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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The First Thursday Beer News Of October 2019

Beer: less popular year after year!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

A pubby sort of place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Your Quieter Mid-September Thursday Beer News Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seems applicable. Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.