Your Unimpeachable Thursday Beery News Notes

Sad news to start with. We lost one of the greatest comedians I have known in my life – as well as a figure at the early end of this wave of good beer culture. The role of Terry Jones of Monty Python, along with co-conspirator Eric Idle, in bringing real ale to the attention of the British public during the mid-1970s was recorded by Boak and Bailey in their fabulous book Brew Britannia, excerpts of which were posted on their blog for the 100th edition of the dear departed Session:

This should not have come as a surprise to anyone who had seen Palin in the famous 1974 ‘travel agent’ sketch in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, in which Eric Idle delivers a ranting monologue with repeated disparaging references to Watney’s Red Barrel. Of the two, Terry Jones was the more enthusiastic about beer. When his accountant, Michael Henshaw, introduced him to another of his clients, Richard Boston, they entered into partnership on two projects. First, an ‘alternative’ magazine, The Vole, to be edited by Boston; and second, a brewery, which they initially intended to open in Berkshire.

I love that an accountant was involved with getting him going on good beer. Roger Protz remembered him, his brewery and a particular moment before the press with this tweet:

I remember it well. Terry Jones… didn’t want to pose sniffing the beer. He suggested pouring it over his head. He had to do it twice as the incredibly old-fashioned Fleet Street photographers in their trilbys were not ready with their cumbersome cameras.

My favorite remembrance today was from Stephen Fry: “Farewell, Terry Jones. The great foot has come down to stamp on you.” Lovely.

And from a slightly earlier point in beer culture, David Sun Lee shared this Youtube vid for Carling Black Label noteworthy for its significant Mabel content. My mother’s cousin Mabel married a Glasgow pub owner and mailed them Canadian “Hey Mabel, Black Label!” related breweriana when I was a toddly kid in the 1960s.

In corporate news, all is not so real. We learn from Matt that Australia’s Lion Beer, a Kirin subsidiary, is consolidating its “Little World Beverages” arm to include New Belgium, Little Creatures, Panhead, Fourpure and Magic Rock.  And Atwater Brewery of Detroit is selling to  Molson Coors under an agreement that sees all of its brewing assets, taprooms and a biergarten moving to Molson Coors under its craft beer division Tenth and Blake. Adjust your buying preferences accordingly.

Speaking of shadowy corporate goals, I found an email from Beer Connoisseur webzine in my spam folder which had, miracle of miracles, a softball Q+A with well-known promoters Jim Koch and Sam Calagione which included this sad statement of where we are:

Jim: Who would have thought a few years ago that The Boston Beer Company would play in hard seltzer? Truly was an innovation we explored as an alternative for drinkers – and we’re happy we took the chance on it when we did as one of the first to market… We’ll continue to innovate within this lifestyle space with beers like SeaQuench and Slightly Mighty, but in the past two years, the hard seltzer category has grown more than 830 percent and more than 220 percent in 2019 alone. Hard seltzer sales have now surpassed all IPA sales, one of craft beer’s most popular styles, demonstrating the shift in drinker preference, which Truly is capitalizing on.

Lifestyle space! It’s like he writes the advertising himself! Grim stuff. Speaking of pressures on actual good beer, we learn that there is just too much darn pot in Canada!

In just a year after Canada’s historic pot legalization, pot producers built up a massive surplus of pot. In fact, only 4% of pot produced in Canada in July has been sold! The rest is being stored in warehouses… just like crops during the Great Depression. For much of the past century, laws held back pot production like a dam holds back a river. But Canada threw those floodgates wide open, and the market was flooded with millions of kilos of pot.

More grim stuff – and quite a distance from what Terry Jones was advocating for back in the mid-70s. Heck, I’m pretty sure Mabel wouldn’t want any of this, either.

Note #1: don’t blame higher alcohol duty rates in the UK for whatever you need to blame something for. They are actually lower.  Good news!

Note #2: telling others their descriptors are poor is an utter waste of time, reflects a weak understanding of how language works and is also a bit of bullying.*

For more gooder news, look at this fascinating story of how one scientist (for whose work the world should be on its knees thanking its lucky stars) is making a personal medical breakthrough in his own struggles with alcohol:

Electrodes are inserted into a targeted region of the brain to recalibrate activity in that area using electrical impulses – controlled by a pacemaker-like device placed under the skin of the patient’s chest – and ease cravings. Dr Plummer was the trial’s first patient and underwent the experimental surgery just over a year ago. A total of six people are expected to eventually participate – all with a history of chronic alcohol use disorder proven resistant to other types of treatment.

And here’s another ray of sunshine. Pete Brown dusted off his blog and shared two posts this week, including this one on the modest increase in the number of pubs in the UK in 2019:

Now, a friend of mine has pointed out that when you dig right down into the data, rounding numbers in individual regions may mean this very modest increase is even smaller than it looks. It’s also worth noting that the modest increases in 2003 and 2007 – the only other years this century with a net increase – did little to alter the overall downward trend that’s seen more than a quarter of British pubs disappear in the last twenty years. But rather than quibble about the size of the rise, what’s more important is that the number of pubs hasn’t gone down.

Speaking of revival, Will Hawkes has a story in Imbibe on turn in craft’s  rejection of traditional Fuggles-based bitter:

The key to the beer is the use of Fuggles hops, sourced from the Weald of Kent, their ancestral home. Hobbs says the brewery has brewed one batch with Goldings, but that they plan to stick with Fuggles for the foreseeable future. ‘The quality of the Fuggles makes that beer,’ he says. The volume of hops used makes for a fi rm, almost austere bitterness that is very diff erent from some of the more mimsy family brewer ales; ‘That’s how we like it,’ says Hobbs.

And Katie (who assures us she is NOT TO BE FEARED!) wrote about the use of local woods for barrel aging beers in Brazil for Ferment web-mag-thingie:

“Culturally we use a lot of local botanicals in our drinks because fresh hops were hard to come by, and this includes the wood we use to store them,” he explains.  “In fact, brewers and cachaça makers are starting to use small pieces of wood or specially made spirals for an infusion effect. In cachaça there are more than 30 types of wood that can be used to give the flavours of the drink. The trees this wood comes from are local and usually are only found in Brazil. This gives these drinks even more cultural value and adds to their identity.”

Speaking of old beer methodologies, via a h/t to Merryn, we learn for those out there studying China circa 4,000 BC that there is news that “Chinese people experimented with two different methods of making BEER** 6,000 years ago”:

One method, employed by the Yangshao people in Dingcun, was to use malts made of sprouted millet, grass seeds and rice to produce low-alcohol drinks.  Whereas another made use of qu, mouldy grass and grains, to produce stronger drinks. ‘Yangshao people may have been experimenting with various methods to find the best way for alcohol making, or were brewing multiple types of alcohol for different purposes,’ Dr Liu Li, writes in the study.

That’s it for now. The real and the sad. The fake and the glad. Don’t worry. Just five full weeks to March. We can make it. As we wait for sugnshine and warmth, don’t forget to check in with Boak and Bailey’s on Saturdays, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast now as well! Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast.

*Or put another way…
**Random pointless capitalization is one of the best thing about mid-range UK newspaper headlines.

This Thursday’s Beery News Notes Are Brought To You By Dog Sled

OK, it’s finally winter. I accept it. Pals in Newfoundland are reporting 150 cm of snow. Other pals in Alberta are living with -40C.  But… it’s six more weeks to March. I will survive. As I learned all those years ago from my personal hero, Gloria Gaynor. And, just like someone looking for a friend out there on the dark frozen suburban tundra without any luck, Matt asked about new beer blogs this week and seemed to get no answer – even if a few promises to start one up were offered.  Boak and Bailey even mentioned the same thing in Last Saturday’s round up:

Blogging is dead, people sometimes say, but it’s so frustrating that great information is left lying in Twitter where hardly anybody can find it within ten minutes of transmission.

