smoking ban, smoking in certain outdoor spaces would carry a Fixed Penalty Notice of up to £150. If you refuse to pay this, you are liable to be prosecuted. According to Action on Smoking Health (ASH), the 2007 ban led to a 2.4 percent reduction in hospital admissions for heart attacks, and a 12.3 percent reduction in admissions for childhood asthma.

This is something we have had this sort of ban in Ontario for quite a number of years now – and we’ve expanded it over time – with the result that no one misses breathing in the neighbouring table’s ciggie gak. But these things are local. Apparently elsewhere, not so gak. The Guardian covers some of the frustrations with the proposal:

…Sean Short, 54, was smoking on the pavement outside a Wetherspoon’s pub – there is some suggestion that pavements outside venues could also fall under a new ban. “I think it’s ridiculous. As if there’s not enough pubs being closed anyway at the minute,” he said. “I can understand them banning it outside hospitals, that makes sense, but not outside pubs.” He said an outdoor ban would not stop him from coming to the pub, but he could see that it would for other people, especially when alcohol is cheaper to buy in supermarkets.

Still, will any of this matter if, as The Guardian also asks, the kids ain’t even drinking the stuff:

A seemingly endless stream of recent reports have warned that baby boomers, who have fueled the industry, are retiring and spending less, and millennials aren’t picking up the slack. “You’re looking at a cliff,” the industry analyst Rob McMillan told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2022, following a key report that showed wine consumption in the US hadn’t grown in 2021 – despite bars and restaurants reopening. McMillan foresaw wine consumption by volume declining 20% in the next decade, with millennial habits key to the shift. Last year, Nielsen data showed 45% of gen Zers over 21 said they had never drunk alcohol.

Not all that relatedly, Jordan has been doing his annual stint at the Canadian National Exhibition – aka the CNE – selling beer tokens in a booth, acting as huckster to both carnies and marks alike. Observations include: (i) “Big Boi didn’t draw the crowds”; (ii) a pickle shot is “a pickle, cored out, filled with tequila”; and (iii) someone asked “What is tokens?”

Note: Gary is not linking over at Twex anymore so keep and eye on hiblog for updates. This week he explains why some Canadian troops in WW2 fighting in Italy drank British beer while some of the British fighting there drank Canadian beer.

Boak and Bailey in their footnotes posed a question about the cartoon in Pellicle last Friday:

…cartoonist David Bailey seems to be arguing that confusion, jargon, and being pushed around by expert staff, is part of the fun of artisanal drinks. But maybe he’s also asking: really? Is that how you want it?

Me, I took the cartoon as pure mockery. I felt badly for the poor beer buyer, there in her tiny version of Pilgrim’s Progress facing the craft carny. Could it be that the craft carney stuff is also off putting… or mid… from the perspective of Gen Zers?

Never mid, Ron introduced me to a new word this week… no, not that sort of word, a brewing related word:

… what’s odd, is that there isn’t a full fermentation record for the “Double Stout”. Just one or two entrie. While there is a full record for Single Stout, right up to racking. Why would that be? Eventually I twigged. There’s a reason there isn’t a full fermentation record. Because that wort wasn’t fully fermented. At least not on its own. I’m pretty sure that this is “heading”. One of the elements of Irish Stout. It’s a strong wort in a high degree of fermentation which was blended in at racking or packaging time. It’s effectively a sort of Kräusen.

Now, I had understand that certain Irish stout had a lesser portion of stale for tang as well as fresher for the body in a blend so, if Ron is listening, does this mean that three different agings including a heading as part of finishing were used? Or am I, as per, wrong?

Laura Hanland posts an interesting set of questions which popped to mind after a certain sort of restaurant experience:

In essence then, my food was deeply “not too bad” – usually enough for me to decide not to return for a repeat visit – but I loved the restaurant so much that I really think I am going to go back and give their pasta a go! And this is my conundrum. If you’re reviewing food, then the food must be good. Surely? But the lovely team, the genial surroundings… these were charming elements that I couldn’t ignore. Also I was a little bit taken by the scowling Italian elder who peered out at me from the kitchen. He gave the whole thing a very authentic feel of a family business. This review makes no sense. I don’t know if it will help you decide whether to visit or not. But I’ll be sure to tell you if I do get back for the pasta.

I think it makes perfect sense. One of the problems in the social media age with its instantly curated expertise (just add water… or, as with the craft carney, booze) is the expectation of mind blowing experiences. They rarely actually happen. For example, my chicken burger was actually a bit bland when we were out this week. Could have done with some chopped green onion in there. Or something. But the server was great as was the sharable carrot cake dessert. Look for the good in things. And put a little black pepper on the burger yourself. Don’t be lazy.

Pellicle‘s feature this week is by Jacob Smith – a discussion with and of the definitely not lazy Judith Gillies, co-founder of Cairn o’ Mohr, a Scottish producer of fruit wines and ciders:

There was little money to spare—Judith fondly recalls a cupboard acting as their only shop—yet, the couple enjoyed something far more valuable than excess cash: access to some of the country’s best fruit. Thanks to its loamy soils, moderate temperatures and—for Scotland—dryish weather, Perthshire is home to an array of world class berries, apples and flowers. As head of production at Cairn o’ Mohr, Judith puts this bounty to good work, producing around 18 different wines, three alcohol-free beverages and five ciders. While popular fruits like strawberries, brambles and raspberries are central figures in several of Cairn o’ Mohr’s wines, less appreciated ingredients like elderberries, oak leaf and gorse are just as commonly used.

I like this line, too: “We tend to take knobbly fruit,” Judith says. “The ones that are too big, too small, too ripe for the supermarkets, things like that.” And speaking of seeking out new tipples, Jancis R reported from a tasting of independent wineries from 15 central and eastern European nations:

Of the other countries whose wines I tasted, Croatia was the most stimulating. The wines, especially those from Istria in the far north of the country, seemed to have an extra layer of sophistication. The region’s special white-wine grape Malvazija Istarska (nothing to do with most other Malvasias) produces full-bodied wines with an apple-skin character, real grip and ageing potential. My favourite examples at the tasting were made, respectively, by the well-established Kozlović winery and the much younger enterprise owned by the unfortunately named Fakin family.

Beating us to EuroEast for drinks, The Beer Nut has been reporting live from Bulgaria this week. It sounds so good:

80% of being on holiday is a random bottle of something that’s €8 in a supermarket and has a picture of a fruit on the label. To my veins, please. Directly…  The next song will be performed by a man who looks like he should be on the sex offenders’ register but has sufficient connections to have avoided it… This open-air bar is opposite my hotel. On beautiful sunny days I’ve been looking across and thinking it would be nice for a drink. Here I am and my beer tastes like it was triple-filtered through a skunk’s anal gland… 

And for Labo(u)r Day, Dave Infante in VinePair was fairly free with the finger pointery over craft beer’s record in labo(u)r relations:

Substandard products, dangerous equipment failures, hell, even terrible rebrands — workers can help owners solve these problems with union training programs, higher self-enforced safety standards, and honest feedback from outside the boardroom bubble. But they need a voice on the job, and protection to use it even when it’s going to piss the boss off. This industry is getting left behind by drinkers. It cannot afford to be left behind by its workers at the same time. Like the Teamsters organizer at Stone this past Monday, I have a message to deliver this Labor Day weekend. This one is for brewery bosses and workers alike. The country is changing, and so is this industry. Which side are you on?

I know what side I am on when it comes to beer cocktails (because port and stout is not a beer cocktail… even though I called it just that in 2012) but the National Post shared a very extended article on beer cocktails that lingered over something from the 1990s built around a recollection of youth as part of creating the argument that one should not overthink… or even, really, think about these matters:

…Dad mentioned that I’d left some beer in the basement fridge that I might want to take home to drink. Investigation revealed that the bottles in question were the remainders of a six-pack of Tequiza. Some of you may recall this late-’90s-era beer brand, juiced with “the natural flavour of lime” and sweetened with agave nectar, a brand that lots of people in flannel shirts and Doc Martens used to consume while listening to Pearl Jam and waiting for our dial-up modems to connect to the internet. The portmanteau name was supposed to suggest a marriage of tequila and cerveza…

Never thought Tequiza would get that much media footprint but there you go.  Finally and definitely in the Tequiza zone, today is the day here in Ontario when I can walk to the corner store and get beer… probably a macro brand I don’t want and at a higher price than elsewhere. But I can get it at 7 am. So that is excellent. Does this mean death to the near century old macro brewers’s run retail monopoly aka “The Beer Store”? Can you say supply chain?

“Bring it on — we’re ready,” Roy Benin, president of The Beer Store, said in a statement. “We see this as a new chapter for The Beer Store and we’re excited to compete. All of our channels – from distribution to retail to deposit return will continue to deliver for Ontario.” The beer conglomerate said it has also expanded its distribution fleet, helping to bring close to 4,000 convenience stores online to sell beer. The retail giant is involved behind the scenes in stocking many of those locations, and grocery stores, as well as its own storefronts.

That being the case – is The Polk right? Is it all politics and money?

It’s not about access. It’s about Dougie needing more bread & circuses distractions for the low information voter to drive more votes his way when he calls the election. He wants to get into another majority before the RCMP gets deeper into the Greenbelt. He’s gonna win, too…

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

*Ahh… we the drifty, Gen Xers in the era of the X: “What are you interested in?” “Nothing.” “Me neither.“
**Me, I’m all avout the social medias. Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (166) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (931) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,466) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

The Chores… More Chores… It’s The Weeks Of Chores Along With Some Beery News Notes

When last we met, I was happy as anything, wandering around Montreal on a few days away. That’s so last week. The first week of vacation. Then I came home to folk building the new fence and the related 24 foot tall tree removal on my side of the line. The fencing guys did a couple of the main branches with their power saws but I’m doing the rest by hand, sorting* and hauling most of the stuff away. Which is why this week’s beery news notes are brought to you by my Japanese pruning saw. It is the only thing I have ever bought which has each and every promised attribute. Forget that claim that beer makes you feel exactly like you wanted to feel like just before you had that beer. This beauty sits neatly in the cut, eats into the wood in both directions, stays sharp, creates minimal blisters. Japanese pruning saws. Get yours today.

First off, I am really grateful for Stephanie Grant‘s piece on her changing relationship with alcohol. She puts things so clearly, things that I have thought about myself and others over the years – especially this bit:

I haven’t dived into non-alcohol beers or mocktails, and I’m not sure that I will. I’m not someone who necessarily needs to replace beer with a non-alcoholic version. I know that there are some great options out there today, but when I am abstaining from alcohol, I don’t really feel the need to replace it with something that is similar to alcohol. I also feel the same way about meat substitutes. If I want to eat meat, I will eat meat, but if I want something vegetarian, I don’t necessarily need a meat-like substitute… if I really want a beer during the week, I have no problem drinking a beer and have no trouble sticking to one. That level of flexibility feels good to me and has made this new adventure feel even more doable…. It helps that I know other people who work in beer and the beverage industry as a whole that have also cut back on their drinking. I look to them for inspiration. Because of them, I know it’s possible.

