Category: Wisconsin

Your Weekly Beery News Updates For This Mid-November Of 2024

What a boring heading. “Couldn’t you come up with anything clever?” I hear you. Nope. All my wit, such as it is, has drained away with the recent tide of events* and I am still waiting for a top up. Retired Martin, as he often does, gave us some relief this week with a lovely photo essay of countryside walk to a village pub:

In truth, I’d no idea where Great Cransley was, only 45 minutes walk from Kettering station and Wickstead Park, a walk that rewards you with the golden stone of east Northants. A smart looking village of 305 souls whose nearest What Pub entry while the Three Cranes was closed was the (keg) Broughton WMC… and you get 4pm opening here, though as is always the way the door was actually open while I stood patiently waiting for the clock to tick.

Good news, too, for the beer book buyer as Dr Christina Wade has announced the publication of her latest:

I’m delighted to announce after seven years of research and writing FILTHY QUEENS: A HISTORY OF BEER IN IRELAND is here! Published with Nine Bean Rows, it is available for preorder now… we look at the history of beer alongside some of the biggest events in the story of Ireland. You’ll find an 18th-century courtesan who had a wicked streak of beer snobbery and early medieval monks who wrote beer reviews so terrible, any Untappd fan would feel right at home.

Yikes! A bit of harshing on the craft nerdiratti. Get your copy here. And Jeff posted an interesting essay on the effect of history’s tide on the distinction between Bavarian and Czech lager:

In a remarkable article in the New York Times immediately following the fall of Communism, reporter Steven Greenhouse identified 2,000 workers at Pilsner Urquell, a brewery roughly the size that Sierra Nevada is today. Among this giant workforce, “the advent of capitalism” will, he wrote, “probably mean tougher management, less slacking off and perhaps some layoffs, especially among the 400 administrative workers who spend much of their time doing paperwork for Prague’s central planners.” It’s hard to fathom what four hundred administrative workers would spend their days doing, though “slacking off” would seem to have been a central activity if for no other reason than there was no work to do.

I worked in Poland as an ESL teacher not long after the fall of Communism there and the drunk principal in the nearby elementary school was certainly proof enough to convince me of Jeff’s main argument – that there was little initiative or innovation under the Soviet system. Yet… I wonder if that is the whole story. Are there cultural differences beyond that between the German and Czech experience?  Does the Austrio-Hungarian empire have any lingering effects?** And if there had been no Soviet era locking time in amber… would there still be any Pilsner Urquell as we know it?

Stan shared the news of the closure of the Chippewa Falls brewing facilities of Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Co., one of America’s oldest breweries founded in 1867, and the consolidation of operations at another nearby plant owned by parent company Molson Coors with some hard news for those employed there:

The closings will result in the loss of a total of 90 jobs – 34 in Milwaukee atnd 56 in Chippewa Falls – according to notices filed by Molson Coors on Thursday with the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development. The layoffs at both facilities are expected to begin on Jan. 17. The Milwaukee brewery layoffs include 33 hourly employees and one salaried employee. The Chippewa Falls plant layoffs include 54 hourly employees and two salaried employees. Hourly workers at both plants are represented by local Teamsters chapters.

So… which brewery at this point is more authentic to its own roots? Pilsner Urquell or Leinenkugel? And, to ask Marx’s question, which system alienated the workers from its product, capitalism or collectivity?

Speaking of capitalism, in his most recent edition of London Beer City, Will Hawkes shared a conversation with Sam McMeekin of craft brewers Gipsy Hill on their decision to be acquired:

With the London brewing scene getting progressively smaller, it makes sense to be as big as possible, even for a company that, as Sam puts it, is “essentially debt-free.” “In theory, we could have refinanced all of our equipment, taken on a load of debt and struggled on,” he adds. “But I don’t have [enough] faith in the market [that that would be] a success.” Hence the deal with Sunrise Alliance Beverages, a group which grew out of St Peter’s Brewery in Suffolk and which now takes in Wild Beer, Curious Brewing and Portobello, the latter of which was added last month. It’s more complex than a simple takeover, Sam says: he describes it as a “partial MBO” (Management Buyout), in which Sunrise has bought all the shares but Sam still retains his chunk, “rolled into” the new company.

There is a lot of heavy lifting (parenthetically or not) in that sentence “I don’t have [enough] faith in the market [that that would be] a success.” Picking up that story and hot on the heels of recent reports of SIBA moving to adopt “independent” and ditch “craft” in the ongoing saga of the key adjective tussle (KAT), Glynn Davis applies the new approved verbage to report… things are not going well:

My own involvement with Bohem Brewery has shown that independent breweries without a decent pub estate to sell their beer through will face ongoing pressures, and sadly, there will be more failures. It’s why I sold out at a painful 80% loss. Along with many other craft breweries, Bohem has produced some excellent beer, but as an investment, these businesses can leave a sour taste in the mouth.

And building a pub estate may well require that “faith in the market” that might not necessarily be reasonable. Hmm. Not unrelatedly, Liam guided me to a news item on another approach being taken in Ireland where a number of pub owners showed some faith combined with another now familiar zing:

It is thought to be the first time that a group of Irish publicans have come together to launch their own brewing operation… The new brewery launches into a challenging market, dominated by a small number of large established brewers and brands. It also does so at a time when the cost of living remains a difficulty for many potential customers and when more drinkers are moving away from alcohol to zero-alcohol products. “I think it is a very good idea. It is probably very timely because the craft beer phase has kind of come and gone and the bottle beer and so on,” said Damian O’Reilly, lecturer in retail and services management in TU Dublin.

Phase. You were just going through a phase. You know that, right? Speaking of phase, you don’t have to get past the first paragraph to see something that takes little analysis:

An ongoing point of frustration within the contemporary American brewing industry is the vast chasm between what drinkers say they want, and what they actually buy. For example: sessionable alcohol-by-volume beers. Even though stroller dads get their Vuoris in a bunch lamenting the lack of broad availability of full-flavored, mid-ABV craft beers, the sales data suggest that they simply don’t buy those beers in meaningful volumes.

What frustration? It seems pretty obvious that if you want low alc beer you are also going to be buying less beer*** but, hey… similarly, Katie Mather may have identified the reason for all this change, may have sussed out what is really going on:

In my banking app, it tells me what I could afford to spend less on in future, and this is always a list of pubs I’ve bought pints in. It’s never told me to cut down my spending on bills, by far my largest outgoings. Quite frankly this is bullshit… pubs are still shutting down because people can’t afford to leave their homes to enjoy a little bit of leisure and all-important social time, and the official reaction is, “oh well.” 

