A Perhaps Much Abbreviated Thursday Beery News Notes For My Big Week Off

Off. It’s not like I’m off doing very much but, you know, I have actual chores to do, a couple of nights in Montreal… and other day trips to take… and summer’s slipping away so maybe there won’t be so much in this week’s beery news notes.  And I am going to have limited access to scribbling time during the middle of this week so let’s see what I can come up with… no one wants someone to get that sad and lonely feeling if there isn’t something to read as they slurp down their Froot Loops early this Thursday morning. Hmm. How to cover up my half arsed effort? Perhaps another slightly different format will suffice. Let’s have a Q+A session!

Question #1: Does anyone do social media as well as Lars does? It was on display in this week’s photo essay on a little historical brewing recreation he did last weekend at a museum:

Had to clean the inside of the rost (lauter tun, the wooden vessel), because it was mouldy. Hard to avoid with wooden gear… Foundation of the filter is alder sticks. For color, flavor, and to give the wort space to run underneath the real filter, which comes on top…

My observations: I hates me a mouldy rost.

Question #2: do we care if we use the original language’s grammar and spelling when referring to beer related things? I am disinclined to worry about this all that much but that is not a universal thing. There’s a thread:

Not to nitpick the thriving transatlantic linguistic exchange through l/Lager, but for anyone not writing bilingual #WhatsBrewing blurbs, what generally would be pro-copy guidelines for US-ENG capitalisation in writing keller, kellerbier, but: Kellerwald?[…] My remark goes beyond the basics of why other natural languages should/can drop German capitalisation when importing, trying to get at the desired branding (“auratic”) effects of opting back in when it creates perceived authenticity, say for Scandinavian or Czech diacritics.

My thought: be consistent but be prepared for people to think you are weird when you talk about Poland’s capital amongst English-speakers.

Question #3: why should I care about NA beer? NA beer to me is expensive fancy soda pop that is made in an unnecessarilily convoluted manner. I thought of that on Monday when Stan reported from the World Brewing Congress:

Today there will be three presentations related to making sure non-alcoholic beers are safe to drink. This is important and was already on my radar when I read “How Mash Gang is Breaking the Alcohol Free Mould.” That is not to imply that Mash Gang beers are not safe, or that the story should address what the company is doing to assure the beers are free of pathogens. It simply reflects my current fascination with what brewers might do to make non-alcoholic beer better without the many useful functions ethanol performs. One of those is making beer safer to drink.

My concerns: in addition to a swath of cheaper established competition, the idea that NA beer has not solved the sanitation issue is decidedly off-putting. And this may well explain in part last week’s omission. Plus it was a very bobby B.O.B.

Question #4: do you miss RSBS as much as I still do, all these years later?  Answer: well, we may have a form of this care of Boak and Bailey tinkering around at BlueSky. They have set up a list that allows you to follow all added on that list to effectively create a aggregator displaying those who sign up for those who follow. Have a look.

Question #5: do any of you not draw lines in the sand? I am 100% on board with Laura Hadland this week in The Drinks Business:

I have a personal blacklist of the companies I will not deal with because of their past actions. I don’t write about them, I don’t spend my money on them, I don’t visit them. This quiet boycott is a private affair. If I don’t agree with someone’s ethics, I don’t fan their flames. There are so many fantastic businesses out there that I do want to shout about, it’s rarely an issue. Last week, however, I was approached by a PR company offering me a spot on a very interesting project. I was feeling pretty excited as I scanned through the details. Until I spotted one of the toxic names from my blacklist. Deflated, I immediately replied to the email letting them know that I could not participate. I told them why too. That was that. It felt quite good for a minute.

My total concurrence: I won’t ruin the punchline but, again, go have a look.

Question #6: so if the CBHOF is using the Baseball Hall of Fame nomination process, will the “good character” rule also apply? That states:

Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.

So, given the recent years’ allegations of sexism, racism and a bunch of other serious -isms in craft beer… how will that be taken into account? See, working as I do in governance, I can assure you that there is always a set of process rules that run along side the substance rules in these things. You can have the greatest process in the world but they only affirm the substantive standards which have to be set out before any nominations are considered. Do we know what they are?

Question #7: does my national, regional and local construct for North American craft hold water? Jeff asked for more:

I think we should talk about local and regional, since you hinted at it and Stan picked it up but didn’t elaborate. I am hesitant to respond without understanding your fuller take.

My point: all those nice cans from the like of Sierra Nevada and Sam Adams fill grocery store and gas station shelf space where other distributed beers used to be found.  As I said, “basically I see that one of the tensions is framed by the economics of investment required for scale. Locals have done well. Turns out there was space for a few big grocery store national craft breweries but at the expense of those intercity / interstateers.” See, I think that the mob of ankle nipping locals can defend themselves from big craft in each market but regionals have found themselves, for a few years now, neither here nor there.

Question #8: Maybe related, is there any passing of a micro era brewery more shocking than the closing of Cambridge Brewing C0mpany which will serve its last beer on December 20th? The notice was on Instagram:

We were the first commercial brewery to produce a Belgian Style beer in this country and one of the first to embrace multiple yeast strains in-house and even to intentionally invite wild organisms into our brewery…. A heartfelt thank you to all who have participated in our dream. To our customers that have joined us time and again over the years, your support and friendship enabled our success. To all that are working or have worked here, you guys are what made this place so great. What an honor and a joy it has been to work alongside you! So please join us often over the next 4 months! We still have Patio Season, Festbier, Fall Menu and more coming. 35 years, one hell of a run. 

My thoughts: Perhaps it’s an east coast thing but I heard about CBC long before I had ever visited. Along with Shipyard and Gearys in Maine, it was a name I heard when I was a young beer fan in Nova Scotia, a name spoken with reverence by those coming back from the Boston states.  Then in 2013, we found ourselves right there and witnessed the making of pumpkin ale with the actual pumpkin harvest and made a bit of a photo montage over at FB.  Get over to CBC while you still can.

Question #9: What the heck is “hop preparedness” anyway?

Question #10: Has Ron out-Ronned himself with this dialogue? It’s a two-part play between father and son as they recall visiting Dad’s old home town:

“Marks and Woollies next door to each other and Boots over the road. Used to be typical of a UK high street.”
“But now they’re all gone. I’ve heard this story before.”
“They aren’t, though. Boots is still there and Marks has moved to by the old Warwicks brewery.”
“Loads of pub pictures coming up, I suppose.”
“There sure are, son. There sure are.”
“Don’t talk like John Wayne, Dad.”

My response to these things is always that Ron missed his calling as an author, getting sidetracked into a pub as he was at age twelve. Fabulous bit of writing.

Question #11: did you have any beer in Montreal? Yes, on Tuesday a cask brown ale at a funky fermented veg place called Poincaré and also a Mexican style lager at La Capital Tacos. Both were local beers but to be honest the food outshone them. Fish terrine at the first place before crossing St. Laurent to the other for Pastor tacos. We walk, we eat. We eat, we walk.

Last question, #12: why did it rain all Wednesday? We still saw the penguins and marched around town but I feel like moss is growing behind my ears. My nooks and crannies felt a certain alliance with the wild managed orchards of Cidrerie du Golfe in Brittany as featured in Pellicle this week which contained this excellent facts:

Their emphasis on nature is a way for them to preserve cider’s heritage, they say, strongly attached to rurality and peasantry. A tradition partially lost since the World Wars, when cider was relegated to second place in the region. “Soldiers were given red wine in the trenches while cider was distilled to be used in weaponry, it changed people’s habits,” Virginie says. “Before WWI, people in Rennes were drinking up to 400 litres per year!”

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

*This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (+13=146) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (929) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (-2=4,464) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

The Mid-August 2024 “No, You’re The One Dreaming Of Sweater Weather” Beery News Notes

Great. Stan took this week off. And probably next week too. He may hover in my mind like the absentee desk editor like I mentioned a few weeks ago. But he also has a nickname, too: cheat sheet. Stan “The Cheat Sheet” Hieronymus. Yup. See, come Monday when I can’t think of anything to go look for in the world of beer to think about, I can go see what Stan has been thinking about first. He’s a bit like that nice smart left handed kid in grade 11 math class with really good posture that I sat one row back of and one seat over to the right. Gave me a good view. Made tests just a bit easier.

By the way, there is little beer related in that photo up there. Took the image Monday evening looking due south, down over central New York State. A pinhole sunset catching the anvil cloud from below. Right about in the middle of that horizon is Oswego, NY.  On still days in winter, you can see the plume rising from Nine Mile Point Nuclear. Also, home of Rudy’s. Where you can skip stones and drink Genny Cream Ale.

Did someone mention beer?  Starting hereabout, as we face almost 4,000 new beer retailers in these parts in a few weeks, Ontario’s public broadcaster TVO published a great piece by Matt Gurney about the shock of the new he has experienced in the last few years of deregulation of the provincial booze market, with a particular focus on that one odd rule that allows 7-Eleven to qualify as a restaurant:

Seeing someone drinking in a 7-Eleven or walking out of my local variety store with a bottle of wine will probably feel exactly the way seeing people openly smoking cannabis felt like for the first few years after legalization. I have a specific memory of standing at an intersection, waiting for a light so I could cross, and noticing two young men standing on the corner passing a joint back and forth. I thought to myself, huh, that’s unusually brazen. And then, seconds later, my brain caught up with reality: it would have been brazen a few years earlier, but that day, it was simply two law-abiding citizens engaging in a legal activity in public. 

On undoubtedly similar sorts of offerings, Doug Velky of Revolution Brewing in his newsletter Beer Crunchers, unpacks how craft has turned full circle with craft’s adoption of “cold” in the race to make light generic lagers:

…we also recognized that Cold Time, whose model focuses more on volume than margins, would require broader adoption than just our loyal Revolution customers to ever be considered a success. To achieve this greater scale, early investments would be crucial to get Cold Time into new places to find audiences who don’t currently think of themselves as craft beer fans, but are very open to a great, locally made lager.

Volume. Hmm. Disclosure. I’ve been buying Ice Cold Beer from Toronto’s Left Field Brewing for at least three years so there is no news here. But that branding had at least a level of self-parody in the mix along with the tasty within. Is that self-effacing sort of joke now all so… what… 2021? They may not be dipping as low as the macro-lags but aren’t they fighting for the Centro-Euro buyer‘s attention? Given how well “beer from anywhere you like” can sell, can we blame them?

Interesting bit of history over from Katy Prickett at Auntie Beeb this week on industrialization of England during the Roman Era, including brewing at scale:

“At Berryfields, we found evidence of malting and brewing and the tanks used to steep the grain before processing,” he said. “We tend to think of the Roman world as being very much a wine-loving place. “But actually a lot of the population in Roman Britain were drinking beer and we see that in the pottery they were using, large beakers in the same sort of sizes as modern pint glasses.”

