Your First Edition Of September Find the Long Trousers and Hard Black Shoes Thursday Beery News Notes

Ah vacation! Remember that. Seems like it was just a few days ago. Because it was just a few days ago. Now I sit here in the hard black shoes and a tie, half boggled from a work meeting that ended towards midnight. It’s so much better on holiday.* But its not all happy happy joy joy on vacation. Things can get out of hand. I had my concerns, for example, for the place Garrett Oliver had found himself when he posted the image just there on Twitter the other day. It could be just art. Could be. I will leave it for your further contemplation.

Don Cazentre has written an excellent extended piece in the central New York Syracuse.com, a digital arm (I believe) of that venerable newspaper, The Post-Standard. In it he explores three local breweries and how they face challenges in the current craft beer marketplace:

The competition is real. Still, it would be wrong to see the troubles at CB, Empire and Ithaca as a sign that the craft beer industry overall is collapsing, according to Leone, Stacy and other observers. “As a beverage branding consultant I speak with producers and stakeholders across the industry about how they position their businesses for success in today’s crowded marketplace, and from where I sit, none of them are hitting the panic button,” said Glenn Clark, who advises many craft beverage companies through his company, Crafting A Brand, in the Rochester suburb of Mendon. “Last week’s bad news was the result of unique problems at three larger, established breweries — and in my opinion shouldn’t be seen as a bellwether of a broader economic trend.”

No, but they should be seen as warnings of what might be faced by any brewer: unexpected implications of debt load, unplanned equipment upgrades and, of course, competition from those pesky nanos that are nipping at the heels everywhere.

Gorgeous tiles in a Belgian bar, courtesy of Boak and Bailey and their holidays. Click on the pic.

Speaking of holidays, Ontario Gewürtztraminer is one of my favorite Ontario Gewürtzes. A few weeks ago – as I do every year – I get myself to nearby Lacey Estates once or twice for their version. Their Cabernet Franc, a 2016, was fabulous, too.

On the last day of August, Martyn blessed us with a wonderful long form essay on his personal experiences of drinking and going to the pub underage and revisiting his teen haunts as a seasoned gentleman:

Not, either,  that I crawled that much back in 1969: there were two pubs out of the eight on the High Street itself where most of my pals would be found, so those were the two where I did most of my drinking. Generally Friday and Saturday evenings those pubs would be rammed almost to bursting with, largely, under-20s drinking pints (or brandy-and-babycham for the teen females: at least, that was what they always seemed to be drinking when I was getting the rounds in). I don’t recall any trouble or violence: the physical aggro was restricted to the only two pubs in Stevenage’s vast pedestrian shopping centre, and mostly to only one of those, the Edward the Confessor, know universally as the Ted the Grass.

Come for the study in change and stasis, stay for the photo of Martyn as a teen.

Myles on Twitter posted this excellent image on Labour Day reminding us all of the realities of how we got to this wonderful mixed socialist capitalist construct that we all love called the modern western world. He also reminded us that brewing – especially craft brewing – still has a ways to go to:

Without the sweat and toil of women & men in rubber boots, this industry means nothing. Brewers are entitled to much higher pay than they generally receive; the work is hard and dangerous, and actually creates something. Brewers, I hope y’all organize. Happy Labor Day!

Preach! Let’s have less of the craft brewery ownership class worship and more respect for those who actually brew and package and deliver your beer.

Robin and Jordan follow up on last week’s White Claw news, seemingly agreeing as we learned in last Thusday’s edition, that we suffer from an over-faux-intellectualizing of pop drinks like craft beer and are burdened by something of a parallel state which is perhaps best exemplified by the “no data” response.  The data, of course, is clear and tells us that the one product is now bigger than all of craft beer mere months into its existence. If we over-complicate, as Jordan discusses, one aspect which may need to be considered is if over-complicators act as a causal cabal. Few in the consumer side of the industry actually need or care to know why this or that hop, why this or that barrel. Good beer is comfortingly far simpler than craft would have you know as it is pitched to us even as it is a Mansion of Many Apartments, too.**

Note: I don’t like to link to other people’s new links posts but Stan’s was such a model of pungent minimalism this week, I have to direct you that-a-way.

Finally, this piece on non-alcoholic “spirits” is so accurate it is quite hilarious on yet another*** fraud being perpetrated on the drinks buying public:

…my opinion was based on a single shot. To give the respect any new product was due, I went on to Amazon and ordered two bottles of Seedlip: the original, called ‘Garden’ and what they call ‘Spice’. Cost me £56. I tried them every which way and tested them on my friends. Some were drinkers who understood the rationale. Others had given up drink and were crying out for a decent substitute. Not a single person liked them. It was a real case of the emperor arrogantly flaunting his new clothes. ‘Garden’ was just watery. And ‘Spice’ reminded them of dental mouthwash.

Update: The Tand has a late submission to the editors on his relationship with a certain suspiciously named Sam Smith and his landlordly attitudes:

…horror on horrors. A mobile phone rang in the bar and in hushed tones, after exchanging endearments with his/someone else’s wife/girlfriend or whatever, the callee, said words to the effect of “I have to go. I’m in The Pleasant and mobiles aren’t allowed.” Seems Humph has put the fear of God into his customers on that one. Less so on the effing and jeffing I’d suggest, but all of it was in the context of fitting bathrooms, exchanges about how the day had gone and so on, so to my mind at least, harmless enough.  One lad called through to me saying that he didn’t care (“couldn’t give a fuck”) about Humph’s rules. Sooner or later he’d shut the pub anyway, like he had the Yew Tree he observed.  “Aha” I thought. “I could have saved a journey here.”  

That’s it for now. Remember to expect Boak and Bailey reporting  on Saturday and Stan to follow up next Monday. Catch the OCBG Podcast on  Tuesdays, too. Soon it will be mid-September. Time for the woolens and heavy ales. All’s not bad. Now, surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life.

*Of course it is.
**Romantic Poetry 307, undergrad honours 1983-84 FTW!!!
***Also see, for example, hard soda.

Your Thursday Beer News For The Last Of August… Of Summer… Of…

It’s over. Well, I don’t go back for another five days but the kids are getting geared up for their respective schools and the hot hot heat is gone. Fabulous. Me, I continue to rest and convalesce. I had no idea I had not taken two weeks off for years. Two-thirds of the way in, I am a bit dumbfounded. May eat a peach today. Because I dare. By the way, fresh peach chunks and fresh tomato chunks with olive oil and basil. You have been advised.

The big news this week is White Claw, some seltzer thing that I will never see or try if the gods are pleased. Zima again. The news is not White Claw itself but that that bastion of east coast liberal culture, The Atlantic, published an extensive article by Amanda Mull on this summer’s cultural phenomenon, seeking the why of it all:

A major factor in hard seltzer’s current popularity is what it’s not: difficult or aspirational. Being a cool young drinker has had a lot of arbitrary rules in the past decade. For much of the 2010s, booze trends have centered around limited-edition, high-alcohol craft beers and booze-heavy, professionally assembled cocktails. These trends have demanded that young people learn the ins and outs of booze culture; have a willingness to pursue the stores, bars, and breweries that meet their very particular tastes; and have the ability to spend some money to try new things. To get the full experience, those drinks also have to be aesthetically pleasing—all the better to document on Instagram, to show off your generationally and socioeconomically appropriate good taste.

Screw you, kiddie curating class.  Screw you, the aesthetic tyranny of Instagram-determined good taste, as Mull calls it.  A blip? Hah! As Josh Noel noted, the  White Claw‘s variety 12-pack now outsell every craft beer. After a few months. Screw you, craft. Actually, this reminds me of a line that Stan noted The Beer Nut mentioning earlier this week:

I didn’t expect to get such a cliché of everything wrong with the concept of ‘milkshake IPA’ but here it is. If this is what you wanted beer to be in 2019, fill your boots.

See, it reminded me of that because milkshake IPA and White Claw are exactly the same thing, a facile form of booze that is identifiably different and needs no consideration as it goes down. It’s the other “screw you, craft” beverage. And, yes, after a decade it’s quite possible that people are actually exhausted with the multilayered Art Rock keyboard of being over-informed with non-information by the self-appointed and of, yes, of being intensely beveragely cool being the core of their entertainment time. My kids just like the odd Gordon’s gin so I deffo saw this coming.