“Oh well” was also my response to the fair bit of anti- neo- prohibio–science– mumbo- jumbolian back and forth this week, both sides not making any new convincing arguments… until I read this in that august medical journal SurreyLive:

…alcohol indiscriminately impairs brain function as it is a “very weak neurotoxin” that disrupts neuron communication. Restak emphasises the importance of abstaining from alcohol past the age of 65, a time when the body naturally loses neurons more rapidly, potentially exacerbating mental decline: “It is essential to abstain from alcohol at a stage in life where preserving neurons is crucial.”

Drag. But as a bit of relief to all that… we have a wonderful and particularly deftly written**** portrait of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord by Rachel Hendry in Pellicle. Structured in parts that focus on different elements of the brewing and experience, it is both a bit impressionistic as well as, well, expository:

Once I am sat, I slowly rotate the glass clockwise, and then anticlockwise. The colours change with the movement—chestnut glints into amber, glints into cinnamon. I take a sip and I am greeted with thick slices of toast generously spread with a whisky marmalade, the sweet squidge of malt loaf, the reassurance of blood oranges in the depths of winter. The tension in my shoulders begins to dissolve. I can see why so many view this pint as a friend. I have taken it in my hand and it has placed an arm around me in return.

Lovely. I particularly like the concise treatments of various sorts of men. And another warming photo essay, too. This should fall in the beer flavoured beer filing cabinet folder neatly so you can bring it out and point at it when someone says beer flavoured beer is a meaningless concept.

And finally, before the links, we note the passing of Beth Demmons’ Prohibitchin’ which regularly was referenced around these parts. She explained why:

I feel like it worked, for a while. But over time, things have changed. DEI initiatives are getting slashed across the country, from academia to private business. Promises of change are quietly fading into distant memory. People—mostly women and non-binary folks, some even featured on these pages—have faced burnout, changed careers, or just moved on to different things. People kept reading Prohibitchin’, but over the past four years, fewer people have engaged, or even really seemed to care. I’ve felt like I was shouting into the void, or perhaps just preaching to the choir.

Sad stuff, especially coming so soon after the suspension of The Share as noted last week.

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

*As per usual, B+B have something welcome and wise to say about where we are at, from last Saturday’s footnotes on Patreon: “The elephant in the room is the US election which is definitely big news. Our general approach to unsettling events (the pandemic, war in Ukraine, and so on) has been to keep on posting through them more or less as usual. As a wise person once observed: “You don’t need to publicly condemn or condone every event, every announcement, every story. You’re not an embassy.” Don’t think we’re not following the news, though, or that we not concerned about what’s going on. It’s just that a beer blog, and our various silly social media accounts, don’t seem like particularly useful tools for addressing any of it. The best thing we can do is provide an opportunity to think about something else for a few minutes every now and then.“
**A question I ask myself at least once a day in relation to something or other.
***‘Cause who doesn’t love to drain a 12 pack of thick soda pop? See also the shocking concept that high alc low price sells. “Breaking!“
****And a particularly good example of how this publication has succeeded while GBH and others have packed it in.

Your Bootastic Hell’s Gates Open Up Today Halloweeny Edition Of The Beery News Notes

Today is the second scariest day in the next week or so. Number two. Today, the undead walk the earth! But by next Wednesday, Americans may have elected the Nazis. I sure hope some of that polling data is wrong. Anyway, there is a time and place for everything and this day and this week’s focus is all about the lesser of those two evils – the celebration of Lords Satan’s reach into your verrrry soul and the tenuous grasp of all existence, of all of reality itself. Let next week take care of next week.

Still, good to see one of the candidates has some normal habits, some of which like drinkin’ and swearin’ were on display over beers at a stop with the Governor of Michigan at a bar on the campaign trail:

‘We need to move ground among men,’ she can be heard saying in a low voice to Whitmer, clearly not thinking that anyone was privy to their conversation.  She then looked up abruptly and cut off the private chat. ‘Oh, we have microphones and listening to everything,’ a surprised Harris says. ‘I didn’t realize that.’ ‘Okay… you’ll bleep my F words hopefully,’ Whitmer joked. ‘We just told all the family secrets, s***,’ Harris replies before her busting out into a loud laugh.

Giving equal time, did you hear about the Respublican running for office in Wisconsin?  Traveling GOP U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde (AKA the “California banker”) wants to ban beer sales and it has been picked up in his opponent’s political ads. Rolling Stone covered the story a few months ago:

…if we just decriminalize [marijuana]? Fine. Nobody’s going to go to jail. No one’s going to get arrested for it. That’s your self-determination, but you’re not going to turn it into an enterprise. Frankly, it should have happened with alcohol,” Hovde says in the audio. “I mean look at — alcohol has a lot of negative byproducts. If somebody wanted to distill it, drink it. Fine, go ahead…

He also apparently bought a tavern to tear it down. Booo…. Now… getting serious, Jessica Mason has reported on concerns that the language related to the pricing of beer is posing challenges:

One of the issues this kind of research presents is that if the nation is constantly sold beer on “lowest prices” translating as “best” then it will not consider beers as different or with some deserving of higher price points than others. Describing how crucial pricing is, Sussex-based Burning Sky founder and head brewer Mark Tranter told db: “All overheads continue to rise but it’s impossible to put our prices up in line with these, without running the risk of pricing ourselves out of the market and or alienating people.” 

That sounds a bit like being clear about value is a bit of a problem – unless there was a way to factually explain the value to be found in an more expensive drink. Well explained value is always good. Consider how Tennent’s is holding its own in its home market due to its accepted inherent value:

Changes in UK alcohol duties have led to some lager brands, including Carlsberg and Grolsch, being reformulated to a lower 3.4 per cent ABV, but Findlay said that would not be happening with the core Tennent’s product, which has an ABV of 4 per cent and accounts for more than half of the lager segment in Scotland. “Tennent’s is such a strong brand that to reformulate it or reduce the ABV would be a no,” he stressed. “We have lower ABV variants of Tennent’s available, so there are no plans and no need to change what is an astonishingly successful brand.”

