Category: Pennsylvania

The Flip Flops Flappin’ Cold Beer Cracking Summ-Summ-Summertimin’ Beery News Notes


Jumping right into it, last Friday’s cartoon strip, a snippet of which site above, in Pellicle by Dave Bailey mocking craft brewery culture was something of a milestone, a bookending of sorts finally… finally confirming those inside the bubble understand what the greater world knew in 2014 when that New Yorker cover of the hipster craft beer bar was published.* The details of all the embarassing characteristics that Bailey notes as he roasts craft culture were not so publicly discussed back in 2014- even if they were obviously known to those present and paying any attention. We are told that the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there but we perhaps forget how, even over one short decade, how quickly those differences may develop.

Fortunately, Boak and Bailey** have saved you all the need to look back to through this blog’s archives just there to the right to trace all the changes which arouse at least in the UK during those intervening times. They’ve provided us with a real gem of an update on their book Brew Britannia also, conveniently,  published in 2014. It’s a beast of a bit but I am not going to ruin it for you so much as, I hope, give you reason to go dive into the full +10,000 word essay:

This long post is an attempt to fill in some of the gaps and hold ourselves to account: what did we get right, what did we get wrong, and what took us totally by surprise? More importantly, it’s about gaining some perspective. It’s easy to mistake the fact that we personally have become older and more jaded to mean that there has been a decline in the quality and vibrancy of the beer scene. Maybe there has, maybe there hasn’t – but there must be some objective facts we can use to test our gut feelings. We know other people have different perspectives, though, so we’ve also asked as many people as possible for their thoughts.

To answer all those questions, B+B applied their list of eleven indicators from 2013 of whether a community has a healthy beer culture and drew some thoughtful conclusions. Go have a look.

Speaking of lists, Jeff wrote one this week that got me thinking, too. It was a list of his top ten beer drinking experiences. I would re-arrange their order, kick a few out and add some others but the exercise is quite interesting. Consider his #10 “In the first half of a sporting event in which you are not deeply invested”:

Sporting events are festive affairs, and drinking a beer early in a game helps elevate the sense of occasion. It builds a mood of camaraderie, binding the watchers in the clink of glass. The beer itself tastes of promise—of the next couple hours, of a win, of greasy food and more beer. By the second half of any sporting event (later innings in baseball, third period in hockey, etc), the drinking event has become a sporting event and attention turns fixedly to the game. Ah, but those first minutes…

See, I see that differently – not as a linear experience but one that turns on the flow of each game. Reminded me of a 1987 Canada Cup pre-tourney hockey game between Canada and the US that I watched with pals. We ended up (like UTTER MORONS) sitting in the bar during the third period drinking beer with our backs turned to the ice because Canada was up something like double digits to diddle over the Americans. Why were we morons? Because Gretsky and Lemieux were on the ice at the same time. And between 27% to 73% of all the other hockey players who I’d ever worshiped were also right there playing. But, you know, there was beer over there on the concourse… soooooo…

Martin marked the fifth anniversary of the passing of his friend Richard Coldwell with a bit of a public service – a report on the gumwashery of Thornbridge‘s brewing of Jaipur on their new old fashioned Burton Unions saved from wreckers… or perhaps the storage locker… earlier this year:

Richard wasn’t a great fan of Burton’s beers, but would have had intelligent things to say about the Thornbridge “saving” of the Burton Unions this year. You’ll know I couldn’t care less about history or the brewing process, and argue the quality of the publican is by far the biggest determinant of the quality of the beer in your glass (see : the improvement of Bass in the hands of a smaller number of committed landlords). On Saturday, back in Sheff from Italy, I thought I’d better taste the new Jaipur at my nearest Thornbridge pub…

He approved. As did John aka TBN himself when he first encountered his first fonio:

Have you heard of fonio? If you haven’t yet, you will, at least according to Brooklyn Brewery’s Garrett Oliver who has become an advocate for this climate-resistant African grain. Its most important attribute is that you can make beer from it, which will be terribly useful once the Earth decides it can’t do barley any more. Garrett had come to St James’s Gate to make a fonio-based collaboration beer, although that won’t be out until much later this year. He also brought over some beers of his own to share.

He liked it too. You know, I am not sure whether “quite a shock; incredibly soft and chewy” or “if it’s saving the planet, then all the better” is higher praise. Clearly both worth seeking out.

Ron has been looking for a new local and last Saturday found himself with his gang checking out a really good looking stop in Amsterdam called Soundgarden – offering us a pretty good photo essay:

Soundgarden is slightly unusual as it backs directly onto a canal. Which gives it a nice view. And also means that customers can arrive by boat. Which is exactly what happened not long after we got there. How cool is that? Unlike the garden itself. Which was pretty warm. Too warm for my liking. And with almost no shade. That’s a mark against the pub. The inside was totally empty. Which meant I could take lots of nice photos without people getting in the way. I won’t bother trying to describe how it looks. I’ll let the photos do the talking.

Similarly – except a whole country away – Franz Hofer posted a study of a beer garden in Munich with this startling geolocating sentence:

Once the location of the smallest royal blacksmith, the Swiss-style hut at the edge of the estate allegedly served as Ludwig and Lola’s love den.

Now, let’s set all that traipsing wandering about the taverns and such aside. We live in a real world and many in the UK today will be needing one or celebrrating with one as it is election day. One poll by More in Common in particular caught my eye when it hit the sosh-meeds.  It detailed voting intentions according to a fabulous sixteen different favourite clinky-drinkies. So we learn that cider drinkers prefer Labour by an advantage of only half that of IPA fans. Almost twice as many SNP voters prefer shandy to whisky. But Sherry drinkers?  Totes Tory. They’ll be sucking back the sticky raisiny toffee gak tonight!

Speaking of the unhappy, The Times had an extended investigation into the new eco-lairds of Scotland including, as noted hereabouts last April, one Mr. Watts semi-formerly of BrewDog and his failed forestry project:

At Kinrara, Dave Morris, 77, of the Parkswatch Scotland blog, points to the dead sticks which should have grown into great Scots pines. “We should not be planting in the uplands,” he said. “There is inevitable disturbance of the soils which brings peaty ground to the surface, leading to carbon loss for decades.” Morris is furious that BrewDog received nearly £700,000 of money for the project, arguing that the land should have been left to regenerate naturally. A few metres away from the dead and dying saplings, young trees are thriving, pushing their way through the heather. Without the chomping teeth of deer or sheep to tear them down, these trees are growing naturally. All it needed was a fence to keep the animals away.

I’ve mentioned from once in a while that I worked teaching English in Kołobrzeg, Poland back in 1991 but probably didn’t mention the time I watched a construction crew out the window of the classroom. Two things caught my eye. First, they used the trunks of pine trees, bark and all, as a form of embedded rebar as they poured the building’s concrete floors. “How long until that collapses?” I thought foreshadowing a future dabbling in construction law. Second, there was a regular flow of empty beer bottles crashing down upon the work site’s ground level many floors below as the crew kept themselves… hydrated all day long. “Lordy… Lordy…” thought I. I recalled this scene when I read the news about the neghbouring Czechs cutting back on their intake as reported by Jessica Mason:

The average number of beers drunk per capita in 2023 was 256 beers per head, which is equal to approximately 128 litres, reflecting similar figures to the lowest average consumption figures ​​during the pandemic restrictions and the lowest record number in 1963. Radio Prague International (RPI) also highlighted how in 2005, beer consumption reached a record high when Czechs consumed 163.5 litres, or 327 beers per head. Consumption per person was 153 litres in 2009 holding at 140 litres for nearly a decade before falling to 129 litres in 2021… In 2021, the Czech Statistics Office estimated that beer consumption that year was the lowest since 1989 when it had been at around 151 litres per person and even jumped above 160 litres momentarily in the 90s.

So… is that really all that bad a thing for Czechs? I have consulted Max‘s dispatches for clues.

