Pubs, Tavs, Diners and Restaurants – Page 3

The Almost Sweater Weather Edition of Beery News Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Back To School 2023 Edition Of The Beery News Notes

Corduroys wiff-wiff-wiffing down a linoleum floored hallway. That’s all I can recall from the first week of Septembers if I am being honest. The rest is all a mixed of high school anxious misery and stupid fun – except that sound of new cords on the first day of school. Was I really into beer that much then? Were there September beers before undergrad? I have no recollection other than drinking the one I was handed at some kid’s unfortunate parents’ place, grabbing whatever we could sneak out with while their folks were off shopping. Someone else’s hell to pay when it was all found out later. September beer was a thing in the 1620s. But what was it? Apparently went with Cheshire cheese. That September beer post also has one of my favourite harvest time images, from 1680:

In husbandry affairs they are very neat, binding up all sorts of grain in sheaves; they give the best wages to labourers of any in England, in harvest giving 4 and 5 shillings for an acre of wheat and 2s. a day meat and drink, which doth invite many stout workmen hither from the neighbouring country to get in their harvest. So that you shall find, especially on Sundays, the roads full of troops of workmen with their scythes and sickles, going to the adjacent town to refresh themselves with good liquor and victuals…

Ahh, harvest at the time of mellow fruitfulness… as I blogged about twenty years ago* yesterday. September is also the time when craft beer in the US apparently hits its highest share of the overall market. I know that this is the case because BA Bart posted the helpful chart right there up at the top of this post to confirm that fact. It also confirms that craft beer’s share is down overall something around 2.5% from 2018 to 2022. Which may explain why those breweries and bars are shutting. Yet it also shows that the share in September 2022 was about the same as July 2018. Is that important? Dunno. But it does somewhat create that discussion with many points of view my authoring team leader Carlo Devito triggered over at FB:

Call it a contraction. A correction. A classic cycle of Boom and bust. Whatever. But you are spot on…yes. My % is off but my numbers are correct….I feel. I’ll stand by 1,500 to 3,000. Remember. I’m including wineries and distilleries in this. Not just breweries. This is all craft beverage businesses.

More tiny breweries making their living making less beer? Could be. Seems a reasonable next reality. And Pete Brown asked a good question this week which received plenty of response about the realities of the past:

Question/discussion time: in general, but specifically in brewing, does heritage really matter? Without progress, everything stagnates. But is there value in remembering the past, and encouraging others to do so? If so, what is it?

My thought in these matters? Change is constant – but that still can’t explain bad ideas. It can be a bad idea just to cling on to heritage just as much as it can be a bad idea to run from it. No doubt those workers in 1680 would love the labour standards we enjoy today. Me, I responded that in the late 1800s new brewing techniques in North America were leading to new forms of beer, plus mergers and many closures which often now blamed on temperence.

Then as now, the breweries which didn’t move with the times were the ones left behind. In 1907, one Ontario old school holdout’s beer was tasted by someone hip to the new ways: “not at all nice and had a pronounced old, harsh flavour… devoid of character in every way…“** Sounds a lot like 2023 looking back at 1998. Or 1955 looking back at 1907 for that matter. Stagnation. Perhaps that old, harsh flavour could be recreated as Old Stag Pale Ale! Speaking of changing reality if not “de void” we see that The Beer Nut was frankly surprised after encountering a couple of NA beers:

Honestly, I thought these would be worse than they were. They can’t be accused of going for the lowest common denominator or turning out non-alcoholic clichés. They’ve put the work in and may even be in the upper tier of this sort of product available in Ireland. Not that that’s saying much.

Speaking of new forms of things, Eoghan wrote about a very rare bird, the new gueuze from Belgiums newest lambic brewers, Danseart:

The Dansaert Gueuze is the culmination of BBP’s mixed- and spontaneous-fermentation Dansaert brewery project, a beer that’s been in the works since January 2020. But the Dansaert Gueuze – a blend of one-, two-, and three-year-old Lambics made to the Oude Geuze specifications set down in EU law – is not just a milestone for BBP. It’s a landmark beer for Brussels too, because it’s the first of its kind to have been made in Brussels by a new producer for several generations. Lambic, indigenous to Brussels and once one of the city’s dominant beer styles, was virtually extinct by the early 1990s. There was only two lambic breweries left in Brussels, and only one – Brasserie Cantillon – still making beer the same way as previous generations of brewers. In fact, such was the complete eradication of the Lambic tradition in the 20th century that it’s entirely unclear who preceded BBP as the previous newest Lambic brewery.

Neato. An odder ripple in the beerosphere was noted this week, objections to one brewery taking on an more unexpected focus than a new lambic or NA beers. Joe‘s giving a side eye. Matt was particularly ripe: “How is the grain being farmed? How is the enzyme produced? Who has actually been to the brewery in question and seen the process?” and then apologized. To help resolve matters, the most patient and polite even if too pressed and perhaps put upon Jessica Mason in The Drinks Business published a response to questions raised about one NY state brewery’s raw beer brewing process and a defence of the practice’s benefits:

After all, he hinted, there will always be questions the business will be have time to answer further down the line. Regarding the debates online and the push for data-driven evidence directly and immediately from his brewhouse, he said: “These are very valid questions but are a distraction from what we are doing, which is simply skipping the malting process entirely… In other words, like-for-like if you take one barley farmer and one brewhouse and you brew the exact same beer in the traditional way and you brew it our way, in that controlled environment — where all things are otherwise equal — then this is what you save: 350ml of water and 16g of CO2 per 500ml of beer served.”

Hey maybe it will work! You know, I wonder if being overly concerned about this sort of stuff should lead one to be concerned. It’s all about perspective. Someone tries something. Maybe it works. Things go on. Conversely and probably more in the too much perspective category, there was a passing of note at least adjacent to the world of clinky-drinky with the death of Jimmy Buffet. Never owned a record of his. Still, I probably heard and hummed along to “Margaritaville” in pubs or at parties as much as any other drinking related song out there. Easy enough to do. But this observation from Jason Wilson of Everyday Drinking really is quite remarkable… so I remark… or at least take note:

I’ve always believed we experience drinks very much like we experience the popular songs of our youth. An ounce and a half of booze, a three-minute song—ephemeral for sure, yet in the right context you may remember it your whole life. We know that no new song, regardless of how well made it is, will ever matter as much the ones we heard as a teenager. When I listened to those 1970s Buffett songs again this week, I was struck by how melancholy they are. I’m definitely not the only one commenting on this. There is even a meme making the rounds on social media that suggests if you drop “Margaritaville” into a minor key, it becomes very dark.

Much more in the major key, Beth Demmon continued her Prohibitchin’ series with an interview with Bex Pezzullo of California-based Sincere Cider and her wide ranging interests and back story:

It took nearly 20 minutes for Bex and I to get through chatting about the Hollywood writers’ strike, comparing how quickly our social batteries drain, how to make friends as adults, why we both prefer honesty over tact, and how prison populations artificially inflate town populations for tax benefits to even start talking about Sincere Cider. But honestly, who wants to hear about target markets and five-year sales projections when Bex is talking about working at Bonnaroo? But in talking about Bonnaroo—the annual music and arts festival in Manchester, Tennessee—and her experience having to clear out the outdoor furniture section at Target to construct a makeshift backstage for the musicians after an incident with some destructive raccoons, her personal values still managed to reveal themselves.

Brimming with positivity, David Jesudason’s piece “Ypres Castle, Rye—A Bastion From Hate” in Pellicle yesterday with is a great portrait of the world created by our old pal Jeffery John Bell including his approach to creating a great welcoming tolerant pub:

“It’s my house, and I’m the one curating,” Jeff tells me. “I pick the music. I pick the beers. The lighting, the decor—everything is deliberate. And to some extent you have to curate the conversation at the bar—I don’t police it—but you can steer people. If someone says something beyond the pale or outside the environment you’ve created I say: ‘I don’t agree with that’,” he adds.”

It’s a wonderful portrait about making and shaping space with some particularly lovely photos by Claire Bullen, like this one to the right. Contented lad. I like it so much I am going to put it on the Christmas cards this year.

Do you like wines? I know Jeff does. And would you like a short but handy starter guide to liking them more? Eric Asimov published one this week in The New York Times:

The basics remain, but in between lie incremental alternatives that may offer a richer selection but require a greater degree of understanding. Consider the options that now turn up on contemporary retail shelves or wine lists. You might be asked to choose from transparent whites or golden whites, orange wines ranging from pinkish to amber, rosés in pale or dark hues and reds that are light, dark or somewhere in between. Additional subdivisions further complicate matters. If you want a sparkling wine, would that be pét-nat, traditional method or tank? Do you want that red chillable? Or dense and heavy? Perhaps you would like an oceanic white, or would you prefer it to be mountain?

Speaking of coming to an understanding, Boak and Bailey wrote about being excited by a few beers recently and helped me with this trim description of that thing called an Italian lager:

Bearing in mind Italian Pilsner was basically a mythical entity to us at the start of this year, it struck us as absolutely convincing. It was extremely bitter and desert dry despite its 6.4% ABV. It had the requisite white wine quality with suggestions of elderflower and lemon. On a warm evening, after you’ve schlepped up Christmas steps, it’s exactly the glass of lager you dream of drinking. OK, so beer can still excite us, we’re not dead yet, we said.

That so neatly summed up my last Italo-Pils experience that I had a Pavlovian response, then a Proustian recollection and perhaps even Swedenborgian moment all at once.***

Finally, did you think there would be an agument being made for a revival of malty beers? How about an 1800 word argument like the one by Jim Vorel in Paste this week which carries with it more than a hint of suspicion and perhaps an implicit accussaion:

The expected “malt backbone” once referenced in styles such as pale ale increasingly disappeared, while surviving styles such as amber ale, pale wheat ale or brown ale found their hop rates increased and malt character toned down to appeal more to IPA drinkers. Porter and stout increasingly ditched actual malt-driven flavors for the wide world of desserty adjuncts. By the mid-2010s, we had entered an era where malt-forward flavors were being shunned by many drinkers whether they realized it or not, and we still find ourselves in this position today. This holding pattern has stretched on for almost a decade.

Bet September ales were malty. Good and malty, I bet. Just the thing, a spot of the old September.

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

*Yikes! This today is me at 60 looking back at me at 40 looking back at me at 20… and finding a beer related anecdote!
**Which sorta points out how “heritage” is the collection and shaping and editing of only the bits of history we like. See: “Practical Notes on a Visit through American and Canadian Ale Breweries”, Journal of Institute of Brewing, 1907, Vol. 13, Issue 4, page 360 – 362.
***Roughly, the image is of a tree full of slobbering angels stuffing their faces with tiny butter cookies but going on and on about the butter cookies from before.

The Mere Days Before Vacation Edition Of The Beery News Notes

Mid-August. What to do? What to do? Soon I should have that annual dream about having to go back to school, never finding my courses, finding it all too late to catch up and… why am I even here anyways… seeing as I have more fingers on one hand than I have years to retirement. It’s coming. Thoughts of autumn come in shades of brown, whether new corduroys or old leaves. Like these lovely images from Warminster Maltings, a clickable one of which is nipped and tucked to the right. But I rush ahead. Too far ahead. Plenty of green days still to come, right? Right? Better be. I have plans. Plans a plenty for the next couple of weeks away from the coal mine. Well, the office. The home office, half the time. But my shoes are generally black so you get the idea.

First – and as much as for equal time requirements as anything – one very interesting bit of the old vid I came across this week is a wonderful PR piece for a maker in the old coopering trade:

The special delivery of a 9000L wine foudre by Taransaud at Château de la Chaize near Brouilly. Very proud of our coopers! (sound on).