Hmm… somewhat relatedly Matty C. shared on the absense of critical writing in beer, something that that is has been one of my interests for, well, decades now given it is only through critical thought that value is established:

This week I’ve been thinking about the lack of criticism in beer writing. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot over the years, because beer and pub reviewing doesn’t really exist in any meaningful way compared to how it does in wine or food writing. I consider that there are many reasons why this is the case, the main one being a general lack of consideration from mainstream (or, indeed, niche) media outlets for beer and pubs. But also it’s because beer drinkers are a different beast to most wine drinkers. There’s a certain level of—dare I say—zealotism, that means if anyone decides to log on and pan a beer, they can almost certainly expect some flack.

This is great. He has pushed this out into a great open conversation and I have to say that it has caused me a lot of thinking – something I like to avoid most weeks. I’ve actually written this week’s notes twice to cope with my inner termoil. Why?  In part, that word – zealotism. Zeal seems to sit one step down the stairs from enthusiasm and you know what we think of the enthused. Why?  Because zeal places countervaling pressure on value. It distracts one from reality. So how to respond?

First, I will try to be brief but I see three distinct factors as the prime drivers of this gaping chasm between reality and zeal in beer writing: (i) objectivity denial; (i) unreliable claims to expertise; and (iii) real marketplace consequences. Starting with objectivity denial, have a look at this passage in one of Boak and Bailey’s recent (and always fabulous) Patreon footnotes to their Saturday roundups:

…the two Grodziskies we drank this week were more interesting than enjoyable. Both were also adulterated with things like fruit and tea, making it hard to get a sense of the base flavour…  We’ve tended to avoid the phrase ‘beer-flavoured beer’ and similar for the reasons Jeff sets out: the idea of what ‘beer flavoured’ is totally subjective.

It appears they and I are struggling with similar thoughts* as after I started sketching this out on Monday, I realized they themselves had posted their own cogitations on this whole thing – though I cannot agree with their interim assessment that it is just a pint and “we do not need that intel” – especially given the annual investment a beer fan may make. It’s not about the pint but all the pints one buys. In a year. In a life. As a result, I believe it is not correct to say that good beer can be, should be lost in an ocean of subjectivity. One cannot determine value if everything is subjective. No, there are and should be measuring sticks which can be relied upon. There must be the intel.

That being said, who would set these standards. Who measures the sticks? Beer experts? Problem: there are no beer experts in that blanket general sense. Sure, there are real experts in specific areas of beer and brewing with the greater expertise existing in narrower areas. Like any study. And a number people certainly know much more than many others. No question. But claims of expertise in that general sense that we see eminating from some of the merely eager is a common problem with beer writing.  Can we place our trust with zealots? One shouldn’t. The resulting status scrambling** to be identified as that authoritative person may be vigourous, vicious and even entertaining but all in all it’s hardly an academic process. And it creates a fog around the question of value.

Perhaps the saddest reality is that the rejection of standards and the weakening claims of expertise have left an imbalance of power. Perhaps ironically, beer writers lack sufficient security to stand up against pressures from the trade.  In the very comments under MC’s post, Gary raised this very point:

The difficulty is few want to risk offending people in the industry, as future access to the brewery may be limited and awkwardness can arise when you meet them at events.

And in addition to event attendence, in order to get ahead some beer writers are also expected to show up time after time as supportive boosters – as compliant judges or even consultants. We even sometimes see the trade described as a “we”*** – which can leave one left with the impression that one gets the inside view of the trade by being effectively a branch of the trade. None of which is wrong if, well, you don’t want to be warned off the bad beer, don’t want to learn about relative value but are only looking for something to read as light entertainment. Which it often all that you get. Which is fine. Consequence free and affirming pleasure writing for a happy sometimes tipsy crowd. All fine.

But we have to be honest – that is the opposite of a critical discourse. It can deter journalistic inquiry and even triggers  stronger response: “…you can’t write that, those are real people with real jobs!” or “you shouldn’t be writing about beer” or that stumblefuck of a non-thought “you are just a old curmugeon!” It even justifies the recently received assessment I’ve heard from one writer about being told in a formal setting that DEI isn’t a business imperative for breweries, just part of culture wars. And of course this is all in addition to that old chestnut of total alcohol harm denialism from the anti-science set.**** As a direct result of those factors, not only has the opportunity to argue in favour of value been lost, I would also argue that it is one key reason there is no reliable concept of “fine beer” – like we have in wine or spirits. A critical discourse is fundamental to anything deemed fine. But this trade? Won’t have it. Would you want it? I do.

Thankfully, there is a actual critical discourse out there even if the jockeying beer writers of a certain scrabbling sort don’t engage with it. Think of The Beer Nut reviewing can after can, glass after glass excellently so you don’t have to… unless you want to. He has no problem being honest about value:

My recent complaint that the Teeling Distillery giftshop was overcharging for the small cans of DOT collaboration beers at €5.50 has been heeded. The latest addition to the series was €6: For Wheats Sake! 

Think also of Retired Martin, Ron and others travelling to pub after pub taking photos and making observations with his exceptionally keen eye so you don’t have to.  This week Boak and Bailey wrote in generous terms on the wonders of this sort of blogging… over, you know, on their Substack:

One thing blogging is better at than social media is linking. Old skool blogging thrived on the practice of generous linking. Sometimes, it was about search engine optimisation (SEO) – which is no bad thing when it helps good stuff rise to the top of search results. But mostly it gave readers a chain to follow. We used to spend ages following links from one blog post to another when we were first learning about beer. A sort of Choose Your Own Adventure approach to study. Blogs are also more stable and more independent. They’re less likely to suffer from an egotistical investor buying up, damaging, or shutting down a platform. With a blog, you have your own space to do your own thing.

Viva blogs! Viva Viva!!!  And there are a few dogged shapers of public opinion working their way into the general media who rise above as well as other sorts of independent voices with critical views are out there. Consider the David Bailey cartoons in Pellicle which have a cheery habit of undermining supposed established principles.***** Similarly, in beer history writing, we also find people digging and digging into the past pulling out the correcting facts and illuminating stories which both add depth and redirection to good beer culture. This week Liam wrote a post about the 1913 theft of pewter tankards from Dublin’s pubs for melting down and sale:

… this was a relatively common practice but it is interesting to see the ‘modus operandi’ here in print. So, it appears that the theft of drinkware from pubs isn’t a new phenomena – not that we really thought it was – although the reasons for said theft appears to have changed through the years to one of collecting.  Although there is no mention of where the ladies mentioned in the report hid their soon-to-be-swapped tumblers and stolen tankards, it is possible they were tucked neatly into the folds of a dress but it is probably more likely a bag of some description was used.