Pellicle‘s feature this week is a piece on a pub called The Swan with Two Necks by Katie, which contains some great detail of the life of a license holder living under pub chain owership thirty years ago:

One day in 1992, they received a letter welcoming them to the PubMaster group, their only notification that Whitbread had sold their pub. After a while of trying to acclimatise to their new owners, it seemed like they might need to move on again. “We just didn’t get on with PubMaster,” Steve says. “There was such a reduced selection of beer, restrictions on what we could and couldn’t buy, it was just an aggravation all the time. It just wasn’t what we set out to do.” PubMaster agreed to talk with them to see how they could help improve the situation. Before the talk was had, Christine and Steve received another letter. It read: ‘Welcome to Jennings’… “They came to me and said they had a tenancy agreement with Whitbread through PubMaster, and that they wanted me to change from partial to full-time leasehold with no compensation. And then PubMaster was bought by Cafe Inns, who were even worse.

Philadelphia magazine had an article this week on an unexpected subject, the city’s obsession with that most basic of drinks that turned out to be well suited for the most basic of bars. The drink? Twisted Tea:

The price point for Twisted Tea was lower than that for any beer they were selling, says Keenan’s owner and Grays Ferry native Scott Keenan, meaning he could sling Teas for two bucks and still turn a decent profit. Combine the price with the drink’s lack of carbonation — if you’re reading this and have somehow never been down the Shore in your early 20s, that translates into “dangerously drinkable” — and Twisted Tea was primed to explode. “It just ran like wildfire,” Keenan recalls. The numbers were eye-watering: Every week that summer, he’d sell between 350 and 500 cases of Twisted Tea. Reread that sentence, then do the math. Every week, one bar in North Wildwood was slinging between 8,400 and 12,000 bottles of Twisted Tea, outselling everything but Miller Lite.

Finally, some wise words from Jamie Goode on the subject of the role of a critic when it comes to wine which are worth thinking about in relation to good beer, too:

…what people come to a professional for is an honest opinion, built on solid tasting experience and good taste. They are looking for the model critic as described by David Hume: someone free of bias, with good sensitivity, and good aesthetic sense. Low involvement consumers are well served by the wines they are being sold. High involvement consumers – the people who are listening to the critics – are well served by critical opinion. That there might be a discrepancy is not a problem: this will always exist in any field, whether it is food, or fashion, or art, or movies. Popular taste often departs from critical opinion, but this doesn’t mean that the critics are out of touch or irrelevant. They are all part of a larger ecosystem and are doing their job. A food critic concentrating on fast food and large chains is entirely useless. So is a wine critic endorsing and second guessing the tastes of people with no real interest in wine who just want something cheap that doesn’t taste bad.

Does beer have those principles? Critical opinion writers? Or just… you know… We can think about the question for a while before we meet again next time. Send in your essays on that point by Tuesday at 5 pm. Marks deducted for late submissions.

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

*Along with of course, the crowd pleasing cult classic The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer – A Rant in Nine Acts of earlier that same year.
**Yes, yes – no relation.
***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 (929) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,484) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear. 

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!!!

A Brief But Paradigm Busting Edition Of These Beery News Notes For Mid-November

I’ve been mentioning that beer writing seems to have gone a bit quiet this autumn and – horrors – it’s gotten into such a state of the doldrums that Stan’s booked off until the first Monday in December. Lordy. What to do, what to do? Scour the globe? Look near and far. That’s what we always do. When we are not sifting clues we scour the globe. Beer helps. Had this one on Saturday, bought in Quebec as a standard shelf item with a reasonable price tag. Not sure why we can’t have the nice things they get at the SAQ…

UPDATE: Lew posted a new podcast. Normally I would not encourage podcasting… because… you know… but look at all of what he’s done on one short trip!

Hanover may have thought it was a frontier town, a market town, a transportation hub. But the peckish German-Americans who populated it in the late 1800s and early 1900s knew better. Their ovens and kettles, and a vague hunger between meals, were destined to make Hanover known as Snack Town!  My friend Dave Dreese and I hit town on our way to Baltimore, and wow. We visited two of the biggest snack food companies in America, two very old school hot dog joints, and a great butcher shop with their own smoked sausage and cheese. And of course, all those snacky eats need beer, so we hit the town’s six breweries. I interviewed the man who makes the last hand-rolled pretzels in Snack Town, Kevin Bidelspach of Revonah Pretzels.

Two hot dog joints… “two very old school hot dog joints”… Lordy…

Resuming normal service: I am starting off this week with a news item from Jessica Mason published at The Drinks Business at the end of last week. I like this because it acknowledges that values can clash in the world of craft – and not the ones you might think at first:

… even though the regulations and consumer pressures have led to sustainability fast-becoming a “licence to operate”, rather than a “nice-to-have” novelty, beer trends for variety were contrary to the guidance… Stronger consumer appetite for variety over volume has undoubtedly created commercial opportunities for breweries, but producing up to 100 different varieties of beer in a large-scale plant means that short production runs will require more energy and water.

I like that – push back on all thing to all paradigms. The bulk of beer brands are not only fleeting but gotten a bit lazy. Add a sauce or swap the hop so you can change the label.  Even the best brewers who attempt to make all things for all people are putting out too many clangers. Focus.

Factoid: One beer in Iceland costs the same as nine beers in Hungary.

In science news, a yeast strain has also pushed back… or perhaps been pushed back by the lab coat wearers at the University of Wisconsin:

A key trait of yeasts used in beer production is the ability to break down maltose, the most abundant sugar in the material used to brew beer. The team chose a yeast strain that had evolutionarily lost this ability despite possessing many of the genes required for maltose metabolism. After running evolution experiments growing the yeast on maltose and selecting decedents that thrived, the lab’s S. eubayanus yeast reacquired the ability to eat maltose. 

Hmm… I know that these things are important but wouldn’t starting with the strain that could do the thing you wanted it to do in the first place have been a faster way to get to your goal? Are they just jerking the poor things around?!?! [ED.: …Just a minute… let me check my high school science grades again… hmm… yes, you’re right. I don’t have a clue.] Perhaps similarly in terms of getting somewhere, Mudgie pitched something that, to be honest, I had never considered, probably because it has not yet come from the oracle Elon’s mouth:

…surely one of the main potential benefits of driverless cars is that they will extend mobility to people who are unable to drive themselves either through old age or medical conditions. It is also impossible to have driverless taxis – often suggested as one of the main applications – if there always needs to be a competent driver on board…  If an automated taxi can travel without a driver to its pick-up point, then surely it can carry a passenger who is incapable of driving, whether through age, infirmity or intoxication. And if a taxi can do it, why not your own driverless car?

I’m not sure I want to live in that world… but if you give it a quarter century that’s not likely going to be an issue. Question: who cleans up the vom? Conversely, certainly in quesions of personal control, my favourite character is all of beer writing is Delores, Ron’s wife, and this week we learned a bit more about her and her ways when travelling:

Luckily I have Dolores with me. Who, from years of travelling on overcrowded Deutsche Reichsbahn, is an expert in elbowing her way to grab seats. It’s not too difficult as the train isn’t totally packed… “Andrew would have loved it here as a kid. We could have just left him looking out of the window all day.” Dolores isn’t wrong. I’m tempted to do that myself…. Weighed down both by shopping and the kilo of pork in my belly. I sip on whiskey while Dolores flicks through the German channels. We only get five on the Amsterdam cable.

The next day, we read “Dolores has the morning all planned out” which is great news given I have been out and about with Ron and know what the possibilities really are and what needs to be done about it. I was not at all reminded of Ron when I saw this interesting comment on the reasons behind all the Bud Lite $105 million-a-year sponsorship deal with the UFC:

He said: ‘It’s like this whole Bud Light deal. People are talking s*** now. “Sell out” and all this s*** they f***ing say. Believe me, I’m the furthest f***ing thing from a sell out…’I look deeper than just f***ing “oh you know, they did this can with whoever”. I don’t give a s***. You guys think you’re all looking for an apology, they ain’t going to f***ing apologise to you.

