The Thursday Beery News For When The Winds Of November Come Early

Fine. Here we are. It’s now dark as midnight on the bus ride home from work. The garden is all dead. Dead. Dark. Wind. Cold. And these sensations are also the first hints of the happy holiday season. Depending on your cultural context, it may be just three, four, five or six weeks from the day when everyone packs it in and hits both the bottle and the buffet hard. Not everyone is waiting. My pal Ben, who is semi-Nepalese, is traveling there and found a good beer that was also basically semi-Nepalese. As illustrated. No reports yet on if it was any good.

Also internationalistically, now that craft beer has co-opted kveik, is Lar on the hunt for another indigenous set of yeast strains from Russia?

Kveik signals very clearly when it’s done. It’s almost like the little critters are knocking on the glass, saying “we’re done now.” Starter turns all grainy, and once you stop the stirrer, they settle out in 3-4 minutes. Not so with this Russian yeast. It’s just as milky still.

Speaking of new discoveries, another new beer publication was launched this week, Beer Edge featuring the northeast US’s Andy Crouch and John Holl. The subscription rate is a bit out of my snack bracket but we are promised tidbits au gratis from time to time, focused perhaps more on the trade side of things than whatever community means or doesn’t mean:

From long-form writing that explores the culture, business, and process of brewing, to shorter essays, think pieces, and timely editorials, Beer Edge hosts sharp writing that provides context to an industry that often just receives cursory coverage. For consumers, bartenders, brewers, industry executives, distributors, farmers, bar owners, tourism boards, analysts, and anyone else eager for more news about the craft beer industry… 

Speaking of the trade everywhere, Crystal Luxmore tweeted about an organization and an issue that needs more attention:

When you love tasting, selling and making alcohol it feels like drinking is a joyful part of the job — but it also opens you up to massive health risks and addiction issues…

The organization is Not 9 to 5 and the issue is over-drinking on the job when your just is in the drinks trade. More here.  Not at all unrelated, a British self-described archaeologist, technologist, infovore, mediocre chef under the nom de plume “Archaic Inquiries” published a rather shocking piece on the role of alcohol in archaeology:

I’ve not worked outside of archaeology much, so perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that I didn’t think that was a particularly inappropriate thing to say to a supervisor you’d just met (though it didn’t strike me as very smart). But as I thought about it, I started to recall all the antics of archaeologists under the influence, both adorable (getting in trouble for using government jello for wrestling at the McMurdo Antarctic research station) and not so adorable (I once saw a crew chief fall out of the company truck because she couldn’t stand… at the end of the work day).

I also learned that we “shouldn’t giggle when someone pukes into their shovel test pit“! Wow. I have not had a drink since Saturday. Seriously.

Bread.

I have a confession. And not that I have puked in a test shovel pit. No, I am uncomfortably interested in one aspect of the TV show from 40 years ago, Three’s Company. Only one aspect, I said. The Regal Beagle. Why? Well, the past is a foreign land worth studying. And when writing my bits of the history of Ontario, I realized that SCTV’s McKenzie Brothers and their movie Strange Brew was a last vision of the world of Canadian beer before micro hit us all over the head. So, too, in a way was Three’s Company‘s  Regal Beagle – an American vision of a 1970s faux British pub.  I want to put together enough images to figure out the pub set to see what what props were considered necessary 45 years ago. Here’s a blurry analogue vid view of the bar unfortunately filled with bad acting. There seem to be three beer engines back there but were they used? Here is a gif posted this week of Ralph Furley walking into the place, showing the brasses by the door. Here is another tweet with an image of the one bleak plot of the entire show – but with the bonus of an out of place “Ye Olde English” nutcracker sitting at the end of the bar, the couple in the background (above) expressing it for all of us.

Getting back to real life nostalgia, Alistair of Fuggles fame was able to revisit the Prague of his twenties and visit his old favour boozer, U Slovanské lipy:

…no airs and graces, no pointless fripperies, and the majority of patrons were locals rather than tourists, perfect. The big thing that had changed though was the prices. Where I had been used to paying only 20kč for a half litre of Kout’s magisterial 10° pale lager, the nearest equivalent available, Albrecht 10° from Zámecký pivovar Frýdlant, was about double that. Yeah, it was odd having sticker shock in a Czech pub, but a quick conversion in my brain telling me the beer was $2 a pop for superb lager soon put that into context.

In upstate New York, a tiny town voted to go “wet” this week:

In a 3-to-1 vote, the referendum, aimed at making the town “wet” again, passed and a town that has been dry since Prohibition will now be wet. “I’m all for it, absolutely,” said Eleanor deVries on Tuesday afternoon after voting, adding that the town needs it economically.

I trust Eleanor has settled down since Tuesday’s results. Economically, by the way, is the new medicinally.

Sadly but yet again, your weekly reminder that good beer people are not all good people – this time, the distasteful and fairly racist Halloween outfit edition:

Breweries can talk about diversity all they want but when this idiocy still happens it shows how far craft beer has to go to create a safe and welcoming space for POC. You need to not just talk about diversity but “walk the walk”.

I might have added “…as well as a welcoming space for non-fascists…” but that’s just me. Not quite as horrible, but still thoughtless…

You know what’s shitty? A prime time TV show on one of the major channels asking for free beer for their changing rooms & wrap party in exchange for ‘exposure’. If you are paying hundreds of thousands of pounds for your ‘talent’ you can afford a few hundred on some fucking beers…

Conversely and to end on a happy note, Jeff gave us a four photo explanation of why in Sicily he has proclaimed:

This place immediately enters my top ten of best drinking establishments I’ve been to in my life…

Exhibit A. Exhibit B. Exhibit C. Exhibit D. Case closed.

There you go. A bit of a global tour. In space and time. The good. The bad. The ugly. For further beery links, check out the Boak and Bailey news update on Saturday and then bend an ear towards the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays. And look to see if there was a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well.

A Few Exciting New References To Albany Ale… Which I Looked Up Now That Baseball Season Is Over

One of the things about the world we live in is that Google Books is being updated constantly. When I co-authored the histories of brewing in Ontario and the Upper Hudson Valley with Jordan and Craig, now over five years ago, we were very aware of the horrors earlier pop historians faced putting together an idea of regional brewing’s past. Google Books has been a particular blessing to us all. So, every once in a while you have to go back, as I did in August with Lambeth Ale, to see what has been added since you last wrote about a topic. Today, then, let’s look at the references to Albany Ale which have popped up since I last had a proper scan, including this image up to the right from the excellent Soda & Beer Bottles of North America website’s 2018 notes.*

By way of summary introduction to Albany Ale and in addition to my own tagged posts, I offer Craig’s observation posted last February on our Albany Ale Project‘s Facebook page on the scope of the drink’s travels:**

Regardless of the numbers of papers available on the site, it’s clear that Albany Ale was fairly common in the south, and specifically during the antebellum period. Of the roughly 3,500 hits from 1800 to 1900 (with New York papers eliminated) for “Albany Ale”, “Albany Cream Ale”, “Albany Double Ale” and “Albany XX Ale”, seven out of the top 10 returns were from southern states. Louisiana showed the most hits in the database (94) as well as the earliest (of the southern states) mention, in the Louisiana Gazette in 1819. Pennsylvania, is the first northern state on the list and it ranked fourth behind Mississippi and North Carolina. Connecticut missed the top 10 by one, but the Hartford Courant’s April 30, 1806 edition boasts the earliest mention of Albany Ale outside of New York.

