Your Very Own Mid-April 2021 Beery News Notes For A Thursday

What a difference a week makes. My birthday is coming up. My 18th bloggaversary is coming up. My jab appointment is coming up. The radishes are well up.  Speaking of the 18th bloggaversary, I was thrilled to realize that quite early on I had witnessed and captured forever perhaps the first bit of beer blogging snark or at least shade back in 2003.  Nothing like being a part of history. Oddly, someone just offered me $300 for that original URL  “genx40.com” under which the beer blogging started. I can’t imagine what for.

Pubs are open in England for outdoor service and apparently everyone I follow is a vitamin D deficient dipsomaniac. Except Matt. He was anxious. And Boak and Bailey hovered.  Me, even after I get the jab it’s going to be a while before I am settled enough to race towards a crowd. Retired Martin, as always, provided a great photo essay of his experience, a portion of one of which is captured above. I love capturing of the moment, the hipster hat in shades next to the guy at the left taking a seat. Two years from now the set up will look like something from a sci-fi movie.

Speaking of things not affected by the pandemic, what is not to love about this chart provided by BA Bart indicating what is needed to be remembered if you hang your emotional well being on the peg of craft beer. It shows the percentage of actual craft (not baloney craft) sales as a percentage for the years 2019, 2020 and into 2021. The percentage is stable. You see it dips in the summer when normal people buy more normal beer. And rises when they slow down. Nice. Pundits can cease their concerns otherwise.

In the greatest city in the world, Montreal, people are falling in love with the local lager scene:

Richer says lagers “appeal to a lot of different people” — everyone from “Monsieur et madame Tout-le-monde,” who might normally be fans of Molson or Labatt, to beer geeks who are looking for something simple, but well-crafted, and with lots of variety. To be clear, this isn’t a trend created by the pandemic — just accelerated by it. Across Quebec, hopheads still rush out to the latest can releases at breweries like Messorem Bracitorium, Brasserie du Bas-Canada, and Sir John, which specialize in full-on, double-dry-hopped hazy IPAs. But even those breweries are making lagers.

Perry. One of my heroes in the drinks writing world is Jancis Robinson and this week she offered her website a space to let us know about a rare perry:

Flakey Bark is a marvel of a drink. Broad, bold, structural, it carries on its breath a muscular depth of pear skin, peach pit, earthy bacon rind and wet slate. Its tannins in youth are formidable – so much so that eating the fruit raw is said to skin the roof of your mouth. It is built for food-pairing, offers extraordinary versatility in that respect, and with age it unfurls into layers of riper, fleshier fruit. A treasure – a delicious one. And one bad storm could wipe it entirely from existence, because there are only six mature Flakey Bark trees left in the world.

Nutso. Absolutely nuts. Speaking of which: brewery gets grocery store deal,  brewery told off apparently by morons.

I set out a slightly different understanding of the agreement which binds Ontario’s In and Out Store, aka The Beer Store, compared to some skuttlebutt observations being made. Our own expert beer business reporter Josh Rubin knows more about the situation than anyone else and has set out the deets in The Toronto Star. Very unlikely (aka impossible) that the team leading the big brewers who own TBS into the 2015 Master Framework Agreement that gave us grocery store beer did not see the writing on the wall for the system’s long term prospects. The ten year deal gave them the time to transition.

Or maybe an agreement to terminate. The talks leading to 2015 weren’t exactly public but getting ten years to transition otherwise stranded capital assets into operational loss offsets is a pretty civilized way to wind up EP Taylor’s brilliant idea as it became obsolete… it ends up being free to the 3 owner/breweries’ own pockets and fairly organized as it gives them time to sell the properties applying the funds meaningfully. Not unlike how the Federal gov’t has done it since Chretien. Securing the pension plan will be the big question.

That last point is key. The question of the land and buildings in the inventory of assets is not an issue. Otherwise useless assets offset operational losses. That’s part of the solution. That’s having a spot to put down the hot pan from the oven. The pension, however, is potentially problematic unless it is vested and capitalized. If so, all in all it was a brilliant plan.

Looks like Flying Dog,* the sort of brewery folk thought much about before the second Obama administration, has lifted the IP from BeerKulture, the diversity collabs they were working with:

Hi, @FlyingDog! Did you folks really have a meeting with @beerkulture to work on a collab, walk away from it, and then release Kulture King? That’s disgraceful, dilutes @beerkulture’s brand, and undermines the work they do to make beer better.

Two odd last things. Folks for over a decade have suggested that there is an issue with the reality of the Great White Male narrative in craft beer. Good reason. It’s a false construct. This is not news. Why did you think it was? Also, the idea that WBB invented criticism of craft beer?  Maybe if you were nine years old in 2014. Please. A very fine voice but pretty much common until folk stopped caring much about craft beer in 2015. Grow up. Buy my book. Please.

I really still can’t tell you anything about Project X but it is exciting and charming and… interesting. More laters. Meantime, check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday (who marked their 100th episode with gratitude for all) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  There is more from the DaftAboutCraft  podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s 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. Plus a newcomer located by B+B: The Moon Under Water.

*A proud sponsor of many of A Good Beer Blog’s Christmas Photo Contests of 2005 to 2016… or so…

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For Spring… Actual Spring With Radishes Sprouted And Robins Singing And…

I have been waiting to try out this new introductory sentence that I came up with. Tell me what you think: “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Yes, that’ll do nicely. Here we are! The Red Sox are playing real games. And it is warm enough to sit outside for more than five minutes… to get chores done in the yard… to get a sense that soon enough I will be jumping in Lake Ontario to cool off. And… Ontario have gone into an absolute lockdown today. No shops open other than groceries and pharmacies. Out city is relatively safe – even with a small spike yesterday – but we have ICU patients from elsewhere coming to our hospitals because elsewhere is not as relatively safe. I placed another home delivery of excellent beer to mark the moment.

To top it off, it has been a quiet week in this corner of the internet, in the world of beer. What have I noticed? The Suez! I am fond of the Suez canal… but not as fond of it as my slightly mad great-grannie Campbell was between the wars. Her favorite pub circa 1936 was named The Suez Canal… as illustrated to the right from a post circa 2012. Anyway, nice to see the ship has shifted and Suez has been cleared and that goods are moving again:

The shipments included common goods such as the consumer products made in China along with the equivalents of more than 11,000 20-foot containers, hauling wastepaper from the U.S. to India, more than 1,600 boxes holding automotive parts heading from Germany to China and 641 containers packed with beer from the Netherlands—the brands unnamed—on their way to China.

Gee – do you think the name of those beers might rhyme with Bline-hicken? Frankly, I was a bit surprised that so little bulk beer was involved.

From southern England, Stonch has shared some timely and sensible advice as a pub landlord for customers returning to their favorite establishments as they are able to open a bit just as we shut again – and which does open up the question of how to be an ethical pub goer in these times:

Remember, you can’t go for a pint if you’re unwilling to check in for NHS track and trace: pubs are legally obliged to ensure you either use the NHS app, or give your details manually. If you won’t, they must refuse you admission and service. Businesses will be fined – in an amount starting at £1000 and rising to £10,000 for multiple breaches – if they let you in. If you’re going to make a fuss about it this – due to some libertarian, freeman-on-the-land bullshit that’s wrecking your head – you’ve barred yourself from every pub in the UK.

Plain and true. Also from England, the heritage blog A London Inheritance has posted about a pub called Jack Straw’s Castle in Hampstead. As per usual, the post has a great selection of photos past and present as well as a good amount of background detail on the locality being discussed in and about London:

Jack Straw, after who the pub was named, is a rather enigmatic figure. General consensus appears to be that he was one of the leaders of the Peasants Revolt in 1381, however dependent on which book or Internet source is used, he could either have led the rebels from Essex, or been part of the Kent rebellion. Jack Straw may have been another name for Wat Tyler and some sources even question his existence. Any connection with Hampstead Heath and the site of Jack Straw’s Castle seem equally tenuous – he may have assembled his rebels here, made a speech to the rebels before they marched on London, or escaped here afterwards.

Interesting news in the US with some final high level figures about what the pandemic did to the craft sector in 2020 as per J. Noel:

NEWS: @BrewersAssoc says the craft beer industry saw a 9% decline (driven greatly by the pandemic), which dropped craft’s share of the overall beer market to 12.3%. However the number of craft breweries grew yet again in 2020, reaching an all-time high of 8,764.

