Category: The Netherlands

The “Happy Canadian Thanksgiving To You!” “Err… What????” Edition Of These Beery News Notes

Did you know that the entire meal is American. That’s the dirty secret of Canadian Thanksgiving. It’s not even ours. Roast Turkey. Mashed Potatoes. Stuffing and cranberry sauce. Pumpkin pie. Food as seen on cable TV. At least I will have my own damn carrots like those up there. And my own beets. Hmm… if the menu was really Canadian what would it be? I dunno. A big ass butter tart at the end maybe. And a roasted wild goose. Where I lived out east a couple of decades ago there were church hall community suppers serving hunter-shot local wild goose. They even created a special regulation to allow it. But only at church suppers. Fat chance with even that being allowed now. Frigging Ohio. Me, I’d have it with Fin du Monde. Suits the times these days.

What else is going on? I am pretty sure that when I were a lad no one cared about if me and the lads preferred beer or wine. I do find the obsession with Gen Z’s taste in booze a bit odd but let’s let the NYT explain their latest cultural findings as to why wine is doing well with them:

Farah Sheikh-Ogoe, who until August was a bartender at Moonflower, a wine bar in the West Village, said that many of the young customers she encountered were drinking, but drinking less. “It’s a little bit more of like, I’m going to be thoughtful about what I’m consuming,’” Ms. Sheikh said. Drinking wine isn’t like taking a shot of vodka or slamming a margarita, said Carson Bennett, a 24-year-old freelance writer and waiter in Brooklyn. “It’s something to sit and savor.” “I think of watching ‘Ratatouille’ and the way that they drink wine,” she continued. “It is a sort of event.”

Big H/T to the person I forgot to note who mentioned that reliance on a cartoon you saw as a child shaping your adult drinking preferences is all a bit heewhooheehaahaa.

And it is interesting to see some serious format changes coming to both the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF) next year and the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) next week. The first is run by CAMRA, a UK lobby group for the beer buying public, while the second is run by the Brewers Association, the USA trade association for brewers other than the really big brewers. The change coming to the GBBF is its move from London to new venue in the reasonably accessible city of Birmingham. The changes coming to the GABF were summarized this week by Andy Crouch who indicated in All About Beer that they were driven by the realities of “emptier aisles and far fewer attendees” in recent years:

Attendees at the 2024 festival will experience six distinct areas. They include “Prost!,” a German inspired biergarten featuring decor paying homage to Oktoberfest, live polka bands playing traditional Bavarian music, and a stein-holding contest. “Score!” is a sports-themed area that will host Lucha Libre Mexican Wrestling and Mechanical Bull Riding. “Fright” is a Halloween-themed area welcoming costumed festival attendees. “Blast Off” offers “liquid innovations and on-trend flavors from international and domestic breweries,” according to the BA. This includes the United Nations taproom, which hosts classic beers from around the globe. 

The event is held in the BA’s hometown of Denver, which makes for interesting logistical challenges. There would be three main classes of attendee: (i) locals, (ii) people in the trade one way or another using their expense accounts or tax write-offs and (iii) beer fans affluent enough to pay to attend. If you are heading any distance to Denver, you would need to have at least $1,000 to spend on the weekend – $220 for the pass, $250 for the plane, $400-600 for three nights at hotels and the balance for food, taxis and the after parties. By contrast, the GBBF pass to the new location in Birmingham costs £9.50 a day and there are four modestly priced trains an hour arriving from the old HQ in London. But even at that budget, the event still has B+B questioning whether to attend according to last week’s footnotes:

The news of the return of the Great British Beer Festival did somewhat gladden our hearts, even though we don’t really like beer festivals, and haven’t always had a great time at GBBF. It just felt as if something was missing from the calendar this year when it didn’t happen. All the old problems will no doubt still apply, however: how do you make a big, drafty conference centre feel anything like as pleasant as a pub?

Somehow I don’t believe they were thinking of “Lucha Libre Mexican Wrestling and Mechanical Bull Riding” as the solution to that conundrum. Yee. Haw. We shall wait on reports from these events before issuing our final condemnations… err… thoughts.

And, just as Hurricane Milton hits, the tough news continues to come out of the aftermath of Hurricane Helene but I was watching for this story:

As communities across the Southeast respond to the catastrophic damage of Hurricane Helene, Anheuser-Busch is actively supporting relief and recovery efforts across the region. Together with our wholesaler partners, we are working alongside the American Red Cross to provide clean, safe drinking water to communities impacted by the Category 4 hurricane… At the request of the American Red Cross, [for example] Anheuser-Busch and its wholesaler partner KW Associates LLC delivered three truckloads (150,000+ cans) of emergency drinking water to Greenville, South Carolina on Wednesday, October 3. 

Good stuff. Similarly, we read about this as well as this at a smaller scale from one craft brewery:

Workers at Holy City Brewing have temporarily shifted their focus from brewing beer to canning water, aiming to provide clean drinking water to those affected by Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina. “We haven’t really canned water, so we’ll see how fast we can run it,” said Owner Chris Brown. “Water’s a little bit different from beer. So, we can run the pressures a little lower. We’re not worried about carbonation.” The brewery’s team quickly adapted to the new task, processing between 200 and 250 cases of water… “We kind of had to scrounge some cans together…” 

More will be needed in Florida no doubt.