Being someone who never gives a second thought for the Roman Empire, this was all news to me. I am told that Barryfield was located “at an intersection along a major routeway” and was “the location of multiple roadside industries, such as brewing, woodworking, and metalworking, aimed at supplying the travellers passing through.” Here, too, is an archaeological report on a neighbouring site complete with maltings and even malted spelt deposits along with some barley and even some apples and beets.*

In an exploration of more recent history and in light of far more recent racist events in the UK, David Jesudason published the story of a hopeful scene in late 1940s Wales as recoujnted by historian Kieran Connell, the story of an event that showed how working class people rejecting racist hostility are always as he says the vanguard of multiculturalism:

In 1948, the CIAC organised a black-tie event to celebrate Douglas’s success after he made 39 first-team appearances for the team, with the CIAC inviting white members of Cardiff Rugby Club. Announcements were placed in Tiger Bay shop windows and St Clair attended the night which was held ‘not at a dingy clubhouse’ but in the convention room of a city-centre hotel rented for the occasion. “He [St Clair] entered the hotel,” writes Kieran, “without any of the stares or comments that might ordinarily greet someone from an ethnic minority in central Cardiff. In the hotel lobby, he spotted five white girls and two black girls chatting with a group of four white boys. Further on, four or five boys of mixed ethnicity were trying to set up a large keg of beer.”

Table tennis? Bun fight? A bit of both? That’s the theme in an article by Ted Simmons in The Spirits Business about the dispute between the  American Craft Spirits Association (ACSA) on the one hand and, on the other, the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America (WSWA) over what is causing the great retraction. We join the debate half way in progress:

WSWA released a second statement [:]… “Blaming wholesalers for the industry’s challenges is shortsighted. The focus should instead be on how the entire supply chain, including wholesalers, can adapt to changing market conditions and support each other in navigating economic pressures,” it read…  ACSA cites a study that found that 87% of craft spirits drinkers want to legally purchase via DTC, and 82% of craft spirits drinkers support laws changing in order to expand DTC… The WSWA calls for an end to any finger pointing… 

Speaking of handbaggery, Ed had a posted about the redistribution of CAMRA branches which so far has not yet popped up into the general finger pointery zone but might be heading that way:

CAMRA currently has a plan to change its branch structure so no branch straddles CAMRA region or county boundaries. From what I can gather it’s a top down proposal from the National Executive… I’m a bottom up man so am dubious about the proposal. Though a devout member of our Mother Church I’m not very active in the branch, but it is the branch I’ve been in since I was a teenager so I would be sad to see it end. Our branch chairman has written a long reply detailing how the branch came to be and why its current structure works.

BREAKING: Ron + Uruguay: one, two, three, four plus one alarming admission: “I want a rest from being Mr. Beer“!!! Heavens. Jings even.

And Jessica Mason shared details on the losses left in the wake of the failure of one brewery, the unfortunately** named Anarchy Brew Co of Newcastle:

Following the pandemic, the business also reportedly fell into financial difficulties after being unable to pay back loans and financial obligations on top of rising supplier costs. Reports have outlined that the trouble began when directors of the company took out Covid support loans and used tax deferrals to manage finances. FRP Advisory has since put together estimates with a breakdown, showing the shortfall owed to creditors stands at approximately £492,413 and an additional £158,016 still being owed to HMRC. Many in the sector with debts currently unpaid by Anarchy are set to lose out with 22 businesses in the industry, including malt and hop suppliers, still being owed thousands of pounds. 

In the referenced reports, it is stated that unsecured creditors such as trade creditors, the landlord and loans and finance agreements are owed £261,468. Assets came in at about one-third of that fugure. What to take away from all that? Certainly the interconnectedness what with so many others dependent on the success of the brewery. Plus… would it have been a kindness had the pulg been pulled earlier?

Perhaps speaking of which but definitely for the double, makring the Molson Coors cutting of losses Doug Velky posted a neat and tidy summation of the recent string of ditchings of unwanted craft brands which has seen one firm… consortium (… collector… aggregator…) named Tilray picking up the pieces to perhaps slide up to fourth place in the contracting US craft brewer market:

For Molson Coors’ there’s no growth potential looking forward for these brands as each posted negative trends in 2023. The brands aren’t dead as nearly 200,000 BBLs across four regional breweries is nothing to sneeze at, but in order to reverse these trends it would take focus, vision, energy, and dollars. As a public company focused on growing shareholder value, cutting these brands and focusing on positive trending formulas is where they’ll head instead. We saw the same of Anheuser Busch who dumped more than half of their crafty brands to Tilray in 2023 and Constellation Brands who quickest to take their “L” in craft and move on when they cleaned house and sold off Ballast Point, Funky Buddah, and Four Corners.

Jeff asks some good questions and triggers good thoughts – but there seems to be an assumption that “local” and “regional” are similar constructs. I don’t think they are. By the way… does one now cheer in 2024 as much as one booed in 2016? Such a long time ago, isn’t it? Wasn’t it? My thought it that it all such a case of corporate deck chair shifting that it really no longer matters. Macro abandoning craft at the same time craft is seeking to mimic macro. Whoda thunk it? What an odd scene this is for so late in the play.

Headline for these times: “World Of Beer Has Filed For Bankruptcy, Here Are The Details.”

Interestingly and conversely, the government of Western Australia has created a ten-year economic development plan to boost the state’s craft beer industry:

The plan was put together by the state’s Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, the Independent Brewers Association (IBA), West Australia Brewers Association (WABA) and South West Brewers Association (SWBA). As part of the strategy, the four parties’ two main goals are increasing the volume and value of locally produced beer threefold by 2034 from a 2023 baseline and creating “greater vertical integration of the craft beer value chain” in the region. Over 120 craft breweries exist in Western Australia, representing 20% of total craft beer production in the country.

A ray of hope? A futile effort given the bigger picture? Who knows. Finally – and as a welcome night cap if you get my analogy – ever the optimist or at least open to the possibility, The Beer Nut gave credit where credit was due in his piece this week on a brewery that has turned its luck around:

There’s hope for us all, I like to think. Today’s beers aren’t the first to come from a brewery premises whose earliest wares I didn’t care for and thought poorly made, but under new management seem to have been turned around. Investment in better equipment? Less corner-cutting? Or just a more highly skilled brewer? I don’t know. I do know that the beers from the Hillstown brewery in Co. Antrim were usually a raft of off-flavours, of the homebrew rookie sort. It seems that there’s a new broom about the place now, going by the friendly and approachable name of Modest Beer.

PS: I like shameless. I can work with shameless.

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

*How do you say “ooh, look, my pee’s gone all pink” in Latin?
**Although perhaps not as unfortunate as Jolly this week.
***This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (+1=133) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (-1=929) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (plummeting a bunch to 4,466) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

The “We Are Only Now Actually Halfway Through Summer 2024 This Week” Beery News Notes

 

Midsummer. This week. It’s now been 48 days since the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox is still a whole 45 days away. Mid. Summer. I blame public education for the false impression. The months of harvest are really just getting in gear. Moved: school should only be held in the months which are not summer gardening months. Approved. And Pete‘s #1 beer is exactly right. Beer after garden or yard work. Except… beer during garden or yard work. Or after coming back from the hardware store, I suppose.

What’s up? First off, I know my people can be a dour lot but I have never heard of it being a selling point in the hospitality trade until now in Inverness:

Dog Falls Brewing Co has applied for change of use to convert the long-closed Semi-Chem chemists’ to a beer “taproom” selling its product and other selected beers – but without music or entertainment. The brewery through planning agents Davidson Baxter Partnership Ltd, say in a supporting document to Highland Council: “The concept revolves around experiencing fresh beer from Dog Falls and selected other breweries in a setting where locals and visitors can talk, laugh, and interact with each other rather than being distracted by loud music or entertainment.” Dog Fall proprietor Bob Masson explained the concept further saying: “We want to encourage a convivial atmosphere among the customers without the entertainment add-on…

Got that? No need to repeat the point again. No entertainment. None. Nada. Don’t be looking to be entertained at this place. No way. Don’t. Not apparently related at all, I have never really needed twenty-four drinking each day in my life. Once forty years ago I got hammered starting at 4:30 am but that is only because I was a campus police officer at my small college and I arrested a guy breaking into cars at 3:30 am. After the fist fight in the wee hours and after handing the over to the actual cops, me nerves were a bit shot. So when I was offered unending tequila sunrises by my pal Bruce who was also technically my managing supervisor at that moment, I took up the opportunity.  Anyway, all that is to say, by way of intro, that the entire City of Montreal is now acting like my pal Bruce and is offering drinks around the clock for interesting reasons – and the BBC took notice:

Montreal will become the first city in Canada to allow 24-hour drinking. In Toronto venues have to close by 2am, and it is 3am in Vancouver. In the US, Las Vegas and New Orleans have long allowed bars and clubs to stay open all night. While in New York the cut off time is 4am, and in Los Angeles it is 2am. On the other side of the Atlantic, pubs in London still typically close at 11pm… Ms Alneus agrees. She says the fact that so many bars and clubs all currently close at 3am presents problems for the police. She believes by allowing 24-hour drinking, those venues that don’t wish to stay open all night will be able to close at different times across the night.

I will be over there in a few weeks but I am pretty sure I won’t be checking out that scene.  Yet a few hours after the party ends, in the UK for some on the move it starts up:

“Whether it’s 3am, 6am or 5pm, we all know that having a pre-holiday beer is a true British tradition. “Most of the time it’s a Fosters or a Carling and we all know they don’t exactly hit the spot. So, we decided to work with a local brewery and create the ultimate breakfast beer – the first of your holidays that matches perfectly with breaky.” Further findings from the research also revealed that a large majority of Brits (72%) believed a beer pre-10am is a “must” on our holidays.

Really? Honestly, I though it was just Ron. He’s been on the road in South America, as mentioned a couple of weeks ago, but he has finally gotten around to sharing the deets as well as the breakfast buffet experiences not to mention the glimpses into family life on holidays:

It’s quite chilly inside. Feeling a little cold, I put my coat back on. And notice no-one else has taken theirs off. They aren’t great on indoor heating here in Santiago. There’s a TV showing non-stop heavy metal videos… “Would you like to climb Mount Fuji, Dad?” Alexei asks. “No.” “Why not?” “For obvious fucking reasons. Like age and not wanting to die on a fucking mountain.” “If you weren’t old and scared, wouldn’t you want to climb it?” “No. I probably wouldn’t be able to breathe at the top of it.” “Well, apart from that?” “Just leave it.” After our first drink, it’s time for food.

In opposition to both Montreal and Ron, TDB reports that India is continuing its tightening of the prohibitions against liquor advertising after it became clear that there were efforts to circumvent the ban which already “outlaws direct advertising” by adding laws against “surrogate commercials and the sponsoring of events…” Examples:

Carlsberg would no longer be permitted to promotes its Tuborg drinking water in India by showing film stars at a rooftop party using the slogan “Tilt Your World”, which echoes its beer commercials. Nor would Diageo’s YouTube ad for its non-alcoholic Black & White ginger ale [which] features the iconic black-and-white terriers used to promote the scotch whisky brand of the same name.

Speaking of things that make you go “…hmmm…“, Jeff did some interesting data collection this week which has raise questions about some other data collection:

I found many of the breweries were no longer around. It wasn’t a marginal number. Despite the ambiguities in identifying what a brewery is, the number I ended up with was about 30% less than the Brewers Association’s official tally. For a number of reasons, this may be higher in Oregon than elsewhere: we have a more mature market, which means a lot more breweries have taprooms, which confounds things, and we also have more breweries closing because competition is so fierce. Nevertheless, it seems almost certain that the number of breweries in the US is thousands fewer than the regularly-cited figure of 10,000.

Which leads one to ask, of course, if that number is that wobbly – what else is? I mean, it’s not like any of this stuff is peer reviewed and footnoted.