EcoBart kindly confirmed these figures relate to volume and not value, suggesting it relates to on premises v. off drinking.  I would have thought that direct sales from the brewery were more profitable but that would maybe only apply to the continuing wave of the new and good and tiny and local.

Hereabout and somewhat similarly, apparently it is possible to run a massive and reasonably monopolistic beer retail chain and still lose masses of money. Josh explains:

The retailer, majority owned by Molson Coors and Labatt, had an operating loss of $50.7 million in 2020, as competition from grocery stores and restaurant bottle shops grew, and keg sales were crushed by COVID-19 restrictions… The Beer Store also saw its operating revenue fall to $399.4 million, down from $402.2 million in 2019, and $418.9 million the previous year.

I will miss the stupid name for the chain after it’s gone. Like I miss The TV Store and The Shoes Store. It’s nickname is “The IN and OUT Store” because every branch has a sign that says “IN” and one that says “OUT.” Ah, Ontario. More here on whatever TBS is here from 2015 when its end times were foretold. Relive the thrills of the Beer Ombudsman announcement.

In Japan, one effect of the pandemic has been a rise in no/low beer sales – and not to craft newbies but to established macro beer fans as Reuters reports:

The pandemic is propelling an unexpected boom in alcohol-free beer that has Asahi Group Holdings forecasting a 20% jump in revenue for non and low alcoholic beer this year after flat sales in 2020. Asahi is also debuting a new “Beery” label and has plans to expand its line-up. Main rival Kirin Holdings, which had a head start in the category, expects its sales volumes in the segment to jump 23% this year after a 10% rise in 2020 and recently revamped one of its main non-alcoholic beers.

Finally, like all of you I received the email blurb about November’s Ales Through The Ages event at Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg and, unlike most of what I write about, I had to actually cross check what I saw with others to ensure my eyes did not deceive me. Except for an optional event on Monday morning after the main conference is over, there are only male presenters. And the topics are not particularly diverse.  It’s all a bit weird to see such a thing. I can’t imagine I could travel even over half a year off given other obligations but… it’s all a bit weird.

One last thing. I came across a master list of current beer blogs. It was so 2006 when I found it. Called Top 110 Beer Blogs, it lists 157 blogs. Sweet.

I still can’t tell you anything about Project X but it is exciting and charming and… interesting. More laters. Meantime, check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, 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 more from the DaftAboutCraft  podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s 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. Plus a newcomer located by B+B: The Moon Under Water.

The April Fools Day Edition Of Your Beery News Notes

Here we are – April. The month of the showers that bring all the flowers. A snow storm is passing through this morning here at the east end of Lake Ontario. Such is life. Work is heavy, the third wave is heavy… and these packs of cookies and chips are making me heavy… heavier. Fine. We’re locking it all back down. I need my jab. Really. Soon please. But remember – it could be worse…

Speaking of the weather… Mexico is considering taking steps about the water that is moving north from arid lands through the porous US border in the form of beer:

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is railing against the production of beer and milk in areas where there isn’t enough water. López Obrador cancelled plans for a huge brewery on Mexico’s northern border last year, and on Sunday he questioned the whole idea of producing beer for export. “How can we have beer breweries in the north? How can we produce beer for export? What are we exporting? Water. We don’t have water in the north,” López Obrador said.

This is not a small matter, as Forbes has reported:

Beer used to come from a variety of countries. In 2020, Mexico accounted for a record 72.27% of all U.S. beer imports during a record year for all beer imports, which totaled $5.75 billion. It marked the ninth consecutive year for record U.S. beer imports and the 12th consecutive year that Mexico increased market share. Most of that beer comes a massive brewing operation outside Piedras Negras, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from Eagle Pass, Texas, which is responsible for 56% of all U.S. beer imports.

The owner of that brewery? Anheuser-Busch InBev. Economic imperialism. Sweet. Somewhat similarly, The Full Pint has somewhat bravely posted, in 2011-esque style, the list of the top 50 US craft breweries but much of the top ten is made up of odd assemblages of investment vehicles of one sort or another. Gambrinus? CANarchy? Artisanal Brewing Ventures? It’s bad enough that Yuengling and Boston Beer are in there. Who are these people… err… these mega corps? So confusing.

Somewhat economic and culturally imperially speaking, a Chinese firm has found a way to brew in Pakistan to serve the Chinese economic actors in their new work zone:

“The company formally started its beer production last week, which product will be supplied to Chinese nationals working at various projects launched in different areas of Pakistan under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and mines and mineral projects in Balochistan,” Mohammad Zaman Khan, director general, Excise and Taxation South, told Dawn. He confirmed a licence had been issued to the Chinese company in 2018 as it had submitted an application to the authorities concerned in 2017, pleading that the beer and liquor brand which the company produces in China is not available in Pakistan.

Almost as confusingly dramatic… Q: could a hotdog be a sausage IPA? A: apparently anything is possible these days if the logic leading to the “farmhouse IPA” is to be trusted:

The one thing we know for certain, without even a hint of ambiguity, is that the word “saison” does not attract drinkers. A few breweries and a few beers have achieved success, but it’s despite, not because of the word. Justin regularly modifies his “saison” with equally dangerous adjectives like “Brett” or “table.”—other words that scare off drinkers. It’s too bad because I am convinced beers like Ashfall and Bumper Crop and Slow Motion have broad appeal. The word IPA no longer has much connection to style. And if “saison” reads like a warning to drinkers, IPA is a reassurance, a way of saying, “You’ll like this beer.”

Reflecting a more certain time, Ron told the story of a party for the coronation of Edward VII in 1902:

…the hero of the day was enthusiastically drunk. As twilght came on the grounds were beautifully illuminated with fairy lights and lanterns, and at midnight the proceedings terminated by a display of fireworks…

Ron was less enthused, saying Ed7 was “remembered for being a debauched glutton, who ate, drank and smoked himself to an early grave.” I hope he is more charitable in his plans for the next coronation party. What plans do I have? Jings. No idea. Better call Ron and ask. Has anyone laid away a few dozen hogsheads of strong ale?

The price of beer is being lowered in India to cope with Covid.

One of my favourite memories of living in Poland 30 years ago was the hardly operational trains – and especially the food and bar cars:

…the company’s name has in Polish become all but synonymous with its dining cars, serving up a taste of Poland – everything from hearty pierogi to piping hot żurek fermented-rye soup – in sleek and comfortable surroundings. Wars dining cars have fostered countless anecdotes, inspired songs, and generated a large following among contemporary train buffs. And recently, those restaurant cars have been even more of a welcome sight, as they have become the only sit-down restaurants in Poland allowed to remain open amid coronavirus restrictions.

Go Covid! Covid loves trains!! In further news of the pandemic present, Ed has provided a summary of how his British brewing workplace has coped with the situation – and explains its very interesting business model:

… brewing through the plague year. As an essential worker I’ve been slaving away whilst many have been at home all day playing with themselves and saying how it’s affecting their mental health. Maybe the Victorian moralists were right after all? I work at a site which contains four independently owned breweries (brewhouses and fermentation vessels), of which the main brewery does the processing (stabilisation and filtration) and packaging (cask, keg and bottle) for all four, and provides staffing for three.

Reversedly equipment-wise, the UK’s Fullers PubCo is now two years into life without its own brewery but things there are looking up:

Simon Emeny, Fuller’s chief executive, said the company had entered the pandemic in strong shape financially, partly because of the January 2019 sale of its brewery, which makes London Pride ale, to Japan’s Asahi after 174 years in the business. However, the pandemic cash burn meant the company needed money to train staff and take advantage of an expected sales surge once pubs reopen, he said.

Finally, Evan has discussed the use, misuse and uselessness of “craft” in the language of drinks as spoken around the world:

In other languages, saying “craft beer” can be close to impossible, at this point being “too new” a phrase to have a local equivalent. Apiwe Nxusani-Mawela, a brewer and consultant at Brewsters Craft in South Africa, says that she wouldn’t even know how to express the idea of a craft beverage in a language like Xhosa or Zulu. “The concept is not new — Africans have been hand-crafting various items for years,” she says. “The traditional beers here have different names, but they all mean beer. Like one is called ‘utywala besintu,’ because ‘utywala’ is beer and ‘besintu’ means for traditional people or natives. But craft beer? Craft beer is still a new term. I don’t think we have a word for it.”