For as long as I have been writing about beer my interest in drinking a lot of beer has slowly slipped away… well, maybe let’s say it has reduced. (Apparently, not unlike Ireland.) For a while now, I’ve been a none or maybe one with meals or maybe after mowing sorta person now.  I know, sounds like Old Man Day Napper. But that’s now due, you know, to hauling the boughs and branches to the yard waste depot.

Yet… when I do have a drink, I like to drink the swell stuff. So what are you drinking when in Lisbon? Not what you expect you might be, if Jason Wilson is right:

My choice for the first stop of the evening would be Quattro Teste, one of the best cocktail bars I’ve visited in any city. Run by Alf del Portillo, from Spain’s Basque Country, and Marta Premoli, from Lombardia, Italy, at Quattro Teste you can start with a shot of cider straight from the barrel, Basque style. Then move on to Alf’s take on the low-brow classic kalimotxo. It’s usually just a mix of red wine and Coke, but his version has a healthy pour of Amaro Lucano and a splash of Branca Menta to make it a kalimotxo revelation.

I am not sure my meagre daily ration would go in the direction of a kalimotxo but, go ahead, make the case for it. Jeff made the case, unpacking his thoughts on our conversation about the economics of local v regional noted last week as Question #7:

The regional breweries can’t compete with the giants on price, and lose the advantage of “local” affection the further they try to send beer. I recently got to see the barrelage of those regional breweries, and it is mostly sinking as this dynamic squeezes them more. And yet if you zoom in a bit, something interesting is going on as well. If you surveyed the beer cooler at the local grocery store in different regions (not just the U.S., but anywhere), you’d see different retail space given to local, regional, and national brands. Some places I visit have mostly national brands and a sad little pocket of local brands. In other places, the reverse is true.

There was also follow up over at their Patreon-based footnotes this week, when Boak and Bailey (Hello Jess and Ray!) looked for just the right word:

The idea of national-regional-local that Jeff Alworth writes about, after a discussion with Alan McLeod (hello, Alan!) feels like an important one. We look here at breweries like Butcombe, which are definitely tied to the West Country, but which don’t feel especially… loyal? Is that the word? They’re not national, exactly, but they’re too big, too remote, and too slick, to feel quite part of the scene. In Bristol, local means from the city. And ideally from the neighbourhood. Somerset and Gloucestershire too, at a push. We need to think about this some more.

I like that reference to “the scene.” A scene is something to which you can have personal affinity. My scene, for example, for a long time pre-pandemic extended much more to the south into central New York than to Toronto to my west.  It is about identity as much as anything but there is a clear tension between the economics and the identification with regionality. Put it this way. I support local breweries as much as I do because I can drive to them all. That is a distinct relationship where the economics and identity of local might look like loyal but perhaps it is only practical. At the regional level one needs to make more of an effort, both the brewer and buyer. I probably put a premium on spotting a Great Lakes zone beer. National craft? Might as well be ketchup. I’ll buy it but mainly on based on the price with hard eye on the best before date.

On the subject of scene, it has many facets. We see that in the piece Laura Hadland had published in What’s Brewing which explored the history of beer serving measurements below the pint. It illustrated the hazards to be encountered in place to plane and time to time – as illustrated by the “schooner”:

The two-third pint measure was not legally recognised as a specified measure until October 2011. Despite this late introduction, the measure was not new. A publican in Greenock, Scotland, is recorded as testing the market for the schooner – a glass of American invention – in the 1870s. His tuppeny drink was described by locals as the Wee Pint and seems to have met with relative success, spreading to other venues in the area. The two-third schooner for beer is not to be confused with the sherry glass of the same name – a tall, waisted 3.5oz glass that was popularised in the UK in the 1960s, alongside its smaller cousin, the clipper. To add another layer of bemusement, a Canadian beer schooner is a 32oz super-sized affair!

I like that, the “wee pint” – basically the size you get in the US now when you ask for a pint. What else is going on? Pete Brown posted his take on George Orwell’s perfect urban pub “Moon Under Water” but with the perfect English country pub in mind:

There’s a big open fire at one end of the room. In winter, you have to be here at opening time to claim the table next to it. There’s also a large, shiny-seated wooden chair opposite. It’s the kind of chair you don’t sit in unless you’ve been drinking here since the pub was built. The walls and ceilings are decorated with random stuff – nothing as obvious as horse brasses or old black-and-white photos of the pub. A lot of the décor relates to the name of the pub (which isn’t really the Old Stone House.) But on top of that (sometimes literally) there’s a collection of old scythes. A bowsaw. A 1930s policeman’s helmet. A case full of arrows.

And… wait for it. There is a twist. By the way, R+J of B+B may have found their own new perfect pub even though the first dealt with some well-founded doubts:

…people who are much more clued into Bristol pub gossip than us told us they’d heard Sam Gregory, landlord of The Bank Tavern, was interested in taking it on. You might have heard of The Bank, even if you don’t know Bristol: it’s the one with the four-year waiting list for reservations for Sunday lunch. We filed this news under “We’ll believe it when we see it”. So much can go wrong with plans to revive pubs, as we’ve seen with successive attempts to take on The Rhubarb.

Also extolling the ideal pub this week was ATJ whose A Pub For All Seasons comes out soon. He summarized the goal of the book:

Deep breath, then: A Pub For All Seasons is a narrative non-fiction travel book about my journey through the UK over the four seasons in search of how pubs change organically, unconsciously, without fanfare, almost with nobody noticing. It is about how pubs echo the seasonal drinks and dishes we fancy throughout the year — as they change a pub also changes.

Speaking of which, I received my copy of Martyn’s new book, Around the World in 80 Beers: A Global History of Brewing, a study of brewing history through 80 beers from around the world. Very oddly, exactly 2.5% of the beers discussed were from my homeland, the Canadian Maritimes. The entry on Keith’s IPA is (shall we say) kind but does highlight, as do a number of others, the imperial reach of British brewing.  My first skim though did raise one question. Has anyone actually seen that receipe for great-grandpaw’s beer that was the foundation for Sam Adams Boston Lager?

Other than witnessing the praising of glitter beer well after it “glit-ted” its last “-ter“**, I was interested in the thoughts Doug Veliky shared on the effect of Hazy with about a decade’s reflection – and expectually its effects on other style as well as style itself:

The term “American IPA” appears to mean little that can be trusted anymore, at least consistently and nationally for someone traveling, and might as well be shelved completely by the US brewing scene. It’s turned into a filler word to show more intention to the style, but that intention is now be muddy and misleading. The reason I used to like the descriptor is because it could serve as a way to communicate clear and bitter, while letting West Coast IPAs be their more specific versions, still leaving a wide range of variables to incorporate and differentiate with.

In Pellicle, Will Hawkes explored other sorts of fundamental changes in his excellent biography of an important figure in mid-1900s British brewing, Dr. Dora Kulka, and her escape from the Nazi we well as how her work in yeast biochemistry supported the early adoption of lager brewing:

Dora produced a stout (“Your vitamin stout is good,” Erna Hollitscher, to whom she sent a bottle, told her; “In spite of the protest of some English people I still don’t think it is so very different from beer!”), a pale ale and, most significantly, a lager. She probably thought little of it, but for the powers-that-be at The Hope Brewery it was like a lightbulb flickering on. Just a few years later, Claywheels Lane became the first British home of Carling Black Label, the beer that started the British lager revolution, and that has been the nation’s favourite since the early 1980s…. Hope & Anchor began making their own lager—Anchor Lager—very soon after the War ended. “Dr Kulka got us brewing a lager. She noticed Sheffield water was similar to that of Pilsen in Czechoslovakia, where her family came from, and suggested we make one. That’s what set us going.”

It will be harder to find a lager in some communities in northern Ontario now that the implications of the new beer sales in private stores are playing out:

The Beer Store has confirmed that the 8 James Bay Rd. location in Cochrane is permanently closing on Sept. 9… In Cochrane, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) has approved two licences for convenience stores that will be able to sell alcohol — the Cochrane Truck Stop at 99 Hwy. 11 S., and COSTCAN Liquor at 143 Fourth St. W. Unit B. The Beer Store locations in Geraldton and Nipigon are also set to close next month.  Gordon Mackenzie, a former Nipigon councillor wrote to The Beer Store president, highlighting the impacts of the closure on the community, noting his concerns that the closure will add to the long-standing issues of vacant buildings populating the downtown core and the loss of job opportunities. The community has also noted that The Beer Store is the only location to return empties to.

Note: “My bet is the price of beer will go up, especially in northern Ontario.” In suburban southern Ontario, the issues are different, as over licensing as 350 new retailers will open up in one municipality on the same day. Plus: “stores will be allowed to sell starting at 7 a.m. and up to 11 p.m., two hours earlier in the morning and later at night than the current operating hours.” Really? Pre-school beers? How long until we read the “drunk guys in grade 12 first class home room” story?

And, relatedly perhaps in terms of change, in his Hop Queries, Stan shared some news about the German hop harvest that ended up with a bit of an odd conclusion:

Each of Germany’s five hop growing regions (Hallertau is by far the largest) provided estimates as harvest began. Production in the Hallertau increased 21 percent over 2023, to 42,350 metric tons, while overall German production grew 18.8 percent to 48,964 metric tons (98.1 million pounds). Why? Yields in Germany were up 20.5 percent. Although yields in 2023 had improved on 2022’s particularly disappointing harvest, they were still below average… The overall harvest yielded about nine percent more hops than an average crop the last 10 years, which a press releases notes will be sold into a market that is “. . . oversupplied.”

“Oversupply” does no lead to cheering as it turns out. A bumper crop causes concerns in a retracting marketplace for beer.

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

*Those straight branches to the right are all around ten feet long and will be next year’s tomato poles.
**Not sure if or even how my disinterest in glitter beer translates into sexism but there you have it. Adulterations and adjuncts are simply gak.
***This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (151) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,469) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

The Mid-August 2024 “No, You’re The One Dreaming Of Sweater Weather” Beery News Notes

Great. Stan took this week off. And probably next week too. He may hover in my mind like the absentee desk editor like I mentioned a few weeks ago. But he also has a nickname, too: cheat sheet. Stan “The Cheat Sheet” Hieronymus. Yup. See, come Monday when I can’t think of anything to go look for in the world of beer to think about, I can go see what Stan has been thinking about first. He’s a bit like that nice smart left handed kid in grade 11 math class with really good posture that I sat one row back of and one seat over to the right. Gave me a good view. Made tests just a bit easier.

By the way, there is little beer related in that photo up there. Took the image Monday evening looking due south, down over central New York State. A pinhole sunset catching the anvil cloud from below. Right about in the middle of that horizon is Oswego, NY.  On still days in winter, you can see the plume rising from Nine Mile Point Nuclear. Also, home of Rudy’s. Where you can skip stones and drink Genny Cream Ale.

Did someone mention beer?  Starting hereabout, as we face almost 4,000 new beer retailers in these parts in a few weeks, Ontario’s public broadcaster TVO published a great piece by Matt Gurney about the shock of the new he has experienced in the last few years of deregulation of the provincial booze market, with a particular focus on that one odd rule that allows 7-Eleven to qualify as a restaurant:

Seeing someone drinking in a 7-Eleven or walking out of my local variety store with a bottle of wine will probably feel exactly the way seeing people openly smoking cannabis felt like for the first few years after legalization. I have a specific memory of standing at an intersection, waiting for a light so I could cross, and noticing two young men standing on the corner passing a joint back and forth. I thought to myself, huh, that’s unusually brazen. And then, seconds later, my brain caught up with reality: it would have been brazen a few years earlier, but that day, it was simply two law-abiding citizens engaging in a legal activity in public. 