On a happier topic, in their weekly newletter feature called “WHAHWEDRUNK!!!” (or maybe something else) B+B wrote about one beer that made for a neat and tidy tiny essay:

We spent last weekend in London, and honestly, we keep thinking we should go somewhere other than The Pembury Tavern and drink something other than Five Points Best. But really, when it’s become one of the best beers in the country, why bother? To be fair, both of us tried the Best at a couple of London pubs that weren’t The Pembury, and it was just as good. On the face of it, it’s a really traditional bitter, but there are a few tweaks that make it next level good. There’s a honeyed, biscuityness in the malt; and a slice of orange, Fuller’s style, alongside the hard bitterness. If we were going to make comparisons it would be something like Bathams, or the various Boddington’s clones we’ve had over the years. But like Bathams, it also tastes like its own thing.

(I wish I was known for my honeyed biscuityness.) Moving on briskly, at the end of last week there was this news from the world of art, an incident in the LAM museum in the Netherlands:

An elevator technician, filling in for a regular worker, mistakenly threw away Alexandre Lavet’s All the Good Times We Spent Together (2016), thinking it was trash. The artwork, two hand-painted beer cans meant to evoke memories of friendship, had been intentionally placed inside an elevator shaft to mimic something casually left behind. LAM, known for its food-themed art and unconventional displays, places pieces in unexpected locations to encourage visitors to view ordinary objects differently. “Our goal is to make people see the mundane in a new light,” said museum director Sietske van Zanten in a statement. The technician, unaware of the museum’s approach, discarded the piece in good faith.

Empty Can Performance Art Note: a Nova Scotian tradition continues – though in my day we would leave an empty there any old day of the year.

In the political realm, Kamala Harris had a beer on TV this week:

When they go low, she goes high. Miller High Life to be precise. Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, took her election campaign to late night television on Tuesday by cracking open a can of the lager with host Stephen Colbert. The moment set her apart from Joe Biden and Donald Trump – both, famously, teetotallers.

Speaking again of the dry among us, apparently Canada’s game coming to Utah has triggered a Canadian response:

Not only did the Utah Hockey Club begin its tenure in Salt Lake City with a 5–2 win over the Chicago Blackhawks on Tuesday night, but also the NHL’s newest fan base arrived at the season opener with a thirst for hockey. And, well, good times. According to The Salt Lake Tribune, Delta Center sold a record-breaking number of beverages, with beer sales climbing over $120,000—more than any other previous NBA or NHL event in that venue, which has served as the home to the Utah Jazz since 1991. The beer prices weren’t cheap, either. A Michelob Ultra, which was $13 at the Jazz’s preseason tilt the night before, sold for $15 for the arena’s NHL debut.

I once had professional occassion to review the effect of the Belleville Bulls coming to town for a Friday night OHL game and I can assure you that the right crowd can sell a lot of beer.

Interesting that just as Ontario has opened up beer and wine sales in cornerstores the nanny state social engineering Tories posing as pretendy libertarians of Alberta have come out against the very same idea:

…the Smith government now says it’s not happening, in part, because they think most Albertans do not want beer and wine and ready-to-drink cocktails and coolers sold in convenience stores and grocery stores…  The minister for red tape reduction said those opposed felt there were already lots of liquor stores. “They weren’t being teetotallers in any way, suggesting we need less access to liquor. They seemed to feel we had good access”… There is a report on what the UCP politicians heard. It is not going to be made public.

Noooo… not them… not “in any way”… no way… not a chance…

Speaking conversely of “yes, yes, yes” David Jesudason had a great feature in Pellicle this week. I like that Wednesday publication deadling thing by the way. You can imagine why. Anyway, David wrote about the subtitled “Harcourt, Altrincham’s Hong Kong Inspired Pub”:

“Because we’ve got the traditional Chinese character outside [on the sign] the locals didn’t expect us to be a pub,” Priscilla says. “They thought we were a Chinese restaurant.” “Some people thought maybe we’re just a restaurant serving some beers.” When customers who were sceptical about the food smelt the dishes being brought through, however, it turns out they couldn’t resist temptation. Harcourt reminds me of a great desi pub in that it mixes an important aspect of Asian culture in a British bar setting, offering a unique welcome so that the visitor believes they are visiting a home away from home. The best of Britain. The best of Hong Kong. The best of Manchester.

And finally… well, eventually finally… Matty C wrote an opinion piece on the ongoing debate in the UK about the pint and the proper serving size:

Lets say, for argument’s sake, that legislation was introduced where the pint was scrapped and only third, half and two-third measures remained. If, as the study states, beer consumption was reduced by 10%, then so too would sales volumes, and indeed, revenues shrink by the same amount. The trend in pub closures already indicates how fine a line hospitality businesses are walking in terms of operating sustainably. Any reduction in revenue would surely only hasten the demise of those already teetering on the brink, which, as evidence suggests, is a high proportion of operators.

It is an opinion piece so must naturally invite response. So I shall. First, however, a couple of weeks ago, I shared (or at least I hope I shared) my thoughts that the conspiracy theory about the lazy use of the “guy drinks beer from pint glass” is a bit much. It’s like the North American use of a martini glass (olive and all) in the style of a “banned!” sign. Wine bottles are common here, too. I don’t take these as a slight against wine*… or olives for that matter. Stock images are what they are. They offer continuity and a clue to what’s been written. Even if you don’t agree with what’s been written.