Sound on indeed for quite a display of how staves and hoops come together to hold over 11,000 sleeping bottles worth of the old Chat de Chaz, one of which sits nearby, sleeping with others in the cold and dark, waiting for my own Christmas dinner in a few years.

Neither sleeping or in the dark is Mudgie who has some shareable thoughts on why of all the pubs that are lost the Crooked Pub, apparently of little interest when opened other than for being off plumb, is now a national cause:

Over the past forty years, the pub trade as a whole has been in a long-term decline that has led to tens of thousands closing down. The reasons for this are down to a variety of changes in social trends and attitudes, although certain government actions such as the Beer Orders and the smoking ban have exacerbated matters. There is undoubtedly a profound sense of loss about this, even from people who never used pubs much… At times this can turn into a kind of vaguely-directed anger, as we are seeing here, and people are keen to look for scapegoats such as pubcos, developers, supermarkets and government. But the reality is that pubs have mainly been undone by social change, not by some malign conspiracy, and there is no remotely credible alternative course of action that would have made it permanently 1978.

And Stan had some good thoughts on the benefits of not chasing the tail that craft’s been diving after for all these years now:

I am left considering what it means for a brewer to be creative, or what it takes for a beer to be considered new, even novel. New Image Brewing, located in an adjoining town, currently has a terrific helles called Do Less on tap and in cans. It is brewed with malts from Troubador Malting here in Colorado, and thus probably tastes more familiar to me than to you. The malt flavor in Do Less is different than the malt flavor in Bierstadt Lagerhaus Helles, brewed less than 10 miles from New Image. Bierstadt Helles, to me, is pretty much a perfect beer. I’m not going to quit drinking it because I’ve found something new (and practically speaking, Do Less is probably a one-off). But new, interesting and good, to me, that is creative. It would be greedy to ask for more.

Indeed. And greed may get one more – or less – than one counted on. Which is why context – the big picture and the long view – is so important. And Andreas Krennmair has added to that total sum by publishing his new book, Bavarian Brewing in the 19th Century: A Reference Guide. He advises that it is available on Amazon worldwide, both as paperback and Kindle e-book and gives the friendly caveat:

Please note that this is properly nerdy beer stuff….

Which is a healthy approach to such things. One can embrace the lighter topic – the hobby interest – too firmly and squeeze much of the joy out if it. Turn it into a belief. Fortunately for a scribbler, the downsides of things can be as interesting as the up and gives opportunity for humanity to expose its gentle foibles. We have as the current example this summer’s continuing flow of opinion about craft’s collapse yea or nay as with this article “Is the craft beer tide turning?“:

“Distributors and retailers have been reducing their focus on distributed craft and searching for growth in other pockets, but there are signs that the worst reductions may be in the past”, the association said. Overall, craft brewers “continue to face economic headwinds on both business and consumer fronts”, it said. From a business perspective, borrowing costs continue to rise, and while input cost increases have stabilised, they remain elevated over previous levels. Meanwhile, mounting evidence shows inflation eroding consumers’ buying capacity.”

Not to mention mega-brewers selling off craft assets.* The news has reached as far as India. Heck, even those boosters for booze at GBH have been having their swings at poor old craft:

“To me, that experience of drinking in your garage with your friends is universal whereas Braxton maybe isn’t,” Sauer says. “When a craft brewery is presenting to a retailer, [the buyer] asks, ‘Can this brand travel?’ I wanted to remove some of those assumptions.” He also hopes Garage Beer can shake off some of the flavor expectations with which drinkers associate the term “craft beer.” Research Sauer conducted in partnership with the marketing department at Miami University in Ohio found that the top characteristics respondents linked to craft beer were “hoppy” and “heavy.”

“Heavy” – oooof! Is that the new curse word? The Beer Nut shared his thoughts on craft meets US macro:

I can safely say it’s true to type for this inexplicably craft-credentialed American industrial style, being dry, crisp and very dull. There’s a tiny hint of fruity lemon fun hovering in the background, but otherwise it’s a straight-up fizzy lager of the nondescript sort. I couldn’t leave things there.

Endtimsey. But, you know, for many of those who have invested deeply in the fading trade on way or another there is still talk of turn around. Could be. As with maybe fringy party politics perhaps, there is that sort of normal human desire for plucky redeption when the hero is cornered, the hope against hope that fuels the observations of alien sci-fi characters like Spock or Doctor Who. Which is what makes reading about the beer trade and beer culture so perhaps unhealthily yet tantilizingly compelling. Especially when it isn’t as firmly footed in fact as I fully expect Krennmair is in his new book.

Note: CB&B has published a handy newbie guide to all mash home brewing – a clear sign of a downturn as ever I saw:

Mashing grain is what makes beer beer. Yes, hops, yeast, and water certainly play important roles, but it is only through the mash, whether performed in your house or in the process of manufacturing malt extract, that the soul of beer is liberated from its starchy origins. Mashing grain is to beer as crushing grapes is to wine, as pressing apples is to cider, and as collecting honey is to mead.

Also note: twenty years ago this very week, I invented the “Molrona” during the 2003 black out. You. Are. Welcome.

Martin noted a sad ending with a photo essay from his recent visit to Corto, Katie and Tom Mather’s establishment, which I never saw myself but supported as I could:

It’s incredibly cosy, and welcoming, and tiny. One spare table upstairs, where the cheery chap brought our Wishbone and Thornbridge… Sorry it was a flying visit, Corto folk, you were lovely. Best wishes for whatever you do next.

Say hello to Tom Grogan, 92, now in his eigthth decade in the pub trade:

Mr Grogan, who is believed to be the UK’s oldest landlord, said he was not that keen on alcohol himself. He said despite pouring thousands of pints, he drank “very little” and had been only drunk “half a dozen times”. His career began 71 years ago, when started helping out in a pub in Rusholme after arriving in England. Seven years later, he got the chance to become a landlord, but said it meant he and his girlfriend had to make a quick decision.

You’ll have to read on to figure out what that decision was… unless you guess… because it’s not much of a guess…

Ron’s Remebrances take us this week back to Scotland in the mid-1970s when a radical change in licensing laws were brought in:

I was dead jealous when my school friend Henry, who studied in Aberdeen, told me of pubs not only staying open all afternoon, but until 1 AM. All totally legal. And totally due to the interpretation of a new Licensing Act for Scotland. Which, I’m pretty sure, wasn’t intended to liberalise opening hours to the extent that it did… I can remember visiting Edinburgh in the late 1970s and wondering at the continental-style opening hours. And wondering why the same liberal treatment couldn’t have been given to the rules in England.

GBH has run an interesting if ripe study of Coopers Sparkling Ale this week:

It can be tempting to dismiss Sparkling Ale as an early offshoot of Pale Ale, without any notable idiosyncrasies to help define the liminal space separating the two. Most contemporary stylistic guidelines highlight a focus on Australian ingredients, but beyond this and some more proscribed production techniques, the difference is minimal. Though delineation between styles has never been an immutable barrier, for those of us who grew up on it, Sparkling Ale has a highly distinctive character.

I had no idea that there were service disruptions in out next province to the left, Manitoba… keeping in mind as my excuse that the border is almost 2000 km and a timezone away. Seems like the government store is on strike with unequal consequences:

When Shrugging Doctor, a local winery and vineyard, said in July it would expand and move operations, its owners had no idea it was about to head into a devastating strike-induced limbo thanks to a labour dispute at the Crown-owned liquor corporation. While Manitoba beer producers have the option of distributing their own products — by hiring delivery companies to drop off merchandise to private vendors, bars and other sellers — by law, wine and spirit manufacturers aren’t allowed to do the same, said Shrugging Doctor co-owner Willows Christopher, who founded the business in 2017.

Matt is doing a good job keeping an eye on Mikkeller’s deek around the ethical implications of claims made against it:

I see Mikkeller are pouring at another U.K. festival this weekend, which is honestly absolutely wild to me. I feel like there was a real opportunity to create real, progressive change in U.K. beer a couple of years ago. But this is being moved on from in favour of the ££££.

No doubt part of their long term plan which seems to have been successfully pulled off if this admission from late July is understood. Easy to enough to foresee back in February 2022.

A poem by Justin Quinn was noted by the ever lyrical M.Noix this week that is worth saving and sharing… and thereby trodding all over intellectual property rights but for this bit of review… lovely… I have dreams also like that… and it even rhymes here and there. Solid second stanza letter “u”use.

Four weeks ago, I forwarded the news that Russia had moved to grab Carlsberg’s assets, you know, those assets that really should have been shut down when the invasion of Ukraine began but, you know, money. Well, now the brewery has spoken out:

The chief executive of brewing giant Carlsberg has said he was “shocked” when Russian President Vladimir Putin seized its business there. Cees ’t Hart said the company had agreed a deal to sell its Russian operations in late June, but just weeks later a presidential decree transferred the business to the Russian Federal Agency for State Property Management. “In June, we were pleased to announce the sale of the Russian business. However, shortly afterwards, we were shocked that a presidential decree had temporarily transferred management of the business to a Russian federal agency,” he said.

Well, lookie lookie. Why buy when you can take? Beware with whom you think you are doing business with, I suppose.

Note: the ever increasing subdivisions of beer expertise never ceases to amaze.

And finally what week would be a proper week without a story like this:

A “plague” of racoons have stormed a number of houses across Germany to steal beer and kill family pets. Households have been billed up to €10,000 after returning home from their holidays to discover their kitchens destroyed. According to Germany’s National Hunting Association (DJV), a total of 200,000 raccoons were killed last year in a bid to control the population.

Furry bastards! And – that is it for another week. Not a record breaker for length this week and, frankly, a few familiar sites may have been mailing it in from the beach. Plus all those awards! Which claim to pick global champions …while also reminding you that judging is nothing more than what a few folk thought on the day. Ah, August! And as per ever and always, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect – even including at my new cool Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Have you checked out Threads as Twitter ex’s itself? (Ex-it? Exeter? No that makes no sense…) They appear to achieved to make social media offer less and less. Brilliant… but I never got IG either. I still prefer the voices on Mastodon, any newer ones noted in bold:

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

*Revisiting a thought, we discussed two weeks ago how that portion of Ontario’s smaller brewers who are members of the trade association OCB have launched a new lobbying effort that has a bit of an odd goal: “Keep Craft Beer Local.” I say “odd” as the argument that seems to be being made is taxes are too hight therefore small brewers will have to sell out to… dum dum duuuuuummmm… strange folk from away. As previously noted: “If no changes are made to the tax structure, he and the Ontario Craft Brewers Association, say they fear more and more of Ontario’s craft breweries will be bought up and merged with foreign buyers. The association says it represents over 100 breweries.” This is an odd argument, as I say, seeing as international mega brewers are divesting themselves of their craft assets. I wonder if this is just an example of bad timing, the power points keeping up with the news. Perhaps Ben can help explain.

The Beery News Notes For The Dog Days Of August

Here I am! Thursday morning once again. And the whole world of beer and brewing… and photos of vegetables. It’s what you demand. I know. I hear you. That’s an Orangello plum tomato from Chiltern right there. Just six seeds to the pack and everyone a winner. Super productive and tasty. Seed influencer opportunities most welcome. Katie Mather is eating her veg, too, as we read about in this week’s feature in Pellicle:

Eating salads, for me, has been a radical act: buying fresh food, taking the time to prepare and pre-prepare meals, encouraging myself to eat and to feel good about eating. Learning how to make bowls of healthy, nourishing vegetables and herbs so delicious that I don’t think twice about devouring them. I’ve been steadily unlearning my aversion to salad dressings, and my unhealthy belief that unless they are low-calorie, salads are worthless.