See also Gary’s extensive posts on tavern culture in Quebec or Canadian brewing during the Second World War. No one will pay for that sort or writing. But no editor will also smooth or dilute it either.

These things lead to other helpful insertions and inveiglings .Last week we saw Katie Mather have a deftly written argument published in The Guardian. She wrote in support of the decision by the UK’s small brewers’ organization SIBA to ditch “craft” in favour of “independent” to help buyer understand what is in their glass:

Beer fans are starting to realise that their favourite breweries might not be the paragons of independence and system-subversion they once thought they were, and it’s leaving an unpleasant taste. Now that many of these breweries have become part of large corporate entities, the idea of standing against the man, colourful can in hand, is a ridiculous one. It’s sowing seeds of doubt across the whole industry, too – the word “craft” never meant anything specific, and so it can be used to market beers that aren’t “craft” in any understanding of the term.

And she expanded on this in The Gulp, her newsletter: “We all got bored of defining craft a decade ago. But just because something is boring, doesn’t mean it isn’t important.” I don’t really agree with any of that – but really I do like to have the well-argued ideas bouncing around in my brain. And speaking of a knowledgable grasp of specifics versus what is in my brain, Stan’s Hop Queries hit the inbox just after last week’s press deadline and it is full of detailed goodness around the king of all adjuncts, including this about how Kiren invested “dip hopping”:

Basically, they made a slurry by steeping hops for about an hour at temperatures (150-170° F) lower than found in conventional whirlpooling, then added the slurry into wort before pitching yeast. Kirin learned that the resulting beers contained as much linalool as dry hopped beers but less myrcene (which itself may mask fruity aromas associated with linalool and other oxygenated compounds). This also reduced production of 2M3MB (an onion-like off flavor)… For brewers, the appeal is pretty simply: less isomerization than with whirlpooling and greater retention of some essential oil for biotransformation. In addition, drinkers have said they perceive a difference, a positive difference, in dip-hopped beer aroma and flavor. 

Me? No, not really. But sorta. You know… but how else are you going to learn? Exactly. And expertise is not just about having a deep understanding one one topic but also a view on the intersections of a number of areas. For example, The Sunday Times had an interesting story on the disappearance of Britain’s pubs called “The Black Bull” based on some excellent investigative reporting of the role of Big App:

Another Black Bull is the historic community-owned pub in Gartmore in the Stirlingshire Trossachs. Its name makes sense: this is an old drovers’ inn. There has been a pub on the site since at least 1740. It too has lost its Facebook, and the thousands of connections the social media giant brings. Wilson believes Facebook removed the page because of a row involving a New Zealand company called Black Bull Group Limited. And this, The Sunday Times can reveal, is certainly the reason why at least one Black Bull pub in England was told its Facebook page was being shut down. This New Zealand company two years ago won a trademark case against another business which launched a website called Blackbull Markets similar to its own. The firm’s complaint, heard by the World Intellectual Property Organisation, did not feature British pubs.

Look at that density of ideas. Global law versus the wee pub, private international social media control versus local community heritage – all coming into conflict. Fabulous.  And speaking of fabulous, here’s one last story this week. It’s from Chris Drosner in Milwaukee Magazine, his love letter to dive bars:

I love settling onto the stool, hanging my jacket on the hook under the bar. The sound of pool balls dropping after the quarters go in. The shake of the day. The neon glow. Overhearing bad takes about the packers. Seeing ice in a beer down the bar – not my thing, but you do you. Someone hitting a pull tab big enough to pocket the cash. Being the tiebreaker in strangers’ friendly argument. 

I particularly liked his list of the key signs you’re in a dive bar including: (i) “someone lives upstairs”; (ii) “unclear if it’s open, or how to get in” and (iii) “sink outside the bathroom.” Beautiful.

All of which is to say there is actual critical writing out there but it is not often found in that certain circle of trade friendly and, dare I say, commodity writing that has gotten a lot of attention. Thankfully, it role may be fading as part of the bubble burst of zealot culture. At least in beer even if not in rest of the world, like the geo-political world. Maybe. Well, let’s see how that pans out next Tuesday evening.

That’s it. That’s a lot. And there’s a lot of footnotery still to come down there below. Neatened and nicened any number of times over the more than 45 edits of this week’s post. For more beery news check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan going strong again each and every Monday. Then listen to Lew’s podcast (if he ever does one) and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the (now very) odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is out there with the sweary Mary! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? Check out the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good and they are revving up for a new year. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s one cost a fifth of that but only had the one post.