Brewing in Albany (as the attentive amongst you who have a well-thumbed copy of Brewery History (2014) 157 by the bedside will know) goes much further back in time than 1806.  Harold A. Larrabee in his April 1934 personal and municipal biographical article “Herman Melville’s Early Years in Albany” in New York History Vol. 15, No. 2*** spends a generous amount of time on the maternal side of Melville’s ancestry going back well into the 1600s – aka the brewing Gansevoorts. Larrabee confirms that the site of Stanwix Hotel (aka Stanwix Hall) was the site of the family’s first brewery in Albany at Maiden Lane and Broadway run by Melville’s namesake, Harmen Harmensen Van Gansevoort. It also includes this recollection from the fiftieth anniversary of the building of the Stanwix Hotel:

Many a barrel of good beer, made of wheat, [says a newspaper account of 1883] has been brewed upon that spot. It was a pleasantry with the old people of those times, to say that when a brewer wanted to give a special flavor to a choice brewing, he would wash his old leather breeches in it; showing that slanders against Albany brewers and Albany Ale are not a new thing but of considerable antiquity. So as late as 1833, when the dome of Stanwix Hall was raised, the Dutchmen of that day called it Old Harme Gansevoort’s brew kettle turned upside down.

Bonus confirmation of Albany’s wheat malt based reality!

From 1840, we find in the likely temperance leaning publication The Ladies’ Companion and Literary Expositor this vision of the Albany ale drinking gent of the times:

An irreligious man—one who professes to be so, and glories in his own shame—who considers it an honorable distinction to be ranked among unbelievers, and who mouths blasphemy among his acquaintances as a sort of accomplishment to be proud of, is unquestionably disgusting enough; he takes decided precedence of the porter-house drunkard who blurts blasphemy over his mug of Albany ale without knowing what he says, and is merely vulgar and profane amidst an association whose whole object is a forgetfulness at once of self-respect as well as of respect for every thing else. 

Before you go all finger pointy at our prohibitionist forefathers and foremothers, I would note that this description roughly lines up with the 1832 diary entry of a traveler passing through Albany who, diving into a cellar, found a 3:00 am party described as “a good sample of low life in Albany” where they shared a feed of biscuits washed down by what was likely Albany Ale: “…there was no brutal drunkenness nor insolence of any kind, although we were certainly accosted with sufficient freedom.”

In the 1841 publication A Brief History of the Origin, Progress, and Effects of the Present Astonishing Temperance Movement, and of the Life and Reformation of John H.W. Hawkins, the Distinguished Leader. Embellished with a Correct Likeness of Said Hawkins, we read this about the habits of pre-reformed Mr Hawkins when he was just twenty-one:

When once he got taste of liquor, after long abstinence, all power of resistance forsook him, and, as is the case with other inebriates, he gave himself up without restraint, till his health and strength for the time being became exhausted with intoxication. Albany ale, or “cat soup,” as it was termed, was a favorite beverage, to which he was particularly partial. He would sometimes begin with this, when at a public house; call for a pint tumbler, and, while reading a newspaper, drink a little at a time, till it was drained; then, feeling his appetite sharpened for more, would call for a second tumbler, and, without waiting, toss it all down at one drink. By this time, his rage for more became so violent and irresistible, that he has sometimes drunk many quarts in a few hours. 

We are told that prohibitionist “John H. W. Hawkins was born of respectable parents in Baltimore, September 28, 1797” and was alive at the time of the book’s publications which means his recollection of the slang for Albany Ale is reasonably reliable and dates to about 1818. Which is fabulous. Cat Soup. Love it.

Also from 1841, in the Western Temperance Journal, we find an article on all the meanings of the very newly coined slang “O.K.” which at the very last of a long list states: “O. K. Oil of Karrion—or Albany Ale.” Excellent! The greasy residue of the rotting dead. Which is a pretty cool actually contemporary goth or steam punk attribution when you think about it. Which also means Oil of Karrion now stands as a neato second name, along with Cat Soup, for a modern craft brewery’s recreation of an actual 1841 Albany Ale.

It’s important to note that there was good reason that the prohibitionists took aim at Albany Ale. By mid-century, it was a huge industry as this reference from an 1849 edition of The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review illustrates:

The business of malting and brewing is carried on to a great extent in Albany, and employs a large amount of capital. Six breweries and malt-houses of the largest dimensions were erected in this city the past year, and the whole number of such establishments is about twenty. The demand for malt liquors is daily increasing in the United States, and Albany ale and beer are found not only in every city in the Union, but likewise in the West India islands, in South America, and in California.

In 1871, it could still be stated that “Albany ale and Albany lumber are known everywhere.” But it did not last. Times change and change can come quickly. From 1884, we see something of the beginning of the end in this brief but telling observation on time’s cruel march from The Albany Hand-book: A Strangers’ Guide and Residents’ Manual:

…Albany ale, at one time was on tap in all the large cities of the country, but of late has been displaced, to some extent, by lager beer which is also brewed here in large quantities…

Ah, Albany Ale. I am glad I played a part bringing it and the pre-lager history of American brewing back into the spotlight. One day far into the future if someone is looking up me on Google Books, it will likely be one of the few things I will be known for. And rediscovering that “Cat Soup” was once slang for the stuff. That’s just excellent.

*Of course, Craig may have seen all these but that is the reality of having keeners for co-authors. PS: I want that bottle. PPS: Craig likely has one and is keeping it from me. 
**Probably time we updated the book what with all this new information.
***Free at the wonderful JSTOR archive with a simple sign up as a researcher.

The Halloween Edition Of Thursday Beer News. Boo.

I’d be a bit nervous at the Sing Sing Kill Brewery

Ah, Halloween. A right nor-easter is promised meaning 100 mph winds, lashing rain – and me lonely and all dressed up at the front door looking at a bowl with a minimum of 15,000 calories per handful. We get maybe 12 kids max in a good year. Maybe. I have a vegetable garden on my front lawn. I am marked as a neighbourhood weirdo. But I get ahead of myself. Halloween is tonight. The Future. What’s gone on this past week?

Last Friday just as the weekly news cycle began, Jeff posted about the problem with novelty as it turns into longevity:

Every brewery that was once an emblem of a shining new future—Widmer, Hair of the Dog, Ninkasi, Boneyard (to cite local examples)—has seen trends move on without them. Great Notion and Ruse are the current trendsetters, but time continues to march. We have absolutely no experience of what happens when four thousand breweries immediately become “old school” before our eyes.

Coming up on three years ago now, I wondered about novelty and whether it was possible that today’s twenty somethings could “actually get a bit verklempt over memories of weird fruit flavoured gose thirty years from now.” Interesting that weird fruit flavoured gose is sorta dead to us all now. It’s so 2017. Novelty’s pace has increased. The Pub Curmudgeon posted about another aspect of the same phenomenon, the pervasive presence of recently but no longer quite cool craft:

 It’s not the absolute bleeding edge of craft, but even so it’s a pretty respectable selection, including the likes of Vocation, Magic Rock, Thornbridge, Five Points, Crate, Toast and Camden. It’s interesting that pretty much all of these beers now seem to have moved from bottles to cans. The German discounters, Aldi and Lidl, have introduced their own-brand “craft-a-likes” at even lower prices. This has attracted a certain amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the craft influencers, complaining that such low prices will devalue the concept and won’t give brewers a decent return.