Exactly. All veg is worthy. Is anything else happening out there, things not in my garden? Other than, you know, famous pubs surprisingly burning to the ground days after being sold off… what’s that you say? Here’s the update:

An update post on the pub’s Facebook page on 27 July said: “The Crooked House has been sold. Unlikely to open its doors again. Marston’s have sold the site to private buyer for alternative use, that is all we know. This is just to update the page so nobody makes any wasted journeys to the site.” A petition to save the pub from redevelopment, launched on 29 July, had attracted more than 3,500 signatures. Andy Street, mayor of the West Midlands, said there were “a lot of questions” surrounding the fire. “I’m sure the authorities will get to the truth,” he said.

The BBC has visited in happier times. There are rumours that the path of the fire trucks to the site was somehow obstructed leading to suspicions piled upon suspicions: “… blocking off of the lane to the pub seems to indicate a deliberate act.” Police have been on scene. Jings! I say no more.

In almost as disasterous legal news, ye who lives by the sword apparently dies by the sword as whatever is left of California’s former craft darling Stone has lost a tradename court case in Europe to Molson Coors, owners of of the venerable Stones bitter brand – making some extraordinary and entirely unaccepted claims:

Among them was a claim that Molson Coors had not provided “sufficient evidence of genuine use” of the Stones bitter brand – which has been around since 1948 and which was the sponsor of Rugby League and The Superleague in the 1980s and 1990s… that was rejected, along with the claim that “the element ‘Stones’ of the earlier (Molson Coors-owned) trademark will be perceived by a part of the English public as the music band ‘The Rolling Stones’ or the surname ‘Stones’, whereas the trademark applied for Stone Brewing is perceived a reference to the object ‘ stone’.”

Speaking of Molson, to my east… perhaps… Gary has been writing about mid-century brewing marketing from Quebec in a series of posts like this one focusing on 1939-40 advertising including one from Molson with this eye-catching slogan:

The campaign tied into a longstanding advertising theme at Molsons, “The beer your great-grandfather drank.”

Yum… beer flavours from the mid-1800s… Now, on the topic of what your great-grandfather wouldn’t be drinking, The New Yorker has a piece this week on something recently noticed in France:

Recently, in Paris, posters appeared all over town advertising an unfamiliar beverage: vière. “Du jamais bu,” one poster punned—“Never before drunk.” It came in a seven-hundred-and-fifty-millilitre glass bottle, just like a Chablis or a Marsannay. The bottle had a metal cap, the kind you might pry off the top of a Heineken. “It’s not a typo,” Gallia, the drink’s manufacturer explained, on its Web site, of “vière,” adding that “we wanted to switch things up by combining two malts that we love.” Vin (wine) + bière (beer) = vière.

Really? Perhaps you would prefer a citron presse instead? Simple. Perhaps something your great-grandfather would enjoy.

Update: Jessica Mason (who totally wins this week’s best humoured approach to rudeness award) reports that the young folk love cask but they are clueless… dimmer than a 25w lightbulb and just can’t find it in a pub!

Speaking to the drinks business, the ‘Drink Cask Fresh’ campaign coordinator Pete Brown said: “The industry talks it [cask ale] down way more than the drinker does. No one ever says it’s old fashioned or geeky or old men in socks and sandals. We say it to each other. Younger drinkers don’t.” Brown explained: “It’s not just about how tall the font is – the badge at eye level is handy but you can’t have two and a half foot long hand pulls. But even Guinness with its new font is now poured just below eye level. Cask is the only beer poured beneath the bar where you can’t see what’s going on and this greatly adds to the uncertainty around it.”

Not sure I believe that… but beer writers interviewing beer writers is on the rise, however.*** Yet also not sure I believe this either. Paste is having none of the sort of thinking that leads us to kiddie cask campaignning and vière, instead joining the death of craft pile-on and pronounced upon the scene thusly:

Welcome to the spiritual ennui of the beer world, a problem at least partially separate from the myriad economic factors that have made it so daunting to run a successful small brewery in this day and age. On the most basic level, the craft beer landscape has simply felt trapped in stylistic stasis in recent years, a far cry from the previous era of new discovery and growth that was fueled in the 2000s and 2010s by a market in which it was so much easier to turn a profit. This stagnation has no doubt played some role in the migration of craft beer drinkers to other segments of the alcohol world…

Moving on. Have you? Perhaps relatedly, no wonder Ron has joined the masses of people (as discussed just last week) who are questioning why they ever every got at all interested in beer now that it is (i) not cool and (ii) fruit juice with a malt base:

There are so many parallels with the real ale movement. Kicking off with, mostly, very excited young people who want to change the (beer) world. Slow beginnings, followed by intoxicating, seemingly never-ending, growth. Then you look around and you’re all in your forties. And those young people, they just don’t understand what good beer is. They like some new nonsense, that isn’t proper beer. Not like the stuff you love. “Your beer is boring.” Youth says. “We want something new and exciting. Not that old man beer.”

Old man beer? What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that what your great-grandfather drank? Speaking of one form of that – and despite all the recent Guinness love – this may be reason enough to boycott the stuff and all Diagio products:

Guinness and Kilkenny back on tap in Moscow despite the war sanctions: Exports of Irish beer and spirits to Russia have been suspended, but are now available in pubs and supermarkets. Vladimir Putin’s local Irish pub in Moscow is boasting of pouring real pints of Guinness and Kilkenny, despite sanctions imposed against the war in Ukraine

But is it? Are these all bootlegged products smuggled infrom third countries? Is Heineken not the worse offender?

Heineken Russia launched an Irish stout last year after Guinness was withdrawn from the country following the invasion of Ukraine. In March 2022, the Dutch drinks giant said in that it would join other western brands in withdrawing from Russia following the invasion. However, it maintained a local business that has developed products after it withdrew the Heineken, Miller and Guinness brands. The company makes Miller and Guinness in Russia under third party licences.

Or is it Carlsberg? Questions questions questions. I ask all these questions as, frankly, I am not paying the fee to look behind the paywall.** But they are great questions, you will agree! Speaking of questions being asked, Greene King Abbot Ale came second in the race to be named the Champion Beer of Britain… and people went nutso… as reported in the measured tones of The Sun:

Angry real ale fans are all frothed up amid claims a champion beer contest was rigged. They are questioning how sponsor Greene King’s Abbot Ale won a coveted silver medal at this year’s Great British Beer Festival. The Suffolk brewer’s pub staple was also named the UK’s best premium bitter. Greene King is one of two backers of the festival, along with the JD Wetherspoon pub chain — where Abbot Ale is one of the biggest sellers. Drinkers at London’s Olympia venue were outraged at the vote by the Campaign for Real Ale. Beer blogger Mark Briggs, of Burnley, fumed: “I suspect some unfair influential intervention.

Mr. Briggs appears to write a column for a chain including the Lancashire Telegraph given sa bazillion links pop up for the same story so perhaps it should be beer columnist, beer connoisseur and passionate pub campaigner.* I am of the “get a goldfish!” persuasion in such matters so congrats to this mid-range and accessible brewery for put out a pretty good product. Some beer nerds just need to get a life. And as for doubts as to the definitive authority of a beer judging contest – what the hell do you expect? The ever reliable Ed was even on the scene of the incident:

…the next day was a bit of a struggle it was brightened by the return of twerps whinging on about the GBBF on twitter, this time because Abbot Ale got overall second place in the CBoB. CAMRA and the blind tasting panel are in the pay of Greene King it seems. Which I suppose makes a change from Wetherspoons. To me the twerps are just showing their ignorance. The wonder of cask beer means that at times it can elevate beers to highs you would never have expected. If people spent less time suckling at the devil’s drainpipe and more time drinking beer served as god intended they would realise this.

Martin went out and about looking for some to make up his own mind: ” sadly it’s a bit dull and “milky” (NBSS 2.5)… 2.5 is the level at which you don’t take a beer back, you just decide NEVER to try cask again.”

Things I did not know until this week #1. Sir Walter Raleigh brewed a beer in Virginia in 1585 – and it was made of corn:

…the same in the West Indies is called MAIZE: English men call it Guinea wheat or Turkey wheat, according to the names of the countries from whence the like has been brought. The grain is about the bigness of our ordinary English peas and not much different in form and shape: but of divers colors: some white, some red, some yellow, and some blue. All of them yield a very white and sweet flour: being used according to his kind it makes a very good bread. We made of the same in the country some malt, whereof was brewed as good ale as was to be desired. . .

Not the oldest beer in North America as eight years early that came to what is now Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic care of the 1577 mission of Sir Martin Frobisher, spending a summer for the English navy mining for ores some of which may have ended up in the superior cannon that destroyed the Spanish Armada. Neato. But is this new find the first beer brewed in the hemisphere or even the actual first beer? I know that Cartier brought wine and cider in his hold in the 1530s as was drunk in the 1520s off Newfondland. Still looking for Cabot‘s records from almost 100 years before Raleigh’s trip.

More recently, we learned this week from Boak and Bailey that 1860s London barman Thomas Walker was born Mary Anne Walker – and moved between those identities for a number of years:

Once he had become famous, this became more difficult. Throughout the late 1860s, newspapers delighted in reporting that ‘the female barman’ had been found out again, and taken to court. Eventually, he made some attempts to capitalise on his reluctant fame. In 1870 he went into business with one Solomon Abrahams with the idea of being the celebrity landlord of a pub in Shoreditch. Walker ended up in court again after a dispute over the takings with Solomon. (Lake’s Falmouth Packet and Cornwall Advertiser, 15 January 1870.) Eventually, perhaps having run out of options, in the 1870s, Thomas began performing as Mary Walker, “the original Female Barman”, on the music hall stage.

Back to the present, in health matters CNN published a commentary on a study published by The Journal of the American Medical Association indicating an unbalanced increase in mortality from alcohol use:

According to this research, from 2018 to 2020, women saw a 14.7% increase in alcohol-related deaths, compared to a 12.5% increase among men. And the shift was also pronounced among individuals 65 and older, where there was a 6.7% increase in alcohol-related deaths among women, compared to a 5.2% increase among men… There is also the simple fact that Americans have long had a deeply dysfunctional relationship with booze, and as women have moved toward greater equality with men — and lived lives that look more like men’s — women are engaging in more alcohol-related dysfunction.

Really? And what to make of some of the negative news out there when the European Union has declared that beer production has now returned to pre-pandemic levels?

In 2022, EU countries produced almost 34.3 billion (bn) litres of beer containing alcohol and 1.6 bn litres of beer which contained less than 0.5% alcohol or had no alcohol content at all. Compared with 2021, the production of beer with alcohol in the EU increased by 7%, returning to levels closer to the pre-pandemic year of 2019, when production was at 34.7 bn litters. When it comes to beer without alcohol, there was no change compared with 2021. The EU’s total beer (with and without alcohol) production in 2022 was equivalent to almost 80 litres per inhabitant.

Something is selling… but what? Is it just that we want comfort beer in these times of uncertainty? I’ve buy that. If you think about it, isn’t that what identi-craft hazy fruit flavoured IPA are? As much as macro lagers are labeled? Is it what is on the plate next to the comfort beer that really matters, like this rural Australian pub has discovered?

In between pulling beers at the bar and serving fine South Australian wines in the adjoining dining room, Sanne passes me the wildlife-driven menu I’d travelled all this way to see, where I gamely order the specialty of the house – the feral mixed grill – a challenging plate sporting such non-everyday delicacies as emu rissoles, kangaroo fillet, goat chops and camel sausage. Dismissing the momentary reservation I might in fact be devouring a petting zoo – when the dish arrived, it was absolutely delicious – beyond delicious in fact – my favourite, I think, was the goat chop.