*And that to me is a contradictory set of statements even if understandably so. In the first, there is a desire for the standard base beer to then, one assumes, compare with the ideal standard of an unadulterated Grodziskie, a presumably identifiable fact. In the second, the existence of standards is rejected. There can’t be a dependable body of knowledge that spawns experts at the same time as you have a totally subjective subject matter. Thankfully, I am reading a bit of Smil these days which may explain where we are. He describes how the quality of information received though individual perception is not in the control of those doing the perceiving but also that it does follow reliable patterns. Understanding those patterns can draw us back to a greater sense of objectivity by removing our natural tendencies to clarify the equation.  As a result, as I understand it, reasonably objective assessment of beer is possible even if it is surpressed. But just a minute.  Isn’t that itself a smarty pants faux expertise claim? Am I the zealot? Well, I have always enjoyed the sort of long long essays that argue that personal persception is deeply flawed ever since I took courses from Canada’s conservative Anglican philosopher George Grant (a chummy sports sideline watcher, Ten Penny drinking, ebullient ciggie smoking presence of my college days.) Around the same time I was reading liberal Catholic Ivan Ilych as well as atheist mathematician Bertrand Russell before I moved through my work then family into eastern North American Indigenous writings as well as other perspectives. They all teach that personal subjectivity and even institutuional authority are deeply unreliable. They also proposed various competing objective constructs that we can rely upon as footholds in any subject matter. Testing and contesting the application of those constructs is what critical analysis is all about. 
**How did we get here? How did the blandification of beery expertise arise? In the beginning, you had the established authoritative few who wandered in a primordial shallow end unaware. Then, new voices arouse who started asking questions, on blogs in zines, much to the irritation of those who will never be bettered. And, about a decade ago, the dead end was entered as good bloggy writing was pushed a bit aside in favour of the hunt for paid writing. (We were all going to be published authors!!) And then, rather than fostering a peer reviewed discussion of relative merits of contrasting views, we have the unending awards circuit populated by oddly familiar judges handing out statuettes for BOBs like Halloween candy to bolster CVs and bios. (We’re all going to be award winning published authors!!) Circles of backpatting by the accepted then boost each other to take up all the available chairs and even oxygen in the room. (We merry few are all going to be well paid award winning published authors!!) But now… now with the retracting good beer marketplace those less endowed chairs have become more musical as the opportunities and the payouts shrink. Breaking: closed access newsletter subsciptions did not save the day. This is good and healthy. Be loud and proud.
***Like this comment on BlueSky in response to MC’s post: “Perhaps there is something like: all attention for beer in writing should be mostly positive, or we will lose even more fans. With the beer market on a general recline, we want to make more people enthusiastic, rather than pinpointing flaws.” Who is this “we”? And, really, who wants to be involved with any interest that is just a glob of semi-smug uninformed fans? Apparently not the new satistied than you very much lager lovers. Yet… “We Are Beer“? Really ?!? FFS.
****In addition to all the flawed, gratuitous and possibly even actionably negligent opinions on alcohol and health we are subject to from the unknowing on a regular basis, I always come back to the emailed dingbattery shared via email by one prominent beer writer about 15 years ago on the topic of drunk driving: “As much as I am against careless driving caused by drinking, smoking, the application of eye make-up, over-tiredness, cell phone conversations or the accidental spilling of tomato sauce off the veal parmigiana sandwich being scarfered whilst at the wheel, I have no wish to be associated with anything ending in “…ADD,” Alan. Bad enough that the loonies at MADD have co-opted the anti-drunk driving position to the degree that they are a force behind such things as the lowering of the legal limit — you can now have your car taken from you at .05…. which I think is quite extreme — and interlocks for all, worse still to be associated with them in any way, shape or form.” 
*****Thanksfully without hallucinogenic recourse to cats.

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:

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

Anyone else? 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 Last Of August’s Thursday Beery News Notes

What was that? Summer 2021? Done? It’s still going on here as I am on an actual holiday and doing fun stuff like getting new spectacles for my face and a new electrical panel for the basement. Wooot! This is the dream and I am livin’ it. I even had 330 ml of a 3.8% beer yesterday and watched a Netflix show about the Korean buckwheat noodle dish naengmyeon, as recommended by DSL.* Both a drinking and then hangover dish apparently. Now I know why my buckwheat noodles suck. I didn’t immediately rinse and rub them in ice water. And, yes, a hundred other reasons. Never again. Probably. Maybe.

First off, it was good to read “The Ancient Magic of Malt: Making Malt Sugars and Ale from Grain Using Traditional Techniques” by sometimes reader Merryn Dineley in the journal EXARC.net,* 2021 (vol 2) who set the record straight:

This paper is presented as a historical narrative as well as being an explanation of basic ‘mashing in’ techniques. I aim to tell the story of the development of my understanding of how to make malt and malt sugars from the grain. I have learned from other experimental archaeologists, from ancient technologists and brewing scientists as well as from ethnographic research and the study of traditional style malting, mashing and fermentation techniques. One of the common myths about the origins of beer thousands of years ago is that grain was perhaps left in a container, it got wet and, somehow, turned into beer. This is impossible. The conditions for making malt and malt sugars do not exist in this situation. 

A bit later in time but still in the past, Rob Sterowski at “I Might Have a Glass of Beer” wrote about Epochal Barrel Fermented Ales, a brewery intent of brewing the old fashioned way:

Possibly the most erudite of Scottish brewers, Young deserted the world of academic philosophy to devote himself to a study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century brewing literature instead, and Epochal Barrel Fermented Ales is the result. A skilled home brewer, he has set up his small brewery in Port Dundas to make beers influenced by the way it was done two hundred years ago. His beer is fermented with a multi-strain yeast, cleansed to rid them of excess yeast and then allowed to mature to completion in oak barrels with a handful of whole-cone hops. The finished product is naturally carbonated in the bottle.

As Boak and Bailey noted, suggestions that the #MeToo and #BLM movements’ efforts to expose craft beer’s ugly side have faded were found wanting with the news of an open letter to England’s West Berkshire Brewery. You can click on the image to the right to read the complaints yourself. It is certainly one of the long failings of the drinking entertainment pleasure trade to address the piggish attitudes that go along with booze. So it is good to read that folk won’t be bullied to keep quiet when it comes to bigotry and harassment even if a lot of the privileged voices have wandered away.

I wasn’t familiar with English comedian Sean Lock. He passed away this past week but I am glad to know he had a hobby.

Update: I failed in not mentioning “Empire State of Mind” by David Jesudason published in GBH (thereby upping their average significantly) who looks at IPA from the point of view of the “I” as in India:

My father’s love of empire, and his belief that Britain was a civilizing force, was mirrored in the drink he called his own: the India Pale Ale. Of all of his beliefs, this one was particularly confused. His friends were Lager drinkers, and his adoption of IPA was a way of pretending to be refined in the days before the craft revolution had taken hold. But where he saw a drink that was emblematic of genteel, colonial India, I see something very different: Owing to the beer style’s association with the East India Company and its brutality, I can’t help but think of bloodshed, oppression, and enslavement.

I noted that it was an parallel to “Britain’s Idyllic Country Houses Reveal a Darker History“, the recent NYer piece on England’s National Trust but also cause for reflection on my own family’s path. One side included servants at big houses like that of the Collins publishing family as well as a great-grandfather who was a Sgt Mjr British army out in the empire while the other side, displaced highlanders in Greenock, built the ships that shifted the sugar that came out of the colonial system. Many died young, many had lives of if not poverty then at best modesty – with much drink caused troubles in industrial towns before many emigrated the hell out of there. If you have any doubt as to the way that IPA is code for empire consider this from that NYer article:

“At the end of the day, we went to a very, very, very rich country and transferred a lot of its wealth to this country, by trade, entrepreneurship, and looting,” Dalrymple said. In 2003, Angus Maddison, a British economist, calculated that India’s share of the global G.D.P. went from 24.4 per cent to 4.2 per cent during two and a half centuries of colonial rule. In 1884, the British state had a total income of two hundred and three million pounds, of which more than half came from its overseas territories, including seventy-four million pounds from India. Taxes were levied across the world and sent to burnish the metropole.