The other arguments often trotted out against the rejecting pinting or quarting for that matter are also well known. Unfortunately. Too many of them are simply not winners. If your best argument is “NEO-PROHIBITION!!” you’ve pretty much wasted the readers time. Same about “things should still be like twenty years ago!“… or even like 1824. And sorry to break the news… again… but medical science advances and public health measures are simply a couple of of those undeniably good things modernity has gifted us.

There are, however, some other good arguments to be made. Try the tax burden. Try other regulatory burdens and the supply chain markups. Try discussing the freedom to choose to drink. Matt does that. And maybe add in a (coherent) relative risk argument. Matt approached that* but then veered towards study sample size and a methodology complaint.  The best of these pieces also address the reality that people have so many more options for their entertainment purchasing power than 40 or even 20 years ago. That isn’t changing. Folk are passing on the pub for many reasons but they are choosing to be elsewhere.

And, for me, the “save the pubs!” argument included in the passage quoted above is – frankly – wishery and honestly even slightly corporate if we unpack it a bit. First, my liver is not an cash cow for anyone’s business. See, it’s an argument that big doughnut makers and the ciggie trade can also make. “Save the sugary snack bakeries!!” No one wants those team mates on the bench. And then lastly there’s that tie of these sin trades to Matt’s bias against the working classes. I am not liking this one – even if in classist England it is a reality. Because isn’t that easily reframed as “working class people ought to compromise their health to ensure pub and brewery owners maintain profitability“? Is that the argument? How can’t it not be? Me no like.

But you may see things differently. Get blog and let your yap trap clap. There. That’s my opinion. If Matthew gets to hoist an opinion so can I! Cancel your subscriptions. See if I care. Why you look to see how in fact to cancel your subscription, for more beery news check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and there is a promise that Stan may be back from his autumnal break starting (not last Monday but surely) this very Monday. Then listen to Lew’s podcast and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is thereback with the sweary Mary! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? Check out the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s one cost a fifth of that but only had the one post.

*But, let’s all be honest, the 250 ml wine glass is a bit nuts. A third of a bottle. 30 ml of pure alcohol. Gulp. Gulp. Nudder plz. Standard wine bottles have five or six sensible servings.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Along with of course, the crowd pleasing cult classic The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer – A Rant in Nine Acts of earlier that same year.
**Yes, yes – no relation.
***This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (929) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,484) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear. 

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:

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

Anyone else? 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?

Notes: Flemmynges, Hans Beerpot, Thirsty Actors And An Odd Crusade

A bit of a jumble, this post. First, here’s an interesting 15th century slag:

Ye have herde that twoo Flemmynges togedere
Wol undertake or they goo ony whethere
Or they rise onys, to drynke a baralle fulle
Of gode berkeyne; so sore they hale and pulle
Undre the borde they pissen as they sitte

Those Dutch – they get so drunk they just urinate under the table as they sit drinking their beer! These sweet poetic thoughts are from Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, a short treatise in verse from the 1430s pumping up mercantile jingoism. I came upon it in the book Representations of Flemish Immigrants on the Early Modern Stage looking for references to a slightly later form of anti-Dutch slag, the stock theatrical character Hans Beerpot. We still have loads of lingering anti-Dutch sentiment in the English language hidden in phrases like “Dutch courage” (drunkenness) and “double Dutch” (lying) and even “going Dutch” on a date (formerly being cheap, now perhaps egalitarian) but I had presumed they arose in the 1600s when England and the Dutch battled for naval domination of the North Atlantic and the North Sea. I was about two hundred years too late in my thinking.

Point? This all ties into my recent noodlings about the question of when the English first brought beer to North America – which I presume depends on when beer first got to the ports of England from which expeditions to North America disembarked.* And, yes, the life in those ports was fairly beery in the first half of the 1400s. In “The Civic Franchise and the Regulation of Aliens in Great Yarmouth” by Liddy and Lambert, we read at page 131:

Cornelius Shipmayster, who also went by the name of Cornelius Ducheman, mariner, kept a hostel in the 1440s; his wife was fined for being a tippler of beer, and it is probably that she sold the beer her husband brewed. Beer production rose substantially in the autumn, to cater to the visiting merchants from the Low Countrys and during the quiet season men such as Robert Phelison were able to pursue multiple trades: a resident of the south leet, he brewed beer, ran an alehouse, and owned a fishing boat, which was arrested for naval service in 1437. In this multi-occupational community, hostelling and beer brewing were often practiced together.

Which leads to an observation: you have to slag someone’s nationality for being beer drinking drunkards only after observing them being beer drinking drunkards. So for the Dutch or Flemish or other sorts of low country aliens to be the focus of slagging they needed to be (i) present in England, (ii) drinking hopped beer and (ii) disorderly drunk.  The stereotype is framed in Hans Beerpot from the 1550s play Wealth and Health.** He arguably plays no function other than to arrive in the plot as a stranger, drunk, singing in Dutch and (as an additional sixteenth century touch) representing military menace. But that’s all a bit late for my purposes. I’m interested in earlier things.

Context. The War of the Roses came to a head in the 1450s just when the Hundred Years War was ending with English loss of French possessions, including Bordeaux where (as mentioned a few posts ago) Bristol had had a thriving wine trade.  There was still a spot of the plague going about. Normal ties, internal and external to England, were being disrupted as the very question of being English was being framed. No wonder aliens were being registered. No wonder the ways of the Dutch amongst them were being observed.