Mmm…. feral mixed grill… great-grandpas likely tucked into that once in a while, too. And – that is it! And as per ever and always, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect – even including at my new cool Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Have you checked out Threads as Twitter ex’s itself? (Ex-it? Exeter? No that makes no sense…) They appear to achieved to make social media offer less and less. Brilliant… but I never got IG either. I still prefer the voices on Mastodon, any newer ones noted in bold:

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

*…and draftsman of some pretty ripe prose: “It presented itself foggy golden in colour. The aroma being certainly intense, as I expected. Peach, lemon-citrus, passion fruit and some piney notes were all identified. There was a sublime flavour explosion of more juicy, peach, passion fruit and lemon-citrus on the palate. Some floral, subtle spice, pine and soft, caramel malt sweetness were also tasted; in this beautifully balanced, Simcoe and Loral Cryo hopped beer. More tropical fruit, lemon-citrus and a hint of spicy warmth, in the crisp and long, drying finish.” Lordy!
**It’s not like I’m speading money on just anything for your pleasure reading, you know. Look at this, for example. Clearly a botch on the meaning of the meaninglessness of “craft”… yet there it is. Does one pursue the question? No, because it is going to be public knowledge in 73 hours. It always is. Make that… two: “Upon satisfaction of customary closing conditions, Tilray will acquire Shock Top, Breckenridge Brewery, Blue Point Brewing Company, 10 Barrel Brewing Company, Redhook Brewery, Widmer Brothers Brewing, Square Mile Cider Company, and HiBall Energy. The transaction includes current employees, breweries and brewpubs associated with these brands. The purchase price will be paid in all cash and the transaction is expected to close in 2023… the acquired brands will elevate Tilray Brands to the 5^th largest craft beer business position in the U.S., up from the 9^th…” Canadian whacky tobakky firm buys tired old dull brands… why? Jeff has more. Note: I do pay for The New Yorker. All the funny cartoons and those fabulous “Tables for Two” columns are worth every penny.
***Sort of the old self-sustaining adver-news-a-torial thingie I suppose… in The Lion King wasn’t this called “The Circle of Life”? Yet… if how Pete… who will say these things? PS: do you like the chronological appoach to footnotes instead of the traditional sequential? I’m experimenting. Send a telex with your thoughts.

The Most August Edition Of Beery News Notes In 2023 For Far

Well, so this is August. And what have I done? I had old pals over, one not seen since about 1989, and shoved some Hard Way Cider at them. Lovely stuff. And I actually finished a briefish if tiny fonted biography of pretty boy Johnny Milton which was interesting even as a reminder of the politics of the 1600s. Forty year old Hons 17th Century Lit flashbacks triggered. Shudders. Have had hard time getting back to the books since my first and only bout of Covid back in April but seem to be back on track, thanks for asking. Next, on to High on the Hog. Also of note, I still have no understanding of cricket whatsoever but apparently the crickets were good this week.

First up, Beth Demmon has another edition of Prohibitchin’ out, this time with a portrait of perry maker Erin Chaparro:

Erin splits her time between her position as a Research Associate Professor at the University of Oregon’s Educational and Community Supports Research Center and working at the tasting room—which is on the farm’s property—on weekends. But before there was Blossom Barn or even pear trees planted, Erin wondered: what type of farm would set them apart? The pair didn’t want to commit to water-intense crops like hops or lavender, but had been introduced to perry a few years prior and loved it. Plus, the state fruit of Oregon is pear, and the perfect pears found in the iconic Harry & David gift baskets are grown in nearby Medford. It was an ideal crop to pay homage to the land, stand out from the myriad nearby wineries, and maintain their commitment to sustainability.

I love perry but, being in Ontario, have little access to the stuff due to the apparent anti-perryist policies of the provincial monopolists. Frankly, pears are the provincial anti-fruit as far as I can tell. Speaking of policies gone mad, Professor Dan Malack helpfully guided me to this indictment of Canada’s very restrictive new alcohol intake recommendations published in Le Devoir. I am going to presume you can parse this bit of French being the clever readers you are:

“Le modèle utilisé a perdu tout contact avec la réalité. […] Et honnêtement, nous croyons que les études sélectionnées ne représentent pas la quantité et la qualité des études sur la question”

Wow. Just wow. As might be obvious from my writings* hereabouts, I can’t fully buy into a public health policy framework that is as adversarial and even perhaps cynical as in this comment: “accusations that opponents of the CCSAs report have alcohol industry connections are especially spurious, although typical, neo-temperance ad hominem responses“… BUT (and I say BUT!!!) that finding on the quality of the CCSA study is astounding. Moi? I will stick to my max 14 drinks a week plan, thanks very much. Alcohol is still not a health drink.

Note: J. R. R. Tolkien discussing his love for beer & pipe smoking. He lived to 81.

Speaking of modernity and extended life spans Euro-folk-wise, I saw this new to me Substack author (writing under the presumed pseudonm Lefineder) and enjoyed this wee essay called “When did people stop being drunk all the time?” which argues that temperance was not the primary moving principle that cause the shift in societal norms – industrialization was:

England transitioned to a low rate of beer consumption toward the end of the 18th century, looking at the more granular data on Malt beer consumption we see that this transition coincided with the timing of the onset of the British industrial revolution (1780-1800s). Society is transformed in several ways, Whereas beer expenditure used to consume 12.5% of people’s salary in 1734 in the 1800s it consume only 1-3%. In the English poll tax of 1379-81 we can see that a total of 2.5% of the medieval workforce is comprised of brewers, in 1841 this is reduced to only 0.3 of the labor force.

This makes tremendous sense. Just as the Black Plagues caused the end of serfdom in Euro-ville, a couple of centuries later industrialization caused the Great Awakenings which led to the benificence of Temperance which was then modified through the blended capitalist / social welfare state to serve as the foundation of the glory of modern western society that we all enjoy today!

Stan had possibly the greatest weekly round up this week, putting at least myself to shame. My tears are spraying the laptop screen even as I type at this very second. I’m not sure why. Probably the deft paragraphing. And probably due to his highlighting of the B+B round up of comments in response to the question why beer seems boring at this point:

Has the excitement gone out of the beer scene, and if so, why? Those are the questions we asked in our most recent newsletter last week. They prompted some interesting responses across all channels. Overall, we’d say those who had an opinion shared our sense that things feel depressed.

What I find most interesting about their post is how it illustrates the need to move “across all channels” now if you want to find good readings – but how it is actually not all that hard once you sign into all the services. You can rethink your priorities like Boak and Bailey have been doing. Check out Don, for example, for voluminous trade positive but extremely well backed views via emailed newsletter. Read Maureen at Mastodon. She’s there. It’s all there. Just a bit more like driving standard than automatic. Folk who bloat on about not leaving Twitter despite its search for the deepest levels of trash seem to me to be like lost spirits wandering an abandoned shopping mall, long devoid of the old good shops, getting the vapours as they run their fingers along the dusty rose tile trim of the stagnant water fountain by the food court, dreaming it was all still like that one interesting bit of Wonder Woman 1984. Err… sorry… it’s all the Milton I’ve been reading doing talking…

Elsewhere amongst the Canadas, Ontario’s small brewers are lobbying against what they consider unfair levels of taxation, a claim that is largely based on our split sovereignty reality where juristiction is divided in a number of ways including between the federal level and the provinces, leading to different taxation regimes (… as well as some bizzarely fifth-rate governments.) Long time friend of the blog (and once upon a time my mini biographer) Troy gave the CBC some quality quotes:

Craft brewers in Ontario face higher taxes than anywhere else in the country, said Troy Burch, senior manager of sales and business development at Great Lakes Brewery in Etobicoke. If no changes are made to the tax structure, he and the Ontario Craft Brewers Association, say they fear more and more of Ontario’s craft breweries will be bought up and merged with foreign buyers. The association says it represents over 100 breweries. “We’re being taxed too much compared to the rest of Canada,” Burch told CBC Toronto. “What we would like to see at the end of the day is just a fairness when it comes to looking across the country.”

Note: there are over 400 craft breweries in Ontario but only 100 or so in the association. Not sure what the other 300 think. Someone has to pay for health care and sins will be taxed.* Interesting to note that the threat is foreign buy-out and not closure. By the way, by way of disclosure the OCB used to sponsor this here blog years ago. $100 a month. Sometimes the cheques came from a PR agency in St.Louis, Missouri. Dunno why.

The Times ran an article on a Bristol pub with a seemingly winning plan for the Sunday lunch crowd that may have been too successful:

A pub in Bristol has been named the hardest restaurant to reserve in the world, with a waiting list stretching more than four years for its Sunday roast dinners. The Bank Tavern on John Street near Castle Park, which was founded in the 19th century, has closed bookings due to an increased demand for its award-winning lunch… the restaurant confirmed it had begun working its way through the backlog and expected the waiting list to reduce soon. It added that bookings for the remaining days of the week were operating as usual.

Boak and Bailey’s notes on the place are in their guide to the city’s pubs including these particular directions: “On an alleyway next to a churchyard along the line of the old city wall this small pub has the feel of a local boozer despite its central location.” Evan wrote a state of the union address on the English pub for VinePair, too, and found hope:

“I think there’s a kind of romanticization of the idea of the pub, which treats it as this sort of unchanging institution that relates back to Merry England,” he says. “Jolly images of medieval times and so on, which is, of course, all utter nonsense.” Instead of being a purely British invention from the halcyon days of “Merry England,” numerous foreign influences have helped to create British pub culture. In recent years, some of the most visible might have their origins in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. But a generation or two ago, they predominantly came from the Republic of Ireland — geographically part of the British Isles, but decidedly not part of the United Kingdom.

JRR might disagree on the nonsense suggestions but the overall argument is sound. One sound he might not have appreciated, however, is that of children… in the pub… as investigated by The Guardian this week:

It’s a summer afternoon and most of the punters appear to be young adults and parents in their 50s, plus some teenagers with gen X parents. Boyd’s observation strikes me as true at a cultural level even deeper than the pub: the problem with kids isn’t the kids; it’s the parents. Or rather, it’s what some parents become when their kids are under 10, gripped by a sense that the burden of keeping them contented is astronomically heavy and should be shared by all. Martin Bridge, 52, the owner of the Whippet Inn, a boutique, child-free restaurant in York, says: “Being in the industry 30-odd years – and also out shopping, out in public places – how parents view the responsibility of their children, and how that has changed, is quite mind-blowing. It feels as though the kids are now the responsibility of everybody, all the time.”

Frankly, this cultural angst has always struck me as a bit odd (like perhaps that cold draught felt on a warm day as when the backs turned to us at the Golfers’ Rest... though perhaps space was also being made in a way…) but I live in a jurisdiction with a human rights code that protects folk receiving services from discrimination based on family status… so go figure.

Speaking of innovative tavern type places, Gary continued his series on Anchor and its legacy with some thoughts about the brewery in the hippie-dippie era of San Franciso in the 1960s which led me to this piece by Gary’s main source, David Burkhart, about the beat poetry era San Fran of the 1950s:

Frederick Walter Kuh moved to San Francisco in 1954, where he became a waiter/bartender at the Purple Onion. Two years later, on October 19, 1956, Kuh and fellow “founding father” James B. Silverman opened the Old Spaghetti Factory Café & Excelsior Coffee House at 478 Green Street, in the former home of the Italian-American Paste [sic] Company. The OSF became San Francisco’s “first camp-decor restaurant,” Fred later told the San Francisco Examiner, “but it wasn’t called camp then.” Early on and counterintuitively, he advertised his bohemian North Beach watering hole and its “Steam Beer Underneath a Fig Tree” in the New Yorker.

That’s a nice sharp photo of the matchbook cover art that the restaurant handed out.