Displaying far more solidity, The  Guardian had a pretty good interview with ‘Spoon owner, Tim Martin, who shared some interesting information about his approach to business including this early decision:

He wanted to be a barrister and studied law at Nottingham University, but was paralysed by a fear of public speaking. “I went to my first law of contract lecture and the professor started asking questions, so I didn’t go back. It made me very nervous. It sounds pathetic but you can get these little phobias.” The solution, it turned out, was getting into the pub trade, which he did in 1979 with the opening of Martin’s Free House. The JD Wetherspoon name came later, a mashup of JD Hogg, a character in The Dukes of Hazzard, and Wetherspoon, the name of a teacher who did not think much of  him.

And Jessica Mason has taken a cheeky approach to a piece which at the outset appeared to be about the place of fruity hazy IPAs in your fridge this summer as illustrated by one brand’s offering of something that is “effortlessly drinkable with a fresh watermelon taste and a pink haze” – and then is smartly turned on its head with the help of a couple of colleagues:

Tierney-Jones explained: “There’s a market for them and beer should have an element of fun but personally I tend to regard them as baby food for adults, the infantilisation of a great and noble beverage, it’d be a bit like a great wine producing chateau around Bordeaux adding mangoes or preserved lemons to their vintages.” Author and beer writer Pete Brown added: “I talk to so many brewers who say they brew hazy, fruity beers because that’s what the market wants. Then I look at the total share that hazy, fruity beers have in the market and think….’really? Looks to me like they want Guinness and ‘Spanish’ lager’.”

Brutal. Speaking of honest truths, Martyn has a book he wants you to buy and, as always, I was most obedient to the call. It sounds a bit like a reverse engineering of that earlier Jacksonian idea of classics:

There are certain classical examples within each group, and some of these have given rise to generally-accepted styles, whether regional or international. If a brewer specifically has the intention of reproducing a classical beer, then he is working within a style.

I say a reversal as Martyn is taking each of these eighty beers and expanding on their inherent implications – and not without peril as he explains:

One big problem with writing a book about beer with one foot firmly in the present is that the present is constantly changing. After I submitted the manuscript, it was announced that the Anchor brewery in San Francisco was shutting down. I hesitated for some time over whether to take the chapter on steam beer out, decided it was too interesting a style to ignore, and was saved by the announcement that the brewery had – at the time of writing – found a buyer. Similarly the chapter on Gale’s Prize Old Ale had to be rewritten twice, first after the closure of the Dark Star brewery, where POA was revived, and then after the closure of the Meantime brewery, where the brewing of POA was transferred. 

Speaking of wordcraft – and for the double – Jeff wrote about a subject that never has left me with much satisfaction – authenticity. What is that you say? He summarizes: “Authenticity is a self-referential quality. We associate ourselves with products that have the social currency of authenticity because it reflects well on us. We become authentic when we consume the right products.” It has always seem circular like that to me. A vessel of an adjective into which pretty much anything  can be placed. And Stan provide some more context particular to one beer related point:

In 2003, Holt and Cameron created a commercial that features a character they called The Tinkerer, who finds an old bicycle at a garage sale, carefully restores it, and then happily rides it into the Colorado countryside.  They outline their strategy for New Belgium in a chapter called “Fat Tire: Crossing the Cultural Chasm” within their book, “Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands”… The word authentic comes up in most chapters, but usually as a given and without a definition of what it means to be authentic. What is clear is how important whatever they label authenticity is to those focused on marketing.

This has not been my sneaking suspicion so much as my clear understanding for years. I think we three are all on the same page so we can be honest. The call to generic authenticity is a useful call to nothingness, a warming abstraction which is is nothing more than a vacant space for marketeers. The sibling of “effortlessly drinkable” when you think about it. This is where we are. Craft beer has long abandoned the firmer footholds of traditional techniques and smaller scale* – but will current welcome interest in Czech lager and perhaps a building upwards blip in English cask now act as a counterweight to the mess big craft has made of itself?  If so, isn’t there a better word then authenticity? Perhaps credible. A credible rendition of something is a simple direct take – in the X=Y sense – without adding any intermediate generic analytical steps. I’d much rather have a credible take on a Světlý Ležák than an authentic one. Must now consider the other applications for the word in the beer world.

Finally, Matthew has written a personal essay about the pubs of his hometown of Lincoln and how his parents’ divorce when we was a teen affected his relationship them. To do that, he visits his Mum to spend a day about town:

The day starts off well. Mum has a hairdresser’s appointment on the other side of town and has offered me a lift. This means I have to leave early, burdening me with an extra hour to kill before the pubs open. No matter, I thought, this would give me a rare opportunity to play tourist in my birthplace. Mum, however, is running late, so puts her foot down. She banks hard down a side street, hitting 40 in a 20 zone. I grip my seat, before reassuring myself that she has spent her entire life driving on these roads, and probably knows them better than anyone. She drops me off close to my first stop and reminds me I need to be home before 7pm. It’s her choir practice this evening and she wants to make sure I’m back in time for tea.

We’ll have to tune in next week to find out if he made it back in time for tea. See, he ends the story in the last pub. I just hope his Mum wasn’t late for choir practice.

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

*A movement perhaps so spent that there’s only one move left – a Hall of Fame for the same approved names to give themselves a good old pat on the back! Will the nominating committee weigh each candidates downsides along with the PR pluses? Will “Sex for Sam” be to this HOF be what the steriod era is to another?  If not, what is the committee doing? Something authentic perhaps.
**This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,483) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

A Most Thoroughly August Edition Of Your Beery News Notes

What can you say about August that we each haven’t thought in our hearts of hearts? We are now well into the downside of the year, four months and three weeks and a bit until Christmas. It’s always struck me as odd that the first half of the year has seven months while the second only has five. August. Hmm. Plus it all gets a bit endtimesy around now. The garden gets weedy and a bit tired in the corners. We even got forest fire smoke from Pennsylvania this week, for God’s sake! Looks!! Good thing there’s all those fit folk at the Olympics in Paris, over there throwing themselves against the track, against the ball, against ocean waves and against each others fists to give us all at home cheering on the sofa an endorphin boost. Speaking of the Olympics, how’s the beer?

Anyone who was planning on heading over to Paris for the 2024 Olympics and expected to be having a boozy jaunt in a stadium is going to be sorely disappointed. Almost everyone who has got tickets to see bits of the 2024 Olympics will not be allowed to buy alcohol at the venues where the sporting competitions are taking place… if you must drink beer inside the venues then you’ll have to stick with the non-alcoholic stuff. For half a litre of non-alcoholic beer you’ll need to be spending €8 (£6.74), while if you want a 400ml drink of zero alcohol beer with some lemon juice in it that’ll cost €6 (£5.05).

Whhhaaaaat?!?!? Really? I’d be tempted to get me a robot but I suppose that makes sense in the keeping the eye on the ball sense for spectators but, more importantly, what is the point of cutting NA beer with juice? Don’t worry, however, as the rich in catered VIP zones will be able to drink… because… France… or the Olympics… or…

Same as it ever was? Things go around and around. Consider this piece from Jessica Mason in TDB on salting your beer:

According to the reports via Parade, the trendsetters claimed that “adding a bit of salt to your inexpensive brew will enhance the flavour” and described how “some people add salt to certain beers, like sours or IPAs, to enhance the fruity notes and reduce the bitterness” and suggested that “for those ‘cheaper’ beers, it’s supposed to make the brew taste a bit more highbrow”. The report emphasised how “Texans take beer salt so seriously” and said that drinkers were “likely to find lots of flavoured beer salt options when you want to crack open a cold one”.

Taverns when I was a lad in Halifax, Nova Scotia in the 1980s had shakers of salt on the tables. It was an old guy thing even back then, used by the hard cases in the back corners, but soon a little rattle of the shaker was a habit at the Seahorse or the Lower Deck when the unpasturized generic draft was a little off. Definitely done at the Midtown.

More information has been released on experimentation with the hotest new brewing grain in town, fonio. Interesting news even if this was a rather silly statement from Carlsberg director of brewing science and technology Zoran Gojkovic apparently (but I hope incorrectly) recalling a past discussion with Garrett Oliver:

“The internet says it is millet, but there are lots of millet grains and this one comes from Africa. But, back then, I misunderstood was what it really was all about. If someone tells you something is beef, but really it is like a variety, like wagyu steak, then it can be more easily understood. What I didn’t know was that fonio, compared to other kinds of millet, is like the wagyu steak of grains. Millet, as a cereal could be quite boring, but this in its pure formula is not boring. It is elegant.”

I’m more comfortable with it being the warp drive of millets – but only because that is obviously even more silly. Or is it the warp drives of wagyu? Or the wagyu of warp? That’s the fonio beer name I want to see: Wagyu of Warp!

And, speaking of silly, we have yet another study that resulted from the study of studies that studied booze and, again, it has been determined that there has been a lack of studiouness about that J-Curve fibbery:

…a new analysis challenges the thinking and blames the rosy message on flawed research that compares drinkers with people who are sick and sober. Scientists in Canada delved into 107 published studies on people’s drinking habits and how long they lived. In most cases, they found that drinkers were compared with people who abstained or consumed very little alcohol, without taking into account that some had cut down or quit through ill health. The finding means that amid the abstainers and occasional drinkers are a significant number of sick people, bringing the group’s average health down, and making light to moderate drinkers look better off in comparison.

I mentioned how dodgy the concept was at least as far back in 2018 but this newer focus on the problem of including “people who had stopped or cut down their drinking for health reasons in the comparison group” is critical. Note: not drinking because you are sick is different that being sick due to not drinking.

Note too: “golloping beer with zest” was a thing. Gary explains.

In Pellicle, David Jesuason wrote about one of the the tougher aspects, the mental health implications, that can go along with setting out to run a small brewery. This is how he set the scene at McColl’s Brewery of Evenwood, County Durham before help arrived:

“I came here thinking all I have to do is 150 casks a week and it didn’t happen,” Danny says. “Because I did it [before] I thought I was capable of doing it and not even knowing it was the wrong [thing to do] as well.” Danny’s mental health suffered because there was no long-term strategy, just day-to-day drudgery. Graft instead of focus. “I couldn’t make good decisions,” he tells me. He was running the entire operation by himself: brewing, selling and even delivering the beer to customers. It was far too much to take on, his mental health suffered and Gemma, his wife, became worried about him having suffered from depression herself.

That piece reminded me of the life of a farmer, alone with their business subject to the whims of nature and the trade. Should brewing trade associations provide mental health support programs similar to those being set up for agriculture?

Also on the ag beat, Stan has given us something to chew on with his July 2024 edition of Hop Queries, Vol. 8, No. 3 for those who are trying to collect a full set. He mentions that harvest time has begun, triggering images of golden light on hedgerow graced horse plowed scenes, perhaps mixing with Beethoven’s 6th wafting quietly in from somewhere… then – WHAMMO – the invasion of the lab-coated eggheads begins:

Scientists at Sapporo in Japan used headband sensors to measure the brainwaves of participants… The subjects reported feeling relaxed by the aromas of linalool and geraniol because they provided floral and green impressions… An increasing tendency in the rhythm regularities of the frequency fluctuations of the right frontal alpha-waves while drinking a European pilsner-type beer with aromas characterized by hops. 