Good for someone to finally point out in depth the obvious issue with IPA as a placeholder for good beer.  Might as well brand US craft lager Berghof.

Note: craft.

One of Canada’s few pre-Confederations tavern/inns/hotels, the Queen’s Inn, is up for sale in my fair town. I wrote about it in 2004 when it was just 165 years old and I was only 41: and is ripe with history and charm:

…he remembers one particular customer who continued coming in until he was in his 80s. The gentleman, Mitchell recalled, was blind and had a booming voice. “Give him two drafts,” the bartender told the younger Mitchell. “We just put the price up to 50 cents. Have fun.” “I didn’t know what he meant. I put the two beers down and said, ‘That’ll be 50 cents.’” “Forty-five is all you’re getting,” the man bellowed back.

Another pandemic affected business. And, on that theme, Josh Noel pointed me in the direction of the tale of overzealous expansion which ended in the collapse  of Ale Asylum of Madison, Wisconsin:

Dilba said the pandemic “didn’t help” the business but added, “there were other extraneous factors, which I won’t get into, but the pressure applied by the pandemic was significant. And we’re not alone in that. Everybody in this world is in this fight together that really made moving forward very difficult.”

Factors cited elsewhere in the article include too many local beers, too many out of state beers in local bars and rent increases. Maybe also it’s because Americans are just drinking less, according to VinePair or, rather, the authors of the polling study they echo:***

Sixty percent is down nearly five percent from 2019. It’s down even more compared to 2010, when 67 percent of U.S. adults replied “yes” to the survey. There seemed to be a shift in drinking habits from 2019 until now. The average number of drinks per week (3.6) dropped to its lowest since 2001. Additionally, men (63 percent) reported drinking at a higher rate than women (57 percent).

Good reason to find another career than drinks writing! One person who does not care is likely Sister Doris Engelhard, the brewing nun in Germany whose story as told by NPR was the retweeted topic of the week:

“I only brew beer that I drink myself, so if the other sisters want to drink a wheat beer, they’ll have to buy it themselves,” she says. She also waves away any question about the intersection of her faith and her beer. “Beer is part of the Bavarian soul. If you’re not happy with yourself, you won’t be happy in a cloister,” she says. “And eating and drinking are part of that life. It’s not about being pious. All I need to do is believe in a higher power that accepts me as I am.”

Speaking of good stories about good outcomes, the BBC reported this week on the life of Cesar Kimbirima, a child soldier in Angola who found himself left for dead, now running a Wetherspoons pub:

…as the sky started spinning, and his consciousness faded to black, he thought it was over. His life would end in the long grass, while his blood poured into the dry Angolan earth. More than 20 years later, that dying soldier pours pints at the pub he manages in south London. As he chats to punters, and waves to babies in prams, there is no hint of Cesar Kimbirima’s former life.

There. That is it for now. Not sure if there will be an edition next week as I am driving to the sea. We will see. During these last lazy days, for more check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and (if I dare say) from Stan mostly every Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness! And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*who once posed as me just to be nearer Lars.
**an archaeological foundation of some sort out of The Netherland with an address on the fabulous street, Frambozenweg!
***Hah! I’m one to talk.

Not So Much The “Tra-La It’s May!” Edition Of Thursday Beer Notes

A short edition this week me thinks. It has been another odd week, weeks which are each in their own way odd unto themselves. This week “murder hornets” were the new form of crap the planet has offered up – except they make a tasty snack. And Cinco de Mayo came and went but some Mexicans were not even able to get to their beer. Not essential. A few more things are opening up here in Ontario. Jordan noted that cideries are now suddenly relieved of an arbitrary five km limit on direct sales. Jeff is still posting photos from his walks about Rye which is another form of relief.

Tomorrow being Friday, 8 May, sees is the return of #BeeryLongReads2020 care of Boak and Bailey. Me, I am not looking like a likely participant myself given I have nothing to write about and no energy to write the noting that I have to write about. So I look forward to a good read. Me. Selfish. Keep an eye out for the roundup of last Friday’s revival of The Session over at Fuggled, too.

Jeff’s take on the homebrewing machine that is no more is pretty much my take: “I never understood the appeal of these things.”

PicoBrew, the homebrewing appliance startup based in Seattle, is effectively shutting down the Spoon has learned today. Back in February, the Spoon broke the story about PicoBrew entering the Washington State bankruptcy process in the form of court-managed receivership. Earlier this month, we uncovered news that the company had put up for sale via auction what looked to be most of the company’s warehouse and PicoPak assembly equipment.

Note #1: not a victim of Covid-19. Note #2: these things have been failing for at least 209 years. CBC TV’s archives have a bit from 1985 on the hobby. Spot all the clichés. Sweet Dave Line sighting!

Speaking of doing it all yourself, Seeing the Lizards has published a guide to creating your own private pub experience with theme options from the tedious to the fearful:

Unfortunately, even if you were allowed past the top of your street, there are no open pubs to go to (unless, nudge nudge wink wink, you “know” somebody).  But never fear – in one of the gestures of community spirit and generosity that this blog is famous for, we at Seeing The Lizards are providing you with an instructional guide to make your own preferred pub experience without having to leave your property boundaries and risk being fined by the fuzz.  And remember, getting those subtle touches right only adds to the sense of authenticity, as is imagining the requisite atmosphere.

This is interesting: “NEIPAs are killing the Ontario hop industry.” And this is the story about it:

Many growers in Ontario are now sitting on at least two years worth of inventory, and have to sell older hops at discount rates. Things have gotten so bad for some farmers in two of Canada’s biggest hop growing provinces—Ontario and British Columbia—that they’ve decided to get out of growing the product all together. “At the beginning there was a big allure,” says Brandon Bickle, an Ontario grower who has decided to shut down his hop farm, Valley Hops, after seven seasons. 

Retired Martyn notes a Covid-19 passing of someone I was fond of, David Greenfield, the keyboardist of The Stranglers:

At the age of 14 I furtively met an older lad in the corner of the playground at Cottenham Village College and handed over my 30p for an ex-demo copy of The Stranglers classic with that new wave late ’70s theme of Armageddon (See also : Atomic by Blondie and Luton Airport by Cats U.K.).