Anyway, this is about beer, right? Let’s go a little earlier.  Three records of the Cofferers’ Accounts of the Gild Merchant of Reading, Berkshire from 1420, 1424 and 1427 seem to indicate part payment to theatrical players was in terms of hopped beer: seruicia or ceruisia in Latin. A later similar record from the 1452 accounts of St George’s Chapel of Windsor, Berkshire again for the part payment of actors states:

Et in ceruisia data lusoribus recitantibus ludum habitum in Collegio erga donatoris festum.

Were these all Dutch actors? Maybe. They were likely travelers, at least. But that makes an odd parallel pattern. Flems in port towns and actors liked hopped beer in the early 1400s. So, to find more similar patters, searches for variants of the root of the now familiar cerveza might be in order to see what might be up.***

And we find some in the 1390 accounts of another sort of traveling, the expedition led by then Earle of Derby, later Henry IV (reign 1399-1412),  crusading through Prussia and, surprisingly, on to Lithuania. In a sort of code mixing English, Latin, French and plenty of numbers you see plenty of  interesting references. When the force passes through the friendly lands of the Hanseatic ports en route, Derby’s clerk of the buttery starts buying beer along with wine and sometimes mead. As a result and for example, in September 1390 we read this sort of expense (amongst hundreds) being recorded:

Clerico buterie super beer per manus Gylder, pro j barello de beer, pro portagio et tractagio beer et vini…

Looks to be a bill for the beer, for the barrel in which the beer sit as the hauling of the beer as well as wine. There are a lot of accounts like that on the expedition. A lot. Which is interesting. Because here we have Englishmen drinking a hell of a lot of beer over a long period of time. High status folk. Well before beer is considered to have been consumed much in England by Englishmen. Never thought to look for that sort of thing before.

Flems in England in the 1430s, actors in England in the 1420s and English crusaders in the 1390s. All having hopped beer very early in the timeline. I have to think about what this might add up to, if anything.

*This approach entirely sets aside the question of Viking brewing hundreds of years earlier in what is now Newfoundland but bear with me on that.
**See “Toward a Multicultural Mid-Tudor England: The Queen’s Royal Entry Circa 1553, and the Question of Strangers in the Reign of Mary I” by Scott Oldenburg – and especially the discussion around pages 110 to 115. The character also appears in the 1618 play Hans Beer Pot, his Invisible Comedy of See me and See me not by Daubridgecourt Capability Belchier.
***Examples of treachery in such matters abound. Consider the 1417 appendix to a will in which the summary states beer was to be brewed but the details make it clear it’s ale that being ordered by the future deceased.

 

The First Thursday Beer News, Resolutions And Gnawing Regrets For 2019

One eye on the beer, one eye on you!†

Wasn’t that fun? New Year’s Eve = The Worst Holiday Eh Ver. I had promised myself I would be nicer again this year* but I honestly found this holiday more boring than usual. Was it because it was on a Monday? Because it rained? I was holiday-ed out? You decide. I did drink a wee bit but we stayed in. I sipped on an insanely** cheap Belgian beer throughout the day and shared a swell bottle of Ontario Riesling in the evening.  Defrosted grocery store pastries shared about the family room. Wooo!!!

Anyway, here we are: 2019. Big news so far? The Trump shutdown of the US Federal government has halted the breakneck manic approval of more and more, newer and newer transient ephemeral brands of craft beer, the amnesiac mainstay of the trade over the last few years. So he can’t be all bad. Not unrelated, David Frum also linked Trump to craft crusaders this week. Slightly related, U.S. Sen. and potential Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren appears to have done herself a beer-related injury.

I am absolutely gutted that I did not follow the DrinkablongwithRon 2018. What sort of animal have I become? I even had string. I did notice that noted British beer writer Jeff Evans announced he is pulling the plug on his website:

A short message re Inside Beer. After ten years, I’ve decided to close the Inside Beer website, due to other pressing commitments. The site will stay live for a few more weeks but will not be updated. This Twitter account remains open. Thanks to everyone for their support. HNY!

I note this not only for the update but to capture Martyn’s keen observation: the move is related to Jeff getting a more attractive opportunity. No doubt more to come on what that turns out to be.

One thing I did do in 2018 was avoiding Brut IPA altogether… along with glitter beer, that one month flashpoint. Never had nuttin’ of neither. I’m still coping with kettle sours. The New York Times, being generally more useful, has provided us with a helpful if brief study of its local BeePah action:

It’s taken a little over a year for Brut I.P.A., a new style of India Pale Ale, to sweep through the craft-brewing community. The name is a reference to brut, a dry Champagne. By all accounts, it was created by Kim Sturdavant, the brewmaster of Social Kitchen and Brewery in San Francisco, who used amyloglucosidase, or AMG, to remove the sugars in an I.P.A. AMG is an enzyme usually added to make light beers and to balance big beers like imperial stouts.