So let’s see if it is all death of a disco artist out there or not, shall we? Or are blogs so alive that we just forgot to notice. This week, it’s getting meta!!!*

Blog. Found one. Jordan visited a brewery this week. He found it odd. But he thought he was doing beer journalism** when he was just writing a blog post:

Editor’s note: Just going and reviewing a brewery is seemingly an old fashioned idea. When was the last time you saw someone do it? That’s a legitimate question, by the way. If you can picture a Maslow’s hierarchy of beer journalism, reviewing a brewery is somewhere towards the bottom of the pyramid. It’s fundamental, but who goes places anymore? Ah, well. Some idiot has to do it. 

He then goes on to examine the realities of one new brewery’s prospects in Toronto. They aren’t all good but they ain’t all bad. And Jordan explains why. No proper news organ is ever paying for this. Which is great. Because it’s on a blog.

Nudder blog. The Beer Nut also went to a brewery – which means Jordan thinks he is also an idiot. And it was also in an odd part of town, too. And he also had problems with the purpose of a blog:

BrewDog Outpost Dublin opened its doors in December. This long-anticipated addition to the Dublin beer landscape has chosen a daring location, at the very far eastern end of the south quays, where the city is still very much developing. They’re clearly hoping for a high enough concentration of wealthy young tech and finance workers to keep the large pub/restaurant/brewery in business. But this blog isn’t where you come for speculation on the economic ins-and-outs of the local on-trade. This is where I talk about beer.

Meta.

Anudder blog. That’s three. Pints with Polk pulled out the crystal ball and set it to 2020 to discover nine trends, one of which is the pox of influencers:

My wish that those types of people would not be given any credibility by those who matter will no doubt fall on deaf ears and I’ll just say I take most things I see with a grain of salt, while continuing to try and tell the truth about what I drink at every turn, good or bad. Influencers aren’t going anywhere anytime soon and as long as they remain docile and pliant to only saying nice things, they will continue to be rewarded.

Hmm… Seems like blogging is actually in! The kids know it. You should know it, too. We just need to face facts. And, as if we needed proof, Ed added a bit of excellent technical brewing bloggetry to this week’s reading all about the mystery of a black malt addition:

My current boss, has been a brewer for many a year, occasionally drops a fascinating fact into the conversation. He started out working for Courage, so Imperial Russian Stout occasionally crops up, and I’m pleased to say that last week the mystery of black malt in the copper was solved.

I also liked this blog post by Liam about Smithwick’s dabbling with lager in the 1960s, this one from the Boak and the Bailey on whether there is a mild in disguise all around us, this one from Jeff on the weirdness that is Bud Light Seltzer, and this one telling craft brewers to embrace that same weirdness. And the daily output from Ron. They are out there. Here’s one from Amsterdam and another from Eindhoven. Here’s one from the far frozen northlands. Plenty are run by Gen X men. Many by Canadian Gen X men. During the blizzards while the lights are still working. When beer blogging started, it was all a side gig run by folk in the IT world. Now so much of it is left to Canada. Like saving Royals from themselves. What is up with that?

Anyway, there you are. Blogtastic stuff. Get the fever… and now the news. First up, the really important news that the silver spoon child*** who runs Sam Smith’s empire is as dull and dim as the rest of us:

He is the ultra-traditional – indeed some would say Victorian – brewery boss who has notoriously banned mobiles at his pubs. But it seems Samuel Smith’s owner Humphrey Smith has found a cunning way to get around his own rules – by popping into a Wetherspoon’s to check his phone. The seldom-photographed brewer was spotted in the rival chain in Heywood, near Manchester.

Hmm.  And that’s the end of the news.

And it’s not all about blogging. It has also not all kind to the paid beer writer out there recently, either. Beth Demmon has been tweeting with some upset over new regulations in California Assembly Bill 5 – or AB 5 – which aim to get rid of unfair employment practices but which have sideswiped her career plans:

Fuck #AB5. I’m so upset. I’m sitting here crying bc everything I’ve worked for, the career I’ve created and based my entire life on, is crumbling around me and there’s literally nothing I can do about it.

Kate of the shine and the biscuit shared another downside in her weekly newsletter, The Gulp:****

My Stuff. Not much to report this week — I’ve got something I’m really proud of on an editor’s desk at the moment, and a few other things in my drafts pile. (I use the American spelling. I’m not sorry. “Draught” is such an ugly word, I don’t like it at all. It looks like I should be pronouncing it “Droauuft” and no. I won’t.)

There are still other perils as we remember when Megan reminds us that is OK not to drink. Who is paying anyone to report that? Nobody. Well, not many. But Olga Khazan got paid to write in The Atlantic about it in a way, about the lack of an anti-alcohol movement:

Breunig’s outlook harks back to a time when there was a robust public discussion about the role of alcohol in society. Today, warnings about the devil drink will win you few friends. Sure, it’s fine if you want to join Alcoholics Anonymous or cut back on drinking to help yourself, and people are happy to tell you not to drink and drive. But Americans tend to reject general anti-alcohol advocacy with a vociferousness typically reserved for IRS auditors and after-period double-spacers. Pushing for, say, higher alcohol taxes gets you treated like an uptight school marm. Or worse, a neo-prohibitionist.

And Colin Angus gets paid as part of his work with the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group at the University of Sheffield and he updated that map I liked so much last week. And by update I mean made more grim by adding Scotland. Good Lord, that is horrible.

Yikes. I better find something else to look at for a bit. But you? Want more beer writing, paid and unpaid, journalism and not? It’s there and happy to share what I see out there.*****  And don’t forget to check in with Boak and Bailey’s on Saturdays, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast now as well! Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. Plenty. Good ‘n’ Plenty.

*Yaaaaawwwwwwnnn!!!!!!! If you don’t believe me, check out the Google Images search results for the one word “blogging“!
**At a minimum, you need to be paid or in college to be performing journalism… unless it is performance journalism.
***h/t to the Tand.
****I signed up through a combination of fascination and fear, frankly. Gotta stay on the right side of Katie. For sure. Even across an ocean. She’d rip me apart. Does anyone read these footnotes? NO????
*****Could be worse. Could all be GBH even without those potential better Myanmar connections. And don’t check out #beerblog. That ain’t pretty either.

 

Your Thursday Beer News Notes For The Week That The Bills Come

It was supposed to be fun. All fun. But now there is the reckoning. Not just in the sense of #Dryuary but #Skint-uary. #I-spent-all-I-had-uary. No wonder folk feel a pinch and stop splurging. Remember, though… pubs can be for cheap sustenance, too.  And if you are really stuck, here is a guide to getting the booze out even if you want to go out. And even if you get the booze out, just thank your lucky stars you aren’t deep into big US milk.  It’ll be #Dairy-uary next year if this keeps up. Fighting all this as a voice raging in the wilderness, the Pub Curmudgeon posted his warnings about state control of such matters – and included this very attractive poster that should really be placed by every child’s bed.

That being said, first off all hail June Hallworth of the Davenport Arms in Stockport, England, Still working at her family’s pub at 81. Her secret is a surprise:

Despite a life spent around alcohol, Hallworth doesn’t actually drink. “My husband used to ask: ‘Is there nothing you like the look of?’” Yet she has witnessed changing drinking habits: before, you’d struggle to get people out of the pub after last orders. “You’d have to shout at them to drink up. Now, people drink earlier. You can lock up more easily.”