Good value should always be something we are grateful for. In any other marketplace, this is called The Victory Of The Consumer! What? You disagree? Did I miss something?

Note: he didn’t drop the beer.

Ron unpacked an advert he found for the sale of Barclay’s Russian Stout from that part of the foreign land known as the past, aka 1922:

…another Barclay’s Russian Stout advert. With some more interesting claims. The oddest being that Bismarck liked Russian Stout. Especially as the advert is from just after WW I, when there was still considerable anti- German feeling.

These things are funny. In 1816, a year after the end of a bitter border war with the US of A, Albany Ale was being sold in my fair military town.

Business Insider posted an interesting short video bio of Celeste Beatty, the first African American woman to own a brewery in the US, the Harlem Brewing Company in New York City. Here is a Forbes story on her from a few years ago with more background.  Speaking of vids, here is a scene from a Scottish pub the very noo.

The shadowy Portman Group is at it again but this time I fully agree if only because the Bearded Brewery defended its cider named Suicyder because “the noose references reflected the owner’s previous career at the Forestry commission where a noose was used to dismantle unsafe trees“! If one is going to attorn to the jurisdiction of a trade tribunal please do not be silly. I am an owner of The Ashley Book of Knots and I know no one in their right mind would every use a noose to take apart a tree given a noose is used to tighten on to a short stubby think like a head. To be clear, I give you a selection of arborists knots. Knots don’t lie.

Health news update. Or really not an update as this is old news. Again, there is no j-curve. Don’t believe otherwise – alcohol is just about degrees of badness:

…for a long time, the consensus was that abstaining from alcohol is unhealthier than consuming moderate amounts of alcohol (equivalent to one or two drinks a day). But that “J”-shaped relationship between alcohol consumption, and death and disease, has come under criticism. It’s now widely understood that a lot of this data could be flawed: people abstaining from alcohol may be doing so because they’re unwell, rather than becoming unwell because they’re abstaining.

Here in Ontario, we have no need to worry about the j-curve or not as, woohoo, the new government is passing new relaxed liquor laws left right and center:

The Ford government is pledging more changes to alcohol access in Ontario — announcing plans on Monday to allow international airports to serve booze 24-hours a day, and to remove limits on how much beer, wine and spirits can be brought across provincial or territorial borders for personal use. Those two promises are among a sweeping list of changes, packaged as the ‘Better for People, Smarter for Business Act’… The Bill also promises to ease restrictions on bringing dogs onto restaurant patios, and inside certain breweries in the province.

Those booze runs I made into nearby Quebec all those years ago? Smuggling. NO MORE!!! What a great law. Huh? Holy crap! “The Bees Act is repealed“!!!

I enjoyed the personal essay, photo set and brewery founder interview by Lily Waite run in Pellicle this week on the Table Beer produced by London brewery, The Kernel:

“The other thing—and I think it helps Table Beer more so than the others—is the fact that we still put all of our beers through a second fermentation,” Evin tells me over a shared bottle. “The extra little bit of yeast character and fermentation by-products that you get—hop biotransformations, too—those really hard-to-define things, they’re key to Table Beer.” Though I’ve drunk many brown-papered beers in search of that fugitive quality, I’m reluctant to believe it’s simply down to a second fermentation. I’m much more inclined to believe that it is, in fact, a little bit of magic.

It’s good not always to dissect something but convey the pleasure of it all. I think the author has done that. These pieces, like Matt C’s before, are love letters. But there are technical tidbits, too: (i) “…as with all of their beers, the strength varies from batch to differently-hopped batch…“; (ii) “…[i]t’s now brewed weekly, every Friday…“; (iii) “…a fullness of body, achieved through high mash temperatures and oats in the grist…” All of which add up to a story that is telling you that the beer is borne more by the technique than the ingredients. Very interesting.

The proud Canadian company formerly known as Molson is still theoretically out there, now going through another hybridization and perhaps some degree of bionic implantation:

Most support functions, including finance, information technology, procurement, supply chain, legal and human resources, will be consolidated in Milwaukee. The company will continue to maintain global business services offices there and in Bucharest, Romania. The Molson Coors International team, meanwhile, will be reconstituted, with its Latin American team becoming part of a new North American Emerging Growth team headed by Pete Marino. Its Asia, Pacific and Africa team will fold under the Europe business unit, which will be led by Simon Cox.

Interesting to note that they are branching out into other areas including a “forthcoming line of cannabis-infused nonalcoholic beverages in Canada.” Sounds hellish to me but the baby boomers love this sort of stuff apparently.

That is it for now. Get going on the tricking and the treating. For further beery links, check out the Boak and Bailey news update on Saturday and then bend an ear towards the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays. The last one featured a great interview with Ren Navarro, owner of the consulting and education firm Beer. Diversity.  And look for mid-week notes from The Fizz as well.

 

The Thursday Beer News Update For A Week When My Mind Was Elsewhere

On Tuesday, I had a great joke all prepared for my proctologist, analogizing with him or her over the election results. But… well, at least in the end, we seem to have had a good result. In both senses. Not much time for me to focus on the beer industry, however, which makes this week’s beer update as much news to me as to you. Let’s see what’s been going on.

First, speaking of biological science, Stan sent out his regular hops newsletter this week and, as exemplified by the photo up at the top, decided to provide some photos from the Hop Research Center in Hüll, Germany that Evan recently wrote about, as mentioned in last week’s news update. Up there, that’s a picture of some of the Center’s germ plasm collection of long-held varieties. Want more? You will have to pay Stan for back issues of his newsletter now if you want to see the images but haven’t subscribed already.*

The biggest story has to be the member of management at Founders giving testimony in a disposition that he did not know if someone who was… well, let’s see see how the story was covered:

A transcript of the exchange between Founders’ Detroit general manager Dominic Ryan and Evans’ attorney, Jack Schulz, shows Schulz shifting from shocked to incredulous and perhaps a bit angry as Ryan claims he had no idea Evans is Black. Instead of just answering the question and moving on, Ryan digs in deeper and deeper, repeatedly asking for clarification when Schulz asks questions like “Are you aware Tracy is Black?” At one point, Ryan even claims that he doesn’t know if former President Barack Obama, Kwame Kilpatrick, or Michael Jordan are African-American, because he has “never met them.”

The Beer Law Center tweeted: “This is stupid. The “if I didn’t say it, you can’t prove it” strategy – quite simply – sucks. The law, justice, trials, and courts, just don’t work that way. Shame on Founders.” As a practicing lawyer a quarter century into his career, I can’t disagree. The person diving the testimony did themselves no favours. Plenty of rightly offended folk now rejecting the brewery like Beery Ed: “if you still drink founders , you suck.” Which is true.

Boak and Bailey proposed a scoring system this week to determine if a British pub is in fact a pub.

Monty Python’s Terry Jones was on the BBC in 1984 and discussed both dental hygiene in medieval Britain and his brewing. Wogan preferred keg to cask. Jones, having a multi-faceted shirt malfunction announced: “real beer can only be made on a small scale.” Heed ye all!