My. A couple of bits of experimental hop news came out this week. Stan (because he was not totally slacking) issued another edition of Hop Queries including a few invitations to help with leading edge research like this:

Do not feel left out. The Hop Research Council currently has more than 2,500 pounds each of three varieties that have advanced to elite status available for brewers to use. They expect feedback. That will help determine which ones, if any, get named and become available to farmers. The hops cost $9.25 a pound in 11-pound and 44-pound packages and $10 a pound in one-pound packages. Each has two names: HRC-002 (2000010-008), HRC-003 (W1108-333) and HRC-004 (201008-008). HRC-003 has been top rated in early brewing trials, with intense ripe peach, mango and other tropical aromas. 

Here is the form to send in your request to participate in this program. The other hops story appeared in Pellicle where Adam Pierce wrote about a hop called Strangs #7:

The taste of Strang’s #7 is like no other British hop I have experienced before. It has a kaleidoscope of flavours from pithy orange marmalade, tangerine, a touch herbal; dill, lemongrass, a hint of pear drops, sweet bubblegum and finally the “controversial” coconut note, similar to the one found in the Japanese Sorachi Ace and North American American Sabro varieties.

Note: the role of beer league hockey’s most important team member explained.

And the latest edition of London Beer City was released by Will Hawkes last Friday and includes a short study of Eko Brewery at Unit 2A-2, Copeland Park, Peckham:

Eko bucks the trend by drawing on African drinking culture and brewing techniques and recipes, plus ingredients such as palm sugar, cassava, yam and hops grown in South Africa. “The main focus is to incorporate African ingredients in the beer,” says Anthony, “but the first beer we made [in 2018] didn’t have any African ingredients – but it was low bitterness, low carbonation, to ensure it went well with food, which is the way beer is enjoyed in Africa.” Anthony grew up in Peckham and his family comes from Nigeria (Eko is the Yoruba name for Lagos), while Helena’s are from Congo. That’s had a big impact on her approach to beer. “In Congo, women drink a lot of beer,” she says. “My mum, my aunties drank beer when I was growing up. A lot of the women in my family drank beer more than the men.”

I love auntie culture. I had aunties. And aunts too. Two separate categories.

Speaking of assigning categories, a court ruling about beer from Canada’s top court was published in the Ontario Gazette this week, months after its actual release by the Supremes. Facts are always fascinating:

A constable of the Ontario Provincial Police (“OPP”) formed the intention on a highway to randomly stop the respondent to ascertain his sobriety, and followed him onto a private driveway to do so. Once the constable approached the respondent, he observed obvious signs of intoxication and the respondent indicated that he might have had 10 beers. Two subsequent breathalyzer tests revealed that the respondent’s blood alcohol concentration was above the legal limit.

Why did this get to the highest court in the land? The random stop… tsk-tsk… nope… naughty naughty:

…the police officers did not have statutory authority under s. 48(1) of the HTA to follow the respondent onto the private driveway to conduct the random sobriety stop. Accordingly, the police officers breached the respondent’s rights under s. 9 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms…

Also here in Ontario, @starbeer of the Toronto Star is speculating and rumour mongering again (based largely on things like “investigative journalism” and “fact gathering”!!!). As we’ve been monitoring for the best part of the decade, we the agreement governing our semi-monopolistic big brewery owned sales outlet is coming up and it appears that the government is not going to renew the deal with the imaginatively named The Beer Store (TBS). This effectively places all beer retailing policies on the table. I don’t have the text of the Star article (as it’s behind a pay wall and I save my pennies for other things like cheese) but BlogTO is providing a helpful summary of the issues including:

The agreement as it stands now expires in 2025, and this year is the cutoff for when the government must notify affected parties if it is not being renewed. And experts are noting that the Beer Store has been downsizing and selling off multiple properties in recent years, cutting four per cent of its footprint… While talk of the vendor potentially closing is nothing more than a rumour at this point, many citizens appear to feel strongly about the subject, with the vast majority celebrating the end of what they see as one of many problematic monopolies or oligopolies in the province. Then there are the thousands of jobs that will be lost if the Beer Store goes under, and the fears that beer prices could actually end up going up.  

Concidentally… as most things I report in a week are… big brewer Labatt is expanding its London Ontario plant with a 27 million investment:

The new machines will see beer packaged using paperboard — which is one layer of paper compared to recycled cardboard which is three layers of heavy paper. It will also use  less glue than older machines… “It allows us to get our products to market for consumers in the most sustainable way possible…” the new tanks will also expand the capability to ferment beer by over 59 million litres — the equivalent of 24 Olympic sized swimming pools… “Our London brewery is the largest in Labatt’s network, brewing over 40 per cent of the beer we brew for Canadians, and this significant investment boosts the facility’s production capacity and sustainability performance…”

Someone is optimistic. And look – there it is again: sustainablility. Greenwashing? Cost cutting? Or real?  Going back to the question of the TBS agreement, who will take on the bottle recycling the TBS does now if a deal doesn’t continue? Who knows. But the province is moving to a general scheme of producer paid recycling generally so maybe that’s at play. Another question: can price rises be stopped in at least one respect? See, the currents scheme has for almost a century levelled prices throughout the province. Meaning a beer bottled next to one TBS retail outlet costs the same as when sold that beer is sold at a remote TBS outlet. Effectively, southerners and urban folk subsidize transportation costs for more remote Ontarians. The roads are still poor and beer is heavy. Back in 2012, the CBC reported that as an odd consequence booze is relatively far cheaper in northern Ontario.

Relatedly, Victim of Maths has shown a similar phenomenon affecting “Today’s Britain Today”*:

Arguments about the affordability of alcohol during the cost-of-living crisis also don’t seem to hold much water. The fact that alcohol prices rose at lower than inflation levels means that even a stagnation in disposable incomes didn’t stop alcohol becoming *more* affordable.

As per usual, he provided a handy graph which I have included for your clicky pleasure. Note how beer in the UK becomes notably even more affordable compeared to wine and the hard stuff right around in the mid-2000s and becomes slowly more and more so. And concurrently climate change may be playing a role too – at least in terms of pure alcohol levels according to Jancis:

As the planet warms up and dries out, it is going to be increasingly difficult to make wines below 14% anyway. I recently attended a tasting of 32 red bordeaux from vintages 2011 to 2019 from the stocks of Justerini & Brooks, a traditional wine merchant not known for favouring flashy wines. Seven of these clarets had 14.5% on the label and two 15%. This would have been unimaginable in the last century.

And finally, just as the previous discussion was triggered by thoughts on the meaning of “full-bodied” in today’s market, Matthew Lawrence of Seeing the Lizards was posting at Twex and responded to the challenge to create a top ten list of beer euphemisms: 1. lively = overcarbonated; 2. easy drinking = flat; 3. juicy = sludge; 4. aged = musty; 5. light = tasteless; 6. fruity = syrup; 7. dank = weed soup; 8. imperial = loopy juice; 9. blonde = bland; 10. challenging = undrinkable. Like. Your list? You could even do one forensically in five year increments for craft beer. Talk among yourselves. I might add overly ripe exclamations as seen in reaction to beer news from “…utter joy to read…” to “…totally gutted by…” or even the “brewery is one of the most successful in the country…” Please.

Done. 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. But beware! Mr. Protz lost his Twex account five weeks ago and still hasn’t recovered his 27,000 followers. Update on my emotional rankings? Now, for me Facebook remains clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (80) rising up to maybe pass Mastodon (903) then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,429) hovering somewhere above or around Instagram (161), with unexpectly crap Threads (42) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Seven apps plus this my blog! That makes sense. I may be multi and legion and all that but I do have priorities and seem to be keeping them in a proper row. All in all I still am rooting for the voices on the elephantine Mastodon. And even though it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing 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

Anyone else? Anywhere else? Yes, you also gotta check the blogs, podcasts (barely!) and even newsletters 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 – I forgot to link to Lew’s podcast. Fixed. Here’s a new newsletter recommendation: BeerCrunchers. And  get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now much more occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back 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!

*My dream of a name for a current affairs show.