Clearly, June is on team #Dryuary. Wonder if she also minds a mobile phone or a little foul language, too? And here’s something interesting and not unrelated – a map of England indicating where alcohol and drugs are laying people flat, kicking or otherwise. Entitled “Deaths from alcohol and drugs by Local Authority in England” – does it make sense? By which I mean, are there cultural, logical, socio-economic aspect to the information? Why is the lower left tippy-toe bit so much worse off than that other bit up there off the North Sea? Hmm… also not unrelated… a poem… on drinking… circa 1700:

His trembling hand scarce heaves his liquor in,
His nerves all crackle under parchment skin;
His guts from nature’s drudgery are freed,
And in his bowels salamanders breed…

So, at least it is not all new. Speaking of getting at the new, I am not entirely sure that I agree with Matt but I do support his right to argue for the place of what he calls beer media:*

Establishing strong lines of communication with both the beer media and the drinker is essential, but as pointed out in the first part of this series, engaging with these two sets of people are actually very different things. Yes, a press release is an essential tool for getting out snippets of information and keeping people informed about what your business is doing. However, there are more effective—and importantly, more meaningful—ways of engaging with the press.

One would hope that sort of thing does not lead to this sort of thing… Because that is really not that far off other sorts of things. Like how baijiu got where it is today. Baijiu you say?

Produced at a state-owned distillery in Moutai Town, in the scenic southwestern province of Guizhou, Kweichow Moutai is rich in symbolism. “Moutai was the favourite drink of Premier Zhou Enlai, Mao’s longtime number two… He made Moutai the baijiu served at all official state dinners.” Legend has it that Red Army soldiers used it to cleanse their feet on the Long March, while in 1972 Zhou Enlai and President Nixon were famously pictured toasting each other with it. “So it became the baijiu of China’s elite…”

To avoid these various pressures of lobbyists and state control, we need information and, honestly, if believes that one really all should buy the new edition of The World Atlas of Wine:

Robinson bears the main responsibility for this new edition, and her limpid, authoritative style is part of what makes the book so engaging. “At least half of the words on 45% of the pages about wine regions are completely new”, Robinson points out. As with earlier editions, there are excellent introductory sections on how grapes are grown and wines are made, plus wholly new sections on the roles of temperature, sunlight, water, money and climate change on winemaking. There are twenty-two new maps, with some countries (including Brazil, Cyprus and Uruguay) receiving their own pages for the first time.

One thing I have not considered adding to my lifestyle** is home delivery of booze. But now craft is in so it must be good. Yet… the rules for these sorts of things at least in in Toronto are a bit involved:

“When we heard foodora was an option for delivering our beer, we immediately got on board,” said Joey Seaman, head of business development at Bellwoods Brewery said in a release. “This is definitely the most convenient way of getting our beer into the fridges of our local Toronto customers that can’t easily make it to our Bellwoods Brewery bottle shops. Only Smart Serve-certified foodora riders will be delivering alcohol. If the order recipient doesn’t produce valid ID, appears intoxicated, or attempts to purchase for a minor or impaired individual, foodora says that the delivery will be cancelled, and a $20 restocking fee will be applied.

I love that a delivery dude is now empowered to assess the appearance of intoxication and charge a penalty. Like that’s going to happen.

Finally, a bit of the old science after a h/t to Stan:

Here’s a sentence that I never imagined writing in a paper “More generally, the two fly species preferred different #beer styles”. Yup, dear tax payers, we are using your money to investigate which fruit fly species prefers which beers! (And Trust me, this actually is useful!)

At least they gave the flies a selection of fine Belgian beers as part of the program. Oude Kriek was one of the offerings!

Oh, and here is @katzenbrau revealed!

Now that it is a new year, there is still no reason to forget to check in with Boak and Bailey’s on Saturdays, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast now as well! Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast.

*The other term used – “beer writers” – is too wide a label for this purpose, something that the guilds seem to be forgetting.
**Do I really need to say it?

Welcome To The 2020s Edition Of Beery News Notes

I think I lost about three days over the last week. I mean I didn’t notice them slip by at all. It wasn’t any happy haze of a drunken hour or anything. Just the slow drip drip drip of the chocolate assortment boxes being passed around the rooms filled with cousins-in-law, nephews and the pets of others. I was practically temperate all weeks as a matter of fact. Thanks to Katie, I watched the first season of the Detectorists  on DVD – which earned me the stink-eye from our eldest for, again, not having Netflicks.  [See, I didn’t even know it is spelled “Netflix”!]  So, needless to say, I have no real news updates to share.

First up, the blogger known as Wee Beefy had a bit of a sharing post on Boxing Day:

…regular and more astute readers may be aware that since my stroke and more so since my recent brain injury, memories, whatever they are, have not been very high up on my agenda. Longer term readers may also note that throughout the nearly ten year history of my blog, accurate memories of liquids consumed and other aspects of crapulence have thus far regularly escaped me, or at the very least, presented themselves in my memory through a dizzying, contorted haze. So last night, when it took me an hour to find and recall the name of Yorkshiremen the grumbleweeds (not a pub), I was prompted to write.

I’ve actually wondered to myself what, after 17 years of this sort of writing hobby,  might happen were I to have a similar change of life. I assume I would not keep writing. Good to see someone not making that mistake.  I will be reading to see what I can learn.

Jeff at Beervana posted a great scrapbook… album… post… of the favourites among his beery photos.

And to the visual accompaniment of The Beer Nut* on New Year’s Eve, Stephen Beaumont himself concurrently tweeted an excellent and pointed set of wishes for 2020 including:

6) That more breweries operating tap rooms realize that in so doing they are in the hospitality game, and start creating spaces in keeping with that understanding. Also, treating their customers with respect and appreciation. 6/11…

8) That fining and filtration stop being viewed as sins. Yes, hazy works, cloudy works, but there is also nothing wrong with a brilliantly clear beer. 8/11

Switching vices, this is an interesting take from the Beeb on the lack of change that cannibals (aka dope)  becoming legal had on Canadian society:

There were early signs of trouble. When cannabis became legal on 17 October 2018, there wasn’t enough supply to meet the demand. Long lines and backlogs of online orders plagued consumers. Producers weren’t sure what strains would be most popular where, and kinks in the distribution chain were still being ironed out… Where there was once a shortage, now producers have too much product, in part because of the lack of retail. 

The story goes on to say that while we Canucks bought 11,707 kilograms in Sept 2019, about 165,000 kilograms of finished and unfinished products was ready for sale. Frankly, I know of no one who picked up the habit and hear of plenty who still buy off the illegal unregulated market at a much lower price.

On the one hand, I suppose this is entirely good news for Evan and the other authors… but on the other I am not sure why it is news. A gratuitous gift just seems odd. So I trust per word rates will also go up for 2020.

And speaking of curated community, Beth has noted an important limitation on “curation” of “community” – two concepts I have never had much time for: everyone and everything should not be welcome just because sales increase, numbers increase or popularity increases. Things can be bad, especially around alcohol.

You will be happy to know that craft beer is booming in Saskatchewan:

…the major trends right now are hazy New England IPA-style beers, and fruit and sour beers. The hazy beers “are generally very juicy in flavour and they offer a big citrus flavour,” Gasson said. The fruit and sour beers range from very tart to having almost no tartness depending on the style. Gasson thinks those trends will continue, but he also sees more traditional IPAs — that may appeal to a broader audience — making a comeback.

This illustrates the paper-doll moment that good beer is in now. Swap out Saskatchewan for Alabama or Aberdeen and the same sameness applies. Some call it a golden era. It’s conformity. Perhaps even self-censorship.