Lisa Grimm has had a timely article published in Serious Eats about the haunted history of the Lemp family of brewers out of St. Louis:

Today’s beer history installment is something of a micro-level view of my previous column on German-American brewers—but this one has a Halloween twist. The story of the rise and fall of the Lemps, once one of America’s most powerful brewing families, reads like something out of gothic fiction; and, as would be entirely appropriate for that genre, some say that they’ve never left. The story begins familiarly enough…

A great technical article on barley came my way entitled “Characterising resilience and resource-use efficiency traits from Scots Bere and additional landraces for development of stress tolerant barley” I believe from @merryndineley. Now I have to go and look again at the standard for “landrace” when it comes to barley as I’ve seen husbandry in the 1600s but when we are talking bere we are talking about something much older than that as the abstract suggests:

Potential sources of viable resilience and resource-use efficiency traits are landraces local to areas of marginal land, such as the Scots Bere from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Bere barley is a deeply historically rooted landrace of barley that has been grown on predominately marginal land for the last half millennia. The landrace yields well in these conditions. The project aim was to assess and genetically characterise traits associated with enhanced resistance/tolerance, and to identify contributing genomic regions.

Speaking of great technical articles, I was blessed with a copy of an article on the history of Fuggles hops by the perennially referenced Martyn which, this time, appeared in Technical Quarterly published by Master Brewers Association:

The Fuggle hop is one of the most important varieties on the planet, not only in its own right as a contributor to the flavor of classic English beers for more than a century but also for the genes it has given to almost three dozen other hops… It is surprising, therefore, that until this year there was considerable mystery over the parentage of the Fuggle—it seemed to be unrelated to any other English hop type, with a hop oil profile much closer to the German landrace variety Tettnanger—and a fair amount of doubt and confusion over exactly who developed the hop and when it was first commercially available. Now, however, research in England and the Czech Republic has convincingly answered all the questions…

Nice article in Pellicle on the realities of the beer scene in Iceland:

We had moved up to the bar at Kaldi, and the low-hanging bulbs made the copper bar top and our bartender’s shaved head shine in the dim light. I had just ordered the Borg Garún Icelandic Stout Nr. 19, an 11.5% behemoth. If you haven’t heard, beer and food are pretty expensive Iceland. Pints of basic craft styles were $12-$15 (£9-£12) everywhere, and the higher in alcohol pours were $20-$30 (£15-£23).

Even at those prices, beats the hell out of an vaguely described essay on (what Canadians properly spell as) bologna.  Sums something up.

Katie tweeting on junkets triggered that a discussion wasn’t the usual monocrop of defensiveness.

There was a discussion on Facebook on the early days of the British Guild of Beer Writers awards dinners with some entertaining recollections. Martyn** recalled a night 22 years ago:

The earliest awards dinner menu I have is from 1997 – ham cured in Newcastle Brown Ale (!), accompanied by figs steeped in Old Peculier, breast of guinea fowl braised in Fraoch heather ale, pears in porter and cheese served with McEwans Champion Beer. Dinner sponsored by Tesco …

Ah, the romance… Related perhaps is this thread about traditional brewing in today’s alcopop world.

That’s it? Yup. For further links, check out the Boak and Bailey news update on Saturday and then bend an ear towards the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays. And look for mid-week notes from The Fizz as well.

*I don’t make the rules. Stan does.
**Again with the Martyn!!!

Your Last Thursday Beery News Update Before the Impending Canadian Hung Parliament

This is great. We have an absolutely gridlocked national political scene according to the polls and that, for a Canadian, is a wonderful thing. We love minority in our national federation of a parliamentary monarchy system. Best is there is a good chance that the highest vote won’t equal the most seats, given 105% of Albertans vote Tory. Probably the guy tapping the keg last week in Kitchener (at the world’s second largest Oktoberfest) gets the nod as PM.* The Leader of HM’s Loyal Opposition just looks too much like a 12 year old in his bigger cousin’s suit to pull it off. Which is fine. Which makes minorities great. Things get done. Deals get made. Progress happens.  I know in the US folks are all like “wuzza third Party?” and in the UK folk are all like “making deals based on compromise?” but here in the Great White North we know what works. And that is working.

First, an acknowledgment and a bit of a bummer. I read this note this week at Stan’s place:

For 6 years I assembled links to good reading about beer and other things fermented, posting them here on Mondays, often with a bit of commentary. That ended in with the arrival of October in 2019. Of course, the archives (in monday links during 2018 and 2019, musing before) remain, and at the bottom of every post there is a list of sites that have new links every week. You may also look at my Twitter feed on the right to see what I’ve been reading.

It would be telling half a story if I were to tell you that Stan is my favorite beer writer, the only person I will call a “beer expert” given the depth and breadth of his comprehensive knowledge. He has always had the time for my dumb questions and has even taken the time to tell me to go to straight to hell… now… exactly when I needed it. I will be sad to not read his thoughts at the beginning of every work week but I have noticed an uptick in his own blog writing activity otherwise so maybe he will focus on more posts. A welcome thought. As is the news that there will be a Lew v.2.

If there was a next gen candidate to follow in Stan’s footsteps, Evan Rail might be it. Late last week, just after the round up hit the presses, he posted an article at GBH.  (And without the obligatory 27 “GBH” references embedded in the text, too! He must know how to negotiate a contact.) The article is about hops and, more specifically, a trip he took to the Hop Research Center in Hüll, Germany to learn more about their breeding program:

Breeding itself is a delicate process. Commercial hop plants are generally all female, with female flowers. To create new crosses, male hop plants—which usually but don’t always have male flowers—are also bred. But, in the middle of a commercially important hop region like the Hallertau, how do you raise male hop plants, when just a pinch of their pollen can create unwanted hybrids on the surrounding farms, potentially ruining the crop?

Me? I probably would prefer the unofficial version of the history of CAMRA, which is what the “biography of the organization” is actually called.**

We would like this perspective to come from someone who is not perceived as having a close association with CAMRA.  The brief is for a c.50,000 word authorised biography of CAMRA, to be researched and written in 2020, with the text due at the end of the year, ready for publication in March 2021 in time for the Campaign’s birthday celebrations. Exact outline, terms and fees to be negotiated.

Nothing like a book where the subject matter gets to negotiate the outline.  Also from the UK and in line with such thoughts on the improbabilities of the world we live in, a stark truth from an English brewer on the perfect pint pour:

A proper family/regional head brewer would know that the perfect amount of foam is that which allows the publican to sell 105% of the beer from each cask.

Next, Martyn has continued in his Martyn-like habit of posting long excellent blog posts with another long excellent blog post on corporate misinformation about a certain Sri Lankan brewery’s history:***

Mind, even at five errors in four sentences, that’s not the worst pile of nonsense on the internet about what is now the Lion Brewery, famous today for an award-winning strong stout that is one of the last links with British colonial brewing in Southern Asia. The Lion Brewery’s own website is full of rubbish (and bizarre random capitalisation) as well…

Odd news out of Oregon where one brewery has been vandalized twice in recent weeks… by the same person:

Police contacted Albin in the area and arrested her for first-degree criminal mischief. However, Albin was released from the jail just three days later. She returned to the brewery around 2:30 a.m. Tuesday. That’s when she allegedly threw rocks and liquor bottles into the windows and doors of the restaurant, and made Molotov cocktails that were found thrown around the inside of the brewery. The entire incident was captured on surveillance video…

Speaking of Molotov cocktails, I now have less of an issue with paper-based beer containers:

Carlsberg announced the launch of two prototypes of the new bottle at the C40 World Mayors Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. The newer, eco-friendly versions are made from sustainably sourced wood fibres and are fully recyclable. The concept of a paper-based bottle may sound strange at first, as you wonder how the structure would stand firm, holding liquid safely inside.