Addendum: Cream Beer Was Once Cream Beer

Over five years ago now I wrote the last of a few posts on the question of cream beer.  It co-existed with cream ale and Imperial Cream Ales and all the other creamy drinks. I traced it from Ohio in the 1840s back to NYC and Pennsylvania in the 1820s. It has been referenced as a predecessor to Kentucky Common. It was a thing until it wasn’t:

‘The scent of roses clings round it still.’ Cream beer, which was brewed by our best brewers, is, like the ale-sangaree, is a thing of the past. The rich cool beverage has gone out of use…*

Note: cream ale as not “a thing of the past” when that was written. One of the puzzles was whether it was something from Germany. One of the records I came across referenced “…cream beer, or Lauderschaum…” My problem was I thought there were two waves of German immigration to the USA which did not line up with this timing: the Pennsylvania Dutch from before the American Revolution in the mid-1700s and then the Germans of the 1840s escaping the backlash against other revolutions like George Gillig, bringer of lager.

So much pleased was I to come across that notice up at the top from the Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette of 19 Nov 1816. A notice for the sale of indentured servants, or German Redemptioners. To the right is another notice for Redemptioners from New York City in 1785. No brewers were mentioned in this group unlike the notice from thirty one years later. According to Wikipedia, redemptioners were continental European immigrants in the 18th or early 19th century who sailed most often to  Pennsylvania by selling themselves into indentured servitude to pay back the shipping company for the cost of the ticket. Including brewers.

Which means there was a third sort of immigration, one with a supply of brewers with contemporary brewing skills within the right time frame who would be able to make “…cream beer, or Lauderschaum…” just like Gillig was able to bring his lager brewing skills a few decades later.

Update: I should also link to this 2018 post about schenk and Bavarian beer.

*What the hell is ale-sangaree?

These Are The Mid-April Thursday Beery News Notes

Do we really need more beer? Olive Veronesi from Pennsylvania did. I’ve had five boxes of beer delivered over the last month or more as well as a case of wine. All local. But Olive wanted Coors Light. Olive got her beer. Direct. Everyone and everything is rearranging supply chains. New things are starting up here and there but work is stopping elsewhere and folk are furloughed. Thankfully, no 1949 pub cars on trains yet.

The Brewers Association has cancelled the World Beer Cup and taken the clever step of turning all samples into sanitizer:

With a warehouse full of beer slated for a canceled World Beer Cup competition, the Brewers Association had a dilemma—what to do with the beer. With social distancing measures and distribution laws in place, returning shipments infeasible, and inability to refrigerate the entries long-term, the options were limited… On Monday, a handful of Brewers Association staff and volunteers, led by BA executive chef Adam Dulye, began emptying thousands of cans and bottles of competition beer into 275 gallon totes and delivered the first batch of 1,500 gallons to the distilleries.

Beer judging is a bit like the dis-unified world title boxing organizations these days. Apparently there is also a thing called the World Beer Awards. They are not as of yet turning the beer into san-zi-hizer.* Think I will invent the World Beer Awards Cup.

The question of rat fink etiquette in these troubled times was the basis of a story coming out of Kent in England which was explained a scene in a local beer garden in this way:

“The same four members of staff have been working at the pub during the lockdown and we have been very strict on that – we have too much to lose to make mistakes. They were sitting down to eat their lunch, hence why they were not wearing gloves at the time.”

My take is, unfortunately, this was a clash of reasonable actions. The pub stays open to serve the community in as safe a way as possible and community members need to know it is OK to ask if the actions of others are keeping everyone safe.

Retired Martin provided us with a similar session from the pre-times but with one difference: more drunk members of the affluent end of society who prove that ai nice country pub garden is “where you get the upper-class intoxication the middle-classes just can’t pull off“!

From brewing history, a lovely tale from the early days of the new American republic of the first elephant that sailed to the USA in 1796 – and her love of beer:

…the America was reportedly understaffed and under-stocked. Halfway through their trip, Crowninshield and his crew ran out of clean drinking water and were forced to give the elephant a dark ale, or porter, which is a heavy liquor made with browned malt. Other stories report that Crowninshield charged his New York spectators 25 cents to watch the elephant uncork and drink the dark beer…  the elephant uncorked the bottles with her trunk and would consume 30 bottles of porter a day.

Speaking of history, the Tandyman has been rummaging through his safe house and posting things he finds in storage – like this early reference to trendy new hazy beer from twenty years ago:

Today’s breweriana comes under the heading “Things I didn’t know I had”. A spirited defence of hazy beer by @marblebrewers.  Not dated, but I’m guessing around Year 2000. Happy to be corrected. 

And if you go back another 14 years, you will find the time John Clarke wrote about – a 12 pub crawl through Stockport in 1976:

I edit an award-winning local CAMRA magazine called Opening Times.  It was launched in June 1984 and has continued with only a couple of minor breaks (including the current one!) even since.  However this isn’t its first incarnation. A previous Opening Times appeared from around Feb-March 1976 to June-July 1977 and that’s where we are going today.

And speaking of more history, Gary has posted an interesting series of posts on British beer and British Burma:

Turning to the Second World War, beer again produces a story so outré one thinks only a novelist could have conceived it. It is the so-called mobile brewery introduced by Lord Louis Mountbatten (1900-1979). He was Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command, between 1943 and 1946. This brewery is specifically associated with Burma, although it may have been fielded elsewhere. The beer was intended for forward fighting units, not rest and recreation centres or other rear areas.

We had a nice email chat and discussed lentils.

Still with history, a beer jug from British North America in 1766, noticed care of Craig’s sharp eye on Facebook.

Last week, Ed posted something I like, something of a recent memory, a trigger for a good pointless argument:

In these difficult times it has been encouraging to see many people return to beer blogging. But there has been a noticeable lack of pointless arguments, which as we know is what the internet is for. So you’ll be pleased to hear I spotted in article in the IBD magazine where a German brewer gives his views on extraneous CO2. Always good for a pointless argument that.

Lars posted about a similar technical issue without all the argumentation – mainly because he used three options to figure out how to brew keptinis:

I visited Vikonys in Lithuania and saw how the Lithuanians there brew keptinis. The basic idea is straightforward enough: do a normal mash, then bake the mash in a huge Lithuanian duonkepis oven to get caramel flavours by toasting the sugars in the mash. This is important idea, because it’s a completely “new” type of brewing process that creates flavours you cannot make with normal techniques.

The hot news of the week is that the #BrewsBrothers show on Netflix really sucks. Jonathon started with this:

Just watched an episode of Brews Brothers on Netflix and if you value your life and the minutes you have left, you should probably use that time to watch anything else. Anything. You could go outside and watch bugs have sex or just lay face down on the ground and watch that.

We are told. It is garbage. Mr. B made it through 8 minutes and 38 seconds. I shall not bother.

And finally, Jordan spent time this last seven days of favorite pubs he is missing and included one of mine… and included a picture of me at the Kingston Brew Pub!

I’m fairly certain I had Dragon’s Breath Pale Ale for the first time in 1996. I would have been 16 at the time, and while I’d love to tell you that it was a moment when the heavens opened and Gambrinus reached down and tapped me on the shoulder, but really, I was more impressed with the lamb burger.

I take my lamb burger with blue cheese there.

Another week in the books. Remember there is more out there. Keep writing and keep reading. Check in with Boak and Bailey most Saturdays, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Laters!

*As known chez nous.

The “Here’s Your Hat – What’s Your Hurry, January?” Edition Of Beery News Notes

There is nothing I like about January. It starts with the worst holiday in the year and ends with ice five inches thick covering every corner of your property. Usually. It’s actually been a warmish winter with only a couple of sharp snaps into the -20C region. But it’s still January so I hate it. This week sucked on a number of levels: coronavirus, Kobe and even a cat named Jinx.* Yet is will be March four weeks next Monday. So that is good. Did you need me to explain how the calendar works? Is that why you come here? Probably not. Not that you need me to explain anything else… and yet I do… week after week. Like this =>

I didn’t see much about beer in the news, frankly, but someone forgot they drove onto a ferry near here so it wasn’t all about zippo – but then I did see that photo up there from Lars’s trip to a museum in Oslo:

Saw this in Oslo Historical Museum today: the Tune stone, 4th century. Raised in memory of Wodurid, “the bread lord”, by his three daughters, who brewed the funeral ale.