On undoubtedly similar sorts of offerings, Doug Velky of Revolution Brewing in his newsletter Beer Crunchers, unpacks how craft has turned full circle with craft’s adoption of “cold” in the race to make light generic lagers:

…we also recognized that Cold Time, whose model focuses more on volume than margins, would require broader adoption than just our loyal Revolution customers to ever be considered a success. To achieve this greater scale, early investments would be crucial to get Cold Time into new places to find audiences who don’t currently think of themselves as craft beer fans, but are very open to a great, locally made lager.

Volume. Hmm. Disclosure. I’ve been buying Ice Cold Beer from Toronto’s Left Field Brewing for at least three years so there is no news here. But that branding had at least a level of self-parody in the mix along with the tasty within. Is that self-effacing sort of joke now all so… what… 2021? They may not be dipping as low as the macro-lags but aren’t they fighting for the Centro-Euro buyer‘s attention? Given how well “beer from anywhere you like” can sell, can we blame them?

Interesting bit of history over from Katy Prickett at Auntie Beeb this week on industrialization of England during the Roman Era, including brewing at scale:

“At Berryfields, we found evidence of malting and brewing and the tanks used to steep the grain before processing,” he said. “We tend to think of the Roman world as being very much a wine-loving place. “But actually a lot of the population in Roman Britain were drinking beer and we see that in the pottery they were using, large beakers in the same sort of sizes as modern pint glasses.”

Being someone who never gives a second thought for the Roman Empire, this was all news to me. I am told that Barryfield was located “at an intersection along a major routeway” and was “the location of multiple roadside industries, such as brewing, woodworking, and metalworking, aimed at supplying the travellers passing through.” Here, too, is an archaeological report on a neighbouring site complete with maltings and even malted spelt deposits along with some barley and even some apples and beets.*

In an exploration of more recent history and in light of far more recent racist events in the UK, David Jesudason published the story of a hopeful scene in late 1940s Wales as recoujnted by historian Kieran Connell, the story of an event that showed how working class people rejecting racist hostility are always as he says the vanguard of multiculturalism:

In 1948, the CIAC organised a black-tie event to celebrate Douglas’s success after he made 39 first-team appearances for the team, with the CIAC inviting white members of Cardiff Rugby Club. Announcements were placed in Tiger Bay shop windows and St Clair attended the night which was held ‘not at a dingy clubhouse’ but in the convention room of a city-centre hotel rented for the occasion. “He [St Clair] entered the hotel,” writes Kieran, “without any of the stares or comments that might ordinarily greet someone from an ethnic minority in central Cardiff. In the hotel lobby, he spotted five white girls and two black girls chatting with a group of four white boys. Further on, four or five boys of mixed ethnicity were trying to set up a large keg of beer.”

Table tennis? Bun fight? A bit of both? That’s the theme in an article by Ted Simmons in The Spirits Business about the dispute between the  American Craft Spirits Association (ACSA) on the one hand and, on the other, the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America (WSWA) over what is causing the great retraction. We join the debate half way in progress:

WSWA released a second statement [:]… “Blaming wholesalers for the industry’s challenges is shortsighted. The focus should instead be on how the entire supply chain, including wholesalers, can adapt to changing market conditions and support each other in navigating economic pressures,” it read…  ACSA cites a study that found that 87% of craft spirits drinkers want to legally purchase via DTC, and 82% of craft spirits drinkers support laws changing in order to expand DTC… The WSWA calls for an end to any finger pointing… 

Speaking of handbaggery, Ed had a posted about the redistribution of CAMRA branches which so far has not yet popped up into the general finger pointery zone but might be heading that way:

CAMRA currently has a plan to change its branch structure so no branch straddles CAMRA region or county boundaries. From what I can gather it’s a top down proposal from the National Executive… I’m a bottom up man so am dubious about the proposal. Though a devout member of our Mother Church I’m not very active in the branch, but it is the branch I’ve been in since I was a teenager so I would be sad to see it end. Our branch chairman has written a long reply detailing how the branch came to be and why its current structure works.

BREAKING: Ron + Uruguay: one, two, three, four plus one alarming admission: “I want a rest from being Mr. Beer“!!! Heavens. Jings even.

And Jessica Mason shared details on the losses left in the wake of the failure of one brewery, the unfortunately** named Anarchy Brew Co of Newcastle:

Following the pandemic, the business also reportedly fell into financial difficulties after being unable to pay back loans and financial obligations on top of rising supplier costs. Reports have outlined that the trouble began when directors of the company took out Covid support loans and used tax deferrals to manage finances. FRP Advisory has since put together estimates with a breakdown, showing the shortfall owed to creditors stands at approximately £492,413 and an additional £158,016 still being owed to HMRC. Many in the sector with debts currently unpaid by Anarchy are set to lose out with 22 businesses in the industry, including malt and hop suppliers, still being owed thousands of pounds. 

In the referenced reports, it is stated that unsecured creditors such as trade creditors, the landlord and loans and finance agreements are owed £261,468. Assets came in at about one-third of that fugure. What to take away from all that? Certainly the interconnectedness what with so many others dependent on the success of the brewery. Plus… would it have been a kindness had the pulg been pulled earlier?

Perhaps speaking of which but definitely for the double, makring the Molson Coors cutting of losses Doug Velky posted a neat and tidy summation of the recent string of ditchings of unwanted craft brands which has seen one firm… consortium (… collector… aggregator…) named Tilray picking up the pieces to perhaps slide up to fourth place in the contracting US craft brewer market:

For Molson Coors’ there’s no growth potential looking forward for these brands as each posted negative trends in 2023. The brands aren’t dead as nearly 200,000 BBLs across four regional breweries is nothing to sneeze at, but in order to reverse these trends it would take focus, vision, energy, and dollars. As a public company focused on growing shareholder value, cutting these brands and focusing on positive trending formulas is where they’ll head instead. We saw the same of Anheuser Busch who dumped more than half of their crafty brands to Tilray in 2023 and Constellation Brands who quickest to take their “L” in craft and move on when they cleaned house and sold off Ballast Point, Funky Buddah, and Four Corners.

Jeff asks some good questions and triggers good thoughts – but there seems to be an assumption that “local” and “regional” are similar constructs. I don’t think they are. By the way… does one now cheer in 2024 as much as one booed in 2016? Such a long time ago, isn’t it? Wasn’t it? My thought it that it all such a case of corporate deck chair shifting that it really no longer matters. Macro abandoning craft at the same time craft is seeking to mimic macro. Whoda thunk it? What an odd scene this is for so late in the play.

Headline for these times: “World Of Beer Has Filed For Bankruptcy, Here Are The Details.”

Interestingly and conversely, the government of Western Australia has created a ten-year economic development plan to boost the state’s craft beer industry:

The plan was put together by the state’s Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, the Independent Brewers Association (IBA), West Australia Brewers Association (WABA) and South West Brewers Association (SWBA). As part of the strategy, the four parties’ two main goals are increasing the volume and value of locally produced beer threefold by 2034 from a 2023 baseline and creating “greater vertical integration of the craft beer value chain” in the region. Over 120 craft breweries exist in Western Australia, representing 20% of total craft beer production in the country.

A ray of hope? A futile effort given the bigger picture? Who knows. Finally – and as a welcome night cap if you get my analogy – ever the optimist or at least open to the possibility, The Beer Nut gave credit where credit was due in his piece this week on a brewery that has turned its luck around:

There’s hope for us all, I like to think. Today’s beers aren’t the first to come from a brewery premises whose earliest wares I didn’t care for and thought poorly made, but under new management seem to have been turned around. Investment in better equipment? Less corner-cutting? Or just a more highly skilled brewer? I don’t know. I do know that the beers from the Hillstown brewery in Co. Antrim were usually a raft of off-flavours, of the homebrew rookie sort. It seems that there’s a new broom about the place now, going by the friendly and approachable name of Modest Beer.

PS: I like shameless. I can work with shameless.

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

*How do you say “ooh, look, my pee’s gone all pink” in Latin?
**Although perhaps not as unfortunate as Jolly this week.
***This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (+1=133) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (-1=929) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (plummeting a bunch to 4,466) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

The “Remember Before We Went Through The Looking Glass?” Edition Of Your Beery News Notes

Remember a month ago? Before “the” debate? Before France went right then went left faster than Gretzky ever could? Before Britain finally ditched the Tories? Before some dumb kid decided to murder Trump and just murdered someone’s Dad? Remember before everything went sideways? Well, except for England losing in fitba… again. Thank God somethings never change. Like bees. Bees don’t care. As I witnessed the other day in the zucchini patch. They just undertake some sort of death battle for pollen from time to time, mindlessly fighting and stinging each other for survival. Isn’t nature wonderful.

First up, Pete Brown was provided a number of bolts of broadcloth to set out his thoughts on the state of CAMRA this week in The Times. It is an excellent piece and even a bit of an artifact in terms of the rare access to the pulpit. I particularly like this paragraph that goes to the heart of the organization:

And Camra saved that culture in a uniquely British way. Whatever else cask ale is, to thousands of campaigners and volunteers it’s a hobby. And as George Orwell once observed, we are a nation of hobbyists — “of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans”. Camra is an organisation of amateurs and enthusiasts. Some are eccentric, some are pub bores, some are cliquey. But they always turn up. Others are charismatic, engaging and keen to welcome anyone who might be persuaded to share their interests. Everyone I speak to inside the organisation describes Camra as a family. If they’re frustrated with it, for most, it’s the type of frustration you feel for an annoying sibling who you will defend to the death.

In North America someone might have chosen the phrase “grassroot” but remember those roots in that conception stay in the dark serving the showy fronds above. Not so in the image Pete paints. For him, it’s an organization for people. Not “The People” – just people. All sorts of people. Great point.

Speaking of a sort of people, The Beer Nut wrote about the gulf between hype and quality. Let me spoil his conclusion without revealing the subjects of his study:

If the road through hype leads to refined and high quality beers like (most of) this lot, then perhaps it’s tolerable. And I’m glad that both of these breweries are still turning out great stuff even when their praises are no longer being sung hourly on social media.

Speaking of praises not being sung, Jordan updated the news on Ontario’s LCBO workers strike on his periodically irregular update on the provincial scene adding an interesting observation to the news shared last week of grocers’ disinterest in the new deal:

This might not go quite as well as the premier seems to think. Under the new plan, grocery stores are staying away in droves because they don’t want to have to deal with returns of bottles and cans. The margin they make on beer and wine sales would be eaten away by it. Probably, the margin they make is eaten away by planogramming. Look at the picture above from a midtown Toronto Loblaws from day four of the strike. They’re using the beer fridge for margarine and the selection is down to about five items. It wouldn’t surprise me if the number of grocery retailers actually drops this year.