…but the technology probably would be put to better use in the jams and jellies trade. Which I assume is about 1,297 times bigger than beer. Isn’t it? I need to check out Insta-jam or whatever that corner of the social media boglands are called.

There. A bit of a quieter week, I suppose. And not particularly wide in the selection of voices. I did hunt around, honest. Let me know what I am missing. Still, plenty of good reading for a week filled with many bigger matters. Some things beer can’t fix. Expect a further Boak and Bailey news update on Saturday and then check out  the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays. And look for mid-week notes from The Fizz as well.

*Fact: Canadian politicians must love beer.
**Illiteracy is an alarming problem, as we know, in the industrial scribbling circle but this is inordinately odd.
***And one I love as their foreign export stout makes it regularly to Ontario.

The Thursday Beer News For A Week Of Fests, Awards, Junkets And Other Melancholy Things

So, if I was going to write about all the interesting things I read this week, I need to first acknowledge all the uninteresting things I read this week but then not write about those things so that I can focus on writing about all the interesting things. [Thanks, folk who are keeping good beer stuff so dull!] Now, one of the most interesting things I read this week were the labels by the apples in this image from Instagram and Twitter posted by RV Nurseries of Yorkshire. These are apples from cider varieties all pre-dating the year 1800… which itself is a date that is now 219 years ago. That is very interesting. Very very interesting. Sets a standard this week for interestingness, doesn’t it.

Speaking of apples, Nicci Peet’s extremely interesting interview with one Roger Wilkins, the owner of Wilkins Cider in Somerset was posted by one of the better sort of blogs that calls it self a periodical… no, publication… no, journal. It’s a bit of a trip back into the 1700s in the sense that the production is extremely spare and the cider-making dates back to the 1500s and the farmer appears to be an high-functioning alcoholic:

I’ve drunk cider ever since I were 5 years old, and course I drunk it all me life. Then when I left school, well, before I left school I used to help me Grandfather cos he was crippled with arthritis, he had bad hips. He died when I was 21, I’ll be 72 this year. So then I learned it all off of him right up until he died, then I just carried it on the same. But like I said, there’s not many places you can get proper cider today. You’ll never get a headache or hangover with this because there’s no [additives] in it.

Well, except the saccharine in the sweet cider. And we wonder where Strongbow came from? Very interesting, indeed.

Also very interesting is the week Katie of @shineybiscuit (as illustrated, right) has been having working in a vineyard in the Mosel valley in Germany. Did you work in a vineyard in the Mosel this week? Me neither. I am in fact riddled with jealous to the point I hardly know how to type. She is not only learning about the Mosel but also Riesling grapes and the wine making techniques of Rudi. Holy Mo-lee. Very very interesting. She will write about it all in a story soon, too, which will also be very interesting.

Perhaps not quite as interesting but still rather interesting is the fact that in 1968 Lionel Tutt won the World Beer Drinking Championship by downing 17 pints in an hour as well as the fact that you can watch a video of it now, 51 years later, and notice that he got rather loaded.

Stan wrote an interesting post about language about beer, correcting the recent allegation that these sorts of things (i) start with M. Jackson and (ii) are dependent on M. Jackson but then confirming how they were grabbed, shaped and then released again by M. Jackson. I love how he also corroborated my observations that said M. Jackson developed his thoughts on the unified structure of beer after his initial writings, an observation I shared yoinks ago – just look!

Avery wrote, “There is a move in MJ’s writing from an amateur understanding (in the true sense of the word, the amateur as a lover of something), to an adoption and, crucially, a demonstration of understanding of technical terms, to a move toward describing beers purely in sensory terms.”

It’s wonderfully being so totally vindicated. One quibble – “geek” is venerable and probably misapplied. Speaking not of which, Matt published a story one something called MASH (which is different from the other now semi-former MASH) about the problem with beer events today:

I feel that, presently, venue operators and producers see events as a necessity as opposed to an opportunity. They’re an easy-ish way of putting bums on seats and beer in glasses in an increasingly difficult market, with a consumer that has a limited amount of disposable income. I don’t see how this will reach outside of our insular beer community. This is where work needs to be done to ensure that events have value, so that the community can continue to flourish and grow.

While I have nothing to do with the “let’s grow the trade!!” aspect of beer writing I do like Matt’s candor about such things.

Speaking of degrees of exactitude, Jordan wrote a very interesting blog post about stats, demographics and macro economic trends that really surprised me in the sense that for fifteen years folks holding out to be beer economists have never written anything as useful. Cut to the core question:

The good news is that there is a generation behind them! Somehow we keep making people! Let’s look at the pyramid chart again and think about Generation Z, which is the post-Millennial generation. Mmm. Oh dear. That 1990’s drop in volume from the beer litres per capita chart? That corresponded with the Boomer – Gen X shift. Both of those groups are still much larger proportionally than Generation Z. I don’t think per capita consumption is going back up anytime soon. 

Lars provided us with the photo of the week, an art installation entitled “Kvass tank. Yoshkar-Ola, Mari Republic, Russia. 2017.” I particularly love the way the image confirms that concrete provides no drainage while capturing the moment the girl in the black dress was getting a poorer photo of the same scene from the backside of the really angy looking kvass seller. Check out the high res version of you disagree. Please bring exact change.

Fabulous. A revelation even. I don’t even know where the Mari Republic is! Kray. Not unlike the next story. Except for the lack of resemblance stuff. The Stonch blog lit up in activity this week with a defense of Coconut IPAs. Let me ruin the ending for you:

Danse des Coco certainly doesn’t let the side down. I drank three 500ml cans just to be sure. Like the Italian beer I’d drank a fortnight earlier, it was nice and strong (6.9% abv). Again, this showed me that coconut can really work in brewing. The fruit was more pungent in this example, and the overall package heavier and more bitter, but once more I was drinking a great beer. I used to be sniffy about brewing with adjuncts. I’ve learned not to be. Quite simply, I think craft beer is getting better: the brewers are more experienced, the standard expected by consumers is higher. For those of us who’ve expressed legitimate scepticism in the past, it’s worth overcoming old prejudices and embracing new styles.

Coconut IPA!?! I can’t imagine the pleasures it held. But that’s because I was not there.

Finally, Matt* (again and perhaps unlike others) offered a moderately clear understanding of all those who paid his way to get on a bus in the Czech Republic (unlike those elsewhere paying their own way) on a Pyongyang-style guided and structured tour of repeat offender breweries with a load of other writers – all the while all of whom were missing entirely the fact that one of the land’s most venerable breweries on the tour was days away from financial and legal collapse. Experts! Note: Beth Demmon goes all in on transparency. Wow.

Well, that was better than expected. Just to review. Fest? Boring. Awards?* Well, what a surprise! Junkets? Only thing different is the seats they were assigned on the bus. So… wait for further Boak and Bailey news update on Saturday and then check out Stan on Monday. Audiophiles are ranting about the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays, too. See you next week for more logging of the beery web. Laters!

*For the double! And as noted was about to occur last week…
**That’s me in the white shirt…

The First Thursday Beer News Of October 2019

Beer: less popular year after year!