Similarly negatively – but hanging on to defend a seemingly crumbling last redoubt – Miles Liebtag in Medium tells us Here’s What’s Killing Craft Beer: Us.** Somewhat curiously to me, he writes:

Allow me to share with you a law of Craft Beeria, deduced from ~8 years of in-field observation: one’s Beer Knowledge is often in direct and inverse proportion to one’s Market Knowledge. The former is what one knows about beer qua beer: how and why and when and where it’s made, and how that set of questions has both historical and political dimensions, what makes a beer look and smell and taste the way it does. The latter is one’s knowledge of trends, brands, who and what’s hot, what’s trading well, what’s rare, who’s on the outs, etc. It’s not that the twain shall never meet, just that they rarely do, and often the entire beer media universe seems bent on keeping them apart.

Jings! Perhaps an over wrought over-intellectualizing of both categories** might just be playing a role in all this, too.  Beer from a consumer perspective or even that of a brewing technician is not complicated compared, you know, to actually complicated things.  We go to movies and buy from Amazon but no one really cares about the logistics of either. Who needs to be associated with the body of beery knowledge that gets foisted on unsuspecting drinkers while all the while studiously avoiding the obvious questions like relative value? That’s beer today. It all befuddles the buying public Hence the unhappiness. Hence… White Claw!

Need a happier link to a simple time? 1970’s TV ads for Courage Best.

In the latest edition of his emailed newsletter on the state of hops, Stan*** discussed the idea of terrior in hops, one that he has long suspected, has been studied by folks in white lab coats:

I’m pleased the idea is catching on. Earlier this month, Coleman Agriculture in Oregon hosted Bine to Beer: Coleman Hop Terroir, announcing that Coleman, Oregon State University and Red Hill Soils have begun a study into hop terroir… The initial study included two hop varieties, Sterling and Centennial, grown across four different locations in the Willamette Valley, and two main types of soil. Scientists analyzed the soil and took into consideration all the other factors involved in growing hops. A sensory panel evaluated beers brewed with these hops.

Interesting. Terrior in beer is a rare thing but here this study found that the differences between Sterling hops from different locations were more muted and nuanced while the differences were clearer and more easily identifiable with Centennial. If they are replicated year after year, I’d say you might well have some terrior right there.

In other joyous beer as farm news, Katie Mather of @Shinybiscuit herself wrote about and with the folk at Rivington Brewing Co. in Chorley, Lancashire who brew on their family farm:

Tenth generation farmer Mick leans against the stone doorway, letting Ben do most of the talking. When he’s done, we head off with muddy boots to their current setup, a mile or so down a puddled and potholed lane, heavily shaded by the midsummer greenery of thick forest scented with marshmallowy clouds of Himalayan balsam. It’s in this woodland vale that Tap Beneath The Trees takes place, Rivington Brewing Co.’s summertime taproom gatherings. Over the years these little weekend-long beer festivals have gained cult status among the beer fans of Lancashire. Ben tells me that people come just as much for the countryside convalescence as they do his beers and that he’s completely happy about that.

Lovely stuff.  And certainly an antidote to all that fretting up there. Who cares about so much of it all? Not when you can go up a country lane and find a wonderful glass of tasty. Or around a city corner. I did that this week myself and found my beer of the year to date but will leave that a separate post.

In a last nod to joy, Ben gave a tip to read a good article in Craft Brewing Business on the good beer scene in Toronto by the design firm involved with the Left Field branding refresh – the last two words there being something that usually makes my temples ache:

We were received with equal warmth at Left Field’s East End taproom, nestled snug in an alley in a charming and lived-in neighborhood. In this area, many years former, a massive factory turned out bricks by the thousands: the neighborhood retains a blue-collar industrial charm. We sampled a number of beers, including a knuckles-down DIPA called Laser Show and a lip-smacking fruited sour called Squeeze Play. We met the staff at hand and talked shop. After a quick tour of the brewery and reviewing our itinerary for the remainder of the trip, we were off to check out a couple more spots relevant to the local beer conversation before calling it an evening.

What I like about the article is how the branding firm sought out an understand of the local scene. I also like how they stuck with the original logo without too many tweeks and then rebranded around it. Wow – look at me fawning over the outside of the can… jeesh…**** Now, if only someone would tell everyone that Canada had only temperance and not prohibition that would be great. Breweries never shut. Booze available but fairly restricted.

PS: being a lawyer is actually fun some days.

My other big news was, of course, the response to my mammoth post on the meaning of Lambeth Ale. Thank you for all the postcards, telegrams and teletyped messages of congratulations. Whatever shall I blog about next month? While I ruminate on that, you will be pleased to know that we can expect Boak and Bailey back behind the newsdesk on Saturday and Stan to be right there on Monday. Catch the OCBG Podcast on  Tuesdays, too. What Septemberish-fun!

*Not me. You. Max and I warned you about all this five years and and did you listen? No.
**My reaction was not as spicy as that of others but perhaps one sees it in the unnecessary use of “beer qua beer”?
***For the double!
****Full disclosure. I have spent more on them than that damn sample was ever worth.

I Get It. It’s Lambeth Ale. But Why Is It “Lambeth” Ale?

For a while now I have been noodling around 1600s English brewing history and have a bunch of posts that you can generally find here with a few other topics from that century woven in. The important things to understand are: (i) there were distinct forms of beer easily recognizable by the consumer, (ii) they mainly were defined by their geographical source and (iii) they are often but not solely described according to that location. So, brewing elements like a local water table, the local produce including husbanded post-landrace barley malts and traditional local malt bill blends combined to create reliable and recognizable categories of beer called Northdown/Margate, Hull or Derby. John Locke’s letter of 1679 gives a good example of contemporary understanding. Poor Robin’s Almanac in 1696 sets a similar marketplace of diverse offerings under the definition of Cock-Ale:

But by your leave Mr. Poet, notwithstanding the large commendations you give of the juice of barley, yet if compar’d with Canary, they are no more than a mole-hill to a mountain; whether it be cock ale, China ale, rasbury ale, sage ale, scurvy-grass ale, horsereddish ale, Lambeth ale, Hull ale, Darby ale, North-down ale, double ale, or small ale; March beer, nor mum, though made at St. Catharines, put them all together, are not to be compared.

However, the penny has yet to drop in relation to one prominent beer in that system. Lambeth Ale.  Don’t get me wrong. It is pretty clear what it was:  a lower alcohol bottled pale ale that was highly carbonated. Consider this line from the 1712 play The Successful Pyrate at Act ii., scene 1:

Ha, ha, ha, faith she is pert and small like Lambeth ale.*

But why was it called “Lambeth” after a shoreline district along London’s southern bank?  One would think this is an easy question to answer but if we look at the facts on the ground at the time it is not one so simple to answer. For today’s purposes, let’s even call this part 1… or perhaps part 7… in my thought process.  A winnowing. A ruling out perhaps. See, what bothers me the most about it is how I can identify the who and why and what about 1600s Derby or Hull or Margate but there is a bit of an issue when it comes to mid-1600s Lambeth. There ain’t much there on the ground.

Let me illustrate my conundrum. If you look up at the image above, which I am informed is a 1670 illustration of the sights at Lambeth, you will note two things: a big church complex and a lot of grass. Here is a similar version dated 1685. I have further illustrated the concept here for clarity. Lambeth Palace is and was the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England.  It sits in what is known as – and what was at the time in question – Lambeth Marsh. Grass.

To the right is a bit of a map from 1574 which shows the scene. Lambeth faces Westminster across the Thames, combining to embody the authority of the church and state. But to the south there are a few buildings, you note. Yes. And it appears Lambeth as a zone was narrow and long with northern and southern districts. So Lambeth Ale could be from the south of the Palace and the Marsh. It is, after all, a parish. Could be. But the south seems to really only develop after the building of Westminster Bridge in the very middle of the mid-1700s.  And, as I noted a couple of years ago, when Samuel Pepys was downing lashes of Lambeth Ale, he was traveling over by boat when he was not finding it in town proper. Lambeth was a place, apparently, where one could do all sorts of things once the boat got you across. Here is Sammy P from his diary on the 23rd of July 1664:

…and away to Westminster Hall, and there sight of Mrs Lane, and plotted with her to go over to the old house in Lambeth Marsh, and there eat and drank, and had my pleasure with her twice, she being the strangest woman in talk of love to her husband sometimes, and sometimes again she do not care for him, and yet willing enough to allow me a liberty of doing what I would with her. So spending 5s or 6s upon her, I could do what I would, and after an hours stay and more, back again and set her ashore again.