HEADBAND SENSORS!!! And, for the double, Stan pointed to this number crunching post from Phil Cook on Monday but (even though I may risk breaking an unwritten weekly updating rule) I want to unpack this point in more detail – one key difference between Australian and other beer judging events:

Because there’s a list of every beer entered, not just those that win medals, we can calculate some ‘batting averages’ to better compare how each brewery fared. So, I’ve worked out each entrant’s medal percentage (MPC: how many of their beers won a medal, of any kind) and their points per entry (PPE: adding 3 for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze, then dividing by number of entries submitted). Bigger numbers are better in both cases; overall about 74% of beers entered earned a medal,2 and if your PPE was 1.00 or higher your brewery was in the top half of the competition. 

This would be a huge step towards making the results of these events more meaningful that those of the moveable buffet of the international circle of they who judge. Being able to figure out brewery top rankings as well as those surprising disappointments would be a great benefit to consumers. But who in beer puts the buyer first?

Perhaps connected, Jeff shared his thoughts on the financial perils of being a freelancer writing about the brewing trade without separate income:

Writing is a terrible way to make a living. It’s why people end up going into marketing. You could spend your days scrambling after $600 articles, or you could get a job for $60k with benefits. This is why we bleed great writers, who take their services to companies who will pay what their work is worth. It’s not just that the money’s bad—it’s also hard to get. If you could somehow stack up your articles and get a couple in every week, you could make a decent living, maybe fifty, sixty grand a year before taxes… Trying to pitch stories, and then research, report, and write a hundred of them in a year? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but again, you’d be barely making more than working at McDonald’s if you somehow enjoyed that level of “success,” which perhaps 2-3% of working freelancers enjoy.

The best line was near the end: “If you have any other choice, don’t write.” What he means (of course… or rather I hope!) is don’t write for money but this isn’t news.* Still… write. Writing a free, joyful and easy experience of expression. Scribble, jot, draft, forget and rediscover – and, yes, even submit. Just don’t think you’re going to be buying the kiddies shoes with the income.

Joyful, too, is Dave “Still No Relation” Bailey’s cartooning, also in Pellicle, which this month explored the notion of perfection.  And if you want an example of writing for joy, ATJ has been working on one particular theme quite a bit over at his Substack, that being ATJ sitting in a pub and looking at the details of the scene around him. Second or third time I read one of his I thought “hmm…now, that sounds familiar” BUT as this week’s edition testifies its his process being worked out before our eyes:

My eye was caught by a faded photo of the pub, sometime before World War I. Outside it, there stood a line of long dead regulars, mainly men, standing still, a couple smiling, the rest sombre and holding themselves stiffly as if on parade, which several years later many of them would be, ready to march off to war. A long ago day, the sun shining maybe, though given the quality of the photo it was hard to say. Bowler hats, cloth caps, none of them bareheaded for that was not how they presented themselves to the world then. I’d like to think that once the photographer finished, off the men went into the pub, glasses of ale and cider purchased and amid the hubbub there would have been little time for reflection.

Sharp stuff. And it sure beats the sort of cash-focused writing that has recently given us such gems as “deepest echelons of the industry” and “with demand being high, the category has continued to thrive, despite the sector struggling” and the astoundingly poorly thought out alleged expression of expertise “Liquids within the same ‘competitive set’ are not distinctive from one another as liquids.” Bring on the robots of A.I.! Viva Robots!!

No, I didn’t mean that. There are no robots of joy. It’s actually all around us already now if you look for joy. We see it in a long wandering piece about wandering at length. And we also see it at home as when Rachel Hendry in her emailed newsletter J’Adore Le Plonk shared some thoughts on the role and value of the leftover bottle of wine there in the kitchen that was opened a few days ago… and may have lost whatever finesse it had:

Service work should neither be seen nor paid, tends to be the general consensus and when my wine joins me in a position of domestic work I attach the same framework to it. Why add this beautiful, evocative glass of wine to my dish when I can reach for something leftover, or looked down on, fuck it, why not just add water instead? The recipe provides a role for a wine that is past its best, that may otherwise be retired down the drain and into the bin. It doesn’t, however, mean the wine isn’t important. Wine has many roles in our lives and contributor in the kitchen can be one of them. As I work through my hesitation and add a splash of my wine to the courgettes slowly melting into butter I notice I have not lost anything in the process. The wine is still mine to enjoy, I have placed value on an ingredient as I would like to be valued myself and the meal tastes better for it.

And I should have mentioned that Katie wrote a few weeks ago about trying Italian wines with any sorts of unexpected flavours to see what works for you. My tip? Chianti with roast turkey. It can have a swell cranberry vibe going on. Try a turkey and blue cheese sandwich with slices of pear and a cold glass of Chianti. Could sound weird but it works. Not this weird, mind you, but there that gets a lot going on.

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

*My full sympathies (though I might have used the phrase “good writers” to convey a sense of realism.) I wrote this in an email to Max, now eleven years ago: “It is tough. There is no money in beer writing so if that is all you have to go on… I have met with pro writers over beer and always find them bagged out and drained from the nights of PR work in pubs to keep the wolf from the door. I complained once somewhere about how craft brewers should be supporting good beer writers directly without expectation of return and this was met with howls – even from writers. Earn your way as a freelancer, said the freelancers. Suck it up and take the junkets, said those on the junkets.” Is that the macho forehead + wall thinking part of the freelancing problem?
**This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,483) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

Fine… The Dog Days Of Summer Beery News Notes Have Begun

Is it me? It’s not you… is it? No, it’s beer. When beer sales peak, the news gets a bit sleepy or at least played out as expected. LCBO strike got settled. Beer in Canada is still expensive. Biden stepped aside. The French fascists were humilated… again. Sure, the back channel comments about the winding up of GBH continue to flow in – but nothing I would share to you lot. Some write for pay. Me, I write for gossip. I think Martin captured the zeitgeist of the week perfectly with this image above from his trip to take in the delights of the Church of St Mary Magdalene in Yarm.

Which leads to the question of the week, as posed by Stan on Monday when he responded to my comment last week that I think of him as my ever absent desk editor:

I am embarrassed, flattered, and a little surprised (perhaps skeptical) by the idea he does the sifting for me. The takeaway, to his credit, is a reminder of something all writers should remember: who the heck they think they are writing for.

Who or what do you write for? The reader? The commissioning editor? The next commissioning editor? The bills? The long dead relative who told you that you’d never amount to anything? I joke about things but I really have only been writing for myself for years. The beer trade is a benign sideshow that lets me explore ideas in an innocuous way. Ideas about life, business, quality, ethics… the whole shebang. It’s all right there. By the way, did you know a shebang was a rough hut of the Civil War era or a frontier settler? Me neither. One has to be careful about certain words.

Speaking of words, Jordan was out there recently wandering lonely as a cloud, not hunting out daffodils so much as dandelions to do some unpacking, dissecting and extractions to ‘splain a thing or two:

Dandelion has GLVs (hexenol), but that is to be expected since it has green leaves. It’s complex in that the different parts of the plant have their own properties. Harold McGee refers to the component smells as “light, fresh, and watery,” but we’re thinking about the entirety of the palate and not just the aroma. In terms of aroma, we have some of the same makeup as clover. Phenylethanol and benzaldehyde. There’s also Nerolidol, which is slightly woody and barky, which makes sense when you think of the rigidity of the stem. When the stem breaks, the dandelion’s defense method is to secrete latex, which is found mostly in the root system of the plant. The latex is not only bitter, but alkaloid, and polyphenolic. If you pick a dandelion to hold under someone’s chin, you’re going to get aroma from both the flower and the stem.

Yes, yes… outside of the Greater Toronto Area kids used buttercups to hold to a chins. But the point is made. There is science right there. Smelly tasty  science. Yes, there. And there as well…. ‘s’tru’. Even if “…phenylethanol and benzaldehyde… There’s also Nerolidol… “ sounds like a particularly challenging point in a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto.

Before the doors close, GBH published an interesting story by  Yolanda Evans on the practice of giving “libation” globally and also particularly in Black American culture:

“I think hip-hop just popularized [libations] in a way where we were given the language to talk about the celebrations of life that maybe we didn’t have before,” says Gates. “It’s not specific to a particular generation—hip-hop only happened 50 years ago, while we’ve been in this country for centuries,” she adds. In some ways, the genre transformed the ritual from a private and personal thing to an act so popular it eventually became removed from its roots—eventually, people everywhere, and especially in the African-American community, would pour one out for their homies without knowing they’re performing an old boozy ritual with roots that go back several thousands of years.

The piece expands much on the 2015 article in VinePair and, for me, it’s an interesting exploration a familiar thing because we Highland Scots do it, too. But it’s part of what my Reverend father would call the greater  “heedrum hodrum” aka the pre-Christian rituals that hang on. But in that context it’s not so much about remembrance as thinning the ether between here and there, now and then. Want to have a moment with Grannie to share a thought? Pour a little of the good stuff on the ground.

Tasting note of the week: “…distressingly grey…”

Speaking of VinePair, David Jesudason wrote an interesting piece for that fine journal in which his powers are on full display. I love how he places himself in stories, rejecting that more formulaic approach that we suffer along with too often. Consider this passage:

He’s all for mixing Guinness when done well but prefers to use bottled Guinness over widget beer cans or draft kegs in pubs for logistic reasons, such as lower carbonation. “Bottled Guinness has a different bite, of course,” he adds. When I press-gang Gaurav Khanna, the publican at the desi pub Gladstone in south London, into mixing numerous Guinness with soft drinks, he at first struggles with wastage caused by the stout’s carbonation. After a few pints mixed with Irn-Bru and some Gonsters, though, he nailed it. (At the end of the session we had to negotiate hard over my tab because we lost count of the amount of Guinness that was “tasted,” drunk or discarded.)

But no mention of stout and port, 2012’s sensation. Why?

News out of the UK related to the affirmation of the new government’s intention to impliment its predecessor’s public venue protection standards in Martyn’s law. Sarah Neish in The Drinks Business shared the likely implications for pubs and other parts of the UK hospitality industry:

… premises are unlikely to be expected to undertake physical alterations or fork out for additional equipment… measures are expected to include: Evacuation – how to get people out of the building; Invacuation – how to bring people into the premises to keep them safe or how to move them to safe parts of the building; Lockdown – how to secure the premises against attackers, e.g. locking doors, closing shutters and using barriers to prevent access; and Communication – how to alert staff and customers, and move people away from danger. “Additionally staff will need to understand these measures sufficiently to carry them out if needed,” Grimsey tells db, which suggests there will need to be an element of staff training for front-of-house employees of Standard Tier venues.

Sensible stuff. These are different times. Speak of these times, Katie wrote an explanation of “underconsumption core” this week in her newsletter The Gulp, a concept which may explain my dedicate use of a dull manual rotary lawnmower:

Underconsumption core exists because even the most exuberant of haulfluencers are starting to feel the constrictions of what is basically a national money shortage. When Broccoli is £1.20 a head in Lidl (one pound twenty pence!! for broccoli!!), there are many other things that have to get cut from our monthly budgets. Nights out become more infrequent. Takeaways become frozen pizzas. Beer turns into slabs of whatever tinnies are on offer at Tesco. We do what we can to keep ourselves afloat when the weekly shop increases by more than 20% over a year.

Reality. It may be a variation on another thing – the return to basic beer. Don’t tell Forbes, by the way, which published a piece by one of the 198,349 beer columnists (no, not AI generated at all, no way) they seem to have on the payroll that offered this astounding statement:

Researchers highlighted the increasing popularity of craft beer and the emergence of more independent breweries, reflecting evolving consumer preferences, especially among younger consumers of legal drinking age in local markets. These breweries are often at the forefront of innovation, offering more flavors and styles that appeal particularly to millennials and Generation Z.