Butter and margarine in the beer aisle, folks. Butter and margarine. But little wine in some spots. And a rollout by the government that appears to be being rewritten day by day.

BREAKING NEWS FROM SCOTLAND: “WHIT? No Vitamin T???”

Jeff had a portrait of Czech polotmavý published in Craft Beer & Brewing (a style of beer I have enjoyed after ordering a mixed two-four to be delivered from Godspeed) and pointed out a bit of a puzzle in the chronology:

… to connect the dots from märzen, granát, or Vienna lager—another style that some have cited as a precursor—to polotmavý, you have to skip decades in the historical record. When I ask Czech brewers and experts where (and when) polotmavý came from, I get something like a collective shrug. More than a century ago, Bohemians were making amber lagers—and a few decades ago, they were making polotmavý. In between, no one seems to know what happened.

I wish the crack team at CB+B avoided concepts like “mysteries” which is the neighbour of “magical” even if in this case it does not relate to that most tedious of applications – the brewing science mystery. Those claims put the “moron” back in “oyxmoron.” But here it is different. Here there is a gap in the records. A conundrum perhaps. Yes, a conumdrum mixed with an interlude of Soviet authoritarianism.  Which does have that hint of “The Third Man” so… fine. A mystery. Yet, as Evan noted in 2009, Ron had previously noted* that polotmavý were an amber lager “roughly in the Vienna style” and that:

Vienna lagers aren’t dead: they’ve just moved over the border. No country produces such a range of amber (polotmavé pivo) and dark lagers (tmavé pivo) as the Czech Republic. I can’t quite understand why no-one has twigged this yet.

Well, we’ve twigged now, Ron! I have it delivered. And… I might point out… they didn’t move over the border so much as the borders moved around them. Maps redrawn and all that. Did I ever mention that as a lad, when visting Grannie, I stayed in a small hotel run by friends of the family and had breakfast every morning with an older gent who, in the First World War, had fought the Austrio-Hungarian navy in the Adriatic? I have? Oh. Nevermind.

Pellicle‘s feature this week is by Fred Garratt-Stanley and is about the loss of pool tables in London’s pubs. I love me a pub game and have an entire category of posts dedicated to the concept… which I haven’t updated since 2011… no, 2017! Anyway, I’ve spent a pleasant afternoon playing pool in a London pub so anyone who is rooting for that has my vote. What is to blame for the loss? Money:

Costs vary depending on whether pubs opt for bog-standard tables or high-end ones more suited to league competitions. At Ivor Thomas, it’s £10 a week plus VAT for the former and £20 for the latter, but this is cheaper than most, with some pubs reportedly paying over £20 a week.  A week’s fee can be recouped in one busy evening, while plenty of extra cash is accumulated from drinks sales. But an increased emphasis on food in many pubs has changed the landscape. Writing for the Financial Times Jimmy McIntosh reports that, according to the British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA), “from March 2022 to March 2023, the number of wet-leds declined by 3.1 per cent, as opposed to food-focused taverns, whose number dwindled by 2.2 per cent.” 

Regular reader and archaeologist Merryn Dineley pointed us towards a very interesting news related to another sort of food stuff storage.  Based on the premise that “beer brewing is difficult to identify in the archaeological record” the authors explain how residues of beerstone as found in clay pot can be used. The study’s abstract as published in the Journal of Archaeological Science concludes:

In comparison to ungerminated and germinated barley grains, we find that beerstone preserves only a subset of the barley proteome, with the residue being more reflective of the final brewing product than of earlier brewing steps such as malting. Overall, we demonstrate that beerstone has potential to entrap and preserve proteins reflective of the beer-making process and identify proteins that we might anticipate in future archaeological analyses.

Got that? Good. Speaking of good, at the end of last week we heard from Will Hawks and his London Beer City project. Not a newsletter. A project. In this edition, he wondered which pub he should hit before an AC/DC concert and in doing so paints a picture of the jumbly sort of pub I’d much prefer over most of those pub-porny protraits all those other folk write about:

You go to De Hems, Soho’s Dutch-ish pub, because it’s recently been renovated and it’s really close to somewhere else you want to go (of which more later).  At 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon it’s busy-ish, mostly with men in pre-Covid business wear: ill-fitting suits, no ties, a smattering of skinny-fit v-neck jumpers. Most of them will not see 45 again. There’s a big TV on in the corner – it’s showing the Tour de France, where Mark Cavendish is about to win a record 35th stage – and there are high tables (boo hiss) around the front section of the bar… the floor is dark wood and the ceiling a sort of dried-blood colour that looks like it’s been there a while. There’s a lot of ageing beer memorabilia on the walls, and some Dutch stuff too, including a Holland football shirt in the corner.

Sweet! Finally, Boak and Bailey wrote in their monthly Substack newsletter about the state of beer writing. I won’t repeat what’s been said but I would point out one thing. “Beer writing” is a thing that only exists in a small fish bowl. ATJ rejects the term for himself. He is a writer (and on form this week, too). So (watch me taking perhaps a mid-sized logical leap) when B+B state “there are too many really good beer writers, and simply not enough outlets for their work” I don’t think I can agree. Or maybe I do. If they mean there are “too many really good writers writing about beer” I have to disagree. Show the me the novels, the essays in a range of periodicals, the CVs with a wide range of seriously and well received writing. not the filler. Some qualify. Others don’t. But if they mean “many really good beer writers” we have to ask ourselves this: what is this narrower thing, the “beer writer“? The phrase has always reminded me of that chestnut “craft beer community” and the circle of affirmation that is so unlike the messy complicated and increasingly inclusive CAMRA Pete describes above. The question then moves to the even narrower phrase “professional beer writers” which they define as those trying to pay a mortgage from income. By that standard, all people who are paid are “professionals.” Which leads one to other words. One commentator responding to social media outreach wrote them about one particular word:

I was a freelance journalist for several years. I guess fundamentally I don’t really think of beer journalism as A Thing, as opposed to “that blogger I used to read, only now he’s got a byline, good luck to him I guess”.

“Top Ten Beers For Summer” journalism anyone? (“It goes with salad!” Amazeballs.) We also see “expert” a bit too generously applied in a similar fashion, too,** even though we know there are some actual experts each in their specific areas related to some corner of the wide world of brewing. What do we take from all this? It is possible that scribblers’ personal dreams of an achievable goal got ahead of actual capability and capacity? Does that cause unfair marketplace where those who are established and have an “in” are heard while others (the often more interesting) are left out? I wonder. There’s plenty of good and plenty of not good. I sift. See, me? I read about beer every week. For this here website. For you. Well, for Stan. You others, too, but between you and me I think of Stan as the managing editor who is oddly never seems to be there at the desk, still not back from lunch who, once in a while, still drops off a sticky note.***

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

*Ron’s source code says the page was written 2004 to 2010.
**Is there a fine line? Consider this observation from  wine writer, Jason Wilson: “I remember arriving at the grand tasting in Montalcino for the release of the 2014 Brunellos. Early grumbling had already labeled 2014 as “challenging,” which is the wine world’s euphemism for “shitty.” We were to taste all day, through dozens of wines, at our own pace. I arrived at the event about an hour after the doors opened and sat down. Before I had even taken a sip, or written a note, an American wine writer I knew waved, came over and, by way of greeting, said, “Ah, I can’t believe you came all the way over here to taste the 2014s. They’re shit.” Apparently, he’d already tasted more than 100 wines in the previous hour, and already rendered his judgment. I don’t know what he did with the rest of his work day.“
***Me – “a high-involvement reader“!?! Certainly gave me airs.
****This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,483) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear. 

Your Sodden And Soaked Mid-July 2024 Mid-Tropical Storm Beryl Beery News Notes

OK, a busy week. Away on the weekend for the rugby, Canada v. Scotland in Ottawa. Photo by me. Scotland won. I wore blue. Then covering for others at the office. Others won. I was blue. So… early in the week I was thinking that this week’s update may be a short one. Or I might just make some stuff up. Then… Beryl came a’callin’. Tropical Storm  Beryl that is. Formerly Hurrican B. I won’t really know if the tomatoes survived until after this here update hits the presses. I may have even scheduled this early for publication, typos and all, just to be on the safe side of the power grid. Wouldn’t want to leave The Beer Nut with nothing to read. That’d be bad.

What else is going on? Big news hereabouts is the strike at the government store, the LCBO. Here is a handy primer on some of the main issues. The Premier is out there on his intern’s social media feeds telling people to buy local, buy elsewhere while the strike goes on. Gary, being the anarchist, wants to burn the whole place down. Robin, being the authoritarian, reads everyone their rights. Jordan broke out some of his excel sheetery, gave it all a good shake and shared a few resulting thoughts:

The LCBO’s dividend to the Ontario government as a crown corporation is up 770 million dollars since 2015 and it is because they have repatriated funds that were going to foreign owned brewers through The Beer Store chain. That 770 million dollars represents 13.3% market share. Back of the napkin math says that if The Beer Store gets run out of town, there’s 2.39 billion dollars up for grabs annually, and increasing rapidly due to inflation… Grocery and Convenience are likely to continue being wholesaled by the LCBO, which means there are going to be a lot of warehousing positions that need staffing. A lot of logistics. A lot of administrative positions. If you let the approximately 2.39 billion that’s about to shift direction go without a fight go, you’d be crazy.

See, in conservative Ontario, statist socialism is incredibly good business. See? Similarly, there was a bit of handbaggery in the UK over “socialist member owned  grocery chain” The Co-operative* when they put out an ad recommending that people shop for their beer at their stores ahead of some sort of sporting event. The Campaign for Pubs, clearly a business oriented front, even issued a press release as illustrated to the right.  Le Protz exemplified the capitalist outrage:

If you can’t make it to the pub to watch the England match, please don’t buy beer from @coopuk in response to their anti-pub #EURO2024.

It strikes me a odd that a business is not able to advertise its own wares without striking terror in the hearts of another set of businesses. It seems odder that Mr. Protz is backing the right wing of the discussion over the left one. Me? When I drink, I drink at home more than in pubs. Old Mudgie seems to share my views:

…this response comes across as distinctly thin-skinned and precious. Pubs are commercial businesses, not sacred institutions, and have no right to be shielded from the rough-and-tumble of competition… The venues that benefit most from the football will tend to be knocked-through drinking barns where most of the customers are on Stella or Madri, not chocolate-box locals or trendy craft bars, many of which won’t even show it in the first place… Being referred to in your competitors’ advertising is generally regarded as a sign of strength rather than weakness, as pointed out by licensee Joe Buckley, who took the ad as a compliment to the pub sector.

Hmm… What would Mr. Protz think of one medical professional’s advice on drinking during these summer heatwaves, as reported in The Daily Star:

But did you know it can also affect you or your partner’s ability to perform in the bedroom? When dehydrated, your body reacts by producing less red blood cells and plasma needed for proper blood flow. It also produces increased levels of a hormone called angiotensin to compensate for low fluid levels, meaning your blood vessels will narrow to conserve fluid, reducing the amount of blood able to reach the penis, causing issues getting or maintaining an erection. Consider limiting your caffeine and alcohol intake as these can have diuretic effects.