Heavens. So, was it a pleasure ground with its own ale like the later Vauxhall? There is one problem I find with that. If we remember that Mr. Pepys is mentioning Lambeth Ale in the first half of the 1660s, we also find that there was a certain local someone who was not a big fan of brewing prior to that date. The Archbishop himself. Or rather an archbishop… as they come and they go. The one I am talking about is one who went in rather dramatic fashion: William Laud.

William Laud was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633 to either 1640 when he was arrested in the English Civil War or 1645 when he had his head cut off.** In a 1958 article on 1630s English politics,*** there is a explanation of the word Laudian which indicates High Church Anglican and sits in opposition to Puritan reforming rabble. The illustration of the distinction is the Puritan distaste for churchales – local church fundraising fetes of a drunken happy sort. Laud took a political stance in support of this but mainly as a means to exercise his power early in his term of office, to fund his church repair project and to tick off the growing Puritan element within the church. He is not considered to have been all that pro-beer at the time.

He continues to not be a big booster of brewing. Writing to one Bishop Bridgeman, from Lambeth on 29th October, 1638, Laud enclosed a letter he had written to the Dean of the Cathedral of Chester “concerning your quadrangle or Abbey-court, & the Brewhouse, & Maulthouse there.” He stated that they had better do as he instructed or “I promise you they shall smart for it“! Here is some of the enclosed letter: 

After my hearty commend: &c. I am informed that in your Quadrangle, or Abbey-Court at Chester… the BP’s House takes up one side of the Quadrangle; and that another side hath in it the Dean’s house and some Buildings for singing men; that the third side hath in it one Prebend’s house only, and the rest is turned to a Malt house; and that ye fourth side (where yo Grammar School stood) is turned to a common Brewhouse, & was lett into lives by yo” unworthy Predecessors. This Malt house and Brew house, but the Brew house especially, must needs, by noise and smoke and filth, infinitely annoy both my Lo: ye BPs house and your owne… hitherto this concernes your Predecessors, and not your selves. That won followes will appeare to be your owne fault… Now I heare ye Brewer’s wife is dead, and you have given mee cause to feare that you will fill up yo Lease againe with another life. And then there will be noe end of this mischiefe…  And in all this I require your Obedience in his Ma’yes Name, as you will answer it at your p’ill. So I leave you &c.” 

In early 1640, Laud wrote another letter. This time to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford:

I received a Letter this Week from Oxford, from an ordinary plain man, but a good Scholar, and very honest. And it troubles me: more than any Letter I have received many a day. “Tis true, I have heard of late from fome Men of Quality here above, that the Univerfity was Relapfing into a Drinking Humour, to its great Dishonour. But, I confess, I believed it not, because I had no Intimation of it from you. But this Letter comes from a Man that can have no Ends but Honesty, and the good of that Place. And because you shall fee what he writes, I fend you here a Copy of his Letter, and do earnestly beg of you, That you will forthwith set yourself to punish all haunting of Taverns and Ale-Houfes with all the strictness that may be, that the University, now advancing in Learning, may not sink in Manners, which will shame and destroy all.

After his arrest in December 1640, Laud faced a number of charges including one that he caused the shutting and pulling down of a number of brew-houses across the river in Westminster because their smoke disturbed his enjoyment of life at Lambeth. Just there to the right under the thumbnail is the charge as published in a 1695 book, The History of the Troubles and Tryal of the Most Reverend Father in God and Blessed Martyr William Laud, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. There are two witness supporting the charge, Mr. Bond and Mr. Arnold of the second of which the following is said by Laud in his response to the charge:

2. The other Witness is Mr. Arnold ; who told as long a Tale as this, to as little purpose. He speaks of three Brew-Houfes in Westminfter, all to be put down, or not brew with Sea-Coal; That Secretary Windebanck gave the Order. Thus far it concerns not me. He added, that I told him they burnt Sea-Coal : I faid indeed, I was informed they did; and that I hope was no Offence. He fays, that upon Sir John Banks his new Information, four Lords were appointed to view the Brew-Houfes, and what they burnt. But I was none of the four, nor did I make any Report, for or againft. He fays, Mr. Attorney Banks came one day over to him, and told him that his House annoyed Lambeth, and that I fent him over. The Truth is this; Mr. Attorney came one day over to Dine with me at Lambeth, and walking in the Garden before Dinner, we were very fufficiently annoyed from a Brew-House; the Wind bringing over fo much Smoak, as made us leave the place. Upon this Mr. Attorney asked me, why I would not fhew my felf more against those Brew-Houses, being more annoyed by them than any other ? I replyed, I would never be a means to undo any Man, or put him from his Trade, to free my felf from Smoak. And this Witness doth after confess, that I faid the fame words to himself. Mr. Attorney at our parting faid, he would call in at the Brew-House: I left him to do as he pleased, but fent him not : And I humbly defire Mr. Attorney may be Examined of the Truth of this.

So. What to make of all this. First, it is very unlikely that there was a brewery at Lambeth Palace that was putting the stuff out as an estate ale. Laud did not like brewing and malting on church property and his found the resulting smoke annoying and after Laud it was turned into a prison. Tauntingly to the contrary is one small reference I have found related to London’s Training College of Domestic Science:

The College was founded in 1893 by the National Society in the disused Brew House of the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace. Here, training was provided for teachers of Cookery and Laundry. Housewifery was added to the curriculum in the first decade of the twentieth century after the College had acquired additional premises in Charles Street, Southwark.

For now, I am putting that brew house down to the 230 years or so between the restoration of Charles II and the founding of the College.

Second, Lambeth Ale really isn’t referenced at that exact time. It shows up very neatly a couple of decades later at the other end of the English Civil War. As early as 1660 Pepys, a fairly high government official, is drinking Lambeth Ale and apparently having time of his squalid life. The wonderfully named Lord Beverage in his Prices and Wages in England notes it as recorded by the Lord Steward from 1659 to 1708. Click on that thumbnail if you don’t believe me. I haven’t not found, in fact, any reference to it much before 1659 but I would welcome any who have.

Perhaps Lambeth meant more than just the place, just the Palace as a building. As I noted before, three years after Laud’s execution in 1648, Parliament placed a garrison and prison in Lambeth House which they also used as a prison. With the Restoration, came the rebuilding of Lambeth Palace as viewed by Pepys in 1665 but still he went there to gypsy fortune-tellers in 1668. And all this must be somehow laced into his contemporary understanding of the word Lambeth. Is it possible it started not as a geographical reference like Hull, Derby or Margate but as a bit of pre-Restoration political satire? Is the popping of the cork the popping off of the Archbishop’s head? The lightness and the fizz, a comment on his character?

I have no idea. But it does seem odd that the term appears in the middle of the great upheaval, comes out of a holy place turned into red light district and then continues on for decades, even respectably mentioned by John Locke in 1679 and the French Ambassador in the 1680s. It was so popular that it pretty much killed Christopher Monck, 2nd Duke of Albemarle, the Governor of Jamaica in 1688:****

Albemarle’s medical troubles began before leaving for Jamaica. In general the duke spent his nights, Sloane wrote, “being merry with his friends whence he eat very little … [and] drinking great draughts of Lambeth ale,” a practice that had secured him what Sloane termed a “habituall Jaundice if I may call it Soe.” Referring to the duke’s jaundice as “habitual” was no accident, for Sloane placed the responsibility for it squarely upon the duke’s lifestyle. Thirty-three years old in 1686, Albemarle practiced no regimen, “loves a Sedentary life & hates exercise, as well as physick,” his physician lamented. Prior to departing for Jamaica, the duke was attended by several physicians who prescribed “temperance & keeping good houres,” warning that “the voyage he intended for Jamaica it being a very hott place could not in probability agree with his body.”