For the double this week, Evan Rail wrote a heart-felt remebrance of Fred Waltman, travelling beer expert, beer guide author and founder of the Pacific Homebrew Club, and included these observations in his thoughts:

The other meaning I’ve taken from Fred’s death is a bit harder to talk about, so I’ll just come right out and say it: The good beer movement is aging, and funerals for beer lovers are going to be a lot more common than they once were. While it might have been the height of youthful exuberance to launch a brewery or a craft beer bar two or three decades ago, plenty of those first- and second-generation brewery and pub owners—and beer fans, to say nothing of beer writers—are now quickly moving toward and past retirement age.

Very true. And this comment from Andreas Krennmair on Mastodon in response to B+B paints an interesting portrait of the man:

…one time I met Fred Waltman, he actually told me why there was always his cap in his beery photos. Many years ago, he got accused by some internet trolls that he hadn’t actually visited all the places he claimed to have visited, and that he had just stolen the photos off the internet. So to prove that the photos were actually his, he started putting his very own cap in the frame. And that‘s how the cap in the photo became his trademark.

We also lost Warren Ford, one of the great tea persons of England as well as David Geary, founder of the Geary Brewing Company of Portland Maine, whose beer I’ve enjoyed for over 30 years, especially their Hampshire Special Ale. The brewery shared the news of his passing on Facebook:

It is with great sadness that we share the passing of David Geary. In 1983, David and Karen Geary founded the 13th U.S. craft brewery, and David’s pioneering spirit and leadership played an integral part in the explosion of the American craft beer revolution. We send our deepest condolences to the Geary family and take this time to celebrate David’s life and legacy.

And I was surprised to read this week that there are efforts in Ireland to expand barley marketing into being a food crop. I was surprised because, as a Canadian of Scots parents, I have been eating the damn stuff my whole life. But it turns out we only eat 2% of the crop of the StatsCan graph to the right is to be believed. The rest is basically what the US brewing industry is based on. Then I learned that Campbells stopped making their canned Scotch Broth and I am now a little sad. Another hot tid bit of barley news that Matty C shared?

Interesting article. Barley/Ag in general is where most of the efforts to make beer production sustainable need to be. Farming barley uses a lot of water, and produces around half a kg of carbon for ever kg of malt used in the brewhouse. That’s a lot of CO2!

That is a nutty stat right there. Spin that, ye brewery PR type experts (slash) independent writers (slash) consultants (slash) independent beer award judges!

And finally, Pete Brown shared some very personal thoughts in is emailed newsletter, building on the piece by Mark LaFaro discussed here abouts a month or so ago, as he shared his grief at passing of his own younger brother, Stuart Brown, who died at just 51:

It makes me examine my own drinking very carefully – I drink too much. Many of us in the industry do. This excellent piece in Good Beer Hunting last month makes for uncomfortable reading. It makes me think about the false bravado we have, the way we mutually reassure ourselves that we can’t be abusing alcohol because it’s work and we know what we’re doing, or alcoholics only really do any real damage when they’re on spirits (Stuart killed himself with Henry Weston’s Vintage Cider and cheap white wine, by the way.) But it also reminded me why I argue so hard that there is such a thing as positive drinking. Stuart drank mainly alone, in his flat. He didn’t go to pubs much. He didn’t have many friends. If he’d drunk socially in the gorgeous 17th century pub five minutes from his flat, he might still be here. I’m back now. More hesitant and less confident in what I’m doing, less sure of myself in this strange industry. Let’s see how it goes.

Tough reading such open thoughts. My family member like Stuart was my youngest uncle who recently passed away. He was a bit lucky. He caught himself before an early death but he dealt with the serious burdens he placed in his path for the rest of his life.

As per and as is more and more the case, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via social media and other forms of comms to connect – even including at my new cool Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Have you checked out Threads as Twitter ex’s itself? (Ex-it? Exeter? No that makes no sense…) They appear to achieved to make social media offer less and less. Brilliant… but I never got IG either. I still prefer the voices on Mastodon, any newer ones noted in bold:

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

*There is still no J-Curve folks even if the harms are statistically marginal with lower levels of intake.

The Thursday Beery News Notes For The Week I Did Rock

Well, to be fair, it was more like rock-grass. Prog and Western. Yup, we headed north to Ottawa on the weekend and saw Alison Krauss and Robert Plant play an outdoor concert. I even had a beer as they played. A Hop Valley Bubble Stash by Creemore. At twelve bucks it wasn’t as shocking as the 17$ for a small glass of Ontario made Pinot Grigio. The beer tasted exactly like an IPA, you know… if you are wondering. Honestly, I was just happy that the drinks weren’t distracting. I was trying to pay attention to the music. I only heard one “baby” but really wanted to hear him rip just one “babybabybabybabybaby.” We did hear a couple of “oooh yeahs” and maybe an “oooh yeah oooh yeah” but, to be honest, we weren’t sure. Great show. Got me a tour tee. Cost me less than three of those dodgy Pinots.

As a result, I am bouyed this week by pure positivity. We also saw a bit of that this week from Boak and Bailey who wrote about one beer shop in Plymouth England – Vessel:

What was clear from that conversation was that Vessel had not only survived the pandemic but to some extent found its feet, and its people. How to describe Katie and Sam? They’re the kind of people who default to smiling. They are optimistic by nature, and full of ideas and energy. They’d made it through the pandemic with a mix of deliveries, takeaway, events over zoom, and sheer enthusiasm. That challenge out of the way, they told us about plans for expansion, for a brewery, for more trips and tastings.

Boom! Good stuff. See also their post on The Cockleshell in Saltash, Cornwall packed with pure perceptive positivity like this: “There’s plenty of greebling, for example, with every surface covered with nick-nacks, oddments and vintage decor.” Nice. And not just nice nice. Greebling sweetness nice.

And Liam wrote a tribute to Beer Twitter itself, sort of an interesting subject in these days of further collapse and sudden new competiton from Threads. And his approach was comparing the social media landscape to his choice of pubs:

…for me personally the place operates in the same general way. I can enter through the same front door and choose who to sit with, who to talk to, and who to ignore – although admittedly I’m not on the premises as often as others so perhaps that makes a difference. For me it’s the people within the walls who make the pub – it’s only a building after all – and if you enjoy conversing and interacting with them then why leave or change locations? I’ve investigated some other pubs to see what the fuss is about; I’ve even drank in one or two – but they are not quite the same. They feel wrong, they are not a good fit for me and not all of the people I enjoy mingling with are there either.

I agree. That is a good way of putting it. Jeff, anticipating the same patient’s final stages might be approaching, wrote something of a sweet goodbye to Twitter this week:

Unlike any other social media platform, Twitter allowed me to build my own community and have immediate and sometimes extensive discussions with the people in it. That’s you. I’ve always appreciated how generous you’ve been with your engagement.

I can only say that speaks for me, too. There has always been a lot of comment that #BeerTwitter is a dumpster fire but it has been a great resource, too. And fun. At this moment, however, things as feeling all a bit endtimesy as Jeff also shared this:

I write a blog. About *beer.* It is unnecessary. It is largely for amusement. (Though I’d like to think edification plays a small role.) I would NEVER debase the site by throwing up a garbage AI post.

The endtimsey big news in US craft this week I suppose is the press release issued by Sapporo on Wednesday, as described by Dave Infante in his newsletter Fingers:

This morning at about 1:45am local time, Anchor Brewing Company issued a brief press release announcing its imminent liquidation, citing “a combination of challenging economic factors and declining sales since 2016.” The brewery has been operating in one form or another since 1896; its current owner, Japan’s Sapporo conglomerate, acquired the firm and its iconic Potrero Hill facility in 2017 for a reported $85 million.

Quite a blow given the narrative of craft’s whole genesis story. I am not convinced (at all) that the hagiography necessarily matches reality (at all) but I sure did like Liberty Ale back when Ontario was part of the sales footprint a few decades back. There has been much by way of erroneous speculation, questioning, cherry tree chopping, wailing and rending of garments along with some common sense and respect… but… the bottom line is this from The Olympian:

I ran a cheap “pizza and pint” feature. It helped for a while, but then hazy IPA became a thing. Beer geeks turned their laser focus on to that style and unfortunately, a lot of other brands/styles just slowed down or stopped selling altogether. Anchor was one. I think there’s only so much life a publican or retailer can do to breathe life into a cherished heritage brand before they finally give up and switch to something new and shiny. But when I see 3 cleaning dates marked on the top of a keg, it’s a slow mover and time to move.

AKA: no one bought the Cro-Magnon of beers anymore. Be honest. You may have loved it, but you didn’t actually like it all that much. Elsewhere, beer sales in Romania down 9% in the first months of 2023. Moving on, no- and low-alc beer sales well up in England but there is one hitch in the stats:

Perhaps more surprisingly, away from our living rooms, the British Beer and Pub Association says pubs are also chalking up a 23% rise in driver-friendly beer over the last year, with sales more than doubling since 2019, just before the pandemic… the overall UK sales of low- and no-alcohol beer – which covers anything up to 1.2% ABV – still represents just 0.7% of sales of UK consumption.

The immediacy of the cultural paradigm shift that has been caused by David Jesudason’s book Desi Pubs A guide to British-Indian pubs, food and culture can’t be understated… and The Morning Advertiser knows it:

Like accidentally biting on a cardamom pod, ‘Desi Pubs’ has exploded on our complacent palates and spiced up the way that we think about the great British pub…

Even though the literary cheese is a bit notched up in the way that Phil Mellows puts it, he’s spot on that the charm is also real and widely embraced, triggering fond and thoughtful discussion and eager recommendations. Phil’s article goes on to say this book as shaken the beer world like the popular and widely read works of Pete Brown as well as Boak and Bailey did a decade ago. So far it is the thing of 2023. Just like Anchor is the not thing. It’s the thang. The thing and thang of 2023. Right there.

I also would like to say that being positive is not about just being a booster. There are things needing improving, needing to be addressed. Otherwise, any idea of community is a convenient falsehood. To that end, Beer is For Everyone published a personal essay by Lindsay Malu Kido, the group’s founder. It was on the poor experience many faced at the Craft Brewers Conference in Nashville, discussed here back in May. The findings against the Brewers Association were telling:

The Brewers Association had the power and responsibility to set the stage for a more supportive and inclusive conference experience. While they can’t control every individual interaction, they can certainly influence the overall atmosphere. By staying silent on the political climate in Tennessee and not visibly showing support for marginalized attendees, they indirectly contributed to the isolation I, and many others, felt. Their failure to act emphasized the dismissiveness and lack of care that seemed to permeate the conference.

Why is this such a persistent part of craft, not just the bigotries but the institutionalized comfort with the bigotries? What is it about beer… hmm… Perhaps not unrelatedly, Gary wrote this week about a 1949 study of pub culture in England which even included a pointed criticism of the high and holy mid-1900s UK “Beer is Best” brewing trade advertising campaign and how its encouragement of mindless drinking was worth noticing. To be fair, Gary is not fully convinced by the authors – but summarizes the results very fairly:

The period they describe exemplified the heyday of the English pub and draught beer, with men (usually) supping from one to three or four pints every evening afer work. The was apart from the dissolute group who spend most of their day in the public house. A shopheeper had that sad fate, leaving the shop to his wife’s administration… The authors tend to be hard, once again, on the drinking ethos, stating at one pint the typical drinking pattern progresses from “exhileration to “anaesthesia”. For them, the idea of the public house as valued community cetre is pretty much, to use an appropriate vernacular, tosh, excepting in some rural areas.

Speaking of the disfunctional in plain view, it is sad that one of the legacies of what people call craft beer is this sort of design disfunction:

If you put fruit pulp in beer and do not fully ferment it this happens. It has happened to other breweries over the years. It isn’t just unfortunate, it’s dangerous. There is NO reason to have unregulated, unplanned fermentation in sealed containers.