Ah, beer. You ever ask yourself on why you bother thinking about it? You know, if it’s not your last ditch effort to cobble together a career? BA Bart posted a thread on Twitter this week on the latest stats – which seem to be in line with the previous stats. All worth considering, for sure, but there is that underlying personal question that I suppose everyone who reads this blog has asked themselves since their first glass – why do I bother? Knitting bloggers have a way easier answer. Mittens. Knitting bloggers get all the breaks.

Speaking of big stats over time, relatedly and with a similar set of graphs, apparently Russia’s public policy program to reduce alcohol consumption has been… a fabulous success:

In 2018, Russian life expectancy reached its historic peak, standing at almost 68 years for men and 78 years for women. The experience gathered by the Russian Federation in reducing the burden of disease stemming from alcohol represents a powerful argument that effective alcohol policy is essential to improving the prospects of living long and healthy lives.

By contrast, Gary thumbs his nose at Mr. Putin and gives us a portrait of one of my old favourites,* La Choulette, and the under-respected biere du garde style:

It has a full, complex flavour, quite different from the standard conception at least in North America of a “Belgian ale”. The beer is somewhat earthy, dark fruit estery, with malty/caramel tones, and an interesting tonic or “camphor” edge, almost gin-like to my taste. It has no tart notes, and is quite different from a Flanders brown style, East or West.

Before going on junket with others of the cap in hand crowd,** young Mr. Curtis wrote a response to a typical Stone-based blurt a ripping set of tweets on the failure that has been Stone Brewing’s experience in the UK and Europe including this bit of honesty:

They’ve had to sell there entire U.K. brewing operation. Instead of trying to understand their export markets, they’ve attempted to subvert them. And it’s backfired time and time again.

Yowza! It’s all true, of course, but as we know with the stale older monied end of US craft beer – facts are not all they are cracked up to be.

Perhaps related, GBH shared Jeff Alworth’s sharing of the Instagram posting by Baltimore brewer Megan Stone of @isbeeracarb on sad reality of brew house work conditions.  Because I don’t want to know what my kids do on Friday night, I stay away from Instagram so this was helpful.

Beth Demmon has published a wonderfully in-depth piece at CraftBeer.com on brewing while raising a family:

As Oliver, 34, and her generation have children—albeit later and at a lower rate than generations past—more beer professionals are increasingly finding themselves in similar situations as Oliver. Child care costs, lack of parental benefits, and other obstacles mean employees working in the estimated 7,500 breweries across the United States face the potential of their children existing in alcohol-centric spaces.

Now perhaps building upon those last two stories, “scandal” and “Ontario” usually evoke as much shock as the combination of “curling” and “action” but this week the decision of Ontario Craft Brewers*** to attend and post on social media about a government PR announcement which included standing with a certain Member of Provincial Parliament (“MPP”) due to his past and presumably present day quite intolerant positions. Ben Johnson I believe was the first to point out the glaring problem:

For an organization that has made public overtures to women in their industry, the @OntCraftBrewers looks pretty hypocritical here posing for photo ops with a kid who said he wants to make a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body “unthinkable in our lifetime.”

Brewers issued social media statements: Muddy York, Bench, Sawdust City,**** People’s Pints, Manantler. There are others. It made the news. And there was some unhappiness that the associated larger event got tarnished.  Some didn’t comment. Jordan posted his thoughts on the naturally resulting trade backlash this way:

The OCB’s leadership is actively undermining its own credibility. They have lost two members this week in Block 3 and Manantler and may well yet lose Muddy York. Their largest members are backpedaling faster than I have ever seen them and while I would like to think that this would be a wake up call to them, I just don’t believe it. I think they believe this will go away because this is an emotional response. 

Disastrous decision. In other key conservative political news which might be related, have a gander at British Cabinet member Michael Gove recently pickled out of his skull – not only in public but in the UK’s Parliament.

In more positive news, co-creator of this stuff Max headed out from Prague tracing a line north to try out some actual (and not craft bastardized) kviek in Norway as part of a program to establish partnerships between Czech and Norwegian people who practice traditional trades and crafts:*****

After a hearty lunch prepared by his wife, Julie, Sigurd took us a couple of kilometres uphill to pick juniper and get some alder wood for the next day’s brew. We came back with a full trailer and we sat in the garden to have some home made beer while we waited for our accommodation to be ready. That’s when I had my first contact with a Kveik Ale, brewed with juniper but with a boiled wort. It was amazing! It had notes of green wood and spice that reminded me of Szechuan pepper without the burn, but they weren’t overpowering. It still tasted like beer thanks to its sufficiently muscular malt base.

Wow. And no one adding fruit syrups at all!  Finally, some other beer news in brief:

a. The craft beer hangover.
b. Zwanze Day fightin’ words!
c. Beer powered radio.
d. A trip to JJB’s (aka the formerly Stonch’s) pub.
e. The most blatant example of entitled craft ripping off someone’s intellectual property yet. Oof, indeed.
f. Barry in Germany is now selling his own clinky drinky produce!

Finito! I’m actually sick as I put this together. The autumn school bug. While I recover, I can look forward to expect the Boak and Bailey news update on Saturday and Stan should back on Monday. Check out the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays, too. Heck, there is so much to follow – what do you need me for… sorry… it’s  just the cold medicine talking… zzzzzzz… zz… zlurp… zzzzzzzzzzzz…

 

*Ten summers ago…
**If I have done anything, my part in making “the junketeer’s admission” a norm has been my proudest achievement.
***Former sponsors of this blog.
****Oddly, even having to explain a former senior staffer wearing their t-shirt as if he was still representing.
*****Sounds actually legitimate!

The “I’m Just Back From Toronto And Boy Are My Arms Tired” Edition Of Thursday Beer News

A pubby sort of place

It was a short visit. Twenty-two hours. Nine of which were used up at a conference. A very interesting one. Ten of which were the worst hotel stay that I have had in a very good hotel in my entire life.* And three of which I hung out with Jordan. [You may place these experience in their proper order in your mind as you see fit.]   We wandered and ended up down by the docks. The nice docks.** We talked about craft fibs, money, and the seeming draining away of fun in good beer culture.*** And then we asked the waiter if he liked his job, because he seemed to.  He did. A lot. When the waiter left, we asked why any place would make a beer that tasted like thin lemonade with a soapy hint of dish liquid. Jordan made me drink it. I made a funny face when I had the first sip of that one. Then made another sort of face when I gulped the rest of the sampler glass. I am sure it sells. What do I know?

Two bits of news related to getting things right. Getting the truth out. First, Maureen Ogle has finished her revisions to Ambitious Brew and is about to press the publish button. [Editorial note: she did… buy it now!]**** Fabulous.

And Martyn has written yet another post. It’s like 2009 over there at his blog. Active. So odd to see an active blog. Anyway, it is excellent set of complaints about how horrible the beer style information is in the Good Beer Guide 2020:

It’s not as if all the information on beer styles that the GBG gets wrong isn’t out there in easily discoverable forms: there are now a considerable number of books, blogs, magazine articles and so on giving the true facts about how the beer styles we know today developed. And yet the 2020 GBG still prints utter nonsense…

Excellent. And then there were comments this week about money. Money is like truth. Stan wrote this in passing in his Monday beer news update and it struck me as a particularly obvious point that I had not seen made yet:

The price question is a constant in beer circles (and pops up pretty much every day). But it is one that brewers must continue to consider if they are serious about inclusivity.