Contrast that with Gary Gilman who has again added again to our collective substantive experience of beer history with a post on the unrelated brewing Reinhardts of Ontario and Quebec 170 years ago in a series of three posts, including this from the last:

On August 31, 1889, a box ad for the brewery, about 2″x 2″, appeared in Toronto’s The Globe & Mail (institutional access or paywall). The brewery was called Berlin Brewery, with a statement that “E.V. Reinhardt, Prop.”, was “manufacturer of the celebrated Berlin lager” on Queen Street. The ad was in a group of ads from town merchants that accompanied a multi-page feature on Berlin life and industry. Seemingly the business was on a good footing at this time. One imagines that the Toronto Reinhardts were not thrilled to read this over breakfast in their home city. True, it was small beer in relation to them, but as an outpost of an older, well-established Montreal brewery, they probably experienced disquiet over it, apart from seeing “their” name used by someone else.

Elsewhere this week, The Beer Nut* has published his Golden Pint Awards for 2019. This is a thing started by those who have since drifted away into more successful modes of human existence but, along with some really clever wit in the comments section, it’s nice to see a bit of Windows XP era nostalgia being clung onto:

This month makes it ten years since Mark Dredge and Andy Mogg suggested categories that beer bloggers might like to use for an annual run-down of the best in beer. I’ve stuck with it steadfastly since, even if I do change my criteria for the winners each year, and sometimes during the process of writing that year’s entry. It’s not meant to be taken seriously or considered meaningful, is what I’m saying.

[Edit: an earlier entry by Boak and Bailey should be noted, too, as should be the fact they have not posted for two weeks. PANIC!!!!]

Stan‘s latest Hop News by Email! (aka “the HNBE”) newsletter came out this week  and it was a great addition to the beer news chit chattery, including:

Attendees filled out provided evaluation sheets, giving beers a score of 0-5 in seven categories (floral, spicy/herbal, woody/resin/pine, citrus, vegetal/onion/garlic, red fruits, tropical fruit). This certainly was not scientific. The sheets were intended to enhance the experience for attendees more than provide peer reviewable feedback. This was not a trained panel, there was no calibration and it would be silly to present you with a cumulative radar chart for each of the beers. So I won’t. Instead, a couple of overall observations:

Now, based on the above I am not going to make any large observations about my thinking this was all a bit…err… detectorist** but I will leave you to the more fundamental questions of why it is that (i) men like hobbies and (ii) all hobbies eventually bear a strong resemblance to other hobbies.

Note: I drove from the 1780s to the 1840s bit of Ontario on our holiday drive in a Ford Transit mini-bus, passing the Fryfogle Tavern each way. Alarmingly lovely, I always look behind it as we drive by to get a glimpse of where Tiger Dunlop drank in a leanto in the 1820s. Up there at the top is an image actually tweeted alongside the note “John Severn, Brewery, Yonge St., northeast corner Church St.” indicating perhaps that it may well have been painted by Tom Thompson. Which would be lovely.  It was actually apparently painted by Frederic Victor Poole, however. Which is still lovely. Two bits on Ontario’s pre-temperance existence in one paragraph. Beat that, 2020 guess-timate articles.

I must admit to not having much interest in the people who will make the news in beer in 2020 given, as science of yore has explained clearly, they are always about people identified as such in 2019 or earlier. My prediction? 2020 will clearly be best known for the Pellicle-GBH mid-year Asian land wars. We already have a sense of who the loser may… err, will be. And we’ll have plenty more of the really great pro beer writing. That’s always guaranteed.

Somewhat similarly, I can’t think of a better example of underwhelming fact finding than this article in Forbes which seemingly relies exclusively on old big craft brewery owners or executives posing as a “cross-section” assessing how we got to the current market as “beer experts” – a term without meaning in itself – here used to suggest that somehow they are not just players with a possibly fading interest.  Consider this:

…according to Schuhmacher, all of that capex spending could become a problem in the years to come. “The next decade will reveal a tremendous amount of excess brewing capacity, which will drive closures, consolidation, and lower pricing,” he said.

As we know,*** this actually was the tale of 2018 which accelerated in to 2019. We are well down this path. In my own town we are three breweries down compared to a year ago. A healthy retraction. But, again, remembering presented as forecasting. Who saw tree hug leftie New Belgium selling to the pals of the right wing military dictatorship? Now that would have been forecasting!

Should grocery stores selling beer have designated beer aisles as opposed to loss leader end placements? Recovering alcoholics might prefer it:

…it’s “inappropriate” to be displaying alcoholic beverages in grocery aisles alongside basic food items, including products that are marketed to children. “Alcohol is not a normal commodity. It makes you intoxicated. It’s a psychoactive substance. It’s a Group 1 carcinogen. So, from the point of view of a child seeing alcohol in a grocery store, it normalizes a substance which is not the same as the other products that are in that grocery store.”

Hmm… that actually seems reasonable.

So, there… another year and another decade.  It is now The Twenties.  The decade near at the end of which I get a pension.  There’s a cheery thought. As you contemplate that, don’t forget to check in with Boak and Bailey’s on Saturdays, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too.

*JOHN!!! HIS NAME IS JOHN AND HE IS A HUMAN BEING!!!!
**For the next three weeks I shall so compare all things in life’s rich pageant.
***Come for the news, stay for the gratuitous slag!

Your Brief Beery Thursday News Notes For Boxing Day

Like you, I am tired. End of year tired. I was tired on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day offers no rest. It feels like the end of a university term and tomorrow we travel. 2019 was a good and busy year – and next week, in my fifty-seventh year, I enter my seventh decade on the planet. I need a rest. So I will be brief this week if only to see if I can get in another nap. Ray of B+B perhaps captured my mood with the tweeted image to the right accompanied by the one word “England.”

I had no idea that Dec 23rd was celebrated as Tibb’s Eve in Newfoundland. Fabulous. And Cookie gave tips on how to survive the 25th by being sensible on the 24th.

Jeff at Beervana had a good bit on style evolution. He uses the example of an oat ale from twenty years ago. Somewhere, I have similar notes on a hot IPA from the late 1980s. I am not sure if these illustrate a continuity of evolution or the fact that evolution is a cycle of organic unplanned diversification of traits followed by crisis out of which only a few of the diversifications survive followed by more organic unplanned diversification of traits.

Alistair at Fuggled is reviewing the year in a number of posts, including on his pale beer experiences of 2019.

@oldmudgie noted something endtimsey in the Morning Advertiser‘s round up of the year 2019 in craft. Seems like most popular craft brands in the UK are part of big industrial brewers’ portfolios. Only four years ago, it was something just starting to get confusing. Where will be be in another four?

Gary did us all a big favour with finding and exploring a reference to Labatt IPA from 1867 as yet uncovered in the English discussion:

I searched carefully and could not locate an English version, I believe none was prepared. The author was A.C.P. R. (Phillipe) Landry, whose biography may be read in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, here. He wrote the study when at Laval University in Quebec City. He was trained in chemistry and agronomy, and was later a noted federal politician, surviving to 1919. I’m not aware that his work has been previously cited in Canadian beer historiography. I have not read every single brewing history resource, so if anyone did raise Landry’s study, I’m happy to know of it.

What thrills me is how it fills a gap in my much suspected continuity of indigenous strong ale in eastern North America from the 1700s to today:

This creates a very useful stepping stone chronologically from NY state strong ales [edit: ie those brought in by the Loyalists] to Albany Ale (1830s) to Labatt (1860s) and Dominion White Label (1890s), to EP Taylor (1930s), to Bert Grant (1980s) and to today’s high test craft IPAs.

This is a different branch from the sequence that goes Albany Ale to Ballantine IPA to Sierra Nevada that Craig wrote about almost four years ago now. The idea that we can link the transmission of experience from generation to generation as part of general culture seems much more reasonable to me than anyone involved in first gen micro brewing having an “a-ha!” out of which the rest came.