More of the best of the new? Ed posted the most honest Golden Pints ever. Mashtun and Meow’s were filled with fun and gratitude. More GP18 here. In other beer writing news and opinion, Matt is laying off the sauce. Crystal is off the sauce, too. BeerAdvocate reminded each of us to ask ourselves… why not lay off the sauce?  And Tandy Man asked about another sort of laying things aside:

It has been a very quiet year for the blog for many reasons. I have had the passing of my mother to contend with, been very busy with beery things here in Rochdale, Oldham and Bury and latterly in Manchester for Manchester Beer and Cider Festival. But I don’t think it the main reason. I just couldn’t be bothered. Little inspired me frankly.  Some things interested me, but overall, just all a bit flat. Like a London pint.

I suppose it’s been obvious that creative beer writing has not been quite as interesting over the last couple of years as it was in its hay day (given all the jostling to be Bernstein and Wordward, pretendy or otherwise) but it’s important to be OK… be just OK, like the man above,† with the idea that one can be neither a craft PR type pushing for greater collective boosterism or sitting looking in the mirror, finding yourself admitting you are are cutting back for health reasons. While Stan may be right, that beer reading has been rather spare the last couple of weeks, there is still that great big middle ground to write about and it is full of interesting things worth exploring and sharing your ideas. So while I won’t be confused anytime soon for a #beerpositive**** supporter, Polk is on the right track.

Say – speaking about drinking and health, this is an excellent article worth considering because it’s written by a wine writer and judge who is also a liver disorder specialist. He poses the question this way:

I believe advice that everyone should have at least two alcohol free days a week is a well-intentioned effort to combat the enormous adverse impact that alcohol has on some individuals’ health and well-being. The question, of course, is whether that strategy will be effective in reducing the well-known damages of excessive drinking to individuals and society: liver disease, neurologic problems, socially unacceptable behaviour, and driving under the influence, to name just a few.

See that? “Well-known”… which means if you don’t believe it you are participating in something like climate change denial.***

New booze laws for 2019? That’s what you showed up for, right? I left it for last. Big news is how the crowds at the next World Cup will face plumped up booze taxes:

In an effort to make their country healthier, authorities in Qatar have introduced new taxes. But with the World Cup just round the corner, fans around the world will be raising their eyebrows almost as high as the new prices for booze. That’s because the Gulf state has added 100% to the cost of alcohol – seeing a crate of 24 beers now retail for £82 and a bottle of gin set you back and astonishing £73.

Other new laws include unintelligible changes to craft distiller operations in California, relaxed retailer rules in Tennessee and Colorado, tougher drink driving laws in Ontario, and a booze crackdown in Turkmenistan.

Well, that’s enough for now. Can’t give away all the good stuff on the first Thursday. Predictions? What will happen in 2019 otherwise? Ask me in 12 months. What’s happening Friday and on the weekend? Go ask Boak and Bailey on Saturday and then Stan on Friday.

†Don’t be looking for the linked connection down here…
*I don’t mean that I will be even nicer, just that again I promise… only to fail.
**I have no idea how this gets shipped to Canada for such a low price. Does it come by tramp steamer with no guaranteed delivery date?
***And for God’s sake stop taking about a J-curve. You just look silly.
****#beerrealism is much more interesting. #ThinkingAboutDrinking, too. And I need to get my own butt in gear. Frankly, more than anything, I blame me.
*****Ben predicts on three topics, and does so rather well. On the most interesting topic, DME, the main question I have is not one really asked yet except in discussions on the QT. Something is afoot – as the story so far is not right. The other question I have I will ask: how much of the deposit money was borrowed and how much was actual saved cash. If the former, the ripples will spread much more widely. Who will lend for such equipment now? If the latter, perhaps spare me a full throttle application of the broke craft owner motif next time we meet. But, as Ben’s gathered threads ask by implication, think on the fate of Texas’s Big Bend Brewing Co., now closed due to $1 million lost to DME and the others who may soon follow. 

Beer and Art: The Harvesters, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565

Nosing around the Met‘s digitized collection a bit more, I came across “The Harvesters” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder from 1565. Not hard as it was on the front page. I have posted a few times about paintings by his son, the imaginatively named Pieter Bruegel the Younger, over the years but this one struck me as perhaps illustrating a few things worth thinking about.

Look at the scale of the people compared to the height of the grain. One of the characteristics of Battledore barley two hundred years later in Britain was that it had a short stalk. It could survive hail or wind better than other varieties but didn’t provide all that useful straw that we learned about in relation to beer in New York before the switch to barley from wheat. The stalk was in itself important to the community as a multi-purpose material for mattress stuffing to looser wheat mash spargings. In “The Harvesters” the stalks are tall and entire stooks* are taken from the field with care. The stooks are strong enough to serve as a bench for the workers having their meal.

Harvest time is big stuff. The image is a narrative of agricultural economy in the Renaissance. If you click on the image at the met site, you can zoom in quite closely. Look at how the topography is used to illustrate the economic activity. The field being harvested is on the top of a hill. Scythed and stooked, it is carried one by one to the bottom of the hill where it is loaded on a cart and carried away. There are three communities in the painting. The hilltop has a church to the upper left seen through the trees. Down below there is a manor of some sort where some are swimming while others are killing a tied up goose as a blood sport. In the far distance, there is a coastal town with ships in the harbour. Is one point of the painting’s structure that the grain gets exported?  Or is beer made from the grain getting shipped out?  I should cross reference the painting with Unger.

Where is this place? The blurb attached to the image by the Met says:

Bruegel’s series is a watershed in the history of western art. The religious pretext for landscape painting has been suppressed in favor of a new humanism, and the unidealized description of the local scene is based on natural observations.