There. Easter weekend. Four days off heres abouts. Nice. Well, except for the whole Christ died on the cross for your sins thing. Best be good. One thing that is good and charming and interesting is Project X. I can’t tell you anything about Project X but it is exciting and charming and… interesting. More when I can tell you. Meantime, check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, 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 more from the DaftAboutCraft  podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s 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. Plus a newcomer located by B+B: The Moon Under Water.

 

 

 

 

 

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For The End and Beginning

Here we are. The end of March and the beginning of spring. Baseball is on the TV. Shorts and sweater weather. Excellent. I even planted lettuce seed and radish seed last weekend under row cover. Just a bit. I’m no idiot. Well, not that sort of idiot. Like many this year, it’s been a quiet week for good beer writing. Hopefully everyone else has been planting their first radishes, too. It’s also the end and beginning of the year of the plague and the second… year of the plague. Things are weird. Free beer for the vaccinated? Jab-based pub passports… why not? Me, I’m not doing too much soul searching or looking back but this by Martin serves as a milestone of sorts:

A year ago I walked into tourist Cambridge on the hottest day of the year so far. The tourists (typically two-thirds Japanese and Chinese) were completely absent. The Universities looked forlorn. Pubs were advertising their loo rolls, and the staff at Fopp treated me like their first visitor of the week. Perhaps I was.

Enough of that. In good news of 2021, The Guardian reported on an outcome which gives joy to any staff lawyer working for a municipality:

…after a dogged six-year campaign by locals, the Carlton Tavern will reopen next month – lockdown permitting – after the developers were ordered to rebuild the pub “brick by brick”, a ruling that pub campaigners say has set an extraordinary precedent. “People said it was impossible,” said Polly Robertson, a leading member of the Rebuild the Carlton Tavern campaign… “I just thought, no – I’m not going to let it lie.” 

Speaking of the pubs of England, Mudgy wrote about Cask v. Covid and picks a winner:

Nowadays, the pubs that don’t offer cask tend to fall into the categories of places that are effectively restaurants, down-at-heel boozers that only appeal to a local clientele, high-end trendy bars and some beer-focused places that think not selling cask puts across a modern image. Any pub seeking a wide appeal rather than just a captive market of locals will offer cask in some form. There is a huge amount of loyalty to the category that isn’t going to disappear any day soon. The day Wetherspoon’s start dropping cask from some of their pubs in England and Wales is the day you really need to start worrying about its future. It’s not just changing a brand on the bar, it’s making a statement about what kind of pub you aim to be.

To the northwest, a tale of high tech beer packaging tech in Iceland:

The equipment in the line comes from numerous parts of the world, including the U.S.-made end-of-line Econocorp E-2000 cartoning machine.  “We were led to Econocorp during conversations we had with other machine suppliers who are familiar with the kind of machinery that’s suitable for craft brewers,” says Ólafsson. “It’s just the right size machine for our production, and it’s very simple in design and, subsequently, in operation.”*

Me? I love everything from Econocorp. Elsewhere, Stan was good enough to send out his Hop Queries newsletter on Wednesday. Topics this month include “Up the downstream,” “Query of the month,” “UK hop exchange,” “Look & listen,” “At the Hop,” and “Hop profile: Nelson Sauvin” which confirm that, yes, this is a newsletter and, yes, even Stan can’t resist the hop pun. It’s also edition 4.11 which tells me he’s throwing a fifth anniversary party for the next one!  I won’t spoil the Danny and the Juniors reference but Stan does provide this:

In a Wall Street Journal review of “The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats” a writer gushes: “Beer lovers, too, might want to raise a mug to (David) Fairchild. A boozy night in a village inn buying rounds for Bohemian farmers resulted in Fairchild procuring the finest German hops, which he smuggled out of the country, allowing American brewers to vastly improve their sour, inferior beers.” That’s simply not true. Full stop. No farmers in the United States at the beginning of the 20th  century successfully managed to grow continental landrace hops, although English Fuggles did find a home in Oregon.

That is interesting. Formerly, I had a client in PEI who owned a former tavern which was formerly owned by a local brewer who, in his formative years, travelled to England and back, returning with hop rhizomes in pockets that he nurtured and kept damp that whole sailing voyage. The yard of the house was still rotten with them. Google maps shows it still there. Wonder what they are.

Jeff on government. As they saying goes, no one likes to see sausages made.

Also semi-officially, I like the idea of this notification from a bar as referenced on Reddit and Twitter and a bunch of other places. It would be useful for future reference in discussions with one’s children. I, for example, know some one which is or could be a grandmother who was also barred for life from a certain establishment two Saturdays in a row. Having better documentation and records retention principles may have helped.

Gary wrote a very interesting piece on an issue of Brewing Trade Review from 1962 including info on the iconic Toronto brewery set up by my hero E.P.Taylor in the early 1960s and still pumping out macro gak today!

The plant still exists, as Molson-Coors Beverage Co.’s main Canadian brewery. The tower-like, oblong-shape central building of dark brick with contrasting light frame atop, shown in the article, is still a leitmotif at the plant, on Carlingview Rd. in Etobicoke, Toronto, despite much expansion…

Ryuuhyou Draft. Japanese sea ice beer. Low in malt. Blue in colour. Speaking of weird Japanese beers…

“We will pitch the product as the standard beer for the new era.”

Ban-zoink! Elsewhere and much to the opposite, my personal hat supplier Katie M has written about her new business, Corto, with a deft dramatic touch:

“Did you know you can get down under the flooring?” our always-happy landlady beamed, on a final visit to sort the fire alarms. No. We did not know that. We’d agreed not to mention the storage issues for our sanity’s sake, clueless about how we were going to overcome the challenge of managing inventory in such a small space. Tom had only just stopped having nightmares about having to fill the entire ground floor with bathrooms. “The hatch is under the stairs, in the cupboard.”

DON’T GO IN THE BASEMENT!!! You’ll never believe what happens next.

By contrast, I found this portrait of startup Belgian brewers Antidoot a bit bizarre and even a bit disturbing, especially this bit:

A few months after the unpleasant Spring Release, Tom Jacobs read an article in Belgian newspaper De Standaard about a French winery in Bordeaux called Château Pétrus. Pétrus wines were highly coveted, partly for their quality (they are produced on an exceptional slope with blue clay soil) and partly for their scarcity (the vineyard covers only 11 hectares). A limited amount of Pétrus wine is released each year (the whole of Australia, for example, receives only 36 bottles). As a result, bottles of Pétrus were being purchased by speculators who resold them on the black market at huge markups, used as investments which which would grow in value with each passing year the wines aged. 

Weird. I think they invented pre-speculation. Just to be clear, Château Pétrus is one of the great wines of the world, producing vintages since the 1700s. It does not attract high prices on the secondary market. It attracts high prices on the primary market as this LCBO screen shot shows. Antidoot, on the other hand, is one startup brewery among thousands. One of the least reflective articles on a brewery I’ve ever read. The passage where the rocket scientists also invent compost is amazing. Spinal Tap meets beer. Sucker juice.

One final note: beer bottles prove that recycling is bullshit. Never knew that.

There. Spring. Hmm… why doesn’t my heart go dancing? And that waltz isn’t particularly… you know… entrancing? No desire… no ambition leads me… WTF!?! Oh yes – the second spring of a pandemic but, screw it, still spring. Get a beer, turn that soil and plant some seed! While performing your ag-art, check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, 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 more from the DaftAboutCraft  podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s 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.

*ZZZZzzzz….

The Day After St. Paddy’s Day Beery News Notes

There, at least that’s over. That’s him there to the right, apparently ordering two. You know, this may have been the St. Patrick’s Day that I’ve always wanted. Quiet. By force of law. Even last year, during the first week of something being quite wrong, there were college idiots half smashed on a Tuesday loitering around the downtown square, wearing green things made of plastic. Amateurs. Appropriating plastic coated amateurs. In 2017, I asked why craft beer hated the day. I don’t think that is the same now but it’s mainly because craft beer has ceased to exist in the same sense four years on. Not much taking a unified stand against anything these days. Not much of a soap box to stand on anymore so much as being an object of the inquiries.