Laud left a deep scar. He continued to be hated for his gross authoritarian excesses as we see from this 1730s letter from the non-conformist Samuel Chandler to theologian William Berriman:

Oh! how happy are the present times, and with what satisfaction may I congratulate my country, when titled divines, when reverend Doctors, when the dignitaries of the Church, hold up the blessed Laud as a perfect pattern for the imitation of the reverend Bench, and insert him into their calendar of Saints and Martyrs! How will discipline flourish under such spiritual Pastors! How effectually will the mouths of saucy laymen be stopped, and the liberty they take in censuring God’s anointed priests be suppressed J How secure will the Gentlemen of England be in their lives and properties and estates, when instead of the Courts of Westminster-Hall, they shall be again subjected to the Star Chamber, High commission and spiritual Courts! Oh what infinite blessings must spring up from a revival of the Laud, an principles and times!

I know this is a leap but it strikes me that the contemporary beer drinker could not but help make an indirect connection somehow between the role of Lambeth Palace and name Lambeth Ale. But, if so, what is the connotation? What is the connection? And despite that connection, it still appears to have been a singular beer – weaker, fizzy, bottled and worth rowing across a river for. And high status stuff. Worth shipping to France. Worth a Governor drinking  himself to death.

*See A Supplementary English Glossary, Thomas Lewis Owen Davies, at page 369 which defines Lambeth Ale based on that quote, concluding “seems from the extract to have been brisk and not heady.” Is that it? Is the idea that it is not “heady” the joke on the beheaded Laud?
**I really did not know that folk other than Charles I had his head cut off so this bit of research has already been instructive.
***“County Politics and a Puritan Cause Célèbre: Somerset Churchales, 1633: The Alexander Prize Essay,” by Thomas G. Barnes, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Vol. 9 (1959), pp. 103-122 at footnote 1, page 103.
****at page 225.

The Probably Not Quite As Long As Usual Thursday Beer News Given I Am On Holiday

I want to live in Montreal. Might retire there. Just for the subway.  It runs on rubber tires. No screeching metal on metal. And the pale ales.  All over the place, you go in to a pub or restaurant and there they are. Good malt forward classic cold pale ales of one sort or another. Without haze. Without franken-hops pretending to be mango or hot dogs.  Below left to right* are Archibald, Bishop and St.-Ambroise. From Quebec City, Montreal and Montreal respectively. Happy. Happy. Happy. Beer with beer flavour. Favourite newly found bar? Tie. Wolf and Workman, Old Montreal and Le Petite Marche, at the north end of the Plateau on St. Denis. Might go again next week. It’s only two hours drive away.

First up, one obvious sign that you are dealing with a good beer writer is that they are just a good writer.  So happy news, then, as this was announced by one of the B‘s of B+B as it related to the other B:

Anyway, the reason we’ve been on a Monday afternoon bender is to celebrate publication of Ray’s first novel, “The Gravedigger’s Boy“. We’re not going to use this account to promote it, but I wanted to say *something* coz I’m dead proud of him. ^Jess 

Elsewhere in England, Greene King has been acquired by a Hong Kong based firm CK Asset Holdings for mind-boggly £4.6 billion. The Tandy one has shared his thoughts:

As Greene King carries little emotional attachment in the mind of most beer drinkers, it was always unlikely that its takeover would have beer fans rushing to man the barricades. That’s just how it is, but wait.  Greene King is a big part of the British brewing industry. It owns a large number of pubs – over 2,700 – and these are spread all over the country. Heck we even have plenty of them here in Greater Manchester where, one must admit, they aren’t exactly the most popular beerwise.  Their type of beer is not always particularly suitable to local tastes. 

Something else that’s not suitable to location tastes as the brewery that controls the license to brew Skol in Rwanda has had to retract an alarmingly bad branding idea:

A beer company in Rwanda has apologised after critics said jokes that appeared on their bottles were sexist. One of the jokes on a bottle of Skol asked, “when can a woman make you a millionaire” with the answer “when you are a billionaire”. Skol launched the beer labels with the jokes printed on them on Friday but on Monday promised to stop using them.

Being a northern hemisphere western hemisphere sort of person, I was happily informed that “Rwanda is ranked fifth in the world for gender equality, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2016 report” – which makes the local brewery’s initial decision all the more mystifying. Except that it’s beer. And… you know.

Reading Canadians on personal consumption politics is a bit like reading English folk writing about voicing opinions on the personal preferences of others. It always seems a bit awkward and unpracticed. The Polk and Ben Johnson as well as others in Ontario wrote this week about the question of craft breweries donating to political parties. First, a bit of Polk:

It is the ultimate first world problem to be worried about the politics of your favourite brewery, but in a world where every dollar counts, it does to those of us who wish to see the world a better place for everyone. Our money is a reflection of our beliefs to a certain extent, although most of us still shop at Walmart, Loblaws and other huge corporations with spotty track records in how they treat their employees, the environment and even their loyal customers.

Now, a bit o’Ben:

 A savvy business owner should recognize the importance of being at the table when decisions are made that affect his or her business and the best way for a brewery to do that in Ontario is with donations (Indeed, the lack of an alternative method in the form of cohesive lobbying efforts is probably one of my biggest beefs with the brewing industry in this province and is a conversation for a dozen more blog posts). Because don’t forget: Breweries are businesses.

If I was to suggest anything, I think both views somewhat overstate the case. No donation gets you access you don’t otherwise get by being otherwise annoying and individual purchasing choices don’t really send the sting of a generally organized boycott. Yet, if a smarmy Canadian-style middle ground is needed, I might suggest that being aware of your beliefs as you make these decisions is good for the soul and arms you for the next time you face the ballot box.

Katie:

If only writing was just sitting down and thinking about what I might want to say and it just happened…

CNY beer intellectual property law guy Brendan Palfreyman was featured in a law publication recently. It’s always good to be recognized outside the bubble. Have a look under the thumbprint right there next door. You can likely read the whole thing. Probably an utter violation of copyright law!

One third of the way in, this two-week holiday thing is working out just fine. Expect Boak and Bailey to have more news on Saturday and Stan to be there on Monday. The OCBG Podcast is a reliable break at work on  Tuesdays, too.

*1,2,3.

The 36 Hours From Vacation Edition Of Your Thursday Beer Notes

Have I mentioned I am going on vacation? Not really doing much but not doing much is exactly what I want to do. Napping. Snoozing. The whole rang of middle aged man stuff. Mowing will be in there, too. Snacking in Montreal defo. Perhaps a trip to a nearby brewery will be in order. Hmm. Haven’t taken two weeks off in a row for a few years given obligations and stuff. This could be interesting. But enough about me. On with the week in beer news!

First off, Boak and Bailey posted a long and interesting piece on the beer scene in Leeds, England from the 1970s to now. I particularly like their choice to rely on chronologically ordered quotes from locals:

What follows is based on emails and interviews, some dating as far back as 2013 (John Gyngell and Christian Townsley), others from the past month or so, with light editing for sense and clarity. We’ve also used a quote from Richard Coldwell’s blog because we get the impression he wouldn’t want the mere fact that he sadly died in July stop him contributing on a subject about which he was so passionate.

Excellent stuff. And, in case you did not know The Hammer has a beer scene, too. Scene mapping is a good thing. Good baseline data to return to down the road.

Garrett Oliver on the present state of popular meaninglessness:

We can complain all we want, but it was craft brewers and our “advocates” who gave away the store. WE declared that “craft beer is dead”, WE gave away the power of nomenclature for quick success (what is “IPA”? Anyone? Anyone?). It’s a bit late now to complain, is it not?

Speaking of which: “Loving this alcohol-free breakfast-blend NEIPA”!?!?!?

Happily, not everything is a sham. I can only repeat what I wrote Wednesday morning immediately after reading Matt‘s piece on Harvey’s Best. “There are supposed deep dives and then, to use a phrase more common ten or more years ago, there is beer pr0n. This love letter is a bit beyond even that. Fabulous.” This is the paragraph that got me over my de rigueur ennui:

Walking past the kettle and into the adjacent room you are met with several stainless steel open fermentation vessels on either side of a thin corridor. It is here that the wildness inherent within Harvey’s beers has nowhere to hide. So potent is the aroma produced by its proprietary strain of yeast—almost strawberry-like—it soaks into every crevice and pore. Waves of off-white foam—known as krausen, produced by the yeast during fermentation—cap several of the tanks. Others lie vacant, with those recently emptied marked by what looks like an immovable dark brown crust around the edge of the vessel. To this day, standing in that room is one of the most intense sensory experiences I can remember. 