But is this really a local scene or an imaginary one? Where is it? Bruegel lived in coastal Antwerp, Belgium a city of about 100,000 at the time and the richest in Europe. He was born in the river town of Breda, another community now in the Netherlands but then also in the Duchy of Brabant. Perhaps one of those two centres is in the background.  Could you find the field and stand where the artist stood?

But what about the beer? As one commentator notes, the scene is about producing and consuming. Or – if you are the goose – producing, torturing then consuming. The workers are eating bread and cheese as well as pears that one guy is shaking from the tree to the upper right. And they are drinking. A central character is a man carrying two large jugs up the path. Another man in the circle having a meal drinks directly from a jug. A fourth jug with what looks like a loaf of bread on top sits in the uncut wheat to the lower left.

We are told by Markowski that saison and biere de garde were brewed for centuries in the Low Countries and northern France to attract and retain workers. Farmhouse beers. The scene in “The Harvesters” is smack-dab in the middle of that culture, in the saison zone that included Brabant. Unger explains that particularly in the sixteenth century, tax records indicate a wide number of names for various grades of beer: “… dun and scheynbier and volksbier and scharbier and scherbier all turn up. No matter the name, it was always cheap.”** Was that what was in the jugs? We can’t reach back to ask those in the picture what they called their drink or even if it was in fact beer. But it could be and, frankly, likely was so… it is what it was. Day drinking 1565.

*I use the SW Ontario usage, spelling and pronunciation of the in-laws.
**at page 129.

The Steelyard, Stillyard, Stylyard and Spelling

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Ah, the Hanseatic League. I posted about the Hanseatic League earlier this year, pointing out how it was likely the conduit for the first introduction of hopped beer into England – and, by implication, not the Dutch. I think that might be the case for no other reason that the Dutch were introduced to hopped beer by shipments from the Hanseatic League, the Renaissance corporate port towns of the Baltic which had that handy corporate navy with corporate cannon to enforce its idea of open trade.

Renaissance and Elizabethan brewing and drinking in England is particularly interesting as the period ties a lot of later things together…. or founds them… or whatever. For example, Hull was a 1600s brewing town that also was a Hanseatic depot. Hull ale was a contemporary of Northdown as being a premium drink in London in second half of the 1600s. It’s a coastal ale of the sort that governs until the canals reach deeper into the countryside releasing the odd sulfurous and maybe hoppier beers of Burton in Staffordshire upon the national and international market. Like the railways in the mid-1800s Ontario that gave rural Labatt and Carling the opportunity to explode out into the world, England’s canals of the early 1700s also placed brewing at scale nearer the grain fields, likely cutting out middlemen and displacing premium coastal brewing perhaps by undermining existing price. Theory. Working theory.

What was displaced was the model set by the Hanseatic League. Renaissance Hamburg was the greatest brewing center in the history of beer – 42% of the workforce was involved in brewing. The Hanseatic depot at King’s Lynn still stands, one of the branch locations of Hanseatic activity. London was the Kontor with its headquarters of import / export operation located just west of London Bridge on the north shore of the Thames where Cannon Street station now stands. One of the coolest thing is that there have basically been two owners of that site since perhaps 1250 as the vestigial Hanseatic League interests in Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg sold it to the South-Eastern Railway Company in 1852. The presence of the Hanseatic League cannot be minimized at the critical point in the 1400s. Consider this passage from 1889’s bestseller The Hansa Towns by Helen Zimmern. It has a certain ripe Victorian style but does explain things like this:

Nor was London by any means their only depôt. It was the chief, but they also had factories in York, Hull, Bristol, Norwich, Ipswich, Yarmouth, Boston, and Lynn Regis. Some mention of them is found in Leland’s “Itinerary.” Under an invitation to the Hanseatics to trade with Scotland we find the name honoured in legend and song of William Wallace. In John Lydgate’s poems we also meet with our Hanseatics. In relating the festivities that took place in London city on the occasion of the triumphal entry of Henry VI, who had been crowned king at Paris some months previously, the poet narrates how there rode in procession the Mayor of London clad in red velvet, accompanied by his aldermen 196 and sheriffs dressed in scarlet and fur, followed by the burghers and guilds with their trade ensigns, and finally succeeded by a number of foreigners.

“And for to remember of other alyens,
Fyrst Jenenyes (Genoese) though they were strangers,
Florentynes and Venycyens,
And Easterlings, glad in her maneres,
Conveyed with sergeantes and other officeres,
Estatly horsed, after the maier riding,
Passed the subburbis to mete withe the kyng.”

A love of pomp and outward show was indeed a characteristic of the Hanseatics in England who thus perchance wished to impress upon the natives a sense of their wealth.