Right. Back on planet Earth, when someone not really at the core of a scene like the former style director of Esquire, Charlie Teasdale, takes the time to give craft beer a mocking kick it is starting to feel like the proper response is, what… pity?*

… like supporting a football team through a massive, slightly grubby commercial takeover, I stayed the course. I never wavered in my dedication to stupidly named pale ales and unorthodox beers. Even a jug of pseudo-craft – a beer brewed by a corporate outfit but marketed as a local endeavour – was better than, say, a Moretti or a Heineken. They were for drinkers, and I was a gourmand.

VinePair may well have gone next level… again, joining this latest pile-on according to Maggie Hennessy. And whereas Mr. Teasdale has moved back to popular lagers, Ms. H is touting something called “lifestyle” beer but mainly to beat the word “hipster” wtith a very big stick… over and over.** Strike me as all a bit of excessively early liminal labeling syndrome. Perhaps best to leave this phenomenon alone until it all settles down a bit and clarifies. By contrast, Courtney Iseman slides a more deftly phased zing in the larger context of her very comprehnensive survey of the use of rice by better brewers:

That industry maturation, and the decreased pressures of toxic fandom—no one’s boycotting your brewery anymore if you sell shares to a corporate overlord, nor if you put rice in your beer—has allowed craft brewers more freedom to find a place for the grain.

Toxic fandom! We are now a long way from the “beer community” fibbery. [Note: as stated in the story, it was the craft brewers were the ones who shit on rice but now it’s us beer buyers who were being toxic for taking up the brewers’s PR (touted by beer writers) as the great cause.] Ron don’t care. Ron is spending much of the month with family in South America. He is sending in posts from the field that look like he’s tied up the radio operator and highjacked a distant railway station deep inland, relying on only direct current and Morse Code to send out terse missives like this one entitled “Loving Santiago“:

The kids, too. We get to ride the metro everywhere. They drink beer, I drink pisco sour. We get to shiver together in the unheated pubs. It’s like being back in the 1970s. But in a good way. Montevideo tomorrow.

That’s the whole post? So unRon, Ron is being. Where the hell are the breakfast buffet photos, Ron?!?!?!

Speaking of a buffet, Rachel Hendry has studied the world of (call them what you will) thin bits of potato fried in oil and shared the extensive results in Pellicle this week. I particularly like the polite “don’t be an arsehole” notice to readers:

I have then chosen ten styles and flavours to explore within each section, with more precise pairings given as examples for each. I have defined crisps as a potato or potato adjacent snack that tends to be found behind the bar or in the crisp aisles of a shop, and I have defined beer styles as you might see indicated on the list displayed in a pub or taproom. There is only so much one woman can cover and I have forgiven myself for the detail and genres missed. I trust you to have the grace to forgive me, too.

And… when did PBR become hipster cool? I was interested for what I consider pre-hipster reasons in 2006. This 2014 HuffPost article traces the story… with graphs!

…something changed, and PBR was suddenly the hipster’s choice at bars and barbecues everywhere. Sales jumped by 20.3 percent in 2009 and continued to rise steadily over the next few years, according to Beer Marketer’s Insights. By 2013, Americans drank more than 90 million gallons of PBR, according to data from Euromonitor, which is nearly 200 percent more than they did in 2004.

“Rise Steadily” is one of those hints that the tipping point people can just remain seated.

Fine. That is it. And with that this and those other thats too … now we roll the credits… well, the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections.** Want to keep up with the news before next Thursday? Check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan on the job each and every Monday. Elsewhere go look at then listen to Lew’s podcast. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly soon celebrating a 10th anniversary… or really a 9 1/2th given the timeline . And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a few podcasts… but some may be losing steam… until… Lew’s interview! And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water… is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that but is writing for 47 readers over there. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link! Errr… nope, it is gone again.

*h/t The Tand.
**Stan gave sound advice (see what I did there?): “I think the relationship, if there is one, between hip and hipster has me confused. Were the bike messengers who drank PBR hip, hipsters, or something else? What PBR itself ever hip?“
***This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (132) rising up to maybe… probably… pass Mastodon (932) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,485) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear. 

The “Remember Before We Went Through The Looking Glass?” Edition Of Your Beery News Notes

Remember a month ago? Before “the” debate? Before France went right then went left faster than Gretzky ever could? Before Britain finally ditched the Tories? Before some dumb kid decided to murder Trump and just murdered someone’s Dad? Remember before everything went sideways? Well, except for England losing in fitba… again. Thank God somethings never change. Like bees. Bees don’t care. As I witnessed the other day in the zucchini patch. They just undertake some sort of death battle for pollen from time to time, mindlessly fighting and stinging each other for survival. Isn’t nature wonderful.

First up, Pete Brown was provided a number of bolts of broadcloth to set out his thoughts on the state of CAMRA this week in The Times. It is an excellent piece and even a bit of an artifact in terms of the rare access to the pulpit. I particularly like this paragraph that goes to the heart of the organization:

And Camra saved that culture in a uniquely British way. Whatever else cask ale is, to thousands of campaigners and volunteers it’s a hobby. And as George Orwell once observed, we are a nation of hobbyists — “of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans”. Camra is an organisation of amateurs and enthusiasts. Some are eccentric, some are pub bores, some are cliquey. But they always turn up. Others are charismatic, engaging and keen to welcome anyone who might be persuaded to share their interests. Everyone I speak to inside the organisation describes Camra as a family. If they’re frustrated with it, for most, it’s the type of frustration you feel for an annoying sibling who you will defend to the death.

In North America someone might have chosen the phrase “grassroot” but remember those roots in that conception stay in the dark serving the showy fronds above. Not so in the image Pete paints. For him, it’s an organization for people. Not “The People” – just people. All sorts of people. Great point.

Speaking of a sort of people, The Beer Nut wrote about the gulf between hype and quality. Let me spoil his conclusion without revealing the subjects of his study:

If the road through hype leads to refined and high quality beers like (most of) this lot, then perhaps it’s tolerable. And I’m glad that both of these breweries are still turning out great stuff even when their praises are no longer being sung hourly on social media.

Speaking of praises not being sung, Jordan updated the news on Ontario’s LCBO workers strike on his periodically irregular update on the provincial scene adding an interesting observation to the news shared last week of grocers’ disinterest in the new deal:

This might not go quite as well as the premier seems to think. Under the new plan, grocery stores are staying away in droves because they don’t want to have to deal with returns of bottles and cans. The margin they make on beer and wine sales would be eaten away by it. Probably, the margin they make is eaten away by planogramming. Look at the picture above from a midtown Toronto Loblaws from day four of the strike. They’re using the beer fridge for margarine and the selection is down to about five items. It wouldn’t surprise me if the number of grocery retailers actually drops this year.

Butter and margarine in the beer aisle, folks. Butter and margarine. But little wine in some spots. And a rollout by the government that appears to be being rewritten day by day.

BREAKING NEWS FROM SCOTLAND: “WHIT? No Vitamin T???”

Jeff had a portrait of Czech polotmavý published in Craft Beer & Brewing (a style of beer I have enjoyed after ordering a mixed two-four to be delivered from Godspeed) and pointed out a bit of a puzzle in the chronology:

… to connect the dots from märzen, granát, or Vienna lager—another style that some have cited as a precursor—to polotmavý, you have to skip decades in the historical record. When I ask Czech brewers and experts where (and when) polotmavý came from, I get something like a collective shrug. More than a century ago, Bohemians were making amber lagers—and a few decades ago, they were making polotmavý. In between, no one seems to know what happened.

I wish the crack team at CB+B avoided concepts like “mysteries” which is the neighbour of “magical” even if in this case it does not relate to that most tedious of applications – the brewing science mystery. Those claims put the “moron” back in “oyxmoron.” But here it is different. Here there is a gap in the records. A conundrum perhaps. Yes, a conumdrum mixed with an interlude of Soviet authoritarianism.  Which does have that hint of “The Third Man” so… fine. A mystery. Yet, as Evan noted in 2009, Ron had previously noted* that polotmavý were an amber lager “roughly in the Vienna style” and that:

Vienna lagers aren’t dead: they’ve just moved over the border. No country produces such a range of amber (polotmavé pivo) and dark lagers (tmavé pivo) as the Czech Republic. I can’t quite understand why no-one has twigged this yet.

Well, we’ve twigged now, Ron! I have it delivered. And… I might point out… they didn’t move over the border so much as the borders moved around them. Maps redrawn and all that. Did I ever mention that as a lad, when visting Grannie, I stayed in a small hotel run by friends of the family and had breakfast every morning with an older gent who, in the First World War, had fought the Austrio-Hungarian navy in the Adriatic? I have? Oh. Nevermind.

Pellicle‘s feature this week is by Fred Garratt-Stanley and is about the loss of pool tables in London’s pubs. I love me a pub game and have an entire category of posts dedicated to the concept… which I haven’t updated since 2011… no, 2017! Anyway, I’ve spent a pleasant afternoon playing pool in a London pub so anyone who is rooting for that has my vote. What is to blame for the loss? Money:

Costs vary depending on whether pubs opt for bog-standard tables or high-end ones more suited to league competitions. At Ivor Thomas, it’s £10 a week plus VAT for the former and £20 for the latter, but this is cheaper than most, with some pubs reportedly paying over £20 a week.  A week’s fee can be recouped in one busy evening, while plenty of extra cash is accumulated from drinks sales. But an increased emphasis on food in many pubs has changed the landscape. Writing for the Financial Times Jimmy McIntosh reports that, according to the British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA), “from March 2022 to March 2023, the number of wet-leds declined by 3.1 per cent, as opposed to food-focused taverns, whose number dwindled by 2.2 per cent.” 

Regular reader and archaeologist Merryn Dineley pointed us towards a very interesting news related to another sort of food stuff storage.  Based on the premise that “beer brewing is difficult to identify in the archaeological record” the authors explain how residues of beerstone as found in clay pot can be used. The study’s abstract as published in the Journal of Archaeological Science concludes:

In comparison to ungerminated and germinated barley grains, we find that beerstone preserves only a subset of the barley proteome, with the residue being more reflective of the final brewing product than of earlier brewing steps such as malting. Overall, we demonstrate that beerstone has potential to entrap and preserve proteins reflective of the beer-making process and identify proteins that we might anticipate in future archaeological analyses.

Got that? Good. Speaking of good, at the end of last week we heard from Will Hawks and his London Beer City project. Not a newsletter. A project. In this edition, he wondered which pub he should hit before an AC/DC concert and in doing so paints a picture of the jumbly sort of pub I’d much prefer over most of those pub-porny protraits all those other folk write about:

You go to De Hems, Soho’s Dutch-ish pub, because it’s recently been renovated and it’s really close to somewhere else you want to go (of which more later).  At 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon it’s busy-ish, mostly with men in pre-Covid business wear: ill-fitting suits, no ties, a smattering of skinny-fit v-neck jumpers. Most of them will not see 45 again. There’s a big TV on in the corner – it’s showing the Tour de France, where Mark Cavendish is about to win a record 35th stage – and there are high tables (boo hiss) around the front section of the bar… the floor is dark wood and the ceiling a sort of dried-blood colour that looks like it’s been there a while. There’s a lot of ageing beer memorabilia on the walls, and some Dutch stuff too, including a Holland football shirt in the corner.