Yowza!

In other yowzly news, while we are all in favour of meaningful anti-bigotry efforts in the beer trade and greater society, this action by SIBA is quite remarkable:

We have reason to believe the individual behind this anonymous blog may work in our industry. The blog in question has been reported to the police.

The bigoted comments in question were apparently in response to the latest issues of the SIBA Journal on diversity. Here is more on that issue of the Journal which is likely all you need to know… unless you are with the police. Heather Knibbs adds some excellent connected context in a blog post about how not only SIBA but the GBBF have been taking more serious steps towards inclusion this year – then tells us why it is important to her:

In case it wasn’t clear, I am a woman. So for supporting this decision I will inevitably be labelled a femi-nazi or a liberal snowflake [a.k.a the world’s new favourite slur for anyone who refuses to humour your outdated opinions]. I think it’s a great decision that will hopefully lead to less women feeling intimidated by pubs. I wrote a piece in March about the progress being made within the brewing industry to be more inclusive of women, to which GBBF’s organiser Catherine Tonry contributed. Indeed progress has been made but from the feedback I’ve seen to this decision by the festival, the road to the finish line is as long as ever…

The job is not done, notes Laura of @Morrighani.

Speaking of love letters, Alistair wrote one from home to home about his (and my) people’s favourite beer, Tennents Lager:

Four mouthfuls in and the pint was gone, a fresh one on its way, then another, and another as we settled into the buzz and banter of the bar. At some point a pair of young girls came in, one with ID and one without, dolled up for a night on the town and pre-gaming before heading into Inverness. The gathered older folks, which Mrs V and I have accepted we are now part of, shared looks of recognition of days gone by, while the barman gave the IDless girl short shrift, and soon they were gone, while hands reached out for pints and the drinking continued.

In this week’s OCBG podcast, Robin and Jordan had a good personal discussion about mental health and alcohol, about how pervasive anxiety and depression are in the trade. It’s not an easy topic but it is a real issue.  The health of beer writers has always been something not talked about and, with respect, it does not take a dramatic trauma to trigger it. The tensions that arise for anyone seeking success in the limited world of beer writing careers can itself be a self-damaging cause. Be safe out there. And, yes, drink less. Spit.

Also in the UK, the Samuel Smith chain of pubs has apparently added a “no phones” policy to the “no swearing” policy which was noteworthy enough for noting in July 2017. An alleged copy of a notice in one pub is to the right. Wag-master Mudge observed:

As you know, I’m a big supporter of Sam’s, but the phone ban is a ban too far. They now have a big sign explaining it applies to everything including texting and web browsing. I was tempted to ask whether I could take a photo of it with my phone…

Turning around 180 degrees in terms of the transactional, wine writer Jamie Goode has commented on an interesting question in these recent times of exploding variety:

There has been a lot of chat on twitter about a food blogger who had a bad experience in a restaurant in Manchester. He began by ordering a bottle of Tondonia Blanco (a stunning, but distinctive white Rioja that I and most of my right-thinking friends adore), and then rejecting it because it wasn’t to his tastes. You can imagine the fall out.

He states that the only reason to reject a bottle of wine that is offered is faultiness which should be accepted, when raised by the customer, without opposition. Things gone off should be something you can refuse. But what if the thing that has gone off is the planning and execution rather than the cork? My habit is to not necessarily return a beer, say, but just not finishing but paying while ordering another giving me the right to say “man, did that one suck!” opening up a theoretical discussion not focused on the specific commercial context for the bartender.

Speaking of wine, wine has apparently passed beer as the UK’s most popular drink, according to a very wobbly survey.*

The large veg hobby has struck Mr Driscoll, brewer of Thornbridge.

Evan Rail has shared an interesting Radio Prague story on the discovery of a renaissance Czech brewery:

In medieval times in the Czech lands, only burghers officially had the right to brew beer, right up until the Treaty of Saint Wenceslas in 1517, which repealed the monopoly, and the nobility got into the game. But it was not until 1576 that Krištof Popel of Lobkovic installed a brewery at Kost Castle, in the new palace bearing his name that he had built alongside the original fortifications. Radek Novák says the excavation uncovered some vats in which beer was brewed, along with a kiln and foundations made of the sandstone abundant in the Bohemian Paradise region. 

…and then he made a date with Mr. Fuggled himself to visit it.

Speaking of visiting, Stan has alerted me to the fact that Lars has added more dates to the kveik tour. I am not pleased. I already bought the Toronto ticket. I am half way between Toronto and Montreal and faaaarrr prefer Montreal. For the hotel rates alone. Plus the food. Plus it’s Montreal! But the Red Sox are in Toronto on the same night as the night on my ticket. Oh well. I may never meet Lars.

Enough!!!  Over 1500 words. No dog days these.  Expect more news on your internets soon. Boak and Bailey will be at the presses on Saturday and Stan should apply pressure to the big red “publish” button on Mondays. The OCBG Podcast should be there, too, for you audiophiles again on Tuesday! Me? Next week? I perhaps I will report back from Montreal. Who knows?

*Sorry for linking to The Sun.

The Thursday Beer Notes For A Week Or So From My Summer Vacation

There is a certain something in the air. The sound of back to school ads? The fear of seeing a pumpkin ale on a store shelf? Summer is winding up. Harvest has begun, as MacKinnon has pointedly pointed out.  I was out there in the trenches… err… ditches in 2018. Looking forward to their Harvest Ale this fall.

Not entirely unconnectedly, we were up in Ottawa last weekend visiting with eldest before it does and one of the best moments was a pint of London Pride. The middle one has been working at a craft brewery this summer and it was very instructive to watch him take a sip. He has been canning contracted and the brewery’s own stock of beer since May, coming back coated with the stuff. He has tried many brands. But he didn’t know what to make of London Pride, asking what that taste was. It wasn’t fruity. It’s an actual ale, I said.

I thought of that when I read this from The Beer Nut on Wednesday in one of his inordinately regular, lengthy review posts:*

My only other Irish beer for today’s post was from YellowBelly, a brown porter named Chewbaccale, in defiance of the Walt Disney Corporation. It is, fittingly, a big lad, at 6% ABV. It’s all about the balance: a touch of roast, but not too much, and a splash of caramel, but not too much of that either. It’s incredibly satisfying to drink, in that way you only get from brown malt. A little weaker would perhaps make it even better, but might also make it Touching the Scald. Either way, I’d love to see lots more beer like this around.

I was also thinking about this when I chatted with Jordan last Friday morning as I sat in the yard on a day off:

Does Beer develop or just change? Not priggery. “Develop” might suggest (i) progression, (ii) intention. As The Beak of the Finch shows, evolution causes both loss + gain. Each are just results of pre-existing qualities that succeed or fail in new contexts…

My point was illustrated by the idea that it is impossible to have a general global English pale ale fad before 2022 as there just aren’t the hops to support it. Fruit-ee-oh favoured hops control the world. Stan had confirmed that peak Fuggles in the US was achieved in 1930. No wonder TBN longs for more traditional British ale flavours. No wonder my son the brewery worker did not recognize the taste. Hmm. Have traditional British styles become so rare abroad that we have to think of them like Belgian beers in the 1970s?

Elsewhere, something called The Suffolk Gazette posted results of a study that suggest that drinking beer makes men more intelligent:

Boffins at Suffolk’s prestigious College of Medicine found men who drink at least five pints of ale a day were far better equipped to hold high-level discussions about important issues of the day. And blokes on the beer were also more adept at completing brain tasks like finishing cryptic crosswords and solving complicated mathematical equations. The surprising findings will be music to the ears of boozers across Britain, who have been insisting beer is good for them since the drink was first invented in 1937.

Oh, it’s a joke. Speaking of which, Stan posted the picture to the right on Twitter and heard from the crowd: “That store is NO JOKE. He must have $60k+ in bottled beer stock in there.” Which sounded pretty general to me.  This sort of thing interested me in 2006. Do people still drop $300 after driving for hours? Do they have kids?

Did you know that Ontario has a deli meat cold cuts competition every two years? I wan’t that press pass. But the judging took place a couple of weeks ago so I will have to wait until 2021.