And there was a hot blast of unhappiness aimed at the Cicerone server training program, much of which was unhappier than I thought warranted but much of which was also based on some obvious limitations. This is at the heart of objections: “…dropping coin on some private co. that clearly hoards prestige on specious grounds.” Plenty of people responded with the sort of authorized Party Central Communications Committee invocation of craft’s inherent right to silence we are sued to… or, stunningly, rooted for rote memorization as a intellectual pursuit. These, of course, are some of the most depressing things about good beer** and something I attribute to money or rather a lack of money in the complainant’s accounts. One does not bite the hand that feeds you.

My take is that it is always funny when folk compare it to law school* (as if the standards and candidates are equivalent) when the course and others like it isn’t formal education and not a source of new ideas like an academic process. It’s a social media propagated, non-accredited, proprietary, non-peer reviewed program that (given the intellectual property controls) sits outside of the marketplace of ideas. But it is a reasonably affordable and accessible certification for educating front of house staff to a proper standard. Which is good enough. And the basis for a good next step. Best new observation? Robyn’s:

Gonna give a slightly spicy take and add that it’s an industry cert that is both prohibitively expensive and made as a necessity for women and other marginalized folks to get in order to be taken with 1/10th of the seriousness a straight white male homebrewer gets by default.

Me? Until I see the published archive including the thesis of every graduate, I’m not going to look to the program for too many interesting new ideas. But whenever someone serves me a good beer with a reasonably knowledgeable comment, I welcome the skill and assume they are a graduate with some level in their back pocket.

Actually seriously, New Belgium’s owner-employees voted to sell to Kirin despite, as noted two weeks ago, the problems with a profitable authoritarian military branch in Myanmar being in the mix. As one report noted:

Activists are hoping the publicity surrounding the trial will increase the pressure on international businesses like Kirin to sever ties with the Myanmar military. “The profits are being pumped back into the military, helping to fund their operations,” said Mark Farmaner, director of the Burma Campaign UK, which has published a “Dirty List” of about 80 companies linked to the Myanmar military. “Kirin are literally helping to fund genocide.”

Remember: it’s about money. Strike another brewery off my list of interests.

Well, that was more than I intended. As we head toward a new year, don’t forget to check in with Boak and Bailey’s on Saturdays, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too.  I’m off to sing some Boxing Day carols and eat leftovers. Happy New Year to you all!

*Yet never oddly engineering of medicine…
**…not just my view…

The Last Thursday Beer News Update Before Santa Visits And Delivers All The Stuff

Yuletide.  Its been busy so far this month but after one last late evening meeting for work tonight I think I might be sliding into Yule proper.  As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the days of the Christmas Yuletide Hogmanay Kwanzaa and Hanukkah Beery photo contest may be well past us but the archives go on and on. To the left is 2014‘s co-winning entry from Thomas Cizauskas, one of the drinks world’s longest serving bloggers (care of Yours for Good Fermentables) and general gentleman of the trade. I remember being immediately taken by the way it reminds me of Vermeer, busily full of subtle detail.

Speaking of detail, the efforts of Boak and Bailey to single handedly keep beer blogging going never fail to impress and this week we have, in addition to their normal weekly roundup as well as a summary of their favourites among their own posts,* a wonderful summary of the best that they have read from the blogs of others:

We do this not only as a reminder that there’s lots of great stuff being produced by talented writers but also because writing online is transitory – you sweat over something, it has its moment of attention, then sinks away into the bottomless depths of the Eternal Feed. The pieces we’ve chosen below excited or interested us when they were published an, rereading them this weekend, retained their power. They tell us things we didn’t already know, challenge our thinking, find new angles on old stories, and do it with beautiful turns of phrase and delightful images.

Wonderful and particularly wonderful as they liked my August 2019 post on Lambeth Ale to include it. I don’t get the time as much to do research so I am pleased that one was pleasing.

Look! A wonderful pub in England. In a time of need, too. Elsewhere, holiday tragedy struck in Scotland this week when a truck full of Brussel sprouts went off the road.

The vehicle pulling the trailer full of the Christmas dinner vegetable overturned in Queensferry Road in Rosyth at about 10.45. Police Scotland said it had closed the road and was urging drivers to avoid the area. A spokesman tweeted: “There’s been a bit of a Brussel Sprouts accident at the roundabout at Admiralty Road.” The tweet added: “Please avoid the area if possible. Traffic and Christmas dinners may be affected. Apologies for any delays.”

Now, you may say what has this got to do with beer but there is nothing so good as a sprout covered in gravy washed about the gums by a faceful of Fullers Vintage Ale on the 25th of December and I will call out anyone who disagrees. By the way, if the city is Brussels why is the sprout singular? Ha ha! They are not. It’s Brussels sprouts. I grew them once about twenty years ago. Only pick them after a few frosts. Top tip, that.

Speaking of not beer, there is a wine glut in the world:

From a balance of supply and demand for bulk wine as recently as a couple of years ago, we are now in surplus worldwide thanks to some abundant recent vintages, and also possibly due to declining demand as consumers trade up while per capita consumption levels off or declines.

Speaking of holidays, excess and mindless abandon, I have learned that the good folk in Australia have come out with new drinking guidelines which are prefaced in a very Antipodean style:

“We’re not telling Australians how much to drink. We’re providing advice about the health risks from drinking alcohol so that we can all make informed decisions in our daily lives. This advice has been developed over the past three years using the best health evidence available,” says Professor Anne Kelso, CEO of the National Health and Medical Research Council.  “In 2017 there were more than 4,000 alcohol-related deaths in Australia, and across 2016/17 more than 70,000 hospital admissions. Alcohol is linked to more than 60 medical conditions, particularly numerous cancers. So, we all need to consider the risks when we decide how much to drink.”

Good way to send the message. And similarly from the “the sky ain’t falling department, the Pub Curmudgeon reports on the after effects of the lowering of the drunk driving limits in Scotland five years on, objecting to a study’s core findings:

This month sees the fifth anniversary of the reduction of the drink-driving limit in Scotland in December 2014. At the time, the immediate impact on the licensed trade was such that it caused a noticeable downward blip in Scotland’s national GDP figure. Now, five years later a study by academics at Stirling University has examined the longer-term effect on the trade and, perhaps predictably, concluded that it hasn’t really made a great deal of difference, saying that “Most participants reported no long‐term financial impact on their business.”

He argues that the rural pub is affected the most and therefore the study places its finger on the wrong outcome. Interesting…

Speaking of criticism, there is a wonderful piece on the site for NPR’s foodie show The Splendid Table on how the role of restaurant critic has evolved since the 1970s:

Today, the relationship between restaurant critics and restaurants themselves is kind of adversarial; it wasn’t then. To me, we the people who were cooking the food and the people who were writing about it were all on the same team. And as time went on, I started seeing my role changing a little bit in that I honestly believe that cities get the restaurants they demand. I started in the mid-1970s, and by the mid-1980s I was starting to think that it was really important that people be more demanding of restaurants, that the food in the city would be better if people didn’t settle for mediocrity.

Is good beer, therefore, almost four decades behind?** Or is the good beer writing about good beer now good?

Speaking of being behind, I am ashamed I never heard of this story of racial discrimination, one beer and the Supreme Court of Canada from eighty years ago:

…since Christie vs. York was handed down, 80 years ago this month, little else has been known about the man who took a Montreal tavern to court for refusing to serve him because he was black. Civil rights activists in Montreal, wanting to honour his legacy, have been trying to locate Christie’s relatives and gather more information about him.  It was believed he moved to Vermont in disgust after the Supreme Court decision. That’s where the trail ran cold.

I should unpack that case. The majority opinion reads like something from the 1800s. The single dissenting ruling sounds like modern law.

Someday, brewery features will features sources other than the brewery owner.  Until then, there is this. Tell me if you’ve heard it before.