Breaking: craft beer loves generic globalist multi-internationalism.

In days of yore brewing news, Martyn has undertaken the work I’ve been begging him to undertake for at least a decade: exploring the 1898-1899 Canadian Inspectorate of Foods and Drugs study on stouts and porters:

…the average strength of the Canadian porters was 5.73 per cent abv, nearly 20 per cent less than the average stout strength. The two beers had almost identical average apparent attenuation, at 81.4 per cent for the porters, and 81.5 per cent for the stouts. Other analyses show big differences, however. The average percentage of maltose in the finished beer was 0.594 per cent for the porters, and 0.747 per cent for the stouts. The average percentage of solids in the finished beers was 4.99 per cent for porters and 5.6 per cent for the stouts…

Whammo! Kablammo!! Now you can all shut your pie holes about it and face facts.  “What about McDonagh & Shea porter out of  Winnipeg, Manitoba brewed to 8.8 per cent abv?” you say? Shut up. Get out.

Speaking of relatively recent history, sad news of a pub closing trade in Burton England was tweet-paired with this fabulous image of a 1962 price list for brewers and pub chain operators, Mitchells and Butlers. A great opportunity to identify grannie’s top drinks as well as the relative price of things. Fact: Dubonnet is not vermouth.

And in even more recent recent history, this picture of Eugene Levy and John Candy as the Shmenge Brothers of SCTV fame in the 1984 Kitchener Octoberfest parade posted this week by the University of Waterloo Library is as cheery as it gets. Careful fans will recall how pivotal the same parade is in the plot of the 1983 film Strange Brew, staring fellow SCTV alumni Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis. That’s an actual production vehicle, by the way – a Messerschmitt Kabinenroller.

Thing you couldn’t do in 2019. Going back into past restaurant reviews and finding evidence of unidentified covid-19 symptoms being the unwitting basis for complaint.

Not quiet sure what to make of this supply chain news out of Australia, whether it means Asahi are switching their malt purchases to be more local or just that it is now going to be tracked as local:

The new supply chain means that local barley will be used to brew Australian beers like Victoria Bitter and Carlton Draught for the first time in decades. Asahi, which developed the new direct sourcing program after it purchased Carlton & United last year, will now buy more than 70,000 tonnes of malted barley direct from farmers in Victoria and southern NSW to be used at its Yatala and Abbotsford breweries. Growers in northern NSW are expected to join the scheme before this year’s harvest while the first beers brewed under the program will be rolled out in April.

This one program appears to include 7.6% of Australian malt production so what ever it is it is significant.

Not unrelatedly, though he will fully disagree and it pains me when he does, Stan captured one of the best examples of craft beer nonsense that I’ve ever seen:

Breweries have terroir as well. But instead of revolving around a patch of land, ours are centered on a group of people. We operate our business on a human scale and with a human face. 

Remember when people used to say stuff like that? Many copyright law suits later and the firings of all the women in the craft beer bar and… and… and… Speaking of which in a sort of contrapuntal way, diversity in brewing and the craft beer trade continues to be a big discussion circling about the topics of both inclusion and actual identify as this article in Foodism Toronto discusses:

Sandhu has a beer on his menu dedicated to his grandfather, Chanan, which includes Indian coriander as one of its ingredients. “I actually do see a high percentage of Indian customers ordering the beer that’s named after my grandfather,” Sandhu says. “I think these populations feel safe and they feel comfortable at our brewery. We don’t just see them coming in just once, but they become regulars.”

Unlike the samey “I miss the pub” teary tales or the quite uncomfortable “beer has been the only thing that gives my life meaning” confessionals, Mr. G. Oliver has looked to the future and sees hope as well as these three interesting trends:

What use is a “share bottle” you can’t share? It’ll be interesting to see if the stemming of the pandemic brings the 750 back at all. I think people are doubling down on case sales; we haven’t wanted to make any more trips to retail than necessary. People are also buying fewer expensive specialty beers.  I also think that the pandemic is helping fuel the rise of the non-alcoholic category. A lot of people are now home for lunch every day. What are you going to drink with your sandwich for lunch? NA beers can provide a perfect answer, and there’s nobody watching you “drink a beer” at lunch in your kitchen. NA is getting normalized faster than it would have otherwise.

By the way… does anyone know how you are supposed to find a story on GBH? What a hot mess of a front page.

Stonch, well known pub lad and operator of Britain’s longest-running beer blog, praised CAMRA on its 50th anniversary this week for, yes, achieving its goals:

Yes, there’s been a growth in excellent keg, and that has perhaps pushed cask ale out of the limelight in many beer-focused bars. Yes, the immediate after-effects of the pandemic will produce challenging conditions for cask-centric brewers. CAMRA has plenty to be keeping busy with, and without doubt can remain relevant and vital if it so chooses. Speaking as a publican, I can say with confidence that there is no way that a significant part of today’s pub-going public would be happy to visit a pub that didn’t offer reasonably well-kept cask conditioned ale. That commercial reality will preserve this particular part of Britain’s heritage for years to come.

And from the other side of the bar as well as knees under the organizational table, the Tand praised CAMRA on its 50th anniversary this week for, yes, achieving its goals:

I’m a relative newcomer, my tenure in the Campaign being a mere 40 years, but happily my anniversary as a member coincides, more or less, with the fiftieth year of our venerable organisation.  Like many, I’m looking forward to Laura Hadland’s book outlining CAMRA’s rich history and to reading the tales of those who have made this epic campaigning journey, both with and before me. Of course, while the organisation is to be congratulated, it is also an excuse for members to raise a glass to themselves, whether they are grey in beard and sandal or – like some of us – still youthful and inspired. Young or old, we are all the Campaign for Real Ale, and we can justifiably bask in our own reflected glory, even if just for a day.

For an alternative view, consider the Viz magazine perspective.

Best actual brewing thing I have seen this week? This:

OH MY GOSH – sooo excited!! Today’s the day we’re brewing our 1st 2021 Vintage Ale @FullersBrewery and I got the honour of mashing it in! Thanks @FullersGuy!

Me, I’d make my own now… but they employed a cunning strategy and reversed the image so we will never know how the beer was made. One thing is for sure. There aren’t any ambering hops in there.

There. Saturday is spring. Yes, the second spring of a pandemic but still spring. So while you turn the soil and plant the seed, check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, 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 more from the DaftAboutCraft  podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s 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.

These Are The Thursday Beery News Notes For The Week Of Melting

The week of melting is a great week. It occurs usually two weeks before the week of everything smells like dog poop. The week in between is called the week of maybe it won’t happen this year. One lad was thinking how nice it would be if something didn’t happen, as illustrated to the right. Max shared the image and voted it top entry for the Hogmanay Xmas Yuletide Kwanza Photo Contest 2021. It is a study of humankind’s folly… or true role of beer… or something… whatever it is we are advised by someone presented that balance was in fact recovered.

Much doings to report upon this week. First, Stan wrote about something I have never had the slightest interest in – beer recommend / review / rate apps. If you are spending any time at all on them, you need a goldfish in your life.  Something real. But Stan persists, as they say. And he delved a bit into the phenomenon to point out one app which actually had detail:

Next Glass 1.0, circa 2015, was something different. It was one of several drink recommendation apps that came and went about that time. Some got tagged as the “Pandora for beer.” For First Glass, that made sense because it took a scientific approach similar to Pandora when collecting data… [F]eature-based systems begin by measuring specific attributes of songs (or beers). Pandora created the Music Genome Project and employs musicians to catalog key elements of every song in its database. Next Glass mapped the chemical makeup of individual beers, forgoing any effort to quantify a beer based on its descriptive characteristics. 

All of which means there are graphs. Graphical displays of information. Why did it fail? Beer failed it: “…the company was never going to be able to collect mass spec information on the thousands of new beers released every week…” A.K.A. T.M.I.

Victim of Maths has tweeted an interest set of… graphs! Graphs on the effect of the pandemic on alcohol consumption patters in different nations. The form of graph itself is very helpful. But look how consumption goes up in the US while dropping in terms of the tavern trade. Who benefitted from that? White Claw? Local actual craft brewers delivering to home? Interesting stuff.