The Master Brewers podcast posted an episode entitled “Breathe, Breathe, Breathe, Scream” about brewer Kerry Caldwell who overcame the 34% chance of survival calculated by the hospital after she was injured in 2015 when a brew kettle boiled over at a brewery where she formerly worked. They also discuss improving brew house safety by adding a cut-off mechanism that would avoid her sort of incident.

The Beer Nut** has yet again alerted me to a matter of good ecclesiastic practice. In Cork, Ireland one priest is a bit fed up with folk bringing beer and other personal relics of the deceased to funerals:

Fr Tomas Walsh, who has previously spoken out about Godless Godparents and disrespecting the Holy Eucharist, has criticised behaviour he has seen at funerals. Writing in the weekly Gurranabraher newsletter, Fr Walsh said inappropriate memorabilia is being brought up to the altar at funeral Masses. “Bringing things such as a can of beer, a packet of cigarettes, a remote control, a mobile phone, or a football jersey does not tell us anything uplifting about the person who has died,” Fr Walsh wrote.

My late father, a Protestant minister, confiscated cameras brought out during weddings – walking up the aisle hand outstretched for delivery of the offending article as he continued to speak, leading the service – so I do get Fr Walsh’s point.  Seems a bit pagan. Except the remote control. That’s gold.

It’s interesting that the acquisition of a craft brewery by big bad macro is so uninteresting:

AB InBev SA (NYSE: BUD) has agreed to acquire Platform Beer Co., which will join Anheuser-Busch’s Brewers Collective as its newest craft partner. Platform Beer Co is the fastest growing regional brewery in the United States in 2017, known for their diverse portfolio of unique beers and innovative approach. Platform, founded in Cleveland by local entrepreneurs Paul Benner and Justin Carson, began in 2014 as a homebrew-inspired brewery devoted to community outreach and education. Still carrying community values at the core of their business today, Platform is known throughout Ohio for their taproom customer experiences and vast beverage portfolio of award-winning innovative products – creating more than 200 unique beers per year. The brewery’s unparalleled creativity and experimentation has resulted in more than 600 recipes that include a variety of unique seasonals, sours, ciders and fruit ales, barrel-aged beers, and a line of hard seltzer.

“Homebrew-inspired“? Now there is a new nothingness. “…a line of hard seltzer…”??? Hooray for everything! I look forward to maybe three of those 600 brands being discount regional pale ales by 2022.

There. Next week will be the day before the holidays expect the quality to decline… if that is possible.  Check in with Boak and Bailey for more news on Saturday and Stan on Monday. The OCBG Podcast should be there, too, on  Tuesday so check it out. Have a good weekend!

*Pray for his liver.
**The Double!!!

If This Be Thursday Be It Not The First August Edition Of Ye Beery News?

Finally. August. I am not one to complain but July has seen me up at 5:45 am most days to drop three householders off at their various destinations about town before I get to my office. There. I complained. And the heat. My genetic code has spent most of its existence in the land of the midnight sun. I burn in the shade. I miss cardigans. There. I complained again.

This week’s photo of the week is from a tweet by @davidtinney1. Ghost signs are always good but this one of Whitbread is lovely.

First news: Stan sent out Vol. 3, No. 3 of his Hop Queries newsletter this week and some of the news from Europe makes other bad news from Europe look like not so bad news from Europe:

The 57th Congress of the International Hop Growers’ Convention is meeting this week in Slovenia. You can bet the weather is being discussed. The heat wave tracked here in Vol. 3, No. 2 was not necessarily a setback for much of this year’s German crop, but another heat wave and lack of precipitation combine to raise new concerns. The situation appears worse in the Czech Republic. A report from July 6: “After climatically promising May the weather in June 2019 unfortunately got back into the groove of previous several years, i.e. to the dry and hot weather. A particularly adverse situation developed at the temperatures, when monthly average reached the value of 21.4°C, exceeding the long-term average of 17°C by 4.4°C. Together with unevenly distributed rains, which were mostly of stormy nature, they had a very negative impact to the growth and development of hops, which seemed to be quite promising in this year.” Harvest begins in a few weeks.

Were I Snagglepuss and this was a 1960s Saturday morning TV cartoon, I might say “Heavens to Murgatroyd!” but I am not so I won’t.

Next up, the Tand Himself shared his thoughts on the state and source of murk as we know it today and I think he has it right:

I think it was Robbie Pickering who first coined the term “London Murky” and then it was rather unusual to see deliberately hazy beers, championed by a few and regarded with a mixture of indifference and horror by most of us “traditionalists”, but the beer itself was well enough brewed, with my main objection being that it – pun intended – muddied the cask conditioned waters and undermined the convention built up over many years, that a problem pint was identified by sight first of all, if it was presented as less than clear.  There was more or less a nationwide acceptance on both sides of the bar that this was a starting point about a case to answer on a beer’s saleability. In short the increase in hazy beers eroded the customer’s position and allowed barstaff to say something that had largely been eliminated; “It’s meant to be like that”…  

On the topic of bad ideas, Jason Notte triggered a lively and thoughtful debate on the cultural appropriation of Chinese imagery and language and perhaps even cultural slurs by Stillwater. Argument made in favour: “…inspired by some of your favorite Chinese takeout classics.” David Sun Lee concisely shared: “That Fu Manchu font can GTFO.” All seems pretty crass to me.  “Inspired by” usually is.

Speaking of inspired, one of the biggest problems with podcasts – along with the discovery that humanity gets by through mumbling most of the time – is that you cannot link to the un-indexed content in any meaningful way. So, as I was listening to the R.J. Beer Half Hour Of The Airwaves this week, I live tweeted my thoughts on one observation being made about how Robin felt being called a beer blogger despite all her good writing:

Interesting hierarchical suggestion: beer authors / book writers > published columnists > website columnist > bloggers > YouTubers > instagrammers > mimes! Journalists? Not really around anymore. I place playboy amateur brewing historians at the top. But that’s me.

Now, it has been such a long time that anyone cared about beer blogging that metablogging about blogging is unknown to the youff of today. That being said, after you listen to the podcast yourself. I find the idea that there is a pecking order of beer writer-ship still really odd. To be fair, I am pretty cynical about these things and to be really fair I think the only thing I have not done in that list is beer YouTubing… because there is only one thing sadder than podcasting.* That being said, it is entirely unfair to (i) label anyone these days as a “blogger” and then (ii) put them down because of it. Being a beer blogger these days is like being a Victorian botanist funding trips to Papua New Guinea though frittering away the family estate. Good things may come of the effort but no one is in it personally to come out better off. No, I would far prefer people were put down for claiming to be beer journalists as that is only comparable to being a Venusian.**

Good to see the Ontario Provincial Police sending out this image of someone suspected LCBO shoplifter. There were odd rumours going around that government liquor store shoplifters were being allowed to go free. Nasty thing to say. Nasty thing to do.

Vinepair posted an article this week that has a tile that explains everything: “We Asked 20 Brewers: What Are the Worst Trends in Beer Right Now?” Its interesting because folk seemed to share a wide range of what they each actually thought were the worst trends. Right now. This comment by someone I don’t know named Harris Stewart, Founder and CEO, TrimTab Brewing is particularly interesting:

The beer community is a vocal one, and we love how people freely review, discuss, and share their opinions about beers they try. However, a trend I see that isn’t constructive is a tendency of people to default their reviews to a comparison of any given beer to an archetype of that beer style. As opposed to evaluating a beer as an independent expression of a style — and most importantly whether they liked it! — it becomes more a question of does it taste like X beer or is it better than Y beer. We as a brewery place primary importance on innovation and are never trying to duplicate an expression of any given style. So, we believe it would be a positive move for craft beer if the community would keep an open mind and evaluate beers as unique steps along an evolution of a style, not a catalog of archetype imitations. 

I say this one is interesting as it is a renunciation of so much: Style as archetype, beer store shelf as a place of decision making, consumer as independent opinion makers with their own personal experience and existence.  Problem: if one is to “keep an open mind and evaluate beers as unique steps along an evolution of a style” how does one know and communicate to others when something sucks?

On that note, the long weekend is upon me. I took Friday off, too. Boak and Bailey will more news on Saturday and Stan seems back on track on Mondays. The OCBG Podcast should be there, too  Tuesday so check it out. See you!