Perhaps reading those sorts of reports, big brewer Carlsberg announced plans to move in a decidedly less boozy direction, according to The Independent:

Brewing giant Carlsberg has agreed a huge £3.3 billion deal to buy Robinsons squash maker Britvic. The UK soft drinks firm, which also makes J2O and Tango, told shareholders on Monday morning it will recommend the latest deal – which is valued at £4.1 billion when debts are taken into account – after rejecting a previous £3.1 billion offer. Carlsberg will pay 1,315p per share to Britvic investors under the deal. Britvic also holds an exclusive licence with US partner PepsiCo to make and sell brands such as Pepsi, 7up and Lipton iced tea in the UK.

Speaking of which, here is a stat that I can’t wait for US craft beer spokespeople to spin. Have a look at this graph and then read the following as published in Craft Brewing Business:

…the BPI is a forward-looking indicator measuring expected demand from beer distributors — one month forward. A reading greater than 50 indicates the segment is expanding, while a reading below 50 indicates the segment is contracting. The craft index for June 2024 was 27. Blah. The BPI’s total beer index of 58 marked the highest June reading since 2021, as well as the fourth straight month in expansion (>50) territory.

Craft = Blah. That’s not good. It was also a drop to the 27 Blah Zone from 2023’s Ho Hum of 38. Which is all sorts of yikes.

Neither blah or yikes is the tale told by Isabelle O’Carroll in Pellicle this week of a Balkan pastry, the Burek:

At its core a burek is a yufka (or phyllo pastry) pie, often filled with an egg and cheese mixture, (but sometimes vegetables or meat) and usually (but not always) rolled into a spiral before baking. Take a glancing look at the AskBalkans subReddit and you’ll get an idea of the roiling debates on the proper name and correct filling for bureks. “Go to Bosnia and ask for a burek with cheese, suddenly you’re waking up in the ER with multiple life-threatening wounds, I don’t think we even agree on burek,” one Redditor said. “You said a pita is a burek, which is not true unless you’re okay with calling all pitas bureks, which means you’d call maslenice, mantije, and other meals with jufka bureks, too! Which you said you don’t. It’s okay to just admit you’re wrong, you know?”

Glad we cleared that up! Speaking of science, we read this report that came out this week and see this is the summary in the abstract presented by the journal:

Moderate chronic consumption of IPA beer and hops infusion showed antigenotoxic effects in mice but no antimutagenic action.

Pretty sure that does not equal “[d]rinking IPAs in moderation has shown it does not have an adverse effect on health” very much at all. Seems to me the more likely route to something that does not seem to have an adverse health effect (with all due respect to all neo-boozy-Babbits dreaming of the unthinking life) is not drinking alcohol. Which means NA beer. There’s a lot of money apparently in selling nothing. Yet, if that nada produces nuttin’… why keep it from the kids?

Since these beverages contain virtually no alcohol, they can largely be sold to anyone, anywhere; they’re stocked on grocery and convenience store shelves around the country, and purchasable online. But Collins doesn’t sell to anybody under 18 years old at this store, and he checks ID’s to enforce that rule. “When there’s no minimum age, can a nine-year old come into your store and buy a non-alcoholic Corona? For me, I don’t want that perception,” Collins says. Collins set his own age limit, and he’s free to set it however he wants because in Maryland — as in the majority of states — there are no state age restrictions on who can buy adult non-alcoholic beverages.

Really? That’s odd. I would not buy them for my kids – if I still had little kids – because they are slightly insanely expensive! Odd. And Katie in an abbreviated edition of The Gulp asked another  very odd question:

Why do men order default drinks for the ir female partners without asking them what they’d like?

I’d get shot if I did that!  My mother would have shot my father if he did that – and don’t even start about Grannie! Or Great-Grannie for that matter! I am and come from a long line of men who would be dead if, you know, they weren’t dead already.

Speaking of socialists, did you hear that Keir Starmer and the Labour party gave the Tories the boot in the UK? Always nice when the Tories get the boot somewhere. He is by reports a pub lad. The Spirits Business, not a journal for professional clairvoyants, gave its thoughts on the wish list of policies which may now roll out for the British booze trade, including this from Mark Kent, chief executive of the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA):

“During the rest of 2024, there will be opportunities to support Scotch in the first budget of the new Parliament, secure a trade deal with India which will reduce tariffs on Scotch whisky in this key market, and work closely with the industry as we continue on our journey towards net zero.” He added that the organisation looks forward to working with the MPs to “ensure that Scotch whisky is at the heart of the central mission of the next five years – growth and economic renewal”.

Not correcting the imbalanced non-dom taxation, not strengthening national defence, not boosting public education or restoring health services… whisky.

Before, as discussed below, the doors close, ATJ got in one last post at GBH which refreshingly is about hunting out good beer and some sort of perversity in Belgium:

Perversely, in the land where Lambic, gueuze, and Trappist ales are heralded and celebrated, lager is dominant. However, these beers might be popular, but they are often seen by connoisseurs as one-dimensional and simply designed to quench thirst as well as being easy on the pocket. Most of these beers have as much in common with the Ur-lagers of central Europe as a kangaroo has with a chicken—they both have two legs, but that’s it. This is why Brasserie de la Mule, led by its young founder and head brewer Joel Galy, is unique, especially as it has only been in existence for three years.

And finally, Good Beer Hunting has suspended operations with a florish offered by way of announcement:

We have some ideas for what the future of Good Beer Hunting might look like—and soon I’ll be working on that vision with the counsel of my colleagues to see where it takes us. But the earliest vision is so drastically different than what GBH currently is, that the only way to get to the other side is to make a clean break. We’ve got to clear out the cache. We’ve got to quiet everything down for a bit and see what it all sounds like on the other side of that silence. We’re shutting down our various content streams—the podcast, the website, social—ending a sort of always-on feed of content that’s been, for many of us writers, editors, and artists, our life’s work. And for most of us, our best work.

Quite so. And that makes sense despite the lamentations of the writing circle. For some time, as careful readers will know, I have noticed** that the focus had shifted as the frequency of posts decreased. Sightlines continues under separate URL but with little seemingly on offer given the sparce front window. And the business model has had a heavy burn rate. Yup, a new title and framing as perhaps a broader audience travel and lifestyle magazine would fit better with the pieces which have been the mainstay of GBH for some time. As noted above, these are not the days to invest in whatever craft has become so any retooling is the wisest approach.***

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

*Great-grandpa apparently refused to eat anything bought from anywhere but The Co-op.
**Perhaps after others, I’ve always remembered this tweet from Matty from 2018: “…for a short while now I have felt my own ambitions do not align with that of GBH, and as such I have chosen to go in my own direction…” which was the beginning of Pellicle in a way.
***Conversely, following through on the comment sent to contributors might not be wise: “We still plan to pursue our special print edition featuring original work and new stories from the world of beer, spirits, and food, called “Beer & Brine,” although we’re not committing to a specific timeline for that at the moment.“
****This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,483) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear. 

The Last And Perhaps Best Yet Perhaps Slightly Timid Beery News Notes For May 2024

Well, that went fast. May. See ya. June backons. That image up there? It’s from the Facebook group for the Brewery History Society, a grand display of policing the Epsom Darby on May 31, 1911. Each having Mann London Ale. They would need it as thunderstorms later that day killed 17 people and 4 horses. Hopefully more peaceful, this year’s race will be on again this Saturday. And the French Open, the UEFA Euros, the NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup and World Cup of Cricket will be all on the go in June, too. Brought to you by Stella Atrois, Bitburger, Michelob ULTRA, Molson and Bira91 respectively.

First up, I have to say I really liked this portrait by Boak and Bailey of Dorset’s Square & Compass, a pub that took them back through a forest, even back through time in terms of the layout and service, a pub where they found themselves looking at a menu with three food items and maybe twice that many drink offerings before they went outside to sit next to a slab of rock:

Looking out from the garden is as magical as looking up at it from the lane. We had a view of the hills sloping down to the sea, fading into haziness beneath a big white sky. At one point an ancient blue Landini tractor passed by, its upright driver puffing on a pipe, like something from a 1950s British Transport documentary. In the hedgerows, on the telephone wires, and on freestanding stones, birds gathered and chattered.… Then, unbelievably, they came to visit.

Fabulous. And check out Martin’s review of The Harlequin in Sheffield for another sort of fabulous in an urban setting.

Back into the now, the big news here in Ontario is the debate over the costs of the Province’s move to finally get beer, wine and all the coolers into corner stores. Let me say from the outset that while I don’t plan to vote Tory, I can’t imagine a download of services (either to the private sector or another level of government) that does not include a transfer of revenues associated with those services. That being said…

“It’s a billion-dollar booze boondoggle,” Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie said Monday during a news conference at Queen’s Park. Crombie and the Liberals base their $1 billion figure on these additional costs: (i) $74 million per year to the large grocery chains by giving the 10 per cent wholesale discount, (ii) $375 million to the Beer Store by rebating the LCBO’s cost-of-service fees and (iii) 300 million in foregone revenue by not charging retailers a licensing fee. Those amounts would be on top of the LCBO’s lost revenue from selling less alcohol through its own stores and on top of the $225 million payment to The Beer Store. *

See, if the gross revenues of the LCBO (wholesale and retail) were $7.41 billion generating a whopping $2.58 billion in dividends to the Province, according to the most recent annual report, then shifting significant services, fees and expenses away from the LCBO to the new players probably should be expected to cost more than the 3% of gross revenue. But, if the annual report in 2026 says that the gross has dipped to $6.41 billion with the dividend dropping to $1.58 billion, well, then there should be some questions asked. The main problem is the concept that the greater number of outlets will cause an expansion of sales covering those costs. Ain’t happening. Booze is retracting. Even pre-pandemic, there was no change in sales caused by partial deregulation. And we’ve already seen the retraction of sales in those 450 grocery store which were first permitted to sell beer wine and cider in 2015. This is all a great leap sideways.

I missed Jordan‘s post last week on the pleasures and pitfalls of brewing a collaboration including this unexpected turn towards what can only be called pronounced zippiness:

A funny thing happened on the way to the brewery. Adrianna, who had very kindly put aside some Agnus for our 20 hL batch, got in touch one day to say that it had accidentally shipped with someone else’s order. She offered to throw in some Saaz for the trouble, and I asked if there was anything else Czech in the warehouse. This is how we ended up with Vital hops. Vital isn’t a brewing hop. It’s pharmaceutical grade. They were originally grown for their antioxidant properties (xanthohumol and DMX), although I didn’t know that when I leapt at the opportunity to use them. What I saw, looking at materials online, was that it contained everything including Farnesene and Linalool in pretty high proportion. Farnesene is usually Saaz exclusive (gingery, snappy, peppery). Linalool is the monoterpenoid associated with lavender, lilac, and rose. In fact, the description of it said lavender, spice, plum, licorice.