Much talk on alewives and witches again which I think is up there with the role of Sumerian goddess of beer, Ninkasi, in medieval Norse brewing. There seems to be a drive to switch one story of exclusivity with another an then make it universal rather than particular.  Dr. Christina Wade made this very good point in relation to this topics and one which is useful in any other historical studies which I present as a merged mega-tweet:

That is a really important avenue of research. And, in which case, we must get hyper-specific. Brewing in the Middle Ages could be a high-status, non-liminal, position for women. If we take the example of late medieval and early modern England, which is what these sorts of articles seem to be meaning, we can see that women who brewed were vilified. And men absolutely did accuse and lie about things to ruin women’s brewing businesses. We have primary sources for that in England. But as to whether this took the form of witch accusations the data is lacking. This may be because the populations who brewed and who were accused of witchcraft overlap. That is to say, single/widowed/poor women. That said, married women also brewed with great regularity. So it’s largely speculative.

This raises an interesting question. Why and should we participate in the continuation of myth telling? Even as myth correction. On the one hand it is organic and bolsters identity often in a healthy way. I myself am quite pleased to be generically connected to the faerie folk and advise all of you to watch your step accordingly. This, however, is quite distinct from the role I play from time to time of amateur historian – even when I get paid for that part of my research and writing. Nothing is as shockingly and clarifyingly accurate as a primary source. You can’t get around that sort of thing. You must face it. So how does one do both in an area of our collective culture as laden with fib and story telling as beer and brewing?

Never a happy event. A founder leaves a brewery.

Wee Beefy, one who has written of the horrors of the experimental craft alcopops that are too prevalent these days, has discovered a new love in an very unexpected form:

Last year or before, Maltgarden Browari came along. I had already tried a few of their excellent stouts, along with stumbling through opening their ridiculous wax capped can, and then bought a can of Tzatziki pastry sour with Pink Guava, Mango and cucumber… I drank the whole can in about ten minutes. It was ludicrously easy drinking – but also featured a distinctive but perhaps created tzatziki flavour along with the excellence of the pastry elements. It tasted very strongly of the cucumber and as I admit, the tzatziki I imagined but impressively the other flavours blended in so well together! I used it as a palate cleanser…

Me, I am physically revolted by that description but celebrate the freedom.

One weighs carefully whether one mentions BrewDog anymore given they are (i) now an international brewery with few links to micro or craft and (ii) they are adherents to a form of serial stupid that is beyond all reckoning – but… but… this one is up there with Sam Adam’s 2002 “Sex for Sam” promotion that led to charges, humiliation and (in a less than round about way than you might imagine) the Brewers Association as we know it. Trade Unionist Kmflett neatly summarized the seemingly sordid scene:

A post noted that Brewdog Indianapolis had sacked female and LBTQ employees on International Women’s Day apparently looking for a change in culture at the bar, possibly to a white male workforce. The CEO of Brewdog USA tweeted that of course Brewdog don’t discriminate while the London based head of Brewdog bars globally tweeted that he was investigating. On the one hand he was aware of an issue on the Indianapolis bar. On the other hand people are not sacked on the basis of gender or sexuality and if anyone had done that they’d be off too.

Lordy. There’s the statement from those let go. To date, no response from Mr. Jim Watt via Twitter except to point out how carbon neutral they are trying to be in addition, apparently, to be anti-discrimination neutral. It’s sad. I just checked my emails and there I was care of Stonch giving James himself advice in exchanges for photo contest prizes. It was all about how to run a blog about his wee brewery… and there it is now…  crushing hopes and dreams.

Finally, you will note every week I list below any number of podcasts related to good beer. This week I tweeted a question which got mucho response:

Honestly, how much time a week do you have for listening to beer podcasts? 27 minutes? Three and a half hours? I think of this when I encounter the 68th new podcast this year that’s over an hour long, not much edited and 7-11% filled with umms, errs and insider giggling.

I mean it quite seriously as a question about the medium. How many could you keep up with. I myself uses the FF technique in which I take a 35 minute podcast and reduce it to 5 by clicking and hunting for the actual bit of most interest to me. For all the “beer editors” out there who seem to be getting chump change for taking away the new writers voice in exchange for the dull tried and true, it would be good if there was a similar thing for podcasts, a central hub of some sort, a single global beer podcast editorial committee who could take these rambles and turn them into an actual magazine of the air of some sort. Some folk who could say “no” and who could also say “yes, this!” Listeners await.

Soon it will be spring. That makes for happy. For more happy, check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, 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 more from the DaftAboutCraft  podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s 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.

Now It’s March And These Are The Thursday Beery News Notes

Well, it’s March. Finally. From the last crop out of the garden until now I wait every year for the return to the best nine months of the year after the unreal times that are December followed by the garbage months of January and February. No, it is always all about March with me. March, March, March. And… it’s been -16C outside in the mornings. Perhaps I missed anyone mentioning it… but Canada sorta sucks sometimes. Speaking of sucks, I love Retired Martin’s photo essay on Sheffield’s Queens Hotel as shared above.  I know the feeling. What else is out there? Let’s see.

In more local news, Forbes magazine has an article on breweries led by women in Africa – including one in Rwanda with an eastern Ontario twist:

Josephine Uwase and Deb Leatt number among them as brewer and chef, respectively, at Rwanda’s Kweza Craft Brewery. Like Nxusani-Mawela, they have gotten their share of coverage, in part because Kweza is Rwanda’s first brewpub; in part because Beau’s All Natural Brewing Company in Ottawa has very publicly supported Kweza with fundraising and consultation…

Less locally, for my favourite “craft in outrage!” story of the week we go to the waters off Argentina:

The owners of the three breweries in Mar del Plata, which had teamed up with a diving school for what they described as a first-of-its-kind months long experiment in deep-water beer making, were left mystified, and heartbroken, upon discovering on Tuesday that the barrels were gone. “I started crying,” said Carlos Brelles, who runs the Thalassa Diving School in Mar del Plata, a coastal city five miles from the sunken ship. “Three or four people without morals destroyed the work of so many people who put in so much effort.”

Heist! The breweries are going to try the idea again. Speaking of unfortunate situations, I have not idea why this was published other than as a submission to a dull interview contest:

5. Did you think it was going to be your most popular beer or did that take you by surprise?

I do not feel that any of our beers have a greater popularity than others. So many are good on their own merits.

Very confused I also was when I thought I was agreeing about his observations on the odd use of the term “badass” and got the thumbs up while he, Mr. B., got another sort of response. All part of the seeing and speaking of things that are otherwise unspoken.

To my east, we learn through error. It’s a principle that Lars illustrated this week as he tweeted out his Kvass making skills:

First mistake. Too much bread, and wheat bread apparently soaks up more water. So from 5l of water I’m left with 1l extract from the bread…

To my less east, I liked this profile of Gloucestershire cider and perry maker Kevin Minchew published in Pellicle this week and not only for the lack of a polished romanticized backstory:

In his own words he was living “hand to mouth,” the traditional farm labourer’s way—working hard, eating simply and drinking the product of the land from his own hands. But he recognised this couldn’t go on forever, so the traditional cidermaking life is having to take a back seat while he focuses on the day job…

To the west, Josh Noel had a great article in the Chicago Tribune this week on facing the conflicts while working in hospitality in these days of Covid:

Bondi hasn’t been out to eat in nearly a year. He doesn’t think it’s safe. So why do his customers go out? Why do they sit there, indoors, masks off, in the midst of a pandemic? He regularly serves people who appear to be congregating outside each other’s pods or bubbles — such as a group of six women who had brunch at Jerry’s one recent weekend. “It’s hard not to have contempt for that, at least from my point of view,” he said. “But I’m a professional and I try to treat everyone as well as I can.”

Down south, Alistair has posted his thoughts on the semi-silly distinction between brown and robust porters according to an ancient BJCP dartboard:

When you look at the 2008 BJCP guidelines for Porter, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the difference between brown and robust was largely based on the side of the Pond your drink came from.

It’s part of his efforts to drink his way into enlightenment upon the meaning of the word in the American context.