*Joke. Funny ha ha!
**Not so much.

The Summer’s Lease Hath Far Too Short A Date Edition Of Thursday Beer News Links

Gather ye rose buds, lads and lassies. Five more weeks until Labour Day weekend looms. Back to school ads on the TV start soon. Remember: every fair from fair sometime declines. Boom. Chucka. Lucka. Photo of the week is from retiredmartin who has been out gathering. Note the first:  check out the third person’s experienced expression. Note the next: there is a missing fourth person. What is not to love?

A great start this week so far, don’t you think? Let’s go! Next, Dr. J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham spoke at Slow Food Nations about the progressive influence craft beer has on communities – something I would have thought would have been happening at every slow food conference since time began. She sat for an interview on her thoughts about food and justice:

Largely people are heartbroken because their intentions are good but haven’t actually been realized in their business. The project of equity, inclusion and justice tends to overwhelm people with a sense of fear of doing it wrong. So my approach is to come at this as a huge opportunity for a business both in terms of social good and the bottom line. To do this, a business has to think about it on par with all other organizational goals, build infrastructure and then talk through specific tactical scenarios that people can grab on too.

Here’s some science for you. Drinking is being studied studiously and one study has found out that folk are not altering their habits all the same way. It asked the question “why are alcohol-specific deaths going up in Britain when alcohol consumption is going down?”

Countervailing alcohol consumption and alcohol‐related harm trends in the UK may be explained by lighter and heavier drinkers having different period and cohort trends as well as by the presence of cohort trends that mean consumption may rise in some age groups while falling in others.

I heard a similar science-like story on NPR Monday morning but never found the link. [It’s sad when things turn out like that.] But the point was teens seem to be reversing what the last set of teens did and the newbies are turning to the bottle after their elder teens of the last ten years have been subsisting digitally.

Writing advice. Boak and/or Bailey included more than one excellent observation in their monthly newsletter but I liked this one the bestest:

A couple of weeks ago we posted about migrant workers from Suffolk in the Burton brewing industry. In a follow-up Tweet we said: “TIP: If you really want to learn about beer and brewing, don’t just read beer writers – look beyond.” This is something we think is important. When we wrote Gambrinus Waltz, for example, most of the research was undertaken in newspapers, old magazines, books about London, theatrical biographies, autobiographies… We hardly looked at a single book by a capital-B, capital-W beer writer, except for Ron Pattinson and Martyn Cornell.

Sounds like a couple of dodgy sorts to me… but the point is correct: get ye to the primary records as often as possible. Right after the rosebuds. Or perhaps they are your idea of rosebuds. Good all-round general thinking advice, when you think of it.

Hmm. Not sure I like this. The next nightmare beverage has apparently shown up in Malaysia:

Asians love the bubble milk tea. They love beers as well. One franchise has decided to merge the both together in what it considers the “matchmake of the century”… The Boba Beers consists of Butter Beer made with Kirin Ichiban, Guinness Milkshake with Guinness (duh), Strawberry Lime Cider made out of Apple Fox Cider, and Watermelon Beer mixed with Tiger Beer.

I don’t judge but, well, it sounds pretty yik. I expect some craft brewer will update* it and the kids will go nuts.  Because tea+beer=boba can’t help but be cheaper to make than even beer+juice+radler.

Geoff Latham had a good go at pointing out that one craft fabulous UK brewer selling into the EU was seemingly breaking the law:

It’s not allowed under EU rules. They closed the “personal import by post” loophole when tobacco sales by post rocketed. The person importing can have their goods seized and face prosecution. The company exporting also can if the correct customs documents don’t accompany the beer

I liked Zak Avery’s experienced views on the matter, too. Craft is all fine and good but a couple of weeks of short sharp shock might be called for.

New brewery news: Ontario emigrants brewmaster Andrew Bartle, marketing manager Marissa Bégin have declared their new operation The Church Brewing open for business. This is great and especially so as they are located in Wolfville, Nova Scotia** near where I grew up, where my Dad was a United Church minister which means he likely went to presbytery meetings in a future brewery.

I am enjoying the approach Matt Curtis and his journal Pellicle are taking in treating good beer as part of broader food and rink production.  British wine has been included in that scope this week:

Thanks to this bumper crop, British wine is being spoken about with more fanfare than ever before. British sparkling wine, particularly from vineyards based in Sussex and Kent, is now widely recognised to be on par with Champagne. This perhaps explains why in 2017 the Champagne house Taittinger planted vines in Kent (though, due to its appellation, they cannot call what they make here Champagne) in order to exploit similar growing conditions as the prestigious house enjoys in France.

Boak and Bailey have hit for the double this week when on Wednesday they posted a tweet with a link to a 1971 article from the publisher of the foundational and likely all-time leading home brew and good beer books in terms of sales, Amateur Winemaker. The article is about beer tourism to Belgium, a copy of which is produced to the right. I love it. While a bit cringe making on topics matrimonial, it is far less creepy in its sexist approach than the sometimes leering thoughts of one Mr. Jackson when he spoke of ladies AND it does an excellent job describing the subject matter of his article – traveling to Belgium in that year of 1971 to explore the beer culture. I particularly like the observation that sweetening sour beers like Rodenbach or Gueuze was locally common. This primary record proves their earlier observation – and raises again the question of why no one has seriously studied the influence of Amateur Winemaker publications. Then again, perhaps Columbus did actually discover the New World.

Finally, a point of view from our side good beer on the word authenticity. While I am a bit of a loaf, I do like reading about good menswear as I am a man who needs to wear things. Permanent Style is one of the best current guides to things I can never afford which offers an alternative voice on matters analogous to good beer and here is their take on that word:

In the past couple of years ‘authentic’ has become increasingly important to how I see clothing.  Partly, this is because the other terms – or values – have become less important.  Heritage has been overemphasised. Frankly, some old companies make terrible products and are stuck in the past, unable to adapt either to changing consumer expectations or the media that markets them.  So too has craft. The fact it is done by hand doesn’t necessarily make it better. Some craftsmen set out on their own before they’re ready, and deliver a poor product. And some things are just better made by machine. 

Interesting. Given most “craft” beer is made on computerized set ups that manage much of the process automatically, the comparison may well be a useful one.

Well, that is it for now. Not a boring week at all. Boak and Bailey should have even more to share on Saturday and I am now trusting Stan to being back again Monday. Consider, too, the OCBG Podcast which is broadcasting the thoughts of Robin and Jordan as they observe upon good beer each Tuesday now coming on three months or so.

*aka poach.
**pronounced “Wuhff-fuh” locally.

In 1655 Good English Beer Made Its Way To The Caribbean

It’s already 38C according to the humidex outside at 11 am. I’m not gardening. I’m not even hanging around outside until the shade starts making its move in the backyard. With the sting of the Beer Nut’s pointed truth fresh in my mind, how about patching together a beery post about trans-oceanic beer transit.

And what a tale it is! Let’s not forget that the earliest date I have established for trans-Oceanic beer transportation is 1577. In that year, Martyn Frobisher brought a boatload of miners to gather iron ore in Canada’s Arctic. And he brought a boatload of beer to keep the miners lubricated. 80-and-one-half tunnes in all:

Biere for iij monthes contayneng 168 daies after the computation of one gallone aman per day 80 1/2 ton at 2li 5s per ton wth caske iron whoopes and chardges.

All seems to have gone well but it would, wouldn’t it. It’s the Arctic and the beer would have been able to keep relatively cool. What about further south and days of heat like today out there in the yard? We know that good old Taunton ale was shipped south in the 1700s. It’s in New York City in the 1750s and into the Caribbean with its delivery to Jamaica in the 1770s. But the British were in the equatorial zone of the Atlantic well before that. Did they bring beer? Yup:

In September 1655, Major Robert Sedgewick was pleased that the beer shipped along with the troops on the Western Design remained potable: “Amongst the rest of our Provisions our beere proved generally very good wch was a very great refreshment and is so to this day.” 