Oddly, “Linalool” has been my private nickname for Jordan for years! Not apparently encountering any Linalool whatsoever, Stephanie Grant has still been on the move and reported from Belgium where she visited some auspicious breweries and perhaps experienced that other sort of hangover that lambics can offer:

Our last day in Belgium, we continued the Tour de Gueze, this time joining the bigger group of participants on one of the many buses taking drinkers around the region. We visited De Troch, Mort Subite, Eylenbosch, and Timmermans. I’ll be honest, after gorging myself on lambics the day before, I wasn’t as thrilled to do it all again the next day. Instead, I spent most of the day seeking out bottles to bring home and share with friends once I returned home…

Ah yes: that good old “I am sure it hates me” feeling. Also out and about, Katie has reported from the ferry to the Isle of Man… in fact from the ferry’s busy bar:

The bar on board the Manxman is just as bizarre and pleasant as I remember it, and I’m sat with a Guinness at a little round cabaret table surrounded by TT hats, jackets, and fleeces and the people they belong to. Almost everyone on board is travelling for the races, and we’ve already run out of Norseman lager, the local lager brewed by Bushy’s on the island. By the time we get to Douglas I’m sure we’ll be out of crisps too.

What else is going on? You know, I wasn’t going to go on about the Hazy Eeepah thing that took too much time in May BUT (i) Stan shared a great summary of where we have gotten so far** and (ii) ATJ shared a recollection of IPA studies past by sharing the agenda of a British Guild of Beer Writers from 1994. Click on the image. Notice something? Apparently three PhD recipients. Plus Jackson, Oliver and Protz. No mention of fruit sauce. And no cartoon infographics or can wrapper designers. When people backdate the term “craft” beer to anything before around 2007 when it passed microbrewing in popular usage, I think this primary sort of document is a helpful reminder that the terms of reference were quite different. Not, by the way, “dudes grumbling about the good old days” so much as a discussion before the adulteration of both the beer itself and the overall concept of IPA. We need more of that again. Because it is possible to discuss things being worse that other things. Not that it seems many “in craft” would understand.

Similar in the sense of things not appears to be what they are or rather appearing to be exactly what that are even if that is not admitted – and for the double… wheew… ahem, Martin came upon a scene at a beer festival in Cambridge, England that (in amongst the photos of dilapidated properties and sodden grounds) has got to be the aggreation of all the reasons I share his dislike of beer fests including: (i) “the students and groups of mates who make up the core attendance“; (ii) “Nice weather for newts” and (iii) that disappointing beer that “has a touch of sharpness about it that I can’t explain.” Let me spoil his conclusion for you:

I didn’t see anyone I knew, and (unlike in pubs) it’s on your own hard to strike up conversations with random strangers who have largely come with mates. In and out in 24 minutes. Time for a pub.

Also missed: the Historic Brewing Conference planned for August has been cancelled.

Pete Brown shared some refreshing comments on the old trope that craft brewers need to tell their story in his industry insights newsletter this week:

Firstly, every single one of them insisted on telling him their foundation story – where the founders met, what inspired their “dream”, and the modest circumstances in which they began dragging it into reality. Secondly, when they finally got to the shiny parcel of vats, every single one beamed, “And here’s where the magic happens.” Now, on the surface, this is far more interesting – there’s an actual story there for a start. But on the other, I get the sense that when he visited these businesses, Thom was given this spiel whether he wanted it or not. Once again, the pitch wasn’t tailored towards its audience. 

Short take: if it’s everyone’s story it’s no one’s story.

Elsewhere, The New York Times had a great article on the unique story of Eritrean and Ethiopian diaspora home brewing – and home barley malting – in Texas:

The thick brown liquid had been fermenting in the jug for three days, which meant it was time for Fatean Gojela to get it ready to serve for Orthodox Easter. With her granddaughter, Ava, at her side, she poured it little by little through a thin mesh sack. “Patience, Mama,” she said to Ava, showing her how to squeeze out the liquid from a doughy mix of grains and herbs. Ms. Gojela, 65, learned to make suwe, as the beerlike drink is called in the Tigrinya language, from her mother while growing up in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. (Today, she lives in Fort Worth, where she works as a housekeeper for hospitals.) The beverage is primarily brewed for special occasions in Eritrea and Ethiopia, where Amharic-speakers call it tella.

In a far less celebratory frame of mind, Jessica Mason shared a depressing thought that really makes one wonder what all the efforts towards inclusion were really about:

If you’re wondering why fewer women think beer is for them, maybe just look at the comments I get on a daily basis when I share, write or question anything on the topic of beer. See how women are treated when they do take an interest in beer. It is no wonder we are where we are.

She shared that on Twex the day after having her piece on the suprisingly negative findings related to women and the UK beer market in the report “The Gender Pint Gap: Revisited” authored by Annabel Smith:

Speaking exclusively to the drinks business about the data, gathered by YouGov, report author and beer sommelier Annabel Smith said: “When we set out to conduct a further piece of research into women’s attitudes and behaviours towards beer in Great Britain, we were fairly optimistic that the dial would have moved in a positive direction since the first Gender Pint Gap”… Smith lamented that “there has been very little academic research done in this field, but we uncovered a wealth of anecdotal evidence perpetuating the ideology that beer is for men. And when this is in your face every single day, you start to believe it.”

Here is the full report by Smith.  There’s more at Beer Today too. Oddly, the Morning Advertiser chose to highlight the phrase “the dial doesn’t appear to have moved very much since” 2018 despite the report saying that the report indicates that female participation slipped from 17% to 14%. This is a 17.6% drop. Which is sorta huge given the efforts taken during the time to counteract disinterest in this group of consumers. But beer is bad at math, isn’t it. (Like when we read that a large facility closure is a sign of industry maturity. Subtraction. It’s tough to explain. Who knew?) Conversely, Rachel Auty also added her thoughts which were more comprehensive, including these comments related to beer advertising the in UK:

I believe we also need to address the connection between beer and sport, and move away from sport being treated like it’s something that only men like to do. The rise of the Lionesses – as one high-profile example – has given beer an opportunity to unlock a whole new type of customer, and it’s only going to continue in the same direction. Why would any brewery or venue turn that opportunity away? Ultimately, if more women work in breweries, bars and other beer industry roles, the advertising will shift. The problem is at the core – truly – and we have to get women into roles where they have leadership responsibilities and the autonomy to make key decisions and become role models that create and inspire positive change. This is still not happening anywhere near enough to shift the needle.

Preach. Why isn’t that as easy for everyone to see as seeing a mud filled beer fest in Cambridge and, you know, leaving?

And, just before deadline, we note the long form writing of Claire Bullen in BelgianSmack on Frank Boon and his beers:

From the park, the Zenne flows around the village, under bridges, and approaches Brouwerij Boon, where it meets the gaze of Frank Boon. He has paused for a moment on a small concrete bridge to regard it, to watch as ducks and moorhens paddle against the current. In its progression, the river bisects the brewery, one bank home to the brewhouse, coolship room, visitor centre, taproom, woodshop for foeder repairs, and an enormous warehouse of foeders and barrels; the other a rented warehouse space where additional foeders are stored.

The piece is Augustan***, displaying the arguably Tory nature of this part of brewing – a perfected stasis point where craft and nature sit in ordered balance. And, once achieve, will remain so. I was immediately taken back to my university class forty years ago where we studied the Olivers Goldsmith, the Irish one of the middle 1770s as well as his less successful great-nephew of early 1800s Nova Scotia and their two villages. Or that Boak and Bailey pub way up there, come to think of it.

Finally, Mudgie shared the sad news of the passing of one of his long time readers, Janet Hood a Scottish solicitor who was a member of the licensing bar. Her colleague Stephen McGowan shared his thoughts:

…as a new solicitor I was a recipient of her enthusiasm, passion, and I know she gave great encouragement to new solicitors and those on the journey into the profession. That was Janet. I first met her at a licensing conference when she was the deputy clerk to the Aberdeenshire Licensing Board and she made an immediate impression. What a character! Although I confess I can’t remember her precise topic I do recall no one was left unsinged – everyone got it in the neck! Other clerks, agents, the Government. She really rattled some cages and forced the conference to face the difficult questions. But that was Janet.

An inspiring life. I am adding her email sign off to my own: “niti pro regula legis – fight for the rule of law.”

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

*Edited to get rid of the stupid bullet points that the CBC seems to inordinately love.
**Notice in particular his coy statement “I do not agree every word in the paragraph” when referring to something, frankly, extremely insightful that I wrote last week… which made me realize something – there was a typo in the text he  quoted  that I needed to fix. Now he must agreed with every word, right? That’s what you meant, Stan, right?
***Ripely ornamented: “Our steps clang madly as we walk into the empty coolship. Outside, the wind makes the yellow wildflowers dance, a feast for pollinators. The river reveals nothing.”
****This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (128) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (913) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,478) hovering somewhere high above or around my largely ignored Instagram (163), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. 

The Greatest Leapday Thursday Of Your Life Edition Of The Beery News Notes

So… today is Leap Day Thursday but tomorrow is March. The second event is more exciting to me even if it doesn’t happen only every 28 years. Careful readers will know that I’ve coaxed along those plants right there down in the basement, a bit of chlorophyll green under grow lamps since November. Click for the deets. But the thrill of knowing I am going outside on Saturday to actually plant actual pea seeds under thermal cover is palpable. Palpitational even. Spring. You know, baseball and outside veg live parallel lives in these parts. March to November if you are lucky. And did I mention there’s a solar eclipse coming? We are on the path. So much doin’s going on.

What is going on with beer? There’s a theme or two forming on the horizon over the last few weeks that I want to explore a bit. For beer drinkers, it looks like a bit of a positive pattern even if it’s a pattern small brewers might not necessarily welcome. And there has been some reflection on the point of being a beer writer that goes a little past navel gazing. Along with a bunch of other stuff. But there are no new drunk domesticated animal stories. Sorry Stan.

Let’s go. First, we received a check-in from France this week from Gary Gillman who’s taking a break from the blog as he only packed his cell phone. He sent holiday snap shots like that one there. We had flash freezing warnings here last night, ourselves. Frig. It’s March Friday, right? This is sort of a category #2 story but it’s a break Gary is taking that is being put to good use according to his emails:

I am in France again… The mountains shown are in Menton, on the Mediterranean, where I stay until next Thursday. Then to Toulon down the coast, til end of month… I checked again on the history of the Abbaye de Crespin and St. Landelin ales… they were brewed by tiny Rimaux Brewery in Crespin, on the French-Belgian border. Jackson lauded the little brewery in the 1977 The World Guide to Beer, and mentioned that the local abbey once had brewed beer.  Rimaux Brewery closed forever in 1988. After that, the small Jeanne D’Arc Brewery in Ronchin, and later Enfants de Gayants Brewery in Douai which bought out Jeanne D’Arc, issued these labels, maybe by buying them from the last Rimaux owner – either that or they just started to brew their own versions to keep the names in the market,  I couldn’t confirm which. Then, in 2010 Saint-Omer Brewery in Saint-Omer buys out Enfants de Gayants, closing the Douai Brewer, and continuing some of these labels including Abbaye de Crespin and St. Landelin. So one way or another the Abbaye de Crespin Noel I pictured relates back to one of the ales in the Rimaux line, and less directly to an old heritage of abbey brewing in France similar to the Belgian tradition.