Sweet! Finally, Boak and Bailey wrote in their monthly Substack newsletter about the state of beer writing. I won’t repeat what’s been said but I would point out one thing. “Beer writing” is a thing that only exists in a small fish bowl. ATJ rejects the term for himself. He is a writer (and on form this week, too). So (watch me taking perhaps a mid-sized logical leap) when B+B state “there are too many really good beer writers, and simply not enough outlets for their work” I don’t think I can agree. Or maybe I do. If they mean there are “too many really good writers writing about beer” I have to disagree. Show the me the novels, the essays in a range of periodicals, the CVs with a wide range of seriously and well received writing. not the filler. Some qualify. Others don’t. But if they mean “many really good beer writers” we have to ask ourselves this: what is this narrower thing, the “beer writer“? The phrase has always reminded me of that chestnut “craft beer community” and the circle of affirmation that is so unlike the messy complicated and increasingly inclusive CAMRA Pete describes above. The question then moves to the even narrower phrase “professional beer writers” which they define as those trying to pay a mortgage from income. By that standard, all people who are paid are “professionals.” Which leads one to other words. One commentator responding to social media outreach wrote them about one particular word:

I was a freelance journalist for several years. I guess fundamentally I don’t really think of beer journalism as A Thing, as opposed to “that blogger I used to read, only now he’s got a byline, good luck to him I guess”.

“Top Ten Beers For Summer” journalism anyone? (“It goes with salad!” Amazeballs.) We also see “expert” a bit too generously applied in a similar fashion, too,** even though we know there are some actual experts each in their specific areas related to some corner of the wide world of brewing. What do we take from all this? It is possible that scribblers’ personal dreams of an achievable goal got ahead of actual capability and capacity? Does that cause unfair marketplace where those who are established and have an “in” are heard while others (the often more interesting) are left out? I wonder. There’s plenty of good and plenty of not good. I sift. See, me? I read about beer every week. For this here website. For you. Well, for Stan. You others, too, but between you and me I think of Stan as the managing editor who is oddly never seems to be there at the desk, still not back from lunch who, once in a while, still drops off a sticky note.***

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

*Ron’s source code says the page was written 2004 to 2010.
**Is there a fine line? Consider this observation from  wine writer, Jason Wilson: “I remember arriving at the grand tasting in Montalcino for the release of the 2014 Brunellos. Early grumbling had already labeled 2014 as “challenging,” which is the wine world’s euphemism for “shitty.” We were to taste all day, through dozens of wines, at our own pace. I arrived at the event about an hour after the doors opened and sat down. Before I had even taken a sip, or written a note, an American wine writer I knew waved, came over and, by way of greeting, said, “Ah, I can’t believe you came all the way over here to taste the 2014s. They’re shit.” Apparently, he’d already tasted more than 100 wines in the previous hour, and already rendered his judgment. I don’t know what he did with the rest of his work day.“
***Me – “a high-involvement reader“!?! Certainly gave me airs.
****This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,483) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear. 

Your Sodden And Soaked Mid-July 2024 Mid-Tropical Storm Beryl Beery News Notes

OK, a busy week. Away on the weekend for the rugby, Canada v. Scotland in Ottawa. Photo by me. Scotland won. I wore blue. Then covering for others at the office. Others won. I was blue. So… early in the week I was thinking that this week’s update may be a short one. Or I might just make some stuff up. Then… Beryl came a’callin’. Tropical Storm  Beryl that is. Formerly Hurrican B. I won’t really know if the tomatoes survived until after this here update hits the presses. I may have even scheduled this early for publication, typos and all, just to be on the safe side of the power grid. Wouldn’t want to leave The Beer Nut with nothing to read. That’d be bad.

What else is going on? Big news hereabouts is the strike at the government store, the LCBO. Here is a handy primer on some of the main issues. The Premier is out there on his intern’s social media feeds telling people to buy local, buy elsewhere while the strike goes on. Gary, being the anarchist, wants to burn the whole place down. Robin, being the authoritarian, reads everyone their rights. Jordan broke out some of his excel sheetery, gave it all a good shake and shared a few resulting thoughts:

The LCBO’s dividend to the Ontario government as a crown corporation is up 770 million dollars since 2015 and it is because they have repatriated funds that were going to foreign owned brewers through The Beer Store chain. That 770 million dollars represents 13.3% market share. Back of the napkin math says that if The Beer Store gets run out of town, there’s 2.39 billion dollars up for grabs annually, and increasing rapidly due to inflation… Grocery and Convenience are likely to continue being wholesaled by the LCBO, which means there are going to be a lot of warehousing positions that need staffing. A lot of logistics. A lot of administrative positions. If you let the approximately 2.39 billion that’s about to shift direction go without a fight go, you’d be crazy.

See, in conservative Ontario, statist socialism is incredibly good business. See? Similarly, there was a bit of handbaggery in the UK over “socialist member owned  grocery chain” The Co-operative* when they put out an ad recommending that people shop for their beer at their stores ahead of some sort of sporting event. The Campaign for Pubs, clearly a business oriented front, even issued a press release as illustrated to the right.  Le Protz exemplified the capitalist outrage:

If you can’t make it to the pub to watch the England match, please don’t buy beer from @coopuk in response to their anti-pub #EURO2024.

It strikes me a odd that a business is not able to advertise its own wares without striking terror in the hearts of another set of businesses. It seems odder that Mr. Protz is backing the right wing of the discussion over the left one. Me? When I drink, I drink at home more than in pubs. Old Mudgie seems to share my views:

…this response comes across as distinctly thin-skinned and precious. Pubs are commercial businesses, not sacred institutions, and have no right to be shielded from the rough-and-tumble of competition… The venues that benefit most from the football will tend to be knocked-through drinking barns where most of the customers are on Stella or Madri, not chocolate-box locals or trendy craft bars, many of which won’t even show it in the first place… Being referred to in your competitors’ advertising is generally regarded as a sign of strength rather than weakness, as pointed out by licensee Joe Buckley, who took the ad as a compliment to the pub sector.

Hmm… What would Mr. Protz think of one medical professional’s advice on drinking during these summer heatwaves, as reported in The Daily Star:

But did you know it can also affect you or your partner’s ability to perform in the bedroom? When dehydrated, your body reacts by producing less red blood cells and plasma needed for proper blood flow. It also produces increased levels of a hormone called angiotensin to compensate for low fluid levels, meaning your blood vessels will narrow to conserve fluid, reducing the amount of blood able to reach the penis, causing issues getting or maintaining an erection. Consider limiting your caffeine and alcohol intake as these can have diuretic effects.

Perhaps reading those sorts of reports, big brewer Carlsberg announced plans to move in a decidedly less boozy direction, according to The Independent:

Brewing giant Carlsberg has agreed a huge £3.3 billion deal to buy Robinsons squash maker Britvic. The UK soft drinks firm, which also makes J2O and Tango, told shareholders on Monday morning it will recommend the latest deal – which is valued at £4.1 billion when debts are taken into account – after rejecting a previous £3.1 billion offer. Carlsberg will pay 1,315p per share to Britvic investors under the deal. Britvic also holds an exclusive licence with US partner PepsiCo to make and sell brands such as Pepsi, 7up and Lipton iced tea in the UK.

Speaking of which, here is a stat that I can’t wait for US craft beer spokespeople to spin. Have a look at this graph and then read the following as published in Craft Brewing Business:

…the BPI is a forward-looking indicator measuring expected demand from beer distributors — one month forward. A reading greater than 50 indicates the segment is expanding, while a reading below 50 indicates the segment is contracting. The craft index for June 2024 was 27. Blah. The BPI’s total beer index of 58 marked the highest June reading since 2021, as well as the fourth straight month in expansion (>50) territory.

Craft = Blah. That’s not good. It was also a drop to the 27 Blah Zone from 2023’s Ho Hum of 38. Which is all sorts of yikes.

Neither blah or yikes is the tale told by Isabelle O’Carroll in Pellicle this week of a Balkan pastry, the Burek:

At its core a burek is a yufka (or phyllo pastry) pie, often filled with an egg and cheese mixture, (but sometimes vegetables or meat) and usually (but not always) rolled into a spiral before baking. Take a glancing look at the AskBalkans subReddit and you’ll get an idea of the roiling debates on the proper name and correct filling for bureks. “Go to Bosnia and ask for a burek with cheese, suddenly you’re waking up in the ER with multiple life-threatening wounds, I don’t think we even agree on burek,” one Redditor said. “You said a pita is a burek, which is not true unless you’re okay with calling all pitas bureks, which means you’d call maslenice, mantije, and other meals with jufka bureks, too! Which you said you don’t. It’s okay to just admit you’re wrong, you know?”

Glad we cleared that up! Speaking of science, we read this report that came out this week and see this is the summary in the abstract presented by the journal:

Moderate chronic consumption of IPA beer and hops infusion showed antigenotoxic effects in mice but no antimutagenic action.

Pretty sure that does not equal “[d]rinking IPAs in moderation has shown it does not have an adverse effect on health” very much at all. Seems to me the more likely route to something that does not seem to have an adverse health effect (with all due respect to all neo-boozy-Babbits dreaming of the unthinking life) is not drinking alcohol. Which means NA beer. There’s a lot of money apparently in selling nothing. Yet, if that nada produces nuttin’… why keep it from the kids?

Since these beverages contain virtually no alcohol, they can largely be sold to anyone, anywhere; they’re stocked on grocery and convenience store shelves around the country, and purchasable online. But Collins doesn’t sell to anybody under 18 years old at this store, and he checks ID’s to enforce that rule. “When there’s no minimum age, can a nine-year old come into your store and buy a non-alcoholic Corona? For me, I don’t want that perception,” Collins says. Collins set his own age limit, and he’s free to set it however he wants because in Maryland — as in the majority of states — there are no state age restrictions on who can buy adult non-alcoholic beverages.

Really? That’s odd. I would not buy them for my kids – if I still had little kids – because they are slightly insanely expensive! Odd. And Katie in an abbreviated edition of The Gulp asked another  very odd question:

Why do men order default drinks for the ir female partners without asking them what they’d like?

I’d get shot if I did that!  My mother would have shot my father if he did that – and don’t even start about Grannie! Or Great-Grannie for that matter! I am and come from a long line of men who would be dead if, you know, they weren’t dead already.

Speaking of socialists, did you hear that Keir Starmer and the Labour party gave the Tories the boot in the UK? Always nice when the Tories get the boot somewhere. He is by reports a pub lad. The Spirits Business, not a journal for professional clairvoyants, gave its thoughts on the wish list of policies which may now roll out for the British booze trade, including this from Mark Kent, chief executive of the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA):

“During the rest of 2024, there will be opportunities to support Scotch in the first budget of the new Parliament, secure a trade deal with India which will reduce tariffs on Scotch whisky in this key market, and work closely with the industry as we continue on our journey towards net zero.” He added that the organisation looks forward to working with the MPs to “ensure that Scotch whisky is at the heart of the central mission of the next five years – growth and economic renewal”.

Not correcting the imbalanced non-dom taxation, not strengthening national defence, not boosting public education or restoring health services… whisky.