Henry IV was crowned the King of England in 1399. Hanseatic League ambassadors are in the procession when he enters London for the first time. They are somebodies. And they are powerful. They had a wee war with England from 1469-74… and won entrenching their right to trade. Hopped beer was not introduced to England by a few straggling sailors showing up at a few coastal towns. It was brought along – even imposed perhaps – by a massive commercial and military complex. Let’s look at some maps at how the Hansa QH has been described:

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hanselizmap1720

hanslondon1667

 

 

 

 

The illustration to the left is a detail of the 1633 reprint of the 1561 Agas map. You can see the location of London’s Hanseatic Steelyard in blue to the west of London Bridge. Above way at the top of the text is a much finer detail of the site. Notice it is referred to as the “Stylyarde.” In the middle is a 1720s map of Elizabethan London. Notice the site is now referred to as the “Stillyard.” And to the right is a diagram of the site of the Steelyard itself in this case called the “Stahlhofes” – as it was in 1667 according to a late 1800s German atlas. So, we have four ways of spelling the name of the site. Which means that each needs to be run through the dark Satanic
research mills if we are going to have an idea of what’s going on. In a note to the discussion of John Stow‘s Survey of London (editions from 1598 to 1603), British History Online has an extended discussion in a footnote on the variously described Stillyard / Steelyard / Stilliard / Stelehouse / Steleyard which states that there was a trade presence from Cologne there as early as 1157. It also indicates that the German version Stahlhof that appears rather early on means a stall hall – a marketplace. Stow himself describes the site and operations at length in his narrative map of London including the following:

Next to this lane, on the east, is the Steelyard, as they term it, a place for merchants of Almaine, that used to bring hither as well wheat, rye, and other grain, as cables, ropes, masts, pitch, tar, flax, hemp, linen cloth, wainscots, wax, steel, and other profitable merchandises.

Interestingly, as Stow notes, past the intervening church, near the Steelyard in Haywharf Lane in the late 1500s there was a “great brew-house” operated in the past by Henry Campion and then by his son Abraham. Life in the district was… lively. In the poem by Isabella Whitney (1548–1573) “The Wyll and Testament of Isabella Whitney” we read the following:

At Stiliarde ſtore of Wines there bée,
your dulled mindes to glad:
And handſome men, that muſt not wed
except they leaue their trade.
They oft ſhal ſéeke for proper Gyrles,
and ſome perhaps ſhall fynde:
That neede compels, or lucre lures
to ſatiſfye their mind.

So, as we see on the image to the right, there is a wine house. I assumed it was a wholesale depot but it appears to be an Elizabethan retail party palace where lads and lassies mingle as they consider drink, lust and lucre. February 1582 government orders issued by the Privy Council to the Lord High Treasurer show the Stillyard being excused from certain taxation – right under another order allowing the export of 1,000 tuns of beer from London. Elizabethan brewing and trading at scale. You don’t hear about that often. Leaping ahead into the next century, Samuel Pepys, diarist and high government official, records a number of visits to the site in the 1660s. On Friday, 13 December 1661 he wrote:

…to the office about some special business, where Sir Williams both were, and from thence with them to the Steelyard, where my Lady Batten and others came to us, and there we drank and had musique and Captain Cox’s company, and he paid all, and so late back again home by coach, and so to bed.

On Monday 26 January 1662/63 he stated that he was “up and by water with Sir W. Batten to White Hall, drinking a glass of wormewood wine at the Stillyard… while on Sunday, 2 September 1666 he uses it as a location in his description of the Great Fire of London. Perhaps most gloriously, he gives us this image of a part of his day on Wednesday, 21 October 1663:

Thence, having my belly full, away on foot to my brother’s, all along Thames Streete, and my belly being full of small beer, I did all alone, for health’s sake, drink half a pint of Rhenish wine at the Still-yard, mixed with beer.

Rhenish mixed with beer. There’s a challenge to today’s sense of yum. Thankfully, he also drank Northdown and Hull so it was not all weird for Sammy. I am going to leave it there but to review, then, what we have seen is that the Hanseatic League was a massive trading partner which had a huge export trade in beer in the 1400s. It had a very significant governmental foothold in the middle of London which was recognized from at least 1399 to the 1660s as something to be reckoned with. The business presence stretched for 700 years from the 1150s to the 1850s. They ran a retail and entertainment hall of some sort exactly when beer is coming into England at the same time that they operate the largest brewing center in the world at Hamburg.

Suffice it to say, there is more to be found about the role of the Hanseatic League and the history of hopped beer in England. Does it support the rough overlapping sequence Haneastic hopped beer (say Hamburg and later Flemish 1300s to 1600s) => coastal hopped beer (like Hull and Northdown, say, late 1400s-1712) => canal based hopped beer (Burton after 1712)? Could be. Need to find out.

Is This One Way Big Craft Might Be Dying?

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There is nothing more certain about the brewing trade more than the history is defined an extraordinary limited set of patterns. Those who think that the owners of big craft breweries are special, well, know nothing about the rise of lager in the late 1800s as a premium even healthy drink – and know nothing about the rise of Albany Ale from central New York in early the middle third of the 1800s or the rise of Taunton Ale from southwest England as probably a premium even healthy drink in the last quarter of the 1700s. I suspect Northdown Ale was the premium even healthy drink in the lower Thames valley in the third quarter of the 1600s, too. There are, in fact, only a limited number of things you can say about beer to make people buy it other than that it’s tasty, cheap and gets you a tremendous buzz. They are: (i) it’s premium and (ii) it’s healthy. Check out social media today. The spin doctors are still at it. That quote up there? That is from the fabulously fabulous Dr. Richard W. Unger of UBC. More particularly, it is from his essay “Beer: A New Bulk Good of International Trade” in the book Cogs, Cargoes and Commerce: Maritime Bulk Trade in Northern Europe, 1150-1400. It’s actually the ending. Sorry. Spoilers. It reminds me of craft. Or rather big craft.