So he’s on the hunt. Working it. As is this week’s feature at Pellicle by Jana Godshall is also a romantic romp in faroff Sicily and one, unlike Gary’s emails, that includes the word “Aldo” 33 times – which makes sense because he is the winemaker at the heart of the story:

Aldo has been connected with nature, communicating and listening since he was a boy. As a fourth-generation winemaker, Aldo carries on a family tradition that spans his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father, Don Ancilino. This legacy endures as Aldo and his brother, Alessandro, continue to bottle and sell their own individual wines. Though Aldo may not explicitly label himself a winemaker, he embraces the roles of artist, farmer, composer. This symphony of skills defines his approach to his land and illustrates the importance of communication in this trade. 

There’s four of them right there! If you want to travel, too, while enriching your understanding, check out the latest Beeronomics conference will take place at University of Milan Bicocca, Italy, 19-22 June.

Main panels and sessions will be held at the University of Bicocca main campus located in the heart of the city. The Conference Organising Committee, led by Christian Garavaglia, welcomes all high-quality research on the economics of beer and brewing. With a strong interest in interdisciplinary research, we are looking for submissions

Papers being presented are expected to cover trends and driving forces in local and global beer production, consumption, distribution; management, marketing, market structure and industrial dynamics; individual beer choice and health; policy and regulation; and the impact of beer on society and culture. Also, have a look at the Historic Brewing Conference being held in Manchester, England on the 5th and 6th of August, 2024.

Always giving a learned air, Mudgie wrote a good post that started me thinking about theme #1 – it’s on the tension in economic terms between premiumisation on the one hand and, on the other, the unfortunate habit of ever rotating novel offerings. He frames the question in terms of guest beers at a pub but I think the same applies for craft in the US:

To achieve premium status, you need to be able to exercise a strong measure of control over product quality at the point of sale. You must make it possible for people to readily find your product, and to be able to make repeat purchases if they like it. And you will need to develop the perception of your product over a long period of time through a carefully considered and crafted marketing strategy. But none of this applies to rotating guest beers. Yes, it matters that the individual pub knows how to look after its beer, but if one isn’t to your taste there will be another along in a couple of days, or even later the same evening.

This is an interesting counterpoint to Jessica Mason‘s report late last week on the price of beer in one higher end Irish pub hitting 10 euros a pint:

Reports highlighted that, currently, in the main bar at the Merchant Arch, drinkers are charged €9.10 for a pint of Carlsberg and €8.65 for a pint of Guinness but these prices are due to rise in the room upstairs at the venue to €9.95 for Carlsberg and €9.65 for Guinness. Additionally, after 10pm, the venue also reportedly increases the prices further to above €10 with a pint of Carlsberg setting customers back €10.90 and a pint of Guinness costing €10.50. As part of the “late hours” prices, reports confirmed that a pint of Kilkenny costs €10.65, a Blue Moon or Chieftain pint €10.50 and a Harp pint €10.60.

See, for me, all things seeming to be equal,* I look at a pint as a unit of personal drink decision the same way a glass of wine is. And there are five 150 ml servings of wine in a bottle.  So a pint of Blue Moon at €10.50 is competing with a €52.50 bottle of wine. I am pretty sure I can buy a very nice bottle of wine when out and about for $77.20 CND. For home consumption I can actually buy two at a far higher quality** than any NNY gas station shelf regular offering like Blue Moon. And so, going back to Mudgie’s point, even if we accept premiumisation with these stable standard brands is possible… is it sustainable given the recreational alternatives?

Still… Reuters has published an interesting article suggesting that big beer may have now hit the bottom and is ready for an upswing compared to the spirits trade – which I can believe if we trust the sort of math we see above:

Unsold bottles of spirits are already piling up in some markets, shaking investor confidence in top firms like Diageo as some drinkers ditch pricey spirits for cheaper options… The risks to spirits businesses were possibly underestimated, O’Hara said, adding the stocks were also relatively expensive. “Beer is easier: it’s resilient, there’s very little downtrading…” he continued, adding there was a consensus building around this view. The world’s largest brewer AB InBev… is expected to benefit in 2024 from easier comparative numbers following a sharp drop in U.S. sales of key brand Bud Light last year due to a boycott. Moritz Kronenberger, a portfolio manager at Germany’s Union Investment, which invests across spirits and beer, said some drinkers appeared to be swapping back from spirits to beer.

Building on that confidence (and with a passage that I might have written during 2008 market meltdown) Eloise Feilden has written about beer as the affordable luxury during the UK’s dip into recession:

…people still want to treat themselves, and alcohol is one of the major categories which experiences continued spending on luxury items. Half (49%) of adults bought premium alcoholic drinks in the 12 months to October 2023, including 42% of those describing their finances as tight/struggling, according to Mintel’s research…  “brands at the higher end of mass-market like San Miguel and Corona were among star performers in lager.”

So, if we see expansion of macro as micro-craft continues slides, as premium comes to mean Corona and not Hazy IPA made in your own town… who wins? Good at least to see a hint that beer might not actually be going out of style – even if beer that isn’t all that beery might be.

Slightly shifting, we see a different meaning of value for this season of Lent (according to a regular source that Stan and I seem to share) the Catholic News Agency:

The brewery created the beer in collaboration with Father Brian Van Fossen. The priest told CNA this week that he went to high school with Mark Lehman, one of the co-owners of the brewery. “I discovered a doppelbock beer which was rooted with the Paulaner brothers in Munich, Germany,” he said. “The beer consisted of strong grains and an interesting mixture of hops and barley, which provided a strong nutrient content.” The priest said the beer was originally developed as part of the “strict fast of the Paulaner monastery.” The beer “celebrates the history of the Doppelbock beer style and its ties with the Lenten season,” the press release announcing the beer said. The beer collaboration is meant to help fund the diocese’s “Rectory, Set, Cook!” program to help feed homeless people.

And Barry has been on top of his role at Cider Review seriously and shared the news of a piece on a recent tasting of traditional British ciders for the drinks press:

Looking around the room as we assembled at a charmingly re-appropriated high school science lab table-top, complete with obligatory teenage graffiti and holes where Bunsen burners once stood, Adam identified a number of very well-known wine writers. Quite by chance I got chatting to acclaimed drinks writer Jessica Mason, who then sat down with Adam and I for the tasting. In terms of writers with a laser-focus on all things of pomme-based origin, it was just Mr Wells and Mr Toye. Cross pollination in nature, as in drinks writing, is a wondrous thing however, and it was heartening to hear the inquisitive nature of many of the writers in the room, eager to find the similarities and differences between pressing the apple and pressing the grape.

Writing about writers! Speaking of which, GBH seems to woken from its extended winter slumber with the first “Sightlines” column shared beyond the handful from Kate Bernot in weeks (on the “declining sales, layoffs, vacant sales leadership roles, and two packaging rebrands” at Lagunitas) as well as this excellent piece by Kiki Aranita on how Pennsylvania’s strict liquor laws include a fabulous loophole that helps state drinks makers bigly:

It’s clear that this model has the potential to benefit customers like me, and the system works pretty well for winemakers and distillers in the region, too. Without a full rewriting of the state’s liquor codes, not much is going to change for the community at large, but Enswell is showing us that there is another way. Maybe our restaurateurs don’t have to be beholden to obtaining a traditional liquor license, and maybe they don’t have to source and serve alcohol from all over the world when there are excellent options being produced nearby. And maybe that’s the best we can do for now. 

No word on the effect of the law on beer. Which is… you know. Perhaps back to theme #2, Ron‘s been sharing some inner thoughts, skipping past that one question that has really bugged me for years:***

One of the questions I get asked most often – along with “Why is your blog called that?”, “Why don’t you get a haircut?”, “Who is this mysterious woman called Dolores?” and “Are you sure you want a pint of Imperial Stout this early in the day?” – is “When are you going to write a book about Ireland?” I think I’ve already got the title nailed down. But that’s about it. Which is why my answer has always been: “I don’t have enough information.” That wouldn’t have put everyone off. In the past, at least. Being positive (however uneasy that makes me feel), writers just making stuff up doesn’t happen now. So much. A second answer is: more research.

Fear not for Ron. He’s off junketeering in Rio. Not ATJ who wrote the partial sentence of the week over at his Substack blog not blog:

…I sat in a somnolent pub, alone apart from a small dog…

And Jeff drew back the curtain and explained – or perhaps started to explain – his obsession with beer:

I’ve spent half a life writing about beer, a decade and a half doing it for a living, and yet I’ve rarely even considered what it means to me, personally. I’ve always mined meaning from those breweries and countries I’ve visited, placing my spotlight outward. Looking back, I realize I have a lot of those Crown Street experiences rattling around my brain. More than that, over those long years—and well before, extending back into late adolescence—I see the ways in which beer has threaded through my life experience. It was there, as a rebellion, in high school. In college it was a celebration. In early adulthood, homesick in Wisconsin, it was a lifeline back to lupulin-green Oregon. Throughout my life it has rarely been center frame, but as my life morphed from wannabe professor to social work researcher to political writer, from single cab driver to married homeowner, from barfly to boring old man, it was never out of frame either. That is true of very little else in my life.

Good reflections. It’s a bit of a different experience from mine but not in any way more or less worthwhile. It’s good to reflect on one’s own singular experience.*** There are so many whys out there. Why is this publication more stable than that?  Why does that glaring error get hedged while that one sails through? Me, I only started out doing this to mainly to explain my interest in beer to me. The taverns of youth and all the money we left behind. Why’d we do that? And it turns out, I am lucky that my job gives me a lot of opportunity to unpack anything from criminality to specifications of concrete to the sope of medical consents… and asking every second day “why the heck did they do that?!?!” My hobbies too, including beer but in its place along with plenty of other things. A lot of looking for the why. So, the path of others has been always been of interest to me. Back in the fall of 2020 when Boak and Bailey broke the tension of the pre-vaccine Covid world by reaching out via Zoom by a few people including me, the main question on my mind was “why… why do we do this?” but I am not sure I put it in quite that way when we met screen to screen. Why? It’s a good question to ask.

Finally, we learned Wednesday of the very sad news of the passing of Van Turner retired from leading role with the Kingston Brewing Company, one of the founders of the microbrewing scene in Canada. Even before we lived here, we arranged travel to include the KBC going back around thirty years now. Van always had time to talk about everything from trends to history. Time for everyone. Very sad news.

That was that… And here we are. The 29th. Remember last week when I realized that this was the third time I’ll experience a Leapday Thursday in my life… then last Saturday I realized… could well be my last. The next one will be in 2052. I’ll be 88 – if I make it that far. So… err… on that cheery note… roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes. There is a lot going on down here and, remember, ye who read this far down, look to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (123) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (913) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (up again to 4,456) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (165), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. I now have admitted my dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat, relocated the links and finally accept that BlueSky is the leader in “the race to replace” Twex even while way behind.

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

*Check my math. €10 is pushing $15 CND which is an hour’s mini-wage here. In Ireland, minimum wage is €12.70 or $18.75 CND. But it seems average incomes in Ireland and Canada are about the same, say both lining up to about $48,000 USD.
**Like a five year old St. Joseph or a 15 year old Colheita port.
***The haircuts… the haircuts!!!