There is more in Wikipedia Norske-style. I can’t read a word of it but it’s still really interesting. I did notice that Norwegian for “log in” is “logg inn” which is really, you know, a bit lazy on their part.

And there was that “the sky is falling!” article on the craft beer industry in what is called our national newspaper… except isn’t really. But I really liked one thing in it, this stat about the US craft beer market:

…major brewers have acquired the equivalent of 7 million to 8 million barrels of production as they purchased previously independent companies and added them to their rosters. That’s a significant shift in a roughly 25-million-barrel industry…

So one-third of craft is now macro.  And macro-craft and Sam Adams is more than half of craft. Which is weird. But exactly as I suspected…

And Beth just had to remind us that we are coming up to the second anniversary of glitter beer which come right before the second anniversary of the end of glitter beer. And she noted the diversity diversion trend applies to craft beer.**

Plus Jordan got some regional state-run media attention this week with his recreation of an 1830s old ale from what was York, Upper Canada but is now Toronto, Ontario:

The recipe was put together from notes in a diary by William Helliwell — the brewer at Todmorden Mill in the 1820s and 30s. Todmorden Mill was located at the bottom of Pottery Road. “The great thing is that all of the brewing details, all the detail that makes the recipe for this beer is sprinkled throughout that diary,” St. John told CBC News. “He’s not recording it because he’s keeping track, he’s recording it because it’s just part of his day-to-day life. He’s really more interested in the girl next door.”

Wag.

And Mudge semi-fisked the stats about UK pubs losses/gains including this assertion of what really is the obvious:

A few years ago, Pete wrote an angry blogpost in which he called racism over the suggestion that had made that, in some areas, the increasing Muslim population had been a major factor in the decline in pub numbers. However, it was pointed out in the comments that this wasn’t racism, but a simple question of fact. If the proportion of people in the population who don’t drink alcohol, especially in public, increases, then inevitably the demand for pubgoing will decline. He later deleted the post, and now accepts the point in his article.

Note #1: quaff…

1510s (implied in quaffer), perhaps imitative, or perhaps from Low German quassen “to overindulge (in food and drink),” with -ss- misread as -ff-. Related: Quaffed; quaffing. The noun is attested by 1570s, from the verb.

Note #2:  -able…

…there are 3 rules that control how the able/ible
suffix is used.
1. In original Latin words, the suffix was -bil- and the vowel was
the thematic vowel of the verb.
2. In new Latin words where the thematic vowel was no longer
apparent, the suffix was reanalyzed as -ible.
3. Words that are formed in English use -able. 

Result: Robin wins.

Yup:

The weird thing about the ‘return of bitter’ narrative is that at no point in the last decade has bitter been remotely difficult to find on sale.

Dr J noticed a person doing a good job:

The beertender at the new spot in Terminal E at CLT is personable AF and knows her tap list back and forth. Just watched her upsell 3 separate parties who asked Coronas/Bud Lights. Beer politics aside, she’s out here doing work and pouring lovely beers in clean glass. Props…

Day Bracey wrote about putting together a fest in Allentown but not that Allentown:

We’re talking Allentown, Pittsburgh, a predominantly black “redeveloping” neighborhood between Mount Washington and the South Side. By “redeveloping,” I mean “pre-gentrified.” They have a coffee shop and folks are actively looking to open a brewery there. Once that happens, the flood of white people will be inevitable and Pittsburgh will have a Lawrenceville 2.0, or rather an East LIBERTY 3.0. What better way to combat this than by filling the streets with 5,000 people who may be interested in gentrifying responsibly, with investments in both the people and the buildings? 

Neato. And finally, Katie watched a cooper bash a firkin and made a tiny movie.

So not all that much news this week. More anecdote, perhaps. Some tableau, even. Mainly maybe mise en scène. If you want more of that and some other stuff, too, don’t forget to check in with Boak and Bailey’s most Saturdays except for last week and weeks like last week, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast now as well! Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast.

*Note: Googling “Polk” and “Jinx” delivers some weird results, not all of which relate to unfortunate U.S. Presidential luck in the 1840s.
**As we see in diverting misery-level funding.

There Is A Thursday Between Easter Being Done And Taxes Being Due And Here’s The Beer News For That

The last Thursday of April. Didn’t we just start March five minutes ago? I’d love to know whose life is dragging these days because mine is flying by. Taxes last weekend (first draft and executive decisions.) Taxes next weekend (final draft, resignation and despair.)  What has that got to do with good beer culture? Well, for one thing, it’s been a week of fairly bad news which is not really having an effect but only in the sense that so few people are paying attention anymore. I try to be so damn cheery these weeks… but this one is going to be a bit of a study in shades of grey.

First, and as noted just too weeks ago, any idea that Canada will soon have free inter-provincial trade in booze can only be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of our constitution, a misunderstanding which is apparently shared by our hobbyist Prime Minister:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this year’s budget bill does what the Harper government could never do over ten years in office — it “frees the beer.” There’s just one problem with that claim: only the provinces can free the beer (or wine, or spirits). And most of them haven’t — including Premier Doug Ford’s Ontario, despite his government’s first budget being otherwise loaded with booze liberalization measures… “Unfortunately, in the parliamentary system that we have … we still have to struggle province by province.”

Speaking of disastrous misunderstandings of law, apparently the policy decision to place beer and other boozy treats in the corner stores of Ontario could cost us all $1,000,000,000 to get out of the relatively recent 2015 deal that kept beer and other boozy treats in the corner stores of Ontario. Quietly arranged without public input, the current deal locked in something for another decade – the vested right of big brewers to continue to leverage the decades-old interesting combo of a monopoly married to a cooperative to make heaps of dough. Who would give that up? No one.

In other gross misunderstanding news, Max has published a follow up on Joe Stange’s piece on the brand new used BrewDog brewery in Berlin. Go read both:

Though there’s no doubt that the delays and unexpected costs contributed its ultimate fate (and I sympathise Koch’s frustration with the builders), I believe that, even if everything had gone according to plan (which hardly ever does), the enterprise was doomed for the simple reason that it had arrived way too late. Let me explain.

What I don’t get is the idea that there was “frustration with the builders” at all. I do planning on construction projects on the owner’s side, sometimes a few times the value of this project and consulting project managers are always part of the planning process. And they carry errors and omissions insurance. Odd. And no one has contacted anyone in on the site other than the owner. Did not one beer journalist think to check with the construction company or the local permit issuing authorities to corroborate? Very odd. But who am I to say?

Similarly, big news for old big craft out of Pennsylvania as venerable craft cornerstone Weyerbacher is disappearing as we know it according to the reliably reliable (and far less drama-ridden than GBH) Brewbound:

Speaking to Brewbound, newly named president Josh Lampe, who previously served as chief operating officer and has supplanted brewery founder Dan Weirback as the company’s leader, said 1518 Holdings had acquired a 55 percent stake in the 24-year-old business… In addition to the new investment, the Easton, Pennsylvania-based craft brewery has also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in an effort to restructure its debt. In a press release, Lampe said 1518 Holdings believed the bankruptcy filing “was necessary in order to move forward quickly.”

I used to hunt our a few Weyerbacher ales over a decade ago, barrel aged things that were so smokey rich I swear I was drinking BBQ sauce. Insanity, Prophecy, Blasphemy all got reviews in the summer of 2007. So long ago, I called them oaked ales and not barrel aged. Then I lost interest in +/- 10% massive ales. Then a decade passes. Then the brewery ends up in bankruptcy. And now I am 56.

Keeping up the theme that things are on the move, I repost myself. In a comment at Stan’s I wrote how, while I can no longer distinguish between whether something is nonsense or that I just no longer care, I found this observation is weirdly interesting from the rebuttal to PKW thoughts on the BA no longer being on the right track:

Despite its flaws, the BA does present a threat to the capitalist paradigm that is bolstered by the current administration, and that is exactly what the economy and beer industry need in order to prevent corporatocracy and monopoly under the guise of a diverse portfolio. 