I was a bit less impressed with the opposite argument seeming to be be made, that expense and exclusivity were not a barrier to inclusion. But then that was put in a bit of perspective when I read someone arguing that if people really cared about working in craft beer that they should not be too concerned with being paid. These are some of the reasons craft beer culture sometimes seems like an alt-reality with whole necessary pieces simply missing. Then BeeryEd wrote this and the whole thing seemed to right itself again as fresh air returned:

Trust me. As someone that’s been in the game a lil while and spent waaaay too many hours on spreadsheets in regards to costings etc. I guarantee you there is enough to pay people fairly. I promise you. Hence why we have a bunch of brewers that do and are fine….

The comments that flowed from his string of tweets were instructive. And then they just got mean. Because craft beer is full of great people. And thin lemonade with a soapy hint of dish liquid.

Speaking of inclusion, I’ve learned there is a frequently updated list of “Black Owned Craft Brands and Other Diversed Ownership” drink makers map! And because I love maps almost as much as inclusion I am linking to it right => here. Add more data. The world needs more data.

Care of a Katie tweet, I found this fabulous review of the food and drink at the Hackney Church Brew Company by Jay Rayner in The Guardian which starts thusly:

Down a shadowed road an old man shambles. He’s wearing a secondhand pinstripe jacket and sensible shoes with cushioned soles. Pools of buttercup-yellow light spread from reconditioned railway arches, illuminating the uncreased faces of the Friday-night crew outside, bottles of the finest local microbrew in hand. Music booms. There’s a cavernous bar gilded in red neon with the legend Night Tales. Broad-shouldered bouncers stand sentry, thumbing their phones. The old man shuffles past, aware it’s not for him. I can’t help but feel a little sorry for him. This is because the old man is me.

I resemble that remark myself. And I even went to yet another bar this week. I never go to bars but last Friday for one at the Kingston Brewing Company after work. It’s like I never had children. And what a selection! I had a Vim & Vigor which I much prefer to think of as Vim & Vigour.

Fergie Jenkins beer! He once almost slapped me to the ground in 2006. At Cooperstown, NY. Hall of Fame Game crowd. Walking towards the game he was barreling from where he had been signing books to the field where he was to be introduced before the game between the Reds and the Pirates. He was 64. Felt like I was hit by a side of beef. Solid. Took one of my best photos ever – of a ball hit into the left field crowd just near me.

And finally, Lew has been recalling the first time he experienced a regular undergrad habit of mine:

I stopped at the border liquor store before returning home to the dry county of Hardin. The cashier weighed my empty milk jug, I filled it with draft Schlitz, and she weighed it again—the store sold beer by the pound.***** When I got home, I opened the jug and started drinking. I put away the groceries, and decided I needed a shower. On a whim, I took the beer along. It wasn’t long till I was soaped up, hot water rinsing off the day. I grabbed the jug, and tilted it back. Hot water pounding on my back, cold beer running down my throat. Wow! I’d found a whole new experience. The shower beer!

There. I need a rest. My fingers are all tipped with blisters from all this writing. No worries. I have time to heal. Boak and Bailey will be on duty for the beer news on Saturday and Stan will be covering on Monday. The OCBG Podcast is available most Tuesdays in plenty of time for happy hour at the mess, too. See ya!

*I checked my diaries all the way back just to make sure.
**Amsterdam’s Brewhouse on the Lake, 245 Queens Quay West. Everyone has a screen, watches a screen, is a screen.
***I blame all the off-flavour seminars teaching folk how much good beer is bad or at least flawed. Yet teaching people that soapy lemonade is OK. Haven’t got to the soapy lemonade bit yet? Wait for it.
****But please also seek out the actual vibrant story of colonial brewing in British North America from the 1620s and then its continuation in the USA before the Germans brought over lager in around 1840. Start here.
*****Beer by the pound is an even more interesting story that needs to be researched and reported upon.

 

Your Quieter Mid-September Thursday Beer News Update

Quieter? Why yes,says I. Quieter. We have begun the long slide and climb towards the Vernal equinox, the true beginning of the year. By which time my carrots for 2020 should be up. I have yet to pick a carrot. Not one. Before you pick a carrot you have dreams that they are all sweet as candy and the size of baseball bats. Like the feeling you have the day before the lottery is drawn, the anticipation felt walking to a first date.  You can eat those little green young stems, you know. You can’t eat a lotto ticket.

So what is going on? First off, Martyn posted another great essay – this time on a small Greek craft brewery which opened in the town where he has been holidaying for years… oops… and now it seems it is gone. Did I see only a draft? It was titled “How Heineken Tried To Bully A New Small Greek Brewer And Failed” and it was wonderful. I know it was named that because I saved the URL in an email to myself. Some of his best stuff. I hope he didn’t get bullied and it did not fail. Please check in, Martyn.

Speaking of locals explaining the local experience rather than the fly-by experts from away who seem to get most everything wrong, Ben Keene* has written a lovely detailed piece about the breweries to be found along the Hudson River Valley train line:

Between the cities of Yonkers and Poughkeepsie (the terminus), no less than a dozen breweries can be found in the small towns dotting this historic river valley, almost all of them a fairly short walk from the corresponding Metro North railroad station. So whether it’s one more hurrah to cap off summer travel, or a trip meant to dovetail with the Hudson Valley’s colorful peak fall foliage, here’s your guide to breweries near the Metro North train line from Westchester to Dutchess County.

As an Upper Hudson Valley Beer and brewery man myself, I find the idea of doddling along the rails for days by the more southerly river shorelines very compelling.

The inclusivity anti-bigotry hashtag #IAmCraftBeer has reached every continent now. Sweet.

I liked this brief photo essay entitled Why Oh Why Do We Cellar / Horde Beer. Time To End This. Sorry, I Have Been Stupid. No More. I only have a few bottles left that I stuck away years ago and they give more pain than pleasure. Weren’t we all silly? Jeff Scott aka @beergeek might agree, I think, as he finds finds cleaning out his hoard, too.

Is 2013 the year the original hyped breweries of the American craft beer scene were opening? No.

As mentioned in the 29 March 2018 edition of these Thursday notes, some questions as to the actual history of lambics have been raised by Roel Mulder of the blog Lost Beers. Remember that next time someone suggests blogging is not a higher form than, say, periodical publishing for pay… as Punch magazine has apparently now** taken notice of the question at whiplash speed and run an article on the situation:

…according to Mulder, that’s a flawed family tree. “Lambic certainly wasn’t the first of the family to surface,” he says, citing evidence that sweet faro, in fact, came before, with the earliest mention dating to 1721—more than 70 years before the arrival of lambic. Gueuze, meanwhile, a merger of young and old lambic, didn’t appear until the early part of the 19th century, while kriek came about at the century’s end. But perhaps the most firmly held belief in the legend of lambic is its adherence to the idea that the beer can only be produced within tight Belgian parameters, the regional microflora supposedly crucial to its creation. Yet Mulder has found lambic brewing records from the Netherlands dating as far back as 1820.

Someone help me out with this – just as soon as we locate Martyn. Do that first.

This is interesting. A new Molson Coors macro brewery is opening in British Columbia. I did like this quote from the firm:

“We’re constantly looking at innovation and introducing new products to the market, knowing that there’s interest in changing things up,” said Andrew Molson with Molson Coors. 

Fascinating. But that much capacity, the capacity to produce more beer than the total amount of craft beer sold in the province in the 2018/2019 fiscal year, is an odd investment. A question. Consolidation is the logical answer with brewing but whose production is going to get rolled into this facility to justify the scale? Not folk in the province’s craft scene, that’s one thing that’s for sure. Odd.