Everywhere, there has been lots of slightly worried considerations of purpose or status or something in the beer scribbling world. After all these years of reading, I still see that the best finds the general in the specific, if not the human condition then at least the illustration of a principle or common experience. But everything is not the best. Some is the work of the keen newbie. Some the hobbyist seeking distraction. But that is OK, too. That’s pretty much me. I was thinking about this when I pulled the January 18th issue of The New Yorker and read the article “Is It Really Too Late to Learn New Skills?” by Margaret Talbot and got stuck on this passage:

Thomas Curran and Andrew P. Hill, the authors of a 2019 study on perfectionism among American, British, and Canadian college students, have written that “increasingly, young people hold irrational ideals for themselves, ideals that manifest in unrealistic expectations for academic and professional achievement, how they should look, and what they should own,” and are worried that others will judge them harshly for their perceived failings. 

Better have a chat with my kids. That’s a bit weird but would explain a lot.

Interesting merger and acquisitions news out of India as Molson Coors is selling big time but not in the way that they might have hoped:

Singapore-headquartered Inbrew Holdings Pte Ltd has acquired NortAmerican lager producer Molson Coors’ beer business in India. London based non-resident Indian (NRI) businessman Ravi Deol owns Inbrew Holdings Pte Ltd through privately held Ahead Global Holdings. Molson Coors India Private Limited (MCIPL) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Coors Brewing USA with popular beer brands in India.

And finally, some common sense out of Japan as Kirin finally ditches that joint venture with the military dictatorship that controls Burma:

Brewing giant Kirin said on Friday that it is ending a six-year-old joint venture with a holding company in Myanmar that is linked to the country’s military. The army this week seized power in a coup, detaining the country’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and numerous other top government figures. Kirin is “deeply concerned by the recent actions of the military in Myanmar,” the company said in a statement, adding that it had “no option but to terminate” the partnership.

No option, eh? Does this mean New Belgium is OK again? Dunno. Probably not.

There. A whirl around the world this week. For more, check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more withe the Beer Ladies Podcast, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  We have a new entry from the DaftAboutCraft  podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword.  And remember BeerEdge, too.

The “Buh Bye February” Edition Of Beery News Notes

Oh, to be in England now that April’s (almost) there…

Well, that was great. February, the last month in the pandemic year around these parts. March is the bestest of the months anyway so I am just moving on, planning on getting some seeds in the ground within the next few weeks. The hard frozen ground. Not like in Ypres where Stonch waits upon the law to let his garden, above, grow.

First, an interesting comment from David Frum on the duration of the shock of the new:

It’s like when distilled alcohol arrived in Europe after 1400. Human beings had long experience of wine and beer. But distilled liquor spread carnage through unprepared societies. Took a long time to learn to cope with it. Broadcast media => social media an almost equal shock

That works. Speaking of culture shock, I can’t say I agree with the idea that the folk in their early twenties are a wave of future beer drinkers just waiting to hit the beer stores for the next forty or fifty years but Matt makes an argument:

What I’m interested in flipping here is the narrative that runs through all of these stories: that under 25’s are not interested in drinking alcohol. That craft beer, specifically, is not cool to them. While the youngest bracket within the above data might be drinking less, I believe they are almost certainly drinking better. Case in point: In putting out a tweet asking for 18-24 year olds to reach out to me about their beer preferences, my inbox was overwhelmed with a flood of positivity. 

That right there? The choir. My kindly response – avuncular even – was that my kids and their pals have little or no interest being tediously focused on building a healthy and productive future. Does it matter if they like what i like?

UK Covid Pubwatch 2021 continues. Are you a little more worried each month about the role the pub and lashings of booze have on British culture? Folk are fretting. On Thursday, Emma McClarkin of the British Beer & Pub Association forewarned of Boris’s newest announcement with this:

Outdoor opening -as we told Gov- not viable option. More support will be needed to survive prolonged closure, but what we really need is to be opened fully inside & out as soon as possible.

Stonch was more realistic and more humane:

Business owners in hospitality / leisure / retail (of which I am one) will understandably feel bitter disappointment about the glacial pace of re-opening about to be set out. However we need to be realistic and remember this is how most of the public want things to go.

This was cool. A 1989 record from Mass Observation. Typed. Might as well have been 1949.  Reminds me. I knew a guy called Bob in the mid-90s who went on about enjoying life, smoking and drinking. Died from smoking and drinking in the mid-90s. More to enjoying life than stubbing it out like a butt in an ashtray.

And Martyn added Curling, Newfoundland to my understanding. Now part of Corner Brook. I don’t actually think it’s the worst slogan ever. We’d do well to have a lot more “Alcohol: makes you an idiot” reminders. So, more like a public service announcement. Might’ve helped Bob.

An old link but an interesting one – Ottawa’s first tavern unearthed.

Here’s a lengthy post from Martyn which has little to do with beer but a lot to do with the state of understanding of beer:

Of course, having a “gut instinct” that something is or is not true, after our subconscious minds have reviewed the evidence and decided whether the arguments hold up, does not absolve us of the need to muster the evidence for others to review, because other people cannot interrogate our subconsciouses. The evidence for the two sides of the “porter name origins” argument is pretty easy to line up.

My first response was unkind as it the question was not the origins of the name of porter but the ethics of going on and writing about junkets rather than spreading one’s attention more equitably, well, facts and standards would not have such sway. But I am intrigued by the fact that “Daniel Defoe wrote in 1724 of porter being a working-class, alehouse drink” so I can overlook such things.

Elsewhere in taxonomy, Katie wrote extensively about small bready lumps in the UK.*

It’s a first date question. It’s something to debate over pints and a cheese and coleslaw bap. It’s an argument in the kebab shop at 1 a.m. It’s a reason to fall out with a favourite baker when they revise their packaging. It’s a clichéd social media meme and an easy engagement win. People queue up to die on the already heavily-bodied hill that is the true and rightful name of their favoured handheld breadstuff. We love to claim the naming rights of our daily bread. It’s personal. It’s tribal.

This article reminded me of when in 1991 as a ESL teacher in Kołobrzeg, Poland I invented a game of twenty questions for my adult evening class. They found posing oneself as an object to be asked questions was a very odd process. Apparently it was not something Stalin had mentioned might assist in expanding understanding. They also found it very odd when I proclaimed the correct answer: “jestem buka!” Or “I am a bun!”

And Stan waxed taxonomically when he picked up the “what was craft?” theme rather helpfully – in the sense that it is now a past tense discussion even if five years after the real endy times struck:

If we are going to “use 2020-’21 as a convenient place to divide the ‘craft era’ with whatever we’re about to inherit” who is in charge of coming up with a title for the next chapter?

Stan (for the double) also wrote of Kentucky Common, which I semi-secretly consider likely an echo of schenk.

And finally, over at the Beeb, the plight of the most remote pub on the mainland of Britain was discussed:

Locals have launched a bid to bring Britain’s remotest mainland pub into community ownership. The Old Forge in Inverie sits on the Knoydart Peninsula in Lochaber. The only way of reaching the village – and its pub – is by walking 18 miles (29km) or making a seven-mile (11km) sea crossing. The pub’s owner told residents in January of their intention to sell up, and following a consultation locals say they are keen to buy it.

Keeners. There. Soon it will be March. Feel free to dream of planting seeds. Peas and lettuce can take a frost. And while you are, for more good reading, check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey, back now mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesday (Jordan weights apology as opposed to apologia over beer cocktails this week!) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  We have a new entry from the DaftAboutCraft  podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (explaining the reason for his irregular 1970s-esque TV dramedy season finale. Bellissimo!!!) And remember BeerEdge, too.

*I have to admit the current trend in illustration – the slightly out of focus or cartoony drawing – let the story down. When reading about differentiations amongst various  sorts of brown lumps of dough it is good to not be presented with a diagram of brown lumps.

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For The February Blahs 2021

The blahs. I have never liked February all that much but in this year of the plague I’ve actually come to appreciate it. The the lengthening days compare well to what’s been out the window for the previous couple of months. So there. But there is a blah nonetheless. Not much vibrancy in the world of beer writing. That’s what I am talking about. It’s all a bit due to other themes both worthy and banal being layered over, sure, but even with that… there is blah.

Not as blah as that image up there of a pub lovingly taken and posted by ATJ. I love it because it is so horrible. It could be called The Blah Pub unless it was 1994 when it would be Pub Blah. The image of the scary lad drinking painted on the façade in the upper right is particularly horrible. Who thought that would help? Anyway, it reminds us all that ugly is not necessarily all about the ugly. Therefore… I start this week in an effort to disprove my own blahlological observations with a study of “blah /  not blah.”