Before, as discussed below, the doors close, ATJ got in one last post at GBH which refreshingly is about hunting out good beer and some sort of perversity in Belgium:

Perversely, in the land where Lambic, gueuze, and Trappist ales are heralded and celebrated, lager is dominant. However, these beers might be popular, but they are often seen by connoisseurs as one-dimensional and simply designed to quench thirst as well as being easy on the pocket. Most of these beers have as much in common with the Ur-lagers of central Europe as a kangaroo has with a chicken—they both have two legs, but that’s it. This is why Brasserie de la Mule, led by its young founder and head brewer Joel Galy, is unique, especially as it has only been in existence for three years.

And finally, Good Beer Hunting has suspended operations with a florish offered by way of announcement:

We have some ideas for what the future of Good Beer Hunting might look like—and soon I’ll be working on that vision with the counsel of my colleagues to see where it takes us. But the earliest vision is so drastically different than what GBH currently is, that the only way to get to the other side is to make a clean break. We’ve got to clear out the cache. We’ve got to quiet everything down for a bit and see what it all sounds like on the other side of that silence. We’re shutting down our various content streams—the podcast, the website, social—ending a sort of always-on feed of content that’s been, for many of us writers, editors, and artists, our life’s work. And for most of us, our best work.

Quite so. And that makes sense despite the lamentations of the writing circle. For some time, as careful readers will know, I have noticed** that the focus had shifted as the frequency of posts decreased. Sightlines continues under separate URL but with little seemingly on offer given the sparce front window. And the business model has had a heavy burn rate. Yup, a new title and framing as perhaps a broader audience travel and lifestyle magazine would fit better with the pieces which have been the mainstay of GBH for some time. As noted above, these are not the days to invest in whatever craft has become so any retooling is the wisest approach.***

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

*Great-grandpa apparently refused to eat anything bought from anywhere but The Co-op.
**Perhaps after others, I’ve always remembered this tweet from Matty from 2018: “…for a short while now I have felt my own ambitions do not align with that of GBH, and as such I have chosen to go in my own direction…” which was the beginning of Pellicle in a way.
***Conversely, following through on the comment sent to contributors might not be wise: “We still plan to pursue our special print edition featuring original work and new stories from the world of beer, spirits, and food, called “Beer & Brine,” although we’re not committing to a specific timeline for that at the moment.“
****This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,483) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear. 

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer’s Here… And Canada Day… And St. Jean Baptiste… And Another Thursday So Here’s The Beery News Notes

We went to Montreal earlier this week just for the one night. Supposedly to catch the tail end of their Saint Jean Baptiste / Fête nationale celebrations marking the founding of Quebec. It was a bit subdued in the area we were in, though the Old Port was hopping. We walked and snacked, walked and snacked. As we do. The lad and I each had a Joufflue which hit the spot on a hot day. Paired well with watching the wait staff panic over the play of Italy against Croatia. We could have easily left without paying. Definitely a pick me up after my personal all absorbing Euro 2024 situation. Little known fact: my fair city once had a seigneurial set up as part of New France, too, so I was representing. It led to thoughts, again, of retiring to La Belle Province. Or maybe just to 5 km west of LBP. Less of an administrative hassle that way. Bonus points for guessing my location in the picture. But – just to be clear – Gary can’t play. Insider knowledge. Gotta keep things on the level.

What is going on? There was a bit of a call for input at the end of their post in which Boak and Bailey traced another bit of English berwing history with their incomplete history of Smiles Brewery of Bristol, 1977-2005. You can read it yourself – but if you can provide any more information you can also help with the preparation of an update, as their epilogue invites:

We’re frustrated by the bittiness of the story we’ve been able to tell above. It feels unfinished – and we’re certain people are going to have additions and corrections. To which we say, bring it on! We’d love version two of this post to have more human voices, more pictures, and more detail from the frontline. If you worked at Smiles, or, indeed, founded it, we’re contact@boakandbailey, or @boakandbailey on Twitter, if you want to get in touch.

Delving further back in time, Ron published something pretty interesting this week, parts of newpaper report on the hearing that followed the 1814 catastrophe at London’s Meux brewery when a large vat burst and the ensuing flood caused multiple deaths. Here’s the scene as recounted by George Crick, the brewery’s store-house clerk:

“I can not account for the accident. The vat which gave way had been built about ten years, and it has been full of beer for two-thirds of the time, during which I have been on the premises. It was built on uprights or pillars of oak. The foundation did not give way. When the wreck is cleared, the bottom of the vat will be found perfectly level; neither did the vat touch the wall. It stood full eight inches from it. We can account for the accident in no other manner, but by the hoops giving way – by the rivets bursting. An hour before the accident a hoop was started; hoops frequently burst – two or three times a year – but such a circumstance does not produce any idea of danger.”

Was the Burton Union developed as a structural alternative to these massive vats? No idea. But another bit of that last union has been saved by Epochal Barrel Fermented Ales.

And ever further back, have we witnessed the birth of another Law of Lars: “Repeat after me: there are no ancient Egyptian recipes.” Yet… OK… but it’s a recreation with what seems to be an aggregation from a few texts with very well intentioned careful ingredient sourcing. Not a recipe but still. Yet… how do you get to 5% and not 11%, 4% or 1.5%?

Back to today. Me, I subscribe to The Times legal briefs newsletter to keep up with my professional distant cousins and this well sourced item caught my eye which, initially, sets out as a description of how drinks centered social culture in law firms can hinder the careers of young observant Muslim lawyers:

According to the report’s authors, many candidates from those two backgrounds feel “underprepared compared to their peers due to limited access to professional networks and social capital”. They went on to target the “prevalent drinking culture in law firms” as a “significant challenge for Muslim candidates”, many of whom abstain from alcohol. “Social events centred around pubs and bars create an uncomfortable environment, forcing these candidates to navigate situations that conflict with their religious beliefs,” the report said.

But then the story goes on to additionally point out (i) “City law firms are significantly better than their peers in the financial markets”; (ii)  it is now more common “to head to the gym for spin classes… after work than it is to head to the pub“; and (iii) “most of the associates just aren’t interested in a late-night drinking bender”! I’ve worked with alcoholic lawyers so this rings entirely true. Still, pity the young unfit accountants of London.

This is a fun bit of Euro 2024 reality for English fans in Germany. In addititon to the shock of learning that the previous visitors from Scotland put a serious dent in Cologne’s beer supply, when they do find it it seems to be served in tiny glasses:

It may not have been a thriller, but with England through to the knock-out stages of the Euro 2024 championships, it was a good opportunity for fans to celebrate with a few glasses of locally brewed cold Kölsch beer. Kölsch, which is the traditional beer style of the city, is served in 200ml tall glasses. But, according to the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, this smaller serve have been criticised by fans for the paucity of liquid. The tall and thin glasses were described as like “Champagne flutes” and thirsty fans complained about having to get a large number of rounds in to match their drinking habits. One of the reasons for the bemusement could be that fans have been used to pictures of two pint steins in Germany, often showcased during Munich’s Oktoberfest…

And Pellicle published a piece about beer that tastes like beer. By Matty himself. Those pitch negotiations must have been difficult. Anyway, it’s about a favourite beer… sorta… well, it’s all a bit… artsy*:

We stood there, motionless, in the blinking room’s perpetual silence. Then, suddenly, one of the thin men stretched out an arm, opened its greasy, white palm, and spoke with what appeared to be its mouth. If I could describe to you what I heard, I would, but it was not a sound in a conventional sense, more like a feeling, similar to what I’d experienced when the shape approached me in the field. I remember hearing four distinct waves of a flat baritone that did not waver in pitch, but it felt like there were layers upon layers of complexity to whatever the thin man had uttered.

AJT, recently becalmed, is going to have to watch out for folk making moves on his impressionistic patch. Speaking of impressions, Stan asked me a question this week but I answered another one:

Hmm… do I understand that people prior to the 14th century apparently didn’t understand ice cellars… or storage of foods either, for that matter. Despite Central Europeans using and living in caves and around ice for many millennia.

Many, there is some astoundingly deep… errr… poorly thought out beer writing out there. Greater context? Why bother! [And it is not just the trade puff stuff either: “…highly prestigious World Beer Cup, often referred to as the Olympics of the beer world…“? Said no one ever who was not being rewarded one way or another ever.] Anyway, Stan wanted to like my comment and that is all that matters to me. I actually answered his question over at B+B at the P the day before:

That cream ale story’s history is pretty good fiction. There were two or three eras when “cream” was a flag adjective for premium. 1850s Hudson Valley cream ale was a big burly ale. What is mid-1900s western NY cream ale comes from the earlier forms like 1800s Kentucky Common which in turn came from pre-lager late 1790s German immigrants. It’s all clearly set out publicly if someone takes the time to use Google.

[See here, here, here, here and here for example. Not hard.]

Barley Cluster? I loved their second LP! What’s that? Not that sort of cluster? Hmm:

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) announced a new Canadian National Barley Cluster, a significant initiative aimed at advancing barley production in Canada. With a value of $9.6 million over five years, this Cluster will drive research efforts to enhance the competitiveness and resilience of the Canadian barley industry. More than just a financial commitment, the Barley Cluster represents a united front in securing the future of the barley value chain. Administered by the Canadian Barley Research Coalition (CBRC), the new Barley Cluster will fund research projects that advance feed barley, barley genetics, agronomy, disease resistance and sustainability to make it a more resilient and profitable crop for Canadian farmers and end users.

In fact, we seem to be hubbing it up all over the place, grain-wise. You know what this means: “all your beer is us!!!”

London’s TimeOut had quite a pop at “craft” beer this week framing it as so 2019:

Remember the glory days? When we all had skinny jeans and immaculate beards and wore beanie hats, even in summer? When going for a pint meant nine percent porters, pink rhubarb sours and whatever a ‘saison’ is. It meant tasting each and every beer on tap to make sure they weren’t ‘too hoppy’. It meant, perhaps more than anything, bright, graphic labels and deeply silly names.  Nowadays, trips to the pub look a little different. Rows of pastel-coloured IPAs have been swapped out for classic lagers and big boy beer brands, all seemingly owned by one omniscient beverage uber-corporation. Craft beer options are few and far between (often rotating on just one tap)…

Finally and not unrelated, I’ve noticed that some of the advice to craft brewers these days being written has a couple of odd aspects to it. Reiterating the sort of advice you would might have expected before the downturn is one thing. Buy board games. Hold quiz nights. Hire HR specialists. Not “make sure you diversify your revenue streams to hedge against further consumer disinterest!“** Salty snacks? Used cars! Mens wear!! Anything!!! Another is minimizing the retraction, denying youth’s reduced interest. We see the code word “mature” to describe the industry contraction. Good sign that the writer’s a team player, I suppose, but lacking a certain… certaintly. And Boak and Bailey pointed out last Saturday, the actual news continues to be otherwise in the UK:

There was apparently a sharp acceleration in the number of pubs closing in the first quarter of 2024, according to a report compiled by commercial property intelligence company Altus. Of the 472 pubs that closed between April 2023 and March 2024, a remarkable 236 closed in the first three months of this year – equivalent to around 80 per month.

There sure are loads of factors piling on good beer, not the least inflation. Putting a hurt on wine too. But that complexity just makes things harder to address. One quite singular story underlies the closing of Cascade Brewing of Portland, Oregon – a tale of succession plan gone awry as reported by Jeff:

It was a strange and developing story, but involved the death of Founder Art Larrance last month. That was odd, because he announced he’d sold the brewery four years ago. In the announcement’s fine print he described it was a “phased transition” sale, however, and it turned out that transition never quite happened. The details blur here, but Art’s daughter, who was unaware her father still owned the brewery, didn’t have the money to continue on.