That’s it. A bit of coal after many pressies. Next week’s edition will be out on Boxing Day. Make sure you are good and lubricated for the wonder that ye shall behold. And don’t forget that there’s more news at Boak and Bailey’s on Saturday, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. Merry Christmas to you all!!!

*…in which they include my favorite post of the year from anyone, their piece “The Swan With Two Necks and the gentrification issue” from November.
**That is so meta of me.

The Last Thursday Beer News Notes Before The UK General Election

It’s not often that I get to headline the weekly update with something so.. so… unbeery – but is beer ever really that much removed from politics? Consider this photo to the right that circulated about a man to the left. I was as sad that it was Coors Light, the faceless multinationals of beer that he was pouring as much as I was saddened by the mleko* pour.  The Late Great Jack Layton held the red banner high here in Canada for years and he also knew how to pour a beer with a bit of style.

Given it is Yule, I will start with Ben Johnson and his list of ways to avoid the Christmas party hell you fear most, other drinking your good stuff:

Hosting at home guarantees my own access to good hooch but it also opens the door to the undesirable possibility that my guests might assume that they will be graced with the same luxury, which of course they are not. Indeed the one downside to hosting is that it means people might drink my beer. Thankfully, over the years, I’ve learned ways to keep my guests from dipping into my stash and I’m here to pass that wisdom on to you.

Speaking of Yule, Merryn in Orkney and Lars in Norway were discussing Christmas brewing obligations in Norway when Lars made this extraordinary statement:

This was not even the law for all of Norway: it only applied in western Norway (the Gulathing area). The other regional laws did not have this provision. (The Frostating law required brewing for midsummer.) Neither did the Swedish regional laws.

The Frostating law? Now I have to get my brain around the legal brewing requirements of other jurisdictions. It would be interesting to have a great big list when folk had to brew and why.

Katie of the shiny and the biscuit gave us a wonderful portrait of and an interview with two Mancunian fans leading the cause of cider from their demand side of the commercial transactional teeter totter, this week at Pellicle:

With Dick and Cath leading the march, Greater Manchester has become the centre of “real” cider in the North in the space of two years. Together, they created the Manchester Cider Club, and in doing so have brought cidermakers like Tom Oliver, Albert Johnson (Ross-on-Wye) and Susanna and James Forbes (Little Pomona) to the city. At regularly sold-out ticketed events and inclusive meet-ups, they are encouraged to answer questions and share their cider with a new, northern audience.

From further east, the tale of Vienna Lager was told at scale in the seven days at A Tempest in a Tankard:

Four hours east of Munich as the RailJet flies, the Viennese were marking a milestone anniversary of their own, albeit with much less fanfare: 175 years of Vienna Lager. Even if no museums commemorated the fact, and even if the media resonance was akin to the sound of one hand clapping, Vienna had good reason to celebrate its contribution to the culture of brewing. Bottom-fermented beer had been produced for centuries in Europe’s Alpine regions, but it wasn’t until Anton Dreher, owner of the Brauhaus zu Klein-Schwechat, brought together technological advances he learned in Britain and Bavaria that he was able to produce the first lager beer that could be brewed year-round. That happened in 1841. **

Big Beer Corporate News? Apparently darling of a decade ago Stone is maybe up for sale, a rumour of a story almost entirely confirmed by the denials of the brewery. In another sort of bad brewery news reporting… or rather reporting on bad news for a brewery… it appears that New Belgium may have new clients amongst the authoritarian military elite!

The New Belgium Brewery insists it is not like other companies. Its owners, who are also its employees, are devoted to fighting social inequity and climate change, proving business can “be a force for good,” its website says. Their CEO Kim Jordan was honoured among 30 “World-Changing Women in Conscious Business” last year. Employees even get free bicycles. But those ethical credentials have not stopped them planning to sell their firm, which has breweries in Colorado and North Carolina, to a beer giant accused of funding genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar.

Wow. Too bad there was no way for the governing hands on the nNew Belgium transaction to be warned of the situation, like a hearing of the International Court of Justice or anything. Speaking of things end-timesy, beer in the U.S. of A. is dying again:

The trend doesn’t appear to be reversing itself. Sales of domestic beer slipped 4.6% between October 2018 and October 2019, according to Nielsen. Microbrew and craft beers are also in a minor slump, down 0.4%, despite Big Beer companies scooping them up left and right (AnheuserBusch just purchased Craft Brew Alliance, which makes Redhook Ale).

“Microbrew” can only be a word used by someone who knows very little about microbrewing, rights? Aside from that, the story is White Claw and, if we had any sense, no one would care as that is something other people buy like purple velvet trousers or quadrophonic stereo systems. So why do we care? I don’t care. Affects me in no way. Nada.

All of which leads to the news in Ontario that the national brewpub chain Les 3 Brasseurs has announced that four of its locations in Ontario are closing:

Ten years ago, we entered the strategic market of Ontario and, over that time, experienced some great victories, notably our Yonge and Oakville restaurants, but also some challenges,” said Laurens Defour, CEO of 3 Brewers Canada, in a statement. “This is a difficult decision, but we have concluded that we need to close some sites in order to support the evolution of our business.

Careful readers will recall that I happily attended on of the busier outlets in Oakville last year and was quite happy with the carrot pale ale I was served.

Barry in Germany posted an afternoon’s worth of photos of old apple and pear trees taken during a walk with his dog. Elsewhere in Germany, there is a pub branded with the likeness of Roger Prozt but denying it is a pub branded with the likeness of Roger Prozt. Protz commented thusly:

I’m not even allowed to be flattered. They deny any connection to me because they think – wrongly – I’m going to sue them. I recall the image that was produced for a beer event, same style for all participants.

Note: of the two being depicted, I’d suggest the dandy, the fop, jack the lad was more mocked than Peg. Interesting that the powdered wig was not a wig at all. And speaking of the Irish of yore, here is the tweet of the week:

“Ale has killed us”? Short memories of the Vikings apparently. But enough! I have a long day’s work ahead of me then need to settle in for the the election results. Don’t forget that there’s more news at Boak and Bailey’s on Saturday, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too.

*A teacher in Poland I once was…
**I used a slightly different quotation than Boak and Bailey so I feel justified.

Your “Is It Now Yule?” Edition Of The Beery New Update For A Thursday

December. The month that is three weeks long followed by two weeks of blur before real winter sets in. Winding up the year’s work is the main thing on my plate. From 2006 to 2015 this would have been the culmination of the annual Yuletide Kwanzaa, Hogmanay, Christmas and Hanukkah photo contest but I have long come to my senses. You can see the annual winners here. That is the 2012 Champion up there by Robert Gale of Wales. As I wrote then, click on the photo so you can see the full scale and explore all the detail for yourself. Robert explained in his email where the photo was taken:

Located in Manchester, England, the Circus Tavern apparently has the smallest bar in Europe. It’s also located in the hallway of the pub near the entrance which means it very easily gets crowded.

Well, did anything happen this week in beerland? OK, fine: the big news in craft was not just a buyout this week but that a minnow was seemingly swallowing a whale. The billion dollar baby that is Ballast Point was sold seemingly to a mere brewpub. It is not quite what it appears as the purchase was made with a bucket of moolah earned from a sale four years ago in the hospitality industry along with input from other friendly and wealthy investors. Within minutes of the announcement, Josh Noel on the scene in Chicago noted the reasons why the sale was made from the view of Constellation brands:

… on maximizing growth for our high-performing import portfolio and upcoming new product introductions, including Corona Hard Seltzer, scheduled to launch this spring.” That’s right. It all comes back to hard seltzer.