Just at the moment, big craft is going through a time of change that is not unlike what happened to the beers of Hamburg in the latter 1400s and early 1500s. Hanseatic Hamburg’s hopped beer as a technology went through an era when it was considered premium, rare and difficult to make. Roughly from 1250 to 1350. Neighbouring markets raised import duties to keep it out or just enough to equalize the cost with local producers. Because Hamburg during that time was the greatest brewing center in the history of beer. 42% of the workforce was involved in brewing. 15% of all Swedish exports were hops sent to the breweries of Hamburg and its allies. Read ye some Unger if you have any doubts. These trading communities had their own warships and a trust based commerce that overcame North Sea and Baltic piracy and storm. A commercial empire. And it all went away. At least the brewing did. They switched to trading in the ultimate beer concentrate – grain.

Here in Canada we are undergoing much more accelerated change at the moment. The collapse of the oil market and the sad performance of the Canadian dollar against the American version means no one in their right mind is even thinking of buying US craft beer either by a quick flip over the border or as an import. Yet there are around 550 craft brewing kettles in the land. As a result, while I can buy 2 litres of Pilsner Urquell for 10 bucks and decent Ontario craft for maybe 12 bucks the equivalent volume of beer in a six pack of fairly pedestrian Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is selling for a silly $15.50 and will likely soon cost more given our new 68 cent dollar. Who needs it? Few if the stock that sits on the shelves is any indication.

This is an accentuated version of what is happening in the US itself. Being well north of 4,000 breweries in the US means fans of good beer in the US are no longer dependent on those Hanseatic Hamburgers of big craft who ship coast to coast. People are making their own better local beer now just as the Netherlands did around 1450 and England did starting in 1520. Big craft is losing sales just as its handmaid bulk cider is. Who needs it? If you are looking for something rare and interesting – premium and maybe even healthy – who needs to go to a grocery store or gas station shelf to buy the beer trucked in from out of state? Fewer and fewer.

The economies of scale in good beer are having their way with the market. Not large scale. Small scale. The era of the great white male multi-millionaire brewery owner is over. The nameless nimble newbie hoards have learned the tricks of Hamburg, leaving the old fests cancelled and the old men the option to sell out, shut down or sit around wondering what happened. Same as it ever was.

Sad News Of A Beer Fan’s Passing Earlier This Summer

ckaI took down the little logo for the Cracked Kettle beer store in Amsterdam today. I removed it after getting an email advising that the shop closed a few months back and that owner Jeff Cunningham had died in June after a few months of terminal illness. Sad news. I never met Jeff but had worked with him now and again since the late fall of 2006. His shop paid for the ads in beer shipped to me and other writers then populating the blog as proof of how fine the service was. Knut, micro-famously, had to sit around waiting for a delivery and then got hit by the Norwegian tax man. They also sent care packages to me, to the States and to England, too. In 2008, Lars won a t-shirt from Cracked Kettle in the Christmas photo contest. Ah, for the days of free style happy go lucky beer blogging.

Jeff, along with partner Andy, ran a shop that struck me a something of a ground breaker even if it was only six years ago. Rereading his emails, it is easy to see how he was really excited to be stocking some of the great beers of Europe, providing solid service – and figured he had managed a way to make airlifting it direct to beer fans make sense. And bringing US craft to Europe before others. From the Wayback Machine, it appears that the shop started as a plan to make a micro-brewery in Amsterdam in 2003. Sad to hear of his passing. Some beer fans left their thoughts over at RateBeer.

Book Review: The Economics Of Beer – Swinnen, ed.

oxeb1I bought this because Simon told me to. Simon said.

This book is a series of essays related to the 2009 conference of The Beeronomics Society. It says on its back cover that it “is the first economic analysis of the beer market and brewing industry” but that is just silly puffery. There have been loads of economic analysis of the beer market and brewing industry. Frankly we have been weighed down by them. Don’t make me review Tremblay and Trembaly again. Do you remember those graphs and tables?

This book is a lot like one of my favorite sets of essays, the papers from the “Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture.” It is also a lot like Beer and Philosophy, a set of essays which included one from me on the underlying philosophy of beer regulation in Canada. What they all have in common is that they are a collection of papers tackling aspects of a general topic from various points of view. In the TEOB you will find 18 papers from the 2009 conference organized under the four topics of history, consumption, industrial organization and the new beer markets. With any luck, as with the annual baseball conference but unlike Beer and Philosophy, the followup second conference of The Beeronomics Society will issue another volume of essays reflective of the topics covered in September 2011.

So is it worth getting? For a book nerd like me, sure. I was a little uneasy with the superficiality of the first essay “A Brief Economic History of Beer” given it covered so much of time and culture so quickly. However, when I saw that there was an essay by Richard Unger, everyone’s favorite beery medievalist and Renaissance man, I was won over. And the essay “Recent Economic Developments in the Import and Craft Segments of the US Brewing Industry” by the manical graph-huggers¹ T+T may serve as something of an update of their 2005 book. Best of all, each submission comes with its own bibliography alerting folk like me to other papers and texts that might be out there just waiting to be added to the book shelf.

Published, too, by Oxford University Press, this book is another sign that we fans of beer and brewing live in lucky times. If I have more intelligent comment after reading a bit more, I will add it in the comments. But at this point this, too, looks like a good buy for the serious beer nerd.

¹ There are seven graphs and four table in just 18 pages!!!