Jeff* has been at the front line of the Covid-19 battle, publishing first-hand reports from brewery owners, like this on the struggle one faced to get part of the Federal small business support funding:

After contacting every business person and bank I could think of, there seemed to be little I could do. Our company was stuck with our existing big banks who didn’t seem to care. Meanwhile I was reading about Ruth’s Chris, The Lakers, and Shake Shack. I was so angry and did my fair share of yelling at my computer. I can relate to Van Havig’s post and have not been the best person to be around the last few weeks.  I feel bad my family had to put up with me.

Brian Alberts took the opportunity to compare today with the Spanish Flu of a century ago for GBH through the lens of the the competing forms of crisis that faced Wisconsin:

Milwaukee’s leaders stepped up in a crisis, and largely handled it well. But, for the city’s brewers and saloonkeepers, this wasn’t the only battle to fight. From a business standpoint, it probably wasn’t the most important battle in the fall of 1918, nor the second, and maybe not even the third. After all, when the President criminalizes your beer supply, a university threatens to shut you down completely, the Senate tries to brand you a traitor, and a pandemic ravages your community—all at the same time—how do you decide what takes priority?

A few interesting notes in this trade article on not getting stuck at the “off-flavour stage of sensory training but I am not sure about this:

“It is important to revisit brand flavor profiles as they change and evolve according to consumer preference, and I do think that brands really should evolve,” says Barr. “I’m not a believer that brands should just maintain as they are out of some kind of philosophical reason. I do think they need to be updated, and incremental changes should be made based on the palate of your consumers, because it is changing and developing.”

Don’t like that idea. While it is true that the hallmark of a good brewer is how to make the same beer out of ingredients of differing qualities, it is odd that the idea of “brand” should not be fairly closely tied to a certain flavour profile. If your creating brand loyalty, don’t dilute it with changes that can be perceived… and often perceived by the customer as cutting corners even if the intention isn’t quite that.

Well, there you go. Not a tome but not haiku either. Keep writing and reading and keeping up with the chin. Check in with Boak and Bailey most Saturdays, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Thanks for stopping by.

*for the double!

The Resistance to Change As Spring Arrives Edition of Your Thursday Beer News

Spring! Let’s get going right away with this tweet from Joe:

I am against fetishizing containers and dispense methods. I am for glasses of beer with sturdy foam in comfortable pub and home settings. Vote for me.

Interesting. In these last weeks of by 56th year, I am a friend to such an idea. I long for the first warm Saturday, a late morning beer after a few hours of digging in the garden. That’s the dream.  But is that reality? Is it healthy? I mean we all want to be healthy, right? But there is this great unhappiness that things are not what they seem which seems to be downright toxic and very 2019. Let’s see if I can put a thought or two together… well, let’s do that a little later. I am enjoying the first full day of spring too much to be too cranky right away.

There – that’s a better way to start. By the way, I really liked this photo posted by Boak and Bailey on Twitter. A cheery scene. By the way, I hear Jessica grabbed guzzled the pint – and then  was licking the mustard straight off the knife. Weird. Still, a lovely still life. Now, some actually interesting reading: the tale of brewer Wilhelm Kohlhoff, Peoples Brewing Company in Oshkosh, Wisconsin (1953-1968):

Kohlhoff is now 91 years old. He still recalls details of the brewing process he followed at Peoples. He also still has the original, handwritten notes he made when he first went to work in the brewhouse. They form a step-by-step, minute-by-minute outline of his brew day. The notes are written in a mix of German and English and give temperatures in degrees Réaumur, a unit of measure favored by many brewers of the period.

More actually interesting reading: the story of Italy’s relationship with Tennent’s Super Lager:*

It’s a scene that has been repeated for loads of folk from Glasgow who have made the trip over to Italy on their holidays in the last decade or so. A holiday that, while the stunning architecture, frescos, ice cream and pizzas might seem like the most obvious talking points when you return to work the next week, they all play second fiddle to the fact everyone drinks Rab C Nesbitt’s favourite swally, Tennents Super.

I love this. Nothing better than the happy confusion my Scots folk feel finding out they are actually loved for one thing or another.

Next, Jeff has proven himself a big fat liar** about the quality of his writing with this piece entitled “The Sound of History Rhyming.” Now, don’t get me wrong… I fundamentally disagree with his premise, and his timeline… as well as all his examples. It is all too clever and neat. But the writing is compelling. And I might be entirely wrong. Utterly. Consider this bit of a tid:

As products, there is very little in common between mass market lagers and milkshake IPAs. The intention brewers have in creating highly engineered beer in 2019 is flavor, not cost. That’s a huge difference. But what the two eras have in common is a comfort in harnessing science to achieve an end without considering tradition.

See, that is fundamentally wrong. We are given this fib that somehow folk after WW2 were suckers and the brewers took advantage of their naivety. Nothing is further from the truth. Throughout the 1900s was a rush for lighter and zestier flavoured beers that, yes, were cost effective but were also celebrations of the progressive confidence of the era. The Champagne of Beers was so labeled in 1905. In Canada, rice based beers show up in the 1920s. They were modern – even if we*** are no longer modern in that way. Milkshake IPAs are also speaking to today in their way, even if I do not speak the language. I am, as I keep telling you, an anachronism.

One more thing before, you know… here’s a fabulously boozetastic giffy graphy.

Now, the gloom. First, beer writing. Mr Beeson went right after something called in a way that raised two concerns for me right away:

The Beer Boutique is closing/going into administration. In six months writing for them they never paid me once on time, and by the sounds of it they’ve treated their employees & investors just as appallingly.

So, obviously not being paid is a rotten stinking thing. But I am not sure what “writing for them” means.  It is a store? Ms. K. shared the other day that she was “going back to the client-based blog posts” which indicates the way she earns a living, in addition to her rightly proudly proclamation that her work is found in @fermenthq and @ogbeermag. Similarly burdened by the slog, Jeff admitted “I can see how my writing has degraded as a result of the constant hustle. It ain’t a good thing” in a follow up to an odd tweet by GBH – and by odd I mean MK’s boast that the reason he started “GBH was that beer media was boring (with a few exceptions) 15 years ago!” strikes me as odd given I have seldom seen so much claimed for (with a few exceptions) such exuberantly tepid writing, known mainly, yes, for moving the mid-point firmly from the comparative to the superlative while, oddly, keeping the foot on the clutch when the time for a conclusion comes around. It’s not that it’s wrong or ill-intentioned. It just… falters. Like somewhere else someone not including the obvious reason for changing a recipe of a brand of beer – the making of the more of the money. Is that why folks are turning away from reading paid beer writing?