Not blah? Perhaps this tweet, as it is at least taking a stance:

Beer should be like wine. Only named after the region or the hops used. Styles are just made up.

Except beer isn’t really regional and hops only define certain sorts of beer. So.. a bit blah but assertion saves it somewhat. And “style” sucks, we all know that now.

Elsewhere, Rob MacKay, Creative Director at Glasgow’s Drygate Brewing Co., created and shared what he calls Beer Care Instructions:

“…a handy set of standardised icons, which can be applied to beer in the same way that the global standards for laundry care are…”

I like this a lot and it is definitely not blah as it is both thoughtful and somewhat cheerily useless. Yet serves as an alternative construct to all the failures laying about our ankles. One that I see is missing is “tastes like beer and not a fruit salad that’s been left out in the sunlight.” Still, very not blah.

History. Not blah is the news out of Egypt that a 5,000 year old mass production brewing facility has been uncovered, as the BBC reports:

The brewery consisted of eight large areas, each 20m (65ft) long and each containing about 40 earthenware pots arranged in two rows, according to the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mostafa Waziry.

Seven years ago, I posted about a visit to the Royal Ontario Museum where I saw an original display showing brewing in Ancient Egypt. Perhaps this group of people represented one of these eight areas or even just a portion of it. Nope. Not that. A household brewery in Thebes. Never mind. Update: the site has been known for over a century. Q: if Hornsey knew that Egypt was fuelled by beer consumed throughout society, how is a 22,000 litre facility a surprise? At a max a gallon a day consumption, this facility supplies 6,000 people.

Revisiting that tiny part of my mind we discussed the other week, the bit that recalls that Anchor changed its branding, it’s interesting to see that that the brewery’s union is not happy and made it clear-ish on their Instagram account. And while “…many of us are not thrilled…” isn’t exactly a lyric from a Woody Guthrie song still makes the point. More not blah than blah. But overall, still a bit blah.

Further afield, Kenya is considering banning the quart, the preferred measure of youth and Cape Breton barroom brawls of the mid-1960s:

“We believe this is an outrageous, retrogressive proposal that has no place in our developing economy today and we are opposed to the proposals in the Bill,” Gordon Mutugi, ABAK chairman, said. The association argues the elimination of the option to sell alcohol packed in smaller packages would force those who cannot affordable quality alcoholic beverages sold in larger packaging to seek illicit and unhealthy alternatives. These include the purchase of alcohol in bulk and sharing it into smaller containers or consuming contraband alcohol from neighbouring countries.

Garth fears change. You know, that seems all a bit real. It’s been almost a year since me myself I saw actual real. Hmm… And I am not sure that I want to suggest Jeff shared a blah – but revisiting “craft” has been done by too many:

Craft brewing didn’t start becoming a real player for another decade—thirty years after its birth. And even then, it was making slow inroads into the fuller market. Only by the mid-teens had it achieved real substance, with 12% market share—though more important to an industry, it was earning more than one in five dollars of revenue.

Sure it’s just a label, a brand as much as Anchor’s only was… is… But, see, we are aware of these things but really the order is: (i) micro brewing (1980-2007ish), (ii) craft (2007-2015ish) and (iii) post-craft chaos (2015-now.) It is not analytically satisfying to backdate an era or delay its passing. Sure, I don’t really mind it as a unsubtle umbrella term, I suppose. But “craft” has been dead now coming on six years. Actual punk rock comes and goes in less time. It’s time to figure out what is going on now. What is it?

Relatedly, Toronto’s… err… Canada’s other national newspaper, the National Post also attempted to explain craft beer in the post craft chaos era including a description of the work of Lex Konnelly, a PhD candidate in the University of Toronto’s Department of Linguistics:

Beer has shifted from a working-class beverage to elite commodity, Konnelly explains in their paper recently published in the academic journal Language Communication. By speaking the language of so-called beer snobs, brutoglossia (“craft beer talk”) can perpetuate inequalities. Taste is far from arbitrary. It’s wrapped up in social status, which is in turn influenced by other categories such as gender and racial identity. Language is one of the ways people define the in-group and out-group.

Oh dear. What to make of it all? Comparing today’s clever lowest common denominator alcopops to an “elite commodity”?*  Oh dear, oh dear. Then, similarly but far less so, “Flagship February” is hanging on but has shifted into a more general thing, another blog under a bushel like all those other blogs pushed out on the unsuspecting, feigning under any other name but blog. Yet… and yet… Stan sets aside any resulting potential for blah with his profile of a place called Halfway Crooks he posted on the FF blog:

Before Halfway Crooks Beer even opened their taproom in July 2019, they sold through their first run of hats with the words “LAGER LAGER LAGER LAGER” serving as a billboard. However, it would have been a mistake for beer drinkers walking around Atlanta proudly showing off this new hat to think this would be a lager-dominant brewery.

And, for the double,** Stan also gave us his thoughts on the effect of the US West Coast fires of 2020 on the hop crop:

…this is bad news for farmers affected because it reduces the value of some of their crop. But brewers should be aware that tainted hops could make their way into the supply chain. As one grower told me, “Here’s hoping we don’t see a rush of rauchbier’s coming into the market.” Unlike many people, I like rauchbiers, but I’m not looking forward to being surprised by a juicy IPA that tastes like licking an ash tray. (“Licking an ashtray” being a phrase used to describe wines made with smoke-tainted grapes.)

Blah beer but not a blah story. Not at all. And for maximum not-blah we have a post from Rye’s own pubman in hiding, Stonch sharing his fabulous style:

I drank a can of strong-as-fuck beer a couple of weeks ago, tweeted about it, and promised to review it here. One person has since asked me why I didn’t. In the face of such overwhelming demand, I must deliver. I can’t be bothered to match the pithy and succinct style I’d developed when this semi-dormant website was in its pomp, so you’ll have to plough through some verbose bullshit.

Finally – and as if just to prove they are not merely Egyptologists- the BBC tells us the latest calamitous news of the UK pub trade according to the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA):

The BBPA said trading restrictions and lockdowns knocked sales by 56% – worth £7.8bn – last year. In the first lockdown in the second quarter of the year, beer sales plummeted by 96%, it said. Even during the summer, which saw the Eat Out to Help Out scheme and a temporary VAT cut on food and soft drinks, pub beer sales fell 27%.

Wow. Not blah. Yikes. Except things were locked. So it might be more odd that it was not 100%.  Who was that 4%. We all now pray to Dr. Fauci and the gods of global distribution systems. Eleven months and in we know its closer to the end than the beginning. We know.

Do it! And while you are, for more good reading, check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey, back now mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesday (Jordan flips out over beer cocktails this week!) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  We have a new entry from the DaftAboutCraft  podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (featuring another one of his irregular 1970s-esque TV dramedy season finale. Finaleissimmo!!!) And remember BeerEdge, too.

*The elite are actually drinking pre-mixed Clamato out of cans.
**Say “pour le double!!” like you are Charles de Gaulle speaking to Quebec in the 1960s!

 

Blink And You May Miss The Mid-February Edition Of These Beery News Notes

I was thinking this week about an undergrad pal who used to say that February went by like a bat out of hell. Our small college of those days – just 400 students, half that in residence – has been making news for sad reasons this week so I have been thinking about those days a bit. But it is mid-February now and that means weeks from March and just as justice will have its day so shall the first coming warmth of spring. I am a bit all a giggle about it this year, frankly. I waaaay over invested in reusable row covers. Going to dig up have the lawn. Yup.

Sweetest bit of writing of the week has to go to Matt as he placed himself in the lineup at Pellicle and wrote about Dann Paquette and Martha Simpson-Holley of The Brewery of St. Mars. Many a love letter I sent to those two when they were on this side of the Atlantic brewing at Pretty Things. I send Matt my 2010 review of Jack D’or in response to Matt’s call for research materials. It provided him with background but I didn’t get quoted in the foreground. Oh… well… Anyway, the story is well worth your time:

Dann’s drawing of Jack D’Or, which depicts the “golden barleycorn”—as Martha’s poem describes him—bathing in a mash tun, adorns the label of a deliciously crisp, bold, yet balanced saison-style beer of the same name. It would eventually obtain something of a cult status among beer-loving Bostonites, New Englanders and others lucky enough to find it on tap, or get their hands on a bottle.