Does anyone actually think this? As I wrote, I have never equated any brewing with anything but something stoking a capitalist agenda. Or, you know, they go all Wayerbacher. Brewing is one of the classic examples of the capitalist construct whether in its multi-national form or the mom and pop. If anyone believes that the BA is working otherwise has to have been operating under at least a profound willful blindness for the last decade of irrational exuberance over market share stats.

Perhaps related, The Guardian has reported on the stalling of UK craft’s expansion:

Five years ago the sector was still in its “gold rush” stage, which made it easier for new brewers to start up and quickly gain market share, according to the research from the national accountancy group UHY Hacker Young. But with the industry maturing, it is now much harder for startups to gain a foothold as multinational brewers buy and invest in existing craft and artisan breweries, the group says. “We’re not saying that the market is shrinking, just the number of players is consolidating and sales growth is going to be harder to come by,” said James Simmonds, a partner at UHY Hacker Young

With eight new breweries opening in the UK in the last year compared to 390 in the year prior to that, well, it’s obvious that something has changed – but is anyone paying attention and considering the implications? Pete, interestingly and perhaps applying the same techniques beer writers use to consider the health implications of alcohol, has disputed the same figures as published in the Morning Advertiser, asking “why are people so keen to see the demise of the craft boom?“* More misunderstanding! I’d be more upset at perhaps the worst selection of a verb within a very short sentence including a quotation:

“Sales growth is going to be harder to come by,” exclaimed Simmonds.

Exclaimed! Of course, we are living with a core of writers who are keen to see and posit upon nothing but a perpetual craft boom so there is a likelihood for a disappointment. And it doesn’t mean that good beer is any less popular but, as Boak and Bailey noted last weekend, international craft beer “is a parallel dimension, clearly signposted, and easily avoided.” Is it perhaps time to say (like JFK did when declaring himself a doughnut half a century ago) that in a way we are all now Berliners? That craft beer in one sense is becoming too easily avoided?

Want to trigger fanboy unhappiness, mention something good in the LA Times Official Domestic Beer Power Rankings… like now finding myself attracted to this description of top ranking entry Busch Light:

Busch is so named because of the company that owns it. Anheuser-Busch InBev, with almost $55 billion in revenue in 2018, owns so many beer companies. In addition to all the Budweiser brands, they also have Corona, Michelob, Stella Artois, Beck’s, Rolling Rock and dozens of smaller brands. Ever wonder why a lot of your beers sort of taste the same? Busch Light is actually an outlier, though, in that it tastes like nothing at all. I literally wrote down “no tasting notes.” It doesn’t taste like anything. It tastes like Arrowhead water. It is refreshing, though!

I now want to try something with no taste. It’s not possibly possible, is it? Everything has some taste. Note also that according to 2007, back in my Weyerbacher years, all these beers were supposed to be dead in 2014 or so… yet they live on just as before. How many of the top craft breweries on 2007 can we say that about, that they live on just as before?

Finally, Ron has triggered a conversation which seems to have gone on to touch all the bases of craft fan unhappiness over his choice of recreation brewing partners. [Why do people over 14 years old even bother typing “haters gonna hate“?] Jeff linked to the 20 minute long backgrounder YouTube story of the Goose Island recreation of an early Victorian porter so, you know, now I don’t have to. I just hope Ron got paid a lot. At least more than producing the YouTube video.

Well, that is it. A weirdly ungleeful week. And it’s not just me. No bubble bursting with a bang. More like the whimper. Who stands for the cause these days? Who waves the banner for international big bulk craft proudly?? Hello? Anyone??? Hmm. Surely, someone can explain it all. Boak and Bailey on Saturday and Stan on Monday? We will have to wait to find out. Well, wait and finish those tax forms.

*This week alone, I might offer Stone and Weyerbacher but that would be a fact-based reality-based observation.

What Is… Or Was “Schenk” Beer Anyway?

That’s from the New York Herald of 28 May 1874.  Schenk is one of those words that flits around the edges of US beer history popping up in scientific tables, included in passing references before, say, 1900 that is one of the more irritating to research. One simple reason is that it was / is a reasonably common surname. And it may suffer from that problem of speculation in the guise of conclusion we see too much of. Footnotes and primary records are the regular cure for that ailment so let’s see what we can find out before we form the image in our mind’s eye.

First, let’s start relatively near the end. In every child’s favourite bedtime book, Johnson’s New Universal Cyclopaedia: a Scientific and Popular Treasury of Useful Knowledge, Volume 1, at page 442 we read this in the sub-article on “Lager Beer”:

Three varieties of this beer are made: (1) “Lager” or summer beer, for which 3 bushels of malt and IA to 3 pounds of hops are used per barrel, and which is not ready for use in less than from four to six months. (2) “Schenk” winter or present-use beer: 2 to 3 bushels malt and 1 pound hops per barrel; ready in four to six weeks. (3) Bock bier, which is an extra strong beer, made in small quantity and served to customers in the spring, during the interval between the giving out of the schenk beer and the tapping of the lager. In its manufacture 3 1/2 bushels of malt and 1 pound of hops per barrel are used, and it requires two months for its preparation. 

The encyclopedia was produced by the A.J. Johnson publishing house of New York City run by one Alvin J. Johnson. You can click on the image to the right where each of the  three sorts of beer are prefaced by the word “Munich” – which is interesting. What I also like about that passage is how well it aligns with one other reference from a completely difference source. In 2011, the terribly reliable Ron wrote a post about Vienna malt and quoted a long passage from the British Medical Journal 1869, vol. 1 and particularly from pages 83 to 84:

Generally speaking, the beer drunk in Austria and Germany has less alcoholic strength than that consumed here. The strongest Kinds, such as those known in Bavaria by the names “Holy Father”, “Salvator”, and “Buck”, rarely contain so much as 5 per cent, by weight of absolute alcohol. The store-beer, or lager bier, generally contains about 3.5 per cent., ranging from 4 to 2.8 per cent. ; and the ordinary beer for quick draught, schenk bier, corresponding in that respect to our porter, contains from 2.25 to 3.5 per cent, of alcohol. In the Austrian dominions, the beer is generally preferred rather weaker than in Bavaria ; but in Austria, the organisation of the breweries, and the system of conducting the business, have been developed in such a manner as to assimilate more to the vast establishments we have in this country.

Now, to my mind that looks like two sources from two English-speaking countries within nine years of each other each presenting as fairly authoritative information about a classification of beer from a third culture.* For present purposes, this is useful enough to rely upon as a first principle that, whatever it was, in the latter third of the 1800s, schenk was understood as and also the common word for German beer of a weaker sort than middling lager and stronger bock. It is considered to exist on a continuum and not of a difference class than lager or bock. It is an adjective as much as a noun. A degree of strength.

This is interesting. Boak and Bailey’s bibliographical guide to entering an enhanced understanding of lager included a 2011 article by Lisa Grimm – “Beer History: German-American Brewers Before Prohibition” – which states this about the entry of lager into the brewing culture of the United States:

Many historians attribute the first lager beer brewed in America to John Wagner, a Bavarian immigrant who set up shop in Philadelphia in 1840, though some of that notice is probably due to the chain of events he helped kick off—Maureen Ogle points out in her excellent Ambitious Brew that two German immigrants were brewing lager on a small scale in 1838 in Virginia.

This passage follows the statement “German brewers were a relatively late addition to the scene, arriving in large numbers only in the mid-19th century.” This timing aligns with the post I wrote about a rather alarming New York City Sunday afternoon attack on a public house** which I entitled “An Anti-German Anti-Lager* NYC Riot In 1840” with that asterisk. See, I assumed Germans and lager were common entrants into the NYC scene but as Gary, well, chided me (let’s be frank) in relation to… 1840 slightly predates the date lager is understood to have arrived in New York with George Gillig… or rather the date Gillig takes on brewing lager. It appears he brewed something else from 1840 to 1846.

Additionally, that bit brings up national pride right about now. Jordan, in part of our book Ontario Beer, wrote that the first brewer on record in Waterloo Township was George Rebscher who opened his establishment in 1837:

It should come as no surprise that Rebscher, as a German brewer from Hesse in Franconia, brought with him the brewing techniques that were used in his homeland. Rebscher was the first brewer of lager beer in North America. What we cannot know is exactly what the lager might have been like. It seems likely the unfiltered styles that were popular in Franconia might have represented some of the early output. Given what we know of brewing in the early stages of a settlement in Upper Canada, it is relatively unlikely that George Rebscher’s lager would have been made entirely of barley for the first year or two of production.