Note: if that is what is happening on the beer store shelf, what the hell is happening in your guts? Don’t the people who buy this stuff know the burbling brook is not suppose to be a feature?

Aaaaannnnnd… once again, no politician of any stripe in Canada suffers from displays of beer culture prowess:

Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim (left) generated lots of social media buzz when he shotgunned a beer on stage at the Khatsahlano Street Party on July 9.

As a result of our political culture, I wonder if this sort of thing operates very differently north and south of the 49th parallel:

The Beer Institute, a national trade association representing the $409 billion beer industry, hired Cornerstone Government Affairs to lobby on economic, budget, tax and appropriations policies impacting large beer producers. The Beer Institute recently launched StandWithBeer.org, which alleges large liquor companies exploit tax loopholes to lower their effective tax rate. John Sandell, former tax counsel to the House Ways and Means Committee, will work on the account.

And this week’s feature at Pellicle by Rachel Hendry is about the placement of fine wine in the TV show Succession. [Confession: never watched one episode. Never watched on of The Wire, Madmen or Dexter or a whole whack of other must see TV for that matter.] I do really like this sharp observation shared from a wine writer’s Twitter feed about one drinking scene:

In a Twitter thread by sommelier Rapha Ventresca, they break down why this choice of wine is so intriguing. As half-brother, not only is Connor the oldest of the four siblings, but his oddities have him consistently excluded from the machiavellian manoeuvres that make up most of Succession’s plot. Château Haut-Brion, then, is not only the oldest of the first four Bordeaux Chateaux, but it is the only one grown outside of Medoc, to have majority Merlot in its blend and to be bottled in a sloping shape that breaks away from the traditional Bordeaux style. In essence, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Not unlike the man using it to drown his sorrows the night before his wedding.

Sweet. I had a pal who knew so much about trucks and cars that he was a pain to go to the movies with. In any given car crash scene, he would count off how many vehicles were actually filmed and presented as the one car driven through the mess by the hero. Me, I price the flower arrangements given I was raised by a florist and trained in The Netherlands myself in the wholesale trade. No one in 99% of all movies can afford the flower arrangements in their home. But I’ve told you that before. Must have.

There. Once again, that’s it! Ooooh, yeah… baaaaaaybeeeee… As per, you can check out the many ways to connect including at my new cool Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Have you checked out Threads? Seems a bit thin to me so far. But I don’t like IG and it is like mini-IG. Don’t forget theose voices on Mastodon, the newer ones noted in bold:

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

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

The “It’s Canada Day Down Canada Way” Edition Of The Beery News Notes

It’s that special time of year, the middle of the year, when those two guy up there often reappear. It’s Canada Day week. I can’t be sure when they first appeared on this here blog but nine years ago I said it was nine years before that. Back then I was writing political posts on the now merged blog Gen X at 40* and I had a whole schtick in 2005 about a future where the Maritime Provinces of Canada was working towards breaking away to be an independent nation based on graft and hydrofoil ferry services. The identity of these two gents is lost to time or at least just lost to my mind so if it is you say hello! And remember… for all your Canadian beer news read Canadian Beer News!!

Top beer news of the week from the land of canoes and maple syrup? Toronto municipal bureaucracy!

The proposed pilot, which will be considered by the Economic and Community Development Committee on July 6, comes after city council directed staff to create a pilot program last month to allow residents to drink in select public parks this summer. If approved, recommendations will go to city council July 19. The program would run from Aug. 2 until Oct. 9 and allow people aged 19 and older to drink alcohol in 20 city-owned parks in neighbourhoods where local councillors chose to opt in. Toronto councillors had the option to opt out of the program entirely, making parks in their area off-limits when it comes to drinking in public.

You know, we are not so much prudish in Canada as waiting for our grade four teacher to come back into the class to tell us what to do next. Consider the approach of our Commonwealth sibling Australia in this regard on a similar issue:

No worries about spectators getting a beer at the stadium when Australia hosts the 2032 Olympics. “We’ll serve a beer because we can,” Brisbane organizing committee president Andrew Liveris said Wednesday when asked about an alcohol prohibition for ordinary fans at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

In Commonwealth HQ, Boak and Bailey published** a magnificient piece of work entitled “Henekey’s Long Bar and the birth of the pub chain” – effectively an addendum to their excellent 2017 book 20th Century Pub. The story neatly begins are the beginning:

The building was probably built in the 17th century, although a plaque on the site claims there was a pub there from 1430. It was originally called The Queen’s Head Tavern or, in later years, The Queen’s Head Coffeehouse (“Frequented by professional gentlemen”). Under Henekey it came to be known as The Gray’s Inn Wine Establishment. After Henekey died in 1838, at the age of 55, the wine importing business carried on under his name. There were, however, no Henekeys involved in its running and his son, George Henekey Jr, actually set up a rival business right across the road.

PRESSES PAUSED!!!: puzzling Pompeii painting portraying possible pizza published!!

Mark LaFaro wrote quite a good but heavy piece for GBH*** this week on the topic that I had hoped I would see in October 2022, a discussion of the craft beer and drinks trade and the dangers of alcoholism:

Our experiences are not uncommon. Examples like this made it clear from the start of my career there was an ongoing pressure to try to “fit in” culturally in the alcohol industry, which meant honing a coveted skill of being able to drink heavily but still function. So, I drank. Hard. I got extraordinarily good at skirting that line between being a party animal and a professional. As my career and reputation grew, so did my alcohol tolerance.

While we are at it, Afro.Beer.Chick shared her thoughts on the progress of DEI initiatives in craft beer this week at exhibits A, B, C, D, E and…

History corner time. Here to the left (my right) is a lovely bit of brewery record, a rough estimate of profit for 1896 for Rose’s Old Brewery at Malton, England. Click and have a look. Over 100% profit on the sale of XX ales at their tied houses. Approaching 150% profit on XXXX ales. Reminds me of when I bought Sam Adams shares back around 2001 to get their annual financial disclosures. Stunning profitability in beer during good times if it is done sensibly.

Now I know what goes into a new sort of Mexican lager to make them extra special:

Mexican entrepreneurs are using crickets to supplement barley in beer… La Grilla beer is being tested out in small batches in Querétaro by a local craft brewery and a company that makes gluten-free and bread products using insects. The creators wanted to prove that insects can become part of our diet even in drinks while maintaining taste…

I saw Chris Dyson’s blog pass by my newsfeed and liked this piece about Ilkley of Wharfedale in Yorkshire especially for the great level of detail:

Not far down was Bar T’at, a modern bar run by Market Town Taverns. Here there was a good range of beers on cask and keg and the welcoming, effusive lady behind the bar immediately approached to ask me what I would like. From the available cask, I went for a pint of Kirkstall Three Swords, which I have found is always a good bellwether pint when in somewhere new. The bar, which you enter via a mini flight of stairs, is split in two, with the bar itself to the right as you go in from the road, with an adjoining room with seating, which is where I went. There is an additional room below, whilst outside is an area with several tables alongside the car park of a shopping centre. The beer was pretty good, a decent NBSS 3, but I had spotted a beer from Bini Brew Co on the board, so once the Three Swords was no more, I ordered a half of their 4.3% hazy pale Under the Manhole Cover from the keg list. Now I was interested because…

There is more. Speaking of more, Stan unpacked an aspect of the ripples passing through the US craft malting trade after Skagit Valley Malt closed its doors (as mentioned hereabouts last week and discussed in detail here, here and here) and shared one maltster’s sensible caution:

What I have come to terms with is that the financing play for expansion has to jive with malt house aspirations, not the other way around. Letting the needs and requirements of the financing terms influence our goals or take undue risks is simply too reckless for me. In short, unwise ego-driven aspirations need to be replaced with modest, incremental growth strategies utilizing myriad funding options all at the same time (private capital, bank, community rounds, government program funding, and organic). It takes forever because in funding an agriculture-based business you immediately go from an ocean of financing options to a hot tub of very hard to find slow-money-minded investment partners. While customer demand is there, trying to service all of it immediately doesn’t necessarily make financial sense.

Speaking on the processes of brewing, Ed of the excellently named Ed’s Beer Spot is/was in Plzeň at the Plzeňský Prazdroj from whence he reported the following:

Next we went to see the filters. They have a kieselguhr candle filter and two 72 module cross flow filters which filter 600hl/hr of high gravity beer down to 0.45 micrometres. The filter modules are changed after 400 CIPs. Pentair is paid a fee for them by hl filtered. The cross flow filters are better quality than the kieselguhr filter but cost more.

Frankly, I think he just makes this stuff up.

Neat bit of writing this week by ATJ on his Substack site ATJbeerpubs:

Beyond, the view looked out onto lush green fields, cows the colour of dark caramel moving ever so slowly as if in a bovine trance, while behind me voices chorused from tables, and a noisy cock blackbird dashed across my nearer vision and fixed itself on a branch in a luxuriantly leafed tree. I wondered if this is a view that Dave ‘Woody’ Woodward saw when he sat he, for obviously this was a favourite spot of his for on the wooden bench his name and 1943-2006 was engraved alongside the words ‘He loved to sit on this bench’.****

And there was a lovely bit of lighter writing by Martin Flynn at Pellicle this week on the more… err… physically active part of pub life, the crawl, which includes this keen observation:

Personally, I believe crawls are best served in winter. That rush of warmth on entering a pub hits even stronger when it replaces the cheek-tingling air of a December evening. There’s also something lovely about meeting friends in the day, then emerging from your latest stop to see dusk has cloaked the rooftops and the streetlights have started their shift. That visible change bolsters the sense of setting aside time for people you care about: since you met up, nobody’s glanced at the clock.

Ah, the romance of being an international beer judge: stuck on a train station platform unable to get to the event, cold boxed pizza for dinner if you do get yourself there!

Finally, not much to say about the mutiny not mutiny in Russia last weekend except that I saw this totally clickable image from early Saturday morning from Rostov which now captures the whole thing for me. A bleary guy in sandles looking like he’s out for his first coffee, standing mere feet away from a soldier, both probably thinking WTF. Note: sandles guy is not actually at the front which is just a handful of kilometers away. Note as well: the one Russian with the gun is trying to establish a fairer more effective system for running the war against Ukraine but he is next to a guy doing very well by the fact that the soldiers at the front are mainly conscripted from the non-Russian parts of the Russian Federation.

One last thing! Thanks to reader jordan b. who liked this personal favourite of mine from last week:

There was something strangely pleasing about the juxtaposition of “bag of cans” and “all-you-can-puke prosecco”.

There. That’s it! I’m all over the place this week. Smoke’s back but just for a day or so they say. Which means I am not – after I type these last few words- going to attempt to throw my back out this Wednesday evening to make a tomato plant happy. I’ve a long weekend coming up for that. Strains by 10:45 am guaranteed. As for beer news, it’s now back to you all as always. Talk amongst yourselves. Write something. Something for me to read. And then write about. And also as per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon, the newer ones noted in bold:

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

*all preserved at the Wayback Machine for your reading pleasure.
**And they gave up a nice Saturday for you ungrateful folk!!!
***Slightly undermined for the regular weak kneed editorial function of making sure it’s clear that not everyone in website HQ is entirely comfortable with the actual story or an actual quote: “…John Carruthers, director of communications at Revolution, highlights that the company has policies in place to protect the health and safety of employees. “Beer is a social beverage and naturally a lot of fun can come out of that,” he says, “and that’s why one of our highest priorities is making sure our team has fun in a responsible manner…” ” What is the point of adding that?
****Channelling a bit of the old Thomas Grey if you ask me… which you didn’t…
*****And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again. The Fizz died in 2019. Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

This Week’s Beery News Notes Are Fraught With All That A Thursday Might Entail

What a week. I spend the week’s few forecasted dry sunny hours on Tuesday evening hands on knees with this newly acquired handy friend indeed clearing out a patch invaded by raspberries and catnip about seven by ten foot to move some of the tomato plants into. I wanted to lay down and weep by the end me being an old guy and all but it’s got to be done. It’s really getting out of hand out there. I have a pot problem. Bought another six to fill Monday night just in case. “Just in case of what exactly?” I later thought. Seventeen zucchini seeds hit the soil on Saturday and pole beans were added on Sunday too, as illustrated. Who is going to eat all this other than the bugs and birds?