In this week’s beer label lawsuit news, some knuckleheads out near the Pacific used the image and name of UK TV baker Mary Berry and then blurted the classic excuse:

“It was totally intended as an homage, but I get it, people gotta protect their image to the public,” Armistice cofounder Alex Zobel told SFGate. That sounds fairly conciliatory, but the brewery’s Instagram post is more pointed, stating in part: “Somebody’s agency has a very soggy bottom, indeed.” The brewery told SFGate it plans to rebrand the beer as Cease And Desist Berry (reminiscent of Lagunitas’ Undercover Shutdown Ale, if you ask me).

Boring. Boring idea in the first place. Boring style. Boring. Homage? Free advertising stunt more like it. Boring.

Finally, a note*** from the eldest brother:

Therefore one should not discuss geometry among people who are not geometricians, because they will not recognize an unsound argument. The same applies to all other sciences.” 

Seems applicable. Right?

There. A bit quiet. That’s OK now and then. Now, off to think about that carrot patch for another week. In the meantime, Boak and Bailey will have more news on Saturday and Stan will be with us on Monday. The OCBG Podcast is ready most Tuesdays by the recess bell, too. Their review of TIFF and TBW are good listens this week.  That’s a lot. Is there too much updating. What if someone comes out with a mid-week update by way of a Wednesday evening edition? I’ll be ruined… ruined!!!****

*Also author of Best Hikes Near New York City and Camping New York: A Comprehensive Guide to Public Tent and RV Campgrounds.
**In an article dated 10 September 2019 with the very odd statement “The Dutch historian had just published his 2017 book…” I am sure someone can explain.
***Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 1.12… as if you didn’t know…
****As if I get up at 4 am Thursdays and write all this!

The Week We All Decided Good Beer Is Anti-Fascist Edition Of The Thursday Beer News

Ah, the last few days of summer… as long as we were are in the northern hemisphere. The neighborhood is literally humming with sound of critters, birds and bugs out gathering in the last of their winter’s stores. It’s actually quite the thing. Consider for a moment Keats’s Ode to Autumn, would you? My grapes are in that place between perfect ripeness and being mobbed by robins and blue jays. The chipmunks are invited. Few others are.

First up, Jordan and Robin interviewed the principals of the kveik roadshow driving through central Canada this week. Note: Lars says “kwehk” at the 8:10 mark of the audio but everyone else is saying “kvehk” so I really need this cleared up. I had to give up my own ticket to the event but it was put to good use as the photo above shows.

Speaking of beery gatherings, an interesting comment was made about the reaction to beers at a festival by one Florida brewer:

I make beer, have had this happen countless times, and completely disagree. Not everyone is going to like everything. And in a festival setting, etiquette often goes right out the window. I’d suggest removing ego from the equation, but then we wouldn’t have 7,500 breweries.

My thought was it was important to leave buckets and spittoons at fests as the dumping of the unwanted beer is always so common, either by the frenzied ticker or the simply disappointed.

The Chicago Tribune has reported on the hugely positively social media phenomenon #IAmCraftBeer that Dr. J thought to use to redirect a discussion that began with a very ugly start:

Chalonda White checked her phone Monday afternoon and saw a strange and jarring email. It was just three sentences and 35 words, sent to the address on her Afro Beer Chick website, where White, a Rogers Park resident, has blogged about her love of craft beer since 2017. It came from a name she’d never heard of — she suspects it was a pseudonym — laced with hate, misogyny and racism, including three uses of the N-word.

I might have just gone straight to “hate mail” and “Nazi” myself having seen Chalonda’s reaction on Twitter soon after she posted it.  It was certainly good to see the hundred of positive reactions but also an important reminder that fascists find dirty corners to crawl into in every aspect of life. Good to make them uncomfortable anyway we can.

The Pursuit of Abbeyness has shared a welcome blog post on national parks in the British Peak District.

Given this longstanding industrial heritage, it is no surprise to find brewing prevalent in and around the Peaks. Burton-upon-Trent sits just 25km to the south, after all. Within the boundaries of the national park itself lie Thornbridge, Peak Ales, Taddington, Intrepid, Bradfield, Flash and the Wincle Beer Co. On its fringes there are a dozen or so more, including Abbeydale, Buxton and Torrside. And that is before we get to the thriving beer culture of Sheffield proper, or indeed Manchester.

Did someone say England? The BBC Archives shared video of the 1948 English hop harvest last Friday.

Furthermore and within that same decade, this series of photos commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Brussels when British troops arrived on the outskirts of the city in the evening of September 3, 1944 includes the image of Manneken Pis dressed as one of the liberating soldiers in full dress uniform.

The New Yorker magazine had an interesting article by Troy Patterson this week on natural wines which have always struck me as a partner to some of beer’s crueler styles. This snippet does not deter me from that suggestion:

One section featured the variety of skin-contact wines known as orange wines. One of these, from Friuli, glowed tropically in my candlelit glass. The list explained orange wine as a white wine that is made like a red; the skins and seeds, left to macerate in the juice for a while, impart color and texture. There was honey in the aroma. An intense whirligig of tannins metallically attacked my mouth and, on the finish, there was an astringent sizzle, with undertones of acid reflux. Tasting notes described this as a “long persistence.” I found it to be a test of stamina. While I waited for the wine’s acrid smack to wear off, I meditated on how this chic but peculiar elixir reflected the terroir of the urban social landscape.

Speaking of the cruelties of craft, Sophie Atherton has written in the UK’s Morning Advertiser about how craft has just gone too far:

What I see now is a hell of a lot of style over substance, with a glut of shoddy beers that appear to get away with it because they are on trend. The flip side is that more traditional beer is neglected, both in availability and keeping standards- which threatens to return us to the era of people viewing beer as a poor-quality drink.

This sort of succinct observation is one that you do not see made too often, given is it saying something bad in relation to brewing. Quite pleased to see it pop up in a major industry  periodical.

This weeks winner of le dubbel extraordinaire is Jordan who also posted this week on his blog about his family’s very small hop farm or rather his failure to tend to his family’s very small hop farm:

The Centennial hops on Mom’s property in Kingston have been growing all summer. Some other year, I will go and watch them train up the trellis and coir, straining sunward at midday in their ascent. This year, it has been hard to find time, but it becomes obvious that for a good vinedresser, time is something to be made. You cannot learn physical skills by reading books. Even Stan Hieronymous’s excellent book on hops does not really tell you how you are to harvest them: 15 bines that do not quite express their full height and cluster together decoratively but not optimally for growth. 15 bines that now in the late summer take on the allium tinge of garlic where they have been sunburnt. 15 bines that I am a week late for.

On that story of the summer of 2019, Lew Bryson has founds some more excellent facts on White Claw: (i) one in three people will buy it again, (ii) seltzers are brewed, not formulated, (iii) nearly every liquor store and supermarket carries White Claw, only 20 percent of bars and restaurants are currently selling it, and (iv) he underestimated the tie-in with the keto diets. I still don’t think I am going to buy it. But my kids might. And, really, who cares?

There. Dusk at 7 pm now. Time’s a tickin’!  I expect Boak and Bailey will have more news on Saturday and Stan should be there on Monday. The OCBG Podcast is a reliable break at work on Tuesdays, too. Except this week when it was on Wednesday. Go figure.