Maybe. It’s all so uncertain. We are next inevitably drawn to “The Fraudulent Influencer” by Doug the CPA as posted at Beer Crunchers V.2.0:

Despite this NOT being a lucrative field, the prospect of being insta-famous and the money, free beer, glassware, tickets, and access that accompanies it has resulted in a vast sea of wannabe influencers. Like authentic versions, the imitators come in all shapes and sizes, each in search of a piece of the action. The time it takes build a strong following by generating meaningful content is too daunting. They look for shortcuts to appear more influential than reality, in hopes of getting noticed by breweries, or agencies working on their behalf. 

Is it the glam? Apparently the glam ain’t all that glam. It can’t be the glam. You may now want to listen to Andy Crouch on the Full Pint Podcast. You might want to tighten your seat belt before you do. And it’s not just the writers. Consider the brewers next. The Beer Nut offered this second hand observation:

Chatting to a brewer yesterday who said his access to international markets is determined by his Untappd scores. Terrifying.

What does that do? Does it lead to things like the “uncomplicated and easy drinking“or a pastry stout named Chocolate Lagoon? Fact jostles with fiction these days as far as what is on the shelf or in the tap. I’d be getting skitterish, too. Breweries are dropping like flies. It’s the era of “a miniaturized version of industrial lager’s vision” for heaven’s sake. And then what about the drinkers? Well, it seems that some older guys of The Men’s Shed sort can’t get a break when they gather in congregation and discuss, likely, boring brown beer. Jings.

These are tough times. But is it all bad? I don’t think so. I can get a better selection at better prices than ever. Value reigns even if sucker juice beer is getting its day in the sun. Ah, the sun. Spring is here. Hopefully folks will get out and find something other to do, other than to buy than beer. Other than to seek a living writing about beer. I don’t really depend on beer culture, me. I just want that corner with a bit of warmth in the sun, a ache in the shoulder, dirt under the nails and an excuse to open something nice on a Saturday soon. Before then, check out Boak and Bailey on Saturday and Stan on Monday. It’s probably warmer wherever they are already. Spring!

*H/T to Cookie.
**See “…my writing has degraded…” below… well, now above seeing you are reading a footnote.
***Well, the “we” who are not the majority of beer drinker everywhere who prefer light industrial lagers still today.

Yeast News: Migrating Birds And Sheboygan

One of my slowest moving interests in beer comes in the form of a trickle of stories about the origins of lager yeast. In 2008, there was the tale of the two Bavarian caves. Then there was the dinosaur era yeast story. Then in 2011, the ur-yeast for lager was found in Argentina. Now, it turns out that little bit of goodness shows up elsewhere, too:

It is the first time the microbe has been found in nature in North America, or indeed outside of Patagonia. Found by UW-Madison undergraduate student Kayla Sylvester, a member of Hittinger’s group, the yeast occurs only at a very low frequency and was likely accidentally introduced, just as an ancestor found its way to Europe and kick-started the production of cold-brewed lager beer hundreds of years ago. “If I had to bet, I’d lay money on ski bums or migrating birds” as the agents responsible for transporting the microbe to Wisconsin, says Hittinger. “What we think is happening is that well-established, genetically diverse populations are sending migrants around the world. Generally, they’re not successful, but occasionally they are.”

I love this stuff. One of my proudest moments was when the yeasty eggheads jumped in the conversation and gave me more details in the comments. I even got corrected and edjificated that the proper written form is “egg head.” The goal of all this is “to tap into biodiversity and find the strains that ferment better” according to study lead UW-Madison Professor of Genetics Chris Hittinger. Which beats the hell out of making synthetic yeasts to get more of that candy store mango taste into out future beer.

As Boak and Bailey noted today, there is an end to the pursuit of the merely novel, the manufactured. The law of diminishing returns demands no less. But the exploration of the actual, the natural and traditional? I’ll buy that, too.

Evan Rail Ensured My New Glarus Mules Were Happy

Does that make sense? My co-workers have family in Wisconsin which means I get a share in New Glarus mixed cases once in a while. Moon Man Pale Ale. Me happy. To keep them happy in return – because only a fool does not want to keep that deal going – I share some of my beer travel findings and have been pleased to hear that a beer like Hennepin or a timely biere de garde is well received. To keep them really happy, hitting good beer folk up for tips when they travel is clever and, as they just were traveling in Prague, it means a plea from me goes to Evan and, in return, I get treats from Prague including this nice glass and bottle as well as a couple of Primator 16s.

Ain’t life great? Thanks Evan. Life lesson for today: treat your mules well and they will treat you well.

Wisconsin: Moon Man Pale Ale, New Glarus

It’s Memorial Day weekend in the USA and I am celebrating. Mainly because I’ve been sick since the middle of last weekend’s Victoria Day long weekend up here. Being in a border town it’s not a great stretch even if I can’t get over to witness one of the glories of the western world, a small town US parade. Eat a hot dog this weekend, woudja?

This beer was launched just a few weeks ago and arrived in a mixed 12 pack care of my Wisconsin mule – oddly by way of a village in north western Quebec. It gives off the aroma of peaches and apricots at an alarming level. It pours light burnished gold with an actively sustain pure white foam. On the swallow, theres a wall of pale malt sweet graininess with black tea hop with a weedy floral overlay. The finish is a bit tea, a bit bitter green with a squirt of juicy malt right at then end. Yum.

Structurally, it’s quite singular – a overly perfumed kolsch? And at 5% its a reasonably sessionable beer but I bet it could be rolled back to 4.4% with reasonable integrity. BAers got the love thang.

Wisconsin: Stone Soup, New Glarus, New Glarus

A Belgian pale ale from the USA’s Upper Midwest. This one smells good. Either that or I smell really bad. I’ve just finished two 16 hour days so it is not beyond the realm of possibility. But I’ve been in a jacket and tie the whole time. So it’s likely the beer or the guy next to me was inordinately polite.

Medium pale golden ale under a thin rim of white. Apple and pear on the nose with a little nutmeg. More in the mouth framed in a sweetish effervescent rich ale. Plenty of bready yeastiness. Dryish ending with black tea and twiggy hops and that lingering spice. A reasonable session beer at 5.3%. Part of a New Glarus mixed 12 pack that made the trip from near Lake Superior to the east end of Lake Ontario. A respectable level of BAer respect but probably not enough.