Where to begin this week? There’s a lot so perhaps at the outset just a summary of the endsy timesy news of the week. The spokesperson for the BA actually used the phrase “craft slowdown” this week. Mirrors perhaps the excellently honest new B+B tag for these times: “the age of divestment“! We learned this week, as Stan noted, “stunning is the news” that Anchor‘s beer will be far less common a sight. We also heard (as I dutifully discussed back in late April) that things are not going so well financially at BrewDog as the Morning Advertiser shared:

BrewDog has reported an operating loss of £24m in its latest trading update… which BrewDog founder James Watt attributes to the cost of investing in the brand, its people and its bars, alongside the “devistating” increase in input costs.

All of which unnervingly indicates that the losses were due to making less money than they spending on, you know, their core activities. All of which leads me to wonder if an ebbing tide lowers all boats. Not yet here in Canada where there was a very sensible bit of consolidation as reported by the clever folk behind the Canadian National Beer News Service, a branch of the Department of The North:

Corby Spirit and Wine Limited has announced that it is set to purchase Ace Beverage Group, parent company of Ace Hill Beer and several other beverage alcohol brands, including Cottage Springs and Cabana Coast ready-to-drink cocktails, Liberty Village cider, and Good Vines wine spritzers. The transaction will see Corby acquiring 90% of Ace’s shares for $148.5 million, with call options on the remaining shares that can be exercised in 2025 and 2028.

That’s real money but apparently the beer assets is one of the least attractive part of the deal. Despite its ongoing move to be about less beer hunting, there was an similar tale told about Ninkasi Brewing in GBH. More good beer settling in as just a part of a portfolio.

Settling. Phil of the excellently named Oh Good Ale in a post also excellently named as “Toil and Trouble“* wrote about a survey retaken after ten years, a repeated of a 2013 census of sorts studying pubs, breweries and cask ale in one part of Manchester England, Chorlton, and had surprising results:

What’s changed? Well, many things have changed – I’m comparing April with June, apart from anything else, so it may possibly be that some of those bars were running dry due to warm-weather demand. Other than that, I was expecting to see little change among the (seven) bars of 2013 – six of them still are bars, after all – and carnage among the (22) breweries, but if anything it was the other way round. As far as I can make out, only three of the 22 breweries have closed outright…

What he found had changed was in the pubs, that the range of service had retracted leading him to state that “the cask bubble in Chorlton and environs has pretty well burst” leading in turn the Tand himself to comment:

…leaving cask to those that handle it well is good policy and the points about addressing a mixture of beer expert and cheapskate are well made.

So perhaps not so much a burst bubble as enthusiasms becoming cammed doon. No, craft is not to blame as it is retracting too. It’s all just a bit of balancing out.

Lisa is not settling. She has scouted out another weird pub for her guide to Dublin starting with this appealing intro:

I must admit, the immediate vicinity of this week’s pub is something I typically speed through as quickly as possibly – the visual clutter from its side of Westmoreland Street is not the most inviting vista, featuring, as it does, the National Wax Museum (NATIONAL WAX MUSEUM), lots of plastic major-brand logos, and CCT Dublin’s building in that block must be one of the worst insults to architecture in any European capital (and I have a soft spot for a lot of ‘ugly’ kinda-Brutalist buildings, but this…is not that).

Beet beer is in the news care of Pellicle (and it’s a favourite of mine given we have year round access to my nearby neighbours’ MacKinnon Bros Red Fox Ale which is made with good Ontario root veg):

Given all these strengths, I asked the brewers why they thought beets weren’t a more common beer addition, especially given the great diversity of fruits and other adjunct ingredients brewers are experimenting with these days. Part of it, of course, is that beets are just a contentious food. Todd, for his part, doesn’t find it terribly surprising that so few brewers have touched beetroot. “I recently saw a meme about fast food variety, and it just showed fried chicken sammies from every chain. That is basically craft beer right now, but sub in hazy IPA/kettle sour. Yes, there is a lot being added to beer these days but I would say that it isn’t really experimental, or very courageous,” Todd says. “For real, no shade over here, but the ingredients people are using could be mistaken for a candy shop or ice cream parlour.”

I like that… because if ye’ve no eaten your veg you cannie hae any puddin!

A fitting obituary for a great rugby player and beer man, Paul Rendall:

He would often proclaim Nunc est bibendum. For those old team-mates who had not studied Latin, he would explain, in the bar, of course, that now it is time to drink.

Drinks Business had a great piece this week unpacking more about that waste water beer building that I mentioned a month ago in San Fran:

In an experiment, Epic fed wastewater from a large San Francisco apartment block through “ultrafiltration membranes” 100 times thinner than a human air. They filter out impurities and the cleaned water is then disinfected by using ultra-violet light. Tartakovsky told CNBC this process is comparable with the biology that takes place in the human stomach. And seemingly it works. He claimed that independent testing of Epic’s cleaned water shows it meets US Federal standards for drinking water and often exceeds them. Cleaned water was passed to Devil’s Canyon Brewing Co in San Carlos California, which produced the Epic OneWater Brew.

What else is out there in the world? Well, The Beer Nut continued his wandering ways and has reported on a trip in May to Haarlem in The Netherlands and found a lack of wallop:

While I’m used to the Dutch people’s effortless fluency in English, I’m not sure that Black It Up! was a great name for the beer. Echoes of Zwarte Piet linger there. I liked the tarry bitterness in the aroma here, presented with a little black pepper spice. It was unfortunately rather more ordinary to taste: dry and roasty with only a token treacle effect to thicken and sweeten it, and no proper hop wallop. I feel that something of this nature should be delivering wallop aplenty; instead this is calm, restrained and frankly a bit boring. Oh well.

Sounds a bit like me. Anyway, speaking of The Netherlands, Ron has been in Vietnam revealing all on the breakfasts to be found near the lobby among other things. And, elsewhere, Stan is reporting from the hop fields again, with his jam packed June 2023 edition of Hop Queries now out. This month we learn that:

Friday the USDA forecast hop acreage strung for harvest in 2023 in the Northwest will be down 8%, or 5,067 acres, from 2023. That’s only about half of the reduction John I. Haas CEO Alex Barth told those attending the American Hop Convention is necessary to begin to get American hop supply and demand back in balance. More likely will be needed… Because general agreement is that the alpha market is in balance, that means the reduction must come from varieties valued first for their aroma and flavor. In fact, farmers added more than 2,500 alpha acres (primarily +1,960 CTZ and +555 Pahto), and aroma acreage was down more than 7,500.

The fabulousness that Stan brings is rooted in the shameless presentation of hop production as agriculture. Fact fact factity fact. You might as well be reading reports from an early US ag societies studying barley growth over 200 years ago. It is all a continuum of knowledge development that sits as a counterpoint to the sorts of approaches to appreciation that startle one with their admitted limitations:

…there’s nothing wrong with mystery, I try to use it when I can for if you stuck to the plain facts with beer you would have writing on a par with that covering the drainage industry or the world of pallets

Speaking of facts, we had a wonderful bit of pushback published this week by a very unhappy investor in the now restructuring Black Sheep Brewery, one of England’s longest serving micros. See, as noted in my May 4th editon of these my scribbles, when everyone cheered Hooray! at the idea it was not shutting so much as getting its affairs in better order we must remember that one of the realities when a firm goes into administration is that the necessary new money may well have to bump away a lot of the old. As we are told is happening in this case:

Long before Covid, when interest rates were at all-time lows and trading conditions were relatively benign, I clearly identified the coming apocalypse, and tried to spell out to those few of you who would listen that “The End was nigh”. Back then, there was still an opportunity to raise new equity, properly invest in our brand, arrange for regulatory accreditation of the packaging plant, smell the coffee, or rather understand where national beer consumption, and indeed alcohol, trends were heading, and to truly “Build a better Black Sheep”. My prescient web-site spelled it all out for you.

The piece goes on to name names and point pointed fingers. I expect the law will be applied appropriately.

Not dissimilarly in terms of a daring do done, I was surprised in a very familiar way by the wild eyed responses to the excellent opinion piece published by Pellicle this week. An editorial. Now, right up front we have to be clear – good beer is no place for forming and certainly no place for sharing opinions or editorials so it is fair that it created a sort of confusion in the hearts of many. Don’t worry. It’s just like that feeling you felt when you saw a small dog in bright yellow rain boots for the first time. Odd but it actually works.

And what was the problem? What upset the universe? Well, if you really want to know, this is the sort of vile sprew that society faced when it woke on Monday morning:

I respect the importance of linking beer back to its agriculture—in fact this is something I feel personally invested in—but this is not the same thing as terroir. Beer is not merely a representation of the land from where its ingredients came, and to advertise it as such underplays the significance inherent to the production of both beer itself, and its individual raw materials.

Good Lord! The gall of the man!! See… see… err… well, that actually all makes fairly perfect sense doesn’t it. Hardly an opinion at all. Most agreed. It’s practically cheery out there. Yet… we are faced with three sorts of minor rebuke (aside from the usual scoffy self-satisfied crab bucketeers in the corner): (i) “Wrong!” (ii) “Clickbait!!” and (iii) you have to appreciate that to be an expert you need to understand that nothing means anything so trying to explain stuff is pointless… as well as combinations of that trio of top notch beer writing principles right there. We are, as always, formed and framed by our weaknesses more than our strengths.

Stan shared a well considerd counterpiece supporting the use of terrior in relation to beer. Read the whole thing but here is the nub:

I became more comfortable with the word as I researched “For the Love of Hops” and continued with “Brewing Local,” although I continue to prefer “taste of place.” Amy Trubek concludes “The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey Into Terroir,” an absolutely terrific book, by writing “ . . . the taste of place exists, as long as it matters.” To repeat myself, I’m more inclined to use the words taste of place opposed to terroir, but I’m fine with “beer terroir exists, as long as it matters.” Both matter to me.

That works, too. For me? A bit of this has always been the way. There is a simmering desire in beer writing for the shortcutting convenience that making X mean Y brings. The extrapolation slipped in here or there. And there is no X that is more attractive to beer culture as a Y construct than a well grounded principle from the much more established world of wine. So, we have a slightly wonky beer styles construct because wine has naturally developed styles. And we have mildly informative beer atlases mainly because wine legend Hugh Johnson made an excellent one about wine that has been regularly updated.** Just recently Garrett Oliver illustrated this tension (and perhaps even envy) recently when he wrote:

We sometimes forget that the projection of meaning is WORK. Hard work. The wine industry does that work. The beer industry, by and large, does not. This is one reason why wine and spirits are eating our lunch, especially in the US.

And the results and the dear are real. At least here in Canada, where we have moved from a marketplace where (i) in 2002, beer had a market share of 50 per cent by dollar value, while wine had 24 per cent to one (ii) to 2012, to one with a 44 per cent beer to 31 percent wine ratio and (iii) by 2022, we have a 34.9% beer to 31.3% wine. There is cause for concern.