Which is all very interesting. In the 1843 edition of Flügel’s Complete Dictionary of the German and English Languages there is a translation given at page 508 for “schenk” and a number of related words.  You can read it if you click on the thumbnail to the right. And if you can struggle with the Gothic script you will see that it is related to ideas of draught and tavern. Sort of table beer, perhaps. By contrast, lager-bier is defined at page 353 as “beer for keeping, strong beer.” Jordan went on to suggest that the early beer from Rebscher was more zwickelbier than kellerbier based on the lack of aging. To my mind, based on the above, that sounds a lot like a beer that is more schenk than lager, too.

And… that’s it. Frankly whether it was Rebscher, Wagner or Gillig really does not matter for today’s purposes. These gents are all examples of the folk included in the wave of German-speaking immigrant to the western hemisphere in Q2 1800s. It’s The Beginning. The beginning of lager. Well, a beginning of what is called lager. The beginning of German beer in North America. New beer for a new wave of immigrants in the 1830s and 1840’s. Sorta. Sorta maybe. The problem with the story is that there are two key elements that exist in North America well before this genesis story: German beer and… Germans. See, the Germans who came to North America in the second quarter of the 1800s were not the first. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has summarized it this way:

The largest wave of German immigration to Pennsylvania occurred
during the years 1749-1754 but tapered off during the French and Indian Wars and after the American Revolution… By the time of the Revolutionary War, there were approximately 65,000 to 75,000 ethnically German residents in Pennsylvania. Some historians estimate the number as high as 100,000. Benjamin Franklin wrote that at least one-third of Pennsylvania’s white population was German.

Which is interesting. There was German beer of some sort and there were Germans not only well before lager shows up in America but plenty of Germans were before the American Revolution.  But they were not necessarily the same sort of Germans. As that piece states, the German immigrants of the 1830s and 1840s came from northern and eastern Germany and were Catholic whereas the earlier Pennsylvania Germans tended to come from the southern German principalities and were Lutherans or other sorts of Protestants. Which may well mean, then as now, the beer was different.

 

 

 

 

So, armed with that, let’s go further back. If we do, we see that “schenk” was a term with a prior history. As illustrated to above the far left, Heinrich Hildebrand used the term in his early 1700s philosophical treatise Jurisdictio Universa Secundum Mores Hodiernos Compendiose Considerata. You can see it there in Gothic German script as an illustration of his tenth hypothesis set out in Latin. And, no, I have no idea what he’s talking about either. “Schenk” also shows up, as up there in the middle, in this entry in a French language dictionary of German terms from 1788, the Neues Teutsches und Französisches Wörterbuch. And, to the upper right, here it is in an English-German dictionary from Britain published in 1800. So, schenk was a thing before lager came to the USA. At this point, not so much the adjective explaining relative strength. Note also how broad the various associated forms of the word are. In 1800, a tavern  keeper is a schenk or a schenke depending on gender. It has a meaning more its own than by the end of the 1800s.

Let’s go a bit lateral now. Bear with me. We saw a year and a half ago that in the 1820s there was something called cream beer being sold in New York which was associated with the Germans of Pennsylvania. A sort of fresh beer… draught… table beer perhaps. There is another term used around the same time – “Bavarian” – sometimes with “ale” and sometimes with “beer.” The New York Evening Post of 20 January 1836 uses the term “Bavarian beer” in a long article, “The German Prince In Germany And France” where it is said the German author Jean Paul was fond of it.

And then there is swankey which , as noted by Boak and Bailey in the June 2015 edition of BeerAdvocate, was a name of a beer in Pennsylvania which was a lot like a name for a light rustic beer in Cornwall England, swanky.  The word swankey with an “e” was used in a 12 May 1849 article on a crisis at sea in the New York’s Weekly Herald. It was used in rather unflattering terms as you can see to the right: vinegar, brandy, saltwater and molasses. Notice that the ship left from Delaware. Next to eastern Pennsylvania. A lowbrow making a lowbrow reference to probably a lowbrow drink.

Hmm… then we see that the 28 April 1888 edition of the New York Tribune included a passage in a newsy notes column on a enterprise dedicated to the brewing of swankey which I set out in full below:

Brook’s law was an 1880’s temperance law in Pennsylvania. And low strength table beer “is very popular in Germany.” Stan notes a similar add from Wichita from around the same year in his book Brewing Local but suggests swankey started there. Hmm – the police blotter article up top from twelve years before would discount an 1888 start if there is a connection.  I wonder if it actually is something of the end point for the concept. See, swank is an old word, too – like schenk.*** In the common sense has a rather interesting etymology. Full of notions of youth and swagger and stagger before it was a fifty cent word for trendy.

And if we are honest, swanky and schenk can start to sound a bit alike if you mix in various accents especially if the schenk is schenke. Mixed accents of mixing peoples. See, there is a Cornwall and Pennsylvania connection, too. Quakers moved from Cornwall to western New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania in the later 1600s.  Pennsylvania has a few nicknames and one is the Quaker State, immortalized by the engine oil as well as a brand of oatmeal. Did they bring the word swanky in the 1600s,  meet up with Germans in the 1700s making schenk, merge them in to swankey and maybe brand it as cream beer in the early 1800s to explain it to people who didn’t get the local lingo. That 1880s reference Stan notes might be more of an echo, a remembrance of beer words past.

Seems a bit of a convenient stretch, doesn’t it. But we are talking about a pretty small and culturally discrete population. There are only 240,000 people in Pennsylvania in 1770. And we see three low alcohol not-lager beers coming out of the same community over time and at a time when there was no real finesse about neatly splitting hairs over whether a beer is of one sort or another. Think about it. Maybe a stretch. Maybe not.

*Note also this definition from the 1885  edition (and not the claimed 1835 edition) of The Progressive Dictionary of the English Language: A Supplementary Wordbook to All Leading Dictionaries of the United States and Great Britain published by the Progressive Publishing Company of Chicago: “Schenk-beer (shengk ber), n. [G. schenk-bier, from schenken, to pour out, because put on draught soon after it is made.] A kind of mild German beer; German draught or pot beer, designed for Immediate use, as distinguished from lager or store beer. Called also Shank-beer.“

**The term “German public house” was a thing in New York before 1846. The Spectator newspaper used the term on 2 April 1842 to describe one of the buildings lost in a great fire.

***This looks like a reference to “schenkebier” from the 1400s.

Could Cream Beer Actually Be Cream Beer’s Ancestor?


…by “handsome” I presume you mean the “other” one…

Here’s the thing. There is only so much I can lay out to support this idea so I might as well do it and admit that it is something of a reasonable hypothesis. To be fair, I rarely take a position that I can’t later extract myself from. I am squidly like that. But today I am almost extracting myself at the same time I make the assertion. Which assertion? That cream beer in 1820 may well be the forefather of cream beer today and that neither has anything to do directly with cream ale. Three people worldwide just fell off their chairs. How did I get there? First, I submit two biographical statements for two people – John and Mary – who were each children of German-American immigrant brewers, Philip German and Christian Frederick Haas:

…GERMAN, John W., was born in Harrisburg, October 27, 1851. He is the son of Emanuel S. German, who was born in Harrisburg in 1821, whose father, Philip German, a native of Germany, came to Harrisburg in 1800, and established a brewery, celebrated for its “Cream Beer,” and conducted it for many years…

…Mrs. Maltzberger was born in Zanesville, Ohio, where her father had removed in 1833. He was a native of Germany and emigrated to America early in the nineteenth century, being a brewmaster by trade, brewing what was known in the early days as cream beer. While in Zanesville he purchased much valuable real estate, and owned a brewery, and hotel. He was a very prominent man, and was highly esteemed by all who knew him…

If you go to page 1219 of this text you will see that Mrs. Maltzberger was named Mary and her father was Christian Frederick Haas. Both Haas Sr. and German Sr. come to the young United States early in the 1800s, establish a cream beer brewery and do very well. Convinced of anything yet? Me neither. So, let’s look at this passage from the April 1900 issue of The Pennsylvania-German a magazine “devoted to the history, biography, genealogy, poetry, folk-lore and general interests of the Pennsylvania Germans and their descendants.” At page 42 in a travelogue piece, we read the following:

In Nantucket it is safe to address every man as captain, and his return salutation, if he wishes you to enter his home, is “Come aboard.” So we say. “get aboard,” and let us resume our journey westward toward Middletown, so named because it was midway between Carlisle, then an outpost, and Lancaster. Leaving the centre square, we cross the Conoy Creek, which empties into the river at Bainbridge, and gives its name to one of the townships. That old brick house, just across the bridge, used to be Pfaff’s brewery, where cream beer, or Lauderschaum, was brewed more than half a century ago. It was a pure malt, wholesome and non-intoxicating. The art of making is lost, for you see none on the market.