The Hardly Able To Sleep I’m So Excited Dontcha Know Edition Of Your Beery News Notes

It is getting close, isn’t it. Hopefully when this is posted, all the mail and all the parcels will have been sent. I have a list and on that list it says that will be done… so it will… right? Last week I shared a photo from the Xmas contests of a decade or so ago and, Lordy, the image above submitted by Jeff of Beervana back in 2012 passed by my Facebook memories on the weekend. Another great entry worth resharing – if only to ponder the question of whether the man on the little green vehicle spent his days saying “wheeee…. oh yeah… vrooooommmm!” quietly to himself.

Starting locally, sometime today we may learn more about the government of Ontario’s new plans for the booze marketplace. The CBC has posted some juicy rumours with perhaps a few twists on expectations:

… two sources said the government will require retailers to devote some portion of their shelf space to Ontario’s craft brewers and small-scale wineries, but had no specifics. The reforms will not alter the role or structure of the LCBO in the retail landscape, sources said. Some industry sources said The Beer Store will be well-placed to corner the potentially lucrative market for distributing beer to thousands of new locations in supermarkets, convenience store and gas stations because of the breadth of its existing distribution network.

Let’s be clear. I look forward to 2025, the year when any grocery stores, all corner stores and any gas stations which are willing will be able to step up and start selling those beers, wines, ciders and even that stuff we call “coolers” but marketeers refer to as “ready-to-drink alcoholic beverages, such as seltzers or premixed cocktails (collectively known as RTDs).” But I also fully expect this to be a mess like the cannabis marketplace of the last five years due largely to a retracting public interest with a lot of good intended investment dollars along with certain consumer hopes to go down the toilet, a lot of places just selling the marco gak and the concept of “craft” being further diluted… if that is even possible.

OK – festive question: does your drinks culture include insanely complex and repetitive Christmas parties? I’ve always thought the British over do these things and am not dissuaded from a guide like this to surviving them without compromise even with all the dangers – social, career or otherwise:

Even if you can hold your nog, there’s snogging — firmly back after the plague years — to consider. And then reconsider: 59 per cent of office romances end with a resignation. Beyond the work do, there’s double booking, guest lists and menu planning, dress codes and inquisitive v intrusive small talk to consider. Personally, I love a 4am finish, dissolve in the face of trying to deliver dinner to the table before 10pm, love flirting with strangers, hate awkward set-ups and loathe being asked to squeeze in for a photo.

Yikes. Too much. And troubles in big fests too? CAMRA has announced that the “Great British Beer Festival is taking a year off in 2024 but will return in 2025.” And Eoghan shared that:

…its Belgian equivalent Zythos also not going ahead in 2024. Zythos moved from Leuven to Kortrijk in 2023 but now cancelled next year, citing “organisational reasons” Will it ever come back?

If you need a drink, just get ye to a proper establishment. The Mudge has again noted the Merseyside Pub Guide from Phil Wieland which, as promised, “goes in the pubs where no other bloggers dare to venture“… like he did this week:

On my previous visits I have noted that this is a football fans’ pub and I recall many years ago during the Euros finding all the regulars with red white and blue face paint and silly hats.  Today was no exception, and the place was busy with noisy Liverpool fans, all very happy as their team was now winning.  No face paint this time! I watched the last few minutes of a rather scrappy game until the whistle went with 102 on the clock, welcomed with a very loud cheer.  More cheers when we learned that that LFC were now top of the league, albeit possibly for only two or three hours. The atmosphere gradually calmed down a little but it remained a lively pub, another proper boozer.

And Jessica herself of B+B has sent a dispatch from Sheffield, a trip that has become an annual affair, where she met up with Retired Martin himself:

First, Ray was unfortunately unwell, so this ended up being a solo trip for me. Secondly, it turns out I can’t come to Sheffield two years in a row and ignore The Rutland Arms, even if that does break the new-pubs-only rule. Martin has handily written up the first part of my weekend. (Yes, I am the mysterious “guest from Bristol”.) He suggested a few meeting spots and I went for The Old Shoe, on the grounds that it was central and promised a good range of beer. It’s always interesting to see how a newly-opened pub can compete in a well-established drinking culture. I’d say based on a short visit that this is a great addition to the city centre.

And… and , for the immediate double, the brawny brains of B+B posed an excellent question that is not unrelated:

Are the pubs dead because there’s a Wetherspoon nearby? Or is the Wetherspoon busy because the pubs nearby are dead?

Check out the comments, too: “My purely anecdotal observation on the two huge Wetherspoons in central Dublin is that they attract a crowd that wouldn’t be in proper pubs otherwise….” There’s sort of a proper theme, then, this week: considering the current sense of the relative rough and tumble of competition and the resulting success of pubs as opposed to fretting about their openings, closings and, you know, intentional burnings down. What makes them work? Does getting yourself known as a fan base hangout really work?

Has a second and perhaps more unexpected theme arise this week? What to make of how very weird it would be if US craft beer took warmly to supplying murderous dictatorships as a way in part to keep their heads above water – but that’s what we learned might be affot this week from Dave Infante in VinePair:

Parr is emphatic that he doesn’t want craft breweries to sell their beer in China, or anywhere else, unless it makes good business sense. “Brewers need to consider whether they have the capacity, the product range, the pricing, and the resources to support all those things like regulatory compliance, marketing, a trade relationship when that could otherwise be supporting your domestic market,” he says. But the potential upside is considerable. “China is certainly a huge market … [and] despite the economic challenges, there’s a segment of the population that has the money to pay for premium products.”

I hear officers’ mess halls in the the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China might have an interest in warm overly hopped IPAs and exploding fruity kettles sours. Would you take that money? But…  seriously? Has craft gotten so stunned, so needy that it hugs the despot and rejects the lessons of  New Belgium and Kirin dabbling into the fridges of the approved classes of Myanmar? And along a lighter, tempered version of something similar, we may have already have a winner for top junket of 2024 as Jeff explained:

I’ve been invited to give the keynote speech at this year’s Central European Brewers Conference in Budapest. I’ve never visited this city routinely described as one of Europe’s most beautiful, so I’m psyched… I’m going to be speaking on a topic dear to my heart—how culture manifests—but the talk will have a special focus on why that’s relevant to individual breweries… It is a smaller event, which means you’ll have real access to the folks on the ground, including luminaries like Evan Rail, who is the conference MC; see the list of speakers at the links above…

No doubt Hungarians of the current politico-cultural bent with be keen on any illustrations of cultural nationalism made manifest. Try the Tokaji but perhaps best not to mention the related regional imperial tensions. Premium drinks for autocrats.

These things on the edges speak to these times, I am sure. And somewhat relatedly I am left wondering if this is something of a buried lede – but it might be better to arrange the data before the thread begins. Not quite sure of the point other than perhaps the perpetual craft grope 4 hope demographic thing. So… will they or won’t they?

We’ve known for years that underage drinking has been dropping. Monitoring the Future data shows the % of 12th graders drinking has been dropping for years. So it’s no surprise that 16-22 year old Gen Zers would drink less than Millennials.

By comparison, a nice bit of work in Pellicle this week by Courtney Iseman on the cask ale scene in New York City. NYC has been a beer town for over 400 years and it was nice to see a proper bit of research into the recent history of cask there:

Having also tracked bars with cask beer for his blog Gotham Imbiber, Alex confirms there were 67 New York bars serving cask pre-Covid. The pandemic certainly acted as a nail in the coffin for cask beer, moving imbibing into the home. But in New York City, it’s safe to say that while plenty of bars had carried on with perhaps intermittent cask programs, the fervour had cooled. The beer scene had moved into brewery taprooms, suddenly allowed to exist after New York governor Andrew Cuomo signed The Craft NY Act into effect in 2014.

Before the Gotham Imbiber was a blog it was a ‘zine (as this 2007 BeerAdvocate article describes) that identified where cask could be found throughout the city. So I am not sure that the statute was as critical as other factors like higher commercial rents or simply the entertainment competition in the Big Apple. Cask ale and taprooms also predate that date but they were more to be found upstate in Albany, Syracuse and Buffalo like the taproom in 2006 at Middle Ages or at the dearly departed Clarks the year before. Today’s story shares how the arc of history in this century shows how NYC lagged in matters of good beer behind even the rest of the state, leading us to where we are today.

And Gary has been posting another series on a single topic, this time ads from 1924-25 promoting the somewhat vague Barclay’s Lager advertising slogan “Still Discussing It!” which turns out to be a bit of a then new and modern conversation:

…the theme continues of Mrs. Brown showing an equal if not greater interest than her husband in Barclay’s beer. Not all the ads stress the wife’s independence. In one, while sharing (always) the husband’s taste in beer an alterior motive appears, to butter him up for a post-meal shopping spree. In another, impressed by the panoply of financiers in the chic restaurant, she muses she might accompany one to Throgmorton Street (home of the Stock Market) to make an investment sure to pay off, a flutter she calls it.

The characters here are more affluent and carefree but still the structure of the campaign remind me of the ads from two decades later during the war sent out by Labatt under the “Isn’t It The Truth” slogan where the main voices are women working towards their own liberation along with freedom from military dictatorship… hmm… there’s that word again…

Back to Yuletide merriment, Will Hawkes in his December edition of London Beer City newsletter for December set out to find out if the touristy Kensington landmark The Churchill Arms truly is really London’s most Christmassy pub by comparing it to “The Dog and Bell (‘Dog’, locally) in Deptford”:

The best seat in the house – inside the door on the left, dark-green banquettes and a great view of the bar – is untaken. It’s not as busy as at The Churchill, and the voices are all English or Irish, but it shares that key quality: a sense of carefree happiness, of reality postponed.  Across the way is a family – grandparents, daughter and two kids (“Tell grandad what colour the loos are … Millwall blue aren’t they?”) – while the regulars are seated at the bar in the new bit of the pub, chiselled out of the next-door building a few years back. There are hops above the bar, alongside copious Christmas decorations – sliced oranges, pine cones, pine leaves – hanging thick and lustrous from the walls and ceilings. 

Nice… and finally, maybe not so nice but still one of the funnier yet still sadder tweets was posted by Jessica Mason this week, one that bears preserving should Twex get what it deserves:

EXCLUSIVE: I’m approaching the final week of work for 2023. Glorious men of Twitter, you have JUST ONE WEEK LEFT to tell me how to do my job. Knock yourselves out. #micropenisdetectedonaisle3

As regular readers may have picked up, I have a lot of time for Jessica Mason’s writing about beer business as well as the surrounding culture and so I read this mindful of how it reflects not only (1) the sick abuse she bears personally or even (2) a broader comment on the pervasive misogynistic shit that women in beer have to put up with but, let’s be honest, (3) also a reflection on how good beer culture has a fair share of pricky pathetic fifth-rate obstructive domineers (and, yes, perhaps even -atrixes) who actually bring little to the table but still screw things up for others by blocking the way for others who are more interesting and deserving. Suffice it to say, after all these years now, I am not thrilled with the effectiveness of the curre “state of social advocacy work in craft beer.”

There. Next week, the Yuletide roundup. And remember, ye who read this far down to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (97) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (909) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,426) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (164), with unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. All in all I now have a bit of dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat and accept that BlueSky is catching up in “the race to replace.” Even so and although it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing or perhaps only waiting to discuss beer:

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

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