That’s a tough one but a lesson – get to the accountants and lawyers and get things put properly in place. Costs way less than screwing up.

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

*Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
**How long has Twisted Tea been around serving as the obvious example?
***This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (down 1 to 132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (up to 928) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (up 3 to 4,482) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (flopping 1 to 162), crap Threads (somehow up to 52 from 43) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear. 

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For The First Fabulous Harvest Of The Year

Here we are. Scape pesto to the left of me. Scape pesto to the right. OK, fine. Not really. But the mid-June plucking of the 435 or so scapes and zipping them into a small bucket of goo with a litre of olive oil is a good thing. Martha Stewart circa 1998 good. Free food. And there’s more. I’ll lift the whole plants in three or four weeks to be bundled and dried in the shed before they are sorted and replanted in October. You get the 450 seed cloves for planting in the fall for next year’s harvest, more than 1000 second best cloves for eating, the three litres of scape pesto and – who knew? – the scape tips and dried garlic straw for anti-bug mulching around the tomato patch. All from a 5 x 11’s worth of raised bed. Highly recommended.  Start your own tiny garlic ranch come the autumn.

The biggest bestest reading this week was from Katie at The Gulp and her piece “Beer Has A Sex Problem.” It’s a theme that is admittedly well explored but perhaps not as well – dare I say as radically – argued as this:

…in a conversation with drinks writer Rachel Hendry, we both agreed on something: women who don’t drink beer want something that matches their mood. A drink that accentuates their style and punctuates their sentences. A drink that makes them feel how they want to feel. When I go out and choose not to drink beer—and I’m reminding you here, I’m a woman—it’s because I want something chic like a martini, or sexy and flirty like a spicy margarita. Easy-breezy like a vodka tonic. Beer is seriously unsexy. Is that why women who don’t love beer for all its flavours and styles and aromas don’t drink it? I don’t know. Has anyone asked them? What do women want? As Rachel says: “To feel sexy! And strong! And smart! And sensual! Give me a champagne coupe!”

Question: is that just an approach exclusively for women?  Beer trade writers will tell you that a beer suits all situations… but does really?  Don’t you feel like a bit of a dork with your brown tall neck brewski when everyone is having wine and talking intelligently about it? Wouldn’t you feel dumb having a beer chaser when there is a dram of good whisky in the other paw?

Speaking of social situations, Boak and Bailey linked to this great article in Esquire on ceremony of buying a round:

Maybe six people took me up on the offer. To my left, a pair of guys who were visiting from Atlanta told me one of them was a doctor, and he could tell I’d just had a baby because of the hospital bracelet on my wrist. They drank beers, and as one of them took a sip, I heard him say, “This is why I love New York.” The guy sitting next to me was only there for a burger, but he congratulated me and asked if he could pick up my personal bar tab. I thanked him but told him it wasn’t necessary. Another guy, about sixty-five or seventy, who looked ready for a long day of golf, opted for a shot of whiskey. He walked over to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and asked what we’d had. When I told him a daughter, he smiled and said, “A blessing. Daughters are truly a blessing. I’ve got three kids, and the oldest is a girl. She’s my world.”

Memories rushed in. I’ve been in pubs and bars with naval connections, like my dear old college tav, that made it simple. Ring the bell by the end of the bar and you buy for everyone. And don’t touch the damn bell if you don’t intend to! In 1986, in the Rose Street brewpub in Edinburgh I was on the receiving end of the most subtle buying a round ever seen. A gent in a group who came in and placed an elbow at the bar just waggled his index finger ever so slightly. There was less energy in that wagging digit than in a rural Nova Scotian passing pickup driver’s hello. I was asked by the barman “what will you have?” even though I had a pint in front of me. I had to have the whole thing explained to me. Which led to me spenting an hour chatting with the group and having a great old time.

In Pellicle, Ruvani de Silva presented a scathing report on the failure of craft beer to participate in equity, diversity and inclusion in any practical or meaningful way and the resulting burnout banging their heads against walls:

I could go on about how bad things in beer really are, and I will, because we need to address the inconvenient truth that these problems have not been solved and things are not okay… As belts tighten and global attention moves to new disasters, DEI is being left behind across the board. “Breweries and venues [are] desperately trying to survive, so are not putting the time and energy and resources into this kind of work…

Read the whole thing. Best line is the first one: “DEI is so 2021.” I would add one thing. Craft beer awarded itself a gold star for achieving top marks in all matters from day one. It tells itself it has been a success story people enter after the victory was achieved. Everyone is great. A cause fed by passion propped up by trade writing. It’s a big fib. But a profitable even cultural foundation for craft beer. As a result, there is less concern with the performative nod to the bigotries and botches because, you know, it’s craft! Govern yourselves accordingly.

Slightly on that theme, I like this anti-sucker juice statement from Marcel Haas in the Netherlands from his website Tasting Craft Beer:

I should have ignored this advertisement. I should have bought local. Buying locally helps the local bottle shops to survive. They are the ones who make sure that interesting, high quality offering is found around the corner from my house. Another selection around the other corner. When everybody starts buying the same small box from the same (inter-)national importer, then all variety in the beer landscape will cease to exist. I should have reconsidered, and I should have taken my bike to my local bottle shop. And I will.

Speaking of regrets, this story in the NYT by Susan Dominus is a great bit of thinking about drinking which is all about… thinking about your drinking:

No amount of alcohol is good for you — that much is clear. But one might reasonably ask: Just how bad is it? The information we receive on health risks often glide over the specifics of how much actual risk a person faces, as if those were not details worth knowing. These days, when I contemplate a drink with dinner, I find myself wondering about how much to adjust my behavior in light of this new research. Over the years, we’ve been told so many things are either very good or very bad for us — drinking coffee, running, running barefoot, restricting calories, eating all protein, eating all carbs. The conversation in my head goes something like this: “Should I worry? Clearly, to some degree, yes. But how much, exactly?”

ATJ wrote a fine bit of reflection on life as a pub goer:

Another sip of my beer, a long glance at the road outside, and then I think about the Venerable Bede’s parable of the sparrow flying through the mead hall and about how my time in this pub is akin to the flight of the small bird on a cold winter’s night, which takes it briefly through the warmth and the light of the hall. Life. Yet there is nothing sad about my feelings. It could be worse. Remembering some of the most dire pubs I have had to spend time in over the years I imagine the purgatory in which the same dismal pub is visited night after night and the same dismal beer is drunk and the same dismal conversations are had, the purgatory of a failed life, the collapsed star of the only pub in town.

And The Mudge wrote about less finer things said about pubs, election promises never fulfilled:

It’s noticeable how, when an election comes around, politicians suddenly discover an interest in pubs that had been notably lacking in the preceding years. The latest example of this comes from the Labour Party, who have proposed a policy to “give communities a new ‘right to buy’ shuttered pubs.” It must be said that this is a bit rich coming from the party responsible for the smoking ban and the alcohol duty escalator… However, setting that to one side, what would such a plan involve? 

Here is an excellent illustration of an explanation of terroir which should serve you well should you encounter someone insisting that Hazy IPA have, you know, terroir:

The current clos is 99.6% owned by Lambrays. It is triangular in shape and has a difference in elevation of 60 m from the top to the bottom. It is east-facing but far from uniform, with undulations, and some parts with red clay, other parts with brown, and different sized limestone stones in different areas. Unusually, the rows are perpendicular to the slope, to help fight erosion. This row orientation also helps protect the developing bunches from direct sun.

Speaking of wine, as the breweries are plumping up their prices, at least one wine writer is helping with your budget. Here is Eric Asimov from The New York Times with his best summer wines under $20 with this caveat on value:

Despite the seemingly endless climb of wine prices, it’s still not difficult to find intriguing bottles in the $20 and under category. Most will not be familiar producers or grapes, nor will they come from well-known areas in great demand. But that’s why they don’t cost very much. Still, inflation has had an effect. A 20 Under $20 column from 10 or 12 years ago will look quite different. Those bottles remain great, but they cost quite a bit more nowadays. So, we make way for other terrific values.

And in their monthly supplementary newsletter, the media-multiplex of B+B shared thoughts on the concept of psychogeography:

To understand pubs and their place in the landscape you also need to understand how towns develop. Old town, new town, ring road, slum clearances, tower blocks, estates, railways, canals… pubs either stud these spaces, or are noticeably absent from them. Some notable psychogeography practitioners also happen to be keen on pubs. John Rogers, a YouTuber and the author of This Other London, often pauses to look at pubs on his rambles, and often finishes his walk in the pub. And many beer writers and bloggers take a psychogeographic approach, whether consciously or not. Martin Taylor’s posts often include details of the journey to the pub with wry and sometimes snarky commentary on the towns he visits.

I like this idea. One of my roles at work is supporting the built heritage team and as a result of a couple of decades of looking at buildings and street layouts, I see the town in decade by decade layers. One good start is to notice every date carved in the facade of a building. Why do they date buildings anyway?  B+B also mentioned the streetscapery of Will Hawks’ London Beer City which this month included coverage of an event at the massive Downham Tavern in 1931 where a memory and fact entertainer put on a show… and also coverage of those who covered it:

Among the crowd is Daily Herald journalist Hannen Swaffer, who tracks down landlord Fred Johnson. “That Irishman’s a stranger,” he insists. “He doesn’t come from around here. The Downham people all behave themselves.” Swaffer (…according to the British Journalism Review, he was remembered after his death for “little more than the mixture of dandruff and cigarette ash on his velvet collar”) is much taken with the show. He likes the acts. He likes the crowd. He likes the notion that a music-hall revival might be on the cards, even if its real glory days are a few decades in the past.  What Swaffer, boozer-turned-teetotaler, really likes though is the attitude to alcohol. “Alcohol is dying out naturally,” he tells his Daily Herald readers.  

Excellent. And Stan published his Hop Queries this past week with more details on the continuing decline in production:

…the US hop industry has 35-to-40-million-pound aroma hop surplus. Nobody disagrees. In the last six years, farms in the Northwest have produced an average of 1,848 pounds for hops per acres. Across 9,775 acres (this year’s reduction), that would amount to about 18 million pounds of hops. It would, and should, put a serious dent the surplus. Still, it will take much longer for supply and demand to return to balance. You are going to see flash sales like this recent one from Yakima Chief Hops for a while. Although eliminating those pounds is necessary, it also is painful. The average farm gate price last year was $5.40, so we are talking about almost $100 million pounds of hops.

Question: so it, as Stan also says, 2023 is really the twin of 2015 for US craft beer… will 2025 be 2010? That surplus isn’t being used up over one growing season. As you consider that, also consider the post Jeff put up – replete with graphical presentation of data – on the growth in excess brewing capacity:

American breweries are currently at about half their capacity. That’s not good! But it’s actually worse that in looks because growth has been dead flat for three years. Were the industry growing, it would need headspace, so to speak, for future expansion.

Heavens. Tettering. Could deflation be next? One thing is practically for certain. DEI isn’t the next big thing in these conditions.

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

*This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (133) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (915) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,479) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (162), crap Threads (43) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear. 
**Not that many footnotes really this week. Look at this one. An out and out joke really. Sad.