OK, so again cream beer is placed in the early 1800s in a German immigrant context. It also now has a German name, Lauderschaum. I am advised that schaum is German for foam. Based in part on this incredibly detailed essay on the word lauter I am going to suggest that the lauder- in lauderschaum in fact lauter- and means “pure” or “honest” or even “only” which makes cream beer pure honest foamy beer. Buying anything yet? OK, how about this. It is a memoir of a gent, George Farquhar Jones, who lived from 1811-1887 in both Providence, Rhode Island, and Philadelphia and contains this recollection at page 231:

Rich, cool, in Pennsylvania and no longer in existence when the book was published in 1887. Hmm… Another? OK, look at this:

It’s another passage from a second memoir – this one about one Colonel James Worrall, Civil Engineer. He lived from 1812 to 1885 and in that passage above was recalling his youth in Philadelphia. Cream beer was “cool, creamy, not bitter, plenty of malt.” Sounds familiar?

All five sources use the term “cream beer” in relation to Pennsylvania in the early 1800s. Two reference that it’s malty and not bitter. It’s lower in strength. If we go back and look at the notes on Perot’s brewing logs for 1821-22 we see that the draught beer they are brewing is lower in hops and likely lower in strength. Both these records and 1820s notices from New York City indicate that it was considered rich. I am going to declare that it was a thing based on the above. Here’s another thing. Kevin Gibson in his 2014 book Louisville Beer: Derby City History on Draft states that the City had cream beer which became known as Kentucky Common later in the century after it evolves locally to be made with corn and caramel for colouring. It was associated with German breweries, was light in alcohol and lacked bitterness. Remember Mrs. Maltzberger up there? Her father immigrated internally too, bringing his brewing and maybe his cream beer to Zanesville, Ohio, too, where he established the American House Brewery. Like the German brewer in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania around 1800 and the ones in Louisville, Kentucky, a bit later in the 1830s Christian Frederick Haas struck out for the interior to set up shop.

Which is interesting and, if correct, sets cream ale a bit adrift on its own course. If we recall, cream ale shows up in newspaper notices in the Hudson Valley in the 1830s. John Taylor of Albany takes it on and, by 1839, is selling an imperial cream ale. Taylor is a hugely successful ale brewer which is no way dependent on the German tradition. The sign proclaiming “Taylor’s Cream Ale” scars Albany’s waterfront skyline as early as 1841. His beers, like most others in the city, appear to be a different thing – big Anglo-American ale bombs – certainly when compared to lighter Teutonic cream beer awaiting its co-national lager to show up care of George Gillig in the early 1840s. Each goes on and traces its own route west – and even north as we see above – as part of the American story, evolving and lasting well into the ensuing decades and centuries.

Could it be that each happily just latch on to the adjective oblivious of the existence of the other? Could be. Could be.

Francis Perot Brewed 116 Times In 1821 to 1822

perotlog1821dftbBrewing was seasonal in the early 1800s east coast towns. You see it in the Vassar logs from Poughkeepsie NY and again with the brewing logs of Francis and William Perot of Philadelphia of 1821-22. Ed Carson was good enough to scan them last fall and I am drawn back to them by
this question about what “cream beer” might be at that moment. That “B” up there is potentially very important. “Cream” is a word that gets used in a number of ways in brewing over the years so being fairly tight on what is being described is a good approach. In this exercise, I am trying to think about what it meant attached to “beer” in Philadelphia and also NYC in 1820 to 1925 or so. It is clear from the newspaper notices discussed last time it was (i) a novelty, (ii) desirable and (iii) local to Philadelphia. But what else can this year’s worth of notations tell us even though “cream” is never mentioned?

First, who is Perot? Highlighted above is the first log entry for the 1821 to 1822 season from the brewery of Francis and William Perot. Francis becomes quite accomplished. He was known for his cream beer.. His summary biography states:

Francis Perot (1796-1885) was apprenticed in 1812 to the 5th and 6th generations of Morrises (Thomas and Joseph). In 1818, Perot started his own brewery and malt house on Vine Street between 3rd and 4th Streets, bringing other family members into the business and marrying Elizabeth Morris. The Morrises turned their business over to Francis Perot. T. Morris Perot and Elliston Perot represent the 7th and 8th generations in the business — an unbroken line of descent in the business.*

More needs to be written and researched about Perot. For today’s purposes, we can stick to this one brewing year’s worth of log entries. I will post the log pages is a bit for purposes of your rebuttals and accusations but for now I see the following:

=> In 1821-22, all but one of the 87 brews of draft beer are noted as “home consumption.” But his ale is either mild (1/3) or “long keeping” (2/3). One batch of draft beer is shipped to Virginia;

=> As Ed pointed out, “the “Dft B” is less hoppy with 1 lb of hops to 3-5 bushels of malt, while the ale is .5 to 1+ lbs per bushel. And the Porter is the strongest with a hop rate of 1 to 1″;

=> In addition to the 87 batches of “Dft B” they brew twenty-one of Ale and eight of Porter. Like the Ale, their Porter has notes as to whether the batches are mild or for long keeping. They also each have, for certain batches, the notation “hops boiled twice”.

=> They brew doubles and singles off a single batch and in some cases three separate runnings. They appear to be kept at least initially separate as they are accounted for by number of barrels of each.

=>The log records that 57% of the bushels of barley went into the “Dft B” but it accounted for 75% of the batches produced. I have to count up the barrels for each batch as Perot does not total them but they do not appear to skew to the same ratio. It may well be that it is beer is lighter in strength than the Ale and Porter. Gotta do a bit more looking at that…

What to make of it? In the summary page, Perot uses the full term “Draught Beer” as opposed to “Porter” and “Ale” but what is odd is that low hopped brewing results in the “beer” which is the opposite of the normal usage of the word, isn’t it? By fifteen years later, we see regular ads for “cream ale” but at this point whatever is coming out of this Philadelphia brewery is called beer, looks like what gets called “cream” beer – and it has half the hops of their ale.

Later: The 1821-22 Perot Logs

Page 1 and 2 – 19 Sep 1821:

perotlogpage1a

perotlogpage1b

 

 

 

 

Page 3 and 4 – 1 Nov 1821:

perotlogpage2a

perotlogpage2b

 

 

 

 

Page 5 and 6 – 18 Dec 1821:

perotlogpage3a

perotlogpage3b

 

 

 

 

Page 7 and 8 – 24 Jan 1822:

perotlogpage4a

perotlogpage4b\

 

 

 

Page 9 and 10 – 23 Mar 1822:

perotlogpage5aperotlogpage5b

 

 

 

 

Neato. There is plenty more to write about. As far as I can tell there may be five “creams” in US NE brewing history: pre-1825 Philly cream beer; 1835-1860s Taylor-style cream ale; 1860s-1910 cream ale; post prohibition cream light lager like Genny Cream; and craft cream… whatever that is. Much more work to do to see if that is right or if something else is going on.

*Cited this way in the family papers: “Information from: “A Condensed History of the Oldest Business House in America – The Francis Perot’s Sons Malting Co. of Philadelphia.” 1890.”