Hmm. What does it mean and where does it all take us? I like this take by T-Rex to my left, your right. And little while ago, Jeff wrote very sensibly how a technique is not a style. Similarly, things can only bend so far and we need to agree that terroir is not defined by a technique. Technique is not terroir. A yeast strain that’s been transported world wide as terroir? Nope. That’s all square-holery-round peggishness to me. Works for you? Fine… but it’s utterly unnecessary and may undermine things. Don’t get me wrong. I have been into good wine for as long or longer than I have liked good beer. I have even tended to my own vineyards in two provinces, mainly to the delight of birds. For my money, the two trades deserve to return to their largely separate and well-defined lexicons if anything is to be understood in itself. Ditch the code and, as Matt wrote, all that it is covering up. Clarity avoids confusion. Get at that, please. Yes, you. The problem is… I am not sure how much of beer writing is meant to do that, if it is meant to make things clearer to the beer buying public.*** There is comfort in mystery apparently. And, in a world where some of the expertise is based on hanging out one’s own shingle or … where one has little else, well… one has to protect one’s reputation. Doesn’t one.

Finally and just perhaps unrelatedly, I have a hard time getting my head around the idea that the Nigerian non-alcoholic beer market is worth 6.2 billion USD when the same article states:

BusinessDay’s findings showed the firm incurred a loss of N10.72 billion in the first quarter of 2023 from N13.61 billion in the same period of 2022. The firm’s net revenue amounted to N123.31 billion in the first quarter of 2023, a 10.5 percent decline from N137.77 billion in the comparable period. “Despite challenges, the opportunities in the coming decades for non-alcoholic beers are quite as substantial. That is a prospect worth drinking to,” John said.

Worth nothing that the collapsing Nigerian Naira is currently worth 0.0021 USD and, as the same article states, roughly 50 percent of Nigeria’s brewing input costs is imported.

That’s it! That’s enough from me. I need to save my strength for the allotment my house now sits in. Back to you for now as always. And as per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon, the newer ones noted in bold:

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

*Here you go. Here’s the reference.
**When the fam says “What? Why?” when I pull out a bottle of something tasty, I pull out my atlas, point at a patch of a few hundred square metres and say “From that field right there!“
***See, if you see nuance or complex or subtle being used to point at things that are merely specific or one part of a long list, just as with “mystery” as cited above, you might be in the doldrums of such conditions. Hanging out with engineers taught me this. Engineers are the heroes of the lengthy sensible to do list. Put things on it when you think of them and strike them off when they get done. Build a few bridges and you learn this sort of thing.
****And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again. The Fizz died in 2019. Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

These Be The Beery News Notes For A Week Of The Big Smoke

It’s been a weird week. A low pressure system stuck over the Gulf of St. Lawrence has driven smoke from massive forest fires, first, in Atlantic Canada and, then, in Quebec south down upon our fair city, well… really our region and, yup, right down into the American northeast. That’s Monday evening up there. Tuesday the hazard rating hit 11. And no one made a Spinal Tap joke at all. Sports fields shut, tight throats and all outside workers called in. Now everyone is following the smoke forecast. And you can too with this helpful anxiety raising app and its realtime disaster info. So all backyard activity is pretty much suspended which means sitting around with a beer in hand has to wait for the winds to shift. My near neighbour Spearhead Brewing posted this on Facebook Wednesday:

Our thoughts are with those affected by the devastating forest fires. Due to the hazardous air quality in Kingston today, we have made the difficult decision to close our patio. However, we warmly welcome everyone inside our taproom, where we prioritize your safety. Kingston’s air quality is currently classified as ‘extremely dangerous’ by the government…

In equally uncheery news, The Guardian ran an article this week which laid out a few of the factors behind UK craft beer closures:

“The craft beer market became heavily overpopulated over the last decade. The cost of living crisis now means many of these brewers are fighting for a place in a shrinking market. Some of them will not make it.” Small breweries also often suffer from limited routes to market, lacking proper distribution channels to consumers, and are reliant on taprooms and supplying to local bottle shops. Those restrictions have limited the turnover of many craft breweries, meaning that they were not able to break even.

The Yorkshire Evening Post ran a set of old photos from one Leeds suburb and included this snippet of 1930s-esque fact:

Dantzic Brewery on Regent Street in Sheepscar was best known for their black or spruce beer, a drink which is similar to stout in that it is made from roasted malt. The name Dantzic was taken from the town in Germany – now Gdansk in Poland – which was famed for brewing Spruce beer and also the high quality of oak casks which were used. The brewery was owned by Joseph Hobson and also made ‘vintegg’, a ‘delicious’ egg wine.

Yikes! Not necessarily relatedly, Jessica Mason shared the news in Drinks Business that Guinness 0.0 on draught would be hitting Irish pubs – leading to questions as to it’s capacity to support a session.

Diageo has been urging pubs to take the 0.0 brand on draught and its teams of are now working to install separate pipes for the 00 brand into venues that want to stock it. One County Louth publican who is planning to have the 0.0 draught version installed, told reporters: “The drink is very popular with designated drivers who feel they can still have good craic drinking a zero zero and it almost tastes as nice as the real thing. The drink has become a big hit in a very short space of time and now Guinness wants to roll it out everywhere. The reaction to it from the punters is very positive and the 00 obviously has a huge future and is currently the number one non alcoholic drink.”

Whether it’s a beer or a nice cup of tea, you need the zip to go round after round, don’t you? I just can’t see no-alc beer being a sessionable thing. These things are based on the active ingredient. Who chugs decaff? Oh, that person. Yes. I suppose. KHM has other thoughts:

This is the notorious line whose first release was followed by a global recall as it was contaminated with food born pathogens. A poster child for the dangers of taking beer’s chief preservative out of the equation.

What else is going on? I wade through the week’s newsletters by email I’ve filed away… but none really attract a thought. All that self-declared beer expertise and nothing much to speak of. Now, do get yourself on Eoghan’s Like a Little Eel subscribers’ list. Not so much about beer but lots of good writing. Oh, and read Boak and Bailey’s review of Desi Pubs by David Jesudason which really is two reads well worth your while:

It makes you itch to visit Southall, Smethwick or, closer to home, Fishponds, and go somewhere new. Perhaps somewhere you’ve previously ignored because the signals it sent weren’t ones you were primed to read.

Fishponds? Speaking of sessions in pubs, Stan noted one thing in his weekly news notes which was a quote from Jaya Saxena‘s piece in Eater which got me thinking:

The bars that seem to be thriving are ones that managed to embrace the breadth and depth of the LGBTQ+ community. The kind of bar that used to serve only older folks or maybe only young people, or only white people or only men, those bars sometimes seem to struggle. I think bars that have figured out how to embed themselves deeply in the community, maybe being used as a different kind of space during the day than during the night, seem to be thriving.

Thinking back to my bar rat days, I thought how odd the idea of bars which “embed themselves deeply in the community” might have been to me back then. If bar is a third place it is also to a degree antithetical to the general community. Narrow nowheresvilles which offers a perfect alt-reality. Why do you want to be in there? Because you don’t want to be out here. Wouldn’t you like to get away? You want to go where people know people are all the same. You want to go where everybody knows your name. Because in the broader community you are a nobody but in a bar you are with those same people who know you and are like you. Yup. What a miserable idea. No wonder these are the places that are struggling and dying. Viva the big raft bars. Viva!

Speaking of affronts to cultural identify, Eric Asimov wrote an interesting article for The New York Times on how tyrants and dictators regularly destroy vernacular wine cultures:

The Soviet Union routinely sought to transform the local winemaking customs of its constituent republics, discouraging, for example, the winemaking culture of Georgia, and instead creating vast state vineyards that could supply enormous amounts of wine for the Russian market. Likewise, in the Alentejo region of southeastern Portugal, the tradition of making wine in clay talha, amphoralike vessels, largely disappeared in the mid-20th century as the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar pushed the country into centralized wine production. In Spain under Franco, regional methods died off as the government channeled wine into bulk production.

And speaking of cultural appropriations verging on colonial hegemony, Pellicle ran an excellent article by Paul Crowther on whatever Mexican lager is supposed to be. This passage is particularly apt on the meaninglessness of these sorts of things:

…in beer writer Mark Dredge’s book A Brief History of Lager, he suggests that Mexican lagers are more like pilsners, and don’t have anything to do with Vienna lagers. There’s an implication that there are pilsner and Vienna style lagers produced in Mexico, but that there is no such thing specifically as ‘Mexican lager’. “We brew all sorts of lagers in Mexico: pilsners, Viennas, bocks,” Mariana Dominguez of Cervecera Macaria, based in Mexico City, tells me as I try to get to the bottom of this Mexican lager mystery.“What about Mexican lager? Is there such a style?” I ask. “I think it’s something that White Labs [a yeast manufacturer and wholesaler] made popular,” she explains. “They are selling a yeast supposedly propagated from a Mexican beer as ‘Mexican Lager Yeast’. No one in Mexico really uses this as it’s too expensive.” “We’re not brewing ‘Mexican lager’, we’re brewing lager.”

The layers of appropriation are rife. Outsiders upon outsiders layering. American craft style square-hole aficionados and yeast hawkers building upon the unfortunate Hapsburgs and their German industrialist fellow travelers who stood on the shoulders of Spanish colonizing imperialists. Isn’t Mexican beer Tejuino?

Apparently there is oddly at least one unexpected winner in the fall out from the Bud Light brand botch:

Coors sales have accelerated from 6.3% growth over the latest 52 weeks to about 13% growth over the past two months, Spillane said in analyzing Nielsen’s data. The gains have been fueled by demand for Coors Light and Miller Lite. “It’s difficult to determine the duration of the boycott, but it has already lasted longer than industry executives anticipated and appears likely to impact the July 4th holiday,” Spillane added. “Molson Coors appears able to service the demand spike due in part to supply chain improvement (part of the revitalization plan) and learnings from COVID supply chain stress.”

And there are more details on that situation noted last week where branches of the 7-Eleven convenience store chain have been licensed in Ontario as restaurants:

The licences will allow 7-Eleven to serve alcoholic beverages with food at tables in the dining section of each store. Customers are not permitted to take any drinks off the premises. After 7-Eleven applied for the licences in 2021, the AGCO launched a formal review called a Notice of Proposal for all of the company’s applications. That’s a more rigorous process than what the AGCO goes through for the vast bulk of licence applications. The AGCO put out Notices of Proposal for less than one per cent of the nearly 7,000 liquor licences it issued in the 2021-22 fiscal year, according to its annual report.

Prepping for the impending regs allowing corner store beer sales, one presumes. Speaking of Ontario, The Agenda a news magazine produced by TVO ran a 30 minute panel on the state of craft beer in our dear province with some familiar old faces on the show.

And finally – and no doubt inspired by the research shared last week into the dainty powder rooms of Philly dive bars – the image Will Hawkes shared the image of one of the grottier urinal troughs I’ve seen, a vision that takes me back to a bleak Sydney Mines elementary school boy’s washroom circa 1971 when I was dropped into what felt like the grim 1940s after moving from the modern, cool and hip Toronto suburbs. Fabulous.

That’s it! That’s enough from me. It’s back to you for now. And as per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon, the newer ones noted in bold:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*I just note that he and I are on the team writing the hitory of New York State brewing for SUNY Publishing. He knows everything one needs to know about the CNY brewing business and more.
**Update: well after my press time, Courtney Iseman went so far in her newsletter to carefully suggest and also plainly express a few things about the power dynamic that the BA imposes on craft beer culture when she wrote: “There are good things about CBC, and there are good people at the Brewers Association. I’m not comfortable telling people they should never go to CBC again. I’m not optimistic the BA will really take the note and meaningfully improve CBC, but I’m hopeful, so while I have no plans to attend again for the foreseeable future, I think it’s too soon to make any certain, sweeping statements… I think it’s important for us to remember that there are many people in the industry who don’t have as much of a choice. Their jobs might essentially require them to regularly attend CBC.” Which is absolutely nuts when you think about it for three seconds: get in line or get another job. Thanks BA.
***And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again. The Fizz died in 2019. Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?