See footnote 53 at page 124 of Temperateness, Temperance, and the Tropics: Climate and Morality in the English Atlantic World, 1555-1705, a PhD dissertation from 2013. The author-candidate, M.R. Hill contextualized the footnoted information in this way:

In the hot climates of the Atlantic world, however, English travelers and colonists usually had to make do without their cherished beers. European grains did not grow well in the West Indies, leaving the English without ingredients for brewing in the island colonies. Beer often failed to survive long sea voyages, corrupted by bad casks, heat, or simply the passage of time. In the West Indies the English imported drinks or turned to local substitutes such as mobby (a mixture of potato juice and water, sometimes fermented), citrus drinks and rum-based drinks. Because they shipped well, however, distilled spirits often replaced beer among the English in hot climates.

Jamaica was invaded by the English in 1655 as part of Cromwell’s Western Design, ousting the resident Spaniards after flubbing an attack on what is now the Dominican Republic. They landed in Jamaica on the 9th of May. Sedgwick’s letter in which he praises the beer was dated 6 September, four months later. Notice that he wrote that it was a great refreshment and “is so to this day.” Notice that the beer was “shipped along with the troops on the Western Design…” It lasted through a Caribbean summer.

Wikipedia tells us that “Within a year the 7,000 English officers and troops that took part in the invasion were reduced to 2,500.” Robert Sedgwick was one of those who died.  Interesting fellow. Born in England in 1611, he spends his later twenties and thirties in colonial Massachusetts, joins the Military Company of the Massachusetts but goes back home to support Cromwell. He takes to the sea, attacks the French in what is now the Canadian Maritimes and into New England before attacking Spain further south. Sedgwick, Maine is named after him. Boston of the 1630s was a beer drinking town:

Boston was, in the early days of the Company, the principal seaport town in North America, untrammelled as yet by a custom-house, and the flags of the maritime nations waved at her wharves… she exported to the mother country dried codfish, tar, turpentine, lumber, spars, whale oil and bone, deerskins, furs, etc., receiving in return Holland gin, strong beer, and merchandise of every description.

Sedgwich himself seems to have operated a brewery in Boston in 1637. It says this in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America:

… after being licensed by the General Court held in Newton, Massachusetts on 20 November 1637, Captain Robert Sedgwick opened the first of the New England breweries in Charleston, now part of greater Boston.

He also seems to have obtained a licence to brew from the local Boston government in 1635. He was something of an all-rounder:

Charlestown has cause to remember Genl. Sedgwick for the results of his active public spirit when residing in the town. He was an enterprising merchant, built wharves, carried on a brewing establishment, built the old Tide-mills, and had an interest in the Iron Works at Lynn. “He was representative in the style of his ideas and character of the liberal Puritans of those early days of Now England history, religion was in all his thoughts, and yet he openly opposed the prevailing intolerance. He was a very brave, zealous and pious man.”

So, it is entirely reasonable that Sedgwick would not only have written about the beer that arrived in Jamaica along with the English in 1655, he might have been involved with keeping in good condition. Keeping it in good condition from at the latest May to September at the earliest.

He dies in 1656, one year after the invasion of Jamaica and left children who died lived there and in England and in New England. Beer lad.

The Mid-July Thursday Beer News You Need

Mid-July! It’s lovely. Warm. Tropical even. We are actually getting the edgy remnants of Hurricane Barry into the Great Lakes basis so it’s all a bit thick out there.  Raspberries picked by my own sausage-like digits. And the fire flies are at their peak. I let the garden go a bit and they seem to love it. 100+ flashes a minute in one corner of the garden. Beer has its role, too. I even had one last night, mid-week. At a Denny’s.* A Bud Light. The weirdest thing was being handed a ice cold bottle and an ice cold glass. Entirely hit the spot. Mid-week, mid-month, mid-summer, mid-year, mid-aged.

What is going on? Well, Josh Noel, who admitted to needing something to wash out his mouth after writing about hard seltzer, has written a helpful article for the Chicago Tribune on dark lagers:

And that gets to the genius of dark lager. They’re beers that typically have a modest amount of alcohol — about 5 percent or so — but are long on aroma and taste. Flavors usually include a mild to deep roast character and can veer into chocolate, char or coffeelike terrain thanks to the roasted malt that gives the beer its dark hue. But unlike most of the porters and stouts they resemble, dark lagers tend to finish dry. The best dark lagers make for stealthily ideal summer beers: interesting layers of flavor, but refreshing. The color, which can range from deep amber to impenetrably black, winds up playing a visual trick.

We have an excellent local black lager, Blacklist from The Napanee Beer Company, so I am particularly grateful for this addition to the discussion.

Note: “bee boles were used before the development of modern hives to provide shelter to the skep…”

As we have been noticing over the last few weeks, beer writing and commentary seems to have divided into (i) “it is so dull and boring right now” for one reason or another** and (ii) HOLIDAY!!! So it was good to see some interesting travel being discussed by a couple of Brits abroad. Nate posted a top ten list of things to do in a city I have lived near – Gdansk, Poland – and gave ten top tips for visiting the old Hanseatic port including hitting up a museum about the Solidarity movement and this:

Shoot Some Guns – Maybe a controversial one, but I’d always wanted to shoot some guns since we can’t do it in the UK and I stumbled across a shooting range whilst doing some research. DSTeamStrzelnica was a great experience where we got to shoot four guns (A Glock 17, a revolver, AK-47 and another rifle) and it only cost us £18 each to shoot a full clip of each gun. It was a really fun experience!

Retired Martin has been in NYC and left us a photo essay with commentary:

How joyous to see a “Sorry, no samples” sign, by the way. 16 ounces (80% of a pint) is practically a sampler anyway.  I reckon the Five Boroughs Hazy IPA served in a plastic glass will have cost me £8 by the time taxes and Lloyds Bank conversion charge are added on.  Still cheaper than Port Street. “Tastes like Brew Dog” says Mrs RM.  It tasted like Hazy Jane. On to the High Line, the one place in New York where you can avoid craft beer and tipping…

Saskatchewan’s Pile O’ Bones Brewing Co. is getting a bit of heat for its name – folk saying its disrespectful to the local indigenous community – but according to this Cree language place name resource site, the location of what is now Regina was called “oskana kâ-asastêki” which meant “where the bones are piled.”

Beervana had a interesting guest blog post this week written by Ben Parsons is the co-founder/brewer, along with Rik Hall, of Portland Oregon’s Baerlic Brewing which unpacked the benefits in the US for craft brewers to self distribute their beers:

I would posit that if and when a brewery business does get into some troubled water—albeit from market conditions, saturation, losing chain grocery, etc—not owning their own distribution rights could easily be the last nail in the coffin. And although distributors are a very necessary part of the industry, their foothold on this particular part of the conversation is risky business and needs modernization so that it better fits with the current state of the industry.

Folk chatting about early brewing methods is always interesting. Who knew that bands in the pottery meant the line to fill with boiling water before topping up with cold before adding in the mash was so obvious?

At the Corrigall Farm, Orkney, large tubs that have marked lines inside, usually about one third to a half way up. Custodian told us (years ago, hope I have the details right) that you put in boiling water to the mark, then top up with cold and it’s the correct temperature.

Pilsner as the anti-NEIPA? Maybe.

This is an interesting piece, a remembrance of 16 of B.C.’s now shut early micro- and even some more recent craft era breweries. And it contains this interesting bit of history:

Horseshoe Bay Brewery was the first microbrewery in Canada when it was opened in 1982 by John Mitchell and Frank Appleton to produce beer for the nearby Troller Pub and became Ground Zero for the craft beer revolution. Mitchell and Appleton soon moved on to Spinnakers, and Horseshoe Bay briefly closed in 1985 before reopening and produced beer well into the 1990s, before closing for good in 1999. The original brewhouse, made from converted dairy equipment, is still in use today at Crannog Ales in Sorrento.

Now, that would be a real Canadian beer nerd’s pilgrimage: “honey, I am off to see the original brewhouse, made from dairy equipment!” It’s halfway between Kamloops and Sicamous, if you are planning the trip yourself.

That’s it! Have a great week as Q2 turns into Q3. I will be lounging myself. Well, dapper by day then lounging through evening. Such is the life of the office worker. Check out the beer news from Boak and Bailey on Saturday and maybe on Monday we will have a sighting of the inter-continental Stan now that he is back from Brazil.

*You can mock me after you’ve tried the burger. I was surprised, too.
**hard seltzer, everyone’s already been bought out, even glitter beer is so last year…