Excellent. Hard seltzer. The future is now. Anyway, Noel’s story in Wednesday’s edition of the Chicago Tribune will be your best starting point for the background. Me, I suspect that (even if not Plan A but at the fallback Plan C level of the original Ballast Point purchase) there was the opportunity for significant tax write offs down the road.

Elsewhere, I declared that one particular story was one of the best bits of beer writing I’ve read this year and I meant it. Just look at this:

The ditching of big-brand lagers was similarly controversial and Ashley’s attitude reveals the gulf between traditional attitudes and those of the modernisers. There is still lager on offer but it’s from Moor and Lost & Grounded. Though you might think these would appeal to Bristolian drinkers, there’s a weird loyalty to international brands brewed under licence, and these sometimes hazy, fruity, characterful beers bear little practical resemblance to Foster’s or Stella, despite the shared family tree.

An actual investigative research and writing piece from Boak and Bailey that takes a very immediate specific example of the life of a pub in our times and makes it a universal question cut with a strong note of sympathy: “it’s drinkers who prefer a more traditional, unpretentious atmosphere who have to schlep or catch the bus.” Fabulous.

Others have commented but I was – perhaps oddly – reminded of this when I read Matt Curtis and his reasoned argument for more UK breweries joining SIBA to promote independence. While he is correcting in stating this:

This still means that at least 86% of beer sold within the UK is produced by the multinationals. As such I am eager to see the next step in the discussion of independence, and some real progress in terms of presenting this argument to a greater number of industry members and bringing them together to form a unified front against increasingly tough competition and unfair access to established routes to market… 

I am mindful of the beer drinker of modest means seeking their refuge from craft. Is that not as much a cry for independence? For autonomy from the gaping maw of gentrification into which craft beer is poured?

Bad Guinness pours. All day. All bad.

I am never sure of anything that is based on the concept of “wine drinkers” and “beer drinkers” as being subsets of the population but I found this bit of discussion from Danielle Bekker of Good Living Brewing failure interesting. She asks whether it wouldn’t be better to describe beer according to flavour profiles as opposed to more familiar methods. Being a hearty believer in the uselessness of style as a construct I like the idea but then hit a wall with the notion of a beer that “will appeal to wine drinkers as well as women.”

Sadly and as reported on this week’s edition of the OCBG, Waterloo Brewing Ltd. from Ontario says it has lost $2.1 million to a cyber scam:

The Ontario brewery says the incident occurred in early November and involved the impersonation of a creditor employee and fraudulent wire transfer requests. Waterloo Brewing says it initiated an analysis of all other transaction activity across all of its bank accounts, as well as a review of its internal systems and controls that included its computer networks, after becoming aware of the incident this week.

Martyn made a confession…

I know there are beer writers who eschew any involvement with corporate freebies, but my argument has always been that I’m very happy to accept free stuff, from beer to trips abroad, when it enables me to put information in front of my readers that I would not be otherwise able to give them. Certainly I do not believe I have ever held the boot back because someone had dropped off a case of beer. 

At the risk of someone searching the blog’s archives, I don’t think this is ever the key points. My concerns are always two-fold: (i) you are telling the story that the brewery provides for you, even if you do put the boot in and (ii) you are not telling the story of the brewery which does not pay for the trip. So they all go to Asheville and then they all go to Carlsberg. Bo. Ring. There is a third point. You do not go to these junkets alone. Even if “it enables me to put information in front of my readers that I would not be otherwise able to give them,” well,  the same information will be put in front of same readers by the other members of the same traveling hoard sent the airplane tickets, the hotel room reservations and the buffet passes. There is no special story attached to a junket. Go find a unique story instead.

Two items from the co-authors. First, Craig has been digging more and found two very early advertisements for Albany Ale in the Charleston Daily Courier of 1808. Which not only means triple was being brewed in 1808 but it was being shipped to Charleston. Which is cool. I have seen “treble” spruce beer in New York City in 1784 but never a pale ale at that weight with that name.

Second, Max. Max was the centerfold cheesecake pin up in a Czech newspaper this week. A very hairy centerfold. Wonderful.

The DC Beer 2019 year in review post is up.

That is it. I am on a train as you read this over your morning coffee. I’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime,  there’s more news at Boak and Bailey’s on Saturday, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And look for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too.

Beer And Brewing By Hudson Bay In The Late 1600s

This post is a reworking and updating of a passage from that cult classic Ontario Beer: a Heady History…, the book Jordan and I published five years ago. I post this not only as a blatant reminder for Christmas giving, but as a look see to add to what we knew then about the role of beer in the years from 1660 to 1690.  This was one of my favourite bits to research as it combined a number of heroic tales on the edge of Europe’s known universe.

The conflict for control of what is now Ontario from the later 1600s was primarily between France and England. But the Dutch colony in what is now central New York on the Hudson River also sought its share through its alliance with the Mohawk nation until the 1660s. In the northeastern interior of the continent, events were part of what were known as the Beaver Wars.  The beaver was destined for hat makers in Europe and at this point…

The fur trade depended on the labour of native people and on their centuries-old trading network… After being worn for a year, the pelts that made up the robes shed their long guard hairs, exposing the short hairs required for the felting process. Several hundred thousand used pelts, known as castor gras d’hiver would have been available annually…

Who knew European fancy hats depended on used Indigenous clothing?  The beaver pelt was certainly a commodity recorded in the Company’s minutes. Anyway, after taking New Netherlands to the south of the French, England continued to expand its North American trading empire on Hudson Bay and James Bay through the establishment of “factories” or commercial settlements in the 1660s and 1670s. Beer was consistently included in the ships stores for the voyages to the factories and, apparently unlike the French, so was the means to brew beer as soon as the ship made shore.

The English came well prepared with provisions, useful trade goods and even spoke the language – and as part of those preparations beer was clearly important to the early explorers.  Perhaps their version of an astronaut’s roast beef dinner in a squeezable tube of three centuries later.  The early ships’ crews exploring the eastern fringes of the Canadian Arctic in voyages in the 1570s and early 1600s considered their beer of great importance and even instrumental in survival.  Driving further west in search of trade routes, in 1668-69 the crew of the Nonsuch were forced to over-winter on the James Bay coast and reported upon their return:

…they were environed with ice about 6 monethes first halting theire ketch on shore, and building them a house. They carried provisions on shore and brewd Ale and beere and provided against the cold which was their work…

Here is a YouTube vid showing the recreation of the ship, giving a sense of scale. It’s tiny. Note the reference to the two separate forms of fermented drink. Ale was likely unhopped or lightly hopped and brewed for early drinking while beer would have been hopped likely for longer keeping. None would have been considered an IPA as the sulfurous vomitous mess that later became known as Burtonized water was only being first explored as a tonic in a small alehouse in 1686.

After the return of the Nonsuch, Charles II granted a charter to the Hudson Bay Company in 1670. According to the Minutes of the Hudson Bay Company from the early 1670s, an order placed by the Hudson Bay Company’s London management for three grades of beer as well as malt and hops was recorded in the minutes noted on 16 February 1674:

John Raymond: By Severall quantities of Ship Beere at 40s p. Tonn Strong beere at 12s, 9d a barrell & Harbor Beere at 6s 6d p. barrell with Malt & Hopps dd. Capt. Gillam, Morris and Cole, £ 79.

A few months later, on 6 July 1674, the committee of the Hudson Bay Company directed payment to the same John Raymond £ 30 on account of “Beer and Malt. dd. on board the Prince Rupert.” The three grades of beer supplied and the means for crews to brew their own beer once the ships made landfall illustrates the various functions beer played in the life of the company. Ship beer sold in bulk not the barrel was the cheapest and weakest would have served as daily drink for the crew while at sea. The strong beer was reserved for the officers, as was apparently the case on Hudson’s voyage. The drink identified as “harbor beer” was sold at half the price of strong and may have been a middle strength beer for when the ship was at anchor. It’s actually the only time I have seen that grade of beer listed.