Oh. There I am. One of the lucky others. Thought for the day. A lovely summation of that which is the influencer:

She reminded me most of MPs I’d interviewed — the imperviousness to humiliation, the tolerance of rejection that let them go up to the public again and again.

Not unrelated. Bad day in your early Renaissance? Someone was having one when this image was painted. H/T.  Speaking of bad days, Ron has been posting interesting thoughts about why British beer became more boring in the 1980s and has been dipping into his own stream of consciousness as he does. This is his best sort of writing:

I’m just back from a walk. Unless it’s pissing down, I always go for a walk around noon. A good time to think, while I’m strolling around my little patch of Amsterdam. Not just think, but start writing in my head. Phrases or even whole sentences. I can shuffle the words around before committing them to metaphorical paper. (That’s an example of a sentence I mentally wrote.) But let’s not stray from the point. I was pondering why and when UK beers became blander. A few things became clear. Oh, what I’m referring to is mostly cask-conditioned Bitter and occasionally cask Mild. 

Writing. The waste of a good walk. Why is it so?  And while we are at it, consider the lot of the freelancer, too.

Speaking of whom, Kate Bernot has popped up with an excellent article on the issue facing breweries in these times of supply chain problems – bottles or cans or back to bottles. It’s in a restricted medium uncomfortably self-identifying as Beer & (Craft) Brewing so I am constrained from telling you more. I think I had a free subscription offered last time I complained so it’s really all my fault. Who suffers? You do. Sad.

A book on Celis. Might have to get that.

Elsewhere in time, Casket Beer has provided us with some extra thoughts in great detail on the creation of another container, the Nonik glass and its genesis in the US soda fountain trade of a century ago:

Hugo Pick, of Albert Pick & Company, created the nonik, receiving its first patent in 1913 (some advertisements around the time also indicate a 1912 patent). Pick & Co. was a well-established service industry company based out of Chicago. They also owned and operated a chain of hotels. The Nonik Glassware Corporation was a licensee, and, according to the Crockery and Glass Journal, sole distributor of nonik glasses to the “jobbing trade”. They advertised widely, emphasizing a glass design that was 38-percent stronger than other glasses, and eliminated breakage and nicking by 40-percent, or 50-percent, depending on which ad you read.

Sticking with mid-20th century beer history, Gary G has examined the iconic Genesee Cream Ale of western New York:

To my mind Cream Ale has always been a quasi-American lager. Genesee Beer, according to the 1977 account, used as adjunct, “powder-fine and oil-free corn grits”, the proportion not specified. Genesee Beer only is mentioned in that section, not the Cream Ale, but I’d think the Cream Ale used the same adjunct. The rationale advanced for the corn is “starch to increase its ratio over proteins”, and this made the beer “lighter in colour, smoother in taste, and more pleasing to the palate”.

I mention this in particular due to the cream ale / cream beer connections that I wrote about a few years back. There is a thread here… but what?

Jordan has also posted in some detail, in his case the state of the Ontario beer market mid- to late-pandemic. There is a bit of futurism in there which will have to play out to see if it is correct. I am more of a “what is now is not the future” person myself but I am totally on board with the short term nature of the bottle shop hereabouts:

What we’re dealing with here is a loophole that looks to be open on a permanent basis, and as happens with loopholes, people are pushing the concept as far as it can go as quickly as they can push it. I’ll tell you the same thing I tell the people who get in touch: It would be a mistake to assume that these changes as they stand are permanent. They’re making it up as they go and it will likely continue towards liberalization. Opening a bottle shop at this point might be fun, but I’m not sure it’s going to work out long term.  

Once the big money that has sat gathering at the sidelines moves back in, what is a state of flux will have settled and we will see where the real coins land. I am rooting for beer-mobiles – like bookmobiles meeting an ice cream van!

And Ren Navarro received an interesting honour of a bio in the Toronto Star this week. Nicely done.

Pete Brown reports that total UK beer sales are down +14% 2019 to 2020. One the one hand, bad. On the other, no too bad for the first pandemic in a century to his the nation. One solution for that might have been on the UK Tory government’s mind when they organized Brexit so so carefully – if one Brit retailer is correct:

Well looks like our importing of Belgian Beer is over. Software needed to “talk” to HMRC is not cost effective. Nearly £550 a year – Unless anyone knows of a different route #Brexit

Finally, in this week’s police blotter we highlight… or rather get into a bit of detail about a new matter which is moving towards the courts with a very local flavour. Iconic Canadian band The Tragically Hip have brought a lawsuit against one Toronto-based branch of the InBev / AmBev / ThingieBev conglomerate called Mill Street Brewing for poaching their intellectual property, as the CBC reports:

The Tragically Hip are suing a Toronto brewery for alleged trademark infringement in the promotion of its 100th Meridian lager. The legendary Canadian band has filed a suit in Federal Court against Mill Street Brewery, a subsidiary of Labatt, which is owned by Belgian multinational brewer AB InBev. The Tragically Hip allege in legal documents that Mill Street has tried to “pass off on the fame, goodwill and reputation” of the band. “Many of you are probably under the impression that we are associated with Mill Street’s 100th Meridian beer — we are not,” the band said in a Facebook post on Tuesday. At The Hundredth Meridian was a hit single on the Hip’s 1992 album Fully Completely. Its title refers to the line of longitude that marks the beginnings of the Great Plains.

The reaction has been swift and folk are eager to pounce. [Update: here is Josh Hayter of Spearhead on FB Thursday morning:

…they are using someone else’s intellectual property to sell their beer. They have been implying for years that the band supports their beer. If you think for one second if the positions were reversed, (someone using any AB product to promote anything they were doing) AB would not have an ARMY of lawyers up their backside in a second you are sadly mistaken…]

I have to admit a slight conflict as the band and its late singer originated here in my hometown and, while I never met one of the members, my late folks knew Gord Downie’s folks. Such is the town. That being said, I was personally and professionally quite surprised and even astonished that there had not been a licensing arrangement when the beer was created. Exactly no one in Canada knows that the “100th Meridian” is anything but a tune by the Hip. Crafty people even make crafts about the connection here in town. A huge hit. As the Winnipeg Free Press (the paper of record in that fair city) noted in 2011: “…the band slammed into the unforgettable riff to the 100th Meridian..”

“Unforgettable…” In his podcast, Ben mentions this week that there were failed negotiations before the lawsuit but that now Mill Street is in for a “world of hurt.”  And he is right. This is dumb and was well known. And the marketplace confusion is clear. In 2014, the Calgary Herald (the paper of record in that fair city) wrote of the release of the then new beer and always unexciting beer:

To steal a line from Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip, 100th Meridian Organic Amber Lager from Mill St. Brewery is where the great plain begins. (That’s a bit harsh, but I couldn’t resist the joke.) Seriously, though: the concept here is laudable — make a beer with barley from Canada’s breadbasket, the Prairies — but it falls short in the execution…

In 2015, The Tomato food and drink blog stated in a column written by Peter Bailey:

…Call it a classic Canadian compromise, Alberta barley married with Ontario water, with a name that calls to mind a great Tragically Hip song (“At the hundredth meridian / Where the Great Plains begin.”)…

In 2016, Simcoe.com recommended including the beer in any Hip themed party:

“…offer up Mill Street Brewery’s 100th Meridian Amber Lager and some of the band’s own Fully Completely and Ahead By a Century wine from Stoney Ridge Estate…”

And in 2017, one beer blogger wrote: “I have no idea if the beer is paying honour to the band or not, but here in Canada it’s great marketing.”   Yesterday, Jordan shared his recollection from the beer release party in 2014 that the brewmaster at the time claimed he had not heard of the song. Stunning – if only to indicate that they had their head in the sand and did not one bit of intellectual property investigation before the beer got named.  Lesson: pay attention to reality, brewery owners. Make sure you are aware of what is going on in culture and the law.

That’s it. Watch your nose. Don’t step out of line. Pay your bills. And for more good reading check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey, back now mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  We have a new entry from the DaftAboutCraft podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword.  And remember BeerEdge, too.