In 1674, the Hudson Bay Company planned 3 quarts of beer a day per man and shipped enough beer and malt to supply the trip there and back – and also to survive a winter. Twenty-seven tunns of beer and fifty-nine quarters of malt were purchased in 13 April 1674 for that season’s sailing of the 32 man expedition. Here are the instructions – and note that the plan included enough malt (or “mault”) for the 20 who were supposed to overwinter:

They were clearly planning to brew and that would require a total roughly 18,000 lbs of malt or enough malt to provide each man with a beer made from pound of malt a day. The details of all provisions can be found in the minutes from 14 April 1674.

Like the Nonsuch six years before, the crews of the Prince Rupert and Shaftsbury had to stay over in the winter of 1674-75 but were better prepared and provisioned for this possibility. It was too late too late in the season for the ships to return to England so arrangements were made for them to over winter in Rupert River and the crews were employed to cut timber to build houses for them as well as a brew-house and a bakery in the small fort. Their planning was not always successful. The beer and “winter-liquor” reportedly ran out by April 1674 at one Hudson’s Bay fort even if the stores of beer and malt shipped with the crews were significant.

The establishment of the northern English presence did not go unnoticed and clashes between the empires required feats of nearly unimaginable hardship and daring. When forces from New France struck at the forts on Hudson Bay in 1686, its soldiers walked north overland from the St. Lawrence Valley through hundreds of miles of forest before attacking and capturing Hudson Bay forts including Moose Factory at the mouth of the Moose River.  The conflict was fairly civilized, with negotiations taking place over flagons of port wine. The return trip of the French forces by foot took four months just to reach the northern community at Temiskaming in December. The French detachment survived on five or six pounds of pork each as well as sprouted barley which had been “originally intended for brewing beer.” They probably found more than enough malt when they opened the brewery’s store rooms.

The French, temporary victors in this phase of Europe’s war for the New World’s north, survived the march home through the primeval winter forest by eating the brewing malt of the defeated English. Seventy or so years later, their control of northeastern North America was about to be lost.  England and later Britain continued its trade via Hudson Bay but the greater focus of European efforts had long shifted away from the trade in woodland pelts.  To the south, colonial farming plantations and entrepreneurial coastal towns were expanding in the early 1700s – which was accompanied by the first boom of commercial brewing in the Western Hemisphere.

The End Of November’s Thursday Beery News Notes

I won’t miss getting past November. The worst month in my year. Damp and dreary. I mourn the end of the garden, the shortening of the days. The death of parsley. While Katie may have pointed us to a more healthy approach to November, I know too well that just a month from now, nearing the end of December, we’ll start feeling the days just slightly lengthening even it the cold is deepening. I took Monday off as I am still due about three weeks away from the office this year and drove off looking for signs. Just after noon, I found one on that dirt road up there. On the south side of Bloomfield, Ontario in Prince Edward County. It’s the last few hundred yards to the rolling idled farmer’s field across from Matron Fine Beer. I stocked the pantry with some jolly juice for Yule. Clever me.

Speaking of the hunt, Boak and Bailey may have found a small redoubt in the battle for more mild assisted by those behind the lyrically titled BADRAG:

Tasting notes on mild, like tasting notes on ordinary lager, can be a struggle, like trying to write poetry about council grit bins. Good mild is enjoyable and functional but, by its nature, unassuming, muted and mellow. Still, let’s have a go: dark sugars and prune juice, the body of bedtime cocoa, hints of Welsh-cake spice, and with just enough bite and dryness to make one pint follow naturally into the next.

I actually have to write bits of essays about council grit bins once in a while at work but never poems.

Never thought we would need a beer cooler for keeping beer cool when ice fishing out on a wintery lake in Saskatchewan frozen a foot thick but this is actually a clever idea. It keeps the beer from freezing.

The decade photo challenge as posted on behalf of IPA. I wonder if IPA will sue for defamation or whether the law’s recent dim view of chicken not being entirely chicken will deter such reckless? Speaking of the laws of Canada, drunk driving in Quebec now carries a new serious penalty:

Starting Monday, Quebec motorists convicted of drunk driving twice in 10 years will have to blow into a breathalyzer every time they start a car — for the rest of their lives. Their licence will be branded so any intercepting police officer will know to inspect the driver’s ignition for an interlock device — a piece of equipment that prevents the car from starting if the driver’s estimated blood alcohol concentration is above the legal limit.

To my east across the ocean, Mr Protz alerted us all to the closing of a pub that has been in place for about 750 years, the Cock Inn “situated on an upward slope on the north side of a tributary of the river Sence” as reported in the Leicester Mercury:

One of the oldest inns in England built in about 1250 AD, it witnessed the preparation and aftermath of the Battle of Bosworth Field and the death of Richard III and the start of the Tudor reign. The notorious highwayman Dick Turpin would return here after working the Watling Street, taking refuge in the bar chimney, stabling his horse in the cellar when pursuit was close at hand.

Interesting to note the nature of its feared fate: “…hope it will reopen and not become a house, as many village pubs do.” Still on the pubs, Retired Martyn has ticked all the GBG 2020 pubs in Glasgow but on the way made something of an admission about a distraction:

Yes, by the Tim Horton Christmas Spiced Caramel Brownie and a medium filter. I read that “nearly eight out of 10 cups* of coffee sold across Canada are served at Tim Hortons restaurants and more than 5.3 million Canadians – approximately 15 percent of the population – visit the café daily“, and Canadians are never wrong. Most of them.

Who knew? And he visited Greenock, the paternal ancestral seat, too. Great photo essays as always. The Pub Curmugeon prefers to work similar themes in text.

I was confused by a thread about CAMRA discount cards this week, accused of being  out of date, faithless to the true cause and a money grab… but then there seems to be no way to replace them in terms of the good they do. It stated with this:

I’m a CAMRA member & I work in a brewery. CAMRA needs to address the corrosive paradox of claiming that real ale is ‘the pinnacle of the brewers art’ while promoting discount schemes for cask beer. So I’ve drafted an AGM motion & explanation.

Discount? Doesn’t that mean well priced? Speaking of which, is beer about to get cheaper in Sweden?

Sweden’s state-run alcohol monopoly chain Systembolaget is planning to cut the costs of its cheapest beer from next year. The cheapest beer sold at Systembolaget today costs 8.40 kronor ($0.87). But next year it plans to launch two new kinds of canned beer for less than 6.90 kronor… the plans, which are meant to compete with border trade, that is Swedes travelling across the border to Denmark and Germany to stock up on crates of cheap beer.

The wonders of scale. Big entities can do great things, can’t they. Just consider this story on beer and the environment:

Anheuser-Busch, in partnership with Nikola Motor Company and BYD Motors, completed their first ever ‘Zero-Emission Beer Delivery’ in the company’s hometown of St. Louis — utilizing both companies’ innovative fleet technology to deliver beer from the local Anheuser-Busch brewery to the Enterprise Center using only zero-emission trucks.

Imagine! Using the word “innovation” and not referring to copycat alcopop IPAs!

Finally, I am not sure I want legalized beer corkage opportunities. Just another argument I don’t need. Go out where you want and spend the money at the place.  Don’t bring your own cutlery either.

There. A quieter week in these parts. But a busy one at work so there you go. Busier still soon enough, too, what with the last month of the decade comes the inevitable “best off” lists. I myself sorta did one at the end of 2009, at least painting a picture of where things stood.  I’ll have to think about what I’d say ten years on… other than wondering where the time went. Where did it went…

In the meantime,  there’s more news at Boak and Bailey’s on Saturday, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And look for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too.